kiss was taken up in a spaceship to soothe aliens on distant planets. Eskimos kiss by rubbing noses. To kiss Marilyn Monroe was apparently like kissing Hitler so bristly was her upper lip. To kiss at the point of ejaculation guarantees a child genius. So complicated is social kissing that it’s safer for normal people like Miranda and myself just to stand there, waiting for one, or two, or even three cheeks to be airbrushed towards us. French kisses. Butterfly kisses. Kissing cousins. Kiss of life. Kiss of death.
Tim’s kiss was a lick of melon.
Honey sweet melon fresh in your mouth at breakfast time when you’re on holiday and life is good. In fact it’s never been better.
I put my hand up to my mouth when he finally drew away. I rubbed the tips of my fingers over my lips. It was a good job I was sitting down because my legs were shaky. It was as if Tim had sucked all the air from my body.
So this was what it was all about.
‘Do you think we could do that again?’ I asked.
He took the walnut from me. I hadn’t realised I’d been holding it so tightly until I felt him prise my fingers open one by one to release it.
‘No.’ He shook his head. He’d stopped smiling now. ‘But tomorrow we can.’
I must have sighed then, because Tim took my hand and rubbed the dent that was still on my palm from where I’d been clutching the walnut.
‘If we’re spared,’ he added.
The day after the Kiss was late night shopping for the posh end of town.
Down on our side of the street though, we closed at five sharp every night. Sometimes Mr Roberts and I would get customers who’d come and press their noses at the door and rattle the handle, confused as to why they could buy designer shoes or fancy jewellery at eight o’clock at night, but not a box file or a pencil.
‘Because we’ve got bloody homes to go to, mate,’ Mr Roberts would mouth at them, and I’d nod along with the righteous warmth of being on the inside although, of course, I didn’t exactly have a home to rush back to.
I went to the bench instead, and Tim was waiting for me, hunched up inside his jumper. He pulled the sleeves down to cover his hands. A red scarf was wrapped tightly round his neck.
‘It’s a bit chilly,’ he said, and then he stood up, took my hand and told me to trust him. I could almost feel the energy coming off him as he pulled me down half-lit alleys I’d never noticed before, through car parks and shop yards. Waiters looked up at us as they sat on the back steps of their restaurants, sipping coffee and having cigarettes before the evening rush began. An older man and young woman embraced just behind a half-open office door, his briefcase slotted between their legs.
Tim didn’t say a word even as we passed through the automatic doors of the shopping centre. He’d been hushing me all the way along as I tried to make conversation. We stood there for a moment, breathing in the smell of freshly baked bread from the café at the entrance.
‘It’s not real, that smell,’ I rambled. ‘It’s a spray they use, or they put it in the air conditioning. It was in one of Miranda’s magazines. A woman once seriously hurt herself by. . . ’ I had to put my hand over my mouth to shut myself up.
Tim pulled me along again. In the town’s one department store, he led the way up to home furnishings, going not by the lift or even the escalator, but through an unmarked door and up by the staff steps.
‘Are we allowed?’ I asked, but he didn’t hesitate once, not even when we passed a uniformed security guard coming down carrying three heavy boxes. Then through another door and we were back in the main part of the shop. We were standing in front of a display case full of glass ornaments when he turned to me.
‘Have you seen anything more beautiful?’ he said.
He pointed at a statue of a polar bear, about six inches high, framed in a square box. The bear was made of clear white glass apart from its four cloudy legs and it had an etched expression of tranquillity on its face. The base was spiked up to look like falling snow. The rim of the box was edged with gold. Inside, the bear had a curious wild dignity amongst the sparkly bejewelled cats and dogs it kept company with on the shelves.
We stood on either side of it. When I bent down to the bear’s level, I looked right through it and saw Tim staring just as intensely from the other side. But then he caught me looking at him and started to laugh. His smile was warm and real through the icy perfection of the glass. I felt something melt inside me as I laughed back.
‘It’s trapped,’ he said. ‘I come and look at it sometimes to work out how I can help it break free.’
‘Can’t you just buy it?’ I asked. ‘Or steal it.’
Tim shook his head. ‘That would just be forcing it into another kind of captivity,’ he said. ‘It would be under an obligation then.’
‘It’s very beautiful,’ I said, because it was. I didn’t tell Tim I disagreed with him. There was a feeling of calmness about the bear that made me think it was exactly where it wanted to be.
‘Come on, Molly,’ he said. ‘Let’s get ourselves home.’
‘Home?’ I asked.
He looked surprised. ‘To the bench,’ he said. ‘Where else?’
‘I didn’t really mix with the girls at school,’ I told Mr Roberts from the top of my ladder, ‘but there was one girl, Leanne, who I liked. She spent a lot of time on her own too.’
The ladder shuddered as Mr Roberts coughed. ‘Sorry, Molly,’ he said. ‘Just not been feeling too good recently. Mrs Roberts keeps on at me to go to the doctor’s.’ He coughed again.
I shut my eyes until he’d finished. ‘You were never really allowed to stay in the school buildings at break-time,’ I said. ‘They had this idea that fresh air was good for you, but what it meant was that everyone congregated in bits of the playground where you couldn’t be seen and there they’d smoke or get up to other trouble. Sometimes they’d even creep through the trees and go into town. The older ones went to the pub.’
‘Did you?’
‘Wouldn’t have been worth the risk of my father catching me. Instead I begged this biology teacher to let me stay inside. I said I was frightened about being bullied, and to my surprise she believed me. She let me stay in the detention room and while the other students were getting on with the punishments they’d been set, I’d sit there staring into space. The funny thing was that it got me the reputation for being a real hard case because all the other kids thought I wasn’t bothering to do the extra work. I didn’t mind. It just meant people left me even more alone.’
‘And that’s where you met Leanne?’
‘Yep. She was often there too. We never really talked but one day as she was leaving, she slipped something onto my desk. I was about to call out after her when I looked at it. It was a lipstick in a shiny silver case. When I opened it up I could see it was bright red.
‘Of course when I got home, I couldn’t resist trying
