‘I know. I don’t get it.’
‘Is it a big party? Do you think she’ll invite me?’ said Lucy, sounding hopeful.
‘I thought you couldn’t stick her.’
‘I can’t. And you wouldn’t ever catch me going to one of her parties. Honestly, the things that go on!’
‘What?’
‘Well, this girl in Year Ten knows her, and her cousin went to a party in the summer, and apparently …’ Lucy started whispering stuff in my ear.
‘Rubbish!’ I said uneasily. ‘You’re making it up. No one does that anyway, not in real life.’
‘You wouldn’t know. You’re so innocent, Titch,’ said Lucy.
I wanted to hit her even though she was my friend. I could put up with Miranda and her pals patronizing me but not Lucy. Her mum and dad called her Lucy Locket and she had three Bear Factory bears, Billy, Bobby and Bernie, and she still liked watching her old Disney videos.
‘Well, if I go to Miranda’s party I won’t be innocent much longer,’ I said.
‘You’re not really going to go, are you?’ said Lucy.
‘Of course I am,’ I said, though I had no intention whatsoever of doing so.
‘And Carl’s going?’
‘Yep,’ I said, wondering why toads weren’t tumbling out of my lips, I was telling so many lies.
‘But you’re always saying Carl’s so antisocial,’ said Lucy.
This has been a kind lie. When I first made friends with Lucy I wanted to show Carl that I’d managed to make a good friend even though I felt so lonely and half a person without him. I also wanted to show Lucy just how close Carl and I still were. I suppose I wanted to show off. I was mad enough to invite them both round to tea one Saturday. It was awful.
Lucy arrived in a dreadful silly-frilly dress and shoes with heels. They seemed too big for her. Maybe they belonged to her mother. She wore thick make-up, though she forgot she was wearing it and kept rubbing her eyes so it smeared all over the place and made her look like a panda. She spoke in a silly self-conscious way in front of Carl, and whenever he said anything at all, even ‘Can you pass me the cakes?’ she giggled. She practically wet herself she giggled so much. I wanted to die.
Carl made a bolt for home the moment he’d finished his tea. He barely paused to say goodbye. I didn’t want Lucy’s feelings to be hurt so I pretended he was going through a very shy withdrawn stage and couldn’t really cope with company.
Carl was incredulous that I had become so friendly with Lucy. For a long time he used poor Lucy’s name whenever he thought anything especially twee, silly or naff.
‘Oh, dear God, switch that programme off, it’s too Lucy for words,’ or ‘What have you got that skirt on for, it’s a bit Lucy, isn’t it?’ or ‘You don’t look right with lipstick, Sylvie, it makes you look Lucyfied.’
It wasn’t fair. I didn’t really like Lucy very much either, but I needed someone to go round with at school.
‘I can’t see Carl wanting to go to a party with a whole lot of strangers,’ Lucy said now.
‘You’re probably right,’ I said.
I went home in a daze. I was sure I wasn’t really going to Miranda’s. I wanted Carl to refuse, and then I could use him as a convenient excuse.
When I got home to our semi-detached houses I went down Carl’s crazy-paving path instead of my own. I knocked at the front door and Carl’s brother Jake opened it. He just grunted when he saw me and ambled off up the stairs again, leaving the door open so I could come inside.
He was sixteen, in Year Eleven at my school. He wasn’t as brainy as his brother and hadn’t sat for any special scholarships. He didn’t look a bit like Carl. He had dark untidy hair and very dark eyes so you could barely see his pupils. He’d been quite small for his age once but now he was this great lanky guy of at least six foot. He was bright enough but he rarely bothered with much homework. The only thing he worked hard at was playing his guitar.
I wondered what Miranda would make of Jake. I thought he was far more her cup of tea, can of lager, whatever. He’d probably go for her too, even though she was only in Year Nine. I had a feeling Miranda was already famous throughout the school.
‘Miranda Holbein has invited Carl and me to a party tonight!’ I called up the stairs after him.
He paused on the top step. ‘Cool!’ he said, trying not to sound too impressed. He peered down at me. ‘She’s invited Carl?’ He shook his head. ‘He won’t go.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Where is he? In his bedroom doing his homework?’
