London Belongs to Us Page 9

  There’s no point in trying to style it out. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And you’re totes going to kick him to the kerb, right? He cheat, he beat, he hit the street.’ Jeane nods emphatically.

  ‘He hasn’t actually beat, but I think that maybe he might have cheat. He says that he hasn’t but he’s avoiding me and he wouldn’t be doing that unless he knew he’d done something really, really …’

  ‘Jesus! When you’re done nattering, do you think you could actually serve someone?’ snaps a man standing behind us. ‘Haven’t got all bloody night.’

  Jeane gives a long-suffering sigh. She’s really not cut out for customer service. ‘Excuse me! A young girl’s future happiness rests on the outcome of this conversation, thank you very much,’ she says grandly and I turn round and I guess my face looks miserable enough that the man adjusts his heavy black framed, hipster-issue glasses and simmers down.

  Jeane leans back and above the sound of the music she bellows, ‘Frank! Can you take over for a bit?’

  A good-looking Asian guy wearing surf shorts and an AC/DC T-shirt slides out from behind the decks and snake-walks down the aisle. ‘I knew you’d get bored after ten minutes.’

  ‘Not ten minutes. I stuck it for fifteen,’ Jeane argues. ‘Frank, this is Sunny, she has the biggest hair of anyone I know. Sunny, this is Frank, the genius who came up with the idea of having a club in his dad’s shop. It’s even been on TV!’

  ‘Got a film crew coming from Tokyo next week too,’ Frank says proudly as he shakes my hand, then looks past me. ‘Right, who’s next?’

  Jeane steps out from behind the counter. I’d forgotten how small she is. Emmeline says she’s stunted from never eating a single vegetable in her life. ‘Why are you holding a broom?’

  I start to tell Jeane why I’m holding the broom but I’ve only got as far as the barbecue part of the story when she holds up one stubby hand. ‘Whatevs! Forget I asked. So anyway, back to your loser boyfriend. What are you going to do when you catch up with him?’

  ‘Still haven’t worked that one out,’ I admit as we lean on the National Lottery stand. ‘Hopefully, I’ll launch into this amazing, heartfelt speech that makes him question his entire existence, or else he’ll explain that sucking face with some … some girl pretty much just wearing knickers was all a big misunderstanding and then I’ll forgive him because I’m completely ridiculous.’ It was the truth. No wonder my stomach was lurching left, right and centre. ‘Got to find him first, though.’

  ‘Well, I can help you but only if you promise that you’ll go with the first option, not the one where you roll over and play dead,’ Jeane says sternly even as she holds her phone aloft.

  Maybe I have been wrong about her. Though I haven’t been wrong about how bossy she is. ‘I’m not like you. The right words never make it from my brain to my mouth.’

  Jeane shakes her head. ‘Your hair is so fierce. You need to be more like your hair. Wow! Now there’s a blog post. Hair as role model, discuss.’

  ‘Jeane, not everything in life happens so you can blog about it,’ I tell her, because my failures are my failures and not to be shared with the gazillion people who hang on Jeane’s every word.

  ‘That’s more like it! I knew you had to have at least a little bit of edge to you,’ she says. ‘Now, I’ll text my trusted peeps group and put an APB out on Mark. Bet we can find him wherever he is.’

  ‘Oh! Would you? That’s so kind!’

  ‘Don’t gush, Sunny. No one likes a gusher,’ she says as her thumb moves over her phone screen at a speed that’s hard to fathom.

  I’m saved from thinking of something else really edgy to say to her because all the people dancing have suddenly stopped and instead are all clapping wildly and going ‘wooh, yeah!’

  I look round to see, oh sweet baby Jesus, Vic on top of the freezer compartment doing … I’m not even sure what he’s doing. I think it’s the Running Man. On steroids. His legs look spindlier than ever, especially when he keeps clutching an ankle on every third step. And his arms. Oh my days! They’re pumping away like he’s in a little rowing boat being chased by pirates.

  He keeps pursing his lips and I can’t decide if this makes Vic cooler than he already was or if he’s dropped about ninety million cool points. One thing I do know: it’s impossible to stay mad at someone who’s doing the Running Man on top of a freezer unit.

  Vic sees me grinning, waves and finishes off with a fancy little spin that any boybander would be proud of before he jumps down. ‘Your turn,’ he shouts. ‘Come on, Sunny!’

