by Sue Limb
‘Oh, yes, the dinner dance!’ cooed Granny happily. ‘Grandpa used to take me to dinner dances down at the Royal George Hotel. They had a wonderful buffet there, with seven different kinds of salad!’
‘Wow, Granny!’ said Jess. ‘What sort of dress did you wear?’ Anything to divert attention from the subject of catering. Jess was secretly appalled to hear there could be seven different types of salad, and wondered how many types her customers were expecting.
Just as they were finishing dinner, somebody rang the doorbell.
‘Get that, would you, Jess, love?’ asked Mum.
Jess cringed. ‘But, Mum, I look so gross!’ She pulled disgustedly at her joggers.
‘If Fred doesn’t mind, why should anybody else?’ asked Granny with a naughty wink.
Wearily and apprehensively, Jess dragged herself to the door, pulling down the fleece to try and hide, well, everything. Gingerly, she opened the door. It was Martin.
‘Martin!’ Jess cheered up. Martin’s return was good news: it meant he was still interested in Mum. But he was about to walk into a cosy family dinner with Dad apparently totally back in town. ‘Come in!’ Jess’s mind was like a thunderstorm: black rumbles of dread punctuated by sudden desperate flashing ideas. ‘We’re just in the middle of Dad’s farewell dinner! He’s off to Barcelona in the morning to join his boyfriend – you knew he was gay, didn’t you?’ She was doing her best to reassure him.
Martin nodded slightly awkwardly and stepped inside.
‘How’s Fred?’ he asked, looking down at her with a kindly smile. It was so nice of him to remember Fred’s name.
‘He’s here – you can meet him!’ she said. As he took his coat off, Martin looked towards the kitchen with a tiny, thoughtful frown. Jess wondered if he was nervous about Mum and Dad possibly getting back together again. Well, she had done her best, inventing that reunion with Phil in Barcelona.
Chapter 20
‘Martin!’ cried Dad, getting up with a welcoming kind of wave.
Jess glared at Dad. Martin was Mum’s friend – Dad should just sit quietly and stop acting as if he was the boss around here.
‘You haven’t met Fred, have you?’ Dad went on.
Martin nodded and grinned, and Fred did one of his self-conscious twitches.
‘Hi, Fred!’ said Martin. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you. Hello!’ Then he smiled at Granny, who greeted him with politeness but not warmth. Oh no! Maybe Granny had got it into her head that Mum and Dad might be heading for a reconciliation, and now viewed Martin as a dangerous threat.
‘So, Madeleine,’ Martin continued – rather nervously, Jess thought, ‘how were things at the library today?’
‘Somebody died on us this morning,’ said Mum with a tired shrug. ‘Otherwise, fine.’
‘You never told me somebody died, Madeleine!’ exclaimed Granny resentfully. As the resident murder buff, no doubt she felt unjustly excluded. ‘Was it natural causes?’
‘No,’ said Mum. ‘A woman clubbed her husband to death with an encyclopedia.’ Mum had a strange demented look, as if she was planning to do something similar before bedtime.
‘Oh, Madeleine, you are a one!’ Granny sighed, and turned to Martin with a strange, manipulative look in her eye. ‘She’s always been a terrible fibber ever since she was small. You never know where you are with Madeleine! Somehow Tim’s got used to it over the years, though I don’t know how he does it – he’s a hero.’
Jess stared at Granny in disbelief. She really was trying to put Martin off Mum! How many lies could the old girl cram into one brief speech? Mum was so not a fibber – the reference to death by encyclopedia had been an obvious joke. You always knew where you were with Mum, and Dad had never got used to it over the years – and that phrase suggested he had somehow been present over the years, whereas they’d been lucky to see him every three months or so. Lastly, Dad was about as far from being a hero as it is possible to be.
‘Was it one of those street people who died?’ asked Dad, gazing at Mum in awe. He would never have the bottle to deal with a dead body. He would run off screaming and lock himself in the bathroom if there was even a dead mouse behind the fridge.
‘No, it was a little old lady,’ said Mum. ‘She fainted in the reference section and she sort of never came round. We placed her in the recovery position but it didn’t work.’ There was a brief awful depressed kind of pause. Fred was staring fanatically at the table. He was usually so witty; why couldn’t he say something funny or helpful, or at least catch Jess’s eye in a conspiratorial hysterical stare?
