Dancing With Mr. Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen and Chawton House Library (12 page)

THE OXFAM DRESS

Penelope Randall

Kelsey, Lucy, Bex. And Charlie.

The problem was cash, or rather, the lack of it. Charlie didn’t have the means to Keep Up, so one day soon three beautiful friendships must end. A chunk of her world would vaporise and vanish. When this mood hit her Charlie pictured light sabres from Star Wars.
Ker-pow.
Just like that.

Kelsey, Lucy, Bex and Charlie. Charlie let them down, and not just with money. For one thing she enjoyed doing homework, and for another there was her hair. It was a) red and b) unstraightenable. Persistent offences for which she must eventually pay the price.

She guessed this ought to bother her more than it did.

‘Charity shops are cool,’ she suggested one lunchtime, while they were sitting in Subway digesting the warm smells of mass-produced bread and too many fillings. They watched Bex growing bored with her salami and brie. She’d begun picking out olives and flicking them into a soggy heap on the table top.

Kelsey, newly-blonded and with a sufficient coating of fake tan to insulate her from most of life’s barbs, tapped her lip. ‘Why?’

‘Good places to buy from,’ Charlie said. Of them all, Kelsey had the most disposable cash; at their school wealth seemed to come in inverse proportion to brains. Charlie quietly hugged to herself the fact that none of the others knew what inverse proportion meant. Charlie was in the top maths set, with the nerdy girls who wanted to do it for A level.

‘Buying is like giving them a donation. And you end up with something you want. Maybe a bargain.’ She nibbled regretfully at an olive. It was always hopeless to mention how little you’d spent on something. Admiration, after all, went simply and directly in line with price.

As if to press home this obvious truth Bex wrinkled her nose. ‘Why would you want to?’ Bex’s teeth were tanked with wire, as if her opinions needed shoring up.

‘There’s this blue dress in Oxfam.’

Lucy’s phone buzzed with an incoming text. Lucy was tall and naturally golden and used to play tennis for the school before she got too cool for sport.

‘Josh passed his driving test!’

It was summer, GCSEs, and Year Eleven was drawing to an anxious and disorientating close. Charlie got up at seven-thirty every morning and did an hour’s revision before breakfast. The others lay in bed until lunchtime unless they had an exam, when they’d need time in front of the mirror with straighteners and lip gloss, texting each other about how little they knew. Panic was a competitive sport.

‘I don’t get it,’ Kelsey moaned as they left Subway. It took twelve-and-a-half minutes to walk to school. ‘LECDs. Tell me.’

‘LEDCs,’ Bex said. ‘Less Economically Developed Countries.’

‘Less than what?’

‘Than MEDCs. It’s on the front of the exam paper.’

‘So, they’re, like, poor.’

The girls rounded the corner by the post office and the school gates slid into view. Charlie read the latest from Lucy’s phone.

‘Josh is getting a car.’

Josh was big and dark and beautiful, with hair down to his shoulders and a bum in his rugby shorts that might have been carved from teak. During the winter they’d all taken to watching rugby on Thursday nights, parading their handwoven scarves and slouch boots along the touchline. They’d learned phrases like drop goal and forward pass. There was a bit of a frisson about walking into the boys’ school, from all the hormones that got mixed with the floor polish in the corridors. Little boys at the lockers gawped as they went past. Sometimes the teachers did too, but they never said anything, not if you’d come to watch sport. Boys’ schools encouraged that kind of thing.

‘He wants a Mini Cooper. One of those new ones.’

Josh was also Lucy’s unreachable stepbrother. He occupied a separate and unimaginable stratospheric orbit, coddled by other grey suits and yellow-striped sixth form ties, worn wide and loose and sexy. Kelsey, Lucy, Bex and Charlie picked out names to decorate their school planners in highlighter pens and Tipp-Ex. Ben, Josh, Grant, Callum. They sought information from Facebook but none of the boys added them as a friend.

Worse, the rugby season had ended months ago.

Eighty-four girls in damp white shirts huddled in the school foyer, clutching biros and rulers.

‘Hey. Megan looks scared.’ Kelsey nudged Bex.

‘Scared she’ll get less than ninety-nine percent.’

