Here Come the Girls
Read Here Come the Girls Online
Authors: Milly Johnson
Milly Johnson is a 4ft 11in half-Barnsley, half-Glaswegian author, BBC Radio Sheffield broadcaster, greetings-card copywriter and award-winning chef (winner of
Come Dine With Me
Barnsley). She likes cruising on big ships, mingling with big wrestlers and savouring big hampers full of rum truffles, carrot cake and Canadian ice wine.
She lives in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, bang opposite her mam and dad with her two hulking lads, four moggies and Teddy, her German Eurasier dog. She is a proud patron of Haworthcatrescue.org and The Well – a complementary-therapy centre for cancer sufferers, associated with St Peter’s Hospice, Barnsley.
Here Come the Girls
is her fifth novel. Visit her at www.millyjohnson.co.uk
Also by Milly Johnson
The Yorkshire Pudding Club
The Birds and the Bees
A Spring Affair
A Summer Fling
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Milly Johnson, 2011
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Milly Johnson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor
222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB
Simon & Schuster Australia
Sydney
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-84983-205-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-84983-206-9
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental
Typeset in Bembo by M Rules
Printed in the UK by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, Berkshire RG1 8EX
This book is dedicated to the wonderful people of Yorkshire. The ones who have taught me, healed me, employed me, supported me, laughed with me, lent me tissues, scoffed cake, broken bread and drunk wine with me, represented me legally, tucked me in at night, cooked for me, delivered my babies, read my books, called me ‘friend’, called me ‘mum’, liked me – and loved me.
On the third day out I get it, the sea
Is not one thing, it constantly transforms
Itself, and in unthinking majesty
Tapestries horizons with sun or storms.
So then lying now, rocking to and fro
On its soothing and gentle amniotic swell
I loosen thoughts of home, and let them go,
And my shipwrecked heart can start to heal.
What promise for me, what spirit salve
When unanchored here I find at last,
Something has shifted, giving me resolve
To let hope aboard, jettison the past.
The sea has given me a chance to live,
And leads us maybe to a safe harbour, love.
‘The Voyage Out’ by James Nash
‘Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.’
Mark Twain
Contents
Prologue
People always remember the winters of their childhood as being as white as iced Christmas-cake tops. They recall their journeys to school as being trapped inside a giant snow-globe, recently shaken. Likewise they remember their long-ago summers as hotter and brighter and longer than they ever were. The sun switched on its light in May – all 950 watts of it – and didn’t even begin to fade until all the rusty, crispy leaves had dropped from the trees in late September. Indeed, whenever four women thought back to a certain afternoon twenty-five years ago, they pictured the shapes in the clouds as more defined, the sky impossibly blue and the sun the colour of a massive sherbet lemon. The grass they lay on was more velvet than itchy, and no one remembered sneezing because their hay fever had been triggered off.
Full of Cornish pasty and lumpy school gravy, four fourteen-year-old girls reposed on the grassy bank in their red and grey regulation uniforms and looked lazily up at the sky.
‘That one looks like a squirrel,’ said Ven, pointing to a white mass of cloud.
‘Eh? Where the hell are you looking?’ replied Frankie.
‘There.’ Ven stabbed upwards with her finger. ‘That bit there is its tail and the big round thing is its head.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Roz. ‘I sort of see what you mean, but you have to admit that it does look more like a squirrel which has just been run over by a tractor. Aw, look – there’s a heart.’ She sighed, making the others groan.
‘Has it got “I love Jez Jackson by Roz Lynch” written across the middle of it, by any chance?’ laughed Olive.
‘It might have,’ said Roz bashfully, or as bashfully as she could manage as the thought of Jez Jackson glided into her brain. Three years older than her, he lived across the street and was skinny and lithe and never acknowledged her. He was the ‘Boy from Ipanema’ and made her heartbeat rev up whenever she spotted his Marc Bolan perm.
‘That one looks like a cloud,’ said Olive.
‘Oh, very funny!’ snorted Roz.
‘No, I mean like a proper cloud in a cartoon. Flat at the bottom but bobbly on top. By the way, did you know that Zeus was the God of Clouds?’
‘Ooh, who’s been paying extra attention in Classics,’ said Frankie, poking Olive in the ribs. ‘Swotty Olive Lyon, that’s who.’
‘Give over!’ chuckled Olive.
‘I’m surprised she pays any attention in Classics,’ said Roz. ‘She’s always too busy looking into Mr Metaxas’s eyes.’
‘That’s a big lie. I am not!’ refuted Olive, but laughing too because it was true and her friends knew it was.
‘I reckon you’re going to move to Athens, Ol, and become a Greek bride. You’ll change your name to Aphrodite and live off vine leaves. They love blondes out there, apparently. You’re worth at least a couple of camels,’ said Frankie.
‘They don’t use camels as currency in the Med, dafty,’ said Roz.
‘Oh whatever,’ Frankie returned with a sniff. She sat up and swished her long black sheet of hair behind her. ‘Olive, the most-a bellissima fruit in the world-a,’ she said, affecting an accent very similar to Mr Metaxas’s sexy Greek one. ‘How juicy the olive is. I just want to eat her . . . er . . .
it
all up in-a one-a bite.’
Olive was giggling and blushing and trying not to think of snogging Mr Metaxas. His Mediterranean tan, black hair and huge brown eyes had done their fair share in helping to kick-start her adult hormones. She often went to sleep thinking of him calling her ‘Olive’ in the same way he did in class. Out of all the crap names her parents could have called her, ‘Olive’ had always seemed by far the worst. If only her parents had called her ‘Olivia’ which was far more posh and acceptable. But Olive! It was the name of the frumpiest woman ever in
On the Buses
. Mr Metaxas always managed to make it sound so romantic and rich, though.