The writing on the wall, p.8
The Writing on the Wall, page 8
Her grandmother whiffs of the brown scent she keeps in a bottle on the dressing table. It smells as if it’s slightly gone off. There is also a hint of liquorice about her. Come to think of it, chocolate trails way behind liquorice when it comes to her grandmother’s confectionary preferences. Why hadn’t she remembered that before she’d nicked the Milk Tray? She could so easily have avoided all this grief.
Helena’s father goes to hang his mother’s coat up. It’s summer but she has come equipped with mac and brolly because she doesn’t trust the weather not to ‘play silly buggers’.
Behind Simon’s back, Nana Nancy mutters conspiratorially into Helena’s face, ‘Your father says you’re in disgrace, but we’re not talking about it.’ Her upper lip is hairy and her breath faintly fishy. ‘Happy families and all that.’
And then she taps her nose in a ‘nudge-nudge wink-wink, say no more’ kind of way, and all of a sudden Helena feels better than she has done in days.
She hugs Nana Nancy gratefully, noticing that she is wearing red plastic dangly earrings that most people would think were far too young for a seventy-five-year-old woman. Nana Nancy has a tendency towards ‘mutton dressed as lamb’, as Alicia puts it.
Helena eyes her grandmother’s make-up; maybe she subscribes to Jackie too? Today she has experimented with a pale-blue shimmery eyeshadow. Unfortunately her blending leaves a lot to be desired. As for her lipstick, Nana Nancy has completely ignored her natural lip shape and, like a five-year-old with a bright-orange crayon, has very much gone ‘outside of the line’.
Before lunch, there is present-giving in the sitting room. Nana Nancy accepts a glass of sherry and sits on the sofa with a granddaughter on either side. Helena has wrapped the wretched chocolates in some of the recycled wrapping paper Alicia keeps under the stairs, having carefully removed a ‘to Juliet’ birthday tag, before taping up her grandmother’s gift.
Nana Nancy opens Rosalind’s card first and raves about what a promising artist she is, then Rosy gives her the flowers she collected from the garden and receives a big hug and a kiss in return. Helena notices Nana Nancy’s eyes are very shiny. She isn’t crying, is she?
Next, she opens her present from Simon, which is a chiffon scarf in tasteful muted pastels, obviously chosen by Alicia, and an Engelbert Humperdinck Greatest Hits album, which Nancy insists is put on the record player at full blast while she opens everything else. When ‘Please Release Me’ starts, Nana Nancy puts her presents to one side and bellows along to the chorus with Rosalind, Simon and Helena joining in, while her daughter-in-law goes to see how the potatoes are doing.
By the time Alicia gets back to the sitting room, surreptitiously turning the record player down en route, Nancy has opened her daughter-in-law’s gift. It’s a lovely beige cardigan from Marks. ‘Very nice, dear,’ says Nancy. ‘Do you have the receipt, only I might swap it for something with a bit more oomph?’
Alicia has also bought Nancy a very smart set of bath salts, but as she goes to put lunch on the hostess trolley, Nancy presses the gift box on to Helena. ‘Don’t tell your mother, but anything scented makes my noo sting, ’ere, you can have these.’
On the other hand, she is delighted by her chocolates. ‘You shouldn’t have,’ she tells Helena, and her father mumbles, ‘No, she shouldn’t,’ but Nancy doesn’t notice because Engelbert is singing ‘Quando Quando’ and it’s her favourite. ‘Quando, Quando, Quando,’ she trills.
Seconds later, Alicia yells that ‘everyone needs to sit down at the table NOW, please’ and they all troop through to the dining room.
As Alicia bumps the hostess trolley from the kitchen down the hallway, Nana Nancy asks, ‘Has someone burnt the potatoes?’
‘No,’ Alicia snaps. ‘They’re fine.’ She has cooked a chicken, with slightly watery cauliflower, peas and some baby new Jersey Royals, some of which are very black around the bottom.
Nana Nancy has the nose of a bloodhound and she smirks at the sight of the scorched potatoes. ‘What, no gravy?’ she asks, making a big fuss about getting comfortable and bringing her handbag to the table.
‘I’ve made some mayonnaise,’ Alicia responds.
‘Oh dear,’ says Nana Nancy, turning to Rosalind. ‘Be a good girl for your nana, fetch me some salad cream from that la-di-da pantry of your mother’s.’
