West End Girls - Jenny Colgan Page 0,2

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