Blowing It (23 page)

As if she didn’t know. Bitch. Of course it wasn’t bloody all right.

FOURTEEN

‘IT’S A FULL
house down there. You can’t move for the kids’ toys and bags stuffed with Ilex and Clover’s things everywhere. Mum’s going mad because now she’s got a skip on the drive she’s trying to get stuff out of the house, not have people bringing more in. Ilex spends all his time lying around watching Sky Sports and Clover’s forever bloody crying. Chaos.’

Sorrel turned away from the window, from where she’d been watching Sophia and Elsa racing round the terrace, squealing as they threw handfuls of hedge cuttings about and tried to stuff them down the backs of each other’s T-shirts. Al was caught in the middle of their game, trying to clip the hedge but being sent off balance as they crashed around him and into him. The whole scene, Sorrel thought, was a horrible shears-and-arteries accident waiting to happen.

She flopped down on her creaky old brass bed, all her French revision – files, books and notes – squashed beneath her. A copy of Baudelaire’s
Les
Fleurs
du mal
, which lay face down and open, was inch by inch having its spine broken as she wriggled to get comfortable. Gaz was up a stepladder at the end of the bed, carefully adding a pair of Edna Everage-style glasses to his painting of the Queen’s head that had so successfully transformed the damp stain on the ceiling. Sorrel was no longer so sure this was a good thing, even though she’d been the one who’d asked him to do it. If she was supposed to side with Clover and help her delay the moment when the house was finally sold then surely it would be better to paint a
trompe-l’oeil
of even more manky and suspicious damp stains to put the punters off rather than disguising the ones that were there. Too late now though, and it did add a certain arty something to the room. Perhaps she’d get him to do the rest of the walls – add the entire royal family, have them doing mad things – a football match would be good. Nothing to do with sex though; this was a room she had to sleep in; for Chrissake, you wouldn’t want to open your eyes at three in the morning and see Prince Philip’s bits waving at you. Gaz’s best subject was art. He was amazing at portraits and could so brilliantly capture the essentials when he painted that made even a rough, quick portrait look just like the person. Perhaps if the two of them ran out of cash when they were away in Australia, he could do sketches of tourists and raise a few dollars that way. It would be like busking, but without the horrible noise. Her
contribution
could be to fetch the drinks and then lie helpfully on a beach while he worked, keeping nice and still in the sun to conserve energy so they wouldn’t need so much expensive food.

‘What do you think?’ He climbed down and stood back by the door to take a longer view.

‘Ace,’ Sorrel said, sitting up to appreciate his work. ‘Very Rolf Harris. I hope the new people keep it for prosperity and don’t just paint over the top. It should stay with the house.’

‘Posterity,’ Gaz said, giving Sorrel a strange look.

‘Posterity. Yeah. Didn’t I say that?’

‘No. You said “prosperity”. You’re losing the plot. I thought language was your thing.’

Sorrel slumped back onto the bed. ‘It’s the pressure. It’s getting to me. How am I supposed to concentrate when I don’t know if I’ll be living on a park bench by September?’

Gaz laughed. ‘Come on, Sorrel, don’t keep pulling that old one! You know they’re gonna be sorting something. And even if they don’t, you’ve always got your sister’s place to go to if you need it. It’s not like she hasn’t got the room.’

‘And it’s not like she’s exactly offered, is it? And anyway, even
she’s
not there now, is she? She’s here, and howling! “I’ve leeeeft hiiiim!”’ Sorrel mocked the anguished Clover-wailing that had echoed up the stairs like the keening of a distraught mourner the moment she’d crashed so dramatically into the house the night before, dragging along her
two
tired and bewildered daughters and a carload of hastily gathered possessions.

‘Wha’ever,’ Gaz went on. ‘We’ll be going away ourselves by then. Your folks will have been away, come back and got themselves a new pad by the time we’re home so what does it matter? You’re just milking it because of how it’s been at school.’

Sorrel threw a pillow at him, which was a mistake as it hit a pot of blue paint which fell off the table and trickled all over the carpet.

‘I am so
not
milking it!’ she yelled. ‘I’m really,
deeply
worried about it!’

