The two little girls, bright specks of blue and pink, leave the school gates, wiggling through the scrum of parents, toddlers, shouting swaggering classmates. Most of the children display that strangely exhausted excitement peculiar to Fridays, when the weekend stretches far ahead like a road through the desert, with scarcely a hint of anything but absolute freedom ahead. Car doors slam, babies shriek, parents chat, doggedly ignoring tugging, bored children who are anxious to get home and play.
It’s starting to rain, just a little, and the air feels sticky, tacky with moisture. The weather forecast says there might be a storm tonight. Someone’s umbrella is forced inside out, and people chuckle. Rubbish is already spread across the street and baffled, resentful cats hide under cars and sheltered doorsteps.
In the middle of all this, the two girls are a bubble of apparent calm. They’re neither smiling nor talking, and when you look closer, they’re not even walking together. The girl in blue is slightly ahead, her face set in an expression of self-conscious tragedy. The girl in pink lags deliberately behind and she looks at the ground, but her face is tight with suppressed, confused emotion.
No-one talks to them, no-one looks at them, but everyone knows who they are: Lisa Cook and Kirsty Cooper. They’re Best Friends Forever. They’re almost one entity. The only difference between them is that Lisa is a liar, and Kirsty… Kirsty is…? Nobody knows what Kirsty is really like any more. She’s been under Lisa’s shadow for such a long time that when (and if) anyone thinks of Kirsty, they think first of Lisa. It’s been like that for a long time, and it will carry on being that way, even after Lisa is declared dead.
But that hasn’t happened yet. That doesn’t happen for a while.
It took Kirsty ages to persuade her mum to let her walk home. She wouldn’t cross any main roads, or talk to strangers, or anything like that! Come on! Come on! Everyone walks home, why couldn’t she? And it’s not like she’d be alone, she’d be with Lisa! What was the problem?
Part of the problem was just that: she’d be with Lisa. Sometimes Sarah Cooper would watch her daughter, her face angled up at her friend like a drowsy flower to the sun, and wonder if they were a little too close. There were times, though Sarah couldn’t be sure if she saw more what she feared than what existed, when Kirsty seemed embattled by the closeness of this friendship.
‘I just think you should make some more friends,’ she’d tell Kirsty sometimes. ‘There’s plenty of fish in the sea!’ There was something about Lisa that made all her platitudes rise to the surface like drowned things. ‘You can’t put all your eggs in one basket.’
But it did no good. In fact, it had the opposite effect; Kirsty was at the foothills of adolescence now, and everything Sarah said was Wrong, and everything Lisa said was, by definition, Right. They’d go to the same school, and live next door to each other when they were older and carry on being Best Friends Forever – it was all worked out. And so Sarah gave ground, agreed to let them walk home together, so long as They Were Sensible and Came Straight Back with No Dawdling and they weren’t to go through the park or by the canal, all right? Do you promise? Promise me? Sarah’s private belief was that, perhaps – no, not perhaps, of course – when they got to secondary school, Kirsty would make more friends, blossom, come into her own, and September was only six months away. Six months is no time, is it?
Despite her intense lobbying, her hard won victory, Kirsty felt a little bit scared on the first walk home. Mindful of the No Park, No Canal rule, she suggested walking through the Marne Way industrial park – it’d take longer, but… And they did it for a week until Lisa said that was a stupid way to walk because it was boring and long and anyway everyone knew that there was quicksand in Marne Way. ‘And that’ll kill you, sure as cancer. I saw it on The A-Team.’
Kirsty wasn’t sure that England even had quicksand, but she’d learned not to argue with Lisa, and so they started taking the different, forbidden path – over the Iron Bridge, over the train tracks, past the secondary school, over the canal bridge and through the park.
‘Your mum’ll never find out,’ Lisa assured her. ‘They never find out. And if she asks just lie. You don’t even have to lie, just kind of nod and smile, or get her talking about something else.’
