Pandora’s Box

She half-covers the mouthpiece with her hand but I can hear her calling out, ‘Kie-ran. Someone on the pho-one for you.’ She sounds vaguely amused.

‘Hey, man.’ Kieran’s voice is curt, abrupt; it gives me a shock and I want to put the phone down and just run away. He’ll think I’m a complete nerd.

‘It’s Shelley,’ I say stupidly. ‘You know—ShelleyPixie.’

‘Oh my god.’ He seems to gasp a bit; I can’t quite make out why. There’s this silence. It stretches on forever. ‘Hey, Shelley,’ he says at last. His voice is soft now, I can make out the echo of an Irish lilt. ‘How come you’re ringing me? Nothing’s wrong, is it?’

‘No.’ I’m staring at the symbols I etched into my desk with the sharp end of my school compass: ‘K4S’. I did that the other night when I was on the phone to Surinda and she was waxing lyrical about Jallal. Now I’m feeling embarrassed about it, to be honest, so I’ve covered it up with my mouse mat. ‘I just wanted to say hi.’ I feel like a complete fool. A complete and utter fool. Just thank god that he can’t see me because my face must look like a beetroot. I clear my throat. ‘You haven’t been online lately. I wondered if everything was okay? I…I…’ I was going to say ‘I missed you’. But that’s so much easier to type on a screen than it is to say over the phone. He’s a stranger, after all, I’m thinking. What do I really know about this guy, other than what he wants me to believe?

And we aren’t supposed to contact strangers we meet over the Internet. Everybody drums that into you. All the time. Especially if you’re kind of fragile, like me. At least he sounds…he sounds like he looks: young and kind and gentle.

‘I’ve missed you,’ he says it for me. His voice has gone real low. ‘There’s been so much going on. Granddad’s been ill. And then there’s been this game-show thing…’

‘I heard. Sorry about your granddad,’ I remember to say.

‘I got you those tickets,’ he tells me, ‘I didn’t forget you were after them. The next filming date is in a week or so. Or you could use them for the final.’

‘Did you?’ I can’t believe he did that. He really did it.

‘They’re screening the first episode tonight.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ My voice has gone kind of funny It’s because my mouth has gone all dry, speaking to him. ‘I’m going to watch it, for sure.’

‘I’m counting on it. You can tell me if I look like an ee-jut’. He says ee-jut for idiot. I can feel him grinning. He sounds pleased. If they’ve filmed several at once and he’s still going back then he must have done well and got through to the next round.

‘I hope this isn’t a bad time?’ I say after a bit. He’s gone quiet on the other end. I think maybe he’s just as shy as me? I can’t think of anything else to say. Why is this happening? When we talk online my fingers fly over the keys. He makes jokes and I laugh and laugh; he’s so witty and funny and fast. I can hear the front door opening now and I hope it’s just Daniel back from his bike ride, I don’t want it to be Mum back already. I hope if it’s Daniel he doesn’t come in here looking for me.

‘Not in the least. We’re never that busy in the morning,’ Kieran is saying. ‘But, Shelley, now that you’re here. I’ve got those tickets for you, like I said. Would you like me to bring them over to you sometime?’

‘No!’ My dad would kill me, and Mum, she would really kill me if she even knew I was talking to this man. ‘I mean, my parents…’ I trail off.

‘Of course. I understand completely. Never give out your address to someone from the Internet, right?’

Kieran doesn’t feel like a stranger, though. He’s got a nice voice; it’s everything I thought it would be. I think of Surinda, talking to Jallal for the first time, and I can’t help smiling. She’s right. You can fall in love over the phone. Just a little bit.

‘Perhaps we could meet somewhere public, though?’ I don’t want to put him off. This might be the one and only chance I get, and a great wave of bravery lifts me up.

‘There’s a fair up on Blackberry Common at the weekend. My mates are doing a mini-gig up there. Do you think you could make it?’

‘If I can get someone to help me with the wheelchair,’ I remind him. He hasn’t forgotten, has he? He does still remember that I’m in a wheelchair?

‘I’d help you myself but I know you don’t want to meet me alone. And you shouldn’t. You’re sensible to insist on that.’

‘How will you find me?’ I ask him. ‘Even if we agree a specific place…how will you know it’s me?’ My heart is hammering in my mouth. I’m actually arranging to meet Kieran! I still can’t believe I’m doing this.

‘Shell-ey!’ Daniel has just discovered that Mum is out. And he’s probably found that there aren’t any biscuits left. It’ll be something like that.

‘I’m here. Where would I be?’ I yell back.

My brother’s face is red and flushed as he pokes his head round my bedroom door.

‘We’re out of squash,’ he informs me.