Charlie turned to glance at Megan, who sat behind her in maths and barely spoke. Megan had waist-length hair that no one remembered ever being cut. It was as greasy as chip fat and had a halo of split ends.

‘No time to shower when there’s LEDCs to learn,’ Bex murmured, but somehow loud enough for everyone to hear.

Charlie knew, because her mum talked to Megan’s mum – they lived on the same estate and had younger siblings who walked to the primary school two streets away – that Megan washed her hair sometimes twice a day, and took medication for her acne. The drugs she’d been prescribed were so dangerous you had to do a pregnancy test before they let you have them. Even if you’d never had a boyfriend.

She hadn’t mentioned any of this to Kelsey and Lucy and Bex.

From her corner Megan smiled at Charlie, the sort of woebegone little smile that made Charlie want to team up with Bex and squirt superglue into Megan’s ponytail. Although of course there were days when she thought of rallying Megan so that together they could gather all the Ugg boots and designer handbags and chuck them in Lost Property with the old gym shorts and rancid lunchboxes. Occasionally Megan walked to school with Charlie, but usually her dad gave her a lift so she didn’t have to walk anywhere with anyone. Charlie held up crossed fingers and grinned non-committally, jiggling her pens.

‘Don’t encourage her,’ Kelsey hissed.

Afterwards, numbed by Geography, they reeled into Starbucks. Bex and Lucy ordered iced cappuccinos. Charlie, who had to rely for cash on her Saturday job at the newsagent’s, leaned on the counter and read a message from her phone.

What did u think? Last q was murder r u @ kelsey’s?

Megan was the only person Charlie knew who used apostrophes in her texts. She flipped the Back button to hide the screen and watched Lucy rearranging her hair in a fresh cascade of glossy clichés. Vibrant. Glowing. Because She Was Worth It.

Sometimes Charlie managed to think of her own hair as
pre-Raphaelite.
Days like this it was just frizzy, and badly conditioned to boot.

‘There was this top in Monsoon,’ Bex began loudly. Charlie sighed.

‘Come with me to look at that dress?’ she said to Kelsey.

Charlie’s mum worked in the Oxfam shop on Wednesday afternoons and gave Charlie a lift home at the end of the day if she didn’t mind hanging around for an hour, helping with the stock. Today was Thursday.

As Kelsey crossed the threshold her face actually puckered, like she needed a pomander to stuff under her nose. It seemed to Charlie, annoyingly, that the clothes in the shop were thinner and more lifeless than usual. Granny garments, and not in the nice, retro,
antique
sense, like twenties lace or a real cloche hat. This stuff was more printed polyester and jersey knits in poisonous patterns. She hooked the blue dress off its rail.

She’d remembered it as silky, but now she saw that the fabric was cheap and stiff, its colour an electric ultramarine rather than the pale indigo she’d held in her head. Which was annoying because Charlie had a knack for recalling shades. She’d arrive at art lessons with colour schemes memorised and ready to put to paper. She got them right, too. Charlie was hoping to do Art for A level. They all wanted to, but in Bex’s and Kelsey’s and Lucy’s cases it was because there was nothing else they liked. And they thought Art was easy.

‘Well?’ Charlie draped the dress over her arm, knowing that Art was actually impossible. How could anyone look at something you’d created for an exam and give it a
mark? A
mere number? Kelsey shrugged. ‘It’s up to you.’

‘I think,’ Charlie retaliated archly, ‘that I may as well buy it.’

Behind the cash desk were pictures of African people with goats and spice baskets and piles of woven blankets in sunburned colours. The assistant reached forward and Charlie noticed too late that it was Malcolm, the work-experience boy with the speech impediment, whose mouth didn’t ever seem to close properly. He always had a fine thread of drool running down the side of his chin. Malcolm used to be Special Needs and now Charlie’s mum supervised him at work. Sometimes he helped Charlie with the stock check. It took ages longer.

‘Pretty,’ Malcolm declared, running the fabric of the dress across his hand. ‘It’ll suit y—y—you.’ The expression on Kelsey’s face drilled loudly through the back of Charlie’s head.

‘Working Thursday this week, Malcolm?’ She pulled her shoulders into line. Vital not to show weakness.

‘Ei—Ei—Eileen’s off. She’s at a we—we—wedding.’

