Girl, (Nearly) 16: Absolute Torture! (7 page)

If they were going to have to look at some of that Celtic chalk art stuff on a hillside, Jess would prefer it to be an amusing chimp or a cute meerkat.

‘OK, here we are,’ said Mum, giggling rather foolishly as she pulled off the road and into a car park. ‘Don’t look yet – just get out of the car and keep your eyes down on the ground.’

They piled out and kept their eyes down. Jess hoped her mum wouldn’t go in for this
surprise surprise
thing too often. It seemed ever so slightly infantile.

‘Right!’ said Jess’s mum. ‘Now look across the valley – over there.’

Jess glanced up and almost died with embarrassment. Across the valley, on the opposite hillside, and cut into the chalk like the white horse, was the gigantic figure of a naked man. No detail was missing, not even his private parts. In fact it would be true to say that no parts have ever been less private.

Chapter 10

‘Mum!’ shrieked Jess. ‘How totally gross! What did you want to show us that for? It’s disgusting!’

Granny was screwing up her eyes and peering intently at the figure.

‘It seems to me, dear,’ she said, ‘that his head is much smaller than his whatyamacallit.’

‘Well, that’s men for you,’ said Jess’s mum. ‘Tiny brains, obviously. He’s a sort of fertility god. They did think he was thousands of years old, but now they reckon he only dates from maybe a couple of hundred years ago.’

‘These fertility figures!’ said Jess. ‘Always lying about their age. Trying to get into the history books. Like me trying to get into an eighteen certificate film – which, incidentally, I would never dream of doing.’

‘Well, that was the Cerne Abbas Giant,’ said Mum as they piled back into the car. ‘And now we’ll find a sweet little tea shop for lunch.’ It was the first sensible thing her mum had said all morning.

The sweet little tea shop proved to be just moments away, in the village. Jess devoured a massive chunk of cheese and potato pie. Her next challenge was to control her burps as her half-pint of Coke jostled up unpleasantly against her massive high-fat lunch, which had been the size of a small but delicious child.

The waiter was a really cool guy, plump and with black curly hair and long dark eyelashes. When he brought the pudding menu, Mum looked up and gave him a cheeky grin.

‘Has anyone ever said you look just like Tony Curtis in
Some Like It Hot
?’ she asked.

The guy shrugged, shook his head and gave a doubtful smile.

‘Most people say I look like a three-toed sloth,’ he said.

‘Oh, sloths are so cute!’ said Jess’s mum, with a ghastly skittish laugh, ‘I suppose we all have animal lookalikes. When Jess was a baby we used to call her duckling because of her little turned-up beak.’

Everybody at the table, in fact everybody in the tea shop – possibly everybody in the whole world – turned to look at Jess for a split second. It was the worst moment in her life since the incident with the minestrone soup bra inserts. She glared back at her mother through a bright red fog of blushing, trying not to look too much like a duck.

‘And what’s your animal lookalike, Mum?’ she hissed. ‘A skunk?’

‘I’d like a tiny piece of apple pie with cream, please,’ said Granny, skilfully directing attention away to the menu. ‘What about you, Jess? Some sticky toffee pudding?’

Jess didn’t want a pudding. Her tummy was already hurting a bit. It would put rather a dampener on the holiday if she were to explode before the end of the first day.

Dear Fred
, thought Jess (she would get it down on paper later).
My mum has become completely deranged – forcing Bronze Age nudes on us, flirting with a waiter young enough to be her own son and humiliating me in public. This holiday just gets better and better
.

‘We’re booked into a B&B in this village,’ said Mum, who had also passed on the pudding. ‘It’s called the Lilacs. I think I’ll just go and see if our rooms are ready, if you’ll excuse me.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Jess grimly. She had to get her mum on her own and give her a severe talking-to. Granny was quite happy to wait for them at the tea shop with a slice of apple pie and a cup of tea.

Jess and Mum set off down the village street.

‘Now listen, Mum!’ said Jess. ‘Promise me there won’t be any more gigantic naked men on this trip! And do try and keep your hands off the waiters!’

‘Oh, come on!’ Mum grinned. ‘Give me a break! I’ve had such a dull old year in the library. I know I’m being a bit over the top, but I feel positively skittish for the first time in ages. The clouds! The sky! The medieval churches! I’m like a kid that’s been let out of school!’

Bizarre. Usually it was Jess who was misbehaving and her mum laying down the law.

‘Embarrass the life out of me in public, then, why don’t you?’ said Jess. ‘Get drunk tonight and rip all your clothes off. Go for it.’

