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Tell Me Everything
Sarah Salway
Discover a novelist that Neil Gaiman describes as ‘an astonishingly smart writer’.When a chance meeting with a stranger leads to an offer of a room in exchange for telling her stories, Molly jumps at the chance.Slowly she builds a new, eccentric family around herself: Tim, her secretive boyfriend, who just might be a spy; Miranda, the lovelorn hairstylist; Liz, the lusty librarian; Mr. Roberts, landlord and listener; and his French wife, Mrs. Roberts.Much to Molly's surprise, she finds the stories she tells now are her key to creating a completely different life. Suddenly, her future is full of endless possibilities. The trouble is, Molly's not the only one telling tales. And the truth is always stranger than fiction.Sarah Salway's witty, finely-tuned and poignant story of many stories is a uniquely entrancing chronicle.
SARAH SALWAY
Tell Me Everything
Find yourself a cup of tea; the teapot is behind you. Now tell me about hundreds of things.
Saki
Contents
Cover (#u79a09dc9-e4aa-591a-ba74-210a40d26775)
Title Page (#uab4efa32-2d55-5d93-9326-ece681c07064)
Epigraph (#u5a27a2cd-6ade-5bd4-bd0e-7e45c282a474)
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Sarah Salway
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
You can tell me anything, she said.
And I believed her.
I only have your best interests at heart, my biology teacher told me. It’ll go no further unless I consider you at risk.
There are moments when you really can stop time. Make a decision to go one way, and not the other. There’s just a sense, a prickle on the skin, something impossible to describe, that tells you you’re at the crossroads. But it’s only when you’re too far along to change direction that you realise you ever had a choice.
So, lulled by the warmth in the biology lab and the novelty of an adult really listening to me, I spent the afternoon telling her stories. In the cosy web I wove there, I lost sense of where I began and she ended. We seemed to be in it together; my words pulling expressions out of her face that made me want to carry on, to take the two of us higher and higher up a ladder of emotions. I was filled with something outside myself. I didn’t have to think, to struggle and stumble in the middle of a sentence for a thought or a word, not even once. I was floating. It was only when we reached the top that I realised how exhausting it can be to empty yourself out.
When it was time to go home I stood in the doorway, not wanting to cross the threshold back into the outside world.
‘I can come here again, can’t I?’ I asked. ‘We can do this another time, can’t we?’
I was watching the tears falling down her cheeks. They looked like icicles dropping off her chin. It made me want to laugh, but I was proud too. Proud that I’d made her feel that much. On the wall behind her there was a poster of a dissected human heart. All the tubes coming from it were left dangling in mid air. Cut off with a bloodless straight line.
By the time I got home, she’d already spoken to the headmistress who had rung my mother, and nothing was ever quite the same again. Not even the blood that pumped through our bodies, not even the air we all breathed. Everything had become thick, hard to absorb. It iced up the inside of our throats until we longed for any kind of warmth, even the fiercest hottest words that burn you in hell. At least they would melt the silence.
That’s how I learnt the power of stories.
Chapter One (#ulink_f4558b1a-6ffe-51b1-9f9b-9ecf370122da)
‘How did you meet?’
People always ask you this when you become part of a couple. It’s throat-clearing, before they get to the really interesting stuff which normally involves what they think about things, or how they met their partners, or just anything about them really.
Miranda was different though. She was only about a year older than I was, but was already a hairdresser in the salon near to the stationery shop where I worked. We met in the street where we were both forced to smoke our cigarettes. We were furtive, trying to look as if we didn’t mind being outside. ‘We’re fag hags,’ I said to her when we got to know each other better, but she never found this as funny as I did.
‘You’d look lovely with your hair thinned,’ she said to me the first day, after we’d been shuffling round and nodding at each other from our respective doorways for a bit.
I stubbed my cigarette out quickly and went back inside. I hoped I had smiled at her too but I’ve been told that sometimes when I try too hard, or am taken by surprise, my attempts at a friendly expression come out as grimaces. Ones I can’t get rid of for a long time afterwards. My mouth gets so dry, it’s as if my face has frozen with all my teeth bared.
Her words stayed in my head though, and a bit later I nipped into the toilet to look in the mirror. I brushed the hair away from my face and practised being normal. I pinched the ends of my hair with my fingers to try to understand what she meant.
I tried to see myself as Miranda must have seen me.
Bright.
Interesting.
Someone else. Someone different.
And, let’s face it, that’s always an attraction.
After lunch, I made myself go out for my usual afternoon cigarette and hang around until Miranda appeared although I could see Mr Roberts gesturing from inside the shop. Although it was Mr Roberts’s shop and I’d only been working there for a week by that time, I already knew he didn’t like face-to-face customers. They might ask him something he didn’t know the answer to but, as he said, it was water off a duck’s back for me. Apparently he’d never known anyone who knew less than I did.
We were like those weather-house couples, Miranda and I, that afternoon. As soon as she popped out of her door, I went back into mine to put Mr Roberts out of his misery, but not before I managed to say, as casually as I could:
‘Do you really think so then?’
‘What?’
‘I should thin my hair?’
‘Definitely. Come in to the salon on Wednesday. It’s model night.’
After that first time, the Wednesday model night, turned out so disastrously, Miranda promised to work on my image a bit more gradually.
I had been worried she might give up on me when I lost my nerve in the middle of all those other women and ran out of the salon halfway through with the soapsuds still in my hair, so when she came up to me in the street the following morning and asked me for a light, I was going to explain about how it got too much hearing all those women’s voices, the words floating around me, clinging to me. I was even going to tell her about the biology teacher and what had happened but before I could say anything, she cut me off. She suggested that maybe the next time we should do it more privately. To take it easy. To change more slowly. As if it really could be that simple. As if there was nothing more to say.
So after that, I started going across the road to Miranda’s most nights after I finished work, and she’d put on a selection of sad echoey ballads. They filled up the empty salon and would make us feel all full up and weepy too. We’d smoke our cigarettes in that warm muggy atmosphere, spinning round on the seats and flicking our ash into the basins as the street darkened outside. There was a female smell in the air: the chemical tartness of hairspray, a garden of roses and lilies from the shampoos and underneath it, a dampness from the dying bouquets left just a day too long on the reception desk. While she leafed through magazines and read out horrific stories to me, I’d look in the mirror and try to see myself as Miranda did.
‘See her.’ She pointed out a photograph of an ordinary looking middle-aged woman smiling for the camera. ‘Attacked in broad daylight by a man with a sharpened broom handle who split her stomach from throat to bum, she was. Can’t do housework now. Says sweeping brings back nasty memories. There’s pictures of the scar too. Want to look?’
And in between murders and misery, she’d show me photographs of beautiful women she would say I was the spitting image of if only I would agree to let her transform me.
‘You’re stunning,’ she said. ‘I’d kill for your eyes.’
That was how we talked to each other, Miranda and I. As if we were practising for one of those Sunday afternoon black and white films mum always used to watch. ‘I’d die with joy if I could have your nose,’ I lied. ‘It’s like Doris Day. It’s sweet. If your nose was a person it would wear a frilly apron.’
‘Oh but your ears. They’d wear black berets with diamond studs on them. There’s something decidedly glamorous about your ears.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘And your cheeks. They’re the Kylie Minogue of cheeks. So, so, so. . .cheeky.’
