‘Well, yeah, but I’d watched people cut hair for years…’
‘Like, that’s the same thing…’
‘When you don’t know how to do some sewing thing, you look up videos of other people doing it on the internet,’ Alice pointed out.
‘Yeah, but if I bodge a seam, then I’m not going to parade around showing my bodged seam to the world, unlike my hair…’
‘It didn’t look that bad.’
We were going round in circles. Alice was stubborn. She’d never admit that she was wrong: not to other people’s irate girlfriends, not when she’d been busted by her mum when she was snogging Raj outside the Spar when she’d sworn she was home revising and not even when she’d tried to sabotage me in her pursuit of Louis.
‘You didn’t have to do that,’ I whispered. I wished we had a cordless phone and not an old-fashioned thing fixed to the wall with a curly wire that was always getting tangled up. ‘We both know that when it comes down to looks, you’re going to win every time. You didn’t have to do what you did and it totally violates the rules we drew up.’
‘I didn’t do it on purpose. God, you’re never going to let this go, are you? I called to apologise, to try and make this right. Jesus, Franny, you do love to play the victim sometimes.’
I gasped at the unfairness of her accusation. ‘No, I don’t!’
‘Yeah, you do. I get that stuff is hard, I really do, but you don’t always have to be such a martyr about it,’ Alice told me in a tight voice. ‘Sometimes I wonder if I should put a sign up in the newsagent’s window asking if anyone’s seen your sense of humour because it feels like it’s been missing for months.’
‘Shut up,’ I hissed, not as quietly as I thought because Dad’s eyebrows shot up and even Mum looked mildly alarmed. ‘It’s obvious you don’t give a toss about our friendship, because if you did you wouldn’t be behaving like such a dick.’
‘You’ve been behaving like a dick ever since you started —’
I couldn’t bear to listen to what Alice was going to say next and then have to think of something nasty to say in reply. It was much easier to hang up and put the phone back on its little perch with a hand that shook slightly.
I sniffed. The tears were threatening to unleash yet again. I took a deep breath and turned round.
Dad became very interested in smearing his herb crust on the lamb, like he was slathering a pasty child with factor 50 sunblock on a hot day at the beach. Mum was transfixed by an ad for nan trousers in the back of the Sunday Mirror magazine. They both looked up as soon as I turned round.
‘Everything all right, Franular?’ Dad asked. He glanced pointedly at Mum for some back-up.
She tore herself away from the nan slacks. ‘Is there anything you wanted to talk about? Um, did you want a mother-and-daughter chat?’
I did not. Things weren’t that bad. Things would never ever be that bad.
‘Everything is fine. It’s better than fine. In fact, it’s cool,’ I said in a tone of voice that brooked no denial. ‘Anyway, I’d love to stay here and chat but I have GCSE revision to do.’
It was my get-out-of-the-kitchen-free card and it had never failed me yet.
I was primed now for my GCSE Maths retake. I’d taken so many timed mock exams and never scored less than 70 per cent that I wasn’t even panicking any more. I just wanted it done, marked, then I could get on with the rest of my life.
When I wasn’t taking timed mock GCSEs, I worked on my leather dress. I’d done the really scary bit, which was pinning my pattern pieces to my scant metres of leather and cutting them out. Now I was slowly and carefully sewing them together with surgical gloves on my hands so the leather didn’t get grubby, though even Barbara said she thought that was going a bit too far.
I was starting to really love college. A place had opened up on one of the beauty courses so Krystal with a K had disappeared and Karen and Sandra were actually hilarious when you got to know them. They entertained us with very rude stories about their ex-husbands and their cut-price package holidays to Turkey where they did unspeakable things with men half their age, so when Barbara wasn’t in the workroom I seemed to spend a lot of time listening to their sexcapades and giggling.
Even Barbara wasn’t as bad as she had been at the start of term. In fact, she was a mine of information about Martin Sanderson if you caught her in a good mood or she’d had a glass of wine at lunchtime. ‘He once tried to make a tartan jacket that I still see in my nightmares’ was just one of the gems she’d come out with. ‘He worked on it for weeks but he just couldn’t get the tartan to match up. It was what you young people would call a hot mess.’
Mostly though it was the five of us: Sage, Dora, Mattie, Paul and me hanging out. I loved that I could talk about fashion for hours on end and no one told me to shut up, like Alice used to; and five should have been an odd number, someone should have been left out, on the sidelines, but it didn’t work like that. Anyway, sometimes we became six when Francis hung out with us. Not all the time, but there was always a reason for him to come into our workroom. It was surprising how many times one of the sewing machines stopped working and it was against Health and Safety for us to mend them ourselves.
Once Francis was around he tended to stay so he could join in our heated debates about whether his boss, Ted from Facilities, used to be a woman or if it was true that one of the girls studying Leisure and Tourism was boffing the canteen cook who always scratched his armpit with whatever serving utensil was to hand.
