Sex and Stravinsky (6 page)

Most of her class have given up birthday parties for the moment because at twelve, and especially thirteen, you can’t very well go on having those babyish all-girl parties with treasure hunts and loot bags, and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, and with your mum making you a novelty cake of your choice, with candles on it. Well, you can if you’re Emily, of course, but then Emily is so kind of floaty that she doesn’t even notice. And, on the quiet, all the girls really enjoy her parties, because Emily’s mum keeps everyone so busy there’s no time to get bitchy or to feel left out, like there is at Gemma and Becca’s parties, where you stand there wishing you had different shoes on and that your mum had let you have your ears pierced and that you knew about kissing and stuff.

Zoe’s mum, Caroline, used to do those four-star kids’ parties for her, except that she always insisted Gran come and only once, two years ago, did she agree to make Zoe a ballerina cake.

The next year she said, ‘Not again, Zoe. That’s just boring. And aren’t you getting a bit too old for all this ballet stuff? What about the belle époque, if you’re wanting something a bit girly? Or how about we make you a map of Middle Earth?’

Zoe really doesn’t like Tolkien. It seems to her it’s a lot of weird boy-stuff that, for some reason, her mother thinks would be better for her than reading ballet books. It’s probably because her mum was young in the 1970s, so she thinks that girls should be forever doing plumbing and welding along with cooking and sewing, to show how liberated they are. And she won’t let Zoe have ballet lessons, because she says they’re much too expensive and that Zoe must absolutely not go leaning on her dad.

‘You know what a pushover he is,’ she said. ‘He’ll start going without lunch just to pay for you to have lessons.’

So Zoe hasn’t said a word to Josh about it. She’s kept it to herself.

But, about the birthday cakes, the only really embarrassing time was once, when her mum and dad had to be away and Gran did her party instead. She just insisted and Zoe didn’t know how to tell her not to. Gran made this horrible iced cake like a Christmas cake that looked like a tombstone and inside was that kind of claggy fruitcake, when everyone knows it’s a chocolate cake you’re supposed to have. Anyway, nobody ate it. They just broke it up into bits and then Gran kept saying cringeworthy stuff out loud in front of Zoe’s friends, like, ‘Personally, I can’t abide the waste!’ and, ‘It makes you wonder what sort of homes they come from!’ that just made everyone giggle – especially as most of them have got quite smart houses and it’s Zoe’s family who still live in a bus – though not for very much longer because when she gets back they’re going to be moving into a house where she’ll have a ‘proper’ bedroom.

Except that, last weekend, when her dad had a sneaky plan that he and she – just the two of them – should go and camp in her new bedroom overnight, they’d got there and Zoe had refused to sleep in the house, because the bedrooms had these really horrible old nylon carpets that stank of wee, with creaky floorboards underneath, and all the door panels were painted orange and lilac with, like, brush hairs stuck in the paint, though her dad said that Caroline was going to ‘work miracles’ on the house while they were away. But, anyway, her dad said never mind, they’d just practise a few headstands against the walls downstairs for a bit and then they’d go back home to the bus.

Her bedroom in the bus is just about big enough for her bed with drawers under it, plus with about forty centimetres running down the side, so that she has to keep all her ‘hanging-up’ clothes in her mum and dad’s room, but at least the bus is kind of stylish-looking inside and her friends really like it.

Doing the headstands was fun and now Zoe’s really sorry that she wouldn’t sleep in the house with her dad, because she’s not going to see him for ages and ages until they both get back. She’s quite good at headstands and so is her dad. She used to be scared of doing gym, but when she was six he’d taught her to do forward and backward rolls on this big trampoline they’d found on a rainy beach in Devon and after that she’d got much braver about it.

Anyway, about Gran and the embarrassing birthday party, she said all Zoe’s friends had to eat up the sandwiches first before they were even allowed any cake, so no one had room for it by then. Emily’s mum’s a widow and she’s a doctor who works with people who’ve had head injuries, so revolting Sadie once passed this note around the class saying that Emily must have had a head injury, which was where her mum had got all the practice. But, instead of passing the note on, Zoe just shoved it into her desk, because it was so mean and horrible. Sadie had only written it because Emily’s a bit goofy-looking and her ears are quite sticky-out. And just because she’s got this quite big sort of a mole thing on her chest, Sadie’s note also said had anybody noticed Emily had got ‘three nipples’.

