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

Title Page

Epigraph

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

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

‘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.’

I peered in the mirror, trying to read something more into the outline of my face than just that. An outline. What was it that Miranda could see?

‘We should go out one time,’ she said, ‘to the cinema or something.’

‘Or to the pub?’ I suggested.

‘I don’t think so,’ she laughed. ‘Nasty loud places. No, we’ll find a nice romantic comedy. Something jolly, that’s the ticket.’

Neither of us had boyfriends when we first met.

We would talk about men though, but always in that ‘oh aren’t they hopeless’ way other women did. I’d talk about Mr Roberts, but I didn’t tell Miranda everything. To make her laugh I’d ham it up about how he got me to go up the stepladder to fetch down boxes from the top shelf. Miranda and I grimaced at each other when I demonstrated the way he’d hold on to my legs when I was up there, and how he said he did it because he was scared I might topple over but we both knew he was fibbing.

‘I’m not surprised though,’ Miranda said. ‘Your calf muscles are perfect. You should insure your legs. I’ve never seen such romantic legs.’

‘Oh you,’ I cooed. This was something I’d learnt to do from Miranda. Cooing, and saying: ‘Oh you.’

When I got back to my room though, I couldn’t resist lifting up my skirts and having a quick look at my legs in the mirror. I turned this way and that, trying to see the romance Miranda must have read there. I flexed my legs, letting my fingers trail over where muscles should be. I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see the dimples of fat. I couldn’t stop thinking about how Mr Roberts always said he liked a girl you could get hold of.

I sat on my bed later and watched the few passers-by in the street below as I ate my supper. I sipped my packet soup from my mug, pretending it was home-made and that I couldn’t taste the chemicals of the mix. The doughnuts I picked delicately one by one from their box, licking my lips to catch the sugar from round my mouth. The last one I had to force down but I didn’t want there to be any gaps in my body left unfilled.

It was so quiet. Blissfully, eerily quiet, in my little upstairs room. When it was time to sleep, I lay down and placed my hands in the form of a cross on my chest. The only sound was the occasional echo of footsteps which drifted up from the street. Some running, others dawdling. Everyone going home, I thought.

Chapter Two

‘How did you meet?’ This was the first thing Miranda asked when I told her about Tim.

We were in the salon. Miranda was putting my hair up into a high pleat. I could feel her fingernails scrape against my scalp as she twisted strands into shape.

I couldn’t get the words out. All I’d told her so far was that I had a boyfriend called Tim, but now I kept giggling. I hid behind my hand as I tried to answer Miranda.

I’d had a hard time even just saying ‘boyfriend’. It didn’t feel right. Not next to Tim. Somehow Tim and Boyfriend weren’t two words that went naturally together. So by the time I’d finally managed to say it all in just the one sentence she was suspicious. That’s why her question wasn’t just throat-clearing. She really wanted to know.

I spun the back of the empty hairdressing chair next to me so I wouldn’t have to look at Miranda’s face in the mirror. In the background Miss Otis was busy regretting how she wasn’t going to be able, after all, to make lunch.

‘In the park,’ I said. Round and round the chair spun.

‘What are you reading?’ Tim had asked, and I showed him the second-hand romance I’d just picked up from the charity shop. I didn’t let him judge my reading habits from the pale pink cover though. I told him how I was getting through Proust but the books were too heavy to carry around. The novels I read outside were lighter. Not just in weight. They helped me keep my concentration keen for the main task. I was determined to get through the whole of French literature by the time I was thirty, I said. That gave me years, I added. I wanted to get that in quickly. Because of my size, and because I’m still wearing the clothes my father bought me, most people think I’m a lot older than I am. This has worked in my favour recently, but there was something nice about wanting to be young again. I felt a lightness inside.

‘The main task,’ Tim repeated. ‘You’re keeping your concentration keen for the main task.’ He nodded a lot as he said it so I could tell he liked that particular phrase. Maybe even that he liked me.

Tim didn’t say much, but he never stopped moving. He tapped his fingers on his jeans as if he was playing the piano, his feet twitched up and down too in a rhythm I tried to catch. He was wearing no socks. It was one of the first things I noticed about him.

