by Lisa Jewell
Tallulah closes her eyes and angles her face toward her mother’s outstretched hand.
“So,” says her mother, applying the brush to the rim of her left eye. “What’s with the makeup?”
It’s the college Christmas party tonight, a disco in the canteen, famously awful but she knows the cool kids will be there, Scarlett and her lot, because they’re on the social planning committee, and she feels very keenly that if she doesn’t go, she might miss out on something, but she’s not entirely sure what.
She shrugs. “Just felt like it,” she says.
Her mother completes the second wing and she turns to see herself in the mirror. The wings are perfect. “Thanks, Mum,” she says. “You’re the best.”
“What are you going to wear?” asks her mum.
“That top,” she says, “you know, the one we got when we were at the Belfry last week. With the hearts on it. With my black jeans.”
“Oh yes,” her mum replies, “that’ll look lovely.”
Tallulah smiles. It’s not the most amazing top in the world but it’ll hide her post-baby stomach, which just won’t seem to snap back into shape no matter how hard she tries, and that’s the important thing.
An hour later she comes downstairs. Her mum has Noah on her lap and they’re watching CBeebies together. Ryan is at the dining table with headphones on, doing his homework.
“You look gorgeous,” says her mother. “Just gorgeous.”
Tallulah leans down to kiss Noah on both cheeks.
“How are you getting there?”
“Chloe’s giving me a lift.”
Her mother nods.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” Tallulah asks, touching the crown of her baby’s head. “I don’t have to go if you’d rather I didn’t?”
“Of course we’ll be all right. It’s bath time in a minute, isn’t it, my angel?” Her mother’s voice rises an octave or two as she turns to address Noah. “And after that we’ll have a lovely story and a lovely long sleep. Yes! Yes we will!”
Noah turns and smiles at her and Tallulah’s mum kisses him hard on his cheek. “Off you go,” she says. “Have fun. Let me know if you’re going to be late.”
“I definitely won’t be late,” she says. “Chloe’s mum wants her home by eleven, so that’s when I’ll be back.”
She hears the sound of a car pulling up outside and dashes to the front door. Briefly, she appraises herself in the mirror there.
She looks, she thinks, quite pretty.
* * *
The first hour is every bit as crap as Tallulah had expected it to be. Shit sound system playing bad music; the hatch in the wall where the dinner ladies usually serve lunch is open and serving beer in plastic bottles and wine by the glass. She and Chloe sit on a bench with their backs to the wall, each holding a beer, watching the party unfold around them. Chloe went to school with Tallulah, primary and secondary; they were never particularly great friends but have come together out of necessity during this first term at Manton.
Then a buzz passes across the room, and inside the frame of the double doors appear Scarlett Jacques and her gang. They’re laughing among themselves and none of them has made any effort to look nice. Scarlett’s faded-blue hair is tied back into two short pigtails. She’s wearing baggy jeans and a leopard-print vest top and an oversize fake-fur coat. The whole atmosphere of the room changes as they enter.
Chloe tuts. “What the fuck are they doing here?”
Tallulah turns. “Why wouldn’t they be here? They helped to plan it.”
“I would have thought they were waaaay too edgy and cool for this sort of thing.”
Tallulah feels a strange wave of defensiveness pass through her. “They’re just people,” she counters.
But she knows this isn’t true. They’re more than just people. They’re a mood, a feeling, a vibe, an aspiration. They’re like a music video or a trailer for a really cool movie. They’re a billboard poster for a hip clothing brand. Within the tiny fishbowl environs of Manton College, they’re basically celebrities.
“Want another drink?” she asks, getting to her feet.
Chloe shakes her head. “This is my limit,” she says, miming driving a car.
“Coke?”
“Sure,” says Chloe. “Diet, if they’ve got it.”
Tallulah tugs down her heart-print shirt so that there’s no gap between the waistband of her jeans and the hem of her shirt, no glimpse of the rice pudding mess left behind by her pregnancy.
