Come and Tell Me Some Lies (11 page)

He spoke low and fast, obscene in his urgent need to communicate. ‘I've seen you. I've been watching you every day.' Bile, salty, suffocating, rose in my throat, and my knees shook. I could not drag my eyes away. ‘You go to Mary Hall,' he continued. ‘You are different from the others. I know you, I know your name. I see all the girls, but you are the best. I want you to come with me now.'

His voice, his grotesque words, his stinking presence, overwhelmed me for what seemed like hours. I wanted to scream, but I couldn't find the right signals. Suddenly I did; paralysis left me. I ran, hurling myself at the nearest cashier. The man loped away down the emergency stairs. Now I had found my voice I
couldn't stop screaming, clutching the cash lady, shaking until I ached. She led me into a little office, but I wouldn't let her leave me there in case the man came back. A phone rang, and she answered it. ‘It's all right, love, they've caught him downstairs. Someone saw him following you into the shop, and had already told the detectives. He's with the police now.' She came and sat next to me, hugging me and stroking my arm. ‘Let's phone your mum, shall we?' I nodded and told her the number. I sat in silence, tears pouring down my face. He had followed me. He had followed me. What did he want to do to me? I wasn't different. I was like everybody else at school. Why had he picked me? Was it my fault?

A girl at school had been raped, we had been told one morning in assembly. We must be careful. I had listened and felt pity for the unnamed girl, but although I walked briskly down the street, I never imagined being followed or accosted, or raped. I didn't know what rape was. It sounded like something to do with a sword. Had I now been raped? It was shaming; I blushed crimson, embarrassment breaking over waves of shock. Mummy and Daddy arrived, and a policeman came in and asked me what the man had said. Another policeman stood to one side with Daddy and the man who had raised the alarm. I heard one of them say in an undertone, ‘We've sent men into his flat. They've found photographs of the girls coming home from school, hundreds of them. And others, worse, much worse. He's a nutcase. Thank God he's done no harm to your daughter.'

‘It's my birthday, my birthday,' I sobbed as we drove home, and Mummy rocked me in her arms. Daddy vented his anger
by driving like an Italian all the way home. For once, Mummy didn't even flinch.

A few days later, the nice man who had noticed the pervert sent me a book token. ‘Jones's sent me this,' he wrote, ‘but I think you need it more than I do. I hope you are feeling better now, and that you can forget your horrible experience.'

I did not forget it, but it sank to the bottom of my mind as Christmas and the holidays approached. I had been invited to a dance by a girl called Imogen Lyttleton-Fraser. Daddy and the boys teased me about the smart party, and Daddy called her ‘Ima Little Freezer', but I paid no attention. Mummy and I discussed my clothes exhaustively.

‘I'll wear my new dress of course, and those sparkling tights, but I don't have any shoes except the red velvet ones you gave me. I know, I'll paint them gold.'

‘And what about your hair? Some combs might be nice.' Mummy was making sausage rolls, her arms a blur of bright white where the flour had stuck to them like long, soft gloves. Dan came running into the kitchen, knees muddy, face pink from football training. He grabbed a sausage roll. Mummy screamed, ‘They aren't cooked, you'll get worms!' but he had already swallowed it whole. ‘That'll teach you,' I said sourly. Dan groaned and ran out again. We heard retching sounds from the yard.

On the day of the party I spent all afternoon getting ready. Lingering in the bath, I submerged every angle of my bony knees, hips and shoulders in the fog of water as the bathroom evaporated in steam. Everything had to be just right.
A newly-washed towel from the airing cupboard, holey and singed, a faint aroma of bacon drifting from it; a new bottle of shampoo, bought specially, and a capful of rare bluebell bath essence given to Mummy for her birthday. My bedroom was warm, scented with joss sticks like a church heavy with incense before Mass. I put a pile of records on to my newly-acquired gramophone and danced around, hoping that this was the sort of thing other girls did before parties. Beads and ornaments clinked on their shelves and the little room shook. I saw myself dancing in the mirror. I narrowed my eyes, imagining I was Cleopatra in my brown towel, my long hair, never thick enough to make a decent pony-tail, draped wet across my shoulders. I dressed, not as languorously as I had hoped. Goose-bumps stippled my flesh, and I fell over sideways on the bed trying to pull my new sparkling tights over damp legs. Once the dress was on, I leaned towards the mirror and dabbed my eyelids with some mole-brown eyeshadow Mummy had given me. Spitting into an old cake of mascara, a trophy from a visitor's handbag, I scrubbed the little brush through the puddle. The spiky effect on my eyelashes was most satisfactory. I had to climb on to the bed and then bend double to see my whole body, but I liked the contorted result. I went downstairs to show Mummy and Daddy.

