Secrets (24 page)

I've had
no
experiences;
they've
had plenty. The girls writing to the problem pages spoke a different language and behaved as if they were from a totally different planet. They wore astonishing clothes and got up to astonishing things with their boyfriends. I read these letters feeling hot, my heart beating.

The only letters I could identify with in any way were the ones where the girls moaned about their mums and dads. They said they couldn't stick their parents. Their mums wouldn't let them have a nose stud or platform heels; their dads nagged about bad marks at school and got mad if they didn't come home till midnight.

‘They should try having my mum and dad,' I muttered, as I flicked through them by torchlight under the bedcovers.

‘What?' Grace said blearily, propping herself up on one elbow. ‘Are you still awake? What are you doing?'

‘Just reading my book. Go back to sleep,' I said. But Grace has bat ears. She heard the rustle of the pages. ‘That's not a book, it's a magazine! Let me see!' She leaned over from her bed. She leaned far too eagerly and fell out with a yell.

‘Shut
up
, Grace!'

‘Ouch! I've banged my elbow – and my knee!' Grace whimpered.

‘Ssh!'

‘It hurts,' she whispered. She came scrabbling into my bed. ‘Please let me see, Prue.'

‘You won't tell Mum?' I hissed.

Grace sometimes has terrible attacks of conscience when she worries and frets about some tiny little thing she's done wrong and then suddenly blurts it all out to Mum when they're having a cuddle. Grace is far too big for cuddles now but she still wants them. She's like a large lollopy dog, desperate to be patted all the time.

I didn't waste my breath warning her not to tell Dad. Even Grace isn't that mad.

‘I swear,' she said. Then she whispered all the worst words she knew, swearing like a trooper. We might live like princesses locked in a tower but you can't go down the street without hearing boys blinding away and drivers yelling. Also, very strangely, Dad sometimes swears when he's in one of his tempers, foul words frothing out of his mouth. If Mum or Grace or I ever said just one of those words he would murder us.

I showed Grace the magazines. She handled them reverently, as if they were the finest first folios, easing over the pages and smoothing them out. She looked at all the photos of teenage girls and stroked their clothes longingly. She started reading the problem page and then snorted with shocked laughter.

‘Ssh!'

‘What's this girl going
on
about? What does she
mean
?'

‘Oh, for heaven's sake, Grace, you know the facts of life,' I said, although I wasn't clear what a lot of it meant either.

I had secretly looked at several volumes of Victorian erotica which Dad bought in a book auction, presumably by mistake. I found them right at the bottom of the box, under a Norton set of the Brontë sisters. They featured a bizarre vicar, Reverend Knightly, with a large congregation of ever so lusty ladies. There were extraordinary colour plates showing the vicar cavorting in his dog collar and very little else. I found them comical but not particularly disturbing. They were adults, figments of someone's imagination, and one hundred and fifty years old. The girls in these magazines were real.

‘Oh I
wish
I had a boyfriend,' said Grace. ‘Do you think Dad will ever let us go out with boys, Prue?'

‘I don't
want
to go out with boys,' I said, not entirely truthfully.

For years and years I'd had a private pretend friend, an interesting and imaginative girl my own age called Jane. She started when I read the first few chapters of
Jane Eyre
. She stepped straight out of the pages and into my head. She no longer led her own Victorian life with her horrible aunt and cousins. She shared
my
life with my demented father.

Jane was better than a real sister. She wasn't babyish and boring like Grace. We discussed books and pored over pictures and painted watercolours together, and we talked endlessly about everything. Sometimes we didn't talk silently enough. I knew my lips moved and occasionally I started muttering without realizing. Grace knew I made up imaginary games inside my head and resented it.

‘You're doing it!' she'd say when I muttered, giving me a nudge. ‘Tell
me
, Prue, go on. Make it up for me.'

‘Make up your own games,' I said, which was unfair, because she wasn't much good at it.

