Cyril and Marie are fighting over the Beano Jack brought round the other day. Breakfast is from the Tupperware where Mother collects the stuff no one will eat from the bottom of the cereal box: muesli dust and cornflake pap. It saves a lot on wastage, but it does tend to lower the spirits. Cyril has spilt milk on his trousers. We’ve run out of cat food and Dave, our tabby, is winding round everyone’s legs hopefully. The sofa bed, where Mother sleeps, is still out in the sitting room. The radio’s on. There is talk of a war and a ‘long shadow over the economy’. (That’s just what I need.) And Mr Spence, our landlord, has dropped in.

I opened the door and physically barred his entry. ‘Hello?’ I said suspiciously. Marie scrawled felt-tip on the radiator the other day; I thought it might be best if he didn’t see that. Also he was wearing a T-shirt made out of blue string and the smallest pair of satin shorts you’ve ever seen, so I didn’t really want him in the house. His face glowed sweatily and there was a little drip on the end of his nose. He was jogging up and down on the spot as if he didn’t intend to hang around.

But then Mother bustled up behind me and said, ‘Mr Spence, enter, enter, enter.’ (She often says things in threes.) She put her lipstick on the moment she heard the door. She is all woman where all men are concerned.

He stopped jogging and said, ‘John, please. As I’m always saying,’ and she almost simpered. She was wearing her cheap brown suit, with a little pink T-shirt underneath. (She is always, always elegant, unlike me. She has a knack with colour.) Marie had been fiddling with her hair – putting in those sparkle things you twist in – and Mother had just been tickling Cyril to cheer him on with his breakfast, so there was a flush to her cheeks and she really looked lovely. And there was Mr Spence with his pale hairless thighs and his hopeful droopy expression and his damp satin shorts (frankly, I had to avert my eyes).

William will be calling for me any minute – we cycle to school together – and I’m not happy. Mr Spence is inspecting the leaking kitchen roof and Mother’s out in the garden hovering prettily by his bare legs. I don’t know what she’s playing at. It’s time she took the children to school. They’re going to be late. Marie gets in a tizz if she misses register, and Cyril’s got his SATs this year and everything. But she’s still out there flirting with him.

Honestly, if anything is going to galvanize me into action, this is.

I found her at break and we sat on the bench near the concrete pit where some of the boys do their skateboarding. Her in her cool parka with the fake-fur collar, me in my pink pack-a-mac (bargain at Cancer Research). Recently the skateboarding seems to have been a bit more show-offy when Julie is on the bench. It’s not that she’s pretty exactly. She’s got large features – a huge nose and a jutting chin and big lips which she licks a lot. But she’s womanly, if you know what I mean. She wears a proper bra, not just a support-vest like me. And she doesn’t care what people think. She says I don’t either or I wouldn’t wear wellies and pink pack-a-macs to school. But I wear wellies and pink pack-a-macs to school because I do care what people think. There’s not enough money for me to buy trendy stuff, so I’d rather opt out altogether. I’d rather be wacky than boring. Charity-shop chic, I call it. Anyway, back to Julie. Not caring is why I think she’s so popular. William says it has more to do with certain other Large Features. That boy can be so childish.

I knew I could tell her about my plan to find Mother a boyfriend and that she would take it in hand. She’s really good at things like that. She’s more clued up than me romantically. She’s had two boyfriends herself, one of them, Phil from the sixth-form college, quite serious. I saw them in the high street at Christmas outside HMV. He had his hand up her jumper. I had to run home and eat chocolate to get over the shock.

‘Hm,’ she said when I explained and ran through my requirements (quick recap – money, interest in France, ability to handle small children). ‘Int-er-est-ing.’ She rolled the word out in a sort of French manner, and took a drag of her cigarette. I don’t smoke by the way. Julie does. It is one of the many differences between us. We met on the very first day of secondary school after she stood up for me when some girls in Year Eight started throwing my tartan beret around and calling me names. ‘Freak yourself!’ she said over her shoulder as she took my arm. We’ve been friends ever since.

At break she gave me a long look. Her eyes under the black eyeliner were very pale green, like the Wedgwood ashtray Mother and Jack got for a wedding present. She’s a bit funny about parents and their other halves. She puts on a voice when she talks about her stepmother. Like, ‘Ali-son thinks Dad should take us out to TGI Friday’s tomorrow night,’ and although I know she loves TGI Friday’s there’s something in the way she leaves the sentence hanging as if even she doesn’t know what she wants from it that makes you wonder. So I didn’t know whether she might be about to tell me not to be stupid or something. But then she grinned. ‘I think we can have fun with this,’ she said. ‘Leave it with me. Double geog. Supply teacher. I need something to keep me busy’

She’s just passed me a note. ‘Walk me to the bus stop after school. I’ve made a list.’

