Monday 25th September
By Allie Nicholson / Spinebreakers Crew
Disaster has struck. It turns out that Hell’s View isn’t as secluded as Gecko and I thought.
Got a phone call from the Mermaid after breakfast this morning. At first I couldn’t make out what she was saying over all the sniffling. Plus I was still half asleep. She was saying something about her thinking we were an item, and how could she ever have trusted me. The porridge I’d just eaten turned to lead in my stomach when I realised she’d seen me and Amanda walk off together.
“I just don’t understand you, John.” she’d said. “I thought we had something special. I thought you said you’d wait for me.”
I just stood there like an idiot whilst she sobbed down the phone at me. I had no clue what to say. In the end she hung up.
The St Catherine girls have gone back already. I’m not sure I’d want to talk to Amanda about this anyway. I keep remembering her expression when the Mermaid came up and hugged me. I wouldn’t be entirely keen on having that glare directed at me again.
19:00 Lunch with The Guv. He noticed my morose expression straight off.
“Milton lad, you’re much too young to start despairing about the complexities of dealing with the fairer sex.” he said. “Leave that to the old cadges my age that have trodden the weary path of marriage.”
The Guv’s wife still hasn’t returned. We were eating hamburgers in front of the television and The Guv had already finished off the better part of a bottle of red wine.
“You’d do much better to enjoy your carefree days of adolescent non-commitment.” he said, waving a hand in the air. Unluckily it was the hand he was holding his glass with, and he managed to throw half of it at the wall. He didn’t seem to notice. “And besides. ‘Tis much better to have loved and lost, and then regained, and then lost again, and then become embroiled in a bitter divorce settlement with….”
He carried on in this vein for some time. I knew it was time to leave when he started comparing his wife to every Shakespeare villain ever written (even the male ones) and shouting “Frailty, thy name is woman!” at random intervals.
Haven’t told Gecko about the Mermaid’s phonecall yet. I fell in to bed and was dead to the world almost instantly. Even Vern’s excited retelling of the plotline of Oliver to his pencil case wasn’t enough to keep me awake.