The ABCs of Love Read online

  See also Friends; Indecent Exposure; Woolworths; Yields; Zzzz

  colin

  I am starting to get suspicious about Colin. Maybe it’s a hangover after my escapade with Peter, but I worry about the way he seems to treat Sally so casually.

  Sally says that as long as he pays the bills and keeps her happy, she doesn’t mind if he is a mad axman. She says his attitude is a relief.

  “I’m blossoming,” she says, and so she is.

  I try to be happy for her, but when I walk up and down the road where Sally says Colin lives with his wife and family, I see no sign of him. I can’t smell Colin in the air. Also, he is spending more and more time with Sally in what she calls their “love nest.”

  “Isn’t his wife jealous?” I ask.

  “If Colin doesn’t mind, who cares?” Sally says, and I must admit it seems a little bit odd that it’s me who does.

  See also Best Friends; Foreheads; Love Calculators; Stalking; Youth

  crème caramel

  Sally has a friend who can devour a whole crème caramel from a plate in one go. I have seen her do it. She stands over the table with her hands behind her back, and then she sucks it up all at once without leaving a drop either on the plate or around her lips.

  Sally herself can fit thirty-eight Maltesers into her mouth at once. She has to stuff them under her lips and in the spaces at the back of her jaw. It is not a very attractive sight, especially when she has to spit them all out again. But then neither is the crème-caramel-sucking-up trick, but at parties, people always ask to see them. It makes Sally and her friend the center of attention and the rest of us feel jealous.

  Unfortunately, I don’t like either Maltesers or crème caramel, and the one trick I do know is very complicated, involving three packs of cards. Could this be where I am going wrong?

  See also Captains; Underwear; Wobbling

  D

  daisies A

  My mother told me once that I was not sweet enough to be called after a flower. Something useful, yes, but not a flower. Her name was Rose, and I thought if I also had a pretty name, then I’d look more like her.

  I called myself Daisy in secret and would talk about myself in the third person. “Daisy’s nearly ready for bed now” or “Look how pretty Daisy looks in the mirror.” It made me feel like I belonged. But then one day I blurted out something about wanting to be called Daisy, and everyone laughed.

  “It sounds more like a cow,” said my father, and he smiled fondly at my mother.

  See also Ants; Names; True Romance; Zest

  danger

  Sally will always be my only real friend, although I hope she never finds that out. She would probably think it was funny.

  When we were growing up, our families were very different. Her parents used to go to the pub and drink sweet liqueurs that made her mother giggle. They were also what my parents called “Sunday drivers,” which meant they went on outings. If I was lucky, they’d take me with them sometimes. Sally’s mother called us “the girls,” which I liked because it made me seem like a second daughter. As if Sally and I were interchangeable.

  Once, we all went to a fete in the country and watched a local girl being crowned the Rose Queen. She sat giggling on a throne, holding a bunch of roses and surrounded by Rose Princes. These princes were all spotty and fat. The dishy boys were too busy throwing grass over the Rose Princesses to look at the Queen. The minute they’d put the crown on her, she’d become too much for them, although we couldn’t see why she’d been picked in the first place.

  Sally and I soon got bored because no one was throwing grass over us, so we went to look round. We found a bridge that was very crowded, so we joined the throng going over it. When we reached the middle, we suddenly heard the cracking and splitting of wood, and the bridge gave way.

  Later, the man who owned the house and gardens came out and said that the trouble was that the bridge didn’t lead anywhere, just to a shut gate; so what had happened was that people were coming straight back at the same time as others were crossing, and that meant there was too much weight in the middle for the bridge to hold. Considering the danger we’d all come through, he was surprisingly unsympathetic. It was the last time he was holding the fete on his grounds, he said, because he didn’t understand why the public were all so keen to go over a bridge that went nowhere. And now he’d have to have the bridge mended, which was going to cost money he didn’t have.

