Tell Me Everything (9 page)

“Wild girls,” Mr. Roberts repeated. I knew he liked Leanne.
He was always wanting to hear more about her. He liked the way she taught me the tricks that would allow us one day to appear in the circus ring together, lessons she'd learned at her daddy's knee.

“When are you going to show me that nude juggling trick with lit torches you learned how to do so well?” he asked.

“Well, it's a bit of a fire risk to do it in a stationery shop when there's so much paper around, but one day soon,” I promised.

“She was a clever little girl,” he said, through the coughing that seemed to be usual with him these days, “that Leanne.”

I snorted. He didn't know what he was talking about. I was the one who had perfected the art of juggling with seven flaming sticks while stark-bonking naked. And I knew I had made it perfectly clear to Mr. Roberts that this was something Leanne had never quite managed to do correctly herself. She'd been too scared. What was so smart about that?

I was getting annoyed at how Mr. Roberts always stuck up for Leanne. The other day he'd been cross with me for the hard time I gave her. He thought I should have been nicer, considering the rough period she'd gone through when her father had run off and her mother blamed Leanne before she took up with that conman posing as an aristocrat and didn't want Leanne living at home anymore.

“Would you believe that much bad luck?” he coughed. I shrugged. You make your own luck.

So perhaps it was jealousy that persuaded me one day to get rid of Leanne just like that. Whatever the reason, it was surprisingly easy.

She'd come from nowhere and one day, I told Mr. Roberts, she went back to that place. It really did happen as quickly, as easily, as that. I came to school and there was another girl sitting in Leanne's chair. A not-so-nice girl. A big spotty one, I told Mr. Roberts, peeking down the ladder at him so I could enjoy his look
of disappointment. This girl had greasy pigtails, blackheads all over her nose and a cross-eyed look about her. I'd gone to Madame Gilligan to find out what had happened but she said that Leanne's mother had written to the school and said Leanne wasn't coming back anymore. I went round to her house that afternoon, and when I rang the bell a weaselly woman with two snotty kids hanging on her skirt answered the door. She said Leanne had left no forwarding address.

No more questions asked. No answers given. People vanish into thin air every day and no one misses them.

Y
ou see, Miranda was wrong.

People
can
come from (and go to) nowhere. The homeless Molly Mr. Roberts took home with him from the church cafe to his stationery shop was a monster he had created himself with every question he asked during that first cup of tea we'd had together.

And that Molly was now a shared production. Miranda looked after my exterior appearance while, over in the library, Liz and her books were taking care of the inside thoughts. Even I had a part in the play, reshaping my memories with every story I told Mr. Roberts up that ladder.

The strange thing was that although we all seemed to be happy in our assigned roles, it was only when I was in the park with Tim that I had to think about being the real Molly. I told him the truth about me and Mr. Roberts, and how I actually liked how I could make up things to tell him. I said how I didn't really like the hairstyles Miranda gave me, but I liked the attention she gave me. How the books Liz picked out for me told me more about her than she realized. I admitted to Tim how I missed a television
to watch but how I'd lie in bed sometimes and imagine I was one of the girls from the pictures I had on the wall and what I'd be doing if I were her.

What I didn't tell him about was that it was my mother's picture I imagined. How I punished myself at night when I thought about what she might be doing, because I knew that without me she'd go back to my father. She'd said no to him only once before, when she took me away, but she wasn't strong enough to do it again. So even as I told myself I was opening up my heart to Tim, I knew what I was telling him about was now. Never then.

It didn't seem to matter. Tim lived almost entirely in the present. He never wanted to know about the past, or the future. I'd never been with anyone like that before. When I told Tim anything, he didn't absorb it as just another story that didn't need acknowledgment, like Liz, or turn away from it, like Miranda. He listened to what it was I was really saying, even when it was hidden under layers of other words. He was more like the counselor at school but better, because it wasn't his job. He wasn't being paid to listen to me. With the counselor sometimes, however nice she was, I could imagine that she'd forget about me the minute I shut the door to her office. I'd be like Leanne to her. Something more convenient to be rid of. A blank line in the register after I didn't show up a few times.

There was so much to say to Tim that I'd leave the park after one of our evenings and, by the time I got back to my room, I'd have to get out my notepad and write a letter to him.

This is something I forgot to say
…

And then I'd write and write about all the things that were in my world before I went to live above the stationery shop, about my family and everything that happened. About how it was too frightening to think about how much I had destroyed. I wrote
down everything I was hiding from. How I wasn't who everybody thought I was, but how I didn't know what would happen to me if I forgot who I really was.

You're the only person I can tell this to
, I would write. The words took their own shape on the page in front of me, solid and indestructible. I didn't give Tim those pages though. Something would make me hide them under the bed as soon as I finished with them. Instead, I'd start again and write a follow-on from our conversations in the park.

Occasionally I'd get letters back from him too—long letters on A4 lined paper, full of his thoughts of the moment; strange rambling letters much of which I couldn't really understand but that I'd look through for clues about anything I might have missed.

We'd leave our letters by the bench for the other to find during the day, underneath a flat stone we moved there especially. I hid behind a tree once, hoping I could catch Tim picking mine up. I didn't even want to speak to him, just to get the pang of joy that always hit me when I watched him coming to meet me. I lost attention only once, when I bent down to shoo off a little white Scottie dog that was sniffing round my feet, but when I turned back to watch the bench I knew something had happened. I walked over, shifted the stone, and my letter was gone. A letter from Tim was waiting in its place.

