by Dyan Sheldon
Jocelyn laughed pretty heartily for someone on whom dust clearly never settled. “Oh my God, you Americans are so funny… I feel like I’m in an episode of Friends.”
Which was more than I could say. (Unless it was The One Where Cherokee Wishes She’d Stayed Home and Helped Caroline in the Garden.) We hadn’t even gotten into the station yet and already I had a feeling that the afternoon wasn’t going to make me really glad I wasn’t in Brooklyn. If Jocelyn was the cavalry I’d really rather take my chances with the Indians.
She turned right off the bridge. “I can’t tell you how shocked I was when Sophie said she was going off to New York all on her own without Mummy and Daddy this summer.” Jocelyn’s voice went squeaky when she said “mummy and daddy”, like she was about three. We walked down some stairs. “And I’m not the only one. Everyone was shocked. I mean, that isn’t like Sophie at all.”
“It isn’t?”
“You should probably get a travel card.” Jocelyn sailed into the station. “Do you know how to use the machine?”
What was she, my mother? (Well, not my mother, but somebody’s.) Select Ticket Type, said the instructions. Insert Coins. I thought I could probably figure it out, but I decided not to change the amount into dollars so I didn’t actually scream out loud.
“Anyway, Sophie’s just not the sort of person to go off on her own like that…” she went on. “Sophie’s … well … I mean, she’s my best friend and all and I love her dearly, of course, but she isn’t exactly the adventurous sort, if you know what I mean.”
I looked over at Jocelyn, a girl who definitely gave the impression that her idea of adventurous was going out with a run in her tights. How on Earth would she know?
“She isn’t?”
“Oh, puhlease…” Jocelyn sniggered. “You really don’t have any idea what she’s like, do you?”
I gave her my best Brooklyn, eat-cold-pizza smile. “It’d be a little difficult, seeing how I never met her.”
Her smile twisted in sympathy. “And who’d tell you, right?” Only Sophie’s best friend, apparently. “Let me put it like this: if life was a funfair Sophie’d spend most of her time wondering what rides to go on, and in the end she wouldn’t get past the carousel. Plus, she wouldn’t even get on a horse – she’d sit in a chair.”
What a great friend. I was surprised Sophie could bear to be parted from her for even a day.
“Really? Not even a stationary horse? Not even a llama?”
“Absolutely.” (I swear, not one hair moved out of place when she shook her head.) “I mean, don’t get me wrong, Sophie’s a terrific person and an absolutely brilliant friend and all, but she is truly hopelessly—”
Betrayed? Deluded? Unlucky in her choice of friends?
“Dull.” Jocelyn’s laugh ricocheted around the empty platform. “There. I said it. She’s dull. She’s a very sweet person, but she’s about as exciting as porridge.” She treated me to a view of sixteen years of really good dental work. I’d have to remember to tell Mr Scutari he was wrong about English teeth. “Personally, I blame her mother.”
I could tell that all the hours Caroline and I had spent collecting snails and taking them to the nearest park and stuff like that had made us bond because this statement really irritated me.
“You do?”
“Oh, absolutely. She’s very overprotective.” She flashed the teeth again. “Don’t you think so?”
I smiled back as the train pulled in. “I can’t say I’ve noticed.”
“Oh, puhlease… You can be honest with me. You’ve been here a while now – you have to have noticed. She never stops fussing. What if this? What if that? And don’t tell me you haven’t seen the blackout blind. Really, it’s enough to drive you bonkers.”
It wasn’t the only thing.
Jocelyn strode ahead of me onto the train. “Personally, I think going to New York was the best thing Sophie could have done.”
“Me too,” I said as I followed her on. “Me too.”
As soon as we sat down Jocelyn said, in this mega casual, could-you-pass-the-salt way, “Did I tell you we’re meeting my boyfriend?”
Despite the fact that she looked programmed, she was obviously a girl of surprises. Hidden depths again. I looked at her smile (about as genuine as a two-dollar bill). OK, maybe it wasn’t hidden depths. Maybe it was just hidden shallows packed with coral reefs.
