by Lucy Diamond
What a snob, she thought, suddenly cross with herself and her preconceptions. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said, eyes still on the delicate lines of ink. ‘Really lovely.’
‘Have you got one?’ Gloria asked, rummaging in her handbag for a cigarette and snapping her lighter to produce a yellow licking flame.
‘Me? No. It’s not really my … No.’
Gloria drew on her cigarette and puffed out a stream of smoke, then offered the packet to Olivia. ‘Why not? Scared of the pain? It’s not as bad as you think.’
‘No, I – ’ She fumbled for the right reply but spread her hands helplessly. Scared of pain? Definitely not. She’d gone through childbirth twice over and had gritted her teeth throughout each time, barely making a sound. ‘My husband always hated them,’ she said in the end as Gloria gazed steadily at her, waiting for an answer. ‘So …’
‘So what? He’s not here any more, right?’ Gloria’s lower lip twisted in awkwardness as soon as she realized just how blunt she’d been. ‘Sorry,’ she added hastily. ‘That came out wrong. Bill never liked them either. Oh, it was all right for a bloke to have tats, he reckoned, but not a woman.’ She patted her arm with a grin. ‘I had this done after he died. Not as a way of disrespecting him or anything. Mitch talked me into it. Having a tattoo changes you, he told me. Gloria with a tattoo will be a different person from broken-hearted, bereaved Gloria who is financially up shit creek.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘So I did it.’
‘Are you and Mitch … together?’ Olivia found herself asking.
Gloria gave a roar of laughter. ‘Together? No, love. Just friends. No, he’s the tattoo artist. He’s the one who did it for me.’
Handsome Mitch was a tattoo artist? For some reason Olivia had imagined him splodging oil paints into wild seascapes on huge canvases, not creating something as finely beautiful as the floating dandelion head. Had his thick fingers really worked such delicate lines? She must have looked disbelieving because Gloria laughed.
‘He does bloody big dragons and Harley Davidsons for other people, mind. Whatever floats your boat. I’ve always loved dandelion clocks, though. The way you see the seeds drifting on the breeze, flying free, to who knows where.’ She chuckled. ‘Your nicest flower bed probably, or a good bit of lawn, knowing my luck, but never mind. It seemed like the right design for me, that’s all.’ She nudged Olivia. ‘You should get one.’
‘Oh, no,’ Olivia said at once. ‘I couldn’t.’
‘Couldn’t you?’
‘Well …’ Olivia floundered. Of course she couldn’t. Offer up her bare skin to be punctured by a tattoo artist’s needles? The idea was ridiculous. Imagine her children’s faces! ‘Did it work like Mitch said it would?’ she found herself asking. ‘I mean, did it make you feel better?’
‘A million times better,’ Gloria told her. She touched the tattoo with her fingertips. ‘It’s hard to explain but I just felt … new. Different. Like the version of me that I truly wanted to be.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Gawd, listen to me. Hippy nonsense.’ She waved a hand self-consciously. ‘Sometimes a change is as good as a holiday as they say. You know.’
Olivia wasn’t sure she did know, especially as this holiday had turned out to be memorable for all the wrong reasons. Mercifully, their food arrived before she had to reply, though, and goodness, it looked wonderful: miniature silver buckets stuffed with salty skinny fries, scallops served in the shell with garlic and flecks of chilli, and Gloria’s burger which turned out to be pieces of lobster crammed into a golden brioche, and came with its own tiny jug of garlic butter. As the chef placed the final dishes on the table – a small jam jar of juicy red tomato relish and a dish of green salad to share – he bid them, ‘Enjoy your food,’ and left them to it.
Oh my. Olivia would never judge a pop-up breeze-block restaurant on appearances again. The scallops were deliciously fresh and cooked to perfection, the fries crunchy and moreish, and the relish properly tangy, with the tomatoes tasting as if they’d been picked just that morning. The sun poked itself tentatively out from where it had lurked behind the clouds until now, and Olivia felt her spirits lift. Sitting here with good food and – yes – good company, however unconventional, felt much more like a holiday. It reminded her, too, that she was most definitely alive.
