by Sue Limb
‘No!’ said Mum. ‘You’ll sleep in Jess’s bed! Please! You know it’s for the best. I’ll just go and get you a cup of cocoa.’
Mum went off to the kitchen, and Granny sat down on the sofa, looking thunderous. Jess was amazed at this evidence of a row between the adults, but wondered if the best thing would be to distract her granny with small talk.
‘So, Granny!’ she said, grasping the old dear’s hand. ‘Heard about any good murders recently?’ Granny was an enthusiastic devotee of TV and newspaper homicide. Granny gave her an exasperated look, glinting with malice.
‘I haven’t heard of any, dear,’ she remarked. ‘But if things don’t get any better, I shall be committing one fairly soon.’
Wow! Her granny was thinking about murdering her mum! What on earth was going on?
Chapter 17
‘So what on earth’s going on with Granny?’ asked Jess, once she was installed in Mum’s double bed. Mum switched the light off.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s not important.’
‘It must be pretty important,’ said Jess. ‘After all, you’ve dragged her all the way here and she seems totally gutted. What’s happened? Has she been dating someone unsuitable?’ Grandpa had been dead a while now, and Jess had wondered if people as old as Granny ever fell in love a second time around.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Mum. ‘Be quiet, now, Jess, please! I want to go to sleep. I’m shattered.’
‘I won’t shut up until you tell me what it’s all about,’ said Jess.
Mum sighed.
‘Well, Granny’s being exploited,’ said Mum.
‘Exploited? How?’
‘She’s got a new friend – a woman called Gina.’
‘What’s wrong with this Gina?’ asked Jess. ‘Isn’t Granny allowed to choose her own friends or something? That’s a bit harsh. She’s not a baby.’
There was a long pause while Mum sat up and took two headache pills. She didn’t have to switch the light on, because the bottle of water and the pills were always right there on her bedside table. Then she lay down again and pulled the covers up round her ears. Jess waited. Her mum said nothing.
‘I said, what’s wrong with this Gina?’ demanded Jess.
‘What’s wrong with her is that Granny has to pay her twenty quid every time they have a talk!’ snapped Mum.
‘What?’ Jess couldn’t believe it. ‘You mean she charges Granny to have a conversation with her?’
‘Yes,’ said Mum. ‘That’s about the size of it. And they’ve been having three or four little conversations a week recently. It’s just not on. I won’t have my mum exploited. I’m going to sleep now, Jess. It’s nearly half past twelve! We’ve got to be up at the crack of dawn to get Edouard off for his Oxford trip.’
‘Oh, by the way,’ said Jess, ‘he split his trousers this evening by falling downstairs.’
‘What?’ Mum whirled round in bed so fast she made herself giddy. ‘Oh, my head! Horrid … It’ll stop in a minute … Did you say ‘‘fell downstairs’’?’
‘Yes,’ said Jess. ‘And it wasn’t my fault. He did it all by himself.’
‘Was he hurt?’ asked Mum.
‘Well, he pretended it hadn’t happened, so he can’t have been hurt all that much.’
‘Horrendous!’ Mum shuddered. ‘What if he’d died?’
‘Mum, he patently didn’t die. He sat down in the kitchen and ate some supper, and then he checked his e-mails. Why don’t you worry about the real crisis here: that his trousers are split right down the back? I actually saw a glimpse of his underpants. They had teddy bears on.’
‘How sweet!’ said Mum thoughtfully. ‘Don’t worry about the trousers. He’s bound to have brought a couple of pairs, at least. Granny can fetch them down and mend them tomorrow, while he’s away.’
‘When’s she going home?’ asked Jess.
‘When she sees sense,’ said Mum grimly. ‘Please stop talking now, Jess. I’ve got to get to sleep and so have you.’
Jess, who had been asleep on the sofa already this evening, found it harder to nod off, but eventually she managed it.
In no time at all she was back at school and late for registration. And a sudden horrible fear ran through her. Had she done her homework? Had she? Had she? She searched her bag. No homework! A bell rang. Oh no! She’d missed registration!
Gerard loomed up. They were surrounded by crowds of people, but he gazed into her eyes, grabbed her and crushed her to his manly chest.
‘I love you, Jess,’ he said.
