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‘Sex?’
I stared at the sugar bowl so he couldn’t how my red and hot my cheeks were. Sex wasn’t something you talked about in public, let alone so near a church.
‘Ah,’ he said, as if he’d discovered something from my silence. ‘So that’s it. And no one understands you, that’s the problem, is it?’
Silence.
‘Living at home?’
I twisted a strand of my hair so tightly round my finger the skin went white. It looked as if I was trying to slice the top off, to get down to the bone.
‘Stop doing that,’ he told me. ‘Where do you live then?’
‘Nowhere,’ I said. I held the wet tissues to my cheeks, the palm of my hand stuffed in my mouth so I wouldn’t cry.
Mr Roberts prodded my duffle bag with the tip of his foot. ‘Your mum chucked you out?’ he asked.
I looked at him and then nodded. My stomach had been hardening into a knot as I answered his questions. The strange thing was that Mr Roberts was drawing a picture of me that I rather liked. I felt I was in one of those documentaries on the television. The waif the television crew found on a street corner and whose story they shared to make the viewers feel half-guilty, half-grateful for what life had thrown at her, and not them.
I smiled bravely. I expected Mr Roberts to be kind to me now.
‘Can’t say I’m surprised if the only sentences you can manage to string together are about wheels and that crap,’ he said. ‘Or is she as bad as you? Is that where you caught it from? Psychobabble. Nothing worse.’
I opened my mouth to reply, but he put his hand up to hush me. ‘I can just imagine the set-up. Wind chimes, patchouli and no discipline. Yoga even.’ He spat the word out as if it were a bad taste he wanted rid of. ‘So where are you staying tonight?’
I started to get up. ‘Thank you for the tea,’ I said. Just because he was so rude, it didn’t mean I couldn’t remember my manners.
‘No, you don’t.’ He put his hand on my shoulder and pushed me back down. I looked round for the Church woman but now that I needed her she was busy sorting out the plastic teaspoons by size. It seemed to be taking every last bit of her concentration, although I noticed she was keeping in earshot. ‘You’re not quite what I thought but there’s something about you. Do you know how to keep quiet?’
I nodded.
‘Thought so. Had to learn, have you?’
I nodded again.
‘And how old are you?’ he asked.
‘Twenty-five,’ I lied.
He raised his eyebrows at me questioningly but I held my chin up.
‘I’ve a room above the shop you can kip down in temporarily if you want,’ he said. ‘Do you?’
I fiddled with the packet of sugar until he repeated himself, but louder.
‘Well, do you want it?’
Another nod. In my mind I was still the street-waif and this was just one more step along my journey, either down to degradation or back up with the clean shiny people. Only time would tell. I was a dandelion wisp twirled around in the wind of fate.
‘Although there are conditions,’ he continued.
I thought about how the girl in the television documentary would be used to conditions. I nodded again.
Chapter Five (#ulink_2deba5bc-3038-59fb-a0cf-df0ee21a44f1)
The room Mr Roberts offered me was bare and uncarpeted. There was already a mattress up there, and Mr Roberts came in the next day with a sleeping bag he said I could have. Although it still had the price tag on, he told me it was an old one he didn’t want any more. There was some relief in his pretence that he was doing nothing for me really. It meant I could slip into my new life quietly, without too much obligation to anyone.
I made myself a dressing table out of a few of the boxes of old stationery stored in the room, and piled the others against one wall so they acted as a makeshift shelf. I covered them with a piece of old blue curtain material I’d found in a skip in one of the roads being gentrified behind the High Street.
The same skip yielded a broken coat stand that I painted with paint returned from a stationery order that had apparently gone wrong. It wasn’t surprising an office didn’t want it, because it was bright pink. ‘Nice for a girl though,’ Mr Roberts said when he handed it over. Again, I wondered if he’d bought it especially for me.
A couple of rubber bands and a ball of string stopped the coat stand falling apart, and I used it instead of a wardrobe to hang up the few clothes I had. When I saw how successful this was, I painted the woodwork around the window pink, and then the door, the pretty fireplace that was left over from better times, and I even drew crooked pink stripes down one wall. The room felt a bit like a drunken beach-hut, but I liked it.
