The Worst Girlfriend in the World (23 page)

‘He mentioned it in passing.’ I shrugged like it was no big deal. ‘So, is everything all right with his dad? Is that why he’s not been in work?’

‘Yeah. I mean no! Oh, hang on. Like, um, no, his dad’s in hospital and yeah, that’s why he’s not been around,’ Louis clarified. ‘Something up with his dad’s piss.’

‘Ewwwww!
What?
’

There was a loud shushing noise behind me. I didn’t dare look round, especially as Louis chose that moment to put his hand on my arm to pull me a little closer.

That should have been my cue to melt into a puddle of gloop that was formerly known as Francesca Barker, but it turned out I was made of stronger stuff. Also, I was so grossed out by what Louis had just said that I wasn’t sure I wanted his hands anywhere near me.

‘He’s got an infection in his pee or his kidneys. Whatever. It was pretty serious. Francis even missed a rehearsal because he was at the hospital.’

‘You guys actually rehearse?’ Another Merrycliffe mystery solved.

‘Every Monday evening,’ Louis told me proudly. ‘Well, except we don’t really do much rehearsing because that goes against the whole spirit of Thee Desperadoes, so mostly we play
Rock Band
in our drummer’s basement. But Francis didn’t even text to say he wasn’t coming.’

‘He was probably worried about his dad.’ There was a thought I didn’t want to think. ‘But is his dad getting better? How long is he going to be in hospital for? He will be coming home, won’t he?’

Louis was nodding happily again. It was my turn to sigh in relief. How strange to think that time wasn’t something that stretched endlessly in front of you but something precious that could run out. How did Francis even get up in the morning and walk and talk and smile and remember to look up clips of films that he knew I’d like?

‘Don’t worry. It’s all cool. Francis’ dad and his piss…’

‘God, please stop saying that…’

‘Hey, Franny, we all do it,’ Louis said earnestly. ‘Everyone has to sh —’

I held up my hand in protest. ‘I get the picture. Francis’s dad is on the mend and Francis will be back at work soon, right?’

‘Right. End of the week. I never thought you were this uptight, Franny.’

And I never thought that a) I’d ever go up to Louis and start talking to him like it was the most normal thing in the world and that b) I’d then beg him to shut up because he kept talking about a mutual friend’s dad’s wee.

‘I’m not uptight. I’m actually quite laid-back,’ I said, though I was probably more on the uptight part of the life spectrum. I glanced over my shoulder to see Mattie and Paul waiting at the exit for me. ‘I have to go but if you see Francis, will you just say hi and that… Just say hi and that I’m glad everything’s all right… No! Just say I said hi.’

‘Sure,’ Louis said. His attention was drifting back to the graphic novel he’d been reading. ‘Franny B says hi. Got it. OK. Yeah…’

I’d lost him.

But I found Francis. Or rather I thought I saw him in the distance when I was dropped off at college by my parents the next morning like I was six or something.

They were going to the big wholesale supermarket in Preston. They always went there about a week before Dad headed off on a long European trip. That was usually when I clenched every muscle in my body and kept them clenched until he came back, but this time I was unclenched. The outing to buy catering packs of bacon and Capri-Sun usually coincided with Dad writing the dates he’d be away on the calendar in the kitchen and pinning up his itinerary on the fridge. But this time both calendar and fridge were unmarked so it looked like he was staying in Merrycliffe for a while longer.

I opened the door before Dad had even pulled into the kerb. ‘Don’t forget to buy me one of those huge glass jars of the pralines. Oh and if they’ve got the nice pizza, not the gross pizza, make sure to get lots and lots.’

Dad muttered something about how he was amazed I hadn’t asked for a job lot of cheap vodka and cans of Red Bull and Mum lifted her head up from her shopping list, which she’d been compiling and cross-referencing and amending for three days.

‘I’m sure that the cheese on even the nice pizza is full of carcinogenic chemicals,’ she told me. Then she slapped on a cheery smile. ‘Have a good day, love!’