‘Like the nerdy little swot he is,’ said Jake, pushing Carl’s door open. ‘Oh. Not here. His bike was round the back so he must be somewhere.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll look for him,’ I said.
I was pleased. Jake hadn’t said more than two consecutive words to me for years. Just one mention of Miranda Holbein and I seemed to have become cool by association.
I went looking for Carl. I tried the living room first, the looking-glass twin of my own. I liked the Johnsons’ so much more. I loved their crimson velvet sofa and bright embroidered throws and big saggy cushions and the large red and blue and purple paintings on the wall.
Carl’s mum was an amateur artist and the house was like her own gallery. She’d always nurtured Jake and Carl’s artistic abilities too, encouraging them to crayon on the kitchen walls when they were little. There were a few of my own scribbles too. I’d crayoned a crazy wedding all along one wall, with me in a white meringue and Carl in a white suit so that we looked like an advert for washing powder. There was a long colourful row of wedding guests: my mum and dad and Jake, and I’d added lots of children from school and our cat Flossie and my rabbit Lily Loppy (both long deceased) and Jake’s dog Wild Thing (so wild he’d run away and never come back). They were all wearing big pink carnations, even the cat and the dog, and the rabbit had two, one on each ear.
Carl’s mum Jules was washing lettuce at the kitchen sink.
‘Hi, Sylvie sweetheart,’ she said.
‘Hi, Jules,’ I said.
She wouldn’t let me call her Aunty Julia, let alone Mrs Johnson. She was Jules to everyone, even the little kids at the nursery school where she worked part time. She’d obviously been doing finger painting with them today. There were little red and yellow fingerprints all over her big flowery trousers.
‘I think Carl’s down in his hut,’ she said.
‘Oh, great.’
‘Sylvie?’ said Jules. She paused, shaking the lettuce. ‘Is Carl OK?’
‘OK in what way?’
‘I don’t know.’ She picked a little slug out of the lettuce, shuddering. ‘Yuck! Any kind of way. He just seems a bit … quiet. You two haven’t had a row, have you?’
‘We never have rows,’ I said.
We did, but I generally gave in quickly because I couldn’t bear Carl being cross with me.
‘Maybe it’s something at school then,’ said Jules. ‘I keep wondering whether it was a good idea to uproot him and send him there.’
‘No it wasn’t!’ I said.
‘Oh, darling. I know it must have been very hard for you. For both of you. But you know what an old brainybox Carl is, and the grammar gets lots of boys into Oxbridge. He’s keeping up with the work all right, I know that, though he’s had a lot of catching up to do. Maybe he’s just tired from working so much. I don’t know though. He just sort of mooches about when he’s at home, like he’s got stuff on his mind.’
‘He’s always been a bit dreamy,’ I said uneasily.
I felt flattered to be asked about Carl, as if I was the one who had the key to all his secrets, but I knew how he’d hate to think I was discussing him with his mum.
‘Are you two still working on this book of yours?’ said Jules.
‘Oh yes,’ I said, though we hadn’t made up anything new since September, when I’d gone to the high school and Carl started at the grammar. I’d tried working on the book on my own but it wasn’t the same without Carl. I’d
only written two pages and then decided they were so silly and sentimental I ripped them right out of the book.
‘When are we going to get to read it then?’ said Jules.
‘Oh, goodness! It’s kind of private,’ I said.
Jules shrieked as she found a truly gigantic slug. She dropped the lettuce in the sink, letting the cold water rinse it.
‘I feel I really should buy organic veg but, oh God, I hate these slimy slugs.’
‘Carl hates them too. He hates all creepy-crawlies.’
I had to be chief spider-catcher in the Glass Hut. Carl wanted to be a Buddhist and not kill anything but he wouldn’t have minded a holocaust of the insect world.
‘Tell me about it,’ said Jules. ‘Last time we had salad he found some little buggy thing on his plate and squealed a bit, just out of shock, I think, but Jake and Mick were merciless. He got teased for being a wimp the entire week, poor boy.’
