Girls, Guilty but Somehow Glorious (3 page)

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4

FRIDAY 8.45 p.m.

We set a cunning trap

After supper we went up to my room. My teddy bear Bruce was lying with his legs in the air and a big smile on his face. Chloe grabbed him and cuddled him.

‘I so adore Bruce!’ she sighed. ‘If only we could find a magic-potion thing that would turn him into a boy.’

‘You’d have to fight me for him,’ I warned her. ‘And anyway, Bruce is gay.’

Chloe laughed, kicking off her shoes and diving on to my bed with Bruce. ‘OK then, let’s draft the ad!’

I still had some misgivings about actually advertising for boys, but I got a piece of paper out and sat down at my desk.

‘It seems a bit tacky,’ I said. ‘How do we word it? “
Romeos wanted”
?
“Must be gorgeous and fragrant with perfect manners
”?’

Chloe bit her nails and frowned. ‘I know!’ she said. ‘We don’t actually tell them we’re auditioning them to be escorts to the Ball. We advertise for something else. Uhh . . .
“Boys wanted for odd jobs”
.’

‘It sounds weird,’ I said, biting my pen. There was a lot of biting going on. I had a feeling that before we managed to draft the ad, we’d be eating the furniture.

‘It sounds weird advertising for
boys
, plural,’ said Chloe. ‘We’ll probably get more than one reply anyway.’

I wrote:
Boy wanted for odd jobs.
It still looked a bit strange. ‘Hmm, it doesn’t say anything about age,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘It would be awful if we were deluged with a lot of little Boy Scouts.’

‘
“Odd jobs”
sounds a bit weird, too,’ pondered Chloe. ‘It doesn’t sound, like, inviting.’

‘Yeah . . . maybe we should try and make it sound mysterious and intriguing.’

‘Hmm.’ Chloe lay on her back and stared at the ceiling. Chloe’s great when it comes to throwing ideas about. She can think on her feet. And she can also think on her back. ‘How about,
“Young man wanted for exciting venture”
?’ she suggested.

I wrote it down. It was certainly better than
Boys wanted for odd jobs.
In fact, if I was a young man I’d certainly be interested.

‘
“Venture”
is good, too,’ I mused. ‘Because it doesn’t necessary imply big bucks.’

‘We’re not actually going to pay them, are we?’ asked Chloe, sitting up suddenly. ‘I mean, we can’t! I thought the idea was, get to know them by pretending we’ve got a job offer, and then once we’ve fascinated them, they’ll be begging to take us to the Ball.’

‘Or we could keep it as a strictly business arrangement,’ I said. ‘I mean, we might not be able to fascinate them. We might not
want
to fascinate them. They might be perfectly OK, but just not heart-throbs. How much do you think we should pay them?’

‘I don’t think we should pay them,’ said Chloe. ‘I think we should sweep them off their feet!’ OK, so she’s great at brainstorming, but she can be a bit silly at times.

‘We
could
pay them, though, in theory,’ I went on, ‘if it was
necessary
. We could dip into our Newquay money.’

‘Hmmm,’ Chloe looked a bit doubtful. ‘I don’t want to waste my precious holiday money on a guy to take me to the Ball. Not if I can get him to take me for nothing.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘You fascinate yours, and I’ll pay mine.’

The final draft of the ad, after about a hundred more versions, went like this:

Strong, fit young man (over 15) wanted for exciting weekend venture.

Then we had an argument about whose mobile number we were going to give.

‘You’re always losing your mobe!’ I said accusingly.

‘I’m not!’ objected Chloe.

‘OK, then. Where is it right now?’ I’d seen her put it down on the kitchen dresser before supper and I knew she wouldn’t remember.

‘Oh God!’ Chloe went pale. She searched her pockets. Then she ransacked her bag. She even started looking under my bed, which was pretty stupid. ‘Oh my God, Zoe, it’s gone!’ she cried, approaching a major panic.

‘I think you’ll find it downstairs on the kitchen dresser,’ I said in an irritating know-it-all kind of way.

Chloe ran downstairs and came back up with it.