She heads to the hatch just as Scarlett and her crew arrive. They smell as though they’ve been drinking already, making a kind of mockery of Tallulah’s sober hour in front of a mirror, her quiet farewell to her baby son on her mother’s lap, her brother sitting at his laptop, diligently doing his homework. How different their pre-party evenings have been.
Scarlett stares at her phone while someone else queues to get her a drink. Her fur coat hangs off her shoulders, revealing a tattoo on her upper arm and a chiseled collarbone. She takes the beer from her friend’s hand and as she does so she catches Tallulah’s eye.
“Oh!” she says. “It’s Tallulah from the bus.”
Tallulah nods. “Yup,” she says, “it’s me, from the bus.”
They’d acknowledged each other a couple of times after their interaction at the bus stop that day a few weeks earlier, but that was as far as it had gone.
“You look nice.” She tips her beer bottle toward Tallulah’s face, a reference to her makeup, Tallulah assumes.
“Thanks.” She almost says, So do you, but then thinks better of it.
The guy serving behind the bar looks at her inquisitively and she orders her drinks. She expects, as she turns away from the bar, that Scarlett will have left to join her friends on the dance floor, but she’s waiting for her. Tallulah tries to hide her surprise.
“Cheers,” says Scarlett, knocking her plastic beer bottle against Tallulah’s.
“Cheers,” says Tallulah.
“Who are you here with?” Scarlett glances around the room.
“Chloe Minter.” She points at her friend, who is sitting scrolling through something on her phone. “She’s in my year. She lives in the village. Near me. You know. And she was driving. So…” She shrugs, a suggestion that her reasons for being here with Chloe Minter are purely practical. Which, in a way, they are.
The DJ puts on “All I Want For Christmas Is You” by Mariah Carey and there is a huge swell of excitement, arms in the air, a dash to the dance floor.
“Oh! Oh, oh!” says Scarlett. “Come on. We’ve gotta dance!”
Tallulah blinks. She doesn’t like dancing at the best of times. But she doesn’t want to sound miserable so she laughs and says, “I’m not drunk enough yet.”
Scarlett delves into one of the pockets on her huge fake-fur coat and pulls out a copper hip flask. “Quick,” she says, “neck it.”
“What is it?”
“Rum,” she says. “Really, really good rum. My dad brought it back from Barbados. It’s like”—she makes a circle out of her thumb and index finger—“the best.”
Tallulah sniffs the rim of the flask.
“Can you smell the spice?” says Scarlett.
Tallulah nods, although really she can only smell the alcohol. She takes a sip and hands it back.
“No, no, no,” says Scarlett. “That won’t get you dancing! More!”
Tallulah tips the flask to her lips again and takes four huge slugs.
“Drunk enough to dance now?”
She nods and Scarlett pulls her onto the dance floor. They dance toward her friends and she twirls Tallulah in front of her and Tallulah is conscious of her new top riding up as she lifts her arms and she tries to lower them but Scarlett keeps pulling them up.
Everyone is singing along and Tallulah can see some tutors joining in now, and people she wouldn’t expect to be on a dance floor, and the alcohol pumps its way through her blood supply and into her brain and suddenly she doesn’t
care about her porridge belly or Chloe sitting on the bench, she just wants to dance, dance like she’s eighteen years old and doesn’t have a care in the world and there’s no baby at home, no put-upon mother who should be out at a party herself tonight, no ex-boyfriend loitering in the wings trying to woo her back, just her, eighteen years old, in her first term at college, her whole life ahead of her and the coolest girl in the world holding her hands above her head and grinning at her: Mariah, rum, glitter descending from the ceiling and landing at her feet and in her hair.
* * *
The song comes to an end and Scarlett finally lets her hands go.
“Now,” she says, “Christmas has officially begun!” She makes a whooping noise and high-fives her friends and then, just as Tallulah assumes she will fade away from her and back into the protective bubble of her little gang, Scarlett turns to her and says, “Come outside with me.”
Tallulah looks over her shoulder anxiously at Chloe.
