West End Girls Read online

  Dedication

  In memory of my beloved papa,

  who taught me how to swear

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Jenny Colgan

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Lizzie squinted at the old LED alarm clock she’d had since she was at school. 03:39. She had to get up in three and a half hours, which was a slightly comforting thought in itself—that was ages away, so that wasn’t why she’d woken with a start.

  There was a stumbling noise. Lizzie’s heart stopped. Someone was in the room. Someone was definitely there. It was a burglar. A murdering, raping burglar. There were loads of them around here, everyone knew it. God, if only she kept a gun under her bed. She had never seen, touched, or learned how to work a real gun, and disagreed with them in principle, but . . . she wanted a gun, goddamn it!

  “Oh, tittin’ hell,” came a familiar voice.

  Penny. Lizzie’s longing for a gun lasted for a couple of seconds longer than it ought to have.

  In drunkenness, Lizzie noticed, and at 3:39 in the morning, Penny’s Essex accent rang out even stronger than usual.

  “What the effin’ eff was that?”

  Lizzie sat upright and turned on the bedside light, from which Penny recoiled, hissing crossly.

  “That is my shoe,” said Lizzie, trying not to shout and so wake their mother down the hall, although the walls were so thin she could hear her snoring from here.

  “What’s it doing in my bloody room?” Penny squinted. “And what are you doing in my bloody bed?”

  For a second, Lizzie double-checked just in case it was Penny’s room. “This is my room, you idiot.”

  Penny looked dumbfounded. “I know my own bloody room.”

  “You’d think.”

  Penny looked around her. “Oh. Bugger it.”

  Lizzie sat up. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m awake now.”

  This room had belonged to both of them when they’d had to share and their mother had had Sarcastic Alex, the lodger. When he’d moved out Penny had taken the smaller room, claiming it didn’t matter, she’d be moving out practically any day to get married and live in London and only occasionally come to visit them in a really big car. Well, that was six years ago now, and it was the last unselfish act on her part Lizzie could remember.

  “How was it?” said Lizzie, passing Penny her water glass. She could feel the waistband of her pajamas dig in as she did so. Oh, God. She wasn’t going up another size, she absolutely wasn’t, 16 was bad enough, 18, no way.

  “What time is it?” said Penny, ignoring her question.

  “It’s an inbetween-y kind of time: between a good night out and a really, really bad one. So?”

  Penny took a long gulp of water, then shrugged. “Hmm.”

  “Terrible?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Did he lavish you with compliments and jewels?”

  “Hmm,” said Penny, squinting at the water glass. “You know, I’m beginning to wonder if this lavishing-with-jewels type really exists.”

  “My God,” said Lizzie. “You can’t stop searching now. That’d be like a nun renouncing Jesus on her deathbed.”

  “Shut up,” said Penny.

  There was a break in the snoring from down the hall.

  “You shut up,” said Lizzie. “And go to bed.”

  Penny sighed theatrically. “We did go to Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant. He wasn’t there though.”

  “That’s good. That’s very good. I’m very pleased for you. I thought restaurants shut at twelve, but we’ll just draw a veil over that.”

  “And he spent the entire time complaining about the cost of his divorce. And the chateaubriand, as it happens.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” said Lizzie.

  “Never mind, darling,” said Penny patronizingly.

  Don’t think about the gun, thought Lizzie. “What is it then?”

  Penny sniffed.

  “So? What have you been doing? Taking cocktails at the Ritz? Dancing under umbrellas in the rain? Ice skating in Central Park?”

  “Night bus.”

  Lizzie winced in sympathy. “Who’d you get?”

  “One bung-eye, three general lunatics, and one wanker.”

  “Only one wanker on a night bus? That sounds amazing. There’s usually hordes of them putting traffic cones on their heads.”

  “No, just one literal wanker. One man having a wank. There were thirty-five with traffic cones on their heads.”

  Lizzie tutted.

  “And I had to change at Seven Sisters.”

  “Seven Sisters is far too dangerous for girls! What kind of man is he?”

  “Not one who sends a nice girl home in a cab.”

