“Can’t have been that bad.”
I closed my eyes in recollection, and an image of my seventeen-year-old self swam before my eyes. I’d been a skinny little girl, but in my teens I somehow acquired puppy fat. And spots. And my lovely wispy blonde hair darkened into a sludgy, lifeless non-colour that hung fine and shapeless around my round cheeks. I was sarcastic and bored and a little too clever, and I knew it. I was never really unpopular, but I sure as hell wasn’t popular, either. My school was small—a hundred or so kids in my year—so everyone knew everyone, and everyone knew who was cool.
I was most avowedly not cool.
When I opened my eyes I was looking at Luke, and I just knew that at seventeen he’d been having the time of his life—gorgeous, athletic, smart and rich—well, who wouldn’t?
“Trust me,” I said, “it was that bad.”
Luke took me back to my place, where I took a grateful shower and fed Tammy, who was very disgruntled with me. She has one of those automated feeders for when I forget to come home, but I never remember to fill it.
Sitting on the sofa with my head in a towel, wrapping up my feet (which had been bare at the office, for lack of time) with plasters, I watched Luke look through my school photo box. It was a bit unnerving—that box was my life. Or at least, my life from the age of eleven to eighteen. I had all the family photos in my flat. They were in shoeboxes on top of my wardrobe, and Luke had laughed to see them all neatly labelled, I guess because they’re the only thing in my house that falls into any kind of order.
“Wow,” he said, coming up with a picture of me giving the camera the finger, a typically charming pose. I’d always really wanted to be one of those
Princess Diary
girls who just has to pluck her eyebrows and cut her hair and she’s gorgeous. But it took years of acne medication and bothersome dieting and expensive highlights to make me look this good.
And honey, sometimes I look really good.
Right now, wrapping tape around my feet to hold the plasters onto the ugly red and white weals all over my feet, I was less attractive. Not as bad as manky Sophie in the pictures—I mean at least my skin was okay and I wasn’t wearing chunky loafers—but I could have looked better.
“What’s this?” Luke held up a picture of me covered in plaster of Paris, sculpting a hideous wobbly statue.
“Expressive Arts.”
“Which is…?”
“One of those cop-out GCSEs. They were always asking for back-up work, which I never did, so I just got Evie to take pictures of me aiming Modroc at stuff.”
“…okay.” He pulled out another picture. “Is this them?”
I looked at it and grimaced. Ella and Evie were my friends from about sixth form onwards, when we discovered we had things in common by virtue of being deeply uncool. Also because we didn’t really have too many other friends. Evie was bullied mercilessly because of the backbrace she wore to stop her spine from curving, and Ella was a manic-depressive who brought alcohol into school when her parents split up. Although they’re pretty cute now, they matched me in the attractiveness stakes at school.
“Yep,” I said.
Luke looked at the picture a while longer. “You must really have hated school,” he said thoughtfully.
The insight of man.
I made him come shopping with me for new clothes (he wasn’t to know I still had a lot of the stuff I wore at school. I’m not
stupid
) and things for school. A new bag, obviously. A pencil case and ring binder and paper. (Luke was amazed that the school didn’t give us exercise books, until I reminded him that it was a state school, and therefore penniless.) I fretted a while about art stuff. I mean, presumably the school had some art equipment, but if it was anything like the stuff they’d had at my school, it wouldn’t have taxed a four-year-old.
And then I remembered that I had a whole load of stuff at my parents’ house, decaying gently in the damp garage. All my old artwork, which doubtless the school would want to see. And when Luke heard about it, he wanted to see it too.
“I bet it’s really good,” he wheedled.
“If you bet that you’d be really poor.”
“Come on, Soph. I know you’re creative,” he said suggestively, and I blushed. “Wow, that really clashes with that top.”
I scowled at him. “Other than my skin tone, is it okay? Do I look seventeen?”
He shrugged. “You look hot. No one will care how old you are.”
Very sweet of him, but I needed something more useful. “What about this?” I grabbed a micro mini. “Tell me truthfully, will my bum look big in this?”
The truth was that my bum would hardly have been covered by the thin strip of material, but Luke covered up diplomatically by saying, “It’ll show up that bruise on your leg. And you don’t want to have to explain that.”
