by Liz Tipping
An athlete, a princess, a brain, a criminal, a basket case…
Cara Dunham is definitely one of them. But stuck in her small hometown, with no prospects of escape, she’s struggling to find her thing. Her life is more book club than Breakfast Club and there is no Judd Nelson in sight.
So when Cara is invited to a school reunion she knows this is her chance to channel her inner Molly Ringwald and grab her John Hughes moment, once and for all. Because her teenage love Daniel Rose will be there, the coolest boy at school and the one that got away…
But transforming into an 80’s icon isn’t easy and Cara enlists the help of her oldest friend, Stubbs, to teach her all she needs to know about being cool and quirky – a la Ringwald. Except Stubbs thinks she’s perfect, just as she is. So taking it upon himself he tries to show Cara that while her life might not be ‘movie perfect’, there is always another take to get things right. And that maybe the hero she’s dreamed of has been under her nose the whole time…
Also by Liz Tipping
Five Go Glamping
Don’t You Forget About Me
Liz Tipping
www.CarinaUK.com
LIZ TIPPING
writes romantic comedies. As well as reading and writing novels, Liz enjoys John Hughes films, science fiction box sets, reality television, Irish sausages and ginger beer. She lives in Birmingham with her husband and their beagle, Mary. You can say hello to Liz on twitter @LizTipping and facebook facebook.com/LizziesBooks/
For Kirstie
Contents
Cover
Blurb
Book List
Title Page
Author Bio
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Excerpt
Endpages
Copyright
Chapter One
Saturday 14 May 2016
8.47 a.m.
The Battered Sausage Revelation
I assumed it was going to be another humdrum day in the shop, so you can’t imagine how thrilling it was for me for to find the battered sausage in the video rentals returns box.
I hoped we’d at least have one or two customers, something to keep me occupied and interrupt the troubling, monotonous thoughts in my head such as “What am I doing with my life?” and “How the hell did I end up back here?” and “Is it still okay to fancy Tom Cruise?”
I still checked the returns box every day even though it had been weeks since anyone had borrowed anything. No one really borrowed films any more, but sometimes there would be returned DVDs, which someone had borrowed months ago. Occasionally letters were delivered there by mistake or there was the odd bit of litter, but this was the first and only time I had found a battered sausage. It had been delivered in a polystyrene carton and fully wrapped in paper. I peeled back the layers and there it sat, sprinkled with salt over the now greying batter. It was a bit like opening a present and I could barely contain my excitement.
Olivia blew in from the street, pushing the door open with her backside while she wrestled with her umbrella.
“Look at this, Liv, a battered sausage. Fully wrapped. Jumbo sized. Isn’t it brilliant?” I said.
Liv inspected the tray. “Euw. You’re not going to eat it, are you? How gross.” She recoiled, her blond curls still bouncing even when she stopped. She frowned and her eyes narrowed so much and for so long that I wondered if her mascara had stuck together.
“No, I’m not going to eat it. It was in the returns bin. Where do you think it came from?” I said.
“Erm…the chip shop? Maybe?”
I nodded. “Well, yeah, obviously, I know that, but who would have posted it through the door?” I was sad that Liv wasn’t as excited as me.
Olivia shrugged, shook her brolly and headed to the kitchen leaving me alone to ponder the mystery with the cast of The Breakfast Club.
“Any thoughts on this one?” I said, addressing the giant cardboard promotional cut-out. I showed the battered sausage to Molly Ringwald.
“Stop talking to the Breakfast Club,” shouted Liv, over the boiling kettle.
“I’m not,” I mumbled, turning away from the cardboard cut-out, which had seen better days. I took the mystery fast food package to the bin on the other side of the shop. I paused at the Cocktail poster to see what Tom Cruise thought but before I could ask him, Liv was returning from the kitchen with our coffees. “And don’t even think about talking to Tom Cruise. We’ve talked about this.”
“Fine,” I said. Liv didn’t approve of me talking to the promotional posters. But now that we didn’t have any customers at all I found myself doing it more and more. This was the first week since I’d been back that we’d had absolutely no customers whatsoever. The only thing that had kept the shop going for as long as it had was no one seemed to pay any attention to our little Worcestershire town.
Cable television arrived here ten years after everywhere else so the shop had trundled along quite nicely. The only time anyone had ever heard of Broad Hampton was when a newspaper revealed we had officially the worst broadband in the country. The town wasn’t close enough to the city to be a suburb and not far enough away to be considered rural and had been pretty much overlooked by everyone for years. We kept the “worst broadband” label for a good few years, which meant no one was able to stream films so the shop kept its customers. But eventually, broadband arrived and the customers had been dwindling ever since. We hadn’t even had anyone buy anything out of the fifty-pence VHS bargain bucket recently, and as far as we could tell, no one had even stolen anything.
