Girl, (Nearly) 16: Absolute Torture! (6 page)

Still, Fred would understand. And they’d be able to keep in touch. There’d be internet cafes and she would send him a postcard every day. Maybe even whole long letters.

It was nearly lunchtime when the phone rang again. They were all downstairs. Jess was laying the table, her mum was fixing some soup and Granny was reading the murder trial reports.

‘Oh, who on earth’s that?’ said Mum. ‘Someone always rings up when I’m cooking. Keep your eye on this soup, Jess. Don’t let it boil.’ She walked over and picked up the phone. ‘Hello? Madeleine Jordan speaking.’

Jess stirred the soup and turned it down. But right away she noticed there was something odd about her mum’s body language. Something bad.

‘What?’ said Mum. ‘
What?
I see . . . No, no, I can assure you this is news to me. It explains a lot, though.’ And she turned round and gave Jess a glare that could have grilled bacon.

‘There’s been a murder in Bognor,’ said Granny, irrelevantly. Jess quailed. It seemed as if there might be a murder a lot nearer home, any minute now.

‘No, I’m sorry, but it’s out of the question,’ her mum said, quite snappily, to whoever it was on the phone.

Jess’s mind whirled blindly. She couldn’t imagine who it was. She just knew she was deeply submerged in elephant poo, right up to her chin.

‘I don’t think Jess is nearly old enough, and besides, we’re leaving for a family holiday tomorrow . . . That’s OK . . . Bye!’ Her mum slammed down the phone and turned to confront Jess, her eyes spitting rage.

‘That was Fred’s mother,’ she said, ‘asking if I’d prefer you to take two tents rather than one to Riverdene, and offering her spare one. Very considerate of her, wasn’t it?’

Chapter 8

Jess opened her mouth to try and protest, but her mum had only paused for breath, and dived back in.

‘So it was Fred’s idea to go to the festival – he’s the one who’s got the tickets – and you didn’t have the guts to tell me.’

‘We were all going!’ shouted Jess. ‘Loads of us! OK, it was Fred’s idea in the first place. But the whole gang was involved: Flora, Jodie . . .’ For an instant Jess was so panicked, her mind went blank and she couldn’t remember the names of any of her friends. So she invented some. ‘Gloria, Toby, Hamish, Max, Cleo . . . Ben J, Ben S, Ben . . . X –’

‘I’ve never heard of any of these people!’ yelled her mum. ‘For all I know they could be drug dealers or something! Why do you have to sneak around doing things behind my back all the time? I never know what’s going on and you never come clean!’

‘You’re the one who never comes clean!’ exploded Jess. ‘I’ve been asking you for years why you and Dad split up and I never get a straight answer!’

Granny, who had been watching the shouting match like a tennis umpire, suddenly put her finger up and, in the brief silence which followed, she said, ‘I just want to remind you, Madeleine, that you were young and foolish once – not that I’m saying Jess is foolish, mind.’

Dear Granny! Jess made immediate plans to name her first child after her. Not ‘Granny’ obviously – that would be something of a social handicap. But Granny’s first name, Valerie, would surely come back into fashion sooner or later.

Jess’s mother gave Granny an exasperated glance, and shot a last ferocious glare at Jess.

‘I’m certainly not going to waste the rest of the day bickering. Go upstairs and finish your packing, Jess. We all need an early night.’

It seemed as if Jess would have to abandon her plans for a secret meeting with Fred at seven o’clock by the park gates. She went up to her room and sent him a text.

AS YOU’LL HAVE GATHERED, MUM ASCENDED THE NEAREST WALL. SORRY. NO HOPE OF GETTING OUT TONIGHT. BE GOOD WHILE I’M AWAY, AND FOR GOODNESS’ SAKE TEXT ME DAILY.

Instantly the reply came back.

MY HEART HAS BROKEN WITH A SICKENING CRACK AUDIBLE IN ICELAND. I’LL SELL THE RIVERDENE TICKETS AND BUY LOADS OF VIOLENT DVDS INSTEAD. WRITE ME A LETTER NOW AND THEN, OK? LUCKILY I WON’T HAVE TO REPLY AS YOU WON’T HAVE A FIXED ADDRESS.

Jess felt slightly comforted by the thought of writing Fred letters. She started one straightaway.

Dear Fred,

This is the first of a series of letters describing the horrors of travel in the 21st century. I am upstairs in my tragic little bedroom, packing.
I
’m only packing black clothes, of course. I shall be in mourning throughout this doomed trip. I shall pose picturesquely against haunted ruins, at sunset, with ravens in my hair, utterly deranged and occasionally muttering,
‘
Fred . . . Fred . .
.
’

I
t
’s a shame you have
n
’t got a slightly more tragic name. I mean – Fred. Not much grandeur there. I think I shall rename you. How about Archibald? Or would you prefer Hamlet? Hamlet Parsons – it has a certain ring.