Everybody standing around started applauding. It was embarrassing, but quite wonderful, too. Jess’s heart soared with happiness. Suddenly, mysteriously, they were on the school stage. The whole school was clapping and cheering. Mrs Bailey was up on the platform with them. She held up her hand. The cheering mob became still.
‘It gives me great pleasure to announce the engagement between Jess Jordan and Gerard Play-doh,’ she said. ‘May your babies be bilingual. I am going to sing a song of congratulation in a minute, but first I just have to take a dump.’ And she hitched her skirt up right there on the platform.
It was at this point that Jess realised it was all a dream. On the one hand, it was wonderful being with Gerard. On the other hand, she certainly didn’t want to spend a second more with Mrs Bailey. Jess knew how to wake herself up from bad dreams – she sort of stretched her eyes. But she didn’t want to lose Gerard. Maybe she could suggest to Gerard that they fly right out of the window to a tropical island paradise. She turned to him. He was still holding her hand. But he had turned into a baboon.
‘Agh!’ cried Jess, waking up. For a moment she didn’t recognise the curtains, and thought it was another dream. Then she remembered she’d spent the night in Mum’s room. The bed was empty.
‘Wake up, Jess!’ Mum yelled up the stairs. ‘Everybody else is having their breakfast!’
‘Coming!’ shouted Jess and crawled out of bed. Thank goodness Mum had remembered to bring her school uniform up here, and clean undies and shirt. Otherwise she’d have had to go downstairs in her Winnie the Pooh pyjamas. Almost worse than the dream, somehow.
As Jess joined the others for breakfast, the strange nightmarish atmosphere was still hanging around. Granny smiled at her, but it was a fairly feeble smile. She was clearly still sulking hard at Mum. Mum hadn’t quite got rid of her headache and was taking some more pills. Edouard looked up briefly, nodded, said, ‘Good merning!’ and buried his nose back in his hot chocolate.
‘Good morning, Edouard! Good morning, everybody!’ cried Jess, with pantomime panache. She’d almost never said ‘good morning’ in her own home before. They’d been spared all that formal stuff up till now.
Edouard finished his bread, and Mum said something to him in French. He said, ‘Eskoos me,’ and went upstairs.
‘He’s gone to get his stuff,’ said Mum, who was finishing his packed lunch. ‘We need to leave in five minutes, Jess.’
‘Fine, OK,’ said Jess. ‘Make sure you put some chocolate biscuits in his lunchbox.’
‘I already have,’ said Mum rather snappishly. ‘I’m just going to the loo. Hurry up, Jess.’
There was the terrible sound of Edouard going into the bathroom upstairs. Everybody looked at the ceiling.
‘Tough luck, Mum,’ said Jess. ‘You’ll have to go in public like Mrs Bailey in my dream last night.’
‘Thank goodness we’ve got an outside loo,’ said Mum, and disappeared through the back door. Jess and Granny were now alone for a split second.
‘Granny,’ said Jess. ‘What’s all this about your friend Gina charging you £20 every time you have a conversation?’
Granny grabbed Jess’s hand, leant in close, looked around in a conspiratorial way and whispered, ‘It’s not a conversation with her, dear. She puts me in touch with Grandpa.’
‘What?’ gasped Jess. ‘You mean, like a seance or something?’
‘She’s a medium,’ said Granny. ‘And she’s absolutely
super. She talks to Grandpa as if he’s still in the room. And she’s given me all these messages from him – about things only he and I could know about. In my view, dear, it’s money well spent, and if your mum tries to keep me here against my will, I want you to help me to escape.’
Granny winked roguishly, but there was a feeling that underneath her light tone she was deadly serious. Jess was simply amazed. As she sat there, trying to work out whether Granny was crazy or not, Edouard upstairs in the bathroom and Mum in the outside loo flushed in almost perfect unison. Jess had the awful sense that, somehow, she was still asleep and this was some kind of deranged nightmare.
Chapter 18
The main task was to get Edouard to school in time to catch the bus for the Oxford trip. It was raining. As they ran to the car, Edouard pulled a gloomy face at the sky, as if to suggest that it never rained in France.
‘The Queen is sneering at our magnificent British rain!’ said Jess, as she fastened her seatbelt.
