The Manifesto on How to be Interesting Read online

Not really. All Bree wanted to do was dollop vast amounts of Tiger balm onto every part of her and curl up with the new Booker Prize winner. But she wasn’t that person any more. Well, not publicly anyway.

  She scraped the last of the sweat off her face.

  “That was the plan, right?”

  Her mum smiled.

  chapter eleven

  After a long shower and clothes change in the gigantic marble changing rooms, they set off into town.

  “I didn’t know all the shops were open on Sunday,” Bree said, looking up and down the bustling high street. Sundays had always been her writing and reading day and she rarely ventured past the security gate.

  “Did I give birth to a daughter or an alien?” her mum asked, pushing the button at the pedestrian crossing. “Shops have been opening on Sundays for years. Nobody believes in God any more so we’ve made consumerism our new religion. Haven’t you noticed all shopping centres look like churches?”

  Hang on – had her mother just said something profound?

  Bewildered, Bree said, “And hairdresser’s are all open too?”

  “Of course. They take Mondays off instead of Sundays.”

  “To go to church?” Bree deadpanned.

  “No. So they have a chance to go shopping!” Her mother threw back her head and laughed at her own joke.

  She steered them towards the “nice” bit of town and pointed to a window display.

  “Oooh, those shoes would look lovely on you, Bree.”

  Bree looked. Her mother was pointing to a pair of chunky platforms that stood centre stage behind the glass. Platforms so stylish they would make anyone wearing them look just plain fabulous. They were black but with a bright purple undersole.

  Bree looked through the glass nervously. “I dunno.”

  “At least try them on.”

  “I don’t have anything to wear them to.”

  “What? Since when did us girls need a reason to buy amazing shoes? Come on, let’s go in.”

  She clasped Bree’s hand and half-dragged her into the store.

  Bree felt out of place the moment they walked through the doors. It was like having a neon sign on her head, glowing with the words I DON’T BELONG. She felt the shop assistants’ eyes on her as she and her mum browsed the rails of expensive clothes. She could sense them narrowing as they took in Bree’s baggy jeans and hoodie. Her mother put a protective arm round her shoulder and kept up a constant stream of inane babble to cover the judgement hovering in the air like a storm cloud.

  “This jumper is lovely. Ooooh, this blazer would be good for school. It looks like it would fit in with your uniform policy but it’s so much less frumpy than your current one. Shoes! We must get you some shoes too. Where are those platforms?”

  Bree’s arms quickly filled up with stacks of material – each item more trendy/beautiful/stylish than the last. At Queen’s Hall you were allowed to wear “home clothes” once you got to sixth form, as long as they had a “corporate” feel. This stuff would fit the rules, but it was a world away from the garish frumpy stuff she was used to. When the pile was too big to add to, her mum led her through to the luscious changing rooms. They all had floor-to-ceiling red velvet curtains and spotlighting. To Bree’s dismay, her mum barrelled into the cubicle with her, sat on a stool, and watched as she struggled into one outfit after another.

  “That one looks great on you. Oooh, try it with this scarf. I wish I had a seventeen-year-old’s body again.”

  It was so hard, changing in a way so her mum wouldn’t see the scars on her legs. Bree jiggled and danced from outfit to outfit, her heart thumping, always ensuring the tops of her thighs were covered. Luckily her mum seemed too excited to notice Bree’s odd behaviour. Or maybe Bree had been behaving so oddly already this weekend, she was immunized.

  “We have to get everything,” her mum said.

  Bree had seen a few of the price tags. “But it’s very expensive…”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “Maybe we should just get the shoes?”

  And then to Bree’s delight, shock, and embarrassment – she couldn’t decide which one – her mum stood up and hugged her.

  “Darling, you do realize this is the first shopping trip we’ve been on since you started secondary school? Financially – and emotionally – we have a lot of catching up to do.” Her voice broke, like she was trying not to cry.

  Wow, Bree thought. Who knew the answer to happy families was clothes shopping?