A man passed us as we sat there. ‘Nice day,’ he said, or something like that, and I smiled back. Tim’s feet stayed still then, I noticed. His ankles were white and bony above his unlaced trainers. A vein snaked its way round the bump like a twisting river of blood.

‘You’re not saying you picked someone up in the park!’

I came back to Miranda’s salon with a start.

‘Do you not know how dangerous that is? Do you not know that, Molly? There was this woman in one of my magazines who was captured by a man she met in the park. He kept her like a dog in a flat nearby, let her out for exercise and she was so frightened that she always came back to him when he called. Can you not imagine that?’ When Miranda got excited a Scottish under-current always came out, not just in the accent but in the sentence order too. The negativity of her Caledonian grammar made me more defensive than I knew I should have been.

‘I can look after myself,’ I said.

Miranda pulled a piece of my hair especially tight, ignoring my gasp. ‘Leave that chair alone,’ she said too, and I let go of it, but not before spinning it once more round for luck.

‘I was just sitting on the Seize the Day bench reading,’ I said. ‘He came to sit there too. Asked if I had any idea who Jessica was.’

‘Not local then.’

I shook my head. That had been one of the first things I’d thought too. All the locals knew about Jessica Carter. She was a teenage girl who had killed herself four years ago. It was just before she took her A levels and when she died, it started a big campaign about adolescent pressure at school and academic achievements and how girls were supposed to look like models as well as everything else.

Because that’s what she wrote in her suicide note: Maybe if I was prettier, then none of this would have mattered.

No one but me seemed to think it was funny how the newspapers used the story as an excuse to print photographs of Jessica looking pretty alongside the articles about how dangerous it was to worry so much about appearance. My mother had told me not to always be so difficult, but it was true. There were lots of photographs, not just of Jessica but of film stars, supermodels, musicians. Pages and pages of beautiful women.

‘Don’t go all dreamy on me, Molly,’ Miranda said. ‘You were telling me about the man.’

‘He’s different,’ I said. ‘Hard to explain.’

‘Could I meet him?’

‘I’ll ask but he’s not shy exactly. More private.’

She shrugged and twisted my chair so I was sitting straight, facing the mirror with her standing behind me. I normally liked seeing us like that, one on top of the other like two twists in one of those fancy bread sticks they sell in the Italian deli on the corner but there was something strange about our reflections tonight.

‘I thought we might go for a flick-out at the end of your hair next time,’ she said. ‘It’ll bring out the beautiful texture of your skin. You’ve been blessed with your skin. It makes me mad with jealousy.’

I put my hand up to my neck in the mirror, let my finger and thumb stretch across so I could be strangling myself, but then raised my hand up so it was just cupping my chin. Softly. ‘But your neck. . . ’ I said. Behind me, Miranda lifted her face up in the mirror to expose the arch of her neck.

Chapter Three

I was pleased Tim was late for our date that night.

It gave me more time with Jessica.

‘Jessica,’ I told her in my head, tracing the carved letters on the rough wood of the bench with my fingertips as if I was playing the piano. S.E.I.Z.E. T.H.E. D.A.Y. There’d been a collection for the bench at school, but it was the headmaster who had chosen the words. He’d wanted it to be a lesson to spur the rest of us into a new joy of life, but it hadn’t worked. Rather than the inspiration he’d hoped for, the Seize the Day bench had become a symbol for everything that could go wrong. I wondered whether that was why most people shied away from it. Most people, that is, apart from Tim and me. ‘This is how I met him. . . ’

And, although it all happened on her bench and she must have been aware of us, I told her everything Tim had said that first time I met him, and how when Tim asked whether we could meet again, I told him this bench could be our regular spot. ‘Maybe tomorrow. I’m often here. She was a friend,’ I’d lied to him.

After the first ripples of shock at Jessica’s death had gone round the school, there was a curious quietness everywhere for weeks. Every excuse for not being happy was suddenly flawed.

‘Maybe if I was prettier. . . ’ But if you were looking for one word to describe Jessica, it would have been pretty.

‘Maybe if I had more money. . . ’ But Jessica’s family took two holidays a year. Once, for her fourteenth birthday, they took the whole class to a theme park for her party. Jessica got all her clothes in London, not the local Topshop like the rest of us. She wasn’t the sort of girl who needed a Saturday job.

