by Chloe Rayban
‘No, really, thank you. I couldn’t.’
‘Show Jessica out, Cedric,’ ordered his mum. Cedric reluctantly hauled himself off his chair and went towards the door. We reached the doorway at the same time and had a really embarrassing ‘you first’ session. ‘Ladies first, Cedric,’ called out his mum.
In the hall, he unlatched the front door and held it open for me. ‘Sorry about my mum,’ he said, looking really embarrassed. ‘She means well.’
‘Mine drives me mad too at times.’
‘That’s what mums were made for, I guess.’
‘Well, see you round,’ I said.
‘Inevitably.’
‘Mmm.’
Mum arrived back about ten minutes later.
‘I thought I’d never get away,’ she said. ‘That poor boy.’
‘Smother love,’ I agreed.
‘If I ever get like that, please tell me.’
‘You won’t. You couldn’t.’
‘Really?’
‘I’d have left home long ago.’
I returned to my Pygmalion essay. I was rather pleased with it, actually. I finished the last act with Prof. and Mrs Higgins (i.e. Eliza) having breakfast one sunny morning in their thatched cottage in Surrey with Eliza expecting the first of their four perfect children. I put down the last word, ‘Curtain’, with a flourish. George Bernard Shaw eat your heart out. I had righted an injustice.
Next morning, Monday, I stowed the essay away in my backpack with care. Mr Williams was going to be impressed. I expected that he’d give me at least an A+ for it. I set out for school with a good feeling. This mark should go towards my GCSE coursework.
Downstairs, I stopped in the lobby to check the post. There were a load of bills addressed to Mum. And another envelope. A purple one, the kind that came with greetings cards. It was addressed in neat black handwriting to Miss J. Seymour, Flat 12, Rosemount Mansions, SW12 4QU.
That was odd. It was our address, all right. But the people who’d lived here before us had been called Hill. And they’d had all their post redirected. I checked down the names beside the other mailboxes. There was no one called Seymour in our block. Obviously someone had got the wrong address. In which case the best thing to do was to put it back in the postbox and hope the postman would recognise the name and redeliver it. I took out my pen and scrawled on the envelope, ‘Not known at No. 12.’ That should do it. I glanced at my watch. One minute to get to the bus stop. I thrust the envelope into my bag and ran.
The bus drove up with Clare waving enthusiastically from the upper deck. I climbed up to join her. She was bursting for news.
‘Did you see him over the weekend?’
‘Him?’
‘Cedric!’
‘Oh, him. Yes.’
‘Well?’
‘I was invited over to his place.’
‘Really.’
It was going to be tricky to cover up the total uncoolness of this visit. ‘He’s got a fantastic record collection.’
‘Records? Like what?’
‘Well, all sorts, you know.’
‘More specifically?’ demanded Clare.
‘Jungle, mainly.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Some pretty cool stuff that was round in the late 90s,’ I said.
‘So when am I going to get to meet him?’
‘What about inviting him to Marie’s party?’ I suggested.
‘What, just like that? Out of the blue? Won’t he think that’s a bit odd?’
‘Well, maybe we should get to know him a bit better first.’
Clare frowned considering the problem. ‘Perhaps we could bump into him on the way back from school,’ she suggested.
‘He goes to Cranshaw. It’s totally in the wrong direction.’
‘Where does he hang out?’
‘Errm. I think I saw him once in Costa’s.’ (Costa’s is a really cool coffee bar that recently opened in the high street. I mean, I have seen Cranshaw guys in there. He could well have been with them.)
‘We could sit in there for ever, and their coffee costs a bomb.’
‘Umm.’
‘Tell you what. I’ll come over to your place and check him out.’
‘But we can’t just ring on his doorbell.’
‘We could bump into him accidentally.’
‘We’d have to hang out on the stairs all day.’
‘We could wait in your flat and then lure him up.’
‘But how …?’
‘I’ve got it. Chocolate brownies!’ she announced. ‘They never fail.’
‘What?’
