‘Why aren’t you telling Lynsey this?’ I wanted to know.
‘Because she’s only a wee girl,’ Mum said. ‘It’s different.’
‘Carmen!’ Lynsey’s voice breaks in on my thoughts. ‘There’s a car coming!’ She grabs me and pulls me up onto the steep verge. I can feel a nettle against the back of one elbow. ‘My shoe!’ Lynsey says. One of her white sandals – good new shoes that cost good money – is still in the middle of the lane. Lynsey makes a lunge towards it, but the car’s coming round the corner already, braking when the driver sees us. It stops with its front tyre right on top of Lynsey’s shoe. A tiny piece of the back of the sole is still showing under it.
Lynsey lets out a high-pitched little noise, staring at her shoe as the window slides down. The man driving has got to be the dad of the boy with the wetsuit. He looks exactly the same except with white in his hair. A woman leans forward to see past him.
‘You must be Carmen,’ she says. ‘And you’ve brought a little sister along, have you? Tosca? Mimi? Well, the more the merrier. I’m Anna and this is Oliver. We would turn round and give you a lift but we’ve been banished. There’d be hell to pay if we go back now. Have fun!’
She flicks a look down at Lynsey’s one bare foot and her smile dims a tiny bit, but she doesn’t say any more as the window slides up again. It’s automatic. You can tell from the way the man sits so still while it’s moving.
I’m expecting Lynsey to cry. Her sandal’s flattened and some of the white has come off the straps and got stuck to the ground in the pattern of the tyre. But she giggles instead.
‘Ay’m Enna and thees ees Olivah!’ she says, prancing out into the middle of the road. ‘There’d be hell to pay if we gew beck nee-ow.’
I’m checking my top. I had to put my arms down when the woman was talking to me. I couldn’t stand like a crossbow in front of them. Lynsey’s foot was weird enough for both of us.
‘Is that their mum?’ Lynsey says. ‘Is that their dad? Does Mum know there’s not going to be a mum and dad there?’
I ignore her. My top’s pale blue and now there’s dark streaks under the arms. Maybe if I put a tissue in each armpit it’ll soak up the stain. But what if I can’t get it all out? The sleeves are wide and floaty and someone might see bits of tissue stuck there. Likes of if I’m dancing.
Anyway, before I can decide, Lynsey’s whining again.
‘The colour’s coming off on my hand,’ she says. We wrapped his present – an Eternity gift-set – in navy-blue crêpe paper and put silver ribbon on it, and now there’s a perfect print of Lynsey’s chubby fingers on the edge of the box and her right hand’s deep purple from the blue dye on top of her pink palm.
‘Don’t touch your dress,’ I say. ‘We’ll go in the back way and straight to the toilet to wash.’ I’ll be able to flush the tissues down the pan and check for bits.
‘Or I could do this,’ says Lynsey. She presses her index finger against one eyelid, leaving a smudge there. ‘Eye-shadow.’
‘Stop it!’ I say, then I look at her properly. ‘Do me! Do mine!’ I’ve got lip gloss and blusher on and a bloom of blue from Lynsey’s hot finger would be perfect.
‘Can’t make me,’ she sings, and then she’s skipping up the road, still with her sandals flapping, waving her hand in the air. ‘It’s drying! It’s drying!’
‘It’s going to look like a black eye!’ I call after her. ‘I won’t show you where the toilet is.’
So she wheels back, presses her fingers all over my eyes and does her other one too.
I’ve never come up the drive to the front of the house. I’ve been in Dad’s car a few times when he dropped Mum off at the back, if she had bags of washed sheets to put on or if she’d ironed shirts and it was raining. It looked nothing at all from there. It’s a plain brick wall with a door in it and the sloped roof of a row of sheds, then the back wall of the house with the same windows as our place, deep-set with peaks over them and the same crisscross panes.
It’s totally different coming in the front way. This one house looks like the whole row of cottages where we live, five windows along the top upstairs, and downstairs windows you could walk in and out of at each end of a curve, the middle bit filled in with a deep porch full of seats and tables.