Lisa had mastered this kind of Jesuitical logic years ago, and her own mother, Denise, was none the wiser. Lisa did all sorts of things that Denise didn’t know about… She stole make-up testers from Boots, magazines from the newsagents. She watched horror films and claimed that they had a video recorder at home – but Kirsty doubted that because those things were expensive and nobody she knew had one. That was the problem with Lisa; she tended to make things up, but finding out exactly what she had made up and what she hadn’t was pretty much impossible, and if she was challenged, she raged. Kirsty feared conflict, would do anything to avoid it. Other kids in school didn’t have her scruples though; they knew Lisa’s uncle didn’t have a plane; that the twittery nonsense she claimed was Japanese was just gibberish she made up on the spot. They had all lost patience, and as a result, Lisa had become steadily more and more unpopular, until she was practically a pariah.
The Iron Bridge – a dark, rusting hulk that wobbled over the train tracks – was frightening. Kirsty couldn’t help imagining falling through the open metal slats of the steps, and, when on the partially enclosed metal walkway, the noise of the trains below rushed up in one angry, animal bellow, she shivered and closed her eyes. Perhaps Lisa was a bit scared too, because it was her idea to bring back an old game they used to play when they were little – they imagined trolls under the bridge, trolls who would reach out to grab them if they didn’t move quickly, trolls they had to escape by running the length of the bridge in ten seconds or less. They’d stop at the last step, count to three, and run screaming across the walkway, collapsing, mock-exhausted at the other end, loudly congratulating each other for surviving yet another day. The thrill of besting the Iron Bridge almost obscured the guilt Kirsty felt every time they walked down the canal path and through the park.
‘What your mum doesn’t see won’t hurt her,’ Lisa said. ‘Don’t be a baby.’
‘Don’t be a baby.’ That had been the refrain all school year. Lots of things were babyish now, it seemed… Everything on TV was babyish apart from Grange Hill and that was only good sometimes. Care Bears and skipping games were babyish, and so were fish fingers, having a pet rabbit or a hamster (although gerbils were excluded from that list because Lisa owned a gerbil named Funshine) and knee socks. They should wear tights, Lisa said, like ladies did. Denise and Sarah didn’t buy either girl tights, however, so they had to get the look by stretching their knee socks until the elastic cracked and securing the tops around their thighs with rubber bands. They dug in something awful, but complaining about that was babyish too, so Kirsty didn’t any more.
If the Iron Bridge was scary, the canal and the park beyond were scarier still. The water looked like black oil, and it lapped against the concrete bank with a slapping, sucking noise that was faintly lascivious. And then there was the huge, flat expanse of park with the plane trees rustling, looming so high… it was spooky. There were sudden dips in the grass that made you stumble, and sound carried differently – things could seem closer or further away than they were; traffic from the distant road or little wisps of conversation were borne by the wind from far away. Sometimes the opposite happened, and there was no sound at all, just each other and the dark, as if they were floating on the River Styx. Kirsty felt as if the park was a sentient thing, that it played tricks with the sound and the light, simply to frighten little girls who lied to their mothers.
On the walk back home, Lisa would prattle about all the usual things she prattled about – the cerise lipstick she’d nicked from the market, how she was definitely getting a puppy for her birthday (this last was almost certainly a lie, but Kirsty wasn’t going to pick her up on it). Lately though, she’d started using these familiar tropes as a way of introducing her new favourite subject: Boys and How to Get Them to Like You. Walking this hypothetical dog would help her get fit because the ideal measurements for a girl were 34–22–34 and both of them had better start aiming for that now. The lipstick was important – everyone wore lipstick and you had to learn how to kiss so it didn’t smear all over your face. Lisa was practising by kissing the wall next to her mirror. Kirsty should too. She wondered aloud if she had the right kind of face for a perm? She pinched her cheeks to make them pink – because it made you look cute and excited, and men liked it when you look excited. She took to flapping her arms in a mysterious and ungainly chest exercise designed to make her breasts grow, and she bunched up her skirt, doubling it up at the waistband, trying to make it into a miniskirt. It gave her a strange silhouette, like a half-cooked dumpling, but she didn’t seem to notice and Kirsty certainly wasn’t going to tell her.
