Paper Aeroplanes
Table of Contents
3. When the Worst Thing Happens
4. The Importance of Family and Friends
7. The Most Wonderful Time of the Year?
9. Dribbles Down the Side of a Pan
10. The Letter of Mass Destruction
For Nana
Paper Aeroplanes
is a novel about Renée and Flo – two teenage girls who realise pretty quickly that without each other they struggle to be themselves. It’s about friendship, good and bad.
Although there are some similarities in the girls’ lives (particularly Renée’s) to my own, every character in this book is entirely fictional. I did however use my own teenage diaries for inspiration. The book is set in 1994, and the girls are fifteen, which is how old I was then. It’s set in Guernsey – a small island just off France – and anyone local will recognise many of the places I write about, but I have changed some names to create a new world for Renée and Flo.
Reading back through my diaries from this age was as fascinating as it was excruciating. In a time where there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no mobile phones and obviously no internet, friendships worked very differently. As much as I rely on the internet more than the air I breathe, it’s been fun to remember how simple everything used to be.
I hope you enjoy this story. It’s been cathartic to write and brought back lots of memories. Having my own diaries as my guide to how it really feels to be a teenager has been invaluable; I just wish I hadn’t stopped writing them when I was sixteen. If you are a teenager now and keep one, don’t stop. Reading your own words many years later is the best story of all.
I take my place on the front bench of the science lab. A few weeks ago we had been dissecting pigs’ trotters and all the vegetarians were huddled in a corner trying not to look. I thought it would be funny to flick a bit of trotter at them from the end of my ruler. As it turned out, it wasn’t very funny. I only meant it as a joke but it landed inside Kerry Bowden’s pencil case and she screamed like someone had run over her foot.
Vegetarians are so dramatic. What’s it all about anyway? I mean, I respect animals, but I also respect the food chain, and one of the few pleasures I have living with Nana and Pop is that once a week I’m allowed to have a tin of Chicken in White Wine Sauce with a pouch of Uncle Ben’s rice. I have the whole tin, in a bowl, poured on top of the rice and I sprinkle so much salt on it that not all of it dissolves. The reason I love the Chicken in White Wine Sauce so much is because Nana gives it to me while Pop is at the snooker hall on Thursdays, and she lets me eat it with a spoon sitting on the floor next to the heating vent, because that is my favourite place. That fifteen minutes once a week is my idea of heaven. Not only does tinned Chicken in White Wine Sauce taste like the most delicious thing ever – with the possible exception of Wotsits – but Nana only has to heat it up, so eve
n she can’t ruin it.
Nell has recently announced that she is a vegetarian. When she told Pop he shouted at me for filling her head with nonsense, and Nana cried. I think everyone in my family is actually starting to lose their minds.
September 1994
1
Back to School
Flo
‘You look fine. Hurry up.’
I look at my reflection. I do not look fine.
‘I look better with it up.’
‘No you don’t. Wear it down. Up makes your chin look big.’
Ouch. I never wear my hair down, she knows that.
‘And anyway, I’m wearing my hair up today, so you can’t.’ Sally spins around and pounds for the door, leaving me to stare back at myself in the mirror and rebelliously yank my limp, dark brown hair into a ponytail. Hurting my fingers with the elastic band and wincing as hairs are plucked from my skull. When it’s up, all I can see is chin.
Brilliant! In under three minutes she’s managed to inspire a brand-new insecurity. My fat chin is now right up there with the big nose she informed me of when we were ten. If there was a GCSE this year in making me feel paranoid, she would get an A+.
I leave the toilets, hair down, and chase her up the corridor. She beavers her way to the classroom with all the menace of a headmistress in the making. No one wears the green school uniform quite like Sally, her shirt equally tucked in all the way around and her thick green skirt exactly at the regulation length, just on the knee. Her tie – real, unlike my fake one on an elastic band – is in the perfect knot, her light brown hair gathered on top of her head like a dog poo. She moves forward like she’s on rails, her nose in its usual tilted position, her eyes searching for something to tell off, her aura oozing imminent battle. I walk alongside her, my big nose leading the way like an arrow losing speed. All summer I have told myself that this year will be different, but I’m only one morning into a new school year and my ‘best friend’ has me quivering in my knee-length socks.
‘Why do we have to sit right at the front?’ I ask nervously.
‘Flo, you do this every year. I get us to school as early as I can so we can get the best desks in the classroom, and you just moan, AND you always make me late. We only just about made it before anyone else because you were faffing so much.’
‘Sorry. I had to give Abi her breakfast.’
‘Why doesn’t your mum do that? It’s her child,’ Sally says, proving she’s never listened to a word I’ve said.
