by Alice Oseman
According to Raine, Carol carried a pink Filofax with her whenever she came into school for a meeting.
Also according to Raine, if Carol had any record of Carys’s address, it would be inside the Filofax.
I had no idea how we were supposed to steal Carol’s Filofax from under her nose, and to be honest I didn’t really want to. It’s not like I’d stolen anything before or wanted to become a thief. The idea of getting caught by her was enough to make me feel a bit ill.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. We were sitting at my breakfast bar eating Bourbon biscuits out of the packet. “I have way less morals. I’ve stolen stuff before.”
“You’ve stolen stuff?”
“Well … sort of. I stole Thomas Lister’s shoes because he threw a sandwich at me on the bus.” She grinned and looked up. “He had to get off the bus and walk in his socks in the snow. Beautiful.”
The plan was that Raine would walk directly into Carol as she exited Afolayan’s office and drop a load of books everywhere. Theoretically, Carol would then drop her Filofax and Raine could grab it without her noticing.
I thought this was a terrible plan because it relied on a) the Filofax being in Carol’s hand and not her bag, b) Raine dropping her books in such a way that she could pick up the Filofax without Carol seeing, and c) Carol immediately forgetting she had been holding the Filofax after dropping it.
In other words, I couldn’t see any way this was going to work.
We didn’t even know for sure whether Carys’s address would be in there.
Mum happened to be in the kitchen at the time, and as Raine finished speaking, she said this:
“I’m not too sure this is going to work, girls.”
Raine and I turned to her.
Mum smiled and tied up her long hair. “Let me deal with this.”
We knew for sure that Carol would be in school at 2pm on Thursday 13th February for a meeting of all the parent governors. I wondered what jobs these parents did that allowed them to be free at 2pm on a Thursday. I wondered why Carol was a parent governor of a school that neither of her children went to.
Mum had taken a day off work. She said she never used up all of her holiday time anyway.
I think Mum was very excited to be part of this plan, actually.
She’d scheduled an appointment to see Dr Afolayan at 3pm. She said she was going to talk to Carol as she left the parent governor meeting. She didn’t say how she was going to get Carys’s address. Raine and I would be in a history lesson while this was happening so we had no idea what was going to happen.
“Leave it all to me,” Mum had said with a wicked grin.
Raine came back home with me on the train after school that day. Mum was waiting for us at the kitchen table. She was wearing the only trouser suit she owned and her hair was pinned up with a hair claw. She looked like the most stereotypical mum I had ever seen.
She was holding up the pink Filofax.
“Jesus Christ!” I shrieked, kicking my shoes off into a corner and hurling myself on to a barstool. Raine quickly joined me, with an expression of absolute awe. “How the hell did you do it?”
“Asked her if I could borrow it,” she said, with a nonchalant shrug.
I coughed out a laugh. “What?”
Mum leaned on the table. “I asked her if she had the contact address of our local MP because I wanted to write a strongly-worded letter about the honestly weak amount of homework you lazy students are being set and how the local schools are letting you down and making you all slackers.” She held out the Filofax to us. “But of course, I had to hurry into a meeting, so I didn’t have time to stop and copy the address down. So I asked if I could borrow it and said I’d drop it through her letterbox after the meeting, so you two had better be quick.”
“She must seriously like you,” I said, shaking my head and taking the Filofax.
Mum shrugged and said, “She always tries to talk to me at the post office.”
It only took Raine and me ten minutes to look through the entire address book section and to discover that there was no entry for Carys Last.
We then looked through the notes section, but only found a variety of shopping lists, to-do lists, work-related notes (I still had no idea what she actually did), and Mum’s notes from her meeting, which consisted of the words ‘blah blah blah’, a smiley face and a small drawing of a dinosaur. I made sure to tear that page out.
“I don’t think it’s here,” I said, feeling my stomach drop a little. I had honestly believed we might find something. Surely Carol had a record of her daughter’s address somewhere.
If she even had an address.
Raine groaned. “What are we going to do now? It’s already February, Aled’s been gone for nearly two months …”
“February,” I said, suddenly.
“What?”
February.
“February.” I pulled the Filofax towards me. “Let me just have one more look.”
I turned each page of the address book very slowly. And then I stopped, cried, “YES!” and stabbed a finger on to the page.
“Oh my God,” Raine whispered.
In the ‘F’ section of the address book, there were only four entries. The top one was for a person who apparently didn’t even have a surname. There was only one word on the ‘Name:’ dotted line:
‘February.’
LONDON’S BURNING
I took the train to London that Friday. Mum made me promise to carry a rape whistle at all times and text her every hour.
I was going to do this.
I was going to find Carys. She was going to help Aled.
I found myself at a fairly clean-looking townhouse in a residential area. It was a lot fancier than I’d expected. Obviously it wasn’t one of those posh white townhouses that everyone thinks of when they imagine London living, but Carys wasn’t living in a hovel. I’d been expecting something with crumbling walls and boarded-up windows.
I walked up the steps to the door and rang the doorbell. It rang in the tune of ‘London’s Burning’.
