The Queen of Bloody Everything Read online

  ‘I’m going to do it, girls,’ you say.

  ‘Do what?’ asks Harry.

  ‘Change my name,’ you crow. ‘I meant to do it years ago. But I forgot. Or I was broke. Whichever. Now is the time. I’ve got forms.’ You wave a sheaf of official-looking paper at me, already decorated with a mug stain and something that may or may not be lipstick.

  ‘There’s one for you too, Di. Otherwise you’ll be all alone as a Jones.’

  ‘There are hundreds of Joneses,’ I retort for the sake of it. But secretly I am thrilled. Because here it is, the secret potion, the magic key, the fairy godmother I have been waiting for to transform my appearance, my very existence, into something not exotic, not butterfly-like, but ploddingly, forgettably normal.

  ‘Can I be anything?’ I ask.

  ‘Absolutely,’ you say. ‘Except for Jesus. Or Beelzebub, I think.’

  ‘Who’d want to be Beelzebub anyway?’ asks Harry.

  ‘Or Jesus?’ says Edie.

  ‘The Spanish?’ I suggest belligerently.

  You roll your eyes and light a cigarette.

  ‘So?’ Harry demands. ‘What are you going to be?’

  You hold up a skinny, silver-ringed hand. ‘Not what, who,’ you say. ‘And I’m still thinking.’

  We wait in absurdly respectful silence for what feels like an eternity, at least at that age, until finally you pull a rabbit out of the hat.

  ‘Paradise,’ you say. ‘Pearl Paradise.’

  ‘Coo-ool. You sound like a stripper,’ I hear Harry respond, in what I assume is awe and appreciation.

  ‘Try it,’ you say to me. ‘Call me Pearl.’

  I roll my eyes, practised, perfected. ‘Why can’t I just call you “Mum”?’

  ‘Because I refuse to be defined by a single act,’ you say. ‘By one facet that is merely biology rather than achievement.’

  As opposed to all your other achievements, I think, uncharitably.

  ‘Though at nine pounds you were a bloody feat, I can tell you.’

  ‘I was six pounds,’ says Harry.

  ‘I was premature,’ you say. ‘A slip of a thing.’

  ‘I wish I could call my mum “Pearl”,’ Harry bemoans. ‘Or even “Angela”. “Mum” is so primary, you know?’

  But I don’t know. And I don’t care. Instead I switch off and drift into my own imagination, my refuge, my preferred place to live.

  Who do I want to be? I think.

  The list of girls I would rather be is almost infinite in its length and impossibility. I have tried out so many, borrowed their outfits, their lines, already conveniently written out for me in black and white.

  There was the tragically orphaned Heidi, of course, who got to sleep in a hayloft and spend all day with Peter the goatherd, my first and lasting crush. Then, over the years, and entirely through the pages of books, I worked my way steadily through Velvet Brown from National Velvet, who wins and then loses the Grand National disguised as a boy; Laura from Little House in the Big Woods, who may have to deal with bears and unbearable winters, but has a pa who can tap maple trees for syrup; George from the Famous Five who bests the boys at everything (Anne would seem a more obvious choice, but even aged eight I understood my own limitations); Jo from Little Women; any of the five Bastables, or indeed any child with a crowd of rowdy siblings. Given a real choice I might have plumped for the brightest girl with the most glittering future, but really any of them would have done. As long as there was a plentiful supply of lemonade and eggs, a clamour of brothers and sisters – preferably sharing bunk beds – and at least one normal parent, I would have been happy.

  But now, for a change, I have set my mind on more tangible beings, made of flesh and blood rather than ink and imagination, but no less unachievable for it. First came Harry. Of course, Harry. Who could not want her legs, her hair, her popularity? But more than that: her house, with proper carpets and built-in everything; her parents (two of them! What luxury!) and her ability to slip into any scene, to play her part at a neighbour’s cocktail party, a roller disco, a meeting of the cigarette select behind the bike sheds, as if she were to the manner born.

  But then there is Tom.

  If I am Harry, I am destined to sisterdom. Yes, I would get the strange balance of bitter brawls and then undying devotion that I watch on a weekly basis and so covet. But that is all I could ever hope for. And by now, I hope for so much more.