Julie said she knew I was going to say that.

‘No way,’ I said again. ‘No way’

I put my head back and slunk, as if slowly dying, to the ground. I made a few choking noises while I was down there. I had a momentary vision of meeting him in the bathroom doorway, him with a towel on…

Julie turned to Margaret Jackson, who was next in the bus queue. ‘Mushroom bake,’ she said. ‘Always stick to cold food in the canteen.’

Then she kicked me, and I stood up.

‘I’m not joking,’ she said. ‘I’ve thought it through. You don’t have to fancy him. Only your mum does. And just think: Monsieur Baker’s life ambition is to retire to France. Nuff said. Think about it.’

I nodded and said I would, but then her bus came and she got on and, as it shunted up to the lights alongside me, I did the Baker walk – a heavy marionette sort of galumph, sausages for limbs – resting my tongue on my lower lip at the same time (which was a bit unfair because, while he does funnel-up his mouth when he speaks French, he doesn’t actually do that). Julie sat looking out of the bus window, shaking her head at me in pity.

She’s right, though, he’s worth considering. OK, I’ve considered him. No.

We didn’t get a chance to talk about the rest of her list. She said to ring her tonight. Here’s what I think:

I opened the door and he was standing on the mat, looking sheepish and irritating. He’d just got off his bike – the skin on his face and arms was mottled red and white as if he was hot and cold at the same time. The chain with his crucifix was out of his T-shirt, skew-whiff across his shoulder.

He said, ‘Where were you? I waited for you at the sheds.’

Bother. We usually cycle home together and I’d forgotten to tell him I was walking with Julie. I should have felt guilty, but I just felt cross. I said, ‘I went down with Julie.’

‘Oh,’ he said, looking hurt. ‘Oh, sorry.’

He’s always apologizing, even when I’m at fault. It’s a vicious circle we’re in. I’m hoity-toity; he’s repentant. And the awful thing is, the nicer he is, the crosser I get. I’m really not a very nice person.

‘Do you want to come in, then?’ I said.

‘Yeah, all right.’

He wheeled his bike into the hall, leant it against mine and followed me into the kitchen. His jeans are so wide and baggy these days the legs seem to start down at his knees. He’s such a fashion victim. Sometimes I think I’m outgrowing him.

He sat on the stool while I filled the kettle. ‘Did you hear about the French exchange?’ he said.

I stopped what I was doing. ‘No. I didn’t have French today.’

‘Yeah,’ he said casually. ‘Easter holidays. You have to get your form in by the end of the week. Cheque for eighty quid. I doubt I’ll bother.’

I turned round and he was looking at me closely. He knows how I feel about France – the de Bellechasse thing – that it’s my spiritual home. (In fact, it annoys him; he thinks it’s pretentious.) I felt sick.

‘Eighty quid?’ I said.

‘Yeah. Probably not worth the hassle.’

I sat down next to him. ‘How does it work?’

‘Two weeks at Easter with a family in Paris. Then the French student comes back to you in the summer.’

‘Two weeks in Paris?’ My heart soared. I imagined myself reunited with my grandparents, an elegant woman in a bun clasping me to her bosom, a small dog at her heels. Two weeks in Paris!

William was still looking at me. He said, ‘Yeah. Probably not worth –’

How could I ask Mother for eighty quid? ‘No,’ I agreed, trying not to sound miserable. ‘No, it’s probably not.’ I stared at the table. I remembered the day trip to Boulogne with the school, how I envied the neat French schoolgirls in their brown suede boots. Even the stationery shop where I bought this notebook was heavenly. ‘Do you want a rice cake?’ I said. ‘They’re not exactly chocolate digestives, but…’

William was opening the packet of buttons. ‘Ah, but we could be inventive!’ he said cheerfully. He was probably trying to get me off the French exchange. ‘We could try melting these on top.’

We had a bit of trouble with charring. And clouds of dark-grey smoke started pouring out of the grill at one point. But it wasn’t completely unsuccessful. Heated up buttons go sort of powdery rather than melty. Chocolate rice cakes are not quite as good as chocolate digestives, but they’re not bad. When we had a pile each and had put the burnt tea towels in some water in the sink, we took them with our cups of tea upstairs to the roof. There’s just enough room for us both, though it’s squashier than it used to be – must be all the fabric in William’s trousers. It was a bit cold – a high blue sky darkening over the roofs – so we pulled the duvet out and tucked it round our knees. We had our usual vague munching chat – the stultifying dullness of suburbia, why supply teachers are always Australian. We didn’t talk any more about the French exchange, and I didn’t tell him about my campaign for Mother. We never do talk about things like that.

