Tell Me Everything (3 page)

T
his is how I met Mr. Roberts.

He caught me crying at one of the cafe tables they put up outside the church on the high street during spring and summer.

Despite the cold, I'd been sitting there for one hour and forty-two minutes, refusing all offers of refreshments, even though I could see the volunteers pointing me out and tut-tutting among each other. Then a plump, peachy woman in a white blouse and flowery skirt—with one of those elasticized waists women her age wear for comfort although they're always having to hoist the skirt back down from where it's risen up under their tits—came out and told me I wasn't to sit there anymore. That the cafe tables were for proper customers only.

I didn't say anything, just started to cry, and suddenly this old man came up and told the waitress it was all right. That I was with him.

It was Mr. Roberts, although of course I didn't know that then. I was just relieved that everybody was now staring at him instead of me. He said nothing at first. Just bought me a cup of tea, pushed it over and sat there in silence until I raised my head.

“What do they mean about being proper?” I asked.

“I suppose they want people who'll pay,” he said. “They're trying to run a business here after all. Although the Bible does have something to say about merchants in the temple.”

“I might not want anything to drink,” I said, “but that doesn't mean I'm not proper. They should be more careful about what words they use. Words matter. That sticks and stones saying is rubbish. Names can break you.”

“I know that, pet,” he replied. “You don't want to worry about church people. They've no taste. They can't see how special you are.”

This made me cry even harder. Mr. Roberts didn't say anything, just got up so I thought he was leaving me too, but he came back with a handful of paper napkins and handed them to me.

“Dry yourself,” he said. “And then we'll sort you out.”

I wiped the tears away and looked up at him nervously, but he shook his head. “Not yet,” he said, and pulled out a sheet of newspaper he had neatly folded away in the pocket of his tweed jacket. It was the racing pages and he started studying the form closely.

He was right too. As soon as I realized his attention had wandered away from me I started crying again, loud, gasping sobs. When he didn't seem to mind, I ignored the sour looks I was getting from the church woman and let it all come out. The pile of napkins was sodden by the time I was finished, and his racing columns were full of the little Biro marks and comments. He must have been about sixty, with steely gray hair cut forward over a bulging forehead. It was his mouth I noticed most. It was prim and womanly, with perfectly shaped teeth he kept tapping his pen against. It wasn't the first time I'd noticed that the older men get, the more feminine their mouths and chins become. It's the opposite of women, who start to sprout bristles and Winston Churchill jowls. In fact, most long-term married couples look as if they've swapped faces from the nose down.

I coughed and he looked up. Then he looked again but slower, up and down my body. He even tilted his head to one side so he could get a gawk at my legs.

“Well, you're a big girl,” he said. “What sort of weight would you say you were then?”

It wasn't funny, but I was so shocked by him coming out with a statement like that, I just exploded into giggles. Since I'd put on all this weight, everybody pussyfooted around the subject. Fat-ism. But although I laughed I couldn't help it when, just as quickly, the tears started to well up again. Mr. Roberts creased his eyes in annoyance so I tried to stop both the laughing and the crying.

“It's glandular,” I explained. “I eat nothing really, but I can't help putting weight on. Mum says it runs in the family, although my father used to—” I stopped.

“Used to what?” He stared at me as if he was weighing me himself. “So there are parents in the background. Been mean to you, have they, or is it boyfriend trouble?”

I shook my head. Since that afternoon in the biology room, I'd found that the hurricane of feelings continually raging inside me was impossible to put into words for anyone, let alone a stranger. That's why I'd come here, to get away from it all. I thought of the counselor they made me see at my new school. The red chair I used to sit on for my weekly sessions with her, the box of ever-ready tissues like the ones I was clutching now, and how she used to sit with her long gray hair, bad back and Dutch accent that made her just sound as if she was posh, not foreign, until you got to know her better.

“There are times when nothing goes right,” I told Mr. Roberts, catching myself before I copied the counselor's long vowels too strongly. “This is just one of those times. I just need to sit it out, wait patiently and my turn to shine will come. Life is a wheel and
sometimes we're on an upward circle and sometimes we're heading down. It's all natural. Part of living. You can't fight it.”

He stared at me. “Got a job?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“You're not at school, are you?”

I looked down at the table. “Not anymore,” I mumbled. “Too much time on your hands. That's your trouble.”

I shrugged. “Drugs? Alcohol?”

“No.” I looked up sharply and then down again.

“Sex?”

