Her daughter was one of the kids waving.
We were sitting in assembly one Friday morning when our headmaster made an announcement.
‘It’s come to my attention that some girls have been filming some incredibly offensive things and posting them on to the internet,’ he said. ‘I’ve been told by one member of staff that it’s borderline pornographic.’
Everyone began whispering, wondering who he could be talking about. You see, we weren’t the only girls filming videos and uploading them. Dave the Woman’s internet success had encouraged other girls in our school to follow suit, and while their videos may not have been as deep and artistic it was still cool that our success was being used as inspiration.
It couldn’t have been us – could it? I mean … pornographic? What was he on about? Was Dave pretending to wank off a tube of chocolate ‘pornographic’?
‘We did film that lady in the nude,’ Dave whispered next to me. Oh yes – the life-drawing model, who we’d filmed in the style of a David Attenborough documentary through the window of the art block.
‘So I’m giving these girls the chance to bring themselves forward by the end of today,’ the headmaster continued. ‘And if they don’t, there will be severe consequences.’
No one was going to hand themselves in if their videos hadn’t been watched, were they? But that didn’t mean we weren’t sick with worry that it was us. We tried deleting the videos that break time, but YouTube had been banned that morning on the school’s network (how convenient). Lauren the Goth, another close friend, rang her boyfriend to log on to our YouTube account and take it down.
We must’ve got away with it. Phew!
As if.
We’d just finished another mundane assembly on Monday morning when Dave, the videographer and I were tapped on the shoulder by the deputy head.
‘You three – come with me. Now,’ she said in a very menacing voice.
So I guess it was our videos then. She led us to the headmaster’s office, which was occupied by a police officer. I wasn’t an idiot – I knew the policeman was there as a scare tactic, and the whole thing felt like it had been massively blown out of proportion.
‘Sir, I don’t really get what the problem is,’ I said.
‘The problem? THE PROBLEM?!’ he yelled. ‘You are CHILDREN who uploaded videos of yourselves to the internet doing OBSCENE things!!!’
‘Well … yes, but they weren’t “obscene”,’ I said, trying to reason with him, as Dave and the videographer sat there quietly.
‘I’ve heard they’re pornographic!’
‘I can tell you they weren’t,’ I said, beginning to get offended. After all, this was my directorial debut he was slagging off. ‘I know we filmed a naked lady, which was out of order, but we can show you them if you want …’
‘I’ve been told they’re not appropriate for me to see!’ he yelled. ‘Do you think I want to be arrested?!’
As this was unfolding, PC Plod was taking notes in his notebook. Jesus Christ. You would’ve thought we’d filmed a murder.
‘You hacked the school’s network in order to upload it!’ the headmaster kept yelling, which was admittedly kind of true. I was quite good at computer stuff, even if I did say so myself. ‘Why would you even think making these videos was a good idea?!’
‘It’s had loads of hits,’ I said.
The headmaster sighed and told Dave and the videographer they could leave. ‘You,’ he said, pointing his finger at me, ‘can stay here.’ Once they had left, he carried on. ‘I blame you in all of this.’
I couldn’t help but feel he was being incredibly unfair. The videos weren’t all my fault. He always seemed to pick on me, like the time a group of us were yelling loudly during Christmas hymns and he told me off, not everyone else, or when a group of us decided to go trick-or-treating in the local village and scared some old lady.
He reeled all these stories off, as though he’d saved them up for an opportune moment. There was the time I’d convinced a friend to go to the local village pub with me one wintry Thursday evening, and when we opened the front door we came face-to-face with a table full of teachers. We were fourteen and dressed in school hoodies, so I don’t know how we ever thought we’d get served, but there you go. The teachers were as shocked as we were, and we stared at each other for what felt like five minutes, before I slowly shut the door in their faces. By the time we ran back to school our housemistress was trying to de-ice her car in an attempt to rescue us. Can you imagine how much trouble she’d be in for not paying attention to two schoolgirls who were meant to be in her care?! Don’t worry, she told us enough times in the half-hour she spent yelling at us afterwards.