It was almost comforting the way we slipped into these roles like we were a normal family, but then Dad would go away again and we would become an abnormal family. Not even a family but just one girl left to cope with her menty mother.

‘Bye then,’ I said, and hurried after Francis. He was too far away to call out to and I was still swiping my ID at the security gate when he went through the entrance marked
Staff Only
.

But he was back, which meant that his dad was better, and I’d discovered a sixties actress called Julie Christie and wanted to show Francis a scene from a film called
Billy Liar
where she skipped down a street and had adventures. I also needed to give him a tenner for the London petrol kitty and mostly I just wanted to say hi.

This morning as I’d been brushing my teeth, I’d made a vow to myself that I would redo the armholes on my grey leather dress, which were still giving me all kinds of grief. Once they were sussed, I would ease in the sleeves. The sleeves would become my bitches.

‘I think a sleeveless dress would be much easier,’ Barbara told me when she assessed my work-in-progress later that morning. ‘I don’t think you’re ready for sleeves.’

Of course that just made me want to put sleeves on my dress even more.

‘Why do you think so many dresses in the shops are sleeveless?’ Barbara asked me.

She had this habit of staring at you without blinking when she was talking and she had her glasses on, which made her eyes look superbig and distorted, and I started blinking a lot more than I normally would. I was beginning to get paranoid that Barbara would think my blinks were taking the piss when the door to the studio opened and my head swivelled in that direction, as it had done all morning whenever anyone even passed by in the corridor outside. This time my head-swivelling wasn’t in vain.

It was Francis with his toolkit.

He was walking straight towards me. I smiled. Had the ‘Hey!’ all ready to go, but then he took a left towards the broken overlocking machine and even though I tried to catch his eye, his eye refused to be caught.

Even after Barbara had moved on to give Paul grief, I didn’t have a chance to talk to Francis because Sandra and Karen were busy explaining how it totally wasn’t their fault that the overlocker was making a terrible noise, and I had a meeting with my English tutor.

‘Hey you,’ I said as I walked past but he didn’t hear me or look up because he was intent on unscrewing tiny, tiny screws with a tiny, tiny screwdriver.

There was no chance to catch up with Francis at lunch either as I had a lunch date with Lexy of Thee Desperadettes fame who I’d been tweeting with about possible sequinned T-shirt designs. She was going to bring along Kirsten of the allergic-to-false-eyelashes-glue fame.

I was worried that it was going to be awkward and it
was
awk at first. ‘So you’re the girl that always hangs round with
that
girl,’ Kirsten said when we met up outside the posh sandwich shop. Her eyeballs were normal size but she was giving me serious glare action. ‘What is her problem?’

Where to begin? ‘I don’t really see her so much any more,’ I mumbled, because it still felt wrong to slag Alice off to other people.

‘It looked like Louis was seeing quite a bit of her on Saturday night,’ Lexy said drily and I waited for my stomach to drop to the floor. Just as it started to plummet, I thought I saw Francis across the road, but it wasn’t him and by then my stomach had righted itself.

I found I could listen to Lexy and Kirsten discussing Alice’s Saturday night exploits without flying into a murderous rage even though it sounded like she’d been all up on Louis all evening. I guess now we weren’t actually friends any more, none of the rules we’d drawn up applied.

‘I would never let Louis that near once he’s taken his top off,’ Kirsten sniffed. ‘His sweat gets everywhere and I love him but sometimes he smells really ripe.’

‘Foul,’ Lexy agreed. They didn’t sound that besotted even though they were members of Louis’s entourage of besotted Desperadettes. ‘I also really hate it when he drops to his knees in front of me and beats his chest. I keep telling him that it’s not even a little bit funny and then he gets upset and it’s impossible to stay angry with him.’

‘Why’s that?’ I asked.

They both looked at me and shook their heads. ‘Because it would be like kicking a kitten,’ Lexy explained and I wanted to interrogate her further, but then Kirsten asked if it was true that Alice had come at me with a razor blade and that was why my hair was so short, then they both put in orders for sequinned T-shirts.

