Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy (9 page)

Joe King just popped into my head again! I’m in a wedding boutique in Nunstone and I just looked out of the window onto the street and thought, I hope I don’t see him. The ridiculousness of that sentiment works on many levels. For a start, he works in a chemist in Tiddlesbury, why would he be hanging around a wedding dress shop in Nunstone? But also, more importantly, why should I not want him to see me in a wedding shop? Why? It would be good for him to find out that I’m a soon-to-be-married woman. He continues to pop into my head, even though I’m really trying not to think about him. I really am. I really, really am. I bet he hasn’t thought about me once. The beautiful comment was probably just a throwaway that he says to a different girl at every gig. I bet he’s lying in bed with nineteen-year-old twins at this precise moment. Not that I care. Really.

On a positive note, we’ve only just arrived at the wedding dress shop and we’ve already been given champagne.

‘Cheers,’ I say, clinking glasses with Mum and Philippa. I feel a bit bad about snapping at Mum last night. Although I don’t want to apologise, because then I’ll be bringing it up again.

‘In the eyes,’ says Philippa eyeballing both of us. ‘Can’t risk seven years of bad sex.’

‘Oh, God, is that what happens?” Mum says, sounding concerned.

‘Yep, seven years bad sex, Mrs T.’

‘So that explains it.’

‘Did you call that Simon chap?’ Philippa asks, because I try to avoid talking about my mother’s quest for rebound sex, if at all possible.

‘Not yet. But I will.’

‘Now, then, Jenny,’ the sales assistant joins us.

‘Yes!’ I squeal. I’ve already reached quite a high vocal register. It’s the excitement.

‘Do you have any thoughts about what sort of dress you are looking for?’

‘Yes.’ Another yelp. They’re very hard to control.

‘Right.’ She laughs.

‘So, what I really want is sixties style, short in length, cream lace, long sleeves, high-ish neck, you used to have one just like that…’ I hold my breath, willing her to still have this dress.

‘Ah, yes. The Twiggy dress, let me fetch that for you.’

‘The Twiggy Dress.’ I sigh. ‘It’s called the Twiggy dress.’ l suddenly freeze. ‘What if it looks terrible on me?’

‘I assure you it won’t.’ The lady is back. She’s holding up a dress bag. It’s in there. She’s holding my dream dress. I gulp some champagne.

‘Ta da!’ she says unzipping the bag and manoeuvring the dress so we can glimpse its glory.

Oh, I feel like kneeling in its presence. I couldn’t imagine a more exquisite wedding dress. I love clothes. I truly do. I have hundreds of items of clothing and if I had to explain why I would probably end up getting a little misty eyed. There’s something magical, something amazing about someone, somewhere designing a beautiful dress and choosing a stunning fabric and thinking, I know what I’m going to do, I’m going to create something exquisite that will make someone feel sublime, feel beautiful, feel whole. When I was little and there were a lot of nasty words being said to me both at school and at home, I would lock myself in my room and put on a pretty dress and it would make me feel better. It really would. I think there’s a lot wrong with the fashion industry, I hate to think of starving children in far-flung countries working for pennies to make cheap T-shirts, or young girls starving themselves to look like skin-and-bone models. I hate that fashion has became so complicated and dangerous for women. But then I think back to the twelve-year-old me, who’d been banished to my room by my father and didn’t have anyone to confide in, and how she would put on a dress and it would feel like a comfort, like a friend. Clothes have always had the power to transport me to somewhere different, somewhere better.

I gulp some more champagne. Why I am scared to try on this dress? Perhaps because I’ve pictured this day for years and years, ever since I was that twelve-year-old girl in her bedroom. ‘You’ll find it hard to get a husband with those habits, Jenny,’ my father would always say to me, if ever I licked my knife or blew on my food or sneezed without holding my hand over my mouth. But then at some point it became, ‘No one will marry you, Jenny.’ Perhaps he didn’t mean it to be as cruel as it felt. Sometimes I got the impression that he might have thought he was being funny. But there was no playful wink or loving ‘I’m only having you on’ hug after. Just those words – no one will marry you, Jenny. Even so, I’d daydream. Daydream that, one day, someone would want to marry me. And in those daydreams I’d always be wearing a cream lace sixties minidress. And now, look, it’s here, in front of me.

‘It is so beautiful,’ I whisper as though it’s sleeping and I might wake it. ‘What do you think?’ I ask Mum and Philippa.

‘I think… it’s divine,’ Mum says, and again her voice sounds choked with emotion. ‘I wish I’d had the confidence to get married in something like that.’