I
’m bracing myself for an early start. My mum has O
D
’d on history guidebooks and I dread wha
t
’s in store:
‘
Jess, are you listening? Here is the stone where King Egbert the Hard-boiled was mashed up with mayonnaise by the Vikings in the year 809. And this is the tower where St Kylie received the Sacred Acne. In this garden Prince Flatulent proposed to Lady Isabel Ginger-Niblets in 1678. And this flower commemorates their love, as well as being a cure for severe halitosis. I
t
’s called the lesser spotted stinkweed. Rub some on your gums and feel it tingle
!
’

So, my dear Hamlet, tomorrow morning I shall be wrenched away from the divine city where you live. I shall be dragged screaming down country lanes infested with thundering herds of squirrels and things.

But you – you will be left here undefended against evil. Beautiful girls will pass you in the street, giving you saucy sidelong glances. They will be playing tennis gracefully whenever you walk in the park, flashing their bronzed elbows seductively in the sunshine. How will you ever hold out?

There was one local girl in particular that Jess was worried about. Flora, of course. She and Fred might not need the romantic setting of a campfire at a festival. They might just bump into each other in the High Street and go for a coffee, and one thing might lead to another.

Eventually Jess prayed briefly for God to smite all the local girls with boils, and make Flora smell like a rubbish bin full of rotting cabbage – just for the duration of Jess’s holiday. Then she went back to her packing.

Chapter 9

Next day they started early. Normally at 8.15 a.m. (in the holidays, anyway) Jess would have been turning over in bed and sinking luxuriously into a dream about being chased around dark city streets by an ape in a tutu. But today, by 8.15 a.m. they were already driving down the motorway.

‘Oh, look at the sky! Have you ever seen such blue!’ cried Jess’s mum hysterically. Her normal character, mostly stern and anxious, seemed to have been replaced by a disconcerting, deranged joy.

This happened occasionally when her mum had a chance to wallow in nature or history. History and nature were clearly going to loom large on this trip. Jess sighed.

‘Blue is my favourite colour!’ Mum went on, as if she hadn’t already done it justice. ‘So many lovely things are blue. Sapphires . . . the sea . . .’

‘What’s your favourite colour, Jess?’ asked Granny from the front passenger seat.

‘Black,’ said Jess. She was dressed from head to toe in black.

‘Oh, that black thing is just a phase!’ said her mum. ‘You’ll grow out of it.’

Jess made immediate plans to wear nothing but black for the rest of her life. She would even get married in black (if indeed she ever got married). She would wear a long dress in black satin, carry a bouquet of black flowers, wear jet earrings and a deep black veil, and on her shoulder she would display her pet raven, Nero.

Fred would wear white, though. She hoped it would be Fred she was marrying, anyway. She certainly couldn’t imagine herself ever marrying anyone else. Yes, Fred would wear a white suit, white shoes and a white rose in his buttonhole. And possibly, for that final little weird touch, white contact lenses.

Jess spent the next hour fantasising about marrying Fred. Their wedding day would be at Christmas, so he would never forget their anniversary, and the buffet would include deep-fried mince pies.

‘The ancient Britons and the Celts both worshipped the horse,’ said her mum suddenly, just as Jess was about to give birth to divinely beautiful twins called Freda and Freddo – painlessly and without blood or slime. ‘You’ve probably seen those big white chalk horses on hillsides – installation art from the Bronze Age.’

‘When was the Bronze Age?’ asked Granny.

‘About two to four thousand years ago,’ said Jess’s mum. ‘You’d have loved it. There was a large amount of gratuitous violence.’

‘Oh, lovely, dear!’ said Granny. ‘I love those archaeology programmes on the TV. Especially when they find those skulls that have been bashed in with a heavy object.’

Jess sometimes thought that, in a previous existence, her granny might have been a ruthlessly brutal warlord.

‘There’s a figure I want you to see,’ said Mum. ‘It’s in Dorset, on the hillside, cut out in the chalk. But it’s not a horse.’

Thank goodness
, thought Jess. She had never really got into that whole horsy thing. She could imagine Flora galloping along a beach, her hair streaming in the wind like a shampoo ad, but Jess was sure that if she ever tried to meddle with horses, she’d find herself upside down in a hedge, with her bra straps wrapped round a bird’s nest.