Free Girl, 16: Five-Star Fiasco by Sue Limb

the way that one’s mind plays tricks, how Ed would look if a map of the world was tattooed on his belly. It could lead to a variation on that old song, ‘He’s Got the Whole World on His Paunch’. He could go round the schools and be used as a visual aid in geography lessons, like a globe.
    ‘You wouldn’t want tattoos, would you now, Jessica?’ demanded Ed.
    Jess stared at his freckly face. ‘I’m not sure.’ She didn’t want to side with him or his daughter. As they were doomed to spend the rest of the evening together, she decided she would pass the time by imagining what fun it would be to approach his freckly face with a felt-tip pen in a jolly join-the-dots sort of mood. She thought she could see a potential church right there on his left cheek – or was it a unicorn?
    ‘I must get out of this coat, Jess.’ Mum turned to her for help. The chairs were small and somehow nastily curved, so once seated in them you could easily start to feel as if you’d never get out, especially if you were swaddled up in five kilos of polyester wadding. ‘Help me, love!’ appealed Mum.
    Jess caught her eye for a split second, and they shared a deeper moment of understanding than they had ever experienced before. Mum was wishing her daughter had been born with supernatural powers and was able not just to help her out of her duvet coat, but to sweep her up under her arm and fly off, smashing the cafe window to smithereens as they passed, rocket-like, through it and headed for Zanzibar.
    Jess was wondering why she had been born to this ridiculous woman caught up in her disastrous dating madness, when, if there was any justice, her mum could have been a movie star or business guru. However, she just gritted her teeth and pulled the duvet coat off, then sat down and shared with Polly a kind of eyebrows-raised ‘Isn’t my parent appalling?’ shrug, which was the nearest they were going to get to bonding.
    The film was OK, because they just sat in a row in the darkness (why couldn’t all relationships be like that?). But chatting in the pizzeria afterwards was always going to be a challenge . . .
    ‘So, Polly,’ said Mum, reaching deep into her emergency store of librarian’s conversational gambits, ‘have you read any good books recently?’
    Polly looked startled. At this point, mercifully perhaps, Jess’s phone bleeped. She scrabbled in her bag.
    ‘You should turn that thing off when we’re having dinner,’ said Mum irritably.
    ‘Oh, don’t mind us!’ Ed waved Jess on as if Mum’s etiquette was absurd. ‘Pol’s texting away day and night.’
    ‘Only my mum!’ Polly said, shooting her dad a secret fierce look. ‘I text my mum, right, because I hardly ever see her.’
    ‘All right, all right, don’t let’s go through all that again!’ Ed flapped his arms at his daughter. It was a strange gesture, like trying to scare birds off a picnic table.
    Jess took a peek at her phone. MESSICA! LATEST EPISODE IS FESTERING IN YOUR INBOX. DREADFUL DISASTERS BESET LORD VOLCANO .
    ‘Who’s it from?’ asked Mum. ‘Fred?’
    ‘No, Dad.’ Jess swiftly composed a reply suggesting that whatever disasters had befallen Lord Volcano they couldn’t compete with her own current night out in hell.
    ‘So, you been divorced long, Madeleine?’ enquired Ed, picking his teeth languorously in a manner designed to increase his charm.
    ‘Oh, yes, for years.’ Mum brushed a few crumbs off the table and tipped them back on to her plate. ‘We separated soon after Jess was born.’
    ‘So you ruined your parents’ marriage, eh, Jessica?’ enquired Ed with a rather horrid and tactless grin, as if joking about such matters was just the thing to make the evening go with a swing. Jess herself had made that joke a hundred times, but coming from Ed it seemed cheeky and presumptuous.
    ‘No, I didn’t ruin it,’ she explained. ‘They managed that all by themselves. Dad’s gay.’
    There was a sudden strange silence. A weird