Mick was Jules’s husband. He was a big broad man with a bit of a beer gut. He looked like a labourer in his scruffy T-shirts and sagging jeans but he was actually a lecturer in Politics at the university. He was always very kind to me but he teased me too. He called me Silent Sylvie because I barely said two words in his presence, and when I had my hair in plaits he could never pass me without pulling on a pigtail and going Ding-ding.
Carl said he sometimes couldn’t stick his dad.
I said Carl was lucky to still have his dad. That shut him up.
My dad isn’t dead. He just cleared off two years ago. I used to see him every weekend for the first few months, but when his girlfriend had their baby he stopped bothering.
Carl and I had great fun making up two warrior kings in Glassworld, one a jokey buffoon and one an untrustworthy philanderer. They donned heavy metal armour and fought in time to heavy-metal music, sweating inside their visors as they hacked and whacked frantically with their silver swords. They fought all day and half the night without managing to inflict a single wound, and then died within a minute of each other of exhaustion and apoplexy.
Jules gingerly batted the lettuce from one side of the sink to the other. ‘Horrid little sluggery sluggers,’ she said. She paused. ‘Sylvie, you don’t think Carl’s being teased at school, do you?’
I stared at her. ‘Everyone looks up to Carl,’ I said. ‘Everyone was just desperate to be his friend.’
‘Yes, I know they made a big fuss of him at Milstead. But maybe it’s different at the grammar? All those boys … He says he’s got friends but he never really talks about them properly. I’ve tried asking him about it but he just clams up with me. You know, “I’m fine, Mum, just leave it.”’
‘I know,’ I said. He clammed up with me too.
‘Thank God he’s got you for his friend, Sylvie. But I wish he’d make more friends. He just holes up in his room or down in the hut. I wish he’d get out more.’
‘Well, I’ve come to invite him to a party,’ I said.
‘Really! Oh wow, great,’ said Jules, suddenly so happy she threw the soaking lettuce up in the air, showering herself with water drops.
‘I don’t think he’ll go though,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’m going. It’s this girl at school and she’s so grown up and scary – goodness knows what they’ll get up to at her party.’
I wanted Jules to come the heavy mother and forbid Carl and me to go now, but she still looked eager.
‘You and Carl are sensible kids. You won’t do anything too silly. And if it’s at this girl’s house I suppose her parents will be there keeping an eye on things.’
Miranda seemed to come from such an alien world I couldn’t even imagine her having parents.
‘Don’t get too excited, Jules,’ I said. ‘You know Carl isn’t really a party kind of boy.’
‘Go and ask him!’
‘OK, OK!’
I went out of the Johnsons’ kitchen door into their back garden. It was the twin of ours, but Jules had been imaginative with all sorts of colourful plants and weird painted statues and shrubs. Wind chimes tinkled from every tree as I walked down the garden, right to the bottom behind the yew hedge, where the Glass Hut was.
IT LOOKED LIKE an ordinary large garden hut at first glance. It was made of planks of pale wood with a latched door and two small windows. They each had a stained-glass roundel of white-robed angels with gold wings gliding across a ruby glass carpet. I stroked them gently, my finger following the black lead outline, our little ritual ever since Carl bought them with his Christmas money last year.
I knocked at the door, our special knock, Morse code for glass. Carl was supposed to knock right back. I waited. The Glass Hut was silent.
‘Carl?’ I called.
I heard a sigh.
‘Is that you, Carl?’
‘Not just now, Sylvie. Sorry. I’m doing my homework.’
‘I need to talk to you,’ I said, and I opened the door and went inside.
Carl wasn’t doing his homework. He didn’t even have his books out of his school bag. He was lying back on the old velvet sofa, hands behind his head, staring up at the chandelier.
It was a real cut-glass Victorian chandelier, a little one with twelve droplets, though three were broken, and the chandelier itself didn’t actually work. Mick wouldn’t let Carl have the hut properly wired for it, so the only light was from the naked bulb sticking out of the wall. Carl had painted it with rainbow swirls so that it looked slightly more decorative.
