“What the flip is that, you loon?”
“I believe the standard greeting is HELLO. Nicotine inhaler.”
“Hello. Why have you got a nicotine inhaler? You don’t smoke.”
“No smell. Mum and Dad.” She grimaces. “And I don”t smoke” but I was feeling so stressed out I started to, like, feel addicted to the idea of smoking? Except I don’t want to end up with a raisin face. So I half-inched this.”
She flicks imaginary ash from the end of the slim, white tube before going in for another drag, the cold air puppeting her blonde bob around her pixie-face. There’s a flash of blue as she looks up at me through her fringe. Blowing out non-existent smoke, nature plays along and freezes her breath which floats away in little clouds. She is an angel in eyeliner. Not that you can say stuff like that to her. She’s enough of a handful as it is.
“You look like you’re smoking a tampon. Get a hold of yourself, woman.”
I lead the way inside and pretend not to notice as she mimes putting out the ridiculous prop before tucking it behind her ear. The glass door slips shut behind us and we are suddenly in 1982 which is approximately when ‘The Blue’ was last redecorated.
Brown and red plastic predominates – booths, laminated menus, those tomatoes with ketchup inside and then the brown ones with brown sauce, their non-tomato status serving only to highlight the mysterious nature of their contents. At the back of the café is the reason we (and everybody else in town with a clue) come here. Racks of records and CDs frame a large hole in the wall behind which, illuminated by strings of fairy lights and an angle-poise lamp, is a small room stuffed from floor to ceiling with singles, albums, CDs and merchandise from bands-gone-by. MGMT are playing on crackly vinyl on the stereo. The Blue Room, at the back of The Bluebird Café, is the only non-chain record shop in town and apparently evolved from the days when The Blue was a 1950s ice-cream parlour with a jukebox at the back. But that’s not the reason we come here. The reason is perched on a high stool behind a book. The Dice Man.
“That Dan Ashton. So unbelievably hot. Hot!” Hol stage whispers behind her menu.
The book is readjusted momentarily revealing a black eyebrow, a mop of hair to match and one chocolate-brown eye.
She doesn’t notice. “So what gives? I take it you’re not ill. Ill people never wear hats.” I give her a quizzical look. “They haven’t got the energy to accessorise.” Hol tips a dose of sugar out of the dispenser on to the table and starts drawing in it with her fingers.
“Mum and Ray are getting married.”
“Shut up!”
“They are.”
“SHUT UP!” This time she reaches across the booth and punches me in the shoulder, sprinkling grains of Tate and Lyle down my chest in the process. I brush them away.
“No. Seriously. A wedding – cake, singing, a really embarrassing horse and cart. Me probably being forced to wear a lilac dress. Them dancing together.” I shudder, recollecting the scene I walked in on earlier. “It’s a nightmare.”
Holly pouts her bottom lip. “Oh, Can. That’s terrible. That’s…Ooh! I forgot! I brought THESE for us!” She reaches into her enormous yellow pleather bag and produces two pairs of sunglasses. Hers are electric blue with glittery frames in the shape of two butterflies, mine are white with red stripes like a candy cane. The frame contorts into a letter L on one side of the lenses and K on the other.
“And these are?”
She throws her hands up, universal sign language for “Duh!”
“They’re a disguise? So that we can, like, do stuff today without attracting too much attention? I got them from the arcade on the way over.” She slips hers on and turns butterfly-eyed to the surly waitress who has just appeared beside our booth. “A pair of cokes and one chips, please, garçon.”
The waitress, who is about nineteen but looks way older, purses her lips, shakes her head and stalks off in disapproving silence.
To be honest I didn’t expect much sympathy from Pirate. Holly is not great at bad news, operating a blanket policy of “tuning out negativity”. I think of it as just ignoring stuff. She must read my thoughts because she reaches across the booth, gives my forearm a rub, then a pat before finishing off with a few more firm slaps on my shoulder. I feel like a sofa having its cushions plumped.
“Chin up, soldier. It sucks, you know? But parents…they’re nuts. Well, ours are. Come and live at my house! I’m sure Mum and Dad wouldn’t notice one more!” I smile in spite of myself. “Why don’t you, like channel your feelings into our art?” Hol waves her arms around in what she obviously imagines is an arty fashion.
Hol is one half of said art project – our (as yet unnamed) band. She doesn’t write songs. She claims her role is “more of an actualisation deal. Like, you provide the raw materials – I bring the magic.” What this actually means is that I spend every night wigging out on my own in my room like a loser (singing along to my knackered old keyboard in apparent silence via my gigantic orange headphones) writing songs for which Hol then has to create a four-note bass part. Like she says – magic.
“What was that one you wrote last week?” she asks, sucking a few grains of sugar off her index finger.
I cast my mind back to last Wednesday, when I stayed up late writing about this really annoying girl in our class who has a secret tattoo. The chorus was particularly satisfying (“You’ve got your boyfriend’s name in ink on your bum/ And if you don’t shut up/ I’m telling your mum”).
“Er…Inkspots?”
“No! The one about Ray!”
“Oh! Chairman of the Bored.”
“Yeah – you could adapt that and make it about this. You know what John Lydon says, ‘Anger is an energy’. Use it to your advantage, Caine. Now put on your regulation issue disguise and let’s discuss Operation Awesome.”
She may not do sympathy very well, but if you want cheering up, Pirate is the girl for you. “Sir, yes sir!” I slip on my extremely 70s Elton John eyewear, my head now inviting the empty café to LOOK.
Operation Awesome is our plan for world domination by our band, using the weapon of amazingly brilliant music. Holly and I spend most of our time together discussing logistics, tactics, album titles, who we’ll tour with, which cities we’ll play in and what we’ll wear onstage. The fact that we are the only members, own one battered old Casio and a borrowed bass does not figure in any of this. We have a Facebook page called Operation Awesome inviting the public to help us on our road to superstardom. So far we have three friends, two of whom are us. The other one is Glad.
Removing a tattered notebook and pen from her skip of a handbag, Holly flicks through the pages until she reaches the list of potential names we were working on yesterday lunchtime.
“So…where did we get to? The Neon Girls, Play, The Twister Sisters…”
“I hate that one. And there’s already a metal band called Twisted Sister.”
“…Daydreamer, Ice Scream…”
“And that one. Cross it out – people will think we’re a screamo band. Totally wrong.”
“Totally!” agrees Holly, who refuses to acknowledge her enormous emo phase which finished three months ago (her wardrobe has yet to catch up with her music taste). She puts a decisive strike through the offending moniker. “But we do need something. It needs to say who we are and what we’re about – it needs to show that we mean business and – CHIPS! WOO HOO!”
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