Cross Your Heart, Connie Pickles Read online

  William doesn’t help. He was here when Uncle Bert picked her up, and after they’d gone he asked me how on earth they’d met. I told him about Bert’s phone and Julie’s purse and he said gnomishly, ‘It must be fate.’ I felt so grubby I had to go and wash my hands.

  Also I keep remembering Sue punching Uncle Bert’s cKone-infused gym bag. I’m hoping she’s having a nice time in Australia. But she did say she met a lot of men in her work, didn’t she? So maybe she’ll meet another one soon.

  I must try and forget all that. The good thing is it does seem to be going well.

  On Monday at breakfast I asked Mother straight if it was Uncle Bert she’d been out with the night before. (Must stop calling him Uncle Bert. It makes him sound like some dodgy entertainer with a rabbit in his pocket.) She went a bit pink and said, ‘Yes, yes. He’s a bit lonely and his stomach was empty. I said I would give him some French lessons. It would be a big, big, big help with his merchandising.’

  So he came round on Tuesday and she made him supper (crêpe à la fromage; a bit like cheese on toast only posher) and they sat at the kitchen counter, knee to knee, sipping wine and giggling over his schoolboy pronunciation. And then he came again on Wednesday (cheese soufflé: ditto). And tonight they’ve gone to see a French film in town, ‘to perfect his accent’.

  It’s all ver’, ver’, ver’ – as Mother would say – exciting. Julie high-fives me at school every day. On Monday she said, ‘That’ll teach her,’ and I wasn’t quite sure what she meant until I realized she was referring to Sue. She really doesn’t like her. I told her we might be cousins soon, which she didn’t understand at first and then she laughed. ‘God,’ she said. ‘Yeah. I s’pose.’ There’s been lots of talk at school this week about the approaching war. People were handing out leaflets at the gates. The news is full of it. There’s going to be a march next week. I think Julie’s mind’s on that. As mine should be too.

  Anyway, I must have an early night. That’s another thing to record. It’s my first day at the chemist’s tomorrow. I’m feeling calm and collected about it. Completely in control. Aghghghg.

  Saturday 22 February

  My bedroom, 6 p.m.

  I’m a natural! John – Mr Leakey to you! – said so. He said, ‘Well, Connie, you have a way with customers, I must say. You ask the right questions and you know when to shut up. That was a good day’s work. Thank you.’

  Mostly I just have to stack shelves and flash around the price gun. I’m allowed to serve, but I’m not allowed to handle drugs. I told John that’s fine. If anyone asks, I’ll just say no.

  Gail – that’s the woman with the pouchy eyes and wiry hair – said she liked my cardy. I told her it was from Oxfam and she breathed in sharply. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Looks like cashmere from Harrods.’ I can tell we’re going to be friends.

  John wasn’t there the whole time. He had errands to run. I’m still a bit shy of him, but it was nicer when he was around.

  It wasn’t very busy Granny Enid pottered in to buy indigestion tablets to spy on me, and that was a bit embarrassing. She’d had her beehive newly done. ‘I hope you’re behaving yourself, young lady,’ she said, and I wanted to duck under the counter. (She’s Jack’s mum, so she’s not actually my grandmother, but she treats me as if she is.) Later there was a whole surge of underage boys hulking over the mint-flavoured condoms, which I found rather challenging. Otherwise it was mainly shampoo and toothpaste and old dears and their prescriptions. During one lull John asked me to give the door a little wipe down and the AID NOT BOMBS poster fell off. We had a proper conversation then. I told him our school was planning a march and he said good for us. He said he thinks it’s great that young people are aware of the world outside and engage with it. Think globally, act locally. He said the government should listen to its people, that if the kids are shaking off their apathy to campaign against this war – it might be in a far-off place, but it impacts morally on all of us – it should tell them something important about the strength of feeling in the country as a whole.

  I nodded a lot and resolved then and there to shake off my own apathy. And to find out more about the war. (Note to self: WATCH NEWS.)

  He isn’t as scary as you think. He listens to you when you talk and gives a succession of thoughtful little nods when you’ve finished. His eyes are so dark they are almost black. Maybe he has Italian blood: I should ask him. I wonder if he ever got our/Mother’s valentine card. I sneaked a look under the till, but it wasn’t there. He must have taken it home.

