Threads Read online

  Praise for THREADS

  Great fun. It goes at a cracking pace and girls will love it.

  JACQUELINE WILSON, AUTHOR

  . . .the next Princess Diaries – only hotter.

  AMANDA CRAIG, THE TIMES

  A magical tale. . .

  BLISS MAGAZINE

  . . . a must read . . .

  INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

  Miss it, miss out.

  MIZZ MAGAZINE

  Bang on trend, with some hilarious fashion faux pas . . .

  TBK MAGAZINE

  The fashion story everyone's talking about. . .

  SUGAR MAGAZINE

  A treat . . . elegant and funny and has real narrative verve.

  DAVID ALMOND, AUTHOR

  The perfect stocking-filler for the girl who knows her Marni from her Matalan . . .

  EVENING STANDARD

  . . . upbeat and thoroughly entertaining.

  BOOKS FOR KEEPS

  Intelligent chick-lit with lots of heart.

  BOOKSELLER

  SOPHIA BENNETT

  2 Palmer Street, Frome, Somerset BA11 IDS

  To Emily, Sophie, Freddie and Tom

  and Alex for making it all possible

  and Noney for her joy in beautiful things

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 40

  What you can do

  Take fashion action like Edie. Why not join Save the Children's campaign?

  Acknowledgements

  We're standing in a fashion designer's studio in Hoxton, admiring ourselves in the mirror. At least, Jenny's supposed to be admiring herself in her red-carpet dress. Or she would if it didn't make her look like a cherry tomato. Edie and I are just tagging along, but the mirror takes up the whole wall and it's hard not to take a bit of a peek.

  Apart from the mirror, the studio's big and bare. Lots of brick walls and tall windows and clothes rails. My mother would call it ‘industrial chic’. I would say it was in need of some love and upholstery.

  I'm looking at my Converses, which got their first outing today after a bit of customisation with some Tipp-Ex. They're only mild French swear-words (and one in Italian that I got from my pen pal, Marco). I know much worse ones. I thought they were funny and Jenny laughed. Edie is above such things. But Mum this morning when I came downstairs in them . . . well, you wouldn't think she'd been a model and walked HALF NAKED down a catwalk in her time. She wants me to be preppy and brainy like Edie and have the youth she never had. I quite like the sound of the youth she did have.

  I'm not so sure about my silver leggings, although they're gorgeous. They seemed slinky and alluring in my bedroom, but under the studio lights I look as if I'm about to blast off. The velvet top is cute, though. It used to be a dress, but works so much better without the sleeves and skirt. And the black lace fingerless gloves were a definite find. I'm quite pleased with the overall effect.

  Edie's trying to pretend she's not looking at herself. She has a model's body (I don't; I take after my father, who's French and smokes Gitanes and is practically a midget), but she dresses it in knee-length skirts and Kate Middleton jackets. Yawn yawn. She could probably do catalogues after we leave school but no: she wants to join the United Nations. Mum is SO impressed.

  Edie's surreptitiously looking at her face. She's pretty in a blonde, centre-parting sort of way. You can't see her brains behind those steel-grey eyes. She's trying to work out whether she should get a fringe. She's been thinking about this for the last five years and no decision yet. She catches me watching her and makes out she's admiring Jenny, which is a total giveaway.

  Jenny is un-admirable right now. A lovely person and my best friend, but THAT DRESS. It does nothing for her. And to think she has to wear it to a premiere in a week.

  Jenny's done a lot of things over the last year and a half. She's turned from a bouncy, freckly, funny twelve-year-old into a totally new edition. For a start, she's grown boobs and developed an interesting line in facial spots. She's acted in an action movie with Hollywood's Hottest Couple and the New Teenage Sex God – not something you want to be doing with the whole boob/spot thing going on. And she's developed a complex about her weight.

