‘Here she is!’ I squeal. Even Edie has the decency to squeal too.
Gradually the knees give way to a glimpse of thigh and the bottom of the cherry tomato. Cameras flash. Holding firmly to the hem of her dress, Jenny inches nervously along the rest of the seat and manoeuvres herself out of the car. I can see why finishing schools have classes in this sort of thing.
She stands beside the car, waiting, while a fat old man in a dinner jacket squeezes out beside her. We scream to grab her attention, but everyone else is screaming too, so she doesn't hear us. Her hair has been curled into tight ringlets. Someone has decided it would be a good idea to give her lots of shiny green eye-makeup. And whoever did the fake tan got more than slightly carried away. She is orange from the hemline down.
Not so much a cherry tomato any more. More of a traffic light.
Jenny smiles nervously into the bank of flashing cameras. Fat bloke beside her (her father) takes her by the elbow and some men in black suits with walkie-talkies guide them both towards the red carpet. From the look on her face, it might as well be the guillotine.
Once she's there, Hollywood's Hottest Female gives her a brief wave of acknowledgement. Her husband flashes a smile. Joe Yule, on the other hand, is suddenly busy signing things for a group of fans and talking into their phones.
Jenny's dad works hard, on the lookout for TV presenters to talk to and grinning madly at anyone with a camera, including the crowd. For a while, Jenny wafts around vaguely in his wake. Finally, she spots our frantic waving and gives us a bit of a smile. It's hard to tell from this distance, but I would swear she looks almost tearful. Then suddenly the men with walkie-talkies are closing in and she's ushered through the doors and into the cinema. It's all over.
‘How d'you think she looked?’ Edie asks. This is, after all, my area of expertise.
I try for a few seconds, screwing up my face with the effort, but nothing will come.
When your best friend has just been standing outside the biggest cinema in Leicester Square, near one of the sexiest women in the world who happens to be dressed in form-fitting Armani Privé, sky-high Manolos and matching husband, and your friend looks like a traffic light, standing next to a fat, baggy guy with fake hair, there is no fashion vocabulary that can adequately capture the moment.
The next day, I'm trying to catch up on some French grammar in the garden when I get a text: ‘In Drchster 1/2 hr off, pls cm nw. HELP!!!!!!’
Jenny's doing her promotional tour. She's installed in the poshest hotel on Park Lane, faced with a stream of journalists who've seen the film and want to talk to her about it. She gave me her list of instructions for managing their questions:
Don't talk about Hollywood's Hottest Couple, except as actors.
Don't talk about Joe Yule's girlfriend (rumours they are splitting up).
Don't talk about that incident with the peanut butter, the honey and the fire extinguisher in Egypt.
Make sure the film poster can be seen behind you at all times.
Tell the funny story about the monkey when you were on location in Morocco.
Don't say what Hollywood's Hottest Female said to the monkey.
And so on for pages and pages. She's already told the monkey story about fifty thousand times. And she didn't find it funny the first time. And every journalist's first question is always about Joe Yule's girlfriend, so she has to start every interview saying she can't comment, which she hates. I can imagine that she needs a quick shoulder to cry on, so I shove one of Crow's skirts over my romper suit (I'm not sure if the Dorchester allows romper suits) and tell Mum where I'm going. Ten minutes later, I'm there.
Edie's obviously had a text too. We meet at reception. Edie's in a grey printed summer dress that covers her knees and matching ballet slippers. I doubt she needed to change. She was probably wearing it to do her homework.
‘She's on her way down,’ says a tall bloke behind the desk. ‘You might like to go outside.’ He's looking at my legs. It turns out the petal skirt is transparent in daylight and I might as well not have bothered.
But outside is fine. As soon as Jenny sees us she flings her arms around us and takes us across the road to Hyde Park, where the sun is shining, the grass is endless and the romper suit seems totally appropriate.
Then she promptly bursts into floods of tears.
