Candy and the Broken Biscuits

3 Operation Awesome

Instead of going to school, I head home. Not ideal as Mum’s salon is a mere creaky floorboard below but that’s where I go. Partly because I’m not sure what else to do and partly because I’ve got to get out of this uniform before I can think straight. I feel anchorless and a bit floaty. It’s beginning to sink in that Mum is going to go through with this. Her life is separate from mine. I suppose that looks obvious written down, but I’ve never really thought about it before. It’s a horrible thought but the other side of it is…a bizarre kind of freedom. Why should I go to school anyway? I can make my own decisions too.

I walk home via the quiet streets, so that I’m not spotted. The floatiness turns to giddiness and then something approaching hysteria. The world is spinning out of control and nothing is the way I thought it was when I first opened my eyes today. I’m out of school on a Monday morning! I feel, in a surreal way, daring. Spy-like.

I flip my MP3 player to a David Holmes’ film soundtrack. As it thrums into action, pacy and tap-tap-tappity everything suddenly looks monochrome. I cling to the sides of cars Jason Bourne-style as I pass, subtly checking over my shoulder for double agents and imagining myself seen through the sights of a weapon. When I place my hand on an imaginary gun, I have a word with myself. Luckily I’m back. I pop out my headphones and, quiet as a mouse, sneak into our yard, through the back door and up to my room.

My bedroom is as much like the inside of my head as anywhere could be. Pictures line the walls. Mainly they’re of musicians but there are some of places, too. Each one takes me somewhere or pushes my thoughts further out. Towards? Just away, I suppose. I have a bit of a thing for stars and my collection decorates the ceiling. Every time I find a picture of one I have to cut it out, otherwise it’s unlucky. Cartoons, scientific diagrams, wierdy mathematical line-drawings of ones by an old Dutch dude called MC Escher (not actually a rapper as it turns out!) and a 3D model I stole from the school science block that I still feel bad about.

My bed is tucked under the window, with its sea view and embarrassing curtains. Mum is obsessed with old stuff. Clothes, records, furniture: anything, really. So obviously our house is full of it. She calls it “vintage” but we sensible people know it as second-hand junk that’s often broken. Like the people in it, our house’s furniture is charming but doesn’t really do what it’s supposed to. I have an old 1950s bedroom set, made of white melamine with a sort of grey tiger-stripe pattern going on. There are a couple of handles missing and one of the dressing table drawers won’t open (Holly, has speculated that it may contain the ashes of a murder victim). At first I thought it looked uber lame but I must admit, now that it’s got all my stuff on it, it’s pretty cool. A rainbow selection of clothes peek out of the wardrobe, lounge on the bed and curl up on my dressing-table like old friends.

My phone beeps. Text: PIRATE. It’s Holly. Her surname is Rodgers. Holly Rodgers. Jolly Roger? Pirate. Don’t blame me. I didn’t invent the rules about nicknames. Why do they always have to be something insulting? When people try to start their own nickname it’s always so obvious. They give it away every time by trying to make it sound cool like ‘Laser’ or ‘Hawkeye’. It never sticks. Fart in PE once, though, and you’re ‘Napalm’ for the next hundred years.

Anyway Holly has decided to “own” Pirate. It actually really suits her. She’s the most genuinely rebellious, take-no-prisoners, close-to-the-wind-sailing girl I know. Definitely the funniest. She got detention for titling her homework ‘A pain in the Pythagoras’ last week. Which shows you how much she hates authority. And maths, which is where she is now.

“Whr ru? M in hell pls snd hlp. X”

I picture her texting from her pocket without looking at the screen.

I message back. “@ home but going 2 the blue. Can u get out? X”

I know, I know, inciting her to truant. Well trust me – today may be a first for me, but for Holly it definitely isn’t. How Mr and Mrs Rodgers produced her I’ll never know. She’s from a family of nine and they’re very religious – they go to one of those churches with singing, clapping and lots and LOTS of smiling but NO ACTUAL SENSE OF HUMOUR. Our pirate friend is very much the cuckoo in the crow’s nest. She actually keeps a change of clothes at school for sneaking out.

“Cu in 20. X”

I’d better get changed myself. It’s funny – the things I wear make me even more of a freak to people round here but dressing up makes me feel better about it. I’ve tried toning it down but it’s like holding your breath. You can only last so long.