‘I know.’ I wave the phone at him. ‘Drink water instead. I’m busy right now.’

‘Is that Mum?’ He eyes the phone suspiciously. I don’t talk to my friends all that often. I shake my head at him.

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s Kieran. A friend. Now scoot.’ My brother darts out the door again.

‘I’ll know it’s you because you are going to send me that photo of yourself that you keep promising me, right?’ Kieran’s voice is soft and coaxing. I get a crazy thought: maybe he thinks he’s falling for me too?

‘Right,’ my mouth says before my brain screams No! Too late.

‘Email me your mobile number, Pixie. We’ll firm up the times a little later. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Thank you for your call,’ he says before he hangs up. Thank you for your call. As if I were a business associate. But he sounded as if he really meant it, though.

I’ve got a date. Ohmigod. Who shall I tell? Surinda, of course, because I’ve only got a date if she’ll take me to it.

And she will if she wants those Beat the Bank tickets.

When I phone her, my fingers still trembling and sweaty on the keypad, her mum tells me that she isn’t there. Surinda is at school, she says. I don’t know about that, but I’ll have to call back later. Her voice sounds a little arch, as if she’s wondering why I’m not in school, too.

Stuck on the back of my bedroom door there is an old, gilt-edged mirror. It used to be Mum’s. It came from the old house and she didn’t have anywhere else to put it. Maybe she didn’t want to be reminded, either, of the days when our whole world felt so much bigger—and so much more capable of expanding—than it is now. They were talking of moving to a bigger house in the countryside one time. That’s what Dad ended up with. We got Fetherby Road.

This used to be my ‘dressing-up’ mirror. I used to put on Mum’s scarves and her high heels and her lipstick. Oh yes I did! I can’t believe it now but I used to twirl around like a princess. What a twit.

I don’t think Mum even owns a pair of shoes any more that aren’t flats. She used to have some velvet-black stilettos that I loved, and a silver pashmina that she’d throw over her evening dresses (I loved that shawl, I think I’ve still got it stowed away in the back of a drawer somewhere, I saved it from the Oxfam bag). She used to wear a lot of emerald greens to show up the auburn in her hair, and dark russet-reds that showed up her real beauty. That’s a pity because she used to look so glam going out to Dad’s ‘corporate dinners’, as they called them. She told me they were very boring, really; it was only the chance to dress up that she liked!

Well, this mirror. I never look at myself in it. Why would I want to see what I’ve come to look like now? But once I put the phone down I suddenly get the urge to look at myself. I close the door and take a deep breath. Then I peer at what I can see in the half-light.

My arms are skinnier than I remember them. I look like a thin weed, struggling through a shady copse of bushes, all gangly and spindly and droopy in my chair. My face looks too pale. I could look a lot better than this if I took some trouble over it. I know this because everyone says I look so much like my Aunt Lily, and she was a beauty when she was my age. Naff fashion sense, admittedly, but you could see she had something when you look at her pictures. Perhaps I should send him a picture of her? Lol. Nah, not really; I just need to do myself up a bit.

I wonder what I would look like standing up? I’m so sick of sitting in this hunk of metal. I haven’t stood up by myself for such a very long time. They tell me I mustn’t put any pressure on the bones of my legs. That’s why they gave me Bessie so long ago, even when I was well capable of walking by myself. I could walk, but they didn’t want me fracturing the bones in my legs.

Now I’ve got this overwhelming urge to try standing up on my own two feet. I want to know what I would look like standing up, by myself, without anyone else there to hold me.

Grabbing hold of the knobs on the chest of drawers near the door I pull myself up. It’s damn hard. My arms are so much weaker than I thought. Inch by inch I do it, gritting my teeth, gingerly feeling the weight resting on my legs. The effort is huge. The effort is Mount Everest to a crawling baby. For a second, just a brief second, I see what I might look like if I were normal. I’m not as tall as I thought I was. It’s just the stick-thinness of me that gives the impression of height. Yuk. I have dark circles around my eyes that most girls of my age would not have. My mouth droops down a bit at the edges. My complexion is a bit grey. My hair is okay-ish. I’m going to get Surinda to cut out the black bit that I dyed into my blonde fringe. Or else she can dye it back to blonde. What will he think if he sees me, looking as I do?

Maybe he won’t notice anything but my eyes. My eyes are looking different today; talking to him has put a new light into them. He’s made me remember what it feels like to be alive.

My legs give way just then and I collapse back into Bessie again, feeling every limb trembling with a strange fear and excitement and pleasure at the same time. I shouldn’t have done that, but it feels good that I did. It makes me think that there are other, unthinkable things that I still might be able to do.

Just like Mum, really. She had to move beyond what was permissible or possible in order to get what she dreamed of.