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 onto my hand and inhaled them as I waited for her to speak.
Apple. Rosemary and pine. Honey. I stopped trying to make my skin absorb the liquid, just kept adding more and more on to the surface until my fingertips were swimming in oily goo. Then I went to get a clean towel from one of the piles in the back room to wipe it all off.
‘We had this English teacher at school,’ Miranda said when I came back. ‘What he always said when we were writing stories was that it didn’t matter if the facts were true or not, but whether we believed in them. For lots of reasons, it’s something I’ve remembered.’
She paused then and I thought about what she’d just said. ‘So you can make something true just by believing it?’ I asked. ‘What if you believe in a lie? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘I know,’ Miranda sighed. ‘But the way he explained it was that not everything’s black and white. He used to ask us if we’d ever been nervous about waiting for something and how five minutes could seem like hours.’
I nodded.
‘Well, what he said was that if you were trying to tell someone about it, you were better to say you had to wait five hours because that gave a more truer picture of what it felt like, even though it wasn’t true.’
‘And that’s not bad?’ The skin all over my body felt as if it was being charged by several hundred electric shocks. I willed Miranda to continue and after a few seconds – seconds that felt like hours – she did.
Miranda shook her head. ‘In real life, it can be very bad,’ she said. ‘It can even ruin lives. But these are just stories we’re talking about, aren’t they?’
I stared at her. I couldn’t speak.
Miranda clicked her tongue against the top of her mouth hard. ‘Molly,’ she said. I guessed she meant to be kind, even encourage me to say something more, but it took me out of the trance I was in danger of falling into. My cheeks were red from the heat in the salon and I could feel a flush coming up my neck. It was exactly as it had been in the school room.
‘It was only something a friend told me,’ I interrupted her before she could say anything else. ‘What you’re talking about reminded me of her.’ I was willing myself not to cry. Next to me Miranda was holding the hairbrush at chin level, her mouth open. She looked as if she was about to sing into a microphone but no sound came out.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I lied, shaking my head. ‘It happened a long time ago and I think my friend’s left home now. I was just wondering about stories and stuff.’
‘And she’s OK?’ Miranda turned her back on me.
No, I wanted to shout, but Miranda was back fiddling
