The Worst Girlfriend in the World

by Sarra Manning

  It was a long while, with everyone turning to look at us, before Francis could straighten up. He was a little breathless and pink-faced like maybe he didn’t do a lot of laughing and was out of practice.

  ‘So, I’m sorry for getting mad and telling you to piss off,’ I concluded. ‘But after talking to Louis, then another person coming over to tell me that I looked like a boy… well, it was just too much.’

  Francis nodded. ‘I get that and, for the record, I don’t think you’re a twat. Or that you look like a boy, for that matter.’

  When Francis said it, I believed him, in a way that I hadn’t when everyone else was telling me that I still looked girl-shaped. There was something quiet and calm about Francis that made me trust him.

  I offered him one of my chips and Francis followed me back to where Sage and the others were hovering at the end of the counter, because there were no tables spare.

  Then, half an hour later when there were still no spare tables and I knew that I was in danger of violating my curfew like it had never been violated before, Francis offered to walk me home.

  Not like he was waiting to lunge and pull me into a darkened doorway, but everyone else lived in the opposite direction to me and there was this Merrycliffe urban myth that girls could be abducted and within minutes be locked in the hold of a ship en route to somewhere very far away. It had never happened but that’s what our parents always told us. That’s what Francis told me too, and it was past one in the morning and it would just be my luck to get kidnapped by some vile pervert who wanted to sex-traffic me to the Far East, so I agreed.

  18

  ‘Where do you live anyway?’ Francis asked, as we waved goodbye to the others. ‘You don’t live miles away, do you?’

  I was tempted to tell him that walking the seven miles to Lytham was nothing, but the friendship we seemed to be forming was too fragile and new to take any more miscommunication. ‘Nah. I live on the seafront. About this far from The Wow but in the opposite direction.’

  ‘Didn’t think anyone lived on the seafront,’ Francis said. ‘Apart from the old people in all those retirement homes. What’s it like having an ocean view?’

  ‘Very windy,’ I replied, just in time to hear Louis shout something that carried on the breeze. Something that sounded a lot like ‘Woooh! Yeah! Francis! Don’t do anything that I wouldn’t do.’

  I shuddered and at least it was dark and there wasn’t much in the way of street lights so Francis couldn’t see the embarrassed blush that was burning up every millimetre of skin that I possessed.

  ‘Talking of twats,’ he said, though we hadn’t talked about twats for a good forty minutes. ‘Don’t take anything Louis says too seriously. He’s one of those people who doesn’t have a filter. As soon as he’s thought it, he says it, but he’s not doing it to be evil. The guy doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body.’

  I didn’t say anything while I processed that. Maybe Sage was right when she’d said that Louis wasn’t blessed in the brains department. But that was only one part of the Louis whole and the other parts had to be worth all the effort I was going to, otherwise what was the point?

  ‘Well, that’s good to know,’ I said at last. ‘Because there was a moment this evening when I really wanted to smack him.’

  ‘Yeah, I get that feeling a lot too.’

  Francis and I shared a smile that was a little awkward and then he asked me if I wanted to borrow his DVD of Breathless. I was relieved he’d stopped calling it A Bout de Souffle, but I needed to check something. ‘It does have sub-titles, right?’

  It did and Francis promised me that it wasn’t like a lot of French films where people mostly stared out of windows moodily until the camera panned to something random like a bird on a telephone line. ‘It’s boy meets girl but boy is on the run from the police and the girl is a cool American hipster type who doesn’t know that he’s a villain.’

  It sounded wonderful and I was intrigued by the pictures I’d seen of Jean Seberg and then I told Francis about Edie Sedgwick and that actually a lot of the Andy Warhol films she was in were really boring and pretentious and I only watched the bits she was in and skipped the rest.

  ‘Probably not as boring and pretentious as some of the films I had to watch when I was at Central St Martin’s,’ Francis said and my head whipped round in a way that had nothing to do with the force ten gale that was rushing in from the Irish Sea.