‘Maybe if I was cleverer. . . ’ But Jessica was a top A student.

But now, when no one else but me seemed to bother to visit the bench any more, things seemed more equal. ‘We could have been friends,’ I told Jessica. ‘I used to be so unhappy as well.’ D.A.Y. My index finger traced the scars in the wood made by the letters.

So perhaps that was why, even before Tim arrived, I was feeling as if I might have a bit of potential too. I put my face down and brushed my hair back over my shoulder with the side of my hand like Jessica used to do. After Jessica died, I used to do it at home so often that my father banned hair-touching at table. I couldn’t have risked it at school either. It was definitely an in-crowd gesture, and might have drawn attention to me in a way my father wouldn’t have liked.

I must have been too busy doing the hair thing to hear Tim come. When I looked up, he was already sitting down on the other end of the bench, his head between his knees.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

‘Quick,’ he said. ‘Put your head down too. NOW!’

I copied him.

‘Don’t look up,’ he warned. ‘Shut your eyes if possible.’

I couldn’t. I looked at the ground instead. There were bits of chewing gum stuck under the bench. Cigarette butts, even a beer bottle. I made up my mind to tidy up sometime. For Jessica’s sake.

‘Wha. . . ’

‘Be quiet,’ Tim said. He put his arm round my shoulders to draw me closer to him. I could feel the heat of his body through his jumper. The outline of his fingers across my back burnt into me like infrared. He smelt of fabric conditioner and warm apples. I’d never been so close to a boy before. I tried hard to stop my body from tensing up, to relax more and enjoy the embrace.

‘We’re going to have to make a run for it,’ Tim said. He stood up and held out his hand, and I took it, clutching at his fingers as he pulled me into the bushes that lined the edge of the park. Just when I was thinking I couldn’t run any more, he stopped and we hid behind a tree for him to keep a watch out. He pulled the sleeves of his jumper down to cover my hands, holding on to my wrists so tightly. I did the same to him. It was as if we were grafting ourselves on to each other.

‘I know who it is,’ I said. ‘It’s my father. He’s found me.’

Tim hushed me. ‘It’s not,’ he replied. ‘I’ll keep you safe.’

I didn’t ask how he could be so certain. My heart was beating hard against his chest and the echo travelled up to my head. I wondered if Tim could hear the same noises as I could. The scuffle of leaves as a squirrel hunted for nuts, a dog barking in a garden somewhere near, the distant sound of a train announcement from the station. No one walking past us would be able to see us in our nest of leaves. I wasn’t sure how long we could stay there, not moving, but every time I tried to ask Tim what was happening, he put his lips down, hushing through my hair, his breath hot against my scalp.

We were so close, I smelt a flowery sweetness on his breath I couldn’t identify. It was the first time anyone had held me like that since my mother stopped touching me. Since the biology teacher business. I tried not to cry, but just rested my weight against his chest, my head lying on the soft pad of his shoulder.

We didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem the need.

Eventually, he let go of my wrists and we walked out on to the path together. Across the far side there were a few houses with their top lights still on, but apart from that there was no sign of life.

‘Will you?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘Keep me safe?’

Tim nodded. ‘Tomorrow?’ he asked.

I smiled. He put one hand on my head, stroked my hair gently and then without saying another word, he turned. I watched him leave the park. He walked quicker than other people. He knew where he was going. When I couldn’t see him any more I sat back on the Seize the Day bench.

I wanted my heart to settle down before going back to Mr Roberts’s shop.

Chapter Four

This is how I met Mr Roberts.

He caught me crying at one of the café tables they put up outside the Church on the High Street during spring and summer.

Despite the cold, I’d been sitting there for one hour, forty-two minutes refusing all offers of refreshments, even though I could see the volunteers pointing me out and tut-tutting amongst each other. Then a plump peachy woman came out wearing a white blouse and flowery skirt with one of those elasticated waists women her age wear for comfort although they’re always having to hoist the skirt back down from where it’s risen up under their tits. She told me I wasn’t to sit there any more. That the café tables were for proper customers only.

I started to cry, and suddenly this old man came up and told the waitress it was all right. That I was with him.