I knew it hadn't been there before, so maybe Tim was watching me while I stood there hoping to be able to watch him. I smelled the letter first—old-fashioned sweets—and then sat down on the bench to read.

And so on. I couldn't really put my finger on why Tim's letters were disappointing. Maybe I just wanted something more from him. Something sensational, mind-altering. Or maybe just something more personal and loving. And so, because there was nothing much in the content of the letter, I concentrated on his writing instead. It was round and slanted backward with looping “l”s and “y”s, “g”s and “f”s, and he used a real pen with a thick nib and black ink. There was a scribbled note in blue Biro at the end though, and that looked as if it had been added after. It made everything else look as if it had been copied out too carefully.

I read that postscript again and again.

You are all good.

Those words, lumped together with the fact that Tim knew the exact moment I'd be looking away so he could make his letter drop in secret, took on a special significance that grew as I read the postscript yet again. They made me more and more convinced he could read my mind. It was as if he was the twin I never knew I had, hiding somewhere inside me. My better half. Then it wouldn't matter that he never received all the secret letters I never gave him—he knew what I'd written anyway. He really did know who I was.

I held the letter up to my face again. Parma violets, that's what it was. Those thin little tubes of sweets Gran used to keep in her housecoat pocket and that always tasted of clean things, of freshly ironed sheets and nothing going wrong.

L
iz called me over to the desk as I was leaving the library one day.

“Here,” she said. “Take this one out. It's all right. It's not kept with the normal books but I stamped it for you. I wondered about it because you're so young, but I read it again and I think you're ready for it, the way you've been gobbling up the others. It's French, just how you like, and it's a bit more interesting than some of them.”

I thrust it in my bag, without looking. Liz hadn't let me down yet. Standing outside the library, I fished it out again.

The Story of O.

The book's cover was black, and there were none of the usual clues about the author on the inside pages. This was disappointing. I liked to keep that photograph of the writer in my mind. Never mind. I flicked through the pages as I walked, read first one paragraph and then another. Quickly I shut the book, hot-cheeked, worried that someone might see me reading something like this. I imagined my father coming toward me, his arm held up about to hit me. My cheeks were flamed raw with the heat.

A line of schoolgirls wearing brightly checked dresses and
straw hats walked straight by me. Had the teacher noticed my book? Two women in identical black leather jackets strolled by hand in hand. Had they seen? The old man with the walking stick? The frizzy-haired mother pushing a pram? Could they have read the cover?

There was no way I was going to be able to sleep that night. I sat up with the book, holding it in one hand, my other covering my mouth. The descriptions were vivid, too vivid. This was a world too far. One I didn't want any part of. Surely no one could see me in this world. It was like the prostitutes in Amsterdam all over again. I thrust it under the bed where I couldn't see it, but even that was too close. Eventually I put the book outside on the window ledge. I didn't even care if it rained. Let it get wet.

I went straight back to the library to find Liz the next morning. She was down on her hands and knees, clearing out the “T” section. I knelt down next to her.

“Bugger the Trollopes,” she said. “Both of them. They get everywhere.”

She put one knee up, rubbing it where the ribbed thread of the carpet had left tracks on her skin.

“What was that all about?” I asked her, taking the book from the carrier bag I'd wrapped it up in and pushing it across the floor with the edge of my hand so I didn't have to touch it too much. “It's horrible. I hated it. There was nothing good in it. Nothing good at all. It made me feel dirty.”

Liz took the book from me, got up without saying anything and I followed her through to the front desk. I didn't smile at her once, not even when she put it in the bottom drawer and turned the key on the book. “Come with me,” she said, and we went outside into the courtyard garden the council had designed for blind people. It was a hot day; the lightest May wind was blowing, the
sun was warm to the skin. We sat on the wooden chairs and I couldn't look at her.

“The
Story of O
was one of the finest love stories ever written by a woman to a man,” she said quietly, batting away a bee. “You said you wanted to know everything about love.”

“I don't believe that book was written by a woman! No woman would want to be treated like that. It's unnatural,” I said. “The things they make her do. She must be mad to write that book, to think of all those things. She needs to be put away. And it's not love. Don't say that. Not even my father …” I stopped myself just in time.

“It was written by a sophisticated woman who was worried that her lover was going to get bored of her,” Liz continued as if I hadn't spoken. “The book was written in sections, each one sent to the man as an example of how much, and in what depth, the woman was prepared to humiliate herself for the love of him.”

“But why would she do that?” The smell of honeysuckle and summer jasmine in the library garden made me homesick for Colette's world. There, when the men got bored of them, the women retired into a land of summer gardens where they held tea parties full of arching roses, gossip and bridge with other old women. They took pleasure in the small things of life, like the strands of expensive pearls they'd once been given, a letter sent from an old flame, a sensational piece of someone else's bad luck. They didn't let masked men lead them around like dogs on chains. Or worse. Much, much worse. I didn't want to have to think about it. I hated Liz.

“Why does anyone do anything?” Liz shrugged her shoulders. “It worked though. The book kept the man's attention on the author. She won.”

“But—”

Despite my disgust, I couldn't let it go just yet. There was something about this storytelling I couldn't get to the bottom of. When I was talking to him, Mr. Roberts listened to me so I was in charge. But then again the stories wouldn't exist if it wasn't for him. So who did they belong to—him or me? Or did they belong to my father? Because he had thought them up first of all. Hadn't he?