Withering Tights

  A hat?

  For wind?

  Or a headscarf?

  I haven’t got a headscarf.

  Well that’s it then, isn’t it? The whole thing is ruined. I haven’t even got a headscarf to go out in his car.

  I can’t think about this.

  I’m going to do deep breathing.

  Looking out of my window across the fields. Towards Grimbottom.

  Me and the girls are going to go to Skipley tomorrow. On the bus! Who would have thought I would be so excited about going on a bus. But there might be civilisation in Skipley. There might be a Topshop. I am soooo excited. I am over-excited. I’m hysterical, I may have to slap my own face in a minute at this rate.

  I got my things and left the house quickly. As I crossed the village green, I saw that Alex was outside The Blind Pig sitting on the wall. I got the funny thumpy-heart thing. I must think of something sensible to say ahead of time.

  What would be normal to talk about?

  He smiled when he saw me.

  Ooooohhh, he was smiling. He was doing the smiling thing. Ooooooh.

  “Ay up, Tallulah, are you alright?”

  I smiled back and kept my jacket done up to de-emphasise my lack of corkers.

  Alex was sitting with his legs crossed and his hands in his pockets. The sun was still quite bright and he screwed his eyes up so that he could see me. He looked lovely with screwy-up eyes.

  He said, “What are you up to tonight, then?”

  I said in an offhand way, “I’m staying at yours actually, because Dibdobs has gone off making acorn pies with the Brownies.”

  He laughed.

  And then I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  He said, “What have you been up to at college?”

  I said, “Well we did an improvised thingy about the Brontës. You know, howling winds…woooooooo. And then we did leaping and there’s going to be a performance lunchtime about, um…well I thought I might do the owl eggs.”

  He looked puzzled.

  “Eggs?”

  Oh noooo. Now I had started an egg thing. Again. Because I had been thinking about the last time I saw him in the barn. I couldn’t back out of it, so I said, “Yeah, you know, the, well, I was thinking about the owl eggs and I thought I might do a performance about them.”

  He still looked at me and didn’t say anything.

  So I went on. “Yeah, because Ruby told me that when they are born, the owl twins will have double eyelids, which is, um…interesting.”

  And I started doing an impression of double eyelids for him.

  Not that he had asked me.

  But as I had started I couldn’t stop. I raised my bottom eyelids really slowly upwards without moving my upper eyelids. Which is hard, actually.

  Alex folded his arms and leant back and said, “How old are you?”

  And I said, “Hahahahaha, old enough.”

  Why? Old enough for what? To be friends with eggs?

  Just then a car drew up with a boy driving and honked its horn. Alex slid off the wall and waved at the bloke. Then he said to me, “Have fun. Don’t lead my sister into bad ways.”

  And he went off and got in the car.

  Ruby came out with Matilda, her bulldog, and waved Matilda’s paw at him. And the car drove off.

  I said, as casually as I could, “So where is, um…Alex off to?”

  She looked at me and said, “Don’t even think about it.”

  I daren’t ask Ruby anything about Alex. I felt a bit sad. And stupid at the same time.

  But it was good fun with Vaisey and Ruby. We had our tea in the pub kitchen served by Mr Barraclough, Ruby’s dad. I’d never seen Ruby’s mum and I didn’t like to ask where she was. Especially as it might then lead to questions about my mum and dad who I haven’t even heard from.

  Mr Barraclough said, “What will you artists be up to tonight, then? Will you be pretending to be stuck in an imaginary cupboard?”

  Ruby said, “Dad, can we have crisps?”

  He said, “Yes, just as long as you don’t let these two make them into anything unusual.”

  And he went laughing off into the bar.

  He’s big. He ate fifteen pies at the pie-eating contest.

  So we just messed about upstairs in the pub. Vaisey and me worked out what we were going to wear to go to Skipley and tried out different make-up. Vaisey is quite good with make-up. She drew a dark brown pencil line around my eyes and I thought it made me look a bit more grown up. Sort of more moody and less startled.

  Vaisey said, “You should wear a darker pink lipstick.”

