Mates, Dates and Tempting Trouble Read online

  Cathy Hopkins is the author of the incredibly successful Mates, Dates and Truth, Dare books, and has started a fabulous new series called Cinnamon Girl. She lives in North London with her husband and three cats, Molly, Emmylou and Otis.

  Cathy spends most of her time locked in a shed at the bottom of the garden pretending to write books but is actually in there listening to music, hippie dancing and talking to her friends on e-mail.

  Occasionally she is joined by Molly, the cat who thinks she is a copy-editor and likes to walk all over the keyboard rewriting and deleting any words she doesn’t like.

  Emmylou and Otis are new to the household. So far they are as insane as the older one. Their favourite game is to run from one side of the house to the other as fast as possible, then see if they can fly if they leap high enough off the furniture. This usually happens at three o’clock in the morning and they land on anyone who happens to be asleep at the time.

  Apart from that, Cathy has joined the gym and spends more time than is good for her making up excuses as to why she hasn’t got time to go.

  Thanks as always to Brenda Gardner,Yasemin Uçar and the ever fab team at Piccadilly Press.To Rosemary Bromley at Juvenelia. And to Steve Lovering for all his help, input and for trekking round all the locations in the book with me.

  First published in Great Britain in 2004

  by Piccadilly Press Ltd.,

  5 Castle Road, London NW1 8PR

  www.piccadillypress.co.uk

  This edition published 2007

  Text copyright © Cathy Hopkins, 2004, 2007

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  The right of Cathy Hopkins to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978 1 85340 934 9 (trade paperback)

  eISBN: 978 1 84812 260 4

  3 5 7 10 8 6 4 2

  Prined in the UK by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon, CR0 4TD

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 1

  ‘You go on in, TJ,’ said Lucy looking up at Kenwood House. ‘I’ll walk the dogs.’

  I burst out laughing. Lucy’s tiny not even five foot, more like the dogs would walk her than the other way around. ‘Yeah right,’ I said. ‘I can see the headlines now. Have you seen this girl? Blonde. Small . . .’

  ‘Petite,’ interrupted Lucy.

  ‘Sorry right, petite. Last sighted, Hampstead Heath being dragged off by three wild animals.’

  Izzie, Lucy, Nesta and I were standing shivering outside the entrance to Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath on Saturday morning. We had Ben, Jerry and Mojo with us. Ben and Jerry are the Labradors who belong to Lucy’s family and Mojo is my dog (breed, er . . . somewhat mixed but he’s very cute, black with a white patch over one eye and he’s my best friend, apart from Hannah, Lucy, Izzie and Nesta that is).

  ‘Yeah,’ said Nesta, pushing stray dark hairs back into the woolly hat that she had pulled down over her ears. ‘Isn’t the saying supposed to go, mad dogs and English men go out in the midday sun? Not the November rain. What are we doing out here anyway when we could be in the café like sensible people, hogging the radiators and drinking big mugs of hot chocolate?’

  ‘If you’re cold, you go in and have a look around with TJ,’ said Izzie. ‘I’ll stay with you, Lucy. I’ve been in. It’s dead boring. Dark old rooms filled with paintings of people with glum, ugly faces staring down at you. They look like they’ve got plums in their mouths and pokers up their bums.’

  ‘I’ve been in too,’ I said. ‘Many times. And those boring paintings, some of them are by Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Reynolds, there’s even a Turner. I think it’s a fabulous old building.’

  Izzie looked at the white house and pulled a face. ‘Looks like an enormous wedding cake in my opinion. Not my style at all.’

  ‘It’s neoclassical,’ I said.

  Nesta looked at me with amazement. ‘God! How do you know this stuff?’ she asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ I said, shrugging. ‘Read it somewhere, I guess.’

  ‘Well, you must read a lot,’ said Nesta. ‘You always seem to know about everything. Brains and beauty. It’s not fair.’

  ‘I am not beautiful.’

