Free Loving Amélie by Sasha Faulks

ideas!” he said, as they toasted their week ahead.
    “You had to have one one day,”
said Ian, with a playful shunt.
    They had once been boys who
knocked on people’s doors and ran away; scrumping apples from trees before
scarpering on their bikes. Now they were facing fifty, both of them trying to
be parents.
    They looked on in admiration as
Tash bathed Amélie, who seemed, to Chris, as if she might almost have grown
since yesterday – if that were possible – as she opened her shiny
brown eyes with interest at her new carer, and even seemed to ‘talk’ a little
during the ritual.
    “Auntie Tash is clearly a hit,”
said Chris.
    “God, mate, you’re lucky,” said
Ian, after a pleasant pause: and a tear rolled down his wife’s cheek and
plopped into the bath water.

Chapter Eight

 
    “My friend wants to know if you will go out with
her.”

 
    This was from Naomi Jones, a
girl who was unpopular because she wore National Health glasses and because she
smelled as though she came from a damp house where having baths was considered
either extravagant or a waste of time.
    Aged ten, Chris had been
cheerfully occupied in a game of marbles with Ian Thompson and Stuart Swift: he
was on a winning streak and had just bagged his latest “china”. He turned the
soft pouch containing his booty around in his hand, enjoying the sound the
marbles made grinding against each other.
    “Well?”
    “I don’t know. Who’s your
friend?”
    This could be any number of
girls, depending on which one was currently taking advantage of Naomi’s needy
disposition. Naomi was like the hunchback in Scooby Doo who assisted the villain in
his evil deeds: too uneasy on the eye to have a starring role in any school
adventure of her own. She turned and pointed behind her at Kirsty Wade –
a new girl, although not actually Scottish, as her name suggested – who
appeared to be awaiting his response. She was seated on a low wall, swinging
long legs with clean white socks and patent leather shoes. She had plaits tied
at the end with bobbles, which were not unlike marbles.
    “She won’t be kept waiting,
Chris Skinner!” said Naomi, at his hesitation, her eyes as wide as an owl’s
behind thick lenses. She flounced back to her mistress without the response
they had hoped for, encouraging her down from her perch and away to a place
where she might find comfort, although not before they had both shot him a look
of disgust. He watched after them, his bag of marbles hanging dejectedly at his
side.
    She won’t be kept waiting. What
did that even mean?
    He was left with the same sense
of bewilderment he had whenever he was asked a difficult question in class:
like the ones about telling the time that still confounded him and sent him
home anxious, as none of his friends seemed to have the same difficulty. (Not
the obvious ones like ‘o’clocks’ and ‘half pasts’, but the ones where ‘twenty minutes
to’ and ‘twenty minutes past’ were, somehow, stupefyingly, related to the
numbers 4 or 8.)
    Up until that day, when Naomi
Jones had bothered him, school had simply been about getting through lessons,
playing playground football and deciding which flavour sauce to have with his
sponge pudding at lunchtime: the choice was strawberry or chocolate. (Or, of
course, custard.)
    Now there was Kirsty Wade
– looking at him in maths and making him have to think about how he might
look back without turning red in the face.
    She started going out with
David Staples, who everyone knew was the best footballer and who began
strutting around school with his arm draped round her neck. It came as another
surprise – on top of the Naomi Jones interruption – when Kirsty
bumped into him in the corridor, accidentally on purpose, flanked by a couple
of giggling accomplices, and passed him a note in the form of a hastily folded
piece of A4 paper.
    He waited until he was on his
own, in a cubicle in the boys’ loos, before he opened it to find a page