One of the first things Miranda did was to give me a cracked full-length mirror from the salon which I hung on the wall, hiding it behind a curtain of the same blue material as my dressing table so I didn’t have to look at myself the whole time. She also offered me some old hair and celebrity magazines, and I spent several evenings cutting out photographs of women I admired from them. I was careful to follow the lines of their hairstyles exactly as I knew this would matter to Miranda but the bodies I often sliced through, making them all even slimmer and more stick-like than they really were. These I plastered up on the wall, one on top of the other so when I lay in the mattress on the floor that acted as my bed, it felt as if they were all tumbling down on me.
In the middle of these perfect women, I slotted the one photograph of my mother that I’d brought with me. She stood out only slightly, and more because of the shininess of the photographic paper than a lack of beauty on her part. I felt proud of her up there with the beautiful people. There was something about the way she seemed to belong there that made me hope she got a second chance to do what she wanted now I wasn’t messing up her life any more. I hugged myself tightly whenever I had this thought because it always made me cry. I’d lie on my back and let my fingers rest on the outline of her hair sometimes, stroking it in the way I would have liked Miranda to do with mine but could never come out and ask for straight. In the photo, Mum had her arms out slightly as if she was calling for someone. It could have been anyone haring towards her, but I knew it was me she was beckoning.
I tacked the rest of the material up above the mattress so it hung down like a canopy keeping the world out.
No one came into the room but me, but I spent a lot of time there. I ate and slept and read and thought there. Washing took place in the hand-basin in the little loo downstairs that we used for the shop, so four times already I’d walked up to the local leisure centre and had a proper shower. By the time I met Tim, I hadn’t had a bath for nearly two weeks but I kept telling myself firmly that what you don’t have, you don’t miss. When I was younger, I used to spend so long in the bath my father always said my skin would crinkle up and fall off.
‘And then where would you be?’ he yelled once from the other side of the bathroom door.
‘Here,’ I shouted back. I was furious. Would he never leave me alone? ‘I’ll still be here.’
‘No one would want you,’ he said then. ‘Not without your covering. You’d be a mess of bloody insides. That’s all. Nothing to hold you all together. You certainly wouldn’t be my Molly.’
‘And what if that’s exactly what I don’t want to be?’ I’d asked then, from behind the safety of a locked door.
But he couldn’t have heard me. There was no reply.
Chapter Six (#ulink_36f787ea-d1cc-5d1c-9cf2-99e198980dde)
There were three boxes on the top shelf in the backroom of the stationery shop. On the second day I was there, Mr Roberts put up the ‘Closed’ sign and asked me to look for things that weren’t in these boxes while he held the ladder tight. And if, while I was up there, I wanted to tell him all the naughty things I’d been up to – a great big girl like you – then Mr Roberts wouldn’t mind.
No sir-ree, he wouldn’t mind at all.
So these were the conditions he’d mentioned. It took me some time to get the hang of this exchange of ‘information’. The first time, after he made it as clear as Mr Roberts ever would what he wanted me to do, I had to think hard of what I could tell him. It would be safer to stick to stuff about the girls at school, I decided, and the funny thing was I knew straight away what my first one should be. This was a story that shocked me so much it had felt like a physical blow when I first heard it. Telling Mr Roberts seemed like a good way to get it finally out of my mind.
So, standing on top of the ladder, I was almost eager as I recited word for word the story of how pretty, clever, popular Sylvia Collins got drunk on cider at a year eleven disco and four boys from the rugby team took her into the changing rooms and made her give them blow jobs, one by one, while the others looked on. And how after they’d finished with her, they took all her clothes and left her there, crying on the floor of the shower, while they went back to the disco to dance with the nice girls who were waiting for them.
‘Did they dance with you?’ Mr Roberts asked me.
‘I didn’t go to the disco. My dad never let me go to dances,’ I said, but I’d realised something else I hadn’t thought about before. That, even with all her potential, Sylvia was never seen back at school after the disco. I wondered if it was the nice girls who had made sure of that.
Mr Roberts let go of the ladder. ‘That’s enough for today, Molly,’ he said. ‘When we do this again maybe you could try to think of something of your own. And perhaps you could be, ah, a little more delicate.’ And he went to fiddle with the cash register in the shop while I clambered down gracelessly.
I thought I’d got it sussed the second time.
This was more my own story, even if I had been just a spectator. But that had been the whole point of it, I told Mr Roberts.
All the boys in school had fancied Christine Chambers. She had curly black hair and a snub nose. Her eyes were green, and although she wasn’t bright, she appeared to listen in class so she wasn’t told off as much as the others in her group. Strangely this only added to her allure, because she used her popularity with the teachers to lessen punishments for her friends.
