Girl, 16: Five-Star Fiasco

by Sue Limb

  That evening Jack had a rugby match and Fred had his precious chess club, so it was a chance for Jess and Flora to walk home together. Jess hadn’t mentioned the money crisis to Flora, because, of course, it was Flora’s family’s money as well as everybody else’s that she had lost. Instead she tried to enter into a slightly feverishly festive mood.

  ‘It feels like a treat to have some time to ourselves!’ sighed Jess. ‘Men! Aren’t they just a waste of space!’

  ‘Totally,’ agreed Flora with her rippling laugh. ‘Oh my goodness, it’s so cold! Where’s my hat?’ She pulled her fur-trapper’s hat out of her school bag and rammed it on her head. Flora didn’t usually wear hats, because she thought they made her hair go limp and horrid, but today was so cold, the pavements seemed to be made of iron.

  ‘Yeah, totally arctic,’ agreed Jess, snuggling into her scarf. It was already getting dark – they’d stopped for a hot choc at the Dolphin Cafe – and now their breath billowed in the faint glow of the street lamps.

  ‘What time is it?’ Flora looked at her watch for the hundredth time that day.

  ‘Stop showing off that freakin’ watch.’ Jess grinned. ‘I know your boyfriend is a billionaire and never stops loading you with bling, but we Neanderthals do have feelings, you know. My only watch came out of a cracker.’

  ‘Shut up! Don’t be an idiot!’ Flora laughed, admiring the watch again before plunging her hand back into her sheepskin mitt. ‘It was rather fabulous of him, though.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what it’s like having a boyfriend who spends over a hundred pounds on you!’ Jess shook her head. ‘I’m trying to imagine Fred spending anything on me at all. He’s notoriously tight.’ It seemed impossible to get away from the horrible subject of money. ‘Fred did write me a poem once, but he even asked me for the paper to write it on.’

  ‘Oh, but Jack could never write a poem!’ cried Flora. ‘You’re the lucky one! Fred is so clever! Jack is, like, totally without imagination.’

  ‘All the same – that watch …’

  ‘He did get it cheap off the internet, and it was a sort of late Christmas present. And he did earn quite a lot working on his dad’s business website.’

  ‘OK, OK.’ Jess smiled. ‘I’m just dead jealous of you, you pampered princess!’

  Flora laughed, and a cute little twinkly pair of dimples appeared on the flawless jewel of her face.

  Once home, Jess turned her room upside down. There was still no sign of the money. She racked her brains. In the early stages when people had been buying tickets, she and Fred had tossed the envelope of money to and fro like a hot potato, always meaning to open a bank account for it and never getting round to it, making a kind of joke – a joke! – about who was more likely to lose it. But her bedroom was totally and utterly ransacked – she had flung all her possessions about in a kind of panicky madness – and there just wasn’t any money anywhere. That was a fact.

  Fred must have it – even though he’d texted her to say he didn’t, she secretly suspected that he hadn’t even started to look yet, because he was sure that she had it. But of course she didn’t have it, so he must have it, and as soon as Fred started to look in the enormous pile of debris that formed his approach to interior design, he would certainly find it. This reassured her slightly, and she was able, at last, to think of other things, some of them potentially just as awful, but in new, exciting ways.

  On Saturday night Jess had to prepare for the ludicrous double date with Mum, Ed the Builder and Polly. He already sounded like a character on a children’s TV programme. Jess was half expecting him to be constructed of cheerful yellow plastic, with a detachable head. As for his daughter Polly, it was essential that Jess manage to look cooler than her. Although not knowing what Polly was like was a slight disadvantage when planning what to wear.

  At first she let rip, in the privacy of her bedroom, with a pink sequinned vest, cute black jacket and black drainpipe jeans. Were her legs thin enough for drainpipes, though? What if Polly was also wearing drainpipes, only her legs were endless and slim? Jess went downstairs and confronted Granny, who was watching a documentary about Jack the Ripper.

  ‘Granny! Look! Do I look OK?’

  ‘Lovely, dear,’ Granny assured her, dragging her eyes with reluctance from a period homicide. Then she focused. ‘Is it a disco you’re going to?’

  ‘No, Granny! It’s that double date with Bob the Builder – sorry, Ed – and his stupid daughter.’

  ‘Don’t you like her, then?’ asked Granny.

  ‘Well, I haven’t actually met her yet,’ said Jess irritably, ‘but I expect she’ll turn out to be Miss Totally Freakin’ Perfect.’