  ‘Oh my God! You were at Central St Martin’s?’ I couldn’t make my legs work. ‘That’s where I want to go. To do a fashion degree. What were you studying?’

  ‘Film.’ Francis didn’t say anything else. When I glanced sideways at him, I could have sworn he was sneering. I wondered if that was the way his face got when he didn’t want to talk.

  ‘So did you decide that you didn’t want to study film any more or did you do something awful like destroy a very expensive camera?’ I asked.

  Francis wasn’t sneering quite so hard. ‘Nothing like that. I had to defer for a year. My dad isn’t well,’ he added reluctantly.

  I really wanted to reach out and touch him, just on the arm maybe, but I didn’t. We were hardly even buddies, let alone touching buddies. Still, I did want Francis to know that I was sorry about his dad but I didn’t know where to start.

  ‘I’m sorry’ seemed like a good place. ‘Um, is it serious?’ Well, obviously it was serious if Francis had quit his film course and dragged his heels back to merryless Merrycliffe. ‘Like, he is going to get better, isn’t he?’

  ‘’Fraid not.’ Francis swallowed hard and I held my breath a little. ‘He’s OK at the moment, but back in July his doctor said that at best he has a year and at worst, well… he doesn’t have a year, so I came back home.’

  I could fill in the blanks – Francis had slotted back into the spaces left of his old life while he waited for his dad to get worse. How awful. How horrible. It made my problems seem so small.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, because I didn’t know what else to say.

  He scuffed his feet. ‘Yeah, well, shit happens, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It does,’ I agreed. It was odd that I’d never really noticed Francis before. He must have been at school with Shuv but she’d never mentioned him. And he’d been in Thee Desperadoes two years ago, but all I ever focused on was Louis. Francis was one of those people who drifted through the shadows of your own life until all of a sudden they were there in front of you. Making you feel things – sad, protective, helpless – that you didn’t really want to feel because they made your stomach churn and your head hurt and your skin grow clammy and cold. ‘But it must mean a lot to your dad that you came back. And if he’s not too, like, poorly at the moment, then you’ve got the chance to make some more good memories together. Seizing the day and all that stuff, you know?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Francis nodded and gave me another of those almost-there smiles. ‘Never really thought about it like that.’

  I realised that we’d come to a halt outside the fifties milk bar and were just standing there, facing each other. It was hard to have a serious conversation when you were walking into what felt like a tornado. ‘Sometimes… sometimes when you’re in that kind of bad situation, it’s hard to see beyond it. To get some perspective.’ Jesus. I’d been to one family counselling session with Mum and Dad before Mum decided that it was a waste of time and Dad agreed with her because he had a job booked to deliver some stuff to Dusseldorf and here I was, acting all perceptive like I was Oprah.

  ‘Oh, so did one of your parents —’

  ‘No! No! Nothing like that,’ I quickly told Francis before he got the wrong end of that particular stick. ‘It’s just… my mum’s sick too.’ It was my turn to swallow hard. ‘Not sick like your dad but she has depression. Well, she has what the doctors call “a major depressive disorder”. It’s hardly the same thing but…’

  ‘It’s not,’ Francis said, but he didn’t sound angry as we started walking again, the wind getting fiercer so the two of
us were almost folded in half as we tried to stay in forward motion. ‘But it’s still an illness.’

  ‘I know. I’ve been told that a million times. I’ve Googled it. I’ve read about it. I know that she can’t help it but there are also times when I want to scream at her to just… you know, snap out of it. Pull herself together.’

  ‘Don’t think it’s as easy as that, Franny.’

  ‘Yeah, but she could still try.’ I was getting dangerously close to ranting. I took a couple of deep breaths. ‘She used to try. She would cry and get really stressed out about stupid stuff like a parking ticket or a letter from the bank or the washing-up being left undone, but after lying on her bed for a little while crying, she was OK. But now she’s not.’

