I Think I'll Just Curl Up and Die

by Rosie Rushton

  Jemma giggled. Her gran was so funny.

  ‘Jemma, darling,’ continued her gran, ‘you and I are going to sit down and draw up a sensible eating plan. You mustn’t lose any more weight – promise me that. Or you will be ill. I mean it, I’ve seen it happen. My friend Beryl’s granddaughter ended up in hospital because she starved herself. You don’t want that to happen to you, do you?

  Jemma shook her head.

  ‘Now go upstairs and get washed and come down and eat a proper meal. All right?’

  Jemma nodded. In a way, she even felt quite relieved.

  Chapter Fifty Seven

  Recipe for Success

  ‘It’s starting!’ called Barry. ‘Quickly, everyone, I’m on!’ Mrs Gee and Chelsea put their heads round the door.

  ‘Welcome to this week’s round of Superchef. Now in the Red Kitchen we have Anna Standen from Wittersham, in the Blue Kitchen Joan Holman from Eastbourne and in the Green Kitchen, it’s Barry Gee from Leehampton.’

  ‘What did you have on your head, Dad?’ said Chelsea, flopping down in front of the fire.

  ‘We all had to wear those hats – hygiene,’ explained her father.

  ‘Now Barry Gee will be cooking a wild mushroom consommé with olive croutons, followed by venison with black pudding and a swede purée…’ ‘

  Yuk,’ said Chelsea.

  ‘… served with cabbage in garlic and juniper, and to round it off, what will you be giving us for dessert, Barry?’

  ‘A champagne and apple sorbet with a cassis sauce’ said Barry.

  ‘Sounds super tantalising’ enthused Liam Frosby the presenter. ‘So on your marks everyone – let’s get cooking.’

  ‘He looks really professional,’ said Mrs Joseph to her husband who was watching over in Billing Hill.

  ‘Poncy thing for a man to do,’ grunted Henry, and retreated behind his Golf Monthly. A thought struck him. ‘Do they have contests like that for designers?’ he asked. ‘Now you should go on something like that, show the world your talents – you could end up as artistic adviser to an international … what’s the matter?’

  He couldn’t understand it when his wife said, ‘Oh Henry, you are funny.’ But he rather enjoyed the affectionate kiss on the top of his head.

  ‘I hope he wins,’ said Ruth to Melvyn. ‘He’s such a nice guy.’

  ‘True, but just don’t expect me to start doing something creative with celeriac,’ he replied, smiling.

  ‘The judges found it so hard to place these three in order of merit,’ said Liam Frosby. ‘But at the end of the day, the winner by just one point was …’

  Throughout Leehampton, people held their breath. ‘

  Gee! Well done, Barry.’

  The camera panned in on Barry. In his sitting room at home, his wife and daughter were leaping up and down and hugging him.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us you had won?’ said Ginny. ‘I told you, we weren’t allowed to on pain of disqualification,’ said Barry. ‘And besides, knowing you, it would have been splashed all over the Echo.’

  ‘So now, Dad, you can get a proper job as a head chef in a swish hotel, and ditch that awful lorry.’

  ‘Not so fast,’ said her father, laughing. ‘That was only round one. There’s the semi-final and final to go yet.’

  ‘You’ll win, Dad,’ said Chelsea. ‘You’re bound to. I’m really proud of you.’

  Well now, thought Barry, there’s a turn up for the books. There’s a first time for everything.

  Chapter Fifty–Eight

  How Are the Mighty Fallen!

  ‘So how was the party, Sumitha?’ asked Chelsea as they waited for the rehearsal to begin.

  ‘Did you paint the town red?’ asked Jemma.

  ‘No, she coated the carpet with sick!’ tittered Mandy Fincham, twirling round on the stage. ‘Had any good cocktails lately, Sumitha?’

  ‘Oh just shut up, can’t you?’ Sumitha looked close to tears.

  ‘What would you know about anything?’ said Jemma to Mandy.

  ‘Oh didn’t you hear? I was there. With Rob,’ she added, casting a sneering glance at Chelsea. ‘Honestly, it was pathetic. She made a right exhibition of herself. No wonder Bilu’s gone back to Natalie. At least she’s not a wimp. Not, of course, that he ever gave her up,’ she added unkindly.

  Sumitha tried hard not to cry.

  ‘Ah, diddums – can’t hold her drink and can’t face the music afterwards. How sad,’ sneered Mandy.

