Girls to Total Goddesses (7 page)

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12

Luckily Tobe behaved very well when we met Chloe, and he went off shortly afterwards to meet Ferg, who wasn’t free till lunchtime because he had a Saturday morning job. I shuddered with remorse that I had let slip the details about Chloe’s nuisance love texts, and prayed fervently that Toby would resist the temptation to spill the beans. Although I love nothing more than receiving all his latest goss, I would have to emigrate to the Extremely Faraway Islands if Chloe’s embarrassing secret became widely known because of me.

‘Right, brilliant, now we’re going to find the dresses that are going to turn us into goddesses,’ said Chloe. ‘Dresses for Goddesses! OK? And you’ve got to be really firm with me if I get fixated on something dire.’

‘And you do the same for me,’ I added sportingly, even though I had no intention of trying on anything less than divine.

We plunged into the first store. Chloe raced about enthusiastically, gathering armfuls of dresses to try on. She zoomed in on pink, tiered numbers, ruffled prom dresses and one very long vintage floral frock. However, I was having the opposite problem. I’d decided you couldn’t go wrong with black, and of course it had to be short – Jailhouse Rock was only a concert, after all – but the black dresses all looked so dull, as if they were designed for grannies to wear at funerals.

Eventually I selected a strapless corsage dress with a kind of balloony skirt and sequins around the neckline, a black tiered mini and a floaty ensemble that had black chiffon-like scarves hanging down the front. Although it was bizarre, I was hoping it might hide my tum and thighs – although I still had a couple of weeks to get trim and shed the flab before Jailhouse Rock.

We piled into a changing booth and ripped off our kit. Chloe dived into the pink tiered thing; I struggled into the strapless mushroom-shaped number. It was hopeless trying it on with my bra straps showing, so I wriggled out of the top of the dress, discarded my bra and tried to wriggle back in. Chloe suddenly straightened up and ran her fingers through her hair with a flamboyant gesture. Her elbow smacked into my right eye.

‘Ow! Ow! God, that hurt!’ I gasped, trying not to screech too loudly and jumping up and down in agony while cradling my throbbing eye socket. With the other, undamaged eye I could clearly see that I hadn’t managed to get both boobs safely back inside the top of the dress, and they were flouncing about like bouncy castles in a storm.

‘My God! Zoe! I’m so sorry!’ cried Chloe, panicking wildly in case she had given me a fatal blow.

‘It’s OK! It’s OK!’ I assured her gallantly, though convinced that my eye socket was actually cracked. At this point a sales assistant, alerted perhaps by the noise coming from our cubicle (the sound, I have to admit, of a fox in a poultry shed), arrived at our door.

‘Everything all right?’ she called over the low door; not looking in, but horribly
nearly
. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Brilliant! Brilliant!’ I gasped, grabbing my boobs in alarm and trying to force them back down into the crumpled corsage.

‘Everything’s fine, thanks!’ Chloe called, and thank God, the sales assistant went away.

‘Why do they
do
that?’ I whispered indignantly. ‘I mean, being in here . . . it’s private. Almost like being in the loo. Restroom attendants don’t start knocking on the door after half a minute and say, “
How are you getting on?
”’

‘Oh no! Why did you have to say that? I’m going to have a horrible dream now!’ Chloe got the giggles at this point.

By now my agony had subsided into mere pain, though I was pretty sure I was going to be sporting a black eye for the next few days. I blinked blearily at my mirror image. The top of the dress was still somehow jammed under my boobs, and the sequinned edge had turned in on itself and was beginning to itch like mad against my lower ribcage. My hair was ruffled up like a hedge and my right eye was red and streaming. There was mascara all down my cheek.

‘How’s this for style?’ I demanded, striking a bold pose whilst still essentially topless and hideous.

‘Definitely goddess-like,’ squealed Chloe in hysterics. ‘You could paint faces on your boobs – that would be supernatural! And look at me: I look like a freakin’ cake!’

‘Quite a classy one, though,’ I mused, admiring her layers of ruffled pink. ‘You could dust your cleavage with icing sugar.’

‘And we could dot my hair with tasteful little blobs of whipped cream!’ screamed Chloe (though as silently as possible: we didn’t want to be asked to leave).

We struggled out of our dresses (though Chloe had to pull me out of mine) and hastily tried on the others, even though I already had a sinking feeling about the whole project. Chloe’s ruffled prom dress made her look like some kind of weird Amazonian lizard and her long vintage floral number transformed her into a chihuahua lost in a flower bed. My black tiered mini turned me into a stack of car tyres, whilst somehow revealing my legs as a pair of giant sausages, and the thing with the black chiffon scarves hanging down the front suggested an explosion in a curtain factory. We were clearly not going to score here, so we moved on.