Ten minutes later, I am wearing a tea dress that in my head belonged to Drew Barrymore in around 1993, long woollen socks that come up past my knees, battered Nike hi-tops and a 1980s knitted hat made of sparkly lurex wool. Like all the best outfits it’s wrong on paper and right on the person.

By the time I get there, Hol is already standing outside The Bluebird Café dressed head to toe in black except for an enormous fuschia scarf which, being wrapped around her neck numerous times, makes her look like a gothic cupcake. She is jiggling up and down against the cold and…is she playing a kazoo?

“What the flip is that, you loon?”

“I believe the standard greeting is HELLO. Nicotine inhaler.”

“Hello. Why have you got a nicotine inhaler? You don’t smoke.”

“No smell. Mum and Dad.” She grimaces. “And I don”t smoke” but I was feeling so stressed out I started to, like, feel addicted to the idea of smoking? Except I don’t want to end up with a raisin face. So I half-inched this.”

She flicks imaginary ash from the end of the slim, white tube before going in for another drag, the cold air puppeting her blonde bob around her pixie-face. There’s a flash of blue as she looks up at me through her fringe. Blowing out non-existent smoke, nature plays along and freezes her breath which floats away in little clouds. She is an angel in eyeliner. Not that you can say stuff like that to her. She’s enough of a handful as it is.

“You look like you’re smoking a tampon. Get a hold of yourself, woman.”

I lead the way inside and pretend not to notice as she mimes putting out the ridiculous prop before tucking it behind her ear. The glass door slips shut behind us and we are suddenly in 1982 which is approximately when ‘The Blue’ was last redecorated.

Brown and red plastic predominates – booths, laminated menus, those tomatoes with ketchup inside and then the brown ones with brown sauce, their non-tomato status serving only to highlight the mysterious nature of their contents. At the back of the café is the reason we (and everybody else in town with a clue) come here. Racks of records and CDs frame a large hole in the wall behind which, illuminated by strings of fairy lights and an angle-poise lamp, is a small room stuffed from floor to ceiling with singles, albums, CDs and merchandise from bands-gone-by. MGMT are playing on crackly vinyl on the stereo. The Blue Room, at the back of The Bluebird Café, is the only non-chain record shop in town and apparently evolved from the days when The Blue was a 1950s ice-cream parlour with a jukebox at the back. But that’s not the reason we come here. The reason is perched on a high stool behind a book. The Dice Man.

“That Dan Ashton. So unbelievably hot. Hot!” Hol stage whispers behind her menu.

The book is readjusted momentarily revealing a black eyebrow, a mop of hair to match and one chocolate-brown eye.

She doesn’t notice. “So what gives? I take it you’re not ill. Ill people never wear hats.” I give her a quizzical look. “They haven’t got the energy to accessorise.” Hol tips a dose of sugar out of the dispenser on to the table and starts drawing in it with her fingers.

“Mum and Ray are getting married.”

“Shut up!”

“They are.”

“SHUT UP!” This time she reaches across the booth and punches me in the shoulder, sprinkling grains of Tate and Lyle down my chest in the process. I brush them away.

“No. Seriously. A wedding – cake, singing, a really embarrassing horse and cart. Me probably being forced to wear a lilac dress. Them dancing together.” I shudder, recollecting the scene I walked in on earlier. “It’s a nightmare.”

Holly pouts her bottom lip. “Oh, Can. That’s terrible. That’s…Ooh! I forgot! I brought THESE for us!” She reaches into her enormous yellow pleather bag and produces two pairs of sunglasses. Hers are electric blue with glittery frames in the shape of two butterflies, mine are white with red stripes like a candy cane. The frame contorts into a letter L on one side of the lenses and K on the other.

“And these are?”

She throws her hands up, universal sign language for “Duh!”

“They’re a disguise? So that we can, like, do stuff today without attracting too much attention? I got them from the arcade on the way over.” She slips hers on and turns butterfly-eyed to the surly waitress who has just appeared beside our booth. “A pair of cokes and one chips, please, garçon.”

The waitress, who is about nineteen but looks way older, purses her lips, shakes her head and stalks off in disapproving silence.