Daddy was reading by the fire. He looked round, then stood up and reached out his arms to me. ‘Beautiful, my love. What exquisite taste you and your Mummy have. That dress is marvellous.' And he called through to Mummy, who was reading to Dan in the playroom, ‘Eleanor. Come and look at this
beautiful daughter of ours.' Half embarrassed, half delighted, I pirouetted in front of the fire.

The heater in the car was broken. I put on a stiff sheepskin coat I found in the back and wiggled my toes to keep them from dropping off. We drove slowly. Specks of snow melted on the windscreen and were replaced by furred flakes fluttering like moths in the headlights. The car slid down a drive lit on both sides by guttering beacons. Imogen's house rose spectral in front of us. The front door was open, a Christmas tree twinkled within, and white fairy-lights studded the creepers which grew up the front of the house.

‘Look Daddy, isn't it lovely?' I gasped, quivering with pre-party nerves.

Daddy kissed me. ‘Have a wonderful time, my love. And make sure someone has a decent pumpkin to bring you home in.'

We laughed, and he drove off as I stepped into the hall. Imogen was there. She looked very like the fairy twinkling at the top of the two-storey Christmas tree. ‘I say, Gabriella, what a gorgeous dress,' she said, when I removed my sheepskin coat. ‘Put that thing upstairs and then come through.'

I glided up the wide shallow steps, looking forward to coming down them again like Scarlett O'Hara, and breathed the heavy, oily scent of pine mingling with candle wax. I hadn't seen anyone I knew yet, but my head was so filled with dreams that I would have found it hard to cope with a real human being. In a tall bedroom I found a throng of giggling girls from school putting on lipstick in front of the mirror. They were all wearing pretty dresses with bows at their necks and sashes at their waists. They fell silent and smirked when they saw me. ‘Gosh. Look at
your dress,' said a blancmange-pink one, ‘it's very grown-up, isn't it?' I looked through the group of bell skirts and tight bodices to my own reflection in the long mirror, and my hazy dreams shrivelled to dust. In my high heels, carefully gilded with a spray can of car paint, I towered above them. My dress had tiny straps of lace, and my flesh looked sinful and naked beside their puffed organdie sleeves and velvet bows. I saw my hands, huge and blue with cold. They looked like hams. I did not know what to do with them, so I crossed my arms. I wanted to go home.

Downstairs went the rustling twitter of schoolgirls. I followed them slowly, hoping I wouldn't overbalance but determined not to uncross my arms and reveal my hands. I forgot about being Scarlett O'Hara. Imogen's parents were with her in the hall, her mother tiny, with the fragile face of a doe and a thin smile, her father bluff and genial. ‘Do go through and have some punch, dear,' said Imogen's mother. ‘Are you cold?' I shook my head miserably, taking her remark as criticism of my flimsy dress, and stumbled through into a darker room. Music boomed from a black box in the corner, masterminded by a boy in dirty jeans and a paint-spattered shirt.

Sasha Warton was there, and I joined her, grateful to be disguised a little by her height. She too was wearing puffed sleeves and bows, but she looked at my dress with real envy, and I felt better. Before us squatted a vast stone fireplace, its heart blazing with tree trunks. On the walls, gilt-framed paintings of men in wigs and women with powdered ringlets peeped from a hedge of holly.

Someone gave me a glass of punch; it tasted of lemonade,
and I drank it in one nervous gulp. Sasha passed me a purple cigarette with a gold tip, and I coughed as she lit it for me. ‘Don't swallow the smoke,' she said, watching me gulp and then choke, ‘Try to breathe it in.' I tried, and swooning dizziness followed a rush of nausea.

I peered around the room; there were boys everywhere. Most of them were smaller than I was. Sasha was talking to a medium-sized boy called James. I wondered what she could be saying to him, and was listening, my eyes half shut in concentration, when someone touched my arm. I jumped and turned round. It was a very short boy, with an astonishingly deep voice. ‘Hello, I'm Imogen's cousin Tim,' he said. ‘Will you come and dance?' Amazed, I nodded. He led me on to the dance floor and whisked me around very fast. I had been to one or two discos with my brothers. We usually stood around the edge and watched other people dancing. I had never danced with a boy before, and did not feel ready for the experience. Tim had great determination, and after a minute of elephantine galumphing into people and tripping over, I began to enjoy myself.

