The Worst Girlfriend in the World

  ‘Let’s skip Jersey Shore for Made in Chelsea and that sounds like one wild Sunday afternoon right there,’ I said. Then we air-kissed three times, ’cause I’d read that up in London, if you’re in the media or generally fabulous, three kisses are industry standard. ‘See you tomorrow if I don’t get a better offer in the meantime.’

  Alice snorted. ‘Like, that’s going to happen. Here!’

  2

  The house was in darkness and felt cold and stale as if it had been shut up for a long, long time, the rooms unaired, furniture swathed in dust sheets.

  Except it hadn’t, but my mother refused to open a window because she thought that the fresh air was full of toxic germs. Don’t even get me started on the badness of putting on lights – apparently it had been proven that even energy-saving bulbs could give you cancer but whatever, I put them on anyway. Blazing a path from hall to kitchen, where I shoved two pieces of bread in the toaster, stuck the kettle on, put on even more lights as I climbed the stairs and knocked on my mum’s door.

  There was no reply. I pushed the door open and peered into the darkness.

  ‘No…’ came the piteous whine from the lump of flesh huddled under the duvet as I turned on the light. ‘Turn it off.’

  ‘Making toast. What do you want on it? Marmite? Jam? Is it too late for cheese?’

  ‘No…’

  ‘Peanut butter? Tell you what, I’ll let you have some of my Nutella.’ I sat down on the edge of the bed and poked at what I thought might be her arm. ‘As it’s you.’

  ‘Please, Franny.’ Her voice was muffled until she pulled back the covers enough that I could see her face, all squinched up in case she might accidentally breathe in some fetid, airborne virus. ‘I can’t eat.’

  ‘Well, tough, you’re eating ’cause I’m not going to bed until you do. I’ll just stay in here talking and talking and talking until you can’t take it any more and go down to the kitchen of your own free will and end up eating the whole box of those weird Polish cocktail sausages with the use-by date of January 2019 just to get me to shut up. Your call.’

  There was no response. It didn’t surprise me.

  When I came back fifteen minutes later with a laden tray, the bedside lamp had been switched on but she’d disappeared under the duvet again. I put the tray down on the bedside table. Right next to her pills, which I was sure she hadn’t taken.

  There was still no response as I sat back down on the bed, but I made sure that I was pretty much sitting on her leg so she had to shift over. With a deep sigh she sat up. I shoved a mug of tea at her so she had no choice but to take it, otherwise there would have been hot tea all over the duvet and spills drove her to the very edge of her nerves.

  A huge number of things drove my mum to the very edge of her nerves.

  ‘Been out then?’ she asked, her voice rusty because she hadn’t used it all day. She took three sips of tea and I let myself relax ever so slightly.

  ‘Yeah, with Alice.’

  Because she’d started to nibble at the toast now, she had the energy to pull a vinegary face. She didn’t like Alice. Thought she was a bad influence, though she should have known, being my own mother and all, that I wasn’t the type of girl who was easily influenced.

  But tonight, I went along with it. I told her about Alice’s re-enacting The Hunger Games with two dumb boys and it was the distraction she needed to drink the mug of tea and eat her two pieces of toast. She even looked at the tube of hand cream on her dressing table like she was thinking about putting some on.

  ‘Alice… she’s one of those girls who’ll get pregnant before she’s even finished school. She’s probably pregnant already,’ she said disapprovingly.

  ‘She’s not. She won’t. She doesn’t do that with them, she just likes to make them suffer,’ I explained. ‘There’s not much else to do round here on a Saturday night, if we don’t go to The Wow.’

  ‘I suppose.’ Mum smiled so fleetingly I almost missed it. But I didn’t and for that microsecond she was who she used to be, then she was gone.

  I stood up. ‘I’m going to run you a bath. I put a wash on before I went out. Should be dry by now. I’ll get you a clean nightie to change into.’

  ‘I don’t really feel up to it.’ She was already trying to retreat back under the covers.

  ‘Oh, you’ll feel much better once you’ve had a bath. And tell you what? I’ll change the sheets while you’re soaking.’ I pulled back the covers and didn’t quite haul her out of bed, but I came pretty close to it.

  She didn’t shout at me. Or swear. No threats or tears, just a little bit of grumbling as she swung her pasty white legs over the side of the bed and took hold of the hand I was offering to pull her up. This was a good day.

  Once she was in the bath, which I’d generously doused with lavender bubble bath ’cause I’d read somewhere that it was meant to be all soothing and stuff, she let me wash her hair. ‘You can do the rest,’ I told her, as I handed her a sponge and the bar of lily-scented soap I’d bought her last birthday.

  I went back into her room, opened the window to let in five minutes of fresh air and checked the pill bottle by her bed. There were twenty-three tablets in it. There’d been twenty-three tablets in it all week. There should have been only seven left and I should have been nagging her about going to the chemist to pick up her repeat prescription. I was too tired to think about that. Instead, I stripped her bed.

