Then Barbara moved on to Three-piece Suit who was called Matthew and was interested in menswear and tailoring. He even name-checked Fred Astaire and Miuccia Prada. He’d make a perfect fashion friend, I thought, and tried to smile at him welcomingly but I don’t think he noticed.
The Steampunk girl was known to her parents as Dora and launched into an impressive but quite scary ten-minute rant about mainstream fashion and how she was only interested in avant-garde design and she’d ‘like, rather die than have to ever design anything as mundane and boring as a raincoat or a pair of slacks. Honestly, I would totally die.’ I could tell she and Krystal with a K were not going to be bosom buddies, but I thought Dora might be interesting to hang out with. Sitting next to her was Mr Old Skool, AKA Paul, who hoped one day to have his own sportswear empire even though he’d never so much as sewed on a button before.
Then it was my turn. I wasted precious time dithering over my name, which wasn’t the best start. Officially I was called Francesca Barker, but that had always been shortened to Frances. Anyway, everyone called me Franny B, had done ever since nursery school, though I couldn’t demand that of new acquaintances – they kind of had to make that decision for themselves.
‘I’m Frances. Franny, really,’ I said after several long, long moments. Then I didn’t know what else to say. I couldn’t share my five-year plan, which saw me to my final days at Central St Martin’s where my entire degree show was snapped up by Net-A-Porter and everyone marvelled at how a dump like Merrycliffe-on-Sea could have produced me and Martin Sanderson, who had his own huge fashion empire as well as being Creative Director at the French couture house Corres, and was an even bigger inspiration to me than Edie Sedgwick. Then Martin Sanderson would give me a job, preferably in Paris, and that was my five-year plan.
I couldn’t say any of that because it sounded like I was really up myself, so I just said, ‘Well, I love fashion and making my own clothes and I’d really like to have my own design house one day.’
Barbara looked down at her wad of papers, then looked back at me. It wasn’t a good look.
‘So, you’re the girl who failed her GCSEs,’ she said.
That was completely untrue. ‘I didn’t fail all of them,’ I pointed out. I also wanted to tell her that it was blates unfair to share my academic shame with my new classmates. Wasn’t there such a thing as lecturer–student confidentiality? Like when doctors aren’t allowed to blab all your embarrassing medical stuff to people. ‘I’m retaking Maths and English.’
Barbara stared at me like she was amazed that I could even form sentences. Everyone else was staring too and not because they were in awe of my fashion-forward first day look, but because they probably thought I was intellectually backward.
‘We expect people on this course to have a minimum of four GCSEs including English at grade C or —’
‘I have got four GCSEs. In fact, I’ve got seven,’ I snapped in a way that had Barbara’s eyebrows shooting up. ‘As and Bs mostly and the other lady who interviewed me, the dean of art studies or whatever, said that as long as I attended catch-up lessons and retook Maths and English, she was happy to have me. I showed her my portfolio. I wrote a five-page essay on why I wanted to take this course.’ So why are you giving me such a hard time? I thought, but I didn’t dare say it out loud.
Barbara settled back down with a little huffing sound. She had a tape measure around her neck in case of any measuring emergencies. I wanted to strangle her with it. I also wanted to cry.
‘I want to see your portfolio tomorrow.’ She shuffled her papers unhappily. ‘I don’t have your interview transcript and I don’t see a copy of your essay in your file either.’
‘I’ll print you out a copy.’
‘See that you do.’
Even if I managed to stay on the course and pass my retakes, I had a feeling that Barbara was going to personally guarantee that my next two years would be abject misery. She probably wouldn’t even let me operate a sewing machine without adult supervision.
I settled back down in my chair, hugging my notebook to me, and kept my eyes fixed on a spot on the greying white lino. I wouldn’t cry if I focused on just the one spot.
Barbara, who was now at the top of my shit list, number one with a bullet, wittered on about techniques and processes for ten minutes, then told us we could go. It was weird not having the day measured out by the sound of a bell ringing every fifty minutes but I couldn’t wait to get gone.
I stumbled to my feet, shoved my Designers I’ve Met And Liked notebook in the Marc by Marc Jacobs canvas tote that Siobhan’s mate had got me from London, hung my bag from my shoulder and tried to get to the door as quickly as humanly possible without any need for eye contact.
‘You’re Franny B, right?’ demanded a voice.
I turned round to answer Krystal with a K’s question. ‘Yeah,’ I said. I didn’t sound that friendly but I don’t think I sounded that unfriendly either. It was hard to strike a balance.
‘Right, so you’re mates with her.’ Krystal with a K pretty much spat the last word. ‘Alice Jenkins. You’re her best friend.’
I nodded. ‘We go way back. Why?’
I knew exactly why and I knew exactly what the next words out of Krystal with a K’s over-glossed pink lips were going to be. And right on cue… ‘She stole my boyfriend! She stole all of my friends’ boyfriends and she’s a sl —’
‘Well, I’m sorry about that,’ I said quickly because I really didn’t want to hear that word. ‘Anyway, they couldn’t have been very good boyfriends if they were that easy to steal. So, you know…’
‘Alice Jenkins? I only moved to Merrycliffe two months ago and I’ve already heard all about her. It sounds like she needs to come with a public health warning.’ Now Steampunk Dora was getting up in my grille. ‘You willingly hang out with her?’
