All She Wants

by Jonathan Harvey

  We didn’t wait till my sixteenth birthday, we threw caution to the wind, broke the law and consummated our relationship on Derek and Eileen’s bathroom floor with the door locked on the night of Greg’s mum’s funeral a month or two later.

  It was a lovely send-off and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when they played that Abba song about the angels. Greg said he needed to do it to feel alive and I wasn’t complaining. We made the bathroom dead nice, turning off the lights and lighting some candles. The earth didn’t move, but the toilet seat did. The earth did move the second time, in Derek and Eileen’s potting shed, and it continued to move from that day onwards. We became inseparable. Our names were rarely said alone. It was Jodie and Greg. Greg and Jodie. Loved up didn’t even touch the sides.

  SIX

  2004

  ‘Excuse me, love. Can you tell me where you keep your Tena Lady?’

  The woman staring down at me had lipstick stains on her teeth and weird dyed orange hair. It’s one thing being born with it, but to have it by choice . . .

  ‘Er, sorry?’

  ‘Your Tena Lady love. Where d’you keep them?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  There was a distinct tapping of foot now.

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’

  God I hated working in this bloody supermarket sometimes. Especially in the run-up to Christmas when they expected you to wear a Santa hat as well as your badge saying, ‘Hi, I’m Jodie. I’m here to help.’ I wasn’t here to help, I was here to stack shelves.

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘So. Let me get this straight . . .’

  ‘Aha?’ I said, jumping up acrobatically from a kneeling position.

  ‘You work here?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘But you don’t know where you keep your Tena Lady?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said facetiously. ‘I work here and I have absolutely no idea where the Tena Ladies live. Sorry, Madam.’

  ‘This is outrageous. I’m gonna get you fired.’

  And she turned on her heel and went in the direction of the Home Bake aisle. She certainly wasn’t going to find them there. Debs hurried over, reloading her special offer pricing gun.

  ‘What’s her problem?’

  ‘Weak fanny, silly arl boot,’ I said and we both giggled. As if by magic, Hayls was on us like a ton of bricks from her section, pretending to reload her special offer pricing gun in case Kim the manager was watching from her bird’s-eye office high above the shop floor.

  ‘What did she want? Her with the red hair?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said dramatically, ‘She was just really giving me bad attitude and all that.’

  ‘You’re joking! Go’way! Was it really messing with your head?’

  ‘Big time,’ I said with a dramatic tremble.

  ‘God, it’s messing with mine and I wasn’t even here,’ said Hayls. Debs put her arm round me. Hayls carried on, ‘Did you see the state of her head? She looked like Googie the Liverpool Duck.’

  Neither me nor Debs had a clue who Googie the Liverpool Duck was, but it was a phrase Hayls used often, usually to describe someone with bad hair, bad teeth, or a bad face. Or all three.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I hate working here.’

  ‘I know, it’s well cuntified,’ said Debs, and she took her gun and wiped it on my forehead, leaving me with a special offer sticker for £1.99. We all smiled.

  ‘D’you wanna go for a ciggie in the stock lift? Might help?’ she said, ripping the sticker off and sticking it on her left breast.

  I nodded. ‘Don’t let Kim see.’

  So we snuck behind a cage of toilet rolls and wheeled it towards the stock lift, looking to all the world – and Kim if she was watching – like the three of us were hard at work.

  The two good things about my life at the moment were that me, Debs and Hayls were all working together. The other good thing was that me and my Greg were still an item.

  The really great thing about the stock lift at the supermarket was that there was a STOP button, and if you pressed it the lift stopped, amazingly, and didn’t start again till someone else called for it on another floor. It was a great time killer in the middle of a boring shift, and it was a great place to smoke and chew the cud with your best mates.

  ‘So,’ said Debs, handing round the Black Cats as Hayls struck her lighter up, I pressed the STOP button and we juddered to a halt. A toilet roll landed on my head and bounced onto the floor of the lift. I didn’t even like smoking, but I’d do anything to avoid stacking more shelves and having run-ins with the likes of Googie the Liverpool Duck. ‘Your Greg’s twenty-first tonight.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ said Hayls. ‘I’ve got this gorgeous new boob tube from Miss Selfridge, lime green, wait till you see it, yous’ll have a spaz.’

  ‘Oh God, I can’t wait,’ said Debs.

