Authors: Sarah Webb
Boy Trouble (2 page)
Before
we go any further, let me explain how I got sucked into the whole agony aunt business in the first place.
Clover recently landed a job on teen magazine
The Goss
during her gap year between school and college. It’s kind of like
Mizz
or
CosmoGirl
but with more articles and less celebrity pics. Not many Irish celebs actually live in Ireland, they mostly hang out in Hollywood, like swoon-boy Colin Farrell and the utterly gorge Cork lad with the big lips, Jonathan Rhys Meyers.
The mag’s paying her and everything. She wants to be a journalist, so it’s great experience. Gramps set it up; he knows the editor’s dad. The agony aunt had just gone on maternity leave, so Clover asked could she give it a go. To her surprise they said yes. Clover reckons they were a bit desperate.
I overheard Mum talking to Dave, her boyfriend (I refuse to call him my stepdad – it’s too Cinderella. Besides, they’re not married or anything, but more about that later). “Clover is so jammy,” she said. “Things always seem to land in her lap.” It must seem that way to Mum, but Clover works really hard when she wants to. Which, in fairness, isn’t all that often.
You should also know:
1.
Clover has always been spoilt, according to Mum. Mum and Clover are sisters and they have a bit of a love/hate relationship. I guess it’s because of the age difference – twenty years!
2.
Clover’s seventeen going on thirteen (my age), which is probably why we get on so well. Technically she’s my aunt, but we’re more like sisters.
3.
Clover is very popular with boys and always has some poor guy or other on the go. At the moment it’s Ryan, who’s studying Arts at Trinity, an ancient college in Dublin with cobblestones and big metal sculptures, worth millions, sitting outside on the grass.
4.
Clover lives at home with her dad, my Grampa, or “Gramps” as we both call him. I couldn’t say Grampa when I was little, only “Cramps” and then “Gramps”. Clover used to call him “Gramps” in a baby voice to annoy him, but it just stuck.
5.
Clover’s currently on what she has decided will be the first of many gap years from studying or working full-time. She has it sussed!
She has a place to study Arts at Trinity College (like Ryan) but deferred for a year. The Leaving Certificate almost put her off academia for life, she says. She did surprisingly well in her final exams for someone whose idea of studying is cramming the night before.
Clover also says she intends to live at home for years and years so she can spend all her money on the important things in life, like clothes, shoes and going out. Clover is no fool, according to Mum. But Gramps has just retired and he likes having Clover around the place – he says she livens things up. Clover says she keeps him young; Mum says she’s delusional and that her shenanigans will send him to an early grave.
6.
Clover doesn’t mince her words. Mum says she’s borderline rude; Clover says she’s just honest. If you ask me, the truth lies somewhere in between.
7.
Oh, and she’s mad about elephants.
After school on Wednesday, Clover rang me in a complete flap.
“I’ve been reading some of the ‘Dear Clover’ letters,” she said. “You think you lot have problems, try paying for petrol. I haven’t bought shoes in weeks. One or two of them are worth answering, but most of them,
ooh la la!
” – she made a yawning noise – “boring. Someone asked me the answer to a percentages problem, as if I’d know. Ha!” She snorted.
“Hi, Amy, how are you?” I said sarcastically, after she’d finished ranting on about the dull and pointless letters for a few more minutes. And to be fair to Clover, some of them were total yawnsville. “How’s school? Any news? Sorry I haven’t rung in an age, can I take you shopping to make up for it?”
She gave a deep sigh. “Don’t you start, Beanie. Your mother’s bad enough. Listen, I need your help.”
“Oh?” This wasn’t exactly a new one on me. Usually it means lending her some of my hard-earned babysitting money. Clover is permanently broke even though she is the one working, now on the magazine, previously in Tesco on the till. (She used to put on funny accents to amuse herself – American, German and Polish. She is brilliant at accents.) She is a complete shopaholic and spends every cent she earns with the speed of Usain Bolt. Luckily that includes spending money on li’l ole me!
