Tell Me Everything (5 page)

“
O
h you,” I cooed as I stood looking at myself in my mirror. I lifted my skirt above my knees, looking at my legs harshly. I couldn't even pretend they were romantic tonight. They looked fat. Filled up with lies and unsaid things. Mr. Roberts was right. The whole of me was nothing more than lumpy mashed potatoes.

I pinched myself hard; right up on the soft part of my thigh, where they rub together when I walk, where a bruise couldn't be seen. It was an old trick, a way to prove to myself I did exist, that it was possible to be heard. In fact, I'd done it so often now it was always tender, so tender I had to rub cream there every night, otherwise it was too painful to sleep.

I kept thinking about how I'd seen Miranda in the mirror and how I didn't want to look like that anymore. It bothered me that although Miranda and I were both what you might call fat, no one but me seemed to notice it was in such very different ways.

I shook myself all over in the mirror. My head, my arms, my bottom, my legs. I watched the fat wobble, wanting to prove to myself I wasn't as flabbily solid as Miranda. That my outline could be redrawn, even my bones broken.

And that was something I had to believe. That little chance of transformation. Otherwise what was the point of anything?

“
I
used to be a little scrap of a thing, so small no one really paid any attention to me.” I ignored Mr. Roberts's snort from the bottom of the ladder as I noticed my voice turn to almost a whisper. “Then all of a sudden one morning I woke up and it was as if I'd turned into someone else. With a cartoon sexy body I couldn't control. I can't have developed that quickly, of course, but that was what it felt like. None of my clothes fit, and at first Dad refused to waste money on new ones. I got to hate the way he'd glare at me every morning and tell me to pull my skirt down, or button up my shirt properly as if it were my fault I was popping out of everything. He was always on at me.

“I'd walk around with my arms crossed, my shoulders hunched, but you can't be on guard all the time. Round about that time, all the boys at school started to notice me too,” I spoke down to Mr. Roberts. “Even the little boys had crushes on me. Once, when they had an exam, they begged me to give them a good-luck kiss, queuing up so I wouldn't miss one. They'd bring me presents, things they'd stolen from their mothers, just so I'd remember them the next time I walked past.”

“What's that?” Mr. Roberts grumbled. “Speak up, Molly. I can't hear you. You're mumbling.”

“But it was the older boys who were the worst.” I was speaking as loudly as I dared. There was no one else in the shop but my heart was knocking against my chest so hard I could almost feel it vibrate against the shelf. “My pigeonhole would be filled with notes. I'd find telephone numbers scribbled on my class books. They came round to my house in gangs and just stood outside the door. Once a boy knocked himself out on a lamppost because he was clowning around to get my attention. He had a black eye the next day at school.”

“Teenage boys,” Mr. Roberts sighed. “Too many hormones. They never learn.”

“But I wouldn't go near any of them,” I said. “I think that's probably why they all kept after me. I hated it but it wasn't that I didn't want a boyfriend. My father would never have let me. He thought it was all my fault.”

“Only natural to want to protect you,” Mr. Roberts said.

“Things had been OK before; he never took much notice of me to be honest, but after that, nothing I did was right. I couldn't stop making him angry. Mum too. She'd look at me sometimes as if I was changing my body deliberately,” I said. “But she still wasn't as bad as my father. He was so jealous he'd follow me to school. I'd come out at the end of the day and there he'd be, smoking a cigarette and waiting for me. He'd glower at every boy who passed and he'd quickly cup my arm through his and walk me home like that. Not friendly, but rough. He'd hold me so tightly I'd be all pressed into him. He said he couldn't trust me.

“I learned never to talk to boys anywhere, inside or outside school. And then not to girls either. He'd always find out somehow and there would be an inquisition. He said he had to buy me
some new clothes because my old ones were too revealing. But then when we were at the shops he had to leave me for a minute, and a boy I'd never seen before came up and asked if I knew where the pharmacy was. That was all it was, a few seconds’ conversation, but my father caught us and the fireworks went on for days. I couldn't get my father to believe we weren't setting up a meeting.”