‘It’s never too late, Mrs T. You’ll meet a lovely man and you’ll marry him in a minidress.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Fifty-four is not too old to wear a minidress, no matter what they tell you in the
Daily Mail
, Mrs T.’

‘Shall we pop it on you?’ the lady asks me.

I nod nervously. I seem to have finished my champagne. I place the empty glass on a low table near me and follow the lady behind a big swooshy satin curtain.

‘This will look great with your lovely hair.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ I say pulling off my skirt and T-shirt.

The lady undoes the buttons down the back of my dress, a tiny heart is carved upon each button. ‘Here,’ she says, holding it open as I step into it. ‘Oh, look, yes,’ she coos and begins doing up the buttons now. ‘Oh, it could have been made for you.’

When she’s finished I turn to face the mirror. I’m still funny-looking Jenny Taylor. My arms are still too long for my body, my mouth is still too big for my face. I’ll never be a great beauty, but in this dress, here, now, I don’t care, because I feel… what do I feel? What do I feel like in this dress? I suppose, I feel like me, but the best of me.

‘Let’s show the girls.’ The lady swishes back the curtains.

‘The two of them sit wide-eyed and motionless, looking in my direction. There’s utterly no expression on either of their faces at all.

‘What? Do you not…?’

‘Oh, Fan,’ gasps Philippa.

‘Are you crying, you tool?’

She nods. ‘You look amazing.’

‘Oh, Jenny,’ Mum says, standing up and stepping towards me. There are tears in her eyes. She’s mouthing the word ‘beautiful’ and she’s holding her arms out as though she wants to hug me. I freeze. We haven’t done hugging for a long, a very long, time.

‘I think I should get you three some tissues,’ the lady says delicately to me.

‘I don’t need any…’ I start, but then I feel a big tear, that I hadn’t even noticed come into my eye, slide down my cheek.

Mum bought the dress for me. The nice sales lady said the price and my mum brought out her credit card and got pretty aggressive when I told her not to be silly. There ensued a lengthy verbal tussle. In the end, she said, ‘Don’t insult me,’ as though she was a psychopath, so I slunk back and let her pay for the dress. And it wasn’t cheap. It was the same price as most of the long ones, which seems a bit unjust to me. The last time we went shopping together and she bought me something I must have been about fourteen.

So I love my awesome dress but the only downside is that I want to wear it all the time, I keep unzipping the bag and just sitting there watching it. I absolutely cannot wait to wear it. In fact, I could wear it out before the wedding. It doesn’t look like a wedding dress. That’s the beauty. I’ll be able to wear it again and again. Something you couldn’t do with a traditional meringue dress, unless it was Halloween and you wore it with one of those plastic axes sticking out of your head.

Whiteboard wedding planning has been cracking on apace and I think we’ve more or less covered everything. Now, I just need Matt to get back from Chicago, then Mum and I can do a little presentation for him, he can give the nod and we can get ‘Operation Kate and Wills Watch Our Wedding And Weep’ off the ground.

I’ve been running every night too, which I’m doing now. Partly because my wedding dress is short but mainly to get me out of the house so my mother can’t corner me.

Ooh, aw. Stitch. Ah, ha.

‘I’m doing something healthy here. Why give me pain?’ I rail.

I have a confession. One I am very not proud of. Since I met Joe King I’ve started putting a little lipstick on before I go running. There, I said it. And I’ve been running a little quicker than usual, you know, just in case, on the off chance, if he were to see me, I wouldn’t look a total ploddy minger. It’s ludicrous. One, he’s just some syphilis-ridden rock star who I’ve met twice, and two, quickening my pace gives me quite a lot of discomfort and causes me to pull a face like a cow in labour.

Ow! OW! OW! I’ll have to hobble to Wee Gate and try and stretch it off there. I turn the corner down the narrow lane. There’s a car next to Wee Gate. Ooh, could they be doggers? I don’t know why I get so excited about the idea of doggers, probably because I live in Tiddlesbury and need all the excitement I can get. I trundle nearer. I see two people sitting in the front seat of the car, a man and a woman, I can tell from the back of their heads. They can’t be doggers. If you wanted to fornicate in a Ford Mondeo you’d surely do it in the back. What a shame.

‘One day I’ll spot some doggers,’ I mutter. It pays to be positive.

I stand in front of their car and use the gate to stretch my legs on. The couple now have a cinematic view of my arse. I feel the back bottom view is better than legs akimbo from the front though.

‘Ah!’ I jump. The fella’s just beeped his horn. Very funny. I turn around and give them a nod.