It turned out to be a pretty good lunch break in the end. After, I hurried back to the studio to wait for Francis but he was nowhere to be seen and he’d taken the overlocker away because apparently Sandra had bodged it up so badly that it needed to be mended off-site.

‘Will I have to pay for the repairs?’ she asked us. ‘Maybe I could wipe off the debt if I agreed to give Amir a blowie round the back of the bins?’

‘Oh God, can we all pretend you never said that out loud?’ Mattie begged and so of course she spent the rest of the afternoon describing all the ways she was going to work off the money for the overlocker repairs. I spent most of the afternoon bent double with laughter – when she described something particularly wretched involving the student chaplain and an oven glove, I really thought I was going to wet myself.

I was still quite shaky and giggly as I left college and just as I walked past the
Staff Only
door, Francis came through it.

‘There you are!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’ve wanted to talk to you all day. I was beginning to wonder if you were avoiding me. I’m so glad you’re back.’

‘Are you?’ he said in that old flat way of his.

‘Well, of course I am!’ I frowned. ‘Why wouldn’t I be? Come on!’

Francis shook back his hair so for once it wasn’t falling into his eyes and I could get the full glory of his furious face. Eyes narrowed, nostrils flared. Lips pinched. Not a sneer. I’d have welcomed a sneer. ‘Because now you haven’t got an excuse to talk to Louis. Jesus, just how low can you go?’

Wow! And no! And oh my goodness! ‘It wasn’t like that at all. I was worried when you suddenly weren’t around and —’

‘Why would you be worried about me?’ Francis demanded, like all the time we’d spent together recently meant nothing – that we weren’t really friends. Not that I wanted to be friends with Francis now. Not if he actually thought that I was the kind of person who’d use his dad’s illness as a great way to get my flirt on with Louis. Which I
so
hadn’t done.

‘I asked you to put in a good word for me with Louis but that was weeks ago,’ I reminded him. ‘I didn’t know you then and you didn’t know me and it’s clear you still don’t know anything about me, not if you think that’s the crappy way I roll.’

I could see him weighing up my words. Testing the heft of them. ‘I don’t like being used. That’s all.’

Francis was going through something terrible but that still didn’t give him the right to take it out on me. I was sick of people taking things out on me. ‘Yeah? And I don’t like people thinking the worst of me when I was just trying to be nice. I thought you were my mate.
I told you about my mum
.’ I hissed the last sentence at him and he took a step back because I think there was spittle involved. ‘Do you think I did that so you’d trust me enough to get me in good with Louis? Do you?’

‘Well, no, but…’

His hair was falling in his face again but from the sound of his voice, uncertain and stammery, Francis knew he’d made a big mistake, but he still wasn’t rushing to apologise.

‘Oh, just get over yourself,’ I snapped and I turned sharply enough that I clonked him hard with my bag, though that was a genuine accident, and stomped off as much as anyone can stomp when they’re wearing kitten heels and a very tight pencil skirt.

I seethed about it at work as I let out the seams on Mrs Ayers’s black party frock because she’d quit Weight Watchers yet again. I was still seething when I got home even though there was a
mahoosive
jar of chocolate pralines on my bedside table and when I tried to give Dad a tenner for them, he smacked my hand away.

Even having the good pizza for dinner couldn’t turn my ferocious frown upside down. ‘You’ll get stuck looking like that, kid,’ Dad said to me. ‘Come on, cheer up, it might never happen.’

That was the singularly most irritating thing you could say to someone who was already in a bad mood. ‘It has already happened,’ I said glumly. I had no appetite for even the good pizza and Mum was picking all the cheese off her slice with a look of barely concealed disgust and Dad sighed and said that he wasn’t going to waste money on the good pizza again if Mum and I weren’t going to eat it.

By the next morning, I’d devised a brilliant plan to avoid Francis until I was calm enough not to start shouting at him as soon as I saw him, and he’d seen the extreme error of his ways. It involved making sure I removed myself from any place where Francis was lurking. This meant that I wouldn’t be going to The Wow on Saturday night, but that didn’t seem like such a tragedy. Not when I also couldn’t bear to see Alice, whether or not she was all up on Louis.