The front door’s open and there’s music pouring out. When we stand on the doorstep, I can feel the bass coming up through the soles of my feet. I can feel it all the way up my legs, if I’m honest, and it’s making me tingle even though I hate that song. There’s been nothing else on the radio for months except Bryan Adams wailing and mooing. And Top of the Pops is so boring, because you know the end of it’s going to be him standing in that scruffy wood, like out the back of our house, looking old and ugly.
I push the doorbell, but there’s no way anyone could hear it with Bryan yodelling on and on. Lynsey puts her hand in mine.
‘Let’s go home,’ she says. ‘We can leave the present and say we felt sick. Mum would kill us for doing a sick in front of people. Carmen, no!’
I’m ploughing forward with her hand gripped tight in mine. Inside the hall itself the music’s so loud I can feel it in my teeth. It’s coming from the end of a long passageway that stretches miles in both directions, with pictures on the walls and a statue. It’s not like the inside of someone’s house at all. At the other end, halfway up the stairs, the curtains are shut, maybe pulled close to stop the sun coming in and fading the carpet, like Mum does in our front room too. But these curtains are so long they make me think of being at the pictures. I can imagine them suddenly going see-through with the black film-rating thingy behind them.
‘What will we do?’ Lynsey whispers in my ear, close enough to tickle. ‘Where do you put the present if there are no mums and dads?’
‘We need to find the party,’ I say. ‘Follow Bryan and find the party.’
I walk away from her, swishing my hips a bit as I head for the half-open door where the racket’s coming from. It’s so loud the tape machine’s buzzing and squealing and, as I push the door wide and walk in, the music disappears completely and all I can hear is the feedback from the speakers.
It’s a huge room with a full-sized pool table, like at a leisure club. But there are no balls or cues. The ghetto blaster sits on the green felt at one end and at the other end is a collection of bottles and those cut-glass decanters people put drinks in to pretend it’s good stuff when it’s not.
There’s no one in here with the music and all the bottles. The beanbags and sofa-beds all round the walls are dented but empty.
From out in the corridor I hear a deep voice. ‘Hello, little girl. What are you doing here all alone?’
‘Car-men!’ Lynsey shouts.
I go back out and there’s a tall boy looming over her. He’s got the worst skin I’ve ever seen. Three different kinds of acne all at once: the usual greasy teenage spots and blackheads in the creases of his nose and chin, plus so many red bumpy spots on his cheeks and forehead they’re nearly joined up, and one huge angry boil on his neck.
‘She’s not alone,’ I say. ‘She’s with me.’
When the boy speaks again his voice isn’t deep at all. He was putting it on. He takes a step back. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten her. I’m Ramsay.’
‘You and whose army frightened me?’ says Lynsey. ‘Here. Happy birthday.’ She shoves the box of Eternity at him and glares.
‘It’s not my birthday,’ he says. ‘It’s Sasha’s birthday. Come and jab him in the belly with your present if you want to jab somebody.’
‘That’s Lynsey and I’m Carmen,’ I say.
‘Carmen!’ he says. ‘Yes, I heard about you.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ says Lynsey.
Ramsay’s face colours. At least it hides some of his spots. ‘Sasha!’ he shouts, throwing his head back ‘There’s a surprise for you!’ He turns and leaves us, bounding up the stairs.
‘I told you they’d be stupid,’ Lynsey says.
‘Let’s go home.’
But someone else is coming now. It’s the wetsuit boy. His hair looks even darker than it did when he came out of the sea that day. It’s slicked back with so much gel I can smell it from a metre away. His face looks a bit less perfect. I think he’s shaved – maybe for the first time, trying to be grown-up – and he’s scraped too hard and left a red line on his jaw.
‘Carmen,’ he says. ‘Who’s this?’
‘Lynsey,’ says Lynsey. ‘Who’s asking?’
Sasha gives her a long, cool look. I know exactly what he’s feeling. No one can be as annoying as Lynsey when she puts her mind to it. I’m kind of proud of her. ‘I’m Sasha,’ he says at last. ‘This is my party. This is my house.’
‘Yeah, for the week,’ Lynsey says.
‘We’re all upstairs. Come and join in.’
‘Happy birthday.’ But this time she holds the present out instead of ramming it at him.
‘You shouldn’t have,’ Sasha says. Lynsey giggles and I can feel a wave of heat taking over me as I try not to giggle too. He’s a kid but he speaks like a teacher. Maybe when we get upstairs he’ll say, ‘Do sit down.’
