Girl 99

by Andy Jones

  PRAISE FOR ANDY JONES

  ‘Frank, funny and bittersweet . . . this is a book with its heart firmly in the right place.’

  —Louise Candlish

  ‘Touching, funny and real, Andy Jones . . . had me laughing one minute and crying the next. I loved it.’

  —Jane Costello

  ‘At my age I am still amazed when a writer with the gift of the written word can make me care about a character so much that I can be reduced to tears one minute and laughing the next – but [with The Two of Us] this author manages to do just that.’

  —The Sun

  ‘Honest, heartfelt and real, Jones has poured heart and soul into his words . . . the emotions are constant . . . be it laughter or hurt, you will experience it all as you journey through the pages.’

  —The Love of a Good Book

  ‘If you want a book which takes you on an emotional rollercoaster of such incredible highs and lows, this is no doubt the book for you.’

  —Compelling Reads

  ‘Like One Day and Me Before You, The Two of Us almost reads like a screenplay for a hit film and I would not be surprised if we see this on the big screen in a year or two. Like all good romcoms it is heartwarming, poignant, frustrating and its ending feels like a big, warm hug.’

  —Hollikins, Goodreads

  ‘Beautifully written and wonderfully engaging.’

  —Daily Mail

  ‘[The Trouble with Henry and Zoe is] one of the few novels that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as One Day. Everything you could want from a romcom and then some.’

  —The Sun

  ALSO BY ANDY JONES

  The Two of Us

  The Trouble with Henry and Zoe

  Untogether Lives

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2017 Andy Jones

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503942295

  ISBN-10: 1503942295

  Cover design by Emma Rogers

  Revised edition of Girl 99, first published in Great Britain in 2012 by Andy Jones.

  To my brother, Martin

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  DECEMBER

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  MAY

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  JUNE

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  JULY

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  Reasons why I shouldn’t have slept with the girl who’s singing in my shower:

  We have slept together before.

  Several times.

  To the extent where she now has a favourite mug in my kitchen.

  And a favourite side of my bed.

  We work together.

  She likes me.

  I like her.

  But not in the same way that she likes me.

  She’s a lovely girl.

  But a terrible singer.

  This list is not exhaustive, but it serves its purpose. You get my point.

  The first time I slept with Holly was fine. We were single, consenting, slightly drunk, rather horny adults. Why not? No harm done. The second time, less so. You’ve upped the ante; it’s not so easy to dismiss as ‘just one of those things’. Because it wasn’t ‘just one’, was it? It was just two. And so on, exponentially, with each subsequent ‘thing’. Last night was thing number five, and now she’s singing ‘Lovely Day’ in my shower. Add that to the list.

  In terms of direct impact on my life, however, sleeping with Holly still doesn’t top the act of kissing her in the first place, in the back of a taxi after the office Christmas party. That and thinking it might be a good idea to admit this indiscretion to my girlfriend Sadie. Now my ex-girlfriend Sadie.

  DECEMBER

  A LITTLE OVER FOUR MONTHS EARLIER

  Chapter One

  Traditionally, I’m a big fan of Christmas – I love turkey, stuffing and bread sauce; I like presents; I’m rather partial to sleeping off a bottle of wine in front of a James Bond movie. According to the listings, this afternoon’s Double-O is Thunderball – the one where Sean Connery massages the villain’s mistress with a mink glove he had presumably packed along with all his other spy gadgets. Well, I won’t be needing one of those today, that’s for sure. Sadie was due to come back with me this year, our first Christmas together, but I’ve well and truly stuffed that, to coin a festive phrase.

  Even if she were here, there’s no way Dad would sanction us sleeping in the same room. ‘My house, Thomas; my rules.’ But if Sadie were at least in the house, sleeping in my old single bed while I took the sofa, at least then I could have snuck up here for a Christmas quickie while Dad’s at Mass. Jesus. Very nearly thirty-one years old and reduced to sneaking into my girlfriend’s – if I had one, which I don’t, not anymore – bedroom. Happy sodding Christmas, Thomas.

  I haven’t slept on a decent mattress for three weeks (since suffering some sort of brain spasm and confessing to Sadie about kissing Holly) and my spine aches like it’s been concertinaed inside a small wooden box. Which, in a way, it has. I’m six foot three and a half, and this bed is about three and a half inches shorter than that. This bed where I had my first sexual experience. I was alone then, too.

  Pornographic magazines would briefly enter circulation at school, and while I had glimpsed the contents, I’d never managed to take ownership, however temporarily, of this rare and tantalising material. My friend Keith, however, lived in a house full of books. The stairs and hallway were lined with shelves bent under the weight of accumulated lit. Creased spines in washed-out colours, bearing the names of a thousand authors. Some – Dickens, Stoker – were familiar, the majority not. Henry Miller, for example, author of Plexus, Nexus, and the more obviously titled Sexus. No pictures, but enough dirty words and startling acts to stimulate a barely teenage boy. Probably I would have worn the pages translucent if Dad hadn’t somehow found the dog-eared novel hidden beneath the underlay, beneath the carpet, beneath my bed.

