Tell Me Everything (7 page)

“And French?” I was getting to know Miranda.

“Of course.” Miranda smiled at me in the mirror. “I've got better photographs of her at home, walking along in St. Tropez, barefoot, all these men staring at her.”

“I've heard of Saint Wotzername,” I said. I picked out a red Smartie from the tube and started rubbing it round my lips, smacking them together in the mirror.

“St. Tropez,” Miranda purred. “That could be us, Molly. Strolling hand in hand with dark Frenchmen before we take champagne on one of the yachts there. They'd buy us jewels. Loops of pearls that we'd wind round our necks, diamonds for our fingers. Tiaras even. They'd feed us with their fingers, the tastiest piece of lobster, an oyster straight from the shell.”

“I get a bit seasick on water,” I warned. “My tiara would probably drop off as I was vomiting over the edge of the yacht.”

“And then we'd go to a nightclub until morning, dancing and drinking cocktails.” Miranda ignored me. “We'd walk home in our glittery evening dresses, smiling at all the ordinary people we passed as they rush off to work. Just imagine.”

“Don't think it's really me. You've thought about it a lot though, haven't you? Got it all worked out.”

But when Miranda didn't answer and I looked at her reflection, I saw that it was her turn to shut her eyes and feel that tremor. She was even leaning against the chair with her whole weight, her head softly falling to one side. The only clue that she was still alive was the way her lips moved to mime along with the French words coming from the CD player. I picked the photograph up from the counter and turned it over and over in my hands, waiting for Miranda to come back down to earth and finish the hairdo.

S
o it was partly because of that heavy-eyed look of Miranda's and the fact that Tim hadn't been in the park for a few days that I went looking in the library for some of the books Miranda told me about. I wasn't expecting much.

Certainly not to fall in love. Not in the library anyway. But there she was—my first proper crush on a French woman— nestling between Jonathan Coe and a misplaced George Eliot. It was the single name that attracted me first. That, and the old-fashioned orange spine of her book. I turned to the back, as I usually did, to have a look at the writer's photograph before I decided to bother with the story.

Colette had a long, varied and active life.

It was looking good.

At the age of twenty she had plunged herself into a different world
…

Twenty. So I'd got there before her. It was love at first read. By sheer luck, I'd picked someone who understood the advantages of reinvention. Maybe I could even learn something from her.

“Feathery near-pornography,” read the quote on the back of the book. Perfect. It would do for Mr. Roberts too. I took it straight to the desk and joined the queue. The man in front of me
wanted to know where he could obtain proper back copies of the
Daily Telegraph.
He looked like a caricature of a retired army officer and even twiddled his mustache as he shouted how he didn't want to have to read them on microfiche, the stories weren't the same on computer.

“But they're exactly the same words. They've just been copied onto computer to save space,” said the librarian patiently, but the man hee-hawed in her face.

“If God meant us to use computers, He'd have given us television aerials on the top of our heads. This is a library. For the
written
word. For which our God gave us
eyes,”
he said, looking for all the world as if he'd scored not just one point over her, but won the whole war.

She stared at him so fiercely though, he backed away.

“In my day, sentences were meant to be treasured,” he said in a weak parting shot. “Not computered out of all existence. And I would expect you of all people to understand that!”

The librarian merely looked past him, smiling at me in an attempt to put us both on the same side against the man, but I was torn. Instinct and training meant I wanted to be the good girl for her because she was Authority, but I hated computers too. I compromised by trying to look as if I hadn't heard anything.

“Ooh, Colette,” she purred as she stamped my book. “How nice. And how unusual to see someone young enjoying a forgotten writer. Have you read her biography?”

I shook my head.

“It's super,” she said. “You really must, but then again maybe it's only when you get to my age that you prefer real life over fiction.”

As I left the library, the
Daily Telegraph
man was standing there, looking at the notice board in the entrance hall.

“I liked what you said about having an aerial on your head,” I
said, but I must have been too quiet because he didn't seem to hear me, just kept staring up at the mixture of handwritten cards and brightly colored posters. I looked with him.

Each of the advertisements hinted at a story as complicated and plot-full as any of the books on the library shelves inside.

“Good-bye then,” I said, pausing a minute, but he didn't so much as turn round. I pinched myself hard on the thigh as I walked home, clutching the book with my other hand so it wouldn't fly away with all its feathery near-pornography.

I did exist. Pinch, pinch. I did exist.

T
im and I spent the evening pushing each other on the swings. “Did you have a happy childhood?” I asked.

“It was OK.” It was my turn to push him. He had his head back so he was looking straight up at the sky. His legs were right out in front of him and his arms were taut against the ropes of the swing. He was moving too quickly now for me to get hold of him properly so I just stood there behind him, watching his face loom in and out of sight. “You're an upside-down Molly,” he laughed, finally slowing down.

“Aren't you going to ask me?” I said, sitting down on the next swing. I tried to wind the ropes together so we were entwined, but they kept springing loose.

“If you want me to.”

I thought about this. Tim was swinging faster again, pushing his legs up and down to speed himself up. The joints of the swing were creaking above us. I was starting to feel dizzy, so I started swinging myself.

“I'm flying,” I shouted, and then for several wonderful moments Tim and I were swinging in perfect synchronicity. I pushed
my head right back, letting my hair fall down, and watched the stars. It was as if they were all shooting in different directions.

Later, as we walked back to the bench, Tim put his hand out to stroke my hair. “Beautiful,” he said.

“You need to ask me things because you want to know the answer, not because I ask you to,” I said. “That's the only way we're going to find out about each other.” I was still annoyed about his earlier lack of interest in my childhood.

“But I know you already,” he said. “It's my job to know things like that. You're Molly. Beautiful inside and out. What more do I need to know?”

