Tell Me Everything

This was more my own story, even if I had been just a spectator. But that had been the whole point of it, I told Mr Roberts.

All the boys in school had fancied Christine Chambers. She had curly black hair and a snub nose. Her eyes were green, and although she wasn’t bright, she appeared to listen in class so she wasn’t told off as much as the others in her group. Strangely this only added to her allure, because she used her popularity with the teachers to lessen punishments for her friends.

Christine’s only obvious form of rebellion was a thin leather cord of brightly coloured beads she wore around her neck although no jewellery was allowed with the school uniform. With this necklace, she’d draw attention to herself in lessons, running her hands over the beads, pulling them this way and that, up to her lips. One day though, in history, she pulled so hard it broke and the beads spilled everywhere, noisily, over the wooden floor of the classroom, dancing this way, that way. Anxious for any diversion, we’d all thrown ourselves whooping on to the ground hunting for the runaway plastic jewels.

* * *

‘Even you?’ Mr Roberts asked. ‘Can someone of your size throw themselves anywhere? I’d have liked to have seen that.’ He cupped my calves with his open palms. ‘Potatoes,’ he groaned. ‘Big fat potatoes. All mashed up tight in your naughty nylons.’

I shifted on the ladder so he couldn’t hold on to me quite so tightly.

‘Well, I haven’t always been this exact shape but no, I wasn’t on the floor,’ I admitted. ‘That’s how I could watch what was going on.’

The only person – only other person, I corrected myself – who didn’t leave her chair was Christine. So I’d been on the right level to see how, with her classmates scrambling round her feet, she fixed her eyes on the history teacher and lingeringly, slowly, she licked her lips and laughed silently at him. He smiled back and he almost seemed not to be aware of how his fingers went up to his neck and traced a line where a necklace might be. He looked as if he might be cutting his throat. Then, still without breaking the spell between them, he put his index finger to his lips and half blew her a kiss, which he transformed into a sigh as he noticed me sitting there.

‘And that’s it then? That’s all that happened?’ Mr Roberts said after I’d been silent for a moment.

‘It was sex, the way they did it,’ I explained. ‘There must have been something going on between them.’

‘Maybe you were imagining it. I know all about a young lady’s imagination.’

‘Maybe. But I know what I saw.’

‘But it still wasn’t you, Molly. That is the whole point of these stories. I thought I explained all that.’

I felt my throat ice over, and Mr Roberts jumped to one side as I almost fell down the ladder then. I think I took him by surprise. Apart from the leg-holding and the occasional brush-past in the shop, he never touched me. I was grateful for that, but my attempts at storytelling were obviously disappointing to him. If I didn’t get on track soon, I was frightened he might start demanding satisfaction for my board and lodgings in other ways.

That night, up in my room, I emptied my purse out on to the floor and stacked up the few coins into piles I could count. I carefully smoothed out the one note and placed it to the side.

Mr Roberts wasn’t paying me a regular wage. Instead, he would keep the till open after a customer had been in and silently hand me a ten pound note when he felt like it. I’d slip it into my pocket without even a thank you and that would be that. He said that doing it any other way would only attract unnecessary attention and that I could trust him to see me all right.

By my bed I kept the book Mum had been reading the day I’d left home. I don’t know what made me steal it from her bedside table but on my third day at the stationery shop, I took a sharp craft knife from one of the displays and cut a hole carefully through the inside pages. I opened the cover now and checked the cash that I’d hidden was still safe. I raised the book to my face and flicked the pages so they brushed my cheek. Their cut edges felt like the flutter of wings, almost a kiss, against my skin.

And then after I put the coins back into my purse, I took the torch Mr Roberts had given me and went down to wash myself at the sink in the toilet. I hated turning on the bright strip lighting after the shop was shut, taking comfort in the almost secret existence I was leading. After I finished rinsing my hands in the sink exactly six times, I folded my flannel precisely, each corner matching. At least there were still some things I was in charge of.

It was only much later, when I couldn’t sleep, I gave in to the ache of needing to pinch myself, over and over, right at the top of my thighs, on the soft plump skin that no one would ever see. I wanted the comfort of the pain, so unbearable I didn’t have to think of anything else. At least until the next pinch.

Chapter Seven (#ulink_6ae88287-4b74-5c9d-8993-ae5aa4b4f0de)

I was sitting in the empty salon with Miranda one evening soon after, watching her straighten her hair as we listened to Bryan Ferry murdering the old ballads.

‘I’m after that shake your head look,’ she said as she twisted over uncomfortably to one side. I could see the muscle on her neck work its way through her flesh in protest. ‘When your hair looks as if it’s a piece of cardboard that goes from side to side, and people get out of the way in case you slice them in half.’