Kirsty, shamefully, hadn’t made any inroads yet into Making Boys Like Her but secretly she didn’t really want to. She might have succumbed to the knee-sock torture, but she still wore the regulation knee-length skirt and her hair was more often than not cajoled into bunches or held back with plastic hair grips. Lisa had started rolling her eyes at the bunches, so Kirsty surmised that they too were now babyish.
‘We should get matching perms. Maybe I should be the blonde one and you could be, like, a redhead? And I could always wear blue, and you could wear black? Or cerise?’
Lisa had a new plan. They were going to start a girl band together – like Pepsi & Shirlie or Mel and Kim. She even had a name – Angels Times Two – and had painstakingly, and with many rubbings-out, designed a logo of two winged fairies pecking at each other’s lips, their outsized wings all gilded. Well, almost all gilded; Lisa’s gold marker had run out halfway through and she had to colour the rest in with yellow pencil. ‘But it looks ace, doesn’t it?’ Together they wrote song lyrics and laboured over their answers to imaginary interviews in Smash Hits. Angels Times Two demanded synchronised dance routines and crop tops and make-up, and Kirsty better get good at those things and quick, especially the make-up bit, and not just for the band, but for school too because everyone in secondary school wore lipstick and eyeliner and you had to be good at that if you wanted a boyfriend. Wanting a boyfriend was in the natural order of things. Kirsty had been excited about secondary school but now she knew it would be populated by make-up-wearing sophisticates and leering boys that excitement had soured into queasy terror.
She scolded herself for this fear, and hoped against hope that, come secondary school, she’d have changed. She was bitterly ashamed of her ignorance; an ignorance she hadn’t even known she was guilty of until last October, when Lisa got that ring and started telling her all these baffling things that seemed too weird to be true, and quite possibly weren’t… but… what if they were?
October 1984, and Lisa was waiting just outside the school gates. Normally she swung in late, the crust of cornflakes still between her teeth, a smear of breakfast jam on her cheek. Today though, she was early, waving at Kirsty with a gleeful urgency. Her whisper was theatrical, designed to be overheard.
‘I’ve got something to show you!’ She was wearing lipstick. There was a bit on her teeth.
‘You’ve got to wipe that off before Miss Gillgrass sees you.’
‘What? Oh, this?’ Lisa opened her eyes wide, dapped one slick lip with a chewed, stubby finger. ‘Oh, it must still be on since last night. I was out last night. Till late.’
She smiled significantly, and this smile had its predictable effect on Kirsty: a little tug of excitement, a corresponding pinch of anxiety.
‘Where?’
‘That’s for me to know and you to find out!’ Lisa chanted.
The bell rang. ‘Let’s go,’ said Kirsty.
‘Don’t you want to know? You’re dying to know!’
Kirsty hesitated, letting herself be jostled by the other kids filing into class. ‘Why can’t you tell me now?’
‘Meet me in the toilets at break.’
‘Why can’t you tell me now though?’
‘Because I can’t, that’s why. Meet me in the toilets at break!’
Lisa was given to intrigue. She was exciting that way.
During first break, they hid in the toilets, huddled together in a smelly little cubicle, the shrieks from the playground seeping through the toughened glass of the high windows, but still they whispered.
‘Look.’ Lisa pointed one stubby index finger out and wiggled it inches from Kirsty’s face. ‘It’s an antique.’ It was a brass ring, awkwardly twisted into the shape of a snake, taking up most of the finger – all the way up to the knuckle. ‘It came all the way from Oman. And the eyes? Real rubies.’ She nodded significantly. ‘From Oman.’
