I DIDN’T KNOW if Will had heard or not. I couldn’t be sure. He’d given me that one long look, but that could have been coincidence. Maybe he hadn’t heard a word. Maybe I was just kidding myself because I couldn’t bear Will to know that I’d betrayed him.
I was so enchanted with my sudden astonishing friendship with Jasmine that I didn’t even want to think about Will. Jasmine and I whispered and wrote notes all through lessons and walked round arm in arm together at lunch time. Jasmine linked her arm through mine as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I’d been friends with Marnie and Terry for more than a year and we’d never linked arms once. Marnie and Terry disapproved of girls who went round cosied up together and called them stupid names.
It was so wonderful to be with Jasmine instead of Marnie and Terry.
‘Come to tea with me,’ she said suddenly, when the bell went for the end of school.
‘I’d love to,’ I said at once. ‘But won’t your father mind?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Jasmine. ‘We’re renting this flat near the river. It’s in this big mansion block, Ellmere House. Do you know it?’
Of course I knew it. It was a wonderful dark gothic building, with many turrets and cupolas. It looked just like one of the fairy palaces in my Casper Dream books. It seemed a perfect home for someone like Jasmine. I couldn’t possibly miss the chance of going to tea there, though I knew Mum would be worried sick. I didn’t want to phone her. She’d fuss and want to know all about Jasmine and ask embarrassing questions. I didn’t want to get bogged down in all that. I just wanted to go home with Jasmine. So I did.
I walked along beside her. I kept looking round, hoping lots of people would see me with my new friend. I saw our shadows bobbing along behind us, mine little, hers tall and slender, her long hair standing out around her head and waving in the wind. Our arms were linked again so that our shadows were Siamese twins. I pretended Jasmine’s shadow was mine. I wondered what it would be like to be her. I imagined what her flat would be like, lavishly furnishing it in my imagination, giving it purple-velvet curtains and crimson sofas, scattering Persian rugs on the polished wooden floor and hanging cranberry-glass chandeliers from the ceiling.
The real flat was a disappointment, almost as beige and boring as my own house – neutral colours, corduroy-covered chairs with floral cushions, and insipid watercolour prints on the pale walls.
‘Oh it’s lovely,’ I said politely.
‘No it’s not,’ said Jasmine. ‘None of this stuff is ours. It comes with the flat. It’s weird, it’s always the same sort of stuff no matter which flat we’re in. Come into my bedroom. That’s got some of my things in it.’
I thought it was the most wonderful bedroom in the world, although I knew Marnie and Terry would scoff.
Jasmine didn’t have her own television or computer, she didn’t have an elaborate music player, just a little CD radio. Her strange bright beautiful clothes were hanging outside the wardrobe, transforming it. She’d covered the dressing table with glass perfume bottles and snow domes and several sets of Russian dolls, little carefully painted figures lined up in descending order right down to teeny creatures smaller than my fingernail. She’d spread an electric blue and silver Indian veil over the duvet and turned her ordinary bed into a bower. It was sewn with red jewels like rubies. When Jasmine lit the candles on her shelf the jewels glowed in the flickering light. They were scented candles, musky, sweet.
‘Are they jasmine too?’ I asked, sniffing appreciatively.
‘They’re neroli,’ said Jasmine. She stretched lazily. ‘It’s especially relaxing. My dad used to have a girlfriend who was an aromatherapist. I really liked her. She told tarot cards as well. She said she was going to teach me how to do it. She was much nicer than Georgia, his new lady. She’s just one of the dancers in the show.’
‘Maybe she could teach you to dance?’ I said.
‘I can dance already,’ said Jasmine. She put some jazzy show music on her CD player and launched into an impressive routine, strutting and sashaying, slapping her pointy boots. Her skirt whirled, showing the taut calf muscles in her slender legs, real dancer’s legs.