Then, later on, one of the senior girls, who must’ve been snooping in Zoe’s desk during geography, had gone and found the note and given it to the head and Zoe’d got the blame for it, just because she wouldn’t tell who’d sent it. Well, you can’t tell on people, can you? Even if it’s someone gross, like Sadie. Then afterwards Sadie thought it was all dead funny about the head and all, and she started behaving like she and Zoe were kind of ‘together’ because of it.

But, anyway, about the boy thing and the French exchange, Zoe’s already tried getting her mum to go up and have a word with Mrs Mead, but Caroline’s refused, because she says Zoe should learn to fight her own battles, and anyway she thinks it’s ‘a bit silly and bigoted’ of Zoe to mind having a boy. And, worse luck, her dad, who’s usually better at understanding about when you’re scared, was staying over in Bristol all of that week, though he’s usually only there over three nights. It’s because of some funny little opera thing he’s putting on together with the music department, which is all about this lechy old tutor who’s in love with his beautiful young orphan pupil, and everyone ends up getting married to the wrong people. Her dad says this is fairly unusual for a comic opera, but that it’s maybe a lot more like real life.

Anyway, Zoe’s even tried doing something she’s never done before – i.e., going up to Mrs Mead on her own and pretending that her mum wants her to try and swap things round, so she can have a girl – but there’s nothing Mrs Mead is prepared to do about it. That’s except for producing a whole lot of soft soap in a letter that she tells Zoe to pass on to Caroline, which is really embarrassing. I mean as if it wasn’t hard enough telling Mrs Mead a lie like that in the first place.

Dear Mrs Silver

Please be reassured. Zoe is such a sensible girl. She is always so dependable and resourceful that you really need have no fear with regard to the French exchange. I know that she will cope splendidly.

Then she’s signed it ‘Regan Mead’, which is really weird. I mean for teachers to have first names at all, even though her own mother’s a teacher of course, but that seems different. Anyway, isn’t Regan one of the daughters from hell in that Shakespeare play where the eyes get gouged out onstage? The letter is burning a hole in Zoe’s pocket all the way home, so she walks round and round the long way home and finally goes down this little alley that leads to the back of a shop and she tears it up and puts the pieces into the shop’s litter bin, but even then she’s terrified that she’s going to be found out for reading somebody else’s letter. For ‘dependable’, she’s thinking, read orthodontic braces; read red hair that’s too curly; read freckles and nearly flat-chested; read second-to-shortest girl in the class. In others words, read not blonde and not boy-mad, with not underwired uplift bras. That’ll be why she’s got the French boy. Mrs Mead thinks there’s no chance that he’ll want to get smoochy with her. Still, at least if you haven’t grown boobs yet you can go on day-dreaming about becoming a dancer, like in
Dream of Sadler’s Wells
, or like in her current top favourite,
Lola Comes to London
.

‘Do I have to go?’ Zoe says to her mother, once she’s got home. ‘Please can I not go? I’ll work extra hard at French, I promise.’

‘Of course you’re going,’ Caroline says, and she’s sounding all upbeat about it.

Zoe can tell that her mum is really enjoying the idea of the French exchange. She’s making it into one of her eager educational projects. And it’s only because, even though she can speak French really well and she backpacked all over before she came to England from Australia as a graduate student, she and Zoe’s dad never have proper holidays now, like going to Provence, or Malta, or the Canary Islands, or somewhere else nice, like Maggs and Mattie’s families do.

They’re on a tight budget because of having to provide for Gran, who lives near them instead of in Australia, because of some ‘difficulty’ she’s had way back with Zoe’s Aunt Janet whom Zoe’s never met, but it wouldn’t be ‘kind’ to talk about it, Caroline says. So, even though they both go out to work full-time, they can still only ever afford to do stuff like taking tents to St Ives and walking Offa’s Dyke.

‘If I didn’t go to France, would it save enough money for me to start ballet lessons?’ Zoe says. ‘Because I’ll soon be too old.’