She's clutching some folded sheets of paper. Edie takes them from her and spreads them out. They're from one of the Sunday papers. On the front page are two pictures: one of Hollywood's Hottest Couple looking gorgeous in Armani from last night, and another of Jenny half-hiding behind her dad, looking traffic-light-ish. The headline says ‘Exclusive! Theatre Knight's Happy Ending’. Inside is the article. As Jenny sobs on, Edie reads out the opening paragraph.
‘Last night, Sir Lionel Merritt was proudly accompanying his daughter Jenny on the red carpet at the premiere of the new blockbuster, Kid Code. As the cameras flashed and the stars posed, few people could imagine the great man's recent heartache, and the happiness he has finally found with the woman who rekindled the flame in theatre's enfant terrible.’
It turns out that Sir Lionel has decided that now's the time to leave his third wife for his latest mistress, and Jenny's premiere is the ideal way of getting the publicity to finance the divorce and the ‘exquisite Cotswolds home’ he's setting up with wife-to-be number four. There's an awful lot about Sir Lionel and his various stage productions thirty years ago, but newspapers need family appeal, so he's padded it out with the few bits of Jenny's childhood he was around for, her mother's ‘tragic’ nervous breakdown (which coincidentally happened around the time he left her for wife three), and Jenny's embarrassment about her boobs, spots and weight. He rounds it off by wishing her well and promising he'll always stick by her, as ‘theatre is in the Merritt blood’.
Edie finishes the article with a look of disbelief.
‘That man is evil!’
‘He's just . . . Dad, I guess,’ Jenny mumbles. She's at the hiccupping stage now. ‘He needed the money. The funny thing is, he invited me to that house in the Cotswolds last night. He said if I wanted to spend the summer there, I could. It sounded quite nice. Mum wants to murder him, of course.’
I look back down at the paper.
‘Has anybody mentioned it?’ I ask. ‘Today, I mean. In there.’ I indicate the Dorchester, across the road.
Jenny looks at me as though I've gone barmy.
‘Mentioned it? I was all ready with the lousy monkey story. I was geared up to talk about Joe Yule's incredible talent till I was blue in the face. And all they've asked me all morning, for the last four hours, is “What's it like growing boobs when you're in the public eye?” “What do you use for your spots?” “Have you got any messages for fat teenage girls?” “What's it like growing up with a famous father?” And I don't even know, ’cause he was never there.’
I look at her, hunched up on the grass, makeup streaming. (She doesn't normally wear it, but they slap it on thick for those TV interviews.) She's in her usual jeans and some black cotton top they've given her, which billows over the boobs while suggesting that underneath its capacious covering they may be the size of hot-air balloons. A large, fierce spot has emerged on her cheek since last night and is sitting there defiantly, soaking up the midday sun.
‘Anyway,’ she says, desperate to change the subject, ‘what did you think of yesterday?’
There's a long pause while I will Edie not to mention the traffic-light effect. Luckily, she's distracted before she can say anything. A bus is heading down Park Lane with a picture of Jenny's face on it, two metres high, beside Joe Yule's. She looks spotless. Literally. And supermodel thin. It's kind of surreal to see her this way. Especially as real, runny-makeup Jenny is sitting beside us. Edie bobs up and down and points. We look over.
‘They airbrushed me!’ Jenny says, affronted. ‘They even airbrushed my neck! I would've said that was the one bit of me that wasn't spotty or podgy, but they had to airbrush that.’
Edie and I exchange despairing looks. Our cheering-up job isn't going as well as I'd hoped. I absent-mindedly play with the petals of my new skirt while I try to think of something positive to say.
‘That's unusual,’ Jenny says at last, looking at the skirt. ‘Did you make it?’
Relieved at the chance not to talk about Kid Code or Sir Lionel Merritt for a moment, we tell her all about the bazaar. Edie explains about the Three Bitches. I butt in with Edie's super-amazing rescue mission and the library card. We both interrupt each other. Jenny's eyes swing between us as if she's watching a tennis match. By the time we've finished, her eyes have dried and her streaky face is smiling.
‘If only you had been from Teen magazine.’
We all look a bit helpless for a minute. We are so NOT from Teen magazine. If it exists, even.
‘Those girls have to be stopped, though. I'm going to complain to the people I volunteer with,’ Edie says crossly. ‘There must be something they can do.’