‘I always go to bed in the recovery position,’ Granny confided to Martin, ‘in case I faint in my sleep.’
Martin looked impressed. ‘Probably a good idea,’ he said. ‘I should try it.’
‘Would you like a coffee, Martin?’ asked Mum at last. She was so clueless, thought Jess. She should offer him some pudding, too. There was an orange cake thing on top of the fridge and Jess’s Binge Radar could sense whipped cream in the fridge.
‘No, thanks,’ said Martin, looking awkward.
‘Have some tea, then!’ cried Jess, taking the initiative as the grown-ups seemed to be so useless and inhospitable, and Martin still hadn’t sat down. ‘Or some herbal tea!’
Jess rushed to the fridge and carefully picked up the cake. She placed it in the middle of the table.
‘Wait until we’ve cleared the plates, Jess,’ said Mum, clattering about busily. ‘Do sit down, Martin!’ At last! Anybody would think she hated the guy, even though she’d confided to Jess that he was half-gorgeous.
‘You missed a great fish pie,’ said Dad, slapping his tum in a complacent way. ‘Although I say so myself.’
‘It’s OK,’ murmured Martin, sitting down gingerly on the edge of one of the spare chairs – as if he wanted to minimise his presence somehow. ‘I’ve eaten.’
‘Ordinary tea or herbal tea, Martin?’ asked Jess politely. She was determined to keep him there. He mustn’t rush off again. He must understand that he was the one who made Mum happy – not Dad. She cast a desperate look at Fred, hoping in vain for a bit of support. He was examining his fingers. Fred was so hilarious when they were alone, but sometimes, among adults, he could kind of switch off and become rather like a subdued ghost. It was only his way of being shy really, and Jess felt a surge of compassion for him at the same time as wanting to give him a hearty kick up the backside.
‘Ordinary tea, please, Jess,’ said Martin, still kind of edgy and obviously trying to read the matrimonial situation.
‘And you will have a piece of cake?’ Mum was becoming a bit more confident and fired up now, bustling about with the dessert plates.
‘Well, OK, thanks,’ said Martin. ‘It looks delicious!’ He gave Granny an ingratiating smile.
‘It’s one of my friend Deborah’s cakes,’ said Granny. Granny then started rambling on and on about Deborah, including details of her strange rash, which broke out every time she was exposed to lycra – even just watching the Tour de France on TV could make poor Deborah itch. Everybody else sipped their tea and nibbled their cake, praying to be rescued from Granny’s droning monologue – a power cut would have been just the ticket. Eventually Granny paused to burp discreetly, and Fred pounced on his opportunity.
‘I, er, I ought to go,’ he said, scrambling awkwardly to his feet. Jess jumped up, too. ‘Haven’t done my homework,’ Fred added, putting on an angelic face, even though Jess knew he very rarely did his homework before 11 p.m.
‘I’ll see you out,’ she murmured.
After Fred had managed to say his thank-yous and goodbyes, and had climbed into his parka without knocking any furniture over (a first), they slipped out into the hall.
‘Guess what?’ hissed Jess happily. ‘Dad found the Chaos money! It had slipped down behind my desk! I’m so, so sorry, Fred. I just thought you must have had it because I got confused about the times when you did have it, and I’d looked and looked everywhere, and I said all those horrid
things to you and I’m really, really sorry.’
She threw her arms around him and gave him a massive hug. But she could feel that Fred wasn’t responding. She stood back and stared up at him.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
He looked sheepish and started kicking invisible things about.
‘Yeah, um … the reason I called by …’ he began, and his eyes swivelled uneasily all over the walls, the front door, the doormat, the radiator ‘… is that … uhh, this is really, like, awkward, but, uh … Frenzy have let me down.’
‘What do you mean?’ Jess’s heart gave an alarmed lurch. Just when they had found the money and things could be organised properly at last, the band had somehow let Fred down?
‘They, uh, they can’t do the gig after all,’ muttered Fred lamely.
‘But they promised!’ seethed Jess indignantly. ‘You told me they promised you! Who are they, anyway? I’ll ring them up right now.’
‘You can’t do that,’ said Fred nervously. ‘They’ve, uh, they’ve just been offered a recording contract in – in Germany.’