  ‘Oh get lost, Mandy!’ shouted Chelsea.

  Mandy shrugged, pulled a face at Sumitha and wandered off.

  ‘What happened, Sumitha? Who’s Natalie?’ said Laura.

  ‘It was awful,’ said Sumitha tearfully. And told them the whole story.

  ‘What a jerk!’ said Laura when Sumitha told them about Bilu driving off into the night.

  ‘I suppose you all think I got what I deserved,’ she said. ‘I honestly thought Bilu loved me. I never realised that he was just messing me around. I feel so stupid.’

  ‘It could have happened to anyone,’ said Chelsea. And we did have our suspicions and didn’t say anything so it’s our fault too, she thought.

  ‘You weren’t to know that those drinks were that strong,’ said Jemma sympathetically.

  ‘I’d never had alcohol before, not even at home – what with my dad not approving,’ said Sumitha. ‘I didn’t even know what it tasted like. I don’t think I ever want it again. Do you promise you don’t hate me?’

  ‘Of course we don’t,’ said Laura giving her a hug.

  ‘The only person I hate round here is Mandy flaming Fincham,’ muttered Chelsea. ‘Not only does she consort with the boy I fancy but she’s horrid to my friend. I wish she’d drop dead.’

  In fact, Mandy was at her most demonstrative during the rehearsal, singing, clapping, throwing her head back so that her hair fanned out behind her. Rob gazed at her adoringly, till Mr Horage had to remind him that Bill Sykes was supposed to be a violent, sadistic man. Mandy laughed and said, ‘Must be my charms putting him off.’

  Chelsea could have willingly throttled her.

  ‘Up on the table, Mandy, for the dance sequence,’ instructed Mr Horage, reading his stage directions.

  Mandy leaped on the table and bellowed out,

  ‘Oom pah pah, oom pah pah, that’s how it goes,’

  Oh drop dead, thought Chelsea.

  ‘Oom pah pah, oom pah pah, everyone knows,

  They all… AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!’

  Her foot shot out in front of her and she fell off the table into a heap on the floor.

  Serves you right, thought Chelsea.

  ‘Are you hurt, Amanda?’ said Mr Horage, who was prone to use full names when stricken. He beckoned anxiously to Miss McConnell who was doing something artistic with a tankard and a few sunflowers.

  It soon transpired that Amanda was not all right. She couldn’t move her left leg and she was as white as a ghost. When the ambulance men arrived, they pronounced her leg well and truly broken.

  I didn’t mean it, God, thought Chelsea in a panic.

  ‘I should never have made her dance on the table top,’ moaned Mr Horage.

  ‘She’ll miss Oliver!’ gasped Laura.

  I’ve put a curse on her, thought Chelsea.

  ‘Well, at least we’ve got Jemma,’ said Mr Horage, stoutly. ‘She’ll rally to the cause, won’t you, Jemma?

  Miss McConnell pursed her lips and looked worried. Jemma Farrant was a nice enough kid, but so quiet and reserved. Hardly the type to play the raucous Nancy. She raised an eyebrow in the direction of Mr Horage.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Jemma. ‘I can’t, sir, honestly, I can’t.’

  ‘You can, Jemma Farrant,’ said Mr Horage. ‘And what’s more, you will.’

  ‘But Gran, I can’t do it!’ wailed Jemma that night, when she’d told everyone about her new role. ‘I only agreed to understudy the part because I was sure I wouldn’t be needed.’

  Her gran put down the Giant Atlas
of China and gave her a hug.

  ‘You’ll be terrific, Jemma,’ she said. ‘I just know you will bring the house down.’

  ‘But the part of Nancy is not my sort of part,’ insisted Jemma. ‘You know, all bouncy and extrovert and confident and stuff. That’s not me.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Well, everyone always says I am quiet and sensitive and …’

  ‘Jemma, the worst mistake any of us can make is to be simply what we think other people want us to be,’ declared her gran. ‘If I had done that, I would probably be in some rocking chair knitting balaclavas for sailors. Instead, in three months and two days I shall be sailing up the Yangtze.’

  Jemma grinned. ‘But you’re different – you’re mad.’

  ‘Thank you darling, that’s the nicest compliment anyone has paid me for a long time,’ said her gran. ‘Now, do you want to do well as Nancy?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Then you will,’ said her gran.

