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Baked Beans

My grandmother on my mother’s side was a young girl in Liverpool during the war. She can still remember the night the Heinz factory was bombed and how for days afterwards the city smelt of cooked baked beans. It made them even hungrier than they were already.

Her mother – my great-grandmother – once spotted an unexploded bomb caught in a tree near their house. For hours she ran around getting people out of their houses and down to the shelter where my grandmother was hiding. My great-grandmother wheeled the sick down, helped mothers with little children and reassured the elderly.

She must have saved many, many lives that night, so I can’t blame my grandmother for still being annoyed, years later, that they didn’t give her mother a medal for her bravery. Instead, they gave it to the lady who was in charge of making the tea.

See God, Mystery Tours, Noddy

Best Friends

At the age of twenty-five, my best friend Sally has become the mistress of a millionaire called Colin. This is not something that normally happens in our town. Just in films. She has given up her job, her nights out with the girls and living in her studio flat. Because Colin has set her up in a flat near his office, she has taken a lodger to pay the mortgage on her own flat. And all without a backward glance. Recently she spent five hours trying to find a dressmaker who was prepared to pick her jeans apart by hand and re-sew them so the tight seams would make no marks on her skin when Colin pulled them down. We are no longer such good friends. She says she can’t bear the way I look at her these days.

See Danger, Friends, Influences, Ultimatum, Yields, Zzzz

Blackbirds, Robins and Nightingales

Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between how you sound in your head and how other people seem to hear you.

For instance, I have noticed that I can make what I think is a perfectly pleasant comment but it can still cause offence. I do not mean to have a sharp tongue; it is just the way the words come out.

Perhaps it is because I have such low self-esteem and do not think as much of myself as someone like Sally, for instance.

Personally, though, I blame the nuns. At the convent school I went to, we were split into three groups for singing. There were the Nightingales who could sing beautifully, the Blackbirds who were all right, and the Robins who were what Mother Superior called ‘orally challenged’. I was one of only three Robins in the whole school, although I had a cold at auditions so it wasn’t really fair.

The Robins were hardly ever allowed to sing in public and particularly not if the song was anything to do with God. We had to mouth along instead, which got very boring, and sometimes it was hard to keep the words in. Once, an unidentified Robin joined in with an especially loud and lively hymn, one we all loved.

In the middle of our Lord stamping out the harvest, Mother Superior held out her hand for silence.

‘Hark!’ she said, raising her other hand to her ear. ‘I can hear a Robin singing.’ Everyone looked at me.

That moment has always stayed with me. One of the things I hate most about myself is the way I blush in public even though I’m not necessarily to blame. It is the same feeling that makes you itch every time anyone talks about fleas.

See Captains, God, Outcast, Voices

Blood

It used to be a craze at school to scratch the initials of your boyfriend into your arm with a compass and squeeze the skin until the blood came up. Then you’d rub ink over the graze so you were tattooed for life. Luckily it rarely worked.

Once I was doing it with Sally, but as neither of us had a boyfriend at the time, we just dug the compass randomly into each other’s arms. It made me think of the time I punctured my aunt’s favourite leather sofa one Christmas with the screwdriver from the toy carpentry set I’d got from Santa. I did that again and again too.

It was Sally’s idea to mix the blood drops together. She kept flicking her cigarette lighter and we sang ‘Kumbaya’ as we did it to make it seem more meaningful. Sally said that we were sisters now and nothing could separate us, not even a boy.

See Codes, Mars Bars, Vendetta, Yields, Zzzz

Bosses

The only trouble with my job is the bosses. My current one is possibly the worst I have ever had. He is called Brian. He is from Yorkshire and has a short bristly beard which he is always fondling and if I don’t manage to look away, I can sometimes see his little tongue hanging out, all red and glistening.

Brian won’t leave me alone. He seems to think we have a special relationship. He’s always telling me that I mustn’t mind if he teases me, that he does it to everyone he’s fond of. ‘It means you’re one of the family, Ver,’ he says, putting his arm round me.

It’s funny though that while Brian is always standing too close to me, when it comes to work he likes to dictate his typing for me into a machine, rather than face to face. He’ll leave little messages for me which means I have to hear them twice. Once he said into the machine: ‘Good morning Verity, you’re looking very nice today,’ so I called across, ‘Thank you, Brian,’ and he told me off for spoiling his dictation. He said he’d have to start again now. I left the room and when I eventually listened to his tape I noticed that this time he didn’t say I looked nice.