No she wasn’t. Sorrel knew perfectly well that she had a lucky, lucky life and little to whine about. Even her exams were going well. There’d have to be a massive meltdown for her not to get an A in English and almost certainly in French and history as well, no thanks to parental input and enouragement. Had they once asked how it was going? She’d only had one discussion with her mum, when they’d talked about Jane Austen and the concept of daughters as possessions to be sold off to anyone with a few quid. And even then Lottie hadn’t really taken it seriously, saying what a great idea. That Mrs Bennet had had a point: offloading the daughters to the highest bidder was certainly the closest a woman of that era would get to ensuring she’d be properly taken care of in her old age. Sell your daughter: instant pension fund. Sorrel had pointed out that the average female life expectancy in Jane
Austen’s
day had only been about sixty, so then they’d got into a stupid row about whether that was an average brought down by death in childbirth or not. How unhelpful was that? That was the trouble with old parents – it was all about
them
. Millie’s mum was much younger and totally busy-busy being a doctor and taking care of her family and wasn’t even close to the weirdness Mac and Lottie were going through now they’d decided they had ‘Getting Older’ and doing things ‘While They Could’ to deal with.

She slid off the bed and began furiously swabbing at the spilled paint with tissues. There wasn’t that much of it but what there was looked as if it meant to leave a dark, fat, oily stain on what used to be quite a good shade of purple. So what? The carpet wasn’t going to be staying here for any longer than she was.

Gaz took more tissues from the box and joined in with wiping the paint, spreading the marks even further.

‘No, don’t, you’re making it worse.’ Sorrel snatched the tissues from him, rolled them into a knot and hurled them towards the bin. She missed and the knot rolled under the desk.

‘You know I’m right,’ he said.

‘Stop now. You’re pushing it, Gaz,’ Sorrel warned. She stamped back to the bed and started piling up her books, stacking them on the table beside her computer.

‘You know what I mean,’ Gaz said, coming to sit beside her. ‘You’ve always hated Carly and that lot, always said they’re a bunch of losers. Now they’re all being smarmy-nice to you and you’re lapping it up. I just don’t know how you can even talk to them.’

Sorrel chewed a nail. ‘It’s only for a bit of peace. And it’s not for long, only weeks to go till we’re out of that dump for good,’ she said, not looking at him. ‘You don’t know what it’s been like, them getting at me for years and years just because I’m some old music legend’s baby. Not that he
is
one any more. But the way they’ve always gone on, you’d think he’d been as famous as Elvis or something. How was I supposed to have known that Carly’s dad used to go to every single Charisma gig? I bet he’s one of those weirdos who’s always sending e-mails to the website and pleading for a come-back concert. And then Dad was so rude to him that time.’

Gaz laughed. ‘Yeah, but a) it was years ago and b) it doesn’t explain why Carly’s always been a cow to you. I mean, people our age, we don’t … like, no offence to your dad and that but … well, all that Charisma stuff isn’t exactly our generation’s music of choice, is it? I asked my mum once and she said Charisma were somewhere between Fairport Convention and Fleetwood Mac. Like, that gave me a clue what she was talking about?’

‘Hey! Bit of respect please!’

‘Come on, Soz, what sort of people under forty
would
have your dad’s songs at the top of their i-pod playlists? Only freaks and geeks, man, that’s what. So make your mind up, Sorrel. Are Carly’s lot evil and jealous like they always have been or are they your new best scummy friends?’

Gaz stood up, looking serious. He was going to leave, she realized, and hate her and never come back. She might not feel a forever kind of love for him – who did at seventeen (apart from that great exception: her mother)? – but it was love of a sort, all the same. Sorrel reached out and took his hand but he pulled it away.

‘No, you decide,’ he said. ‘Those girls at school, they’re suddenly being nice to you for a reason. You’ve just got to think about it. They want something. Work it out for yourself.’

He picked up his bag of books and headed for the door.

‘No, Gaz, don’t go!’ Sorrel shouted. ‘Please don’t leave me on my own with all these nutters! I’ll go insane. You can stay the night?’ She stroked her hand across the bed, rearranged the pillows, persuading. ‘Mum won’t mind. She’s too distracted by having Ilex and Clover sulking all over the place. She won’t even notice.’

Gaz sighed and leaned on the doorframe. ‘Why would I want to stay somewhere where I’m not even
noticed
? Even at home they can offer me a better deal than that.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that, and you know it!’ Sorrel
could
feel tears threatening. Why did it have to be this stupid way? Gaz doing the ‘Me or Them’ thing?