I was quiet then. Too busy thinking.

M
r. Roberts was breathing heavily below me as once more I shifted the stationery boxes from one side of the shelf to the other.

“Remember I told you about Leanne,” I said. “The one that gave me the red lipstick?”

“The naughty one,” Mr. Roberts said.

“Well, she joined our class late in the year because she'd moved, so she didn't know anyone and she was different from the rest of us anyway. We were tough country girls but she was like a town mouse, a timid little thing with these big eyes and a gentle voice. She needed looking after, but there was something about her that made me want to crush her and just stroke her hair, both at the same time. It's hard to explain.”

I was aware I'd started a bit hesitantly, but now I'd got into the flow the story was telling itself.

“She started to bring me other things too. I knew she'd stolen them but I didn't say anything because they were only little.
Nothing you'd bother about too much. A bit like her, really. Once she stood very close to me when she handed me a hairclip, and she smelled of lemons,” I continued. “Lemons, clean white shirts and sun-kissed skin. I had to close my eyes it was that powerful. I was leaning into her without realizing, wanting to inhale her, to touch her. It was like she was a window out to somewhere else. But the poor little thing was frightened of everything, so when this gang of boys came down the corridor she got scared. She put her hand into mine, as if I could look after her, although we were the same age. Mind you, I was probably double her size, even then.

“It was like holding a heart in my hand, her little fingers curling up into mine. We stayed frozen like that, even when the bell went for the end of break. It was only when everyone had gone into class, and it was just us two left in the corridor, we realized we were still holding hands. I didn't want to let her go.”

“So what did you do?”

I'd forgotten about Mr. Roberts. I was picturing what it must have felt like, holding on to Leanne's hand. You know when you catch a bird and you can feel its heart beating almost out of its body. You realize how fragile that life force is. How little it would take to stop it.

“I kissed her,” I said. “We kissed each other very gently, and then slowly the tip of my tongue went out and licked round her lips. She parted her teeth with this little gasp and I traced their edges with my tongue. She was like a boy, shapewise, so we fitted together, but she didn't taste like a boy. She tasted like fruit. Fresh fruit. There was nothing bad about her.”

Was it my imagination or was the ladder shaking a little now? I shut my eyes to try to forget where I was. I wanted to concentrate on the scene I was describing instead.

“And her skin didn't feel like a boy's either. Or at least not that
bit of her neck underneath her hair, when I pulled it up to kiss her there too. It was so soft, like the underbelly of a kitten. I stroked her shoulders through her thin cotton shirt. She held onto my waist.” I wasn't sure which were my words anymore. All I wanted was that feeling of salty sweetness that came off Colette's pages, because that's what came into my mind when I was talking about Leanne. Reading that library book had been like looking in a mirror. “We cleaved together,” I said finally.

I was trying to smell the school corridor, the scent of disinfectant, wax crayons and sweat. But there was something I'd been missing too. The faintest hint of fear under Leanne's lemony smell. It was making me break out in goosebumps now.

“She was French,” I said suddenly. She wasn't but there'd always been something different about Leanne I'd never been able to put my finger on, something that made you speak slowly to her, to take for granted the fact that she wouldn't be around forever.

Mr. Roberts gasped below me. “You've never said that before,” he said.

“Why should I? And that's all I'm going to tell you this time too,” I said, looking back down at him. “Now if you'll just get out of my way, I'd better get on with stuff in the shop.”

And he did get out of my way. He jumped to the side but still held the ladder steady, as if for the first time he felt I was worthy of some respect. It made me feel dizzy. I wanted to laugh but I didn't. I practiced my tragically fragile smile instead, the one where I felt wistful for all the dreadful things that had happened to me but still looked forward, bravely, to a bright future.

M
iranda wasn't my only friend anymore.

I'd been going to the library so often that Liz, the librarian, let me sit with her in the kitchen and talk during her coffee break. She'd smile at my enthusiasm for the books she encouraged me to read and talk about.

“This is what we should have learned at school,” I said. “This is what matters. I want to know everything about love, not math or history.” And I'd munch my way through the chocolate cookies Liz had started to buy although she wouldn't eat one herself. “A minute on the lips,” she'd say, patting her hips.

When Liz wasn't on her breaks, there was a comfortable low chair in the fiction section I liked to sit in and read. Liz would come and sort out books beside me, whispering gossip as she clicked authors alphabetically into their slots. It didn't take me long to realize she treated dead and living writers, fictional characters and library users in exactly the same way.

“Of course, Ana'is Nin was a bigamist before she died,” she told me once. “And do you know that once one husband rang the other, but Ana'is passed him off as a madman? He probably believed her because she was beautiful, but they used to say too that
the Duchess of Devonshire had skin that was so fresh it sparkled. People would bring chairs to the park especially so they could stand on them to see her when she went past. And talking of chairs, that Karen Cooper with the little baby was in the library yesterday. Not much older than you but her skin was so red and blotchy I couldn't really look at her, and her boobs were hanging out of her T-shirt. Some people should study themselves in the mirror with a bit more care. Oh, but talking of boobs, do listen to this. When Rimbaud's body was carried down the street for his funeral, the prostitutes of Paris all lifted up their tops to show his coffin their bare breasts as a tribute to their own wild child. Isn't that killing?”

It was. So killing I stopped trying to keep up with her, but it was still hard to get my breath back so I could concentrate on my book.

“So have you got a boyfriend?” she asked.

“I have,” I said. “He's called Tim.” It wasn't hard at all to say anymore. In fact, it was nice to have someone to talk to about him. I hadn't mentioned him to Miranda since she asked if he was “all right up there” when I told about how he'd taught me to listen through walls, and Mr. Roberts was too fixated on Leanne nowadays to want to talk about anyone else.