Charlie wrenched her purse from her blazer pocket.

‘It’s in I—I—Ireland.’

‘That’s nice.’ She realised now that the dress was dreadful, beyond any hope of resurrection through minor means such as a change of buttons or a new neck insert of cotton lace. Why had she ever imagined that might work?

‘Seven pounds p—p—please,’ said Malcolm. He was staring at Kelsey without apprehension. He carried on staring.

It struck Charlie like a giant paper dart soaked in cold water.
He fancies her.
The idea was so awful she thought the whole room might actually implode. They’d all be buried neck-deep in hideous garments and ethically-sourced chocolate bars.

Worse, any moment now poor Malcolm would be telling them about his newest computer game, or even the buses he’d spotted in his lunch hour. Charlie had a ten pound note in her hand, practically her entire remaining earnings from Saturday. She banged it down on the counter. ‘I don’t want the change.’ Then she bolted for the door, ushering Kelsey’s attention towards a poster in the window.

‘“Ten pounds buys three sacks of seeds for a poor farmer.”’

‘Oxfam shops. Good places to spend money.’

It was Josh. Impossibly just there, on the pavement, ranged with Ben and Grant and Callum. Looking like they’d dropped off the cover of Cool Guys Monthly.

You could hear Kelsey’s brain changing gear. She gained three inches in height and more in chest size. ‘It’s, like, you’re giving them a donation,’ she declared. ‘For poor people in
LEDCs.’

Josh nodded. ‘What did you buy?’

Charlie rearranged her grip on her bag and relaxed into the spectacle of Kelsey’s orange face working overtime while her mouth remained obstinately slack.

Charlie’s phone buzzed.

‘Megan?’ Instead of relief at the change of topic, Kelsey’s lower lip displayed asymmetric derision.

Revise quadratic equations tonite?

Then Josh – they were still here, Josh and Ben and Grant and Callum – kicked thoughtfully at a bit of gravel. ‘Megan Edwards?’

‘Yes.’

‘Paul Edwards’s sister?’

Kelsey glanced at Charlie.

‘Yes.’ Charlie realised that Kelsey, Bex and Lucy had no idea of Paul’s existence. Megan’s older brother was barely seen in real life. He was thin and gangly and had rosy, hairless skin like a toddler.

‘Going to Cambridge,’ Josh went on. ‘Natural Sciences. Fast bowler.’

Thus was Paul Edwards alternatively defined. Ben’s and Grant’s and Callum’s feet scraped the pavement in agreement.

There was a pause, and Charlie waited for some recollection from Kelsey of best friendship with Megan and Paul. Aligning herself for reflected glory was an accomplishment, sometimes jaw-droppingly effective.

And it was always a mistake to underestimate her.

‘Last exam tomorrow,’ Kelsey began, her utterance of the word knocking Charlie off-balance. ‘Maths. Anyone like to help me out?’

Charlie fingered her phone. ‘Actually—’

‘Josh,’ Kelsey rounded on him, chemically aglow. ‘You’re a maths bod.’

He smiled back. ‘We have nets this evening.’

‘What?’

‘Cricket practice. Team selection for the weekend.’

‘Oh. Yeah.’

Charlie blinked as Kelsey failed to grasp the implications. The boys turned to walk away and jagged lines appeared around them. The sun became unexpectedly brighter. Charlie imagined a migraine would be like that. Or an acid trip.

Cricket.
Why hadn’t they thought of it?

She flipped open her phone, scrolled to Megan’s text and pressed Reply.

Warm, grassy afternoons. Cold beer. No more exams. Leg before wickets and no balls and silly mid-offs. It surely wasn’t rocket science to mug up on this stuff. You just had to have some working brain cells. The right connections. A plan.

With enough determination, tables could be turned. Flipped right over – if your friendships were already fatally flawed. Thinking hard, Charlie twisted a strand of uncooperative red hair around her forefinger and yanked it tight.

Ouch.

Kelsey, Lucy and Bex always knew what they wanted, and grabbed it.

Four doors further down the street Charlie skipped into the Age Concern shop and dropped the blue dress into a box by the counter. After a moment she did the same with her school blazer. Recycling, she thought happily. Setting things in motion all over again, somewhere around the loop.