Whatever Love Is Read Free Page A

and her mother seemed so improved as
to be moved to a halfway house in Hove, Frankie had imagined them living together in a little cottage near the sea and everything being as it once was. She had been on the verge of mentioning this
to Tina when the police had arrived at Park House, and were ushered into the sitting room by an over-important Nerys who just happened to have turned up at the same time. Frankie’s mother had
been found on Hove esplanade, systematically setting fire to beach huts because she believed her errant husband was sleeping in one of them. Narrowly escaping prison on a plea of diminished
responsibility due to forgetting to take her medication, she was sectioned and referred to a secure unit.
    She was still there.
    ‘Frankie? Hey, Frankie!’ She was jolted out of her reverie by Jemma tapping her on the arm and peering at her anxiously. ‘It’s OK, we were just having a laugh. Please
don’t cry.’
    ‘I’m not,’ Frankie protested, turning to face her, and then realising that there were indeed a couple of tears trickling down her cheek.
    ‘Yeah, sorry,’ Mia murmured, grabbing the remote and idly channel hopping. ‘It’s not your fault your family are weird.’
    ‘Mia, shut it!’ Jemma hissed. ‘So . . .’ She turned to Frankie. ‘What are you going to wear on Saturday, then?’
    Frankie frowned, her thoughts still in the past. ‘Saturday? What’s happening on Saturday?’
    ‘Like, hello?’ Mia exclaimed. ‘What’s the whole civilised world been talking about for the past month? Nick’s twenty-first!’
    ‘Oh, that,’ Frankie muttered. ‘I’m not going.’
    ‘ Not going? ’ Jemma gasped. ‘What possible reason could you have not to go?’
    You want a list? thought Frankie, sighing inwardly. One, Mia’s boyfriend was a chinless wonder; two, the place would, she knew, be full of super-confident ex-public-school girls
flaunting their perfect figures and talking in over-loud voices about their latest boyfriend, where they’ve skied and the car Daddy has just bought them; and three, she hated parties. She
always had – even the beach parties that all her mates in Brighton had regarded as cool. Sadly, her aunts both considered that it would ‘do her good’ to socialise at every
possible opportunity, and Jemma and Mia, who were so full of confidence in their own charms, kept teasing her and trying to set her up with guys – usually the ones they deemed completely
hopeless.
    ‘I’d die to be in your shoes,’ her friend Lulu had said a few weeks back when Frankie had shown her the gold embossed invitation card to the party. ‘Since my father
dragged us to this backwater, I haven’t been to one decent party.’
    ‘Nick’s will be one of those pretentious affairs where everyone nibbles on canapés and bares their teeth in silly grins till the photographer from Tatler leaves and
then gets hammered on champagne cocktails and whatever else they happen to have to hand.’
    ‘Sounds good to me!’ Lulu laughed. ‘Take photos, yeah? I want a snog by snog account of the evening!’
    ‘Even if I go – which I won’t – snogging won’t feature,’ Frankie retorted. ‘I’ll only know a handful of people anyway.’
    ‘Francesca Price!’ Lulu exclaimed. ‘Who said you had to know someone to snog them? And you have to go. The only way I get a full-on social life these days is by proxy.
You owe it to me as my best mate.’
    It never failed to surprise Frankie that someone like Lulu – feisty, rebellious and a pain in the neck of practically every tutor at Thornton College – should want to be friends with
her, but ever since she had arrived just weeks after Frankie, she had latched onto her and pretty much ignored everyone else.
    ‘Anyway, forget parties,’ Lulu had continued. ‘You have to promise me one thing, right?’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘You’ll come to all the best gigs at M-Brace? Is it really as great as everyone says it is?’
    ‘I’ve never