Love Bomb (12 page)

‘I’ve got to go,’ I say in a rush.

He shrugs. ‘Don’t forget my party on Saturday.’

‘I won’t,’ I say as I grab my bag and head towards the door.

‘You should stay over.’ Toby lazily strums a chord.

‘What?’

‘On Saturday. Everyone’s going to crash here for the night.’ He slaps his hand down on the strings and the hum of the guitar stops dead. I must look worried because he adds, ‘Mum’s decided to stick around. It’s just a sleepover.’

‘Oh, right,’ I say, as if having a sleepover at a boy’s house is a totally normal thing to do. ‘If your mum’s going to be here, I guess Dad won’t mind.’ He would
massively
mind and there is no way he can ever know about it. I wave goodbye to Toby and slip out of the garage.

I half walk, half run home, thinking about the lies I’m going to have to tell if I’m going to stay at Toby’s on Saturday. Somehow I know that the kiss I’ve been waiting for will happen at the party, but maybe not if I have to leave before everyone else. Suddenly, there’s one of Mum’s letters I have to read.

Luckily, Dad’s not in. Up in my room, I put on Bettye Swann and pull out the Puma box.

I hold
The one where I have my first kiss
. If I open this letter, then I’ll only have one left. I dash out of my room, calling, ‘Mr Smokey … I need you!’ I find him asleep on a pair of Dad’s pants. He digs his claws into them as I pick him up so I’m forced to bring Mr Smokey and Dad’s pants back into my room.

‘Sit on my knee and don’t wriggle,’ I tell him. ‘I need your help … and Mum’s.’ I open the letter, rest my chin on Mr Smokey’s head and start to read.

Dear Plumface,

Kissing. I’ll be honest, I was a bit of a late starter. My mum always used to say I was a ‘slow developer’, you know, to the hairdresser, to my teachers at parents’ evening, to my friends’ mums (loudly, at parents’ evening). She was probably right. I was a slow developer in all the key ‘becoming a woman’ areas: bras, periods and kissing. When I was fifteen, I dragged Mum to Marks & Spencer’s and
forced her to buy me a bra. As the sales assistant was measuring me, I saw Mum shaking her head in the mirror and then she whispered to the assistant, ‘They’re just
buds
.’

When the sales assistant announced I was ‘
almost
a 28AA’, Mum did an ‘I told you so’ face, but she perked up when I was given the bras.

‘Oh my God!’ she shrieked as I pulled the first one out of the packet. ‘It’s so dinky … just like your first ever shoes. Maybe I could get them framed together!’ Seeing my disgusted face she added, ‘A nice
box
frame, Lorna. Something tasteful … It can go in the hallway.’

On to periods. Does the tampon lady still come into schools? I hope so because I can’t imagine Dad sitting you down and explaining how a tampon works. When I was eleven, all the girls in my year were called to a special assembly. A lady wearing jeans and a fluffy jumper stood in front of us and
showed us pictures of ovaries on the overhead projector.

‘You will probably start your periods sometime before your fifteenth birthday,’ she announced cheerfully.

I can’t remember much about the rest of the talk, except she held up a teacup and said that a whole period would only fill up half a teacup – I think that was supposed to reassure us – and that when we first tried to use a tampon we should take a pet into the toilet to help us relax. I don’t think I’ve made the last bit up.

Anyway, me and Mrs Miggins (my hamster) waited and waited for the big day. Finally, when I was about one week off my fifteenth birthday I saw a tiny brown spot in my knickers. YES!!!! I rushed out of the toilet and got my hamster. Now Gramps had made a complicated living arrangement for Mrs Miggins: two double-storey cages joined by a tunnel. Laboriously, I moved her home into the toilet then squeezed in next to the cages.

Mrs Miggins climbed to the top of one of her cages and hung by two paws, swinging and watching me with her beady black eyes. She was making me feel self-conscious so I gave her some toilet paper to distract her. She started shredding it and stuffing it in her cheeks. I squeezed down on to the floor next to her and watched her for a while. Then I picked up my mum’s ‘Take a Break’ magazine. I was starting to feel relaxed … maybe that tampon lady knew what she was talking about.