  If we lived fifty years ago, she'd be hot. She's probably the same size and shape as Marilyn Monroe. But in today's Size Zero age, she thinks she's fat. She's embarrassed about the boobs. Mine are way behind and Edie will forever have fried eggs. She's even embarrassed about her skin, which blushes easily. She hates her freckles and her copper hair. She really just wants to disappear.

  But she's not going to do it in that cherry tomato number. The designer's called Pablo Dodo. Don't try and remember his name, because if he's always this rubbish, he's likely to become extinct. He's the cousin of one of the movie's producers, which is how he got the job. He wanted to turn Jenny into ‘a vision in red’. Which shows the limit of his imagination. Between her hair and her blushes, she can do that all by herself.

  Last time she came, Jenny told Pablo about her boob phobia and he promised to hide them. This he has done. They're buried somewhere under the crimson, floaty, chiffon number that starts at her collarbone and continues outwards down to her mid-thigh, before stopping suddenly, as if it's remembered something, leaving her pinky-white legs somewhat stranded.

  I'm trying to think of something to say, which is normally not difficult for me, but right now I'm challenged. Edie is biting her lip.

  Pablo's assistant is organising the final fitting. She comes over, mouth full of pins, and starts adjusting, muttering about the ‘cheerful brightness’ of the chiffon.

  ‘What do you think, Nonie?’ Jenny asks me, slipping her feet into a pair of gold stilettos. She looks anxious and unsure (although she'd go well with a rocket salad).

  I smile encouragingly, but stay silent. I'm picturing that red-carpet moment and it hurts.

  Edie can't hold it in any more.

  ‘You look like a cherry tomato,’ she gasps at last. ‘In heels.’

  And she's the one who wants to be a diplomat.

  Ten minutes later, after some pinning and shifting about behind a tatty old curtain, Jenny re-emerges in her jeans and tee-shirt uniform, looking squashed. I have tried to explain that cut-offs and a shirt tied at the midriff à la Marilyn would look fantastic on her, but she's too depressed to listen.

  I've given Edie the Look, but she just shrugged at me. She believes in honesty between friends. And she's too busy being super-intelligent to notice the consequences.

  Thanks to Edie, we have to rush for the Tube to get back across London. She volunteers with special needs children on Saturday afternoons. Edie's entire life is organised around getting CV points for her application to Harvard in three years’ time. You're suppo
sed to go there before you join the UN, apparently. It's where Reese Witherspoon went in Legally Blonde. I seem to remember that in the movie Reese made a video of herself by the pool and the Harvard professors let her in. Edie makes it look much more complicated. And not only because pools are hard to come by in London.

  Meanwhile, I've promised to treat Jenny to a smoothie at the Victoria and Albert Museum (the V&A to its friends), which is round the corner from my house. It's the coolest venue in London, with the chicest café – full of vintage tiles and crazy lights the size of space-hoppers – and the best smoothies I've tasted, after years of market research.

  It's Jenny's last chance to do something normal before the promotion tour for her new movie goes hyper. The London premiere's next Saturday. Before that there are press interviews, TV interviews and photocalls. Then afterwards, more interviews. Then a trip to New York, LA and Japan to do it all over again.

  Pablo Dodo says he sees her as a vision in pink for the New York premiere. God help us all.

  On the way to the Tube, a couple of men in dirty denim jackets and jeans shout across to us from the other side of the street.

  ‘Weirdo.’

  ‘Get a life, silver legs.’

  Edie puts a protective arm around me and Jenny holds my hand, but I'm used to it. I don't really mind any more. When some drop-dead fashion god rubbishes the way I look, I might be mildly upset, but guys in head-to-toe denim aren't really in a position to criticise.

  Edie tries to change the subject. Sort of.

  ‘You should see the girl I'm working with this afternoon,’ she announces. ‘She's seriously weird. She goes through different phases but at the moment she's into ballet tutus and fairy wings. I mean, fine if you're five, but she's twelve. I never know what to expect next with her. If she shows up at all, that is. She's missed the last two sessions and she's in mega-trouble if she misses this one.’

