25th August (later)
I’m writing this under cover of my sleeping bag (oh my God, I can’t believe I’m in a sleeping bag), illuminated by a dicky flashlight, which is why my handwriting is doing strange fandangos all over the page.
The journey here was a total disaster. Honestly. The first thing was Veronique and Dylan having the mother of all arguments. I mean, it had a plot and a subplot and several walk-on parts and I’m beginning to realise what all that cryptic speak was about earlier this year when he nearly split up with her.
They were the last to arrive as we packed our gear into the van outside the café. Dylan’s battered little Mini roared up and he’d uncurled himself from the driver’s seat and stood there tapping his feet impatiently while Veronique scrambled over to his side of the car to get out. (It’s been nearly two years and he still hasn’t got his passenger door fixed.)
‘Thanks for helping me,’ she snarled at him. ‘Get my stuff out of your stinking car.’
I looked at Carter but he didn’t seem to find anything particularly wrong and carried on hauling bags into the van.
‘Get it yourself,’ Dylan was saying between gritted teeth but he got her gear out of the boot anyway. As he gathered the bags in one hand so he could slam the boot shut with the other, he dropped a small vanity case which burst open, spilling out all of Veronique’s pots and potions and make-up.
If I thought Carter had gone ballistic in the garden the other day, it was nothing on Veronique’s reaction when she saw her Clinique compact get run over. She was like a creature possessed. She flew at Dylan, slapping him and screaming obscenities at the top of her voice. That was freaky in the extreme, but what was even freakier was other people’s reactions. Me and Poppy, Grace, Atsuko, Darby and the Rhythm Records boys all looked horrified but Shona and Paul just rolled their eyes while Simon muttered, ‘Here we go again,’ under his breath.
Dylan was trying to hold Veronique off without actually hurting her and kept on telling her to calm down but she seemed to get more and more worked up.
‘You make me sick. I hate you,’ she screeched. Dylan eventually managed to push her away and keep her at arm’s length.
‘I don’t need this,’ he said quietly but forcefully. ‘Just stop it.’ Veronique went still for a moment and he finally let go of her and started to head towards the rest of us.
Then Veronique went for him again. ‘Don’t you dare walk away from me!’ she shouted, her hand raised to slap Dylan round the face when Carter was suddenly in front of her and tugging at her arm.
‘Come on, Ronnie,’ he said in that voice he used with me when I was being completely unreasonable. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’
They disappeared down the street and Dylan let out a deep breath, his shoulders drooping.
‘She’s been a complete ’mare ever since she got up,’ he muttered at Shona who rushed over to see if he was all right. The rest of us were still standing there gawping. The sight of Dylan standing surrounded by his friends, who were all trying to console him, but looking utterly alone really got to me. When I thought about it, he was the one that didn’t smile any more. Not properly. Not with that smirk and raised eyebrow that had used to make me come over all unnecessary. But I told myself it was useless to think of Dylan as anything other than an acquaintance, I was with Carter now. And eventually the sight of Dylan and the way his jeans always hung low on his hips and the way his chocolate-brown hair always begged for me to tousle it wouldn’t affect me any more. I just had to wean myself off him.
So anyway, we didn’t exactly set off in the best of spirits and things went steadily downhill.
Poppy insisted that she wasn’t going to sit in the back of the van, giving me and Carter a pointed look, and squeezed up front with Shona and Paul, who was driving. Oh, and Grace, who seemed to be more surgically welded to her sister’s side than ever before, wedged herself between Poppy and the door. Atsuko declined Simon’s attempts to persuade her to sit on his lap so she wouldn’t keep banging herself on bags every time Paul changed lanes, while Darby was happily ensconced between Will and Robbie, and Dylan and Veronique were sitting away from everybody else (well as far away as you can get in the back of a dilapidated Transit van) looking like they’d just had a ferocious row. Which, actually, yeah!
