Girl, 15: Charming But Insane

by Sue Limb

Jess’s dad had texted her one of his ‘horrorscopes’. But Jess wasn’t worrying about the werewolf in the cupboard under the stairs. She had a more immediate problem: the size of her bum. She stared at herself in the huge mirrors of the communal changing room at Togs ’R’ Us. She was wearing leopardskin stretch pants. Did her bum look big in this? You can bet your sweet life it did.

  Geographically, Jess’s backside was a mountain range. The sun rose over it – eventually. Huge birds of prey nested on its craggy heights and hunted in its shadows. It wouldn’t have been so bad if Jess’s bum were balanced by a nice big bosom. But geographically, Jess’s boobs could not balance her bum at all. Her chest was the kind of featureless plain upon which airports are constructed.

  If only, thought Jess, some gifted cosmetic surgeon could slice off my bum and transplant it on to my chest, we’d be in business. Then she would have a majestic cleavage. It was wasted out back, under her jeans. Oh well. They say a clever choice of clothes can conceal bad features and emphasise one’s good points. But these leopardskin stretch pants weren’t working. You don’t see leopards waddling heavily across the plains, do you? They tend to streak across in a streamlined kind of way.

  ‘Flora,’ asked Jess, ‘what’s my best feature?’

  Flora was admiring herself in a cute little black top. A pink navel-ring winked cheekily out above her grey hipsters. She looked divine. Flora’s dad didn’t know she’d had her navel pierced. If he ever found out, he would personally build a high stone tower and lock her up there until she was thirty. If that was what Having a Dad Around meant, you could keep it.

  ‘Your best feature?’ Flora hesitated.

  Oh no! thought Jess. She can’t think of a single thing!

  ‘Your eyes are fantastic – and your neck – and your ears – and, well, you’re fabulous all over, Jess. You’re a babe.’ Flora turned back with relief to the ravishing vision awaiting her in the mirror.

  ‘But my bum is like some terrible gigantic Siamese twin!’ wailed Jess. ‘It follows me around everywhere and gets stuck in doorways.’

  ‘Your bum is great!’ cried Flora, but her voice went up just a little too high. ‘I wish I had a proper bum. I look like a boy.’ Needless to say, Flora looked as much like a boy as a box of chocolates looks like a side of beef. Jess sighed.

  Three hours later, having tried on approximately three thousand garments, Jess decided on a black top with a plunging neckline and a strange shawl-like black skirt.

  ‘Boho!’ said Flora approvingly. ‘You look stunning, babe! Ben Jones will see you as he’s never seen you before! Suddenly across a crowded room he will feel Cupid’s dart!’ They’d been doing all about Cupid in English with Mr Fothergill. They’d both tried to develop crushes on Mr Fothergill, but he simply was too fat and sweaty. You could more easily fancy a hippo.

  Jess doubted if Ben Jones would fancy her, despite the plunging neckline and boho skirt. Life was so unfair. Everybody fancied Ben Jones, no matter what he wore. Although Flora said she preferred his best friend, Mackenzie, who was dark and rather short.

  ‘It’s a biology thing,’ she explained. ‘Blondes don’t fancy blond guys. It’s to avoid inbreeding.’

  Jess was not completely convinced by this. After all, Flora’s entire family was blond. Maybe Flora really fancied Ben Jones, but she was keeping quiet about it because Jess was so crazy about him. That would be a really loyal thing for a friend to do. But also, somehow, really annoying. If Flora did fancy Ben Jones, it would make her rather tragic and picturesque, and she had far too much going for her already.

  They parted and Jess went back home to get ready. How could Jess cram it all into six hours? Flora had gone back to her palace where her granny – possibly a close relative of the Queen – would be distributing bags of gold over tea and exquisite little cakes. Jess’s house, of course, was empty except for dirty dishes. Her mother had gone off to demonstrate against the war. She did this every Saturday. There was usually a war to demonstrate against. Jess didn’t mind really. It kept her mum out of trouble and out of the way and it was free. Just as long as she didn’t ever end up on TV, dancing for peace. Naked. This was Jess’s most nightmarish fantasy.

  Having a mum who was often out on demos also permitted Jess to surf the internet unchallenged by cries of, ‘Get off that thing now! We’ll get a bill as long as my arm!’ Jess did a search on lingerie. Soon she was in the slightly weird world of bra inserts – not just little cotton pads but, apparently, bags containing water or silicone gel.

