Tallulah blinks at her, starting to feel strangely uneasy.
‘Don’t look so scared.’
‘I’m not scared.’
‘Yeah, you are.’
They move as one underneath the carapace of the huge fur coat and end up on a bench. Scarlett goes through the pockets of the big coat and pulls out a packet of cigarettes. She flips it open and offers it to Tallulah.
Tallulah shakes her head. She’s never smoked and never wants to.
‘Sorry to drag you out of there,’ says Scarlett, plucking a cigarette from the packet. ‘Just realised I was too drunk. Way too drunk. Needed fresh air. And fresh company.’ She rolls her eyes.
Tallulah throws her a look.
‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love them to death, I really really do. But we’ve all been hanging out for so long. You know, we were all at Maypole House together and that place is really intense. I mean, really intense.’
‘What were you doing there?’
‘Oh you know, just A levels. I did the first term of sixth form at a boarding school, but then I got expelled. Nobody else would take me except the Maypole, so my dad bought a house close by, so that I could be a day girl.’ Scarlett shrugs and lights her cigarette. ‘What about you? Where did you go to school?’
‘Oh, you know, Upfield High, just local.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘In that cul-de-sac, you know, on the other side of the common.’
‘With your parents?’
‘Yeah. Well, with my mum. And my brother. My dad lives in Glasgow.’
Her breath catches on the next thing she should say. The thing about her son, Noah. It’s there, halfway up her throat. But she can’t make it unstick. She doesn’t know why. She’s pretty sure that a girl like Scarlett would actually think it was quite cool that she had a baby and she was only eighteen. But for some reason, she doesn’t want to be that girl tonight, the girl showing remarkable levels of maturity, the girl taking her responsibilities seriously, the girl who wakes with her baby every morning at 6 a.m., even at the weekends, who does her college work while her baby sleeps, who remembers to buy her own nappies and sterilise her own milk bottles bought with the allowance that her mother gives her which other girls would spend on charcoal nose strips and false eyelashes from Superdrug. She’s been that girl for six months and she is good at being that girl, but right now she is huddled under a fur coat in the cold with a skinny girl who probably wouldn’t have a baby until she was at least thirty-six, who gets expelled from boarding schools and smokes cigarettes and has tattoos and a stud pierced through her tongue and for now, at least, Tallulah wants to be someone else.
‘Yeah,’ she finishes. ‘Just us.’
‘And have you always lived in Upfield?’
‘Yes. Born and bred.’
‘So what’s your dad doing in Glasgow?’
‘He’s Glaswegian. He moved back when he and my mum split up.’
Scarlett inhales and nods.
‘And what about you?’ Tallulah asks. ‘Who do you live with?’
She raises her brow. ‘Well,ostensiblyI live with my mother and father but my mother is kind of two-dimensional and my father is always away. But I have a brother. He’s cool. I like him. And we have literally, like, thebestdog in the world. He’s a Saint Bernard. Like, the size of a fucking pony, but thinks he’s a regular dog. He’s my best friend. Literally. I’d be lost without him. I’d probably die.’
‘I’d like a dog,’ Tallulah says. ‘But my brother’s got allergies.’
‘Oh, God, you have to get a dog. Get a cockapoo! Or anything with poodle in it. They’re hypoallergenic. Cavapoos are nice too. You just absolutely must get a dog.’
For a moment Tallulah finds herself idly fantasising about a cavapoo, maybe one of those apricot-coloured ones, with huge eyes and soft ears. She pictures herself walking it around the village and putting it in a shoulder bag to take it into shops and then she stops and remembers that she cannot have a cavapoo because she has a baby.
‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘Maybe.’
Scarlett rubs out her cigarette on the ground beneath her heel and pulls the copper flask out of her pocket again. She takes a sip and passes it to Tallulah who takes a sip and passes it back.