The atmosphere in the van just got worse and worse. We argued about what music we were going to listen to, which service station to stop at and who got to sit next to the open window and we’d only been driving for an hour.
‘We could play “I went to the festival”…’ I suggested brightly, only to have my idea shot down with varying degrees of savagery. Dylan just gave me a filthy look and I knew he was remembering the time we’d gone to Paris and spent practically the whole journey saying stuff, like, ‘I went to the festival and I took articles of clothing belonging to Paul Daniels, brine shrimp…’ Those had been happier days.
Carter wrapped his arms tighter around my waist. ‘Well, I thought it was a good idea,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘I can’t wait to get you alone in a tent.’
Although I kissed his cheek and smiled at him, I wondered why the thought of losing my virginity with the boy I was really into made me feel like I was about to go into hospital for open-heart surgery.
Dylan had been watching me and Carter with narrowed eyes when all of a sudden he turned to the still-fuming Veronique and stroked her cheek lightly.
‘I’m sorry, Ronnie,’ I could hear him say. ‘It was my fault. I should have remembered to set the alarm clock.’
Veronique gave him a look that would have turned weaker men to stone and shifted half an inch away from him.
‘Oh, come on,’ Dylan continued softly. ‘I’ll do anything to make it up to you.’
Veronique began to look interested. ‘Anything?’ she enquired with that cat-like smile I hated so much.
‘Anything you want,’ Dylan promised.
‘Hmmm, what about that new pair of shoes we saw in Office?’ she said. ‘The snakeskin ones with the pink trim.’
‘I’ll buy them as soon as we get back,’ Dylan said and Veronique gave a little cry of happiness and flung herself at him. I looked at Dylan with contempt. Since when did he get so sappy? Whenever he’d been on the business-end of one of my hissy fits, he’d just smirked and teased me out of it. I could have doubled the contents of my wardrobe if I’d just been a bit more of a princess. As Veronique was planting little kisses over every bit of Dylan that she could reach, he caught my eye and then deliberately captured Veronique’s mouth in a long, passionate kiss.
‘Hey you two, go book a room,’ said Will, loudly.
They came up for air and I turned my head away but not before I’d seen Veronique throw a satisfied glance at Carter who continued to squeeze me tightly. It was like my own private version of hell.
After we’d been travelling for three hours and I was thinking if I had to listen to Will’s iPod and The Best Trance Album In The World… Ever one more time I was going to rip my ears off, Paul stopped the van.
As he opened the big, sliding door and let us out I could see that we weren’t in a service station car park about to pig-out on fast food. Instead we had stopped in a small village, complete with cricket pitch and duck pond and coachloads of American tourists, who were looking at us as if we’d just landed from Mars.
‘Where’s the nearest Caffè Nero?’ Darby asked on behalf of us all but Paul and Shona just grinned.
‘There’s a little tea shop on the other side of the duck pond,’ Shona said. ‘But first we thought we’d take in the sheep-throwing contest?’
‘There’s a what with who and huh?’ I asked in a very blonde way.
‘Yeah, we saw a sign,’ Paul grinned. ‘Sheep-throwing! Had to check it out.’
What happened next was the freakiest thing yet. Grace stamped on Paul’s foot, yelled something about cruelty to animals and stormed off in the direction of a nearby field/paddock type arrangement where there was bunting and crowds an
d other things that suggested that sheep were being thrown. Poppy ran after Grace, and Atsuko and Darby ran after Poppy, Paul hopped up and down and made over-the-top ‘ow’ grimaces and I collapsed on the ground and laughed and laughed at the look on his face. Carter gave me an amused glance and told me to get up but by then I was curled in a ball with tears streaming down my face.
‘Paul’s face…’ I kept trying to say while Paul flushed and grumbled that it wasn’t that funny.
‘Actually it was, honey,’ insisted Shona. ‘I never thought I’d hear that little pixie speak, let alone inflict GBH.’