So there, Alec, she thought defiantly dabbing her lips with a paper napkin. I won’t let you destroy me. Look how much fun I’m having without you. Just look at me go!
Chapter Twenty-Seven
A few days after the kayaking trip, Molly lay back on the creaking camp bed and stared up at the sloping ceiling of Shell Cottage’s attic room. Poky and hot, home to about a million industrious spiders and with so little floor space that she was always tripping over her suitcase, this was not exactly the bedroom of any self-respecting teenager’s dreams. Nor for that matter was this holiday.
So far this week, she had made approximately five thousand loom-band bracelets with Libby and played Minecraft with Dexter for a whole rainy morning; she had feigned interest in Ted’s pebble collection and listened to all his many tedious dinosaur facts; she had kayaked and hiked (under duress), and then yesterday she, Mum and Robert had cycled all the way to Salcombe and back, stopping for a pub lunch and a nosey around the swanky yachtie shops (‘Swanky with a silent “S”,’ Robert had said, eyeballing the price tag on a T-shirt with a look of horror). She had eaten a cream tea too, even though she knew it was, like, a million calories and would give her spots. But she’d had enough of being here now, and badly missed her friends. She missed Ben even more. Next year, she was either staying at home or going to go to Dad’s, and that was that. Whatever Mum said.
She twisted her phone in her hand. She still hadn’t heard back from Dad. What was he up to? she wondered. How was life working out for him and Anne-Marie in France? He had posted a picture on Facebook recently which showed him raising a bottle of beer in the air as the sun set beyond the mountains in the background. There was another one of Anne-Marie looking vastly pregnant in a sundress and bare feet, standing on the terrace of their knackered-looking farmhouse and laughing. She had very white teeth, Anne-Marie. White teeth and thick, glossy black hair. She was going to have the cutest baby ever, probably. A cuter baby than Molly, anyway, who had been a skinny, shrunken egghead for the first six months of her life.
Would Dad still love her when he and Anne-Marie had their cute French baby? Would he even remember her, back in London, spots on her chin, slogging to school on drizzly autumn mornings? Her friend Chloe barely saw her dad these days, not since he’d married again and had two other children. He had taken his new family off to California this summer, while Chloe and her mum, Jan, were left in their small flat in Finchley. The paint was peeling off Chloe’s bedroom wall where damp was getting in but Jan had been off work for six months with depression and they had no chance of moving anywhere nicer. When she spoke about her dad, Chloe didn’t sound bitter or even angry just sad. Resigned to the fact that he loved these other kids more than her. Molly had often thought, quite fiercely, that if she ever saw Chloe’s dad again, she would give him a piece of her mind.
She hoped her own dad wasn’t about to flake out and go crap on her. He wouldn’t, would he? He’d always made such a fuss of her whenever they met, taking her out for grown-up dinners, buying her things she wanted, pressing twenty-pound notes into her hand when she asked for money, even letting her have a glass of wine one afternoon in a pub garden last summer. (‘For God’s sake, don’t tell your mother, or I’ll never hear the end of it,’ he’d said with a wink.)
Yes, okay, so he wasn’t the most reliable father in the world. He hadn’t been to any of her school concerts for years, even though he always promised he’d be in the audience. He sometimes even forgot to turn up when they’d arranged to meet at weekends – ‘Oh bollocks. Love, I’m so sorry,’ he’d say when she rang him, having waited half an hour already, heart sinking. Mum had got really cross after it happened the third time and actually insisted on waiting with
her after that, until Molly pretended she was meeting Chloe instead and didn’t tell her where she was really going.
Molly didn’t mind anyway Well, not that much. She always hated sloping off home on her own when he didn’t show, but then he would be so super-apologetic and nice when she spoke to him afterwards that she couldn’t help forgiving him. ‘I’ll make it up to you, Molls,’ he said, and he always did. Mostly.
But it would be ages until she saw him again now that he lived in France. She’d taken for granted him being a few miles up the road in Mill Hill; she liked being able to slope round to his flat every now and then, particularly if she had the hump with Mum about something. Dad was always on her side, whatever happened. He would make her a coffee (which she didn’t really like, to be honest, but she drank it anyway) and give her a hug, and then they’d watch some boring sport thing on telly together (even though she didn’t really like watching sport either), and within minutes she’d be feeling better again.
