Wonderland (10 page)

July

THE HEAT
is unbearable. Headlining the
Western Daily
and every conversation at the till. Scorching the grass brown. Steering wheels burn to the touch, and passengers’ faces drip with sweat, windows wound down and Atlantic FM blaring out.

Stella and I lie on the Point, wearing SPF 30, smoking and reading lines. All the time, me trying to forget why we’re there. The audition. Pretend it’s nothing. But it overwhelms my every thought.

It’s just a day away now. I’ve booked the train. Dad paid for it. He has given me a map, an
A–Z
with the Tube stop and the Lab marked in red pen.

Sometimes I’m scared of getting in. Scared that London is bigger, brighter, better than I can ever be. That I won’t touch its surface. That it will swallow me and spit me out. Another small-town nobody who didn’t make it.

Other times I’m scared I won’t get in. That I’m nowhere near good enough. That Isabella sounds like a whining prissy, or an overblown stage-school brat. That I should have picked Juliet after all. Or Viola, and gone for laughs. That the piece is too obscure. That I can’t dance. That I’ll end up like the other village kids, doling out gum and papers and getting fat, purple veins bulging on my legs like Mrs. Hickman’s.

“Christ. It’s like Calcutta out here.” Stella drops the book and picks up her cigarettes. A bead of sweat runs down her chest, bikini top discarded for a lineless tan.

“Kolkata. It got changed. Anyway, come on. It’s tomorrow.”

“For God’s sake. You’ve done the same speech for weeks. Even I know it by heart.
That had he twenty heads to tender down/On twenty bloody blocks, he’d yield them up . . .
Fol de rol, blah blah —”

“OK!”

She shrugs and lights up, holding the packet out to me. I take one and reach into my pocket for a lighter. Not her Zippo. A red plastic one, from the shop, that Stella said I needed now that I was serious. I am, I guess. My throat and lungs slowly hardening to the harsh burning. And I crave them. Not the nicotine, maybe. Not yet. But the feeling I get watching myself being this person.

“You need to look different.” Stella brushes ash off her left breast. “There’s no shock. You’re a nun playing a nun. You need to look like — I don’t know — like a slut.”

I smile. “Like you, you mean.”

“Ouch. But, yeah,” she concedes. “Then when you start doing the whole
Isabella, live chaste
thing, it’s, like, oh, my God.”

“I guess,” I admit.

“And drama students are all sluts anyway.” Stella inhales again, then speaks through the smoke. “So, if you’re a slut that can play a nun, you’re their ideal candidate.”

“I’m not, though,” I insist.

“They don’t know that.” She smiles.

I shiver, despite the heat. I’m scared. Because I know what Stella’s makeovers involve. Seen my Barbie and others like it go from prom queen to Goth whore.

Stella leans back on her elbows, smoke mixing with her laughter. “Don’t worry. I won’t make you look like a freak.” She smiles, waiting for the beat. “Not totally, anyway.”

I laugh and kick her. She kicks me back. Then I pick up the Shakespeare and hit her with it.

“Bitch!” Leaving her cigarette in her mouth, she grabs her Coke and tips it over me. It soaks through my T-shirt, making it stick to my hot skin.

I yelp. “Stella! That’s gross.”

“Take it off,” she tells me.

“I can’t. I’m not wearing a bra.”

“So? Not like I haven’t seen it before.”

“I know, but —”

“But nothing. Who else is up here? A load of random tourists? They won’t give a toss.”

The top stuck to me, I look like a photo in a girlie magazine anyway. I pull it over my head, then pour the last of my water over me.

“What are you doing?” Stella says.

“Wasps.” Like it’s obvious.

“Great. So we’ll die of thirst now.” She sighs, then smiles at me slyly. “Wasp stings might improve them, anyway.”

“Stella!” I hug my chest, embarrassed.

“Joking. You’re gorgeous and you know it.”

I smile. “You know the Hollys are getting theirs done for their eighteenth birthdays — 34DD.”

“How low-rent.” Stella lies back and closes her eyes behind the Ray-Bans. I lie next to her, her arm against mine. She reaches for my hand and squeezes it. I feel safe and warm. And that’s how we fall asleep.