  Granny looked thoughtfully at her ensemble. ‘What is it again – pizza?’

  ‘Yes, a movie then pizza.’

  ‘Well, dear, don’t be upset …’

  ‘Of course I won’t be upset! I need your advice.’

  ‘Well, I do think you might have overdone it a bit.’

  Jess was upset.

  ‘You look a bit – how shall I put it? – like a Christmas tree decoration.’

  Jess was outraged. ‘Granny, how dare you!’ she yelled, managing – just – to keep it good-natured. ‘I wanted your input, not a character assassination.’

  ‘Well, you can never go wrong if you’re under-dressed, dear,’ explained Granny, her eyes swerving towards the irresistible TV screen. ‘In the sixties, we all wore sequins all day: girls, boys, dogs, the lot. But nowadays it does look a bit – dressy.’

  Jess ran back upstairs, threw off her sparkles and pulled on jeans and a stretchy leopard-print top. A Christmas tree decoration? Honestly!

  They’d agreed to meet in a little cafe called Gino’s, near the cinema. Mum was holding on so tightly to Jess’s arm, they were both getting pins and needles in their hands.

  ‘I tried on about thirty outfits this evening,’ whispered Mum as they approached Gino’s – quite slowly, as Mum had got her high heels out of mothballs and was teetering along the pavement in a rather worrying way, as if a trip and a sprawl weren’t entirely off the cards.

  ‘You look great,’ Jess told her. Mum was wearing her dark dress, the one she always used for winter funerals, with a little grey and pink cardy to soften it up. It was all, however, hidden by her massive quilted coat, which made her look like a walking duvet – though Jess didn’t have the heart to say so. She left that kind of hurtful truth-telling to her tactless grandmother.

  ‘Why ever did I let myself in for this?’ groaned Mum as they reached the door of Gino’s.

  ‘Never mind you!’ growled Jess. ‘Why did you let me in for it? How are we going to recognise them?’

  ‘He said he’d be wearing a denim jacket,’ said Mum, ‘and he promised we’d notice Polly as soon as we got inside.’

  ‘What’s so special about this precious Polly?’ grumbled Jess. Then they barged into the cafe and saw her.

  Chapter 12

  Polly was a goth. Her face was chalky white, her hair was a dyed-red Mohican, she was wearing a kind of black fishnet top under a black leather jacket, and she had so many piercings that when she turned her head towards them, her face tinkled.

  ‘Wow!’ muttered Jess. ‘We’re into hardcore gothic here.’

  ‘Shush!’ hissed Mum. ‘Come on!’

  Barging clumsily between the cafe tables in her duvet coat, she headed for the person she guessed must be Ed the Builder, a man with a gut so massive you would’ve thought he was expecting twins. He had close-cropped ginger hair and his face was covered with freckles. The hint of attractiveness which Mum had noticed in his photo was mysteriously absent in person.

  ‘Ed?’ Mum said, sweeping a fork off a nearby table with her air bag arm. ‘I’m Madeleine. And this is Jess.’

  Ed made a clumsy half-hearted attempt to get to his feet, but he struck the cafe table with his paunch and sat down heavily again.

  ‘Don’t get up! Don’t get up!’ cried Mum. ‘This place is so crowde
d! Hello, you must be Polly.’

  Polly looked challengingly at them and raised an eyebrow that was already kind of savage and sharpened.

  ‘Hiya,’ she said. Her voice was sweet and low and actually quite friendly.

  ‘Cool jacket,’ said Jess with as genuine a smile as possible in the rather weird circumstances. Polly smiled, and she instantly looked much less scary.

  ‘Yeah, I got it in this awesome ex-government surplus place in, like, London. My boyfriend, Wills, knows one of the guys who works there – he’s, like, his cousin’s friend and he’s got these amazing tattoos of, like, lions and stuff.’

  Ed turned his head and gave his daughter a rather hard look. Polly glared defiantly at him.

  ‘What?’ she demanded. ‘What?!’

  He turned back to Mum and shrugged.

  ‘She’s after tattoos,’ he said. These were the first words he had addressed to Mum. Jess was fairly sure it wasn’t the recommended greeting in the How to Woo Fair Ladies and Sweep Them off Their Feet Handbook.

  ‘So what if I am!’ hissed Polly at her dad. ‘It’s my body, isn’t it?’