‘Well, at least he’s got two pairs of trousers,’ said Mum. Edouard was wearing jeans today, and Granny had instructions to Find and Repair the other trousers while everybody was out. ‘Imagine how awful it would be if he only had one pair. He might get arrested for exposing his buttocks to All Souls.’
‘Who are All Souls?’ said Jess. ‘They sound like a rock band.’
‘It’s an Oxford college,’ said her mum. ‘One of my friends had lunch there a few years ago and met the Archbishop of Canterbury in the loos.’
‘Wow!’ breathed Jess. ‘Some comfort stop!’
Soon they were at school. A bus was parked outside the gates, surrounded by a chaos of umbrellas. Jess and Edouard joined the throng. Edouard ran off without a backwards look. Jess searched for Flora.
Suddenly Gerard appeared, looking vague and stylish. When he saw her, he grinned. Jess felt herself blush, remembering the dream. It was insane, but she almost felt as if Gerard knew about the dream – as if he might have had it, too.
‘Hi, Jezz,’ said Gerard.
‘Hi, Gerard,’ said Jess. She could see Jodie fighting her way through the crowd towards them, looking jealous. ‘Enjoy Oxford,’ she said. ‘Hope your day is not too bof.’
Gerard laughed. ‘You’re phoney!’ he said. Jess gave a parting nod and slipped away. At least ‘phoney’ was a step in the right direction. Maybe he’d manage ‘funny’ one day.
After registration, Jodie grabbed Jess and Flora. She looked round furtively as if she was about to reveal a big secret.
‘It’s on!’ she whispered. ‘But my auntie says there can only be six of us! So it’s going to be us three with Gerard, Edouard and Marie-Louise. There’s this amazing field just below her house, and there’s a fantastic stream running along the bottom of it, and she’s even got an outside loo, so we won’t have to go indoors.’
Jess was glad to hear about the outside loo. On a picnic once, she had retreated into a small wood and had an awful moment involving a nettle.
‘My dad says this rain is just a front going through or something,’ said Flora. ‘There’s still going to be a mini-heatwave at the weekend.’
At this point the bell rang for home economics, and Jess realised that she would be required to make a pizza, and that she had forgotten the ingredients. That was the unfair thing about cooking. In all the other subjects, she could kind of busk and blag her way through. But not even Jess could make a pizza out of half a pack of chewing gum.
Jess managed to get through home economics by shamelessly charming Mrs Ford and confiding details of her mum’s mercy dash to Granny’s last night, and the fear that Granny was being exploited by a ruthless and charismatic predator. Mrs Ford, who loved sensational confidences, forgave Jess for forgetting her ingredients and found some flour and cheese for her in her store cupboard.
‘You should be a defence lawyer when you leave school,’ said Flora. ‘You can wriggle out of anything.’
Lunch seemed more relaxed without the French people, and the rain had stopped, so Jess, Flora and Jodie took their baguettes to their favourite bench in the science quad. Two girls were sitting there. They were in the same year, but a different tutor group. Jess knew them by sight, but they had never talked. One was dark-haired and slightly spotty; the other was skinny, with ginger hair and a brace.
‘Hey! This is our bench!’ said Jodie. ‘Get lost, losers!’
‘And we mean that in the nicest possible way,’ added Jess.
‘It’s OK, leave it. We can go to the field,’ said Flora.
‘The field’s wet,’ said Jodie. ‘We always sit here. It is so famously our spot.’ The ginger-haired girl flushed red with anger so that, for a moment, her freckles disappeared. Her green eyes sparkled.
‘We were here first,’ she said.
‘Don’t pick a fight, Chloe,’ said the spotty girl. She turned to Jess. ‘You can sit here if you like. We were just going anyway. That assembly you did last term was amazing.’
‘It was in the worst possible taste, though,’ said Jess, charmed that this person should have enjoyed her recent performance.
‘Yeah, that’s what I liked about it,’ said the girl. ‘All those thin people in Manhattan. “Fifty pounds will keep a New York broker in cocktails for half an hour – please give generously.’’’ She laughed and got up.
‘What’s your name?’ asked Jess, amazed that her tawdry jests had, it seemed, been memorised. The red-haired friend was still sitting on the bench, and still glaring.
‘I’m Zoe,’ said the spotty girl. ‘And this is Chloe.’
‘Nice to have a friend who rhymes with you,’ said Jess. She wished it could have been a better joke, but her fan laughed anyway.
