Playing with the Grown-ups (22 page)

'Can you just be quiet?' Kitty said. 'I'm taking you out, aren't I? You're giving me such a headache.'

She sat in silence with her arms crossed. Their eyes became round and watchful, and they were guarded and very polite, each
quiet please and thank you a jab in Kitty's heart.

'I don't mean to be cross; I went to bed really late,' she whispered.

'Isn't that a treat?' Sam asked, in a hushed voice.

She wanted to ask, Why do you both trust me? Why do you both trust me when I don't trust myself?

They sat, such little perfect people, the thoughts in their heads left dangling with nowhere to go. They looked silently out
of the windows at the people going by, and Kitty thought her heart might break.

She wished they were back in New York playing spy games, or climbing trees in the orchard at Hay, a lone hot-air balloon sailing
across the sky, as they played at guessing where it was destined.

'A real princess? With a castle?' Violet watched her intently from the floor as her rabbit ran around the bathroom.

'Yes. A real-life princess. She's an artist, she was at my colony. She has a castle in Italy. Violet, your rabbit is chewing
on my Clarins face cream. . . Please pick him up.'

'It's a she,' Violet said.

'My friend is BISEXUAL,' Marina mouthed to Kitty. 'She's coming over for tea tomorrow.'

Kitty had never met a princess, or someone who boasted about being bisexual. She wondered whether she could glean either thing
by just looking at Marianne.

Marianne was not a real princess; she was a raven-haired beauty from Surrey who had married a louche Italian prince whose
peccadillo was opium and transvestites.

'You can't imagine what it was like, living in exile in Siena. The family had cut us off, the roof was falling in, and Oberto
was nodding into his risotto as young boys wearing MY jewellery flitted in and out,' she said loudly. 'It was where I discovered
painting. It was my only outlet. I started selling my paintings to tourists and as soon as I had enough money I got the bloody
hell out.' She pushed her fringe back from her doll face. 'It was ghastly.'

Kitty stared at her, with her mouth open.

'Poor thing,' her mother said sympathetically. 'Would you like a biscuit? Stop staring, Kitty.'

'No, darling. Can't. I shall be fat, and no one will want me.' She pondered the Jaffa Cakes with rue.

Marianne and her mother whispered and giggled like schoolgirls. They had inside jokes and locked the door to her mother's
bedroom. They constantly praised each other's merits and talked of nothing but men and parties.

'I don't like Marianne. She's rude, and she makes Mum be silly,' Violet said to Kitty, on a locked-door night.

'I agree.' Kitty thought that she would be a phase, but Marianne had become a stalwart fixture.

Violet finished painting her nails acid green. It looked like she had a disease spilling from her fingertips.

'Sam doesn't like her either. He says her eyes are like a witch's. They are, if you look, they're yellow and wicked. She pretends
to be nice, but you can tell she's not.'

Nora was the master of objectivity. Kitty sat up in surprise.

'Marianne must be really bad then, because Nora likes EVERYONE.' Sam pointed his fingers like a gun to his head.

In the shadows of Kitty's room, hangmen loomed, the oak outside became a lynching tree.

Her mother locked her bedroom door again and she and Marianne sat inside, talking of hushed things in careful hushed voices.

Kitty knocked on the door, trying hard not to sound plaintive or desperate as she said, 'Mummy, can I come in?' Her mother
said if you played hard to get people wanted you more.

'I'm having grown-up time, Kitty. Come back later.'

'We're telling our secrets!' Marianne shouted, as though it was a joke.

'I tell you all my fucking secrets!' Kitty shouted.

There was a silence, after which she heard her mother say, 'Teenagers!' in a tone that was both patronising and bored.

She went to her room, covered her mouth with a pillow and screamed. She decided she would have her own grown-up time. In her
jewellery box she had a two-gram wrap of coke, which Charlie had left in her handbag the last time they went to Iceni. She
racked out two long lines on her dressing table, and put 'Killing in the Name' by Rage Against the Machine on her CD player.
She turned the volume up as loud as it would go. She lay on the floor, her head splintering with words, and realised with
frustration she had no one to talk to. Her feet were numb.

