‘So you don’t think it was Mike Carmichael?’ he slipped in.
She merely looked surprised. ‘That was ages ago. She wasn’t still seeing him. Sophy razzed her about him so she gave him up. I mean, he didn’t have a car. Sophy says you can’t go out with a bloke without a car.’
Sophy seemed responsible for most of Chloë’s ideas, Slider thought. ‘What’s the importance of a car?’ he asked.
‘For copping off,’ she said, as if he ought to have known that.
‘Copping off, as in—?’
She blushed a little. ‘Well, you know, snogging and that.’
Slider was beguiled that expressions of his youth like ‘snogging’ – along with ‘cool’ – had come back into vogue.
‘Where else can you do it?’ she went on. ‘My mum and dad would never let me have a boy up in my bedroom. Sophy’s the lucky one. Her mum and dad are really cool. They go away a lot, and even when they’re at home they let her do whatever she wants. They’re great.’
‘Is that what constitutes great parents? Letting her do what she wants?’
He got the stare. ‘Well . . . They give her shedloads of money, too. She’s always got all the latest stuff and, like, loads of clothes and everything. It’s cool.’
He was realizing his fundamental failures as a father. ‘What about Zellah’s parents? Were they cool?’
He got the stare and the head jerk this time. ‘Duh! That’s what the whole weekend was about. They’re awful. They never let her go anywhere. And they’ve got, like, no money. Zellah had, like, hardly any pocket money, and no new clothes.’
‘Did you ever meet them – her parents?’
‘Not really meet them. We didn’t get invited round her house. But I’d seen them, at parents’ day and sports day and prize giving, things like that. Her dad wasn’t so bad – sort of hunky, in a way – only way strict. I was scared of him. But her mum was fat!’ She added the last in tones of breathless horror as the worst thing that could be said of any human being.
‘If her dad was so strict, how come he didn’t check up on Zellah the whole weekend?’ Slider asked.
‘He used to,’ she said. ‘It was, like, so-o embarrassing. Zellah, like, trained him out of it. Her mum was all right, she wanted Zellah to have fun – it was her picked the name Zellah. How cool is that? I wish I had a great name, instead of crummy old “Chloë”. Everyone’s called that. There are three Chloës in our year at school. What was I saying?’
‘About her parents checking up on her.’
‘Oh, right. Well, her dad used to phone up all the time, until when she turned sixteen she told him if he didn’t leave it off she’d leave home. She said you can by law when you’re sixteen and your parents can’t make you come back, and he was so scared he agreed not to call her when she was out, as long as he knew where she was going. Well, she could tell him anything after that, as long as it was something he’d approve of, like that dorky Southbank Fair.’
‘So he believed her when she said she’d leave home?’
‘You don’t know Zellah. She’d have done it all right. She didn’t care. She was really cool. She was the first one of us to go all the way with a bloke.’
‘Was that with Mike Carmichael?’
Her eyes slid away from his. She put her hands between her thighs and squeezed them together, rocking forward and back in her chair. ‘I shouldn’t’ve said.’
‘Come on, Chloë. I thought we were going to be frank.’
She looked at him. ‘This doesn’t get back to her mum and dad?’
‘Zellah’s dead,’ he reminded her.
‘Oh, yeah. I’d forgotten.’ She seemed remarkably unaffected by it. ‘Well, I s’pose it doesn’t matter then. Yeah, she went all the way with Mike.’
‘How did that work, if he didn’t have a car?’
‘He’s got his own place. But she said she’d have done it anywhere with him. She was nuts about him. And the way she talked about it, she was really hot for, you know, sex. It was funny really, her being like that and her mum and dad being all proper and churchy. She told Sophy once the only reason she stayed with them was she wanted to finish school and she didn’t have any money so she had to.’
‘In that case, why did her father believe she really would leave?’
Chloë looked blank. ‘I dunno,’ she said at last. ‘I suppose she just kind of made him believe it.’
‘Through force of personality, you mean?’
‘Yeah, like that,’ Chloë said
‘So you and Zellah and Sophy go around together a lot?’
‘Yeah, we’re, like, mates. We’re tight. We’ve had, like, this gang since the fourth year. There used to be another girl as well, Frieda, Frieda Mossman, but she got all stupid when we started going out with boys, so we dropped her.’
‘You mean she didn’t approve?’
Eye-roll and jerk. ‘Couldn’t pull one herself, so she was jealous. Said she was saving it for marriage. Sophy said “nobody’s going to marry you, girl, so you might as well spend it while you can”, and she got all upset and, like, stormed off.’
‘That was pretty cruel, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, Sophy doesn’t care what she says. She’s great. Frieda shouldn’t have been so sensitive. But she was a bit fat and she has this frizzy hair.’
Slider couldn’t decide if this was justification for the nastiness, or the reason for being over-sensitive. He was fascinated, though appalled, at this glimpse below the gleaming surface of these girls. In the kitchen he saw Connolly deep in conversation with Mrs Paulson, with Mrs Paulson doing the chin-work, but he could also see the coffee was ready and only needed pouring, so he had to get on.
‘Tell me about your brother,’ he said.
‘Which one?’
‘The one who lives in Notting Hill.’
‘What, Oliver? He’s cool.’
‘What does he do?’
‘He’s a foreign analyst for a firm of brokers. City stuff, you know. He earns shedloads of money. I mean, him and his mates are all making out like bandits! He shares this great flat in Lansdowne Crescent with these three other guys – you should see it! It’s gorgeous. And he wears these beautiful suits. Boss, Armani. Totally great threads. He had this girlfriend Tara who was actually an earl’s daughter. They’ve broken it off now, though. Sophy says Tara’s a dorky name, anyway. She says it’s, like, a name you give a pony. But Oliver never had trouble pulling girls anyway. He’s gorgeous looking, and he has, like, this great sense of humour.’
‘So how does he know Mike Carmichael? It seems an unlikely sort of friendship, given Mike’s background.’
The round face was innocent of guile. ‘Oh, I don’t think he knows him that well. He just lives in the neighbourhood. I think they met at a party of a mate of his.’
‘And how did Zellah meet him?’
‘Round Oliver’s. Zellah and Sophy used to go up Oliver’s on Saturdays after ballet class and I’d meet them there. I don’t do ballet. This one Saturday Oliver was taking us all to lunch. He does that sometimes. He’s great. And Mike was there, so he came with us. Mike’s all right,’ she added, free of charge. ‘Sophy doesn’t like him, but she’s a snob. Mike’s a laugh. I could see right off Zellah liked him. Sophy said that’s because of Zellah’s chav blood. It takes one to know one, she said. But I reckon she fancied him herself, Sophy did, only you could see it was Zellah he was into. It, like, pissed her off, Sophy, so she never had a good word to say for Mike after that. But I don’t think she would have gone out with him if he had asked her,’ she concluded, ‘so I don’t know what she had to get snarky about.’