Tell Me Everything

  ALSO BY SARAH SALWAY

  The ABCs of Love

  To my father, the writer in the family,

  who couldn't be more different from Molly's dad.

  “Find yourself a cup of tea; the teapot is behind you.

  Now tell me about hundreds of things.”

  —SAKI

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With very grateful thanks to my editors Allison Dickens at Ballantine Books, and Rosemary Davidson and Mary Davis at Bloomsbury Publishing, for their valued expertise and also their friendship; to Rupert Heath and James Friel for being the best “special advisers”; to Kate Jones, and to Christopher Barker, Francesca Klaschka, and Ruth Lacey; to my writing friends including Rob Doyle, Gladys Mary Coles, Jenny Newman, Edward Boyne, Michael Langan, Mo McAuley, Michelle Lovric, Lynne Rees, Cheryl Moskowitz, and Catherine Smith; to my siblings Stephen, Henry and Mary; and, most of all, to Francis, Hugh, and Rachael, for so much more than any story could tell.

  You can tell me anything, she said. And I believed her.

  I only have your best interests at heart, my biology teacher told me. It'll go no further unless I consider you at risk.

  There are moments when you really can stop time. Make a decision to go one way, and not the other. There's just a sense, a prickle on the skin, something impossible to describe, that tells you you're at the cross-roads. But it's only when you're too far along to change direction that you realize you ever had a choice.

  So, lulled by the warmth in the biology lab and the novelty of an adult really listening to me, I spent the afternoon telling her stories. In the cozy web I wove there, I lost sense ofwhere I began and she ended. We seemed to be in it together; my words pulled expressions out of her face that made me want to carry on, to take the two ofus higher and higher up a ladder of emotions. I was filled with something outside myself. I didn't have to think, to struggle and stumble in the middle of a sentence for a thought or a word, not even once. I was floating. Only when we reached the top did I realize how exhausting it can be to empty your-selfout like that.

  When it was time to go home I stood in the doorway, not wanting to cross the threshold back into the outside world.

  “I can come here again, can't I?” I asked. “We can do this another time, can't we?”

  I was watching the tears falling down her cheeks. They looked like icicles dropping off her chin. It made me want to laugh, but I was proud too. Proud that I'd made her feel that much. On the wall behind her there was a poster of a dissected human heart. All the tubes coming from it were left dangling in midair. Cut off with a bloodless straight line.

  By the time I got home she'd already spoken to the headmistress, who had rung my mother, and nothing was ever quite the same again. Not even the blood that pumped through our bodies, not even the air we all breathed. That had become thick, hard to digest. It iced up the inside of our throats until we longed for any kind of warmth, even the fiercest, hottest words that burn you in hell. At least they would melt the silence.

  That's how I learned the power of stories.

  One

  I'm sitting on Jessica's bench looking for men. I'm not fussy so there should be a lot of choice.

  It's hard to pinpoint what does attract me to a man exactly, but I guess ankles would come near the top. It's that little band of flesh you can spot sometimes between the trouser leg and shoe. Or a sock-covered bump that can be so vulnerable, so suggestive that I have to force myself not to gasp, to rub my finger along a stranger's curves.

  Now a large man is looming over me. I think he must be a football player because he's dressed in the full Celtic kit.

  “You're a bitch in heat,” he says.

  I can't deny it but does he have to say it so loudly? I'm turning round to see if anyone else can hear when he repeats himself. But this time he talks slowly, very slowly, as if he's talking to an imbecile.

  “Your bitch is in heat.” He points to where my dog is standing, lifting up her leg so a tall thin greyhound can lick her. If dogs can look dreamy, she does. It seems a shame to drag her away, but I can see another dog, less attractive than the greyhound, queuing up for a sniff too.

  There are limits, Mata, I whisper as I pick her up, holding her wriggling body tight under my arm as we both make our way out of the park. I can't help feeling we're both in disgrace. We've been drummed out of polite company. We're skulking home, thwarted, with our tails between our legs. It's as if everyone can read what's going on in our minds.

  I once loved a man who had a whole parallel life going on in his mind. It was so happy for him in there. When Tim walked through the door of the pub, people would cheer and buy him drinks. Everyone laughed a lot. He was good at his job too, and was often called away for top-secret meetings with cabinet ministers. Once he had to cancel an evening we'd planned because he was being flown to Washington on Air Force One to give his views on economic development to the president of the United States.

  I went along for the ride.

  The ride with him. Not to Washington. That was top secret. A mission. He wouldn't even tell me what happened when he got back. He kept his papers in a locked briefcase in my bedroom cupboard though. I'd stroke it sometimes. Try to read what was inside through the soft grain of leather under my fingers.

  I'd find words that way sometimes. Letters would swim up through my fingertips and into my brain and make something whole.

  Secret. Me. Special. You. Adviser.

  I imagined these in a shiny, curvy script, circling round each other inside the bag, knocking into the leather sides, bumping up against the top until they were released.

  It was a perfect relationship. Being the girlfriend of a special adviser is more interesting than being someone who couldn't pay the rent, and if Tim once thought I was a prostitute paid by Russian spies to satisfy his every need, well, he asked for nothing I wouldn't have given him anyway.

