Something Beginning With. Sarah Salway
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Endings
Ever since the Australian incident, I have been spending more time in my flat. My best treat is to pop into a bookshop and pick up a book to read. Then I curl up on the sofa with a bottle of wine and read myself into a trance.
The sort of books I like best are those in which I can completely lose myself. At first, I sit with the unopened book on my lap waiting to meet the main character with that sense of anticipation I always get on blind dates. Is this person going to be my new best friend? And then there’s a moment – normally just over half-way through – when my heart grows until it’s too big for my body because all these dreadful things are happening in the book and there’s nothing I can do to stop them. I can’t even tell the character they’re making all the wrong decisions. I’ve just got to keep on reading. But then I get to the last words and I can’t believe it, I keep my fingers on the end sentence because it can’t all finish there. It’s as if they’ve shut the door and left me on the other side, unwanted. And I cared so much. And there’s no way to make the characters see how much I cared.
A teacher at school told us that fairy stories always end with the prince and princess living happily ever after because what the writers were really saying, but couldn’t, was that they would die eventually. Apparently it’s a way of helping children to understand life and death. It was raining when he was telling us this.
Anyway, what he told us, very sternly, was that no one could expect to live happily ever after. It just didn’t happen. There are no happy endings, he said. I’ll never forget the sound of the rain falling on the flat roof of the classroom. Somehow it always rained when he read us stories that year.
See Breasts, Stepmothers, True Romance, Yellow, Zzzz
Engagement Ring
Colin has given Sally a ring. It isn’t an engagement ring, but that’s the finger she wears it on even though I tell her it’s bad luck.
She won’t let me try it on or even touch it. She says she remembers me telling her about how I posted my mother’s engagement ring into my piggy bank when I was six.
It’s true my mother cried in secret for days after the ring first went missing. The strange thing was that she didn’t tell anyone. Not even my father. I’m sure about this because I think if she had, he’d have started one of those inquisitions he was so fond of. Instead, she was quieter than normal. I’d come across her in odd rooms, frantically searching through cupboards, drawers, pockets, piles of things. Sometimes her eyes looked white and strained as if she was forcing herself not to weep.
Sally still can’t understand why I never told my mother what I had done, but it was one of those china piggy banks you had to break to open and I loved the spotty smoothness of my pig. And then, of course, I left it too late. I wouldn’t have been able to put the ring back on the dressing table and pretend it hadn’t happened because Mum had moved the table to the other side of the room. I guess now she’d been taking up the carpet to check the ring hadn’t fallen down there.
Dad went mad when he eventually found my mother had lost her ring, but it was such a long time afterwards that I couldn’t feel guilty any more. If my mother had really cared she’d have made a fuss at the time. She was always losing things.
See Daisies, Mistaken Identity, True Romance, Voices
Fashion
My favourite book when I was growing up was called The Little White Horse. There were two things about it I remember particularly. One was the sugary biscuits that were left in a silver tin in the heroine’s tower bedroom. Some even had little pastel flowers iced on them. The other was the heroine’s journey to the castle to stay with her unknown uncle. She was nervous, but still able to get pleasure from her beautiful laced-up boots tucked away under her long skirts. Even though no one else could see them, she knew they were there, and that was enough.
It gave me a thrill of recognition. It probably shaped my life. Made me see the strength you could get from having the right kind of secrets.
I spend a lot of time shopping. I search out clothes which have special things about them only I will know. I hug these to me. A certain colour that makes me want to eat it; a lining of soft plum silk; the Liberty print trim to a denim pocket; a perfectly shaped pleat which kicks up the edge of a skirt.
Coco Chanel knew all about this. She used to sew a gold chain invisibly into the hems of her jackets so they would be ideally weighted around the bottom.
I think if I could have a jacket like that I would die happy. I would be buried in it.
See Codes, Underwear, Women’s Laughter
Fat Women
I am the last person to judge anyone else based on appearances alone, but I wonder if anyone else notices how difficult it is to see a fat woman and a small thin man together and not think of them having violent, needy and possibly perverted sex?
See Indecent Exposure, Sex, Toys, Voyeur, Weight, Wrists
The Fens
Every time I tell people I come from the Fens, the only thing they can think of to say is, ‘Well, there’s certainly a lot of sky there.’ But here are three other things to know about the Fens:
1. A lot of the children I went to school with had webbed feet. In the Fens, this is quite usual. They weren’t heavy like duck feet, but just a sliver of thin skin, so transparent as to be like silver, between each toe and the next.When these children flexed their toes, it was the most beautiful sight I could imagine, especially after swimming when the drops of water would glisten and sparkle.
2. The roads in the Fens are long and straight and run alongside treacherous dykes. They look even straighter because the houses on either side are slipping lower and lower back into the soil. If I was quiet, I could almost hear it sucking at me. Anyway, because it gets so dark at night – all that sky – a lot of people have accidents and drive into the ditches and die. Often when we were driving in the Fens during the daylight, we would see bouquets of flowers by the side of the road from the night before.
A doctor and his wife once had a terrible accident in the ditch opposite our house. He managed to get out of the car before it got submerged but she drowned. He was so grief-stricken that he sat on the side until he was sure she had died. It became a craze for many months afterwards, imagining just what it must have felt for the wife with all that water pressing against the car window, and being able to see her husband through the waves, watching her scream.
3. Not many people appreciate that if you lie in a field of broad bean plants in flower, just as the sun is going down, you will find yourself surrounded by the smell of Chanel No 5. It just goes to show that if you know where to look there is beauty in even the most unlikely places.
See Fat Women
Firefighting
Sometimes when I’m busy at work, I think of Sally’s new life as a mistress, and wonder how she is keeping herself occupied. When we left school and started work, we had so many plans. We were going to start a business together and although we could never decide what to do we had lots of ideas. We were going to train in martial arts and hire ourselves out as bodyguards. We’d look like classy dates, but if someone tried to kill our partners, we’d be able to high-kick our way out of trouble. We were going to run a truly caring removal company, make novelty cushions, revamp people’s wardrobes. In the meantime I went to work for a bank and Sally got a job selling advertising space for