“Sounds a bit harsh,” Mr. Roberts admitted. “Although you do have to look after daughters.” He seemed unsure though, and there was a few seconds’ silence before he spoke again. This time he was more enthusiastic. “But did you meet the boy again?” he asked. “Did you get up to some rumpus-pumpus? I bet you did, Molly. I know your sort. You like your hanky-panky. Nothing wrong with that.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured the rage on my father's face as he came out of the men's room and saw me pointing to the bottom tier of the shopping center and the boy nodding away. I'd learned to take his rage for granted by then, something I had to live with, but now I tried to see it through his eyes.

“We did,” I said. “But not after. That same day. I got my father to leave me for five minutes by pretending I was buying him something special as an apology, and then I ran downstairs and met the boy. We had sex in one of those side corridors no one uses.”

“Just like that? In the shopping center?” Mr. Roberts whistled through his teeth. “Weren't you worried someone would see you?”

“The more people who saw us the better,” I said. “We were like animals.”

“You dirty girl. It's unbelievable.” Mr. Roberts was shaking his head as he held the ladder steady for me to come down.

“It's all true.” After all, my father had thought it was the truth. He probably pictured the whole scene in much more detail than I'd just told it.

“And not very nice,” Mr. Roberts said, with more than a hint of pleasure.

He was right. It wasn't nice. But that night, for the first time since I could remember, I slept like a baby. I didn't have any of my usual nightmares about my father, and I woke up early to the electric whinny of the milk van as it made deliveries along the high street. Then I drifted back to the kind of safe half-sleep world where everything is sweet, anything is possible. I knew I had found my stories.

M
aybe because I had already confessed to Miranda about Tim, it was easier to tell Mr. Roberts I'd got a boyfriend.

I was halfway up the ladder, moving boxes of staplers and ballpoint pens from one side of the shelf to the other. Mr. Roberts's hands were on my calves to keep me steady.

“I've got a boyfriend, you know,” I said. “A proper one.” I paused a moment, waiting for his reaction.

“Well, good for you, girl. I knew you would get cleaned up, although—” He shook his head, his middle fingertip pressing against my flesh a little too hard.

“I'll still tell you stuff,” I said quickly. “Maybe I can even tell you about Tim. It's OK. He won't mind.” He won't know, I whispered to myself.

“I'm not sure it will be the same,” Mr. Roberts said. “It seems impure somehow. Young love and all that. That sort of thing should really be kept behind closed doors.”

I held my breath because I knew I couldn't afford to lose my home and salary. I knew Mr. Roberts was quite capable of docking
my wages if I didn't come up with the goods. I'd seen him with salesmen. They thought he was going to be an easy catch because of his woolly sweaters and funny thick glasses, but more often than not they stood outside the shop afterward going over figures on their calculators as if they couldn't believe what had just happened to them.

If Mr. Roberts spoke before I counted to ten then everything would be OK.

He came in exactly as I reached eight. “We'll maybe see how it goes. Give it a few weeks.”

I shoved the box I'd been pretending to move right over to the end of the shelf. “That's it, finished up here,” I said cheerfully, but Mr. Roberts kept his hand on my leg longer than he normally did. And he stayed where he was as I climbed down so I had to hold my body against his until I got to the bottom and could step aside. This was a new development, one I wasn't too sure about.

I
watched Tim's hand brush along the back of the Seize the Day bench as if he was just testing the grain of the wood. Then he made a sudden lunge to clutch at mine, missing first and knocking my arm before finally taking my hand in his.

I squeezed back but then he started to hurt me so I tried to loosen his grasp. He shook his head and kept on pinching at my fingers. We carried on grasping each other in silence although I could see my skin turning white.

“I've been plucking up the courage to ask you something,” he said eventually.

“Go on,” I encouraged. “You can ask me anything.” I felt so light when I was with him. So free of any need to be looking over my shoulder.

“I was wondering if I might kiss you tomorrow,” he said.

I burst out laughing. I couldn't help it. “You can kiss me now.” I pouted my lips out to him.

“No,” he said. “I would prefer it to be tomorrow.”