  “What about a slightly sluttish girl?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Get out of my bedroom then.”

  Penny heaved a big sigh. “Oh, it’s so boring.”

  “Going to the Ritz for cocktails and out to fancy dinner. Well, it does sound boring. Mum and I watched Property Ladder and ate potato waffles.”

  “I had to hear about his terrible divorce and how that witch kept the house and how he’s terrified of gold diggers getting hold of what’s left of his money and did I mind getting my half of the bill.”

  Lizzie flinched. This was not something, she knew from previous vicarious evenings, that could be tolerated. Although Penny’s minimum-wage waitress job was supposedly supplemented by tips, in reality her attitude, and the fact that a lot of men tried to ask her out, failed, and got aggressive, made the tip-giving side of things fairly erratic.

  “Oh, my God! What did you do?”

  Penny glanced in the mirror above the cheap dresser crammed in the corner of the tiny room. Despite the hour, Lizzie noticed, she still looked wonderful—her makeup had dribbled down under her eyes, but she looked sexy and a bit dangerous, not like Lizzie would: fat and a bit dirty.

  “Legged it out the bathroom window.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “No, of course I didn’t, you idiot.” She paused. “I told him I’d forgotten my purse.”

  “That’s all right then.”

  “I’d have legged it out the bathroom window next though.”

  Penny rubbed her pretty face blearily. “Anyway it went a bit downhill after that.”

  Lizzie tried to smile sympathetically—she was going to have to listen anyway—but this wasn’t exactly the first time she’d been woken up in the early hours. Penny was a cad magnet, but, as she pointed out (none too kindly), she was the only one with a hope in hell of getting them out of this shithole.

  “Go to bed,” said Lizzie.

  “I mean, I didn’t know the bloody brandy was a hundred quid a glass, did I?”

  “No,” said Lizzie calmly.

  “I’m not the one saying, ‘Hey, how’s about a brandy?’ while eyeing up my fishnets.” She glanced down. There was a huge ladder up the left leg. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit.”

  “Say it’s punk.”

  “‘How’s about a brandy? Chil
led? You know, my ex-wife was really chilly in bed. Makes a man feel, you know . . . so lonely.’”

  “Lonely and poor.”

  “Poor my arse,” said Penny dramatically. “My three ninety-nine ripped tights cause me a lot more pain than spending bloody six hundred pounds on bloody brandy does him.”

  “Six hundred pounds,” said Lizzie. How on earth could people do something like that? Lizzie lived as she ate: hand to mouth.

  “Should have read the menu, the dick, instead of yelping ‘Two glasses of your finest brandy’ over and over again. No wonder the waiter was smiling.”

  “Did he tip?”

  “Did he fuck. They were still screaming at each other when I ran out of the door.”

  “Finish the water,” said Lizzie. It might not get Penny to work on time, but it might get her to work.

  Penny took a long slug. “Ah,” she said. “Like finest brandy on my lips.”

  “You’re a bad, bad girl,” said Lizzie. “Go to bed or I’m telling Mum.”

  Six hundred pounds kept running through Lizzie’s head the next morning as she made her way to the bus stop. Six hundred pounds. That was unbelievable. Who could, did, spend money like that? Even by accident. Penny was still in bed; she didn’t start her job, as Brandford’s most glamorous and also grumpiest waitress, until later.

  Nonidentical twins can have a head start on the knowledge, usually learned by children through a procession of tedious and time-consuming upsets, that life isn’t always fair.

  “Twins? Really?”

  That was one of Lizzie’s earliest memories; people disbelieving their mother as to their provenance. Along with, “Look at the size of you!” and, Lizzie’s personal favorite, “So, is Lizzie terribly clever, then?”

  Being dressed alike only made matters worse, so they both started having tantrums about it from as early an age as possible. After all, it wasn’t Lizzie’s fault that she stayed short and plump while Penny shot up. It might have been her fault that while Penny made sure her dolls were immaculately dressed for their tea party, Lizzie scoffed all the scones. And while Penny smiled politely and learned to simper at adults from an early age, in case they had a spare pound coin in their pockets, Lizzie preferred to stay in the background before anyone had the chance to say, “Good eater, are we?”

