Lobsters Page 6

  If my mum asked me that I’d cringe and leave the room, but with Nan it’s different. She’s not trying to extort information, she just likes a good gossip.

  ‘Well … nothing really went to plan.’

  ‘Oh, so there is a boy then? I knew it. What’s his name?’

  ‘Well, one of the boys’ names is Freddie but—’

  ‘More than one, eh?’ Her eyes sparkled.

  ‘No, not like that. Nothing … happened with either of them.’

  She leaned in even closer. ‘Is it your time of the month?’

  She’s really matter-of-fact. As if, in her book, having sex with multiple partners is an acceptable party agenda.

  ‘Nan! No.’

  ‘What? Sister Melanie’s not here.’ She looked around in an overdramatic way just to check. She calls my Mum ‘Sister Melanie’ because she thinks she’s a prude.

  ‘I’m not a slut, Nan.’

  ‘Of course you’re not. But you’re young and beautiful. Live while the living’s good, babes.’

  ‘I’m not beautiful.’

  She just looked at me. There are some things she knows not to push.

  ‘Well, which one do you like then?’

  ‘I thought I liked Freddie. I’ve known him ages and I used to really … want him.’

  She nodded knowingly. ‘Is that the one you had a scene with before?’

  How does she even know this stuff?

  ‘Erm, kind of. Anyway …’ For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about the sick. ‘I think I’ve sort of … grown out of him. And there was this other boy there.’ I didn’t know what to say after that.

  ‘Is he a looker?’ The way she said it made me giggle.

  ‘He’s really tall and he’s got dark brown hair. He’s really gorgeous actually. I just … I don’t know, there was something about him.’

  She nodded to show that she absolutely definitely understood. ‘I love a tall man. Too bad when you get to my age they’re all shrinking or dead.’

  That made me collapse in hysterics. For the rest of the afternoon, everything seemed better. We went round the shops and Nan bought a bright pink-and-green shirt with a dolphin playing the guitar on the front.

  On our way to look at shoes, we walked past the shop with the dress. Or as Stella calls it, my dress.

  ‘Look, Nan, isn’t it beautiful?’ We stood for a second staring at it shimmering in the window.

  It was cream and gold and entirely made of sequins, except for the rows and rows of cream feathers that made up the bottom of the skirt. It had a drop waist and was lined in pale turquoise silk. A dress Daisy in The Great Gatsby would wear to a party, or Tallulah from Bugsy Malone would appear in for cocktails. A movie star dress. I want to be the kind of person who thinks dresses like that are made for them and knows everyone will look at them but doesn’t care.

  ‘Now that’s a dress,’ Nan said. She linked arms with me and we went in. She walked over to the rack and picked it up, looked at the price and put it back on the rail. It was £250. The most expensive thing I own is the dress I wore to my eighteenth, and that cost £140.

  But then she picked up one in my size and said, ‘Go on, try it on. For fun.’

  ‘Nan, it wouldn’t suit me. You try it on.’

  ‘I’m seventy years old. Don’t be so bloody cheeky.’

  So I took it into the changing room and shut the curtain while Nan sat on the posh armchair outside. What I didn’t tell her was that I had sat on the exact same chair weeks ago, in the middle of study leave, when Stella and I had snuck out of the library because we couldn’t bear it any more.

  Stella had picked out the dress and marched into the cubicle and I had waited outside. When she came out, of course she looked amazing. As she did the Charleston around the shop the gold had sparkled against her olive skin, then she draped herself across me and said, ‘I will get it. It will be mine. I just have to convince my mum.’

  There had been no question of me trying it on. It was Stella’s dress, all the way. Not for mere mortals. Even taking it into the changing room now felt like crossing an invisible line. I carefully put it on and looked at myself. I felt giddy. It made me feel how it looked. Confident and cool and sexy. I didn’t want to show Nan in case she got carried away, but she shouted at me so I opened the curtains. I stood inside the cubicle, not wanting to step out into the shop.

  Nan looked at me and smiled. ‘Don’t tell Sister Melanie how much it cost,’ she said. And that was it.