  She wasn’t sure what to think of her mother. There was a big inner conflict whirring round her ever-busy brain. On one hand, she was pissed off her mum only seemed to love and accept her when she was being a shallow consumerist mini-me. Why didn’t they hug and cry when Bree finished writing her first novel? Okay, so she’d never told Mum she’d written a book, but still. Or how about when she won her first game of chess on Difficulty Level Three against the computer (which everyone knows is practically IMPOSSIBLE)? But on the other hand, she was just enjoying feeling loved. By her blood. By her mum. Even though it wasn’t exactly how she wanted it, it still felt wonderful.

  “I’m having a good day,” she mumbled into her mum’s shoulder.

  Her mum pulled back and looked at her with watery eyes. “Me too. Now let’s pay for these clothes.”

  Bags dangling off their arms like giant bracelets, the pair of them walked towards A Cut Above – home to the town’s most sought-after hairdresser.

  “Now beware,” her mum said, as they dodged a woman pushing a double-decker pram filled with two wailing toddlers. “Damian is a bit…harsh in the way he speaks.” She looked sideways at Bree’s pink-tinged hair and a worried crease appeared on her forehead. “He may have a few…things he wants to say to you about your, erm, current style. But he’s only looking out for what’s best for you and you really can trust him. He squeezed you in as a favour to me, so he cares.”

  Bree shrugged. “Whatever. It’s just hair.”

  The crease on her mum’s forehead deepened.

  “Dear God, don’t let him hear you say that.”

  chapter twelve

  The windows of A Cut Above were blacked out, but after pushing the intercom and giving their names, the sooty glass door opened to reveal a stark white hairdressing space-station adorned with fresh orchids. The air was heavy with expensive-smelling hairspray; wall-to-floor mirrors created a glass maze effect, and black-clad hairdressers, each with their own ridiculous haircut, danced on the balls of their feet over the foil-wrapped heads of rich customers.

  “Paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaula!” A very camp voice pierced through the fuggy air. A bald man – ironic for a hairdresser, Bree thought – strutted over with his arms flung open. “What are you doing here, darling? Your roots won’t peep through for another two weeks.”

  “Damian! I’m not here for myself, silly. I’ve brought my daughter. We’re having a makeover day. I rang you yesterday, remember?” Paula moved aside to showcase Bree, who stood hesitantly on the spot.

  “Oh yes, of course.” Damian looked her up and down and went a little pale. “This is your daughter?”

  Bree nodded. Her mum went a bit red.

  “Yes. Well, she’s not had her hair cut in a while…”

  “It’s a mess!” he interrupted.

  Bree blushed. Her hair was purposely a mess, but her whole I-deliberately-don’t-care-about-how-I-look attitude seemed stupid in here.

  “Well, yes, it has been a bit neglected.” Her mum bit her lip nervously, like her daughter having pink-tinged split ends was as awful as bringing in a ten-year-old who wasn’t potty trained yet.

  Damian pushed Bree down into a chair and forcefully wrapped a gown round her shoulders. He scooped her hair out at the neck so it splayed down the black silk, making the ends look even more frazzled. He lifted it and let it drop, sighing, and watched Bree’s face in the mirror.

  “Okay. It’s a mess. But it’s a mess I can work with. What do you want, darling? Anything
would be an improvement.”

  Bree looked up at him. “I want to look beautiful,” she said, her voice authoritative. “I want to turn heads. To stand out from the crowd.” She paused. “For the right reasons.”

  Damian chewed his lip in silent contemplation. Then his eyes lit up.

  “Blonde,” he said. “You need to be blonde!”

  Bree tried to control the grimace her face made. Blonde. There were so many things about blonde that she disliked. It insinuated stupidity – her worst nightmare. She quickly weighed up the other options. There was brunette. Nice, sensible, sophisticated brunette. Not exactly attention-seeking. There was black – but any Caucasian person who dyed their hair black always looked either stupid, gothic, or weird, like Chuck from English. Red. Red was definitely interesting…but was it a bit too in-your-face? A bit too desperate look-at-me-ish? Her natural colour, if she remembered right, was mouse. But who the hell ever asked for mouse?