  ‘No, no, no!’ I shake my head. I don’t dance. Well, I do dance on proper dancefloors with my mates. Then I dance. But not here. Not now.

  Except, everyone is looking at me. Clapping their hands. They don’t even know me, but they’ve taken up the chant and now fifty strangers with nothing to do on a Saturday night but have it large in a convenience store all know my name.

  ‘Sunny! Sunny! Sunny! Sunny! Sunny!’

  I look to see if there’s any way to make a run for the door, but of course there isn’t because everyone’s standing in a circle around me.

  There’s nothing else for it. I’m going to do it. I’m going to be fierce. ‘Take this,’ I say to Jean-Luc and hand him the broom.

  Then I slowly advance into the centre of the shop.

  ‘Sunny! Sunny! Sunny! Sunny! Sunny!’

  I shut my eyes, take a deep breath and then I do a clumsy two-step shuffle and manage to kick the guy standing behind me. I come to the grindingest of halts.

  ‘Come on, Sunny! You can do it, girl!’ I’m back to hating on Vic, but then the music changes to something a little less deep and bassy and a bit more melodic and beat-y.

  I do another two-step shuffle and I realise that I need to put all my faith in my legs and hope that they don’t let me down.

  I kick out my legs, arms pinned to my sides, and it’s all a bit Riverdance but there are a few encouraging cheers now that it’s clear I’m not going to wimp out. And I can do this. I did seven years of dance: tap and modern, jazz and even a little ballet, until I decided I’d rather have a lie-in on a Saturday morning.

  That’s seven years spent training for this moment. I take another deep breath, and I start to click my fingers to the beat and OK, all right, apparently I’m doing the Charleston. Not just that bit where you cross your knees over, but the kicks and the arms, a bit of cakewalk and it’s scary, but then it’s not scary at all. It’s kind of joyous and freeing to dance with everyone watching and ‘wooh, yeah!’ing and ‘you go, girl!’ing, because my body can do all sorts of incredible things to the music when I tell my brain to just shut the hell up.

  If only my old dance teacher, Stacey, could see me now. She used to spend Saturday mornings bellowing in my face, ‘Stop overthinking it! Move your feet! Faster, Sunny, faster! It’s a foxtrot not a tortoise trot!’

  Now I’m Ginger Rogers. I’m Josephine Baker. I’m Baby in Dirty Dancing. I’m a quicksilver sprite of a girl, whirling and turning until a boy I don’t know suddenly glides into the circle and he matches my steps perfectly so we’re dancing side by side in perfect harmony for what feels like for ever but is probably only a couple of minutes until I have to concede defeat and come to a panting, breathless halt.

  The circle closes around my partner and I bend over, hands on my knees, and wait for my heart to stop hammering.

  Someone presses something cool against my back.

  It’s Jean-Luc with a bottle of water that’s about as welcome as, well, a bottle of cold water on a filthy hot August night when you’ve been dancing the Charleston in a crowded shop without any air con. ‘Your turn next?’ I manage to gasp. ‘You can’t let Vic outdance you.’

  He shudders. His top lip curls. Eyes widen. ‘I think you’ll find that I can. Besides, I only waltz. You can’t do the waltz in a store that sells Pop-Tarts. C’est une abomination! ’

  ‘Oh I’m sure you can,’ I say and I swear Jean-Luc winks at me a split second
before settling his features back into a medium-strength scowl. ‘If you really put your mind to it.’

  ‘Sunny! Girl, you got the moves!’ Vic moonwalks over and gives me the finger gun. ‘We should go proper dancing one night. Big band, you in a sparkly dress, me in a penguin suit.’

  ‘Oh, so I’m going to be one of those lucky girls that you do keep in contact with then?’ Dancing the Charleston and letting the music drown out the sound of the doubting voice in my head is giving me another shot of badassness straight to the heart.

  ‘Sunny, you wound me,’ Vic simpers. He clutches his hands to his chest. ‘To the very core.’

  ‘I’ve forgiven you for being a skeeve but you’re on probation.‘

  I’m moist in all kinds of places where I don’t want to be moist and my hair is wilting as I glug down the water in one long, glorious gulp. As soon as I’m done, Jeane beckons us over with a click of her fingers. She waves her phone.

