365 Days (24 page)

These kids were scary, I’m telling you! When Han’s dad told us not to look at anyone who looked like they’d knife us, I doubt he meant ten-year-olds dressed in studs and leather. The parents of these kids looked so…respectable! They hung around in groups, by the bar area, looking like they’d rather be at home reading their
Reader’s Digest
than squashed up against some sweaty Goth reeking of beer. There were small groups of mothers, who would break off their conversations about how ‘Harrods have struck gold in their knicker department at last’, to occasionally wave and ‘yoo-hoo’ to their little dears who were busy moshing as if their lives depended on it.

Then there were the other types of parents. OMG! They were sooooo old (like, in their 30s) and trying sooooo hard to keep up with their kids. Some had squeezed themselves into tiny jeans and even tinier ‘I was at Glastonbury ’96’ T-shirts, while others had gone for the grunge look and looked like bag ladies (but with posh accents). Trying desperately to keep up with their kids. This lot of parents grunted and squirmed at the sides of the crowds (obviously the mosh-pit was a step too far) while sweating profusely and occasionally saying about how they were only here ’cos ‘Toby so loves this genre of music’, but that next time ‘they’d really rather prefer to see
Phantom of the Opera
’.

Me and Han had a great time! We got ourselves down in the pit so we had a really good view and were jumping up and down and screaming and singing along with everyone else. My Chemical Romance played the whole range, and Han videoed ‘Mama’ on her phone for Matty, ’cos that’s one of her favourite songs. Everything was wicked until some little brat next to us jumped up and bashed me in the face with his studded wristband, and it was only when I felt something trickle down my face that I realised the little shit had smacked the fake metal bar out of my eyebrow and cut me to ribbons in the process! Great! So not only had I lost my eye bar, but now I had blood all down my face and my T-shirt. Han got me into the loos and cleaned me up, but I looked like I’d done ten rounds with some heavyweight boxer!!

Of course, the only non-black thing I was wearing
had
to be my T-shirt, and that now had blood all down the front of it. My eye had swollen up, I was sweating so my hair was wet and sticking up, and I had dried blood in it. Needless to say when Dad met us outside the venue, he took one look at me and paled. Great! The first concert—sorry, gig—I ever go to and I look like I’ve been scrapping with bloody ten-year-olds!

Sunday 18 November

Woke up and tried to open my right eye but couldn’t. It’s swollen right up and beginning to bruise magnificently!! I think it looks revolting but Han keeps telling me she thinks it’s sexy and is making a meal of looking after me in the privacy of my bedroom (not that I mind, of course). She says I need a steak to help the swelling go down, but I’m not sure if I need to eat it or put it on my eye?

I took my swollen eye over to show her mum this morning after getting no sympathy off my own mother when I staggered downstairs looking like a prize-fighter. The fact I hadn’t taken last night’s black eye makeup off probably made me look 100 times worse as well, but I have to admit I was expecting a bit more sympathy than, ‘Dear God, what DO you look like?’

I think Han should follow in her mum’s footsteps and become a nurse because she has a
very
good bedside manner, and keeps planting kisses on my swollen, hot eye (not that I expect your average nurse to do that). I kinda enjoy being looked after by her, but now I’m a bit worried that I might have that funny old Munchkins Disease, or whatever it’s called?

Monday 19 November

Got, like, a MEGA reaction from people at school today ’cos of my eye!! Everyone crowded round me and kept trying to touch it, asking me if it hurt very much. It’s still swollen practically shut, and I can’t see very well out of my other eye anyway, so I’m hoping Mrs. Unwin will take pity on me and send me home. Han had her arm slung casually round my shoulders while everyone was fussing round me and took great pleasure in telling them how she’d looked after me all day yesterday, because she thought it her duty, bearing in mind she’d been with me when it happened. She said something about nursing me, adding that she’d ‘Drawn the line at giving her a bed-bath, though’, and everyone laughed. I noticed Alice went bright red, though.

Didn’t get sent home from school, worse luck!