When we emerged from the toilet an hour later, I’d had zero tampon success, but Mrs Miggins had made a huge nest and I’d read about a woman who had a growth removed from her stomach. The growth was exactly the same shape as Italy!

On to the main event. Kissing. When I was sixteen and a half, my Sixth Form had a Christmas party. I was certain that every girl in my year
had been kissed by now and I was getting desperate. I decided that, no matter what, I was going to kiss someone at the party. Unfortunately, there was no one going who I wanted to kiss. This didn’t put me off. My best friend, Julia, decided I was more likely to be kissed if my legs were perfectly smooth. She got a tube of her mum’s depilatory cream and told me it would dissolve all my unwanted hair. We sat on the edge of the bath and smothered our legs in it. This stuff was slippery, and we were using a lot of it, and at one point I slipped into the bath. Julia told me to stop mucking around and in the general confusion (we were listening to Guns ’n’ Roses and putting on mud face packs) neither of us noticed the blob of cream on my head.

I only lost a small patch of hair – about the size of a 50p – and Julia quickly rearranged my hair into a very unfashionable side bunch. I looked in the mirror. The overall effect wasn’t great – a white patch
of scalp still gleamed through my hair, but Julia swore no one would notice in the darkness of the club. I didn’t want to go, but Julia said she’d kill me if I abandoned her, so we set off across town, dressed up in our coolest clothes (DMs, black tights, flowery dresses) and drenched in Bodyshop Dewberry perfume.

As we queued to get into the club, I started chatting to a boy from my history class – I didn’t fancy him or anything, but I was thinking, ‘You’ll do’. He was telling me about his Saturday job when he suddenly stopped talking and gazed intently at my head.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing at my hair.

‘What?’ I felt the smooth bald patch with my fingers and quickly pulled my hair back over it. ‘Oh, that’s just my … scalp spot. All the girls are doing it. It’s like being blood-brothers, but instead we’re scalp sisters.’ He frowned and glanced
around at the other girls standing near us in the queue. ‘Most of them have got one,’ I said.

When we got in the club, I told Julia that she was getting a scalp spot tomorrow, or I was going straight home. She agreed, but to be honest she’d have agreed to anything by then because she’d drunk two bottles of Blue Raspberry 20/20 and was very overexcited. Giggling, she dragged me over to a booth and soon I found myself sitting next to History Boy. We smiled and shouted at each other for a few minutes and then he moved towards me, getting closer and closer, until I went cross-eyed trying to focus on him. The next thing I knew our lips were touching and, amazingly, I was being kissed! I sat there with my mouth slightly open and it was just about bearable until he started pushing his tongue in and out of my mouth. His tongue tasted of
Twiglets
.

‘Sorry,’ I said, gasping for fresh Twiglet-free air,
‘but I feel sick.’ Then I hid in the toilets until Gramps arrived to take me home.

If I’d thought things through, I wouldn’t have had a disastrous first kiss with a boy who I then had to sit next to in history on Monday morning … and for the next two years.

Now I’m going to tell you a BIG secret. A few months later it was Carlo’s birthday. Being an all-round wonderful person he was having a bonfire on the beach to celebrate. It was a cold night and a few people had ducked out, including Eleanor, so by the end of the evening, there were only a handful of us sitting round the glowing embers.

Carlo and I went down to the water’s edge to have a pebble-skimming competition. The moon was low and full, and it shone a silver path across the sea. A thousand stars were scattered across the sky. What I’m saying, Betty, is that it was
romantic
. Carlo and I looked at each other. He put his hands on
either side of my face and I slipped mine round his waist. Our whole bodies were touching and I could feel his heart beating fast. He kissed me and I kissed him and I never wanted it to end. The sea rolled and crashed, again and again, and I melted into our kiss, and although I was drifting off on a cloud of happiness I managed to notice that Carlo’s mouth tasted of Werther’s Originals. That was my first
real
kiss. History Boy didn’t count because I didn’t kiss him back.