Oh, my god, I know these two. We match-made them with a note! He’s the bloke in the denim shirt who was eyeing her up in Nunstone at the pub quiz while she was sharing a bottle of wine with her friend. We slipped her a note. This is unbelievably exciting. I must be grinning quite scarily. The expression on their faces has just changed quickly from one of amusement to alarm. If it wasn’t for Philippa and me, Cilla and Cupid, they wouldn’t even be sat there all smoochy. I want to tell them. Imagine if I did, we’d probably get invited to their wedding. We could be godparents to their children or they might even name their children after us. I can’t tell them though, because the note giving is totally anonymous. Ooh, I really have scared them. He’s reversing the car now. I wave. They don’t respond.

I wonder whether she told him that she received an anonymous note in the form of a very pretty card. If so, I wonder who they think sent it. I get my sweaty phone out from the pocket in my shorts and call Philippa.

‘Today we have reached a big milestone in the Smiling Fanny Manifesto’s life,’ I inform her.

‘Fan, Fan, where are you?’

‘Wee Gate. Listen, guess what I just saw.’

‘Fan, I’m having a nightmare. Absolute sodding mare. I’m interviewing that writer tonight, the one who moved into Rose Cottage. Quite a well-established guy, writes sci-fi for young adults. Philip Hall is his name. I was desperate to do the interview because, you know, I might be able to ask him for advice about my book. Anyway, I said I’d do a light-bite tea, so I made a quiche but it… Oh, Fan, it looks like something unfortunate happened in a shortcrust pastry case.’

‘Chuck some rocket on top of it, make it look posh.’

‘That’s not even the worst of it. He’s bringing some kid. And Dad’s here in the living room with his Gushing Arterial Blood lot tonight, I hadn’t realised!’ Philippa’s dad meets once a month with a group of doctors, from what Philippa and I can tell they eat cheese and talk about gore. ‘I can’t even put the kid in front of the telly, and I can’t let it near the Gushing Arterial Blood lot or the poor thing will be scarred for life. What do I do with it?’

‘How old is it?’

‘Dunno. Must be young if he’s bringing it with him.’

‘‘Hmm. Does it have a sex?’

‘Does it have sex?’

‘No, what sex is it?’

‘Oh, boy,’ she says confidently. ‘I think. Or girl. No, I think he said it was his nephew.’ There’s a pause. ‘F-a-a-n,’ she sings sweetly. ‘F-a-a-n.’

‘You want me to look after the child.’

‘Well, you’re so good with kids.’

‘I’m really sweaty.’

‘I’ll feed you wine and spray you with deodorant.’

‘All right. I’m on my way. Got something very exciting to tell you anyway!’

‘You couldn’t pick up some rocket, could you?’

I jog to Philippa’s. It was only going to be another long bath and book night again. And this book is making me feel a little maudlin because the girl getting married has a lovely dad. He’s not only paying for everything, champagne, canapés, beef Wellington, love birds being released on the lawn of the stately home, but he’s written a poem that he wants to read at the picturesque village church as well. And he’s always hugging her. That’s the bit that makes me feel most maudlin, the fact that she has a dad who wants to hug her. Still, I think her husband-to-be has been copping off with her bridesmaid, so you clearly can’t have it all.

I don’t mind looking after this child. I love playing with children. Come to think about it, it’s the playing I like. I’m not so bothered about the child.

‘Can I get the paints out?’ I call, diving into the cupboard under the stairs as soon as I arrive.

‘Oh, yeah, good idea.’

‘Cool. Oooh, we can play the monster game.’ I’m already armed with paints and paper, stalking through the house to the back garden.

‘Now, I’m jealous.’

Philippa and I do painting and play the monster game not to entertain children but to entertain ourselves. It’s not something we tend to tell people though. The only difference between ourselves and seven-year-olds is that whenever we paint or play monsters in the garden we are heavily armed with Pimm’s and lemonade. Like most of our activities, these were born from a desire to dress in a certain way. We found two Toulouse-Lautrec-style shirts in a charity shop one day, and we’ve never been able to resist two of anything in a charity shop ever since we saw two identical wetsuits in Oxfam, wore them out on New Year and had one of our best nights ever. Once we’d purchased our painting outfits we bought some cheap paints, a big pad of art paper and we got drunk in the garden while we both tried to paint a tree. Our trees were rubbish, so we turned them into monsters, then we tried to paint the house and those paintings became monsters too. By the time we’d got through the entire bottle of Pimm’s we’d hidden our pictures in the garden, made hats out of colanders and were scouring the garden trying to find the monsters.