Oh, and then there was the time me and a couple of friends broke into a dormitory at the nearby boys’ boarding school one weekend and tried on one guy’s clothes before being caught by a teacher. We’d lied and said we were his cousins, yet somehow it got relayed back to my housemistress, and we were put in detention again. Or the time we went down to the garage one evening and got into a fight with some local kids, and the caretaker drove through the field in a Range Rover to save us.
To be fair, there was a lot of instances. Perhaps I was starting to show a pattern of bad behaviour.
Once I’d been dismissed from his office, I joined Dave and the videographer in my housemistress’s office where, would you believe, we had to write ‘police statements’ about the videos in total silence. Then the videographer turned to the housemistress.
‘Umm … in one of the videos, Dave pretended to … to …’
‘To what?’
‘You know,’ she said.
‘No, I don’t know.’
‘Umm … you know …’ She started to do hand movements. ‘Masturbate.’
Dave’s head popped up from across the office.
‘I just put “wank”,’ Dave said matter-of-factly.
Well, when my headmaster read ‘Dave pretended to wank’ in front of the police officer, he went mental again. My mum got called into the staffroom, and he made some arsey comment about how I was ‘lucky’ to be at such a prestigious school, and if I wanted to stay I had to stop misbehaving. I secretly hoped something I did would get me expelled so that I could finally leave.
6
Boys, Body Hair and Bulimia
Back when my big bushy eyebrows were considered the most unattractive quality in the world (oh, how times change), I one day decided to go to Boots and buy myself some hair-lightening cream – you know, the white burning cream women use to bleach their moustaches. I’d come up with an ingenious plan to bleach the in-between monobrow bit, so that it would save me time plucking.
I was sick of having to pluck the hairs from between my eyebrows like some sort of hairy monkey. None of the other girls in my class seemed to have to pluck theirs – their eyebrows were thin and perfectly shaped. Besides, what boy would fancy someone with caterpillars on their face? Women were expected to be smooth and hairless, weren’t they?
I’d had comments from girls and boys about how bad my eyebrows were. One boy told me at a summer fete that he’d probably fancy me if they weren’t so big, and I was mortified. Girls in my class would offer to pluck my eyebrows for me as though they were doing me a favour. Hell, even Dave the Woman’s mum asked me if she could pluck them one weekend. No wonder I was paranoid! When I’d give in and become their test guinea pig, anxiously sitting on the edge of my bed clutching a mirror, they’d pluck them so thin that I’d always end up looking surprised, and not in a good way. Even though thin eyebrows didn’t suit me in the slightest, I was pretty sure that by looking like other girls I was going to look as nice as they did, too. (I didn’t.)
I truly took to heart what other people thought about me – especially boys. I thought their views on how my body looked were more important that my own. But the problem with boys nowadays is that they grow up seeing totally unrealistic images of women, and therefore assume girls are perfectly hairless and smooth, a bit l
ike those weird-looking Sphynx cats, or Phil Mitchell. The idea that women may have, God forbid, body hair comes as a real shock to some boys – and, sometimes, even to some girls. That’s because they listen to what boys have to say about their bodies, feeling like some kind of monster because their pubes don’t grow out like a perfectly rectangular landing strip, or because they have (shock horror!) hair on their underarms.
I wish I could shake teenage Charli and say: ‘You are not a Sphynx cat. You are not Phil Mitchell. Just like you have eyebrows, you also have pubes, and the reason you have hair in those places is because you’re human. Men aren’t pressured to wax or tweeze or to get rid of their body hair, even when they resemble a human rug, so why the hell should you?’
Anyway, back to eyebrows. I probably don’t need to tell you that putting any form of bleach near your eyes is a stupid idea, but I was stupid, and a bit lazy, and I certainly didn’t like the instructions telling me what to do.
‘You all right in there?’ my nan yelled, knocking on the bathroom door.
‘YES! Don’t come in!’