I sagged. “Bollocks. So I’ll have to wear trousers. And long skirts.”
“Make up for it with low-cut tops,” Luke suggested eagerly.
“Are you trying to get me chucked out of school? For all I know Marc-Paul could be a total…
greebo
who only likes girls with dreadlocks.”
Greebo? I hadn’t even thought that in years. Dear God, I was regressing already.
Luke was looking at me critically. “I don’t think you’d look good with dreads.”
Good grief.
It was late when we left the mall, the only place I could think of that was open on Sundays and had more than one shop available, and on the way home I called my mum, who doesn’t understand text messaging or how to work her voice mail, and asked her if she knew the whereabouts of my old artwork.
“In the garage, I think.”
Since the storage space in their garage is roughly equal to the living space in the house, this wasn’t much help.
“I just thought I’d get it out. Keep it at my place.”
“Oh, good idea. Your dad and I have been meaning to clean up the garage for a while.”
“Is it okay if Luke and I come over to look for it?”
There was a pause while I imagined my mother smiling fondly at the idea of her daughter finally pairing off with someone. More likely she was getting misty-eyed over the someone himself. She’s incorrigible, my mother.
“Why don’t you come for tea? We thought we might have a barbecue. Make the most of the nice weather.”
Uh-oh. Two nights of the parentals in a row? This might kill Luke.
Ah well. He’s strong. And my mum makes really good potato salad. And I needed some comfort after the horror of the Going Back To School bombshell.
“Sure,” I said. “We’ll be there in an hour.”
I dumped all of my new shopping on my bed for Tammy to make a nest out of, shoved some food in her bowl and looked in my cupboards for something to take up to my parents’. But the cupboards were bare. Old Mother Hubbard would have to take herself off to Tesco.
Luke backed out of supermarket shopping with me, which was a relief as I didn’t really want him to see me piling in the pore strips and packets of Oreos which were an essential but hidden part of my life.
I got home and changed into jeans with trainers and thick socks, a T-shirt and sweater and my fleece, just in case. My dad has a thing about sitting outside to eat during the summer, despite that it’s almost never warm enough to do it properly in England. Consequently whenever Mum announces that tea is ready in the summer, we all rush to get sweaters and shoes so we won’t freeze to death while we eat. Today had been warm, but not very warm, and there would be no heat left in the evening.
I picked Luke up and drove him the couple of miles to my parents’ house on the edge of the village. It wasn’t the house where I grew up, that was a Sixties Lego brick in the middle of the village. My parents moved here not long before I moved out, first to go to university, which I hated and only stuck at for a couple of months, and then into my flat, which used to be my grandmother’s and is now owned by my mother. I go back there a lot, because my mother can be bothered to cook properly, and because the place is full of comforting things, and because I actually quite like my parents.
My God, I’m a freak.
Both their cars were outside, clean and dripping from a recent wash. The grass had been recently mown and the smell of barbecue hung in the air, a last clinging memory of summer.
“Looks like they’ve already started,” Luke said, and I laughed and shook my head.
“What, are you kidding? Dad won’t start the barbie until about an hour after everyone’s stopped saying they’re hungry. That’ll be the neighbours, eating at a normal time.”
Sensibly, Luke said nothing, but followed me through the open front door.
“Hola!” I called.
Nothing.
“Hello, burglars? Come to nick your telly!” I looked up at Luke. “Well, might as well get the hi-fi while I’m at it. It has surround sound.”
Norma Jean, Chalker’s beautifully stupid blonde dog, padded in and made a noise at us that sounded like a car revving.
“Some guard dog,” Luke said as I bent down to her and she licked my arm.
Someone called my name from the back garden, and I snapped my fingers. “Damn, foiled.” We walked through to the back garden, which was looking damp from a recent watering, thriving and green and lovely. I was always teasing my parents that gardening was a really middle-aged thing to do, but I had to agree it looked good.
Mum was sitting at the garden table with a glass of wine and the Sunday papers. She grinned and ran her gaze over Luke, who was looking lush in a blue shirt that matched his eyes. I’d teased him about being a tart and doing it on purpose, but he’d kissed me until all my lipgloss came off and I had to admit, tart or not, he looked damn good.