  Chelsea and Laura were in Laura’s bedroom packing her china pig collection into boxes ready for the move.

  ‘I can’t wait,’ said Laura, wrapping her Giggling Piglet in bubble wrap. ‘Just think, a decent sized bedroom, two bathrooms – it’ll be bliss!’

  ‘Mmmm,’ murmured Chelsea. ‘Of course,’ she added wickedly, ‘if your mum hadn’t fallen for Melvyn, you would still be living here.’

  Laura grinned at her. ‘Yes, well, he’s not so bad, really – I’m managing to lick him into shape.’

  ‘Do you think,’ said Chelsea, ‘that Jemma will be OK as Nancy? I mean, she’s lovely and everything, but she’s not exactly your forceful type, is she?’

  ‘No,’ agreed Laura, ‘but she’s got a terrific voice. I never knew she could sing like that.’

  ‘Me neither,’ agreed Chelsea. ‘But I still don’t think she’ll be raunchy enough for Nancy. Still,’ she added to herself, ‘I don’t have to worry about Rob with Jemma playing opposite him. She’s just not his type at all.’

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Party Politics

  Jemma was too busy for the next ten days practising the role of Nancy and worrying that she would forget her lines or that her voice would be too soft, to worry too much about dieting or to give a thought to the coming party. So when Rupert phoned her the Thursday before and asked her to arrive between seven and seven-thirty, she flew into a panic.

  ‘My dress – what if it doesn’t fit now you are making me eat fattening stuff again?’ she said to her mother.

  ‘Jemma, it will fit – and I am not making you eat fattening stuff – just seeing that you follow Gran’s list. After all, you can hardly call prawn salads and breast of chicken and pork escalopes fattening, can you?’

  ‘But my hair – what’ll I do with my hair?’ she said, tugging at her mousy brown tendrils in disgust.

  ‘Well, petal, I could do it in a nice little plait or perhaps bunches,’ Mrs Farrant began.

  Her gran interrupted. ‘No, I know. Why don’t you go to the hairdressers on the morning of the party and get them to do it? After all, you want to look grown up for an eighteenth birthday do, don’t you?’

  Claire took a deep breath. ‘Good idea, Mother,’ she said.

  ‘Try that place, Fringe Affairs, where Laura went. She looks lovely,’ she added, turning to Jemma. ‘I’ll pay.’

  Mrs Farrant dropped Jemma at the door of Boughton Hall.

  ‘Have a lovely evening, darling,’ she said. ‘And don’t forget to say …’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘Sorry, love. I’ll pick you up at midnight.’

  ‘You’re sure I look all right?’ queried Jemma, touching her new crinkle perm.

  ‘You look stunning,’ said her mum. And meant it.

  Rupert opened the door.

  ‘Hi, there,’ he said. ‘Gosh, you look really great. Love your hair.’ He put an arm round her shoulder and led her through to the drawing room. Jemma’s heart was thumping so loudly that she was sure everyone assembled in the room could hear.

  ‘Ma, this is Jemma Farrant,’ he said. An enormous bust arrived, shortly followed by the rest of Mrs Kentigan-Fry, who was built like a galleon in full sail.

  ‘Lovely to meet you,’ murmured Mrs Kentigan-Fry. ‘Oh Selena, my dearest, and dear Benjamin . . .’ and she bowled off across the room.

  ‘I thought you said it was just a family supper party,’ gulped Jemma, gazing round the room at the groups of elegantly dressed guests.

  ‘Oh, this is nothing,’ said Rupert airily. ‘Oh look, there’s my sister with her boyfriend, Felix. Come and meet them.’

  From then on, he tugged Jemma hither and thither introducing her every time as ‘my girlfriend, Jemma’. She was thinking that it was quite nice to be someone’s girlfriend when she heard a whisper behind her.

  ‘She appears to have forgotten to put her dress on.’ Giggles followed. ‘Why has she come in her petticoat?’

  ‘Oh don’t be horrid, Felix, it’s one of those slip dresses – Essex girls love them! Ha! Ha!’ The laugh that followed sounded like a horse with laryngitis.

  ‘Isn’t she the comprehensive kid Rupert was going on about? She’s frightfully Top Shop, isn’t she?’

  ‘Ya, well my brother is so damned wet, he wouldn’t manage to hook any kind of classy girl.’

  Jemma wanted to die. She’d felt so good in her new dress till then. How was she to know that everyone else would be dressed up to the nines in designer frocks?