‘Dylan!’ barked Veronique, sounding less than impressed. ‘I’m getting a hunger headache, can we find something to eat in this godforsaken hellhole?’ And she flounced off in the direction of a Ye Olde Tea Shoppe.
‘Anything you say, sweetness,’ Dylan bit out as he followed her, earning him a sharp glare from Carter.
‘C’mon, Edieson Lighthouse,’ said Shona pulling me to my feet. And it had been so long since she used her pet name for me (something to do with an old hippy band called Edison Lighthouse) that even though Carter was making ‘let’s slope off’ motions at me, I linked arms with Shona and went off to investigate the sheep-throwing.
Grace had staged a one-woman protest by the time we got there and was being recorded for posterity on the tourists’ camcorders.
‘You’re cruel!’ she was shouting at some hapless farmer who had a distressed sheep on the end of a lead.
‘Grace, you’re upsetting the animals,’ Poppy said, trying to calm her down. ‘They’re not really throwing the sheep. Are you?’ she added anxiously at a tweedy-looking bloke who seemed to be in charge.
‘My dear, it’s more of a sheep jumping event. There are no sheep being thrown,’ he insisted. ‘It’s all under the supervision of the local vet. We’ve been holding this tournament for over 300 years and I’ve never…’
‘See Grace, nothing to get excited about,’ I said soothingly. ‘Sheep like jumping. I’m sure I’ve seen some sheep-jumping videos on YouTube.’
Grace looked at me questioningly. ‘Do you really think so?’
‘Yes,’ I said, managing to keep a straight face. ‘Can we please go and get something to eat now, preferably nothing sheep-related?’
‘Oh, OK,’ Grace conceded, taking the hand I held out towards her. ‘But if I find out you’ve been throwing sheep I’m reporting you to the RSPCA,’ she hissed at Mr Tweed, before I could drag her away.
Once we’d tried to fill up on cucumber sarnies from Ye Olde Tea Shoppe and watched to make sure that the sheep weren’t being thrown, it was time to get back in the van, which had heated up to furnace-like temperatures.
It wasn’t too long before tempers were getting frayed again. Veronique and Dylan had had another row while we’d been doing the sheep thing so they were snarling at each other, Shona kept sniping at Will who’d produced some egg ’n’ mayo sandwiches from his backpack ’cause the smell was making her feel sick and Atsuko and Darby had had a blazing domestic about whether Simon Cowell was gay.
I was fed up with the whole bloody lot of them. Carter had been stroppy ever since I’d gone off with Shona and I was seriously contemplating jumping out at the next pit-stop and hitching home. Instead I dug my iPod out of my bag, put my earbuds in and tuned the whole moaning lot of them out with a very loud dose of Florence & the Machine.
When we finally got back on the motorway, the van gave a dramatic splutter and got slower and slower before it shuddered to a halt. Luckily Paul managed to steer it onto the hard shoulder before it died altogether but we had to wait four hours in the burning afternoon sun for the breakdown vehicle to arrive. The only highlight of the wait, apart from everyone shouting at everybody else, was when Simon flagged down a passing ice-cream van and persuaded the driver to sell us some cold drinks.
It was six in the evening before we got started again and when we reached the festival site two hours later no-one was talking to anyone else, mainly because they’d fallen asleep, and we were stuck in a huge tailback that led to the main entrance.
Although I hadn’t minded everyone not talking because it was less stressful than all the bitching, I knew I couldn’t stay in the van one minute longer. To tell you the truth I was still vaguely thinking about doing a runner and hitching a lift to the nearest train station but even I could tell that was a baaaaad idea. I grabbed my backpack and my shoulder bag and crawled over to the door.
‘I’m getting out,’ I announced. ‘I’ll meet you at the campsite. I’m going to walk.’
People began to stir. ‘But Edie, you hate walking,’ Darby pointed out.
‘And you’ll get lost,’ stated Carter with absolute certainty.