I’d been sent to ballet classes when I was five. It was Dad’s idea. He wanted a little dancer in the family. I hated the lessons. All the other little girls went to a different infants school and knew each other already. They had butterfly bobbles and diamanté hairslides and FOREVER FRIENDS necklaces and little Lycra leotards in pink and purple and blue. I didn’t have any jewellery. I didn’t even have a leotard at first. Mum made me change into my swimming costume for classes, even though I nearly died of embarrassment. I begged her to buy me a proper leotard but I didn’t look much better when I got it. It was too big and baggy and I was always afraid it might show my bottom if I bent over.
I was in the ballet class concert that Christmas, even though I was slow to pick up the steps. Every child was in the concert, small or tall, fat or thin, talented or totally useless. I was a kitten who had lost her mitten. Dad videoed my dreadful performance. One of Will’s favourite tortures was to replay me stumbling about the stage, head bowed, knees bent, wrists wringing, totally out of step with the other two kittens. It cracked him up every time.
‘You’re brilliant at dancing, Jasmine,’ I said. ‘I’ve always been rubbish at it.’
‘I’ll teach you if you like,’ said Jasmine, holding out her hand.
‘Absolutely not,’ I said firmly.
‘OK, OK,’ said Jasmine, and she swapped her CD for wonderfully weird choral music.
‘It’s Lisa Gerrard. Isn’t she great?’ said Jasmine.
‘It sounds very witchy.’
‘It is witchy. I’m a white witch, didn’t you know? With amazing occult powers,’ said Jasmine. She flicked her fingers as if she was executing extraordinary witch spells.
‘Oh yeah – and you’re a vampire slayer too?’ I said.
‘You bet. And Supergirl. Watch me put on my special suit and fly,’ she said, spreading her arms wide.
She was fooling around, of course, but she was so magical I almost believed her. I stood at her dressing table and fingered the green and blue perfume bottles and shook the snow domes and rearranged the Russian dolls, making them line up two by two in a long crocodile of best friends. I felt overpowered by perfume, shaken in a snowstorm, unscrewed into smaller and smaller pieces. I even looked different when I peered at myself in Jasmine’s mirror. My eyes shone in the candlelight and when I shook my hair free of its fat school plait it tumbled past my shoulders in dark waves.
‘You’ve got lovely hair,’ said Jasmine, brushing it with a beautiful silver-backed hairbrush.
‘Nowhere near as lovely as yours.’
‘So we’re the hairy girls as well as the flower fairy girls,’ said Jasmine, and we both fell about laughing.
‘I’m starving. Let’s have tea,’ she said.
I thought about my own tea waiting at home. I knew I should go right that minute. Or at the very least phone. But I still couldn’t bear to break the spell.
‘Yeah, great, let’s have tea,’ I said.
I thought Jasmine’s dad would be in the kitchen but there was no sign of him. Jasmine rummaged in the fridge, selecting stuff.
‘Where’s your dad, Jasmine?’ I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t come out to say hello. Why didn’t he want to know how she’d managed on her first day at the new school? Why didn’t he want to give me the once-over. My dad would have given any friend a twice- or even thrice-over.
Jasmine shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He’s maybe at the theatre, checking stuff. There was a problem with the lighting. Or maybe he’s gone out with Georgia some-place. Whatever.’
I couldn’t believe she said it so casually. The tea arrangements were casual too. There was lots of luxury food in the fridge, strawberries, special cheese, asparagus, fresh prawns, Greek yoghurt, chocolate éclairs, olives, ice cream, but not the makings of a proper meal. Jasmine didn’t seem bothered about proper meals. She’d had one nibble at her gift KitKat and hardly touched her school dinner. She’d just eaten a few chips and half an apple, that was all. She didn’t eat properly now even though she’d said she was starving. She fixed herself a fancy little mouse-meal, one prawn, three olives, six strawberries and half an éclair. No wonder she was so slender. Her wrists were so thin her bangles clinked right down to her knuckles and she was forever hitching them back into place.
‘Help yourself, Violet,’ she said.
I was hungry enough to eat everything in the fridge but I matched my meal exactly to Jasmine’s.