‘All right, then, I’ll try to behave,’ said Mum, as they arrived at the Lilacs. ‘But I might just go berserk again if I see something beautiful.’

There were very tall wrought-iron double gates, with pillars on both sides and stone balls on top.

‘What a fabulous gate!’ said Mum. ‘What a wonderful path!’

Jess sighed. She was completely off her head. Any minute now she would start kissing the tarmac.

The door was opened by a tall thin man with a grey goatee. Mum introduced herself and immediately started to compliment him on the garden.

‘What a marvellous gate!’ she enthused.

Jess cringed in anticipation of more foolish gushing.

However, the B&B was really nice, with beautiful high-ceilinged rooms painted grey and yellow and blue. Jess’s room overlooked a stream, and while Mum went back to get the car and to fetch Granny, Jess lay on her bed and switched on her mobile.

There were two messages! One from Fred and another one from Dad. Jess read Fred’s first.

I’VE DECIDED TO LOOK FOR WORK. WILL SAVE UP TO GIVE YOU MASSIVE TREAT WHEN YOU GET BACK.

Was this boy divine or not? Hastily Jess sent a text in reply, briefly describing the horrors of the trip so far and promising to elope with him the moment she got home.

Dad’s message was typically eccentric.

DID YOU GET MY TEXT YESTERDAY? LOOKING FORWARD HUGELY TO WELCOMING YOU TO MY HUMBLE ABODE. HAVE ORDERED A CARTLOAD OF CATFOOD AND A FLEA-COLLAR.

Jess replied,
CAN’T WAIT TO SCRATCH YOUR FURNITURE AND CATCH ALL YOUR DELICIOUS RATS.

Although she was still missing Fred like crazy, Jess was looking forward to seeing her dad again. He had such a surreal sense of humour. Unlike her mum. How on earth had her parents ever got together? It was a mystery. Maybe Jess would challenge him on the subject. Yes, she would back him into a corner and interrogate him, big time.

Later that afternoon, another message came from Fred.

GOT A FAB JOB! FOR A CATERER. AS WAITER. DOING A POSH WEDDING TOMORROW. LET’S HOPE LOTS OF TIPS. LOVE, FRED.

Jess was pleased for him, of course. But part of her wished he hadn’t managed to get a job quite so easily. She wouldn’t have minded if he’d spent the whole time lying on his sofa and watching TV. In fact, she’d have preferred it.

ANY BEAUTIFUL GIRLS WORKING THERE?
she texted back.
NOT THAT I CARE, OF COURSE.

Fred’s reply came back right away.

ALL GIRLS. KIND OF LOW-BUDGET CHEERLEADERS.

What on earth did he mean by that? Terror seized Jess’s soul. She was sure that by tomorrow night one of the low-budget cheerleaders would have struck. This was the beginning of the end.

Chapter 11

Jess went down to breakfast the next day, following a delicious smell of bacon. However, she was slightly alarmed to see that Granny had brought Grandpa’s ashes down to the dining room with her. His urn was right there on the table, between the salt and pepper. Jess was speechless, and tried to concentrate on her cornflakes.

‘When I was about your age,’ said Mum, out of the blue, ‘I had a crush on somebody.’

‘For goodness’ sake, Mum!’ said Jess. ‘Keep these embarrassing confessions to yourself.’

‘I’m only mentioning it,’ her mum went on, ‘because it’s to do with the place we’re going to today.’

‘Who was it?’ asked Jess. ‘One of those sixties rock stars? A crinkly old Rolling Stone?’

‘No,’ said her mum. ‘It was a bit unusual, I suppose – because he’d been dead for forty years. And his name,’ she went on, with the shy but triumphant air of one confessing to a relationship with some kind of major celeb, ‘was Lawrence of Arabia.’

‘Who?’ asked Jess. She had sort of heard of him, but she wasn’t sure how.

‘There was that epic movie about him in the 1960s,’ said Mum. ‘They reissued it a couple of years ago. He was a great hero in Arabia, during the First World War. Then after the war, he came back and lived as a recluse in a tiny cottage called Cloud’s Hill tucked away in a corner of Dorset.’

Jess stopped listening. All she cared about was the next text from Fred. She couldn’t help torturing herself with the thought of him at that wedding, surrounded by low-budget cheerleaders. The fact that he had described them as cheerleaders had started to annoy her. Couldn’t he have said, ‘a pack of dogs’ or ‘a horde of hideous heifers’ just to reassure her – even if it wasn’t true?

‘I remember you had a poster of Lawrence of Arabia, pinned up on your wall,’ said Granny.

‘Did I?’ said Mum, sounding rather embarrassed. ‘Maybe. I don’t remember.’