Tell Me Everything

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‘Did you?’

‘Wouldn’t have been worth the risk of my father catching me. Instead I begged this biology teacher to let me stay inside. I said I was frightened about being bullied, and to my surprise she believed me. She let me stay in the detention room and while the other students were getting on with the punishments they’d been set, I’d sit there staring into space. The funny thing was that it got me the reputation for being a real hard case because all the other kids thought I wasn’t bothering to do the extra work. I didn’t mind. It just meant people left me even more alone.’

‘And that’s where you met Leanne?’

‘Yep. She was often there too. We never really talked but one day as she was leaving, she slipped something onto my desk. I was about to call out after her when I looked at it. It was a lipstick in a shiny silver case. When I opened it up I could see it was bright red.

‘Of course when I got home, I couldn’t resist trying the lipstick on in front of the mirror. It made me look older, harder, the kind of girl who wouldn’t be bothered what her father thought. I pulled a chair over to the window and stared at the people passing by in the street, hoping they would look up at me and see this mysterious, beautiful woman and wonder about me. I can’t have been more than about fourteen.’

I could tell by the trembling of the ladder that Mr Roberts was laughing below.

‘Anyway I was so wrapped up in this daydream that I didn’t hear my father’s footsteps outside the room. He stormed in, almost pulling the door handle off he was so angry.

‘“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he yelled. “I come home tired from work, take one look up at my own house and what do I see but you sitting there half-dressed like a prostitute in Amsterdam. Clean that muck off your face straight away.”’

‘Were you half-dressed?’ Mr Roberts asked.

I’d been wearing my school uniform. My hair was tied up tightly in two plaits. I didn’t even know at that time what a prostitute in Amsterdam looked like. I had to research it in the encyclopaedia at the school library.

‘Molly, were you half-dressed?’ Mr Roberts’s voice jolted me back to the present.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’d stripped down to my undies. I was leaning forward so the men passing by could see all of me. Every so often I’d lift my leg and pretend to scratch it so I could stretch it out again, give them a better look. There were about five men standing outside the window watching me. I liked it. I liked them watching me. I put on a show. I promised them that I’d be there the next day too.’

Mr Roberts tut-tutted with delight.

‘I think I’ve finished up here now,’ I said, shoving one of the boxes to the side. I pulled my skirt tight around my knees as I climbed down, smoothing it straight with my palms when I reached the safety of the shop floor.

Chapter Eleven (#ulink_ad77b0ea-ddd9-5b84-aebb-1d3586010483)

‘Tim,’ I said, hours later as we sat entwined on the park bench. ‘Why do we never talk?’

‘Hmmm. . . ?’ His foot stopped tapping on the grass. He lifted his chin up so he could look at me. ‘We’re always talking,’ he said.

‘We’re not. I don’t mind. I just wonder if we should do a bit more sometimes. Maybe we could go to the pub or something.’

‘Come with me.’ He stood up and held out his hand to help me up. I started to walk automatically towards the centre of the park where the paths were brightly lit and clearly marked, but Tim had other ideas. ‘Not that way!’ he said.

Instead he took me into the bushes that edged the park, holding down branches for me to climb over, catching prickly twigs so they didn’t tear my clothes. I followed him, complaining.

‘Shhhh.’ He put a finger over my lips. We were standing against a house wall that backed on to the park. ‘Put your ear to the wall. Can you hear anything?’

I shook my head.

Tim frowned. ‘Come this way,’ he said. I followed Tim again round to one of the cul-de-sacs running off the park. ‘Stare in the window as you walk past. Not too obviously, but take a close look.’

A woman was sitting on the sofa talking on the telephone. She was twisting a lock of hair round and round a finger, laughing and speaking into the receiver.

‘And now come back and listen properly,’ he whispered and I made my way back. ‘Put your head really tight against the wall.’

I still couldn’t hear anything but the bricks felt warmer against my cheek. I nodded at Tim, pretending it was working and he looked pleased.

‘I listen to her a lot,’ he said. ‘She’s one of my favourites. I call her the happy woman. But they’re everywhere, Molly. Think about it. You don’t even have to go against the wall once you become expert. People speak into the phone and someone miles away hears their voice, but what they don’t realise is the hundreds of other people those noise waves have to go through in order to get to the right one. All those other words they’ve picked up on the way. That’s why we’re always talking. You just have to train yourself to listen.’