Using the miniature spoon, I smothered the bleach on to the monobrow bit, trying desperately hard not to breathe in the smell, which was overwhelmingly acidic. But because the bathroom light was so unflattering and dim, I accidentally got it on my eyebrow itself. I’m sure you don’t need to be a hair colourist to understand that because my eyebrows are so dark and coarse, it turned my left eyebrow various shades of orange. It took at least three weeks to grow out properly.
When that didn’t work, and once the orange had eventually faded, I began getting my eyebrows waxed instead. Although I assume the intense smell of incense in the beauticians was meant to make me feel calm, that soon went when Susan the beautician waxed my face. It bloody hurt. Still, I kept going every two weeks to keep my eyebrows topped up and to fit in with the other girls in my class. Whenever she’d hand me the mirror afterwards to admire her grand masterpiece, I’d smile through gritted teeth and tell her how great it looked, despite resembling The Scream.
The reason I stopped going in the end wasn’t necessarily because thin eyebrows didn’t suit me, but because after at least three sessions I’d leave her salon holding a bloody tissue to my eyebrows where she’d ripped my actual skin off. Pain, I soon learnt, does not equal beauty.
By this stage, I was sixteen. There was no part of my body that society wasn’t telling me to hate, and I was miserable. And as though despising myself wasn’t sh*t enough, it’s time to introduce you to bad boyfriend number one.
It’s probably time to point out that throughout my life I have often been known to date losers. I’m aware that makes me sound like I’m up myself, or that I look down my nose at people, but hear me out. I have a tendency to date boys who treat me badly, because I often feel it’s all I deserve. When you’re an unhappy person you don’t feel you deserve people being nice to you.
They’re the men who put you down, because it’s easier for them to project their own insecurities on to you than to deal with their own. They are the men your mothers warned you about and who your dads want to punch in the face, but whose faults you like to shove under the carpet because one day ‘they’ll change’.
These boys don’t start off like that, of course. At first, you are entranced by their charms. They’re exciting. They live freely. They’re fun and make you laugh. You think they’re so wonderful that you fail to see the negatives. And when I go through low or anxious periods, I tend to be drawn to them more than ever.
Mark was a tall, dark, drop-dead handsome hunk of a man (well, boy) who would become my first male obsession. He lived in Cheshire in the house next door to Dave the Woman, a two-hour drive away from our school, and would frequently hang around with Dave and her sister at weekends. I first met him at Dave the Woman’s annual Halloween party, when I was dressed as a ‘sexy bunny’ (i.e. a tight grey dress with pink-and-white-foam bunny ears from Claire’s Accessories. Spooky), and once we’d broken the ice over bottles of blue WKD I began noticing that he’d deliberately try to hang around me at any opportune moment. And yet whenever I’d try to strike up a grown-up conversation with him, he’d stumble over his words and become shy, his cheeks blushing bright pink.
Mark was incredibly handsome, with dark brown hair, olive skin, chocolatey brown eyes and a very dashing smile. I’d never seen a boy as good-looking as him before, let alone spoken to one. I couldn’t understand how someone as handsome as him could be so shy. He’d hide behind his emo fringe, occasionally looking down at the floor if we made eye contact. Weirdly, he seemed to find everything I said hilarious, laughing loudly and hysterically at things that weren’t even meant to be funny (but it did wonders for my ego).
Someone as gorgeous as Mark couldn’t fancy me … could he? Me? I mean, what did I possibly have to offer a man? I had over-plucked eyebrows that resembled sperm and a moon of a head. Nah, of course he couldn’t have done. Who was I kidding?
But the following day, after the Halloween party, Mark popped round to spend time with us before my nan came to pick me up. He seemed a bit more confident that day, showing off and making jokes while Dave’s mum grilled burgers on the barbecue. There was definitely a bit of chemistry between us, even if I couldn’t pinpoint what that feeling was yet.
Not long after, Mark added me on MSN, an online instant messaging site that was basically WhatsApp before WhatsApp. We began chatting, and I could have sworn he was flirting with me, but I wasn’t sure. Besides, Dave the Woman had a crush on him, so I couldn’t go there.