  I said, “How do you know that sort of thing?”

  And she showed me some mags that she had, that told you all sorts of stuff. In the make-up and hair guide it said you should wear make-up to balance your shape. And then there were pictures of girls with a square face, and a round face, and a long face; one with big lips and one with thin lips; narrow forehead, chubby cheeks, no cheeks. It was a nightmare trying to choose what I had. In the end we sort of agreed I was a longy roundy biggy-faced person.

  Which is a help.

  I said to Vaisey, “It’s alright for you, you’re that one in the middle.”

  Vaisey said, “The turned-up nose, sticky-out hair, small-cheeked, round-faced person?”

  I said, “Exactly.”

  Then I said, “You’re cute as a button, though.”

  She smiled at me.

  She is cute as a button.

  We let Ruby use our lipsticks and eye shadows and I said I will get her something tomorrow from town. Her dad shouted up the stairs, “Oy, Ruby, beddy-byes for thee.”

  She went off to her bedroom.

  Vaisey and I were sleeping in the same bed. It was cosy because we could hear the sounds from the pub downstairs. A lot of laughing and singing.

  The bedroom door creaked open and Ruby came in in her nightie with Matilda. She and Matilda looked at us. Matilda is not what you would call athletic. Well, what you could call her is a really odd-looking barrel thing with short, stubby legs. But she is the friendliest doggy in the world and loves everyone.

  Ruby said, “Matilda wanted to see you.”

  And then Matilda threw herself at the bed. She meant to come up on the bed with us, but she is too short, so she just kept hurling herself at it and bouncing off the side. Sometimes she would manage to get her front legs on the bed before she slowly toppled off. It was very funny.

  Ruby got into the bottom of the bed and tucked herself in.

  She said, “Come on Matilda, upsy daisy.”

  Which was a bit mean as it was never going to happen unless someone brought a ladder.

  In the end we hauled her up and into bed with us. It made us laugh a lot seeing her tucked up under the sheets.

  Especially when Ruby went and got Matilda’s special Noddy sleeping hat.

  The volume downstairs in the pub got louder, as did the singing.

  I said, “What is that song they are singing? Is it an old Yorkshire ditty, you know, like that ‘On Ilkley Moor Bar T’at’?”

  Ruby said, “Nah, it’s a football song. It goes ‘We hate Chelsea, we hate Chelsea, we are the Chelsea haters’.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Lying in my squirrel room

  With my squirrel slippers on

  When we woke up on Saturday morning I had been sleeping on my face. Partly because I woke up in the middle of the night thinking that I was having a heart attack. My chest was all heavy and I couldn’t breathe properly. Then I realised that Matilda was sleeping on it. So I pushed her on to the back of my legs and slept the other way round.

  It was not the best night’s sleep I’ve ever had, because I had Ruby’s foot practically up my bottom as well. But it was sort of cosy.

  When I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, it was like Matilda staring back at me because my face was all squashy and flattened.

  Vaisey said, “Put hot flannels on it and sort of smooth it out.”
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  She is a mine of beauty tips.

  We were meeting Honey and Jo and Flossie at eleven o’clock at the bus stop.

  Vaisey was ‘modelling’ things that she might wear. It was a lovely day, no sign of imminent fog, so she was going for a ‘summer girl’ look.

  She’s got lots of nice dresses. I don’t really know about dresses, I am so busy trying to disguise my legs and knees.

  I said to Vaisey, “I wish I could wear stuff like you do.”

  She was trying on a little denim dress and said, “You will, your legs are bound to stop growing soon.”

  In the end I put my jeans on, but I did borrow a studded leather belt from Vaisey which looked good, I think. Vaisey did my eyeliner thing and I wore a bit of dark pink lip gloss.

  Flossie, Honey and Jo were all at the stop when we got there. They’d got out on to the roof last night and were really excited about it.

  Jo said, “It was brilliant, we danced around in our pyjamas and no one knew we were up there!”

  Flossie said, “We could have stayed up there all night and they wouldn’t have known.”

