by Unknown
‘Really?’ Ellen asked in a strangled voice, mopping up water with one of the sheets, burning with envy and self-loathing.
‘Yes – I just met him coming down the bridleway when I was walking out of the gate with Godspell. Mum says she’ll be over in ten minutes, by the way, she’s just taking a shower.’ She was talking far too fast in her excitement. ‘You’re so right – it’s fate! It’s fate! I just stepped out and there he was, like magic, asking if I was busy tomorrow night.’
Ellen closed her eyes for a second. ‘How . . . fateful.’
‘I know! Oh, God, Ellen – Rory’s going to be there so I really, really need your help. Oh, please, say yes. You see, it’s a sort of double date . . .’ The big green eyes watched her pleadingly.
Ellen’s heart crashed so hard at the thought of a night out with Spurs that she expected showers of blood to spring from her T-shirt. ‘I’m not sure, Dilly. I’m pretty busy at the moment.’ Who was she trying to fool?
‘Oh, please, Ellen. I’m helping you paint.’
‘Your mother will be livid.’
‘You mustn’t tell her!’ In alarm Dilly let the chrysanthemums fall to the floor.
Ellen knew she must come across as an ageing stick-in-the-mud, but she was sinking into emotional quicksand. ‘Won’t she want to know where you are?’
‘That’s where I need your help.’ Dilly bit her smiling lip. ‘Can you say you’re taking me to the cinema or something to say thanks?’
‘I don’t like lying – especially to a friend.’
‘You’re my friend too,’ Dilly whined. ‘It would mean so much to me.’ She snatched up the flowers again. ‘I haven’t seen Rory since I got back from school – Mum still won’t get the moped fixed and it’s too far to walk to Upper Springlode, particularly if he’s not interested.’ It seemed that even a soulmate didn’t merit a three-mile uphill hike. ‘I don’t know how I feel about him any more, but I’m dying to see him.’
And I’m dying to see Spurs, Ellen thought wretchedly. I know I shouldn’t. I know we’re bad for each other, and he’s up to no good.
But she couldn’t help herself. The moment he reappeared from the shadows, the socking great torch she was holding for him lit up with a million candlepower, searching him out. It was all very well teasing herself with the idea that he and Dilly were the Bryant and May of perfect matches, but she couldn’t make herself forget the inevitable fact that she and Spurs were as combustible as a lead azide detonator and a lump of gelignite.
‘So you really want to see Rory?’ She wondered if she could cope with Spurs playing her off against Dilly, if that was his game. She doubted she’d last five minutes, and poor drunken Rory wouldn’t have much fun either.
‘Totally.’ She nodded. ‘Can’t you see how kismet this whole thing is? This way, I can decide whether I fancy him or Spurs most.’
And, meanwhile, I do what exactly? Mark them both out of ten for you? Ellen wondered murderously, regretting her earlier encouragement.
‘My only worry is that bloody Godspell will snitch.’
‘Why should she?’ Ellen turned to look at her.
‘Because she’ll be there, stupid.’ Dilly giggled, burying her face in the broken chrysanthemums. ‘Didn’t I say? She’s the other girl coming on the date.’
‘Godspell?’ She wanted to throw herself on the broken vase. She was, it seemed, a wrong-end-of-the-stick in the mud.
‘Yes – I can’t believe she agreed to it, but I guess it’s impossible to say no to someone as gorgeous as Spurs, and it’ll make a change from staying in her room watching horror movies on satellite. I had no idea Spurs knew her. In fact, I’m sure he doesn’t. Oh, he is so fantastic – he must have remembered that I said Godspell and I had fallen out and is trying to mend the rift for me. You don’t think he fancies her too, do you?’ She looked worried.
‘I’m sure you’ll have Spurs and Rory clamouring for your attention – along with Godspell.’ Ellen was staggered by Dilly’s egotism.
‘Oh, I do hope so, that would be so cool.’ Dilly smiled happily, and Ellen realised who she reminded her of: Queeny from Blackadder II, a joyful narcissistic caricature of girl power, winding up Nursey and Lord Melchett with her capricious demands and her petulant reminders ‘Who’s queen?’
‘So will you help me?’ Dilly cocked her head winsomely. ‘And can I please, please borrow something to wear? You have such trendy clothes and Mummy’s been such a bitch about money lately – she won’t let me buy anything.’