‘No I won’t,’ I said crossly. ‘We’ve already decided where we’re going to pitch the tents. I’ve got a map and if I have to spend one more second in this van I’m going to kill someone. Probably Will.’
‘What have I done?’ asked Will indignantly.
‘It’s not you, it’s your trance playlists,’ I said.
‘I never thought I’d say this,’ piped up Veronique, ‘but I have to agree with her on that one.’
My bolt for freedom didn’t exactly go to plan. After ten more minutes of pointless arguing, we all left Paul and Shona to stay with the van and started walking towards the site. We walked and walked and walked until my feet were slipping around sweatily in my trainers. And Lord knows when I’d next get to have a bath. Not anytime soon that was for sure.
It was pitch dark by this time, lit only by the odd campfire, and we kept tripping over people until we reached the place where we thought we had decided earlier to set up camp. It was hard to tell. Of course, all the tent gear was in the van so we had to wait ages for Paul and Shona who’d parked somewhere completely different. It was 1.30 in the morning before we even began to assemble the tents, which led to more sniping and swearing as we fell over tent posts and got told off by the hippies in the next-door tent. Eventually all the tents were pitched. The only thing between me and an uncomfortable night in a sleeping bag was the decision about who was going to sleep where.
Carter had been all right up till now. Thankfully he’d slept for the last bit of the journey and woken up in a good mood, which lasted long enough for him to carry my bags up a big hill for me. I might be a feminist but I have no upper body strength. He was now eyeing up a little two-man tent and then eyeing me up and you didn’t have to be a numbers geek to do the maths. The last thing on my mind though was getting naked and horizontal with Carter, I just wanted to sleep.
It was at that moment that Shona shunted Carter out of the way and got into the little tent. ‘Me and Paul are sleeping in here,’ she ordered in her don’t-mess-with-me voice. ‘Dylan and Veronique are sleeping in the green tent and then the two big tents are girls only and boys only. Goodnight.’
Carter looked annoyed so I tried to look annoyed too.
‘Never mind, eh?’ I said, kissing him on the cheek. ‘I’ll see you later.’
He grabbed me around the waist before I could walk off and pulled me tight against him. ‘Tomorrow. We’ll find some peace and quiet tomorrow, I promise.’ But it didn’t sound like a promise, it sounded like a threat.
I don’t know when I’m going to get another chance to write. As it is, Darby and Poppy keep waking up and moaning at me for daring to rustle paper. Serves me right for still kicking it old skool on the diary front.
I’ll probably do a big catch-up when we get back to Manchester. Jesus, I wish I had a time machine so I could jet propel myself home and it would already be several days from now.
31st August
Back home, thank the Lord. I’m typing this and sticking it in my diary because there’s so much to say. Also, as God is my witness, I am never going to another festival as long as I live. That’s an Edie promise. Anyway:
26th August
The festival was every bit as vile as I thought it would be. There were loads of beered-u
p lads wearing those ridiculous velvet jesters’ hats with the bells on so at least you could hear them as they sneaked up behind you and tried to cop a feel. But even they weren’t as bad as the masses of hippies in the healing field who were walking around bare-ass naked and ensuring that I’d never be able to eat another cocktail sausage as long as I lived. After a breakfast (well, lunch if we’re going to get technical about it) of fresh doughnuts from a nearby stall, everyone split up and I was left alone with Carter. The girls had gone off to the fair and although they’d begged me to go with them, Carter had kept a tight grip on my hand and made it plain that we wanted to spend some quality time with each other.
We started walking down to the main stage and I forgot how nervous I was about what we’d planned to do once we were at the festival. He was just Carter, he wasn’t scary. In fact, we spent the next half hour bonding as we moaned about the medieval bathing facilities and the annoying hippy brats that kept banging into our legs at five-minute intervals. Why is it little kids have no spatial awareness?
Diary of a Crush: Kiss and Make Up Page 15