  ‘Your horrible boyfriend has been spotted in a chicken shop two minutes away,’ she announces cheerfully. ‘If I were you I’d throw hot sauce in his stupid, cheating face.’

  ‘Don’t throw hot sauce in his stupid cheating face,’ Jean-Luc murmurs. ‘It might blind him and then you’ll be arrested by the flics.’

  It seems from that advice that Jean-Luc isn’t going to come with me and that’s really all right. I can fling the hot sauce that are my angry words at Mark and then get the nightbus home, but Vic nods his head at Jean-Luc who nods his head too and raises his eyebrows and they’re right by my side as I reach out to take Jeane’s phone so I can see the text that says Mark is ‘wit crowd of vile rah-rahs in chicken shop on Kingsland Rd, next 2 dodgy sauna.’

  I have a very vague idea of where the chicken shop is. My mum had once gone to a party at Shoreditch House and got so drunk afterwards that, according to Terry, she’d banged on the door of a dodgy sauna and asked if they could give her a quick rubdown and then she’d gone into the chicken shop next door and asked how many chips she could have for a fiver. Way to keep it classy, mum.

  ‘OK,’ I say in a voice that sounds like I’m going to be kicking arses and taking down names. ‘Er, so, um, would it be all right if you take my number in case you get any more texts?’

  ‘Course it is,’ Jeane says. ‘I’ve just followed you on Twitter too, even though you’re not following me. I don’t know what that’s all about.’

  ‘Well, it’s just –’

  ‘I like you, Sunny,’ Jeane makes it sound like a papal decree. ‘When I saw you dancing I realised that I was completely wrong about you, which is weird ’cause I’m hardly ever wrong about people.’

  ‘You make snap judgements about people all the time!’ says someone behind me and I turn round to see Michael Lee, who’d also been two years ahead of me at school and was now at Cambridge studying something deeply brainy and still going out with Jeane, apparently. When they’d got together, it had been all that anyone at school had talked about for, like, months. ‘Based on the most flimsy of evidence.’

  ‘Just because I make snap judgements doesn’t mean my judgements are wrong,’ Jeane says as she plucks my phone out of my hand and puts her number in my contacts without even waiting for my permission.

  ‘Wrong more times than you’re right.’ Michael Lee smiles at me in a vague we-know-each-other-but-I-can’t-remember-your-name-and-I-don’t-want-to-embarrass-either-of-us-so-a-smile-will-have-to-do way. ‘I’ve kept a score if you want to see it.’

  As we leave the shop, I hear Jeane squawk, ‘No, you haven’t. Have you? You’d better not have.’

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER

  Turns out there are three chicken shops on Kingsland Road in the vicinity of dodgy saunas.

  They’re all heaving. It’s Saturday night. It’s twenty to one. If you’re going home, or going on somewhere else, you’re going to need some chicken, definitely some fries and a really icy-cold drink in a cup larger than your head.

  When we get to the last one, right next door to a dodgy sauna, I try to put on my fight face. I pouf up my hair, then clench my fists. But it’s no good. It’s been hours since I had a tuna-mayo baguette for lunch and since then I’ve only had two tartlets and three mini quiches. I have an ache that’s less about my heart and my pride and more to do with the fact that I’m starving. My stomach literally thinks that my throat’s been cut.

  Besides, Mark isn’t in the last chicken shop. In a way, tonight is like a metaphor for our entire relationship. This is our thing: I tag along behind Mark, but I’m never quite able to keep up with him.

  But then I think about riding pillion on scooters and seeing off rude boys and dancing the Charleston and I think that Mark has never seen the best of me.

  Anyway, I need hot wings. Extra-hot hot wings. With hot sauce. The Godards are appalled. ‘The chicken isn’t even free-range,’ Vic tells me in a scandalised voice as I join the back of the long, straggly, shouty queue. ‘How do you even know it’s chicken?’

  ‘The hot sauce … it’s full of, how do you say, Vic? Produits chimiques?’

  ‘Chemicals,’ Vic grimly translates. ‘E numbers. And the chicken is injected with water and hormones and antibiotics and God knows what else.’

  ‘Stop trying to harsh my hot-wing mellow.’ I thrust my shoulders back in annoyance. ‘Are you ordering anything?’

  ‘Mais non! ’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘Well, I am, so just … just go and find a seat and leave me to my fast-food shame.’