‘She’s my best friend.’ I didn’t approve of Alice’s boy-baiting, but when strangers were giving her a hard time I’d defend her to the death. That was the deal with best friends. ‘She’s really funny. She does great impersonations. She absolutely doesn’t need a public health warning.’
‘Yeah, she does. She’s a total whore. She’s, like, riddled with STIs obvs.’
I couldn’t believe that Krystal with a K would say that about Alice, about anyone. ‘You know nothing about her. Just ’cause guys want to get with her doesn’t mean she ever does anything more than snog them and why should it be her responsibility to check their relationship status?’ I drew myself up to my full height, five foot seven inches, and my wedge heels took me all the way up to five, ten. ‘Also, Krystal, it’s really reductive to call other girls whores and condemn them for owning their sexuality.’
The last bit I’d totally nicked from my older sister Siobhan. Since she’d started university, she’d become a feminist and was all about reclaiming words like slut and sending me links to articles about expressing my individuality and not following the crowd. Whatever. Like I didn’t already know that. I was the only girl in Merrycliffe brave enough to do double leopard print.
Dora stared at me like I was some kind of enigma. Matthew and Paul exchanged raised-eyebrow looks. Like it was impossible for a friend of Alice Jenkins to have any depth.
Which just went to show how little they knew.
4
‘I can’t believe how judgey they all were. It’s not like any of them know you. They didn’t go to St Anne’s. We’ve never seen them down The Wow,’ I said the next day to the girl herself as she sat on the counter of Sparkle Drycleaners and rummaged in a bag of pick ’n’ mix. ‘Krystal with a K, who’s everything you hate about trainee hairdressers…’
Alice looked up. ‘How orange is she on a scale of one to ten?’
‘She’s at least a seventeen. She’s… thermonuclear orange.’ I shook my head. ‘She wears pink frosted lipgloss too. It does her absolutely no favours.’
‘She sounds horrific.’ Alice sat up straighter. ‘Poor Franny! Having to put up wit
h all those losers. You’d think fashion students would be more open-minded, but if there’s one thing worse than being talked about, it’s not being talked about.’
‘Though maybe you could rethink the whole using-boys-as-blood-sport thing or at least confine it to a three-mile radius. Krystal with a K, and even Sage, live nearer to Lytham and they knew all about you. Oh! Don’t look so happy about it!’
Alice tried to be serious but her serious face lasted five seconds and then she went back to looking very pleased with herself. ‘But all I do is snog them for a little bit, then toss them back. I don’t dole out blow jobs, I never shag them, I hardly ever let one of them even feel me up. You know it and I know it and we’re the only two people whose opinions I value.’
It was like arguing with a slab of concrete. I shook my head, but I was smiling as I turned my attention to the jeans I was meant to be hemming. ‘Just as long as you do value my opinion.’
‘I do. Without you I’d never have mastered doing the flicky thing with liquid eyeliner,’ Alice insisted, swinging her legs restlessly. It was four o’clock – the afternoon lull. It would get really busy twenty minutes before closing as people rushed to pick up their dry-cleaning or brought in dirty clothes that they wanted ready for collection first thing the next morning. ‘Don’t you mind being stuck in the window like that?’
I worked part-time doing alterations on Tuesday and Thursday after college and all day Saturday. I took up hems, let down hems. Sewed on stray buttons. Mended rips and tears and occasionally took apart a whole garment and put it together again with some extra material added in for Mrs Ayers, a yo-yo dieter who couldn’t bear to abandon a perfectly good dress just because she’d put on a stone.
It was a great way to learn how clothes were put together. And it was a great job for a fledgling fashion designer, but it wasn’t the most glamorous part-time job in the world. Sometimes the clothes that we had in for mending were quite whiffy and Mum was convinced that the dry-cleaning fumes I was huffing were carcinogenic. And no, I really didn’t like sitting behind the huge sewing machine in the window so people could gawp at me like I wasn’t even a real person, but at least I could watch the world go by. Not that there was a lot of world to go by.
‘It’s all right. At least I don’t have to work in Burger King.’
‘Or what about Katie? She stinks of fried fish.’
We took a moment to ponder Katie’s sad lot in life, forced to serve behind the counter of her parents’ fish and chip shop. That took a good thirty seconds and then we were back to matters in hand.
‘So, basically you’re saying that everyone on your course doesn’t like you because they don’t like me?’ Alice clarified.
‘Well, apart from Sandra and Karen but they’re in their forties so, whatever.’ I sighed. ‘Anyway, I’m not there to make friends.’
‘You sound like a reality TV contestant.’ Alice held her finger up. ‘The show’s called Merrycliffe’s Next Best Fashion Designer, not Merrycliffe’s Next Best Friend. Look, I’m sorry if I’m cramping your style…’
‘You’re not. I don’t want to be friends with them if they’re going to hate on people they don’t even know,’ I said, because it was true.
