‘Feel the fear and do it anyway.’
‘That’s my friend Izzie’s philosophy,’ I said.
‘Good for her. Life goes on. You have to go on with it.’
‘That’s what Dad said.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Jen. ‘And he’s right; on the one hand, yes, terrorism is a very real threat – but on the other hand, we can’t give in to them and stop going about our business. I try to be philosophical and say, if it’s my time, it’s my time – whether it’s on a Tube or I have a heart attack or —’
‘Cancer, like Mum had.’
Jen nodded. ‘God, this is a depressing conversation we’re having, for such a lovely summer’s day!’
‘I guess,’ I said, ‘but actually it’s good to talk about this stuff to someone, and it’s impossible to talk to Dad about it. He bottles everything up and shuts off if anyone brings up a difficult subject.’
Jen rolled her eyes. ‘Tell me about it,’ she agreed.
‘I thought a lot about death when Mum passed away. I know it’s a fact. We’re born, we die – we just don’t know when. I do think I’d prefer to die in my bed in my sleep at a ripe old age, though, than be blown up by some mad person.’
‘Me too,’ said Jen. ‘Me too. But really, Cat, millions and millions of people travel on the Tube every day and on the airlines and are perfectly safe. The chances of anything happening to you are very remote. Of course that’s not to say that something won’t happen, but the odds are against it. I don’t know. It’s a strange old business, isn’t it? Like my second cousin, Josie. She was on holiday in Thailand in 2004 when the tsunami hit on Boxing Day. Thank God she wasn’t anywhere near the beach at the time and was OK, but you would think that there was nowhere safer, wouldn’t you? White beach. Turquoise sea. Paradise. And then along came that mammoth wave and wiped out thousands.’
‘And all the earthquakes. It’s a miracle we survive at all!’
Jen smiled a sad smile. ‘I know. Maybe it is. So much we don’t know or understand – whether acts of man or acts of God. In the meantime though, I think the thing is to enjoy the life we have to its maximum. As you said, none of us knows when our time is going to be up so make the most of the life you’ve got. Have good times. Let the people you love know that you love them. All that stuff – and don’t let the bad news get you down.’
I gave her a hug. ‘I agree – and thanks. It’s so easy talking to you.’
‘Any time,’ said Jen and hugged me back.
As we drove through the busy streets of London towards Notting Hill, I felt a lot better about being there, plus I felt closer to Jen again, as if the last few days of the mad move had been wiped out and we were friends again.
I gazed out of the taxi window at the hordes of people dashing about their lives. Look at us all, I thought. So many out there, all shapes, sizes, colours, all with their own stories, hopes, goals, disappointments. And for all our twenty-first century technology and sophistication, we don’t know much at all about what it all means. But Jen’s right. We should appreciate what we do have while we have it. I should. I made an inner resolution to make the most of my life and not waste time being moody, depressed or mad with my mates or family.
Lucy and Izzie were waiting for us at our arranged meeting place outside the Tube station and listened sympathetically as Jen despaired about not being able to find a dress.
Lucy nodded. ‘I know, too many meringue-type things. They don’t do much for anyone, even really slim people like you. What you want is simple, elegant, beautifully cut.’
‘Exactly,’ said Jen. ‘But can we find anything like that? No.’
‘I think I have just the place for you,’ said Lucy. ‘I come down to this area a lot looking for fabric for making my clothes and found this shop I think you’re going to love. If I ever get married, I’d get something from there.’
Jen grinned back at her. ‘Lead the way,’ she said.
The shop was on a side road off Portobello Road and it specialised in vintage wedding clothes. The middle-aged blonde lady who ran it introduced herself as Nicola and treated us like her best friends. She laid on coffee, tea, soft drinks, scones and Belgian chocolates and she made it great fun deciding what look to go for.
‘Your wedding is such a special time,’ she said, ‘and I like to make picking the outfit part of that rather than it being a chore.’
Nothing was too much trouble for her and, after three hours trying on just about every item of clothing in there, Jen had the most exquisite outfit sorted. It was exactly what Lucy had described. Simple and elegant – a slip of a dress in fine ivory silk which was cut on the bias. Over the dress was a three-quarter length antique lace jacket with hand-beading round the edges. It was so delicate and made Jen look like an Edwardian princess. The lady who owned the shop advised Jen to put her hair up on the day and not to wear a veil but instead to wear a hand-made tiara. She found her the most gorgeous one, made of tiny gold fabric leaves, sea pearls and lace flowers – the sort of thing that you would imagine the Queen of the Fairies would wear.