  He paid me in cash and I gave it straight to Mother when I came in. She was very sweet and wouldn’t take it. I wouldn’t keep it, so we had a little spat. In the end, she put it in the empty biscuit jar on the shelf in the kitchen. Sort of no-man’s-land. She said she hopes I won’t end up a simple shop girl like her. I gave her a hug and told her she’s much more than a simple shop girl. She’s a lingerie artiste.

  10.30 p.m.

  I broke off the above because actual, not imminent, war seemed to be breaking out somewhere below me in our house. Screaming, shouting, thumping: all hell, etc. I rushed downstairs to find Marie having a major strop in the front room. She was clinging on to Mother’s waist, her face contorted, screaming, ‘Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me.’ She was wearing a glittery tiara and a pink nylon party dress. A princess, only a demonic one.

  Jack was sitting on the sofa and Bert was standing in the doorway looking panicked. Cyril was in the middle of them all, watching TV as if nothing was happening.

  Mother was trying to extricate Marie’s fingers while cooing, ‘ Chérie, chérie… Bert just needs his lesson. I will not be late. Papa is here.’

  ‘I’m here,’ said Jack. ‘Come on, sweetie, come to Daddy.’

  Bert said, ‘Right, well. Better be off, hadn’t we?’

  Marie started screaming again. ‘I want to come. I want to come. It’s NOT FAIR. You’re always leaving me. Every night, you’re leaving me.’

  Mother sat down on the floor. I could tell Marie had won then. So could Marie. She started whimpering. ‘Can’t we come, Mama? Can’t we all come?’

  Mother looked at Bert. Bert tried to look away. But failed. He looked nervous.

  ‘We’re just going for a Chinese,’ Mother said. ‘You don’t like Chinese.’

  Marie scrambled to her feet. ‘I do. I do. I love it.’

  So we all went. I don’t know quite how it happened. But it did. Mother, Uncle Bert, Jack, Cyril, Marie and moi. We all went to Uncle Bert’s favourite Chinese restaurant to thank Mother for the week of French lessons. We went in Jack’s van because it could fit us, so now we all smell of fish. Poor Jack. I noticed he ended up paying too.

  It was perfectly pleasant. It wasn’t Uncle Bert’s fault that our food took so long in coming that Marie – who’d been overtired all along; am I the only person with enough sense to have realized that? – fell asleep in her Singapore noodles. And I do think Uncle Bert could have made it clearer to Cyril that the Kung-Po Special was squid-related, but maybe he thought we went for a Chinese all the time. Jack and he got a bit funny over the wine list too. There was a sort of tussle. Jack began to say something about the house red, but Bert overrode him. He grabbed the menu and said, ‘Oh no, not Côtes du Rhône. I only drink New World. French wine is so overrated.’

  I just think it was a bit tactless, that’s all. It was as if he forgot himself for a moment there, as if he’d just been pretending before.

  Sunday 23 February

  Delilah’s very grown-up bedroom, 2 p.m.

  I bumped into Delilah on the way back from church and she made me come to her house for lunch. She was so bored she wanted to kill herself, she said. Not the most enticing invitation in the world. But I came anyway. I needed cheering up. The thing is, I rang Julie earlier to tell her about the Chinese.

  She said, ‘You went to a Chinese? The one by the river? He took you to his favourite Chinese?’ Like she didn’t quite believe me. ‘All of you?’

  The
re was something in her voice that made me think she wasn’t happy about it. I tried to make her laugh by telling her about the Kung-Po Special, but she said she had to go before I’d finished. ‘What a big happy family,’ she said before she hung up. But not nicely.

  I hope she’s all right. I hope I haven’t done something to upset her.

  You can never upset Delilah. Not even if you try. She’s so thick-skinned it’s hilarious. We’re wearing orange-and-oatmeal face packs at the moment, so we can’t talk because of cracks. That’s why I’m writing in here. She is filling in her Snog Log. She’s got quite a lot of filling in to do. William, who was at Mass this morning, looking lanky in his smart trousers, told me he’d seen her at a club in Richmond last night, ‘high as a kite’. I mentioned this as soon as I got here, thinking she’d be sheepish. Fat chance. ‘I was just, like, wasted,’ she said. Apparently she got off with a boy. ‘I think it was a boy,’ she added. ‘It might have been two.’