It made sense. That was the stupid thing. What Tim had just said made perfect sense. Before I followed him back, I put my ear back against the wall. I could swear I heard a giggle and then a series of random words – horse, field, bikini – prickling through my skin. It was as if I was joining in the conversation, a dowsing wand between both speaker and listener.

Tim and I fought our way back through the undergrowth in silence until we reached the bench. And then as I was about to say something about his theory or just say anything because I wanted it to be only our words we heard between us, he kissed me.

The next night in Miranda’s hair salon, Edith Piaf seemed to be the only person regretting nothing as Miranda cursed under her breath. She was struggling to perfect her back-combing technique on my hair and things weren’t going well. She’d already snapped at me for eating Smarties while she worked.

‘Your hair’s too thin,’ she complained. ‘I don’t think this is going to work. It’s not falling out, is it? I’m sure it was thicker than this last time.’

She kept peering across my shoulder at the magazine clipping she’d Sellotaped on the salon mirror. It was of a woman walking along a beach with two small dogs yapping at her heels.

‘You can’t even see what her hair looks like,’ I pointed out. ‘And why is it my fault anyway?’

‘It’s the general spirit I’m after,’ she said. ‘All that just got out of bed stuff and hungry eyes they’re always going on about.’ She brushed my hair in angry up and down movements until I could swear it was starting to crackle under the strain.

I looked at my reflection, more unkempt witch than tousled pillow, before putting my fingers up to trace the outline of my lips. They seemed fuller somehow. Redder. A great big sign of how often I was being kissed. Tim and I still hadn’t gone further although I kept my eyes shut often now, as he preferred, and leant against him more with my whole weight, hoping he’d take the hint that I wouldn’t really mind if he wanted to do a bit more. I closed my eyes now, feeling a tremor run through me.

‘Now what’s wrong with you?’

I jolted up as Miranda prodded me painfully on my shoulder.

‘You’re looking a bit peewally, if you don’t mind me saying,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to walk you home?’

‘No.’ I’d managed to keep Miranda out of my room so far, just giving her the general impression that I was in some kind of flat, with bathroom and mini-kitchen. I didn’t want any horror she might feel at my lack of home comforts to spoil my satisfaction at this life I was carving out for myself. I tried to change the subject. ‘So who is this woman you’re torturing me into looking like anyway?’

‘Oh Molly, you’re not telling me you don’t know who this is?’

I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw Miranda’s expression. She was genuinely shocked.

‘Now that’s only Brigitte Bardot,’she said.‘The original sex goddess.’

‘Her?’ I peeled the photograph of the mirror so I could look at it closer. ‘She’s a bit old.’

‘Well she is now, silly. The life she’s led though, it makes your heart bleed. I’ll tell you the whole story one day. And of course she’s gone all animal mad as those sort of women always do when they lose their looks. But she was beautiful once.’

‘And French?’ I was getting to know Miranda.

‘Of course.’ Miranda smiled at me in the mirror. ‘I’ve got better photographs of her at home, walking along in St Tropez, barefoot, all these men staring at her.’

‘I’ve heard of Saint Wotzername,’ I said. I picked out a red Smartie from the tube and started rubbing it round my lips, smacking them together in the mirror to see the colour.

‘St Tropez,’ Miranda purred. ‘That could be us, Molly. Strolling hand in hand with dark Frenchmen before we take champagne on one of the yachts there. They’d buy us pearls to wind round our necks, diamonds for our fingers. Tiaras even. They’d feed us with their fingers, the tastiest piece of lobster, an oyster straight from the shell.’

‘I get a bit seasick on water,’ I warned. ‘My tiara would probably drop off as I was vomiting over the edge of the yacht.’

‘We’d go to nightclubs until morning, dancing and drinking cocktails.’ Miranda ignored me. ‘Walk home in our glittery evening dresses, smiling at all the ordinary people we passed as they rush off to work. Just imagine.’

‘And who exactly would pay for all our dresses?’

But when Miranda didn’t answer and I looked at her reflection, I saw it was her turn to shut her eyes and feel that tremor. She was even leaning against the chair with her whole weight, her head softly falling to one side. The only clue that she was still alive was the way her lips moved to mime along with the French words coming from the CD player. I picked the photograph up from the counter and turned it over and over in my hands, waiting for Miranda to come back down to earth and finish the hairdo.

Chapter Twelve (#ulink_f0c2d7d2-0bd5-522a-92e0-5c532a8c10c4)

It was partly because of that heavy-eyed look of Miranda’s and the fact that Tim hadn’t been in the park for a few days that I went looking in the library for some of the love stories Miranda had told me about. I wasn’t expecting much.

