Girls, Muddy, Moody Yet Magnificent

by Sue Limb

  ‘Well, I certainly hate men,’ growled Chloe, staring into her hot choc. ‘They are all basically losers, liars and wasters.’

  ‘There are some nice guys,’ I argued. ‘What about Toby and Fergus?’

  Toby was flouncing in and out of the cafe carrying trays of stuff. He was working so hard, a sweet little moustache of sweat had started to gleam on his upper lip.

  ‘Toby’s a girl trapped in a boy’s body,’ said Chloe. ‘And Ferg is a cuddly toy.’

  ‘What about Fred Parsons?’

  Chloe thought for a while, shook her head and sighed. ‘Fred Parsons is OK,’ she said. ‘We’ll just have to clone him. It’s the only hope for the human race.’

  I was glad Chloe had managed a feeble joke. It showed she wasn’t totally devastated by Brendan’s treachery. But I gave her an extra hug as we said goodbye.

  ‘Hang in there,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t get upset. He’s not worth it.’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ she asked wryly, raising her eyebrows. I was proud of her. But I knew she was on a knife edge. I’d have to keep monitoring her by phone and text all weekend.

  .

  .

  27

  I had a lot of agendas this weekend. I had to try not to get too distraught about Dave Cheng’s revelations. Maybe Oliver was being unfairly treated. Maybe the guys were ganging up on him. Just because Dave Cheng had a dazzling smile and said Beast was ‘a legend’, that didn’t mean it was true.

  But as I walked up the front path I knew I’d have to put all thoughts of Oliver on the back burner for a bit: Tam would be in crisis and I had a feeling she’d need my undivided attention and support. Although she’d been dumped by Ed, in a way this was good news, because it would mean that he wouldn’t be hanging around in Newquay with us, ruining everything. Now we could just have fun together, the three of us: me and Tam and Chloe.

  Mum and Dad were out on the patio. I popped out to say hello and then dashed back indoors. Tam’s door was shut and gloomy music was flooding out under the door.

  I knocked. There was no answer, but I went in anyway. Tam was lying on her bed, cuddling her old teddy bear. Her eyes were red and black from crying. She looked up feebly.

  ‘Zoe!’ she whimpered, and held out her arms. I knelt down beside the bed and gave her a five-star hug. ‘He dumped me by text!’ she wept. ‘And he’s changed his mobile number and his email address.’

  ‘Don’t think any more about him!’ I urged her. ‘He’s not worth it. Men are rubbish – apart from Dad, obviously.’ Tam reached for a tissue and blew her nose noisily. She looked thoughtful, as if my pep talk had sunk in a bit. ‘Listen,’ I went on. ‘We can have loads of fun without him anyway. Newquay will be way nicer with just the three of us.’

  Tam went pale and sat up in bed. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard. ‘Newquay’s off, Zoe,’ she said in a quavery voice. ‘I’m really, really sorry, but Ed has cancelled the flat.’

  ‘No!’ I gasped. The room rocked and whirled and my heart almost leapt up past my tonsils and crashed into my teeth. I hadn’t realised that cancellation was possible. Our fabulous hol, that we’d been planning for months, going down the plughole? ‘He can’t have!’ I cried in disbelief.

  ‘Oh yes he can!’ groaned Tam. ‘It was a PS in the text he sent dumping me.’

  She passed me the phone on her pillow. The text message was still on the screen. I scrolled down: PS, SORRY BUT I’VE HAD TO CANCEL THE NEWQUAY FLAT, OBVIOUSLY.

  I felt giddy and sick: I sat down on Tam’s bed.

  ‘I’m going to kill him,’ I hissed venomously.

  ‘You’ll have to find him first,’ said Tam. ‘I’m really, really sorry, Zoe. I’ve completely wrecked your holiday with my disastrous choice in men.’

  ‘No!’ I snapped. I was determined not to give up. ‘We can find somewhere else in Newquay. I’ll look on the Internet.’ Tam gave a massive, shuddering sigh.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be up for it, anyway,’ she moaned. ‘How can I go on holiday feeling like this?’

  ‘It’s the perfect thing to do!’ I told her. ‘We need cheering up! Chloe’s been dumped on, too. Brendan told us today that he’s not coming to Newquay, even though he went on and on about how he wouldn’t miss it for the world. He’s going to Edinburgh with Lily.’

  ‘Harsh,’ said Tam. ‘Poor Chloe.’