  “They’re so different, aren’t they?” their mother’s friends would say, smiling meanly in a very unconvincing fashion.

  “Out! Out! Out!” Lizzie would say to herself quietly in the kitchen. “Goodbye, visitors, time to go!” And once they’d gone, her mum would come in and give her a special hug and a biscuit, just for her plain little daughter.

  And here the twins still were, twenty-seven years old and in the same tiny council house in Parkend Close, Brandford. Lizzie sometimes felt as if there should be a bus to take them off to real life, but if there ever was she knew she’d miss it, staying indoors and reading TV Quick.

  Maybe the bus had come, she thought occasionally, as she spent yet another Friday night sharing a big box of Celebrations with her work friend Grainne and her mother in front of Easties, while Penny was off, weighed down by lip gloss, in borderline dangerous nightclubs, chatting up prosperous idiots who left their expensive shirts untucked and reeked of Hugo Boss. Maybe their dad had caught it instead.

  Penny woke at eleven, screwed up her eyes, and groaned. OK. Another day, another minimum wage. That stupid bloody man from last night. She thought for a second and realized she could only just remember his name, and that it would probably be gone in a couple of days. Excellent.

  She blinked in the cheap bathroom mirror. The whole place needed grouting, it was incredibly dingy. But their mother worked far too hard, Lizzie inexplicably was refusing to do it by herself, and Penny had paid a lot of money for these nails so she couldn’t be expected to under the circumstances. They seemed to have reached something of an impasse.

  She threw on her Tesco ultra-skinny jeans and diamanté top, and got to work on her makeup. OK, she was only going to work, but you didn’t know who you were going to meet on the way, and by the time she’d changed into her uniform she’d look so awful anyway she’d be lucky to get a second glance from anyone half decent.

  Penny rarely dwelled on her genetic luck, seeing it mostly as a means to an end, and preferring instead to wonder if she should get her boobs done and whether it really was worth applying for one of those loans she saw on television. So far, Lizzie’s shocked expression had just about held her off, but if she had bigger knockers she’d definitely pull a better class of bloke, and would be able to pay it back anyway. But even in her work uniform she stood out. Pale hair—when she didn’t go overboard with the highlighter, which she usually did—glowed over a small, heart-shaped face with a high forehead and full lips. Her eyes were long, like a cat’s, which she made even longer with liberal amounts of eyeliner in daily changing shades, and she had the figure that only comes to someone who has spent too much time watching what really goes on at a deep-fat fryer.

  Lizzie accused her occasionally of anorexia, but it was pretty much sour grapes. Penny knew she had to be thin—preferably with big knockers—and didn’t think about food terribly often, unlike Lizzie, who turned to the biscuit barrel in times of joy, sadness, stress, tiredness, boredom, and random television.

  Penny hated Brandford. She hated its estates, its graffiti. The underpass, the horrid cheap corner shops with plastic mop buckets, and cheap sweets being guzzled by fat grubby babies. She hated the stoved-in cars, the fact that practically her entire class had gotten pregnant at sixteen. She didn’t feel like she was made for this. Was it so wrong to want more? Really? Just a nice car? Clothes that didn’t come from a supermarket? So, school hadn’t worked out so well. It was a shit school. There was nothing wrong with liking nice things, was there? Even—Penny bit her lip as she applied the white layer of her mascara—someone to fall in love with one day, though she’d never have admitted that to Lizzie in a million years. Lizzie was such a drip when it came to romance, and everything else. She’d seen Dirty Dancing nine million times, snottering into her extra-large popcorn all the while. Penny and her friends had scoffed. Penny’s favorite film was Pretty Woman, closely followed by The Thomas Crown Affair.