‘Why are you being like this?’ she asked him. ‘Why are you suddenly being so critical, just because I’ve been sitting with some different people during lunch a couple of times? It’s no big deal. You and Millie, you’re acting like it’s some huge betrayal. Isn’t it just that they feel sorry for me because I’m moving out with nowhere to go?’

‘It’s because they’ve always been so vile to you!’ Gaz’s eyes blazed furiously. ‘And now it’s like you’re
grateful
they’re throwing you scraps of attention! You don’t need that, you’re
better
than that! Think about what you told me about how Carly was, years ago.’

‘Well, she was only a kid. And it was her folks really, not her.’

Sorrel did remember though, remembered how it felt when she’d first gone to that school, eleven years old, and started inviting friends home. At primary school it had been fine, but here at the new, huge school, people were suddenly curious about her. The parents made their daughters invite her home and then when her mum came to collect her they looked a bit cross, disappointed. Something her mother had said – ‘They look at me as if I’ve got horns’ – had stuck. And then at last Sorrel was old enough to catch on: people wanted to see her dad, not her mum. They wanted a quick gawp at someone who’d been famous, just so they could drop into
a
conversation, ‘Oh yeah, remember Charisma? Bernie MacIntyre’s daughter’s in our Nicky’s class.’

And then Carly had come to the house for tea one day, and when the doorbell went when it was time for her to go home, there on the doorstep were both Carly’s parents, her two brothers, her aunt and uncle and a couple of older cousins, all gathered for a glimpse of The Man. Tradition was that when you came to collect your child, the host parents invited you in for a glass of wine and some social chat about how much maths homework there was and why did they need so much games kit. Mac’s reaction had been a grumpy, ‘Fuckin’ ’ell, bit early for carol singers, isn’t it?’ before fleeing from the invasion to his studio and leaving Lottie to smooth over the visitors and get them out of the place. Taking her cue from Mac’s fury, she hadn’t invited them in, but merely fetched and dispatched Carly as swiftly as possible.

How well that had gone down. Not. It had been interpreted as rude, dismissive and snotty and from then on Carly had turned a whole group of that year’s girls against Sorrel, picking on her at every opportunity, for every new pair of shoes, for every holiday they’d heard the MacIntyres had taken, for every school ski-trip that Sorrel had paid for in one go rather than in instalments. Most recently it had been for the black Mini, a vehicle of such brand-new, suck-on-that ostentation that Sorrel guiltily wondered if they’d got a point. And
now
, suddenly, everyone knew the house was being sold, they were all being kind. Or was it kind? Mostly she knew quite well it was just curious. Speculation was that Mac and Lottie were broke. Or was there a divorce coming? Why did things like that make Carly’s lot suddenly consider her more human? More one of them? Perhaps Gaz was right – they just wanted the glamour of being the friend in the know. Except there wasn’t any glamour. Or anything to know. Just an absorbent audience for Sorrel to pour out the awfulness of stuff and to have sympathy, however insincere.

‘Gaz?’ He was still loading his brushes into his bag, taking his time. She hoped it was because he wanted to give her a chance to say the right thing.

‘What?’ He put the bag down and came a bit closer.

‘It’s just so much easier than always being the outsider. That’s all. Because right now I’m even getting the outsider stuff here in my own home.’

There were real tears falling. Sorrel could feel gallons of them welling inside her, all ready for serious flooding. If she really started it could be hours till she stopped.

‘Hey. Look, it’s going to be all right, just don’t cry, OK?’ Gaz squashed her close against him. She could smell fabric conditioner on his T-shirt. He was warm and comforting and solid and real.

‘So will you stay? Tonight? Please?’ she asked again.

She could feel him shrug and looked up. He was grinning at her, teasing. ‘Don’t mind. Take it or leave it, me,’ he said. ‘Depends on what’s on offer.’

‘House full of crazy hippies, moping, so-called grown-ups, couple of noisy, hyper kids and … me?’

‘I’ll take it,’ Gaz said.

‘I’m so glad to be out of there,’ Lottie said to Mac as they walked across the green to quiz night at the Feathers. ‘It’s worse than when they were teenagers. Sorrel’s the only grown-up one in the house at the moment. You’d think they’d have learned something about relationships by now, wouldn’t you? Do you think it was the way we brought them up? We were too young, too irresponsible. I never thought I’d say that.’