‘Hi, Jake,’ I said. ‘I haven’t got you up, have I? It’s two o’clock!’
‘Heavy night last night,’ he said, scratching his head and yawning. ‘We were rehearsing, working on my new number.’
Jake’s part of this silly schoolboy band, playing the lead guitar. He talks like he’s part of a mega-band playing to millions.
‘Did it go well?’ I said politely, as if I cared.
‘Yeah, it did actually.’ He paused, playing air-guitar. ‘But we need to try it out on an audience. You should come, actually, Sylvie. Bring some friends.’
‘Like … Miranda?’ I said, guessing his game.
‘Yeah, whoever,’ he said.
‘Well, maybe,’ I said. ‘Look, Jake, is your mum in?’
‘Mum? No, I think she’s gone up to town to see some art exhibition. Dad too. And Boy Wonder’s watching football.’
‘I know. Oh. I was rather hoping to beg a lift to Miranda’s from your mum.’
‘I’d give you a lift. If I could drive. You can hitch a lift on the handlebars of my bike if you like.’
‘Oh, ha ha.’
‘I’m serious. You’re only a little titch.’
I winced at the nickname.
‘I suppose I’ll have to walk it,’ I said, and waved goodbye.
It was a very long walk – all the way across town – to Miranda’s house. I’d put on my boots with heels. I realized this was a serious mistake by the time I’d got to the end of the road but I didn’t want to waste any more time going home and changing. I staggered on, and then ran for a bus. Big mistake. I’d come out without any money whatsoever so I had to get off again and carry on walking. I thought I’d take a short cut down the back streets but I got a bit lost. It was about half past three when I eventually rang the doorbell of the white house.
No one answered. I wondered if Miranda had gone off somewhere without me. I rang the bell again and again and then turned and started limping dejectedly back to the gate.
I heard the door open behind me.
‘Dear God, you took your time,’ said Miranda. She was wearing black but seemed oddly speckled with white.
‘Fairy dust?’ I said, touching it.
‘Hey, you’re making it worse,’ said Miranda irritably, slapping my hand away. ‘What took you so long?’
‘I’m sorry. I got a bit lost. I hadn’t realized it was so far,’ I started, but she wasn’t interested.
‘Come in, then,’ she said. ‘We’re in the kitchen. We’re cooking. You have a lot of catching up to do.’
She’d called Alice when I’d failed to materialize within ten minutes. Miranda had made Alice a smoothie in her mum’s special blender, and that had suddenly given them the idea of making cakes. They’d never made cakes before but that didn’t deter them. They had flour and eggs and sugar and butter and jam spread all over the long kitchen table, with bowls and cups and spoons scattered all around.
Alice was listlessly beating a gloopy mixture in a bowl, her hair tied up in a topknot. Her face was as pale as the flour. She smiled at me wanly. It seemed obvious that she wished she had Miranda all to herself. They carried on making their cakes, chatting together, occasionally asking me to pass them more flour or milk as if I was their little scullery maid. I had half a mind to walk straight out, all the way home again.
Miranda flicked a little flour at me. ‘Don’t look sulky, Sylvie. I expect you’ve still got time to make a cake yourself if you get a mad move on. Although you seem in total sloth mode today.’
‘I practically ran here, Miranda,’ I said, flicking her back.
‘Well, no one but a madman would walk all that way. Why didn’t you get a lift?’ said Miranda, flicking again.
‘I tried, but my mum’s out and so is Carl’s. Look, stop it, I don’t want to get covered in flour.’
‘Why on earth didn’t you get a cab?’
I very nearly grabbed the big bag of flour and tipped it right over her head. ‘Because I don’t have any money as I’m not a spoiled little rich girl like you!’
‘Look, you two, don’t get into a fight, for God’s sake,’ said Alice. ‘And stop messing around with that flour. I need it. Look, my eggs have gone all funny. Do you think they’ve curdled?’
‘They’re coming out in sympathy with Sylvie,’ said Miranda. She suddenly put her floury arms round me and gave me a big hug. ‘Hey, sorry sorry sorry sorry! OK? Now, grab a bowl and get cracking, Sylvie. Do you know how to bake a cake?’