  “Blonde it is.”

  Damian broke into a broad grin.

  “Right. We’re gonna be here a while. And I’m cutting your hair off… Don’t worry,” he said, seeing Bree’s panicked face. “Not all of it. But if you wanna turn heads, lovey, long blonde hair isn’t the way to do it. No, you’re getting a graduated bob and you’re going to rock it.”

  And he leaned towards her with a pot full of purple gunk and got to work.

  An hour later and Bree’s head looked like a Christmas turkey. Apparently Damian had added “three different types” of blonde highlights, including “toffee”, “honey”, and “treacle”. It felt a little bit like being a laboratory rat. But instead of curing cancer, Bree’s guinea-pig status was solely in aid of beauty. Such effort for such an unworthy conclusion. But she reminded herself that constant judgement of social norms hadn’t got her very far in her seventeen years.

  She wondered if Jassmine’s blonde hair was natural, or if she too spent the best part of a weekend having foil plastered to her scalp. It broke the magic spell a bit. Thinking of Jassmine reminded her of that morning and the unnecessary evil she’d given Bree. She wrinkled her nose, and her mum, who was leafing through a glossy magazine, noticed.

  “You okay, honey? Is it the smell of the peroxide? It takes some getting used to. I quite like the smell now.”

  She looked up at her mother. “Mum?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you popular in school?”

  “Is that was this is all about? You want to be more popular?”

  “Not exactly. I was just wondering.”

  Her mum put the magazine down and looked straight at her. “No,” she said. “No, I wasn’t popular at school.”

  “Do you think it matters? You know, in the long run?”

  Her mum poked her tongue into the side of her cheek and thought about it a moment. “If I was a good mother I would tell you no, no, it doesn’t matter. Not in the long run. Not in the grand scheme of things…”

  “But…?”

  Her mother didn’t break eye contact with Bree. “But I can still remember the full names of the popular kids in my year.” She listed them on her fingers. “Carly Carding, Nadine Morrison, Lauren Vegas, those were the girls. And the guys, the popular ones everyone fancied, were Ben Wireley and Steve Newington. How can it not matter if I still remember every single thing about them, even though it was decades ago?”

  “Maybe it’s just that everyone remembers the popular kids at school,” Bree said, surprised at her mother’s frankness. She always assumed her mother was just some Pilates-obsessed housewife. Maybe she’d underestimated her… Or just not really spoken to her before.

  “That’s the thing though, the thing that still makes me angry now. I can remember all their names, who went out with who and when, even what they wore to the leaving ball. I can remember every snide comment they made to me or my friends. And so can everyone else in my school year who wasn’t them. But them…” She paused, and went to move one of Bree’s foils that had fallen onto her forehead, before sitting back in her chair again. “They barely knew I existed then, and have definitely forgotten me by now. That just seems so terribly unfair somehow. That they’re so much a part of my life, and I’m nothing to theirs. I still feel like the unpopular kid.”

  Bree scratched the top of her neck where the peroxide itched.

  “But they might not be happy, successful, pretty and popular any more,” she told her mother. “They might’ve failed horribly in life and are now fat, lonely and addicted to lottery scratch cards.”

  Her mum shook her head sadly. “Life doesn’t work that way, sweetie. They’re all doing just fine – better than me probably.”

  “But…”

  “But what? You think there should be some sort of karmic balance? That because they sailed through secondary school it’s only right that they have some suffering down the line to make up for it? Okay, in a weak moment, I might have wished that to happen, so they felt a little like I did when I was at school. But what does that achieve?” She trailed off and absent-mindedly picked up her magazine again.

  “So you think being popular at school is important then?”

  Her mum shook her head like Bree had woken her from a dream.

  “Maybe not important. But it helps. You don’t carry the same scars around if secondary school was easy for you…” Then she shook her head again, almost violently, like she’d caught herself out. “No…no… You know what, don’t listen to me, Bree. It isn’t important. You know what’s important? Being a good person. That’s the most important thing.”

  Nice try, Bree thought. But I’m not buying it.

