Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend

by Jenny Colgan

  Hmm. Boarding schools in books aren’t exactly like real boarding schools. I should have known that, shouldn’t I? Instead of lots of fun girls, there were lots of really pretty, quite fierce and frankly intimidating girls.

  At first I was quite interesting - my tragic story attracted a lot of attention. As this flurry of interest died down, however, and it became apparent that I didn’t yet have an expense account at Harvey Nics, I was left more and more on my own. Being a quiet girl had never mattered before as my parents were always there to listen to me, and I never felt lonely or out of place.

  Here, however, I was as lonely and awkward as could be. Until the day I caught Carena Sutherland giving her hamster a pedicure. Did you know hamsters are allergic to nail polish? Me neither. I was just looking for a cupboard to hide in while I ate my lunch by myself. I had absolutely nothing to contribute to the other girl’s conversations about diets, boys on television shows I hadn’t seen, or music I hadn’t listened to. If I’d been less bruised and awkward I’d perhaps have found it easier to meet people I clicked with. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t.

  ‘Shit!’ Carena was saying, looking at the clearly dead animal lying on its side.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked timidly.

  ‘It’s a very, very small orang-utan, what does it look like?’ she scoffed, then turned towards me. I shrank backwards. Carena was by far the prettiest, most popular and most frightening girl in our class. Her parents worked away all the time and she said her nanny was going to let her go to nightclubs when she was thirteen. We kind of believed her.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone about this, right?’ she said in a threatening voice. So I didn’t, and I could see her eyeing me approvingly when Mr Carstairs spent twenty minutes grilling us all. I kept my mouth shut.

  Two months later, she spoke to me again. My dad had just bought himself a Lamborghini. I have no idea what was going through his head. He must have just woken up one day and thought, Well, I’ve lost the love of my life - perhaps a big shiny red car will do. Or someone at work recommended it. Certainly he let Brad, his assistant at the time, go and pick it up for him and, on a whim, sent him to pick me up too.

  The car made an incredibly loud roar coming up the street. It was bright red and looked absurdly flashy. All the girls came to look at it and then out stepped Brad. He was tall, handsome, American, gay and extremely sweet to me. Dressed in a stripy shirt, hair perfectly gelled back and sporting big white teeth, he looked like the epitome of our twelve-year-old pin-ups.

  ‘Hey, pretty lady,’ he said. ‘Want to come for a ride?’

  In fact, he just dropped me at my dad’s office and I waited an hour for my dad to get out of his meeting, then Daddy and I drove up the King’s Road in near silence. Finally, at the top, Daddy turned to me.

  ‘This is stupid, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Well . . .’ I said.

  ‘I thought buying this car would make me feel better.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘She’d have hated it, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘It’s really, really tacky, Dad.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I should have guessed when Brad liked it so much. Want to go and eat pizza?’

  ‘OK.’

  I don’t remember ever seeing that car again. It was the first time I realised that my family was quite rich.

  And the next day, Carena casually strode past me at break time, pretended to look surprised to see me, then said, ‘Oh, Sophie, do you want to go to my house for lunch?’

  Just like that. It was comparable, later, to the first time I was ever asked out by a boy (Marcus. Father farmed half of Shropshire. More comfortable talking to animals than girls. His kisses were like being licked by a large horse).

  And from then on, we were friends, even when she found out Brad wasn’t actually my extremely glamorous and somewhat paedophiliac boyfriend, but an employee of my dad’s. She enjoyed my obvious admiration and I couldn’t help it - she was dazzling. So sure of herself. My world was confusing and I wasn’t sure of the rules, but Carena seemed to waltz through on an unstoppable cloud of self-belief that she would get everything she wanted and everything would stop for her. And it usually did.

  We all smoked our first fags at Carena’s; cadged our first vodka. Her other best friend was Philly, a scholarship girl, and Philly and I vied to be Carena’s closest lieutenants. It was great not having to worry about what I was doing, because Carena always did. I started to adopt her ‘don’t care’ attitude, her slightly supercilious look at the world. Perhaps I got a little mouthier, a little harder. I like to think I was too timid to have tipped over the edge into really bad behaviour - but then Gail happened.

  One Saturday night, Carena was staying with me - I was thirteen - and Daddy came home from a business trip to Prague. He’d been doing a lot of flying recently. He came in late, and I could hear from upstairs that he had someone with him. They were laughing. My dad used to laugh all the time. Lately, not so much.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Carena, putting on lipgloss in the large gilt mirror that hung next to the staircase and making a sexy face. We were making sexy faces quite a lot at the moment. They were probably not sexy so much as freakish, and scared a lot of our teachers.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. My dad rarely brought anyone home except for his lawyer, Uncle Leonard (I didn’t call him uncle any more, not since Carena had heard me and made fun of me).

  The large door swung open.

  ‘Sophia? Darling?’ My dad’s voice floated up the stairs. ‘Are you home?’

  I made a humphy noise of assent which I’d noticed Carena doing a lot recently.