That didn’t mean I couldn’t ogle him from afar, though. Soon, I’d boycotted going to my nan’s at weekends to spend time at Dave’s house, where the three of us would wander round town together, hang out in the garden or watch films. It was perfectly innocent, despite the fact I desperately wanted to eat his face.
One Saturday evening, the three of us had gone to Blockbusters to rent a movie. (I know, imagine the days when you had to get into a car and drive to a shop to rent a movie, rather than streaming it online?!) Although I didn’t particularly want to watch a scary film, I thought it’d be a perfect opportunity to snuggle up next to Mark and pretend to be ‘frightened’.
Mark sat between me and Dave with the popcorn perched on his lap, and despite the gore, blood and screams on the screen my heart began beating faster.
Then, underneath the blanket, Mark squeezed my hand.
I froze.
WHAT. WAS. HAPPENING?
‘I’m just going to get some more popcorn,’ Dave announced. ‘Anyone want a drink?’
Mark and I smiled at her. ‘No!’ we said at the same time in high-pitched voices, and once the door shut we looked at each other.
Before you knew it, I found myself having my first proper grown-up kiss. It wasn’t like my first teenage kiss, which was at an underage disco with a boy called Charlie who seemed to have a slug for a tongue. This was great. Mark was a hundred-per-cent-certified Sex God. In fact, it was so great that we didn’t hear Dave walk back into the living room …
‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!’ Dave yelled, making us jump apart.
‘Erm, well …’ I stuttered. I had forgotten that Dave fancied Mark as much as I did. She stormed out of the room, Mark left (after kissing me goodbye, of course), and Dave and I had a huge argument about it all night.
But that was it. I was smitten. Once Dave and I had stopped rowing, Mark and I were an actual couple, which was made official over MSN. I still failed to believe that someone as fit as Mark was my boyfriend, but somehow life was finally looking up.
From then on, most of my weekends were spent with Dave the Woman and Mark. Boarding school suddenly felt bearable, because it meant I had him to look forward to at weekends, and I would eagerly cross off the days on my calendar until I saw him. I was absolutely obsessed with him, stalking his Facebook and MySpace accounts to see what he was up to, or just to gawp at his model-esque selfies. I doodled his name across my diaries and notebooks. We chatte
d during the day via text and every night online, making the most mundane of topics like school or family feel like the most exciting things in the world. I clung on to every word Mark said like glue, thinking he could do no wrong. We were totally inseparable for people who went to two different schools in two different counties and who only saw each other at weekends.
I’m aware I’m making Mark out to be the Sex God of the North. Not that I’d know – we never had sex. Our relationship was perfectly innocent and sweet, full of holding hands and trips to the cinema. My dad did warn me that boys of that age only wanted ‘one thing’, but I couldn’t imagine Mark – a sixteen-year-old boy who still had a teddy bear named Gregory in his bed – being remotely interested in sex. He’d certainly never mentioned any interest in it to me. In fact, the closest we ever got to it was getting a bit overexcited in a photo booth in Boots one afternoon and scaring some innocent old lady who pulled open the curtain half to death. (Needless to say, she went elsewhere to get her passport photos taken.)
Although I was supposed to be studying for my GCSEs, the only thing I wanted to study was Mark’s gorgeous face. A lot of the time we had to see each other at Dave’s, but there’s only so many times you can snog the boy you both fancy in front of your best mate without her getting fed up, so we began seeing each other alone in Manchester instead, despite the fact it would take me over two hours to travel there on the train each time. I couldn’t wait for the summer holidays to come, when I hoped we could see each other every day.
‘Why do you always have to go on the train to where Mark is when you meet up?’ my mum asked me one afternoon.
‘What do you mean?’ I snapped. I couldn’t believe she had the audacity to say such a thing. HELLO, MOTHER, IT’S CALLED BEING IN A RELATIONSHIP. LOOK IT UP.
‘Mark never meets you halfway,’ she said. ‘It takes you two and a half hours to travel up there on the train every Saturday. You’re always having to spend your money on trains to Manchester, but he never seems to want to meet you in the middle.’
Misfit Page 7