Girl, (Nearly) 16: Absolute Torture Read online

  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 Her normal character, mostly stern and anxious, seemed to have been replaced by a disconcerting, deranged joy.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.

  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’l
l 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.’

  ‘Did you dream about marrying him, even though he was dead?’ asked Jess.

  ‘No, I didn’t fantasise about being married to him,’ said Mum. ‘I think I wanted to be Lawrence of Arabia. Anyway, enough of that.’ Mum whipped her napkin off her knee and wiped her mouth. She went off to pay the guesthouse bill, and soon they were on the road again, heading for Lawrence of Arabia’s cottage.

  Jess couldn’t concentrate on Lawrence of Arabia. She could feel herself sinking into a horrific but somehow compulsive fantasy about Fred being a waiter with three gorgeous girls, all in short black skirts, competing for his attention. There would be a blonde called Grace, who would appeal to his higher nature. Jess was sure there would also be a dark girl with sultry lips called Selina. She would appeal to his baser instincts. And, worst of all, there would be a redhead called Charlie – such a sassy name for a girl – who was not particularly good-looking but had the most magnetic personality and the funniest gags. It was Charlie Jess was most afraid of.

  ‘He died a very tragic death.’ Her mum broke into the fantasy with yet another of her depressing asides. ‘Is it next left, Granny?’

  ‘No, next but one,’ said Granny, navigating with excitement. ‘By a phone box, according to the map. How did he die, dear? I can’t remember.’

  ‘He fell into a bowl of parsnip soup and was drowned?’ suggested Jess irritably.

  ‘No,’ said Mum, putting on a pious air. ‘It was tragic. He used to ride about on a motorbike. He swerved to avoid two errand boys, and went off the road and crashed. He never regained consciousness. I think he was in hospital for a few days, sort of hanging on. But he died.’

  ‘I wonder if he had one of those out-of-body experiences,’ mused Granny. ‘You read so much about them. A lot of people have had them. They’re lying on their hospital bed, and then suddenly they’re floating up by the ceiling and they hear a voice say – turn right by that chip shop, dear – “Your time has not yet come.”

  ‘Still,’ Granny went on, ‘at least he didn’t have a wife and family, so there wasn’t that immediate sort of family loss.’

  ‘The nation grieved,’ said Jess’s mum, in a pompous tone of voice, as if she were in the pulpit of a cathedral somewhere. ‘And one might say the fact that he wasn’t married with children was even more tragic.’ She sighed, as if she would hav
e given anything to bear a glamorous son for Lawrence of Arabia, rather than a slightly stout and bad-tempered daughter for Tim Jordan.

  Soon they arrived at Cloud’s Hill, and Jess clambered stoutly and bad-temperedly out of the car. This was a remote spot. Wind tossed the grass and leaves about in a rather haunted way. Jess’s mum looked up at the clouds, and a strange, dream-like expression came over her face.

  ‘Cloud’s Hill … I’ve wanted to come here for years and years, you’ve no idea,’ she murmured, and walked off to the entrance.

  Cloud’s Hill was a weird, tiny house. There was no electricity. It was dark indoors, and plain, and it smelt peculiar.

  ‘I do think he might have got himself a decent sofa,’ said Granny. ‘I don’t like those chairs. It gives me backache just looking at them.’

  ‘To think that he actually sat there!’ said Jess’s mum, staring in fascination at the chair upon which Lawrence of Arabia’s charismatic buttocks had reposed. ‘I was crazy about him when I was young. It would have been much healthier if I’d had a proper boyfriend – one my own age.’

  Wow, thought Jess, is Mum fishing? Does she maybe have a hunch that Fred and I are An Item? It would be so, so cool if Mum knew about Fred and approved and everything. Jess’s heart started to beat impossibly fast. She must say something. She knew Fred wanted her to tell her mum about him.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Jess, in a casual, airy kind of way, ‘I’ve got a proper boyfriend – somebody my own age.’

  Mum whirled round, her face transformed in an instant. Her blissful yearning for the spirit of Lawrence of Arabia was replaced by wide-eyed alarm and terror. As if she’d suddenly seen a snake in a flowerbed.

  ‘What?’ she hissed. ‘What’s all this? What on earth are you talking about?’

  Oh no, thought Jess, I’ve blown it. In an instant the skittish, holiday-Mum had gone, and the anxious, disapproving old bat of normal everyday life was back in charge. Jess would have to blag her way out of this one.