The ABCs of Love (3 page)

E

ears

I like to stick cotton swabs in my ear and turn them round, pushing harder and harder. I crave the satisfaction it brings. Sometimes when friends are over, all I can think of is that round plastic jar of swabs until I have to go into my bedroom and clean my ears. It’s like an itch. Once I twisted too hard, and my head filled with a howling pain. I vowed then never to do it again, until the next time.

There was a boy at school called Stewart Griffiths. One day he was swinging on his chair during geography when the teacher called him to attention. Stewart was startled, lost his balance, and as he fell backward onto the floor, the pencil he was holding at his ear pierced right through his eardrum. He screamed.

Three years later, when I started attending that school and joined that class, the other children were still talking about the loudness of that scream. When we were fifteen, I went out with Stewart Griffiths and felt the reflected glory from his fame. He would still scream on the playground for money.

The trouble was that Stewart was boring when he wasn’t making a noise. He wanted to be a lorry driver, and sometimes when we were lying together on his bed, he’d be able to name the type of lorry that went past the window just from the sound of its tires. He seemed to feel that this was particularly clever as he was still deaf in one ear from the pencil incident.

See also Captains; the Fens; Sounds

elephant’s egg

We went to London Zoo for my eighth birthday, and I fell in love with the elephants. I wanted to move in with them and be the little elephant that never strayed from her mother’s side. I wanted people to say how sweet I was, and take pictures of me, and have my father wrap his trunk around me, swishing the flies off or sprinkling water over me to wash my back.

The next year, the day before my birthday, I asked to go and see the elephants again. My mother said once was enough, but when I got back from school that afternoon, there was a message from the zoo. Apparently, the elephant at London Zoo had laid an egg especially for me and my family to eat. It was going to come on my birthday.

The only trouble was that the zookeeper left it on our doorstep during the only two minutes in the day that I stopped watching for him. I took it into the kitchen, where my mother was waiting to cook it. She was cross with me for not keeping a proper lookout because it meant she wasn’t able to thank the keeper for bringing it all that way.

This happened every year until I was thirteen. I never managed to catch the zookeeper. My mother never managed to thank him.

An elephant’s egg is not like an ordinary egg. The white tastes like mashed potato, and the yolk is never runny, being a bit like a large round sausage. I’ve had sausage and mashed potatoes many times since, but never anything as good as those elephant’s eggs.

See also The Queen; The Queen II

endings

Ever since the Australian incident, I have been spending more time in my flat. My best treat is to pop into a bookshop and pick up a book to read. Then I curl up on the sofa with a bottle of wine and read myself into a trance.

The sort of books I like best are those in which I can completely lose myself. At first, you sit with the unopened book on your lap waiting to meet the main character with that sense of anticipation you get on blind dates. Is this person going to be your new best friend? And then there’s a moment—normally, just over halfway through—when your heart grows until it’s too big for your body because all these dreadful things are happening in the book and there’s nothing you can do to stop them. You can’t even tell the characters they’re making all the wrong decisions. You’ve just got to keep on reading. But then you get to the last words, and you can’t believe it—you keep your fingers on the end sentence because it can’t all finish there. It’s as if they’ve shut the door and left you on the other side, unwanted. And you cared so much. And there’s no way to make them see how much you cared.

A teacher at school told us that fairy stories always end with the prince and princess living happily ever after because what the writers were really saying, but couldn’t, was that they would die eventually. Apparently, it’s a way of helping children to understand life and death. It was raining when he was telling us this. I’ll never forget the sound of the rain falling on the flat roof of the classroom. Somehow it always rained when he read us stories that year.

Anyway, what he told us, very sternly, was that no one could expect to live happily ever after. It just didn’t happen. There are no happy endings, he said.

See also Breasts; Stepmothers; True Romance; Yellow; Zzzz

engagement ring

Colin has given Sally a ring. It isn’t an engagement ring, but that’s the finger she wears it on even though I tell her it’s bad luck.

She won’t let me try it on or even touch it. She says she remembers me telling her about how I posted my mother’s engagement ring in my piggy bank when I was six.

It’s true my mother cried in secret for days after the ring first went missing. She didn’t tell anyone. That was the strange thing. She didn’t even tell my father. I’m sure about this because I think if she had, he’d have started one of those inquisitions he was so fond of. Instead, she was quieter than normal. I’d come across her in odd rooms, frantically searching through cupboards, drawers, pockets, piles of things. Sometimes her eyes looked white and strained, as if she was forcing herself not to weep.

Sally still can’t understand why I never told my mother what I had done, but it was one of those china piggy banks you had to break to open, and I loved the spotty smoothness of my pig. And then, of course, it was too late. I wouldn’t have been able to put the ring back on the dressing table and pretend it hadn’t happened because Mum had moved the table to the other side of the room. I guess now she’d been taking up the carpet to check that the ring hadn’t fallen down there.

Dad went mad when he found my mother had lost her ring, but it was such a long time afterward that I couldn’t feel guilty anymore. If my mother had really cared she’d have made a fuss at the time. She was always losing things.

See also Daisies; Mistaken Identity; True Romance; Voices

F

fashion

My favorite book when I was growing up was The Little White Horse. There were two things about it I remember particularly. One was the sugary biscuits that were left in a silver tin in the heroine’s tower bedroom. Some even had little pastel flowers iced on them. The other was the heroine’s journey to the castle to stay with her unknown uncle. She was nervous but still able to get pleasure from her beautiful laced-up boots tucked away under her long skirts. Even though no one else could see them, she knew they were there and that was enough. It gave me a thrill of recognition.

