had gone. She’d been too busy to notice when he left. He had left with the blonde, she presumed, feeling sick inside. He definitely hadn’t remembered what day it was today.
So what? Why should she care if Luke had forgotten it was her birthday? She didn’t need him. Luke Forster could go to hell in a bucket for all she cared.
‘Didn’t your birthday start at midnight?’ Grace asked, giving Lucia’s arm a squeeze as they left the club together.
‘How did you know?’ Lucia asked as they took shelter for a moment before braving the rain.
‘I know everything about you,’ Grace teased fondly.
Including Lucia’s real name. Grace was too good a friend for Lucia to want to deceive her. ‘So you’ve heard the party-girl rumours too?’
Grace laughed. ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word. You’re not a party girl any more than I am, Lucia. But some of our friends at the club seem to think we should lighten up a bit.’
‘I hope you’re not referring to Van Rickter?’
Grace frowned. ‘I wouldn’t call him a friend, exactly, but there are other nice people working at the club.’
‘What are you hiding under your jacket?’ Lucia enquired as they crossed the road.
‘We had a whip-round for your birthday,’ Grace explained, starting to smile.
‘What is it?’ Lucia asked, her curiosity well and truly roused.
‘I’m not saying. I don’t want to spoil the surprise. But I will tell you this much—everyone seems determined to tempt at least one of us off the straight and narrow this year.’
‘It might take a bit longer than that for me,’ Lucia admitted, shivering as the cold wind whipped around her.
‘Don’t be such a defeatist,’ Grace teased. ‘A lot can happen quickly if you’re lucky.’
Lucia huffed as Grace squeezed her arm again, and then both girls screamed as they sploshed through an icy puddle in the middle of the road.
‘I stuck a couple of mags in the bag as well,’ Grace called out as they parted company at the entrance to the Sundowner Holiday Park. ‘You might recognise one of the centrefolds. You were talking to him in the club.’
Lucia’s heart went crazy with excitement. The centrefold was hardly going to be Van Rickter—unless the magazine in question was Amphibian World.
She ran all the way to the caravan and, throwing her shoulder against the buckled door, launched herself inside. Dropping her things on the floor, she snatched the magazines out of the gift bag and flung herself onto the lumpy bunk. Leafing through as fast as she could, she stalled at the centre page of the second magazine.
Luke Forster was ROCK!’s Torso of the Year.
Dropping the magazine, she threw herself back against the cold tin wall. ‘You blue-blooded hypocrite!’ Her main gripe was not how Luke looked—which was pretty spectacular by any standards—but the way he behaved when he was around her, as if he were a paragon of all the virtues. ‘So you’re incorruptible, are you?’
Now, this was worrying. Not only was she talking to herself, but she was involving a magazine in the conversation. With an angry huff, she plucked the gum from her mouth and stuck Luke’s centrefold to the wall. ‘Take that!’ A thump from her fist secured it. Standing back, she had to concede Luke’s centrefold did brighten things up a bit.
So where was he? Lucia wondered, going through her nightly routine of getting ready for bed in the freezing caravan by piling on more clothes. If Luke was still in Cornwall he was probably tucked up in a nice warm room at the Grand by now—with the blonde. Ack! And if he thought about Lucia at all it would only be to wonder if she was ready to go home yet.
‘No, I’m not ready,’ she snarled, glaring at Luke’s poster. ‘And I’m not giving up. I can’t give up. I can’t go home. Not like this….’
Their nice, warm kitchen in Argentina, where the roof never leaked and the floor was never cold, and she had never once had to pick ice off the insides of the windows …
Unscrewing the top of the flask of hot chocolate that Margaret left on the table each night, she scowled at Luke’s centrefold as she gulped the warm liquid down. She tried not to think about the list of goals she had intended to achieve by now—goals Lucia had been so confident were achievable when she was fourteen.
Reaching beneath the bed, she drew out the precious tote full of memories and extracted the battered notebook in which, as a dreamy-eyed teen, she had written down her innermost hopes and dreams. She didn’t often do this. She saved it for when things were really bad. The bag of dreams, as she called the old canvas tote, was her comforter. It contained her journal from when she was fourteen, and her rather more neglected journal from now. She pulled the old one out and started to read.
It is imperative to follow this list to the letter if I’m ever going to break free from Conan the Barbarian and his gang of galloping gauchos—otherwise known as my brothers …
Lucia smiled as she read the messy list, with all its scribbles and crossings-out. It was hard to believe she had ever been so naïve. Most of her ideas had been based on articles she’d read in teen magazines, which of course were essential reading for fourteen-year-olds with everything to learn. She would have to completely re-jig the list. Get a wax after she’d got a man? Well, that was wrong to start with. And, the way she felt right now, getting a wax could be number two-hundred and thirty-six on next year’s list. Yes, Luke was gorgeous, but …
No. She couldn’t.
She just couldn’t, that’s all.
But just out of curiosity, and because trips down memory lane seemed to be in vogue right now, she straightened out the much-thumbed pages and began to read.
1. Get a job!—preferably promoting a bar, which is a great way to meet new people, according to ROCK! magazine
2. Get a flat!—something gorgeous and stylish in the best part of town. N.B. V. close to the bar!
3. Get a wax!
She remembered that last entry being based more on dreading what her rapidly changing body might do next rather than any horrific hirsute happenings. And how many times had that entry been deferred? And why did she still shift position nervously when she read it?
She pulled a face as she got up to check her top lip in the mirror. Flopping back down again, she remembered her mother’s pale face when a visit to the beautician loomed. Perhaps that was the answer to her waxing phobia. She could still hear her young self asking, ‘Are you all right, Mama?’ And her mother’s response: ‘You’ll understand one day what it means to be a woman, Lucia, and what we have to go through for our men …’ Hefty sigh at that point.
All sorts of images had flashed into Lucia’s young brain—nostril-hair-plucking, blackhead-excising, even earwax-removal with one of those long, pointy things—but never had she imagined that her mother was referring to that most delicate of regions, let alone that some stranger was going to view her private bits close up prior to coating them
