Lindsey Kelk - What a Girl Wants

No one was coming. No one cared. Nick didn’t care, Charlie didn’t care, Amy was otherwise engaged, and who on earth knew where she would be by now?

Just as I was considering fashioning a Blue Peter -style pillow out of my frock, there was a loud kerfuffle along the corridor: raised voices, jangling keys and a lot of scuffling. Ooh, maybe I was getting a cellmate.

I sat up straight, my heart pounding.

Shit! Maybe I was getting a cellmate.

Gathering my skirts up around my waist, I stood up and held my breath. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to achieve with my ready-to-pounce pose – I was still in a ten by ten cement cell with iron bars where a door should be – but whatever was coming my way, I was ready for it. Unless she or he was bigger than me, in which case they would be wearing me like a glove puppet by dawn. I was not cut out for life on the inside. I would make a terrible prison wife, I had no discernible crafting talents, and the time Amy tried to give me an amateur tattoo with her compass and a pot of Indian ink she nicked from the art room, I passed out behind the humanities block and missed the first ten minutes of my mock French GCSE.

Before I could work out the appropriate way to greet a fellow criminal in a language I couldn’t speak (not an easy task without my iPhone), two navy-clad officers burst through the door to the cell block, shouting at each other and the blur of arms and legs they held between them. I stepped back into the corner, trying to tie the skirts of my dress into a manageable knot in case I needed my legs free for kicking but there was no time. While I was faffing with the fabric, a third police officer was sliding open the bars so his mates could chuck my new best friend in beside me.

Only it wasn’t my new best friend.

It was very much my old best friend.

‘Police brutality!’ Amy shouted, scrambling to her feet and grabbing at the cell bars as the polizia scarpered as fast as possible. ‘I’m totally writing to my MP about this! As soon as I find out who my MP is.’

‘Amy?’ My skirts slipped out of my hand and fell to the floor with a damp slap.

‘Tess!’ She turned towards me, all wide eyes and filthy face, and flew over, wrapping her arms tightly around my cold shoulders. ‘You’re OK!’

‘I think we’re both pretty far from OK,’ I pointed out, glancing around at our less than salubrious surroundings. ‘What’s going on? Is Kekipi with you? They let me call someone and I called you but I got your voicemail.’

‘Oh, no way!’ She let go of my arms and laughed, before collapsing happily on my concrete block. ‘I called you! How funny is that?’

‘So funny that I might throw up,’ I replied, awkwardly folding myself up on the floor. My knees had decided that standing up was overrated. ‘Where’s Kekipi?’

‘Don’t know; I didn’t see him after they locked me up.’ Amy placed her hands behind her head and closed her eyes, her own floor-length gown having actually fared quite well. At least, hers didn’t have any blood on it. ‘I’m sure he’s coming. I’ve got to hand it to you – you don’t do things by halves these days. No one could accuse you of being boring any more, could they?’

I crawled forward a couple of feet and wrapped my hands around the bars, pushing my nose out as far as it would go and trying not to cry. I thought of Nick and the look on his face. I thought of Al and how disappointed he would be in me when he found out about all of this. And I thought of Charlie and how I could possibly ever make things up to him. Sniffing at the empty corridor and staring up at the full moon through a tiny window across the way, I sighed.

‘No,’ I said to a half-asleep Amy. ‘No one could accuse me of being boring.’

I stood on the street outside my flat for five full minutes before braving the four concrete steps up to the door.

For five long years I had wrestled with the knackered lock, shoulder-barged the warped wooden door open, and called this place home, but after three short days away I was petrified of stepping over the threshold. Admittedly, it was fair to say I hadn’t been on terribly good terms with my flatmate, Vanessa, when I left. For some reason, she hadn’t taken kindly to me borrowing her life for a week, though I’d done a pretty good job with it, even if I did say so myself. Of course, she had chosen not to focus on the elements of our ‘falling out’ that she was at least somewhat responsible for – like how she’d been passing my photos off as hers for years on end, and how she’d been shagging Charlie, my Charlie, behind my back. That all seemed to slip her mind when she stood screaming in the street that I was the crazy one and if I ever stepped foot in the flat again, she’d have me arrested.

Fingering the key ring in my pocket, I forced myself up another step. She couldn’t actually have me arrested for going into my own flat, I reminded myself, and besides, it was half past eleven on a Thursday morning: she wouldn’t be at home anyway. Given that Vanessa was absolutely shit at her job, her dad had been paying the mortgage on our flat since we moved in and she had a standing Thursday lunch date with him to justify her existence whenever she was in the country. I’d only met Vanessa’s father once, but I had to assume no matter how good he was at making Scrooge McDuck quantities of money, he couldn’t really be that bright because Vanessa had him wrapped around her little finger, even though he was pretty much the only man on earth she couldn’t sleep with to get what she wanted. The whole daddy–daughter thing was a mystery to me. Maybe if I batted eyelash extensions and tossed a long blonde mane at my dad, he would pay all my bills too. Unlikely, given that we hadn’t spoken in almost a decade, but you never know.

One more deep breath in and I was at the top of the stairs, face to face with my knackered red front door. Keys in hand, I rested one palm against the glass pane and pressed my ear against the wood, just to make sure. Hmm. Could I hear something? I should have brought Amy with me. Yes, my best friend was small in stature but she was very big on violence and I did not relish the thought of opening this door to a furious former flatmate without her by my side. Why was I here? Maybe I should just turn tail and run back to Amy’s house, get back under the covers, watch the rest of Step Up 3 and pretend I didn’t need any of my old things. And then I looked down at the T-shirt I had borrowed from Amy that morning. A five-foot-ten woman should never borrow clothes from a five-foot-nothing girl. I loved unicorns as much as the next girl but neon pink unicorns on a cropped black T-shirt? The world wasn’t ready to see my belly button and neither was I. I needed my things.

That was, provided Vanessa hadn’t burnt all my clothes, chucked them in the street or used them as tea towels and toilet paper. I let out a quiet laugh and shook my head: what a silly thought. She hadn’t used a tea towel in the five years I’d known her, so that was hardly about to change. But without me there to buy bog roll, that was a definite possibility.

‘You’re being stupid,’ I whispered to myself as I pulled my sad phone with its broken screen out of my pocket and forced it to shuffle through my contacts until I found the number for our landline. This was a telephone no one but my mother and the world’s finest telemarketers had attempted to call since 2007 and yet, every time it rang, Vanessa had the receiver in her hand within three seconds, ‘just in case’. I had to assume she had once given Brad Pitt that number in a bar and was still waiting for his call.

I listened as the line connected, the two long bleats on my phone translating into two short rings inside. It was fair to say I felt something of a twat, stood on my own doorstep, dialling my own landline from my own mobile, but I figured it was better to feel like a bit of a bell-end than to get into another public slanging match with a psycho. But when the phone inside stopped ringing and I heard the lovely lady from BT invite me to leave myself a message, I hung up and forced my key into the lock and merrily kicked the door wide open.