The Booby Trap and Other Bits and Boobs (9 page)

Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others

It was meant to be a summer full of boys. The ones who worked at the funfair on the pier, their tans deepening as the weather got hotter and they took off their T-shirts to spin squealing, sunburnt kids on the Waltzers. The packs of guys down for the weekend to our dreary little seaside town, who wanted to steal kisses behind the amusement arcade. The boys from school who'd suddenly got taller and fitter and learned how to look at you as if you were the only girl in the world.

Which was why me and Jules had got summer jobs at the ice-cream parlour on the pier. Before my dad left we used to spend two weeks in Magaluf so my parents could hurl insults at each other in a Mediterranean setting. But now money was tight and if I had to spend summer at home then I needed to be where the boy action was. And when we turned up the first day in our matching white short shorts, the owner, Big Don, increased our pay to £5.50 an hour and all the sprinkles we could eat.

Yeah, it was going to be the best summer ever. And then three things fucked it completely and utterly up. Jules got appendicitis and was rushed to hospital. Her parents were so relieved that she didn't die that they took her off to Fuente Vera to convalesce. And Jules asked Louise to go with her because I'd insisted her stomach pain was trapped wind. Also I look way better in a bikini than her.

Then it started to rain and never stopped. The skies were permanently dark and the sea was an angry, bubbling grey cauldron. Big Don wasn't too bothered that his only customers were geriatrics making a small vanilla cone last an hour while they waited for the rain to die down to a light drizzle, but I was devastated at the lack of cute boys coming in for a Cornetto.

Then the summer went from sucking to officially sucking like no summer had ever sucked before. Because one morning there was Rosie cowering under the parlour's jaunty awning when I arrived to open up.

‘Oh, hi, I'm Rosie,' she whispered so quietly I could barely hear her over the relentless drip-drip of the rain.

‘Cath,' I said, giving the door a hard shove because it tended to stick. She was looking at me funny because we'd been at junior school together, but Rosie had gone on to the posh girls' school and she was wearing mum jeans and it seemed easier to pretend that I didn't know her.

But she was still the same quiet Rosie who crept round the edges. She looked around the ice-cream parlour nervously, as if she expected the metal scoops to spring to life and start attacking her. I opened the store cupboard and grabbed a handful of yellow cotton.

‘Here, put this on,' I ordered. ‘Loo's over there.'

Rosie reached out to catch her regulation ‘I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream' T-shirt, and I realised that she had changed. I mean, she was still small and round and her messy, mousy hair still obscured her pink cheeks, but Rosie
had
grown up. Or at least her breasts had. They were
huge.
And when she emerged from the bathroom in the figure-hugging T-shirt, her tits entered the room half an hour before she did. Large breasts were wasted on a girl like Rosie.

‘It's a little bit tight,' she bleated forlornly, staring down at her chest in dismay.

‘Yeah, sucks to be you.' She'd bogarted all the breastage so no way was she getting any sympathy from me. Then I launched into her orientation. ‘It's pretty easy to figure out, apart from when someone wants to build their own sundae,' I finished. Rosie nodded and waited at the counter eagerly like we were about to be besieged by hungry customers.

Surprisingly we settled into a comfortable routine over the next few days. I'd serve if a hot guy came in but the pickings were pretty slim and I always got the mint choc chip and the pistachio mixed up. Rosie had way more patience at dealing with people and when it wasn't raining, she actually volunteered to hand out flyers because she was a loser.

But mostly I sat reading magazines and Rosie sat reading books. Proper books with tiny letters and fugly paintings on the front of girls who looked all swirly and watery.

We didn't talk at all. Until the day the guy who worked on the face-painting booth came in for a sundae. I rushed to serve him because he was under fifty and passably fit apart from the whole geek chic thing with his hipster specs and Jack Purcells and, OMG, a
cardigan
, but Rosie was already brandishing one of the scoops purposefully.

I watched in amazement as he took the Build Your Own Sundae promotion to scary places that it was never meant to go. Chocolate ice cream, double chocolate ice cream, chocolate fudge ice cream with chocolate sauce and a Flake was against all laws of God and WeightWatchers.

