Looking for Andrew McCarthy

‘Hard to say. Depends on whether he’s … nothing.’

‘I don’t like the sound of this.’

‘Oh, got to go!’

‘Go where? You’re at your dad’s!’

‘Yes, and his deep fried lard is burning. Got to go!’

She put down the phone and sat back on the bed, deep in thought. God, she had seen those films so many times. It hadn’t been until much later that she’d realized her mother had been desperate to get her out of the house that year, and had let her disappear to the cinema as often as she wanted, so she could get on with the business at hand of arguing with Ellie’s dad and preparing to move to Plockton.

Ellie looked at the back wall, where her old ice skates were hanging by their grubby white laces. That was what her father had done: every time she wasn’t at the cinema, her dad had taken her ice skating. He was mad for it. Of course by the time she’d got to fourteen she’d disdained it utterly and much preferred trying to freeze-frame the video with Julia, to see how far under the duvet they could get in Class. And now she was being petulant about doing her dad’s washing up. Some things never changed. And what was grown-up anyway? And why did she suddenly have an inexplicable desire to go ice skating?

Absolute Beginners (#ulink_8f3f10f7-bce1-5b45-8b25-1ece36c7b5e2)

‘Ikea on a Saturday morning,’ said Ellie. The rest of the car ignored her. ‘Did anyone hear me? I said, IKEA ON A SATURDAY MORNING. ARE WE NUTS??? Why can’t we go … I don’t know … ice skating or something?’

Julia turned around from the front seat, where she was trying to navigate her way through Croydon and placate the rest of the car at the same time.

‘Loxy needs some shelving, okay?’

‘And Patrick needs a new bathroom cabinet – he’s been buying a lot of new toiletry products recently,’ said Siobhan. ‘And he’s too busy to make it today, so I said I’d come.’

‘Why am I here then?’

‘You’re helping push the trolley,’ said Julia. ‘And if you’re very lucky, we’ll let you choose all the food that you don’t know what it is.’

‘I can’t believe you required a taste arbiter like me to come to Ikea,’ said Arthur darkly, buried under The Times. ‘You’re at Ikea; you’ve already given up and admitted you have none.’

When the gang finally limped in through the underpass towards the familiar blue and yellow factory chimneys, the car park was already overflowing with family-sized monster Range Rovers with special cyclist-killing bull bars on the front.

Ellie pouted as they queued up to get through the open doors. To the left, one hundred and seventy children were trying to stick colourful rubber balls down one another’s oesophagi.

‘Why are they there?’ she said, peering through the glass. ‘Contraception?’

The scene opened out slightly to reveal four billion identical couples in casual Gap wear. The girls all had expensively tinted blonde hair cut in Anthea Turner styles, and the men had schoolboy haircuts and emergent paunches.

Arthur and Ellie immediately clutched at their throats and started staggering around with fake choking. ‘Argh! Argh!’

‘Behave, you two,’ said Julia, pushing back her blonde hair.

‘She’s one of them!’ said Arthur pointing. ‘Croydon Wife! Croydon Wife!’

‘I’ll open the book,’ said Ellie. ‘Up to five quid. Which couple are going to be the first to have a fight.’

‘I’ll take the couple in the matching Gap separates,’ said Arthur.

‘Too non-specific.’

A tall, balding man was sighing heavily as a woman castigated him for daring to sit on a sofa.

‘Ooh, coming up on the left,’ said Ellie.

Arthur, however, was already pointing out a slightly overweight woman with a sensible haircut who was trying to push her way back through the shop, managing to convey how furious she was at the standard lamp in her hand, and deliberately kicking out at trolleys.

‘Couples shouldn’t really talk about “going to Ikea”,’ said Arthur. ‘They shouldn’t even say, “Hey – let’s go to Ikea!” They should just say, “Hey – let’s have a fight!”’

‘Well, I think it’s rather sweet,’ said Siobhan. ‘I used to love it when Patrick and I came here.’

Everyone stood and stared at her. She shrugged. ‘You are all just immature.’

Two hours later in the lighting section, all jollity had gone. One man Ellie could see from her vantage point, hidden behind a desk unit, was actually crying.

Siobhan was marching Arthur round the bathroom cabinets for the fifteenth time.

‘For the fifteenth time,’ said Arthur, ‘it’s horrible. It’s all horrible, and this is it put up properly. You and Patrick make tons of money between you. Why don’t you just use some of the stuff you import?’

‘Because it’s made out of gold.’

‘Anyway, it’s only bathrooms,’ said Julia.

‘Yes, only somewhere where you spend the most intimate times of your life. With this rubbish.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Siobhan, getting red and hot and agitated. ‘Stop being such a poseur. It’s only some fucking bathroom shelves.’

‘Shit!’ said Julia. ‘I forgot Loxy’s shelving!’

She tried to turn the trolley around. They were completely trapped. Ellie groaned loudly as they backed up four hundred people around the shop; people who showed their horror at this transgression by muttering very loudly and immediately falling out with the person they were with.

‘Sorry!’ Julia was saying. It was suddenly about 200 degrees in the store.

‘Why don’t we just cut our losses?’ said Arthur. ‘Dump the trolley and run like hell.’

‘God, this place drives me crazy,’ yelled Ellie suddenly. ‘I think it’s some sinister rat/maze type experiment. Giant creatures are peering in through the corrugated roof, making notes on us.’

She looked at the crowds, backing up like panic-buyers at a petrol pump.

‘There’s no way back,’ she said suddenly, in horror, staring around her and breathing hard. ‘There is no way back. Don’t you see? Guys, don’t you SEE?’

They all looked at her.

‘We’re on a one way trek through Ikea. This is it. This is our lives. There’s no way back.’

‘Ehm … are you freaking out?’ said Arthur, as Julia manoeuvred herself out of position. Ellie was still fixed to the spot and staring straight ahead.

She thought about it. ‘Yes. YES I AM.’ And she stormed off against the flow of traffic, leaving a chorus of disgruntled middle class tutting in her wake.

Ellie sat in the car park, thinking furiously. That was it. She was getting off this track right now. The poster in her bedroom came back to her. All those dreams. All those teenage nights. For what? Andrew had disappeared. Emilio; Judd; Anthony. All gone. ‘I’m disappearing too,’ she thought to herself, sadly. ‘I’m getting older, and giving up and fading into the background. And if I don’t run away now, then I’ll run away to Plockton in twenty years and that really will be a disaster.’