Realised tonight that I STILL have hardly any friends on Facebook so added Susan Divine (yes, I know, dear diary, desperate measures!) ’cos I don’t want to look like a right old Billy No-Mates. I just hope I don’t ever write anything on there to upset her ’cos she’ll probably put a fatwa on my head or something.

Tuesday 20 November

Ohhh the best news! It’s Mum and Dad’s twentieth wedding anniversary in December and they’ve booked up to go to Paris for the weekend. It means I’ll have to put up with HRBH for the weekend, but if I annoy her enough she’ll bugger off to a mate’s, hopefully, leaving me to install Han in our house for 48 glorious hours! I can’t wait! I’ll just have to work on HRBH, make absolutely sure she stays away, then I can have my lovely girlfriend to myself aaaaaall weekend. Can’t wait!

Eye still kinda gummed shut. Han says I look cute, HRBH says I look like a nutcase and asked me to ‘stop leering at her with that wizened old hen’s eye’. This is all the sympathy I get off her! She’ll make a great stepmother one day.

Wednesday 21 November

Watched England getting a thorough spanking by Croatia in the football tonight so looks like we’re not going to the European Championships next year. HRBH said she was pleased ’cos at least she won’t have to put up with the sight of overweight men squeezing themselves into England strips and singing ‘Olé Olé Olé’ down the High Street whilst slurping from cans of high-strength lager and waggling their flags in her face. She has NO sense of patriotism!

Thursday 22 November

Woke up with a head that felt like I’d been smacked with a baseball bat this morning, and a throat that felt like I’d been moonlighting as a fire-eater, so stayed off school. Texted Han to tell her I wasn’t well and she replied with ‘My poor baby. I’ll mix you up some special medicine in the Chemistry lab later xxx.’

It’s now 7:30 p.m. and my head’s pounding, my nose is streaming, and my throat’s still on fire, so I think it’s safe to say I have a common cold.

Friday 23 November

Why is it called a common cold? Why
common
? Does it live on a council estate? Does it steal cigarettes from the newsagents?
Does it wear cheap gold jewellery? Has it taken lie detector tests on
The Jerry Springer Show
?

I think I’m delirious. Maybe I overdosed on Lemsip??

Saturday 24 November

HRBH is going out with some bloke called Joe who’s a drummer in a band. She’s on a diet again, no doubt spurred by the fact she’s actually going out with someone for the first time since all that business with Ade. I hate it when she does this dieting lark; she eats, like,
nothing
,
then sits and looks at my dinner like some hungry spaniel, irritating the hell out of me!

I got up for the first time since Wednesday and managed a little scrambled egg on toast in front of
American Idol
. Han wanted to come over and see me but I look like shit. My nose is bright red and my good eye is competing with my bruised eye in the puffiness stakes, which is streaming as though someone’s squirted onion juice in it. Needless to say I declined her kind offer to come over and rub Vicks on my chest!!

Sunday 25 November

Sat downstairs this afternoon wrapped in a fleece blanket and watched
The Great Escape
from beginning to end on Channel Five. It’s one of those movies that you never see all of—like
Gone with the Wind
or
The Sound of Music
—just kinda dipping in and out of them, so it was good to see the whole lot. Decided at around 8 p.m. that I was still too unwell for school so told Mum I would be staying off tomorrow as well. When she said she thought I was sounding better, I blew my nose and showed the tissue to her, then sat back and smugly listened to her cooing at the state of the brown/green mess within. I nodded wisely when she told me I was to stay off school until my snot was clear again.

Monday 26 November

Got up around midday and drank a bit of the chicken soup Mum had left for me in the kitchen. Actually feel a lot better but decided to stay off until tomorrow just to be sure. Besides, we had a Maths test today and I’ve done zippo work for it. Well, I’ve been ill, haven’t I?

HRBH told me about this Joe fellow she’s seeing. Apparently he’s 20 and a student (studying Music Technology at uni) and he lives with two other boys in some rented pit across the other side of town. This is all the information I can get out of HRBH. She’s notoriously cagey about her boyfriends, but particularly cagey about this one, which means she probably really, really likes him.