  I could hear a faint splashing as I came back up the stairs with clean linen and fifteen minutes later she was back in bed. Her hair was damp and she wouldn’t let me use the hairdryer because she said it would just blow dust around the room, but she was sitting up, she’d taken her pills with the glass of water I’d got her and was looking like she was present, rather than, like, absent.

  ‘Tomorrow, I might do a supermarket shop,’ she said. ‘We’ll make a list at breakfast. Maybe I’ll drive, so we can go to the big Morrisons in Lytham. What do you think?’

  ‘It sounds great,’ I said with a lot more enthusiasm than I felt. I didn’t want to spend my last precious Sunday free from the yoke of further education traipsing round the big Morrisons in Lytham. Besides, there were ten hours between now and breakfast tomorrow. A lot could happen in ten hours.

  I bent down to kiss her cheek, wished her goodnight and said I’d see her in the morning.

  When I got to my room, I had the sick, panicky feeling I always got when I thought about what she might be like in the morning. The only way to stop it was to stop thinking about her. To shove her far back into the furthest reaches of my head, as far back as I could, then the sick, panicky feeling would go.

  Instead I looked at all my college stuff laid out, though college was still two sleeps away. I had new stationery: a really expensive set of fibre-tip pens for drawing, an A3 sketch pad and a lime-green notebook my sister Siobhan had bought me which had DESIGNERS I MET AND LIKED embossed on it in gold letters. I had my sewing kit in a little vintage attaché case: three different pairs of scissors, pinking shears and my chalks. Measuring tape, pins, thimble, reels of cotton and finishings. Really, it was a thing of beauty.

  Draped over the back of a chair was the dress I planned to wear on Monday. It was a candy-pink and white sweater dress I’d found in a chazza. I’d put a corded trim on the unravelling hem, and fake-leather patches on the elbows like you get on old men’s cardigans. I was going to wear it with black tights and a pair of amazing cork-wedged sandals because I love an open toe with a matt tight.

  (It’s very fashion to refer to things like jeans and tights in the singular. ‘I was rocking a skinny jean with a five-inch heel,’ you might say, though Alice said you’d only say that if you were a gigantic wanker.)

  Apart from the pile of college stuff, my room is actually very minimalist in a space age, pop art way – probably because my sewing stuff is in the room next door, though I like to think of it more as my design studio. I’m on the third floor, just below what would have been the staffrooms in th
e attic. Mum never ventures up this far and Dad’s always away so I can pretty much do what I want in here.

  What I wanted to do was to paper my walls in silver foil. Yeah, Christmas turkey tin foil. It was very fiddly, but I was inspired by a place in New York called the Factory, where the artist Andy Warhol had lived and worked in the sixties. He was famous for making art that riffed off of all sorts of weird random stuff like Campbell’s soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, even Brillo soap-pad boxes. He also directed black and white films full of sixties hipsters and he had a house band called the Velvet Underground sometimes fronted by a really cool German model called Nico and then Edie Sedgwick would dance on stage with them. Edie was this doomed, mad, utterly beautiful heiress, who’s my absolute style icon and glamour hero and numero uno inspiration. I discovered Edie when I saw a picture of her on a style blog. She was wearing just a T-shirt and black tights and was posed in an arabesque while perched on a stuffed rhinoceros. No wonder I was intrigued. Once I started obsessing on Edie, it didn’t take long to find out about Andy Warhol and his whole scene. I would have loved to be part of a scene like that, except for all the drugs and nudity, that is.

  As well as clearing the Spar of all its tin foil so I could have shiny, silver walls, I also have a huge blown-up photograph of Edie, Andy Warhol and another guy called Gerard Malanga on the wall right opposite my bed. It was taken in New York, obvs, because New York is totes the centre of the universe, and they’re on the street. Literally on the street, rising up out of a manhole, Edie leaning back against Gerard, her long, black-clad legs stretching up to infinity, Andy staring straight ahead at the camera with his own camera poised.

  Whenever I was feeling unsure and down-hearted, like I was tonight, I would climb into bed and stare at Edie, Andy and Gerard and it always made me feel better.

  That photo represents everything I want to be. The problem is that I’m just not sure how to get there.

  3

  On Monday morning, walking through the college grounds, after the trudge up the long hill from Merrycliffe town centre, felt like walking the green mile.

  Obviously I wasn’t the only new person starting college that day. But I felt like the only person hanging solo and I was getting some smirky looks because of my candy-striped dress, tights and open-toed sandals. Merrycliffe College wasn’t ready for a tight and an open toe.

  I styled it out by putting on my big dark glasses – they’re a lot like the ones that Audrey Hepburn wears in Breakfast at Tiffany’s – and assumed my best ‘bitch, please’ expression.

  It got me through three hours of filling in forms and my first catch-up GCSE Maths class, then skulking around the canteen for the rest of the morning. It was weird not having a form room to hang out in but at least I could go home for lunch without fear of being accused of bunking off. At college you were treated as an adult, or else they didn’t really care what you did – it was too soon to tell.

  Mum was actually up when I got home. Not dressed, but she’d managed to make it down to the kitchen and was watching a repeat of Location Location Location on the little portable TV.