  ‘Yeah, but listen.’ I was getting into another pep talk. ‘We can cheer her up.’

  ‘How can I cheer anybody up?’ groaned Tam in anguish.

  ‘Tam!’ I commanded. ‘You have to come to Newquay with us, because if you don’t, Mum and Dad won’t let me go! And they’ll wonder why you’re not going! I’m going to look for a place to stay right now!’

  I ran out of Tam’s room, threw myself on my bed and got out my laptop. There had to be somewhere to stay in Newquay! I remembered once when Mum and Dad had taken us touring in Scotland, and we’d stayed in a different B&B every night. Mum had phoned on ahead to the Tourist Office and they’d always been able to find a last-minute booking for us. I got the number of the Newquay Tourist Office and called them on my moby.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ I said, trying to sound glamorous, rich and about thirty. ‘We’ve decided to come to Newquay for a week, from the twenty-fifth. It’s a bit last minute, obviously, but I was hoping you might be able to find somewhere for us.’

  ‘How many of you are there?’ asked the tourism woman, sounding, bizarrely, rather Scottish.

  ‘Oh, only three,’ I said, as if we would easily fit into a cupboard.

  ‘Are you over eighteen?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m twenty,’ I lied, stealing Tam’s identity. ‘And I’ll be travelling with my sister and her friend. They’re sixteen, and very well behaved. Our dad is a headmaster.’ This little detail had burst from my lips in desperation. ‘He’s terribly strict,’ I added.

  ‘Let me make a few calls,’ said the woman. ‘It’s not going to be easy at this time of year. Could you all share a family room?’

  ‘Oh yes, fine,’ I assured her, secretly biting my nails. We had to find a room somewhere! If our holiday collapsed in ruins, Mum and Dad would want to know why, and Tam’s fling with Ed had to remain a secret. Also, the disappearance of the holiday would push Chloe right over the edge into heartbreak hell.

  While I waited for the return call I phoned a few places myself, in desperation. I couldn’t just sit still and do nothing. I called some B&Bs at random – I got their numbers off their websites. ‘Sorry,’ said the first, ‘fully booked.’ ‘No availability till mid-September,’ said the second. ‘Sorry, but I don’t think there’s a bed free anywhere in Newquay,’ said the third. I rang a caravan place. Full. I rang two surf lodges. No availability. ‘Newquay’s heaving,’ confided the owner of the second surf lodge. It seemed hopeless. I could feel a massive crying fit gathering behind my nose.

  Just as I was deciding to burst into tears, my phone rang. I snatched it like a hawk diving on a mouse.

  ‘I’ve managed to find you somewhere,’ said the Scottish lady. ‘It is fairly basic, though. A three-bedded room with a washbasin. No meals, and no en suite.’

  ‘Never mind!’ I gabbled excitedly. ‘We’ll take it!’

  I ran back to Tam’s room and demanded her Visa card (she agreed but only with a tormented moan), paid over the phone, and then breathed a sigh of relief. Tam’s heart was broken, Chloe’s heart was broken, the fabulous flat was gone for ever, but we were still going to Newquay, and I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth. I felt amazingly proud of myself for having snatched the holiday back from the abyss of doom, but unfortunately the only person available to admire my heroism was me.

  I rang Chloe and told her the whole story, but she was still so upset about Brendan that the change of accommodation seemed a side issue. I made Tam a cup of hot chocolate and promised her that the hol was going to be fabulous. She shrugged and gave me a weak smile. She knew that she had to come because if she refused, I
would be her enemy for life.

  We had one more week at the farm to get through before we left for Newquay. It was going to be so stressy. I would have my hands full trying to keep Chloe from murdering Brendan. And then there was the puzzle about Oliver.

  I was sure Dave Cheng had got Oliver all wrong, but I’d got a week to do a bit of discreet digging and get Oliver to open up and tell me the truth about the rugby team business. Also I had to find out if he was going to Newquay or not. I assumed, judging by the way Brendan and Ed had behaved, that Oliver would also let us down.

  On Monday, on the bus to work, Chloe and I didn’t talk much. There was an edgy atmosphere.

  ‘I think we should just treat Brendan completely normally,’ I suggested.

  Chloe shrugged and struck her lower lip out in a sulk.

  ‘Why wouldn’t we?’ she snapped. I recognised this behaviour of hers. She’d grown a kind of cast-iron protective shell. She would never admit, now, that she had ever rated Brendan. I had seen her like this before: after her thing about Beast. She’d been in denial about Beast, and now she was in denial about Brendan. It made everything difficult when she was like this. But it would have been worse if she’d been in tears.