‘You pig, Zoe!’ she yelled, laughing, and pushed me over on to the bed. ‘You knew where it was all the time and you just sat back and watched while I had a total panic attack!’ She started to tickle me. I screeched wildly. I am incredibly ticklish. Sometimes my sister, Tam, can make me scream for mercy just by stalking up to me with her tickling fingers poised and a sadistic gleam in her eye.

‘Stop, stop!’ I gasped. ‘I’m sorry! Stop! Anything! I’ll do anything, just as long as you stop!’ Chloe stopped. I sat up, panting and wheezing.

‘You’re right, though,’ said Chloe, carefully putting her phone in the specially designed phone pocket inside her bag. ‘I think we should put your mobile number.’

We both knew her phone wasn’t going to stay in that pocket for long. All too soon it would be off on its adventures: the top of the loo cistern, the fruit bowl, the pyjama case . . .

‘And another thing.’ I was really thinking fast now. I was cooking on gas. ‘Maybe we should give false names just in case . . .’

‘In case what?’ asked Chloe.

‘Well, you know, it’s all a bit iffy.’ I was trying to create exit strategies. ‘If somebody rings up and sounds like a complete moron, or it’s someone we know, and we know they’re a moron . . . we can just tell them the position’s taken and if we use false names, they’ll never even know it was us.’

‘Brilliant!’ yelled Chloe, clapping her hands. ‘I’ve always wanted a different name. I’m going to be Africa Zanzibar.’

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ I sighed. ‘That’s so obviously an alias.’

‘OK, then,’ said Chloe. ‘Africa Stevens.’

‘Does it
have
to be Africa?’

‘Well, there are two girls in school called India,’ argued Chloe. ‘And I met a girl called China on holiday. And, you know, Paris and stuff. What’s wrong with Africa anyway? I think it’s a cool name.’

‘OK, OK.’ I knew I had to give in. But to show Chloe how to operate with tact and skill, I decided to call myself something really subtle, like a Jane Austen heroine.

‘I’m going to be Emma Collins,’ I said.

‘That’s so lame!’ objected Chloe. ‘Anyway, there’s a girl in the sixth form called Emma Collins.’

‘I’m just trying to be subtle,’ I explained. ‘Unmemorable. Not interesting. So if we want to dump them before we’ve even interviewed them, they won’t care. I’ll be Jane Elliott, then. I mean, nobody would care if they weren’t going to meet a Jane Elliott. But if they’d psyched themselves up to meet somebody called Zebra Zanzibar, well – they’d be crushed.’

‘Zebra?’ cried Chloe. ‘Zoe, you’re brilliant! Zebra’s even better than Africa! Z. Z.! What cool initials! Or maybe I could have three Zs? Zebra Zara Zanzibar? That would be mega!’

Chloe easily gets over-excited. She’s just completely at the mercy of her emotions. I think they call it ‘mercurial’. I was going to have to raise my voice to her. Just a tad.

‘For God’s sake, Chloe!’ I almost-snapped. ‘You’re going to be Africa Stevens and I’m going to be . . . uhhhh, Jane Elliott.’ My name was so dull and ordinary I’d forgotten it already. I added our aliases to the draft of the ad. Chloe accepted the Africa identity and we moved on to the next argument.

We disagreed about how the ad should be designed: Chloe wanted it festooned with stars and moons and God knows what. I just wanted it to be plain print, because I thought that was a lot more mysterious. I talked her round in the end.

Chloe stayed the night, as it was Friday. She sleeps on a blow-up mattress on my floor. ‘A bit like a pet dog,’ as she always says. Chloe’s dog Geraint actually sleeps on the bottom of her bed. I’m so jealous. I’ve got no hope whatever of having a dog. Not until I’m twenty-one, anyway. And I have to
earn
it . . . but that’s another story.

We decided to put the ad up on the noticeboard in the supermarket the next day.

‘The ad might not work,’ I said, after we’d switched out the light. ‘But it doesn’t matter. I mean, we shouldn’t just
rely
on the ad. Nobody at all might answer it.’

‘Oh, absolutely!’ said Chloe. ‘I mean, I think we should try everything. All sorts of different ways. Stop guys in the street, the lot. We’ve got the whole weekend. Toilethead are playing at Plunkett tomorrow night.’