  You must have known then. Before, even. Because I had hardly had the wit to know what to do with it, still less to hide it.

  I love him.

  I love his anger at the world and need to change it.

  I love that he plays a stumbling, self-taught guitar with the same passion and belief.

  I love that he only wears black.

  I love that he has defied his mother’s impenetrable list of rules and pinned a poster of Che Guevara to his bedroom door and stuck Siouxsie Sioux to his ceiling.

  I love the way his school-rule-breaking hair hides his eyes, but if he likes you, he will flick it sideways and reward you with a wink.

  I love the thinness of his hips and the fatness of his lips.

  I love him so hard and so intensely that sometimes I am struck dumb for words when in his presence and am reduced to a pitiful stammer, or worse, staring.

  And so no, I don’t want to be Harry any more, I want to be someone who can love him the way I love him.

  I want to be Katy Weller.

  Katy Weller is fifteen and fit.

  At least five foot nine, she is an inch taller than Tom and two more in her black suede stilettos. Her hair defies laws of physics with the aid of gel and spray starch, and she has her right ear pierced not once, not twice, but three times, the latter two both performed in the upper-school toilets with a safety pin, according to Harry. At the Christmas disco she put one hand down the back pocket of his jeans and the other up inside his grandad shirt. Though she has put them in several other places, according to Harry.

  So yes, right now, I want to be Katy. Or a Katy at least.

  ‘Katy?’ Harry snorts. ‘Don’t be mental. You can’t be Katy.’

  ‘Why not?’ I ask. ‘It’s a normal name.’

  ‘Exactly,’ you say. ‘Why be Katy when you could be, I don’t know, Delilah?’

  ‘Well, if that’s the only option I might as well stick to bloody Dido, then,’ I snap.

  ‘Don’t be like that,’ you say. Then, relenting, but not getting it, ‘Fine, you can be Katy Paradise.’

  ‘I don’t want to be Paradise!’ I insist. ‘It’s not even a name, it’s a thing.’

  ‘Well, what do you want to be?’

  ‘What’s wrong with Jones?’

  ‘It’s still half my father’s surname,’ you say.

  ‘Fine,’ I echo, seeing a glowing, if cruel, opportunity. ‘What’s my father’s surname, then?’

  You stub the half-smoked cigarette out, snort. ‘You always have to bloody spoil things, don’t you?’

  ‘Sticks and stones,’ I mutter. But you’re not listening. Not any more. You are too busy being Pearl in your head. Wondering at how she will mend your messy life. The next day you come home with a new haircut. Pearl’s haircut. It is pixie-short so that I can trace the shape of your ears and, under the glow of the Tiffany lamp, see the peach fuzz that coats them.

  I love it, but I don’t tell you that. I am still too busy hating you.

  Harry tells Tom even though I beg her not to.

  We’re sitting slumped at the kitchen table after a trip to town; her laden with bags, me with a single eyeliner in my back pocket. Tom is leaning over the Dettol-fresh Formica listening to the radio and eating a sandwich, his jeans too low and his T-shirt too tight. I feel myself redden at thoughts I have barely had time to conjure.

  And she sees it, and sees her chance. In her favour, she has managed to hold it in for two whole days – a new record – but this is too much to bear: the ridiculousness of it, the audacity.

  ‘Dido’s ch
anging her name,’ she blurts.

  Tom looks up. ‘Yeah? What to?’

  Harry pauses for effect, assuming I am yet again allowing her the moment of glory, as opposed to being mute in the presence of beauty and humiliation. ‘Katy,’ she says. ‘Can you believe it?’

  I feel a rush of nausea and wish I hadn’t eaten a Mars bar on the way up the hill. Oh God, I think. What if he works it out? He’s bound to work it out. I am an idiot. I am a fucking dildo.

  ‘From the book,’ I say quickly, desperately trying to cover my clear-as-day tracks with the equivalent of a light dusting of sand.

  But Tom barely looks up from his wodge of cheese and ham.

  ‘What book?’ says Harry.

  ‘Duh, What Katy Did,’ I say, adding a layer of insolence for better disguise.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Harry says. ‘Anyway, it’s still bor-ing. If I could change my name I’d be Siobhán, or something exotic like that.’

