Читать книгу Tell Me Everything - Sarah Salway - Страница 5

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 crossroads. But it’s only when you’re too far along to change direction that you realise 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 cosy web I wove there, I lost sense of where I began and she ended. We seemed to be in it together; my words pulling expressions out of her face that made me want to carry on, to take the two of us 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. It was only when we reached the top that I realised how exhausting it can be to empty yourself out.

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 mid air. 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. Everything had become thick, hard to absorb. 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 learnt the power of stories.