We also found a dress for me. It was so easy shopping with Nicola. She would pull a couple of things out and they would be perfect. Like Jen’s, the dress we settled on was simple – no sleeves, scooped low at the back, and made from fine silk in pale blue. I felt amazing in it. Like a million dollars.
‘If you send it up to me after the wedding,’ said Lucy, ‘I’ll shorten it for you as it would make a really hot party dress.’
‘Right,’ said Jen, after she’d handed over her credit card and everything was paid for. ‘Who’s for a cruise down Portobello Road before I get the train back? Are you sure you want to stay an extra day, Cat? You can come back with me if you like.’
I knew she was giving me a get-out clause in case I still felt anxious, but my earlier fear seemed to have evaporated since our talk, plus I realised that Lucy and her mates used the Tube no problem. I wasn’t going to miss out on spending more time with them just because I had an overactive imagination.
‘You can’t go back,’ said Lucy. ‘We’ve got it all planned for this evening. DVD and sleepover at TJ’s.’
‘Up to you, Cat,’ said Jen.
‘I’ll stay.’ I grinned back at her. I was finding out fast that with good mates to hang out with, life in the city could be fun after all.
‘DOESN’T LOVER-BOY JAMIE live round here somewhere?’ asked Izzie, after we had seen Jen off in a cab to go back to the station to catch her train.
‘Holland Park,’ I said. ‘I’ve been trying to ring him, but I keep getting the answering machine at his house and the voice service on his mobile, and there’s no reply to the text message I left him either.’
‘I thought you guys e-mailed?’ said Lucy.
‘We do. Did. But Luke did something to our computer when setting it up at the new house and we haven’t been able to get or send e-mail. There might be a whole pile from him waiting, for all I know – either that or he’s moved on.’
‘From a babe like you? No way,’ said Lucy. ‘There’s probably some reason and he’ll tell you when he sees you.’
‘Hope so,’ I said.
‘Holland Park’s just down the road,’ said Izzie, pointing down off in the distance.
‘Have you set up a date to see him while you’re up here?’ asked Lucy.
I shook my head. ‘Becca said I should surprise him, but I’m not so sure about that – which is why I’ve been trying to ring him. I mean, I know I’d like some warning . . .’
‘We could surprise him,’ said Lucy. ‘We’re so close. Oh let’s. I’m dying to see what he looks like. What’s the address?’
I scrabbled around in my bag and pulled out my purse with the scrap of paper that I’d written Jamie’s details on. I showed it to Izzie.
‘I know exactly where this is,’ she said setting off along the pavement. ‘Come on. Mission: Find Jamie.’
‘But what are we going to do? We can’t just go up to his hou
se and ring the bell.’
‘Oh yes we can,’ chorused Lucy and Izzie.
Ten minutes later, we found ourselves on a wide road not far from Holland Park Tube station. The houses were awesome. Grand ivory villas that resembled hotels more than houses. He can’t possibly live in one of these, I thought as we looked at the numbers as we went along.
Lucy stopped in front of a gate between two white pillars. ‘Number twenty-three,’ she said as she looked at a brass plate. ‘This is it.’
I glanced up the path at the five-storey town house towering in front of us, and felt very small. ‘I’m not going in there,’ I said. ‘It’s . . . so posh. Jamie never said that his family was loaded or anything.’
‘So what if he’s posh?’ said Lucy. ‘You’re not a peasant.’ She laughed and began to talk in a thick country-yokel accent. ‘Oo-ar, Jamie mi lord, me be a simple country maiden not worthy of speaking to the likes of posh folks like you. I be from Cornwall where we only just got electricity.’
I laughed, but actually that was exactly how I felt – like a country yokel.
‘I can’t believe you’d feel, like, intimidated when one of your best friends is Lia Axford – and you don’t get posher than their house,’ said Izzie. ‘You feel at home there don’t you?’
‘Yeah, I do . . .’ I couldn’t explain why I felt the way I did. It was true, the Axfords’ place was mega, but it was also friendly and lived in. Jamie’s house looked cold and imposing.