  ‘I know.’

  We said this a lot, me and the girls. I know. Our Joey said it, too. It didn’t really mean anything. We may as well have just made a noise. Sometimes I thought we just said words for something to say, with scant attention to their meaning. Debs looked at me.

  ‘Are yer excited?’

  I nodded. ‘God, yeah. Me bottle’s well gone.’

  ‘Why?!’ gasped Hayls, sensing gossip.

  ‘Haven’t you heard?’ gasped Debs.

  ‘No, what?! Tell me!’

  Debs looked at me. ‘You tell her. It’s your gossip.’

  ‘It’s not really gossip,’ I protested, ‘but . . .’

  Debs and Hayls looked at me, smoking in unison. I’m not sure they’d noticed I wasn’t really dragging on my ciggie.

  ‘Greg phoned last night and said he was making a very big announcement tonight at the party.’

  ‘Go’way, you’re joking!’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you know what that means,’ said Debs. ‘I mean, it can only mean one thing, d’you know what I mean? Tell her, Hayls!’

  Hayls nodded. ‘He’s so proposing to you.’

  ‘I know,’ said Debs. ‘Can you believe that?’

  ‘I know,’ said Hayls, ‘I can’t get over that.’

  ‘I can’t,’ agreed Debs.

  ‘I don’t know for sure, like,’ I said with a shrug.

  ‘Bollocks, Jode, yous’ve been going together for ages. Since . . .’

  ‘Year ten.’

  ‘Year ten! That’s, like . . . a lifetime. It’s about time he made an honest woman of you.’

  ‘Yeah, but for all I know he’s gonna announce . . . I dunno . . . something else.’

  ‘Like what? He’s pregnant?’ said Debs incredulously, one eyebrow arched.

  ‘Or, like, he’s gonna vote Tory?’ said Hayls with a similarly arched brow. She was like that sometimes, Hayls, she could be dead political.

  ‘Oh God, you have to drag politics into everything,’ said Debs.

  ‘Can’t help it, Debs. I’m what you call a political animal. God this ciggie’s gorgeous. I’m totally loving it off.’

  ‘I know. I love smoking, me.’

  ‘I know. I do an’all.’ And this time I really did take a drag, and immediately regretted it. It was vile.

  I was so excited about that night. I had a feeling the girls were right. Greg kept asking what I was wearing to the party, which was unheard of for him. And he’d even given me a tenner to go and get my hair done, so I knew something was up. He hadn’t gone so far as to measure the circumference of the fourth finger on my left hand, but it felt like he’d done everything but. Every time I thought about the party I got butterflies in my stomach and my head went a bit dizzy, so I was either excited or pregnant. And as I was on the Pill and kept doing an inner squeal anytime anyone mentioned the do, I guessed it was the former.

  ‘Where you getting your hair done, Jodes?’ Hayls asked.

  ‘Panache in the Precinct.’

  The girls nodded, impressed. Panache was a big deal. There was
a woman who worked there who’d cut Sporty Spice’s hair before she was famous. Even though her hair was always a show before she was famous.

  ‘And I might even go and get a fake tan as well, if there’s time.’

  ‘There’s always time,’ said Debs, flicking her hair extensions back. A lot of people thought Debs was Asian, she was so fond of the spray gun.

  ‘Where will you go?’ asked Hayls.

  ‘Now is the Winter of Our Discount Tans? On Everley Crescent?’

  ‘Oh don’t go there,’ insisted Debs. ‘The woman what runs it’s half blind. She sprays half the gunk up the wall. Go to Fake N Bake on Stan Boardman Walk and say I sent you. Gotta look your best if you’re gonna be proposed to.’

  ‘I know,’ said Hayls with an air of sadness. Debs looked at her.

  ‘You’ll get a fella one day, Hayls. And he’ll be just as gorgeous as Jode’s Greg and my Alex. More gorgeous in fact.’

  Hayls didn’t look so sure. No matter how many times me and Debs told her she was pretty, she was always convinced she looked like a knackered sow (her words not mine). She once said that me, her and Debs were on parallel conveyor belts heading for a door called marriage. Mine was going like the clappers, so much so I could feel the G Force, and Debs wasn’t far behind me. But she claimed hers had broken down and she was sitting there in a puddle of her own failure, calling out for help but none was coming.