It was Mr Roberts, although of course I didn’t know that then. I was just relieved that everybody was now staring at him instead of me. He said nothing at first. Just bought me a cup of tea, pushed it over and sat there in silence until I raised my head.

‘What do they mean about being proper?’ I asked.

‘I suppose they want people who’ll pay,’ he said. ‘Although the Bible does have something to say about merchants in the temple.’

‘I might not want anything to drink,’ I said, ‘but that doesn’t mean I’m not proper. They should be more careful about what words they use. Words matter.’

‘I know that, pet,’ he replied. ‘You don’t want to worry about Church people. They’ve no taste. They can’t see how special you are.’

This made me cry even harder. Mr Roberts didn’t say anything, just got up so I thought he was leaving me too but he came back with a handful of paper napkins and handed them to me.

‘Dry yourself,’ he said. ‘And then we’ll sort you out.’

I wiped the tears away and looked up at him nervously, but he shook his head. ‘Not yet,’ he said, and pulled out a sheet of newspaper he had neatly folded away in the pocket of his tweed jacket. It was the racing pages and he started studying form closely.

He was right too. As soon as I realised his attention had wandered away from me, I started crying again, loud, gasping sobs. When he didn’t seem to mind, I ignored the sour looks I was getting from the Church woman and let it all come out. The pile of napkins was sodden by the time I was finished and his racing columns were full of little biroed marks and comments. He must have been about sixty, with steely grey hair cut forward over a bulging forehead. It was his mouth I noticed most. It was prim and womanly with perfectly shaped teeth he kept tapping his pen against. It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed that the older men get, the more feminine their mouths and chins become. It’s the opposite of women, who start to sprout bristles and Winston Churchill jowls. In fact, most long-term married couples look as if they’ve swapped faces from the nose down. Morphing into each other’s mother or father.

I coughed and he looked up. Then he looked again but slower, up and down my body. He even tilted his head to one side so he could get a gawp at my legs.

‘Well, you’re a big girl,’ he said. ‘What sort of weight would you say you were then?’

It wasn’t funny, but I was so shocked by him coming out with a statement like that, I just exploded into giggles. Since I’d put on all this weight, everybody pussy-footed around the subject. Fat-ism. But although I laughed I couldn’t help it when, just as quickly, the tears started to well up again. Mr Roberts creased his eyes in annoyance so I tried to stop both the laughing and the crying.

‘It’s glandular,’ I explained. ‘I eat nothing really, but I can’t help putting weight on. Mum says it runs in the family, although my father used to—’ I stopped.

‘Used to what?’ He stared at me as if he was weighing me himself. ‘So there’s a mother and a father in the background. Been mean to you, have they, or is it boyfriend trouble?’

I shook my head. Since that afternoon in the biology room, I’d found that the hurricane of feelings continually raging inside me was impossible to put into words for anyone, let alone a stranger. That’s why I’d come here, to get away from it all. I thought of the counsellor they made me see at my new school. The red chair I used to sit on for my weekly sessions with her, the box of ever-ready tissues like the ones I was clutching now.

‘There are times when nothing goes right,’ I told Mr Roberts, catching myself before I copied the counsellor’s long vowels too strongly. ‘This is just one of these times. I just need to sit it out, wait patiently and my turn to shine will come. Life is a wheel and sometimes we’re on an upwards circle and sometimes we’re heading down. It’s all natural. Part of living. You can’t fight it.’

He stared at me. ‘Got a job?’ he asked.

I shook my head. I was longing to pinch myself. It was one of my ways of coping when a conversation got out of hand. Normally this was fine because most of the conversations I’d had recently were just in my head but I knew pinching wasn’t OK in public. Particularly not in a church. I contented myself with squeezing my fingernails hard against my palm instead. I tried not to wince with the pain.

‘You’re not at school, are you?’

I looked down at the table. I was longing to look at my palms and see the marks from my nails but couldn’t risk it so I let my hands rest on my knees. ‘Not any more,’ I mumbled.

‘Too much time. That’s your trouble.’

I shrugged.

‘Drugs? Alcohol?’

‘No.’

‘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

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

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

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.’