  ‘Curves’ are made of a specially formulated silicone gel, enclosed in a sheer, skin-like polyurethane cover. This material was developed for space research and is extremely well tolerated by the skin.

  Wait a minute! Space research? What would be the effect of nil gravity? Wouldn’t your boobs fly off in different directions? Besides, Jess didn’t like the concept of outer space. She liked to keep her feet firmly on the ground.

  Thank goodness I’m an earth sign, thought Jess. Flora was an air sign, of course – kind of angelic and ethereal. Still, never mind air and earth. What Jess needed now was water. She raced to the kitchen and found a roll of those small plastic bags which mothers use to wrap up sandwiches. At least, mothers good enough to make sandwiches for their beloved children, unlike the mother in question, Madeleine Jordan, at present protesting against the war while her child starved helplessly at home.

  Jess filled a small plastic bag with water, tied it up tightly and secured it with a rubber band. It was quite gel-like. She wobbled it around in her hand. It did indeed move rather like breast tissue. She didn’t have enough breast tissue of her own to have conducted personal research on the subject. But she had watched a lot of music videos.

  She wasn’t quite sure about the water, though. Perhaps a faint sloshing would be heard. And what if she sprang a leak? Jess shuddered at the thought of puddles on the floor. The jokes about potty-training would last a lifetime. Maybe there was a food substance a little less watery than water. Jess ransacked the food cupboard, and her eyes fell on a tin of soup. Minestrone!

  Getting it into the bags was a little bit more laborious and messy, but fifteen minutes later, Jess had a cleavage. The bags of soup really worked. Amazing! She was going to have a ball! Now all she needed was a pumpkin coach or, failing that, the No. 109 bus, which would take her all the way to Tiffany’s. She just had to spend four and a half hours on her eyebrows first.

  Chapter 4

  Seconds after arriving at Tiffany’s, Jess was suddenly face to face with Ben Jones. He loomed up out of the crowd, looking gorgeous.

  ‘Um … seen Mackenzie?’ he said in that wonderfully slow drawl.

  ‘No,’ stammered Jess. ‘I’ve only just arrived. Maybe he’s …’

  But Ben Jones had gone. He spoke slowly but he could move fast. And he hadn’t even noticed her cleavage or her boho skirt. Mind you, it was very dark, and very crowded. Perhaps later there would be the magic moment, foretold by Flora, at which his eyes would find hers across a crowded room and he would suddenly realise … At least there was a crowded room, ready and waiting.

  Tiffany lived in what used to be an old mansion house which had been converted into flats. Her family’s apartment covered most of the ground floor. Their sitting room was huge: half the size of the school gym. Tiffany’s kitchen was amazing, with a high ceiling. Jess found Flora in there, surrounded by boys and picking daintily at a pizza. She was wearing diamanté strips across both her eyelids. Every time she blinked, there was a flash of rainbow light.

  ‘Where on earth did you get those?’ demanded Jess in amazement.

  ‘My granny gave them to me!’ said Flora. ‘Aren’t they amazing? But they make my eyelids feel sort of heavy. I think I shall have to go to bed in a minute.’

  Nobody had even noticed Jess’s cleavage. Jess didn’t know whether to be pleased or furious. She decided it was just as well. She was beginning to smell of minestrone, which was unfortunate. She had doused herself in her mot
her’s Calvin Klein. But the sweaty, soupy smell was winning. Jess was a bit worried. You shouldn’t be able to smell the soup, surely, unless it had escaped somehow? She glanced down at her cleavage. Well, somebody had to. There was no sign of anything wrong.

  Flora threw back her head and batted her diamanté eyelashes at the ceiling. ‘This is such an amazing kitchen!’ she breathed. ‘It must be really old. It’s like a palace or something. You can imagine a princess sitting here after a night out at a ball, having a cup of hot chocolate and telling her butler all about it.’ Jess sometimes suspected that in her most private dreams, Flora imagined she was a reincarnation of Princess Diana.

  Tiffany’s brother had the latest gothic video game and so the boys melted away.

  ‘Do you believe in reincarnation?’ pondered Jess.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ sighed Flora. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jess. ‘I’m sure I had a previous life in ancient Egypt. As a dung beetle.’