  Daddy came into the hall. He looked tired and he was putting on weight. But he had on a broad smile, and his eyes had crinkled up at the corners.

  ‘Sophie, I’d like you to meet -’ and almost with a flourish, he announced - ‘Gail.’

  Gail stepped forward with an anxious smile on her face. She was pretty and blonde, with an upturned nose and cute rabbity smile that at the moment looked extremely nervous.

  ‘Sophie!’ she said, her voice slightly too bright. ‘I recognise you from your photos!’

  I was so taken aback I could barely speak. It was totally obvious what was going on. He’d gone and got a girlfriend without telling me! I was genuinely knocked sideways. Carena made an gasping noise. I stared at her. My father was still looking up at me hopefully. On one side was Carena. Downstairs was my dad. And standing right in front of me was the biggest affront I could imagine. And she had lipstick on her teeth.

  ‘Hello . . . Gail,’ I said simply, without smiling or getting up. Gail’s smile faltered immediately. And suddenly, this made me incredibly cross; what was she expecting, that I run down the stairs and give her a huge hug and beg her to be my new mummy?

  My dad took Gail’s elbow.

  ‘Gross!’ said Carena. I glanced at her, completely in shock. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’

  For a moment I was torn. Then I turned and followed her.

  ‘Who was that?’ said Carina loudly as we reached my bedroom. The worst thing was having to admit that I didn’t even know.

  My dad called me in later that evening, after Gail had gone home.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said. ‘It was spur of the moment. We were passing, and I thought . . .’

  I stared at him. Thought what? That I’d like to meet . . . well, it had just never occurred to me that dad would find someone else. It had been only two years. He had me!

  Daddy put out his arms. ‘She’s a lovely girl, Sophia. You want me to be happy, don’t you?’

  Of course I did, and I was too scared to tell him how I felt in case I upset him. But inside I was as furious and mixed up and jealous as I’d ever been in my entire life. Someone had taken my mum, but no one was having my dad!

  Soon, my life was a weekly soap opera for my schoolmates as Gail tried her best to be friends with me. The ruder I was to Gail, the more popular I got at sch
ool. EastEnders had nothing on me.

  She did try, she really did. There were ‘family’ outings, treats and special trips. I sulked through them all like only a thirteen-year-old girl can. If they had made passive-aggressive stropping about an Olympic sport, I’d have been a shoo-in, with a good shot at heavy sighing, door-banging and the sour-faced triple jump.

  So, of course, the inevitable happened.

  It was one Friday afternoon, I’d gone home after school to pick up some clothes and money en route to spending the weekend at Carena’s. I loved my dad’s study. It always smelled differently to the rest of the house - my mother had never spent any time in there, so it didn’t have the faint scent of her perfume (Miss Dior) which permeated the rest of the house and which I still can’t smell without feeling that someone’s just given me a swift punch to the back of the neck.

  ‘Sweetheart, could you come in and have a word?’ Dad said. I looked round, hoping he hadn’t had my latest report. My huge excuse for bad marks was starting to look less impressive this far down the line.

  He looked nervous. Well, good. Nervous was better than annoyed with me.

  ‘Sophia . . .’ He looked at his hands. ‘Look, I was thinking . . . I was thinking of asking Gail to marry me.’

  Oh God. All my worst nightmares were coming true. I didn’t even have the presence of mind to strop out, make a fuss or yell. I stood there, frozen, as my eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Sophia, it’s OK!’ He reached out his arms as if to give me a cuddle, but I was stuck to the spot. Then he sighed.

  ‘This isn’t about your inheritance, is it?’ he said gently. ‘You know I’ll always look after you.’

  That thought had never even crossed my mind. Everyone at school had money. The topic just never came up.

  I was petrified that I would lose my father. Oh, even for a thirteen-year-old, I was self-obsessed. I just stood in that study and let the tears drip down my face, so he could see them.

  And now, here I am on a beach, so much later, thinking, am I happy?

  Anyway, let me just say that I definitely, definitely, definitely got my comeuppance. Let me tell you exactly what happened.

  Part Two

  Then

  Chapter Three

  We were at Toa, a trendy new restaurant in London. Carena, Philly and me cared a lot about what was hot. Philly had got a job doing PR for bars and restaurants, which was great because she got us into every party and restaurant going. We were all still friends, amazingly. Carena’s air of casual superiority had meant she was still exciting to be with, and since my dad had got married he’d given me loads more freedom - easier than trying to get me to sit down and be polite to Gail.

  Carena was still really gorgeous - incredibly thin, long legs and long blonde hair. She had a pout to rival Angelina Jolie’s, and she had plucked her eyebrows into really high glossy arches which made her look surprised all the time. She said men liked a look of surprise because it’s the expression they want you to have when they strip for the first time, like you’re saying, ‘Oh my God, I’ve never seen such a penis before! What a huge and amazing surprise!’ This was quite useful to know, but I wasn’t sure I could manage it myself.