“She’ll be fine,” says Scarlett. “Come on.” She pulls her by the hand, out of the double doors and into the entrance hall, then to the car park. The air is immediately icy cold and while Scarlett is still wearing her huge fur coat, Tallulah is in only her short-sleeved cotton top. “Here,” says Scarlett, opening up her coat. “Room in here for two.”
Tallulah looks at her uncertainly before shrugging and smiling and nestling herself against Scarlett’s bony frame and pulling the other side of her coat around her shoulders.
“Where are we going?”
“A little place I know.”
Tallulah blinks at her, starting to feel strangely uneasy.
“Don’t look so scared.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Yeah, you are.”
They move as one underneath the carapace of the huge fur coat and end up on a bench. Scarlett goes through the pockets of the big coat and pulls out a packet of cigarettes. She flips it open and offers it to Tallulah.
Tallulah shakes her head. She’s never smoked and never wants to.
“Sorry to drag you out of there,” says Scarlett, plucking a cigarette from the packet. “Just realized I was too drunk. Way too drunk. Needed fresh air. And fresh company.” She rolls her eyes.
Tallulah throws her a look.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love them to death, I really, really do. But we’ve all been hanging out for so long. You know, we were all at Maypole House together and that place is really intense. I mean, really intense.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Oh, you know, just A levels. I did the first term of sixth form at a boarding school, but then I got expelled. Nobody else would take me except the Maypole, so my dad bought a house close by, so that I could be a day girl.” Scarlett shrugs and lights her cigarette. “What about you? Where did you go to school?”
“Oh, you know, Upfield High, just local.”
“Where do you live?”
“In that cul-de-sac, you know, on the other side of the common.”
“With your parents?”
“Yeah. Well, with my mum. My dad lives in Glasgow. And my brother.”
Her breath catches on the next thing she should say. The thing about her son, Noah. It’s there, halfway up her throat. But she can’t make it unstick. She doesn’t know why. She’s pretty sure that a girl like Scarlett would actually think it was quite cool that she had a baby and she was only eighteen. But for some reason, she doesn’t want to be that girl tonight, the girl showing remarkable levels of maturity, the girl taking her responsibilities seriously, the girl who wakes with her baby every morning at 6:00 a.m., even at the weekends, who does her college work while her baby sleeps, who remembers to buy her own nappies and sterilize her own milk bottles bought with the allowance that her mother gives her, which other girls would spend on charcoal nose strips and false eyelashes from Superdrug. She’s been that girl for six months and she is good at being that girl, but right now she is huddled under a fur coat in the cold with a skinny girl who probably wouldn’t have a baby until she was at least thirty-six, who gets expelled from boarding schools and smokes cigarettes and has tattoos and a stud pierced through her tongue, and for now, at least, Tallulah wants to be someone else.
“Yeah,” she finishes. “Just us.”
“And have you always lived in Upfield?”
“Yes. Born and bred.”
“So what’s your dad doing in Glasgow?”
“He’s Glaswegian. He moved back when he and my mum split up.”
Scarlett inhales and nods.
“And what about you?” Tallulah asks. “Who do you live with?”
She raises her brow. “Well, ostensibly I live with my mother and father but my mother is kind of two-dimensional and my father is always away. But I have a brother. He’s cool. I like him. And we have literally, like, the best dog in the world. He’s a Saint Bernard. Like, the size of a fucking pony, but thinks he’s a regular dog. He’s my best friend. Literally. I’d be lost without him. I’d probably die.”
“I’d like a dog,” Tallulah says. “But my brother’s got allergies.”
“Oh God, you have to get a dog. Get a cockapoo! Or anything with poodle in it. They’re hypoallergenic. Cavapoos are nice too. You just absolutely must get a dog.”
For a moment Tallulah finds herself idly fantasizing about a cavapoo, maybe one of those apricot-colored ones, with huge eyes and soft ears. She pictures herself walking it around the village and putting it in a shoulder bag to take it into shops and then she stops and remembers that she cannot have a cavapoo because she has a baby.
“Maybe,” she says. “Maybe.”
Scarlett rubs out her cigarette on the ground beneath her heel and pulls the copper flask out of her pocket again. She takes a sip and passes it to Tallulah, who takes a sip and passes it back.