  I didn’t know why I was telling Francis this. Nobody else knew about this, only Alice, and it was probably the last thing he wanted to hear when he had a much heavier burden to carry, but he was listening, he wasn’t sneering. ‘So, what changed?’ he asked so softly the words almost got lost in the night.

  I shrugged. ‘About two years ago we had a really shitty time. My nan, her mum, died and she got made redundant and part of our roof blew away and my sister, Shuv, she’s everyone’s favourite, she left home to go to university and Mum just had a nervo.’ I preferred to call it that instead of a nervous breakdown, which sounded so clinical. So final. Like once something had broken down, it could be fixed but it was never going to work as well as it used to. Our GP and the registrar at the hospital had called it an ‘episode’ but it had looked a lot like a nervous breakdown to me. ‘She cried for weeks and she was always a bit OCD before but she went totally OCD and she spent all day cleaning and messed up her hands by washing them in bleach, then she went away for a bit.’

  She’d agreed to go to a place in Bridlington with a locked ward for really proper menty patients. Mum hadn’t been on the locked ward, but she’d had to share a room with this old woman who had dementia, smelt terrible like weeks-old piss and called me Mary the one time I went to visit Mum.

  There was no way Mum was ever going to get better in a place like that, she and Dad decided. And because she hadn’t been sectioned but had voluntarily admitted herself, it was easy to discharge herself too. So she came home and she was a bit better. And now she wasn’t as better as she used to be.

  ‘She could take her pills,’ I explained to Francis, who must have been wishing that he hadn’t offered to walk me home now. ‘She could go to her group counselling sessions. She could stop pretending that everything is OK when my dad and my sisters are around. She never stops to think that she’s not the only one who has to deal with her depression; I get a double helping of it too.’

  ‘Maybe it’s because she trusts you,’ Francis suggested. ‘Like, she knows you won’t judge her.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I muttered, because I judged her all the bloody time. But I think the reason Mum let me see her without the brave face that she showed the rest of the world was because she knew I’d keep her secrets. Other girls went shopping with their mothers or even clubbing with them, but the way Mum and I bonded was that she fell apart and I picked up the pieces. Anyway, it didn’t matter – this was the last thing that Francis needed. I couldn’t even believe that I’d told him this much. It didn’t feel good to vent. Saying the words to another person, instead of going over and over them in my head, made the truth come out instead of lingering in the dirty, dark shadows where it usually hid. The truth was never a friend. ‘God, forget I said anything. I’m sorry to dump all this on you. And I’m sorry that I keep on saying sorry when you have enough to deal with.’

  We were almost at my house now. I stopped on the corner, hands shoved deep in the pockets of my coat, and grimaced. Not just because of my oversharing but because the wind felt like it was scouring the skin off my face.

  ‘It’s all right, I don’t mind,’ Francis said, though he should have minded. He probably did but was too polite to say it to my face, now that we were almost mates. ‘And you can tell me to piss off again if you hate unsolicited advice, but I find it helps to have stuff that makes you laugh. It gets you through the crap bits. Even if it’s convincing Louis that a spaceship was spotted hovering over the Dyke a couple of nights ago and that we should go up there and see if there are any alien rocks.’

  ‘Oh God, please don’t tell me stuff like that,’ I whimpered because I didn’t want to think that Louis would be stupid enough to fall for such a lame joke but I could already hear his excited cries as he spotted alien rocks that were really just normal rocks. Then I thought about what Francis had said and there were lots of good things happening: college, Sage and Dora and the others, figuring out how to do armholes, having a new sixties icon to obsess over and…

  ‘Don’t forget our trip to London,’ Francis reminded me. ‘Is that going to be cool with your parents?’