Helena could swear at this point she can hear her mother mutter ‘give me strength’ under her breath, and despite being utterly miserable and having had the worst weekend on record, Helena can’t help but smile.
MONDAY
Helena checks her watch again. The girls are late, but at least it’s not raining. There’s no way she will ever set foot in Hawkins again. She leans against the postbox, ready to pedal off as soon as she sees Elaine and Gwen approach. Even from a distance, it’s obvious Elaine’s been crying. Helena might be short-sighted but she doesn’t need glasses to see that her friend’s face is one big red blotch.
‘It’s Percy,’ Gwen mutters as a tearful Elaine cycles blindly ahead. ‘Apparently he started fitting last night. Her mother’s taken him to the vet. He might not be there when she gets home.’
Helena is slow to catch on. ‘Are they going to operate?’
Gwen looks at her. ‘They might put him down, Helena.’
Bloody hell, obviously Elaine is in no mood to discuss Jimmy Simmonds, but considering Helena hasn’t heard Gwen’s verdict yet, she jumps right in while Elaine is out of earshot. ‘So what did you think?’
‘Of what?’
‘Jimmy!’
‘Oh, the boy who came round to Elaine’s on Saturday night with his peculiar friend Greg?’
‘I don’t know Greg,’ Helena protests. ‘It’s Jimmy that I—’
‘Yes,’ interrupts Gwen, ‘I know. Well, I can’t see anything in him myself. I mean, he wasn’t exactly scintillating company, and he was very rude when I asked if he’d heard Cliff’s latest album.’
Helena’s heart sinks. What if Jimmy thinks she’s the kind of square that listens to Cliff too?
‘Anyway, Helena, they barely stayed five minutes and then I believe they went to a party.’
‘Do you know which party?’
Oh God, I hope he didn’t get off with anyone else, thinks Helena.
Suddenly Helena is aware that Elaine is back with them. She has overheard the conversation and has braked sharply. ‘Honestly, Helena Treace,’ she yells. ‘You are a selfish cow. Who cares about bloody Jimmy Simmonds when Percy might die?’
And with that Elaine pedals off even more furiously, with Gwen in hot pursuit.
Arriving at school Helena is locking her bike when she spots Sally strolling across the courtyard. ‘Hey, Sall,’ she yells, but Sally ignores her, in fact she seems to start walking faster and Helena wonders if she is trying to avoid her?
It’s not until the mid-morning break that Helena manages to track Sally down to the girls’ loos next to the library. Helena bounds over to where Sally is washing her hands at the sink and watches her turn pink in the mirror as she sees Helena approach. Has she contracted scarlet fever over the weekend, or is she blushing?
‘Hey,’ Helena starts. ‘I’ve been trying to catch you all morning.’ Sally looks panic-stricken. She stands back, wiping her hands on her school skirt, and there is an uncomfortable pause before both girls start speaking at the same time.
‘How was your weekend?’ they chorus.
‘Mine was shit,’ states Helena, and she is about to tell her about being grounded when Sally comes out with one long word that sounds roughly like, ‘HelenaIgottotellyousomething andyourenotgoingtolikeit.’
Helena waits and Sally goes on. ‘Thing is, I, er, went to that party on Saturday night and, er, I got off with this guy and …’ Helena is grinning but Sally isn’t; what’s wrong with her? Helena would be chuffed to bits if she’d got off with someone at the weekend. Sally continues, ‘He told me his name was Jimmy, but seriously, Helena, I didn’t know until yesterday that he was your Jimmy Simmonds and now I feel awful, but I really like him and, well, I’m seeing him again.’
Helena feels like she does when the teacher says ‘turn over your papers’ at the beginning of an exam and for the first thirty seconds she cannot make head nor tail of the questions.
‘Hold on a minute,’ she says. ‘So have I got this right? You went to that party, got off with a Jimmy but you didn’t know he was my Jimmy and now you’re going out with him?’
‘In a nutshell, yeah, sorry and that, but you know, all’s fair in thingy and thing.’
‘Love and war,’ responds Helena, faking an insincere and terrifying smile, at which Sally spins on her heel and exits the toilets.
So, not just a shit weekend, thinks Helena, but a shit Monday too.
By the time Helena gets to her maths class, Sally is sharing a double desk with Claire Chambers and Helena is forced to take the spare place next to warty Angela Harris.
