Sex and Stravinsky by Barbara Trapido Read Free Book Online Page A

now Gemma’s been moaning her head off non-stop because her thirteenth birthday is going to happen while the class is away on the French exchange and she’s going to have to postpone her party till they get back. Just like other people didn’t have much worse things happen to them – e.g., like being teamed up with a boy, when the whole idea of having to go and stay with a bunch of people you don’t even know is quite scary enough. Zoe just can’t stop worrying about it.
    Most of her class have given up birthday parties for the moment because at twelve, and especially thirteen, you can’t very well go on having those babyish all-girl parties with treasure hunts and loot bags, and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, and with your mum making you a novelty cake of your choice, with candles on it. Well, you can if you’re Emily, of course, but then Emily is so kind of floaty that she doesn’t even notice. And, on the quiet, all the girls really enjoy her parties, because Emily’s mum keeps everyone so busy there’s no time to get bitchy or to feel left out, like there is at Gemma and Becca’s parties, where you stand there wishing you had different shoes on and that your mum had let you have your ears pierced and that you knew about kissing and stuff.
    Zoe’s mum, Caroline, used to do those four-star kids’ parties for her, except that she always insisted Gran come and only once, two years ago, did she agree to make Zoe a ballerina cake.
    The next year she said, ‘Not again, Zoe. That’s just boring. And aren’t you getting a bit too old for all this ballet stuff? What about the belle époque, if you’re wanting something a bit girly? Or how about we make you a map of Middle Earth?’
    Zoe really doesn’t like Tolkien. It seems to her it’s a lot of weird boy-stuff that, for some reason, her mother thinks would be better for her than reading ballet books. It’s probably because her mum was young in the 1970s, so she thinks that girls should be forever doing plumbing and welding along with cooking and sewing, to show how liberated they are. And she won’t let Zoe have ballet lessons, because she says they’re much too expensive and that Zoe must absolutely not go leaning on her dad.
    ‘You know what a pushover he is,’ she said. ‘He’ll start going without lunch just to pay for you to have lessons.’
    So Zoe hasn’t said a word to Josh about it. She’s kept it to herself.
    But, about the birthday cakes, the only really embarrassing time was once, when her mum and dad had to be away and Gran did her party instead. She just insisted and Zoe didn’t know how to tell her not to. Gran made this horrible iced cake like a Christmas cake that looked like a tombstone and inside was that kind of claggy fruitcake, when everyone knows it’s a chocolate cake you’re supposed to have. Anyway, nobody ate it. They just broke it up into bits and then Gran kept saying cringeworthy stuff out loud in front of Zoe’s friends, like, ‘Personally, I can’t abide the waste!’ and, ‘It makes you wonder what sort of homes they come from!’ that just made everyone giggle – especially as most of them have got quite smart houses and it’s Zoe’s family who still live in a bus – though not for very much longer because when she gets back they’re going to be moving into a house where she’ll have a ‘proper’ bedroom.
    Except that, last weekend, when her dad had a sneaky plan that he and she – just the two of them – should go and camp in her new bedroom overnight, they’d got there and Zoe had refused to sleep in the house, because the bedrooms had these really horrible old nylon carpets that stank of wee, with creaky floorboards underneath, and all the door panels were painted orange and lilac with, like, brush hairs stuck in the paint, though her dad said that Caroline was going to ‘work miracles’ on the house while they were away. But, anyway, her dad said never mind, they’d just practise a few headstands