  The next thing I knew we were at the till and she had her credit card out. She handed me the glossy bag with the dress inside, all wrapped up in pink tissue paper.

  Walking out with it felt thrilling. I knew I had started a war with Stella, but right then I didn’t care.

  Sam

  At first, I thought the Stella thing was an accident. Girls like her don’t just come up and pull blokes like me. It goes against the natural order of the world. Even as she was kissing me, I kept expecting her to suddenly break away and say, ‘Oh, shit, sorry – I thought you were someone else.’ But she never did. She just kept kissing me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Robin and Ben gawping at us from the kitchen doorway, probably wondering if they were both hallucinating after the Harry Potter’s bedroom hot-box. They’re also well aware that girls like Stella don’t just come up and pull blokes like me. Robin gave me a double thumbs-up and mouthed, ‘You lucky fucker!’ as Ben dragged him into the front room.

  When Stella finally stopped kissing me, she started talking to me. Or, talking at me is probably more accurate. She was a tiny, perfectly formed ball of energy, rattling off sentence after sentence, flapping her hands dramatically to emphasize certain words. She explained how this was her house, and how her parents were out of the country, and how she absolutely loved throwing parties here when they were away (the word ‘loved’ came accompanied by a particularly dramatic sweep of the hands). I complimented her on the decor of her upstairs bathroom, but I don’t think she even heard me. She just kept jabbering on and on about what a great night she was having and how she hoped everyone else was loving it too. She was at that lively, fiery stage of drunkenness that usually comes just before vomiting or falling over, or both.

  As flattered and nonplussed as I was by the fact she’d pulled me, I noticed that she would rarely hold my gaze for more than a few seconds. Her eyes were constantly pinballing around the hallway, as if to check whether there was someone more important she should be talking to. Finally, there was.

  ‘Oh my god, there’s Carmen!’ she screamed, pointing behind me into the kitchen at a tall, dark-haired girl. ‘I didn’t think she was coming. Listen, Sam, I’d better say hi. I’ll see you later, yeah?’

  She gave another final glance around her, and pulled me back in for one more kiss.

  ‘Why don’t you give me your number?’ she cooed. ‘We could meet up some time.’

  I recited my number as she jabbed it into her iPhone. ‘This is me,’ she said, and I felt my phone buzz in my pocket as she dropped me a missed call. ‘Give me a call, OK?’

  With that, she disappeared into the kitchen, and left me standing in the hallway wondering what the hell had just happened. I popped my head into the front room to find Robin, Chris and Ben all deeply stoned and very much ready to go home.

  I didn’t see Ribena Girl again. I guess she had already left with Freddie. Pulling Stella had been a weird – and, to be honest, quite nice – diversion, but I still couldn’t get Ribena Girl out of my head. I kept replaying the way she chewed her hair and then pushed it back behind her ears when she laughed.

  The next day me, Robin and Chris were sat round the computer in Robin’s bedroom. We’d met up with the intention of sorting out our trip to Woodland Festival in Devon later that month. But we ended up just going over and over the events of the party.

  Robin was obsessed with Stella. He’d never seen anyone so fit.

  ‘She’s hot, she lives in a massive house and sh
e’s named after a beer. She’s basically the perfect woman.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s actually named after the beer, Robin.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. The beer’s probably named after her. I bet some French bloke fell in love with her and invented a beer just so he could name it after her as a romantic gesture.’

  Chris googled ‘Stella Artois’. ‘It was invented in 1926. And it’s Belgian.’

  ‘Look, whatever,’ said Robin. ‘That’s not important. What’s important is us figuring out why the hell she got off with Sam.’

  ‘Thanks, mate. Appreciate that.’

  ‘No, no offence, man. But Stella is next level. She’s one of those girls who should be going with a footballer or an ugly billionaire or something.’

  ‘Why would the billionaire have to be ugly?’

  ‘All billionaires are ugly. Why do you think they become billionaires in the first place? Do you think if Mark Zuckerberg looked like me he would’ve bothered to invent Facebook? No, he would’ve been too busy shagging birds.’

  ‘You’ve shagged one bird, once,’ said Chris.