  Two

  “How did you meet?” People always ask you this when you became part of a couple. It's throat-clearing, before they get to the really interesting stuff, which normally involves what they think about things, or how they met their partners, or just anything about them really.

  Miranda was different though. She was only about a year older than me, but was already a hairdresser in the salon near the stationery shop where I worked. We met in the street where we were both forced to smoke our cigarettes. We were furtive, trying to look as if we didn't mind being outside. “We're fag hags,” I said to her when we got to know each other better, but she never found this as funny as I did.

  “You'd look lovely with your hair thinned,” she said to me the first day, after we'd been shuffling round and nodding at each other from our respective doorways for a bit.

  I stubbed my cigarette out quickly and went back inside. I hoped I smiled at her, too, but I've been told that sometimes, when I try too hard or am taken by surprise, my attempts at a friendly expression come out as grimaces. Ones I can't get rid of for a long time afterward. My mouth gets so dry, it's as if my face has frozen with all my teeth bared.

  Her words stayed in my head though, and a bit later I nipped into the toilet to check myself in the mirror. I brushed the hair away from my face and practiced looking normal. I swung my face round to take myself by surprise and see myself as others did. I pinched the ends of my hair with my fingers to try to understand what she meant.

  Eventually I began to look like Miranda must have thought I could look.

  Bright.

  Interesting.

  Someone else. Someone different.

  And, let's face it, that's always an attraction.

  After lunch, my cheeks were aching with all the smiling but I made myself go out for my usual afternoon cigarette and I hung around
until she came out, although I could see Mr. Roberts gesturing from inside the shop. A customer had come in and although it was Mr. Roberts's shop and I'd only been working there for a week by that time, I already knew he didn't like face-to-face customers. They might ask him something he didn't know the answer to and that would put him in a bad mood for the rest of the day, but, as he said, it was water off a duck's back for me. Apparently he'd never known anyone who knew less than me. He said it was restful for him.

  We were like those weather-house couples, Miranda and I, that afternoon. As soon as she popped out of her door, I went back into mine to put Mr. Roberts out of his misery, but not before I managed to say, as casually as I could:

  “Do you really think so then?”

  “What?”

  “I should thin my hair?”

  “Definitely. Come into the salon on Wednesday. It's model night.”

  Afterward, though, Miranda promised to work on my image a bit more gradually.

  I was worried she might give up on me after that first time, model night, when I lost my nerve in the middle of all those other women and ran out of the salon halfway through with the soapsuds still in my hair, so when she came up to me in the street the following morning and asked me for a light, I was going to explain about how it all got too much hearing all those women's voices, the words floating around me, clinging to me. I was even going to tell her about the biology teacher and what had happened but before I could say anything, she cut me off. She suggested that maybe the next time we should do it more privately. To take it easy. To change more slowly. As if it had been her fault and it really was that simple. As if there was nothing more to say.

  So after that I started going across the road to Miranda's most nights after I finished work, and she'd put on a selection of sad echoey ballads. They filled up the empty salon and would make us feel all full up and weepy too. We'd smoke our cigarettes inside in the warm muggy atmosphere, spinning round on the seats and flicking our ash into the basins as the street darkened outside. There was a female smell in the air; the chemical tartness of hair-spray, a garden of roses and lilies from the shampoos and, underneath it, a dampness from the dying bouquets left just a day too long on the reception desk. While she leafed through magazines and read out horrific stories to me, I'd look in the mirror and try to see myself as Miranda did.

  “See her.” She pointed out a photograph of an ordinary-looking, middle-aged woman smiling for the camera. “Left for dead, she was. Attacked in broad daylight by a man with a sharpened broom handle who split her stomach from throat to bum. Can't do housework now. Says sweeping brings back nasty memories. There's pictures of the scar too. Want to look?”

  And in between murders and misery, she'd show me photographs of beautiful women she would say I was the spitting image of if only I would agree to put myself into her hands and let her transform me.

  “You're stunning,” she said. “You're beautiful. I'd kill for your eyes.”

  That was how we talked to each other, Miranda and me. As if we were practicing for one of those Sunday afternoon black-and-white films mum always used to watch. “I'd die with joy if I could have your nose,” I'd lie. “It's like Doris Day. It's sweet. If your nose was a person it would wear a frilly apron.”

  “Oh, but your ears. They'd wear black berets with diamond studs on them. There's something decidedly glamorous about your ears.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “And your cheeks. They're the Kylie Minogue of cheeks. So, so, so … cheeky.”

  I peered in the mirror, trying to read something more into the outline of my face than just that. An outline. What was it that Miranda could see?

  “We should go out one time,” she said, “to the cinema or something.”

  “Or to the pub?” I suggested.

  “I don't think so” she laughed. “Nasty loud places. No, we'll find a nice romantic comedy. Something jolly, that's the ticket.”

  Neither of us had boyfriends when we first met.

