Though it was freezing cold, we all went and sat by the lock to get mildly tipsy, except we were pestered by old drunk men who kept asking us for money and young drunk men who kept asking to see our tits. We decided to head for the Dublin Castle, where the boys were playing, but first we had to hide our spare cans.
Thee Desperadettes were skilled in the art of hiding alcohol. They shoved their cans to the bottom of their bags and made sure a box of tampons was highly visible when the bag was opened and shown to the security guard on the door, who shied away from the sight of sanitary protection products.
Soon we’d fought our way through the crowded pub, had our names ticked off on the three-pound guest list (playing third on the bill didn’t qualify the band to put any names on the proper free guest list) and found ourselves in a dark back room. It might have been small by London standards – two girls behind me referred to the place as ‘a dump’ – but it was about the same size as The Wow Club, although there were very few tables and chairs. Probably people in London were too cool to sit down.
There was also no way to subtly hang about near the backstage area, but then I didn’t really need to do that any more. I could look at Louis any time I wanted. Talk to him. Touch and be touched by him. Not in a sexy-times way but just in the way that he was a boy that I hung out with now. Which was weird because I’d always imagined that I’d either worship Louis from afar or somehow convince him that we were made for each other – there’d been no middle ground in my fantasies.
I wasn’t really sure how I felt about the middle ground. It was something that Alice and I needed to talk about but she was more interested in running her eyes over every guy in the room.
‘Seen anything you like?’ I asked her.
Alice stuck her tongue out at me. ‘Not really. London boys look very unwashed. Anyway, I have more important things to do like mocking Thee Desperadoes,’ she said, grabbing my hand to tug me forward. I resisted her efforts. ‘Franny! It’s been ages since we’ve mocked Thee Desperadoes. Watching them solo was one of the most excruciating half-hours of my life.’
‘We can’t,’ I said. ‘Look!’ Thee Desperadettes were already gathered down the front. ‘We’ll have to mock from a distance.’
‘I can’t believe you want to be friends with girls who think Thee Desperadoes are any good.’ Alice was incapable of keeping her voice to anything other than a muted roar. ‘What losers.’
‘They’re not losers!’
Before we could start bickering, even though we’d only been made up for a couple of hours, the band appeared. In fact, Louis rushed past us so he could take a flying leap on to the stage, grab the microphone and bellow, ‘Hello, Camden. Are you ready to rock?’
Camden really wasn’t. When Francis straightened up after fiddling with his effect pedals and saw the empty room, he looked beleaguered, like Alice’s dog when she was having a wee and caught anyone looking at her.
I let Alice pull me down the front, but now I was with the band rather than gawping at the band I vowed not to laugh. The only smile on my face would be an encouraging smile, I told myself sternly. Then there was an ear-splitting caterwaul of feedback and, with perfectly synchronised movements, Alice and I were digging into our bags for our earplugs.
It was marginally better, though we could still hear Louis screeching away about offering someone a ride on his love rocket, while Francis and the bassist stood stock still, both of them staring fixedly at the floor like they really, really hoped it might suddenly open up and swallow them whole. I was in a thousand agonies as now my hair wasn’t long enough to hide behind so I could have a good laugh.
Alice was hugging herself and lurching from foot to foot. ‘If I don’t laugh soon I’ll burst,’ she shouted, but I was painfully aware of Lexy and Kirsten staring up at the stage, eyes rapt, Bethany taking pictures. I gave Alice a warning shove.
Three songs in and Louis suddenly whipped off his T-shirt. He whirled it round his head for a bit, then tossed it into the non-existent crowd where it landed on Kirsten’s head. She yanked it off with a revolted expression and it was too much.
A great ugly snort of laughter burst out of me, along with a tiny bit of snot. The dam broke. As soon as I started laughing, Alice laughed too and it wasn’t very long, probably only ten seconds, before we were clutching at each other and howling as Louis strutted his stuff on top of one of the speakers and ran a hand down his sweaty chest.
I didn’t even care what Lexy and the others might think but as I was having a choked, gaspy breather between guffaws, I heard her shout, ‘Oh, put it away, Louis! We’ve seen it all before.’
‘Do you kiss your mum with that mouth?’ Bethany added as Louis yowled about ‘sexing you up till you can’t be sexed no more’. She turned to us and rolled her eyes long and hard. ‘Jesus, you’d think after all this time they might have one decent song, but that’s obviously asking too much.’
‘At this point a cover of “Gangnam Style” would be a relief,’ Alice yelled back. ‘Can you imagine Louis doing the dance?’
‘Oh my God, don’t even —’ Bethany begged and then all five of us were laughing, though at least I had the dignity not to heckle the band, which was more than I can say of the others. Also we were laughing with Thee Desperadoes – Louis kept giving us cheesy grins and even cheesier thumbs-up gestures – not laughing at them, though I don’t think Francis appreciated the difference.
‘Fuck my life,’ he mouthed very distinctly at one point just before Louis launched into an enthusiastic series of star jumps and landed in the audience, where he tried to persuade us to join him in the chorus of their last song.
‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ Lexy shouted, pushing him off her. ‘Get away from me, you freak!’
The room had filled up during the band’s set and as we joined the crush to get out, the five of us glared at anyone we heard dissing Thee Desperadoes. You only got to diss them when you’d earned your stripes and seen them play The Wow nearly every week for at least a year.
‘See, we thought you two were really into the band,’ Lexy said, as we fought our way back through the pub. ‘Like, massive Desperadoes fangirls. We wondered if you’d been dropped on your heads as children.’
‘Yeah, well, we thought exactly the same about you,’ Alice said, but she wasn’t being belligerent and as we spilled out on to the pavement and retrieved our cans of vodka, we happily discussed all the crappy highlights of Thee Desperadoes’ many shows.
‘… then there was the time that Louis jumped off the stage and he landed badly and twisted his ankle,’ Kirsten tried to say though it was hard as we were all giggling hysterically as we remembered how Louis had stopped the song to say, ‘No, really, it doesn’t hurt at all,’ then hobbled back on to the stage.
‘Aw, Louis. He is lovely though,’ Bethany said.
‘So sweet.’
‘Not a bad bone in his body.’
‘And he is really fit.’
It was hopeless. Every girl in Merrycliffe was in love with him. I looked at Alice and she looked at me. ‘We should talk about this,’ she said quietly but then she turned and started talking to Bethany, who wanted to dye her fringe bright green. ‘You’ll need to bleach it first and then you have to…’
I made a mental note to pull Bethany to one side and tell her to never take haircare advice from Alice or else live to regret it and once I’d saved it to my memory bank, I blinked. Francis was standing next to me.
‘Have you any idea how hard it is to remember what order I need to play the only three chords I know, when you’re laughing at me?’ he demanded plaintively. ‘It’s very, very hard.’
‘Laughing with you. Not at you,’ I said.
‘But I wasn’t laughing.’ He was half laughing now.
‘If you’d let yourself look at Louis you’d have been laughing.’ I pulled out my purse. ‘Do you want a drink? I feel like I owe you a drink. Except you’ll have to go to the bar to get it because I’m underage and stuff.’
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Francis rested his hand on mine so I couldn’t open my purse and pull out a fiver, though I really hoped that a bottle of lager didn’t cost that much. ‘We’re cool, Franny,’ he said. ‘Anyway, we got a rider. Three cans each, though the headline band tried to make out they were theirs.’
‘The more I hear about this headline band, the less I like them.’
‘Yeah, well, we have to stay and watch their set. It’s kind of bad band etiquette if we don’t.’
Alice broke off her conversation with Bethany. ‘But we want to go to a club.’ She fluttered her eyelashes at Francis. I held my breath but he seemed unaffected by the lashes that had melted the hearts of so many other boys. ‘Why give time to a band who wouldn’t even let you soundcheck?’
‘And tried to steal your rider,’ I added. Then Francis had the five of us surrounding him for some prolonged nagging.
‘Saturday night in Camden, Francis,’ Lexy reminded him. ‘Why would you try to deprive us of that experience?’
‘Don’t shoot the messenger,’ he said, hands held up in protest, but when the rest of the boys came out they didn’t share Francis’s noble belief that you had to support your fellow bands.
‘Sod that’ was the general consensus and besides Louis was far too excited to stand in one spot and watch a band. He kept darting through the other groups congregated on the pavement until a really old punk with a blue Mohican threatened to smack him.
We decided to take to the mean streets of Camden and find somewhere cool to hang out where we could dance, though it was only ten-thirty and Kirsten insisted that ‘Most people in London don’t get to the clubs until midnight. They stay open till five in the morning. Sometimes even later.’
Olly went back to the minibus because he said he hated clubbing and he wanted to get some sleep before he drove us back to Merrycliffe. I had no choice but to entrust him with my Martin Sanderson bag of fabric and my new coat because I didn’t want to get disco dirt on it.
Yes, it was freezing without a coat and the hem and cuffs of my leather dress were curling up but I tried to think of it as suffering for my art.
‘I’ll keep you warm,’ Louis promised and as we started to walk down the road, with Francis at the head of our little crocodile as he was the only one who knew his way around, he put his arm round me.
It was almost too much to bear. Hanging out in Camden on a Saturday night on our way to a club that might stay open until five in the morning and Louis Allen had his arm around me so that anyone looking at us would think that we were together. That we were a couple. I could feel the heat of him. A prickly hard kind of hot that was strange and other, even though Louis himself wasn’t that strange any more.
‘We rocked it tonight,’ he announced as we skirted past a puddle of vomit just outside somewhere called the Jazz Café. ‘I love being on stage. Love seeing my girls having a good time at the front.’
I felt a bit guilty at how Louis’s girls had really been screaming with laughter but technically we had been having a good time. ‘It’s always fun when you guys play,’ I murmured and Louis beamed at me.
He was so uncomplicated. It was very restful.
‘So, anyway, I’ve been thinking about how, like, you’ve not snogged anyone and we should do something about it,’ Louis continued in a breezy fashion like it was no big deal.