‘I saw you handing out flyers this morning,' he remarked to Rosie, who blushed more furiously than usual. Boys probably didn't talk to her that much, except to comment on her mammoth appendages. ‘I could take some for the face-painting booth if you wanted.'

Rosie did want. She wanted so badly that she even gave him an extra helping of chocolate sauce.

‘Do you fancy him?' I asked when he'd left with his sundae perched precariously in one hand as he shifted the box of flyers under his other arm.

‘I fancy not handing out flyers in a sudden downpour,' Rosie muttered. Her voice dropped. ‘‘Sides, boys like that don't fancy girls like me.'

‘What, dorky boys in cardigans?'

‘Whippet thin, arty boys with a casual insouciance,' Rosie said, which seemed like brainiac speak for dork. It also seemed like we'd used up our allotted word quota for the day.

I soon realised that Rosie really didn't like me. Like, she would never speak to me about anything not ice cream related. She'd either bury her head in one of her boring books or willingly serve customers without waiting for them to cough pointedly first.

I tried everything. I asked her about music but she only liked whiny emo bands. I asked her about her favourite TV shows but she was a freak who didn't have her own TV. By the time I asked her what her favourite colour was, I was officially desperate, but she just mumbled, ‘green', as Cardigan Boy walked in.

He stood there trying to catch Rosie's eye but she was steadfastly gazing at the syrup bottles until I gave her a theatrical nudge. ‘I don't serve dorks, so he's all yours,' I drawled.

If I'd been Rosie, I'd have engaged in some flirty talk involving the word ‘vanilla', but Rosie just waited silently until Cardigan Boy decided on a praline and peanut butter combo. She dropped the first scoop on the floor and because I'm a saint, I offered to mop it up, while she tried again. Her legs were totally shaking and when I finally straightened up it was in time to hear him say, ‘Nice badge,' as Rosie handed him his change.

The door had barely had time to close behind him, before she burst into tears.

Rosie wouldn't say why she was crying. She just ran into the loo. When she came out, her eyes were pink, like she'd been scrubbing at them with the scratchy toilet tissue that Big Don got from the cash and carry instead of the posh stuff we had at home.

‘Are you all right?' I asked, but Rosie simply sniffed a bit and picked up her book.

It was much, much later when I'd just locked up and was gazing at the bulging sky and waiting for the first fat drops of rain to start plopping down, that Rosie spoke.

‘I thought he was different,' she said, trying to yank the zip of her cagoule over her breasts. ‘But he's the same as all the other boys.'

‘He is different from other boys. He wears a cardigan, for God's sake.'

‘No, I mean, it was just about these, wasn't it?' She gestured at her chest. ‘He wasn't looking at my badge at all.'

I looked at her badge, which was hard because her breasts really were attention hoggers. ‘Reading is sexy', it proclaimed, which it
so
wasn't, but if Cardigan Boy really had been looking at her badge and thought it was cool, then they were, like, kindred spirits or something.

‘Maybe he was looking at your badge but your boobs are in the same area so he had to look at them too. They are kinda…'

‘Big?' Rosie suggested coldly. ‘Ginormous, don't get many of them to the pound, could have someone's eye out – whatever you were about to say, don't bother. I've heard it all before.'

‘I was going to say gazeworthy,' I snapped because she could just get over herself. Lots of people would pay good money for a pair that weren't even half as impressive. ‘How big are you anyway?' I heard myself asking. ‘Like 40DD?'

‘Oh, piss off,' Rosie hissed in a very un-Rosie-like manner and stomped off.

‘I was only asking,' I pointed out, following her because I wanted to get off the pier before the heavens unleashed. ‘Boys like boobs. Deal with it.' Which was precisely why I had a pair of rubber chicken fillets stuffed into my bra cups.

‘Well, I like boys who can see beyond my chest to the person underneath,' Rosie muttered. ‘If he doesn't like me for my personality then he's not worth it.'

‘Do you want to know what your problem is, Rosie?'

‘Apart from the way you keep haranguing me with rhetorical questions?' She folded her arms over the offending areas. ‘What is my problem, oh wise one?'