  We entered the farm kitchen to find Sarah making tea and Martin on the phone. And he wasn’t happy.

  ‘You what?’ he bellowed. ‘… Now you tell me! … I’ve got a harvest to get in – I was counting on you this week! … Oh, well, do what you bloomin’ well have to, then, I can’t be bothered with it all. I’ve got a farm to run!’ He slammed down the phone. Sarah cringed slightly.

  ‘Lazy little devil!’ he thundered. ‘Total waste of bloomin’ space!’

  ‘What?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘Oliver blasted Wyatt! Rings me up now to tell me he’s just remembered he’s got to do a week on a pig farm! This week, mind you! Needs it for his course or something! And we’ve got a mountain of work to do to get this harvest in before that rain comes in next Friday!’

  ‘What?’ Sarah faltered. ‘You mean … Oliver’s not coming any more?’

  ‘No, and good riddance, that’s all I can say!’ yelled Martin, tossing papers about.

  ‘Oh no. How could he let you down like that?’ fretted Sarah. ‘And he seemed such a nice boy – sensitive, you know. And charming.’

  ‘Well, I think he’s about as charming as a dead dog!’ growled Martin. At this point Brendan entered the kitchen. I felt Chloe flinch, but there was no time even for the smallest of small talk.

  ‘Brendan, get that tractor down to the twenty-acre field!’ boomed Martin. ‘Thanks to Mr Limp-Wristed Wyatt, you’re going to be harvesting non-stop from now until Friday evening!’ Brendan looked shocked, and disappeared again right away.

  Oliver’s absence, so disastrous for Martin, turned out to be a godsend for us. Of course, I missed him, but it meant that Brendan was busy with the harvest for the next five days, so he had no time for lunch breaks with us. Sarah took Martin and Brendan a picnic and they had it in the field where they were working. Chloe and I reverted to a sandwich in the kitchen. Most of the time we were alone, which was just fine by us. One day Lily came in and made herself an omelette.

  ‘So, when are you and Brendan heading off for Edinburgh?’ I asked.

  ‘Saturday at the crack of dawn,’ she said. ‘The idea is to drive up overnight, because Brendan reckons the traffic will be light.’

  ‘The crack of dawn!’ I smiled, fishing for info. ‘Sounds romantic!’

  ‘Well, there’s certainly nothing romantic between Brendan and me,’ said Lily. ‘I wouldn’t touch him with a bargepole. He’s a bit of an idiot, and he’s so up himself it’s not true, but he does have some redeeming features, including his own car and a clean driving licence, and he said he’s got nothing better to do than drive me up to Edinburgh, so I thought, why not? Go for it!’

  Chloe’s neck went red with suppressed rage when she heard this. Brendan had ‘nothing better to do’? What about our lovely trip to Newquay? He’d promised he would adorn our metal-and-glass balcony, and teach us how to surf. I was going to be very sceptical in future about guys who were all mouth like Brendan. And the jury was out on guys who just chose not to turn up when they were needed, like Oliver.

  If Oliver hadn’t had any conscience about letting a whole rugby team down … if he was suddenly unavailable on the farm at the busiest time of year when they had to get the harvest in, what would the chances have been of him showing up on a date? Maybe I had had a lucky escape.

  .

  .

  28

  Eventually that long, last week at the farm crawled to an end. Martin handed us our pay packets, Sarah kissed us on both cheeks, and the Polish guys shook hands with us and gave us their email addresses. Brendan wasn’t around, thank goodness: there was no tactless goodbye hug for Chloe to endure. We jumped on the bus home with a huge sigh of relief.

  Now suddenly our long-awaited trip to Newquay was right up close. We were leaving tomorrow by coach. It was sooner than I’d anticipated, somehow. Once home, I scrambled about frantically looking for my tweezers, my make-up remover, my swimsuit. All the clothes I’d wanted to take needed washing: I had to pack dirty stuff. Our holiday had been glittering glamorously in the distance for ages and ages and now suddenly it had pounced on us and I was just miles from being ready.

  Never mind. At least we still had a holiday. Tam had agreed gloomily to come, though she’d been in a miserable mood all week. Mum and Dad had already left for a chic little break somewhere in Dorset, which meant that Tam and I had to organise our own packing, order a taxi to take us to the bus station the next morning, lock the house up, and all that stuff.