Something about Fred’s face suddenly rang alarm bells at the back of Jess’s mind. She peered suspiciously into his face.
‘Fred, are you being straight with me? Is this really, really true? You’re lying, aren’t you?’
‘No, no!’ Fred assured her, kicking more imaginary things about. He blushed – always a giveaway.
‘Well, give me their number, then, and I’ll ring them!’ demanded Jess. Fred heaved a huge shuddering sigh. Jess knew what was coming now – the truth. She braced herself.
‘The fact is,’ said Fred tragically, looking down at the doormat, ‘there is no Frenzy.’
‘What?’ Jess was incredulous.
‘I made them up.’
‘You did what?!?’
‘I invented them.’
‘You invented them?!’
‘Because everything was getting so out of hand,’ gabbled Fred, waving his hands about. ‘You were giving me such a hard time –’
‘I was just trying to organise things, Fred. Somebody has to!’
‘I know, I know. There was a band called Frenzy, and Mackenzie said he knew the drummer’s brother, and he said he could get them to come and do the gig, but it turned out they’d disbanded before Christmas. I didn’t totally invent them.’
‘But you told me they could play at the dinner dance!’
‘Yes, but it was only to buy a bit of time. I knew you were in a stress – I wanted you to feel that part of it was all fixed up.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Jess was sceptical about this. ‘Or was it just to get me off your back?’
Fred shook his head, said nothing and now stared tragically at the radiator. ‘I will fix something up, I promise,’ he said, suddenly looking into her eyes. ‘I can’t bear letting you down like this. I will find a band somewhere, really. Give me time.’
And then he was gone, out into the night.
The next few days passed in a flash. The money was at last safe in the bank, and Jess spent hours in the supermarket writing down the prices of salads and hams and quiches and stuff. But how much of it would you need to feed nearly a hundred people?
By the time Friday came, Jess had entered a trance-like state. With only a week to go before lift-off, Jess just had to believe it could be organised, and that a cold buffet would be OK, even though it was February. She would have to ask Flora to help her work out the portions and the cost and everything. And she’d have to ask Mum to collect it all in her beat-up old estate car, and she’d have to ask some of her friends to help … How much help would she need? It was a continuing nightmare.
As for the band situation, Fred simply refused to discuss it. He seemed to spend ages on his mobile talking to people, and he’d dropped some hints that he’d reopened negotiations with Goldilocks. When Jess asked how it was going, he always said the same old thing: ‘Trust me!’ The trouble was, Jess didn’t trust him. She trusted him as a comedian, but as an events manager? Hardly.
Now the trip to Dorset had stopped seeming like an obstacle, and started to feel like a wonderful escape from a bad dream. In fact, one of Jess’s more feverish fantasies involved running off into the Dorset countryside, inventing a new identity as Tess the goatherd, and never going home again.
Chapter 21
‘Right,’ said Mum, driving them to the station on Friday evening after school. ‘Mrs Stevens is going to meet you at Weymouth.’
Jess and Fred, sitting together in the back, taxi style, exchanged an amused look, and Jess rolled her eyes apologetically and squeezed his hand. They were going down to Dorset by train because Jack’s car had developed a radiator leak, and there was only enough room in the Stevenses’ people carrier for Jack’s parents, Jack, Flora, Jack’s brother George and his mates from uni.
‘Get a seat in the middle carriage of the train!’ Mum went on.
‘Why?’ Jess tried not to get too irritated.
‘Because if there’s a crash, the front and back carriages usually get the worst of it!’ Honestly, Mum was paranoid about crashes.
‘I’ve always loved trains.’ Fred tried to turn the conversation in more positive directions. ‘Maybe I was a trainspotter in a previous life! I’ve got vague memories of hanging around stations in my anorak as the Duke of Cumberland went thundering past in a shower of sparks and smoke. I was quite impressed by the trains, too.’
‘And remember to help with the washing up!’ Mum continued her pep talk, ignoring Fred’s ravings. ‘And don’t sit up talking all night when Mr and Mrs Stevens are trying to sleep.’
‘As if we would!’ sighed Jess, secretly imagining the banshee wail with which she was planning to wake Mr and Mrs Stevens at 3 a.m.