I'd started up a new and even more private pretend game recently, after Dad had taken Grace and me on an educational trip to the National Gallery in London. Dad had an old guidebook to the gallery and was all set to inform us relentlessly, but the gallery had long since rearranged all its rooms. Dad couldn't match up the text in his guidebook with any of the paintings and became more and more frustrated and irritable.

Grace barely looked at each painting, trudging with bent head, her feet dragging on the floor. She murmured obediently whenever Dad seemed to demand a response, but that was all.

I didn't say much either. I was flying through this new magical world of religious Renaissance painting, so pink and blue and glittery gold. It was as if I'd sprouted my own beautiful set of angels' wings. I'd always painted wings plain white, but now I saw they could be shaded from the palest pearl through deep rose and purple to the darkest midnight-blue tips. Some of the angels' wings were carefully co-ordinated with their gowns like matching accessories. Others had unusual, eccentric colour combinations like red and gold and black, with a white gown. One particular fashionista angel was strolling along the sandy path with a golden-haired boy about my age, holding a fish.

When we were little Dad used to read aloud to us every day from a large and unwieldy Victorian Bible. Dad had been very religious until he had a row with our vicar. He'd gently suggested to Dad that home-schooling was all very well, but Grace and I needed more of a social life so we could make some friends. Dad blew his top and had no time for the vicar, his church, or the entire Christian faith after that.

He put the Bible back on the shelves as stock. I was sorry when it sold, because I loved looking at the wonderful Doré illustrations. I remembered a lot of the Bible stories, so I knew that the boy with the fish and the angel friend was Tobias. He was dressed in colourful medieval garb, with dashing bright-red tights. I tried to imagine a modern teenage boy prancing about in scarlet stockings. Still, some boys wore their jeans skin- tight. The Tobias in the painting obligingly put on blue jeans and a white T-shirt and smiled at me.

He came home with me that day as my new imaginary friend. Poor Jane got elbowed into the background. Tobias and I read together, painted together, walked together, whispered together. He spoke softly right into my ear, his cheek very nearly brushing mine.

Now I imagined him kissing me, touching me, like the girls and their boyfriends in the magazines. But then I imagined real boys, with their foul mouths and grabbing hands, and I shuddered.

‘I don't like boys,' I said.

‘Boys like you, Prue,' said Grace. She sighed. ‘It's not fair. I wish I was pretty like you so boys would turn round and stare at me.'

‘I bet they only stare because I look such a freak,' I said.

Mum made most of our clothes from remnants from the Monday market stall. I'm fourteen years old and yet I have to wear demure little-girly dresses with short sleeves and swirly skirts. I have a red-and-white check, a baby blue with a little white flower motif, and a canary yellow piped with white. They are all embarrassingly awful.

Mum used to make appalling matching knickers when we were little, threaded with very unreliable elastic. Our baggy shop-bought white pants are only one degree better. Still, I have
proper
underwear now. I used my maths tuition money to buy a wonderful black bra with pink lace and a little pink rose, and two matching knickers, wispy little things a tenth of the size of my plain girls' pants.

I locked the bathroom and tried them on, standing precariously on the edge of the bath so I could peek at myself in the bathroom cabinet mirror. I loved the way they looked, the way they make
me
look.

I hadn't dared wear them yet under my awful dresses because Grace could so easily blab. I'd have to wash them out secretly myself rather than risk putting them in the laundry basket.

‘Do we look like freaks?' Grace asked worriedly.

‘Of course we do. Look at our clothes!'

Grace considered. ‘I like my dresses, especially my pink one with the little panda pattern – it's so cute,' she said. ‘Would you have liked that material for your dress, Prue?'

‘No! I can't stick little pandas or teddies or bunny rabbits. For God's sake, I'm fourteen.'

‘Do you think I'm too old to wear my panda dress?' Grace asked anxiously.

There was only one answer but I didn't want to upset her. ‘I suppose your pink panda dress does still look quite sweet on you,' I lied valiantly.

‘It's getting a bit small for me now anyway,' Grace sighed. ‘
All
my dresses are tight on me. I wish I wasn't getting so large and lumpy.'

‘It's just a stage you go through. Puppy fat.'