‘I think her main problem was the nylon,’ I add.
Edie and Jenny both look at me as though I've completely lost it.
‘How can I help?’ Jenny asks Edie. She's obviously given up on me as a lost cause.
This is tricky. Jenny's going to be out of the country for the next few weeks.
‘Maybe you could email her descriptions of what people are wearing in New York and Tokyo?’ I suggest. ‘To give her ideas for making stuff.’
Edie maintains her pitying look.
‘She can hardly read and she hasn't got a computer. Apart from that, brilliant.’
I'm crushed.
‘Maybe you could bring her back stuff, then,’ I mumble.
‘It'll do as a start,’ Jenny says. Then she suddenly realises that she's overrun her break time and is hopelessly late.
‘I'm in such big trouble!’ she wails dramatically, then giggles. ‘What can they do to me, though? Edit me out of the film?’
We accompany her back to the hotel's reception, where FOUR PR people are standing in their black suits, on various phones and BlackBerries, looking out nervously for her. It's like being met by four angry parents after a late evening out. Much as we love her, we leave her to it. She doesn't seem to mind too much. She's used to it by now.
It's only later, back in the sunshine, that I realise I forgot to ask her about Joe Yule. Something strange was happening on that red carpet yesterday. Was he deliberately avoiding her? Too late now. I know she won't trust anything sensitive to texts or emails while she's away – she's been warned about them being intercepted. Honestly, knowing a couple of Hollywood stars is like joining the CIA. So it may be a while until I finally wheedle the truth out of her.
It's near the end of summer term, so exams are over, classes are winding down and homework is minimal. This gives Edie plenty of time to think about the Three Bitches.
‘I've told the special needs people,’ she informs me one day in maths. ‘But I'm not convinced they can do very much. The one thing they did say was that Crow needs more friends. I'd have thought that was obvious. They suggested I should try and befriend her more. I've tried, but we don't really have much in common.’
She gives me a look and the light comes on in that superbrain of hers. For once, I'm right there with her.
‘Invite her over,’ I say. ‘She can come any time.’
And so she comes.
She looks at my wall of Vogue photo shoots and my other wall of costume exhibition posters from the V&A, and I can tell she's in heaven.
She snuggles herself into my favourite armchair, the purple velvet one, and tells us about her sketches and V&A visits and making clothes after school. It turns out she's on her own a lot, so she goes off to look at clothes, or she just invents them at home with whatever fabrics she can find. And she's always drawing her ideas. Pages and pages and pages of them.
I ask about her family, but she looks past me and I wonder if she's heard me. Then she says something about growing up in Uganda, where her parents and several of her aunts and uncles and cousins are, and leaving them to come to England when she was eight.
‘Why?’ I ask, appalled. I mean, I love England, but leaving your family to come here seems a bit extreme.
Crow looks at the floor and shrugs. For ages, she says nothing, but we wait. Eventually she looks up.
‘It was difficult in my country. My dad wanted me to get an English education. When my little sister is older, maybe she'll come too.’
‘How often do you see your parents?’ I wonder. My dad lives in Paris. Mum met him when she was modelling there. I see him twice a year, which really isn't enough at all. Harry's dad is in Brazil (Mum travelled a lot), which is worse.
‘Not so much.’
‘How much?’
‘Never,’ she almost whispers. ‘They send photos. My sister Victoria sends me her drawings. She's four now. Nearly five.’ She reaches into her satchel and pulls out some folded sheets of paper. They are covered in pictures of smiling children with stick fingers and triangular, colourful clothes under bright blue skies. They are confidently signed ‘Victoria’ in careful four-year-old writing.
‘So who do you live with?’
‘My Auntie Florence. She came here years ago. She cleans at my school. She works very hard.’
Edie and I both smile encouragingly. We're not sure what to say.
On Crow's second visit, my room is a tip. I've had an idea for a mini-dress and I've been raiding my bookshelves for inspiration. The books are everywhere and there are lots of them. I'm not exactly literary, but if it's a book about fashion, I have to have it. Mum, Dad and Granny are very generous (although Dad does insist on giving them to me in French, so I can practise). I have everything from serious histories of couture to cut-out paper dolls. I've been collecting them since I was seven. Most of them are lying open on the carpet and I desperately try and clear a path so Crow can get across the room without treading on them.