  Supper was even worse. There were so many different knives and forks. Jemma just watched Rupert and prayed she did the right thing. She felt people’s eyes on her everytime a new course was served. The guy on her left kept saying things like, ‘Were you at Klosters last Christmas?’ and laughing like a drain when she said ‘Where’s that?’ and the girl opposite, who was called Lucinda Pinkerton-Danesby or something weird said, ‘Not Klosters for her, Clacton more like.’

  She was beginning to wish she hadn’t come when Rupert’s father, who was sitting at the top of the table said, ‘So what do you do in your spare time, Jemma?’

  ‘Oh, er, well at the moment I am busy rehearsing – our school is putting on Oliver! and I’ve got to be Nancy because the girl who was doing it broke her leg.’

  ‘Splendid, splendid,’ said Sir William. ‘Well, good for you. Putting your free time to good use.’ He shot a critical glance at his daughter who was giggling with Felix. ‘Always enjoyed am dram myself, you know.’

  ‘Gosh, that’s terrific – I’ll come and watch you,’ said Rupert.

  His mother looked at him as though he had suggested personally supervising the digging of a sewer.

  ‘Oh wow, how exciting!’ said his sister, giving a mock yawn behind her immaculately manicured hand.

  After supper, Rupert led her through the house to the conservatory.

  ‘We can dance here,’ he said. ‘Away from everyone else.’

  And he clasped her to him, almost suffocating her, and began to bounce unrhythmically from side to side. He was hot and sweaty but at least they were out of sight of all his sister’s pompous friends.

  ‘I’m sorry if I let you down,’ muttered Jemma apologetically. ‘I mean, not wearing the right sort of dress and things.’

  ‘Oh, golly no. I like your dress – especially this bit,’ and he clamped a clammy hand on her left boob.

  ‘Stop it!’ said Jemma, whose nerves were already on edge. ‘How dare you?’ She slapped him round the face.

  Rupert went scarlet and stared at her. ‘I say,’ he began.

  ‘No, I say’ shouted Jemma, real anger suddenly taking hold of her. ‘Just because I’m not one of your public school friends and don’t go around in designer label dresses and own half of Leicestershire, doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings! I felt really awful in there. And you didn’t do anything to stand up for me. I’ve only just realized what you were up to – you brought me here so your friends could make fun of me.’

  Rupert bit his lip. ‘I
say – I’m sorry. Don’t go,’ he said as Jemma turned to go hack into the house.

  ‘I’ve never had a girlfriend before, you see,’ he admitted. ‘I mean, all the chaps at school, they talk about their bits of … their girlfriends, and I have to pretend I know all about it. I thought girls liked – well, you know, that sort of thing.’

  Jemma felt quite sorry for him.

  ‘Well, we don’t,’ she said. ‘And you might have stopped your sister from being so bitchy to me.’

  ‘Sorry!’ said Rupert again. ‘She’s always so rotten to me I suppose I never notice her any more.’ He looked crestfallen. ‘I suppose you won’t let me kiss you now,’ he said mournfully. ‘I had hoped you could be my first kiss.’

  ‘Well,’ said Jemma. She rather thought it was time she got kissed – she had heard enough over the past few months of Bilu’s lips and Chelsea’s commentary on the number of seconds her mouth was clamped to Rob’s. ‘All right,’ she said.

  ‘Oh gosh, yes, well,’ stammered Rupert, and pulled her to him.

  Jemma closed her eyes and waited. Well, she thought, as a wet smack landed somewhere between her chin and her nostrils. If that’s kissing, I honestly don’t know what everyone is on about.

  ‘Good evening, was it, darling?’ asked Gran the next morning.

  ‘It was OK,’ said Jemma.

  Her gran regarded her quizzically. ‘But?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Jemma.

  Chapter Sixty

  A Star Is Born

  GOOD LUCK!

  To my darling Jemma,

  The most wonderful girl

  in the world.

  I LL be rooting for you!

  Loads of Love

  Rupert.

  Despite feeling sick with fear and shaking like a leaf, Jemma grinned. The card was attached to the biggest bunch of roses she had ever seen. No one had sent her flowers before, let alone roses. She just wished she felt more – well, romantic about him.

  Then she remembered that in a little under fifteen minutes she would be on stage as Nancy and all thoughts of love and passion went out of her mind.