At nine o’clock, I turned the sign on the door around to open, and pulled the bargain basket outside onto the street. Looking around the Broad Hampton High Street, which hardly seemed to have changed at all in the last ten years or so, I again reminded myself this was only meant to be temporary.
“I think it’s okay to fancy him in Cocktail still, and maybe in Mission Impossible, but you can’t fancy him when he’s doing a red carpet or on Graham Norton or whatever. What I mean is, you can’t fancy actual Tom Cruise, but you can fancy the characters he plays,” said Liv when I came back in.
I nodded in agreement although I preferred Judd Nelson anyway. He was more my more type.
I took a long look at Judd as Liv settled herself at the desk with her laptop out, ready to stream whichever box set she was currently addicted to from Netflix. Liv said it was the best thing she’d ever watched and we should get the box set for the shop. I’d rolled my eyes at that and I could tell by the look Judd was giving me that he thought the same.
After a little bit of dusting to clear a few cobwebs from Molly Ringwald’s head and then tidying the already tidy covers and drinking more tea, it was almost ten a.m. Right on cue Weird Roger with the greasy hair and the shopping trolley showed up. He pushed open the front door of the shop and shouted “Have you got Free Willy 2?” like he did every day before making his hur hur hur sound. I was pretty sure he’d been doing that every day since the film came out – or at least as long as I’d been here, which apart from a gap of a few years where I attempted, and failed, to do something interesting, was a very long time.
At eleven a.m. the phone rang
and Liv answered and said, “No. No such film.” She hung up. When I asked her what they wanted, she explained someone had asked for “Shaw Hawk’s Red Temptation” and said if they couldn’t even be bothered to find out what things were called, they didn’t deserve to watch films in the first place.
Neither me nor Liv could understand why the owner continued to keep the shop open. We thought it was because he had so many other small businesses he had perhaps forgotten it was there. We also speculated that it was some kind of “front”, but while he continued to pay our wages we decided it was best not to mention it to him, and if he wasn’t concerned that the shop wasn’t making any money, then neither should we be.
I slumped over the counter and pressed the side of my face against the cool surface.
“I’m fed up, Liv. We’re going to have to get other jobs. This can’t go on much longer.”
“I think we both will.” Liv shook her head.
“It is so boring in here. When I was in Cardiff—”
“Stop right there,” said Liv.
“What?” I lifted my head up from the counter.
“Is this another story about how when you worked at the hotel in Cardiff and everything was brilliant and much better than here?”
“No,” I said.
“You sure?” she asked sternly.
“Well, maybe.” I sighed. Obviously things didn’t go that spectacularly for me otherwise I wouldn’t have ended up back here, but I had loved simply not being here, where no one knew me and I could start again.
“Anyway,” said Liv. “It’s cool working here.”
“No, Liv, it is most definitely not cool, not cool at all. It might have been cool when I was a Saturday girl fifteen years ago; in fact, it may very well be the coolest thing I have done, but it is not cool being thirty and having a glorified Saturday job.”
I loved it here when I started. It was like working in Empire Records but with films instead of music. There were ten staff and the shop was busy all the time. It was the first place and the first time in my life I felt I could be myself, instead of trying to stay under the radar like I did at school. I loved it. The customers were excited to get the latest releases and I got to talk about films all the time. There’s a joyous moment when you talk about “that bit” in a particular film and the experience is shared, like you and the other person are sharing in the magical movie moment. But now it was about as glamorous as working in Open All Hours. It was depressing. How had all these years passed and I was still here?
“I miss it, Liv, how it was. I miss how people loved films.”
“People still love films, Cara.”
“I miss talking about them. I miss talking about the little moments of magic. The bits that make you go ‘ahh’ or the surprising bits, the twists that no one saw coming and the happy endings that everyone did see coming, but still loved them anyway.”
“People still talk about them. I’m talking about what I’m watching now.” Liv turned her laptop round to show me she was two-screening with her box set and Twitter.
“It’s not the same, Liv. When I first worked here people were so excited to come and get the latest releases, it was like handing them little parcels of magic.”
“You’ll have to look for another job, then.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I will. Again.”
I folded my arms. I hadn’t planned to stay in Boring Hampton as long as this anyway. It was just a little breathing space while I gathered my thoughts.
When I left here, I decided I would never come back and live in this town, which no one noticed and where no one noticed me. My distinctly average school grades meant I couldn’t go to university, so I took a job as an assistant in events management at a hotel chain in Cardiff, but realised that I was about as good at managing events as I was at managing myself.
I imagined I would be organising glitzy events like weddings and proms where magical things would happen like at the end of a John Hughes movie. I’d be creating little magical moments for others, moments so spectacular, the guests would be astounded by it all. Instead I found myself organising corporate events and product launches. It was all PowerPoint presentations in beige boardrooms and ordering croissants for breakfast meetings whilst making sure the urns of tea were hot.