  ‘Oh, there you are,’ she said when I walked in. ‘I know I never got round to it yesterday but let’s make that list and go to Morrisons. It will only take me ten minutes to shower and change.’

  She’d had the whole summer break, six weeks, to go to Morrisons with me instead of taking to her bed, but she chose today, this lunchtime, on my first day of college, an hour from my first official lesson in how to become a fashion designer. Now she decided she wanted to stock up on loo roll and fish fingers.

  I also knew that if she really was serious, it would take her way more than ten minutes to shower and change. I could go back to college, then come home again and she might just about be ready to leave.

  ‘Well, I have a few things I need to do first,’ I said vaguely because I wasn’t even sure that Mum knew that this was my first day at college. Dad had texted me that morning telling me to ‘break a leg, kid’. Alice’s mum and dad had given me a card yesterday and some salted caramel buttons from Hotel Chocolat. But as Mum spent most of her time in bed with the covers over her head, for her the days all bled into each other. The only difference was good days and bad days and there hadn’t been that many good days for a long, long time. ‘I’m sure I’ll be done by the time you’re ready to go, but shall I make a cup of tea first?’

  I made her tea and toast again. Started the shopping list. Had a slightly tense discussion about soap pads versus scourers and Fairy Liquid, then told her I had to pop out.

  It was easier not to give her details but a brief, shadowy outline of what was happening in my world. That way no one got hurt.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ I promised cheerily as I opened the front door. ‘Call me on my mobile when you’re ready to go.’

  I was so late that I had to get the bus back to college, which meant a mad rush to the bus stop and I still had to chase down the bus until it stopped at the lights, then hammer on the door and pout and make sad puppy faces until the driver relented.

  I didn’t want to start my BTEC L3 Extended Diploma in Fashion and Clothing a red-faced, flustered mess, but we don’t always get what we want.

  I followed the signs to the art block, which was right at the back of the college grounds. Then I wandered around for a bit, getting more and more panic-stricken, until I found the right studio. I took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

  I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting but it was something more exciting than seven other students sitting on stools in a semicircle in a workroom. Beyond them, I could see the workstations at the other end of the room; huge tables, each with a sewing machine built into it. I wanted to rush to the nearest one and get acquainted – but that could wait. First, I was curious and also more than a little scared to see who my sewing companions would be for the next two years.

  Two of them obviously knew each other because they were jabbering away and also they were old, like in their forties at least. Probably retraining after being made redundant or something. By the look of them, they were hoping to open a boutique selling dresses covered in bits of frou-frou and diamanté. Not that I was judging. Me? Judge? Never.

  There was a really pretty black girl with her own ‘bitch, please’ expression, and a girl who was totally orange ’cause she’d overdone it on the fake tan. She had fake everything else too: eyelashes, nails, hair extensions. I wondered if she’d got the wrong room and was meant to be doing a hair and beauty course. A lot of the girls who worked in Alice’s dad’s salons had the same look and they were perfectly nice but they weren’t the kind of girls I wanted to hang out with on a daily basis.

  Then there was a girl with pink hair who was working a Steampunk look – I was sure that’s why she had clock faces sewn on to her billowing, gothy black dress. Last of all were two semi-cute boys. One wearing an old-fashioned three-piece suit, the other wearing jeans, a Fred Perry shirt, Adidas trackie top with Adidas Shell Toe trainers. It was a very old skool look.

  Obviously the two boys were gay. My gaydar was infallible. I took a seat nearest to the one in the suit and there wasn’t even time to make eye contact with anyone or open my Designers I Have Met And Liked notebook, before the tutor came bustling through the door.

  I’d been expecting a Lancastrian version of Anna Wintour, the uber-chic editor of US Vogue, not a middle-aged woman who looked like she’d yell at you if you presented her with a crooked seam. She wasn’t wearing anything amazing either but an olive-green jumper and boring black trousers. I couldn’t imagine how she was going to teach me anything I wanted to know about fashion design.

  Up until now, I was completely self-taught. I’d learned how to make clothes through trial and error; watching how-to videos on the internet and buying clothes from the 50p bin in the chazzas so I could take them apart to see how they were made.

  ‘I’m going to assume that you know nothing about fashion design and start with the basics,’ Barbara,
the tutor, said. ‘Though I do expect all of you to be able to thread a needle at the very least.’

  We all laughed nervously and I waited for Barbara to tell us about all the exciting things we’d be doing, from learning how to make trousers to corsetry. While I waited, I mentally sketched out a perfect pair of cigarette pants and was just frowning over the zipper when I realised that Barbara had stopped talking ages ago and we were meant to be taking it in turns to introduce ourselves.

  I’d already missed the two older women’s intros. Barbara had moved on to the black girl, whose name was Sage (I wondered if she’d made that up), who was keen to pursue a career in costume design for film and TV.

  Orange girl, as I’d suspected, admitted that the hair and beauty courses had been over-subscribed so she was here under duress, waiting for a wannabe hairdresser or aesthetician to drop out. Her name was Krystal with a K. Girls like that always have names like Krystal with a K.