  Jo said, “I’d kept some bread and butter back from supper and we ate that. Outdoors. On the roof.”

  I said to Honey, “Did you go eat bread and butter on the roof?”

  She said, “I did go up, yeth, but it wath fweething and there wath bird poo.”

  I said, “We had a bulldog in our bed.”

  Flossie said, “You lucky, lucky person. You have all the luck.”

  The bus for Skipley arrived. It was quite full. When I asked for five returns to Skipley, please, the bus driver said, “You’ll not come back from Skipley, lass, no one does. You’re all doomed!!!! Especially since I will be driving today with no hands.”

  Then he started laughing and put his hands behind his back.

  A woman at the front said, “Take no notice, love, he amuses himself.”

  Then a grumpy voice from the back said, “What’s the bloody hold up? Ay, aren’t you that gangly one that kicked me on the train? I’m eighty-five you know, by the time you bloody lot get on, I’ll be nearer eighty-six.”

  We sat very near the front.

  And everyone looked at me when they got off, like I was an old-person kicker.

  Which I am.

  It took us about half an hour to get to Skipley, bouncing across the dales and moors. Yorkshire people have a lot of sticks. Almost everyone who got on the bus had a stick.

  Skipley was a biggish town, it had cafés and shops and everything.

  I said, “Look! These shops have got stuff in them. Not just boiled sweets. Other stuff.”

  We spent a lot of time trying on lipstick testers. I got a blusher, well more like little goldy pink balls that you brushed on. I noticed that a lot of the girls in the shop were very orange. And quite big. I was almost squashed to death when two of them reached for the same perfume as me.

  We messed around most of the afternoon and got to the bus stop to go back at about six o’clock. The girls at Dother Hall had to be back by seven-thirty unless they got written permission from Sidone, and then you had to say who you were going with and where.

  Flossie said, “It’ll be fun when you come up to the Hall to stay, Vaisey, although not necessarily for you, because Bob is making your bed.”

  The bus arrived. We piled on and just as we were about to go a group of lads came skittering around the corner and leapt on too. I recognised Phil and Charlie, and as they came down the bus they saw us. Jo started fiddling about with her hair.

  Phil said loudly, “Hurrah, it’s the Tree Sisters. Are you having a thespian outing?”

  The people on the bus started tutting. I went bright red, I think. I could feel my head on fire. Phil and Charlie sat down in the seats in front of Jo and me. And the other three went near Honey and Flossie and Vaisey. As the bus lurched off, Phil leant over the back of his seat.

  He said, “I still dream about our day in the woods.”

  I said, “It wasn’t your day in the woods, it was our day in the woods. And anyway, it wasn’t our day in the woods, we were getting ideas.”

  Charlie popped his head up then and looked really closely at us.

  “Was your idea to go and get off with trees?”

  Jo hit him over the head with her Topshop bag.

  Phil said, “I like a fight on the way home.”

  It was all getting a bit, I don’t know, sort of tense, but I don’t know why. The other boys were talking to Honey and Vaisey. And Flossie was talking to a bloke and his sheepdog. The bus stopped in the middle of nowhere. Not at a stop or anything, and a big old man got on and came up the bus towards us. He was carrying a chicken. It wasn’t dead.

  He looked at the boys leaning over the back of the seats and said, “Ay, you young larrikins. Sit down properly, tha’s not at home now.”

  Then he gave the chicken to a woman at the back and said, “Now then, that’s for thee, bring us up any spare cow tit you’ve got and we’ll call it evens.”

  She said, “Awreet, thanks, love.”

  Then the chicken man walked slowly down the bus and got off.

  Somebody shouted out from the back, “Can’t tha go a bit slower, at this rate I’ll still be alive by the time we get to Heckmondwhite. Bloody hell.”

  When we shuddered off again, Phil popped his head up.

  He looked at Jo.

  She looked at him.

  He kept looking.

  She said, “What do you want?”

  And he said, “Do you want to come to the pictures with me?”

  I have never seen someone look so much like a human goldfish as Jo.

  Eventually because he went on looking at her she said, “What?”