  Penny took the bus—God, she hated the bus—out to the junction of the motorway where the big shops were, at the entrance to London and the M11. In the vast fields of hypermarkets and massive, elongated versions of ordinary high street shops, there were mega-restaurants, huge places seating hundreds for birthday parties, hen nights, reunions, and kiddies’ parties. Penny’s was called the All-American New York Diner. There was a bucking bronco at the back, where girls would get on and shimmy their bosoms, and men would pretend they were having a laugh while taking it all incredibly seriously; the food was entirely brown and came in huge portions, and the cocktails were gigantic and sticky.

  Penny hated it, but it had one major advantage: everyone went there eventually. Whether a works’ night out, or a divorcing couple meeting for a child handover, all sorts of people ended up prodding uselessly at the Death by Chocolate with triple-brownie fudge ice cream and chocolate sauce supreme. And she could spot them a mile away; they’d look slightly perturbed about walking in, wouldn’t know what to do with the sparklers in their drink, ask if she had fizzy water or salad (“There’s our bacon-bit surprise, sir,” she would say insouciantly), and she’d check out their shoes, or their watch, then play the comely wench a bit more. There weren’t many well-off single men in Brandford—one or two footballers in nearby Saffron Walden, but the competition for them tended to be intense and exhausting—but serving four hundred covers a night very often yielded results, as well as occasionally spectacular tips, which made Lizzie green, particularly as she had an indoor job, in an office and everything.

  “I’m off,” shouted Penny, heading for the door. Her mother was at home again today. She’d been having horrible problems with her varicose veins—standing up doling out big scoops
of cabbage, and nowadays chicken twizzlers, to ungrateful schoolchildren for nearly thirty years had pretty much done for her legs. Making it through to Friday tended to be a bit on the tricky side.

  “Penny?” shouted her mother as Penny slunk past the sitting-room door. Fat and florid, she lay with her feet higher than her head, and an enormous flask of tea—made by Lizzie—by her side. “Where were you last night?”

  “Why?” said Penny sulkily. For goodness’ sake, she was twenty-seven, not fourteen. “I went to Paris to visit Kylie Minogue.”

  “Well, could you let me know when you’re going to be so late? I worry about you, you know.”

  “Well, you should stop, I pay housekeeping, don’t I?”

  “Not very bloody much,” said her mother. “Wouldn’t keep a mouse in cheese.”

  Penny rolled her eyes. “I’m running my own life, OK?”

  “Just a bit of consideration, darling. That’s all I ask for.”

  Penny heaved a sigh. She and her mother had been having this argument for ten years. “What are you watching?”

  “The 1979 RSC Macbeth,” said her mum. “Ian McKellen and Judi Dench. One of the best ever.”

  “Right. God, that crap is so boring. Do you want me to bring you back some salad?”

  Her mother’s face brightened. “Oh, go on then, sweetheart. And what about some potato wedges? And some of the fried chicken?”

  “Mum! It’s horrible! I’ve told you where it’s from! It’s not even all real chicken! And the doctor told you to lose weight.”

  “I know,” said her mother, looking slightly ashamed. “But it tastes so good.”

  Penny tutted, and left the house.

  Lizzie marched into work in an even worse mood than usual for a wet Thursday morning.

  Stamp importing wasn’t quite what she’d had in mind when, after a school career of almost total mediocrity spent entirely in the shadow of her misbehaving sibling, she’d landed a proper office job in Brandford—and she hadn’t planned to be there for ten years either, but it was undemanding as jobs go—processing stamp orders from overseas. She’d made a friend, Grainne, who controlled reception and the import desk.

  Grainne’s hobbies were cats and crisps. It was an undemanding friendship. But it was nice, for once, not to be the shy one, especially when she’d been the one with a boyfriend for a change too. Felix had been tall and slim and handsome, and Lizzie couldn’t believe her luck when she pulled him at an awful party Penny had dragged her to one night. It had taken her six months to realize he was actually as dumb as a stone box full of rocks. Lizzie had thought he was just amenable. His constant mumbled “Whatever you like” to films, TV, and sex had eventually grown tiring, even for Lizzie, for whom the novelty of a real live boyfriend was something that took a while to wear off. And she missed having something to talk to Grainne about; now they were back to pussies and Pringles.