  ‘You know what I think,’ he informed her crisply. Then, disastrously, he turned to Mum. ‘What’s your view, Madeleine?’ he enquired, leaning back in his chair and tapping his paunch thoughtfully. ‘Would you let Jessica have tattoos?’

  ‘Don’t drag me into it!’ laughed Mum, but in a way that was about as far from amusement as it’s possible to be. ‘Jess hasn’t made any plans for tattoos yet, and I’m not sure how I’d react.’

  Jess was imagining, in the way that one’s mind plays tricks, how Ed would look if a map of the world was tattooed on his belly. It could lead to a variation on that old song, ‘He’s Got the Whole World on His Paunch’. He could go round the schools and be used as a visual aid in geography lessons, like a globe.

  ‘You wouldn’t want tattoos, would you now, Jessica?’ demanded Ed.

  Jess stared at his freckly face. ‘I’m not sure.’ She didn’t want to side with him or his daughter. As they were doomed to spend the rest of the evening together, she decided she would pass the time by imagining what fun it would be to approach his freckly face with a felt-tip pen in a jolly join-the-dots sort of mood. She thought she could see a potential church right there on his left cheek – or was it a unicorn?

  ‘I must get out of this coat, Jess.’ Mum turned to her for help. The chairs were small and somehow nastily curved, so once seated in them you could easily start to feel as if you’d never get out, especially if you were swaddled up in five kilos of polyester wadding. ‘Help me, love!’ appealed Mum.

  Jess caught her eye for a split second, and they shared a deeper moment of understanding than they had ever experienced before. Mum was wishing her daughter had been born with supernatural powers and was able not just to help her out of her duvet coat, but to sweep her up under her arm and fly off, smashing the cafe window to smithereens as they passed, rocket-like, through it and headed for Zanzibar.

  Jess was wondering why she had been born to this ridiculous woman caught up in her disastrous dating madness, when, if there was any justice, her mum could have been a movie star or business guru. However, she just gritted her teeth and pulled the duvet coat off, then sat down and shared with Polly a kind of eyebrows-raised ‘Isn’t my parent appalling?’ shrug, which was the nearest they were going to get to bonding.

  The film was OK, because they just sat in a row in the darkness (why couldn’t all relationships be like that?). But chatting in the pizzeria afterwards was always going to be a challenge …

  ‘So, Polly,’ said Mum, reaching deep into her emergency store of librarian’s conversational gambits, ‘have you read any good books recently?’

  Polly looked startled. At this point, mercifully perhaps, Jess’s phone bleeped. She scrabbled in her bag.

  ‘You should turn that thing off when we’re having dinner,’ said Mum irritably.

  ‘Oh, don’t mind us!’ Ed waved Jess on as if Mum’s etiquette was absurd. ‘Pol’s texting away day and night.’

  ‘Only my mum!’ Polly said, shooting her dad a secret fierce look. ‘I text my mum, right, because I hardly ever see her.’

  ‘All right, all right, don’t let’s go through all that again!’ Ed flapped his arms at his daughter. It was a strange gesture, like trying to scare birds off a picnic table.

  Jess took a peek at her phone. MESSICA! LATEST EPISODE IS FESTERING IN YOUR INBOX. DREADFUL DISASTERS BESET LORD VOLCANO.

  ‘Who’s it from?’ asked Mum. ‘Fred?’

  ‘No, Dad.’ Jess swiftly composed a reply suggesting that whatever disasters had befallen Lord Volcano they couldn’t compete with her own current night out in hell.

  ‘So, you been divorced long, Madeleine?’ enquired Ed, picking his teeth languorously in a manner designed to increase his charm.

  ‘Oh, yes, for years.’ Mum brushed a few crumbs off the table and tipped them back on to her plate. ‘We separated soon after Jess was born.’

  ‘So you ruined your parents’ marriage, eh, Jessica?’ enquired Ed with a rather horrid and tactless grin, as if joking about such matters was just the thing to make the evening go with a swing. Jess herself had made that joke a hundred times, but coming from Ed it seemed cheeky and presumptuous.

  ‘No, I didn’t ruin it,’ she explained. ‘They managed that all by themselves. Dad’s gay.’

  There was a sudden strange silence. A weird embarrassed expression came over Ed’s face.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, rubbing his nose (always a negative gesture). ‘Different!’

  ‘Yes,’ admitted Mum uneasily. ‘He certainly is different.’