Tuesday 27 November

Went back to school today and was disappointed that no one said I still looked ill.

Alice did at least ask me how I was, which was nice of her; I seized the opportunity of talking to her, and managed to finally ask her about
that night at Caroline’s.

I tried to act all casual, like, and asked her if she was still seeing Vince. She did have the grace to blush, I noticed, at the mention of his name but told me she hadn’t seen him since Caroline’s party. I was shocked but I thought I hid it well, instead I just asked her why, trying really hard not to add: ‘bearing in mind you
did
sleep with him that night’ and trying
even harder
not to add ‘trollop’. She was dead vague about it all, just saying that she was drunk the night of the party and hadn’t really known what she was doing, but that the next morning reality had hit her like a hammer when she woke up and found Vince snoring next to her with all his dangly bits hanging out.

She went on to say that she realised she’d made a huge mistake and she had no idea why she’d done it but she sure as hell wouldn’t be doing it again, she wouldn’t touch Vince with a barge pole ever again and she said she’d more or less told Vince that when he’d texted her later in the week. I don’t know Vince from Adam, but I have to say I do kinda feel sorry for the guy; it must be dead confusing to think you’ve scored only to be told it was a mistake and not to go near the girl you scored with ever again or she’ll punch your lights out!

Anyway, I was pleased that Alice did at least speak to me, bearing in mind we’ve hardly said two words to each other since the summer. I don’t know what I feel about her and Vince, though. Perhaps part of me wants her to get herself a boyfriend, especially if it means it takes her mind off me (if it’s still on me, that is) but at the same time, I feel a right cow thinking that she probably only slept with Vince because I was there at the party that night and maybe it was her way of getting over me. Or getting back at me??

Either way, it’s way too confusing for me to think about too much right now!

Wednesday 28 November

HRBH was telling me some more stuff about Joe today. She met him when she went over to the uni bar with her friends a couple of weeks ago and he was playing in his band. Their eyes met across his drum kit apparently. She told me she really liked him (I KNEW it!) and that she’d already slept with him, and that the sex was—and I quote—
‘amazing’.
Yuk, yuk, yuk! This is toooooo much information!

She also told me that she was trying to get Joe interested in Buddhism too, but he told her he was ‘too rock ’n roll for all that mellow shit’. She said she’d work on him and chant mantras at him or something.

Thursday 29 November

HRBH came into my room tonight and told me she was planning to spend the weekend that Mum and Dad are away over at Joe’s. She hissed at me, ‘So you better make sure you get one of your cronies to come over and baby-sit you, ’cos I won’t be here and if Mum and Dad find out you spent the weekend alone I’m for the high-jump. So sort it.’ What a result! I sooooo wanted to say to her, ‘Like I give a shit where you’ll be? My girlfriend’s coming over anyway and we’re gonna spend the whole weekend in bed,’ but I just smiled sweetly at her and said, ‘Whatever.’

Friday 30 November

What a shit day!! I think me and Han are finished, and it’s all bloody Alice’s fault. Me and Han were having our lunch together and I started to tell Han about my conversation with Alice about Vince the other day, because what she did has been eating me up a bit and I’m fed up with having to carry the guilt and worry around with me. I told Han that Alice had said she regretted sleeping with Vince and then blurted out that I wondered if she’d done it for my benefit. I laughed as I said it, to try and make light of it, like, but…OMFG! She went right off on one, demanding to know what I’d meant. So I mentioned (as casually and as vaguely as I could) about what had happened between me and Alice in France last summer, about how I thought it had been a flash in the pan and had tried to forget all about it, but then had begun to wonder if the business at Caroline’s party had been Alice’s way of either getting over me or getting back at me. I don’t remember my exact words, but I told Han (quite flippantly, I thought) that Alice had had a crush on me and that although I’d been horrified about it at the time, now I thought it was quite funny.