  To call Dad a religious zealot would be unfair. I went to a Catholic school and in my
experience he was no more dogmatic, fearful or close-minded than many of my friends’ parents. And certainly less fervent than the majority of my teachers. He was moderately relaxed about church attendance and only minimally irritated by casual blasphemy. Even so, the discovery of my ‘pornographic’ literature was met with the full weight of the established Roman tradition.

  We burned Sexus together – my father holding up occasional pages in the coal tongs and asking, sincerely, ‘Do you enjoy reading this filth, Thomas?’ ‘Aren’t you embarrassed, son?’

  Yes, and of fucking course yes, I screamed inside my skull, while I shook my head and watched another page go up in smoke and cinders.

  But that wasn’t the worst thing. No, the real toe-curler was being taken to Father McKinley for a ‘talk’. This was the highest sanction, more terrible than any grounding, arse-smacking or pocket-money freeze. It was a long, humiliating session. Veiny-faced, hairy-nosed Father Mac was keenly interested in what happened between the pages of this ‘dorty book’, and what, exactly, I had been doing while reading it. And even though this wasn’t an official confession in the sacramental sense, he gave me a forty-rosary penance and a piece of advice I’ll never forget. Next time I was troubled by ‘wrong notions and belligerent loins’, I was to bite the thumb of my (‘you’re right-handed, aren’t you, boy?’) right hand, and bite it hard, until the temptation passed.

  No biting, however, is required this morning. And it’s not simply my miniature bed that’s responsible for my diminished libido – the entire room is wrong. The walls are black now – dotted here and there with glow-in-the-dark stars – and where there were once posters of Madonna and Kylie, there is now a six-packed actor wearing a towel, and a come-hither rapper beginning the process of unbuttoning his jeans. A small bookcase is heaving with A. A. Milne, Enid Blyton, Jacqueline Wilson, Jane Austen and Stephanie Meyer; last night I read Love Lessons – it’s not bad, but it’s not really my thing.

  I was thirteen when my parents sat me down and told me I should start getting used to the idea that I was no longer an only child. Who was most surprised is a three-way split, but the news was as exciting as it was unexpected. For the next six months I fluctuated between wishing for a brother and wishing for a sister, but when six pounds and five ounces of Bianca arrived the following spring, it was impossible to imagine any alternative. I took to the role of very big brother with gusto, and over the next three and a half years, I fed Bea her bottle, sang nursery rhymes, coloured in, read bedtime stories and watched even more cartoons than usual.

  Baby Bea started nursery school the same month I left for university, and I don’t mind telling you it was a tearful goodbye for all involved. Over the years that followed, Bianca slowly appropriated my bedroom, using it as a playroom, den, study and, I have no doubt, somewhere to snog boys and hang out of the window smoking cigarettes. Her own bedroom is across the hallway, the walls painted a soothing shade of pale grey and hung with tasteful prints of famous paintings. Whereas the walls of my room have been through more shades of pink than Brighton beach on the first day of summer, and most of the rainbow besides. Girls progress through the spectrum in their own sequence and at their own pace, but they all begin with pink and end in black. Bianca made the transition faster than most, I think, reaching for the dark emulsion shortly after her eighth birthday and our mother’s death from breast cancer. Almost nine years ago now.

  Maybe that’s why the room feels so small – all the layers of paint.

  It’s like sleeping inside some kind of macabre doll’s house.

  So even if Sadie was here in my old bedroom, and even if I did sneak upstairs and climb in beside her, even then I doubt I could raise the necessary enthusiasm to commit any kind of sin. It feels wrong just thinking about it.

  So now you know all about my bedroom. That’s good.

  Dad won’t be back from Mass for an hour or more, so I decide to wake myself up with a gentle jog. Before I leave, I knock on Bea’s bedroom door and wish her a happy Christmas. When she doesn’t answer, I knock again and tell her I think Santa’s been.

  Whatever she shouts is muffled beneath several layers of bedding, and it sounds far from festive.

  Where I run takes me through a small wood and onto a country road bordered by a muddy quilt of farmers’ fields. After thirty-odd minutes that feel like twice as long, I arrive at the playing fields of St Francis of Assisi Roman Catholic School, a little over four miles from Dad’s house. Normally I’d just be warming up, but my pulse is high and it feels as if long-dormant pockets of my lungs are being peeled apart with every breath.

  I must have run this route hundreds of times as a schoolboy and it should be no surprise that this is where my feet take me when my brain stays out of the way. Known to the students as Sweet F. A. High, this is the school where Mum used to teach English to predominantly – me included – uninterested children.