“Your boyfriend? No. No, I don’t think you did.” You were way too busy dissing your best friend.
“Really? Oh, I thought I had. He’s meeting us at Oxford Circus.”
“We’re going to the circus? I thought we were going shopping.”
Except that she didn’t really look like she actually performed the usual bodily functions, Jocelyn laughed so hard I thought she was going to wet herself.
Not the kind of circus with clowns, obviously.
“Oh, you are so funny. I must remember that one. I really must.” She brushed an invisible speck of dust from her skirt. “Anyway, as I was saying, Daniel’s meeting us at Oxford Circus.” Jocelyn smiled as though she was about to tell me a secret. “I am so certain he’s going to love you. I told him you wouldn’t be anything like Sophie.”
And what did that have to do with the price of dog food?
“Why would he care if I’m like Sophie or not?”
“Well… you know…” Jocelyn shrugged. “He did sort of go out with her for a bit. Not that it could ever have lasted, of course. Talk about chalk and cheese.”
I decided to skip the chalk and cheese and go right to the other part that confused me. “Sophie used to go out with Daniel?” I was about to meet Ken.
“As I said, for a bit. But they were completely wrong for each other. It was like a tiger going out with a hedgehog.”
I was trying really hard to get through the chalk and the cheese and the tiger and the hedgehog and keep up with this conversation. “Oh, so you mean they had a couple of dates…”
“Not precisely.” Jocelyn gave another shrug. “I suppose they went out together for nearly a year. Give or take a month or two.”
“Nearly a year? It took him nearly a year to realize she was boring?”
“He’s a nice bloke,” said Jocelyn. “He didn’t want to hurt her.”
I didn’t think I needed more than one guess as to who it was helped him overcome that feeling. “Oh, he sounds like a really nice bloke.” I smiled. “I can’t wait to meet him.
Daniel was waiting by the ticket booth. He was definitely Ken. He was thin and fair and good-looking in an average, uninteresting kind of way. He was almost as eerily immaculate as Jocelyn. You could tell his mom ironed his clothes. He was the kind of guy you could picture when he was middle-aged – like he’d never really been young.
As soon as Jocelyn went through the turnstile they were all over each other like skin cream.
I stood there, watching the masses of travellers swarm around us, while Jocelyn and Daniel made a big deal of demonstrating how crazy they were about each other. I’d rather have watched fish spawn. Poor Sophie, no wonder she’d been so desperate to get out of London.
It’s not only good things that have to come to an end – bad things do, too (it just seems to take so much longer – in this case about a million years). But eventually, they had to come up for air.
“Daniel…” Jocelyn moved to one side as though she’d been hiding me behind her back. “Daniel, this is Cherry.” She kissed his cheek. “Didn’t I tell you she wouldn’t be anything like Sophie?”
Daniel grinned. “I’ll say she isn’t.”
“Cherry, this is Daniel.”
“Actually,” I said, “it’s Cherokee.”
“Cherokee?” Jocelyn repeated. “You mean like the car?”
“No.” I shook my head. I could hear my earrings jingle. “Cherokee like the native people.”
“Oh my God!” shrieked Jocelyn. “That is too much.” She gave Daniel a squeeze. “Did you hear that? She’s called after a tribe of
red Indians. How American is that?”
“That’s cool,” said Daniel. “Jocelyn here was called after her grandmother.”
Jocelyn laughed. “At least no one would ever think I was named after a car.”
Though they might think she was named after some kind of snake.
“Right.” Daniel put his arm around Jocelyn’s shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”
I followed them through the lobby and up the stairs. (Lesson for Today: You can’t actually walk through a crowded subway station with an entwined couple because they walk slower than everyone else and they take up too much room.)
We came out on Oxford Circus (which, in less civilized countries, is just an intersection). Oxford Street itself looked pretty much like an incredibly busy London high street, lined with enough typical American restaurants and stores to make me feel at home.