It probably shaped my life. Made me see the strength you could get from having the right kind of secrets.

I spend a lot of time shopping. I search out clothes that have special things about them that only I will know. I hug these to me: a particular color that makes you want to eat it; a lining of soft plum silk; the Liberty-print trim to a denim pocket; a perfectly shaped pleat that kicks up the edge of a skirt.

Coco Chanel knew all about this. She used to sew a gold chain invisibly into the hems of her jackets so they would be ideally weighted around the bottom.

I think if I could have a jacket like that, I would die happy. I’d be buried in it.

See also Codes; Start-rite Sandals; Underwear; Women’s
Laughter

fat women

I am the last person to judge anyone else based on appearances alone, but have you noticed how difficult it is to see a fat woman and a small, thin man together and not think of them having violent, needy, and possibly perverted sex?

See also Indecent Exposure; Sex; Toys; Voyeur; Weight; Wrists

the fens

Every time I tell people I come from the Fens, the only thing they can think to say is “Well, there’s certainly a lot of sky there.” If this is the first thing you think of, here are three things you might not know about the Fens:

A lot of the children I went to school with had webbed feet. In the Fens, this is quite usual. They weren’t heavy like duck feet, but just a sliver of thin skin, so transparent as to be like silver, between each toe. When these children flexed their toes, it was the most beautiful sight you could imagine, especially after swimming, when the drops of water would glisten and sparkle.

The roads in the Fens are long and straight and run alongside treacherous dikes. They look even straighter because the houses on either side are slipping lower and lower back into the soil. If you are quiet, you can almost hear it sucking at you. Anyway, because it gets so dark at night—all that sky—a lot of people have accidents and drive into the ditches and die. Often when you are driving in the Fens during the daylight, you see bouquets of flowers by the side of the road for the tragedy of the night before.

At the bank opposite our house, a doctor had a terrible accident with his wife. He managed to get out of the car before it got submerged, but she drowned. He was so grief-stricken that he sat on the side of the road until he was sure she had died. It became a craze for many months afterward, imagining just what it must have felt like with all that water pressing against the car window and being able to see your husband through the waves, watching you scream.

Not many people appreciate that if you lie in a field of broad-bean plants in flower, just as the sun is going down, you will find yourself surrounded by the smell of Chanel No. 5. It just goes to show that if you know where to look, there is beauty in even the most unlikely places.

See also Fat Women

firefighting

Sometimes when I’m busy at work, I think of Sally’s new life and wonder how she is keeping herself occupied. When we left school and started work, we had so many plans. We were going to start a business together, and although we could never decide what to do, we had lots of ideas. We were going to train in martial arts and hire ourselves out as bodyguards. We’d look like classy dates, but if someone tried to kill our partners, we’d be able to high-kick our way out of trouble. We were going to run a truly caring furniture removal company, make novelty cushions, revamp people’s wardrobes. In the meantime, I went to work for a bank and Sally got a job selling advertising space for the local newspaper. That’s when she persuaded me to follow her into the media, although I was worried at first because my personality has never been as bouncy as hers. I could never cold-call like Sally could.

For example, one summer holiday Sally got us both a job selling fire extinguishers. We were supposed to walk into shops, and while one of us distracted the shop assistant, the other would start a small fire that we would then put out with the fire extinguisher to show how efficient it was.

My father found out what we had to do on the day we were due to start, and he banned me from joining Sally on safety grounds. Although she kept telling me what fun she was having and how much I was missing, I was secretly relieved. Sometimes the things Sally makes herself do frighten me.

See also Attitude; Danger; Imposter Syndrome; Sex

foreheads

Sally asked me what I thought of Colin.

I said he was okay. Nothing special. Not worth throwing your life away. But then Sally said that Colin had told her I was a bit intense. Apparently, I keep staring at him.

At first, I didn’t know what he was talking about. But then I realized. Colin plays rugby. He’d come to the pub with a group of his friends after they’d been playing in the park. It’s true, I couldn’t stop looking at them. They all had the same foreheads. A bulging shelf that hung over their eyes and made them look unfocused and brainless. Other men didn’t have this. They even shared the same wavy wrinkles across their foreheads. It was as if an empty space had been badly filled with cement, and then someone had made patterns on it with a comb when it was still wet.

I wanted to ask why rugby players look and sound permanently concussed, but they were all too busy talking to one another and ignoring Sally and me. I didn’t think Colin had seen me looking.

See also Nostrils; Vendetta; X-rated; Youth

friends

Every time I go out now with the girls, we talk about Sally.

I think that nowadays we spend more time thinking about her than we ever did when she was spending time with us. We wonder if she’s really happy, if she thinks Colin is genuine in his desire for her, what it must be like to have such a one-sided relationship. We agree we only have her best interests at heart.

We are supportive, even though Sally doesn’t always deserve it. I know that Miranda hasn’t forgotten the time we were talking about making love and she was explaining the importance of truly caring for the other person and treating yourself as if you were someone precious.

“I could never have inappropriate, meaningless sex,” Miranda said. She was so earnest that Sally was the only one round the table who didn’t nod.

“I could,” she said, staring at the businessman at the next table and ignoring Miranda’s frown. She left the restaurant with the businessman, and afterward, she wouldn’t tell anyone what happened. Not even when we begged. She said we wouldn’t approve.

It was so typical of her, but even so, the last thing we all want is for Sally’s relationship not to work out.

Whenever I ring Sally to pass on everyone’s best wishes, she laughs.

“We’re here waiting for you if things don’t work out,” I tell her, and she says that’s just what she’s worried about.

See also Outcast; Vendetta