Tell Me Everything (2 page)

Neither of us had boyfriends when we first met.

We talked about men though, but always in that “oh, aren't they hopeless” way we'd seen other women do. I would talk about Mr. Roberts, but I didn't tell Miranda everything. To make her laugh I'd ham it up about how he got me to go up the step-ladder to fetch down boxes from the top shelf although we didn't need anything. Miranda and I grimaced at each other when I demonstrated the way he'd hold on to my legs when I was up there, and how he said he did it because he was scared I might topple over but we both knew he was fibbing.

“I'm not surprised though,” Miranda said. “Your calf muscles are perfect. You should insure your legs. I've never seen such romantic legs. They're perfect. Perfectly beautiful.”

“Oh you,” I cooed. This was something I'd learned to do from Miranda. Cooing, and saying, “Oh you.”

When I got back to my room though, I couldn't resist lifting up my skirts and having a quick look at my legs in the mirror I'd set up against the wall. I turned this way and that, trying to see the romance Miranda must have read there. I flexed my legs as they would be when I climbed the ladder for Mr. Roberts, letting my fingers trail over where muscles should be. I shut my eyes so I wouldn't have to see the dimples of fat. I couldn't stop thinking about how Mr. Roberts always said he liked a girl you could get hold of.

I sat on my bed later and watched the few passersby in the street below as I ate my supper. I sipped my packet soup from my mug, pretending it was homemade and that I couldn't taste the chemicals of the mix. The doughnuts I picked delicately one by one from their box, licking my lips to catch the sugar from round
my mouth. The last one I had to force down but I didn't want there to be any gaps in my body left unfilled.

It was so quiet. Blissfully, eerily quiet in my little upstairs room. When it was time to sleep, I lay down and placed my hands in the form of a cross on my chest. The only sound was the occasional echo of footsteps that drifted up from the street. Some running, others dawdling. Everyone going home, I thought.

“
H
ow did you meet?” This was the first thing Miranda asked when I told her about Tim.

We were in the salon. Miranda was putting my hair up into a high plait. I could feel her fingernails scrape against my scalp as she twisted strands into shape. I watched myself wince with pain in the mirror as she pulled one section too tightly against the skin on my nape and left it pinned up like that.

I couldn't get the words out. All I wanted to say was that I had a boyfriend called Tim, but instead I giggled a lot. Hid behind my hand as I tried to tell Miranda that I had something important to say. I spent nearly fifteen minutes having a hard time just saying “boyfriend.” It didn't feel right.

Not next to Tim. Somehow “Tim” and “boyfriend” weren't two words that went naturally together. So by the time I'd finally managed to say it all in just the one sentence she was suspicious. That's why her question wasn't just throat-clearing. She really wanted to know.

I spun the back of the empty hairdressing chair next to me so I could watch it go round and not have to look at Miranda's face
in the mirror. In the background Miss Otis was busy regretting how she wasn't going to be able to make lunch after all.

“In the park,” I said. Round and round the chair spun.

“What are you reading?” Tim had asked, and I showed him the secondhand romance I'd just picked up from the charity shop. I didn't let him judge my reading habits from the pale pink cover though. I told him how I was getting through Proust but the books were too heavy to carry around. The novels I read outside were lighter. Not just in weight. They helped me keep my concentration keen for the main task. I was determined to get through the whole of French literature by the time I was thirty, I said. That gave me years, I added. I wanted to get that in quickly. Most people think I'm a lot older than I am. It's my size, plus the clothes my father bought me to wear and I hadn't replaced yet. Florals may be slimming, but they can age you.

“The main task,” Tim repeated. “You're keeping your concentration keen for the main task.” He nodded a lot as he said it so I could tell he liked that particular phrase. Maybe even that he liked me.

There were some late daffodils in the park, lined up like soldiers marching to the battlefront. Here and there they'd been mowed down by overenthusiastic toddlers or destructive teenagers. Only the size of the footprints trampling down the mud showed which.