‘I used to feel I didn’t belong in nobby places,’ said Lucy, ‘like those posh boutiques where mannequin-type assistants look at you like you’ve crawled in from under a rock, or hotels where receptionists look you up and down as if to say, “And what do you think you’re doing here, you splodge of insignificant nothingness?” And then Nesta said this thing to me – that no one can make you feel inferior without your permission, and I thought: yeah, right. Nobody knows who I am or anything about me, I might be über-rich for all they know. I might be a Russian princess or the daughter of a millionaire. Whatever. I belong in those shops and hotels as much as anybody and I’m not going to let anyone scare me off by looking down their snobby stuck-up noses.’
I couldn’t help but laugh as Lucy made her speech with such an earnest expression on her face. There clearly had been a time she had been intimidated and she had had to make her way through it.
‘Must be worth about five million,’ Izzie pronounced as she opened the gate and looked up at the house. ‘I know because Nesta used to have a boyfriend who lived round here. Simon Peddington Lee. His family were stonkingly rich.’
‘Oh let’s come back another time,’ I said as I pulled back. ‘I can’t face seeing Jamie just now.’
Izzie, however, was already at the front door and had rung the bell.
I was about to go and hide behind a bush in the front garden when I thought, oh don’t be so stupid, Cat. This is Jamie. Jamie who likes me. What am I so afraid of? He’d think I was a right dope if he opened the door and found me hiding behind a privet bush.
Izzie bent over and looked through the letter box. ‘Looks like no one’s home,’ she said as she straightened up and rang the bell again.
We waited a few more minutes, but all was silence within. I breathed a sigh of relief as Izzie and Lucy decided to give up.
‘Let’s go to High Street Kensington,’ said Lucy. ‘There are some fab shops there, then we can go into a department store and try on all the perfumes.’
We walked down a few streets full of similar houses to Jamie’s and soon found ourselves on a street lined with interesting shops full of the most awesome things – antiques, old mirrors as big as a wall, beautiful statues, light-fittings, heavy brocade fabrics – and then a row of gorgeous-looking boutiques full of clothes that looked like they were made for princesses. I felt in awe not only by the style, but by the prices – like four hundred pounds for a top and two hundred pounds for a pair of shoes.
Izzie and Lucy were gazing in a shoe shop window when I saw him. Jamie. He was in a florist’s opposite and, by the look of it, he was buying a huge bunch of white roses.
‘Oh God,’ I cried, and darted into the shop porch and turned my face away from the street in case he saw me. I felt like someone had plunged a knife into my stomach. White roses. They were the flowers he had sent me. The first flowers he had bought for a girl, he had said. Yeah right, looks like it, I thought as I took a peek and watched Jamie hand over some cash.
‘What? Who?’ asked Lucy as she looked up from the window she’d been absorbed in.
‘Jamie. He’s in that florist’s,’ I said, and pointed to the shop.
‘But that’s brilliant,’ said Izzie. ‘We can go in and surprise him.’
‘Nooooooo,’ I objected. ‘You don’t understand. He’s buying white roses.’
‘So?’ asked Lucy.
‘Those are the flowers he bought for me. I thought they were special, just for me, but he has clearly got someone up here to give them to.’
‘You don’t know that,’ said Lucy. ‘Is he the guy in the jeans and grey hoodie?’
I poked my head out. ‘Yes. What’s he doing now?’
‘He’s just come out of the shop. He’s turned left and is walking away from us towards – oh! Oh dear . . .’
‘What?’ I asked, and poked my head out so that I could see properly. I could see exactly what she’d seen. Jamie had walked down the street towards a very pretty blond girl and had just handed her the bouquet.
Boys. I hate them all.
Later that evening, at the sleepover at TJ’s, the girls did everything they could to cheer me up. Mad dancing, telling jokes, feeding me a ton of chocolate, making plans for how I could decorate my room down in Cornwall. I had fallen in love with the décor in TJ’s bedroom the moment I set eyes on it. It was done out in the strong colours of the East – red, orange, ochre, deep yellow – and the whole effect looked exotic and yet cosy. I could just see my room in the same rich vibrant shades, and Izzie and TJ said they could show me some great shops in Camden Lock where I could get the right extras like cushions, lamps and sari-type curtains. I tried my best to be animated about it all and not let on that deep inside I was gutted about having seen Jamie with the other girl earlier. I knew that there was nothing any of them could do, and I didn’t want my being upset to ruin my first night with them up in London, or for them to think I was some kind of miserable loser that whinged on. Plus the fact that I had made my resolution earlier in the day after talking to Jen – that I was going to live my life to the fullest and not dwell on the bad.