“Top Shop first,” said Jocelyn.
We went to Top Shop first. Daniel and Jocelyn stayed in joined-at-the-hip mode as we walked around. The going was slow since every few feet they’d have to stop to kiss, and sometimes they’d get so involved with each other that it was hard to tell without looking if they were making out or drowning. After Top Shop we went to Hennes. Then we went to Miss Selfridge. Then we went to French Connection. Now and then Jocelyn would stop to look at something. Was this in? Was that her colour? Would those pants make her look fat? Would that skirt make her ankles look thick? I didn’t see what it mattered. All the stuff looked pretty much the same. Daniel had Jocelyn to keep him awake, but trailing behind them I more or less went into a coma. I started thinking about the Suffragettes. Besides being imprisoned inside a clock, the Suffragettes chained themselves to the gates of Parliament … they marched in the streets … they were ridiculed and reviled … beaten and even killed. I wondered, if they’d known that they were going through all that trauma and torment for girls like Jocelyn, if they’d have bothered. When she remembered I was behind them, Jocelyn would ask me something about New York styles and what everyone was wearing and things like that, but she finally must have realized that I could only have cared less if I’d been dead, and gave up.
It took about a hundred years and just as many stores, but at last Jocelyn found something she wanted to try on.
“I won’t be long,” she promised. She gave Daniel yet another kiss. God knew how she managed to stay alive before she stole him away from Sophie. “You can tell Cherokee all about our camping trip while I’m gone.”
How lucky could one girl be?
As soon as she disappeared into the dressing room, Daniel turned to me with a big grin. But instead of saying, “We put up our tent and then we blew up our mattresses”, he said, “You know, Jocelyn’s going away the day after tomorrow.”
I said, “Oh, really?”
He nodded. “Yeah, she’s going to visit her nan. So I was thinking…”
There are first times for everything.
“You know…” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “If you wanted I could show you round a bit.”
“Show me round what?”
“Well, you know, round London.”
I wasn’t sure what he was getting at.
“I’ve already seen Big Ben and stuff like that.”
If he’d jammed his hands any further in his pockets they’d have touched his knees.
“Or we could go to a film or something.”
“Go to a film?”
He more or less rocked on his heels. “Yeah, you know. A movie. It must be pretty boring for you at the P-Ts … you know, coming from New York and all.”
“Oh, it’s not so bad. I’ve been helping Caroline dig a canal in the garden.”
He stared at me for one of those really long nanoseconds and then he laughed. Heartily. “Oh, right. Hahaha. That’s really funny.” He rocked a little more. “You know, there’s a Goth club down the other end of Oxford Street. We could go there if you’d like.”
Go to a Goth club with Ken? Had every pigeon in London been turned into a pig?
“I’m sorry, but I’m a little confused here. Are you asking me out like on a date?”
Daniel pulled his shoulders up so high that for a second he looked like he had no neck. “Well it wouldn’t be a real date, would it? You know, you’re only here for a few weeks.”
“So it wouldn’t really count?”
“If you say so.” He grinned. “But it’d be a good idea not to say anything to Jocelyn about this. She can be a bit possessive.”
I’d never realized before how thin the line between charm and slime really is.
I was saved by the reappearance of Jocelyn outside the dressing room with the skirt on. She twirled around so we got the full effect. “What do you think?”
Not a lot, really.
“I’ll ring you,” said Daniel, his smile on Jocelyn.
“That’d be brilliant. I’d really like that.”
I’d rather stick toothpicks in my ears.
Things Change Suddenly, the Way Things Do
A couple of days after my encounter of the third kind with Jocelyn and Daniel, I went down for breakfast to find Robert alone in the kitchen. This was such a really unusual thing that my first thought was that Caroline had finally had enough and run away from home, too. He had half the drawers and cabinets opened and was crouched down, looking under the sink like he’d suddenly taken up plumbing (either that, or he was looking for a bomb).