‘Grab the colanders and the string, will you?’ I holler as we walk through the kitchen into the garden.

I place the painting gear on the outside table and go straight to the big horse chestnut tree, the one we couldn’t paint, and pull some leaves from it. It’s very important to camouflage the colander hats, all you do is secure the leaves to the colander with string.

‘Here you go,’ Philippa says, bringing me the colanders and string. ‘I better go in so I can hear the door. I’ll bring the little terror out. Thanks for this, Fan.’

‘No worries, I’m shamefully excited.’

I set to work. I wish I’d known I’d be doing this, it would have been nice to wear my green army outfit. I put my camouflaged colander helmet on my head and practise my monster-fighting pose, which for some reason is legs quite wide apart, knees bent and bottom sticking out. I am a monster-fighting hobbit.

‘Fan! This is…’

I hold my arms up to defend myself, when you are fighting monsters you can’t trust anyone, and turn round. I’m Mary Poppins. The child will love me.

‘Hello, again.’

A little bit of me withers inside, I think it might be my pride. Because this isn’t the sweet innocent squeak of a small boy. It’s the gravelly, rich beautiful sound of Joe King. He is wearing his skinny jeans, biker boots and a grey hoodie. He’s carrying a guitar and he looks perfect. I am in my sweaty running gear with a colander on my head. I look mental.

‘This is Philip Hall’s nephew,’ Philippa tells me, and something in her expression reminds me that I’m still standing like a hobbit.

‘Sorry?’ I say, standing up and trying to assume a more sophisticated stance.

‘Philip’s nephew. The writer I’m going to interview, this is his…’

‘We were expecting you to be, um, under ten.’

He smiles.

‘I made you a hat.’

‘And I shall wear it with pride.’

‘Right, I’ll leave you two out here then. Fan will get you anything you want.’

She walks back into the house.

‘Can I get you anything?’

He’s put on his colander hat.

‘What do you reckon?’

‘Suits you, sir.’

It does too.

‘I’ll never take it off.’

‘I think it’s a look that should be explored in the music industry.’

‘Excellent. I’ve found my niche.’

‘Niche. Such a good word.’

‘I missed you after the gig on Saturday. I hoped you’d stay.’

‘You were amazing.’

You were amazing!
 

‘I’ve got a confession. Phil said someone called Philippa was interviewing him and I wondered whether it might be your friend. So I thought I could tag along and ask Philippa for your number. I can’t believe I told you that, my elaborate plan. And I can’t believe it worked out so well. I think I might be a genius.’

I’m very aware that I’m not breathing how I normally breathe. I feel as though I’m shaking inside, as though I could cry but not necessarily in a bad way. As though they’d be tears of joy and they’d be cathartic, wiping everything away to make way for something new. And I’m pretty sure brides-to-be aren’t supposed to feel this way about other men.

‘What do you want to do? As your babysitter, I need to make sure you’re entertained.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘No, you choose.’

‘I think I’d like to do whatever you want to do.’

‘What if I want to play monsters?’

‘Then monsters it is.’

‘Actually. The thing with the monster game is it really only works if you’re completely sozzled.’

‘I wish I’d had a babysitter like you when I was a kid.’

‘I think what I’d quite like to do is lie on my back on the grass and drink beer. I had quite a long run before I got here. What do you want to do?’

‘Lie on my back on the grass and drink beer. With you.’

I go into the kitchen and pull two beers from Philippa’s fridge. It’s only the third time Joe King and I have met. Why am I comparing it with the third time I met Matt? Well, Jenny Taylor, you’re comparing it because you’re feeling so much more now than you did when you met Matt for the third time. Perhaps I’m feeling more for Joe King than I’ve ever felt for Matt. No. No. I must have felt something. Mustn’t I? Well, of course I did, it just wasn’t this physical, this magical, or this terrifying. No way near. I keep my face in the fridge for a while, I’m feeling very flushed.

