Tell Me Everything (4 page)

“Did they dance with you?” Mr. Roberts asked me.

“I didn't go to the disco. My dad never let me go to dances,” I said. “I know all about it though because one of the boys wrote it up as if it was a rugby match report and circulated it.” It had been badly written too, full of jokes about odd-shaped balls, but as I told Mr. Roberts this, I realized something else I hadn't thought about before. That, even with all her potential, Sylvia was never seen back at school after the disco. The nice girls must have made sure of that.

Mr. Roberts let go of the ladder. “That's enough for today, Molly,” he said. “When we do this again maybe you could try to think of something of your own. And perhaps you could be, ah, a little more delicate.” And he went to fiddle with the cash register in the shop while I clambered down gracelessly.

I
thought I'd got it sussed the second time.

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.

Before they'd turned their attentions to me, all the boys in school had fancied Christine Chambers. She was fully developed by Year Three, and wore sheer skin-colored tights in the summer while the rest of us struggled with keeping up our drooping white socks. 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 colored beads. She always wore them around her neck although no jewelery was allowed with the school uniform, and with this she'd draw attention to herself, running her hands over the beads, pulling them this way and that, up to her lips, in lessons. I guessed she knew how mesmerizing it was. One day though, in history, she pulled so hard her necklace 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 onto the ground, hunting for the runaway plastic jewels.

“
E
ven 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 onto me quite so tightly.

“Well, I haven't always been this exact shape, but no, I wasn't on the floor,” I admitted. “I was watching what went on.”

T
he 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 has to be the 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 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.

T
hat night, up in my room, I emptied my purse out onto 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 had made me steal it from her bedside table, but on my third evening alone here I'd taken a sharp craft knife from one of the shop 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. There was no way it was going to be enough to go anywhere else yet, not even after I'd added the note from my purse. 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 flashlight 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. As I finished rinsing my hands in the sink exactly six times, I folded my washcloth 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, that 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.

I
was sitting in the empty salon with Miranda one evening soon after, watching her straighten her hair as we listened to our favorite CD of Bryan Ferry murdering 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. It was a useful trick I first learned during those school counseling sessions. When people start talking about something they're interested in but you're not, you 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 counselor 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. She doesn't know what to do. 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 was more alert than before. 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 onto the surface until my fingertips were swimming in the oil. 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 it was emotionally honest. For lots of reasons, it's something I've remembered.”

She paused then and I thought about what she'd just said. “How can it be emotionally honest, but not normally honest?” I asked. “What's the difference? 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 truer picture of what it felt like, even though it wasn't true.”

“So something real doesn't have to have happened, but people believe it did,” I said at last. “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. “Even ruin lives. But these are stories we're talking about, aren't they?”

I couldn't leave it like that. “But what if you were a child and something an adult was doing to you felt wrong but you weren't sure why, and when you tried to explain, all the other adults came to the wrong conclusion and took over and spoiled everything, then that isn't lying? Even if all the facts weren't exactly right, but it was what it felt like. And then when you got older—” My words were spilling over each other.

Miranda clicked her tongue against the top of her mouth hard and stared at me. “Molly,” she said. I guessed she meant to be kind, even encourage me, but it took me out of the trance I was falling into. My cheeks were red from the heat in the salon, and I could feel a flush coming up my neck. It was just as it had been in the schoolroom.

“It was only something a friend told me,” I interrupted her before she could say anything else. “She said some things about her father, and I think she might have exaggerated everything just a bit but she didn't see what harm it could do, because her father wasn't a nice person. Not to her anyway. And then when everyone took her words as the exact truth, she still thought it was
going to be OK because her mum would know what to do. Trouble was her mum wouldn't talk to her about it because she was so upset and pretty quickly after that her dad left home. No one would tell my friend anything about what was going on, but they kept encouraging her to speak to other people as if that would make everything better. The strange thing was when she did try to tell the truth it was as if no one could hear her anymore. My friend didn't mean any harm.”

Once again, the words fell over themselves as they trickled through my lips, and 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 anymore. 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 really safe to 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 good-bye 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.

“Jean Rhys, Ana'is Nin, even Mills and Boon. 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.”

“I didn't always want to be a hairdresser.” Miranda shook her head so her hair really did flair out, just like it did in her magazine pictures. “That English teacher I told you about. He's got a lot to answer for.”

I bared my teeth, trying to smile along with her.

“And are you really sure you're all right?” she said.

I nodded, blinking the tears back. This was how to be normal. To learn when to be quiet. There was no reason why I couldn't do it. Not every story has to have an ending.

She looked at her watch and then grimaced. “I must be off. Mum's got bingo tonight and I promised I'd look after Dad so she can enjoy a night off. He can't get around by himself, you know, not since his accident. Mind you, you'd be surprised at the trouble he can get up to in his wheelchair. Speedy, that's what Mum says we should call him.” She grimaced and then shook herself. “You take care now, honey-girl. Time for me to love you and leave you. Don't do anything I wouldn't do,” she said brightly, her hair slicing the air around her as I watched her walk away.