  I read about an experiment that made men go over a very dangerous bridge, and when they got to the other side, they were shown photographs of women. All the men found the women more attractive than they would have done if they had not just had such an exciting experience. However, Sally and I both agreed that when the Rose Queen came to wish us well in the Red Cross tent, she was so ugly, we still wondered why she had been crowned.

  Sally has always taken me places, shown me the way to behave, what to do. Sometimes I wonder if this is why she likes me. Sometimes I wonder if where she takes me is always the best place to go.

  See also Best Friends; Worst-Case Scenario

  dogs

  The chairman of our company has a Dalmatian dog called Jupiter. When he brings it into work, we have to take turns walking it at lunchtime. He seems to think it is a treat for us and makes jokes about how many girl-friends his dog has. It does make you wonder what he thinks we are.

  Susan, the receptionist, once told me that she had taken a call from his French au pair. This girl was in tears because she had broken the vacuum cleaner when she was outside, Hoovering the lawn. Susan told her to take the vacuum cleaner inside and pretend it had never happened, but the girl kept crying, saying how much trouble she’d get into if the chairman’s wife came back and found anything left on the grass.

  Perhaps the wife was getting her revenge. You are always hearing stories about au pairs getting it on with their bosses. The chairman is good-looking enough. I have often smiled at him on the stairs or when we meet in the office, but I’m not sure he even notices me. He always calls me Veronica and laughs in this coughing little way when he sees me.

  I remember reading that a jilted girlfriend once got back at her boyfriend by letting herself into his flat when he was away and planting grass seed all over the carpet. She went in every morning while he was on holiday and watered it. I would have loved to have seen his face when he opened the door.

  We never had a dog, although I wanted one. I used to imagine waking up nearly every morning and hearing one barking for me downstairs. Once, I picked a particularly beautiful leaf and kept it in a glass bowl as a pet until I got bored of it. I do realize how pathetic this may sound now, but at the time I really loved that leaf.

  See also Ambition; Revenge; Tornadoes

  doors

  It is impossible to have an advertisement in Britain that features a shut door. This is because so many people were locked in their bedrooms as children that even as adults, they automatically start to panic when a door isn’t open. Even just an inch.

  There were times when my mother used to tell me to stay in my bedroom. It wasn’t cruel, she just wanted a break from looking after me. I’d have as many books as I wanted, treats to eat. I’d make myself a nest up there.

  I always came down when my father came home, though. I was so happy to see him, but he’d be tired after his day at work. He said he just wanted to spend some quiet time with my mother. I had so much to talk about, after my day of reading, but he didn’t seem to want to hear it.

  See also Houses; Noddy; Property; Velvet; Yellow

  dreams

  Sally once went out with a man who liked to record her dreams in a diary. She had to break it off with him because she got too exhausted. She’d be awake all night trying to think of interesting things for him to write about.

  See also Codes; Mistaken Identity; Utopia

  E

  ears

  I like to stick cotton swabs in my ear and turn them round, pushing harder and harder. I crave the satisfac
tion it brings. Sometimes when friends are over, all I can think of is that round plastic jar of swabs until I have to go into my bedroom and clean my ears. It’s like an itch. Once I twisted too hard, and my head filled with a howling pain. I vowed then never to do it again, until the next time.

  There was a boy at school called Stewart Griffiths. One day he was swinging on his chair during geography when the teacher called him to attention. Stewart was startled, lost his balance, and as he fell backward onto the floor, the pencil he was holding at his ear pierced right through his eardrum. He screamed.

  Three years later, when I started attending that school and joined that class, the other children were still talking about the loudness of that scream. When we were fifteen, I went out with Stewart Griffiths and felt the reflected glory from his fame. He would still scream on the playground for money.

  The trouble was that Stewart was boring when he wasn’t making a noise. He wanted to be a lorry driver, and sometimes when we were lying together on his bed, he’d be able to name the type of lorry that went past the window just from the sound of its tires. He seemed to feel that this was particularly clever as he was still deaf in one ear from the pencil incident.