‘Right!’ I was beginning to believe we could really sort this out. ‘Let’s swoop down and snatch our unsuspecting victims there.’

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5

SATURDAY 10.44 a.m.

Hunting for boys – the new blood sport . . .

On Saturday morning we put our postcard up on the supermarket noticeboard. Then we trawled round the charity shops, hoping for some divine designer cast-offs. There weren’t any. We had jacket potatoes with cheese and beans for lunch. Then we went back to Chloe’s and watched some DVDs. Finally, after a quick tea of beans on toast, it was time to get ready for the Toilethead concert. Obviously, this took hours.

I wore a fab black dress which minimises my tum, and some huge hoop earrings. I blitzed my hair into submission with heavy-duty wax (I’ve inherited Dad’s spirally curls, which is a total pain.) I applied a lorryload of eye make-up in order to smoulder sexily at boys we didn’t yet know. And I plastered an inch-thick layer of heavy-duty cover-up foundation over Nigel, who, with perfect timing, had re-emerged on my chin that afternoon. Nigel was throbbing, almost
flashing.
Life is so unfair.

Chloe has all the physical advantages. Slim hips, slender legs, a tiny waist, skin as white as milk, etc. Luckily she has atrocious dress sense and on this occasion was wearing khaki cropped combat trousers and a hideous lime-green T-shirt saying ‘A Present from Weymouth’ on it. Her strange little triangular boobs were certainly not enhanced by this outfit: in fact, they were virtually invisible.

She was wearing wedges, and I have a horrible suspicion they were her mum’s wedges left over from the last century. To complete the style disaster, she had scrunched her hair back into a horrid plait-thing stapled to her head. I wouldn’t dream of telling her, but she looked like a Victorian child pickpocket called Dick Dickens.

We were, however, determined to pull. We hit the Community Centre at 8.45 p.m. precisely. Toilethead were already in full swing – even as far away as the bus station, the pavements were vibrating. Once inside, we went straight to the girls’ loos, where a thousand sweaty females were feverishly applying lipstick. We applied some too. Standing next to us were a couple of girls from our year group: Flora Barclay (aka the Goddess Venus) and Jess Jordan (Comedy Legend).

We said hi and I thought how tough it must be for Jess, having a friend as drop-dead gorgeous as Flora.

‘The trouble is,’ Flora was saying, ‘I’m not sure if he knows that I know, because last time I saw him he looked at me as if he doesn’t know I know, but it all might be just a big act.’

Jess caught my eye in the mirror and winked. It seemed that Flora had communication issues. Well! Who would have thought it?

‘The solution,’ said Jess, ‘is a head transplant.’

‘Oh God, yes!’ sighed Flora. ‘I’d do anything to get rid of these spots!’

Spots? The Goddess had spots? Jess and I exchanged another look – the sort of look Cleopatra’s handmaidens must have shared when Cleo moaned about being the frumpy type.

‘Oh, you’d still have spots,’ said Jess. ‘I just meant that if you and he swapped heads, then you’d know what he was thinking.’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ said Flora ploddingly, ‘because I’d still have my head and he’d still have his.’ She is good at maths, apparently.

Jess rolled her eyes to heaven, and prepared to leave the mirror. She gave me a goodbye grin.

‘Enjoy!’ she said. ‘It’s a zoo out there.’

They left, and I started to check out the lipstick situation. Chloe’s was the wrong shade of pink – a horrible coral colour – and she’d got some of it on her teeth. Although she does have most of the physical advantages, this doesn’t include her teeth. It’s the overbite.

‘Oh God!’ she said. ‘I’ve got lipstick all over my brace!’

For some reason I didn’t need a brace. I have inherited my dad’s big white teeth. But when I laugh too much I do look a bit like sunrise over a whitewashed town in southern Italy. I try to cultivate a girlish simper and keep my goddam teeth inside my mouth.

Chloe scrubbed away at her teeth with a tissue, but the tissue got kind of torn and snagged and bits of it appeared to be caught on her brace like sheep’s wool on barbed wire.

‘Ugh!’ she gasped. ‘I’m in serious trouble here! My mouth is full of paper! We have to go home again! Now!’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said, enjoying a rare moment of superiority. ‘Just keep your mouth shut for once in your life. Swill some spit around. The paper will get soggy and come away, and then you just swallow it.’