‘Of course,’ I said, though I’d only ever made little Barbie fairy cakes out of a packet mix. But Carl was a brilliant cook. He’d started off when we were seven with a Winnie-the-Pooh recipe book, making a really good quick-mix birthday cake. Then he fell in love with Nigella and her chocolate cake, and then he got attached to Jane Asher and experimented with one of her cakes whenever any of us had a birthday. He wouldn’t let me help, rapping my fingers with his wooden spoon, but I always licked out the bowl, and if I begged hard enough he let me play around with the icing bag when he was decorating.
I rolled up my sleeves and started measuring and mixing. By the time Miranda and Alice had finished faffing around with too many eggs and too much flour and way too much milk so you could drink their cake mix I’d caught them up. Miranda found three different cake tins. I bagged the best sponge tin quickly, badly wanting my cake to come out well.
‘Does your mum make lots of cakes then?’ I said, impressed with the assortment of tins.
‘My mum?’ said Miranda, flipping back her long hair, making a weird white streak at the front. ‘You have to be joking. My ma’s so afraid of putting on weight she rarely enters the kitchen. If she smelled our cooking cake fumes she’d need to scrub out her nostrils pronto.’
I thought Miranda was joking but when I went off in search of a loo I burst in on an extraordinary stick-thin woman tweezering her eyebrows in the Venetian glass mirror. She raised one of these beautifully arched eyebrows at me.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ I stammered.
Her reflection smiled at me. ‘It’s OK, sweetheart. So who are you then?’
She was speaking slowly and kindly to me, like I was six.
‘I’m Sylvie, Miranda’s friend,’ I said.
‘Oh. Of course,’ she said. Then she sniffed delicately. ‘What’s the smell, Sylvie?’
‘We’ve been making cakes. I hope that’s all right. We’ll clear up all the mess,’ I said anxiously.
‘That’s fine, darling. Making cakes! How lovely,’ she said, as if it was anything but. She looked as if she lived on rocket leaves and Evian. She was beautiful in a weird otherworldly emaciated elfin way. She had Miranda’s dark eyes and tilted nose and thick glossy hair but her face was all cheekbones and pointy chin. Her skimpy designer T-shirt and skinny jeans hung loosely on her.
I wondered what it would be like to have such a scarily glamorous mother. I thought fondly of my mum with her home-dyed hair and her round shiny face. She wasn’t fat, but she had to yank hard at her Tesco jeans to get them to zip up over her tummy.
‘I’ve just met your mum,’ I said to Miranda when I got back to the kitchen.
Miranda paused, scraping the mixing bowl. ‘Old Anorexic Annie?’ she said.
‘She is ever so thin. Is she, like, on a permanent diet?’ I asked.
‘Oh yeah. Plus the personal trainer at six in the morning, and colonic irrigation once a week. She pays money to have some dimwit shove a hosepipe up her, imagine!’
We imagined it all too vividly and groaned and giggled.
‘Still, she does look wonderful,’ said Alice. ‘I’d give anything to have a figure like hers.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ said Miranda. ‘I think she’s off her head. It’s not even like she’s a model any more so she hasn’t got her job as an excuse.’
‘She was a real fashion model?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. From when she was fourteen. Our age. She’s got huge glossy photos of herself all over her dressing room. How sad i
s that? I think she looks gross in the extreme.’
‘Miranda!’ said Alice.
‘It’s OK. She says I look gross. Do you know what she said to me the other day? I’d called out for a takeaway pizza after supper and she caught me stuffing my face. So she gives me this mournful lecture, right, and she finishes up, “You could be such a lovely-looking girl if you’d only watch what you eat, Miranda. If you’d only lose weight you could be a model!’’ Like I’d want to be a brainless clotheshorse!’
‘What do you want to be, Miranda?’ I asked, smearing my finger round and round my bowl.
‘I rather fancy being a journalist,’ said Miranda. ‘I can write, I’m nosy, I’m pushy, I’m clever at getting people to do stuff. Yeah, I’ll be a great journalist.’
‘I’d much sooner be a model,’ said Alice, striking a pose. ‘Or an actress or maybe a singer. Hey, Miranda, remember way back in the juniors when we sang that Cheeky Girls number and shocked all the teachers?’
‘That’s my speciality, shocking teachers,’ said Miranda. ‘I’ve been slacking recently at Milstead. OK, Sylvie, you can help me out. Shall we develop a Cheeky Girls routine?’