  ‘Siobhán’s not exotic,’ Tom says, still chewing. ‘It’s Irish for Joanna.’

  ‘How do you even know?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He shrugs. ‘I just do.’

  ‘God, you always have to bloody argue,’ says Harry. The wind knocked from her considerable sails, she snatches two cartons of juice from the fridge. ‘Going upstairs,’ she says to me. ‘Coming?’

  I stand, and begin to trudge obediently after her. But he calls out to me.

  ‘Really? Katy?’

  I turn back, see him looking up at me from under that fringe.

  I nod.

  He laughs, a single scoffing sound. ‘You’re not a Katy.’

  My already flushed face burns now with indignation, and I find my faltering voice. ‘Why?’ I demand. ‘Why can’t I be Katy? Or . . . or anything I want to bloody be?’

  ‘Hey, chill,’ he says. ‘I just think . . .’ He pauses, trying to find the right words. But what he comes up with is, ‘You’re Dido. And you always will be.’

  And it’s as if he’s spoken a fairy-tale curse, condemning me, not to sleep for a hundred years, but forever to be a fool. The one who will never quite fit. I feel the familiar prickle of salt water at the corners of my eyes and will my legs to start walking again.

  But then he clarifies.

  ‘Anyway, I like it. Dido, I mean. You shouldn’t change because of those bitches. Who the fuck wants to be called Tracey?’ And with that he takes another bite and turns back to the radio.

  When I get home I tear up my application. And you kiss me on the forehead without saying a word.

  I never knew what happened to yours. Did you forget to post it? Or lose it, perhaps? Whichever, you are still Edie Jones. And I am Dido.

  And you know what? I am glad.

  The Holiday

  August 1984

  There were always men.

  I’d wake with the strangest sensation that the house was fuller, somehow. So cramped were the rooms, so pressurized the air space between the two of us, that the presence of another body seemed to send the atmosphere into a St Vitus’s dance of potential. When I was smaller, I’d creep out of bed and pick my way across the few soundless floorboards, trying to snatch a look at whichever waif or stray you had collected in the Duke of York, or wherever it was that you went when I was safely in bed with a torch and a Judy Blume. I woke up once at half past ten to find the house empty – knew before I’d even sat up in bed that I was alone in the slackness and silence. I should have panicked, gone running to Harry’s, or called the police as I’d been taught at school. But instead, ever practical in my over-imagination, I planned my campaign to persuade the Trevelyans to adopt me once your murdered corpse had been discovered down Battleditch Lane. It was to my severe disappointment the next morning to find you alive and well and in bed with a man who smelled of unwashed hair and went by the name of Milko. A year later I saw his face in the Walden Weekly, arrested after a drugs raid.

  By the time I was thirteen, I just pulled on my clothes, ate cereal standing at the kitchen sink – the better to catch the slopped milk from mouthfuls too big and too rapid – then slunk over to Harry’s and got into bed with her.

  ‘Who is it this time?’ she would ask, still sleep-drunk.

  ‘Docs,’ I would say. ‘And a donkey jacket.’

  ‘Miner?’

  ‘Round here?’

  ‘Social worker, then.’

  ‘More likely.’

  By the time I’d eaten lunch and watched a video on their newly acquired Betamax, the owner of the lost property would be gone and I would be safe to return without having to endure the undignified ‘you could be sisters’ routine. Which we both know was never close to being true.

  But one or two stuck around longer than a night.

  Noel, the self-declared therapist you acquired at a Labour party meeting, whose amateurish attempts to analyse our unfathomable relationship provided, if nothing else, something to laugh about when you had finally had enough of his weak chin, sobriety, and refusal to eat anything from a packet.

  Mr Bruce, my barely-out-of-college chemistry teacher, whom you met, predictably, at the one parent–teacher evening we bothered to attend. My mortification was complete the morning I walked in on him masturbating in the shower. I gave up all three sciences as soon as I was allowed, along with any other subject that might take me to the far end of A corridor.

  And Jermaine.

  Jesus, Jermaine.

  You brought him back from Somerset with you, do you remember? That summer. The summer you looked for your muse and found, instead, a man.

  Toni rented a farm, or the runt version of one: a run-down, ramshackle long cottage at least four miles from the nearest village and connected neither to mains electricity nor sewerage. The back end of beyond, you call it. ‘No hot water and you can’t even flush the bloody toilet half the time.’