  ‘Whatever. All I’m saying is, Stella is out of Sam’s league.’ He turned to me. ‘No offence, man, obviously.’

  I wasn’t offended. It was true. I was as confused as he was. Me and Stella definitely didn’t fit. Me and Ribena Girl fit. Or, at least, it had seemed like we did before she went off with Freddie the Quiff.

  ‘So should I text her, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Do you like her?’ asked Chris.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I mean, she’s really hot. So I guess I do. It would be stupid not to like her, wouldn’t it?’

  Chris shrugged. Robin nodded.

  ‘Right. So, yes. I guess I like her.’

  ‘OK,’ said Chris. ‘So text her.’

  Robin shook his head in despair. ‘Don’t listen to this dickhead. Obviously you shouldn’t text her.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you’ll look like a desperate freak. I usually leave it at least a week before I text a girl. Sometimes I don’t even text them at all.’

  ‘What happens then?’

  ‘Well, I don’t see them again, do I? But at least I keep my dignity intact.’

  Chris and I exchanged glances.

  ‘We can compose the text now, if we must,’ said Robin. ‘But you’ll have to promise you won’t send it for another five days, at least.’

  ‘All right, I promise,’ I said, fully intending to send it the minute I left Robin’s house. I couldn’t imagine waiting a week to text someone. It seemed rude. And anyway, Stella would surely have found someone else by then. A footballer or Mark Zuckerberg, probably.

  ‘OK, let’s brainstorm this carefully.’ Robin grabbed a pad of paper and a pen from his bookshelf and began pacing the room like a caged animal. Chris had lost interest. He was reading the rest of the Stella Artois Wikipedia entry.

  Finally, I broke the silence. ‘What about starting with, “Hi Stella”?’

  Robin stopped pacing and stared at me. ‘Do you want her to text back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right. Well, let’s have some serious suggestions, then.’

  ‘What exactly is wrong with “Hi Stella”?’

  Robin sat down heavily on the edge of the bed and sighed. ‘Listen, Sam. Do you know how many texts Stella has probably received in her life that began “Hi Stella”?’

  I assumed this was a rhetorical question. It was. Robin continued.

  ‘There are probably at least ten blokes from the party last night all sending her texts right now that start with “Hi Stella”. You need to stand out from the crowd.’

  ‘Fine. How?’

  Robin nibbled his bottom lip. ‘Start with a joke,’ he said finally.

  ‘A joke?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What, just any old joke?’

  Chris looked up from the computer screen. ‘My uncle tells a good one about an Irish lighthouse keeper.’

  Robin jabbed the notepad with his biro, like a judge calling for order. ‘Can we concentrate here, please? I mean a private joke. A callback to something funny that happened last night between the two of you.’

  ‘Nothing funny happened last night between us!’ I said. ‘I told you. She just came up and pulled me, jabbered on at me for ten minutes about how much she loved hosting parties, pulled me some more, and then we left.’

  ‘It’s not exactly comedy gold, is it?’ said Chris.

  ‘Yeah. How am I going to make a joke out of that?’

  I idly started composing a private joke-laden text to Ribena Girl in my head. It would have been a five-screen message, at least.

  Robin folded his arms and frowned. ‘Look, I’m trying to help you out here, mate. I don’t have to do this. I’ll be in Florida in a couple of days, beating the women off with a stick.’

  ‘You’re going to the Harry Potter theme park.’

  ‘Yeah, only because my little sister wants to,’ Robin snapped back. ‘She literally begged my parents to take us.’

  From across the hall we heard Robin’s little sister yell, ‘You’re the one who begged them! I hate Harry Potter, it’s for babies!’

  Robin leapt up and shouted back across the hall. ‘I’d like to see a baby grasp the complexity of Dumbledore’s relationship with Snape!’

  He slammed the door and then sat back down as if nothing had happened.

  ‘Yeah, my sister’s obsessed with Potter. She’s been on at my parents to take her for years. Fucking annoying. I’d rather go and check out the Florida club scene.’

  He noticed Chris and I smiling down at the Voldemort wand under his bed. He gently pushed it out of sight with his foot.