Mr Matthews isn’t at his desk. Suddenly a small, vole-like woman bustles through the door and informs them that she will be taking the class as Mr Matthews is unwell and unlikely to be back before the end of term.
‘But not to worry,’ she smirks. ‘He has already written your reports.’
Shit, thinks Helena.
Helena braces herself for an awkward cycle home with Gwen and Elaine after school, but she’s unprepared for quite how awkward, as they squeal to a halt at the first set of traffic lights on The Drive. With the green man illuminated, two people begin to cross the road from the pavement on the opposite side, a boy and a girl. The boy has blonde hair and the girl is laughing. It’s Jimmy and Sally. Of course it is.
‘Oh, hi, Jimmy,’ says Elaine.
‘Um, yeah, hi,’ responds Jimmy, looking unsure as to who Elaine is. Helena keeps her head down, praying for the lights to change so that she can cycle off at speed and feel some breeze against her burning cheeks.
By the time Elaine and Gwen catch up with her, she has blinked back the tears and informs them with as much dignity as she can muster, ‘Jimmy Simmonds has decided he won’t be requiring my services for girlfriend duties and has decided to employ Sally Winwood instead. Possibly because she knows how to give blow jobs,’ she adds spitefully, which makes Gwen blink a lot.
‘Honestly,’ says Elaine, ‘I think he’s a fucking fool.’ She doesn’t swear very often so Helena appreciates the effort.
‘Hear hear,’ echoes Gwen. ‘What a pranny.’ And suddenly Helena feels moved to tears not only by the depth of affection she has for these two girls but also by their utter uselessness at really being able to help.
Before she peels off down the usual back street, she wishes Elaine luck with Percy, then she goes home to have a proper good cry in front of her bedroom mirror.
When Helena appears for supper with a swollen face and refuses pudding (tinned peaches with Carnation milk), her mother asks if she’s coming down with something.
‘I’m fine,’ mumbles Helena, leaving the table and taking sanctuary once more in her bedroom where she starts making a list of ‘Sad songs to play when you’re heartbroken’. She has just added Eddie Holman’s ‘Hey There Lonely Girl’ when there is a knock on her bedroom door and her mother slips in and sits on her bed.
‘Listen, Helena, I know why you’re upset and I know it’s disappointing, but sometimes life isn’t very fair and we have to deal with it.’
Helena is confused. How the hell does her mother know about Jimmy Simmonds?
‘Fact is, I bumped into Lorraine Sanderson when I was out shopping and she told me.’
Now Helena is really puzzled. Never mind her mother, how the hell does Mrs Sanderson know about Jimmy?
For once in her life, Helena cannot think of anything to say, but her mother fills the silence. ‘I know this summer is going to be hard for you, and that at times you might feel a bit lonely …’
Hold on, thinks Helena, OK, I’m upset, but it’s not as if we were going out with each other … She opens her mouth to say this, but Alicia holds up her hand.
‘I know you’re going to feel left out, but as Mrs Sanderson said, they can’t take everyone. There’s only one extra space in the car and … well, it’s just one of those things. I know it must be disappointing that Gwen has chosen Elaine, especially as we’re not going away anywhere this summer, but we can’t take any risks with Rosy.’
Finally the penny drops. Those bloody bitches! They’re going on holiday without her and neither of them had the guts to tell her. Well, bugger them to hell, who wants to spend the summer holidays with those two idiots anyway?
Tears are splashing off her knees now and her mother is stroking her hair, which is something she only does when Helena’s ill, or, as it turns out, when she has been betrayed by her supposed best friends. Small choking noises accompany her tears and her heart really hurts. Never mind Rosalind, what if she’s the one with a life-threatening illness? That would teach them, if she died tonight; then they’d all be sorry – Jimmy, Sally, Gwen and Elaine, especially Gwen and Elaine.
Helena dries her eyes and lets her mother give her a cuddle. Alicia whispers, ‘No more tears, lamb-chop. You’re not a bad girl, Helena, and we all love you very much,’ which makes her gulp some more and then the phone rings and her little sister yells, ‘It’s Juliet!’ and her mother hurries downstairs. Of course she does, thinks Helena, wallowing in self-pity and a growing sense of fury.
TUESDAY
Helena cycles into school by herself, she’s not waiting for those two bitches, but halfway down Kingsway, Gwen catches up with her. ‘It’s Percy,’ she gasps breathlessly. ‘He died last night and Elaine is too upset to get out of bed. Mrs Perks doesn’t know what to do with her.’
