on cider at a year eleven disco and four boys from the rugby team took her into the changing rooms and made her give them blow jobs, one by one, while the others looked on. And how after they’d finished with her, they took all her clothes and left her there, crying on the floor of the shower, while they went back to the disco to dance with the nice girls who were waiting for them.
‘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, but I’d realised something else I hadn’t thought about before. That, even with all her potential, Sylvia was never seen back at school after the disco. I wondered if it was the nice girls who had 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.
All the boys in school had fancied Christine Chambers. 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 coloured beads she wore around her neck although no jewellery was allowed with the school uniform. With this necklace, she’d draw attention to herself in lessons, running her hands over the beads, pulling them this way and that, up to her lips. One day though, in history, she pulled so hard it 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 on to the ground hunting for the runaway plastic jewels.
* * *
‘Even 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 on to me quite so tightly.
‘Well, I haven’t always been this exact shape but no, I wasn’t on the floor,’ I admitted. ‘That’s how I could watch what was going on.’
The 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 is the whole 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 obviously 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.
That night, up in my room, I emptied my purse out on to 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 made me steal it from her bedside table but on my third day at the stationery shop, I took a sharp craft knife from one of the 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. 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 torch 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. After I finished rinsing my hands in the sink exactly six times, I folded my flannel 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, 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 Bryan Ferry murdering the 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. There was a useful trick I first learnt during those school counselling sessions. When people start talking about something they’re interested in but you’re not, you have to 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 counsellor 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. 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 had gone all alert. I squeezed little dollops of shampoo from the shelf