‘Yeah! You have to hate the haters. Is it wrong that I’m kind of glad?’ Alice suddenly asked, swivelling herself round so she could sit cross-legged on the counter. ‘I’ve been worried that you’d meet loads of cool people at college who’d get all your obscure fashion references, and then I wouldn’t see you quite so often and when I did, you’d want them to tag along and you’d all have these little in-jokes and we’d drift apart and eventually we’d stop hanging out together. That would be awful. It would be even worse than if we had a big row. I mean, you can say sorry after a big row, give each other make-up presents, but if you just grew tired of me, well, there wouldn’t be much I could do about that.’
This was the thoughtful side that no one else saw of Alice. They also never saw the really funny side of her. Once Alice had made me laugh so hard with her impersonation of Nicki Minaj at the self-scanning checkout in the supermarket (you kind of had to be there) that I wet myself a little bit. But it was OK because I knew I could trust Alice to take the secret that she made me wet myself just a little bit to her grave.
‘You don’t have to do anything about it because it’s never going to happen,’ I said, reaching across the sewing machine to give her a friendly punch on the arm. ‘We’re going to be little old ladies together, remember? Raising merry hell at the bingo.’
‘Racing each other along the seafront on our mobility scooters.’
‘Our pimped-out mobility scooters,’ I added, because I planned to add hot rod flame decals to mine and do something with the horn so it played Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ at anyone who dared to cross my path. ‘And we’ll tear up the dance floor at the – Oh!’
‘What? What dance floor?’
I was only dimly aware of Alice squawking in the background. All I could see was a smirky grin and a mop of dirty blond hair with bleached ends all tousled and rumpled like he’d only just got up. Then he was gone in a blur of a battered black-leather jacket and a hand maybe raised in greeting, maybe just scratching his nose.
Oh, Louis, Louis, I’ve got a crush on you.
I must have murmured it out loud because when I came back down to earth, Alice was giving me a knowing look. ‘When you see him, I swear your ears prick up in exactly the same way that Pucci’s do when she hears the postie coming up the path.’
Pucci, Alice’s chihuahua, also yapped furiously and ran around in mad circles whenever anyone dared to approach their house.
‘My ears are covered by my hair,’ I pointed out, but it was less pointing out and more sighing rapturously. ‘I just know that the world can’t be such a terrible place when Louis Allen exists.’
Suddenly, none of it mattered. Not hostile lecturers and even more hostile new classmates. Mum and her inability to function on any kind or level. Dad never being around. Siobhan being in Manchester and hardly ever coming home.
It wasn’t important because there were still reasons to cheer and the biggest reason was that Thee Desperadoes, Louis’s band, were playing The Wow Club on Saturday.
‘Oh great, I was looking for a new way to make my ears bleed,’ Alice said sourly when I reminded her.
‘They’re not that bad.’ I waved her disdain away. ‘Anyway, who cares what they sound like…’
‘They sound like what I imagine bowel surgery sounds like when they haven’t given the patient any anaesthetic…’
I waved that away too. ‘I don’t care. All I know is that for half an hour they’ll be playing and for half an hour I have gawping rights at Louis without anyone thinking that I’m a sad stalker.’
Alice smiled at me kindly. ‘But you are a sad stalker, Franny. You’re the girl who followed Louis all the way round all the amusement arcades in Blackpool.’
I regretted nothing. ‘It was an afternoon well spent.’ I grinned. ‘I think he just waved, Ally! To get my attention! My attention. Like, he noticed me and he thinks I’m on his level. This is huge. It’s a total game-changer.’
‘I hope you’re not going to spend all of Saturday night mooning around Louis with a line of drool hanging down from your chin,’ Alice said. ‘Note to self: remember to pop a pack of tissues in my bag.’
‘Except you’ll be far too busy putting the moves on some poor, dumb lad to worry about my drool issues,’ I assured her and she brightened.
‘You’re probably right.’ She looked pensive for all of five seconds. ‘I need to think about who I’m going to snog on Saturday. Indie disco. Pickings are going to be slim unless some university students wander in by accident. I mean, there must be some who live in Merrycliffe to take advantage of the cheap rents and excellent transport links.’
If they were we’d yet to meet them. I was saved from having to think up some names of boys that Alice hadn’t tormented yet by the bell over th
e door tinkling, and talking of which…
‘Yo! Yo! Yo! Looking superfine, Franny B!’ The Chatterjees’ son, Rajesh, swaggered his way through the door. ‘When you gonna get with me?’
‘Um, some time like never,’ I said as I always said every Tuesday and Thursday at four-thirty, when Raj turned up and asked me the same question. ‘But thanks for asking.’
Raj was pretty superfine himself, apart from the fact that he tried to talk like he was from South Central LA, which didn’t really work with a Lancashire accent. Also, there was the fact that he was the apple of the Chatterjees’ eyes and no girl was good enough for him – Mrs Chatterjee was quite adamant about that – and I intended to keep this job until I (hopefully) buggered off to do my fashion degree and then there was…
‘Alice,’ Rajesh said thinly, dropping his fresh and fly routine. ‘You’ve got some front.’