“You’re a first-year, right?” she asked.
“Last time I looked.”
“So you know how their petty little minds work.”
“Petty? Hey!”
“I should have said insignificant.”
“Do you want my help or not?”
“Look, I’ll come straight to the point. I’ve found someone with a proper problem to fix. It’s such a sad email; her ex-boyfriend’s behaving like a complete pig, surprise, surprise. I feel really sorry for her. But I have no idea what to tell her. Help me, Beanie. Please? It’s my first agony aunt page and I really want to impress Saffy.” Saffy is her editor. She sounds a bit scary, like a head teacher.
“What’s your deadline?” I knew all the jargon from listening to Clover over the last few weeks. The deadline is basically the day you have to hand your article or “piece” in to the editor. When you’ve emailed it, you’ve “filed copy”. The “byline” is just your name at the top of the piece, by Amy Green in my case.
“Yesterday,” she said. Clover always leaves everything till the last minute. Two years ago, she went on holiday with me and Mum to Rome and we came very close to missing the flight because of her. When we arrived to collect her in the taxi, she couldn’t find her passport. Mum was not amused. She refused to speak to Clover in the cab, giving her dark looks and glancing at her watch, while tut-tutting every few minutes and muttering about being late for your own funeral. I was stuck between them like a slice of ham in a sandwich, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience.
In the end we had to sprint to the gate. We were the last on the plane by miles and all the other passengers gave us filthy looks as we walked down the aisle with glowing faces, puffing and panting. We delayed the flight by twenty minutes and they weren’t happy. They only held it at all because Clover flirted outrageously with one of the security guards at the X-ray station. She told him she was a swimsuit model and had a photo shoot in Rome that very afternoon and could he be an absolute pet and help her or she’d miss the flight. He phoned the gate and begged them to keep it open for a few more minutes. Clover deserved an Oscar for her effort. Even Mum was impressed.
Clover gave a huge breathy sigh down the phone. “Saffy’s given me until tomorrow morning.” She made an
AAAGHHH
noise that sounded like the fast spin of a washing machine.
I was amazed. It wasn’t like Clover to get so stressed.
“Beanie,” she begged, “I really, really need your help. Are you busy? Can you come over? Like now?”
Busy? I was pacing the kitchen, trying to soothe my three-month-old baby sister, Evie, who was strapped across my front in a rainbow tie-dyed baby sling. I was simultaneously watching my little brother, Alex, trying to feed his wooden ABC bricks into the ancient video recorder which Mum had rescued from the cupboard under the stairs and resurrected. Alex had broken the DVD player a week ago by ripping the DVD tray out: he was more troll than toddler. Mum was on an emergency milk and nappies run, leaving me holding the fort.
“Just keep them alive,” Mum had said as she’d flown out the door.
No, not busy at all!
“I’m babysitting,” I said smugly. I prodded Evie in the hope she’d give a little wail to prove I was telling the truth, but she’d finally dropped off to sleep.
“Where’s Sylvie? Has she finally done a runner? Wouldn’t blame her with you lot.”
“No! Of course not. She’s just coming in the door. I’ll ring you back.” Mum walked towards me, dumped her heavily laden Tesco shopping bag on the tiles and threw her keys on to the kitchen counter with a clatter.
“Sorry, sorry.” Her cheeks were flushed pink and I didn’t think she’d washed her hair for days, let alone brushed it. There was a white milky stain on the shoulder of her sky blue fleece and she looked wrecked. She held out her arms to take Evie off me. While she supported Evie’s weight, I untangled myself from the sling – David Blaine, eat your heart out.
When I was finally free I said, “Mum, Clover just rang. She said she’ll help me with my maths homework if I call over.”
“Did she really?” Mum squinted at me a little sus-piciously. It was a first. Clover didn’t believe in homework, she said it was a complete waste of time and energy.
I nodded eagerly. “Yes. It’s algebra.”
