Buch lesen: «Love and Kisses»

CHAPTER ONE

I’ll never forget the day I first saw Alex. I was walking down Hawthorn Road with my best friend Katie. Best friend in the whole world! Friends for ever, through thick and thin. Though that was the summer we almost parted company…and all because of Alex.

It was a Friday, I remember; the second half of the summer term. Katie was coming back to my place for a sleepover, which was something we quite often did. Either her place or mine; we used to take it in turns. That day it was my turn, so there we were, happily wandering down the road together in the sunshine, carting our school bags full of the usual massive amounts of homework, when WHAM! Bam! It hit me.

A few doors away from my place, they were turning one of the big houses into flats. The other morning I’d seen an older man, who seemed to be in charge; but he wasn’t there that Friday. Or maybe he was, but he was indoors. Outside, in the front garden, there was a red-haired boy churning stuff about in a cement mixer. As we walked past, he turned to look in our direction and winked. He did! He winked. I tried to pretend I hadn’t noticed, but it still made me get all red and flustered. Pathetic, I know, but you can’t always control these things. It’s an instinctive reaction. Very embarrassing.

I strode on, really fast, with my cheeks sizzling. A second boy was coming round the side of the house with a wheelbarrow. I caught his eye, absolutely without meaning to, and he smiled. Straight at me. At me! At me! OMIGOD. That was it. That was when it happened. The wham and the bam, and my heart going into convulsions. I felt like I’d been struck by lightning.

Katie came scurrying after me. “Really,” she grumbled, “that was so not politically correct.”

I mumbled, “What?” My cheeks were still sizzling.

Katie said, “What d’you mean, what?”

“What was not politically correct?”

“What he did! Winking. He winked at us! Don’t tell me you didn’t see?”

I muttered that I had tried not to take any notice.

“Oh, well, yes, me too,” agreed Katie.

“Otherwise they think you’re encouraging them.” And then she giggled and said, “What about the other one?” She nudged at me with her elbow. “Know who he looks like?”

I shook my head. I tried to say “Who?” but I couldn’t seem to get any sound out.

“He looks exactly like Jimmy Doohan.”

It was true! No wonder my heart was walloping. Jimmy Doohan is this boy at our school. He’s Year 12, now. He was Year 11 then, and half the school were crazy about him, including me and Katie. Not that he would ever have looked twice at us, even apart from the fact that we were only Year 8s. Me and Katie aren’t the sort of girls that boys ever look twice at. Not that we’re specially unattractive, or anything; just that we tend to stay in the background. I guess if you want to be taken notice of, you have to make a bit of an effort. Unless, of course, you are so stunningly drop-dead gorgeous that all eyes just automatically turn in your direction…

Jimmy Doohan was drop-dead gorgeous. Thick black hair, and coal-dark eyes and a face that was square and sort of…chiselled.

Katie was right. The boy who had smiled—at me, at me! He’d smiled at me—could almost have been Jimmy’s brother. (I used to think of him as Jimmy, although I’d never said so much as a single word to him so he probably wasn’t even aware of my humble existence.)

“See what I mean?” said Katie, turning to look back.

I couldn’t resist a bit of a look back myself. The boy had emptied his wheelbarrow and was trundling it away, towards the side of the house. When he saw us looking, he raised a hand and smiled again. O! My! God! I nearly died. My cheeks were like a blast furnace.

Katie tossed her head and said, “Well.” I was too busy being incinerated to say anything at all. If my cheeks had got any hotter I might have actually burst into flames. You read about people doing that. One minute they’re there, the next they’re a pile of ashes. Something to do with their electrical systems shorting out. Which was what I felt mine were about to do.

“How about that?” said Katie. She sounded almost triumphant. I looked at her, rather anxiously. I did hope she wasn’t deluding herself, thinking she was the one he had smiled at. Cos she wasn’t, it was me! I was the one he’d seen first. Maybe if she’d been the one…thing is, I’m trying to be fair. I’m not saying I’m any better-looking than she is. We both have our strong points—and our weak ones.

On the plus side, I am quite tall and reasonably slim and have nice eyes (or so I have been told). I also have long blondish hair, which I have a nervous habit of hooking over my ears when I am embarrassed or can’t think of anything to say. On the minus side—well, I have to admit that I am not very pretty. My face is rather long, as is my nose. But I am not ugly!