‘
You
didn't,' she sighed again. ‘Dad keeps going on about me getting fat. He says I shouldn't eat so much. He says I'm greedy. Do you think I should go on a diet, Prue?'

‘No! Take no notice of him. He just likes to nag, you know that. Anyway, you can't diet
just
yet. I've got you a surprise.'

I'd felt so mean spending all my tuition money on myself, though I knew Grace would never manage to keep any present I bought her properly hidden. The only way I could buy her a treat was to get her something edible, to be quickly consumed.

‘A surprise!' said Grace, clapping her hands.

‘Ssh! I was keeping it a secret, to cheer you up the next time Dad goes off on one of his rants, but you might as well have it now.'

I climbed out of bed and went to scrabble in my knicker drawer. My hands found the flimsy satin and lace of my new underwear. I secretly stroked them in the dark, and then searched again until my fingers slid over the crackly cellophane of Grace's surprise.

‘OK! Here we are!' I slipped back into bed and thrust my present into her hands.

‘What
is
it?' she said, unable to see properly in the dark.

I flicked the torch on to show her.

‘Oh
wow
!'

‘Shut up! Do you want Dad to hear?' I said, nudging her.

‘Sorry. But, oh Prue, it's so
sweet
!'

There's a special chocolate boutique in the shopping centre. It's Grace's all-time favourite shop even though she's never even set foot inside it. Mum buys chocolate off a market stall. It's always a funny make and past its sell-by date, but it's cheap, and that's all Mum cares about.

I was going to buy Grace a pound of posh chocolates in a fancy box, but then I saw this big white chocolate bunny in the window, clutching an orange marzipan carrot. I knew she'd love it.

‘What shall I call him? Peter Rabbit? Benjamin Bunny?'

‘Can't you ever make up your
own
names, Grace?'

‘You know I can't.
You
think up a lovely name for him.'

‘There's not much point. You'll be chomping away at him in two seconds. Knowing you, there won't even be a little chocolate paw left by midnight.'

‘I'm not going to eat him. He's far too wonderful. I'm going to keep him for ever,' said Grace, but her fat little fingers had already undone his ribbon and peeled off his cellophane. She sniffed his creamy ears ecstatically. ‘Oh, he smells heavenly!'

‘So eat him, silly. That's what he's for.'

‘I
can't
! Well, perhaps I could eat his carrot? I don't want to spoil him. Still, maybe I could just lick one of his ears, to see what he tastes like?'

‘Go for it, girl!'

Grace stuck out her tongue and licked. And licked again and again and again. And then all by themselves her teeth started chomping and the chocolate bunny was left disturbingly hard of hearing.

‘Oooh!' Grace murmured blissfully. Then she shone the torch on him. She saw what she'd done. ‘
Oooh!
' she wailed, her tone changing.

‘It's OK, just eat his head up quickly. It's what he's
for
.'

‘But it's
spoiling
him. Why am I such a greedy guts? Look, he's got a horrible gap in his head now.'

‘He's fine.'

‘No he's not. I want him to be whole again,' Grace said, looking as if she might burst into tears.

‘Well, his ears are in your tummy. If you gobble up the rest of him quickly then his body can join up with them, and they can squidge themselves together like plasticine. Then he'll be whole in your tummy and it will be his own private burrow.'

Grace giggled uncertainly, but started chomping on his chocolate head. She offered me one arm because she felt he could manage on three paws. I'd imagined him so vividly I felt a little worried myself. It was like feasting on a real pet rabbit.

‘You eat your rabbit all up yourself, Gracie,' I said.

‘It's the loveliest treat ever,' she said indistinctly, mouth crammed with chocolate. ‘But when did you buy it?' She paused. The obvious hit her. ‘
Where did you get the money?
'

‘Keep your voice down!'

‘I'm
whispering
.' Then we heard the bedroom door open along the landing. We held our breath. I snapped the torch off and Grace leaped into her own bed. We heard footsteps: the pad and slap of old slippers.

‘It's OK, it's only Mum,' I whispered.