To be honest I didn’t expect much sympathy from Pirate. Holly is not great at bad news, operating a blanket policy of “tuning out negativity”. I think of it as just ignoring stuff. She must read my thoughts because she reaches across the booth, gives my forearm a rub, then a pat before finishing off with a few more firm slaps on my shoulder. I feel like a sofa having its cushions plumped.

“Chin up, soldier. It sucks, you know? But parents…they’re nuts. Well, ours are. Come and live at my house! I’m sure Mum and Dad wouldn’t notice one more!” I smile in spite of myself. “Why don’t you, like channel your feelings into our art?” Hol waves her arms around in what she obviously imagines is an arty fashion.

Hol is one half of said art project – our (as yet unnamed) band. She doesn’t write songs. She claims her role is “more of an actualisation deal. Like, you provide the raw materials – I bring the magic.” What this actually means is that I spend every night wigging out on my own in my room like a loser (singing along to my knackered old keyboard in apparent silence via my gigantic orange headphones) writing songs for which Hol then has to create a four-note bass part. Like she says – magic.

“What was that one you wrote last week?” she asks, sucking a few grains of sugar off her index finger.

I cast my mind back to last Wednesday, when I stayed up late writing about this really annoying girl in our class who has a secret tattoo. The chorus was particularly satisfying (“You’ve got your boyfriend’s name in ink on your bum/ And if you don’t shut up/ I’m telling your mum”).

“Er…Inkspots?”

“No! The one about Ray!”

“Oh! Chairman of the Bored.”

“Yeah – you could adapt that and make it about this. You know what John Lydon says, ‘Anger is an energy’. Use it to your advantage, Caine. Now put on your regulation issue disguise and let’s discuss Operation Awesome.”

She may not do sympathy very well, but if you want cheering up, Pirate is the girl for you. “Sir, yes sir!” I slip on my extremely 70s Elton John eyewear, my head now inviting the empty café to LOOK.

Operation Awesome is our plan for world domination by our band, using the weapon of amazingly brilliant music. Holly and I spend most of our time together discussing logistics, tactics, album titles, who we’ll tour with, which cities we’ll play in and what we’ll wear onstage. The fact that we are the only members, own one battered old Casio and a borrowed bass does not figure in any of this. We have a Facebook page called Operation Awesome inviting the public to help us on our road to superstardom. So far we have three friends, two of whom are us. The other one is Glad.

Removing a tattered notebook and pen from her skip of a handbag, Holly flicks through the pages until she reaches the list of potential names we were working on yesterday lunchtime.

“So…where did we get to? The Neon Girls, Play, The Twister Sisters…”

“I hate that one. And there’s already a metal band called Twisted Sister.”

“…Daydreamer, Ice Scream…”

“And that one. Cross it out – people will think we’re a screamo band. Totally wrong.”

“Totally!” agrees Holly, who refuses to acknowledge her enormous emo phase which finished three months ago (her wardrobe has yet to catch up with her music taste). She puts a decisive strike through the offending moniker. “But we do need something. It needs to say who we are and what we’re about – it needs to show that we mean business and – CHIPS! WOO HOO!”

Surly Girl plonks the plate down between us. Hol turns beaming towards her. Surly Girl is wearing a badge that says, ‘My name is Nicola. Ask me about our FREE REFILLS!’

“Danke, Camarero! Could we possibly have another fork, sil vous plait? And what’s the deal with these free refills I’ve been hearing about?”

Surly leans in close enough for us to catch the surprisingly pleasant scent of perfume and cigarettes.

“One fork per order only and the free refills is only for a family party who get the lunchtime special. Not timewasters and broken biscuits who haven’t got nothing better to do with themselves than hang around here making one order last all day.”

A crescent-moon smile spreads across Holly’s impish face.

“Ooh, you’re good! Nicola, is it? You’re GOOD!” She starts scribbling in the book.

Taken aback by Holly’s apparent delight, Surly straightens up, gives a derisory snort and stalks off.

“Thank you!” Holly calls after her with a wave. She turns to me, still beaming, before doing her best Professor Higgins, “By George, I think she’s got it!” She turns the notebook round. The entire list of band names has been scratched out and underneath in letters as big as her grin she has written THE BROKEN BISCUITS.

Before long we’re laughing and the world almost feels the right way round again. Pirate can do that to a person.