As a new friend, Francis was shaping up quite nicely. We didn’t mention that walk home, the secrets we’d shared, but it was like we didn’t need to mention them. And because we both knew all this deeply private stuff about each other, it felt like we’d skipped through a lot of the opening chapters in being friends and had settled into a comfortable familiarity that I didn’t quite have with the others yet. With Francis, I could just be quiet. Sometimes it was a relief to just be quiet. Also, Francis was an amazing source of cool girls in old films that we’d watch during lunch break or when Barbara wasn’t around. ‘You need to see Anouk Aimée in La Dolce Vita,’ he’d say. And ‘Brigitte Bardot in And Man Created Woman is totally inspiring.’ Or ‘Let’s watch Jean Seberg in Bonjour Tristesse.’
Occasionally Sage would join us if she was around, but usually it was just me and Francis, though he jumped every time we heard a noise in the corridor because he was meant to be mending broken sewing machines and logging borrowed equipment, not watching films on a college laptop and sharing my bag of stale pick ’n’ mix from the 59p shop.
After so long knowing everything there was to know about Alice, getting to know all these new people was exhilarating. There was so much to discover. Like, I didn’t know why Sage’s parents had got divorced or how Mattie and Dora got together. Or how Francis felt about watching a kissing scene in a film when I was sitting next to him, because it made me feel a bit weird and self-conscious. Or whether he’d mind if I ate all the fizzy cola bottles that were so sour they made my tongue shrink back in my mouth.
The flipside to getting to know so many new people in such a short period of time was that it was also exhausting. It was a relief to be able to talk about hemlines and how there was always a fine dusting of dressmaker’s chalk over everything in your bag, but I missed Alice.
I couldn’t help it.
Alice and me had our own language; our own personal shorthand. She knew that I took two sugars in my hot drinks, the same way that I knew that she would always have a diet Coke with her chips and that she secretly believed the lack of calories in one totally cancelled out the calories in the other.
My history was tangled up in Alice’s history. From all the times we’d cried together and learned to swim together and got scratched by her next-door neighbour’s cat when we were six and ever since then we always said we were dog people, to the year when we watched the entire ten seasons of Friends again and again. Even now, if either one of us catches two seconds of a repeat
on TV we can name the episode and pretty much recite the entire scene from memory. We shared chocolate brownie recipes, fashion disasters, experiments with hair straighteners and liquid eyeliner, long bitching sessions about our parents and teachers, lamented our lack of boobs and got our first period within weeks of each other.
She wasn’t family but Alice was imprinted on my DNA and so, just as how I never stopped loving Shuv even though I was mad at her for bailing on the whole Mum thing, I couldn’t help loving Alice. Not in a lezza way, but in a way that there was no Franny without Alice. I wouldn’t be the person I was today if I’d been best friends with some other girl. But then I’d catch sight of my hair in a mirror or shop window, and Alice was dead to me all over again. Stalemate. Then, when we were hanging out Thursday lunchtime, Francis asked me: ‘So, what’s the deal with you and that Alice girl? I used to think that you two were like non-identical conjoined twins.’
I noted that even Francis called her ‘that Alice girl’. Then I noted that Francis had been aware of Alice and me enough that he’d had a theory about us. I paused with my cheese and pickle sandwich halfway to my mouth. ‘There is no deal,’ I said. ‘You can’t have deals with people who are dead to you.’
‘Is it because of what she did to your hair?’ Francis was sitting next to me and fiddling about with the Quicktime programme on the laptop in front of him, so he couldn’t see the dark look I gave my sandwich.
‘Well, not just that.’ I pulled a face. I could tell Francis about my mum, but talking about Alice seemed so much harder. ‘It was why she did this to my hair.’
‘Yeah? Why?’ Francis was deep in the Quicktime settings, double-clicking on stuff I didn’t have a clue about. Sage still reckoned that Francis had potential but I wondered if he ever felt like Louis’s sidekick, the junior partner, something much less when Louis was around. Did boys have thoughts like that?’
‘To do with Louis,’ I muttered, though I didn’t know why I felt the need to mutter. Francis knew how I felt about Louis. It wasn’t exactly a news flash. ‘I’ve fancied him for ages. Ages. Then Alice decided that she was going to make a move on him, which is totally against the best friend code…’
Francis looked across at me. Now that he didn’t sneer so much, it was quite hard to get a read on his facial expressions. ‘Oh, I didn’t know there was a best friend code.’
‘Well, there is,’ I said quickly. ‘So, then we both agreed that we’d make a move on Louis but she… God, it’s impossible to try and explain and not sound really immature.’
‘You realise that then? Good, ’cause I was worrying about how I was going to break that to you,’ Francis said. He straightened up from his hunch over the laptop. ‘Please tell me you haven’t fallen out over a bloke, over Louis? I thought you were better than that, Franny.’
I thought I was too, but apparently I wasn’t. Though in my defence… ‘It’s not just that. It’s, like, it was always just the two of us, Alice and me, but there was also Alice and all her boy-related dramas, which is why she hasn’t got any other friends. It was why I didn’t have many other friends either, until I started college and began hanging out with Dora and the others and then Alice felt like I was abandoning her, even though I wasn’t.’