‘I didn’t always want to be a hairdresser.’ Miranda shook her head so her hair really did flare out, just like it did in her magazine pictures. ‘That English teacher I told you about. He’s got a lot to answer for.’

I bared my teeth, trying to smile along with her.

‘And are you really sure you’re all right?’ she said.

I nodded, blinking the tears back. This was how to be normal. To learn when to be quiet. There was no reason why I couldn’t do it. Not every story has to have an ending.

She looked at her watch and then grimaced. ‘I must be off. Mum’s got bingo tonight and I promised I’d look after Dad so she can enjoy a night off. He can’t get around by himself, you know, not since his accident. Mind you, you’d be surprised at the trouble he can get up to in his wheelchair. Speedy, that’s what Mum says we should call him.’ She grimaced and then shook herself. ‘You take care now, honey-girl. Time for me to love you and leave you. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ she said brightly, her hair slicing the air around her as she walked away.

‘Oh you,’ I cooed as I stood looking at myself in my mirror. I lifted my skirt above my knees, looking at my legs harshly. I couldn’t even pretend they were romantic tonight. They looked fat. Filled up with lies and unsaid things. Mr Roberts was right. The whole of me was nothing more than lumpy, mashed potatoes.

I shook myself all over in the mirror. My head, my arms, my bottom, my legs. I watched the fat wobble, wanting to prove to myself I wasn’t as flabbily solid as Miranda. That my outline could be redrawn, even my bones broken.

And that was something I had to believe. That little chance of transformation. Otherwise what was the point of anything?

Chapter Eight

‘I used to be a little scrap of a thing, so small no one really paid any attention to me.’ I ignored Mr Roberts’s snort from the bottom of the ladder as I noticed my voice turn to almost a whisper. ‘Then all of a sudden one morning I woke up and it was as if I’d turned into someone else. With a cartoon sexy body I couldn’t control. I can’t have developed that quickly, of course, but it was what it felt like. None of my clothes fitted and at first Dad refused to waste money on new ones. I got to hate the way he’d glare at me every morning and tell me to pull my skirt down, or button up my shirt properly as if it were my fault I was popping out of everything. He was always on at me.

‘I’d walk around with my arms crossed, my shoulders hunched, but you can’t be on guard all the time. Round about that time, all the boys at school started to notice me too,’ I spoke down to Mr Roberts. ‘Even the little boys had crushes on me. Once when they had an exam, they begged me to give them a good luck kiss, queuing up so I wouldn’t miss one out. They’d bring me presents, things they’d stolen from their mothers just so I’d remember them the next time I walked past.’

‘What’s that?’ Mr Roberts grumbled. ‘Speak up, Molly. You’re mumbling.’

‘But it was the boys my age who were the worst.’ There was no one else in the shop but my heart was knocking against my chest so hard I could almost feel it vibrate against the shelf. ‘My pigeon hole would be filled with notes. I’d find telephone numbers scribbled on my class books. They came round to my house in gangs and just stood outside the door. Once a boy knocked himself out on a lamppost because he was clowning around to get my attention. He had a black eye the next day at school.’

‘Teenage boys,’ Mr Roberts sighed. ‘Too many hormones. They never learn.’

‘But I wouldn’t go near any of them,’ I said. ‘I think that’s probably why they all kept after me. It wasn’t that I didn’t want a boyfriend. My father would never have let me. He thought it was all my fault.’

‘Only natural to want to protect you,’ Mr Roberts said.

‘After that, nothing I did was right. I couldn’t stop making him angry,’ I said. ‘I’d come out after school, and there he’d be, waiting for me. He’d glower at every boy who passed us when we walked home. He said he couldn’t trust me. As if it were my fault.

‘I learnt never to talk to boys anywhere, inside or outside school. And then not to girls either. He’d always find out somehow and there would be an inquisition. He made me wear all these really frumpy clothes. Once when we were at the shops, he had to leave me alone for a minute and a boy I’d never seen before came up and asked if I knew where the chemist was. That was all, but my father caught us and the fireworks went on for days.’

‘Sounds a bit harsh,’ Mr Roberts admitted. ‘Although you do have to look after daughters.’ He seemed unsure though and there was a silence before he spoke again. This time he was more enthusiastic. ‘But did you meet the boy again?’ he asked. ‘The one in the shopping centre? Did you get up to some rumpus-pumpus? I bet you did, Molly. I know your sort. You like your hanky-panky. Nothing wrong with that.’

