Tell Me Everything. Sarah Salway
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Roberts prodded my duffle 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 set-up. 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?’
Another nod. 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 thought about how the girl in the television documentary would be used to conditions. I nodded again.
The room Mr Roberts offered me was bare and uncarpeted. There was already a mattress up there, and Mr Roberts came in the next day with a sleeping bag he said I could have. Although it still had the price tag on, he told me it was an old one he didn’t want any more. There was some relief in his pretence that he was doing nothing for me really. It meant I could slip into my new life quietly, without too much obligation to anyone.
I made myself a dressing table out of 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 skip in one of the roads being gentrified behind the High Street.
The same skip yielded a broken coat stand that I painted with paint returned from a stationery order that had apparently 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, 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