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Don't You Forget About Me
Liz Tipping
‘Liz Tipping is a total hidden gem! Her writing is giddy, feel-good and totally entertaining. Don't You Forget About Me is a nostalgic, hilarious must-read. I loved it.’– Kirsty GreenwoodWhat if you could change the girl you were at school?Cara loves to lose herself in the magical world of films. But the Molly Ringwald classics she watches on repeat just keep reminding her of the high school regrets she can’t seem to shake.While stars on screen are immortalised in celluloid (or Blu-Ray, now that she thinks about it), Cara needs to take charge of her own destiny before life passes her by in a blur of John Hughes re-runs.Determined to right past wrongs at her high school reunion, will Cara finally achieve her Pretty in Pink moment? Or will the elusive happy ending she’s chasing have been right in front of her all along?Perfect for fans of Hannah Doyle and Anna Bell, Don’t You Forget About Me is a hilarious and heartwarming story of self-discovery and true love.
What if you could change the girl you were in school?
Cara loves to lose herself in the magical world of films. But the Molly Ringwald classics she watches on repeat just keep reminding her of the high school regrets she can’t seem to shake.
While stars on screen are immortalised in celluloid (or Blu-Ray, now that she thinks about it), Cara needs to take charge of her own destiny before life passes her by in a blur of John Hughes re-runs.
Determined to right past wrongs at her high school reunion, will Cara finally achieve her Pretty in Pink moment? Or will the elusive happy ending she’s chasing have been right in front of her all along?
Perfect for fans of Hannah Doyle and Anna Bell, Don’t You Forget About Me is a hilarious and heartwarming story of self-discovery and true love.
Also by Liz Tipping (#ulink_699f975e-efd1-5ba0-916f-bcf6566d09d5)
Five Go Glamping
Don’t You Forget About Me
Liz Tipping
Copyright (#uf0cdd95e-d476-5fc4-ae7d-9552a803a81f)
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2016
Copyright © 2016 Liz Tipping
Liz Tipping asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
E-book Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9781474049559
Version: 2018-02-15
LIZ TIPPING
writes romantic comedies. As well as reading and writing novels, Liz enjoys John Hughes films, science fiction box sets, reality television, Irish sausages and ginger beer. She lives in Birmingham with her husband and their beagle, Mary. You can say hello to Liz on twitter @LizTipping (http://twitter.com/@LizTipping) and facebook facebook.com/LizziesBooks/ (http://www.facebook.com/LizziesBooks/)
For Kirstie
Contents
Cover (#u9b1dbe2b-d655-5442-a145-d7dd503d1aac)
Blurb (#u778c3427-3420-5a8d-9a79-b0feedfe9d39)
Book List (#ulink_9203d159-b04e-5fad-b400-e7af951ce131)
Title Page (#uccc3b16f-dc04-52ec-8280-51483a1ae381)
Copyright (#uac7c3077-7f21-51a8-8129-290b42b5261f)
Author Bio (#u431d4d0e-09db-5bcf-85dc-a9b13de04ed4)
Dedication (#u4238de66-c8c9-580b-92a4-01f0dc3f63af)
Chapter One (#ulink_c932d437-a6e9-573d-9754-77ff1173ff99)
Chapter Two (#ulink_ad8c84c1-28b0-53c0-8d2e-903687256ff2)
Chapter Three (#ulink_b627494c-3227-5d87-a7e1-6f56a7270854)
Chapter Four (#ulink_67d95103-4477-5c39-a3fa-0f92ce249541)
Chapter Five (#ulink_4d97592d-bad5-501c-b7f8-f7328058d546)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Excerpt (#litres_trial_promo)
Endpages (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ulink_34eeebbd-3780-5644-8758-e3f58d13b946)
Saturday 14 May 2016
8.47 a.m.
The Battered Sausage Revelation
I assumed it was going to be another humdrum day in the shop, so you can’t imagine how thrilling it was for me for to find the battered sausage in the video rentals returns box.
I hoped we’d at least have one or two customers, something to keep me occupied and interrupt the troubling, monotonous thoughts in my head such as “What am I doing with my life?” and “How the hell did I end up back here?” and “Is it still okay to fancy Tom Cruise?”
I still checked the returns box every day even though it had been weeks since anyone had borrowed anything. No one really borrowed films any more, but sometimes there would be returned DVDs, which someone had borrowed months ago. Occasionally letters were delivered there by mistake or there was the odd bit of litter, but this was the first and only time I had found a battered sausage. It had been delivered in a polystyrene carton and fully wrapped in paper. I peeled back the layers and there it sat, sprinkled with salt over the now greying batter. It was a bit like opening a present and I could barely contain my excitement.
Olivia blew in from the street, pushing the door open with her backside while she wrestled with her umbrella.
“Look at this, Liv, a battered sausage. Fully wrapped. Jumbo sized. Isn’t it brilliant?” I said.
Liv inspected the tray. “Euw. You’re not going to eat it, are you? How gross.” She recoiled, her blond curls still bouncing even when she stopped. She frowned and her eyes narrowed so much and for so long that I wondered if her mascara had stuck together.
“No, I’m not going to eat it. It was in the returns bin. Where do you think it came from?” I said.
“Erm…the chip shop? Maybe?”
I nodded. “Well, yeah, obviously, I know that, but who would have posted it through the door?” I was sad that Liv wasn’t as excited as me.
Olivia shrugged, shook her brolly and headed to the kitchen leaving me alone to ponder the mystery with the cast of The Breakfast Club.