‘Is Oman like Argos?’ Kirsty asked after a while.
Lisa rolled her eyes. ‘Oman is a country. Our lodgers, Tokki and Mohammed? They’re from Oman.’
Kirsty had heard about the lodgers, but she’d never met any of them. Where was Oman? It didn’t sound like a real place even. It sounded like a planet from Star Trek or something. Maybe she could go to the library at lunchtime and look it up in the atlas.
‘Can I try it on?’ Kirsty asked.
‘Only if you promise not to tell anybody, all right? No-one.’
‘Tell anyone what? About going to the cinema?’
‘That. And the ring and stuff. Promise!’ This was a tricky thing to respond to. Lisa might mean what she said, or she might mean just the opposite, hoping the word would spread… Kirsty knew from experience that it was better to promise now and reassess later.
‘OK. I promise.’ Lisa pulled the ring over one grimy knuckle and passed it over. Kirsty’s fingers were slimmer, and the ring rattled to the base of her finger. It was an ugly, cheap-looking thing and the eyes were set crookedly. It gave her a nasty feeling somehow, as if she was touching slime. She gave it back hurriedly.
‘Isn’t it gorgeous?’ Lisa breathed.
‘How come you’ve got it?’
‘Tokki gave it me because…’ Lisa struggled to push it on her own finger again, ‘and you can’t tell anyone, about this, ever, all right?’
‘All right.’
‘Promise! Cross your heart!’ She made Kirsty slash at the air in front of her chest. ‘OK.’ She paused dramatically. ‘We’re engaged.’
Kirsty laughed. ‘No you’re not!’
Lisa frowned furiously. ‘I am so!’
‘Kids don’t get engaged… old people get engaged!’
‘Well, maybe I’m not a kid. Unlike you.’ Lisa was all supercilious dignity. ‘No-one’ll ever give you a ring with rubies in it.’
Indignation pushed Kirsty into answering back. ‘They’re not rubies,’ she told her flatly and followed up with something she knew would hit hard: ‘And I bet it’s from Argos really. We’ve got the catalogue at home and when I look I bet it’s there.’
Lisa scowled. ‘It is from Oman. He said I’m not allowed to wear it at home in case Mum sees it, but I asked if I could take it to school with me to show you, and he said yes. He didn’t want to say yes either. He said you’d be jealous and you are.’ She paused to assess Kirsty’s lack of enthusiasm. ‘You’re jealous.’
‘I’m not,’ Kirsty replied. She really wasn’t.
‘Well you will be soon.’ Lisa twirled the ring. ‘He says he’s going to give me a matching necklace too. For my birthday. And you know Harvest Festival? They say they’re going to come. Him and Mo. I asked them to come.’
The bell rang then. ‘What? Why?’
Lisa rolled her eyes. ‘To meet you. I told them about you and showed them your picture, and Mo said you were really pretty and he wanted to meet you. In Oman they’re royal, they’re real actual princes, and anyone who marries them will be a princess. I wanted us both to be princesses, but maybe I don’t now, because you’re too babyish.’
Kirsty couldn’t help feeling a shy pride… someone thought she was pretty? A boy thought she was pretty! OK, not a boy, a man, but still…
‘You can’t just become a princess though.’
‘Princess Di did,’ Lisa replied smartly.
That was true. ‘Yeah, but—’
‘She married a prince, and now she’s a princess.’
‘But, she’s grown up! I mean, we’re in school and you can’t get married when you’re in school—’
Lisa flapped a dismissive hand. ‘Yes you can. You can in Oman. It’s different there. They told me, they can have lots of wives and you don’t get married like in a church, but you just kind of say you’re married and you are.’
Kirsty thought about this for a minute. It could be true. ‘How? How can you just say you’re married?’
Lisa made that irritated gesture again. ‘You fall in love and then you kiss and then you say some words and stuff and then you’re married. He told me. Things are different there.’ Her face creased with annoyance. ‘I knew you wouldn’t get it!’