The third time Matt and I met I was in a foul mood and covered in water. It was just after the bad floods in Pakistan a few years back. I wasn’t wet from the flooding though. Philippa and I had had a big night at Bomber the night before and were both premenstrual and we saw a news report about it and got through a whole box of tissues because children were dying and people were fleeing their homes – we agreed we needed to do something about it. It was a nice day so we decided to clean cars in our local supermarket car park to raise money for the relief fund. We can get fit, get a tan and do some good. It seemed a no brainer of a good deed. It turned out not to be entirely legal and ended in the police station but, anyway, back to the story. So we set off in our shorts and T-shirts, black, we weren’t that silly, with our mops and buckets and we started cleaning people’s cars. Oh, it was ghastly. People expected them to be really spotlessly clean. One woman refused to pay more than £2 as she said it was only a £2 job. It was for charity, the cheek. Besides that, our arms were killing, and we didn’t have a hose, so one of us was lugging two buckets of water at a time while the other cleaned. We were very slow and people were returning from their shopping and we hadn’t even started on their car. It marginally improved when Philippa ran home and collected her dad’s hose, but not much, because we kept accidentally wetting people. Anyway, so grumpy was I that I didn’t even recognise the silver Audi, and he’d paid Philippa and not me, and she was so busy muttering that this was the last time she did anything for besieged people that she didn’t spot that he was the bloke who threatened to call the police before. So it wasn’t until I was sprawled across his windscreen with a sponge and he beeped his horn, which scared me and made me yell ‘cocks!’ really loudly, that I saw that it was him. He was inside the car tapping away at his laptop.

‘Don’t scratch my car with your boots!’ he yelled, getting out of the car in a hurry.

Well I’d had enough. The abuse we’d had all day and we were just trying to do a good deed. And my boots were soaking. They never recovered. They stank after that.

‘It’s for charity!’ I screamed.

‘Oh, it’s you!’ he said.

‘Hello. Did you get out to have a wee?’

‘No, I didn’t. Hello, Amazing Legs.’

‘Hello…’ But I didn’t know what to call him. I didn’t know what to make of him.

‘I have to ask you out now.’ He didn’t sound too thrilled about the notion.

‘Why?’

‘Three times.’

‘What?’

‘The three times rule.’

‘What’s that?’ I hate not knowing things. What was this three times rule?

‘If something appears to you or is suggested to you three times, you should act on it in some way.’

‘What if something heinous is suggested to you, like eating kidney.’

‘Then you should eat kidney. I like eating kidneys.’

‘If you are going to ask me out then never in the history of courtship has the line, I like eating kidneys, been used.’

‘Until now. Take my card. Let’s go for a drink.’

I took the card.

‘Hang about, I’m not calling you!’

I leant on his car and pulled a pen out of my back pocket and wrote my number on the card.

‘Watch the car!’ he gasped.

‘Ooops,’ I said.

‘You didn’t scratch it!’ he panted.

‘Course not.’

‘Thank God.’

‘Call me,’ I said. ‘If you want.’ I shrugged.

But what with cleaning another fifteen cars and having to go to the police station when we really wanted to go to the pub, I’d forgotten all about him by the end of the day. It wasn’t even a blessing when I went to bed that night. Anyway, how long do you think it took him to call me? Two days, you cry. Two days is the uniform time between number exchanging and phone call, is it not? Well, no, in Matt’s world two months is how long it takes. Two months. I know! He said he’d been busy at work! I ask you. However, Joe King engineered our third meeting with cunning. Not that I’m comparing him and Matt. No, Jenny, course not.

I close the fridge door and walk back outside. I stand for a moment just looking at him. He must have heard or sensed me there because he looks up and smiles, and I suddenly imagine that this is our garden, and we have our whole lives together. And I don’t think I’ve ever imagined anything like that with Matt and yet Matt and I
are
going to spend our lives together. I can’t be wrong about Matt. I can’t. Joe King must be a player. He must. He must woo all the girls like this.

‘I wrote you a song,’ he says, as I hand him a beer.

‘Me!’ I exclaim, but he just smiles and starts strumming.

‘If I play it to you, you will probably think I am a nutter. And you might be correct. Although I have seen you battling a monster with a colander on your head. But it’s one thing writing a song about a girl, it’s quite another singing it to her. So after I play this to you, don’t say anything. I’ll be too embarrassed. Let’s just lie on the grass and drink our beers. Deal?’

‘Deal,’ I whisper back.

He starts to strum. He doesn’t look at me. He looks at his guitar or at the tree, everywhere but at me.

‘Phew,’ he says when he’s finished. ‘Um, phew, so that’s your song. And I don’t know why I sang it to you except that if we both die tomorrow then at least you know how you’ve blown me away. And I thought I was un-blow-away-able. I can’t stop thinking about you and I’ve only met you twice. Now let’s lie on the grass and drink beer.’

We lie on our backs on the grass. But my breath is all irregular. I feel light in the head. I can hear my own heartbeat. I need to say, ‘I’m engaged’ but I don’t want to.

‘Um, I need to shoot off,’ I say quickly and I get up and I rush back to the house, leaving him there on the grass.