  ‘What are you doing with her?’ Jenny asks.

  ‘Reading. She's dyslexic. Seriously dyslexic. Her brain just isn't wired up for spelling. Last time we were working on “chair”. I have to give her reading strategies.’

  Jenny and I have no idea what reading strategies are, but decide not to ask. Edie's quite capable of spending the whole journey telling us.

  On the train, she gets some books out of her bag and shows us what she's brought to tempt the girl with this week. They're all stories about small children and animals, with big letters and no word over two syllables. Then she pulls out the Jane Austen she's in the middle of and settles down with it. Knowing her, she'll have finished it by this evening.

  Jenny and I get to South Kensington station and bid her goodbye. The V&A is a short walk away in the early summer sunshine. I love it. The buildings are large and chunky and colourful and rambling. You could get lost in them for days. As always, we go through the costume section to get to the café, so I can get my fix of inspirational outfits.

  Today, I'm busy admiring a John Galliano wedding dress when Jenny grabs my hand and yanks it.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Look!’ she whispers so loudly she might as well shout it.

  ‘What?’

  She starts to giggle. ‘I think Edie's going to be out of luck today.’

  I follow the line of her stare. Sitting in front of my favourite cabinet – the one with the eighteenth-century embroidered court dress – is a little black girl with a satchel and a notebook, who's busy sketching. I see what Jenny means. The girl is wearing blue cotton dungarees, but they're swamped by an oversize pink practice tutu and there's a tattered pair of pink fairy wings slung over her shoulders. She's topped it all off with a sky-blue crotchet beret scattered with beads and fake pearls. London is a trendy fashion capital, but even so, this outfit is distinctive.

  She's staring intently at what she's doing and doesn't notice us.

  ‘Should we say something?’ Jenny asks.

  I shake my head. ‘Not our problem.’

  ‘But Edie mentioned mega-trouble.’

  ‘We can't go up to some stranger and say she needs to be in reading practice. She'd think we were nuts.’

  ‘She's not exactly super-normal.’

  I take this as a personal insult. People who choose to dress differently from the crowd should not be labelled and judged, in my opinion. I sniff in an offended sort of way and walk off. Jenny rushes after me.

  ‘Sorry, Nonie. I didn't mean . . . You know what I meant.’

  In the café, we drink our smoothies in silence. I'm trying to look hurt, still, but actually I'm feeling guilty. Jenny's probably right. The girl will be due for some dire punishment and we probably should have helped her. I'm just not as brave about these things as Jenny.

  Jenny's looking anxious again. In the end, I give in and ask her what the problem is.

  ‘Nothing. Just . . . thinking about next week, that's all.’

  I feel guiltier still. This is supposed to be a cheering-up day, before all the interviews and publicity and being on her best behaviour.

  Some fourteen-year-olds would be itching to live the Hannah Montana life and be on a red carpet beside Hollywood's Hottest Couple and sexy, seventeen, green-eyed Joe Yule (Joe Drool to the press and the rest of his adoring public). Not Jenny. She seems to be particularly dreading her big moment and we're not making it any easier.

  At least her father will be there to keep her company. This is the father who left her mother for his second mistress/third wife when Jenny was two and didn't acknowledge her existence for FIVE YEARS, but he's been a bit friendlier recently so we're giving him a second chance.

  Despite her father, who's an ex-theatre director, Jenny has wanted to be an actress since she was four. Her imitation of Simon Cowell watching an act he doesn't like on one of his talent shows is so funny it physically hurts to watch it. She also does the act in question: usually a middle-aged break-dancer or a little poppet who can't quite get the high notes. Most times we have to beg her to stop so we can catch our breath.