Christine’s only obvious form of rebellion was a thin leather cord of brightly coloured beads she wore around her neck although no jewellery was allowed with the school uniform. With this necklace, she’d draw attention to herself in lessons, running her hands over the beads, pulling them this way and that, up to her lips. One day though, in history, she pulled so hard it broke and the beads spilled everywhere, noisily, over the wooden floor of the classroom, dancing this way, that way. Anxious for any diversion, we’d all thrown ourselves whooping on to the ground hunting for the runaway plastic jewels.
* * *
‘Even you?’ Mr Roberts asked. ‘Can someone of your size throw themselves anywhere? I’d have liked to have seen that.’ He cupped my calves with his open palms. ‘Potatoes,’ he groaned. ‘Big fat potatoes. All mashed up tight in your naughty nylons.’
I shifted on the ladder so he couldn’t hold on to me quite so tightly.
‘Well, I haven’t always been this exact shape but no, I wasn’t on the floor,’ I admitted. ‘That’s how I could watch what was going on.’
The only person – only other person, I corrected myself – who didn’t leave her chair was Christine. So I’d been on the right level to see how, with her classmates scrambling round her feet, she fixed her eyes on the history teacher and lingeringly, slowly, she licked her lips and laughed silently at him. He smiled back and he almost seemed not to be aware of how his fingers went up to his neck and traced a line where a necklace might be. He looked as if he might be cutting his throat. Then, still without breaking the spell between them, he put his index finger to his lips and half blew her a kiss, which he transformed into a sigh as he noticed me sitting there.
‘And that’s it then? That’s all that happened?’ Mr Roberts said after I’d been silent for a moment.
‘It was sex, the way they did it,’ I explained. ‘There must have been something going on between them.’
‘Maybe you were imagining it. I know all about a young lady’s imagination.’
‘Maybe. But I know what I saw.’
‘But it still wasn’t you, Molly. That is the whole point of these stories. I thought I explained all that.’
I felt my throat ice over, and Mr Roberts jumped to one side as I almost fell down the ladder then. I think I took him by surprise. Apart from the leg-holding and the occasional brush-past in the shop, he never touched me. I was grateful for that, but my attempts at storytelling were obviously disappointing to him. If I didn’t get on track soon, I was frightened he might start demanding satisfaction for my board and lodgings in other ways.
That night, up in my room, I emptied my purse out on to the floor and stacked up the few coins into piles I could count. I carefully smoothed out the one note and placed it to the side.
Mr Roberts wasn’t paying me a regular wage. Instead, he would keep the till open after a customer had been in and silently hand me a ten pound note when he felt like it. I’d slip it into my pocket without even a thank you and that would be that. He said that doing it any other way would only attract unnecessary attention and that I could trust him to see me all right.
By my bed I kept the book Mum had been reading the day I’d left home. I don’t know what made me steal it from her bedside table but on my third day at the stationery shop, I took a sharp craft knife from one of the displays and cut a hole carefully through the inside pages. I opened the cover now and checked the cash that I’d hidden was still safe. I raised the book to my face and flicked the pages so they brushed my cheek. Their cut edges felt like the flutter of wings, almost a kiss, against my skin.
And then after I put the coins back into my purse, I took the torch Mr Roberts had given me and went down to wash myself at the sink in the toilet. I hated turning on the bright strip lighting after the shop was shut, taking comfort in the almost secret existence I was leading. After I finished rinsing my hands in the sink exactly six times, I folded my flannel precisely, each corner matching. At least there were still some things I was in charge of.
It was only much later, when I couldn’t sleep, I gave in to the ache of needing to pinch myself, over and over, right at the top of my thighs, on the soft plump skin that no one would ever see. I wanted the comfort of the pain, so unbearable I didn’t have to think of anything else. At least until the next pinch.
Chapter Seven (#ulink_6ae88287-4b74-5c9d-8993-ae5aa4b4f0de)
I was sitting in the empty salon with Miranda one evening soon after, watching her straighten her hair as we listened to Bryan Ferry murdering the old ballads.
‘I’m after that shake your head look,’ she said as she twisted over uncomfortably to one side. I could see the muscle on her neck work its way through her flesh in protest. ‘When your hair looks as if it’s a piece of cardboard that goes from side to side, and people get out of the way in case you slice them in half.’
I nodded as if I understood. There was a useful trick I first learnt during those school counselling sessions. When people start talking about something they’re interested in but you’re not, you have to empty yourself of any attempt to enter into the dialogue and just let the language float around you. If you’re lucky some words stick, and what you do then is repeat them straight back. It doesn’t seem to matter what order they come out in. When the counsellor used to get on one of her explaining jags and I did this, she’d clap her hands and say we were finally getting somewhere.