‘Well, I’m sure a nice holiday will cheer her up,’ snaps Helena. For a split second Gwen looks shocked, but then she says, ‘Please, Helena, can we get off our bikes and discuss this properly?’ and Helena duly dismounts, her face thunderous.
She is still utterly livid. Last night she’d been up till midnight writing poems about the treachery of female friendships. ‘Foes and woes’ had rhymed nicely.
Neither of them can look at each other. ‘My mum said she saw your mum out shopping,’ Gwen eventually blurts.
‘Yeah,’ sneers Helena. ‘Seems like you didn’t have the guts to tell me to my face.’
‘It wasn’t easy,’ admits Gwen. ‘I could only choose one person, and, well, I chose Elaine because she and I have been spending more time together recently because, well, you’ve been hanging out with other people, and in any case, my mum thought she might be a bit easier.’
Whoa. Helena stops in her tracks. ‘Your mum thinks Elaine’s easier than I am? Has she got any idea how bonkers Elaine is? What with her animals and the way she won’t eat anything that’s green and wet, like cucumber, but suddenly I’m the difficult one?’
‘You got pissed and threw up in her cheese plant.’
‘We were all pissed,’ protests Helena
‘Yes, but you were the only one who was actually sick. My mum says sometimes you just don’t know when to stop and then there’s the boy thing.’
‘What?’
Gwen continues, ‘My mum said you behaved like a common tart when Nigel’s friend Ralph came to stay, and where we’re going, there’s a beach which loads of teenagers go to and …’
No, no, this can’t be happening, thinks Helena. Not only is she missing out on a foreign holiday and a tan, but it seems like she’s missing out on a foreign holiday, a tan and a beach full of fit, French teenage boys.
Gwen says in a very matter-of-fact manner, ‘It was a bit embarrassing actually, Helena. I mean, boys are just people too, I don’t know why you get so hysterical around them?’
She doesn’t get it, thinks Helena. She just doesn’t understand. Maybe she’s frigid?
There was an article about being frigid in Cosmopolitan once. Helena can still remember the phrase, ‘Frigid women are unable to respond sexually, they can be emotionally cold and are often averse to the very idea of intercourse.’
Yup, that was Gwen, the frigid weirdo, and Elaine is just as bad. Helena suddenly feels utterly outraged that a beach full of hunky French boys in skimpy swimming trunks are about to be completely wasted on the wrong holidaymakers. But rather than say anything more, she opts for a hurt, dignified silence, which works brilliantly, considering by the time they reach school, Gwen is weepy and apologetic and Helena, despite still feeling furious about missing out on the holiday, enjoys the rare sensation of having claimed the moral high ground.
As Helena struggles with the rudiments of photosynthesis in biology, she writes a ‘SUMMER PLAN’ in the back of her science exercise book:
1. Buy Tanfastic fake tan
2. Spend the summer holidays hanging out in St Anne’s
3. Make some new friends and get a boyfriend
As lists go, it’s quite modest. It’s not like when she was small and genuinely believed in Father Christmas and for years never really got over the crushing disappointment that the man in red hadn’t managed to smuggle a pony down the chimney.
Helena laughs, a cynical bitter laugh, like a woman in an Agatha Christie film, and Mrs Cram, the science teacher, shoots her a warning look.
Nipping into the girls’ loos to change her tampon before geography, Helena once more comes face to face with Liza Branwell’s pouting reflection in the mirror. Liza eyes her warily, then blurts out, ‘Yeah, well, that party was great and yeah, I did get off with Sticks, and as you know, Sally’s going out with Jimmy, so you know … ?’ Then she shrugs her shoulders in a ‘what can you do kind of way’, before banging out of the toilets, leaving a miserable Helena in a cloud of her dry shampoo.
WEDNESDAY
By the time Helena cycles out of the back street the next morning and on to the main road, she sees that Gwen is already waiting for her by the postbox. She’s very much on her own.
Having avoided each other on the bike ride home from school the previous day, neither of them really knows what to say to each other. Gwen breaks the silence by explaining Elaine’s absence. ‘She’s still far too upset to face school,’ she says in a serious tone. ‘I popped round just now. She looks awful and her mum says, considering we’re breaking up on Friday, she may as well stay at home.’