  She’s been on at me all morning. She can’t believe I don’t wear a proper bra. She says I’ve got good legs even if my hips are wide and that my elegant eyes show that I’m trustworthy and good at keeping secrets. She read all that from one of her magazines. There was more to say about the rest of me, but I crossed my arms and told her to get off my back – not to mention my earlobes and my cheekbones. I hate thinking about my body, let alone discussing it.

  ‘Best friend or lover?’ she started on after that. ‘Have you entered the Boy Danger Zone?’

  ‘The what?’ I said.

  It was some quiz in the magazine. It claimed you couldn’t be friends with a boy without sexual tension. Delilah said I had to fancy William because everybody else does. I had to explain what it’s like in the real world – i.e. among normal people who don’t wear blazers and gingham dresses on a daily basis. In the real world no one fancies William. ‘You lot,’ I said, ‘are just desperate.’ That shut her up.

  Oh, her mum’s called us down for lunch. Time to take off our face packs. I do hope I haven’t got a rash.

  My very ungrown-up bedroom, 3 p.m.

  I’ve got a rash. But at least I’m home. Lunch at Delilah’s can be a bit much. It’s not just the smartness and the neatness round there – their house is extended in every possible direction and modern and all painted white –it’s the tension zigzagging in the air. Mother might be hopeless, but at least she doesn’t try to ‘understand adolescence’ like Marcus and Tanya.

  Marcus, who works in the City, flashed his napkin on to his lap and said, ‘So, Connie, it’s a hard year at school this one, isn’t it? All those hormones and a heavy workload. Though your mother tells me you’re doing brilliantly at Woodvale.’

  ‘Clever girl,’ added Tanya, smiling at me. I saw Marcus give her a look over the wooden and cloth sculpture in the middle of the table (a Madagascan fertility symbol, apparently). It meant: ‘And here we are spending all this money on school fees.’

  Delilah knew what it meant too. She said, ‘So why can’t I go to Woodvale, then? I hate the high school. It’s all girls. It’s not the real world. I’m never going to meet any proper boys.’ By that I suppose she meant properly meet any boys as opposed to just snogging them in the dark.

  Marcus cleared his throat. ‘I know, darling. I do understand. Maybe we’ll think about it after GCSEs.’ If I hadn’t been there I expect he’d have said something about the kind of proper boy she’d meet at Woodvale. If I ever bump into him or Tanya when I’m with William they look at him as if there might be something nasty on the bottom of his shoes.

  Then we started talking about the imminent war. Marcus and Tanya are all for it. They said things like ‘enough is enough’ and ‘people have got to learn to see sense’. What did I think? I told them about the march planned at school.

  Marcus tutted. ‘Kids,’ he said. ‘It’s just knee-jerk. There are complications in the situation that are beyond them.’

  I wanted to say some of the things John Leakey had said – think globally, act locally – but I wasn’t sure it was the moment. I suspect Marcus takes his understanding of adolescence only so far. Anyway, Delilah got there first. She’ll use any excuse to go from mild parental resentment to full parental hatred.

  ‘You’re just a fascist,’ she said, jumping down from the table and storming out. ‘I hate you.’

  See what I mean. Quite tense.

  I went upstairs to see her when I’d finished my plate of food. She was lying on her new platform bed (very grown-up), under her pop posters (very grown-up), hugging Floppy Bunny (not very grown-up). We had a general moan about parents – Marcus and Tanya are going away in a few weeks’ time and she says they won’t let her have a party, but she’s going to have one anyway – and I ended up telling her about the Woodvale march. She looked positively thrilled. We can go to war, she said, but not in her name. She says she’s going to bunk off her netball match to join it. ‘That’ll show Dad,’ she said.

  I said I was probably going to go too and we tentatively arranged to meet at the estate agent’s at the top of the high street. ‘But, Delilah,’ I said, ‘I doubt the environment will be conducive to meeting boys.’