  But you still insist we are going. ‘It’s going to be an arts commune,’ you explain. ‘I’ll be able to find my mojo again. My muse.’

  Back then I believed you. Believed that art, like literature, was channelled from a higher plane, from the gods, into the chosen ones, the golden children, the touched. Now I understand that it is as much craft as art; that the only gods ruling whether we succeed or fail are our own inner demons. There is no mysticism, no witchcraft. Just hard graft and the ability to ignore the devil who whispers in our ear, you’re not good enough.

  But still, I won’t let you go.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I say, trying to affect Harry’s sarcasm, which either fails, or falls on selectively deaf ears.

  ‘For the whole of the summer,’ you continue. ‘There’s a river and a goat, I think, or maybe a sheep, though I don’t see what the difference is really, and an orchard and, God, Di, this is exactly what we need. To get away from it all, the bloody rat race.’ Your words scattergun out and I should know from experience that you’re spiralling and that you need this, or pills, perhaps. But I am almost fourteen and so the world revolves around selfish, awkward, desperate me.

  ‘It’s hardly Piccadilly Circus round here,’ I reply. ‘Besides, I need to be in Walden.’

  ‘For what? Bible camp? I thought you’d knocked that bollocks on the head.’

  ‘I have,’ I snap. ‘It’s not that.’

  And it’s not for swimming club, or a Saturday job, or just to hang around with bloody Harry either.

  It’s for Tom.

  But you knew that.

  He’s broken up with Katy. She let Julian Evans put his hand in her knickers down Bridge End Gardens two weeks ago when Tom was at band practice. Only Julian told Nicky Pakely who told Kerry Spackman who has a mouth bigger and dirtier than the murky Slade, and by last break half the new sixth-form intake know. Harry says she’s going to kill her. Or at least write slut on her locker in lipstick. I nod, but it’s not revenge I’m thinking about. I’m too busy working out how I can be his shoulder to cry on, so that then he can lift his tear-sodden eyes, look into mine, and realize I was The One all al
ong.

  By the time Harry’s segued into whether or not Tom Cruise has had a nose job, I’ve planned everything from the soundtrack for our first kiss (The Cure, ‘10:15 Saturday Night’) to his proposal in Paris on my eighteenth birthday. He is, I am convinced, my handsome prince, and this, finally, is his chance to rescue me. Only he hasn’t been out of his room in two days, so a declaration of anything is proving hard to elicit. Plus he’s playing Pink Floyd on repeat. Harry says if she hears ‘Wish You Were Here’ one more time she’ll end up topping herself before she gets near bloody Katy. So being stuck in a lesbian commune a hundred and something miles away with no television, no radio, and no phone is not really an option. Only according to you I don’t have a choice.

  ‘Don’t you want to do something . . . important with your life?’ you demand.

  ‘Like what?’ I sulk. ‘And anyway, what have you done?’

  ‘Nothing.’ You gesture wildly to indicate the nothingness of your life – our lives. ‘That’s the point. This is my chance to . . . to live differently.’

  ‘What, like your life here is so normal?’

  Then I replay her words, and feel my world tilt off-kilter. ‘Hang on. What do you mean live differently? Are we moving?’

  ‘No. Maybe. God, I don’t know, Di. I just . . . I thought this would work, being here—’

  ‘It does work,’ I interrupt before she can tell me how bad our lives are. ‘I don’t want to move. And I don’t . . . I don’t want to go to bloody Dorset.’ I am crying now, the words riding out on the back of fat sobs.

  ‘Somerset. Di—’

  ‘No. I won’t go. I can stay with Harry.’

  ‘They’re going to Cornwall tomorrow,’ you snap, as if that is the end of it. It isn’t.

  ‘So I’ll go with them.’

  You snort. ‘You’d rather spend three weeks with Mrs bloody J-cloth-welded-to-her-right-hand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No,’ you retort, a codicil to my full stop. ‘You spend too much time with them as it is. It’s unhealthy.’

  ‘And you’re what, exactly? The font of all things good?’

  You pick up a pile of books, then slam them down again, unsure what they are or where they go. ‘You’re not going with them, and that’s that.’