And she tossed her head, pushed past her, and left the toilets with great dignity.
Kirsty shuffled about by herself for a while feeling doubtful and confused. When she got back to class Lisa had installed Jackie Johnson in Kirsty’s seat, so she had to sit at the back between Alexandra Wass, who was from a weird religious family who didn’t even own a TV, and David Briggs, who ate his own earwax. It was humiliating.
Lisa punished Kirsty for her insubordination all day. They walked home in silence until, on the Iron Bridge, Kirsty eventually cracked and apologised. After that, all the way past the secondary school, under the canal bridge, through the park, Lisa talked incessantly about Tokki, about the desert and oases and flying carpets and showers of gold. To Kirsty it just sounded like she’d watched a lot of movies, and she even recognised huge chunks of one of her breathless tales had been lifted from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad because she’d watched it herself with her parents only that weekend. Still, it was so nice to be friends again that she didn’t challenge her.
They were nearly at the park gate when Lisa started yawning, stretching, yawning again, before finally mock-stumbling, halting altogether.
‘I’m so tired.’
‘Come on, we’ll be late for Crackerjack. It’s the Spooky Special today.’
‘I know all about spooky stuff.’ Lisa drawled. Kirsty kept walking. ‘Wait!’ Lisa commanded. Kirsty, reluctantly, stopped, turned. Lisa yawned yet again, meaningfully. ‘I hardly got any sleep last night. We got back so late I slept in my make-up!’
‘Why were you wearing make-up?’
‘Because Tokki took me to the cinema last night? That’s why I was wearing make-up ’cause it was an 18? And we watched a horror film and it was about this man? Who killed this other man? And then they buried him but he kept coming back? It was scary. And when we got home I didn’t want to go to the bathroom and wash my face even, and I couldn’t be alone I was so scared, so Tokki stayed with me until I wasn’t frightened any more.’
‘What d’you mean, he stayed with you?’ They were approaching the park gates now, leading to the car park of Kwik Save. From here it was only ten minutes from home. There was no-one around.
‘Oh, I shouldn’t! I promised I wouldn’t tell!’
Kirsty didn’t want to miss Crackerjack, she was going to have to muster up an appropriate level of interest, otherwise Lisa wouldn’t move.
‘Lise! Lisa, come on, tell me!’
That did it. Lisa was ready to deliver her prepared killer line. ‘OK, earlier? I lied. We’re not engaged… we’re married!’ she squealed. ‘Me and Tokki!’
‘What d’you mean, you’re married?’
‘I can’t tell you because it’s a ritual? From Oman? And it’s secret, but when you get engaged to Mo he’ll explain it all and then we can talk all about it. You can get the same ring as me, too, but with emerald eyes so they won’t get mixed up.’ She punched Kirsty lightly on the arm. ‘We’ll be princesses together! He’s gorgeous, is Mo. I said to Tokki that he’d better watch out ’cause I might marry Mo too!’
‘Can you do that in Oman?’ Kirsty, dazed, asked.
‘Oh yeah. You can do that in Oman. You can do anything in Oman.’
The phrase stuck with Kirsty. You can do anything in Oman. Anything? Perhaps you could eat whatever you wanted, and watch whatever you wanted on TV, and stay up late and wear make-up (or not). Being a princess didn’t seem very interesting, but maybe princesses were different in Oman too. Maybe they didn’t have to wear Peter Pan collars and sensible shoes and smile emptily at lines of old ladies and cradle crying babies, like Princess Di had to. Maybe being a princess in Oman was… exciting?