‘You think everything is about your breasts; but they wouldn't be so noticeable if you stopped tugging at your clothes and drawing attention to them every five seconds.' Rosie's hair was in her face and I couldn't tell whether my words were having any effect. ‘You don't make the best of yourself. You should do something with your hair and stop letting your mum buy your clothes.'

‘She doesn't buy my clothes … '

‘Well, it looks like she does.' I tried to soften my voice because we were getting off topic. ‘Look, Rosie, you might read lots of books but they're not teaching you important boy-getting life skills. Twenty-five per cent of your problem is obviously low self-esteem and the other seventy-five per cent of your problem will disappear if you let me work on your wardrobe, grooming and getting you a bra that actually fits.'

Rosie took the bait at last. ‘What's wrong with my bra?'

I came right out with it. ‘You have a mono-boob. There's meant to be two of them, not one long sausagey thing hanging there. I'm not a lezza or anything, Rosie, but I'd really love to know what's going on under your clothes.'

I hadn't even finished my sentence before Rosie bolted across the road and narrowly avoided getting mown down by a bus.

And that was that. If Rosie wanted to spend the rest of her life being a mono-boobed freak, it was nothing to do with me.

But three days later after Big Don had been in to give us our wages, Rosie sidled up as I stacked my magazines in a neat pile. ‘It's late-night closing, isn't it? Will you help me buy some new bras?'

Rosie had a long list of acceptable behaviour for our bra-buying expedition. She refused to have her boobs measured. I wasn't allowed in the changing room. The words ‘knockers', ‘bristols', ‘norks' and all other variants were banned and I wasn't to speculate on what her size might be.

I agreed to everything because even walking to the main shopping drag together was a big thing for Rosie. Acceptance was the first step to recovery, blah blah blah. And I almost shed a tear as I saw the light dawn on Rosie's face as I extolled the virtues of underwire bras and she snatched a handful and hurried to try them on. She was actually figuring out the basic rules of girl stuff before my very eyes.

When Rosie reappeared, and headed towards the cash register with her hands full of new bras and one greying old one, she was walking very oddly, as if her centre of gravity had totally shifted. Maybe it was because her boobs were no longer one weird roll propped on her chest, but like actual proper breasts. They were still enormous but at least they didn't look like they should have their own national anthem any more.

‘You have a waist now,' I told her in amazement after she'd paid. ‘You look super fierce.' I expected Rosie to give me another speech about how she only wanted to be judged for her lame personality, but a tiny, pleased smile played around her lips.

‘I'm having this major epiphany,' Rosie confessed. ‘I always thought it was superficial to care too much about clothes and hair and it was the inner me that counted. But maybe the outer me should look more like the inner me.'

She really needed to come with subtitles.

‘What does the inner you look like,' I asked.

Turned out that Rosie's inner me looked like the girls in the books she read; quirky and mysterious, which I translated as a muted colour palette and lots of V-necks and wrap tops to minimise her mammaries. We trawled through New Look, Primark and H&M and Rosie tried on everything I suggested. I wouldn't say we were becoming friends, more like teacher and pupil.

Every day the skies got darker and the rain got more biblical and we'd camp out in one of the booths, so I could impart all the wisdom I'd acquired in my sixteen years.

Rosie took notes and when I was done imparting she made me laugh by inventing this whole other life for Big Don where he ordered girlfriends off the internet. She was dead sarcastic and funny once you got to know her.

There were hardly ever any customers but when Cardigan Boy came in, Rosie would hide from view and whisper: ‘You serve him, Cath, please.'

But on Thursday when the bell above the door jangled I'd just given my nails their second coat of The Lady Is A Tramp, so with a long-suffering sigh, Rosie hauled herself up.

‘Hey, I haven't seen you for ages,' he said and she almost tripped over her feet.

Then his eyes widened at new improved Rosie in a black V-neck sweater that fitted properly with a little felt corsage pinned to her shoulder and a pair of jeans that didn't give her a mum bum. And game on, because Cardigan Boy was looking at Rosie in exactly the same way that he'd looked at his Tropical Fruits sundae. Mind you, he'd looked at her like that pre-makeover too.