Lynsey feels for my hand again as we follow him up, past the closed landing curtains to the dim upstairs corridor. I shake her off. At the top, the boy turns right and holds open a door for us. The room’s pitch black. I shrug as if it’s the kind of thing I do every day and stroll in.
‘Ow!’
I’ve trodden on someone’s legs and, tripping, kicked someone else’s.
‘Sasha, this is bloody stupid.’ It’s a girl’s voice. ‘We’re crammed into the smallest room in the house and I’m getting stood on.’
I can hear someone moving and then a light’s clicked on. There’s a handful of them there, I think at the time. Seven, I learn later when I piece it together. All sitting on the floor of ‘the smallest room in the house’, which would be the biggest room in my house. They’re teenagers, but that covers a lot. The oldest-looking one even though he’s the shortest – the one that drove my mum home in the rain – has got a scruff of wispy beard that doesn’t match his thick hair. The youngest-looking could be Lynsey’s age, with his baby-face and his thin brown legs poking out of his shorts. Except they’re not really shorts. They’ve been made by hacking into a pair of jeans and leaving the rough ends to fray and clump. I’d kill to do that to a pair of jeans, and have the nerve to wear them to a party after. Mum would drop dead, though.
‘What game are you playing?’ Lynsey says. She’s the opposite of me in some ways. She was scared of coming, ready to run from the doorstep, but now she’s here she’ll hide her shyness. I’ve been looking forward to this all week but, now I’m here, standing looking down at four strange boys and feeling three strange girls’ eyes all over me, I’ve got lockjaw.
‘What and Who,’ Sasha says. ‘It’ll be a lot more fun and a lot less incestuous now you’re here to join in.’
I’ve never heard of it, but I can guess the basics from the way they’re all sprawled on the floor with their legs meshed together.
‘Let’s go downstairs,’ says one of the girls, staggering to her feet and pulling her clothes straight. ‘I’m hungry.’ She’s short and thick and her hair’s like a guinea pig’s coat, but she’s got a boat-neck top and a pair of 501s on. My hankie top and no-name jeans from the market suddenly feel like they’re burning my skin. On the other hand, one of the girls is in a stiff, shiny dress and the grown-up one’s got straggly hair and really bad eyeliner. Anyway, even the one with the good jeans is friendly. ‘Come down to the kitchen, you two,’ she says to Lynsey and me. ‘Aunt Anna’s left enough grub to keep us going for a week.’
‘Dining room first, Morag,’ Sasha says, ‘before you go face down in the trough. I promised Anna I’d get a picture of us all. She left the camera set up on a timer in the dining room.’
One by one they all get up. The girls drift into bedrooms and the boys clatter down the stairs. Mum would kill us for making so much noise. But, then, we’d never be up here in our shoes anyway.
It takes them ages to get organized for the photo. Lynsey and I hang around on the landing, not sure if we’re supposed to be part of this or not. But the girl in the shiny dress scoops us up when she comes back. She’s really pretty, even if her stupid homemade dress looks like the crackly paper you get round cheap chocolates and even if her French plait’s finished off with a ribbon to match it.
‘Of course you should be in it!’ she says. ‘Anna’s got a million pictures of us lot this holiday. She wanted one of the party.’
‘Yes, but that’s probably about me, Rosalie,’ says the big girl with the straggly hair. She hasn’t done anything to tidy it, although she’s taken a swipe at her eyeliner and managed to make it worse: still squint and now smudged too. ‘Aunt Anna probably wanted to make sure I was in it. I haven’t been here all the time.’
‘Thank God,’ both the other girls mouth behind her back, as if they’ve been practising. Then they get a fit of the giggles that Lynsey catches.
The boys are already in the dining room, but they’ve locked the door.
‘What are you doing?’ the big girl asks, banging on it.
‘Some extra pictures,’ one of them shouts. ‘Won’t be a minute!’
‘We can come round and get in the front bay, you know,’ shouts the chubby girl in the 501s.
‘Don’t!’ says the other one, the one in the shiny dress. Rosalie. ‘I know my brother. Don’t you know yours?’
‘No! They wouldn’t. Not on Aunt Anna’s camera.’
