On the other hand, that was hardly fair. I was sure there were plenty of grim former industrial towns in France, cluttering up the border with rusting railway tracks and thundering lorries. I watched a woman shouting at her pram. She was wearing two tank tops, both grubby, neither of which reached all the way over the rolls of fat down to her leggings. She was pushing a buggy loaded with huge thin plastic bags through which the family bags of chips were clearly visible.
I winced. I was turning into a snob.
- - -
“Anna! Have you turned into a total and utter snob?”
It was Cath on the phone. I was so pleased to hear from her.
“Yes!” I screamed back. “I can’t help it! I don’t know what to do. I’m kind of horrible now.”
“Everyone in France is horrible,” she said with all the authority of someone who’d been told off by a ferry operative on a school trip to France in 1995.
“Everyone knows that. They eat dogs and stuff.”
“They don’t eat dogs,” I said crossly. “Where did you even hear that?”
“Well, dogs, or horses or something.”
“Mmm,” I said.
“Oh. My. God. It’s true. Do they eat horses?”
“Well, if you eat cows, I don’t really see the difference…”
“Oh my utter God, that is total rank. Did you eat a horse? Oh man, that mings the mong.”
I started to feel less snobby.
“Get ready,” said Cath. “We’re going out.”
It was good to be home.
- - -
Cath let herself into my room, armed with blow-dryers and curling tongs. She stopped short when she saw me.
“What?” I said.
“Dunno,” she said, but she didn’t look pleased. She had a bright blood-red streak through the top of her hair that made her look like a particularly cheerful vampire. “You look…different.”
“That’s because I’m not in bed vomiting up blood and crying,” I pointed out.
“No, even after you got sick.”
“Well, I’m not out of work and crying in the morning.”
She shook her head. “Neh. It’s more than that.”
She opened up her hairdressing bag and pulled out two clanking bottles of WKD.
“Uhm, Cath, we’re thirty,” I reminded her. “You don’t need to smuggle drink into the house. Dad would make us a martini bianco if we asked him nicely.”
“It tastes better like this,” she said. “Can I smoke out the window?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes.”
She lit up and climbed on my bed, regarding me closely.
“You’ve lost weight,” she said accusingly.
Actually I’d lost a lot of weight in the hospital, then regained it all again by staying indoors being depressed and eating extra-spicy KFC. Then the last few weeks had been so busy I hadn’t even really noticed, which was, I will say, not at all like me. But my jeans had certainly felt looser. But I still considered myself fatter than every other person in Paris. The women were so tiny. Maybe I was just falling into line.
“You’ve gone Frenchy-thin,” she said. “Hmm. Do you smoke now and eat nothing all day except frogs’ legs and dog?”
“It’s horse,” I said.
“I knew it!” yelled Cath.
Her eyebrows would have arched if she hadn’t had that dodgy cheap Botox that she didn’t even need. It had given her a look that screamed Botox. She adored it, all the sheen without the need for repeated injections. Everyone assumed she had it about once a week.
“What’s this man like?” she asked.
“There’s no man,” I said. “Well…I mean…No, no man.”
“Oh my God, what’s he like? Is he tiny and without an arse? French men never have arses.”
“How come you’re so well-informed?”
“Everyone knows that,” she said dismissively. “I’ve met a few men in my time.”
This was undeniably true. I drank the blue drink. Had it always been this revolting? I wasn’t sure.
“Well, I kind of nearly met someone, then he saw my foot and had a serious freak out.”
Cath put her glass down. Her voice was quieter.
“Seriously?”
“It’s all right,” I said, taking a swig. It wasn’t much better than the first one, but I persevered. “It doesn’t matter.”
“What a twat,” she said.
“Oh no, it wasn’t really his fault…my shoe fell off and he thought my toes fell off too.”
She paused for a second then, suddenly, we both burst out laughing.
“What an idiot!” she said when she paused for breath. “Thank God you didn’t brush your hair. He’d have thought your head was falling off.”
The blue drinks must have been getting to us, because we found this very, very funny too, and suddenly I realized that while I might have been learning lots of new things and experiences, I hadn’t had a bloody good laugh for ages.
We headed out to Faces, and there were loads of people there I hadn’t seen for absolutely ages and everyone was dead nice and bought us drinks and congratulated Cath on beating that shoplifting charge, to which Cath assumed a heavenly look and pretended she wasn’t in the least bit surprised, and a bunch of lads we went to school with were there and that was so funny, the married ones all fat and tired-looking, the unmarried ones all flash-looking and bragging about their cars. A few more blue drinks and everything seemed hilarious again and I even ended up giving Darr a bit of a snog for old times’ sake—well, he was right there, and I felt like I needed the practice, but he was absolutely, I realized, rubbish compared to Laurent, so I quickly knocked that on the head. Then me and Cath marched home arm in arm, singing a Robbie Williams song, and it was exactly what I needed.
Even with it though, I still felt different. Like I was an outsider, looking in. That I was playing at being a Kidinsborough girl rather than actually being one. Even though I was, wasn’t I? Of course I was.
It was very kind of Claire not to ring until the afternoon the next day.
- - -
Actually, it was better than kind; it was bliss. I sat in front of the gas fire, watching the telly—my mum had taped loads of reality shows; she likes anything where people come to a sticky end—and we ate toast (no one could believe it when I told them the French had never really heard of toast and ate this indigestible crunchy preburned stuff) with marmite. The boys let me eat some of their massive supplies of chips, which was their way of saying they were pleased to see me, and my dad didn’t really say anything much, just popped his head around the door every now and again, smiled, then popped out again. I’d forgotten how nice it was at home. I’d also forgotten that by the next day, Mum and I would probably be driving each other up the wall and I’d be down at the discount store begging for a job and tripping over the boys’ sneakers…