She decided to do a fashion show for herself and pulled out everything from her wardrobe and put it on the floor. She tried
on an old Alaia dress of her mother's that was too small and she sucked in her cheekbones and her stomach. To her reflection
Kitty said, 'Hello, princess.' She didn't know why she said this but she said it in a cockney accent, which made her laugh
at herself.

Kitty knew Rosaria would think it was funny too so she rang her.

'Are you coming to my birthday party this weekend?' Rosaria asked.

Kitty had forgotten it was her birthday.

'Yes, if I can get enough money for the train. I spent my allowance,' she said.

Rosaria sounded like she was going to cry.

'Mummy says she'll buy you a ticket, Kit. Are you all right? You sound so weird.'

'Cool. Then I can come. I'm fine. I'm having a fashion show on my own in my bedroom. Everything's great.' She spun again.

'What's that ghastly racket in the background? Are you at a festival with the beardy weirdies again?' Rosaria liked the Bangles
and Right Said Fred.

'Rage Against the Machine, man. So I'll come up on Friday evening 'kay?' Kitty said.

'All right, babes. Are you sure you're all right?' Rosaria asked.

'Yup. Fine. Wicked,' Kitty said.

'Wicked indeed. You have got to go back to public school.'

Kitty heard Rosaria's brothers in the background.

'I have to go,' Rosaria said. 'Mayhem here. Love you.'

'I love you too.' Kitty truly meant it.

Her mother screamed outside the door. 'Will you turn that fucking music down?!'

'I'm sorry.' Kitty said. 'Speak up. I can't really hear you.'

'Turn it DOWN!' she said, rattling the doorknob. 'You're giving me a headache!'

'Why don't you call the doctor?' Kitty shouted through the door. 'Isn't that what you do when you have a headache?'

'What are you doing in there?' her mother said, and she sounded lonely.

'I'm having grown-up time. That includes loud music and self-expression.' Kitty twirled around in her dress, crazily.

'Why are you punishing me?' her mother asked forlornly. Marianne had clearly gone home.

'Because that's what you get,' Kitty whispered.

'Marcus Chapman's coming tonight,' she said wistfully. Rosaria had nurtured a crush on Marcus Chapman for six years.

'Why don't you just get royally pissed and jump on him?' Kitty said.

'I can't. It would ruin our friendship. I'll just have to continue loving him from afar. What on earth have you done to your
pubes, Kitty?'

'I put Immac on them while I was on the phone, and forgot it was on, and then there was this horrid burning smell, and I ran
to wash it off, by which stage it was too late and all of my pubes had been burnt to a crisp, so now I look like a bald egret,'
Kitty said.

'You have the pudenda of a ten-year-old,' Rosaria cackled.

'I know. It's really revolting. Good thing no one's going to be investigating down there any time soon. Will you dry my hair
like yours? It looks lovely.'

'Yes. If you'll do my make-up,' Rosaria said.

'Do you want to do a line of coke? I've got some,' Kitty said, nonchalant.

'From a friend,' she said. 'Actually that's a lie. My mother told me if I took Violet and Sam to school she'd give it to me.
She wanted to lie in, and it was Nora's day off.' She laughed to show Rosaria that it was all right.

Rosaria handed her a towel.

'How long has your mother been doing coke?' she asked quietly.

'I think she just does it occasionally. Like if she's going to a party or something. I don't think it's a big deal. A lot
of people I know do it.' Kitty shrugged.

'But your own mother doing it is different,' Rosaria said.

'Your mother smokes dope.' Kitty stared at her.

'Yes, but she's a hippy. And dope is different somehow.'

'Well, we don't need to get into the semantics,' Kitty said. 'Do you want to try it or not?' She felt like a nasty drug pusher.

Rosaria set her lips defiantly.

'I'll try it,' she said. 'But you can't tell anyone. My friends would really disapprove.'

'That's because your friends are prudish and boring. I'm your fun friend,' Kitty said.

Rosaria raised a thick black eyebrow at her.

'You'll have to show me what to do,' she said.

Kitty made two neat lines and chopped them smooth with Rosaria's Barclaycard. She bent over one.

'So you hold your hair back, stick the note up your nose, and snort, hard,' she said, and proceeded to do it, theatrically.