We shook hands when it was time to say good-bye. He told me he would be watching me leave the park, just to make sure I was safe.

K
nowing I was going to be kissed made me jumpy and restless the next day. I couldn't eat anything, not even my usual breakfast of a fruit scone I got from the cafe. It was still sitting in its brown paper bag under the till at lunchtime.

In the end, I went over to persuade Miranda to have an extra cigarette break because Mr. Roberts wasn't helping my mood. He had already made me do all sorts of unnecessary chores around the shop that morning, shifting the display of envelopes from one side of the room to the other, telling me to go up and interrupt customers who were happily browsing and ask if they wanted something, making me sort out the colored pencils into separate jars. He was watching me for signs of love, he said. We couldn't afford to let things get slipshod just because Cupid had shot his arrow.

At last a big order from the insurance office on Silver Street came in, and as he never trusted me with anything important, he bustled round ticking things off the list. This gave me a small respite.

Miranda and I huddled in the doorway of the fashion boutique next to her salon. Despite the fact that the two women who ran it were arrow-thin, continually pointing themselves in successful directions, they never opened their shop before eleven in the morning so it was a useful place for us to meet.

“There's this little girl been born somewhere who's got a bottom half like a tail,” Miranda told me. “Both legs are joined together, and they're going to have to do an operation to separate them. There was an interview with the doctor in my magazine. They called him Dr. Mermaid, because that's what the girl looks like. Apparently the operation rarely works but he never gives up hope.”

“How do you practice kissing?” I interrupted her.

“You must have kissed someone,” she said, surprised.

“Of course I have, stupid,” I lied. “But I want this to be perfect. I'm sure there used to be a way the girls at school rehearsed.”

“With a banana,” Miranda said firmly. “You snog a banana.”

It was only after I'd nipped across to the supermarket and got myself a whole bunch of bananas that weren't even on special offer that Miranda came into the shop and said she'd just remembered she'd got it wrong. Bananas weren't for practicing kissing. They were for something altogether different. And had I heard about a woman who went into a supermarket in Manchester and had been bitten by a tarantula who came over on a bunch of bananas?

T
hat night, on the Seize the Day bench, Tim made to take my hand before he stopped and asked me to shut my eyes. I did and then held my hand out, open-fingered, to him. My arm was shaking, but instead of holding onto me, pulling me closer as I hoped, I felt him slipping something egg-shaped into my palm.

I opened my eyes and peered down. A walnut was cupped there, looking withered and brainlike.

“What's this?” I asked.

“Shhhh.” Tim looked round. “You have to learn to speak quieter, Molly. Trees have ears.”

“Sorry,” I whispered. “But why've you given me a nut?”

“It contains a secret. A word only you will know.”

I stared at him. He looked completely serious. His brows were too heavy for the thinness of his face. They overshadowed every other feature and made him look dangerous in the wrong lights.

“How will I know I've got the right word?” I asked.

“Hold it. Think.”

So I did. I shut my eyes again and the word came. It came miraculously. I knew it was right without questioning. I just didn't know what it meant in this context.

“Fridge,” I said, and when I opened my eyes Tim was smiling, not at me, but I knew it was because of me. I was so proud it felt like a ball of sunshine had burst in my stomach.

“And now I'll kiss you,” he said.

There are kisses and kisses. Prostitutes never kiss. Most teenagers dream of doing nothing else. The sound of a mother's kiss was taken up in a spaceship to soothe aliens on distant planets. Eskimos kiss by rubbing noses. To kiss Marilyn Monroe was apparently like being kissed by Hitler, so bristly was her upper lip. To kiss at the point of ejaculation guarantees a child genius. So complicated is social kissing that it's safer for normal people like Miranda and me to just stand there, waiting for one, or two, or even three cheeks to be airbrushed toward us. French kisses. Butterfly kisses. Kissing cousins. Kiss of life. Kiss of death.

Tim's kiss was a lick of melon.

Honey-sweet melon fresh in your mouth at breakfast time when you're on holiday and life is good. In fact it's never been better. The melon is just the starter for how good the rest of the day is going to be.