  ‘Yes you are,’ said Lucy. ‘Remember when that journalist Sam Denham visited our school when we were in Year Nine and he called you Lara Croft? Not many people can claim to look like Angelina Joke. Your trouble is that you have no confidence about your looks.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Nesta, ‘you could be one of those girls in the movies who wears specs, no make-up and has her hair tied back and works in a science lab or something. Then she meets the hero, lets her hair down, takes off her glasses and reveals that actually she’s a total babe.’

  ‘And the hero falls in love with her saying, oh but Miss Watts! You are beeeooodiful,’ said Izzie, laughing.

  ‘Stop it,’ I said. I was getting embarrassed though it was cool to be compared to Angelina Jolie.

  ‘It is awesome though,’ said Lucy. ‘As Nesta said, you do seem to know about all sorts of stuff the rest of us don’t.’

  ‘Only what I find interesting. I mean, don’t you think it’s amazing that there are paintings by all these famous artists right on our doorstep? Like, ten minutes away from where we live. Some people pay fortunes to go to Venice, Amsterdam, Florence and Paris to look at the great masters and we only have to pop down the road. Don’t you think that’s brilliant?’

  Izzie gave me a blank look. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘There’s one called The Guitar Player by Vermeer. I’d have thought you’d have loved that, Izzie, seeing as you’re into music. She’s got such a look of delight on her face. It’s not like so many other paintings of the period where, you’re right, the expressions are glum. It’s like she was the first of many teenagers to get a guitar and you see how it never changes through time. Even back then they were . . .’

  ‘Whatever. So she’s got her guitar? I bet she’s still dead ugly. All those people in old paintings are,’ said Izzie with a playful squeeze of my arm. ‘I went in there years ago with Mum. Not an experience I care to repeat. Nah. Looking round stuffy old houses isn’t my thing at all.’

  ‘I love looking around old places,’ I said. ‘The sense of history, imagining how it was in days gone by, who lived there, what they wore . . .’

  ‘You’re weird, TJ Watts,’ said Izzie.

  I pulled my best weird face (cross-eyed with a squiffy mouth). ‘But don’t forget it’s also famous as a location in the movies. You have to admit that’s pretty cool.’

  ‘What movies?’ asked Nesta.

  ‘Mansfield Park. Some of that was filmed here and . . . and, it’s in Notting Hill as well. Remember near the end when Hugh Grant goes to visit Julia Roberts’ character when she’s starring in a historical drama. That scene was filmed here. You can see the house in the background.’


  ‘Still a stuffy old place,’ said Izzie. ‘But whatever turns you on.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Oh such philistines as friends. I don’t know if I can bear it.’

  ‘Well, at least you don’t have to hang out with a brainbox like we do,’ groaned Izzie.

  ‘Neanderthal,’ I said.

  ‘Swot box.’

  ‘Airhead.’

  ‘Clever clogs.’

  ‘Ignoramus.’

  ‘Wombat.’

  ‘Wombat?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Izzie with a wide grin. ‘Neoclassical wombat.’

  This time Lucy rolled her eyes. ‘For heaven’s sake. I’m freezing. When you two have finished slagging each other off, do you think you could possibly make your mutually mad minds up what you’re going to do?’

  ‘And actually, if anyone’s an airhead or whatever, it’s me,’ said Nesta. ‘Izzie, you’re as much of a bookworm as TJ and don’t pretend otherwise. I’ll go inside and look with you, TJ. Part of my education programme.’

  Nesta recently went through this phase when she was worried that we all thought that she was shallow. Then she started going out with a boy called Luke and got paranoid that he might think she wasn’t very bright. As if. She’s really clever, just not into reading much if she doesn’t have to. She’s the original good-time girl. Good times to her being boys and, well . . . more boys. A few weeks ago though, she declared that she’s going to learn about ‘everything.’ I wouldn’t care if I had her looks. Even with her brace in she still looks fantastic and boys would fall at her feet whatever her IQ.

