Something Beginning With

When I got into work, I didn’t tell anyone. People kept saying how quiet I was. I went to the loo after a bit, and when I pulled down my knickers I could smell Peter. That’s when I started to cry.

I haven’t heard from him since. It was my first time with a stranger like that. I hope it will be my last. I thought Colin was going to be a one-night-stand for Sally at first. I get angry with Sally sometimes that she doesn’t seem to feel the same guilt I feel about Peter.

See Colin, True Romance

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Captains

This is how Sally and I first became friends.

Like the singing, in my head I am completely coordinated as far as sports are concerned. Now I am an adult I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to, but I still like to lie in bed imagining how I can catch ball after ball in hands that open and caress rather than sting painfully. My legs find such a sweet rhythm as I run the 800 metres that I almost levitate off the ground, able to go on and on and on as I race past all the other runners.

In reality, I became the school expert at the rain-dance I created in the hope that games would be cancelled. It wasn’t just the humiliation. It was the way your legs would get so cold on the hockey pitch, the skin red and blue and sharp with pain.

Sally walked in once just as I was jumping up and down in the deserted shower rooms, hands on top of my head, elbows flapping. I was chanting ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, rain, rain, rain.’

She took one look and left. I thought she might have been smiling but I’d been too embarrassed to look closely. Neither of us said anything.

One hour later we were standing at the edge of the sports field in the perfect sunshine. Sally was at the front by the games teacher as she was always one of the team captains. I was standing at the back so I wouldn’t have to keep getting out of the way when the other, more popular, girls were picked for the teams.

I thought it was a joke when Sally chose me before anyone else. I didn’t want to go up at first but everyone kept prodding me. Sally always picked me first after that.

I never asked her why, even afterwards when we took a vow to tell each other everything. I always hoped it was because Sally was the one person who could look into my head and see those sweet catches I made in my dreams. How perfect everything was there.

See Blackbirds, Robins and Nightingales, Kindness, Vendetta, X-ray Vision

Codes

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See Friends, Indecent Exposure, Woolworths, Yields, Zzzz

Colin

I am starting to get suspicious about Colin. Maybe it’s a hangover after my escapade with Peter, but I worry about the way he seems to treat Sally so casually.

Sally says that as long as he pays the bills and keeps her happy, she doesn’t mind if he is the mad axe-man. She says his attitude is a relief.

‘I’m blossoming,’ she says, and so she is. I try to be happy for her but when I walk up and down the road where Sally says Colin lives with his wife and family, I see no sign of him. I can’t smell Colin in the air. Also, he is spending more and more time with Sally in what she calls their ‘love nest’. ‘Isn’t his wife jealous?’ I ask.

‘If Colin doesn’t mind, who cares?’ Sally says, and I must admit it seems a little bit odd that it’s me who does.

See Best Friends, Foreheads, Love Calculators, Stalking, Youth

Crème Caramel

Sally has a friend who can suck up a whole crème caramel from a plate in one go. I have seen her do it. She stands over the table, with her hands behind her back, and then she hoovers it up in one go without leaving a drop either on the plate or round her lips.

Sally herself can fit thirty-eight Maltesers into her mouth at once. She has to stuff them round her lips and in the spaces at the back of her jaw. It is not a very attractive trick, especially when she has to spit them all out again. But then neither is the crème caramel suckingup, but at parties, people always ask to see them. It makes Sally and her friend the centre of attention, and the rest of us feel jealous.

Unfortunately I don’t like either Maltesers or crème caramel and the one trick I do know is very complicated, involving three packs of cards. Could this be where I am going wrong?

See Captains, Underwear, Wobbling

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Daisies

My mother told me once that I was not sweet enough to be called after a flower. Something useful, yes, but not a flower. Her name was Rose and I thought if I also had a pretty name then I’d look more like her.

I called myself Daisy in secret and would talk about myself in the third person. ‘Daisy’s nearly ready for bed now,’ or ‘Look how pretty Daisy looks in the mirror.’ It made me feel like I belonged. But then one day I blurted out something about wanting to be called Daisy and everyone laughed.

‘It sounds more like a cow,’ said my father, smiling fondly at my mother.

See Ants, Names, True Romance, Zest

Danger

Sally will always be my only real friend although I hope she never finds that out. She is so popular, she would probably think it was funny.

When we were growing up, our families were very different. Her parents used to go to the pub and drink sweet liqueurs that made her mother giggle. They were also what my parents called ‘Sunday drivers’, which meant they went on outings. If I was lucky, they’d take me with them sometimes. Sally’s mother called us ‘the girls’, which I liked because it made me seem like a second daughter. As if Sally and I were interchangeable.

Once, we all went to a fete in the country and watched a local girl being crowned the Rose Queen. She sat giggling on a throne, holding a bunch of roses and surrounded by Rose Princes. These princes were all spotty and fat. The dishy boys were too busy throwing grass over the Rose Princesses to look at the Queen. The minute they’d put the crown on her, she’d become too much for them although we couldn’t see why she’d been picked in the first place.

Sally and I soon got bored because no one was throwing grass over us, so we went to look round. We found a bridge that was very crowded so we joined the throng going over it. When we reached the middle, we suddenly heard the cracking and splitting of wood and the bridge gave way.

Later the man who owned the house and gardens came out and said that the trouble was that the bridge didn’t lead anywhere, just to a shut gate, so what had happened was that people were coming straight back at the same time as others were crossing and that meant there was too much weight in the middle for the bridge to hold. Considering the danger we’d all come through, he was surprisingly unsympathetic. It was the last time he was holding the fete in his grounds, he said, because he didn’t understand why the public were all so keen to go over a bridge that went nowhere. And now he’d have to have the bridge mended, which was going to cost money he didn’t have.

I read about an experiment that made men go over a very dangerous bridge and when they got to the other side, they were shown photographs of women. All the men found the women more attractive than they would have done if they had not had such an exciting experience. However, Sally and I both agreed that when the Rose Queen came to wish us well in the Red Cross Tent she was so ugly, we still wondered why she had been crowned.

Sally has always taken me places, shown me the way to behave, what to do. Sometimes I wonder if this is why she likes me. Sometimes I wonder if the places she takes me too are always the best places to go.

See Best Friends, Worst Case Scenario

Dogs

The chairman of our company has a Dalmatian dog called Jupiter. When he brings it into work, we have to take it in turns to walk it at lunchtime. He seems to think it is a treat for us, and makes jokes about how many girlfriends his dog has. It does make you wonder what he thinks we are.

Susan, the receptionist, once told me that she had taken a call from his French au pair. This girl was in tears because she had broken the vacuum cleaner when she was outside, hoovering the lawn. Susan told her to take the vacuum cleaner inside and pretend it had never happened, but the girl kept crying, saying how much trouble she’d get into if the chairman’s wife came back and found anything left on the grass.

Perhaps the wife was getting her revenge. I am always hearing stories about au pairs getting off with their bosses. The chairman is good-looking enough. I have often smiled at him on the stairs or when we meet in the office, but I’m not sure he even notices me. He always calls me Veronica and laughs in this coughing little way when he sees me.

I remember reading about a jilted girlfriend once who got her own back on her boyfriend by letting herself into his flat when he was away and planting grass seed all over the carpet. She went in every morning of his holiday and watered it. I would have loved to have seen his face when he opened the door.

I always used to want a dog. I would imagine waking up nearly every morning and hearing one barking for me downstairs. Once I picked a particularly beautiful leaf and kept it in a glass bowl as a pet until I got bored with it. I do realise how pathetic this seems now, but at the time I really loved that leaf.

See Ambition, Revenge, Tornados