Neither is Katie. She is probably a bit prettier than I am actually, with this little round face and rosebuddy mouth. Her hair is a sort of brown colour and curly, and cut quite short. Those are her pluses. Her really big minus is her bum. She says herself it is like two pumpkins in a bag, and that her legs are like tree trunks. On the other hand, she looks kind of cute in our rather yucky school uniform and I do envy her nose. I would swap my nose for hers any day!

Katie chattered excitedly all the way up the road. “I bet he’s foreign! He looks foreign. Maybe he’s Irish. Jimmy Doohan’s Irish. Lots of Irish guys come over here and work on the buildings. Jimmy Doohan’s dad is a builder. Did you know that? Jimmy Doohan—”

Oh, dear! She really did believe he had smiled at her. At least it gave me the chance to cool down and stop myself combusting. But in the end I had to say something, cos I just couldn’t bear it any longer.

“Why d’you suppose it’s OK to smile but not to wink?”

“Interesting,” said Katie.

“I mean, it is,” I said, “isn’t it?”

“Yeah…I guess.”

“So what’s the difference?”

“Winking is rude,” said Katie. “Smiling is…”

“What?”

“Smiling is friendly!”

I was so glad that the Jimmy Doohan boy had smiled and not winked.

We got home to find Ellie arguing with Mum in the kitchen. Ellie is my little sister—well, half-sister, to be accurate. She has a tendency to argue. She is one of those people who can’t take no for an answer. In this case, no to going up to London with her boyfriend.

Boyfriend, for heaven’s sake! She was only ten years old. If I’d have been Mum I would have asked her, “What are you talking about, boyfriend?” But that wasn’t what was bothering Mum. She just didn’t like the idea of them going up to London on their own.

“What would you do there?”

Ellie, virtuously, said they wouldn’t do anything.

“So what would be the point of going? If you weren’t going to do anything?”

Ellie said, “We just want to be there. Just look around.”

“Like you haven’t already been there about a thousand times!”

“That’s different,” said Ellie. “That’s with you and Dad. I want to go with Obi.”

What kind of a name is Obi?

“Pleeeeze, Mum…pleeeeeze let me!” She did this thing that she does, this girly thing, clasping her hands to her chest and making her eyes go all big. “We’ll just jump on the tube and sit there good as gold till we get to Leicester Square.”

“Then what?” said Mum. I could tell that she was weakening; so could Ellie. Mum is so predictable. And Ellie knows just how to play her. Brightly she said, “Then we’ll get out! Then we’ll walk up Charing Cross Road and we’ll walk along Shaftesbury Avenue and we’ll watch out for the traffic and we won’t speak to anybody and then we’ll gaze at all the theatres and I’ll-imagine-how-it-will-be-when-my-name-is-up-in-lights!”

She gabbled this last bit in a kind of ecstasy. It made Mum laugh, just as Ellie had known it would. Mum is such a soft touch where Ellie is concerned.

“Have you asked Obi’s mum about this?” she said.

Ellie smiled one of her cute little girly smiles. People just can’t resist her when she does that. “I thought I’d try asking you first.”

“Because Obi’s mum would say no. I’ll tell you what I’m prepared to do…I’m not having you roam around London by yourselves, but—but—” Mum held up a hand as Ellie opened her mouth to protest—“I’ll take you both to a matinée of Guys And Dolls, if you like. That was the one you wanted to see, wasn’t it?”

Ellie gave a loud shriek. “Mum! Can you get tickets?”

“I think I could wangle it,” said Mum. “Then we could go backstage afterwards. How about that?”

“Oh, Mum, thank you! Thank you, thank you!” Now we had the kissy huggy bit, with Ellie launching herself at Mum across the kitchen and nearly throttling her. “Dearest, darlingest, sweetest, bestest Mum of all time!”

Yuck, yuck, triple yuck.

“You’d better go and check with Obi’s mum and see if it’s OK with her.”

“It will be, it will be!”

“Well, go and make sure. Katie, Tamsin! Are you OK, girls? I didn’t mean to ignore you.”

But with Ellie around she generally does. It’s not her fault; Ellie has one of those personalities that just swamps everything. I guess she can’t help it, any more than I can help being…well! A bit inward-looking, I suppose you would say. Like on one of those scales of introversion and extroversion, me and Ellie would be at totally opposite ends.

“Are you going to eat tea down here with us?” said Mum. “Or do you want to take it up to your room?”

