Читать книгу Tell Me Everything - Sarah Salway - Страница 14

Chapter Nine

I watched Tim’s hand brush along the back of the Seize the Day bench as if he was testing the grain of the wood. Then he made a sudden lunge, missing first and knocking my arm before finally taking my hand in his.

I squeezed back but then he started to hurt me so I tried to loosen his grasp. He shook his head and kept on pinching at my fingers. We carried on grasping each other in silence although I could see my skin turning white.

‘I’ve been plucking up the courage to ask you something,’ he said eventually.

‘Go on,’ I encouraged. I felt so light when I was with him. So free of any need to be looking over my shoulder.

‘I was wondering if I might kiss you tomorrow,’ he said.

I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. ‘You can kiss me now.’ I pouted my lips out to him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I would prefer it to be tomorrow.’

Knowing I was going to be kissed made me jumpy and restless the next day. I couldn’t eat anything, not even my usual breakfast of a fruit scone. It was still sitting in its brown paper bag under the till at lunchtime.

In the end, I went over to persuade Miranda to take an extra cigarette break because Mr Roberts wasn’t helping my mood. He had already made me do all sorts of unnecessary chores around the shop that morning, shifting the display of envelopes from one side of the room to the other, telling me to go up and interrupt customers who were happily browsing and ask if they wanted something, making me sort out the coloured pencils into separate jars. He was watching me for signs of love, he said. We couldn’t afford to let things get slipshod just because cupid had shot his arrow.

At last a big order from the Insurance Office on Silver Street came in, and as he never trusted me with anything important, he bustled round ticking things off the list. This gave me a small respite.

Miranda and I huddled in the doorway of the fashion boutique next to her salon. Despite the fact that the two women who ran it were arrow-thin, continually pointing themselves in successful directions, they never opened their shop before eleven in the morning, so it was a useful place for us to meet.

‘There’s this little girl been born somewhere who’s got a bottom half like a tail,’ Miranda told me. ‘Both legs are joined together and they’re going to have to do an operation to separate them. There was an interview with the doctor in my magazine. They called him Dr Mermaid, because that’s what the girl looks like. Apparently the operation rarely works but he never gives up hope.’

‘How do you practise kissing?’ I interrupted her.

‘You must have kissed someone,’ she said, surprised.

‘Of course I have, stupid,’ I lied. ‘But I want this to be perfect. I’m sure there used to be a way the girls at school rehearsed.’

‘With a banana,’ Miranda said firmly. ‘You snog a banana.’

It was only after I’d nipped across to the supermarket and got myself a whole bunch of bananas that weren’t even on special offer that Miranda came into the shop and said she’d just remembered she’d got it wrong. Bananas weren’t for practising kissing. They were for something altogether different. And had I heard about this woman who went into a supermarket in Manchester and had been bitten by a tarantula who came over on a bunch of bananas?

That night, on the Seize the Day bench, Tim made to take my hand before he stopped and asked me to shut my eyes. I did and then held my hand out, open fingered, to him. My arm was shaking, but instead of holding on to me, pulling me closer as I hoped, I felt him slipping something egg shaped into my palm.

I opened my eyes and peered down. A walnut was cupped there, looking withered and brain-like.

‘What’s this?’ I asked.

‘Shhhh.’ Tim looked round. ‘You have to learn to speak quieter, Molly. Trees have ears.’

‘Sorry,’ I whispered. ‘But why’ve you given me a nut?’

‘It contains a secret. A word only you will know.’

I stared at him. He looked completely serious. His brows were too heavy for the thinness of his face. They overshadowed every other feature and made him look dangerous in the wrong lights.

‘How will I know I’ve got the right word?’ I asked.

‘Hold it. Think.’

So I did. I shut my eyes again and the word came. It came miraculously. I knew it was right without questioning. I just didn’t know what it meant in this context.

‘Fridge,’ I said, and when I opened my eyes, Tim was smiling, not at me but I knew it was because of me. I was so proud it felt like a ball of sunshine had burst in my stomach.

‘And now I’ll kiss you,’ he said.

There are kisses and kisses. Prostitutes never kiss. Most teenagers dream of doing nothing else. The sound of a mother’s kiss was taken up in a spaceship to soothe aliens on distant planets. Eskimos kiss by rubbing noses. To kiss Marilyn Monroe was apparently like kissing Hitler so bristly was her upper lip. To kiss at the point of ejaculation guarantees a child genius. So complicated is social kissing that it’s safer for normal people like Miranda and myself just to stand there, waiting for one, or two, or even three cheeks to be airbrushed towards us. French kisses. Butterfly kisses. Kissing cousins. Kiss of life. Kiss of death.

Tim’s kiss was a lick of melon.

Honey sweet melon fresh in your mouth at breakfast time when you’re on holiday and life is good. In fact it’s never been better.

I put my hand up to my mouth when he finally drew away. I rubbed the tips of my fingers over my lips. It was a good job I was sitting down because my legs were shaky. It was as if Tim had sucked all the air from my body.

So this was what it was all about.

‘Do you think we could do that again?’ I asked.

He took the walnut from me. I hadn’t realised I’d been holding it so tightly until I felt him prise my fingers open one by one to release it.

‘No.’ He shook his head. He’d stopped smiling now. ‘But tomorrow we can.’

I must have sighed then, because Tim took my hand and rubbed the dent that was still on my palm from where I’d been clutching the walnut.

‘If we’re spared,’ he added.