During the next couple of hours we tried on dresses that made us look like giraffes, pizzas, air bags, chickens, wheelie bins, low-budget ghosts, and, worst of all perhaps, airline stewardesses. Then, suddenly, in the window of a funny little boutique called Razzmatazz, I saw it.

It was a pink satiny number, off the shoulder, on the money, out of this world. It was short, sizzling, slinky, shimmering, sexy, sensational. Yes, I quite liked it in a way.

‘Awesome!’ I shouted, grabbing Chloe’s arm. We raced inside, found the rail and, thank goodness, there was still one available in my size. I dived into it in desperate panic, praying it wouldn’t look too awful, like all the other dresses I’d tried on in the past couple of hours. But the result was just amazing. I stared at myself in disbelief: the image in the mirror looked like somebody else, somebody relaxed and even charming. Was this really me?

‘Wow!’ breathed Chloe. ‘Now you really
do
look like a goddess!’ Somehow, I don’t know how, the dress was the perfect thing for me. I had always dreamed of looking like this, but never believed it was possible. ‘You’ve gotta have it!’ urged Chloe. ‘How much?’

It wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t totally out of reach. I begged the sales assistant to let me put a deposit on it and come back next week with the rest. She was a kind motherly sort of woman, and she agreed. While she was writing out the details for her records, Chloe sighed.

‘I’m so happy for you, Zoe,’ she said. ‘But I wish I’d managed to find something.’

‘You will, babe,’ I assured her. The sales lady looked up, and smiled at Chloe.

‘You’re so tiny!’ she said. ‘So lucky! Have you tried the little black number with the sequinned neckline?’

Chloe looked doubtful. ‘Black?’ she said.

‘No harm in trying it on,’ said the woman. ‘They’re over there. You can’t go wrong with black. Perfect for redheads.’

Chloe tried it on. It was a really cute mini, in a kind of stretchy material, with a high empire waist and a sparkling neckline. It looked sensational.

‘Black?’ frowned Chloe dubiously, looking at me with an uncertain frown.

‘Chloe, you look the business!’ I assured her. ‘It’s scrumptious! So elegant!’ I was tempted to say that she didn’t have to be festooned with tortoises to look good, but I thought it would be more tactful to hold back.

‘I do sort of like it . . .’ Chloe hesitated.

‘Of course you do!’ I insisted. ‘It’s your goddess frock! So we’ve found them both! Sorted!’

Although paying for them was going to be a struggle. Neither of us could afford to pay up on the spot and the sales assistant said she could only keep them for a few days. We were going to have to get our hands on some cash – and fast.

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13

‘Right,’ said Chloe, as we settled down by the PC with our cups of zingy ginger and lemon herbal tea. We’d had our baked-jacket spuds, and I’d made a special salad with olives and anchovies. We were now ready to rock. ‘Do a search on
goddesses
.’ I Googled it up.

‘There’s a quiz! A goddess quiz!’ yelled Chloe. Two clicks and we were there. ‘“
Discover your goddess type
!”’

‘“
Grow your inner goddess
!”’ I yelled, clicking like a mad click-beetle.

‘“
Your road to growth and inspiration
!”’ shrieked Chloe. We soon discovered, though, that it cost $19.75 to take the Goddess Quiz.

‘What a rip-off!’ I grumbled. ‘I’m sure the goddesses would be outraged.’

‘The goddess of money might be quite impressed,’ pondered Chloe.

‘Who needs a stupid quiz, anyway? We can find out everything we need to know by ourselves. A real goddess wouldn’t take a quiz to find out what sort of goddess she was.’

‘Indian goddesses are cool!’ suggested Chloe. ‘Let’s have a look at them!’

Soon we were admiring a picture of Kali, sometimes known as the nude Indian goddess of evil.

‘Well, that’s
so
me, obviously,’ I sighed in rapture. ‘Look: “
For earrings she wears two dead bodies and she has a necklace of skulls
.” That is so the look I was planning for this winter.’

‘The dead bodies as earrings idea is attractive, obviously,’ said Chloe. ‘But wouldn’t they drag your earlobes down a bit?’

‘Not if they were dead mice or spiders,’ I mused. ‘Oh no, wait – I’d need a garland of fifty human heads, apparently. I’m not sure I could get away with that in school. Maybe Kali is a bit too challenging as a role model.’

‘Look, though,’ said Chloe, peering at the screen. ‘Her sword “
cuts the knots of ignorance and destroys false consciousness
”. Cool!’

‘False consciousness is a problem, though,’ I added. ‘I mean, how do you know if your consciousness is false or not?’

‘Find another goddess,’ urged Chloe. Within moments we were devouring the details of the Norse goddess Freya. It said she was often depicted travelling in a chariot pulled by two blue cats.

‘Blue cats!’ exclaimed Chloe. ‘Great fashion statement! I like Freya. Show me more!’

‘Her husband Od was lost at sea but when she was reunited with him he had been turned into a sea monster.’