I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured the rage on my father’s face as he came out of the gents to see me pointing to the bottom tier of the shopping centre and the boy nodding away. I’d just taken his rage for granted then, something I’d learnt to live with, but now I tried to see it through his eyes. What did he think could happen to make him so angry?

‘We did,’ I said. ‘But not after. That same day. I got my father to leave me for five minutes by pretending I was buying him something special as an apology, and then I ran downstairs and met the boy. We went down one of those side corridors no one uses.’

‘Just like that? In the shopping centre?’ Mr Roberts whistled through his teeth. ‘Weren’t you worried someone would see you?’

‘We were like animals,’ I said.

‘You dirty girl. It’s unbelievable.’ Mr Roberts held the ladder steady for me to come down.

‘It’s all true.’ After all, my father had thought it was the truth. He probably pictured the whole scene in much more detail than I’d just told it.

‘And not very nice,’ Mr Roberts said, with more than a hint of pleasure.

He was right. It wasn’t nice, but that night, for the first time since I could remember, I slept like a baby. I woke up early to the electric whinny of the milk van as it made deliveries along the High Street, and drifted back to the kind of safe half-sleep world where everything is sweet, anything is possible. I knew I had found my stories.

Maybe because I had already confessed to Miranda, it was easier to tell Mr Roberts I’d got a boyfriend.

I was halfway up the ladder, moving boxes of staplers and ballpoint pens from one side of the shelf to the other. Mr Roberts’s hands were on my calves to keep me steady.

‘I’ve got a boyfriend, you know,’ I said. ‘A proper one.’ I paused a moment, waiting for his reaction.

‘Well, good for you, girl. I knew you would get cleaned up, although—’ He shook his head, his middle fingertip pressing against my flesh a little too hard.

‘I’ll still tell you stuff,’ I said quickly. ‘Maybe I can even tell you about Tim. It’s OK. He won’t mind.’ He won’t know, I whispered to myself.

‘I’m not sure it will be the same,’ Mr Roberts said. ‘It seems impure somehow. Young love and all that.’

I held my breath because I knew I couldn’t afford to lose my home and salary. Mr Roberts was quite capable of docking my wages if I didn’t come up with the goods. I’d seen him with salesmen. They thought he was going to be an easy catch because of his woolly jumpers and funny thick glasses, but more often than not, they’d stand outside the shop afterwards, going over figures on their calculators as if they couldn’t believe what had just happened to them.

If Mr Roberts spoke before I counted to ten then everything would be OK.

He came in exactly as I reached eight. ‘We’ll maybe see how it goes. Give it a few weeks.’

I shoved the box I’d been pretending to move right over to the end of the shelf. ‘That’s it finished up here,’ I said cheerfully, but Mr Roberts kept his hand on my leg longer than he normally did. And he stayed where he was as I climbed down so I had to hold my body against his until I got to the bottom and could step aside. This was a new development, one I wasn’t too sure about.

Chapter Nine

I watched Tim’s hand brush along the back of the Seize the Day bench as if he was testing the grain of the wood. Then he made a sudden lunge, missing first and knocking my arm before finally taking my hand in his.

I squeezed back but then he started to hurt me so I tried to loosen his grasp. He shook his head and kept on pinching at my fingers. We carried on grasping each other in silence although I could see my skin turning white.

‘I’ve been plucking up the courage to ask you something,’ he said eventually.

‘Go on,’ I encouraged. I felt so light when I was with him. So free of any need to be looking over my shoulder.

‘I was wondering if I might kiss you tomorrow,’ he said.

I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. ‘You can kiss me now.’ I pouted my lips out to him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I would prefer it to be tomorrow.’

Knowing I was going to be kissed made me jumpy and restless the next day. I couldn’t eat anything, not even my usual breakfast of a fruit scone. It was still sitting in its brown paper bag under the till at lunchtime.