There was so much more to it. I hadn’t even told him about our pitched battle to win Louis’s heart but Francis just said, ‘Right, OK, I get it now,’ and I knew that he did. ‘It’s much easier hanging out with lads. You just call them on it when they’re acting like tools and it’s sorted.’
I shook my head. ‘It can’t be that easy.’
‘Really is. I suppose boys are just more… what’s the word I’m looking for?’ Francis paused to consider. ‘Oh yeah, we’re just more evolved.’
I scoffed and even acted like I was about to throw the rest of my sandwich at Francis, but what had happened between Alice and me wasn’t just going to be resolved with some laddish light banter. It was so much more complicated than that. Deeply and darkly complicated, but I guess I was leaning towards at least offering her some kind of olive branch. Maybe unblocking her number would be a start?
‘No way, man,’ Raj said when I saw him in the shop later that afternoon. ‘She’s a stone cold killer. If you think she’s shed one tear about you, then…’
‘Tears would be a bit much,’ I’d protested. ‘But maybe she regrets what she did. You can’t wipe out sixteen years of being friends like it never happened. We should at least try and put things right, don’t you think?’
Raj looked at me pityingly, like I needed help sounding out the big words. ‘Franny, she maimed you. You look like one of those women from World War Two who got their hair hacked off for getting freaky wit’ the Nazis.’
I glared at him because no matter how awful my hair might look, it didn’t look that awful. ‘Yeah, you should totally use the phrase “getting freaky wit’ the Nazis” in your S levels,’ I’d said. Then I teased him for pretending he was gangsta when he was really a history nerd until he threatened to ‘bust a cap in my ass’, just as Mr Chatterjee brought in a load of clothes that had had to be industrially cleaned off-site and cuffed him round the back of his head.
Which was hilarious, especially when Raj was forced to apologise to me three times for threatening me with physical violence before Mr Chatterjee was satisfied that his son’s words came from a place of deep sincerity. But I still didn’t know what I was going to do about Alice.
I had all these new people in my life and Alice had only me, except she didn’t even have me any more. Over the next couple of days I wondered if I could bear to bow out of our contest and let Alice have Louis as compensation. Here was my opportunity to do something nice, to be the bigger person. But then Louis would tweet a picture of himself about to eat the double burger he’d just constructed or he’d ‘Like’ the Rolling Stones clip from 1969 that Francis had just posted on my Facebook wall. (Francis was adamant that the 1960s Stones should not be judged by the same standards as the bunch of wrinkly-faced, granddad rocker, twenty-first-century Stones who’d headlined Glastonbury.) Just the slightest sighting of Louis on the internet and my stomach did that dippy thing.
Then I’d think about how happy Louis was to see me on the three occasions that we’d talked to each other. It was obvious that there was a spark between us. It was why I’d crushed on Louis for so long – because I knew we could have something really special. Alice should have respected that. But she hadn’t. Which meant that she had no respect for me or our friendship.
Call me unevolved, but whichever way I looked at it, Alice and I were over.
20
On Monday, after a parentally approved weekend (no Wow Club, lots of timed mock GCSE Maths exams), I was well rested and sat in a small room on the second floor of the main college building with six other people also taking their Maths GCSE.
Three hours later, I was done. There’d been one question about higher probability that had made me sweaty but generally it had been OK. I was extremely hopeful that I’d passed with a C or higher and would never have to use a protractor again at any given point in my life.
I still had English to retake but that was in June, which was light years away, and right now all I needed to worry about was easing the sleeves into the armholes on my leather dress, which were as puckered and lumpy as Karen’s caesarean scar, which she’d shown us on Friday afternoon – she and Sandra had been drinking at lunchtime.
I headed back to the art block. The workroom was deserted but there was a good luck card and a chocolate muffin on my table from the others, which made me feel warm and fuzzy inside. I sat down and stared at the leather on my dress form and waited for inspiration to strike.
Inspiration still hadn’t struck when the others trailed in from lunch. Barbara came in five minutes later and made a beeline straight for me. ‘How did you get on in your exam?’ she demanded, though her eyes glazed over as soon as I mentioned high probability. She then gave me a short armhole tutorial that left me more confused
than ever and by the time she bustled out again, saying, ‘I’d start that sleeve again if I were you, Franny,’ it was gone two. This was normally when Francis liked to turn up and tell me what film we’d be watching that afternoon, but he was nowhere to be seen. Half an hour later Francis was still a no-show – maybe there was a light-bulb emergency in the catering block.
I tacked a sleeve on to my dress and then untacked it, but all my focus had gone for the day so there was no harm in checking Twitter, though usually I didn’t indulge when I was doing fashion. I mean, where would Stella McCartney be if she kept stopping every five minutes to tweet about what she was going to have for dinner?
Stella’s tweets weren’t even that juicy but Martin Sanderson was an excellent tweeter. He was always posting pictures of his two pugs and sneak peeks of his new designs.