‘Come on, Chloe,’ said Zoe. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Eat my shorts!’ said Chloe, getting up and scorching past with a glare. She marched off. Zoe watched her go.
‘She’s a little touchy today,’ she sighed. ‘She had a bit of a tragedy last night with one of her poison toads.’ Zoe shrugged apologetically and walked off.
‘Well, I’m exhausted,’ said Jess, sitting down. ‘What does one have to do around here to get some respect?’
‘How much respect do you want?’ sneered Jodie, plonking herself down beside her. ‘She’ll probably come back here when we’ve gone and sit down where you sat. It’ll be a sacred spot.’
‘I just hope Edouard hasn’t got a crush on me after all,’ said Jess. ‘He shows no signs of it, anyway, thank goodness.’
Suddenly a shadow fell across the bench. Fred had arrived. He seemed taller than ever, standing there against the sun, but somehow still not sinister, only absurd.
‘So is the camping trip on?’ he asked. ‘My dad says we can have his old army tent. Just ignore the bullet holes and bloodstains.’
‘Sorry, Fred,’ said Jodie, in her brisk and rather brutal way, ‘you can’t come. My auntie says we’ve got to keep the numbers down and six is the max.’
‘Phew, what a relief,’ said Fred. ‘I was heroically going to go through with it, but to be honest I’m allergic to being outdoors. In fact, I’ve had enough of this so-called fresh air. Ah, well … I’m off to weep with disappointment in the loos.’ He strolled away.
‘That was a bit harsh,’ said Jess. ‘Can’t your auntie just let Fred come? Go on, let him. He’s a laugh.’
‘Nope,’ said Jodie, biting through her chicken tikka baguette with an almost crocodile-like snap. ‘Six is the max.’
‘I feel sorry for him,’ said Flora. ‘He was so sweet offering his dad’s tent and stuff.’
‘His tent sounded gross,’ said Jodie. ‘What’s yours like? State of the art?’
Flora looked startled.
‘We don’t have a tent actually,’ she said. ‘My mum refuses to stay in anything less than a four-star hotel.’
‘Have you got a tent, Jess?’ asked Jodie.
‘No,’ said Jess. ‘We sold ours years ago. But buy me the wool and I’ll knit one by Friday.’ Despite the
joke, she was feeling uneasy. Surely the weekend wasn’t going to be scuppered by a lack of tents? ‘I kind of assumed you’d be providing the tents,’ she went on.
Jodie scowled. ‘Look, I’m providing the field, aren’t I? Plus, unlike you two losers, I do actually have a tent, but it’s way too small for all of us.’
‘I expect we can borrow one from somebody,’ said Flora. ‘Whizzer has a tent.’
‘He’d want something sordid in return,’ said Jodie. ‘We can borrow Fred’s.’
‘What?’ gasped Jess. ‘You can’t tell him he can’t come and then ask to borrow his tent. Have you no tact at all?’
The bell rang, bringing an end to their lunchtime idyll. A sense of uneasiness was creeping over them. Would their wonderful camping weekend have to be abandoned by a stupid thing like a shortage of tents? But, then again, how could one do camping without them?
However, when Jess got home, she discovered that something much more fundamental was threatening her divine plans.
‘Camping?’ snapped her mum, struggling with a cheese sauce (?Jess had once again mistimed a crucial request). ‘At this time of year? Forget it. We don’t have a tent. It’ll be too cold – he’ll get pneumonia.’
Edouard was sitting with Granny. He was pale with the awful aftermath of a trip to Oxford, and preparing to toy disgustedly with Mum’s leeks and bacon in cheese sauce.
It’s so infuriating, thought Jess. Mum hates cooking with a ferocious passion and still she doesn’t want to get him out of her hair for a weekend.
Jess felt her heart sink down, down, down through the kitchen floor, the concrete foundations and the coldest of cold clay, until it came to a dark, dripping cavern where vampire bats roosted. Here it came to rest. The camping trip was a non-starter. This was a total, complete and utter disaster.
Chapter 19
After supper Edouard scampered upstairs, muttering something about ‘’omework’. Jess grabbed her mobile and texted Flora. HELP! MUM SAYS NO TO CAMPING! GRIEF-STRICKEN! THINK OF SOMETHING!