In the end, I went over to persuade Miranda to take an extra cigarette break because Mr Roberts wasn’t helping my mood. He had already made me do all sorts of unnecessary chores around the shop that morning, shifting the display of envelopes from one side of the room to the other, telling me to go up and interrupt customers who were happily browsing and ask if they wanted something, making me sort out the coloured pencils into separate jars. He was watching me for signs of love, he said. We couldn’t afford to let things get slipshod just because cupid had shot his arrow.

At last a big order from the Insurance Office on Silver Street came in, and as he never trusted me with anything important, he bustled round ticking things off the list. This gave me a small respite.

Miranda and I huddled in the doorway of the fashion boutique next to her salon. Despite the fact that the two women who ran it were arrow-thin, continually pointing themselves in successful directions, they never opened their shop before eleven in the morning, so it was a useful place for us to meet.

‘There’s this little girl been born somewhere who’s got a bottom half like a tail,’ Miranda told me. ‘Both legs are joined together and they’re going to have to do an operation to separate them. There was an interview with the doctor in my magazine. They called him Dr Mermaid, because that’s what the girl looks like. Apparently the operation rarely works but he never gives up hope.’

‘How do you practise kissing?’ I interrupted her.

‘You must have kissed someone,’ she said, surprised.

‘Of course I have, stupid,’ I lied. ‘But I want this to be perfect. I’m sure there used to be a way the girls at school rehearsed.’

‘With a banana,’ Miranda said firmly. ‘You snog a banana.’

It was only after I’d nipped across to the supermarket and got myself a whole bunch of bananas that weren’t even on special offer that Miranda came into the shop and said she’d just remembered she’d got it wrong. Bananas weren’t for practising kissing. They were for something altogether different. And had I heard about this woman who went into a supermarket in Manchester and had been bitten by a tarantula who came over on a bunch of bananas?

That night, on the Seize the Day bench, Tim made to take my hand before he stopped and asked me to shut my eyes. I did and then held my hand out, open fingered, to him. My arm was shaking, but instead of holding on to me, pulling me closer as I hoped, I felt him slipping something egg shaped into my palm.

I opened my eyes and peered down. A walnut was cupped there, looking withered and brain-like.

‘What’s this?’ I asked.

‘Shhhh.’ Tim looked round. ‘You have to learn to speak quieter, Molly. Trees have ears.’

‘Sorry,’ I whispered. ‘But why’ve you given me a nut?’

‘It contains a secret. A word only you will know.’

I stared at him. He looked completely serious. His brows were too heavy for the thinness of his face. They overshadowed every other feature and made him look dangerous in the wrong lights.

‘How will I know I’ve got the right word?’ I asked.

‘Hold it. Think.’

So I did. I shut my eyes again and the word came. It came miraculously. I knew it was right without questioning. I just didn’t know what it meant in this context.

‘Fridge,’ I said, and when I opened my eyes, Tim was smiling, not at me but I knew it was because of me. I was so proud it felt like a ball of sunshine had burst in my stomach.

‘And now I’ll kiss you,’ he said.

There are kisses and kisses. Prostitutes never kiss. Most teenagers dream of doing nothing else. The sound of a mother’s kiss was taken up in a spaceship to soothe aliens on distant planets. Eskimos kiss by rubbing noses. To kiss Marilyn Monroe was apparently like kissing Hitler so bristly was her upper lip. To kiss at the point of ejaculation guarantees a child genius. So complicated is social kissing that it’s safer for normal people like Miranda and myself just to stand there, waiting for one, or two, or even three cheeks to be airbrushed towards us. French kisses. Butterfly kisses. Kissing cousins. Kiss of life. Kiss of death.

Tim’s kiss was a lick of melon.

Honey sweet melon fresh in your mouth at breakfast time when you’re on holiday and life is good. In fact it’s never been better.

I put my hand up to my mouth when he finally drew away. I rubbed the tips of my fingers over my lips. It was a good job I was sitting down because my legs were shaky. It was as if Tim had sucked all the air from my body.

So this was what it was all about.

‘Do you think we could do that again?’ I asked.

He took the walnut from me. I hadn’t realised I’d been holding it so tightly until I felt him prise my fingers open one by one to release it.

‘No.’ He shook his head. He’d stopped smiling now. ‘But tomorrow we can.’