‘Wouldn’t they?’
‘What?’ says Lynsey.
‘Sasha’s school’s next to Boots so he puts the photos in and picks them up. If Anna ever looked at the negatives, she’d have a fit.’
‘What are they talking about, Carmen?’ Lynsey asks.
‘Those silly boys taking photos of their bare bottoms,’ I tell her.
Lynsey opens her eyes wide. ‘Boys are silly.’
Rosalie puts an arm around her and kisses her head. ‘You’re a darling,’ she says. ‘Your sister’s a darling,’ she says to me. I catch Lynsey’s eye and we both struggle not to crack up again. They sound so daft with their compliments, like they’re playing at grown-ups.
When Sasha opens the door at last he’s breathing hard and his face is red all over, not just his jaw.
‘Why are you panting?’ says his sister. ‘You’re not right in the head.’
‘I’m excited about my birthday. Look what Anna’s left out for me.’
In the dining room a little extra table is set up in front of the fireplace and heaped with presents. Lynsey adds ours to the pile, glad to get rid of it at last.
‘Can you believe Anna blew up balloons?’ says Rosalie in the shiny dress, even though ‘Anna’ is her mum. ‘And, oh, my God – look! Party hats.’ She lifts one and puts it on Sasha’s head, pulling it over one eye. He sticks his tongue out of the side of his mouth. ‘Here,’ she says, throwing one over to Lynsey. Lynsey puts it on and pulls her hair through so it sticks out the top like a pineapple.
‘I go here,’ says Sasha, sitting down behind the table. ‘And you all cluster round me like backing singers.’
‘I don’t want to be in it,’ says the boy with the terrible skin.
‘No, you should be in the middle,’ says Sasha. ‘And we’ll be the backing singers. Pizza-face and the Clearasils.’
‘That’s not very nice,’ says the grown-up girl.
‘Crater-face and the Cover-sticks,’ says Sasha.
‘Ha-ha,’ the boy says, but he’s not laughing.
‘God’s sake, take a joke,’ says Sasha, dropping down. ‘Pull your party hat down and stand in the back row. Morag, sit beside me.’
Morag – the girl in the 501s – slides onto the other half of the chair he’s sitting on. He puts a hand on the inside of her thigh and pulls her closer. She puts her hand down to prise his off her but he keeps smiling. He flicks a glance at
me to see if I’ve noticed. Like I’m supposed to be jealous or something.
‘Will I click the button?’ I say.
‘Anna’s got a timer set up,’ says Rosalie. ‘We all need to get in position. Hurry up!’
The rest of them file in. The short boy on the other side of Sasha and the big girl and the tall brothers behind them. The spotty one looks miserable but it’s the other who shakes a long piece of hair in front of his face. Rosalie fluffs out the skirt of her homemade dress and stands at the edge of the group, feet together and hands clasped. I take Lynsey by the shoulders and guide her to the other edge. ‘One of us needs to squeeze the bulb on the end of the thing,’ the big girl says. ‘Oh, shut up! Grow up, all of you.’
But everyone’s laughing now. The short boy with the scrubby beard goes loping over to the tripod and unloops a wire from the stand, unwinding it as he returns to the group. He bends his knees like a sharpshooter.
‘Everyone say “Cheeeeeese Pizza Face”,’ Sasha says.
The flash goes off and blinds us.
‘One more,’ says the spotty boy. ‘Everyone say “Raaaazor-burn”!’
‘Razor-burn isn’t smile-shaped,’ says Lynsey.
The flash goes off again, not so bad this time when we’re expecting it.
‘And a third one for luck,’ says Sasha. ‘Everyone say, “Weeeeeeeeee’ll see who chickens out tonight.”’
When the third flash dies none of the boys is laughing.
‘I don’t get that,’ says Lynsey.
‘Let’s go and see what Aunt Anna’s left for the birthday tea,’ says Morag. She gives Lynsey and me a friendly look and then she sort of shepherds us out in front of her, like the teachers when someone’s spilled something sticky in the dinner hall and they’re trying to make sure no one walks in it.
The other two girls come with us. When I look closer at the ribbon in Rosalie’s French plait, I can see it’s actually a piece of her dress fabric doubled over and hemmed.
‘I know,’ she says.
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