  I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. I took it out. I had a text. From Stella.

  ‘I’ve got a text from Stella,’ I announced.

  ‘What?’ yelled Robin, leaping up from the bed. This did not compute for him.

  ‘What shall I do?’

  Chris sighed. ‘Open it.’

  ‘No!’ shouted Robin. ‘Don’t open it! You’ll look like a desperate freak. Wait at least two days to open it.’

  ‘She can’t tell whether or not he’s opened it, Robin,’ Chris said wearily.

  ‘She might be able to.’ Robin peered out of the window, as if Stella might be standing in the street outside. ‘You don’t know what girls like Stella are capable of.’

  ‘Open it, Sam,’ said Chris.

  I opened it and read it out.

  SEE U AT 7 TONIGHT AT THE CAFE OPPOSITE THE POPCORN COUNTER IN WESTFIELD CINEMA? I’LL BRING A FRIEND … DO U HAVE A FRIEND FOR MY FRIEND?

  Chris never stood a chance. Robin jumped into the air. ‘Fucking get in!’

  When he’d returned to the ground, he added, ‘Stella’s friend better be as fit as she is.’

  Hannah

  When I got home I had six missed calls from Stella and one text:

  I NEED TO TALK TO YOU. WHERE ARE YOU?

  That’s the thing with Stella. She had no idea how angry I was about her using my virginity for social point-scoring. And I know if I said something she’d act like I was crazy and turn it round so I seemed immature and silly. Nothing touches her. She’s impervious.

  My phone started ringing again. It was her. I considered not answering, but, of course, I did.

  ‘Where are you? Are you OK? Honestly, Han, Freddie feels awful. I spoke to him for ages this morning and he literally wants to buy you a house in the Caribbean and give you everything he owns including his cat to make up for it.’

  I didn’t speak for a second then all I said was, ‘Uh-huh.’ So she would know I knew what a bitch she had been.

  ‘He really feels bad.’

  Why did he call her to say sorry? Why didn’t he call me? There was a pause and I gave in. If I had even tried to say something, she would have just managed to turn it back round on me.

  ‘Good. I had sick all over me. It was the grosses
t thing that’s ever happened. It had carrots in. Wait, Freddie has a cat?’

  And just like that we both got silly and everything was back to normal. Well, it always had been for her. I just felt angry with myself for giving in like I always do.

  She told me about the rest of the party. How Freddie had fallen asleep on top of the washing machine and how she found people eating dog treats out of unlabelled Tupperware.

  ‘Freddie will be heartbroken that he’s been replaced by someone else.’

  Even though she had already heard the whole Toilet Boy story from Tilly, I told it again. It seemed even more romantic now. We went over the Ribena exchange. His old white T-shirt and battered trainers and how he looked like a beatnik poet.

  ‘I am totally in on the quest to find Toilet Boy.’ Stella said. ‘One hundred per cent in. I’m going to dedicate my life to it, in fact.’ There was a pause. ‘Hang on, I’m putting you on speakerphone. I’m writing him on the door to make it official. What colour do you want?’

  ‘But we don’t know his name.’

  ‘I’m just writing Toilet Boy. I’ll write it in black. Because he is obvs your lobster, and black is classic and doesn’t date.’

  ‘He probably didn’t even like me, though. Honestly, Stell, he was so fit.’

  Stella responded to this concern in song form. ‘You’re insecure/Don’t know what for/Right now I’m writing Toilet Boy on the do-or-or …’

  ‘Stell!’

  ‘Don’t need make-up/To cover up/Toilet Boy on the door is en-ou-ou-gh …’

  ‘Stop singing!’ I screamed.

  But she was away. Freddie was forgotten. In the memory bin with all the other boys we’ve been obsessed with and get hysterical over if we ever see them by accident on the bus.

  ‘Where is Toilet Boy?’ I asked. ‘Where have you written him?’

  ‘Over Freddie. Freddie was so a life-phase, not a life-stage.’ That is a classic Stella thing to say. As if she is a therapist letting you in on the fact she always knew how things were going to turn out.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Toilet Boy is the future.’