I must have sighed then, because Tim took my hand and rubbed the dent that was still on my palm from where I’d been clutching the walnut.

‘If we’re spared,’ he added.

Chapter Ten

The day after the Kiss was late night shopping for the posh end of town.

Down on our side of the street though, we closed at five sharp every night. Sometimes Mr Roberts and I would get customers who’d come and press their noses at the door and rattle the handle, confused as to why they could buy designer shoes or fancy jewellery at eight o’clock at night, but not a box file or a pencil.

‘Because we’ve got bloody homes to go to, mate,’ Mr Roberts would mouth at them, and I’d nod along with the righteous warmth of being on the inside although, of course, I didn’t exactly have a home to rush back to.

I went to the bench instead, and Tim was waiting for me, hunched up inside his jumper. He pulled the sleeves down to cover his hands. A red scarf was wrapped tightly round his neck.

‘It’s a bit chilly,’ he said, and then he stood up, took my hand and told me to trust him. I could almost feel the energy coming off him as he pulled me down half-lit alleys I’d never noticed before, through car parks and shop yards. Waiters looked up at us as they sat on the back steps of their restaurants, sipping coffee and having cigarettes before the evening rush began. An older man and young woman embraced just behind a half-open office door, his briefcase slotted between their legs.

Tim didn’t say a word even as we passed through the automatic doors of the shopping centre. He’d been hushing me all the way along as I tried to make conversation. We stood there for a moment, breathing in the smell of freshly baked bread from the café at the entrance.

‘It’s not real, that smell,’ I rambled. ‘It’s a spray they use, or they put it in the air conditioning. It was in one of Miranda’s magazines. A woman once seriously hurt herself by. . . ’ I had to put my hand over my mouth to shut myself up.

Tim pulled me along again. In the town’s one department store, he led the way up to home furnishings, going not by the lift or even the escalator, but through an unmarked door and up by the staff steps.

‘Are we allowed?’ I asked, but he didn’t hesitate once, not even when we passed a uniformed security guard coming down carrying three heavy boxes. Then through another door and we were back in the main part of the shop. We were standing in front of a display case full of glass ornaments when he turned to me.

‘Have you seen anything more beautiful?’ he said.

He pointed at a statue of a polar bear, about six inches high, framed in a square box. The bear was made of clear white glass apart from its four cloudy legs and it had an etched expression of tranquillity on its face. The base was spiked up to look like falling snow. The rim of the box was edged with gold. Inside, the bear had a curious wild dignity amongst the sparkly bejewelled cats and dogs it kept company with on the shelves.

We stood on either side of it. When I bent down to the bear’s level, I looked right through it and saw Tim staring just as intensely from the other side. But then he caught me looking at him and started to laugh. His smile was warm and real through the icy perfection of the glass. I felt something melt inside me as I laughed back.

‘It’s trapped,’ he said. ‘I come and look at it sometimes to work out how I can help it break free.’

‘Can’t you just buy it?’ I asked. ‘Or steal it.’

Tim shook his head. ‘That would just be forcing it into another kind of captivity,’ he said. ‘It would be under an obligation then.’

‘It’s very beautiful,’ I said, because it was. I didn’t tell Tim I disagreed with him. There was a feeling of calmness about the bear that made me think it was exactly where it wanted to be.

‘Come on, Molly,’ he said. ‘Let’s get ourselves home.’

‘Home?’ I asked.

He looked surprised. ‘To the bench,’ he said. ‘Where else?’

‘I didn’t really mix with the girls at school,’ I told Mr Roberts from the top of my ladder, ‘but there was one girl, Leanne, who I liked. She spent a lot of time on her own too.’

The ladder shuddered as Mr Roberts coughed. ‘Sorry, Molly,’ he said. ‘Just not been feeling too good recently. Mrs Roberts keeps on at me to go to the doctor’s.’ He coughed again.

I shut my eyes until he’d finished. ‘You were never really allowed to stay in the school buildings at break-time,’ I said. ‘They had this idea that fresh air was good for you, but what it meant was that everyone congregated in bits of the playground where you couldn’t be seen and there they’d smoke or get up to other trouble. Sometimes they’d even creep through the trees and go into town. The older ones went to the pub.’

‘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

‘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

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

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.’

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