Liz Elwes

Style Sisters: Friends First

Chapter 1

Friday 9.00 a.m
  Fact. I must have the softest hands in the country.
  You need time and dedication to get them in this condition and I have now been in my room for days and days. The hours don't exactly fly by when you're lying on your bed, staring at the ceiling.
  Depressed.
  It was my keen survival instinct that made my trailing arm start patting tentatively under the bed. This produced a half-eaten packet of biscuits, so I ventured further with some exploratory sweeps of my arm and found an old magazine which had some excellent beautiful tips in it - apparently sleeping with moisturised hands in gloves leads to velvety softness.
  My Vaselined hands have barely been out of my wholly black school gloves since. Sadly the biscuits are finished. Quite a lot of crumbs have sort of woven themselves into the glove fibres over time but, overall, I would say it's been worth it. I could now, honestly, be a hand model. I can do all the moves. I could do diamond Tiffany bracelets. Or branch out and be a weather girl; I've got the required pointing skills and it would be easy for them to stick false nails on the bitten ones.
  The other thing I found under the bed (and I don't want to brag about it but it was quite a haul) was this diary. This one that I am actually writing in now. My brother, Ned, gave it to me last Christmas. It is a blue and sparkly 'My Little Mermaid' Diary. I would almost have been touched by this present if I wasn't over six years old and if it hadn't been for the year before. And to think he complained about my present to him. How could lip balm ever be an unwelcome gift?
  In spite of the dates not fitting the days of the week and it now being the end of March, I am going to start it anyway. I want to record my slow and painful road to recovery after Danny's sudden and devastating departure.
  It will all be very useful in our English lessons when we get going on the classics and dealing with Big Novelists. I will see how their made-up stuff shapes up against my own raw emotion. I can call upon what I write now in future essays and Mrs McGuy will say: 'Carrie Henderson, it is astounding how one so young can write about love with such maturity, clarity and simplicity. These other writers were practically dead before they knew enough to express these emotions!'
  I will bow my head and bravely bite my lip as she cannot possibly understand what it was like when the first boy I ever kissed and my first real boyfriend (as in being allowed to tell people you're going out together and sitting next to each other on the bus) has had to leave my school and my life forever.
  I won't write any more because I will start to cry again, though it's hard to tell if it's grief or hunger. After I said goodbye to Danny, Mum brought me up lots of cups of tea and toast and even a bowl of soup and a chicken sandwich in the first night. Heady days. I should have known she couldn't keep it up. It's not in her nature to be consistently kind for long periods. By the end of day two it was: 'Are you coming down, Carrie? It's shepherd's pie,' and wafting the mouth-watering smell up the stairs with a tea towel to torture me. I resisted.  A broken heart cannot be mended by food. And now it's breakfast time and she's doing it again with the toast. It's obvious she's trying to starve me out.
  I think it's something to do with her being a teacher; they can't sustain nurturing skills over an extended period. It gets trained out of them. (Miss Gooding practically cried when she first came to the school and I told her that a cat had given birth to two adorable fluffy kittens on my homework and I couldn't well disturb her. Those were days - now she'd laugh in my face or, I am sad to say, even use strong language.) 
  Mum's sure to be arrested when my skeleton is found in a corner of my room, though. I'm not sure how dad, Max and Ned will cope with the prison visits. It's only a matter of time before she'll be rolling ciggies one-handed and yelling 'Got any snout?' across the visiting room to large tattooed women called Deirdre.
  Right. To spare them all this fate, I am off to the kitchen now. If I am not greeted with joyous cries from my younger brother and a bit of sobbing into the old apron from Mum I will be offended.

Friday 9.45 a.m.
I am offended.
  I do not wish to commit to paper the hurtful scene that has just occurred but I feel my therapist might find an accurate recording of events useful.
  I do not actually have a therapist at the moment, but I feel it's only a matter of time.
  After washing my hair three times (which, by the way, ruined in ten minutes the melting soften of my hands and thus a future thriving career), I pulled on clean jeans and a T-shirt and descended to the bosom of my family. Well, half of it. Dad was at work and Max is on his gap year in South America.
  I leaned against the door in a soulful way and breathed, 'Hi', trying not to make a dash for Ned's toast and cram it in my mouth. He must have sensed something because he drew his plate, and the dirty trainer on the table next to it, towards him.
  Disgusting.
  'Carrie!', Mum was beaming at me. 'You do look lovely, and more cheerful.'
  I looked at her and wished I could say the same about her. Not the cheerful bit, because she is, but she isn't exactly the last word in style. She was wearing an ancient T-shirt with a crumbly rock band logo on the front and comfy tracky-bums stratched over a not tiny bum. This look was finished off with dazzling white trainers. Truly, truly horrible. I won't say what she wears for school. Too much information. Ok, a bit more - sometimes she cuts her own hair. It is very thick and frizzy. Enough said.
  I was just sitting down and thinking that I should count myself lucky if my only criticism for my mum was her clothes sense, despite the starvation thing, when the next thing she says, apart from 'Do you want toast and tea, etc, etc.' is: 'I'm so glad to see that you've stopped moping around your room.'
  Moping! What kind of word is that to describe my inner tragedy? Three days (nearly) I'd been in that room. I drooped over the kitchen table and tried to shovel the toast Mum had just handed me into my mouth in a depressed yet speedy way.
  And then Ned said, 'You weren't that keen on Danny before you knew he was going away. You said that you thought he could be a bit boring.'
  Don't younger brothers have such irritating squeaky voices?
  'I never, ever said that!'
  'You did.'
  'Did not.'
  'Did.'
  'Did not.'
  Etc, etc. Combine the voice thing with their uncanny ability to remember every single thing you have ever said, even if you didn't mean it, and it's really a wonder any of them ever make it to adulthood.
  He opened his mouth again, but I raised my hand.
  'Please don't try and talk to me about relationships, Ned. You are twelve. You love your skateboard and want me to be bridesmaid when you marry it.'
'Ooooh, I'm cracking up, Carrie. You should be in showbiz, you really should.'
  I sighed.
  It was obvious I was still way too emotionally vulnerable for all this. I had left my room too soon to cope with the outside world. Mum handed me some more toast.
  'What's happened to Rani and Chloe?' she asked. 'It seems like ages since they came round. Why don't you give them a ring, Carrie?
  With quiet dignity I took the plate from her hand and left the room.
  My therapist will be wringing her hands in sorrow at my insensitive treatment when she gets to that bit. (I've decided it's going to have to be a woman because a man might fall in love with the fascinating yet fragile personality which I will have developed by then. And I don't need added complications.) She will wonder what kind of extraordinary girl has the strength of personality to overcome that sort of childhood. In fact, she'll be begging to see me and I won't have to pay.
  I have finished my toast. I am still hungry.
  Now that I've been downstairs, the four walls of my room have lost their charm. Even the pink tree I painted on my wall with the tiny, stencilled gold leaves has lost its allure. On the branches I've nailed tiny tacks that I hang all my jewellery, belts and bits of ribbon, etc. on. I have rearranged this twice. Perhaps I do need to get out.

Style Sisters: Friends First  © Sophie Parkin, 2006. Published by Piccadilly Press Ltd.