‘Yuck!’ said Chloe. ‘Gross beyond words! My mouth will become a kind of
toilet
!’

Eventually we went out into the huge dark cavern that is the Sir George Plunkett Memorial Concert Bowl. The band were rampaging up and down the stage. Lights were flashing. Lasers were crawling up the walls. We pushed our way into the crowd.

‘I bet Oliver will be here,’ screamed Chloe into my ear. ‘You can fascinate him!’

‘Oliver won’t be here!’ I roared back. ‘He’ll be at home grooming his string of racehorses!’ I may be fantasising slightly about Oliver’s background. He may live in a smelly little house in an alley behind the Dog and Duck, for all I know.

We pushed forward – about halfway to the front where we got kind of trapped in a big clump of giants. Maybe they were a rugby club or something. Bloated faces leered at us as we fought our way past, and hideous guys shouted a series of unappetising invitations. We ignored them in a dignified way. I was beginning to wish I hadn’t put on so much sexy smouldering eyeshadow. I scowled, so they’d know I wasn’t some kind of trashy airhead; just a lofty intellectual wearing ironic post-modern make-up.

‘There’s room up front,’ said Chloe, turning round and yelling at me over her shoulder. Then her face changed to shock and horror. She gestured wildly, staggered sideways and fell horribly to her right. The inevitable moment had come. She’d fallen off her espadrilles.

I wasn’t expecting her to be badly hurt, but Chloe is a little bit of a drama queen. She grabbed her ankle, writhed on the ground and literally howled in agony. People around started to look. I tried to bend down and offer her some help, but my dress was so goddam tight, I couldn’t quite make it.

The guy in front turned round. Oh no! It was Beast Hawkins!

‘Whassup?’ he said, giving me a quizzical look.

‘Twisted her ankle or something,’ I said.

Beast crouched down beside Chloe. Oh no! Perhaps he was going to mug, rape, murder or pillage her right now! He was mad, bad and dangerous to know – and my helpless friend was at his mercy.

‘She’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘It happens sometimes. She’s got these very thin ankles and sometimes they give way.’

Beast wasn’t listening. My voice was totally inaudible anyway, as Toilethead were in full spate. He had taken Chloe’s espadrille off! He looked up and handed it to me. Now he was feeling her ankle, the cad! Chloe was sitting up now, still wincing and swearing, but also staring in amazement at Beast.

I wasn’t sure whether he was performing first aid or beginning a seduction. I felt totally helpless. So I just stood and watched. Beast stood up and reached down for Chloe’s hands. He hauled her to her feet. Then he put his arm round her waist, and she threw her arm round his shoulders, and he helped her hop back through the crowds.

I followed, carrying the espadrille. And, slightly to my dismay, Beast’s companion followed me. It was, of course, Donut, Beast’s lardy sidekick. He hadn’t said a word to me yet, and I intended to keep it that way.

‘Tough,’ he said, sort of over my shoulder. ‘Still, the band is crap.’ I pretended I hadn’t heard. I could see what their game was. They were exploiting Chloe’s tragic injury in order to pull us. Well, they weren’t going to get away with it.

When we got out to the lobby, we could see that Chloe’s face had gone green. This was worrying. And it clashed abominably with her T-shirt. Beast sat her on a low wall by the popcorn booth, and placed the sole of her injured foot on his thigh.

Ugh! He was performing some kind of loathsome sex act with her foot and his leg! I could tell by his face that he was enjoying it. The really annoying thing was that Chloe was ignoring me. And as usual when injured, she was panicking.

‘My ankle!’ she groaned. ‘Look at it! It might be broken! It’s swelling up!
Look!
Call an ambulance!’

We looked. Her ankle, previously trim and cute enough to fascinate a whole army of Victorian gentlemen, now resembled a sausage and was steadily expanding.

‘Call the
ambulance
!’ sobbed Chloe, still clinging, rather recklessly I thought, to Beast’s hand.

‘No need for an ambulance, babe,’ he said soothingly. ‘We’ll take you to casualty in Donut’s car. Bring it round, Doh.’