I said we’d take it up to my room.

“So they can have secrets,” said Ellie.

“That’s all right,” said Mum. “It’s allowed.”

“Don’t know what they’ve got to have secrets about.”

I said, “No, because it’s secret. Moron!”

Ellie stuck her tongue out. Really quite pathetic. One minute she’s trying to be just so sophisticated, wanting to go up to town with her boyfriend. The next she’s behaving like a five-year-old.

“C’mon!” I snatched up a packet of biscuits and a couple of cartons of juice and headed for the door. “We’ll be down later. What time’s Dad getting back?”

Mum said, “Your guess is as good as mine. You know what these things are like.”

I explained to Katie as we went upstairs that Dad was appearing in a beer commercial.

“Sometimes they just go on shooting for ever. When he did the drink-drive thing it went on till nearly midnight.”

“That’s mad,” said Katie. “When you think it all ends up as just a few seconds on the screen.”

I said, “Yes, I know, the whole business is bonkers. But Dad doesn’t mind cos he gets paid overtime.”

Some of the kids at school are well impressed that my mum and dad are in show business. I was famous for weeks after the drink-drive ad. That’s the girl whose Dad’s on the telly. Come to think of it, maybe Jimmy Doohan might know who I am! Though I don’t see him as being the sort of guy that’s easily impressed. I’m not impressed cos I’m used to it; and Katie isn’t, either, cos she’s known me since Infants, so she’s used to it too. She can remember a time when both Mum and Dad had been out of work—pardon me, I mean resting—for so long that I almost couldn’t go to school because my one and only pair of shoes had sprung a leak. I had to stuff them with newspaper! Not very glamorous.

“I’m glad my dad doesn’t have to work odd hours,” said Katie, as we reached the safety of my room and could chat without fear of little sharp Ellie ears picking everything up. “I like that he comes home the same time every night. Ellie’d probably say that’s really boring of me, but I don’t care! Sometimes I like boring.”

I said, “Mm. Me too.” Unlike Ellie, I have no ambitions to go into show business.

“Do you think we are boring?” said Katie.

It was one of my secret fears. But I wasn’t about to confess it. “We’re just us,” I said. “Like Ellie is just Ellie. And she’s way too young to have a boyfriend! How can you have a boyfriend at her age?”

I didn’t even have a boyfriend at my age. Nor did Katie. We’d been out with boys; we weren’t totally sad. But there’s a difference between occasionally going out and having an actual boyfriend. Ellie was so…there was a word. I couldn’t think what it was. Precocious! That was it. Acting like she was far older than she really was.

Maybe me and Katie acted like we were far younger than we really were? Thirteen years old and no boyfriends. Soon we would be fourteen. And still no boyfriends!

We were good girls, me and Katie. All the teachers liked us; and on the whole we liked them. We did all our homework, we passed all our exams. We actually enjoyed learning stuff. God, this was seriously weird! There had to be something wrong with us. Why couldn’t we just do normal things the same as everybody else? Skipping homework, bunking off school, going to parties, getting drunk. Having boyfriends.

“Ten years old,” said Katie. She shook her head. “What were we doing when we were ten years old?”

“Dunno,” I said. “Can’t remember.”

“We weren’t still playing with dolls, were we?” Katie sounded suddenly anxious. “Please say we weren’t playing with dolls!”

“No! Of course we weren’t. We were—”

“What? We were what?”

“Well, we weren’t painting our nails green and wearing black lippy,” I said. “And we certainly weren’t going up to town with boys!”

There was a pause; then we both sighed, in unison.

“We’re starting to sound like my dad,” Katie said.

Hang on a minute! Katie’s dad is old. But I mean really old. Like he’s even talking of retiring. We looked at each other, stricken.

“No, but I mean,” said Katie, “really! London is a dangerous place for a ten-year-old.”

“With or without a boyfriend.” Who in any case wasn’t any older than she was. You couldn’t call a ten-year old a boyfriend. It was ridiculous! “Have a biccy,” I said. I didn’t want to think about it any more. My precocious little sister, always getting in ahead of me. Always doing things first. And being allowed to get away with it! It wasn’t that I was jealous of Ellie; it really wasn’t. But I guess sometimes I did envy her.

That night, squashed up in my not terribly big bed with Katie, I lay awake thinking of the boy who looked like Jimmy Doohan.