“Sophie, there’s some white in the fridge,” Mum began.
I waved Ted’s keys at her. “I have to drive.”
“Oh. Well, there’s some water there too. Luke, what do you want to drink?”
“Whatever you have,” he said politely.
Mum and I looked at each other. “Wine?” She gestured to her bottle of red. “There’s white in the fridge, too.”
“Any beer?”
“Lager or bitter? I’m not sure if there’s some Guinness, too.”
“Or you could have a vod and tonic,” I said.
“It’s in the freezer,” Mum said. “With the gin.”
“Or just a Coke,” I finished. “Or maybe some Orangina?”
Luke looked mildly stunned.
“Dad works for a brewery,” I explained.
“And he keeps the entire stock here?”
“No, we’re happy little alcoholics.”
“Ah. What’s the bitter?”
“Directors.”
“Sounds good.”
He followed me into the kitchen, which I’d bullied my parents into letting me help them design, and I opened the fridge. I found the water, but no cans of anything.
“It’s in the garage,” Mum called through.
I poured my water—not as prison ration as it sounds, for Mum to think about getting bottled water in for me shows thoughtfulness on her part since she knows I can’t stand the local limescaley tap water—and led Luke through the house to the garage. The thump of a bass beat came from the corner where Chalker had his little studio, full of band crap and girlie posters and CDs. I listened for a while.
“So he got the ‘Phonics CD too?”
“How can you tell?”
“When you grow up with Chalker you get to recognise anything by its bass line. Or drum beat. Or sometimes a chord change.”
“I’m impressed.” Luke watched me cross to one of the old display fridges that helped to fill the garage, and sort through it until I found his beer.
“Want a glass?”
“No, I’m good.” He looked around. “Seriously, is this all your parents’ stuff?”
“Well, mine and Chalker’s, too.”
“You’re not secretly running a storage business?”
“Nope. You should see the loft.”
“God.”
While we were there, we figured we might as well start going through things for my art stuff. From what I remembered of my own A levels, I’d spent the entire first year drawing fruit and bits of draped cloth, then painting them, then enlarging sections of the paintings and painting them, then making Modroc sculptures of the enlarged bits, then drawing them, then painting and enlarging them until I was so bored I would sit there and cry. I hoped Longford would be slightly better.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Luke asked, brushing cobwebs off a cupboard door.
“Um.” I tried to remember. “Probably some of it’s still in my ‘folio. A2 size. And there was a 3D thing with a sort of face and a sword…I did some stuff on Stonehenge that was sort of psychedelic… Um, I had some printed cloth that was—wait, what’s this?”
My obsession with all things Dark Ages had manifested itself in sketches of druid stones and tableaus of Arthurian myths. I’d wanted to illustrate a book, but apparently that wasn’t artistic enough. It didn’t represent anything. What enlarged sections of fruit were supposed to represent I had no idea, but I’d figured out early in my school career that you didn’t get anywhere unless you sucked up to the teacher, big time.
I pulled out a sort of odd twirly hat made of wire and gold papîer maché, tangled up in a printed veil.
“What’s that?” Luke asked cautiously.
“I think it was something to do with Isolda.”
“Who?”
Heathen. “I’ll lend you the book.” I went on searching through the shadows—the electrics in the house have never been good and in the garage half of the lights don’t work at all. There was ivy growing in under the eaves and it kept tickling me, making me jump.
And then something else tickled me and made me jump.
“Luke, cut that out.”
“I can see right down your top from here.”
“Excellent. Could you use that twenty-twenty vision to look for artwork instead, please?”
By the time Dad came in to get the barbecue, we were dusty and grubby and still hadn’t found anything. Dad greeted Luke as politely as Luke had greeted him the night before and asked what we were looking for.
“Oh,” he said, when I’d told him. “I put that up in the loft ages ago.”
I ground my teeth and fetched the ladders and carried them through the house. On our way through the sitting room, Luke stopped and stared at the wall.
“Did you do this?”
I glanced at the purple flowers on the wall. “Yeah. They never let me crayon on the wall when I was little, so…”