‘So you’re just trying to look as if you can slice some cardboard,’ I said to Miranda, and she nodded as vigorously as she could with her hair trapped in the straighteners.
‘I’ll do it for you if you want,’ she said.
‘I’ve got a friend with this problem,’ I said, quickly changing the subject. ‘Someone wants her to tell him dirty stories, but she doesn’t know any. It’s not really her thing.’
‘And this someone is your friend’s boyfriend?’ she asked, her left eyebrow arching in the mirror as she steadied her head the better to look at me.
‘God no!’ I said but then corrected myself. ‘No, but it’s important my friend gets it right. It’s like a work thing, that’s all. It’s not kinky or anything.’
Miranda went back to stretching her hair, but I could tell she was thinking by the way her body had gone all alert. I squeezed little dollops of shampoo from the shelf onto my hand and inhaled them as I waited for her to speak.
Apple. Rosemary and pine. Honey. I stopped trying to make my skin absorb the liquid, just kept adding more and more on to the surface until my fingertips were swimming in oily goo. Then I went to get a clean towel from one of the piles in the back room to wipe it all off.
‘We had this English teacher at school,’ Miranda said when I came back. ‘What he always said when we were writing stories was that it didn’t matter if the facts were true or not, but whether we believed in them. For lots of reasons, it’s something I’ve remembered.’
She paused then and I thought about what she’d just said. ‘So you can make something true just by believing it?’ I asked. ‘What if you believe in a lie? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘I know,’ Miranda sighed. ‘But the way he explained it was that not everything’s black and white. He used to ask us if we’d ever been nervous about waiting for something and how five minutes could seem like hours.’
I nodded.
‘Well, what he said was that if you were trying to tell someone about it, you were better to say you had to wait five hours because that gave a more truer picture of what it felt like, even though it wasn’t true.’
‘And that’s not bad?’ The skin all over my body felt as if it was being charged by several hundred electric shocks. I willed Miranda to continue and after a few seconds – seconds that felt like hours – she did.
Miranda shook her head. ‘In real life, it can be very bad,’ she said. ‘It can even ruin lives. But these are just stories we’re talking about, aren’t they?’
I stared at her. I couldn’t speak.
Miranda clicked her tongue against the top of her mouth hard. ‘Molly,’ she said. I guessed she meant to be kind, even encourage me to say something more, but it took me out of the trance I was in danger of falling into. My cheeks were red from the heat in the salon and I could feel a flush coming up my neck. It was exactly as it had been in the school room.
‘It was only something a friend told me,’ I interrupted her before she could say anything else. ‘What you’re talking about reminded me of her.’ I was willing myself not to cry. Next to me Miranda was holding the hairbrush at chin level, her mouth open. She looked as if she was about to sing into a microphone but no sound came out.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I lied, shaking my head. ‘It happened a long time ago and I think my friend’s left home now. I was just wondering about stories and stuff.’
‘And she’s OK?’ Miranda turned her back on me.
No, I wanted to shout, but Miranda was back fiddling with her hair and besides I wasn’t sure if I could trust the words any more. We were quiet then until she finished. I sang along with Bryan about how horrible it was to be jealous under my breath but I was finding it difficult to breathe. Was it safe to really leave the story there?
‘So what do you think?’ At last Miranda put down the straighteners and let her flattened hair swing from side to side.
‘Everyone’s going to get out of your way,’ I said and then we laughed and it all seemed so normal that I let out a deep sigh which made Miranda smile again.
‘Time to go now.’ She bustled round the salon turning off lights and putting the equipment and brushes away. She switched off the music system and waited at the door for me to leave first so she could set the alarm. We kissed each other goodbye in the street. One cheek, two cheek, we hesitated over three before leaving it. ‘I’ll do your hair next time,’ Miranda said. ‘It’ll look just darling.’ But then instead of clitter-clattering down the street on those silly high heels she wore that made her look like an elephant on stilts, she held on to my arm tightly.
‘Tell your friend to find a whole lot of made-up stories from somewhere else and pretend they happened to her,’ she said. ‘That way no one gets hurt.’
‘Maybe.’ I wanted to believe Miranda.
‘I’ve got shelf-loads of love stories you can borrow if you want. It’s all in there.’
‘I didn’t know you were a reader.’