‘Typical man!’ snorted Chloe. ‘So unreliable. I wouldn’t mind a husband called Od, though. “
Can I introduce my husband, Od?
” It would be kind of a talking point.’

‘Very Od,’ I agreed. ‘She remained devoted to him even though he was a sea monster,’ I read on. ‘Oh dear . . . but he was killed, in the end. Bad luck!’

‘Tough!’ sighed Chloe. ‘I was kind of getting into Od, even with all his tentacles and slime.’

‘Couldn’t be worse than Joe Gibbons in the lower sixth,’ I observed. ‘Oh look! It’s all right, after all, because the rest of the gods allowed him to have conjugal visits.’

‘What are conjugal visits?’ asked Chloe. We weren’t quite sure so we looked it up on Wikipedia. Apparently a conjugal visit is where a prison inmate can be visited in private by his wife in a little cell with a bed and stuff, so they can get up to all sorts of hanky-panky.

‘Gross!’ shrieked Chloe. ‘I was really into Freya because of the blue cats, but now I know she sleeps with a sea monster who is also a ghost, I’ve gone off her big time!’

‘So have I. Let’s go to Venus. These minor goddesses are letting us down.’

There were some great paintings of Venus, but we decided she wasn’t a good role model either because, basically, she seemed to be obsessed with men. Well, she was the goddess of love, so she had a good excuse. But still . . .

‘Look up some British goddesses,’ suggested Chloe. ‘Think Local!’

At this point my mobile rang. Instantly my heart leapt right out of my mouth and performed two circuits of the room: it had to be Beast. I grabbed my moby and ran out into the hall.

‘Yes???!!’ I hissed in frantic excitement, though trying, of course, to sound laid-back, cool and divine.

‘Hello, old boy, this is your lovable old pa,’ said Dad. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Fine, Dad!’ I trilled, trying to conceal my disappointment with an anguished screech of delight. ‘Chloe and I are doing some research on goddesses!’ I hoped he would be impressed by our scholarly programme. ‘What are you up to?’

‘Having a lovely supper in a little pub called the Vine Tree,’ said Dad. ‘So you’re OK, then?’

‘So far . . . but we’ve left the front door wide open with a notice saying: “
Werewolves, please walk right in
.”’

‘Well, let’s hope they do,’ said Dad. ‘But really, you should have booked ahead. Werewolves are always so busy on Saturday night.’

‘I know.’

‘Mum says how did the shopping trip go?’

‘Brilliant! I found this amazing dress! But, Dad! Listen! If I clean the house from top to bottom will you pay me?’ There was a sudden nasty little silence.

‘Let’s talk about that when we get back,’ he said.

‘No! Discuss it now! How much per room!?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Which rooms were you thinking of cleaning?’

‘All of them! Any of them!’

‘Well, don’t go into my study, that’s all. The crumbs on the carpet are supposed to be there – and I know the exact location of every one!’

‘No probs, Dad! OK. Bye!’ I didn’t want to clog up the line with endless Dad-talk when Beast might ring at any moment.

‘Bye already?’ Dad sounded startled.

‘Yeah! Must keep phone bill down!’ I had started to talk in some weird code, using fewer words, either to keep bill down or ditch Dad
now
.

‘OK, OK! Bye then, old boy!’

‘Love you! See you tomorrow!’ I went back to the sitting room. ‘That was my dad,’ I told Chloe unnecessarily. ‘He said they’ll pay me to clean the house!’ Though this wasn’t strictly what Dad had actually said, I had high hopes. And I’d suddenly realised that, if I got Chloe busy with housework, preferably vacuuming on the top floor, she wouldn’t be able to overhear any phone call I might have with Beast.

‘Great!’ she smiled, looking somehow innocent and vulnerable because I was planning to enslave her domestically. I felt horrid, but it had to be done. Anyway, when Beast used to call
her
, months ago, she’d always run off to another room so I couldn’t overhear.

‘I’ve found another goddess!’ said Chloe, looking up from the PC screen. ‘She’s called Axo Mama and she’s the goddess of potatoes.’

‘Look, I know how important spuds are to you, Chloe,’ I smiled treacherously, ‘but let’s give the Internet a rest for a bit, shall we? We have to clean the house.’ Chloe looked surprised.

‘What, now?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, why not?’ I countered, going off towards the kitchen. ‘Come on! No time like the present! It’ll be great exercise and we can share the muns.’

‘But I think my dad will pay for my dress!’ complained Chloe, following me reluctantly towards the sink. I opened the cupboard doors below, where all the cleaning stuff is kept.

‘Well, that’s great for you,’ I said. ‘Terrific! But I’ve got to work for mine. Of course you don’t have to help me, but I’m going to do a couple of hours of housework right now, and if you do help me I’ll owe you, big time. And if you don’t help me I shall turn into the goddess Kali and cut your head off just slightly, because refusing to help me would be a sign of false consciousness, OK?’