  I’d imagined arriving in Newquay in dazzling sunshine, but when we eventually rolled into town next day, after a bus journey that seemed to have taken about a hundred years, there was a gloomy haze of fog, rain, mist, wind and sulking. On my right, Tam was sulking about Ed. On my left, Chloe was grieving for Brendan. I was fuming at Tam and Chloe for their horrid stereophonic sulking and grieving.

  We were stiff, crumpled and starving, as well as heartbroken, as we climbed off the bus and collected our massive cases. We couldn’t face dragging the luggage through the mist and rain, searching in vain for our B&B, so a taxi smelling of horrid disinfectant took us there.

  As we drove away from the bus station, signs loomed through the fog: Pie Mash & Liquor, Alcohol-Free Zone, Undersea Safari, Surf Militia, Wetsuit Hire £3 hour/£6 day, Pasty Presto, Tattoo Studio. They seemed like messages left over from another era. Newquay was a ghost town, with white buildings fading into the fog, and scurrying figures melting into nothingness. As our taxi climbed up a hill out of the town centre, I tried to fight off a dreadful feeling of disappointment. It was so different to how I’d imagined our arrival. I’d been so full of excitement and enthusiasm, and now this. What an anticlimax.

  The B&B was perched at the top of a hill, though the fog blotted everything out, so we couldn’t see a thing. The taxi driver swore as he struggled to get our cases out of his stinky car boot, then scowled when we didn’t give him a tip. He drove off muttering. We turned to ring the bell of the B&B, a grubby white terraced house with empty drinks cans in the weedy front garden. For a split second I almost wished I’d gone fossil-hunting with my parents on the beaches of Dorset – that’s how depressed I was.

  Eventually the door was opened by a tall thin man who smelt of cigarette smoke. He was wearing slippers with holes in their toes. I knew Tam was back on the fags as the result of her broken heart and I just knew this guy was going to be a bad influence. He had a face like a haddock wearing a moustache.

  ‘I’m Tamsin Morris,’ said Tam. ‘We reserved a room for three?’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Yes.’ He turned round and shuffled off. We followed, tugging and heaving our massive cases up the steps, then up the stairs.

  ‘This is your room,’ said our host, throwing open a dirty door. We stared at three beds whose c
overs had not been washed for centuries.

  We were then shown the bathroom (the colour scheme was dead haddock and there were long brown hairs in the bath). There were notices pinned to the wall on grubby cards: NO BATH’S AFTER 11 PM (Mum would have hated that so-wrong apostrophe) and NO MUSIC IN THE BATHROOM and ONLY ONE PERSON AT A TIME TO USE BATH.

  ‘It’s all lovely,’ said Tam with the ghost of a ghastly, lying smile. ‘Lovely. Thank you.’

  ‘Right,’ said the landlord, ‘if there’s anything I can do, don’t hesitate to ask.’ Then he shuffled off and we shut the door.

  ‘We could ask him to have the house demolished immediately,’ I suggested. ‘That would be a step in the right direction.’

  Tam groaned, threw herself on the bed on the right, and turned her face to the wall. Chloe sighed, threw herself on the left-hand bed, and turned her face to that wall. I was left with the bed in the middle, with no wall at all to glare at. Bitches! They’d out-manoeuvred me already.

  I sat down on the middle bed and started to re-read Heat magazine. There was an amusing photo feature on celebs with sweaty patches under their arms and I had already feasted my eyes on some very fine specimens when my mobile chirruped to indicate I’d got a text. It was from Toby.

  OUR TENT’S LETTING IN WATER, he reported, AND THE NEARBY GENTS’ LOO HAS OVERFLOWED. I DON’T SUPPOSE THERE’S ANY CHANCE OF US JOINING YOU?

  Obviously the guys couldn’t join us here in this hellhole, but the thought of meeting up with them in a steamy cafe was massively appealing.

  ‘Right,’ I said briskly, getting up, ‘I’m off into town to meet Tobe and Ferg, and if you two aren’t up for it, I’m going on my own.’

  .

  .

  29

  Two minutes later I left Haddock Hall, accompanied by Chloe. She was still grieving and sulking, but at least she was vertical. Tam had just lain there sighing in a tormented kind of way.

  ‘OK,’ I said, trying to sound brisk and optimistic, ‘presumably the rest of the town is down there?’ Fog was still blotting out everything except the nearest houses. ‘Although it would be kind of chic and original if the sea was at the top of the hill.’