‘You’re too much of a Cheeky Girl already,’ I said, putting down my bowl. ‘Why do cakes taste better raw than cooked? I wish I’d left more in the bowl.’
‘I think your cake is going to be the best,’ said Miranda. ‘You really know what you’re doing, don’t you? Hey, do you want to be a cook – like, celebrity chef, own your own restaurant?’
‘No, I want to be a writer. With Carl,’ I said.
‘Oh yeah. You’ve written this famous book together,’ said Miranda.
‘Shut up,’ I said. I didn’t want her to talk about it in front of Alice.
‘Don’t tell me to shut up, Titchy-Witchy,’ said Miranda, but she changed the subject. ‘Come on, cakes, I’m hungry,’ she said, tapping at the oven door. ‘Shall I have a look to see if they’re done?’
‘No, they’ve only been in ten minutes tops. They won’t rise if you let a draught in,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to sort out how we’re going to decorate them.’ I peered inside cupboards and drawers. ‘Oh great, your mum’s got an icing bag! So why has she got all this baking stuff if she doesn’t like cookery herself?’
‘She tries to get the au pairs to cook. And for a year we actually had a proper cook-housekeeper. I think the cake stuff started then. She made all sorts – cheesecakes, banana bread, carrot cake, oh yummy yummy – but then Annie went on this mad macrobiotic diet and drove the cook daft with what she could and couldn’t eat so she left and that was the end of my cake-fest.’
‘You’ll have to come round to our house. We’ve got this sweet Polish au pair now and she makes this fantastic apple-sauce cake – you’d love it,’ said Alice.
It was so weird hearing them chatting away, like Victorian women comparing servants.
‘Did you ever have au pairs, Sylvie?’ Alice asked.
‘Nope.’
‘But your mum works, doesn’t she? Who looked after you when you were little?’
‘I went to a childminder and for a bit my mum was like a childminder – she looked after these twins, and she was their cleaning lady too.’
I wasn’t being entirely truthful. Mum just scrubbed up after us if we made a mess with our dough and finger paints but I wanted to make a point.
Alice looked embarrassed, her pale face flushing, but Miranda burst out laughing.
‘What’s so funny?’ I said furiously.
‘You are, Sylvie, scoring points left, right and centre and putting us poor little rich girls in our places. OK, you win, you win. And you haven’t even started on your great-great-granny in the matchstick factory getting phossy jaw and your great-great-granddad being shoved up chimneys when he was six months old—’
‘Oh shut up,’ I said, giving her a shove, but I burst out laughing too.
My cake was by far the best, pale gold and light and fluffy, risen to the top of the tin. Alice’s was a pale soggy sad affair and Miranda’s was squashed down at the very bottom of her tin.
‘Someone’s sat on it!’ said Miranda. ‘Oh, just look at yours, Sylvie! How come yours is so perfect? Ah, you’re going to tell us your mum is a cook as well as a cleaning lady?’
‘Of course,’ I said, gently easing my perfect sponge onto a wire rack. ‘No, actually, it’s Carl. I’ve watched him cook.’
‘You’re so showing off today,’ said Miranda. ‘You and Carl! It’s so unfair, it’s my turn with him now. Can’t we do a swapsie when we go to Kew? You have Paul the Ball. I’m tired of him trying to score goals with me.’
‘No thanks. I don’t really like him.’ I paused. ‘What do you think Carl sees in him? He’s so … basic.’
Miranda and Alice exchanged quick glances.
‘What?’ I said.
‘All boys are basic,’ said Miranda quickly. She prodded her flat cake. ‘Hey, I think I’m going to call this cake a biscuit, then it won’t be so much of a failure. Shall I try to squeeze chocolaty bits into it so it can be a giant chocolate-chip cookie?’
‘You could always ice it,’ I said, finding a full packet of icing sugar in the cupboard. ‘I’ll make enough icing for all of us.’
‘Cool,’ said Alice. ‘And have you got any decorations, Miranda, like those little silver balls?’
‘Maybe. Let’s have a peer,’ said Miranda. ‘We could use little sweets instead, couldn’t we?’
Alice couldn’t find silver balls, so she used little pink sugar flowers instead, stuck in a pattern around the edges of her white iced cake. Miranda’s cake/biscuit was thickly iced and then piled high with Smarties, Liquorice Allsorts and Jelly Babies.