  Phil went on, “Cinema, you and me, jogging boy and tree girl. Go on. Be a devil. Go on.”

  Jo was saying, “But I…don’t…”

  Then Charlie popped his head up.

  “Go on, lady. Don’t upset him. He’s shy.”

  All the way home Jo has been driving us mad. How many times can you go through a conversation? A lot is the answer.

  We had to hang around at the bus stop for ages while she went on and on.

  Jo said, “What does he mean, do you want to come to the pictures with me?”

  Honey said, “He meanth, well that meanth, he wanth to take you to the thinema.”

  We all nodded.

  I said, “That sums it up. Night, night.”

  Jo said, “OK, what if I do go with him and then that’s it. He doesn’t want to see me again. Because I am too small. Or can beat him at arm wrestling or whatever. What then? I will have been dumped just because I said I would go. Whereas, if I hadn’t gone in the first place I would have been alright.”

  I don’t like myself for this, but I felt a bit jealous of Jo. At least she had been asked to go to the cinema by a real boy.

  Jo said, “Anyway, I don’t think I fancy him. He’s too short.”

  After the girls trudged off up the lane to Dother Hall, Vaisey said, “I’d be excited if I’d been asked out by a boy. I liked that other boy on the bus. He’s called Jack, but he didn’t say anything to me. He sort of looked like he was going to and then he didn’t.”

  I put my arm around her. “I’m sure you will get a boyfriend, hair-hat friend.”

  Vaisey said, “Have you met anyone you like yet? Do you like Charlie?”

  I laughed in a casual way and said, “Charlie?”

  She said, “Oh, I just wondered. I thought he might have asked you to go to the cinema as well.”

  To tell the truth, that is what I had thought in a little far away place in my mind. He seemed friendly and sort of happy to see me, but he hadn’t said anything. Why should he? He was quite a good-looking boy. Probably had a few girlfriends before.

  I said to Vaisey, “Maybe he doesn’t go for the Irish broomstick type?”

  Vaisey said, “You’re silly. Anyway, Honey said we had to show our glorwee.”

&nb
sp; I said, “I am showing my glorwee, look at me showing my glorwee.” And I bent down and kissed my kneecaps as we walked along.

  We had breakfast in the pub the next day. It was quite good fun being in a real pub when it was all secret and closed up. Especially as Ruby’s dad had gone to the beer fest up in the dales. For a laugh, I was offering one of the stuffed deer a little sausage when a male voice said, “Hello, Tallulah.”

  I whirled round, hiding the sausage. It was Alex. Matilda went mad leaping up and down at his shins.

  I said, “Hello, Alex.” In a low voice, like the woman in James Bond. I don’t know why.

  Vaisey said, “Hi, Alex. I’m going to go in and work on my song. Laters.”

  Ruby went after her saying, “Vaisey, I want to show you Matilda’s new collar, it lights up. Come and see, Lullah.”

  And she scampered off after Vaisey.

  I was about to follow them when Alex said, “Come and sit in the sun with me. I haven’t really heard about how you are getting on at college or anything.”

  I looked at him.

  He was being quite nice, wasn’t he?

  Was he?

  We went and sat on the wall that ran around the graveyard. You could see miles from there and the moors looked green and not glowering like they often did. I could see big birds swooping and diving above the crags, like in Wuthering Heights on a good day. I felt warm in the sun and it was really nice sitting there with him. I was still nervous, because he was just so gorgeous. Like a film star, really. I don’t think I had ever spoken to a grown-up boy before. About myself.

  He said, “What do you like best about college, Tallulah?”

  “Oh, I don’t know really, I feel like I’m being me. Not that that is probably the best choice but…”

  And he laughed. “What would be wrong with you?”

  And that’s when I did it.

  “Oh you know, the knee thingy. And the—” And just in time I stopped myself from saying the corkers word. I had very nearly said, to the best-looking boy in the universe, “Alex, I haven’t got any corkers, do you think they will ever grow?” And possibly followed that up by saying, “I have been trying various methods of corker-rubbing, what do you think?”