Girls With Permed Hair and Strange Fashion Statements
Author: zed
After a year at UKC, I had started again at a Cambridge college, except I wasn’t a resident there: I lived with my family in a house not too far away. It occurred to me how much I was going to miss my friends at UKC. On the first day, there were all sorts of activities going on. The Who were to play at nine. To kill time before that, I wandered around. Everywhere I went, people were laughing at me. Some stuck up for me, but nevertheless, it wasn’t nice. I went to see a film; by the time I’d left, I’d given up on hope on seeing The Who, and looked around for my parents’ car, which would pick me up. There were Rangerovers everywhere, but not theirs. It occurred to me that I had left my wallet in the cinema, but wanted to see them first before retrieving it.
Two girls with permed hair started hanging around with me. They weren’t friendly, but they weren’t hostile either. I felt uncomfortable with them, though. A middle-aged-man walked past, and one of them said, “Hello, Computer Science Teacher who completely ignored me.” The man stopped and looked at us. “I’m sorry, but I don’t recognise any of you,” he said. I thought he might have recognised me from two years ago, then remembered that I wasn’t at the college I used to attend.
My parents arrived, and I told them I was going back to the cinema to get my wallet. I did so. A film was still showing, and all the people watching were annoyed by my scrabbling about. My wallet wasn’t there anyway. I returned to the Rangerover and found it on the back seat.
I was living in a strange house with my family, my boyfriend Bryn’s family, some of my friend Smill’s family, and a few acquaintances. Bryn, David (his brother), my brother and myself shared a room. This was the first day of this arrangement. When I woke up, Bryn and I were the only people present. He got into my bed, and started kissing my feet, and working his way up my left leg. Before anything else could happen, there was a knock on the door. He got out of bed, and opened it. It was Reanne, David’s new girlfriend.
I wondered what had happened to Lynsey (his girlfriend in real life). Perhaps David couldn’t handle the thought of going out with her while he was at UKC? Or maybe he’d just been going out with her because she had rabbits which he needed for his photography project, which he’d now finished?
Bryn and I were supposed to be going to a disco that night. However, beforehand, we had time to kill, so he suggested going to the gym. I needed to find suitable clothes to wear, which took a while. The process involved:
1) Talking to some people who entered my room while I was topless.
2) Trying to wear a plug on a chain, giving up, and returning it to the sink in my room. While I was there, Reanne and her older sister (who looked remarkably like the girls at the college) also started using the sink. “Did you live in Park Wood?” Reanne’s sister asked. “No, Eliot College,” I said. “Ah, all the plugs are like this in Park Wood,” she said.
3) Unpacking the bag my brother had brought with him to this place, and removing a sleeping bag, a pillow and a foam thing to put the sleeping bag on.
4) Realising my clothes were in the wash and currently being hung out to dry, by various adults. This was done in a huge garden: garments were draped over the bushes at its edges. I checked all the bushes for my clothes, but couldn’t find them. Then Dad told me he was holding them. I put them on, and asked my parents if I could use the car to get to the gym.
Then I realised that if I was going to the disco afterwards, I’d need to bring some other clothes with me. A cross between my friend Ibid and my corridor mate Catherine, who was going with me, realised the same thing. So, together with Bryn, we walked into a very warped version of Eliot College to get to our corridor.
On the way, I accidentally said something that compelled Ibid-Catherine and Bryn to race off in different directions to see who could get to my room first. Bryn instantly vanished. “You geen!” Ibid-Catherine told me, racing up some stairs. I followed her. They took us to a really weird looking corridor, with some more stairs at the end of it. Ibid-Catherine got increasingly more annoyed, and ended up falling down some stairs, caught up in a blue mesh body-bag. I tried to help her out of it, but she resisted.
