Home > Waiting to Begin(8)

Waiting to Begin(8)
Author: Amanda Prowse

They didn’t look alike, not one bit. Michelle was dark-haired, petite yet curvy, whereas Bessie was mousy with a rather flat figure, more test tube than hourglass, but with the right clothes, colour scheme and attention to accessories, they could make themselves look passably similar or at the very least draw comment. They were not the most popular of girls and there was no gaggle of wannabes trotting after them down the corridors or circling them on the school field, flicking their hair and hanging on their every word, but that didn’t matter because they were the most perfect gang of two. Together they were glorious! That said, it didn’t mean Bessie wanted to look anything other than her best, should Melanie Hall or any of her cronies cast a look in her direction. After completing the other eye, she used the tip of her finger to dab a thick coat of concealer over Mount Etna’s little sister, which had taken root on her chin.

Her bedroom door opened suddenly.

‘Your dad let me in!’

Bessie’s face broke into a smile at the sight of Michelle. She leapt up and threw her arms around her friend’s neck as if it had been nineteen weeks and not nineteen hours since she had seen her last. The two settled back on the single bed with their backs against the wall.

‘Ta dah! Happy birthday!’ Michelle pulled two white disposable razors from the back pocket of her jeans.

‘Thank you! I’ve got the Maltesers!’ Bessie grabbed the box from her bedside table and shook it to make a pleasing rattle. Quickly she tore off the lid and the two scooped handfuls of malty chocolate into their fingers, before stuffing them into their mouths, laughing as they crunched and swallowed the sticky, sweet, melting treat. Michelle handed her a razor.

‘How d’you do it, exactly?’ Bessie asked through her mouthful, running her thumb over the hard plastic shield that sat over the double blade.

‘I’ve seen my dad shave a million times – you just put the foam on and drag this up and down. How hard can it be? He even whistles while he does it!’

‘Come on!’ Bessie pulled her friend from the bed and they ran to the bathroom, locking the door behind them. She ran a shallow bath. Both whipped off their dungarees, discarding them in piles on the bath mat and perching now in their knickers and T-shirts on the flat corners of the tub opposite each other. Bessie grabbed her dad’s shaving foam from the little shelf over the washbasin and squirted a sizeable puff into her friend’s hand before doing the same in her own. They each slathered it on to a leg and then carefully, hesitantly, pushed the guard from the blade.

‘I guess it’s like when we first plucked our eyebrows – remember how much it hurt?’ Bessie laughed, thinking of how they had tweezed one hair and screamed! ‘And now we’re used to it,’ she said, to reassure her friend.

‘I guess so. I’m just worried that it’ll grow back like whiskers, like my dad’s beard.’

‘No, I don’t think it works like that. I think the hair on your legs is different.’ Bessie went first, confidently sliding the razor along her shin, aware of the moment, the rite of passage. Michelle followed suit until they were twisting their legs at odd angles to reach them with the razor before rinsing the blades in the warm, ankle-deep bathwater to unclog them of suds and fine hairs.

‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ Michelle said, holding her defuzzing weapon aloft. ‘We’ve been at school all these years and in less than an hour we’ll know if it was all worth it.’

Bessie laughed. ‘Well, of course it was all worth it! First, I met you . . .’

‘Your best friend in the whole wide world ever, ever, ever,’ Michelle interjected.

‘Yes, that. Plus, we’ve learned lots of stuff that’ll be useful, and our grades are our ticket to the rest of our lives.’

‘And by that you mean being an air hostess?’

‘Yep.’

She looked at the toothpaste sitting in a little plastic beaker next to her mum’s toothbrush by the sink. She wanted a more exciting life than her mum’s, that was for sure.

‘It’s weird, but there’s nothing else I can think of that I’d like to do. I want to go up in that aeroplane, Michelle. I want to put on that red uniform and I want to go to California. America!’

She, like everyone else at school, had a fascination for the place where big skies, big burgers, big cars and big hair were the order of the day. A country whose culture she soaked up via the medium of TV and her favourite programmes: Dallas, Dynasty, Hart to Hart and Miami Vice. The closest she could get to the US of A, however, was sitting in McDonald’s.

‘Urgh!’ Michelle pulled a face. ‘I’ve told you before, I can’t think of anything worse – not the California bit, that sounds nice. I’d like to go somewhere sunny, but imagine having to give someone a sick bag while the plane darts all over the sky? I think I’d be sick!’

‘I won’t mind it too much.’

‘Good job. “We have clearance, Clarence.”’

Bessie giggled: ‘“Roger, Roger. What’s our vector, Victor?”’

They both howled, having seen Airplane! three times at the Odeon.

Michelle sobered first. ‘I’m happy you know what you want to do. I was worried for a minute back there, when you were thinking of becoming a nun! We wouldn’t have been able to hang out.’

Bessie felt a twinge of guilt; keeping a secret from Michelle wasn’t a nice feeling. ‘They must get some time off. Plus, think of the advantages: they always wear a scarf and so I’d never have to worry about backcombing my hair.’

‘True. You’d save a ton on hairspray,’ Michelle piped up.

‘I would. And I’d live in the convent, so no bills or decorating to worry about.’

‘But you’d never get married or have babies, Bessie – wouldn’t you miss that?’

‘Yeah, I would. It’s partly why I decided against it. I’d like to find someone who loved me, and we could just be happy, someone that I fancied forever. That’d be great.’ She smiled as Lawrence’s face came into focus in her mind.

‘Someone like Simon Le Bon,’ Michelle giggled.

‘Exactly.’

Michelle paused from her shaving. ‘Anyway, don’t you have to be really religious to be a nun? I’m sure you have to believe in God.’

‘Well, I do believe in God.’ I talk to him often enough . . . ‘Plus, I worry that if I don’t believe and I die and it turns out all to be true, I could be in real trouble, and so the fact that I’m worried about that means I must believe, doesn’t it?’

‘I guess so.’ Michelle seemed to follow her logic. ‘I haven’t a clue what I want to do after school. Mum says something will find me and I just have to keep my eyes open, ready to spot it. Or that I should marry money.’ She scoffed. ‘She says everyone who’s married is miserable, and so you might as well be miserable and rich as miserable and poor.’

‘Mmm.’ Bessie thought it best not to disclose that her mum thought Michelle’s mum was a bit ‘relaxed’ in her approach to parenting. ‘Shit!’ Bessie had momentarily lost her concentration and, while considering her friend’s question, pressed down a little too firmly. She dropped the razor beneath the soap-scummed water and watched in horror as a neat row of dark beads of blood bloomed on her shin. She sloshed water on to them and watched as the beads very quickly grew into three large splats before forming a single persistent strawberry-coloured trickle.

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