Tim didn't say much, but he never stopped moving. He tapped his fingers on his jeans as if he was playing the piano; his feet twitched up and down too in a rhythm I tried to catch. He was wearing no socks. It was one of the first things I noticed about him.

A man passed us as we sat there. “Nice day,” he said, or something like that, and I smiled back. Tim's feet had stayed still then, I noticed. His ankles were white and bony above his unlaced
trainers. A vein snaked its way round the bump like a twisting river of blood.

“You're not saying you picked someone up in the park!”

I came back to the salon with a start.

“Do you not know how dangerous that is? Do you not know that, Molly? There was this woman in one of my magazines who was captured by a man she met in the park. He kept her like a dog in a flat nearby, let her out for exercise and she was so frightened that she always came back to him when he called. Can you not imagine that?” When Miranda got excited a Scottish undercurrent always came out, not just in the accent but in the sentence order too. The negativity of her Caledonian grammar made me more defensive than I knew I should have been.

“I can look after myself,” I said.

Miranda pulled a piece of my hair especially tight, ignoring my gasp. “Leave that chair alone,” she said, and I let go of it, but not before spinning it once more round for luck.

“I was just sitting on the Seize the Day bench reading,” I said. “He came to sit there too. Asked if I had any idea who Jessica was.”

“Not local then.”

I shook my head. That had been one of the first things I'd thought too. All locals knew about Jessica Owens. She was a teenage girl who had killed herself four years ago. It was just before she took her A levels and when she died, it started a big campaign about adolescent pressure at school and academic achievements and how girls were supposed to look like models as well as everything else.

Because that's what she wrote in her suicide note:
Maybe if I was prettier, then none ofthis would have mattered.

No one but me seemed to think it was funny how the newspapers used the story as an excuse to print photographs of Jessica
looking pretty alongside the articles about how dangerous it was to worry so much about appearance. Lots of photographs too, not just of Jessica but of film stars, supermodels, musicians. Pages and pages of beautiful women.

“Molly?” Miranda said.

I gave another start. I'd been thinking about Tim's ankles.

“You were telling me about the man.”

“He's different,” I said.

“Hard to explain.” “Could I meet him?”

“I'll ask. It's not that he's shy exactly. More private.”

She shrugged and twisted my chair so I was sitting straight, facing the mirror with her standing behind me. I normally liked seeing us like that, one on top of the other like two twists in one of those fancy breadsticks they sell in the Italian deli on the corner, but there was something strange about our reflections tonight. The plait had scraped my face back so it looked almost plastic-like in its tightness but Miranda's skin was shining with perspiration, and she'd been trying out this new red eye shadow that was supposed to be the in thing in all the magazines. It made her look fatter than normal. Well, we were both fat. It was something we didn't mention to each other, but now her shiny face and piggy eyes were drawing attention to it in a way I didn't like.

“I thought we might go for a flick-out at the end of your hair next time,” she said. “It'll bring out the beautiful texture of your skin. You've been blessed with your skin. It makes me mad with jealousy.”

I put my hand up to my neck in the mirror, let my finger and thumb stretch across so I could be strangling myself, but then dropped my hand down so it was just cupping my chin. Softly. “But your neck …” I said. Behind me, Miranda lifted her face up in the mirror to expose the arch of her neck.

I
was pleased Tim was late for our date that night. It gave me more time with Jessica.

“Jessica,” I told her in my head, tracing the carved letters on the rough wood of the bench with my fingertips like I was playing the piano. S.E.I.Z.E. T.H.E. D.A.Y. There'd been a collection for the bench at school, but it was the headmaster who had chosen the words. He'd wanted it to be a lesson to spur the rest of us into a new joy of life, but it hadn't worked. Rather than becoming an inspiration, the Seize the Day bench had become a symbol for everything that could go wrong. I wondered whether that was why most people shied away from it. Most people, that is, apart from Tim and me. “This is how I met him …”

And, although it all happened on her bench and she must have been aware of us, I told her everything Tim had said that first time I met him, and how when Tim asked whether we could meet again, I told him this bench could be our regular spot. “Maybe tomorrow. I'm often here. She was a friend,” I'd lied to him.