  We talked about men though, but always in that “oh, aren't they hopeless” way we'd seen other women do. I would talk about Mr. Roberts, but I didn't tell Miranda everything. To make her laugh I'd ham it up about how he got me to go up the step-ladder to fetch down boxes from the top shelf although we didn't need anything. Miranda and I grimaced at each other when I demonstrated the way he'd hold on to my legs when I was up there, and how he said he did it because he was scared I might topple over but we both knew he was fibbing.

  “I'm not surprised though,” Miranda said. “Your calf muscles are perfect. You should insure your legs. I've never seen such romantic legs. They're perfect. Perfectly beautiful.”

  “Oh you,” I cooed. This was something I'd learned to do from Miranda. Cooing, and saying, “Oh you.”

  When I got back to my room though, I couldn't resist lifting up my skirts and having a quick look at my legs in the mirror I'd set up against the wall. I turned this way and that, trying to see the romance Miranda must have read there. I flexed my legs as they would be when I climbed the ladder for Mr. Roberts, letting my fingers trail over where muscles should be. I shut my eyes so I wouldn't have to see the dimples of fat. I couldn't stop thinking about how Mr. Roberts always said he liked a girl you could get hold of.

  I sat on my bed later and watched the few passersby in the street below as I ate my supper. I sipped my packet soup from my mug, pretending it was homemade and that I couldn't taste the chemicals of the mix. The doughnuts I picked delicately one by one from their box, licking my lips to catch the sugar from round my mouth. The last one I had to force down but I didn't want there to be any gaps in my body left unfilled.

  It was so quiet. Blissfully, eerily quiet in my little upstairs room. When it was time to sleep, I lay down and placed my hands in the form of a cross on my chest. The only sound was the occasional echo of footsteps that drifted up from the street. Some running, others dawdling. Everyone going home, I thought.

  Three

  “How did you meet?” This was the first thing Miranda asked when I told her about Tim.

  We were in the salon. Miranda was putting my hair up into a high plait. I could feel her fingernails scrape against my scalp as she twisted strands into shape. I watched myself wince with pain in the mirror as she pulled one section too tightly against the skin on my nape and left it pinned up like that.

  I couldn't get the words out. All I wanted to say was that I had a boyfriend called Tim, but instead I giggled a lot. Hid behind my hand as I tried to tell Miranda that I had something important to say. I spent nearly fifteen minutes having a hard time just saying “boyfriend.” It didn't feel right.

  Not next to Tim. Somehow “Tim” and “boyfriend” weren't two words that went naturally together. So by the time I'd finally managed to say it all in just the one sentence she was suspicious. That's why her question wasn't just throat-clearing. She really wanted to know.

  I spun the back of the empty hairdressing chair next to me so I could watch it go round and not have to look at Miranda's face in the mirror. In the background Miss Otis was busy regretting how she wasn't going to be able to make lunch after all.

  “In the park,” I said. Round and round the chair spun.

  “What are you reading?” Tim had asked, and I showed him the secondhand romance I'd just picked up from the charity shop. I didn't let him judge my reading habits from the pale pink cover though. I told him how I was getting through Proust but the books were too heavy to carry around. The novels I read outside were lighter. Not just in weight. They helped me keep my concentration keen for the main task. I was determined to get through the whole of French literature by the time I was thirty, I said. That gave me years, I added. I wanted to get that in quickly. Most people think I'm a lot older than I am. It's my size, plus the clothes my father bought me to wear and I hadn't replaced yet. Florals may be slimming, but they can age you.

  “The main task,” Tim repeated. “You're keeping your concentration keen for
the main task.” He nodded a lot as he said it so I could tell he liked that particular phrase. Maybe even that he liked me.

  There were some late daffodils in the park, lined up like soldiers marching to the battlefront. Here and there they'd been mowed down by overenthusiastic toddlers or destructive teenagers. Only the size of the footprints trampling down the mud showed which.

  Tim didn't say much, but he never stopped moving. He tapped his fingers on his jeans as if he was playing the piano; his feet twitched up and down too in a rhythm I tried to catch. He was wearing no socks. It was one of the first things I noticed about him.

  A man passed us as we sat there. “Nice day,” he said, or something like that, and I smiled back. Tim's feet had stayed still then, I noticed. His ankles were white and bony above his unlaced trainers. A vein snaked its way round the bump like a twisting river of blood.

  “You're not saying you picked someone up in the park!”

  I came back to the salon with a start.

  “Do you not know how dangerous that is? Do you not know that, Molly? There was this woman in one of my magazines who was captured by a man she met in the park. He kept her like a dog in a flat nearby, let her out for exercise and she was so frightened that she always came back to him when he called. Can you not imagine that?” When Miranda got excited a Scottish undercurrent always came out, not just in the accent but in the sentence order too. The negativity of her Caledonian grammar made me more defensive than I knew I should have been.

  “I can look after myself,” I said.

  Miranda pulled a piece of my hair especially tight, ignoring my gasp. “Leave that chair alone,” she said, and I let go of it, but not before spinning it once more round for luck.

  “I was just sitting on the Seize the Day bench reading,” I said. “He came to sit there too. Asked if I had any idea who Jessica was.”