I nodded as if I understood. There was a useful trick I first learnt during those school counselling sessions. When people start talking about something they’re interested in but you’re not, you have to empty yourself of any attempt to enter into the dialogue and just let the language float around you. If you’re lucky some words stick, and what you do then is repeat them straight back. It doesn’t seem to matter what order they come out in. When the counsellor used to get on one of her explaining jags and I did this, she’d clap her hands and say we were finally getting somewhere.

‘So you’re just trying to look as if you can slice some cardboard,’ I said to Miranda, and she nodded as vigorously as she could with her hair trapped in the straighteners.

‘I’ll do it for you if you want,’ she said.

‘I’ve got a friend with this problem,’ I said, quickly changing the subject. ‘Someone wants her to tell him dirty stories, but she doesn’t know any. It’s not really her thing.’

‘And this someone is your friend’s boyfriend?’ she asked, her left eyebrow arching in the mirror as she steadied her head the better to look at me.

‘God no!’ I said but then corrected myself. ‘No, but it’s important my friend gets it right. It’s like a work thing, that’s all. It’s not kinky or anything.’

Miranda went back to stretching her hair, but I could tell she was thinking by the way her body had gone all alert. I squeezed little dollops of shampoo from the shelf onto my hand and inhaled them as I waited for her to speak.

Apple. Rosemary and pine. Honey. I stopped trying to make my skin absorb the liquid, just kept adding more and more on to the surface until my fingertips were swimming in oily goo. Then I went to get a clean towel from one of the piles in the back room to wipe it all off.

‘We had this English teacher at school,’ Miranda said when I came back. ‘What he always said when we were writing stories was that it didn’t matter if the facts were true or not, but whether we believed in them. For lots of reasons, it’s something I’ve remembered.’

She paused then and I thought about what she’d just said. ‘So you can make something true just by believing it?’ I asked. ‘What if you believe in a lie? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘I know,’ Miranda sighed. ‘But the way he explained it was that not everything’s black and white. He used to ask us if we’d ever been nervous about waiting for something and how five minutes could seem like hours.’

I nodded.

‘Well, what he said was that if you were trying to tell someone about it, you were better to say you had to wait five hours because that gave a more truer picture of what it felt like, even though it wasn’t true.’

‘And that’s not bad?’ The skin all over my body felt as if it was being charged by several hundred electric shocks. I willed Miranda to continue and after a few seconds – seconds that felt like hours – she did.

Miranda shook her head. ‘In real life, it can be very bad,’ she said. ‘It can even ruin lives. But these are just stories we’re talking about, aren’t they?’

I stared at her. I couldn’t speak.

Miranda clicked her tongue against the top of her mouth hard. ‘Molly,’ she said. I guessed she meant to be kind, even encourage me to say something more, but it took me out of the trance I was in danger of falling into. My cheeks were red from the heat in the salon and I could feel a flush coming up my neck. It was exactly as it had been in the school room.

‘It was only something a friend told me,’ I interrupted her before she could say anything else. ‘What you’re talking about reminded me of her.’ I was willing myself not to cry. Next to me Miranda was holding the hairbrush at chin level, her mouth open. She looked as if she was about to sing into a microphone but no sound came out.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I lied, shaking my head. ‘It happened a long time ago and I think my friend’s left home now. I was just wondering about stories and stuff.’

‘And she’s OK?’ Miranda turned her back on me.

No, I wanted to shout, but Miranda was back fiddling with her hair and besides I wasn’t sure if I could trust the words any more. We were quiet then until she finished. I sang along with Bryan about how horrible it was to be jealous under my breath but I was finding it difficult to breathe. Was it safe to really leave the story there?

‘So what do you think?’ At last Miranda put down the straighteners and let her flattened hair swing from side to side.

‘Everyone’s going to get out of your way,’ I said and then we laughed and it all seemed so normal that I let out a deep sigh which made Miranda smile again.

‘Time to go now.’ She bustled round the salon turning off lights and putting the equipment and brushes away. She switched off the music system and waited at the door for me to leave first so she could set the alarm. We kissed each other goodbye in the street. One cheek, two cheek, we hesitated over three before leaving it. ‘I’ll do your hair next time,’ Miranda said. ‘It’ll look just darling.’ But then instead of clitter-clattering down the street on those silly high heels she wore that made her look like an elephant on stilts, she held on to my arm tightly.

‘Tell your friend to find a whole lot of made-up stories from somewhere else and pretend they happened to her,’ she said. ‘That way no one gets hurt.’

‘Maybe.’ I wanted to believe Miranda.

‘I’ve got shelf-loads of love stories you can borrow if you want. It’s all in there.’

‘I didn’t know you were a reader.’