I kept on looking at the sugar bowl so he couldn't see how red and hot my cheeks were. Sex wasn't something you talked about in public, let alone so near a church.

“Ah,” he said, as if he'd discovered something from my silence. “So that's it. And no one understands you. That's the problem, is it?”

Silence.

“Living at home?”

I twisted a strand of my hair so tightly around my finger the skin went white. It looked as if I was trying to slice the top off, to get down to the bone.

“Stop doing that,” he told me. “Where do you live then?”

“Nowhere,” I said. I held the wet tissues to my cheeks, the palm of my hand stuffed in my mouth so I wouldn't cry.

Mr. Roberts prodded my duffel bag with the tip of his foot. “Your mum chucked you out?” he asked.

I looked at him and then nodded. My stomach had been hardening into a knot as I answered his questions. The strange thing was that Mr. Roberts was drawing a picture of me that I rather liked. I felt I was in one of those documentaries on the television. The waif the television crew found on a street corner and whose
story they shared to make the viewers feel half-guilty, half-grateful for what life had thrown at her and not them.

I smiled bravely. I expected Mr. Roberts to be kind to me now.

“Can't say I'm surprised if the only sentences you can manage to string together are about wheels and that crap,” he said. “Or is she as bad as you? Is that where you caught it from? Psychobabble. Nothing worse.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but he put his hand up to hush me. “I can just imagine the setup. Wind chimes, patchouli and no discipline. Yoga even.” He spat the word out as if it were a bad taste he wanted rid of. “So where are you staying tonight?”

I started to get up. “Thank you for the tea,” I said. Just because he was so rude, it didn't mean I couldn't remember my manners.

“No, you don't.” He put his hand on my shoulder and pushed me back down. I looked round for the church woman, but now that I needed her she was busy sorting out the plastic teaspoons by size. It seemed to be taking every last bit of her concentration, although I noticed she was keeping in earshot. “You're not quite what I thought but there's something about you. Do you know how to keep quiet?”

I nodded.

“Thought so. Had to learn, have you?” I nodded again.

“And how old are you?” he asked.

“Twenty-five,” I lied.

He raised his eyebrows at me questioningly but I held my chin up.

“I've a room above the shop you can kip down in temporarily if you want,” he said. “Do you?”

I fiddled with the packet of sugar until he repeated himself, but louder.

“Well, do you want it?”

I nodded. In my mind I was still the street waif and this was just one more step along my journey, either down to degradation or back up with the clean shiny people. Only time would tell. I was a dandelion wisp twirled around in the wind of fate.

“Although there are conditions,” he continued.

I was used to conditions. I nodded again.

T
he room Mr. Roberts offered me was bare and uncarpeted, but that was just how I wanted it. There was already a mattress up there, and Mr. Roberts came in the next day with a sleeping bag he said I could have. It still had the price tag on, but he said it was an old one he didn't want anymore. There was some relief in his pretense that he was doing nothing for me really. It meant I could slip into the shop and my new life quietly, without too much obligation to anyone.

I made myself a dressing table affair from a few of the boxes of old stationery stored in the room, and piled the others against one wall so they acted as a makeshift shelf. I covered them with a piece of old blue curtain material I'd found in a Dumpster in one of the roads being gentrified behind the high street.

The same Dumpster had yielded a broken coat-stand that I'd painted with paint returned from a stationery order that had gone wrong. It wasn't surprising an office didn't want it, because it was bright pink. “Nice for a girl though,” Mr. Roberts said when he handed it over. Again, I wondered if he'd bought it especially for me.

A couple of rubber bands and a ball of string 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, then the door and the pretty fireplace that was left over from better times; I'd even drawn crooked pink stripes down one wall. It gave the room the effect of 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 and hid 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'd 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 sticklike than they really were. Then I plastered these up on the wall, one on top of the other so when I lay on 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 prouder of her up there with the beautiful people than I ever had in real life, where she'd always seemed too shadowy to matter. 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 to 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 running toward her, but I knew it was me she was beckoning. It felt safe, being able to freeze her looking as if she really wanted me like that.

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 was spending a lot of time there. It was where I ate and slept and read and thought. 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 center 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 at home, 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 the safety of the other side of the locked door.

But he couldn't have heard me. There was no reply.

T
here were three boxes on the top shelf in the back room of the stationery shop. On the second day I'd been there, Mr. Roberts put the “Closed” sign up 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 sirree, 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 had 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 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.