  I looked around at my friends. Lucy’s teeth were chattering. Izzie had a red nose from the cold, her dark hair was hanging in wet strands round her face and her head-to-toe black outfit made her look more Goth-like than ever. Only Nesta didn’t look like an iceberg, but maybe that’s because being half-Jamaican, half-Italian, her fudge-coloured skin doesn’t fade to lily white like the rest of ours in the English winter.

  As Nesta and I went inside the house, Lucy and Izzie were hauled off by the dogs in the direction of the café. Once we got in, however, Nesta spotted the room to the right of the entrance hall.

  ‘Just a quick look,’ she said, as she made a beeline for the gift shop where she spent fifteen minutes smelling all the bath gels on sale and then trying all the lip balms. She finally settled for a cherry-flavoured one.

  ‘We don’t need to go round the house,’ she said, as she gave the lady at the counter her money. ‘There are loads of books here that tell you all about the place and have photos of the rooms. We can have a quick flick through and we’ll have seen all that there is here easy-peasy and without having to trudge round.’

  I give up, I thought. I like to go from room to room and sit and look at the paintings and soak up the atmosphere. Not much chance of that with Nesta, I don’t think.

  ‘OK, quick flick through the books then we’ll join the others,’ I agreed.

  ‘Cool,’ said Nesta.

  It was then she spotted the guest book and began to write in it. I went to sign my name after hers and saw what she had written.

  ‘Queen Victoria was ’ere with her husband. We woz not amused.’

  If you can’t beat them, join them, I thought as I wrote, ‘Kenwood rocks, signed Mick Jagger’ underneath Nesta’s writing.

  Kenwood House: an eighteenth century neoclassical villa on Hampstead Heath, North London.

  The art collection features work by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Turner, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Van Dyck and Frans Hals.

  Movies in which it was used as a location include Mansfield Park and Notting Hill.

  Chapter 2

  Hampstead Heath is dog heaven. Miles and miles of grounds and woodland for them to run about in while their owners collapse on benches and watch them work off their boundless energy. The rain had stopped, so we let Ben, Jerry and Mojo off their leads and away they were, tails wagging, tongues out, grinning all over their faces as they greeted other dogs. And their owners.

  ‘Pretend they’re not with us,’ said Lucy, as Ben enthusiastically sniffed the bottom of a rather surprised looking poodle.

  As we sat overlooking the hill rolling down to the lake at the bottom of the field, our conversation soon turned to one of our favourite subjects. Boys. Although we all have different interests, Izzie into all her New Age stuff, Lucy into fashion, Nesta into acting and me into books and writing, we have one thing in common: the subject of boys and relationships.

  ‘Luke’s taking me to see some weird arty film tonight,’ said Nesta. ‘Seven Samurai, I think it’s called. Supposed to be a classic.’

  ‘It is. You’ll love it,’ I said. ‘It was remade later into The Magnificent Seven, you know, the cowboy film.’

  Nesta stared at me in amazement. ‘See. There you go again. Something else you seem to know all about and I’ve never heard off. And seeing as my dad’s a film director, if anyone should know about movies, it’s me. You’re awesome, TJ. How come you know this stuff?’

  I shrugged. ‘My brother Paul went through a phase when he was into all those old films. He never stopped talking about them. But I don’t know loads of stuff. Honest. I’m not a Norma Know It All or anything.’

  Lucy put her hand on my arm. ‘We don’t think you are,’ she said.

  ‘No, just a . . .’ started Izzie.

  ‘Neoclassical wombat,’ Lucy finished for her.

  ‘But hey, TJ,’ said Nesta. ‘You shouldn’t try and hide that you know loads or apologise about it. I’d be proud of it if I were you.’

