Girl, (Nearly) 16: Absolute Torture! (13 page)

Mum made some phone calls and sorted out the accommodation – she had a mobile for emergencies, although she always held it some distance away from her head to avoid brain damage. So stylish. Then they drove off from the haunted castle – Jess had a last look at it, over her shoulder – and within half an hour they came to a dual carriageway down which cars were whooshing with carefree speed.

‘Can I have a look at the map, Granny?’ asked Jess. Mum didn’t need any more navigating now they were on the main road.

Granny passed the map back, and Jess picked it up and studied it. Penzance didn’t look very far from St Ives at all. Maybe, inspired by Granny’s example of romance in Cornwall, Mum and Dad would fall in love all over again.

Jess uttered a silent prayer.
God, are you in charge of dating? If so, could you fix it so my mum and dad get together again? And we could all live by the sea in a big house with a huge dog called Boss. And please, please make Flora smell just awful, if you don’t mind. Just during Riverdene
.

Although it might be a smart move to inflict dire body odour on Flora for the rest of her fabulous life.

‘I’ve been reading this guidebook,’ said Granny. ‘And it’s quite amusing. Guess what it says about Mousehole!
The fishermen of Mousehole once had a reputation for smuggling, bad language, drunkenness and lechery which was envied by quieter men
. He’s very interesting, this writer. What’s his name? Darrell Bates. Do you know him, dear?’

‘Only in my capacity as a librarian,’ said Mum. ‘We’ve never actually dated, or anything.’

‘If you could date a writer, any writer, who would it be?’ asked Jess.

‘Dead or alive?’ asked Mum.

‘Well, knowing you, Mum, dead would be first choice, obviously – but you could just force yourself for once and go out with somebody who still has a pulse.’

‘Oh no,’ said Mum, dismissing the whole of live mankind, ‘give me Shakespeare any day.’

So all Jess had to do was persuade her dad to shave his head, grow a beard, wear wrinkly tights and write several works of surpassing genius. It should be a piece of cake.

Chapter 20

After a while, Jess managed to stop feeling torn apart by jealousy for a split second. She stopped worrying about nightmare scenarios from Riverdene. Instead she was wondering about what Dad’s house would be like. Then Mum announced that she was getting a bad headache.

‘I’m going to have to stop somewhere here for the night,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to ring the guesthouse down in Penzance again and say we’re arriving tomorrow instead. I hope they won’t be cross.’

Almost immediately they saw a sign advertising a B&B. They turned off the main road and followed signs to a farmhouse. The door was opened by a big woman with a red face, surrounded by three fat and drooling Labradors.

‘I only got the family room available, dear,’ said the farmer’s wife in a mooing sort of voice.

‘That’s fine, fine,’ said Mum, clutching her brow with a tragic air.

‘This way, then,’ said the farmer’s wife, and they followed her up a gloomy old staircase on to an ancient landing with low beams. It looked almost as haunted as Berry Pomeroy Castle.

‘In here,’ said the farmer’s wife, throwing open a low door. The bedroom was long and low-ceilinged with three beds, and it smelt faintly of wet dogs. ‘The bathroom’s across the landing.’

They were shown a grubby little cubicle in which there was a light brown cracked plastic bath dating back to the 1970s.

‘Lovely, thank you so much,’ said Mum. ‘Terrific, super.’

‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ said the farmer’s wife. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘A bit later, please, that would be marvellous,’ said Mum. ‘I’d just like half an hour’s sleep first.’

They went back into their bedroom. Mum sat down on one of the beds and got her headache pills out.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she croaked. ‘I’ll be OK in the morning.’

‘Don’t you fret, dear, I’ll get you a wet flannel,’ said Granny.

Jess went back downstairs to bring the bags up. Deep gloom had descended on her soul. She had been so looking forward to arriving at the seaside and staying there, and seeing her dad very soon. And now they were marooned in this hell-hole for the rest of the day.

Jess had a tiny single bed in the corner of the room. It was a bit of a squash. She smuggled her mobile into the dismal bathroom and looked desperately for a message from Fred. But there was nothing.

Mum lay down with a wet flannel on her head, and Granny had a little nap, too. The curtains were drawn. It was like a field hospital from a war movie. Jess had to get out. She crept down the stairs and went outside. There was a notice which said, WALK WHEREVER YOU LIKE BUT PLEASE CLOSE THE GATES AND BEWARE OF THE BULL!

Outside the farmhouse were fields. Jess wandered into the first one, having first made sure there were no mad cows or ferocious sheep poised to strike. Being in a huge field only made her too aware of the fact that Fred and Flora were together in a huge field, too – at Riverdene. Instantly an awful hallucination sprang up in her mind.

‘I’d love to live in the tropics,’ said Flora, looking ravishing with the sun behind her and daisy chains in her hair. ‘I’d love a house with a big wooden verandah overlooking a coconut grove,’ she went on, stretching her lovely brown arms in the sun. ‘I’d have a hammock and I’d feed parrots with mangos from my own mango tree.’

‘I suppose you’d have a swimming pool and a tennis court?’ said Fred, clearly imagining Flora playing tennis – or possibly water-polo.

‘Oh yes! But I suppose,’ Flora went on, ‘what with my blonde hair and my blue eyes, I must be careful not to get skin damage.’

Fred was staring at her in fascination, the swine.