A young black woman with vibrant pink hair opened the door. It took a moment for me to say anything because she’d nestled daisies into her explosion of curls and it really was the best hair I had ever seen.
“You all right, mate?” she asked in a typically London voice. She sounded a bit like Raine, actually.
“Er, yeah, I was looking for Carys Last?” I cleared my throat because my voice was a bit wobbly. “Apparently she lives here?”
The woman made a sympathetic face. “Sorry mate, nah, there’s no Carys here.”
“Ah …” My heart sank.
And then I had a thought.
“Wait – what about someone called February?” I asked.
The woman looked a little surprised. “Oh! Yeah, that’s Feb! You an old friend or …?”
“Er … yeah, sort of.”
She grinned and leaned on the doorframe. “Man. I knew she’d changed her name, but … Carys. Bloody hell, that’s so Welsh.”
I laughed too. “So … is she in?”
“Nah, mate, she’s at work. You could probs go find her there if you’ve got the time? Or you can chill here for a bit?”
“Oh, right. Is she far away?”
“Nah, she’s just down on South Bank. She works at the National Theatre, she’s, like, a tour guide and she runs, like, workshops for kids and stuff. ’Bout ten minutes on the tube.”
As I had been half-expecting Carys to be struggling along with some sort of horrible minimum wage job, this was an extreme surprise to me.
“Would she mind? Would I be interrupting her or something?”
The woman checked her watch, which was chunky and yellow. “Nope, it’s gone six so she’ll have finished her workshops. You’ll probs find her in the gift shop, she usually helps out there till she finishes at eight.”
“Okay.” I paused on the step. This was it. I was going to see Carys.
Or –
no. Wait. I had to check. Just to be sure.
“So, Carys—” I corrected myself – “February … erm … just to check, she’s— She’s got blonde hair—”
“Dyed blonde hair, blue eyes, big tits and a straight-face like she could rip out your throat?” The woman chuckled. “Is that her?”
I smiled nervously. “Erm, yeah.”
It only took me another twenty minutes to get to the National Theatre. South Bank – a riverside area filled with cafés and stalls and restaurants and buskers – was heaving with people out for dinner and going to the theatre and it was pretty dark already. Someone was playing a Radiohead song on an acoustic guitar. I’d only been here once before – I’d been with school to see a production of War Horse.
As I walked towards the theatre using Google Maps as a guide, I checked what I was wearing – a stripy pinafore dress over a T-shirt that had speech bubbles all over it, thick grey tights and a Fair Isle cardigan. I felt like myself, and that really did make me feel a bit more confident about the situation.
Right before I stepped into the National Theatre I genuinely had a moment when I was about to turn round and go home. I texted my mum the crying face emoji and she texted back a thumbs-up, several salsa-dancing girls and a four-leaf clover.
I entered the building – a huge, grey block that looked nothing like your typical London theatre – and immediately located the gift shop near the entrance. I walked in.
It took me a minute to spot Carys, though it really shouldn’t have, because she still stood out just as well as she always had.
She was sorting through some books on a shelf, rearranging and adding some in from a cardboard box she had under one arm. I walked over to her.
“Carys,” I said, and hearing that name she immediately frowned and whipped her head around to face me, like I’d frightened her somehow.
It took her a moment. And then she recognised me.
“Frances Janvier,” she said with an absolutely expressionless face.
GOLDEN CHILD
Lots of things were freaking me out. Her hair, for one. The blonde was peroxide now, almost white, and her fringe only reached halfway down her forehead – her eyes looked so much bigger, you could actually see her looking at you. Jesus Christ, her winged eyeliner must have taken, like, half an hour to do.
She was wearing red lipstick, a nautical striped crop top and a calf-length beige skirt with platform pastel pink Mary Janes. She had a National Theatre lanyard round her neck. She looked approximately twenty-four years old.
The only thing that was the same was the leather jacket. I couldn’t remember whether it was the same one she’d worn all the time back then, but it produced the same effect.
She looked like she could probably murder me, or sue me. Perhaps both.
And then she started to laugh to herself.
“I knew it,” she said, and there it was, that slightly posh, Made in Chelsea voice, soft like Aled’s, like she belonged on the TV. “I knew someone would find me eventually.” She looked down at me and it really was her, but I didn’t feel like I was talking to someone I had even met before. “I just didn’t think it’d be you.”
I chuckled awkwardly. “Surprise!”
“Hm.” She raised her eyebrows, and then turned away and shouted towards the woman at the till, “Hey, Kate! Can I leave early?”
The woman shouted back that she could, and then she went and got her bag and we left together.
Carys took me to the theatre bar, which didn’t surprise me at all. She’d liked drinking when she was sixteen, and she still liked drinking now.
She also insisted on buying me a drink. I tried to stop her, but before I knew it she was ordering us two daiquiri cocktails, which probably cost twenty pounds each, knowing London. I took my jacket off and put it on my stool and willed myself to stop sweating quite so profusely.
