Tell Me Everything (8 page)

Liz sighed. “And is he lovely?” she laughed. “Does he make your heart go pitter-patter?”

“He does. He's, oh Liz, he's everything nice.”

“They always are at first,” Liz said. “It's keeping them that way that's the problem. Still, if there wasn't heartbreak in the world then there wouldn't be books. And then where would we be, Molly?”

Here, I wanted to say. Still right here. For once it wasn't a bad place to be.

“Mind you, I shouldn't be raining on your parade.” Liz slotted
a book back in its place so hard the whole shelf trembled. “Maybe you've got the good one. God knows there must be one out there, otherwise what's the point of all this?” She gestured at the books lining the room.

I watched her carefully as she reached up to put another book back. The fat on her upper arms wobbled until it looked as if it was taking on a life of its own, but I tried to ignore it. I couldn't imagine Liz outside the library. She was like most of the books here, unread and slightly dusty. Maybe what she needed was for someone to take her off her shelf. I smiled. There among all the plots, I was starting to hatch one of my own.

T
ell me more about the little French girl,” Mr. Roberts begged. This was the third time in as many days.

I stared at him until he reached into the till and picked out another ten-pound note. I put it quickly in my jeans pocket.

“We used to go down to this field after school,” I told Mr. Roberts. “We were feral children. I had this long curly hair I could never keep tied in a bow, but Leanne was always neater than me. Her hair was thin and blond, and she kept it short. Once she fell into the stream and we didn't have a towel or anything so I dried her feet with my hair, wrapped it round and round her toes.

“She was shaking, just gently but still shaking. Like a lamb when you catch it.”

“Lambs don't shake,” Mr. Roberts said. “They jump.” I looked down at him sharply. I was trying to establish a rule that he was to keep silent during my storytelling. Every time he started to interrupt or to take over the story in any way, I'd stop. He might be in charge of the shop, but the ladder had become my territory.

“Go on. Please,” he pleaded, and I decided to be merciful this time.

“And then because my face was down there,” I said, “I licked between her big toe and the next very gently. It was wet from the stream, but I could taste her salty skin underneath. She hid her face in her petticoat so when I looked up all I could see was this frothy white lace, but I knew she liked it.”

Mr. Roberts moaned, but he said nothing. He was proving surprisingly easy to train.

The strange thing was that it wasn't just the money that made me tell the stories. Or even the way that I felt more solid somehow afterward. No, it was the fact that if I could change my past so easily, then I could lay an alternative universe over every aspect of my current life too. And my future. It was a Vaseline smear on the lens so that even the miserable bits became not just bearable, but romantic.

Because if Leanne could turn out to be French and desirable, then lots of other things around me shifted. Everything had possibilities. I'd watch girls my age and feel sorry for them. They couldn't see what I could. That the guy they were giggling about because he was with someone so much older than him was a gigolo. The old woman was an elderly courtesan having her last romantic fling. He didn't love her, and she didn't love him, but they both pretended until one day they woke up and found it was true. But neither could confess, and they went their separate ways, living out the rest of their lives wondering what might have been if they'd been able to be truthful.

I'd wake up in my little bare room above the stationery shop, dreaming that I was in Paris, in a luxurious boudoir above the park, sleeping in a gold-barred bed between clean white cotton sheets, and that an elderly but loving servant was downstairs making me hot chocolate with fresh bread for breakfast. There were times I could even smell the bread baking.

I even began to look forward to my sessions with Mr. Roberts
because it was a chance to combine my different lives through the stories I wove for him. What I was doing, the way I was living, stopped being a space in which I merely existed and became instead the wild, gypsy-like existence I'd always dreamed of. I'd never been more free.

“Have I told you about the time Leanne and I went to the seaside and ate rock?” I asked Mr. Roberts, but he just groaned. “I will tomorrow,” I promised.

“
N
o one comes from nowhere,” Miranda said. She was painting strands of my hair a tangerine color and then wrapping them up in silver foil. The bright, hot lights were turning my face red, and I looked like a turkey.