  Greg’s family were from the same estate as us, but because his dad had made a bit of money with his skip-hire business they had recently moved a mile or two down the road to a farmhouse on the leafy lanes of Cheshire. As a result, it had been decided that his twenty-first birthday would take the form of a barn dance. Me, Debs and Hayls had never been to a barn dance before and just assumed it was like any old dance, or disco, only set in a barn. So imagine our surprise when me and the girls got out of our taxi at the farmhouse several hours later, tottering in high heels and with skirts so short you could see what we’d had for breakfast, only to look around us and see that everyone else arriving seemed to be in cowboy boots, checked shirts and straw hats.

  ‘Oh my God, it’s like going to a Wurzels gig,’ said Hayls.

  Hayls’ reference points could be very old-fashioned. Me and Debs put it down to her being the youngest of ten and often re-quoting her elder brothers and sisters.

  ‘What’s going on?’ continued Debs. ‘Did everyone else phone each other up before they come out and go, ‘Hey, let’s all choose the shittest clothes we’ve got and put them on?’

  ‘I know,’ said Hayls. ‘I feel ashamed for them.’

  ‘Jesus, what’ve you three come as? The Good, the Bad and the Ugly?’

  We looked round. Greg’s dad was walking towards us in a – yes, you guessed it! – checked shirt and – oh my God – flared jeans. He had straw sticking out from the collar of his shirt, too, God alone knew why. And yet he had the cheek to criticize our clothes? We looked pretty amazing, I’ll have you know. I was wearing a stunning white blazer – back to front – with matching white trilby and white micro skirt. Rather daringly I was wearing nothing under the blazer, so there was a flash of fake-tanned bare back (no bra). It was a look I’d copied off Celine Dion’s outfit for the Oscars years earlier, which I’d seen in a magazine. Debs and Hayls said I looked amazing. They stood either side of me, Debs in a burgundy rubber minidress and Hayls in spangly lime-green leggings and matching boob tube. We thought we looked fierce as we scowled as one at Greg’s dad.

  ‘And what’ve you come as, Mr Valentine? Worzel Gummidge?’ said Debs. Me and Hayls nodded, Go Debs!

  He laughed and headed into their barn, calling, ‘C’mon! Let’s get this party star-ted!’ in a shite American accent.

  I hated that phrase. I loathed it, in fact. It was the sort of thing wannabe trendy types said in American movies at a frat party when they’d sneaked in some contraband cider. Other phrases I hated were, ‘I’m MAD like that!’ – usually following a very mundane revelation (I just ate two Curly Wurlies. I’m MAD like that). Oh and, ‘She’s more like a best friend than a mum.’ Which roughly translated means, ‘My mum hates my dad, and in the absence of having anyone to talk to she tells me all her boring shite. Plus she dresses too young for her age and ergo looks like a big slut.’

  ‘God!’ said Debs. ‘I feel ashamed for him.’

  ‘I know. The shame of it,’ agreed Hayls. And then I saw something that made my heart sink.

  My Greg. My lovely Greg was coming out of his house – the farmhouse no less, complete with thatched roof, thank you very much – dressed just like everyone else at the party, his dad included, except Greg was wearing . . . oh my God, I can hardly say it . . .

  A pair of dungarees.

  Denim dungarees.

  No. This wasn’t happening. This was meant to be the most perfect of nights. I was looking stunning and he was meant to look stunning. A guy with a face and a body like his needed little help to make himself look stunning. (Me? It took me about forty-eight weeks, and that was just to cover up all my zits.) He was meant to look divine as he stood in the spotlight and uttered those magical words. ‘Jodie, will you . . . marry me?’ But instead he was going to look like an Eighties lesbian, or worse still, a kids’ TV presenter.

  ‘Jesus, Jodie, what are you wearing?’

  The girls tutted in unison.

  ‘That’s what your dad said,’ went Debs.

  ‘It’s dead misogynistical,’ said Hayls, political as ever.

  ‘What are you wearing more like! You look like Sandi Toksvig!’

  ‘It’s a bleedin barn dance. A hoedown.’

  ‘Who are you calling a ho?’ Debs was fuming.

  ‘Country and Western, all that shite, yeah?’ explained Greg.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘What? Like . . . line dancing?’ I asked.