“Cherry!” He’d never looked so happy to see me. “I don’t suppose you know where we keep the coffee?”
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Robert Pitt-Turnbull.
“It’s in the freezer.”
You could see him thinking What’s it doing in there?, but all he said was, “Right.” He got to his feet and went to the fridge.
I filled the kettle. I was starting to get used to the tea. (Steep no more than three minutes and put the milk in last, so you could see how much you needed.)
Robert turned on the coffee maker, and then he looked in the bread bin (he couldn’t miss that – it said BREAD on it in big letters). He lifted out a loaf of unsliced bread and put it on the cutting board like it might explode.
After a few minutes of hacking away at it he had a pile of crumbs.
“Bloody hell…” he muttered. “This is the twenty-first century, for God’s sake. Why can’t we have sliced bread like everyone else?”
One of the advantages of having a grandmother like Sky is that she’s always baked her own bread, meaning that you pretty much learned how to slice it as soon as you could handle a knife without stabbing yourself or you didn’t have any. So I could have taken pity on Robert and cut him a couple of slices, but I figured that in the twenty-first century a highly evolved human adult male should be able to cut his own bread. “So where’s Caroline?”
Caroline had a bit of a migraine.
“A migraine?” I knew that migraines can be caused by stress. “Is that because she’s worried about the Czar?”
Robert looked from the rubble to me. “Xar? She’s worried about Xar?”
You obviously had to be a character in his book to get his attention.
“Yeah. You know, because he’s moved out?”
“Xar’s moved out?”
It was like talking to a parrot.
“Caroline didn’t tell you?”
Robert frowned, trying to remember whether he knew this or not. “Well … she did say they had a bit of a spat and he stormed out of the house.”
The man was totally oblivious.
“They did. And he hasn’t been home since.”
“He’ll be back,” Robert assured me. “As soon as he runs out of money. And I’m certain that has nothing to do with Caroline’s migraine. It’s more likely to be all that rain we had.” He waved the knife over the loaf, as though he was hoping it had figured out what it was supposed to do. “She’ll be down as soon as she’s feeling better.”
“What if she doesn’t?”
; “Pardon?”
“What if she doesn’t feel better? I mean, what do we do about supper and stuff like that if she doesn’t come down?” Robert’s one of those people who doesn’t think he’s eaten if he hasn’t had something that used to have parents. There was no way I was cooking dead flesh for him.
He tapped the instrument of destruction (otherwise known as the bread knife) against the cutting board in a pensive way. “Don’t worry,” Robert assured me. “She’ll be fine. And if not, I’m perfectly capable of seeing that we don’t starve.”
Since he couldn’t slice bread or find the coffee, I wasn’t exactly convinced of that. “You sure?”
“Of course I am.”
Caroline didn’t come down.
After Robert went off to work and I’d waited a while, I went up to see how Caroline was for myself.
The room was so dark it could have been anybody in incredible pain lying on the bed.
I asked if there was anything she needed.
“A new head. If my mother rings, tell her I’ll be over later with the shopping.”
I said that sounded pretty unrealistic. “You can’t even sit up. If you tell me what she needs I’ll get her groceries and walk the dogs.”
“Oh, I couldn’t ask you—”
“You didn’t ask. I volunteered.”
Caroline was right about Poor Old Mum not liking change. She was more resistant than a mountain.
She stood in the doorway with her arms folded in front of her like she was going to block me if I tried to get past her. “I don’t know about this.” The way she was looking at me, you’d think I was a stain on the carpet. “It’s a long way for you to come on foot.”
“I enjoy the walk. I like to look at all the old buildings and stuff.”
She kept on eyeing me dubiously. “And I like things done a certain way.”
Wow, what a surprise.
“So tell me how you want them done and that’s the way I’ll do them.”
She glanced down at the heads poking out from around her legs. “But Drake and Raleigh don’t really know you.”
“They’ll get over it. We’ve got a pig, a cat and a rooster at home. I’m good with animals.”
“But what if something happens? What if I fall again?”