‘Oh stop it, Zoe,’ her mother says. ‘For heaven’s sake. This is all too silly and babyish. You’re far too old already. And I just know that you’ll love France once you get there. You’ll be half an hour from Paris. Just think how exciting that’ll be. You’ll go on lovely trips to Versailles and Fontainebleau. You’ll go to the Louvre. You’ll be walking along the Seine to Notre-Dame and peering into all those little art galleries and boutiques. And the food will be just wonderful. You can buy
crêpes
in the street. And think of the little
brioches
and
pains au chocolat
you’ll be having for breakfast. I expect at supper there’ll be all those delicious soups and terrines. The French are so much better about sitting down to proper family meals.’

But ‘soups and terrines’ are what Caroline makes at home from her French cookbooks. And, anyway, Maggs’s older sister, who did the French exchange two years ago, says that all her Maman ever gave her to eat was sort of instant chicken-nugget things and bags of cheap cup cakes with lots of vanilla in them, like those ones you can get in a plastic bag at the Co-op on special offer.

‘I want you to say I’m a vegetarian,’ Zoe says, ‘because otherwise I’ll have to eat liver.’

‘But you’re not a vegetarian,’ Caroline says. ‘I don’t mind writing a letter to Maman saying that you’d prefer not to eat intensively farmed meat.’

‘Please don’t write a letter,’ Zoe says in sudden panic. ‘Promise me you won’t write a letter, or they’ll think I’m a freak.’ Then she says, ‘How do you say “liver” in French?’

‘
Foie
,’ her mother says. ‘But it depends on the animal, of course. So calves’ liver would be
foie de veau
, for example, and pigs’ liver –’

‘And now,’ Zoe says, ‘how do you say, “I don’t like”?’

‘I’ll make you a list of useful words and phrases,’ Caroline says. ‘Oh, and I’ve ordered you some really good maps of your area. Ones like an Ordnance Survey map only bigger – and, don’t worry – it’s in English. Then there’s a really good street map. They’re from a special map shop in Covent Garden, and they’re very hard to come by in this country.’ Meaning that her mother has already done a whole lot of research into the French exchange project. ‘So, you see,’ Caroline says, ‘you can’t possibly get lost, even if the famous French boy gives you the slip and goes off with his mates to play football.’

Zoe can’t bear it that her mother can think it’s funny when the whole thing has been tormenting her for weeks.

‘Or maybe he’ll teach you how to play?’ Caroline adds, with a twinkle.

The maps come in the next day’s post. They show that she’ll be staying in a newish housing development on the outer edge of the town, between an ancient aqueduct that gets Caroline really excited and a huge area of dense woodland. Meanwhile, Mattie and Maggs will be staying miles away, right in the town centre, near all the shops.

‘The French have such amazing forests,’ Caroline is saying, as she pores over the maps. ‘There’s so much more woodland than we have here.’

The only thing Zoe really likes about the maps is that one of them has got a misprint that has turned ‘huts’ into ‘hats’. All the woodland hut-diagrams look like those little houses on the Monopoly board, and next to each one it says ‘forest hat’. Then, far up in the woods, it says ‘inaccessible forest hat’.

‘What’s the point of a “hat”, if it’s inaccessible?’ she says.

She knows that the edge-of-town housing development is going to be just like where Gran lives on the outskirts of Oxford, because it’s got the same kind of stupid winding roads, just like in
Neighbours
on the telly. Where her gran lives is called Garden Haven, even though all the front gardens have been turned into those crappy concrete spaces for parking a car. Her dad says that he needs a ball of string to find his way to Gran’s house without getting lost, because he can’t ever remember which winding road to go down next, and that all the houses look the same.

But they don’t really, because they’ve all got different replacement front doors and windows, and some of them have got concrete swans or concrete squirrels and rabbits in the front. Also they have different net curtains, so you can count three houses from the concrete squirrel and four houses from the net curtains that are ruched up in the middle, like when your school skirt’s got caught up in your knickers at the back. Then you go past the house with the oval in the front door that’s got a stained-glass sailing ship in it, and then, another two from that, is the one that never takes down the Christmas decorations in the front window.