‘When a male gets the scent of chocolate in his nostrils, all hot and rich and gooey – he’s dead meat.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Listen, we get back from school before him, OK? We get them cooking. A great whoosh of fresh hot brownie smell down the lift shaft. Then one of us bumps into him by accident – he’ll be upstairs in no time.’
‘If you think so.’
‘I know so.’
Friday afternoons we always got off early. Armed with a pack of brownie mix, Clare’s best new jeans and her boots with heels, we were ready for action.
‘OK,’ I said, as soon as we were in my flat. ‘You get changed first while I start the brownies.’
I found a mixing bowl and Mum’s electric whisk and studied the oven. It was a gas one with all sorts of safety devices. Mum had been moaning about it for days, saying that she just couldn’t work out how to use it. It looked simple enough to me.
Clare was going the whole hog. I could hear water running and there was a sickly smell of cocoa butter bathfoam wafting out of the bathroom. I glanced at the clock. Twenty minutes till lift-off!
I couldn’t find anything to measure the water with, so I slopped in what looked like five fluid ounces and switched on Mum’s whisk. The mixer blades were hardly making any impression on the mix so I added a bit more water for luck. Suddenly it was all going horribly runny, so I lifted out the mixer which spun a great arc of chocolate rain all over me and the kitchen. Ooops! Still, no time to lose. I could always clean up later. I raked in the cupboard for a baking tray.
‘How’s it going?’ called out Clare.
‘Fine! You nearly ready?’
‘Aren’t you going to get changed?’
‘Must get this in first.’
Slam, bang, crash. I had to take out every single saucepan until I found a measly little sponge tin at the bottom of the cupboard. I poured in the brownie mix which overflowed in a great brown slick on the worktop. Oh dear. Still. Yumm, tasted nice anyway. Shoving the tin in the oven, I turned my attention to the frosting. Thankfully there was a sachet of ready-made which I squeezed out into a bowl. Right, that was done. I dived into my room to change.
I couldn’t find my jeans anywhere. Mum must’ve hung them up. Or taken them to wash. My room soon looked in a similar state to the kitchen.
‘Looks as if there’s been a massacre in here.’ Clare’s voice came from the kitchen. ‘And they don’t smell as if they’re cooking.’
‘Better turn them up then!’ I yelled.
‘Are you keeping an eye on the front?’
‘Yep. No sighting yet,’ I called back, hauling on a pair of tracksuit bottoms. Very unsexy! But it was Clare who mattered.
I came back into the kitchen. She was right, not the least whiff of brownie. I peeped in through the oven door. Sure enough, the oven had done one of its ‘safety first’ acts and turned itself off.
‘Keep an eye on the front and I’ll deal with this,’ I instructed Clare.
‘Right!’ I told the oven. ‘You asked for this.’ I turned it on full blast and, as an extra measure, I also turned on a knob that said ‘Grill’.
‘There’s a boy coming now, but I don’t know if it’s him,’ called out Clare.
I dashed to my window. The boy she’d seen was delivering flyers. He paused to dump a load by our mailboxes and then walked off.
‘No. Anyway, Cedric’s taller.’
‘How will we know whether or not to invite him?’ Clare suddenly asked.
‘We’ll have to have some sort of sign.’
‘Like what?’
I thought for a moment. ‘I’ve got it. If you like him enough to invite him, you eat a brownie. If you don’t, you don’t.’
‘So if neither of us eats a brownie, we don’t invite him?’ said Clare.
‘Right.’
‘What if one of us does and the other doesn’t?’
‘Hmm … problem.’
‘I know! The one who really wants him to come, eats two.’
We agreed on that. The delicious warm rich smell of brownies was just starting to waft from the kitchen. But there was still no sign of Cedric.
‘Maybe we’ve missed him,’ said Clare.
‘I don’t see how we could have.’
‘Maybe he got off early or he’s gone somewhere after school.’
‘That would be just our luck. Hang on, there’s a bus coming from the Cranshaw direction.’