  Philly kept a rigid eye on her figure by virtue of wearing two pairs of Spanx pants every single day, regardless of what was on the agenda. I swear she swam in them. She also talked a lot about having naturally straight hair, and how easy it was to look after, but I knew for a fact she went to the hairdressers every two days and her biggest phobia of all time was being caught in an unexpected rain shower.

  Lunch always followed the same pattern: we would all look at whatever trendy new menu Philly was promoting that week and umm and ahh at it. Then we’d eye each other up and say, ‘I think I’m going to have the foie gras hamburger,’ and we’d nod knowledgeably and say, ‘Yah, me too.’ ‘With chips,’ someone would add, and we’d all nod vigorously and say, ‘Yah, definitely, definitely chips.’ Then the waiter would come round and at the last minute we’d say, ‘Do you know what, I’ve suddenly changed my mind. I think I’ll just have a green salad.’

  The idea, I think, was to trick someone into getting the hamburger and chips, but we’d all known each other so long it never worked (except on Philly sometimes) so I’m not sure why we still bothered. We all pretended we might order pudding too. The waiters never even looked surprised; sometimes they didn’t even carry a pencil to the table. D’uh.

  Anyway, I had other things on my mind, and almost could-n’t contain myself. Carena glanced at me.

  ‘So,’ she drawled, after glancing at the bread basket as if it was her arch-nemesis. ‘How’s your man?’

  ‘Amazing!’ I said. It was true. Ever since I’d met Rufus, I just couldn’t play it cool. ‘You know we were talking about going skiing, and maybe me meeting his grandmother, who has a seriously grand house, and then maybe a hunt ball—’

  ‘OK, calm down,’ said Carena with a smile, glancing at Philly. ‘God, we thought you were going to be single for ever.’

  So had I, I thought, but didn’t say. I’d met Rufus at a party. Actually, it was a bit embarrassing, he’d been drunk and come up to me at the bar. I’d clocked him out of the corner of my eye and was wondering about him when he leant over and said, ‘Do you mind terribly if I slap you on the arse?’

  ‘Yes!’ I’d said. ‘I’d mind that a lot.’

  ‘Shame,’ he said. ‘I’d really, really like to do that.’

  ‘Tough luck,’ I said, making sure I kept my bum well away from him. ‘What about slapping your own arse?’

  His face briefly brightened. He really was terribly drunk, but I still couldn’t help noticing how handsome he was - his dark brown hair flopped over his long eyelashes and I could glimpse a flash of very white teeth.

  ‘How about you slap my arse first then.’

  ‘No! Go away.’

  ‘Oh, don’t say that, pretty lady! I’m Rufus.’

  ‘Go away, Rufus.’

  ‘It’s because I’m drunk, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Well, that and the arse-slapping thing.’

  He turned to the barman. ‘Pint of black coffee, please.’

  And he winked at me. I gave him my number, but was completely surprised when he called three days later.

  ‘I can’t believe you even remembered me after all that booze,’ I said.

  ‘An arse like yours? Are you kidding?’

  And that was my Rufus. My heart jumped every time I thought of him. He was a trust-fund baby, had a little green MG that I loved and we flitted about London having a whale of a time. He did indeed like spanking, but was so funny and cute and adorable that I forgave him and was really coming round to the idea that he might - just - be the one.

  A couple of weeks ago we’d been sitting on his roof - it was a little precarious, but the view was gorgeous and it was a beautiful evening. We’d been drinking champagne and looking out across the park as the sun went down. It was perfect. I’d laid my head on his shoulder and he’d put his arm around me.

  ‘Do you ever want more, Sophie?’ he’d said.

  ‘More than what?’

  ‘More than just living the high life?’

  I looked at him. ‘But I thought you always said that fun was the thing to have?’

  He took a slug from the champagne bottle. ‘Oh, I’m sure you’re right,’ he said. ‘I just feel sometimes our lives are so pointless. You take great photos, when you can be bothered - don’t you want to do more of that?’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe I could. Well, what do you want to do?’ I’d teased lightly. ‘Go to medical school? Dig wells in Africa? Cure cancer?’

  ‘I did bid at that charity auction the other week,’ he mused. Then he seemed to dismiss this idea. ‘We are having fun, aren’t we? Life shouldn’t be taken too seriously.’

  He’d kissed me lightly on the hair as we finished the champagne, and I felt it was the most romantic evening of my life. We could share things . . . our drea
ms and fears; our hopes. I know Daddy worried I dated playboys, but Rufus really was different.

  ‘You two are getting serious,’ Philly said.

  Normally I would have denied this totally, but it had been four months, and I couldn’t deny I was really pleased with the way things were going.

  ‘Well . . .’ I said.

  ‘You know, do you think he might pop the question?’

  Philly was meant to be engaged to some banker and was completely obsessed with weddings even though he worked such crazy hours she never actually saw him. Carena was saving herself, she said, and to be sure, it wasn’t for want of offers. But they had to be from the right type. I think she was holding out for a large house in the country.