  That evening, Bree looked at her new self in the mirror. Massive cliché, but she actually didn’t recognize herself. She was trussed up in tomorrow’s just-inside-the-school-rules outfit. Her hair was a buttery sheet of gorgeousness. It fell into her eyes, highlighting her perfect make-up, and shone like she’d just returned from a three-week cruise. Her face had been transformed thanks to a make-up lesson from her mum. Her spots were expertly covered, her skin glowed, her lips looked juicy and utterly transfixing – she’d never realized she’d got such good lips before.

  There was no escaping it, Bree looked stunning. She tried not to smile, annoyed that looking like this made her feel so good. But a grin crept onto her face anyway and she did a little jig of joy – before remembering everything she stood for and believed in.

  Finally she dragged herself from the mirror, sat at her desk, and lifted the lid of her laptop.

  THE MANIFESTO ON HOW TO BE INTERESTING

  Rule number one: One must be attractive

  I’ve made this my first rule…

  In order to be interesting, one must be attractive to look at.

  Especially if you’re a woman…

  Alright, okay, calm down. Don’t all yell at once. “HOW DARE YOU?” you say. Call myself a feminist, do I? Modern life has evolved past such nonsense. Attractiveness doesn’t immediately place you into the winning team.

  But you’re wrong. Oh, how wrong you are.

  Because, admit it, you’re gagging to know what colour I’ve dyed my hair. You can’t wait to see the before and after and what my figure’s like now I’ve actually got the inclination to show it off. Hell, you’re frothing at the mouth in desperation to find out how I’ve made my lips look this damn gorgeous.

  There is something about taking something ugly and making it pretty that is compelling to us. It’s a satisfaction you cannot hide from. Who didn’t watch Ugly Betty and want to pluck her eyebrows and see what she could “really look like”? Even though that goes against the whole point of the show, you wanted her to be beautiful, didn’t you? Despite, no doubt, the fact you raved on to all your mates about how great the message of the show was.

  WE’RE ALL MASSIVE HYPOCRITES. We are. We want beauty. We want to watch beautiful people. We just don’t like to admit that to ourselves.

  And, let’s face it, would you really want to follow my little experiment if
I was an ugly chick? If I did all this with a face that still resembled an arse? I’m lucky enough that, apparently, I’m naturally quite a looker. Who knew? This experiment would be a little harder if I was a troll.

  Oh how I wish it hadn’t come to this. So quickly as well. Oh how I wish that my makeover has no effect whatsoever on my life. That everything will remain exactly the same even though I’m hot now.

  But both you and I know that isn’t what’s going to happen.

  The fact I’m attractive now is going to change things. Pathetic. Depressing. But you know it and I know it.

  Let’s see what tomorrow brings, eh? When I reveal my new self to a school which has no idea what’s about to hit it…

  Over and out.

  chapter thirteen

  Bree was a little less cocky the next morning.

  With an unfamiliar reflection staring back at her, she started to second-guess her idea. Although she would never admit it aloud, Bree got the occasional bout of self-doubt.

  She was wearing the blazer her mum had picked out. It hugged her figure – which would shape up nicely if she kept the exercise up. She’d done an exercise DVD with Mum at six o’clock that morning. Zumba – more like personal humiliation. Bree had never felt ashamed of her inability to shimmy before, but the Zumba lady somehow made it feel like a criminal offence. At least they’d been in the privacy of their own massive living room. Bree sweating like a pig on heat, her mum barely getting red and making this weird “Chooo, choooo” noise with her breathing. But the same flood of happy hormones had swamped her body like they had the day before. For an hour or so she’d felt capable of anything. She hadn’t got the urge to scratch her scars all weekend, which was major news – especially with all the stress of thinking about what was coming up.

  “Wasn’t that fun?” her mother had said, dabbing her barely-perspiring forehead with her designer headband. “You know what? If you’re serious about keeping this exercise lark up, we could get a personal trainer to come to the house. What do you think? I’ve always thought it was too extravagant to hire one just for me, but together it could be fun?”