  ‘He did you no good at all, then, Madeleine?’ remarked Ed, staring at Mum with a mixture of disbelief and pity. ‘Not very easy for you, neither, Jessica, having a Dad who’s a little bit queer.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Jess felt furious. ‘Everybody at school’s jealous. They all think it’s amazingly cool.’

  ‘I told you so, Dad!’ snapped Polly. ‘You shouldn’t be so homophobic.’

  ‘No need for them long words, Pol,’ said Ed crossly, folding his arms defensively over his enormous gut. ‘I’m just a normal bloke.’

  Much later that night, when they had escaped at last and were having a late-night cup of hot choc, Mum announced that her dating experiment was at an end, and that from now on she would do anything to avoid spending another evening, or even five minutes, in the company of a ‘normal bloke’. Jess wondered if Mum was being a little harsh. Polly and Jess had exchanged phone numbers and email addresses – she wouldn’t mind seeing Polly again some time, even if their parents’ first date was going to be their last.

  When Jess finally gained the sanctuary of her own room and checked her emails, the latest episode from Lord Volcano was waiting.

  ‘I know you, Volcano,’ hissed Sir Filo Pastry from the depths of his cloud-blue cloak. ‘I know you’re plotting against me. We intercepted your snail.’

  ‘Not Donald!’ cried Lord Volcano in alarm.

  ‘We’re debriefing him now.’ Sir Filo Pastry nodded menacingly. ‘He’s singing like a canary.’

  Lord Volcano uttered a strangled cry. Please, don’t let them torture poor Donald! he prayed.

  ‘And when we’ve got every bit of info out of him, we’re going to have him boiled with garlic butter and a fine Chianti. But as for you, Volcano,’ continued the evil Sir F, ‘you’re going to be taken out to sea and set adrift in a small boat with only enough peanut butter sandwiches to last until Sunday.’

  And with a diabolical echoing laugh, he was gone. The door slammed.

  Lord Volcano shuddered. Would he ever see his beloved long-lost daughter Messica again?

  Chapter 13

  On Sunday at lunchtime the gang met in the Dolphin Cafe. The old Dolphin was looking good: the walls had been repainted a Caribbean turquoise for the new year, and there were new twirling mobiles of dolphins, made of beautiful twinkling silver and glass. But M
aria, the cafe owner, looked more melancholy than ever. She had a tendency towards heartbreak; in fact, she’d already had three heartbreaks since Christmas.

  Jess, Fred, Flora, Ben Jones, Mackenzie, Jodie and Tiffany bagged the biggest table and ordered some drinks. But for once Jess didn’t feel hungry: that morning, she and Fred had exchanged tense and stressy text messages about the missing money. Fred insisted that he’d searched his bedroom from top to bottom and hadn’t found it; Jess was equally sure he hadn’t even looked. They couldn’t mention it in front of everybody, though: it was the elephant in the room.

  ‘Have you written your stand-up for Chaos yet?’ Jodie asked Fred.

  He shook his head and looked embarrassed.

  ‘No, no, I was busy all week embroidering lampshades,’ said Fred. It was a kind of lame gag by his standards, but everybody laughed. Normally Jess loved the way everybody laughed at Fred’s jokes, but she was in such a peculiar mood today, she didn’t seem able to cope with it. Instead she felt a sudden urge to lay it all on the line (except for the missing money, of course) and fess up to the mess.

  ‘Listen, guys,’ she said. ‘Fred and I are a bit out of our depth organising this Chaos thing. We could use some help.’

  ‘Leave it with me,’ said Mackenzie. ‘I think it needs a Wild West motif.’

  ‘Shut it, Mackenzie, you idiot,’ murmured Ben, giving Jess a quick, worried glance. Mackenzie, being Ben’s best buddy, subsided slightly.

  ‘What sort of help do you need?’ asked Jodie.

  ‘Uh … quite a bit,’ admitted Jess, glancing at Fred. He was stroking the edge of the table, as if distancing himself from the mess, and avoiding looking at her. Great. Fantastic. She had become invisible, less interesting than furniture. One day soon Fred might announce his engagement to a chest of drawers. ‘We, er, haven’t managed to get a band, for a start,’ Jess went on. ‘Have we, Fred? Are you still negotiating with Goldilocks?’

  ‘Not really,’ Fred admitted shiftily. ‘They let me down, to be honest.’

  ‘So, still no band,’ said Jess grimly. ‘Fred’s dad is running the bar, because he did that heaps of times when he was in the army, but the food … well, I don’t know where to start.’