Live and Fabulous! (2 page)

Magda's long, thick brown hair is scraped up into a high ponytail with mad, static chunks escaping at the fringe, pointing skyward. Her cheeks are glowing, which may be connected to the posh boutique shopping bags she is clutching in each hand. Since my mother got herself into the pudding club last year (Pregnant at the age of thirty-eight—can you believe it?), she has begun residing in a parallel fashion universe where vile clothes are gorgeous and vice versa. I blamed it on her hormones and weight gain (By nine months Mum was almost big as Luxembourg. She had her own flag and everything), and thought once she gave birth she might calm down. But I was so wrong. It simply gave her more mobility to shop.

“Who are you speaking to? Who's in the hospital?” Mum is shouting.

“I'm on the phone. Go away!” I snap back.

Magda's brow is creased. She can tell I've been crying. Suddenly she's grabbing at me, trying to snatch the phone from my hands.

“Pggh,
just give me that phone,” she bleats. “Has there been an accident?”

I try shooing Magda away, but as an entity, she is highly unshoo-able.

It's like being charged by an ill-tempered, colorblind octopus.

With a crafty pincer movement, Operation Jumpsuit Terror liberates the phone from my right hand, leaving me opening and closing my mouth, waving my arms like a synchronized swimmer.

“Yes, hello, Magda Ripperton here,” Mum says, switching to her hoity-toity posh phone voice. Grrrrrrr. “Veronica Ripperton's mother speaking. What is occurring here, if you please?”

Mum listens to the nurse, her face turning slightly pale.

“Oh, right, she did, did she?” Mum sighs, shaking her head. “Mmm, uh-huh ... Jimi Steele? Oh, yes, I know him very well ... ,” Mum says, in the tone of someone recalling an intimate fungal infection. Her nostrils are flaring.

“Well, Staff Sister Jacqueline, I apologize profusely for Veronica. Her father and I are having her head examined next week. It's an ongoing problem. Good evening to you.”

Mother presses “hang up” on the phone.

I narrow my eyes at her. She sneers back.

“I'm not even going to comment on that,” lies my mother blatantly. “Just please tell me you haven't got the Missing Persons Bureau on Jimi Steele's case too. Or Interpol?”

“You don't understand,” I sigh dramatically.

“Cuh,” Mum splutters, managing to communicate in the space of one grunt that:

 

 

Fine ... if I wanted to swap the most beautiful boy at Blackwell School for a haddock.

“I hate you,” I tell her, glancing at my watch. I am soooo going to miss this party.

“No, you don't,” she replies.

“I
do
hate you,” I assure her, sighing even more deeply. “I hate the world.”

“Well, I
love
you anyhow,” Mum replies cunningly.

“Bleuggh,”
I reply.

Mum and I gaze at each other in silence. I check my phone again for missed calls. Zilch. Nada.

Downstairs, crowds of beer-heads are making their noisy way into the Fantastic Voyage, spilling out into our newly built beer garden, enjoying the hazy June start-of-the-weekend feeling. Travis, our Aussie bartender, is wrestling crates up from the cellar and flirting with the girlie customers.

The smell of Jimi Steele
not
arriving to take me to Blackwell Disco hangs pungently in the air.

“Sooooo,” announces Mum, peering at me. “Aren't you supposed to be with Claudette and Fleur shaking your thang tonight? You've been at hysterical point about this for weeks, haven't you?”

“Hmmphgh,”
I say, plonking down and picking up a copy of
Your Baby Monthly,
feigning engrossment in a feature on inverted nipples.

Mum may have a small point there.

My very own all-girl cosmic fighting force, Les Bambinos Dangereuses, or the LBD as we're universally known, have held hair/body/clothes summit talks every single night for a fortnight to debate the Blackwell end-of-term disco. It's the indisputable social event of the year! Well, so far anyway. We've spent eons yaddering about which outfits made our boobs look perkier, our booties look peachier and our upper arm skin look less like corned beef. Then, after a zillion outfits were tried, Fleur Swan even made Paddy, her dad, digital-camera her sashaying up and down the stairs in her top five choices, just to make an “informed decision.”

Suffice to say, Blackwell Disco, is ... or was ... a big deal.

“And I'm gathering that Crown Prince Retard was escorting you there,” says Mum.

“Don't call him ...”

“Sorry,
sorry,
I mean Jimi.”

Mum mimes “buttoning her lip,” but as ever, her will to speak is too strong. “Right, let's go!” she barks, grabbing her car keys off the coffee table.

“Fix your makeup, missy, you look like a disgruntled panda. I'm driving you to Blackwell myself. Call Claudette Cassiera now and tell her we're en route.”

“But...”

“Lovely Claudette Cassiera
is
going, isn't she? And
that
Fleur Swan? Well, unless Paddy sent her to the nunnery like he threatened to last week. That poor man ... his nerves must be shot to pieces.”

“Yeah, they're
both
going. But you don't understand, Mum,” I begin. “Jimi said he was going to come here and pick ...”

“Oh, spare me,” grunts Mum.

“So I can't just go, Mum,” I argue. “He wouldn't let me down! He must have had an accident or...”

“Ooh-hoo! He'll be having an accident when I get ahold of him,” scoffs my mother, miming squeezing someone by the throat. “At least I'll make it look like an accident.”

Oh, dear.

“Right, Cinderella?” Mum says, clapping her hands. “What you need is a good dance, blow the cobwebs away.”

“Not going,” I say sulkily.