  ‘There are times,’ she answered, ‘when one’s personal life has to go on the back burner.’

  ‘I’m glad you think that,’ I said. ‘People might be about to die, after all.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Got time for a pedicure before you go?’

  Monday 24 February

  At home, 5 p.m.

  Doom and damnation. Something is up with Julie. Definitely. I saw her talking to Carmen at break. They were sitting on the radiators. When I went up she hardly registered my presence. Finally, she said, ‘Enjoy the pancake rolls, then?’

  ‘Yes, they’re delicious, aren’t they?’ I felt like a puppy trying to lick her hand. But she just gave a chilly laugh and turned back to Carmen. In the end I walked off.

  I saw Carmen as I was going through the gates later and asked her if she knew what was up. She said that I should know and that if I didn’t I wasn’t the friend I thought I was. So now I’m really confused. I don’t know whether to be upset or angry.

  6 p.m.

  Mother’s home and full of good spirits. She’s bought some posh bacon – pancetta – from the Italian delicatessen near the lingerie shop and so there’s spaghetti carbonara for supper. I don’t know whether to feel cross at the extravagance – you could probably buy a year’s worth of bacon for the same price at the supermarket – or simply greedy.

  Anyway, it’s been all action at work. Remember that man who bought the set for his fiancée? Today he was back. ‘Was a larger knicker necessary after all?’ suggested Mother. Well, no. Not as such. In fact, no knicker was necessary at all. Engagement was off. ‘Was it anything to do with the thong?’ asked Mother. He shook his head as if it was the least of his worries.

  ‘These foolish thongs,’ he said. Then he reddened, shuffled his feet and asked if they did refunds. Sadly, Pritchard & Benning, Corsetières by Appointment to the Queen, does not offer refunds. No matter how tragic the circumstances. But he could have a credit note. He stared at this dolefully and then turned to leave the shop. At the door he spun round, dashed back and thrust it into her hands. ‘You have it,’ he said. ‘Do something with it. You’ve been so kind. So understanding.’ And then he was gone.

  That explains the pancetta and the good spirits.

  In bed, later

  Bert dropped by just as we were sitting down for supper. It’s funny how he always seems to arrive at mealtimes. Mother gave him half of her spaghetti carbonara. I gave her a look and she said, ‘I’ll fill up on bread.’ She told him the story of the man and the lingerie set right from the beginning. But all he said was, ‘Seventy quid? Is that how much that stuff costs? Just for a bit of French tat.’

  I’m sure he didn’t mean to be rude. He’s Julie’s uncle and she loves him.

  Then Mother took Marie and Cyril up to bed and Uncle Bert and I watched the news. It w
as all about the build-up to war, lots of soldiers marching and missiles being counted. They showed you a picture of a village that was near the firing line, some little children playing in the street with no shoes on. It made me think about the effect it would have on ordinary people. There was an expert talking about other ways of bringing about change, of different sorts of governmental policy, of stopping trade links and stuff like that. It seemed to make sense to me. I can’t wait to talk about it with John The Chemist. But Uncle Bert started huffing and talking about small businesses and ‘who does he think he is, stupid bleeding-heart liberal’.

  I said I’d probably go on the school march and he got quite cross. He said, ‘What do you think a demonstration like that will achieve? It’s just troublemaking. How many of you lot are old enough to have a properly thought-through opinion? Don’t you realize the value of a show of might?’

  I felt my face get hot. I told him I thought it was a mistake to assume all young people were politically apathetic.

  He said, ‘Have you spared one thought for merchandising?’

  I’ve made up my mind. I’m definitely going on the march now.

  Tuesday 25 February

  6 p.m.

  Would you call me an activist? Maybe not, but I have done it. I’ve marched. I’ve marched, I’ve carried a banner, and now I’m home. The only problem is my head isn’t full of an unjust war in a far-off place. It’s full of my row – could you call it a row? Not really: more of a situation – with Julie.

  It’s been quite an afternoon. Fun and misery all mixed up. The whole school was there, or so it felt. We went all the way from school, down Hillcroft Road and the high street, to the river. ‘What do we want? Peace now. What do we want? Peace now.’ I’ve got it stuck in my brain.