  A couple of years ago she starred as Annie in the school musical. Our school is BIG on musicals and anything theatrical. Some of the kids go straight on to drama school. Jenny was twelve and was acting with children six years older than her. Even so, she was funnier, louder and more entertaining than any of them. It helped that the part called for a cute redhead with a big voice, but you have to have talent to get that many standing ovations.

  One of the parents in the audience turned out to be a casting agent for the movies. Next thing Jenny knew, she was chatting to Hollywood's Hottest Couple beside the pool of their glamorous beachside mansion. They were on the lookout for a girl with an English accent to be Joe Yule's younger sister in their new action picture called Kid Code. It's an adventure about a boy from London who can decipher hieroglyphics: The Mummy meets Raiders of the Lost Ark, with a teenage hero and unfeasi-bly attractive parents (guess who).

  So off Jenny went to Hollywood, and all around the world on location, chasing baddies, getting chased by baddies and sharing witty repartee with Joe Drool. As you do.

  The trouble was, nobody thought to give her any training in acting for the screen. She'd tell me about it in long emails, written late at night after a busy day's filming. There was hardly any time for rehearsal. You were just supposed to learn your lines and go out there and do them. And she kept on being told not to act. Everything she'd learnt about doing things bigger on stage she had to unlearn. For the movie camera, she had to do things smaller. The director would tell her to act with her eyes and then go crazy with frustration, shouting that her eyeballs were ‘EXHAUSTING HIM WITH THEIR PERPETUAL MOTION’.

  And when she wasn't acting, she said the boredom of just sitting around waiting was unbelievable. There are only so many Sudokus and Mario Kart games you can do before you start to wonder if your brain is melting.

  I don't think Jenny spent a single day on that set being truly happy. And now filming is finished, every time she meets a journalist she has to say what a fantastic p
rivilege it was to work with so many talented people and how much she's looking forward to the movie coming out.

  To cheer her up, I put my smoothie aside and lie through my teeth, assuring her that the red dress will be super-amazing when she's got her hair done and her new makeup and everything. She almost believes me.

  Then I get her to do a few impressions of recent talent show hopefuls. At first she refuses, but soon she can't help herself and comes up with a would-be teenage tenor who has me collapsed in giggles. We start to get funny looks from other tables and decide it's time to leave.

  When we get back to the costume section, the girl in the tutu is gone.

  Next day, the strangest thing happens.

  I'm in the kitchen getting myself a drink when Mum and my brother Harry come in to talk about something. The kitchen is the place where stuff usually happens in our house. It's big, white and full of designer gadgets that we don't know how to clean. The table is Italian marble (‘Don't touch it, don't sit on it, don't draw on it, and for God's sake don't spill anything on it’). The floor is limestone (‘Don't touch it’ blah blah blah). The walls, like the rest of the house, are covered in framed photos and paintings. It looks like a West End art gallery with a cappuccino machine. But it's actually quite homely when you get used to it.

  Harry lays some photos down on the table (very carefully) for Mum to look at. Harry's five years older than me and is studying art at Central St Martins, which is THE BEST ART SCHOOL IN THE WORLD. I'd be planning to go there too, if my figures didn't look like stick men and my attempts at perspective weren't like some sort of weird 3-D puzzle. As it is, my ambition is to make tea and do the photocopying for the Olsen twins or Vivienne Westwood, but I haven't told ANYONE because it would be fashion heaven and I don't want to jinx it.

  At the moment, photography is Harry's thing. Before that, it was screen printing. I don't think he's decided exactly what sort of artist he's going to be yet, but he's definitely going to be GOOD.

  Harry is Mum's golden boy. I should be jealous, but I can see what she means. He is supercool, because he doesn't try. He's wearing old jeans, frayed by his bike rather than by some designer, a tee-shirt from a dodgy band he saw in a field about three years ago and flip-flops. His hair is dark brown and curly, like mine, and he keeps forgetting to get it cut, so it flops over his eyes. His voice is low and always sounds as if he's about to tell a joke.