  See also Captains; the Fens; Sounds

  elephant’s egg

  We went to London Zoo for my eighth birthday, and I fell in love with the elephants. I wanted to move in with them and be the little elephant that never strayed from her mother’s side. I wanted people to say how sweet I was, and take pictures of me, and have my father wrap his trunk around me, swishing the flies off or sprinkling water over me to wash my back.

  The next year, the day before my birthday, I asked to go and see the elephants again. My mother said once was enough, but when I got back from school that afternoon, there was a message from the zoo. Apparently, the elephant at London Zoo had laid an egg especially for me and my family to eat. It was going to come on my birthday.

  The only trouble was that the zookeeper left it on our doorstep during the only two minutes in the day that I stopped watching for him. I took it into the kitchen, where my mother was waiting to cook it. She was cross with me for not keeping a proper lookout because it meant she wasn’t able to thank the keeper for bringing it all that way.

  This happened every year until I was thirteen. I never managed to catch the zookeeper. My mother never managed to thank him.

  An elephant’s egg is not like an ordinary egg. The white tastes like mashed potato, and the yolk is never runny, being a bit like a large round sausage. I’ve had sausage and mashed potatoes many times since, but never anything as good as those elephant’s eggs.

  See also The Queen; The Queen II

  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, you sit with the unopened book on your lap waiting to meet the main character with that sense of anticipation you get on blind dates. Is this person going to be your new best friend? And then there’s a moment—normally, just over halfway through—when your heart grows until it’s too big for your body because all these dreadful things are happening in the book and there’s nothing you can do to stop them. You can’t even tell the characters they’re making all the wrong decisions. You’ve just got to keep on reading. But then you get to the last words, and you can’t believe it—you keep your fingers on the end sentence because it can’t all finish there. It’s as if they’ve shut the door and left you on the other side, unwanted. And you cared so much. And there’s no way to make them see how much you 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. 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.

  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.

  See also 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 in my piggy bank when I was six.

  It’s true my mother cried in secret for days after the ring first went missing. She didn’t tell anyone. That was the strange thing. She didn’t even tell 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, it was 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 that the ring hadn’t fallen down there.

  Dad went mad when he found my mother had lost her ring, but it was such a long time afterward that I couldn’t feel guilty anymore. If my mother had really cared she’d have made a fuss at the time. She was always losing things.

  See also Daisies; Mistaken Identity; True Romance; Voices

  F

  fashion

  My favorite book when I was growing up was 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 that have special things about them that only I will know. I hug these to me: a particular color that makes you want to eat it; a lining of soft plum silk; the Liberty-print trim to a denim pocket; a perfectly shaped pleat that 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’d be buried in it.

  See also Codes; Start-rite Sandals; Underwear; Women’s Laughter

  fat women

  I am the last person to judge anyone else based on appearances alone, but have you noticed 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 also 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 to say is “Well, there’s certainly a lot of sky there.” If this is the first thing you think of, here are three things you might not know about the Fens:

  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 duc
k feet, but just a sliver of thin skin, so transparent as to be like silver, between each toe. When these children flexed their toes, it was the most beautiful sight you could imagine, especially after swimming, when the drops of water would glisten and sparkle.

  The roads in the Fens are long and straight and run alongside treacherous dikes. They look even straighter because the houses on either side are slipping lower and lower back into the soil. If you are quiet, you can almost hear it sucking at you. 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 you are driving in the Fens during the daylight, you see bouquets of flowers by the side of the road for the tragedy of the night before.

  At the bank opposite our house, a doctor had a terrible accident with his wife. 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 of the road until he was sure she had died. It became a craze for many months afterward, imagining just what it must have felt like with all that water pressing against the car window and being able to see your husband through the waves, watching you scream.

  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 also Fat Women

  firefighting

  Sometimes when I’m busy at work, I think of Sally’s new life 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 furniture 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 the local newspaper. That’s when she persuaded me to follow her into the media, although I was worried at first because my personality has never been as bouncy as hers. I could never cold-call like Sally could.