The girlfriends – well, she could take or leave them. Dad was handsome and charming, it was no wonder women flocked around him like pigeons over a croissant. He was also incapable of speaking to a woman – be she the waitress serving him or a lady in a shop selling him a newspaper or whoever – without leaning in a fraction and giving her this kind of look, a look that said, I am really, deeply interested in you and everything you have to say.
He did the look on Molly too, of course, but then he was really interested in her and everything she had to say. And if she turned up unexpectedly at his flat and there was a woman round there, Dad always sent the woman packing so that he could be with Molly instead. ‘You’re top banana around here, kid,’ he said to her. And while Molly wasn’t that thrilled about being called a banana (she hated bananas and their evil smell), it gave her a warm glow knowing that she was top of Dad’s list, above all these random women who fell in love with him.
Apart from Anne-Marie, it seemed. Anne-Marie must have placed some kind of voodoo enchantment on him because in the space of a year, she had moved into his flat permanently (that had never happened before), got herself pregnant and persuaded him to up sticks and move to bloody France, miles away from Mill Hill and miles away from Molly. These days Molly was pretty sure that Anne-Marie was top banana, not her.
In her darkest moments, Molly had fantasized just a little bit about Anne-Marie tripping over her stupid terrace in France and falling down the mountain, breaking her elegant tanned neck. Maybe that would stop her smiling quite so many toothy smiles.
There was a knock at her door and Dexter pushed his head in. ‘We’re going to the beach in a bit. Dad’s going to blow up the lilo so we can go in the sea with it!’
Molly forced a smile. ‘Cool.’ Then because she couldn’t face another conversation about Minecraft, she held up her phone. ‘Just about to make a call, so …’
‘Sure,’ he said, vanishing again.
The door banged behind him and she dialled Dad’s number, feeling bad about her horrible Anne-Marie-down-the-mountain thoughts.
‘You have reached the answerphone of Simon Reynolds. The signal isn’t great here so I might not get this for a few days. But leave me a message and I’ll get back to you when I can.’
There was a laugh in his voice, as if he couldn’t care less that the signal was terrible, as if he didn’t really want to hear from anyone anyway. When the beep sounded, Molly drew a breath in to speak, but then all of a sudden, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to say any more. So she hung up instead.
She lay there for a moment, unable to stir herself into excitement over the thought of going to the beach with a lilo. Out of habit, she clicked Ben’s name on her phone with the usual stab of longing. She couldn’t help herself. Ever since she’d been forced on this dumb holiday, he’d been in her head non-stop. His slow, sexy smile. The way his eyes fastened onto hers, making everyone else around them blur and vanish. His low rumbling voice, muttering dirty, suggestive things into her ear. Lord have mercy! as Chloe would say. It was enough to make a girl ache.
She threw her arms around her pillow, remembering how they had snogged in the book cupboard of her English classroom on the last day of term, her back pressed against piles of copies of Macbeth and Of Mice and Men. She actually burned inside with yearning when she thought about taking her clothes off in front of him and … well, you know. Doing it. If she was brave enough to ever go through with it, that was. (Would it hurt? Would she make stupid noises? Would he laugh at her if she made stupid noises?) She just wanted to feel like a woman. A proper sexual woman. She had never even thought like this until he had gazed at her, gimlet-eyed, across the classroom two weeks ago, and then brushed up against her in the corridor afterwards, disturbingly close. It was like receiving an electric shock; the hairs on her arms actually stood on end, her stomach seemed to drop away in sudden desire.
Oh, Ben. Ben! Maybe she should just drop him a quick line, a teeny, casual ‘hi’ so that he would think about her. Should she? They’d chatted on the phone and swapped flirty messages a few times but she’d heard nothing in the last couple of days. Was it too keen of her to text him again?
So boring here. Wot u up 2? she typed, then frowned. No, that sounded moany Babyish, even. She deleted it with a sigh.