We stumble out of the café and take the bus up the coast. As we bump along, Hol gives a particularly animated account of her escape from double maths and a life in which she might have grown up understanding long division.

We end up in a little village a couple of miles out of town. Its selection of shops is pretty odd – a tearoom, a fancy dress shop and a newsagent that also sells reproduction antiques. Somehow Holly convinces the owner of the fancy dress place that we are fashion students looking for kitsch accessories for our end of term show. We spend an hour trying things on. Wigs, feather boas, clown noses, witches’ hats…In the end we buy a pair of cat ears (me) and rabbit ones (her). We add them to our disguises, Holly promising to return to buy more “when we’re closer to curtain up.” There’s nowhere else to go and no more money. So we walk down to find a bench on the freezing beach and split a packet of bubblegum.

Glad once told me there is actually no definitive line where the sea ends and the sky begins. They are made of the same thing. I didn’t understand at the time but today I know just what she means. I can feel the sea in the air, like silk. We watch the waves throw themselves one by one on to the sand, each trying to escape the sea. Failing. That’s how the tide comes in, I suppose.

Still in our comedy ears and sunnies, we sit huddled together blowing orange bubbles that look like plastic Halloween pumpkins. We hunch together in the cold for a long time, looking out to sea as if we’re waiting for a ship of loons to come and rescue us, to take us to a place where people wear rabbit ears and sunglasses every day and love music as much as we do. I think about Operation Awesome – Pirate’s the kind of person who’s just about mad enough to manage to make that happen. I need her help with something else. I take a deep breath, the damp February air is cold enough to sting my teeth.

“I think I need to find my dad.”

Hol’s bubble freezes mid blow, then she sucks it back in thoughtfully, bursting it with a smacking sound.

“Is this cos of the wedding?”

“Yeah, kind of. I mean, I’ve always wanted to know who he is. But in a way, not knowing was cool before. Like, he could be anyone. He could be Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt or something. Stupid.”

She smiles and resumes chewing. “It’s not stupid. I used to wish I was adopted for the same reason. Then I realised that it was unlikely my mam would have wanted to adopt, like, her fifth baby when the others were still little. Unless my dad actually had been Brad Pitt. He loves that kind of thing.”

I roll my eyes at her. “Ha ha. The thing is, now that Ray’s going to be my stepdad, I care. He’s taking my dad’s place. Whoever he is. But I can’t do this on my own. I’m going to need help. From you.”

“Of course! Mi casa su casa!”

“Thanks, Hol. I don’t think ‘mi casa su casa’ actually means—”

She cuts me off, pointedly blowing a bubble in my direction. “Does when I say it. What about your mum?”

“Useless. Everything she says about when she was young contradicts everything else. All I know is, she lived in London, she was going to be the next Kate Moss and then…”

POP.

“Have you ever just, like asked? WHO IS MY FATHER?”

“I can’t.”

“Pourquoi pas?”

“I just kind of…can’t. She doesn’t want me to.”

“How do you know?”

“Just do.”

“OK, dude. I’m on board. We now have two projects. Operation Awesome and Operation Who’s-the-Daddy?” She grins. I frown at her.

“Do we have to call it that?”

“Yes,” she says finally, before unfurling a bubble the size of a space-hopper between us. We get my MP3 player out of my bag and take a headphone each. I scroll through to a really old album I just discovered. Marquee Moon by Television. Apparently they are the band who invented punk, which is funny because they totally look like teachers. My favourite track comes on, Friction. Tom Verlaine starts screaming, “I don’t wanna grow up/There’s too much contradiction!” and looking up at the sky I feel like gravity could just switch off and I could step out into it. In my other ear the sea keeps breathing. Wave. Wave. Wave. Keep trying.

On the bus back, I think about Mum crying sometimes when I was little. Wet eyes and a big smile on my birthday. Hiding it but not very well. I heard her at night sometimes, through the bedroom wall. The day after something bad had happened, when she wouldn’t get up. She always said it was a headache but I stopped believing that ages ago. The answer I need is underneath those tears. I have always known not to ask. About any of it. Suddenly it strikes me that I haven’t heard her cry for a while. Definitely not since…I push the thought back down. He’s an idiot. And he’s not my dad.