Ellen only wished she had a trendy chastity-belt.
‘I’d love a tattoo like yours. Will you do a temporary one on my shoulder for me? I got a henna kit for Christmas.’
‘How about a badger?’ Ellen suggested evilly, overcome by an urge to write a message warning Spurs off.
‘That would be lovely! A badger catching a butterfly – I can sketch it out for you first if you like.’
‘Sure,’ she agreed reluctantly, trailing into the bootroom to rinse off the flower water, aware that she smelled as foul as her thoughts.
That evening, Ellen knocked back an uncharacteristic three glasses of wine with Pheely in the Goose Cottage garden while Dilly – as high as a kite caught in a whirlwind romance – threw Snorkel’s ball again and again, doing handstands and cartwheels like a six year old.
I did a handstand the day Spurs granted me my first wish, Ellen thought angrily. He did a handstand the next day. Now he’s got Dilly at it. Perhaps circus tricks are catching.
‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ Pheely sighed indulgently. ‘I was never that pretty.’
‘I’m sure you were.’ Ellen decided that Pheely was, in fact, far more beautiful than her buxom blonde daughter – who was, in truth, immature and rather gingery. ‘You’re still absolutely stunning.’
‘Oh, you are sweet – like the loveliest little sister – but I’m going to seed faster than the cabbages in Reg Wyck’s allotment. I just wish I had your looks.’
Ellen, who had never been confident of her beauty, particularly after years without a single compliment from Richard, found herself asking vainly why Pheely would want to look like her.
‘Oh, come on!’ Pheely reacted a bit snappishly, already working her way through a second wine bottle. ‘Look at you – blonde, blue-eyed, tanned, a figure to die for. Most women must hate you. You could steal half the husbands in this village if you wanted to.’
‘I don’t want a husband,’ Ellen said idly. ‘I want a soulmate.’
‘Bollocks.’ Pheely giggled, reaching for the bottle again. ‘No such thing – just lovers and other animals. And very good friends.’ She chinked it against Ellen’s glass.
‘Dilly told me,’ Ellen started cautiously, checking that the girl was still doing gymnastics out of earshot, ‘about her father. She said that he was your soulmate.’
‘Did she?’ Pheely said archly, spilling wine over her knees.
‘Sorry. You probably don’t like reminding. It’s terribly sad.’
‘What exactly did she tell you?’
‘That he was killed in a motorbike accident when she was just a baby.’
‘Oh, that one – I didn’t think she used it any more.’ Pheely smiled fondly at her daughter, who was dangling her feet in the pond now and teasing Snorkel with the ball so that the clown-faced collie plunged in and out of the reeds, sneezing at the water in her nose.
‘You mean it’s not true?’
‘It is, if she wants it to be.’ Pheely raised her glass as Dilly turned to wave at them, blowing kisses, two butterflies dancing above her blonde head. ‘She absolutely doesn’t want to know her real father, so she likes to make up imaginary ones.’
‘You mean he’s still alive?’
‘Oh, yes. Unlike this topic of conversation.’ The green eyes hardened.
Ellen knocked back her glass of wine in one and suddenly wondered if it could be Spurs. She tried to do the sums, but she was too drunk. Whatever was going on, something definitely didn’t
add up.
‘Lavender’s blue, Dilly Dilly,
Lavender’s green
When you are King, Dilly Dilly
I will be queen . . .’
Dilly sang happily as they painted the sitting room walls the following day. ‘Godspell winked at me this morning when she turned up for her sitting. I think that means she’s cool about tonight.’
She could talk about nothing but the double date and the agonising decision that faced her.
‘I had this huge crush on Rory last year, but he never showed any interest,’ she lamented. ‘And I know Spurs is much older, but the way he looks at me just makes my hairs stand on end, you know?’
Oh, I know, Ellen thought uneasily. No amount of Frizz Ease and hairspray could stop her skin prickling like a hedgehog whenever he was near.
‘I think he’d be thrilling to lose my virginity to – he’s so experienced, he’s bound to be a really thoughtful lover.’
‘Don’t bet on it,’ Ellen said, goosebumps popping. ‘Loving and leaving a lot of women isn’t a great indication of thoughtfulness.’