I miss u, she typed but hesitated again, fingers hovering above the keypad. Too needy. Way too needy. Boys hated clingy girls, didn’t they? ‘Klingons’ they called them at school, like something that needed to be peeled off and flicked away. She didn’t want Ben to think she was a clinger. She wanted him to be reminded she was fun. And sexy. And still interested.
Hey, she typed, then pressed send before she could stop herself. Then she threw herself back on the bed, heart thudding. A second later, her phone buzzed and she almost stopped breathing, clammy fingers skidding over the screen in her haste. Oh. Just Chloe.
Why aren’t you here?? Loz having party 2nite. Everyone going. Inc Niall!!
Molly’s heart sank. Gutted. Their friend Lauren had been promising to throw a party all summer. Why did she have to pick a date when Molly was stuck here in the middle of nowhere? Typical! She felt a rush of annoyance with her mum, for dragging her on this stupid holiday against her will, for taking her away from her friends, for not being nicer to Dad to stop him from moving to France with smiley, pregnant Anne-Marie. And now she was going to miss the best party of the year. Great!
‘Molls? Molly?’
Huh. Speak of the devil. There was the Evil Tyrant Motherlord herself, bellowing up the stairs. Molly paid no attention, instead thinking glumly about how, if she was at home, she and Chloe would be talking about the party this minute and what they were going to wear. Actually, they’d probably be trying stuff on in Zara that they couldn’t afford and then going to buy cheaper versions in Primark. Chloe would be getting in a state about Niall, this lad from the sixth form that she’d fancied for, like, ages, and—
‘MOLLY! Where are you?’
I am in hell, Molly thought, but then her phone buzzed again with another text and it was from Ben. Hey, it said. Miss u x
A smile slid across her face and warmth spread through her body.
‘Where are you? MOLLY!’
I am in heaven, Molly thought. I must be in heaven. Then, still smiling, she rolled off the bed and shoved the phone in her shorts pocket. ‘Did you call me, Mother dearest?’
He missed her. He missed her. Maybe being away wasn’t so bad after all. Didn’t they always say absence made the heart grow fonder? She liked thinking of him pining away for her, unable to concentrate, counting the days till she was home and back in his arms …
Yeah, yeah, steady on.
As Dexter had said, they were all going down to the beach and Mum had this whole speech planned about how Molly had been indoors the entire morning and it was a beautiful day and she needed to get fresh air and Vitamin D, and … Oh, whatever, Mum – Molly had switched off by that point. She was in such a good mood about the ‘miss you’ text that she co
uldn’t be bothered to argue. ‘All right, all right,’ she said, pulling a face. ‘Don’t give yourself laryngitis, Mum.’ Even fresh air was better than listening to her mother when she went into one.
Down at the bay, Molly spread out their large turquoise beach towel and frowned through her sunglasses at her phone. Surprise, surprise: barely any signal. (Poor Devon teenagers. How could they stand it, living here with such crap phone coverage?) She thought longingly of London and Wi-Fi and of messages from Ben piling up in some celestial traffic jam, unable to drop into her phone, and felt like thumping the sand. She didn’t but she must have made some noise of exasperation because Mum pushed up her sunglasses to peer sideways at her. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Yes, of course, everything’s completely amazing and spectacular, why wouldn’t it be?’ she replied witheringly, tucking her hair up into a bun before it got loads of sand in it. Then she pulled off her T-shirt and shorts to reveal her new white bikini, and flumped onto her front before anyone could see her stomach. If she had to be down here, she might as well top up her tan, she supposed.
‘Marvellous,’ Mum said sarcastically. ‘Well, just as long as you’re happy.’ Then she spread out a towel alongside Molly and put her nose in a magazine.
It was only the two of them on the sand right now – the others were already by the water’s edge, pumping up the lilo and a dinghy that Robert had found at the back of the garden shed. Molly squinted crossly at her phone and turned the Wi-Fi on then off again in the hope it might encourage her phone to try a bit harder to find some kind of signal. Yes – two bars! Thank you, patron saint of heartsick teenagers. She twisted her head and shoulders sideways, and tilted the phone to shield the screen from prying eyes. I miss u 2, she typed, then added a sadface emoticon.