“Any thoughts on this one?” I said, addressing the giant cardboard promotional cut-out. I showed the battered sausage to Molly Ringwald.
“Stop talking to the Breakfast Club,” shouted Liv, over the boiling kettle.
“I’m not,” I mumbled, turning away from the cardboard cut-out, which had seen better days. I took the mystery fast food package to the bin on the other side of the shop. I paused at the Cocktail poster to see what Tom Cruise thought but before I could ask him, Liv was returning from the kitchen with our coffees. “And don’t even think about talking to Tom Cruise. We’ve talked about this.”
“Fine,” I said. Liv didn’t approve of me talking to the promotional posters. But now that we didn’t have any customers at all I found myself doing it more and more. This was the first week since I’d been back that we’d had absolutely no customers whatsoever. The only thing that had kept the shop going for as long as it had was no one seemed to pay any attention to our little Worcestershire town.
Cable television arrived here ten years after everywhere else so the shop had trundled along quite nicely. The only time anyone had ever heard of Broad Hampton was when a newspaper revealed we had officially the worst broadband in the country. The town wasn’t close enough to the city to be a suburb and not far enough away to be considered rural and had been pretty much overlooked by everyone for years. We kept the “worst broadband” label for a good few years, which meant no one was able to stream films so the shop kept its customers. But eventually, broadband arrived and the customers had been dwindling ever since. We hadn’t even had anyone buy anything out of the fifty-pence VHS bargain bucket recently, and as far as we could tell, no one had even stolen anything.
At nine o’clock, I turned the sign on the door around to open, and pulled the bargain basket outside onto the street. Looking around the Broad Hampton High Street, which hardly seemed to have changed at all in the last ten years or so, I again reminded myself this was only meant to be temporary.
“I think it’s okay to fancy him in Cocktail still, and maybe in Mission Impossible, but you can’t fancy him when he’s doing a red carpet or on Graham Norton or whatever. What I mean is, you can’t fancy actual Tom Cruise, but you can fancy the characters he plays,” said Liv when I came back in.
I nodded in agreement although I preferred Judd Nelson anyway. He was more my more type.
I took a long look at Judd as Liv settled herself at the desk with her laptop out, ready to stream whichever box set she was currently addicted to from Netflix. Liv said it was the best thing she’d ever watched and we should get the box set for the shop. I’d rolled my eyes at that and I could tell by the look Judd was giving me that he thought the same.
After a little bit of dusting to clear a few cobwebs from Molly Ringwald’s head and then tidying the already tidy covers and drinking more tea, it was almost ten a.m. Right on cue Weird Roger with the greasy hair and the shopping trolley showed up. He pushed open the front door of the shop and shouted “Have you got Free Willy 2?” like he did every day before making his hur hur hur sound. I was pretty sure he’d been doing that every day since the film came out – or at least as long as I’d been here, which apart from a gap of a few years where I attempted, and failed, to do something interesting, was a very long time.
At eleven a.m. the phone rang and Liv answered and said, “No. No such film.” She hung up. When I asked her what they wanted, she explained someone had asked for “Shaw Hawk’s Red Temptation” and said if they couldn’t even be bothered to find out what things were called, they didn’t deserve to watch films in the first place.
Neither me nor Liv could understand why the owner continued to keep the shop open. We thought it was because he had so many other small businesses he had perhaps forgotten it was there. We also speculated that it was some kind of “front”, but while he continued to pay our wages we decided it was best not to mention it to him, and if he wasn’t concerned that the shop wasn’t making any money, then neither should we be.
I slumped over the counter and pressed the side of my face against the cool surface.
“I’m fed up, Liv. We’re going to have to get other jobs. This can’t go on much longer.”
“I think we both will.” Liv shook her head.
“It is so boring in here. When I was in Cardiff—”
“Stop right there,” said Liv.
“What?” I lifted my head up from the counter.
“Is this another story about how when you worked at the hotel in Cardiff and everything was brilliant and much better than here?”
“No,” I said.
“You sure?” she asked sternly.
“Well, maybe.” I sighed. Obviously things didn’t go that spectacularly for me otherwise I wouldn’t have ended up back here, but I had loved simply not being here, where no one knew me and I could start again.
“Anyway,” said Liv. “It’s cool working here.”
“No, Liv, it is most definitely not cool, not cool at all. It might have been cool when I was a Saturday girl fifteen years ago; in fact, it may very well be the coolest thing I have done, but it is not cool being thirty and having a glorified Saturday job.”
I loved it here when I started. It was like working in Empire Records but with films instead of music. There were ten staff and the shop was busy all the time. It was the first place and the first time in my life I felt I could be myself, instead of trying to stay under the radar like I did at school. I loved it. The customers were excited to get the latest releases and I got to talk about films all the time. There’s a joyous moment when you talk about “that bit” in a particular film and the experience is shared, like you and the other person are sharing in the magical movie moment. But now it was about as glamorous as working in Open All Hours. It was depressing. How had all these years passed and I was still here?
“I miss it, Liv, how it was. I miss how people loved films.”
“People still love films, Cara.”
“I miss talking about them. I miss talking about the little moments of magic. The bits that make you go ‘ahh’ or the surprising bits, the twists that no one saw coming and the happy endings that everyone did see coming, but still loved them anyway.”
“People still talk about them. I’m talking about what I’m watching now.” Liv turned her laptop round to show me she was two-screening with her box set and Twitter.
“It’s not the same, Liv. When I first worked here people were so excited to come and get the latest releases, it was like handing them little parcels of magic.”
“You’ll have to look for another job, then.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I will. Again.”