Still, having my hair done and staring in the mirror all that time seemed part of the whole thing. I wanted all the scents, the mousses, the colors. Everything that other women took for granted. Sometimes, when I hadn't managed to get to the leisure center for a shower for some days, I'd smell my arm surreptitiously in the shop, enjoying the slight animal whiff of the skin against the apple-lemon mist that seemed to come permanently out of my hair these days.

I'd taken to tinting my hair red to look more like a postcard of Colette that Liz, the librarian, had shown me, drawing thick kohl lines around my eyes and plastering white powder on my cheeks. It wasn't a look Miranda approved of—“Why spoil the natural beauty of your little face with all that hippie stuff?” she asked— but Miranda did what no one had ever done for me before. She did what I asked her to do.

Although not quite everything. She wouldn't cut my hair short and perm it as I wanted, not just yet. She seemed to think she had to take responsibility for me. Just one year older, and she felt
in loco parentis.

“Perhaps you want to talk it over with someone first?” she asked. “What does your mum think about your hair?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It's my hair.”

She shook her head sadly, fixing me with a look that seemed to say she knew the answer to her next question. “You must have someone who cares whether you're OK or not. My mum always likes to know what I'm up to. I tell her everything.”

“You care enough about me for everyone,” I said. It was meant to be a joke, but it came out too seriously and Miranda looked surprised.

“That's different,” she said. She must have caught the expression on my face because she went on quickly. “Although I do, of course. You know I do, petal. It's just that—”

“Just what?” I wasn't being difficult. I really couldn't see what Miranda was talking about. If I wasn't worried, why should she be?

“You can't rely on me, Molly,” Miranda said. “It's not as if I'm family or anything. You shouldn't just put your trust in anyone.”

I laughed. “You're better than any family,” I said. “I could tell you things about my family that—”

“How about coming back with me and having your tea with us soon?” I'd noticed how she always interrupted me when I was about to tell her anything personal about the past. In some ways it was a relief. I wasn't sure I was ready to tell anyone everything just yet. Besides, keeping silent meant I didn't have to sort the facts out just yet. Everything was still floating. “Me and Mum and
Dad,” Miranda continued. “We can make a fuss of you. Get some real home cooking into you for a change.”

And then she started telling me about a woman she'd read about in one of her magazines who was trapped in a relationship with a man who force-fed her because he had a bit of a thing for fat people.

S
urprisingly for someone who never let himself get pinned down, Tim had a passion for routine and order.

He had told me once that discipline was an essential quality in his line of business. “What's that?” I asked him.

“You'll be better off if you don't know,” he said.

“Go on, tell me.” I knew I was pestering him, but I couldn't believe I still didn't know what he did. It was clear that he did something. And something interesting. Although he looked scruffy and Miranda would die a million deaths if she saw the state of his hair, there was definitely something busy and purposeful about him. I could see that he had money from the way he dressed. Even though he never wore socks, his shoes were made of that shiny leather that felt as soft as the surface of any ten-pound note. He spoke poshly, too, clipping the starts of his consonants and raising his voice at the end of sentences as if he wasn't giving orders, just expecting them to be carried out automatically. He must have been a good five years older than me, and certain things he said made me think he'd gone to university. But despite all this he had never talked about a job.

“I'm an adviser,” he said eventually. “I advise people.”

I waited for him to go on. “Like a personal trainer in the gym?” I encouraged, although even I would admit that Tim was lacking in the six-pack department. He didn't look the type to do anything physical. Sure enough, he winced and shook his head. “So what do you advise about exactly then, Tim, and who?” I asked.

“The trouble is,” he laced his hands together and cracked his knuckles hard, “if I tell you any more, Molly, I'll have to kill you.”

He was joking, I knew that. He must have been, although he wasn't smiling. What surprised me though was my reaction. I didn't want to laugh at all. Rather I felt a tingle of excitement and a rush of joy. I wanted Tim to put his arms around me and hug me to him. I wanted everyone to look at us and see me with him.

“Shall we go for a walk?” I asked him. I was that desperate to show him off.