After the first ripples of shock at Jessica's death had gone
round the school, there was a curious quietness everywhere for weeks. Every excuse for not being happy was suddenly flawed.

“Maybe if I was prettier …” But if you were looking for one word to describe Jessica, it would have been “pretty.”

“Maybe if I had more money …” But Jessica's family took two holidays a year. Once, for her fourteenth birthday, they hired a jacuzzi. After her death there'd even been a picture of her and her friends at that party in the paper, under the caption: “Jessica Happy.” Jessica got all her clothes in London, not the local Top Shop like the rest of us. She wasn't the sort of girl who needed a Saturday job.

“Maybe if I was cleverer …” But Jessica was an A student.

But now, when no one else but me seemed to bother to visit the bench anymore, things seemed more equal. “We could have been friends,” I told Jessica. “I used to be so unhappy as well.” D.A.Y. My index finger traced the scars in the wood made by the letters.

So perhaps that was why, even before Tim arrived, I was feeling as if I might have a bit of potential too. I put my face down and brushed my hair back over my shoulder with the side of my hand, like Jessica used to do. After Jessica had died, I used to do it at home so often that my father banned hair-touching at the table. I couldn't have risked it at school either. It was definitely an in-crowd gesture, and might have drawn attention to me in a way my father wouldn't have liked.

I must have been too busy doing the hair thing to hear Tim come. When I looked up he was already sitting down on the other end of the bench, his head between his knees.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Quick,” he said. “Put your head down too. NOW!”

I copied him.

“Don't look up,” he warned. “Shut your eyes if possible.”

I couldn't. I looked at the ground instead. There were bits of chewing gum stuck under the bench. Cigarette butts, even a beer bottle. I made up my mind to tidy up sometime. For Jessica's sake.

“Wha—”

“Be quiet,” Tim said. He put his arm round my shoulders to draw me closer to him. I could feel the heat of his body through his sweater. The outline of his fingers across my back burned into me like infrared. He smelled of fabric softener and warm apples. I'd never been so close to a boy before. I tried hard to stop my body from tensing up, to relax more and enjoy the embrace.

“We're going to have to make a run for it,” Tim said. He held out his hand and I took it, clutching at his fingers as he pulled me into the bushes that lined the edge of the park. Just when I was thinking I couldn't run anymore, he stopped and we hid behind a tree for him to keep a watch out. He pulled the sleeves of his sweater down to cover my hands, holding on to my wrists so tightly. I did the same to him. It was as if we were grafting ourselves onto each other.

“I know who it is,” I said. “It's my father. He's found me.” I felt resigned, almost numb with disappointment.

Tim hushed me. “It's not,” he replied. “I'll keep you safe.”

I didn't ask how he was so certain. I could feel my heart beat hard against his chest and echo up into my head, and I wondered whether he could hear the same noises as me. The scuffle of leaves as a squirrel hunted for nuts, a dog barking in a garden somewhere near, the distant sound of a train announcement from the station. No one walking past would be able to see us in our nest of leaves. I wasn't sure how long we could stay there, not moving, but every time I tried to ask Tim what was happening he put his lips down, hushing through my hair, his breath hot against my scalp.

We were so close I could smell a flowery sweetness on his
breath I couldn't identify. It was the first time anyone had held me like that since my mother stopped touching me. Since the biology teacher business. I tried not to cry, but just rested my weight against his chest, my head lying on the soft pad of his shoulder.

We didn't say anything. There didn't seem the need.

Eventually, he let go of my wrists and we walked out onto the path together. Across the far side there were a few houses with their top lights still on, but apart from that there was no sign of life.

“Will you?” I asked.

“What?”

“Keep me safe?”

Tim nodded.

“Tomorrow?” Tim asked.

I nodded. He put one hand on my head, stroked my hair gently and then, without saying another word, he turned. I watched him leave the park. He walked quicker than other people. He knew where he was going. When I couldn't see him anymore I sat back on the Seize the Day bench.

I wanted my heart to settle down before going back to Mr. Roberts's shop.