When I did get an opportunity to plan a wedding or special event, I was so stressed by wanting to create the perfect occasion that I crumbled. The pressure got to me and I couldn’t stand being the centre of attention with everyone looking to me to make decisions. When the hotel chain was bought out, they brought in new staff, leaving me without a job at all.
“You could work in another video shop,” said Liv. It wasn’t exactly my career plan of choice.
“I don’t think there are any, Liv.”
I could tell by the look Anthony Michael Hall was giving me that I was right. He was The Brain after all.
Liv went back to her Netflix and the battered sausage was the only truly memorable moment of the day.
We only had one customer and he wasn’t really a customer at all; it was sneery Derek from the bookshop who made a visit now and again to show us how clever he was.
“Ladies,” he said, doffing an imaginary cap. He really shouldn’t have done that because it drew attention to his strange woman’s haircut. He looked at the display of covers on show, pinched the brow of his nose, rubbed his forehead and muttered the words “dumbing down” a lot.
Occasionally he would ask for some film no one had ever heard of, but usually he just ranted about Hollywood and how it was making us all stupid. He behaved like an old man even though he was only in his thirties. He could have been good-looking if he wasn’t always pulling a face because popular culture offended him so much. Everything seemed to make him so cross. Liv said it was because he was so brainy and read so many books that there was no room left in his head for fun. Most of the time, he was fine, I suppose, but a lot of the time I wanted to throw a brick at his head. Like just then when he picked up the cover of Dirty Dancing and said, “Vacuous, my dear. It is all so…vacuous.”
“It’s better than Free Willy,” I muttered under my breath, which raised a giggle from Olivia.
“No wonder you have no customers with this dross,” he said as he left. He flicked his university scarf over his shoulder. I could tell Molly Ringwald did not like Derek at all. I didn’t go into his dusty old shop telling him all his books were boring.
Liv folded her arms and scowled at him as he left. “What was he on about this time?”
“Dumbing down,” I said.
“Again? You’d think he’d give it a rest.” Liv launched into an impression of him and started doing a funny voice, repeating all the things he normally said.
“Liv,” I said. “Do you reckon Derek put the battered sausage in the returns box?”
“Why would he do that?” she said.
“Because he’s a weirdo?”
“Yeah, maybe. I wonder if we’ll get another one tomorrow?”
“That would be exciting,” I said and I meant it.
Just before home time, the pirate DVD lady stuck her head round the door, shouting, “Blu-ray, new release.”
“We’re fine, thanks,” I said, waving her away.
“You sure? All the latest films?” She grinned and shook her carrier bag at us.
“Quite sure,” I said and she left.
I picked up three John Hughes films and I called my friend Verity to say I was too knackered to go for a drink in the social club with her. I rang up my film rentals in the till and paid for them, so it looked at least like we’d had one paying customer that day, and then I had a revelation. The battered sausage had been the only interesting thing that had happened in the shop in months. It was certainly the most exciting thing that had happened in my life that day – possibly all week – and if this was the most exciting thing that had happened in my life all week, I was going to have to do something about it. I’d had a battered sausage revelation.
/> Chapter Two
The one thing this job had going for it was that it didn’t come with a commute. I took the short walk past our row of shops and round the back to the entrance to the flats. Verity insisted on coming over anyway even though I didn’t want to go out. She said she didn’t want to waste her babysitter. She arrived shouting about how she wasn’t going to let David Cameron oppress her because she was a single mum so she’d been shopping at Marks and Spencer’s because, she said, that would be the last thing he wanted. She’d bought us an M&S Dine in for Two. She also said she wanted to eat grown-up food for a change instead of “sodding fish fingers and chicken nuggets.”
“Talking of meat in batter,” I said.
“Yes?” said Verity.
“I had a battered sausage revelation today.”
“A revelation, eh? Okay. Tell me more.”
I told Verity about the special delivery and how exciting I thought it was and she agreed that I was demented and sad and needed to get a life.
Verity was the very best thing about coming home again. She pressed play on the remote control and for the next hour and a half or so we watched Pretty in Pink completely absorbed, mouthing all the words like we used to when we were at school.
“You know what the problem with this film is, don’t you, Cara?” asked Verity, as we watched the final scenes. She was pointing at different parts of the television with her cutlery, waving her knife around while she delivered her lecture.
“Yes.” I did know what she thought the problem with this film was, because every time we watched it, she said exactly the same thing. I shovelled a mouthful of mushroom tagliatelle in because I knew I wouldn’t be required to talk for a while.
“Not only does she ruin one, she ruins two, two perfectly good vintage dresses and turns them into that monstrosity…” She paused briefly to jab at the screen with her fork before continuing. “And instead of leaving with Duckie, she gets off with someone called Blane, who, quite frankly, has behaved like a complete arse. But apart from that, do you know what else gets me about these films?”