Mum winced. Maths wasn’t her strong point. Alex threw a brick across the room and it banged at our feet, waking Evie up. She opened her tiny mouth and howled like a banshee.
“Go.” Mum put Evie over her shoulder and patted her back. “You’ll never get your homework done in this madhouse. But back before dinner, OK?”
Fifteen
minutes later I rested my bike against Clover’s “office”, a wooden shed at the bottom of Gramps’s garden, and rapped on the door. Always best to knock with Clover – you never know what she’s up to. The shed had originally been built for Gran’s flower arranging. She’d been a florist for years, and after she’d retired she had still done the flowers for the local church and the odd wedding and funeral. She’d loved flowers, had Gran, said it was in her blood.
But Gran died four years ago of breast cancer. Mum said it was a blessing; Gran had been sick for ages. But it had still been hard.
The last time I’d seen her she’d looked really, really tired and her face had been pale and waxy, like an apple skin. She’d told me she was proud to have such a beautiful and talented granddaughter. “Never forget how special you are,” she’d said, adding that I wasn’t to be sad when she was gone, that she’d had a good life and had been lucky to have had time to get to know me properly.
I know she said not to, but I still get sad thinking about her. She was lovely. She always made chocolate fudge cake when I visited and never asked me about school or anything boring like that. I don’t think she’d mind me being a bit sad.
Clover was only thirteen when Gran died: my age. Imagine! I don’t know what I’d do if Mum died now. After the funeral I remember Clover going all quiet for weeks and weeks. Mum was really worried about her. Sometimes Clover used to stay with us at the weekends. The three of us – me, Clover and Mum – would curl up on the sofa, eat ice cream and watch movies. One evening we put on this old film called
Beaches
, and Mum tried to stop it halfway through ’cos one of the characters was dying. But Clover made us watch right to the end. We all cried buckets that night. Funnily enough, after that Clover seemed a bit more like herself.
The shed is pretty amazing inside. When Clover got the job at
The Goss
, we all pitched in to help her decorate and make it into a proper office. The walls are a nice creamy white, there are stripy red, pink and white blinds on the windows, and a comfy red sofa that Dad donated from his office. It used to be in the reception of his trading floor where he is a big shot trader. Even Dave mucked in: he found a cool black leather office chair on eBay and drove all the way to Kildare to collect it.
Clover turned the old florist’s counter into a desk, complete with laptop, printer and a tower of primary-coloured plastic in trays, all stacked on top of each other like a horizontal version of Connect 4. As well as writing the agony aunt column, Clover also compiles the “What’s Up?” pages at the front of
The Goss
, telling readers about up-and-coming launches and gigs. She brings bags of stuff home from the magazine to sift through and her in trays are always crammed with press releases, invitations, and free make-up and perfume samples. Every now and then I prioritize her in trays for her – she is hopeless at it.
Today Clover’s desk was littered with sheets of printed paper; a thick rubber band the colour of surgical bandages; half-used gel pens (mostly pink); Gramps’s dog-eared Oxford English Dictionary (my idea, Clover’s spelling is appalling); a candyfloss-pink lip gloss; the latest
Grazia
magazine; and a pair of fabby Gucci aviator sunglasses with green lenses.
“New?” I asked, picking them up. They were sur-prisingly heavy.
“Yep. One of the perks of the job. We did a feature on sunglasses and picked them as our ‘In Trend’ glasses for the summer. The Gucci distributor sent us a free pair each. Score! Apparently they’ve nearly sold out in Ireland already. Power of the press, Beanie. Power of the press.”
“Can I try them on?”
“Sure.”
I lowered them over my eyes. The world turned a lush, mossy green. They channelled coolness. “Wow! Thanks, Clover. I’ll cherish them for ever.”
She put her hand out, palm up. “Hand them over, Bean Machine. You can have my old pink ones. Now let’s get down to business.”
That was when she handed me Wendy’s email.