She closed her eyes, trying to summon a suitably appealing image – herself and Lisa on a yacht, brown and lean as those girls in that Duran Duran video, their eyes hidden by enormous sunglasses, holding glasses of cool-looking liquids with their elegant, unbitten fingers. It was a nice image. Tokki and Mo weren’t in it because she didn’t know what they looked like – it was just her and Lisa. Chink-chink went the ice in the glasses as the sun dipped down into the waves turning them orange, red. And they would finish their drinks and… then what? Dress for dinner? She imagined them slipping into identical slinky outfits, applying sugary lip gloss and emerging into the twilight even more languidly beautiful, taking the arms of their faceless husbands, and then… and then… what? S.E.X.?
You can do anything in Oman.
‘Mum, have you ever been to Oman?’
‘Isn’t it a Scottish island or something?’ Sarah Cooper was pulling steaming wet clothes out of the washing machine. ‘The bloody spin’s broken again.’
‘No, it’s abroad. It’s deserts and stuff. Camels.’
‘No, I’ve not been to Oman. What d’you want to know about Oman for?’
‘Lisa’s new lodgers are from Oman. They’re princes.’
Mum peered irritably at the washing machine dial. ‘They won’t be princes.’
‘They are, Lisa said so.’
‘If they’re princes, why’re they lodging at Denise Cook’s house then? Why’re they living in Beacon Hill? Why aren’t they living at The Ritz or something?’
‘What’s The Ritz?’
‘A posh hotel in London.’
‘Well they couldn’t stay in London, ’cause they’re learning English at college here.’
Mum gave the washing machine a little kick and that seemed to start its juddery spin cycle. ‘Now it does it! After I’ve got the bloody washing out!’
‘They’re learning English at Marlborough House.’
‘Lisa’s having you on, love. She’s joking.’
Kirsty was indignant. ‘She’s not! They’re princes and they even want to make her into a princess! They’re—’
‘Kirsty, look!’ Mum interrupted urgently.
‘What?’
‘Look, there, out of the window! Can you see it?’
Kirsty trotted to the window excitedly. ‘What? What is it?’
‘A pig! Can you see it?’
‘A pig?’
‘Yeah. Flying. Can you see it?’
Kirsty frowned. ‘That’s not funny.’
‘I bet if Lisa told you that, you’d make out you saw it.’ Mum smiled a bit grimly. ‘You believe everything that girl says. You need to watch that.’
‘But—’
‘Lisa Cook is no princess, and whoever Denise is letting that room to, they’re no princes either. Have some sense. Lisa lies like a rug.’
‘She does not!’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ The washing machine was making a wheezing, clunking sound as the spin cycle slowed. ‘This thing is on its last legs.’
‘She’s not lying!’ Kirsty insisted.
‘Really?’ Mum swung to face her, her hands on her hips, her tired eyes narrowed. ‘What about that time she was here for a sleepover and she stole your Care Bear and tried to say she didn’t, even though I saw her put it in her bag? And when she told us her uncle had died in the Falklands and she doesn’t even have an uncle?’
Mum didn’t like Lisa much. She once said that everyone who lived in the Beacon Hill estate was a bunch of pikeys. Kirsty didn’t know what pikey meant and had looked it up in the dictionary, but it wasn’t in there, and any word that wasn’t in the dictionary had to be Very Bad.
‘There’s lots of girls you could hang around with. Nicola? Or that new girl, Lorraine? She does horse riding.’ Sarah left a little pause, as if horse riding proved Lorraine’s superiority over the lumpen proletariat populating St Joseph’s Primary. ‘I’m not sure you should be walking back with Lisa after all. Maybe you can stay at the school until five and I can pick you up?’
Kirsty’s heart stuttered. Walking home from school had been a hard-won victory – it had taken weeks to talk Mum round! If she changed her mind she’d have to wait in the empty school for ages, and creepy Mr Ferabee the caretaker might talk to her, or try to make her help clean up or something… And so she reached for a reassuring lie.
‘I walk part of the way with Nicola now too, and yeah, you’re right, I think Lisa’s joking, I really do. She has a big imagination.’
‘That’s one way of putti. . .
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