“Jude?”

I open my eyes. Everywhere is white. Sun-bleached. I close them again. The sky is burned onto my retina.

“Jude?”

I sit up. Stella is gone. Ed is standing over me. Staring. I grab the damp T-shirt and clutch it to me. I feel anger rise in me. That she’s gone. That he’s here. I don’t know.

“Had a good look, have you?” I sneer. “How long have you been there anyway?”

“What do you think I am? Some kind of perv? You’re just a schoolgirl.” He picks up the bikini top Stella has left and throws it at me. “Here. You never know who might be watching.” His sarcasm bites me.

I feel anger coursing through me. Electricity, making my heart pound, the blood singing in my head. But I put it on, pulling the red halter neck over my head, snapping the strap. “What are you doing here, anyway?” I ask.

“Came to find you. It’s tomorrow, isn’t it? The audition?”

I pick up the half-smoked cigarette and fumble for my lighter. “Yup.”

“So . . . good luck,” he says.

I exhale slowly. Shrug. “Thanks.”

Ed is silent. And it is a silence I can feel. Not like our old ones. Awkward now. And I don’t know if it’s just Stella. Or if there’s something else, something changing us, pushing us apart.

“Good luck,” he repeats.

“You said that.”

“Yeah.”

Silence.

“What time do you get back?” he asks.

“Dunno. Half nine.”

Silence.

“I’ll pick you up from the station.”

“Dad’ll be there,” I retort.

“So he’s changed his mind?”

“Yup.”

Silence.

“That’s good.”

I shrug and say nothing still. Though he’s right.

“Jude. You can . . . talk to me, you know. If something’s wrong.”

“What are you now, a shrink?”

“No. God. It’s just. You’re not — I don’t know —
you
anymore, Jude.”

I laugh, spiteful. “Who am I, then?”

“I don’t know.”

Silence.

“Well. Call me.” He stands up, one hand shielding his eyes against the sun. “Tell me how it goes.”

“Yup.”

Silence. I can feel the cigarette burning down, the ash falling on my fingers.

“See you, then.”

“Wouldn’t want to be you.” But I’m not smiling this time. Because I mean it.

“Whatever.” Ed shakes his head.

I watch him walk back up the slope to the Land Rover. Slow in the heat. And the anger still burns inside me. I’m not a schoolgirl. Not anymore. And I’m going to prove it.

I decide I’ll let Stella do what she wants. Be her personal
Extreme Makeover
project. From nobody to smoking hot in one edit.

Stella shows up after tea. Takes the new
Vogue
and
Elle
off the shelf downstairs and sets up a salon in my bedroom. Cheesy music on the CD player and my head wrapped in a fading pink towel as we flick through the glossy pages for an hour. Peroxide mixing with the sickly sweet rock-candy smell of nail varnish. Dizzy. High. The heat slowing everything down. Waiting for me to emerge.

Five hours later and I’m staring at the not me in the mirror. I am different. Four-packets-of-Clairol-Ash-Blond, heavy-black-eyeliner, and lipstick different. Not obscure anymore, but stand-out, look-at-me bright. Shimmering. A butterfly.

“I can’t believe it’s me.”

“You. Totally. Rock.” Stella nudges me over on the chair so she can squeeze in next to me. We see our reflections and laugh. Because I’m not me. I’m her.

She leans on my shoulder. “There is no me without you. Remember?”

We look at ourselves. At each other.

“See, Jude?”

And I do see. I am still me inside. But now I have Stella’s hair, Stella’s face. She is everything I am not. Everything I want to be. And I can feel it. Feel what she must feel every day. Feel what Mum must have felt. Because right then I know that the world turns for me alone.

I go downstairs for Diet Coke. Dad is in the kitchen, reading the sports pages. He looks up, startled. I wait for the shouting and the demands to dye it back. Back to brown. Back to nothing. But he just stares at the stranger I am now, then goes back to who beat who and by how much. As if it matters. As if it makes a difference.

I walk back up the stairs. Slowly. Each footstep digging into him, I think. Reminding him of life.

“
YOU LOOK
like a film star.” Alfie is agog. His Rice Krispies stopped snap, crackle, and popping ten minutes ago and lie soggy in the milk.