“Ooh, I quite fancy a rave myself,” Mum says, not at all joking. “I might pop in for a leg stretch when I'm dropping you off. Y'know, say thanks to Mrs. Guinevere for resurrecting Blackwell Discos. I'll see if that miserable old headmaster Mr. McGraw fancies cutting a rug.”

I feel faint.

“Ooh, Ronnie, y‘know, since I had Seth, y'know, I feel like I've got a fresh lease on life.”

Mum begins gyrating her bum from left to right, waving her hands.

Wonderful: My entire world is obliterated and she's doing the Macarena.

“Will they play any Tamla Motown?”

“No,” I say through a very small mouth.

“Any reggae?”

“You're not coming in.”

“I'm going if you don't,” Mum bribes.

Then Mum notices the tears starting to run down my face. She stops shaking her rump.

“Aww, Ronnie, come here,” she says, sitting down beside me and wrapping her arm around my shoulder. “I know how you feel. It's crap. Being stood up is really crap.”

“Where can he be, Mum?” I ask.

“Oh, he's just out there. Somewhere. Being a jerk,” says Mum, tickling my neck.

“You don't think he's dead?”

“No, Ron. The smart money says he's absolutely alive.”

“The night's ruined,” I say bleakly.

Over the last ten months, I have learned some harsh lessons about the realities of keeping, training and maintaining a boyfriend. Sometimes it really sucks. I mean, what flaming excuse in the
entire world
could that great farthead give for standing me up tonight?

And this after an entire 330
days
of quacking on that I'm a “total babe” and “absolutely hilarious.” Oh, and he gets a “dead weird feeling inside whenever he sees me.”

(“Hoo-hoo! I get that feeling sometimes,” hooted Mum when I told her. “Usually after eating brussels sprouts ...”)

Pah.

Because if boyfriends care so much that they can slaver on soppy stuff like that, how can they hurt your feelings so much?

Correction. How can they hurt your feelings so much AGAIN?

“Because when it comes to most men, Veronica,” says Mum sagely, “you'd be better off with a sock puppet.”

I tend to take Mum's man advice with a pinch of salt. She always refers to her marriage to Dad as “a drunken bet gone too far.”

(For more wisdom refer to the appendix.)

Then suddenly, we hear some footsteps on the stairs.

JIMI STEELE! HOSANNNNNA!!! LET'S PARTY!

Er, not quite.

“Ahoy, ladies!” says my father, Lawrence “Loz” Ripperton, proprietor of the Fantastic Voyage, appearing in the doorway with a vast grin plastered across his face. My five-month-old baby brother, Seth Otis Ripperton, is strapped to his chest in a powder-blue papoose, snoozing.

“Howdy!” chirps Loz. “Ah, it's good to see the womenfolk of the Fantastic Voyage all present and accounted for.”

My father has somehow missed that while his daughter is sobbing, his wife is dressed as an insane parachute commander.

“We menfolk have been to a meeting,” Dad says, patting Seth's tiny head.

I look at Dad with total bemusement. “You've just attended the Garstang Brewery summer finance general meeting with Seth strapped to your front in a pastel papoose?” I ask witheringly.

“I know!” says Dad proudly.

What is happening to my life? Here is a man who, until a year ago, wouldn't drink a wine cooler in public for fear it made him look “a bit gay.” Now he's waltzing about like Mary flipping Poppins.

It's a world gone mad, I tell you.

I want my old, predictable parents back.

This is yucky.

Everything these days pivots around the desires of Seth Ripperton.

Night and day. Day and night. It's like they've converted to an obscure religious cult, worshipping a fourteen-pound pink lump. And don't get me wrong, Seth is totally, like, the most gorgeous baby you have ever seen. I mean, he's far better looking than some of the freaky-looking things you see on the high street, but right now, he never does anything remotely news-worthy aside from cry, poo, cry while pooing, sleep. (He still manages to squeeze poos out while snoring, don't worry.) No, I tell a lie: Very recently he's begun sitting upright with his head lolling about like a helium balloon.

There was never this fuss when I was a child.

Oh, no, believe me.

When Loz and Magda brought me home from the maternity ward, they simply pushed my buggy into the backyard and left it beside some old Garstang Pale Ale crates. I was raised by a family of benevolent passing owls. All I ate was mice and worms till I was eleven, which raised eyebrows in the school dinner hall when I got my packed lunch out.

No wonder I get stood up on a Friday night.

“You have a very vivid imagination,” sighs Flight Field Marshal Magda, standing up and unhooking Seth from Dad. “I remember hugging you at least twice,” she adds dryly.

“Hee hee, the orphanage kept sending her back, didn't they, love?” chuckles Dad. “They knew we were still alive. They kept spotting us, pulling away in the car!”

Ooh, my sides.

At last my phone rings!

I swoop toward it, in a rugby tackle move, praying it's not Nana calling me to discuss what she had for her supper. However, the screen reads:

LIAM ANSWER?

Why's Liam “Blackwell bad boy but dead nice really” Gelding calling me?

I press “Yes.”

“Hello?” I say.

“What do you mean, hello? How, hello?” begins Fleur “Operation Shock and Awe” Swan, sounding excessively cross. “Right, this better be good, Ronnie. Very good indeed. This party started almost two hours ago! I've been asked for, like, two songs already ... And Carson Dewers in lower sixth has bought me a Coke and asked for my mobile number! Where the flipping heck are you, butt crack?”

“I'm ...”

“Look, just tell me you're just walking in the front door now, or I am going to burst an artery. Just tell me you're almost here.”

“Mmm ... er wah ... well, I'm at home ... ,” I begin, but talk is futile.