Cross Your Heart, Connie Pickles (11 page)

It was taking a while for it to sink in. I said, ‘Is this because you don’t think they’re right for each other, or because you don’t really want him seeing Mother?’

She twisted her lip with her teeth. ‘Um…’

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘You can tell the truth. I don’t mind.’

She looked at me, directly in the eyes. ‘If they’re in love with each other and everything, then that’s fine, but if they’re not… It’s just he’s not bored any more, he doesn’t drop in at our house all the time, and he doesn’t feel like he belongs to me any more.’ She shook her head. ‘But that’s fine, if they’re happy. I’m not a little girl. I’m too old to be jealous. I’ll just have to come and see him at your house…’

All sorts of things were racing through my mind: happiness that we were friends, but also relief about something else. It was like being at the bottom of the water and seeing light glimmering on the surface and realizing it only needed a few pushes to get there. I said, ‘He’s not round our house all the time.’

‘Isn’t he?’

‘No. He toots in the street.’

Julie, who had been looking like she might be about to cry (which is very unlike her), gave a little laugh. ‘Does he leave the engine running?’ she asked.

‘And the door open,’ I said.

We smiled at each other. I put my hand on her shoulder and told her that I understood everything and that we should meet to talk about it more. I said, ‘I just wish you’d told me, that’s all. Not ignored me.’

She said, ‘Sorry,’ in a very small voice, and gave me a hug.

I kept my own anxieties concerning Uncle Bert’s status as stepfather material to myself. There was no point upsetting her. I suggested she came round this evening to talk about the next step – splitting them up.

She grimaced. ‘Can’t. Not tonight. Sorry. Going to Dan Curtis’s sixteenth.’

‘Who is Dan Curtis?’ I said. ‘Why does everyone else know him and I don’t?’

‘You never go out, that’s why,’ she said, but there was affection in her voice.

She’s coming round tomorrow instead.

Julie and I have done a terrible, dangerous thing.

But what we have done, we can undo.

Sunday 2 March

The bathroom, 4 p.m.

I’d almost given
up on Julie when she finally turned up today We’d been to Mass and I’d helped Cyril find ‘Five Interesting Facts About the Tudors’ for his homework. Then Marie had remembered she needed to be a Victorian child for tomorrow’s assembly and Mother went into a spin trying to find something. I suggested a shower cap and an apron, and a new attitude. Seen but not heard and all that. Marie just wanted to wear pink and had a paddy Honestly, for a little angel she can be quite demonic.

Over lunch (sandwiches because of the roofless nature of the kitchen) Mother told us she was going out again tonight – she was giving Bert ‘another lesson’. I panicked for a moment, but calmed myself with the thought that Julie would be here soon, that together we would think of something. I was putting Marie’s hair into a bun when the doorbell went.

It was Julie. She was wearing jeans, a baggy sweatshirt and what looked like last night’s make-up (smeary): a dressed-down Sunday look. She glanced at Mother, who was hanging out some underwear on the drying rack. ‘Hiya, Bernadette.’

Mother looked up and waved. She was dangling some sort of damp purple lace thing from her fingers. Julie and I looked at each other – too much information – and went upstairs.

In my bedroom Julie threw herself on to the bed and closed her eyes.

‘How was Dan Curtis’s party,’ I said.

She groaned. ‘I need sleep. More sleep.’

‘Late night?’

She opened one of her eyes and gave me a dark look. ‘Could say that.’

‘Was it good?’

She groaned again. She was behaving like she was really relaxed, but I knew it was partly an act.

I said, ‘I’m so glad you came. I’m so glad we’re friends again,’ and smiled at her.

She sat up and stretched. When she’d finished, her shoulders sort of crumpled in on themselves in a hunch. She looked at me sheepishly. ‘Me too,’ she said. ‘Ow.’ She shifted her bottom, so she could take something from the back pocket of her jeans. Her phone. She studied it and laid it on my bedside table, facing her. For the next ten minutes she kept checking the display. ‘Delilah was there,’ she said airily. ‘Making a right fool of herself.’

‘Not again,’ I said, then remembered. ‘But I thought she wasn’t invited.’

‘Yeah, well, however she got in, she got into the spirit of things when she did.’