There were five shelves running round two of the walls, originally meant to hold flowerpots and seed trays. Carl kept his glass collection here, in glowing colour-co-ordinated rows: little glass animals on the top shelf, then drinking glasses, then vases, then ashtrays and paperweights, and then his precious pieces. The Glass Boy stood in the middle of the special shelf, tranquil, dreamy, his thick hair brushed forward over his forehead in strands of glass. He didn’t wear any clothes but he didn’t look remotely self-conscious. He stood staring at some distant horizon, his arms loosely hanging, his legs braced. Maybe he was watching for something, waiting for someone.
Carl’s Great-aunt Esther had called him her Cupid, but he wasn’t a baby and he didn’t have little wings or even a bow and arrow. Carl had fallen in love with the Glass Boy on a visit to his great-aunt when he was five. She had fallen in love with this serious, angelic little nephew, so different from his harum-scarum brother. At the end of the visit she presented Carl with her ‘Cupid’.
Carl’s parents thought this a bizarre gesture. Even Jules was sure Carl would play with the Glass Boy and smash him into glass splinters. But Carl kept him on a shelf and simply treasured him. When he was six he asked for a glass animal for a birthday present. He started looking for glass vases and ashtrays and ornaments in jumble sales and summer fairs as he got older. His collection grew too big for his small bedroom so one summer he quietly started converting the garden hut.
I helped too, and went on all his glass-hunting expeditions. I couldn’t get properly interested on my own behalf. I liked dangling crystals with their rainbow sparkles, but I couldn’t see why all the other glass stuff meant so much to Carl. Still, I was very happy to be included in his glass world. I knew all about Murano glass and planned for us to go on a special trip to Venice one day – maybe for our honeymoon!
I looked everywhere for a glass girl, but so far hadn’t found one. I invented the Glassworld Chronicles instead. They started off as a fairy story about a boy and a girl cast out into such a wintry world that they froze and turned into glass. We elaborated and expanded until together we’d invented an entire glass world and a cast of hundreds. My glass boy and girl became the King and Queen of Glassworld. They had family, friends and bitter enemies. There were a host of servants, some treasures, some treacherous. They had a menagerie of exotic pets: penguins and polar bears, a pair of hairy mammoths, and a stable of white unicorns with glass horns and hooves.
They were all so real to me that I actually shivered inside the hot little hut, living it all so
vividly. Nowadays I was on tenterhooks with Carl, wondering if he’d play properly. I didn’t know what tenterhooks were, but whenever he made fun of me I felt little stabs in my stomach as if I’d been caught like a fish on a hook.
‘Sylvie, I’m not in the mood,’ said Carl, his eyes closed.
He was stretched out like a marble effigy on a tomb, not moving. I looked at his beautiful face, his long lashes, his slim nose, his soft lips. I wondered what would happen if I subverted the traditional fairy tale and woke Carl with a kiss.
I giggled nervously. Carl opened one eye.
‘What?’ he said. ‘Just run away and play, little girl.’
‘Don’t you little girl me. I’m only two months younger than you. And I don’t want to play. I’m here to pass on a party invitation.’
‘Oh God,’ said Carl, closing his eye again. ‘Please don’t make me go to Lucy’s party.’
‘It’s not Lucy’s party. It’s Miranda Holbein’s party.’
‘Who?’ said Carl. ‘Miranda? I don’t know any Mirandas.’
‘Neither do I, not properly, but everyone knows about her. I told Jake she’d asked us to her party and he was dead impressed, you could tell. I’m sure I’ve told you about her, Carl. She’s just amazing. She’s the girl everyone wants to be but wouldn’t dare. Goodness knows why she’s invited us.’
Carl lay still as a statue but both his eyes were open now.
‘I don’t get this us bit,’ he said.
‘Well, I was going on about you a bit in the girls’ toilets. Miranda and the others thought I was making it up but Patty Price was there and she started on about you too.’
‘So I’m the chief topic of conversation in your girls’ toilets?’ said Carl.
I was scared he might get cross. It was a huge relief when he started chuckling.
‘So there they all are, the fresh young damsels of Milstead High School, each locked in her lavatory cubicle, seated in splendour, calling to each other like demented doves: Carl, Carl, Carl, Carl, Carl, Carl!’
I started giggling. I sat on the edge of the sofa, by his feet.
Kiss Page 2