  ‘Oh, I so love ancient Egypt!’ sighed Flora. ‘I’d really like to have a black wig so I could go to parties as Cleopatra.’

  This annoyed Jess slightly. She was supposed to be the dark one. Flora had the blonde beauty of a goddess in a painting. Wasn’t that enough? At the very moment when Jess was poised to start hating Flora just a little bit, Flora slid off her chair and made Jess a cream cheese and gherkin sandwich.

  ‘Notice anything different about me?’ demanded Jess, halfway through the sandwich.

  ‘Your hair! Your hair is great! How have you made it stick up like that?’

  ‘No, not my hair, idiot.’

  Flora’s eyes ran up and down. ‘Wow! Your tights! Fantastic! Fishnets are wicked! So Paris!’

  ‘Not my tights, you fool!’ yelled Jess. ‘My cleavage!’

  Flora inspected Jess’s cleavage. ‘It looks great!’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’re so worried about! You’ve got a perfectly good cleavage! Look at it – it’s fine!’

  Jess felt deeply depressed. So Flora thought this was her very own cleavage. Suddenly she decided she wouldn’t tell Flora about the bags of soup. It was just a little secret between herself and her boobs – which were called Bonnie and Clyde, incidentally.

  Jess had got into the habit of talking to her boobs. ‘Grow, you lazy so-and-so’s!’ That kind of thing. Only in private, though. Then it was just a short step to giving them names. Jess’s mum didn’t allow pets. The great advantage of boobs over dogs was that walkies didn’t have to be a special expedition. Every time Jess went down to the corner shop for a new lipstick, Bonnie and Clyde got an outing.

  And Jess’s boobs were certainly getting their biggest outing yet. Jess finished her sandwich, and she and Flora strolled into the main room, where deafening rap music was pouring out of Tiffany’s enormous speakers. Ben Jones may not have noticed Jess’s cleavage, even Flora may not have noticed, but Whizzer noticed right away.

  Whizzer (William Izard to his family) was one of the boys a couple of years above Jess and Flora. He played football with a demonic energy. He had big, rather rude lips and a reputation for wicked ways. He appeared before Jess and rudely and wickedly interrupted her conversation with Flora by grabbing Jess’s hand and pulling her into the dancing throng.

  It was hardly the gracious invitation she would have preferred, but Jess began to go through her moves. As they gyrated and grooved, Whizzer fixed his eyes firmly on her cleavage. Jess began to wish she had worn a modest top which covered her up as far as – well, as far as her eyebrows. She wished she had at least rehearsed dancing before leaving home, in front of her full-length mirror. She feared that her newly-buoyant boobs might be getting rather out of hand. Bonnie especially – the left one – was beginning to feel a bit free-range, and it did seem a little draughty across her chest. Jess also began to worry that, in shaking up the soup so violently, she might somehow make it boil over.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Flora smooching with Ben Jones’s friend Mackenzie. Though short, Mackenzie was quite good-looking in a dark, poetic sort of way. In fact, he was probably the nearest thing to King Charles I available locally. Jess wasn’t sure whether he had a sad and tormenting secret, but she was sure one could be arranged. It would be so cool if Flora could go out with Mackenzie and she could go out with Ben Jones. First, however, she had to get rid of Whizzer.

  When the number ended, she tried to retreat gracefully back in the direction of the kitchen. Whizzer, however, pounced. He put his arms round her and stuck his tongue down her throat. Jess was disgusted. He tasted of cigarettes. And Ben Jones might be watching from somewhere nearby. She struggled slightly, trying to escape, but Whizzer squeezed her more tightly, and Bonnie – her left boob – exploded and a jet of minestrone soup shot up and hit him on the jaw. Whizzer let Jess go and staggered back, clawing at his soupy chin, cussing horribly. Jess seized her moment. She ran. Out in the hall, there was a bathroom. Somebody had put a sign saying ‘Girlz’ on the door. The boys’ toilet was marked ‘Ladz’ and was Tiffany’s parents’ en-suite.

  Jess flew into ‘Girlz’ and slammed the bolt across. There was a loo, a washbasin and a wide shelf above it with a huge mirror. Tiffany had decorated it for the party with loads of leaves and flowers. But Jess didn’t have time to admire the decor. She wriggled out of her plunging black top, and pulled the minestrone inserts out of her bra. The left-hand one had exploded all over Bonnie. Jess threw both bags of soup down the loo and flushed, then stripped to the waist and washed the chopped carrot and tomato and macaroni off her boobs.

