Read Cross Your Heart, Connie Pickles for Free Online Page A

Mother called up my heart gave a leap of anxiety. Then I began to pick at the stool’s cork top. I studied the stain on the bath until I made it look like a wizard with a huge gold cloak. And then a strange thing happened. I began to think I would sit there forever. I would just sit there picking at the stool all night. My watch ticked round to seven o’clock and for a few seconds I stared at it, wondering what I was supposed to do now.
    Then I heard Julie shout, ‘Constance. We’re ready for you!’ and I jumped to it.
    When I came down, all I could smell was cKone. Mother looked at my hair, which I’d just pulled back, and said, ‘> Chérie! ’ rather weakly. Julie snorted. (What were they expecting? A Mohican?) Uncle Bert didn’t say anything. He was already halfway out of the door. Julie gave me a thumbs up behind his back to show she’d done the deed. Mother kissed me, smudging with her thumb a little bit of what I assumed to be toothpaste away from the side of my mouth, and told us to amuse ourselves.
    In the car there was ‘an atmosphere’. I don’t think Uncle Bert’s girlfriend had appreciated being kept waiting. She was squashed up in the back with me and I kept saying I was sorry, but her annoyance didn’t seem to be directed at me. There was a sports bag gaping open between us with a white T-shirt bundled in at the top, half hanging out. It smelt of Bert’s cKone and she kept twisting it with one hand and punching it further in.
    Uncle Bert’s car, according to Julie, is a Spider, but it felt more like a Fly in the back: zippy, still and then fast with sudden spurts of acceleration. Something was buzzing too: I think it might have been a vibration in the window frames. All the way to Hammersmith, Julie would twist round from the front seat and say things like, ‘So how old was your mother when she had you?… So young.’ ‘A widow at twenty-three! How did your father die? Killed delivering pizzas? That’s so sad. So brave. Brave as well as beautiful.’ ‘Bernadette. That is such a romantic name.’
    I couldn’t help laughing out loud at that one, but most of the time I was more worried about Sue. It may just have been the position she was in – her knees bent round to one side, her blonde head slightly ducked – but she seemed to have lost some of her karmic poise. She’s very pretty, despite the length of her hair.
    In the noisy, buzzy bits of the journey, when Julie wasn’t talking, Sue told me she did corporate entertaining – that’s how she met Bert. ‘I meet a lot of men in my line of work,’ she said. She lives in Stockwell and grew up in south Wales. She doesn’t normally go to this sort of gig with Bert but, because it was Valentine’s Day, she had made an exception. Also she was going to Australia for three weeks for her sister’s wedding, so she wasn’t going to see him for a bit. She said I asked a lot of questions and could she ask me one herself? ‘How come you and Julie are friends?’ she said, scrutinizing me. ‘You seem so…’
    ‘Grown-up,’ I finished for her. ‘Yes, a lot of people say that.’
    When we got to the venue, Bert had to go off and do something, and he told us a good place to wait for him, which was to one side of the stage. It was dark, and smelt of stale spilt beer and sweat. When Sue went to get us some Cokes, Julie filled me in on everything that had happened when I was in the bathroom, including the whole ‘’uston’ photograph thing. When Sue came back, I noticed they were both in combats. Julie’s were army and baggy, down by her naval, while Sue’s were satiny and tight. Julie lit up a cigarette then, which was interesting. She wouldn’t do it in front of her uncle, but she did in front of Sue as if to let her know it didn’t count. Oh, and then it got busier and busier and Bert appeared, also, I now realized, in combats (the whole place was in combats), and steered us to the middle, and the noise level began to rise and