The bus drops us back at the stop outside The Blue. It’s quarter past three and already it’s beginning to get dark. Navy spreads through the empty sky like ink in water. Hol fluffs her hair with the back of her hand and stares into the dimly lit café window, half at her own reflection, half through it trying to catch a glimpse of Dan Ashton. “Want to come to mine?”

“Nah. I’d better go home.”

My stomach gives a little lurch at the thought. Holly notices and gives me another conciliatory pat.

“OK soldier. Listen, tomorrow we begin a new phase. We have a name. We are the Broken Biscuits. I think it’s time Operation Awesome went overground.”

“Meaning?”

“We start recruiting. This isn’t a two-woman operation. We need band members. At least two more.”

I salute. “Yes sir.”

I hug Hol and watch her stride away purposefully. I suppose I’d better get home before anyone notices I’m gone.

I arrive back to an empty house. Mum is still down in the salon and Ray…he’s probably teaching some business-dude to pretend he’s a tiger so he can go in and ‘kill it’ at his presentation tomorrow. Lame-a-rama. I try to imagine him actually living here, bursting through the door with a “Honey, I’m home!” every evening, like a character from a bad sitcom. It’s the end. No more TV nights, lounging around in our pyjamas watching films. No more Pizza Wednesdays. No more Mum practising salon treatments on the pair of us, candles and wine glass balanced on the side of the bath; The Pixies on the stereo. The bathroom will probably stink now. Man-stink. In fact that’s the best way to describe Ray’s arrival – a bad smell emanating through the house. Everything looks the same, but the whole place reeks. The flowers sit on the table from breakfast, smiling out at the kitchen with the stupid optimism of things that don’t even know they’ve been hacked down and will soon be dead. Stupid flowers. Stupid tablecloth.

I stagger up into my room, overcome by a weary mix of misery and powerlessness. I kick off my trainers and flop down on to the bed. The clock-radio blinks 15:55. I blink back. Once, twice and then fall headfirst into a black-hole sleep, the deepest I have ever known.

When I wake again it is almost midnight and the house is enveloped in velvety darkness. A glass of juice and a sandwich sit outside my bedroom door. I pick them up and tiptoe down from my little attic room to the floor below. The door is ajar. I call Mum’s room ‘The Museum’ because everything in it is about a hundred years old. It being hers, none of it in any way goes together. Ancient floral quilts clash with old leopard-print lampshades. Twinkling Indian saris frame the window and a costume shop array of frocks are slung willy-nilly over a battered Chinese screen. In the middle of it all is Mum asleep on her bed in a pool of lamplight. Dark hair framing her beautiful face, long eyelashes flickering mid-dream, the gentle rise and fall of Brides magazine on her chest. If she hadn’t been snoring it would have been just like an advert.

I sit on the third stair and eat my sandwich, drink my OJ and watch her sleeping. I can feel the fact of her engagement (sounds so weird – she’s thirty-five!) sitting in my chest like a stone, heavy and cold – a boulder thrown into a lake, the surface of which has now become calm. I think about her almost-crying this morning “Don’t I deserve some happiness?” Like she’d never had any until now. Was life really so unbearable when all we had was each other?

After eating, I walk into the room to turn off her light. She doesn’t look too much like me. Her eyes are brown and mine are green. I suppose our cheekbones are the same. Sticky-outy – but hers make her look like a film star, whereas mine make me look like an alien. Her hair is smooth and unfurls itself like a shampoo ad when she takes it down. Mine seems to defy gravity and if it has been in a ponytail it stays there when you take the elastic out. Wondering if anything about me will ever make sense, I flick off the bedside lamp and sneak out, leaving Mum snuffling away contentedly in the darkness.

4 The Beast and the Godbrother

A feeling of numb calm stays with me for the next few days, punctuated by sickening moments when I remember that the world as I know it is about to end. In science I draw Ray’s face on the textbook illustration of the meteor that caused the Big Bang hurtling towards earth. The dinosaurs were lucky – they didn’t know what was coming to take them out. Then I start daydreaming about my real father (who Hol and I have christened BioDad). Maybe he’s a film star! Mum’s always telling stories about the flash company she was in down in London. “He could be Johnny Depp or Clive Owen,” I suggest to Hol at lunchtime, “maybe even Daniel Craig! James Bond could be my dad!”