  It takes ages to reach the front of the queue. Ages until I have my hands on a box full of piping hot, possibly carcinogenic, hot wings and chips and a 7UP that really is as big as my face because I press it against my cheek as I fight my way out of the queue and look around for Vic and Jean-Luc.

  There are tables and chairs on either side of the shop. The queue snakes between them and out of the door. It’s noisy and chaotic, everyone yelling and pushing. A group of girls in tiny dresses and nosebleed heels gather round one of their friends and press tissues on her. ‘He’s a wanker,’ I hear one of them say as I squeeze past. ‘Never liked him anyway. Oh my God, you can do so much better.’

  Jean-Luc and Vic have found a table right next to the door. Not just a table. Vic has crashed into his own personal heaven. There are already four girls sitting there but when I say girls, I mean four superhero-goddess-vixens, because Vic has a type and it’s girls with legs like Victoria’s Secret models. Girls with sass and style, and these four have sass and style up the wazoo. They’re the kind of girls whose make-up – all contouring and thick, elegant sweeps of eyeliner and glossy lipstick – doesn’t melt in the heat. Girls who can sit in a chicken shop wearing, like, evening gowns as if that was a perfectly all right thing to wear in a chicken shop.

  ‘Oh, there you are,’ Jean-Luc says and they all look at me with my wilting hair and my wet cheek from where I pressed my drink against it and I can tell that my shorts have ridden up again and the black and white stripy tee I’d started off the evening in is now more black and grey. ‘You can have my chair.’

  There’s no way I’m eating food in front of these four goddesses. Especially not hot wings, which will end up smeared over my face. In fact, now I’m not sure if I even want to eat them in front of Vic and Jean-Luc.

  ‘Or you can sit on my lap,’ Vic says and he pats his knees and waggles his eyebrows like a pervy uncle.

  I forget about the four goddesses. ‘In. Your. Dreams,’ I snap and take the chair that Jean-Luc is offering me. ‘Thank you.’ It’s not enough to get me to open my box of hot wings, but I can wait. They’ll go soggy, but I’ve eaten worse things than soggy hot wings.

  Two of the girls murmur at each other as they stare intently at a phone, but the one nearest to me, whose platinum hair is so sleek and shiny that I wonder if it’s real, smiles at me. ‘Girl, you fierce,’ she says in a voice that’s a lot deeper than I expect. ‘Gotta treat the pretty boys like dirt otherwise they gonna walk all over you like a Nancy Sin
atra song. You dig?’

  I get it! Hello! Not that it was my fault, but it’s way past my bedtime and the lights are so bright and everything is so sharp and loud and hyper-real. But I should have known. Emmeline and I have RuPaul’s Drag Race marathons each time we have a sleepover. These girls are guys dressed up as goddesses. Drag queens. Like women, but a little bit more.

  I could say that I do dig, except usually I did let the pretty boys walk all over me like a Nancy Sinatra song and also I was slipping back into the Sunny who could do nothing but smile gormlessly, jaw agape. Because I am like a woman, but a little bit less.

  ‘Oh sweetie, no need to look so scared. None of us bites,’ says the person sitting opposite. She (Emmeline and RuPaul both say that it’s only polite to use the female pronouns if the person you’re talking about chooses to identify as a woman. Even if they might have a penis. Gender politics has a lot of rules. I can never remember all of them) is mixed race like me and she’s wearing a silver sequinned shift dress and has a massive black beehive. It has to be a wig or a weave ’cause I know black-girl hair doesn’t do stuff like that, but either way she’s serving up some serious retro-glam realness. ‘What are you doing with the broom?’

  I can’t even. ‘It’s a really long story,’ I say. ‘A very long, very boring story.’

  ‘Best to skip it then. Now, you gonna share your fries with a sister or are we going to be having words?’

  ‘What? Huh?’ I shake my head to try to put my brain cells back in the right place. ‘Yeah, sorry.’

  I open my box of hot wings, then tear open the paper bag and spill out my fries. I didn’t want to share them, but now I’ve suddenly gone all shy again. I hate when that happens.

  I also hate the hands that descend on my food especially when two of the hands are French and they’re aiming straight for my hot wings. Outrage makes my shyness melt away like spit on a pair of hot hair straighteners. I slap both the hands. ‘Get off my hormone-enhanced chicken that’s stuffed full of chemicals, you utter pair of hypocrites,’ I tell them.