  I grinned sheepishly. I’ve only been hanging around with Nesta, Izzie and Lucy since June. They adopted me after my best friend, Hannah, went to live in South Africa leaving me here on my own. They’ve been great mates and I really want to stay in with them. I don’t want to make them feel like I’m showing off or anything, like trying to prove that I know more than them. I’ve got an uncle like that. Whenever anyone mentions any subject, politics, religion, books, whatever, he has to let everyone know that he’s better informed than the rest of us, usually by giving us a ten-minute lecture. He’s really boring, like his opinion is the only one that matters and the rest of us should be honoured that he takes the time to fill us in.

  ‘So when’s your sister getting married, TJ?’ asked Lucy.

  ‘Christmas Eve,’ I replied.

  ‘That’s so romantic’

  ‘Nah. It’s the only night Marie can get off from the hospital where she works,’ I said.

  ‘I’d love to design a winter wedding gown,’ continued Lucy. ‘I’ve always envisaged a white velvet one with a long cloak.’ Lucy wants to design clothes when she leaves school. She has a great eye for fashion and has made some fab outfits. Shame she’s not making my sister Marie’s dress. Marie isn’t romantic at all. She’s totally disinterested and hasn’t even been for a dress fitting yet.

  ‘Oh, I’ll just dash out and buy any old thing nearer the day,’ she said last time she was up from Devon, where she’s started a new job so that she could be near her fiancé, Stuart. ‘I’m so not into having a white wedding. What’s the point of forking out a fortune for some bit of fabric that you’re only going to wear on one day.’

  ‘You will not dash out and buy any old thing,’ said Mum. ‘It’s your big day and you’re going to look fabulous whether you like it or not.’

  I laughed at the time and wondered whose big day it was really going to be, Mum’s or Marie’s. Either way, we’re all going down south next weekend to, as Mum put it, ‘talk wedding dresses’.

  ‘Are they still arguing over whether to do it in a church or registry office?’ asked Izzie.

  I grimaced. Discussions had been going on for weeks now. ‘Yeah, and still nothing’s been decided. Marie favours a registry office, but she has got some place she wants to show us for the reception. Mum and Dad want her to do it in a church. And Paul thinks she should never have told anyone about it and flown off to Hawaii in secret to get married on a
beach, barefoot under the stars with some ageing hippie type conducting a service that they’d written themselves.’

  ‘That sounds fab,’ said Izzie. ‘Your brother has the right idea.’

  ‘I read about a couple that got married at the bottom of the sea, in scuba-diving outfits,’ said Nesta.

  ‘Did they have a dolphin doing the service instead of the priest?’ I asked.

  ‘Or a whale?’ asked Lucy. ‘Then they could have sent invites saying – have a whale of a time at our wedding.’

  ‘Keep taking the tablets, Lucy,’ said Izzie.

  ‘You can do anything you want these days,’ said Nesta. ‘Get married bungee jumping if you like.’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I think taking the leap to get married would be scary enough, never mind having to jump off a bridge into the bargain. Anyway, we’re going down to discuss it all next weekend.’

  ‘It is a big commitment,’ said Nesta. ‘I mean, saying “I do” to one person for the rest of your life. Like, how exactly do you know if he’s The One?’

  ‘Or number thirty-one?’ said Izzie. ‘In your case, with the way you go through boys, that’s probably the number you’ll be on by the time you get to Marie’s age. Twenty-six isn’t she, TJ?’

  I nodded.

  Nesta pinched Izzie’s arm. ‘Cheek. I haven’t had many boyfriends.’

  ‘More than the rest of us,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Not serious ones,’ said Nesta. ‘Not like Luke.’

  ‘What about Simon?’ said Izzie.

  ‘Simon was OK, but it’s different with Luke. We’re really in love.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ asked Izzie. ‘How do you know when it’s really love? I mean, do you want to marry him?’

  ‘Give me a break,’ said Nesta, laughing. ‘I’m only fifteen. And you don’t want to marry everyone you love.’

  ‘In some cultures, girls marry or choose a partner when they’re twelve . . .’ I started, then immediately regretted it.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right, in some cultures some girls get paired off really young,’ said Nesta.