I decided to resist sweet decoration. I iced my sponge as smoothly as I could, put a drop of blue colouring in the remains of the icing, poured it into the icing bag and then piped Happy Birthday Carl as carefully as I could.
‘Oh wow, why can’t I do that?’ said Miranda. ‘Are you going to give it to him next Friday? Then we could maybe say it’s from me too. It’s all my ingredients, after all.’
‘It might be stale by then,’ I said quickly. ‘No, I’ll give it to him tomorrow.’
MUM WAS UP terribly early on Sunday morning. She had a bath and washed her hair and then came and patted me awake.
‘Help, Sylvie. My hair’s sticking up all over. It won’t go right. Please be an angel and wake up and style it for me.’
‘Mum, you’re going swimming. Your hair will get soaked in the baths. It won’t matter what it looks like now,’ I said, diving down under the covers.
‘Gerry will see it before I go in the pool,’ said Mum. ‘Come on, Syl, please do it. And look, does this skirt look OK?’ Mum tugged at the frills on her gypsy skirt anxiously. ‘I don’t look too girly, do I?’
‘No, no, you look fine,’ I said, sitting up. ‘Well, maybe a bit dressed up to go swimming.’
‘Dressed up, like way over the top?’ said Mum. ‘Oh God. Maybe I look like I’m about to … what do gypsies dance? The Fandango?’ She raised her arms and stamped her foot and then groaned when she caught sight of herself in the big mirror. ‘What should I wear then, Sylvie?’
‘Casual clothes.’
‘I haven’t got any casual clothes. I’ve got fancy clothes and office clothes and very scruffy cleaning-the-house clothes. I can’t wear them – Gerry will take one look and run a mile.’
‘I didn’t think he was up to running.’
‘Stop that, Sylvie!’
‘No. Sorry. I didn’t mean … It’s just so weird that you’re, like, going on a date.’
‘If it feels weird for you just think what it’s like for me. It is mad, isn’t it? Maybe I should phone him up and call the whole thing off.’
‘No, no, you’re going, Mum, and you’ll have a lovely time and this Gerry will be lovely too and if you come here I’ll make your hair look lovely as well. Which way do you want me to style it?’ I said, kneeling up on my bed and tu
cking it behind her ears, trying it this way and that.
‘Any way.’ But then she saw me plaiting a lock and she twitched her head away. ‘Any way except little plaits! I don’t want to look like a middle-aged schoolgirl.’
‘You’re not middle-aged anything yet, Mum. You’re young.’
‘I’ve got middle-age spread already,’ said Mum, patting her tummy ruefully.
I thought of Miranda’s stick-thin mother. ‘You’re just right,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to look too thin. Hey, Mum, why don’t you wear your jeans and that black sweater?’
‘It’s kind of our black sweater now. And my jeans are all frayed at the bottoms.’
‘That’s a totally cool look.’
‘Maybe on thirteen-year-olds. Don’t forget we’re maybe having lunch at the posh club.’
‘OK, OK, stick with the gypsy skirt. Tell you what, get the tongs and I’ll make your hair all wavy and then we’ll stick a rose behind one ear!’
We didn’t go as far as the rose but I did wave Mum’s hair for her so that she could make a magnificent first impression – even if she doused the curls five minutes later.
She set off, smiling bravely, tossing her curls and swishing her skirt, but when she turned to wave at the gate she pulled a funny face of terror, like Munch’s Scream.
‘It’s OK, Mum, you’ll have a great time,’ I said, giving her a thumbs-up sign.
I watched her head bobbing away above the hedge. I so hoped it would go well for her, though I wasn’t at all sure about this Gerry.
I wondered what my father would think if he knew Mum was dating again.
I used to hope he’d come back – not as my real dad, who lied and cheated and couldn’t be bothered with us half the time. I wanted him transformed into a new loving, caring dad who’d make a big fuss of Mum and come home on time and laugh and joke and take us out. I wanted a dad who’d treat me like I was really special. I’d heard Lucy’s dad call her his Fairy Princess. He looked at lumpy old Lucy as if she really had golden locks and gauzy wings and a sparkly crown. I’d wanted to cry then, almost wishing I could trade places with Lucy.
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