‘Yes,’ he mused. ‘Unlike Jess, who is so very dark, short and, let’s be honest, a bit of a porker. I’ve always wondered, Flora, how it is you manage to be so fragrant, whereas Jess, unfortunately – bless her heart – smells rather like a ham that has been left out of the fridge for too long.’

Jess banished the horrible idea from her mind. She hated being trapped in these vile thoughts. There was only one way to discover whether Fred and Flora had indeed met at Riverdene, and that was to ring them. She got out her mobile phone again. She dialled Fred. His was switched off. She dialled Flora. Hers was switched off, too.

Suddenly a text from her dad came through.

MUM SAID YOU’LL BE HERE ON TUESDAY. CAN’T WAIT! WHAT SORT OF JUNK FOOD DO YOU LIKE THESE DAYS? PERSONALLY I’M INTO PEANUTS. I GO ROUND TOWN STEALING FROM ALL THE BIRD TABLES.

Jess grinned, and composed a list:
NACHOS WITH CHEESE AND DIPS, COKE, CHEESEBURGERS WITH DOUBLE FRIES, PIZZA WITH SALAMI ON TOP, JACKET POTATO WITH CHILLI. WELL, THAT’S WHAT I HAD FOR BREAKFAST, ANYWAY.

She pressed the SEND button but the phone bleeped maliciously and a message flashed up:
Message not sent this time
. Oh no! She’d run out of credit again. If only she had a contract phone instead of pay-as-you-go. And where was the nearest town, where she could top up her account? Miles away. At this point a cloud should have covered the sun, or a squall of rain hit Jess on the brow. But the sun just went on shining in a relentless kind of way. Jess reached a stile that led into the next field. She climbed up and looked over the hedge.

Right in front of her was an enormous bull. He turned his massive head and looked at her with horrid, mad little pink eyes. Jess turned back, jumped down and ran like the wind back to the house. The farmer’s wife was feeding some hens in the yard.

‘Your granny is sitting out in the garden, dear, and your mum’s asleep,’ said the farmer’s wife.

Jess went round the house and found Granny sitting on a little stone terrace, under a sun umbrella, sipping tea.

‘Hello, love!’ said Granny, beaming. ‘Mrs Hawkins brought me these cakes. Have one, dear.’

Jess sat down by Granny and accepted a cake. How easy it would be to slide into binge-eating as a cure for a broken heart. She stared at the flowerbeds without even seeing them. Her mind was a hundred miles away, in Riverdene.

‘Are you all right, dear?’ asked Granny. She was leaning towards Jess, peering into her face like Miss Marple, the elderly detective.

‘Fine thanks, Granny!’ replied Jess, trying to back it up with a bright smile. But she could feel the smile losing its power and fading like a torch with a flat battery.

Granny frowned. ‘Something’s the matter, dear. Come on! Spit it out! I may not be able to put things right but it always helps to talk.’

Jess hesitated. She wouldn’t dare to mention Fred to her mum, but what about Granny? She was a lot less fierce on the subject of men and boys. In fact, in her way, she found them kind of cute.

‘Granny . . .’ said Jess hesitantly, ‘did you ever . . . when you and Grandpa were young . . . were you ever jealous of other girls?’

‘Was I jealous?’ exclaimed Granny. And she threw back her head and laughed. ‘I’ll never forget Christine Elliott. She was a dark girl with a sort of snaky smile. She tried to steal him off me. It was on the annual office trip to the seaside. It was in the days of miniskirts, dear. It must have been about 1964. Goodness! It seems like yesterday.’

‘What happened?’ asked Jess.

‘Well, Grandpa and I were sitting on the beach. I call him Grandpa, but of course then he was only about twenty-five or so. That Christine creature, she’d had too many shandies with her fish and chips at lunch. Then we all went down to the beach, and she did a sort of striptease right in front of us. She had her bikini on underneath, luckily, but she threw her tights right into John’s face, shouted, “Come and get it!” and ran down and jumped in the sea.’

‘I hope she drowned,’ said Jess.

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Granny. ‘She just floundered about for a bit, jumping up and down, pretending her top was coming off, silly girl. Then when she came out again she fell on the sand right next to John and said, “Dry me, John, dry me.”’

‘What a tart,’ said Jess. ‘I hope Grandpa ignored her.’

‘He threw her towel over her and told her to do herself a favour and shut up,’ said Granny. ‘And I’m afraid I did something awful.’

‘What? What?’

‘I picked up her clothes and ran down and threw them into the sea. She didn’t bother us any more after that,’ said Granny with grim satisfaction. ‘Always remember, dear, the beach can be a dangerous place. What with everyone taking their clothes off and throwing caution to the winds.’

Jess sighed. It was a great story but it wasn’t much help.

‘So who is it who’s bothering you, dear?’ asked Granny.

‘Well, promise not to tell Mum?’

‘I never tell her anything,’ said Granny with a knowing smile.

‘There’s a boy I like, and he likes me.’

‘Frank?’ asked Granny. She always got his name wrong.

‘Fred, yes.’

‘I like him. He’s got very expressive eyes, dear. A bit like a sea lion.’

Jess let this pass. Fred’s eyes were certainly large and grey.

‘And I’ve found out that he and Flora are both at Riverdene.’

‘Together?’ asked Granny sharply.

‘Well, no, I don’t think they actually went together – unless they were lying,’ said Jess. ‘Flora’s gone with her sister and Fred’s mum said Fred had gone with Luke.’