  I scoffed. Even waved a casual hand in the air. ‘It’s going to be fine,’ I said, especially as I’d already told them I was going to spend the weekend in Manchester with Shuv. It was going to be harder to convince Mrs Chatterjee to give me the Saturday off than to totally lie to Mum and Dad about where I was going. Though talking of parents, I was in such violation of my curfew that there was still a distinct possibility that Dad would ground me and take away my wifi privileges if I wasn’t home soon. ‘Anyway, thanks for walking me home and listening to me jaw on…’

  ‘You can jaw on to me any time you want,’ Francis said and he was so nice. He was probably the nicest boy I’d met, now I was past the sneer. There was a lot more to him than simply a way to get closer to Louis. ‘And I jawed on too. We both jawed on.’

  We were both jawing on now because it’s always a bit weird to say goodbye to someone you don’t know that well. ‘Look, I’ll see you Monday at college,’ I said. ‘And I’ll swap you Edie in Chelsea Girls for Jean Seberg in Breathless. Deal?’

  ‘Deal,’ Francis said and then we did this odd little dance like maybe we were going to shake hands or have a quick and awkward hug but we touched each other’s elbow instead, and then I felt my phone vibrate with what could only be an irate text message from Dad asking if I’d been abducted and I had to run the last fifty metres.

  19

  When I finally surfaced the next morning and Dad had finished giving me a stern lecture about how my curfew wasn’t just a vague suggestion but to protect me from being abducted by sex traffickers, I checked my phone to find that Francis had added me on Facebook. The boy formerly known as Sneering Studio Tech and I were friends. Or Facebook friends, which meant we were almost real life friends. I’d never expected that! Francis had also invited me to an event he’d created: Thee Desperadoes Go Mad In London. They were playing the Saturday after next in a pub in Camden called the Dublin Castle (I’d have thought that pubs in Camden would have more exotic names) and were driving up in the morning and driving back that night.

  I saw that Lexy and Kirsten of Thee Desperadettes had already joined. I clicked on ‘Maybe’ because I didn’t want to appear too eager and then I saw Alice’s name on the invite list.

  I hated that when I saw Alice’s name my stomach did this horrible swan dive. Though I had to admit that my hair didn’t look so bad in the cold light of Sunday. It still had the remains of the silver spray in it (the rest of the silver spray was staining my pillow) and now that I’d seen Jean Seberg, I didn’t mind the tufty bit so much. In fact, by the time it was the Saturday after next, my hair would probably have grown enough that the bald spot would no longer be bald and the fringe wouldn’t be so nineties footballer any more.

  It still felt wrong to have spent another Saturday night without Alice, even wronger not to phone her to debrief about what had happened on Saturday night. And as soon as I thought it, I heard the phone ring.

  Not my BlackBerry but our home phone. I was in the kitchen peeling spuds, Dad was making a herb crust for the lamb (Shuv should never have bought him a Nigella Lawson cookery book last Christmas) and Mum was flicking throu
gh the Sunday paper. We all looked at each other in horror. Nobody ever rang the landline except…

  ‘It had better not be anyone trying to sell me something,’ Dad said as he picked up the phone. ‘Hello?’ After a moment, he held the receiver out to me. ‘It’s for you.’

  I took it gingerly. I didn’t want anyone trying to sell me something either. ‘Hey.’

  ‘It’s me,’ Alice said. ‘I cannot even believe that you blocked my number. That is beyond harsh, Franny. How many more times do I have to apologise about your hair?’

  Then I remembered that this wasn’t just about my hair. It was about why Alice had done what she did. Because getting a boy, a boy that I already had dibs on, was more important than the years we’d been friends.

  Also, you didn’t fuck about with another girl’s hair. It was as bad as punching them. She’d pretty much scalped me – I had a bald spot – so she hadn’t apologised enough yet. I wasn’t sure she ever could.

  ‘You only apologised in the salon because your parents were there,’ I reminded her, painfully aware that my own parents were within earshot and weren’t even bothering to hide the fact that they were listening. ‘And you let me think that you’d been cutting hair for ages when you’re not even allowed to use a blow-dryer unsupervised.’