However, she doesn't move. She's spellbound. Edie gives me an astonished stare. She's never seen Crow look enthusiastic about a book before.
The great thing about fashion books, of course, is the illustrations. Huge, full-page photographs and beautiful drawings. Crow's eye darts from a Balenciaga ballgown to an Elizabethan ruff. She crouches down and runs her fingers over the pages.
‘Does this say Dior?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ Edie says, instantly switching into teacher mode. ‘And that says Christian. His . . . er . . . Christian name.’
‘Dior is my hero,’ Crow breathes. ‘There's this woman called Yvette who lives upstairs. She worked for Dior. She's teaching me to knit and sew. She tells me all about him.’
Edie and I exchange glances. We both suspect that someone is taking advantage of this innocent little girl from Africa with romantic, unlikely stories. After all, Christian Dior died fifty years ago.
‘May I take it?’
She's indicating the fattest book in the pile. It's a history of the House of Dior and it's written like a textbook. It's not exactly the Famous Five.
‘Certainly,’ says Edie, looking shocked. ‘I mean, she can, can't she, Nonie?’
‘Of course,’ I shrug. ‘Take whatever you like.’
To our amazement, Crow chooses five books and happily piles them up. It occurs to me that maybe she'd have learnt to read long ago if people had started her off with cocktail dresses and ballgowns, instead of kittens and puppies.
Edie texts me after her next volunteering session to say they've already finished page one. Which, for someone who struggles with ‘chair’ isn't bad going, I think.
Something's still bothering me, though.
I'm convinced those skirts and knits we got from the bazaar are amazing, but nobody really believes me. It's not helped by the fact that I have a reputation for wearing anything, including Astroturf (which looks great as a miniskirt, by the way, although it's a bit scratchy when you sit down). I think the biggest problem is that Crow's designs a
re made out of cheap fabrics in gaudy colours, which is all that she can afford. But I have a plan.
I interrupt Harry in the middle of another drumming practice.
‘Harry, you know Moaning Zoe …’
‘I wish you wouldn't refer to my girlfriend as Moaning Zoe. Especially not to her face. She doesn't like it.’
‘I bet she moans about it.’
‘Actually, she does. But, I think that's totally justified.’
‘Well, does she have any friends?’
‘Nonie!’
‘What?’
‘Please do not suggest that my girlfriend is sad and friendless.’
‘Sorry, didn't mean to. I was just wondering if she knew anyone who made things out of ordinary stuff. Like cotton. Or even silk.’
Moaning Zoe is in her final year at St Martins. She's doing textiles. In Zoe's case, ‘textiles’ is a loose description because she mostly makes things out of cardboard, as far as I can tell. Or circuit boards. Or old mobile phone covers. All very trendy and eco-friendly, but not exactly what I have in mind. She makes Astroturf look positively normal.
‘Zoe is very talented,’ Harry sniffs. ‘In her own way. But she's got friends who do more conventional things. There's a girl called Skye who's nice. She sings with the band sometimes. Why?’
I explain my theory about providing Crow with better materials but that I have no idea how to get hold of them for her in large quantities. I'm convinced that a textiles student would know. Presumably they cover that sort of thing in week one.
And so the following Saturday – the day Jenny's leaving for New York – Skye comes over. Girls tend to do things if Harry asks them. I like her immediately. She has orange hair with shocking pink streaks and is wearing a floor-length dress made out of tie-dyed parachute silk and Doc Marten boots. No makeup and a constant smile. She's a walking ray of sunshine.
Crow's already ensconced in my room, on page three of the House of Dior book, running her finger carefully along each line. She looks up when we come in and gives a shy smile. Today she's wearing her Wonder Woman cape (rescued from the drain) and a home-made Elizabethan ruff. It's a look. We all cluster round a pile of multicoloured nylon and I do a bit of a fashion show, whipping the skirts on and off over my leggings and showing how beautifully they move when I walk.
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