Sure enough, a minute or so later, Cedric came into sight.
‘Right! That’s him. Action stations!’ I said. ‘Keep fanning out the brownie smell and I’ll go down for him in the lift.’
This announcement coincided with an agonising electronic bleeping. ‘What’s that?’ gasped Clare.
‘Smoke alarm! Oh my God!’ We leaped for the hallway. Smoke was billowing out of our kitchen door. ‘Open the front door. No, don’t. Oh God, what shall we do?’
‘Turn off the oven!’
‘I can’t. It’s too smoky!’
‘We better get out of here.’
We were about to make a dash for it, when I suddenly realised ‘Bag!’ I raced into my room and scooped him up from my bed. We collided with Cedric as we left the flat. He must’ve run up the stairs to see what the commotion was about.
‘What’s going on? What’s that burning smell?’ He forced his way past us into the kitchen and flung open the window. The smoke quickly thinned. Then he climbed up on a chair and deftly took the case off the smoke alarm. There was a welcome silence.
‘They’re always doing that,’ he said. ‘All these flats have the same smoke alarms. They overreact …’ He opened the oven door, fanning the smoke towards the window.
‘Jeesus. What happened in here?’ he said, looking around the kitchen.
‘We were cooking,’ I said lamely. ‘Oh, and by the way. Cedric, this is Clare.’
‘Hi!’ she said. Her face lit up, showing off her dimples to full advantage. ‘We’ve just made a batch of brownies. Would you like some?’
There you go. She really liked him. Well, I suppose in the situation, he was being quite masterful.
I took the oven gloves and hauled the baking tray out of the oven. They looked more like ‘blackies’ than ‘brownies’. I sent Clare and Cedric to put some music on while I did a quick camouflage job with the bowl of chocolate frosting. Arranged artistically on a plate they didn’t look too bad.
‘We need tea,’ I called out.
‘I’ll make it,’ said Clare. She looked really pretty when she smiled like that. Those dimples were obviously having a positive effect on Cedric.
‘I’ll help you,’ said Cedric.
I left them to it and took the plate of brownies into the sitting room. Things got really promising over the tea-making. Cedric and Clare discovered the bowl of frosting. I mean, it kind of deteriorated into a food fight. But then, you’d never splatter chocolate frosting over someone you didn’t fancy, would you?
They came back armed with three mugs of tea. Cedric picked up a brownie and took a big bite. There was an odd crunching noise. I bit into mine. It tasted like coal but I munched on regardless. Clare was licking the frosting off hers, which was really confusing. Was that a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’? I eyed her and chewed my brownie with determination. She’d put hers down. I glared at her meaningfully and took another. Somehow I choked it down. I kicked her under the table. Our eyes met. She nodded.
‘There’s a party at this friend of ours, Marie’s place … ‘ I started.
The words were hardly out of my mouth before Cedric had taken our mobile numbers, given us his, offered to bring a bottle and checked out what he should wear. Clare looked over the moon. How simple it was to plant the seeds of love.
Now all I had to do was extricate myself from the equation. We were currently:
Clare + Cedric + Jessica Triangle
When we should be:
Clare + Cedric – Jessica
i.e.:
Clare = Cedric Nice Match!
I watched them together: Cedric was telling Clare about his bike and she was drinking in every word. (Sweet. They had forgotten I even existed.) Slipping out of the room, I pretended to make a start on cleaning up the kitchen. I could hear little snatches of their conversation through the open doorway.
‘… I changed the main frame right away.’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘I can get it up to around 20 k on the flat.’
‘Re-ally?’
‘More with the wind behind.’
‘Don’t you need special tyres?’
‘Umm, and the shock absorbers, they’re nothing like a normal bike …’
‘I love cycling …’ I heard Clare say. (As far as I could remember, her pink and silver Raleigh hadn’t been out of the shed since we left junior school.)
Cedric left us with the suggestion that we all meet up for a cycle ride sometime. I agreed enthusiastically, not mentioning the fact that I didn’t have a bike. Which would mean, of course, the two of them would have to go without me.