I am trying to chew toast. But the butter clags in my mouth and my stomach contracts, full of nerves. I drop it onto the plate and push it away.

“Dad, can I have yellow hair too?” Alfie dreams of another new disguise.

“It’s not yellow; it’s blond,” I mutter.

“No, you can’t,” Dad says, handing him a glass of juice. He gives me a foil package. “I’ve made you a sandwich for the train. Here.”

I can smell sausages. Last night’s tea. Cold with ketchup on sliced white, I guess. My stomach turns. But I know it’s a big thing. That he’s trying to make up for before. “Thanks.” I push the package into my bag. Where I know it’ll lie forgotten, heating up before I throw it in a bin on a London street.

I’m wearing another dress from Dixie’s, bought with the last of Gran’s money. A green vintage thing with a sweetheart neckline. And scuffed red ballet flats. All Stella’s work. Said they made me look interesting but not like I was trying too hard. “Everyone else’ll be in black. Bloody drama students always are. You’ll stand out. In a good way.”

But alone I feel odd. Not me but not her either. Just a stupid girl dressing up in someone else’s clothes. And I want to go back upstairs and put something black on, so I am one of them.

“Oh, my Lord!”

Mrs. Hickman is here to look after Alfie and the shop while Dad takes me to the train. A blur of white flesh and blue cotton and a faint smell of bleach.

She stares at my head.

“You let her do that?”

Dad holds his hands up.

Mrs. Hickman shakes her head. “Jude, you had lovely hair. Why, for pity’s sake?”

Sarcasm rises like bile. I smile. A film-star smile. “Because I’m worth it.”

Alfie giggles.

But Dad saves me. And himself. “Jude. Time to go.”

I grab my bag and push back the chair, scraping the tiles and knocking the table. Alfie’s juice spills.

“Dad!” Alfie is soaked, the orange staining his pajamas.

“Jude.” Dad groans.

“Sorry.” I sigh.

But Mrs. Hickman already has a cloth. She must carry them in her handbag. Maybe mums do that. Normal mums. She mops the table and sends Alfie upstairs to change.

“Well, good luck. Though why you lot all want to go up to London I’ll never know.”

She sounds like a sitcom character. The dumb local. And I’m the surly teenager with big ideas, set for a fall.

“Because it’s not here,” I say.

She tuts and tips my uneaten toast in the bin.

Dad stays in the van, waiting until the train has pulled out. I watch through the window. See him start up and turn left back to the coast road. Feel the ten-pound note he pushed into my hand before I got out. “Just in case,” he said.

“I’ve got money,” I lied. But I took it anyway. Put it in my purse with the twenty-pence coins he’d taken out of the till and given me for phone calls. I don’t have a mobile. No point. Churchtown is the Wild West. The last outpost with no reception. So the phone box is always busy. Tourists queuing in the summer to order cabs and pizza and check surf reports. Saying, “Isn’t it a relief to be away from it all?” Like it was in the seventies. But secretly longing to get back to their BlackBerrys and Wi-Fi and lattes.

The train is quiet. Just six other seats taken in my carriage. The rest reserved from Exeter, Taunton, Reading. Places that sound gray, lifeless. Nowhere places. I look at the other passengers, with their newspapers and polystyrene cups and early morning silence. All men, four in suits. Not even the heat can persuade them out of their uniform. Two older. Retired, maybe. Still smart, though. I wonder why they are on the train. Are they going somewhere life-changing, like me? Or just to work, one of the faceless, nameless thousands scuttling into tall buildings before scuttling home again. Never making their mark. Never leaving their imprint on the world.

The Lab dances inside me. Turning my stomach, making my foot tap and my hand shake, alive with nerves. And I wish Stella were here.

“You won’t need me,” she’d said, pushing me at the mirror again. “Look. I’m with you. I’m in you.”

But I want her next to me. Telling me it’s all right. That I can do it. That I’m special.

“Can’t afford it,” she said.

“I’ll lend it to you, then.”

But she shook her head. “You’ll be fine.”

I say it to myself. I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine. If I say it enough, maybe it will come true.