Читать книгу Tell Me Everything - Sarah Salway - Страница 12

Chapter Seven

I was sitting in the empty salon with Miranda one evening soon after, watching her straighten her hair as we listened to Bryan Ferry murdering the old ballads.

‘I’m after that shake your head look,’ she said as she twisted over uncomfortably to one side. I could see the muscle on her neck work its way through her flesh in protest. ‘When your hair looks as if it’s a piece of cardboard that goes from side to side, and people get out of the way in case you slice them in half.’

I nodded as if I understood. There was a useful trick I first learnt during those school counselling sessions. When people start talking about something they’re interested in but you’re not, you have to empty yourself of any attempt to enter into the dialogue and just let the language float around you. If you’re lucky some words stick, and what you do then is repeat them straight back. It doesn’t seem to matter what order they come out in. When the counsellor used to get on one of her explaining jags and I did this, she’d clap her hands and say we were finally getting somewhere.

‘So you’re just trying to look as if you can slice some cardboard,’ I said to Miranda, and she nodded as vigorously as she could with her hair trapped in the straighteners.

‘I’ll do it for you if you want,’ she said.

‘I’ve got a friend with this problem,’ I said, quickly changing the subject. ‘Someone wants her to tell him dirty stories, but she doesn’t know any. It’s not really her thing.’

‘And this someone is your friend’s boyfriend?’ she asked, her left eyebrow arching in the mirror as she steadied her head the better to look at me.

‘God no!’ I said but then corrected myself. ‘No, but it’s important my friend gets it right. It’s like a work thing, that’s all. It’s not kinky or anything.’

Miranda went back to stretching her hair, but I could tell she was thinking by the way her body had gone all alert. I squeezed little dollops of shampoo from the shelf onto my hand and inhaled them as I waited for her to speak.

Apple. Rosemary and pine. Honey. I stopped trying to make my skin absorb the liquid, just kept adding more and more on to the surface until my fingertips were swimming in oily goo. Then I went to get a clean towel from one of the piles in the back room to wipe it all off.

‘We had this English teacher at school,’ Miranda said when I came back. ‘What he always said when we were writing stories was that it didn’t matter if the facts were true or not, but whether we believed in them. For lots of reasons, it’s something I’ve remembered.’

She paused then and I thought about what she’d just said. ‘So you can make something true just by believing it?’ I asked. ‘What if you believe in a lie? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘I know,’ Miranda sighed. ‘But the way he explained it was that not everything’s black and white. He used to ask us if we’d ever been nervous about waiting for something and how five minutes could seem like hours.’

I nodded.

‘Well, what he said was that if you were trying to tell someone about it, you were better to say you had to wait five hours because that gave a more truer picture of what it felt like, even though it wasn’t true.’

‘And that’s not bad?’ The skin all over my body felt as if it was being charged by several hundred electric shocks. I willed Miranda to continue and after a few seconds – seconds that felt like hours – she did.

Miranda shook her head. ‘In real life, it can be very bad,’ she said. ‘It can even ruin lives. But these are just stories we’re talking about, aren’t they?’

I stared at her. I couldn’t speak.

Miranda clicked her tongue against the top of her mouth hard. ‘Molly,’ she said. I guessed she meant to be kind, even encourage me to say something more, but it took me out of the trance I was in danger of falling into. My cheeks were red from the heat in the salon and I could feel a flush coming up my neck. It was exactly as it had been in the school room.

‘It was only something a friend told me,’ I interrupted her before she could say anything else. ‘What you’re talking about reminded me of her.’ I was willing myself not to cry. Next to me Miranda was holding the hairbrush at chin level, her mouth open. She looked as if she was about to sing into a microphone but no sound came out.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I lied, shaking my head. ‘It happened a long time ago and I think my friend’s left home now. I was just wondering about stories and stuff.’

‘And she’s OK?’ Miranda turned her back on me.

No, I wanted to shout, but Miranda was back fiddling with her hair and besides I wasn’t sure if I could trust the words any more. We were quiet then until she finished. I sang along with Bryan about how horrible it was to be jealous under my breath but I was finding it difficult to breathe. Was it safe to really leave the story there?

‘So what do you think?’ At last Miranda put down the straighteners and let her flattened hair swing from side to side.

‘Everyone’s going to get out of your way,’ I said and then we laughed and it all seemed so normal that I let out a deep sigh which made Miranda smile again.

‘Time to go now.’ She bustled round the salon turning off lights and putting the equipment and brushes away. She switched off the music system and waited at the door for me to leave first so she could set the alarm. We kissed each other goodbye in the street. One cheek, two cheek, we hesitated over three before leaving it. ‘I’ll do your hair next time,’ Miranda said. ‘It’ll look just darling.’ But then instead of clitter-clattering down the street on those silly high heels she wore that made her look like an elephant on stilts, she held on to my arm tightly.

‘Tell your friend to find a whole lot of made-up stories from somewhere else and pretend they happened to her,’ she said. ‘That way no one gets hurt.’

‘Maybe.’ I wanted to believe Miranda.

‘I’ve got shelf-loads of love stories you can borrow if you want. It’s all in there.’

‘I didn’t know you were a reader.’

‘I didn’t always want to be a hairdresser.’ Miranda shook her head so her hair really did flare out, just like it did in her magazine pictures. ‘That English teacher I told you about. He’s got a lot to answer for.’

I bared my teeth, trying to smile along with her.

‘And are you really sure you’re all right?’ she said.

I nodded, blinking the tears back. This was how to be normal. To learn when to be quiet. There was no reason why I couldn’t do it. Not every story has to have an ending.

She looked at her watch and then grimaced. ‘I must be off. Mum’s got bingo tonight and I promised I’d look after Dad so she can enjoy a night off. He can’t get around by himself, you know, not since his accident. Mind you, you’d be surprised at the trouble he can get up to in his wheelchair. Speedy, that’s what Mum says we should call him.’ She grimaced and then shook herself. ‘You take care now, honey-girl. Time for me to love you and leave you. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ she said brightly, her hair slicing the air around her as she walked away.

‘Oh you,’ I cooed as I stood looking at myself in my mirror. I lifted my skirt above my knees, looking at my legs harshly. I couldn’t even pretend they were romantic tonight. They looked fat. Filled up with lies and unsaid things. Mr Roberts was right. The whole of me was nothing more than lumpy, mashed potatoes.

I shook myself all over in the mirror. My head, my arms, my bottom, my legs. I watched the fat wobble, wanting to prove to myself I wasn’t as flabbily solid as Miranda. That my outline could be redrawn, even my bones broken.

And that was something I had to believe. That little chance of transformation. Otherwise what was the point of anything?