‘Because Mum and Julian were in the living room talking about Dad.’ I dump my rucksack onto my new desk. ‘Did I tell you he moved out?’
‘Julian moved out? Why?’ She wobbles the chair that’s at her desk and swaps it for one that doesn’t wobble in the row behind.
‘No,
Dad
has moved out,’ I say, getting annoyed but trying not to show it.
‘Flo, are you going to go on about your dad being depressed again? It really brings me down.’
‘He moved out, and I miss him.’
‘It’s all you talk about,’ says Sally, meanly.
I start to arrange my desk.
‘Haven’t you even got a new pencil case this year?’ Sally asks, moving the conversation on.
‘This one is OK,’ I say quietly.
‘OK, OK, OK. Everything is always just “OK”. It’s so boring. Who wants to be “OK”?’
I sit for a moment and think about what she said. It doesn’t take me long to realise that I, quite genuinely, just want to be OK.
Nana rips open the curtains and stands over us, mumbling something along the lines of ‘New term, new start’. I throw my hands over my eyes to try to ignore the morning, but she is determined that this will be her first and final visit to our bedroom before school.
‘I’m in the bathroom first,’ barks Nell as her skinny silhouette stalks past the end of my bed. She’ll be in there for ages as usual, but I can wait. My hunger is already forcing me to get up.
Pop is sitting at the kitchen table wearing a white vest, gulping hot tea like a glass of water and fixing the sole of one of Nana’s shoes. He is making grunting noises.
‘Morning, Pop. Want some bacon?’ I ask.
‘I don’t eat during the day,’ he replies, not looking up.
I already knew that. He’s never eaten during the day. Mum told me it was about control. That he sets himself challenges to remind himself who is boss. If you ask me, he doesn’t need to skip meals to show anyone who is boss. With a temper like his, no one is in any doubt who makes the rules in this house.
‘Make sure you make enough for your little sister, Renée. Don’t be selfish.’
I loaf over to the fridge, peel four slices of value bacon from the massive pile in the packet and dangle them in front of me as I walk over to the stove. I know full well that making breakfast for Nell is a total waste of time.
‘I want an egg as well. No, I want two eggs, and bacon, and three slices of toast, and cocoa pops,’ she says when she comes downstairs. She shovels food into her mouth like she hasn’t eaten for weeks. Nana and Pop tell her she’s a good girl, but I find it hard to watch.
After washing up my plate and the cups that were left in the sink, I kiss Nana. She’s holding her fixed shoe that’s just two short walks away from failing her for the fiftieth and final time. I head up to the bathroom.
‘You washed your plate, Renée?’ Pop shouts after me.
I bite my tongue.
With the bathroom door closed I open Mum’s make-up drawer. It’s still just as she left it eight years ago. The smell of Chanel No. 5 comes wafting out. Her blusher brush still red at the tips, exactly the same colour as her cheeks used to be. I close my eyes and run it over my face. As the bristles tickle my nose all the hairs on my arm stand up and then a solid tear falls out of my eye and lands on my top lip. I don’t know why some mornings I get a tear and some mornings I don’t. Maybe it has something to do with my dreams. Last night I dreamed that Mum didn’t really die, that she had just got into trouble with the police and had to go into hiding until they stopped looking for her. I woke in the night convinced it was true, then realised it couldn’t be as I was in bed in her old bedroom, the room that she died in. The last place I ever saw her.
I love Mum’s drawer. The fact that no one has thrown anything from it away is proof that we’re all clinging on to something. This evidence is comforting as no one would ever say it out loud. I know the others look in it too because sometimes I lay a hair over her make-up and by the end of the day it has always moved. The drawer is like an altar in a church. It’s sacred. To get rid of Mum’s drawer would be the final stage of letting her go. None of us is ready to do that.
‘HURRY UP!!’ yells Nell as she pounds on the door. I quickly brush my teeth and let her in. She snarls at me as I skim past her and the door is slammed shut before I barely have the chance to get through it.
Five minutes later I am dressed. My school uniform at least reminds me that there is a life for me beyond this grey, depressed house. I run down the stairs, grab the sandwiches I made last night from the fridge, and leave.
The summer holidays have been long. I can’t wait to get back to school.
My walk to school serves its purpose, as always. I like to call it my daily evolution. I leave the house with my head hanging and arrive at school with my chin up ready to have some fun. It’s like the picture in the science lab of the ape turning into man by gradually standing up over a series of drawings. I leave the house an ape, I arrive a human. OK, maybe ape is a bit dramatic, but I really don’t feel like myself when I am at home.