'It's not working,' Rosaria said a few minutes later. 'I don't feel any different.'

Kitty started to have a creeping feeling that her mother had supplied her with fraudulent coke, but she didn't want to share
this thought with Rosaria.

'Maybe you've just got a high tolerance. Maybe you're Chichester's answer to Tony Montana. Let's get pissed instead,' she
said.

'You've got so glamorous, Kitty. You look like a woman,' Mrs Nivolla said.

'Not really.' Kitty shifted her weight from one hip to another. 'Do you still make lasagne?'

'God, I'd forgotten how much you used to love my lasagne. I'll make some tomorrow if you like. How's your mum?'

'Oh, she's well. The same, but sort of different too. I can't explain,' Kitty said.

'I think we all change a bit as our children grow up,' she said kindly.

'So you're Rosaria's famous Kitty.' Marcus Chapman smiled at her. He had very straight white teeth and he smelled like the
beach.

'I suppose so,' Kitty said, smiling. 'We've known each other since we were little, but she was always cooler than me.'

'She's pretty cool,' he said.

'I feel a bit like I'm at someone's wedding. And I don't really know anyone.' She feared that he might think her a social
leper.

Instead, he took her around the room and introduced her as Rosaria's best friend from London. He was attentive and her glass
was always full. He lit her cigarettes.

'You shouldn't smoke,' he said.

'I hate the word shouldn't,' Kitty said. 'It always makes me want to do the thing more.'

'So you're a bad girl.' He grinned.

She felt the lovely oozing warmth of alcohol trip down through her body. Everything felt soft and feathery, and she felt as
though she were made from down.

'How old are you?' he asked.

'I'm fifteen,' she said.

'You seem older.'

'Thanks,' Kitty said sarcastically. 'Maybe it's because I'm bad. I seem older. Worn. I used to be good. But somehow now, badness
just befalls me.' She thought she sounded like a fifties starlet from Shepperton Studios, bleached with innuendo. She disgusted
herself. Why can't I have a normal conversation with a boy? she thought.

'Aren't we meant to be leaving to go to the club soon? I have to find Rosaria,' she said desperately.

'Come back. I'll be lonely without you,' he said.

Kitty watched them from the floor above.

Hands were over her eyes. It made her jump. Marcus Chapman stood laughing.

'I want to kiss you,' he said.

'I can't kiss you. Rosaria's my oldest friend,' Kitty said, her eyes still looking below to the dance floor.

'So? I'm not, nor have I ever, gone out with Rosaria.

She's a great friend,' he said.

She thought about this. He was right. Rosaria had never even let him know her feelings. She had no prior claim to him. He
was as much Kitty's as he was hers.

'Fine,' she said, deciding. 'But kiss me somewhere secretly and promise you won't tell anyone.'

'I promise,' he said solemnly.

Her adrenalin started pumping with guilt and risk, but it was not an unwelcome feeling. She felt alive.

He pushed her up into an alcove. They kissed, and she coursed with heat and want.

'Come back to my house,' he whispered in her ear, pressing himself against her, hard. She thought that an imprint of him might
leave itself on her skin like a scar.

'I can't, I'm staying with Rosaria.' Suddenly she was sober. They were not star-crossed lovers, they were strangers, and she
had stolen a moment that belonged to someone else.

Guilt made her greedy. Kitty devoured a packet of digestive biscuits and sat on top of the Aga.

'Did you have fun, Kit?' Rosaria asked dreamily, rubbing her feet where her shoes had bitten into them.

'It was amazing,' Kitty said, avoiding her eyes.

'Was the club all right? I know you're used to London clubs, but the DJ was really good, no?'

'London clubs are rubbish,' Kitty said heavily. 'Everyone's too cool to dance. I promise, you had a great party, I could tell,
everyone had a fantastic time.'

'Oh good. Weren't we wild though, doing coke and everything?'

'Wild,' Kitty said.

'No,' Kitty said shortly. 'What was in that coke you gave me?' Her mother flashed a serene smile.

'Crushed-up arnica tablets,' she said smugly. 'I was looking out for your health, and I didn't want you to poison little Rosaria
Nivolla. Plus, because of its anti-inflammatory properties, you now have bruise-free insides.'