“Let's just stay here. Safer that way,” he said.

And so I told him about Jessica. I told him everything I could remember from what I had been told about her, and what I'd picked up from seeing her around, little bits of her life and who she was. I spoke quietly, slowly, weighing each word so that for once none would be a lie. I even said how some of us had been jealous after she died. What she had had the courage to do— killing herself—seemed so glamorous. I told him about the little clusters that had formed in the playground for days afterward and how even I had joined in. We'd talked about doing the same thing, how death was, after all, the great adventure, and how, because Jessica was one of the cool girls, we thought that maybe suicide was going to become cool now too. It was a way out, I said. I think for most of us it was the first time we realized that there could be a way out.

Tim listened. “So she was never really your friend?” he asked.

I thought of Miranda's advice about emotional honesty being
more important than the truth, and all the stories I'd stolen and made my own for Mr. Roberts, and for a moment I was tempted. But Tim was different. I knew he was interested in whatever I said, regardless of what it said about me.

“No,” I admitted. “She was two years older than me. I was invisible to her kind. She wouldn't have crossed the street to help me if I'd been run over by a one-legged, three-eyed monster driving a tractor.”

And suddenly, with that unexpected gust of joy similar to the one I was learning to love in Liz, lighting up his whole body in exactly the same way, Tim started to laugh. It started small but then it exploded all over him until I joined in too.

“A one-legged—” he gasped for breath.

“Three-eyed—” I tried to continue but my stomach was hurting from the laughter.

“And why the bloody tractor?” Tim wheezed. I was crying by this time but it felt so good just to tell the truth. The plain truth, with no embellishments. I felt all cleared out. Fresh and ready to start all over again. Free.

We just sat there and held hands for a while after that. We watched the park darken in silence, although every so often I'd look across at him, or he'd look across at me, and we'd start up all over again. Tim's laugh was so loud. Like a machine gun. It made me smile. I'm so lucky, I thought. I must remember that this is how it feels to be a winner. I stroked the arm of the Seize the Day bench. This is what it feels like, Jessica, I whispered. It can be done. You can get things right. You don't always need a way out.

I stood up then and started to clear the ground around her bench, throwing everything carefully into the bin. “I'm going to get this bin moved away from here,” I shouted across to Tim. He was walking round the tree opposite. He looked as if he was pacing, counting each step as he went. “No one ever bothers to aim
properly so there's always stuff left littered around. And do you know what, Tim?” He didn't reply. He was bent over, digging in the earth with his fingers now. “I can't bear to think of a rubbish bin being the only thing Jessica has to nestle up next to, not when she's alone at night.”

I put my shoulder against it to see if I could shift it myself but the metal frame must have been soldered into the slab of concrete it rested on. “Maybe if I asked one of the park attendants, they'd do it for me?” I said. “I could even write a letter to the council if that doesn't work.”

Suddenly I realized it was the first time in months I had plans other than just my own survival. I felt full of purpose.

“You're good for me,” I called out to Tim, before going over to drape myself over his back. “You're my very own special adviser.”

T
here were times on top of Mr. Roberts's ladder when I opened my mouth and surprised myself. I would be up there, high above the shop on my own personal tightrope, hanging on fast, telling my stories as quickly as I could just to stay upright. Whole spiels would come spiraling out from nowhere.

Look! I longed to shout. Molly's Amazing Acrobatics.

And not a safety net in sight.

Once, as Mr. Roberts and I whiled away a quiet hour on a rainy April afternoon, it turned out that Leanne's father—and I was as surprised as anyone about this—used to be a boxer. He met Leanne's mother when she was a ballerina, fallen on hard times in regional pantomime. Her parentage explained Leanne's smallness but her strength too. After all, there'd been that time she hit me when she got jealous of me and the French teacher, Madame Gilligan. (The Madame had just popped out, Colette-style.) I had grappled with Leanne and we ended up fighting in the middle of the gym while all the other girls and boys clapped us on. I tore her dress; she ripped the buttons off my blouse so my breasts were bare. Oh, we were wild girls.