‘Rory’s always shagging Sharon.’ Dilly’s pretty face tightened. ‘She’s his head girl – in every sense. She’s so madly in love with him, she doesn’t mind that he can never remember her name or afford to pay her just so long as she gets to share the horrible bed in her mobile home with him once or twice a month. He walks all over her.’
‘A plimsoll mate,’ Ellen muttered.
‘He would never treat me like that, of course.’ Dilly stretched to paint a high corner. ‘But that reminds me, I need to ask you about sex just so I don’t end up looking stupid.’ She made it sound as if she was about to sit another exam.
‘What about it?’
‘Well, I know the basics, but could you show me how to give a blow-job? We could use a bottle or a banana or something.’
Ellen painted a light switch without noticing. ‘Take my advice and don’t even think about sleeping with Rory yet. Just go and have a fun night out, and make friends with Godspell again.’
‘Godspell didn’t lose her virginity until she was twenty,’ Dilly told her indiscreetly, not at all interested in Ellen’s advice. ‘That was last year. We were close then – we used to hack out together at weekends. She got fed up waiting, so she drank half a bottle of her mother’s Amaretto before the village barn dance and propositioned Archie Worthington. They did it in one of Ely’s holiday cottages. She said it was quite nice – a bit uncomfortable to start with, but very grown-up and sexy, like getting your first bra.’
Ellen remembered her first bra – a Lycra and scaffolding creation that had pinched her small but burgeoning double-A bust into submission while she continued competing in her school’s sports teams. It had not been remotely sexy.
‘And are Godspell and Archie soul-mates?’ She tried to keep the conversation on love-song.
‘I don’t think they ever actually talked.’ Dilly snorted in amusement. ‘She only did it with him to get experienced enough to chase The Candle.’
‘What is the Candle?’
‘That’s what she calls a guy she’s always been mad keen on – she wouldn’t even tell me his name.’
Ellen’s thoughts turned briefly to the Shaggers. She now strongly suspected Godspell of being one, in which case perhaps this mysterious Candle was the other? They had certainly burned enough of his namesakes while lighting their romantic encounters in the Jamiesons’ four-poster.
‘I doubt it worked.’ Dilly clearly didn’t want to distract herself with an ex friend’s love-life for long. ‘Archie told Dickon Hewitt that she wasn’t up to much.
‘What was your first time like?’
‘Awkward, painful – it took a few tries before I started to enjoy it.’
‘Do you know lots of different positions now?’
‘A few.’
‘Which is the best? For a beginner, I mean.’
‘Sitting down with your legs crossed all night.’
‘You sound like Mum.’
‘Have you told her about tonight, then?’
‘God, no! But she’s always lecturing me about sex. I think she was a bit pissed last night because she kept insisting that she had once been the most beautiful creature in Oddlode.’ She sniggered. ‘She put on her favourite Carpenters LP when we got home and told me that Spurs had been “in awe” of her.’
‘He probably was.’ Ellen hadn’t forgotten Pheely confessing the failed teenage seduction.
Dilly mulled this over as they took a toast-and-coffee lunch break and Ellen drew a rather lopsided badger chasing a butterfly on her smooth-skinned shoulder, which ended up looking as though it was playing host to a duck-billed platypus waving its webbed claws at a pterodactyl. Dilly’s increasingly single-track line of conversation distracted her reluctant tattooist. ‘Do you have a condom I could borrow? I don’t want to get pregnant straight away like Mum, but Lily Lubowski would tell the entire village if I bought a packet of three from the shop.’
‘Aren’t you planning to wait until you marry?’ Ellen asked, bearing in mind the romantic whimsy behind Dilly’s plans. Twisting her soulmate into a sexual back-flip and slipping a condom on with her teeth on a first date hardly seemed to fit in with flower-fairy families in the Lodge.
‘God, no! The sooner I know what it’s all about, the better. I was thinking about it in bed last night, and I decided that I really should start out by getting rid of the big V ASAP.’ She giggled at the accidental rhyme. ‘I’m sure Spurs would be up for it – he’s so sexual. Mum says he’d slept with hundreds of people by the time he was my age. And if Rory really is my soulmate, being broken in by an expert like Spurs would make him jealous enough to ’fess up to his feelings.’
Her attitude appalled Ellen, as did the information about Spurs’ early sexual voracity. ‘It doesn’t work like that, Dilly.’