‘What do you mean?’ I sat next to Julie on the bed as dread began to curl its way down my legs.

Julie’s eyes were laughing. When she spoke it was with something that sounded like admiration. She mouthed the words more than spoke them. ‘Took her top off.’

‘What?’

‘I think she’d had loads to drink. And she was getting into dancing, really saucily. She had some boys from St Antony’s around her. And next time I looked over she had taken her top off and was spinning it above her head. Everyone was whooping and… well, you know, it was a private-school crowd. Some of the boys thought they’d died and gone to heaven. There were just a few of us in the corner looking a bit dubious.’

‘Oh. My. God.’ What had happened to the Delilah I used to play doll’s houses with, the Delilah who owned Floppy Elephant? ‘Was Toyah Benton there?’

‘Different crowd.’

I wanted to ask more about it, but Julie was getting out a notebook from the inside pocket of her parka.

‘To business,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad I’m right about your mum and Uncle Bert and that you agree with me. But we’re going to have to work fast. They’ve been seeing each other two weeks and –’ she leant forward to check her phone – ‘any minute now, we’re talking LTR.’

‘LTR?’

‘Long-Term Relationship. Much harder to destroy. You’ve got habit as well as affection to deal with then. Now. I’ve had a few thoughts. It’s clear to me that part of Uncle Bert’s attraction to your mum is her availability…’

‘Steady on,’ I said.

‘No. I don’t mean that rudely. I just mean Sue had gone off to Australia and there was your mum, pretty and flattered and in need of saving. I know my uncle. He was bored. He was hungry He always needs a woman to feed him. If it had been a bit hard, on the other hand, he wouldn’t have bothered. What was that Shakespeare thing we did in English last year? “Thou shalt not to true love admit impediments”? Something like that. Anyway, impediments are not Uncle Bert’s thing. So. We need to make it hard for him.’

‘How would we do that?’ A memory of Marie’s last tantrum came into my mind.

‘That’s what we need to discuss.’

‘We’d better be quick,’ I said. ‘They’re out again tonight.’

‘OK.’ She checked the display on her phone again. Then lay forward on the bed, on her stomach, with a pen in her hand and the notebook resting on the pillow. I paced the room, occasionally pausing to stare out of the window up at the sky, or down at the patchwork quilt of suburban gardens, stitched with fences. Finally we came up with a list that went like this:

Impediments

1. Make it hard for Bernadette to see Uncle Bert. Cancel babysitter (do this tonight?). Fake illness. Pass on false messages. Generally bugger it up.

2. Put Bernadette off Bert, and Bert off Bernadette. Besmirch characters, spread malicious rumours. Hide Bernadette’s make-up.

3. Find new love interest for Bernadette.

Most of this came from Julie. Point three was my addition. I insisted. After all, it was Operation New Man that began all this.

Every few minutes while we were plotting, Julie would check on her phone. We were about to refer to our initial list when it finally rang. Well, I say rang. It actually played the chorus from the Electric B’stards number-one single, ‘Spit on My Shoes’.

Julie leapt up, grabbed the phone and then sat on the edge of the bed holding it in her palm for a few bars before answering. When she did, she said, ‘Hell-o,’ on a half laugh as if she was in the middle of sharing a joke with someone. ‘Oh. Hi.’ She sounded cool, slightly surprised to have heard from whoever it was. ‘This afternoon? Oh. Um. Let me think.’ She put her hand over the phone, waited and then lifted it. She was so offhand I was sure was going to say no. ‘Er, actually that should be OK. The UGC at 5.30? Sure. See you.’ When she hung up, she clasped the phone to her breast and closed her eyes. ‘Connie,’ she said, ‘I am in love.’

‘Oh yes?’

She opened them. ‘He’s called Ade. He was at Dan Curtis’s party.’

‘And?’

‘He’s gorgeous. He’s in the sixth form at St Antony’s – doing his AS levels this year. Quite posh, but well fit.’