“So what called for this?” she asked, sipping on her cocktail through two tiny straws and looking me dead in the eye. “How’d you find me?”
Thinking about the Filofax fiasco made me laugh out loud. “My mum stole your mum’s address book.”
Carys frowned. “My mum shouldn’t have my address.” She looked away. “Oh, shit. I bet she read my letter to Aled.”
“You— You sent Aled a letter?”
“Yeah, last year when I moved in with my housemates. Just telling him everything was okay and what my new address was. I’d even signed it February so he’d know I was using that name.”
“Aled …” I shook my head slightly. “Aled hasn’t heard anything from you. He told me.”
Carys almost didn’t seem to have heard me. “My mother. Christ. I don’t know why I’m surprised.” She let out a breath, and then raised her eyebrows and looked at me.
I wondered where I was supposed to start. There were so many things I needed to tell her, I needed to ask.
She got there first with, “You look different. Your clothes are more you. And your hair is down.”
“Er, thanks, I—”
“So how are you?”
Carys continued to bombard me with questions for several minutes, preventing me from bringing up anything I actually wanted to talk about such as 1) your twin brother has been displaying worrying behaviour for around seven months, 2) I’m extremely sorry for being a crap friend, 3) how do you have your life so together; you are literally eighteen years old, 4) please explain why your name is now February.
She was still the most intimidating person I’d ever met. More intimidating now. Everything about her bloody terrified me.
“Did you get into Cambridge in the end?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Ah. So what’s the plan?”
“Erm … I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I didn’t come here to talk about that.”
Carys gazed at me, but said nothing.
“I came to find you because of Aled,” I said.
She glanced at me, eyebrows raised. The stony expression I knew was back. “Oh, right?”
I started from the beginning. I explained how Aled and I had become friends, how we’d found each other and our weird Universe City coincidence. I explained about how I’d accidentally outed him as the Creator and how he’d stopped texting me and how his mum was out to destroy everything he had.
Carys listened, taking small sips as I spoke, but I could tell that she was getting more and more concerned. I was fiddling with my glass, passing it from one hand to the other.
“This is …” she said, once I’d finished. “God. I never thought— I never thought she’d start with him too.”
I almost didn’t want to ask. “Start what?”
Carys thought about it for a moment, crossing one leg over the other and swishing her hair. “Our mother doesn’t believe that there is any way to have a fulfilling life unless you are academically successful.” She put down her glass and held up one hand, pointing to each finger as she spoke. She still had those tiny burn scars covering her skin. “This means that you need brilliant grades all of the time, only academic GCSE and A level subject choices, and an academic top quality university degree.” She put down the hand. “She believes in this so strongly that she would actually rather we died than didn’t do all of that.”
“Fuck,” I said.
“Yes.” Carys laughed. “Unfortunately for me, as you well know, I was one of those people who— No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get good grades. At anything. But Mum thought she could just force me to become magically clever. Tutors, extra homework, summer camps, etc. Which was ridiculous, obviously.”
She took another sip. She was telling this story with the sort of nonchalance a person might have when talking about their summer holiday.
“Aled was the clever one. He was the dream child. The favouritism was obvious even before our dad left when we were eight. Mum absolutely despised me because I couldn’t solve maths problems – I was the fat, dumb child – and she made my life a literal hell.”
<
br /> I didn’t want to ask, but I did anyway. “What did she do?”
“She just slowly took away anything that brought me any joy in my life.” Carys shrugged. “It was like – you don’t get an A on this test, fine, you can’t see your friends this weekend. You don’t get ten out of ten on this worksheet, okay, I’m taking your laptop away for two weeks. And it got gradually nastier, you know? It turned into, like – you don’t get an A in your mock GCSE, I’m locking you in your room for the weekend. You fail your exam, you’re not getting any birthday presents.”
“God …”
“She’s literally a monster.” Carys held up a finger. “But she’s cunning, as well. She doesn’t do anything illegal, or anything that sounds abusive. That’s how she gets away with it.”
“And … d’you think … she’s doing this stuff to Aled now?”
“From what you’ve just told me … I mean, it sounds like it. I never thought she’d actually turn on him. He was the golden child. I never would have … I mean, if I’d known … if he’d seen my letter and replied and told me …” She shook her head, abandoning her sentence. “I couldn’t even defend myself against her, let alone him. I guess if I wasn’t there … she just needed someone else to destroy.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“And I can’t believe she had the dog put down,” she continued. “That’s just … horrific.”
“Aled was devastated.”
“Yeah, he loved that dog to bits.”
There was a pause then and I took a long sip of my drink, which was very strong.
“Honestly though, I hated him at the time.”
This was a shock. “You hated him? Why?”
“Because I got all the torment from our mum. Because he was the golden child and I was the stupid one. Because he never stood up for me, ever, even when he could see how badly she was treating me. I blamed him entirely.” She saw my look of disdain and raised her eyebrows. “Oh, don’t worry, I don’t think like that any more. I don’t blame him at all any more, it’s all that woman’s fault. If he’d have tried to stand up for me, she just would have made both our lives unbearable.”