I’m not sure what my message is here, Plumface. Perhaps I should summarise the key points for you:

•   Don’t take Nanna bra shopping.

•   Never try to use a tampon if a live animal is in the same room.

•   Kissing someone you like is as natural as laughing. Kissing someone you don’t like is as unnatural
as putting your tongue into a stranger’s mouth. (And letting them stick their tongue into yours.)

Actually, toddler-you is sucking my chin right now, so I’m going to have to stop writing. If your kissing technique doesn’t improve in the next few years, when you do kiss someone for the first time, aim a little higher. And
don’t
suck.

Love you always,

Mumface xx

That’s the longest letter Mum’s written me. I press the sheets of paper out flat and put them into Dennis. If Mum had never died, if she was downstairs in the kitchen making me dinner, would she tell me these things?

I’ve got no photos of Mum in my room so I go into the hallway and take my favourite one off the wall. She’s standing under a blue sky and the wind is blowing
back her blonde hair. She’s wearing a stripy polo shirt, unbuttoned, and looking off to one side, smiling her big smile. I used to imagine she was looking at me, but she looks too young. I put the photo on my bedside table, next to my fox necklace, and that’s all it takes to make my mind fly back to Toby and his curving smile and wild black hair.

After turning Mum’s photo slightly away so I’m not being watched, I lie face down on my pillow and practise kissing. I try really hard not to suck. After a while, I realise I can’t breathe so I come up for air.

No way am I eating Twiglets at Toby’s party.

When I come down to breakfast on Saturday morning, I find Poo sitting in front of a big stack of pancakes. She’s been round here a lot this week and now she’s wriggled her way into breakfast as well. I sit at the other end of the table and get out my phone.

‘Put it away,’ says Dad.

‘Hang on,’ I say, ‘just got a message.’

A shiver of excitement runs through me when I see Toby’s name. I open the message:
Looking forward to
tonight … x
He’s attached a photo, but as usual my antique phone is letting me down and I can’t see it yet. It’ll probably appear in a week.

‘Betty!’

‘One minute.’
Me too x B
, I reply. I drop my phone on the table and glance down at Poo’s feet. Good. She’s wearing shoes so she’s only just arrived. So far, they haven’t subjected me to Poo staying the night, but I can sense they are building up to it. Actually, their gross middle-aged lust might help me out …

‘Dad,’ I say, as he passes me my pancakes, ‘can I stay at Kat’s tonight?’

‘Sure,’ he says, then I’m sure I catch him flicking Poo a look. I force myself to smile at her. She’s already looking at me, with her calm, knowing look.

‘Nice pancakes?’ I ask sweetly.

‘Lovely,’ she says, taking a bite and smiling, all at the same time.

*

‘So, I’ve got a pair of pyjamas, a toothbrush, hairbrush, deodorant,’ I say to Bea, pointing at each item in turn, ‘and Cheerios.’ I give the Tupperware box a shake and the cereal rattles around.

‘Why’ve you got Cheerios?’ she asks. She’s rolling a seamed stocking up her leg, busy transforming herself into a 1950s starlet for Hollywood Night at her jive club.

‘For breakfast,’ I say. ‘In case Toby only has stuff like Shredded Wheat.’ I start to pack all my things back into my duck rucksack.

‘So you’re really staying the night?’

‘Yep, it’ll be fine. His mum’s going to be there.’ Bea pulls on a purple dress and starts to do her make-up. I squeeze next to her so I can share her stuff. I’m round here because it’s on the way to Toby’s and Dad would have got suspicious if I’d got all dressed up to stay the night at Kat’s. I decided it was too risky to tell him I was sleeping at Bea’s because she’s incapable of lying.

‘It’s just,’ she says, looking at me in the mirror, ‘you could always change your mind.’

‘I’m not going to change my mind. It’ll be fun,’ I say. I stand up and give her a twirl. ‘Do you like my kissing outfit?’ I’m wearing yellow DMs and a knitted dress with skulls all over it. It’s not as scary as it sounds because the skulls are smiling.