stopped the coat stand falling apart, and I used it instead of a wardrobe to hang up the few clothes I had. When I saw how successful this was, I painted the woodwork around the window pink, and then the door, the pretty fireplace that was left over from better times, and I even drew crooked pink stripes down one wall. The room felt a bit like a drunken beach-hut, but I liked it.
One of the first things Miranda did was to give me a cracked full-length mirror from the salon which I hung on the wall, hiding it behind a curtain of the same blue material as my dressing table so I didn’t have to look at myself the whole time. She also offered me some old hair and celebrity magazines, and I spent several evenings cutting out photographs of women I admired from them. I was careful to follow the lines of their hairstyles exactly as I knew this would matter to Miranda but the bodies I often sliced through, making them all even slimmer and more stick-like than they really were. These I plastered up on the wall, one on top of the other so when I lay in the mattress on the floor that acted as my bed, it felt as if they were all tumbling down on me.
In the middle of these perfect women, I slotted the one photograph of my mother that I’d brought with me. She stood out only slightly, and more because of the shininess of the photographic paper than a lack of beauty on her part. I felt proud of her up there with the beautiful people. There was something about the way she seemed to belong there that made me hope she got a second chance to do what she wanted now I wasn’t messing up her life any more. I hugged myself tightly whenever I had this thought because it always made me cry. I’d lie on my back and let my fingers rest on the outline of her hair sometimes, stroking it in the way I would have liked Miranda to do with mine but could never come out and ask for straight. In the photo, Mum had her arms out slightly as if she was calling for someone. It could have been anyone haring towards her, but I knew it was me she was beckoning.
I tacked the rest of the material up above the mattress so it hung down like a canopy keeping the world out.
No one came into the room but me, but I spent a lot of time there. I ate and slept and read and thought there. Washing took place in the hand-basin in the little loo downstairs that we used for the shop, so four times already I’d walked up to the local leisure centre and had a proper shower. By the time I met Tim, I hadn’t had a bath for nearly two weeks but I kept telling myself firmly that what you don’t have, you don’t miss. When I was younger, I used to spend so long in the bath my father always said my skin would crinkle up and fall off.
‘And then where would you be?’ he yelled once from the other side of the bathroom door.
‘Here,’ I shouted back. I was furious. Would he never leave me alone? ‘I’ll still be here.’
‘No one would want you,’ he said then. ‘Not without your covering. You’d be a mess of bloody insides. That’s all. Nothing to hold you all together. You certainly wouldn’t be my Molly.’
‘And what if that’s exactly what I don’t want to be?’ I’d asked then, from behind the safety of a locked door.
But he couldn’t have heard me. There was no reply.
There were three boxes on the top shelf in the backroom of the stationery shop. On the second day I was there, Mr Roberts put up the ‘Closed’ sign and asked me to look for things that weren’t in these boxes while he held the ladder tight. And if, while I was up there, I wanted to tell him all the naughty things I’d been up to – a great big girl like you – then Mr Roberts wouldn’t mind.
No sir-ree, he wouldn’t mind at all.
So these were the conditions he’d mentioned. It took me some time to get the hang of this exchange of ‘information’. The first time, after he made it as clear as Mr Roberts ever would what he wanted me to do, I had to think hard of what I could tell him. It would be safer to stick to stuff about the girls at school, I decided, and the funny thing was I knew straight away what my first one should be. This was a story that shocked me so much it had felt like a physical blow when I first heard it. Telling Mr Roberts seemed like a good way to get it finally out of my mind.
So, standing on top of the ladder, I was almost eager as I recited word for word the story of how pretty, clever, popular Sylvia Collins got drunk 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