Apparently she and Carmen had been outside the party, which was in the recreation centre, having a ciggie on the swings, and he’d come up and bummed a light. They’d ended up messing around outside for a while. He’d climbed up the frame of the swing and hung upside down from the bar and then Carmen had got cold and had gone back into the party and Julie and Ade had talked for ages and then he’d walked her home. They’d spent her cab money on chips and had sat on the wall outside her house sharing them and talking some more until her mum had banged on the bathroom window and Julie had to go in.

Partly I loved hearing about this. She was so funny doing an imitation of her mum’s face, peering out into the darkness without her specs on, but a tiny bit of me felt envious and yearning. I sort of wished I’d gone to the party. I mean, even Cinder-delilah had in the end. Would I have felt out of place, like I always think I will?

‘And now he’s asked you on a date,’ I said. I was doing pretend sixties dancing with my arms, rolling them round with one flying out, to illustrate excitement, and to hide the fact I was feeling left out. I was wearing my zip-up mohair cardy and a pair of baggy men’s trousers. ‘And you’re seeing him – when?’

Julie looked at her watch and rubbed her forehead. ‘Oh God. In a couple of hours. I’d better go home and put on my warpaint.’

I was still doing my silly jerky dance. ‘You. Better. Had.’

She went ahead of me down the stairs. ‘So, Mission Break-Up. Are you on the case? You’ve got to think of a way to stop Jack from babysitting tonight.’

I followed, jogging down each step one by one. ‘Yup,’ I said. I don’t know why I was behaving so stupidly. I expect I was still feeling a little self-conscious around her and also a bit disappointed that, after everything, she was leaving so soon.

But Julie turned when she reached the bottom of the first flight and watched me. She was laughing. ‘Con,’ she said, ‘in all seriousness, do you think it might be time you bought a wired bra?’

That was two hours ago. Since then, I have studied myself in the mirror, stationary and joggling, sideways and front-on. Julie is right. There is quite a lot of movement there now. But do I really have to get a proper upholstered bra? I don’t want one. Is it because I don’t want to grow up? It can’t be that. I am grown-up. When I was, like, five, people were telling me how grown-up I was. I like my support-vests. They’re cosy and safe. Real bras look so uncomfortable. I can see the purple lacy one Mother was handwashing earlier on the line. I’m going to experiment.

I’ve just sneaked down and slipped it off the dryer to bring it back up to the bathroom. Cyril saw me. ‘What are you doing with Mother’s bra?’ he said. I just glared at him and ran past. It’s still a bit damp, but the main problem is it was actually too small. I’d need a bigger one. Oh Lord.

My room, 9 p.m.

I had to have a lie down to recover from the bra exertions, and was reclining on the sofa when the doorbell went. Mother opened the door. It was William.

‘You all right?’ he said, squatting down next to me on the floor. He was wearing baggy army shorts, a washed-out red T-shirt with a torn neck and writing you couldn’t read, and his huge, new, gleaming white trainers. I noticed the muscles on his calves, and the pale inner thighs where there aren’t any hairs.

‘Where’ve you been?’ I asked him.

‘Playing tennis with my brother.’

‘Glad you’ve made some concession to whites,’ I said, nodding at his Nikes.

‘No one cares down the rec,’ he said. ‘You ill?’

‘Malingering,’ I said truthfully.

He stood up and put out his hands to pull me off the sofa. ‘Come on, let’s go for a bike ride down the towpath. It’s quite sunny out. Unless you’ve got homework.’

‘I’ve done it,’ I said. ‘Did it on Friday afternoon.’

He grinned at me. ‘Course you did.’

It was sunny down by the river, warm on the back of your neck. William raced ahead of me. He’s still wearing his pant elastic above his shorts. He turned back once. ‘Having a bit of trouble with your old men’s trews?’ he hollered, which made me put on an extra spurt to catch up with him. It’s bumpy along the towpath, and you have to slow down for the occasional ambling family group, but we cycled alongside each other most of the way. I’d forgotten my lingerie crisis and was filled with good spirits, and relief. William has that effect on me sometimes. And I don’t think I’d realized how unhappy the Uncle Bert thing had made me. I knew he was wrong for Mother, but couldn’t face up to it with Julie behaving so oddly towards me in case it made things worse between us. Now both anxieties had been cleared up in one fell swoop. All I had to do was think of a way to prevent their date tonight. And it was sunny at last. So bugger bras.