Certainly not to fall in love myself. Not in the library anyway. But there she was – my first proper crush on a French woman – nestling between Jonathan Coe and a misplaced George Eliot. I’d just been running my fingers over the spines of the books hoping for one to jump out at me. It was the single name that attracted me first. That, and the old-fashioned orange colour of her book. I pulled it out and turned to the back, as I usually did, to have a look at the writer’s photograph before I decided to bother with the story.

Colette had a long, varied and active life.

It was looking good.

At the age of twenty she had plunged herself into a different world. . .

Love at first read. By sheer luck, I’d picked on someone who understood the advantages of reinvention. Maybe I could even learn something from her.

‘Feathery near-pornography,’ read the quote on the back of the book. Perfect. It might be perfect for stories for Mr Roberts too. I took it straight to the desk and joined the queue. The man in front of me wanted to know where he could obtain proper back-copies of the Daily Telegraph. He twiddled his moustache as he shouted how he didn’t want to have to read them on microfiche, the stories weren’t the same on computer.

‘But they’re exactly the same words,’ said the librarian patiently, but the man hee-hawed in her face.

‘If God meant us to use computers, He’d have given us television aerials on the top of our heads. This is a library. For the written word. For which our God gave us eyes, ’ he said, looking for all the world as if he’d scored not just one point over her, but won the whole war.

She stared at him so fiercely though, he backed away.

‘In my day, sentences were meant to be treasured,’ he said in a weak parting shot. ‘Not computered out of all existence. And I would expect you of all people to understand that!’

The librarian merely looked past him to smile at me, but I was torn. Instinct and training meant I wanted to be the good girl for her because she was Authority, but I hated computers too. I compromised by trying to look as if I hadn’t heard anything.

‘Ooh Colette,’ she purred as she stamped my book. ‘How nice. And how unusual to see someone young enjoying a forgotten writer. Have you read her biography?’

I shook my head.

‘It’s super,’ she said. ‘You really must, but then again maybe it’s only when you get to my age that you prefer real life over fiction.’

As I left the library, the Daily Telegraph man was standing there, looking at the notice board in the entrance hall.

‘I liked what you said about having an aerial in your head,’ I said, but I must have been too quiet because he didn’t seem to hear me, just kept staring up at the mixture of handwritten cards and brightly coloured posters.

‘Goodbye then,’ I said, pausing a minute but he didn’t as much as turn round. I pinched myself hard on the thigh as I walked home clutching the book with my other hand so it wouldn’t fly away with all its feathery near-pornography.

I did exist. Pinch, pinch. I did exist.

Chapter Thirteen (#ulink_8b3adb9b-2e0c-599c-a509-3e63f041fe95)

Tim and I spent the evening pushing each other on the swings.

‘Did you have a happy childhood?’ I asked.

‘It was OK.’ It was my turn to push him. He had his head back so he was looking straight up at the sky. He was moving too quickly now for me to get hold of him properly so I just stood there behind him, watching his face loom in and out of sight. ‘You’re an upside down Molly,’ he laughed, finally slowing down.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me?’ I said, sitting down on the next swing. I tried to wind the ropes together so we were entwined, but they kept springing loose.

‘If you want me to.’

I thought about this. Tim was swinging faster again, pushing his legs up and down to speed himself up, so I started swinging myself.

‘I’m flying,’ I shouted, and then for several wonderful moments Tim and I were swinging in perfect synchronicity. I pushed my head right back, letting my hair fall down and watched the stars. It was as if they were all shooting in different directions.

Later as we walked back to the bench, Tim put his hand out to stroke my hair. ‘Beautiful,’ he said.

‘You need to ask me things because you want to know the answer, not because I ask you to,’ I said. ‘That’s the only way we’re going to find out about each other.’ I was still annoyed about his earlier lack of interest in my childhood.

‘But I know you already,’ he said. ‘It’s my job to know things like that. You’re Molly. Beautiful inside and out. What more do I need to know?’

I was quiet then. Too busy thinking.

Mr Roberts was breathing heavily below me as once more I shifted the stationery boxes from one side of the shelf to the other.

‘Remember I told you about Leanne,’ I said. ‘The one that gave me the red lipstick?’

‘The naughty one,’ Mr Roberts said.

‘She was different from the rest of us. We were tough country girls but she was like a town mouse, a timid little thing with these big eyes and a gentle voice. She needed looking after, but there was something about her that made me want to crush her and just stroke her hair, both at the same time. It’s hard to explain.’