Before I Met You Read Free Page A

would soon be sitting on a train heading towards London, and that there might be real actual Londoners on the train, she did not want to look like someone who lived in a weird old house with a weird old woman on the edge of a cliff on a tiny island that was so small that it didn’t even have a motorway. So she was wearing thick black tights, a very short denim skirt, blue suede moccasins and an elderly and very misshapen navy lambswool V-neck with a lace-trim vest underneath. Her hair was short and dyed black and her lips were painted a reddish black and lined with a slightly darker shade of old blood. She did not, she felt fairly certain, look like the type of girl who came from Guernsey.
    Sometimes Betty forgot that she was a big, pretty fish in a small, not so pretty pond. She and Bella were the reigning queens of their small corner of the world. They were the prettiest, the coolest , the most popular. Everything, in the realm of fifteen-year-old life on the island, revolved around the pair of them. And sometimes Betty believed that she really was, well, that she was famous. Because, on Guernsey, with her smoky-brown eyes, her fashion-drawing legs and her wardrobe of cool and slightly quirky clothes collected from dark corners of charity shops and pilfered from Arlette’s many wardrobes, she may as well have been famous.
    But here, just a few miles from shore, all that fell away from her like discarded tissue paper. Here she was just a girl. A pretty girl, but no prettier than most.
    It was the first time they’d been back to England since they’d left on that foggy January morning almost five years ago. Three months had turned into six months, six months into a year, and by then her mother had found the island quite to her liking. Betty had settled so well into her new school and someone had made a ‘silly offer’ for the house in Farnham, and they’d decided, as a family, to stay. Betty was delighted. From the minute she’d first set foot in Arlette’s boudoir, she’d known that this was where she wanted to be now. The white powder-sprayed bed had been shipped across from England and Betty had settled down.
    But they were back for Christmas, just Betty and her mother, two nights at Betty’s grandmother’s in Farnham, and time first for a bit of Christmas shopping in town. As she entered her teenage years, clothes shopping had become pretty much the only area of common interest between Betty and her mother, and they linked their arms together companionably as they made their way up Oxford Street.
    It was nearly five o’clock; the December afternoon looked like deepest, darkest night and the whole road was bathed in the soft rainbow glow of the Christmas lights strung overhead. They had another hour before they needed to get a train back to Betty’s grandmother’s in Surrey. Betty could feel something deep inside her tugging her from the thoroughfare of Oxford Street, away from the homogeny and the brand names. She pulled her mother past the fairy-tale edifice of Liberty and on to Carnaby Street. Her mother kept pausing to admire a window, to exclaim about a musical showing in a theatre, to remember something she’d forgotten to buy. But Betty kept moving.
    ‘Come on,’ she implored, her hands on her hips. ‘Come on!’
    ‘What’s the panic?’ asked her mother. ‘Where are we going?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ snapped Betty, casting about anxiously, as she felt the day falling away from her. ‘Just …
this way
.’
    She didn’t know what
this way
was. All she knew was that the day was dying and the night was giving birth to itself, and there was something electric, something magnetic pulling her down Carnaby Street, past self-consciously crazy boutiques, past grimy pubs, through the throngs of tourists and teenage girls
just like her
, girls from somewhere else with overblown ideas about themselves, girls having a special treat with dowdy mothers and bored fathers, a day in town with an early lunch