I lay in bed that night feeling a nice cosy glow of satisfaction. It was so easy getting people together. Clare and Cedric were clearly made for each other. Everything confirmed my theory – it was just a matter of balancing their equation. I imagined sorting out people’s lives on a global scale. Starting with Mum and Dad of course, and then working outwards. If everyone could be matched to someone, the world would be a much happier place.
The news is always full of human misery, isn’t it? But if everyone was happily paired off with their perfect partner they wouldn’t want to go round fighting wars and bombing people, would they? I imagined the headlines in my new improved world:
Twenty million, nine hundred thousand and
ninety-nine Britons arrive home safely
Seventy thousand Boeing 747s land without incident
No one murdered in the East End
Eleven thousand healthy babies delivered
Forty-seven countries at peace
Chapter Five
It was about a week later, while I was raking through my schoolbag in the vain search for a stray ink cartridge, that I came across the purple envelope again. Oops! I had totally forgotten to drop it in the post.
I turned it over. There was my message: ‘Not known at No. 12.’ Well there was no way the post could return it as there was no sender’s address on the back. And ten days later it was hardly going to arrive ‘on the day’, was it? So there really wasn’t much point in re-posting it.
I was about to throw it in my waste bin when I thought better of it. Sometimes greetings cards from people, like grandparents for instance, have cheques in them. In which case it would be wrong to just chuck it out. And maybe there might even be an address inside. So I tore open the envelope.
‘To someone special … ‘ it said on the front of the card. I opened it and read the following:
Dearest darling Jane
In life as in art
You’ve stolen my heart
The moment you’re free
Will you marry me?
Henry
My heart did a double somersault. Marry me! O-m-G, what had I done? Or rather, what hadn’t I done, forgetting to re-post it like that? Poor Henry, whoever he was. Nightmare! What could I do now? I picked up the envelope again. It was definitely addressed to Flat 12, Rosemount Mansions. Ou
r flat.
I went hot and cold. I felt really guilty. This Henry person might be suicidal on not hearing back from Jane. Imagine them meeting up and her not saying anything, as if she were purposely ignoring the letter. And him feeling totally rejected. (Like I did that time I thought I’d established eye-contact with that really cool guy in Virgin Megastore and then found he was eyeing up the girl behind me.)
And what about this Jane person? She must have had an inkling that Henry was about to ‘pop the question’. So she’s been waiting helplessly, hopelessly. Maybe she was about to do something drastic. It was just like that awful bit at the end of Romeo and Juliet, when you know that if only that letter had got to Romeo in time, it wouldn’t have ended that way. And it was so frustrating.
I stared at the envelope. There was no easy way out of this one. In the circumstances, I could hardly drop the letter back in the postbox and hope for the best.
Who was Jane? I tried to picture her. She was blonde, I decided. She had straight blonde hair and pale skin – blue eyes of course. A slim willowy sort of perfect cross between Gwyneth Paltrow and Meg Ryan. But where was she? And how could I find her?
There must be a way. If this were a criminal investigation, I’d be giving the evidence forensic tests. I sniffed the envelope. It smelt of the banana that had been beside it in my schoolbag. I turned the card over and looked at the back. ‘Hallmark’ it said, unhelpfully. It was a pretty popular brand of card. Hardly worth questioning all the stationers in the district, like they do about guns, checking who they might have sold it to.
But maybe Jane was somewhere in the building. I needed to double check the mailboxes. I went down in the lift to take another look. This confirmed that there was no box marked ‘Seymour’. There wasn’t even anyone with the initial ‘J’.
Back in my room I stood and stared out of the window searching for inspiration. The telephone directory was the most obvious first step. Maybe I could find a J. Seymour with a similar address to ours.
I located our directory lurking among a pile of magazines and turned to the ‘S’ section. Selkirk, Selwyn, Seymour. There were an awful lot of them, Seymour is a pretty common name. There were quite a number of J. Seymours too but none of them had an address that was anything like ours.