“You’re very cute,” says Scarlett, eyeing her quite seriously. “Did you know that?”
“Er, no, not really.”
“You really are. It’s something about your…” She tilts Tallulah’s face upward with her fingertip under her chin and studies her. “I think it’s your nose. The way it sort of tips up, just at the end there. You look like Lana Del Rey.”
Tallulah laughs hoarsely. “Don’t be mad.”
“I think it’s the eyeliner, plus the nose.” She frames Tallulah’s face with her hands. “You should always wear your eyeliner like that,” she says, slowly pulling away, but her eyes still taking in the detail of Tallulah’s face.
Tallulah feels something flash through her, the kind of adrenaline rush that you get when you nearly miss a step coming downstairs, a sort of thrilling sickness.
And then a flashlight appears from the darkness, and the sound of voices, and there is Scarlett’s gang, incapable of surviving without the oxygen of their leader’s presence for even ten minutes before hunting her down.
“Oh, there you are,” says one, almost cross with her for daring to be elsewhere. “Jayden said he thought you might have gone home.”
“Nope. Just out here, chatting with Tallulah from the bus.”
The two girls look at Scarlett quizzically, and Tallulah sees them take in the shape of their bodies pressed together underneath Scarlett’s coat and sees something like recognition pass across their faces, a small shock of understanding, and she wonders what it is that they’ve seen.
They nod at her and she nods back, and Scarlett says, “This is Mimi and this is Roo. They’re a pair of ho bags I’ve known for about a hundred years. This is Tallulah. Don’t you think she’s pretty? Don’t you think she looks a bit like Lana Del Rey?”
They look at her blankly, slightly awkwardly.
Scarlett gets to her feet and her coat falls from Tallulah’s shoulders and suddenly she is cold, very cold. She looks at the three girls, all of whom are lighting cigarettes and dancing together to the background thump of “8 Days of Christmas” by Destiny’s Child emanating from the dining hall and she remembers Chloe sitting alone w
aiting for her can of Diet Coke and she says, “I’d better get back in. My friend’s waiting for me.”
Scarlett puts her hands on her hips and narrows her eyes at her in mock annoyance and then smiles and says, “See you around, Tallulah from the bus.”
Tallulah gives her an awkward thumbs-up. She doesn’t really know what else to say. And then she turns and heads back inside, where Chloe gives her a pained and questioning look.
“I’m really sorry,” Tallulah says, sitting down next to her. “I don’t really understand what just happened. She just kind of… hijacked me.”
“Weird,” says Chloe, wrinkling her nose slightly.
“Yeah,” says Tallulah, caressing the curves of a rather warm plastic beer bottle and staring into the middle distance. “Yeah. It really was.”
12
JUNE 2017
Kim leaves Kerryanne’s apartment and walks across the common with Ryan to Megs’s house to collect Noah.
He’s asleep in his car seat when Megs brings him to the front door. Kim swallows a surge of annoyance. She specifically told Megs that Noah needed to stay awake because otherwise he wouldn’t be tired at bedtime and now she’ll have to wake him up to get him out of his clothes and ready for bed and he’ll be grouchy and miserable and then won’t want to sleep when she puts him down at bedtime but Megs just smiles indulgently at him in his car seat, his dark hair damp with sweat, and says, “Bless his little soul, he was exhausted, I couldn’t bear to keep him awake.”
Kim smiles grimly and takes the handle of the car seat. “Never mind,” she says tightly.
“And I take it…?” Megs begins. “Nothing about the kids?”
“No,” says Kim. “Nothing about the kids. Although—did Zach happen to say anything to you about what he had planned for last night?”
“No. I mean, I didn’t even know they were going to the pub until you told me about it. Haven’t really spoken to him the last few days.”
“So, you didn’t know anything about…” Kim pauses, wondering whether to spoil the surprise or not, then decides that, no, getting to the bottom of the whereabouts of Zach and Tallulah is more important than surprises right now. “… a ring?” she finishes.