I had stopped feeling irritated with him. He’s like a different person out of school. Or maybe he’s the same, I just look at him differently. There are signs of hair growth on his chin these days and under his nose. I know he shaves sometimes, but he’d hate it if I knew. He’s had his hair cut too short – it’s the kind of cut that makes old ladies cross the road when they see him. And this evening he looked pale. When he yawned for about the fifth time, I said he needed an early night. He said he’d had one last night, only… He trailed off and I said, ‘Didn’t you sleep well?’ and he said no, he hadn’t. He gave a humph of a laugh. I said, ‘Did you get woken up?’ and he stopped laughing. ‘A bit,’ he said, scratching his neck and looking up at the sky.

When Jack lived with us, before the Great Infidelity, he used to say he’d go round and sort William’s mum and dad out – or his dad anyway. All I remember from the sleepovers is the sound of shouting and glass being smashed and William telling me to put my head under the pillow. In the morning, his mother was really friendly and let us have Extra-Thick Single Cream on our Rice Krispies. Once I saw bits of broken glass in the bin and an empty whisky bottle by the sink.

Jack doesn’t talk about going round to sort them out any more. Maybe he thinks William’s old enough to look after himself, which is awful because he can’t even look after his hamster. It got out this morning. He thinks it’s gone under the floorboards.

Granny Enid dropped C and M back just after William left and then Mother got into one of her sporadic efficient moods. It usually means she’s feeling cheerful. Sometimes she comes in really tired. If she’s had a hard day at the shop – ‘a long, long, long day’, when there’s been a run on cup sizes or something – she stretches out in a chair, with her dark head back, her bony white throat showing, her high-heeled shoes dangling. Then she’ll smile and get up quickly, slip on her slippers and jolly everyone up, but for a moment in her eyes it’s as if she doesn’t notice what’s going on around her, as if her head and her heart are elsewhere. And that’s when I think what a waste it is that she should be stuck at home with three children (or two children and me – I’m very old for my age) when she is so very frail and beautiful.

But there was none of that today. She got the children to bed and then she gave a rapid little clap of her hands and said, ‘OK, young lady, homework, no?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve done it.’

She looked a bit disappointed, but soon started chatting about her day. Apparently, she served an ‘agitated man in a suit’ who wanted ‘a set’ for his fiancée. Mother said, ‘Do you mean a brassiere or a camisole? With panties? French knickers, briefs or thong?’ You have to imagine the rolled ‘r’s’ in that. They make it even more embarrassing.

Well, he blushed to his roots – his face was ‘red, red, red’ – and started muttering about sizes. Here’s a trade secret: men always overestimate the extent of their girl-friends’ bosoms and underestimate the extent of their bottoms. (My mother is quite petite but, because she knows her onions, some of her pants are enormous.) So, Mother applied fitter’s law and supplied him with a 34C and a medium thong. And then – he bent his head and kissed her hand! In front of her boss and everything! So, now I understand her cheerful mood. ‘Ooh la!’ she said, leaning back into the sofa and flushing at the memory.

We watched the news – more gloom and war in a far-off place – and I thought about mentioning the French exchange. But then she got out her mending – she’s adding some old material to the bottom of Cyril’s jeans to make them last another year – and she sighed, the man with the set forgotten, and I knew I couldn’t. Instead, I sneaked into the kitchen to ring Julie to tell her what I think of her list – Mr Baker a no-no, Uncle Bert and The Chemist to be pursued further – and she’s cooking up a plan. We had to be short and sweet because her mum yelled that the pizzas had come. ‘Oh, sorry, Con,’ she said. I told her not to worry. We don’t have pizzas delivered at our house out of respect to my father, but it doesn’t mean other people can’t. We’re going to talk tomorrow.

I’m up in my room now, with the cat on the end of my bed. Mother and I watched my dad’s video before I came up. It’s only thirty seconds long. You see him running along a jetty in the sunset, in shorts, with a couple of other young men. He’s the one with the curly dark hair and the cheeky grin in the cut-off jeans. He’s only about twenty-five. He’s laughing and horsing around with his pretend friends and then they all jump off the jetty into the water. It’s nice to see him happy. Even if it is in an ad for a vodka-based alcopop. Mother and I joined in with the slogan at the end. ‘Make a splash!’ we cried. ‘Drink Carrrrib-vod.’

I ran her a bath after that. I added rose and geranium oil, which is really for special occasions, like A Date.

‘Night,’ I said.

‘Sweet dreams, chérie,’ she answered, up to her neck in suds.