  ‘I’m sorry about this, Bonnie,’ she apologised. ‘But it’s your own fault. If you and Clyde had just got your act together and grown a bit, I would never even have thought about inserts!’

  Then she washed her bra, and put it back on. There are probably more uncomfortable feelings than climbing into a wet bra, but all the same, it was quite terrible. There was still soup in the loo. It looked as if somebody had vomitted. The thought was so sickening that, for an instant, Jess was on the edge of throwing up herself, but she pulled back just in time by imagining she was Christmas shopping in New York. Jess had never been to New York, but the shopping fantasy was a sure-fire cure for nausea. She closed her eyes and flushed the loo again.

  Fully, if damply, dressed, she was now ready to leave. If there had been a window in the bathroom she would have climbed out of it, but at least when she left the bathroom she would already be in the hall, right by the front door. Her mascara was smudged. Never mind. In two seconds she would be out in the street. The lovely, dark, anonymous street.

  Jess opened the door, shot out and almost collided with Ben Jones.

  ‘Um, hi, Jess, I was looking for you …’ he said, with a strange smile.

  He knew! Everybody knew! News of her soup debacle was all over the county already!

  ‘Sorry!’ said Jess. ‘I’ve got to go home, my mum just rang, she’s not well.’ She pushed past him – too upset even to enjoy the fleeting contact with his T-shirt – and rushed out into the street. He didn’t follow, thank heavens. She wanted to be Home Alone as soon as possible. The bus stop for the 109 bus was too near Tiffany’s house. Anyone could come out of the party and see her waiting there. Unfortunately, owing to a foolish desire to appear glamorous and cool, Jess had worn her mega-high heels, so she had to teeter in agony all the way home.

  What a complete nightmare, thought Jess as she reached her own street. How could things possibly get worse?

  Chapter 5

  As Jess let herself in, she found her mum standing in the hall. She had a peculiar look on her face. Jess recognised that look. It was the same look as when her mum had broken Jess’s porcelain doll by dropping a brass Buddha on it. Not deliberately, obviously. Jess’s mum wasn’t a sadist. She was just accident prone. Now she looked furtive and guilty. Her eyes were shiny and elusive. It was the look of a dog who has peed on the carpet and is hoping to get away with it.

  ‘What?!’ demanded Jess. It’s important
to seize the initiative at such times.

  ‘You’re back early.’ Her mum frowned. ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘The party sucked,’ said Jess, ‘and these shoes are killing me. I want a bath.’ She kicked off her shoes and walked down the hall towards the privacy of her own room and the comfort of her favourite posters and her old teddy bear Rasputin.

  Jess’s room was the one thing about her home life that was just perfect. It was a ground-floor room at the back, overlooking their garden. It was private. Nobody could see in. It was quite big. And she had been allowed to paint it purple.

  But now her mum sort of barred her way with an uneasy shuffling movement. Jess scowled.

  ‘What?’ she demanded again. Her mum was a pacifist when it came to international relations, but she could still put up a good fight at home.

  ‘Great news!’ smiled her mum, but the smile wavered and cracked a little. What sort of great news? Jess’s weird and rather horrid imagination kicked in. Great news – a runaway skunk has pooed in your underwear drawer.

  ‘Granny’s coming to live with us,’ said her mum. She said it extra fast, so that it sounded like ‘Grannyscomingtolivewithus’. As if by getting it out into the open quickly, she would somehow avoid big trouble.

  Jess considered the proposal. She loved her granny. OK, so Granny was slightly obsessed with death and sometimes acted a bit old ladyish. She could be boring when she droned on about the past, especially her favourite subject: ‘Grisly Operations Suffered by Various Old Codgers of My Acquaintance’. Oh, and there was that other obsession: ‘Ghastly Accidents and Fatal Fires Which Scarred My Tragic Childhood’. But at least if Granny came to live with them, it would mean they wouldn’t have to go and stay with her in her grim old house that smelt of haddock.

  ‘Cool,’ said Jess. ‘Now can I get into my room, please, Mum?’

  Her mum still barred her way. ‘The thing is, darling …’ Oh no! This was serious. Mum never called her ‘darling’ unless somebody had died, or another war had broken out. ‘I’m really sorry, Jess, but she’s going to have to have your room.’