Girls Night Out
Spending time with Alison was always an educational experience for me. She knew all the unwritten rules about the social behaviour and friendships of nine year old girls that had always eluded me. She had girls (myself included) queuing up to be friends with her, so she and her tight circle of constant cohorts ruled over us all, yet for unknown reasons she would only ever have one favourite at a time. Generally it would be one of the inner circle, but when she got bored of, or wanted to punish her minions she would select one of the throng of us hangers on: The ritual was always the same she’d choose you, you would forsake any other friends you had, the pair of you would have a fast, intense ‘friendship’ and when she got bored of you, or she forgave her ‘best friends’ or you said or did the wrong thing, she’d loose you. It was a sadistic cult and we were all indoctrinated.
On those sacred occasions when I was flavour of the fortnight I did all I could to benefit from the friendship. Alison taught me many things, from how to suck the nectar out of pink clovers and how to retrieve a lost ball from a bush of ‘stingies’ without obtaining injury, to applying eye shadow and asking boys to dance. She was not particularly attractive; she had large malteaser-brown eyes that would have been innocent had they not been framed by a huge pair of black bushy eyebrows that all too often knitted themselves into an aggressive scowl. The same dark hair that cascaded from her head dusted her top-lip and formed a furry blanket over her pale arms. Her lips were pink and pouty, her round face was a kaleidoscope of emotion, and her expressions were as changeable as the British weather. What she lacked in beauty she had tenfold in her streetwise know-how. And although she had teachers in despair with her constant chattering, interrupting and copying other kids, her wits and her tongue were scalpel sharp.
