She’ll come with me. It’ll be a laugh. Maybe not for the dressage – she won’t get that at all – but the cross country and show jumping’re easy to follow. She can cheer me on, can’t she? Be one of my team.
So I tell her, “I’m riding at horse trials in Umwinsidale both days this weekend. Why don’t you come on the Sunday and watch the cross country and show-jumping phases perhaps? I know you don’t like horses much, but you don’t have to come too close. It’s really exciting and festive and if you wear shorts you’ll get a good tan.”
Jess hesitates, flicks her eyes around a bit, looks positively shifty.
“I can’t,” she says.
Oh, right. Well.
This is our weekend planning session, like always. Is she really turning me down? Since when does she refuse a chance to have a laugh and get out in the summer sun?
“You really don’t have to go near any horses. Why not?”
“Well, Clive Kenning in Form Two has asked me out. We’re going to the cinema with his brother and a couple of their friends.”
What?
My happy, horsey train of thought fizzles out, grinds to a halt. I do a kind of mental shake up. Of all the unexpected activities Jess could’ve chosen to do on a Sunday, going to the cinema with a boy would’ve been my last guess. This can’t be right.
My voice is very reluctant to come out so I end up mumbling, “Oh. All right then.”
She’s being irritatingly smug.
“Aren’t you going to ask what he’s like? Never mind, Tess. I’ll take a good look at some of these friends and suss out the talent for you!”
Clive Kenning? Never heard the name. He must be new, or come from another junior school. How does she even know him?
I become deaf to whatever she says next, take the sheets I did yesterday’s homework on out of my maths file, then put them back in again with a snap of the ring clasps. Junior school and childish exercise books are part of a past life now, although I still haven’t got used to this moving around to different classrooms all day. We’ve got double maths first thing this morning followed by double English and then double science after break. Wednesdays are not good days.
So. Clive. Clive, whom I don’t know from Adam, has entered my life and mucked up my weekend with my best friend. We’ve always been Jess-and-Tess – and I’ve never minded being second in the name – but how much longer will it be our name? Does that all change when you go to high school? When one of you finds a boyfriend?
But Jess? My friend, Jess? That’s not to say I didn’t think she’d ever get a boyfriend, or that I think she’s unattractive or anything. Just not yet.
First Rosie, now her. Rosie, my little sister, had no fewer than three dancing partners at Angela Walters’s party last Saturday, and then she goes and says to me, on the way home, “I can’t decide which one I’ll marry. What do you think? Who are you going to marry?”
She’s eleven, so where’s this come from? Planning marriage hasn’t yet entered my radar field, but maybe it should. Jess has gone quiet and is gazing absently into nothing with her elbows resting on her school case, so she’s probably contemplating it and all.
Is it abnormal to put more of your mental energy into planning your horse’s competitions than deciding how and when to get married and who to marry? Have I missed something? I guess I’ve always kind of assumed it will happen to me at some stage, but…
Jess’s brought herself back to reality and is peering into my face.
“Don’t worry, Tess. It’s just a date and I want to go and I’m sorry I can’t come with you to your horsey… jumping… thing.”
Horse trials. Has she learned nothing from me?
Then she laughs. “I won’t get pregnant from it and have to leave school so I’ll still be here. Still haven’t started my periods yet anyway.”
She sounds almost annoyed, but, believe me, the longer I have to wait for that to happen to me, the better.
“My mother only gave me the obligatory mother-to-daughter facts-of-life lecture about a month ago,” I tell her. “She cornered me in my bedroom, sat me down on the bed, put her arm around me and told me she had something to explain. Something I might find disturbing. You are growing up, Tessa, she said. Very shortly, I think, you will find things are going to happen to you that you won’t understand and I want to tell you about it.”
Jess snorts.
“Exactly. I nearly laughed, but Jess, her eyes were so serious and searching. What was I supposed to do? She’s obviously forgotten what girls talk about at school. She honestly thought I had no idea.”
I’ve been in touch with the idea since Gill enlightened me five years ago, even though Lauren’s ‘illness’ and behaviour at Mushandike escaped me at the time. I’ll never admit to that. But she was the first one in our class.
“So what did you say?” demands Jess.
“I thought I’d better reassure her. So I said, ‘Oh, I know what you’re going to say, Mum. Is it about periods? It’s all right. I know what they are and why I’ll get them.’ She went all disappointed, like I’d stopped her from fulfilling her role.”
She’s grinning at me. “Have you never told her about your visits to those stud farms with Gill and her mom then?”
“Well yes. But not all the detail. This was her first attempt at sex education, Jess. In her mind I’ve got no right to know anything prior to getting periods. I’ll bet she thinks I still believe in storks. I was diplomatic. Wait till she tries it with Rosie.”
“You never mentioned that book then, either?”
“Are you mad?”
I have no idea who brought ‘that book’ to school and can’t for the life of me remember what it was called or who wrote it. I do recall that the protagonists were called Candy and Sherman and that up till then I’d had no clue that any of what they got up to was even possible. Stallions and mares are pretty straightforward animals.
“You could come round mine this arvy and we can play records?” Jess suggests.
So she does feel guilty for turning down my offer. Well, too late for that.
“No, I can’t. I’ve got a training session with Moira. In fact I have one every afternoon this week. Sorry. Perhaps Clive could spend the afternoons with you instead.”
She gives me the most pointedly rolled-eyes a person can.