‘It was no big deal,’ I said, putting on my best smile. ‘I wasn’t really that into Jamie. It doesn’t matter that he’s given some other girl flowers. So what? It wasn’t as if we were engaged to be married or had been going out with each other for ages or anything.’
‘Good for you,’ said Nesta. ‘I think I would have chased after him and slugged him one.’
Izzie and Lucy had wanted to go and confront Jamie there and then, but I had pulled them back. I didn’t want to make a scene and I didn’t want to fall out with him. On the way home, Izzie kept saying that there might be some explanation, but I didn’t think so. I kept remembering that he had said that I was the first girl he had ever bought flowers for, but he seemed pretty pally with the florist. I thought that white roses were going to be our flowers. Mine and Jamie’s. Something that I would remember all my life. Now I never wanted to see another white rose as long as I lived. They would always remind me of what treacherous, lying, two-timing creeps boys could be.
‘He might have been saying sorry for something,’ said Izzie, who for some reason had decided to champion Jamie’s defence.
Nesta shook her head. ‘With a bunch of flowers? No. There’s more to it. Honestly it makes me sick the way that boys think they can give us a bunch of flowers and we fall at their feet in gratitude. Well not me.’
Lucy burst out laughing. ‘You big liar. You’re a total sucker for flower
s.’
‘You’re the one who’s the sucker for flowers,’ said Nesta. ‘You should have seen her earlier this year, Cat, when we came back from our school trip to Florence. My brother, Tony, was waiting at the airport for her with a bunch and she just fell at his feet.’
‘Did not,’ said Lucy. ‘Did nooooot. And you know I didn’t. Honestly you’re such a wind-up.’
I had heard all about Nesta’s brother and how he and Lucy had something really special – like I had thought that I had with Jamie.
‘Just forget him,’ said TJ. ‘You’re worth more than some stupid boy who sends flowers to girls all over the place and thinks that’s all he needs to do. Somewhere out there is a much nicer boy who will treat you properly.’
‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘And I know that I said I hate all boys before, but I don’t actually. I know there are some nice ones out there. Mac and Squidge, for instance, they’re both great.’
‘I think Izzie would agree with that, wouldn’t you, Iz?’ teased Nesta.
Izzie stuck her tongue out at her. ‘Maybe,’ she said with a smile.
‘And the boys you know sound fab too,’ I continued. ‘I know there are some boys that are users and players too, just . . . I didn’t think that Jamie was one of them.’
‘Shame you weren’t with us today, Nesta,’ said Lucy, then turned to me. ‘Nesta’s our resident boy expert. She can spot a player or a user a mile off. She’d have known exactly what type of boy Jamie is just by looking at him.’
‘True,’ said Nesta. ‘In fact . . . hmm . . . that gives me an idea . . .’
‘I’M NOT SO SURE that this is a good idea,’ I said as Nesta, TJ and I hid behind a telephone box in Holland Park the next day.
‘Relax,’ said Nesta. ‘You said he likes a laugh, and if the worst comes to the worst and he sees us then we can say we were doing what your mate Becca suggested – surprising him.’
I wasn’t so sure now that I was outside his house like some stalker. Not only that, but we were in disguise. It had been Nesta’s idea after Lucy had said that she would know what sort of boy Jamie was in a second. Nesta got it into her head that we should follow him for a little while like spies. Trouble was that our disguises made us look more like mad people than international cool-but-mysterious secret agents. I’d always thought that going undercover meant blending in with a crowd, but dressed the way we were, we couldn’t have stood out more if we’d tried. Lucy and Izzie had gone off to work in Lucy’s dad’s health shop for the day so TJ, Nesta and I went to the fancy-dress hire shop near TJ’s house in East Finchley before setting off for Jamie’s. When we realised that the spy costumes cost thirty pounds each to hire and the Afro wigs were only £4.99 to buy, the wigs won, no contest. So there we were in our shorts, T-shirts, sunglasses – and wild women wigs. Nesta’s was blue, mine was lime green and TJ’s was fluorescent pink.
All Mates Together Page 6