  You might think having a parent who teaches in your school would act as a deterrent to bullies. But, in my experience, it only acts as an incentive: ‘Read us a story, bookworm’, ‘Kiss this, Romeo’, ‘Eat this, Oliver’, and et cetera, most of it initiated by thug-cum-comedian Declan ‘Deck’ Chambers. It would be an exaggeration, I think, to say that I ran to avoid sharing a bus journey with Deck Chambers. I ran because I was good at it and I enjoyed it. I represented the school and then the county at the 10,000 metres, and there are a few ribbons and trophies in a box somewhere in Dad’s attic. Nevertheless, on the days when I ran, it certainly was a bonus not to get whacked around the back of the head with a book. In a way, I resent myself for taking it as much as I despise Declan Chambers for dishing it out. And not smacking the bastard square in the mouth with a spiked track shoe is something I will always deeply regret.

  I stretch my calves against the goalposts, drop to the mud and grind out thirty press-ups. I was born lanky, Mum used to say, and by the time I was thirteen I was the tallest kid in my year and relatively useful as a goalkeeper. Not that I gave much of a shit about football, but the kudos of playing for the first team offset a small amount of the stigma that goes with being an English teacher’s son. Hanging from the crossbar now, the metal is wet and cold and I slip off twice during the course of nine chin-ups. Names I don’t know are etched into the paintwork, some in love hearts, others associated with boasts or insults, a few simply announcing the author’s existence.

  Mum started to show at the beginning of my third year. ‘Life begins at forty,’ she joked on her birthday that October, and I remember catching Dad – almost a decade older than his wife – blowing air from the corner of his mouth, a gesture that spoke more of anxiety than amusement.

  At school, my persecutors had a new angle. Instead of my mother’s profession, they shifted focus to her condition and inferred proclivities. Asking had I heard my parents screwing three months ago, did they do it often, was Mum a screamer? Deck Chambers would re-enact the conception, humping thin air, slapping a pair of invisible buttocks and grunting, ‘How’s that Missus Ferguson?’ ‘Keep your voice down, darling, we mustn’t wake little Tommy.’

  But as vile and humiliating as this was, I found the baby noises harder to bear. Maybe because they were aimed at my mother instead of me. We’d be in her class when someone – almost invariably Declan Chambers – would make a mewling noise from the back of the class. Then someone else joined in, then another and another. Maybe a dozen kids all bawling and squawking and shouting goo-goo ga-ga. Mum would try to ignore it, but it was as obvious as her red face that the taunts were hitting their mark. Sometimes I’d join in.

  With the exception of a few superficial amendments – satellite dish, prefab outbuildings, new goalposts – the school hasn’t changed much in the thirteen years since I left. But who am I to pass judgement? I dig a sharp stone out of the mud, scratch my name onto one of the goalposts and set off running towards another Ferguson family Christmas.

  I’m on my second sherry and peeling my four-hundredth vegetable when Bianca shuffles
into the kitchen, still wearing her pyjamas, one cheek pink and pillow-creased, her hair high and wild as an owl’s nest.

  ‘Happy Christmas, Goat Boy,’ she says, kissing my cheek and stealing a carrot from the chopping board.

  The nickname was coined by my mother in reference to my star sign, a strategy that only really pays off for Leos and Sagittarians.

  ‘Hey, Daffy.’

  Bianca punches me on the shoulder, and the older she gets the harder she hits. Still, it’s nothing less than I deserve. I was twenty-eight when I gave my then thirteen-year-old sister the nickname Daffy, derived from our shared assumption that Bianca had been an unplanned addition to the family. The Mistake, The Gaff, Gaffy, Daffy. Silly, for sure, but it helped pull Bea out of a gloomy patch and the nickname (a secret one, between the two of us) stuck.

  ‘Time is it?’

  ‘Well, you’ve missed half of Christmas already. Time was, you’d be up at five – “Has he been yet? Has he, has he, has he?”’

  ‘Count yourself lucky, then.’

  Bea fetches a sherry glass and pours herself a measure, watching me out of the corner of her eye, defying me to comment.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ I ask her.

  Bea shakes her head, clinks her glass against mine. ‘Where’s Dad?’

  I drop two rounds of bread into the toaster, nevertheless. ‘Snoozing in front of the TV. You’re as bad as each other.’

  ‘So, what have you done with Sadie?’

  I shrug noncommittally. ‘I haven’t done anything, we’re just . . . it’s complicated.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ says my baby sister. ‘She dumped you, didn’t she? Why? What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing. I . . . she didn’t dump me, it was just, we both just—’

  ‘Blah, blah, bullshit.’ Bianca snatches a mushroom and wrinkles her nose in disapproval. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘I was never convinced.’