‘What would you like to drink?’ she said, clanking the bottles in the fridge door. She brought out a gleaming green bottle. ‘White wine?’
‘You’re allowed to drink wine?’
‘Sure,’ said Jasmine. ‘I prefer red though. We’ll have that, OK? Let’s take the food back into my bedroom, like a picnic.’
I took both our plates back to the bedroom, worrying about the wine. I was going to be in serious enough trouble as it was when I eventually went home. If I was also drunk I’d be grounded for ever.
‘Here we go,’ said Jasmine, coming into her bedroom with two big blue glass goblets filled to the brim. She gave me one and clinked hers gently against mine. ‘Here’s to us,’ she said.
‘Yes, here’s to us,’ I echoed. I took a deep breath and sipped my drink. Jasmine burst out laughing. It was cranberry juice.
We ate our tiny meal and drank our juice and listened to Lisa in the candlelight. Jasmine had strung Christmas tree fairy lights across the ceiling and now it was getting dark they twinkled red and green and blue and yellow. I felt as if I was in true Casper Dream fairyland.
It got darker and darker, later and later. My heart thudded when I thought of Mum. Dad would be coming home soon. If I wasn’t back then he’d call out one of his police cars and start a search for me.
‘I think I’ll have to go home now, Jasmine.’
‘No, please. Not yet. We’re having fun,’ said Jasmine. ‘Look, I want to play you some of my other albums and show you all my drawings and stuff. Please stay.’
‘I want to,’ I said desperately, ‘but it’s really really late. I know it sounds pathetic but my mum will be so worried. You know what mums are like.’
Jasmine pulled a face, pursing her soft lips. ‘Nope. Not my mum.’ She said it very lightly but her voice thickened, almost as if she was going to cry.
‘Your mum doesn’t worry?’ I said.
‘Oh, she worries all right. You should see her before a first night or a telly show. You can’t go near her. And she has all these little rituals. She has to wear a particular lipstick and line up her little glass animals in a certain way and swallow three sips of wine, like she’s totally nuts. This isn’t just when she’s got a main part, she gets just as fussed if she’s a fairy godmother in some silly panto or a rubbish role in a soap. And she worries about her hair and her wretched highlights and her botox injections and her tummy tuck and her boob job. She goes on and on about herself, and does she really look thin and should she go to power yoga or pilates classes?’ Jasmine was spitting out the words now, her fists clenched. ‘She worries all the time but she doesn’t worry about me. Well, she worries that her new guy makes too much fuss of me. He’s a creep, I can’t stick him, he dyes his hair blond and wanders round posing all the time, you’ve never seen such a plonker, and yet Miranda’s nuts about him. So she shoves me in boarding school out of the way, and she doesn’t even listen when I phone and tell her how I hate it. Thank God Dad rescued me.’
‘And are you happy now, with your dad?’ I whispered.
‘Yeah, of course. It’s great. I love my dad. He’s a truly super guy, not a bit like a dad. He doesn’t get all heavy or tell me what to do and he acts like he’s glad to have me around – but he’s not here often enough. It’s not his fault, he can’t help it with his job. He’s offered to fix me up with some sort of babysitter but I can’t stand that idea. I’m fine by myself. It’s not like he ever stays out all night, he always comes home, though sometimes it’s not till around midnight and it can get a bit weird just sitting all by myself. I know it’s daft but I get kind of . . . scared.’
I gave her a big hug. Her long golden hair brushed my shoulders as if it was my hair too.
‘I’d get scared. Anyone would. Look, I’d give anything to stay with you, Jasmine—’
‘But you have to go.’
‘Maybe I can stay later another time. Even sleep over,’ I promised wildly. I gave her another hug and she hugged me back really hard, clinging to me.
‘We really are friends, aren’t we, Violet?’
‘Best friends?’
‘Best friends,’ I said.
The two words flickered in my head like Jasmine’s fairy lights, glowing in jewel colours.