Free Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend by Jenny Colgan Page A

inheritance, and show everyone how amazingly well I was doing. I was thinking about setting up some kind of memorial charity for my father. For heart disease maybe - oh no, they already had quite a few of those. Well, I’d find something. Something in his name and I could hold a big fundraising party every year and all the mags would cover it and Daddy would have been so proud of me. It felt like an admirable aim to have. In fact, I thought, tying back my hair, I could almost see it now - me saying, ‘I can understand the struggle people have to cure and heal; to work their way through every day. I’ve scrubbed floors. I’ve been down on my hands and knees . . .’ Oh, no that didn’t sound so good. How about, ‘I’ve known the blood, sweat and tears . . .’
     
    I was running my hand under the tap trying to fill a bucket, but it didn’t seem to be getting any warmer. This wasn’t the best of starts. All round the sink were piled bowls of cement-hard cereal. Why do people eat stuff that dries up like that? They must have insides like quarries.
     
    I was just deciding who was going to draw the raffle - I liked Stephen Fry personally, but maybe Neil Morrissey at a push - when Cal pushed his way through into the kitchen, yawning wildly. He was wearing an unbuttoned striped pyjama top which should have made him look stupid but actually only enhanced the leanness of his torso - no hair - and a flat, narrow stomach. Most of the boys I knew were wide and barrelchested; big, farmer’s boys with years of rugby behind them. This scrawny, indie look, of a boy brought up on jam sandwiches and glue sniffing, was new. I couldn’t help but find it a bit sexy, especially with his black hair sticking up all over his head.
     
    He looked surprised, then briefly pleased, to see me in his kitchen.
     
    ‘Hello!’ he said. ‘I forgot all about you, Cinders.’
     
    ‘I’m not Cinders,’ I said, crossly.
     
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not till you realise that you have to turn on the water heater for hot water. You’ll be waiting to fill that bucket a long time.’
     
    I said, ‘Oh,’ as if I’d known that all along, and turned on a strange-looking white machine which shuddered and juddered loudly and spouted out a thin line of scorching hot water that made me shriek slightly in a daft posh girl kind of a way. I tried to turn it into a cough.
     
    ‘It’s two o’clock,’ I said. ‘Were you in bed?’
     
    Cal smiled broadly. ‘No. This is what I wear to my top office job in the city. Any chance of a cup of tea?’
     
    ‘The kettle isn’t there any more.’
     
    ‘Oh yeah, we were using it for tie-dye. Hang on.’
     
    He stretched his long arms over me. He smelled sleepy - not bad, just warm and rumpled and a bit sexy. It was a good smell.
     
    ‘Here we go,’ he said, taking it down from a cupboard. He peered in it as he nudged me away from the sink. ‘Could probably do with a clean itself.’
     
    The interior of the kettle was completely white, silted up with chalk, with red stripes in it.
     
    ‘You think?’
     
    ‘Maybe they’re friendly bacteria?’ said Cal doubtfully.
     
    I set to it with the boiling water. Maybe we could just fill the teapot straight from that.
     
    ‘It’s great you’re here,’ said Cal and I felt myself soften up a bit. ‘We really need someone to look after us. Like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’
     
    ‘No!’ I said. ‘That’s not what it’s like. It’s just helping pay my way till I get my old job back.’
     
    He looked at me lazily. ‘You have a job?’
     
    ‘Have you?’
     
    ‘I’m a sculptor.’ He shrugged. ‘Michelangelo thought it was quite a cool calling actually.’
     
    ‘Oh, really? Are you as good as Michelangelo?’
     
    He smiled. ‘No. No, Sophie, I’m not as good as Michelangelo. Can I still have a cup of tea?’
     
    I smiled back at him and poured water in the kettle. Cal stretched sleepily like a big cat.
     
    ‘Up all night?’ I