‘I don’t see why not. I fancy Spurs and he is a very naughty man, as everybody keeps telling me. He might well be my true soulmate, in which case Rory’s missed the boat. I have a very special feeling about tonight – I did the tarot and got the Lovers three times.’
‘That doesn’t mean you should set out with the intention of having a shag, Dilly. Sex should be a lot more special than that.’
‘That’s such an uptight attitude. And you can talk – Mum told me about your one-night stand with the estate agent.’
Bloody Pheely, Ellen thought darkly, wishing she hadn’t given her so much wine the previous night. ‘I’m at least ten years older than you – and it wasn’t a one-night stand, it was just dinner,’ she insisted, frantically casting around for a change of subject. ‘Where are you all going tonight?’
‘Just the Plough in Upper Springlode – nice and handy for Rory’s cottage. Actually, most pubs have condom machines in the loos, don’t they?’ Dilly was still thinking about sex – albeit safe sex.
‘Often only the men’s loos,’ Ellen muttered.
‘I always use the gents – after all, I am a Gently.’
When they gathered up their rollers again, Ellen painted as quickly as possible so that Dilly would go home and leave her alone.
I want to be going out with Spurs, she thought unhappily. I want to go out to a country pub on a sunny evening and sit in the garden, flirting and joking and thinking about what he’d be like to go to bed with. I want to go on a double date with him, Rory and Dilly – if only to ensure Dilly keeps her knickers on. The thought of Spurs and the ravishing teenager entwined in a haystack was crucifying, both because it made her wildly jealous and because she was frightened for Dilly. She was tempted to run straight round to Pheely and scream, ‘We have to stop her getting hurt!’
At last the sitting room was as angelically bright, white and pure as the dining room, the paintings, flowers and furnishings providing bright splashes of buyer-friendly colour.
With a heart as heavy as a songbird full of lead shot, Ellen dispatched Dilly with her favourite little floral slip-dress, a s
hort blue leather jacket and her strappy clubbing sandals.
‘You’re such a good friend, Ellen – I wish you were my big sister.’ Dilly hugged her at the door. ‘And you’re really okay if I tell Mum you’re taking me out to the cinema to thank me?’
Ellen was sorely tempted to warn Dilly that if she didn’t tell her mother exactly what was happening, Ellen would. Caught in a strange mid-generational gap between the two, she was uncertain with whom she identified most or to whom she owed her loyalty. But Dilly’s increasing obsession with Spurs cast her in the role of secret, guilty, voyeuristic empathiser. It was horribly addictive.
‘Call round any time, if you want to talk,’ she found herself saying, and instantly felt like a creepy old hag.
‘Thanks – I might.’ Dilly grinned, unfazed by her ambitious plans to lose the big V ASAP. ‘I’ll check what film’s showing at Maddington Corn Exchange tonight so that we can synchronise stories if she asks,’ Dilly promised. ‘I’m meeting Spurs under the lime tree at seven, so don’t forget to hide your jeep and make it look like you’re out – Mum is bound to go out for a walk with Hamlet before it gets dark.’
‘The battery’s flat . . .’ Ellen remembered. Too late: Dilly had already danced away beneath the lime tree and through the magical gate.
Pheely, in fact, set out for her evening perv around the village at a quarter to seven, popping in on Ellen on the way, big green eyes blinking warmly because she knew she’d been testy – and a little drunk – the evening before, plus wildly indiscreet afterwards.
‘Gosh, this looks so much better. Heavenly – apart from the smell.’ Her nose wrinkled against the paint fumes as she wandered from the dining room to the sitting room. ‘You and Dilly have worked hard – the evening light looks just amazing on here now. I might loan you a sculpture to put in that corner . . . It would really set it off.’
‘How is the bust going?’ Ellen trod water, trying not to look at her watch and wondering what the hell to do.
‘Ghastly. That girl hasn’t spoken one word since we started, although she winked at me twice today, which was frankly creepy – it works rather well in clay, mind you, lends her face a teensy bit of animation.’ She smiled impishly. ‘Dilly is so jealous and attention-seeking, poor duck – it must be rotten after all her hard work to come home and find Mum so distracted. Thank you, darling one, for keeping her out of my hair. You are my fairy godsister and her fairy god-aunt.’