Um, if he was about to propose what I suspected he was about to propose, then it was a big deal. The biggest deal.
‘OK, like what did you have in mind?’ I asked casually, even though my heart was suddenly beating like it could explode at any moment. It felt terrifying and delicious all at the same time.
‘Well, we kiss. Simples, isn’t it? If you’re freaking out ’cause no one’s kissed you, then you need to kiss someone…’
‘I wouldn’t say I was freaking out so much as…’
‘I’ve kissed loads of people. I’m really good at it,’ Louis told me like I needed the hard sell. Which I didn’t. Not really. ‘Might as well get it over and done with.’
Louis was right. There was only so long that a girl could remain unkissed before being unkissed turned into such a burden that she’d lock lips with anyone just to rid herself of it. And Louis wasn’t just anyone. It was Louis! The boy of my dreams. And I was in London and it was the day I’d met Martin Sanderson. My first kiss wasn’t going to get much better than this.
‘All right. OK. So… I mean, what did you… should I?’ My mind was made up but it had to be now, otherwise the countdown to my first kiss would lose all its urgency, and knowing me, I’d probably chicken out. One small problem though – we were currently marching down Camden High Street.
‘There’s no need to be nervous,’ Louis said kindly, pulling me through a break in the traffic to the other side of the road where the covered stalls of the closed market beckoned. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll catch up with the others. I’ve been to Camden at least three times and Francis always takes us to the same place on Chalk Farm Road.’
I squinted up the road. I could just make out Francis’s grey beanie in the distance. If he turned round and noticed that we weren’t there, then he’d get cross. Maybe even come and look for us and I was going to tell Louis that but he was pulling me further into the deserted market, a maze made out of canvas and metal. It was a bit scary. Not supernatural scary but like some of those tramps that had hassled us earlier probably hung out round here and I was glad Louis still had his arm round my shoulder.
When we were deep in the heart of the market, Louis stopped and turned to me with a slow-burn smile. ‘Right, let’s get ready to rumble!’
We ended up doing an awkward shuffle to get ourselves in position. I leaned back against a stall and Louis took me in his arms, which should have had me swooning. Instead I was licking my lips then trying to relax them so my mouth would look totally kissable, like Alice had instructed me many, many times when we were discussing the whys and wherefores of kissing.
I didn’t want to think about Alice. I stared up at Louis who grinned at me.
‘OK, bring it on,’ I said enthusiastically and I expected Louis to swoop down and the swooning to start but instead he took a deep breath then clamped his hand over my left boob. I felt nothing. Well, I felt the warmth of his hand and I panicked that there wasn’t much boob for him to get hold of, but then Louis bent his head and I decided that my time could be better spent thrilling to the feel of his lips on mine.
His lips went straight for my neck, along with his nose, and he nuzzled against my skin enthusiastically. He was obviously building up to the kiss, wanted to make it special. Meanwhile the tarpaulins fluttered in the wind and we were cocooned away and – ugh!
I felt something moist and warm drag against my neck. Louis made a happy little noise like my skin was bacon-flavoured, then licked a path up towards my chin and actually standing in the freezing cold with my boob clutched in a vice-like hold while Louis slurped over me was not doing it. None of my parts were tingling and I’d much rather have been in a warm pub with Francis and the others as we complained about how expensive everything was in fancy London. What was wrong with me?
‘Louis! I think we should stop,’ I said. He stopped instantly. Well, he stopped giving my chin a tongue bath but kept his hand on my boob.
‘What’s up?’ he asked, and he was still textbook beautiful, and all right, there was no way in hell he would ever get any of the answers on Pointless but he was funny and sweet and not at all up himself and I absolutely did not fancy him. Then I was all like, woah! Where did that thought suddenly come from?
I fancied Louis. It was one of the basic facts that made up me. My best friend was Alice. I wanted to be a fashion designer. I was allergic to kiwi fruit. My mum was a bit menty and I had a serious case of unrequited love for Louis Allen from Thee Desperadoes. Except somehow in the last few weeks I’d fallen out of love with Louis and not even realised it.
Once I got to know Louis, he’d become less and less sexy as he talked about c
hicken’s testicles and impersonated the cowardly lion from The Wizard of Oz. Also, it was hard to get hot and bothered about a guy when you discovered that he thought antiperspirant was an option rather than something everyone should use once they hit puberty, under pain of death.
There was no mystery to Louis any more. He was no longer a foxy blank canvas to project all my hipster couple dreams on to. He was a real boy and he still had his hand on my tit.
‘Franny? I said, what’s up?’ Louis asked again. He gazed at me with a perplexed expression. ‘I was going to get round to the kissing. I have this whole routine I do.’
‘Yeah, about that…’ There was no easy way to have this conversation and for a microsecond I wondered if I should just kiss Louis rather than explain why I didn’t want to. But it wasn’t just a kiss. Maybe I was placing way too much importance on it but my first kiss was only going to happen once and it might just as well be special. ‘See, I’ve waited so long that I reckon I could probably wait a bit longer. With the whole kissing thing.’