‘And make sure you do all the food preparation,’ said Mum, peering through the darkness as the station lights loomed up. ‘And lay the table! And don’t play silly games on the cliffs in the dark. Promise me you won’t go near the cliff edge? Fred, promise me you won’t let her anywhere near the cliff edge!’
‘I promise,’ said Fred. ‘I won’t even let her go anywhere near the food mixer.’
‘That would be a worse death after all,’ Jess pointed out. ‘Although some people might say it would be poetic justice for me to end up as a hamburger.’ The feeling of going away, even just for the weekend, had filled Jess with a crazy kind of relief and joy.
They climbed out of the car and got their bags out of the boot. Jess’s mum stood watching them with a terrible doom-laden frown of anxiety, as if they were setting out for a war zone. She launched herself at Jess and hugged her so hard, there was a faint cracking noise. Jess knew her mum was convinced they would never meet again – in this life, anyway.
‘Enjoy your weekend, Mum,’ she said, prising Mum’s frantic fingers off her arm. ‘Are you seeing Martin?’
‘Oh, I don’t know!’ said Mum in an irritable way. ‘Never mind about me. You just keep safe, that’s all.’
The train was packed, and Jess and Fred had to stand in the area by the buffet.
‘I so love trains!’ Jess grinned, clutching her lemonade can as the train swayed through the dark. ‘I wish we could just stay on this train all night and end up in Moscow or something.’
‘We should go on one of those epic train journeys one day,’ suggested Fred. ‘You know, across the Great Mongolian Plain or whatever. To China or India or something. Wait! Let’s pretend we’ve never met before. I’ll go to the loo and when I come out, we’ll be strangers on the Vladivostok Express.’
Jess leaned on the counter with the bored look of a heroine in one of those moody black-and-white 1940s films. Fred emerged from the loo with his collar turned up – the idiot. Jess ignored him. He trod heavily on her toe.
‘Oh, excuse me!’ he said, in a deep Russian sort of voice. ‘I’m so sorry. The train lurches so badly whenever we hit a peasant. Is your foot badly hurt?’
‘It’s all right,’ Jess assured him in a snaky
, husky hiss. ‘My right foot is made of iron. I lost it in the uprising in Omsk.’
‘Were you shot by the Bolsheviks?’ Fred loved history, but Jess couldn’t remember who the Bolsheviks were.
‘No,’ she informed him. ‘It was a very uncomfortable pair of shoes. I was at a ball with Prince Obergurgle – we danced all night and in the morning my foot fell off. So what? I never liked it anyway.’ She shrugged.
‘Not the same Prince Obergurgle who was shot by the Bolsheviks?’ asked Fred, looking impressed.
‘It may have been.’ Jess gave another charismatic shrug. ‘Who cares? My next lover was a plough-boy. He was a lot more fun than the prince.’
‘You are a very attractive person, if I may say so,’ hissed Fred in her ear. ‘Can I offer you a job in my spy network?’
‘I’m already a double agent,’ Jess replied snootily. ‘But I might be able to fit you in on Thursday afternoons.’
Fred laughed. Then his face changed; the Russian spy expression fell away and he was Fred again.
‘We could always just cancel it,’ he said, suddenly deadly serious. Jess’s heart gave a horrid skip. ‘We could say it’s due to unforeseen circumstances,’ Fred went on. ‘People cancel things all the time. We’ve banked the money now so we could give everybody a refund.’
‘But people would think we were such losers!’ cried Jess. ‘And they’d be right! And what about Oxfam? We can’t let them down!’
Fred shook his head. ‘Everybody will have forgotten all about it by Easter.’
‘I don’t know …’ Jess hesitated. ‘I can’t face the idea of cancelling it – not at the moment, anyway. There must be a way to get the food and music organised properly!’
‘Hmmm,’ Fred said doubtfully, and shrugged.
‘Fred, let’s talk about this later,’ suggested Jess. ‘I just want to relax and enjoy myself this evening, OK? We’ll talk about it in the morning. Let’s get back to the Vladivostok Express.’
But somehow the mood had changed and the world of Russian spies had evaporated.
When they arrived at Weymouth it did seem as dark and foggy as Outer Mongolia, but through a freezing mist Jess spotted Flora waiting on the platform, huddled deep in her parka, her breath billowing on the cold night air.