Tim had evidently been made master of ceremonies by his aunt. What Tim did, everyone did. After our dance, two other boys, one large, one medium, asked me to dance, and then another large one. I had escaped into fantasy, and the last one looked to me like Rhett Butler. I felt popular and beautiful, and fancied myself as the belle of the ball. Forgotten was my wickedly exposed flesh.

‘My name is James Merry-Curl,' he said.

I snorted with laughter. ‘Sorry, sorry. It's just that it's a funny name,' I said, noticing his hurt expression.

‘Your name is pretty funny too,' he pointed out. ‘Everyone says your parents are really weird. Are they hippies?'

I glared at him. ‘They are not weird, and they're not hippies. Who says they are, anyway?'

Merry-Curl reddened, his film-star glamour disappearing for ever. ‘Oh, you know. Imogen and the other girls. They say that your parents are really poor and that you've got twenty-five brothers and sisters and you live in some weird place like a gypsy's house.'

He was now so embarrassed that he couldn't stop, and I listened in silence, my whole body tensed in humiliation and anger. ‘How old are you?' I asked him.

‘Eighteen,' he said, miserably shifting, dying to get away.

‘Can you drive?'

‘Yes, why?'

‘Well, you can take me away from this hateful party and drive me home. Then you can see for yourself what my family is like, as you seem so interested.'

Merry-Curl's pink cheeks blenched, and his eyes bulged with horror. ‘Oh, God. Umm, I'm awfully sorry, but I don't think I can. I have to take my sister back home, you see.'

Angry and trapped, exposed by two-faced schoolgirls and their feeble-minded consorts, I wanted to go home. I had longed to be like them and liked by them, and they had conspired against me. Merry-Curl mumbled something about getting a drink, and attempted a smile before moving away from me backwards. I watched with a flicker of satisfaction as he bumped into Imogen's mother, spilling her drink over her wrist. I looked around for Sasha, but she was dancing,
her arms and legs swaying like branches. Her sister Annie came over to me, her boyfriend clamped to her side as he had been all evening. Annie was older and more worldly than the other girls at the party, and Chris, her boyfriend, looked like a pop star in his glittering yellow and green striped jacket. Annie wore a black rubber dress and her legs were enmeshed in fishnet tights. Black kohl rimmed her eyes, and her face was unnaturally pale. No one else there had a boyfriend.

‘This is so dire,' she sighed, leaning against the wall next to me and taking a sip of my drink. ‘Let's go. Do you want to come with us, Gabriella?' Annie had never spoken to me before, and now she was inviting me to escape with her. I nodded eagerly, she fastened me to the boyfriend-free side of her wiggling rubber body, and we moved out into the hall.

Merry-Curl was sitting on a radiator with Alice Grey, a girl in the year above me at school, perched on his knee. They both looked very uncomfortable. Alice's legs were braced against the floor so Merry-Curl would think she was less heavy than she was. His face was obscured by her hair, and his hands drooped uselessly by his side. Alice gazed at the wall above Merry-Curl's head. She looked awkward and too big, not like Poppy snuggled on Mummy's lap, more a gormless cuckoo trying to be a tiny lark. I smirked and ran upstairs for my coat.

Chris's car had only two seats. It was a mini pick-up truck, and I had to hover in the gap above the handbrake as we drove. Annie had decided to take me home, and as Chris never spoke, he could not disagree.

‘Will your parents be up? Will your father be reading poetry? Will any of your brothers be there? Will there be a fight?'

Annie was annoying me. I was not being taken home because she liked me, but because she wanted to meet my father. ‘They're not like that,' I said impatiently. ‘They're perfectly normal.'

We drew up outside Mildney, and I noticed with a sinking heart that there were several cars parked behind the house. It was a Drinking Evening.

There were always people at Mildney, and many of them were Fans, Poetry Fans. First they wrote, then they telephoned, then they came, eager to pay homage to The Poet. Patrick would only tolerate them on Saturdays. Brodie, Flook and Va Va founded a kingdom beyond the river with three islands named Fuck, Shit and Hell. The names were part of their sinful secrecy. Springing out from the reeds around their domain, the children greeted cars crawling up the drive, a phalanx of mud-coated outriders brandishing sticks and home-made guns.