Another time he dictated a rude joke to me. A man in an office asked to borrow another man’s Dictaphone. The other man said no, he couldn’t. He should use his finger to dial like everyone else.

I listened to this through my headphones with a stony face because I knew Brian was watching me, hoping I would blush.

See Ambition, Zero

Boxing

I didn’t tell Brian that Sally and I had started going to a Boxercise class at the local sports centre. It would only have turned him on.

I wasn’t very good at first. The instructor was American, a big man with a ponytail he was too old for. He followed me over to the punch bag and shouted out loudly that I was too much of a girl to box. He said it was because I was English and had been brought up to be polite. ‘Who would you like that punch bag to be?’ he asked. ‘Who really pisses you off?’

I couldn’t think of anyone. I wouldn’t really want to hurt Brian, even. Anyway, I told the instructor that I was half Irish. On my mother’s side. He said in that case I definitely had to hit harder. Harder, harder, harder. Eventually, I swung at it so hard that I kept on spinning even though I’d thrown my punch. The instructor clapped me on the back and called me a champ. He even started to sing ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’.

Sally and I couldn’t stop laughing afterwards. When we went for a drink, I noticed that we didn’t hang back as we sometimes do at the bar. We made sure we got served straight away and then we took the best seats in the pub. When a man came to talk to us, Sally didn’t flirt and throw her hair over her shoulder. She told him straight to go away. That she wanted to talk to her friend. ‘You gave it hell, Verity,’ she kept on saying, toasting me with her beer. ‘You gave it hell.’ The next day, I walked sharper, straighter. As if I wasn’t a girl at all.

See Gossip, Lesbians, Moustache, Weight

Breasts

Last week I was on my way home from work, walking past the wine bar, when a handsome Australian stopped me. He was dressed in a business suit, aged about thirty, very tanned, broad. He asked whether I’d have a drink with him. He said he was only in town for a couple of days, didn’t know London very well, and was lonely. I weighed up my options – drinks and a few laughs with him versus a microwaved meal in front of EastEnders.

When he ordered the bottle of wine, however, he asked for three glasses. Then his friend joined us. He was Australian too, but not tanned, not broad, aged around fifty. I didn’t know you could get boring Aussies with glasses, hairy ears and skinny bodies, but you can.

They talked together a lot of the time about intercomputer networking, html, broadband versus bluewave, although every so often Peter, the young one, would look at me and wink. I suppose he meant to include me but I was beginning to wonder why I was there. Then Peter went to the toilet, and after we’d sat there in silence for a bit, the other man leant across the table and asked me how much. His breath smelt of pear drops, I remember, and all the time I was thinking how much what? How much wine? How much time?

And then I realised.

I was running down the street, my face red, when Peter caught up with me. He grabbed my arm. I was shouting no, no, but weakly, so he turned me towards him and we kissed then. You know how sometimes when you kiss someone your tongues intertwine and you feel what’s like an electric shock racing through your body. As if your kiss has connected two wires between you but all the resulting fizzles, crackles and sparks are going on between your legs, not in your mouth. That’s what happened then. That’s why I agreed to go back to his hotel with him.

He touched my breasts a lot.

It is something I am sensitive about. You see, my breasts are very big. People can sometimes be cruel and shout out things about them in the street. I hated them when I was growing up. I used to wear a too-tight swimming costume under my clothes to hold them down so no one would notice them. It used to make going to the toilet exhausting because I’d have to take everything off. Plus at school we used to have these very short doors in the ladies so I had to hold up all my clothes at waist height with one hand so no one could see.

Of course, I wasn’t a virgin when I made love to Peter, but it was the first time anyone had touched my breasts like that. As if they weren’t dirty, weren’t something to be ashamed about. It seemed to mean something.

We had breakfast together in the morning and he kissed me goodbye. There in the restaurant, like we were a proper married couple or something.

When I got into work, I didn’t tell anyone. People kept saying how quiet I was. I went to the loo after a bit, and when I pulled down my knickers I could smell Peter. That’s when I started to cry.

I haven’t heard from him since. It was my first time with a stranger like that. I hope it will be my last. I thought Colin was going to be a one-night-stand for Sally at first. I get angry with Sally sometimes that she doesn’t seem to feel the same guilt I feel about Peter.

See Colin, True Romance