  I hated line dancing. Mum had started taking classes and we never heard the end of it. She was forever tucking her thumbs in her belt and sidestepping her way across the through lounge to Dolly Parton. Blimey, she’d have been in her element here tonight, but unfortunately she and Dad had been double-booked and had tickets to go and see a psychic playing the Pavilion in Southport.

  Greg nodded. Yep, indeed and a big fat yee-haw! Line dancing seemed very much the order of the night. And as if to prove the point, we suddenly heard a scratchy violin screeching out from the barn and someone on a PA system telling everyone to ‘take your partners’. Greg flicked his head in the direction of the barn and said, ‘You coming, Jode?’

  ‘No, it’s just the way she’s standing!’ laughed Debs, and Hayls roared her approval. This was number two in my Top Ten Detestable Quips. Number one was, ‘D’you want sugar in your tea?’ ‘No thanks, I’m sweet enough!’ followed by chortles of mirth, as if that joke had never been said before.

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Yeah,’ I said with some trepidation as I linked arms with his and we headed towards the barn, Debs and Hayls traipsing behind. It wasn’t easy to negotiate the farmyard cobbles on the ground and I nearly went arse over tit a couple of times, but he held on tight. Greg always held on tight. He was good like that. He was, to quote Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way.

  SEVEN

  ‘Partners to your places like the horses to their traces and a-ladies bow and a-gents know how!’

  The caller in the barn was a short fat squidgy thing in a straw boater, black shirt and red dickie bow with matching waistcoat. A bit like the Pillsbury Doughboy at a fancy dress party. He was wearing black jeans that were far too big for him, and the way they were jammed into the tops of his cowboy boots made him look more like a Cossack dancer than the MC of a high-kickin’ hoedown. The band alongside him were called Veejay and the Bull, for reasons best known to themselves, and though they were teetering on the geriatric and looked like they might at any moment need oxygen and a defibrillator, they strummed, twanged and scratched their strings with gusto. Veejay, who was a bit younger than his cohorts – if a bit equals thirty years – em
itted the occasional, ‘Yee-haw!’ as he played the violin, which sounded odd with his Ahmedabad accent.

  ‘And a right-hand turn and a left-hand turn and whoop that fiddle, boy, whoop!’

  And Veejay did indeed whoop. I was a bit sick of do-si-do-ing in high heels by now and a tad dizzy from being spun round like a top, so I slunk away to the back of the barn, pushing my way through stray balloons and exploding party poppers as I went. I was just helping myself to a battered prawn off the monolith of a buffet table when one of Greg’s aunties, elbow deep in trifle, nudged me and said, ‘God, girl. You look hilarious!’ And then laughed as if she’d heard the funniest joke in her life. I readjusted my trilby and tried to ignore her, though when I looked back she was clutching the table as if she might collapse with the hilarity of it all. Through an open door I could see Teresa-May sticking candles in a cake and I realized that some sort of presentation and announcement might be imminent. I needed the loo but decided to hold it all in. Nothing worse than Greg proposing and me not even being there. Embarrassing! I looked around the room and tried to steady my nerves. Another glass of punch might help. I pushed my way over to the bar, where a woman I recognized from Mum’s work was serving drinks in a ten-gallon hat and calling everyone ‘Y’all’.

  ‘What d’you want, y’all?’

  ‘Glass of punch, please.’

  ‘OK, y’all.’

  And all that without even attempting an American accent. I didn’t care, though. In a few moments I was going to be the centre of attention. Up until then I was just the girl in the stunning white outfit, Greg’s girlfriend with the mismatching eyes, but five minutes from now I would be as famous to them as the late Lady Di. I would stand proudly at Greg’s side, just as she did on her engagement day. The only slight difference being my Greg wasn’t knobbing some ugly old boot called Camilla at the same time.

  I watched the dancing, trying to work out where Greg was. I’d not seen him for ten minutes since he’d said he was nipping outside for a ciggie. I could see Hayls trying to do-si-do with some guy in a motorized wheelchair who’d been after her all night. At the beginning of the evening she’d sworn she’d ‘never be seen dead with no spazzy on her arm’, but she seemed to be warming to the idea, and him, as the hours went by and the punch went down. As I watched, she sank onto his lap and he took her for a spin in his wheelchair, doing a figure of eight round the barn. They only bumped into two people, and their injuries were minor: laddered tights and a scuffed shinbone.