Читать книгу Tell Me Everything - Sarah Salway - Страница 9

Chapter Four

This is how I met Mr Roberts.

He caught me crying at one of the café tables they put up outside the Church on the High Street during spring and summer.

Despite the cold, I’d been sitting there for one hour, forty-two minutes refusing all offers of refreshments, even though I could see the volunteers pointing me out and tut-tutting amongst each other. Then a plump peachy woman came out wearing a white blouse and flowery skirt with one of those elasticated waists women her age wear for comfort although they’re always having to hoist the skirt back down from where it’s risen up under their tits. She told me I wasn’t to sit there any more. That the café tables were for proper customers only.

I started to cry, and suddenly this old man came up and told the waitress it was all right. That I was with him.

It was Mr Roberts, although of course I didn’t know that then. I was just relieved that everybody was now staring at him instead of me. He said nothing at first. Just bought me a cup of tea, pushed it over and sat there in silence until I raised my head.

‘What do they mean about being proper?’ I asked.

‘I suppose they want people who’ll pay,’ he said. ‘Although the Bible does have something to say about merchants in the temple.’

‘I might not want anything to drink,’ I said, ‘but that doesn’t mean I’m not proper. They should be more careful about what words they use. Words matter.’

‘I know that, pet,’ he replied. ‘You don’t want to worry about Church people. They’ve no taste. They can’t see how special you are.’

This made me cry even harder. Mr Roberts didn’t say anything, just got up so I thought he was leaving me too but he came back with a handful of paper napkins and handed them to me.

‘Dry yourself,’ he said. ‘And then we’ll sort you out.’

I wiped the tears away and looked up at him nervously, but he shook his head. ‘Not yet,’ he said, and pulled out a sheet of newspaper he had neatly folded away in the pocket of his tweed jacket. It was the racing pages and he started studying form closely.

He was right too. As soon as I realised his attention had wandered away from me, I started crying again, loud, gasping sobs. When he didn’t seem to mind, I ignored the sour looks I was getting from the Church woman and let it all come out. The pile of napkins was sodden by the time I was finished and his racing columns were full of little biroed marks and comments. He must have been about sixty, with steely grey hair cut forward over a bulging forehead. It was his mouth I noticed most. It was prim and womanly with perfectly shaped teeth he kept tapping his pen against. It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed that the older men get, the more feminine their mouths and chins become. It’s the opposite of women, who start to sprout bristles and Winston Churchill jowls. In fact, most long-term married couples look as if they’ve swapped faces from the nose down. Morphing into each other’s mother or father.

I coughed and he looked up. Then he looked again but slower, up and down my body. He even tilted his head to one side so he could get a gawp at my legs.

‘Well, you’re a big girl,’ he said. ‘What sort of weight would you say you were then?’

It wasn’t funny, but I was so shocked by him coming out with a statement like that, I just exploded into giggles. Since I’d put on all this weight, everybody pussy-footed around the subject. Fat-ism. But although I laughed I couldn’t help it when, just as quickly, the tears started to well up again. Mr Roberts creased his eyes in annoyance so I tried to stop both the laughing and the crying.

‘It’s glandular,’ I explained. ‘I eat nothing really, but I can’t help putting weight on. Mum says it runs in the family, although my father used to—’ I stopped.

‘Used to what?’ He stared at me as if he was weighing me himself. ‘So there’s a mother and a father in the background. Been mean to you, have they, or is it boyfriend trouble?’

I shook my head. Since that afternoon in the biology room, I’d found that the hurricane of feelings continually raging inside me was impossible to put into words for anyone, let alone a stranger. That’s why I’d come here, to get away from it all. I thought of the counsellor they made me see at my new school. The red chair I used to sit on for my weekly sessions with her, the box of ever-ready tissues like the ones I was clutching now.

‘There are times when nothing goes right,’ I told Mr Roberts, catching myself before I copied the counsellor’s long vowels too strongly. ‘This is just one of these times. I just need to sit it out, wait patiently and my turn to shine will come. Life is a wheel and sometimes we’re on an upwards circle and sometimes we’re heading down. It’s all natural. Part of living. You can’t fight it.’

He stared at me. ‘Got a job?’ he asked.

I shook my head. I was longing to pinch myself. It was one of my ways of coping when a conversation got out of hand. Normally this was fine because most of the conversations I’d had recently were just in my head but I knew pinching wasn’t OK in public. Particularly not in a church. I contented myself with squeezing my fingernails hard against my palm instead. I tried not to wince with the pain.

‘You’re not at school, are you?’

I looked down at the table. I was longing to look at my palms and see the marks from my nails but couldn’t risk it so I let my hands rest on my knees. ‘Not any more,’ I mumbled.

‘Too much time. That’s your trouble.’

I shrugged.

‘Drugs? Alcohol?’

‘No.’

‘Sex?’

I stared at the sugar bowl so he couldn’t how my red and hot my cheeks were. Sex wasn’t something you talked about in public, let alone so near a church.

‘Ah,’ he said, as if he’d discovered something from my silence. ‘So that’s it. And no one understands you, that’s the problem, is it?’

Silence.

‘Living at home?’

I twisted a strand of my hair so tightly round my finger the skin went white. It looked as if I was trying to slice the top off, to get down to the bone.

‘Stop doing that,’ he told me. ‘Where do you live then?’

‘Nowhere,’ I said. I held the wet tissues to my cheeks, the palm of my hand stuffed in my mouth so I wouldn’t cry.

Mr Roberts prodded my duffle bag with the tip of his foot. ‘Your mum chucked you out?’ he asked.

I looked at him and then nodded. My stomach had been hardening into a knot as I answered his questions. The strange thing was that Mr Roberts was drawing a picture of me that I rather liked. I felt I was in one of those documentaries on the television. The waif the television crew found on a street corner and whose story they shared to make the viewers feel half-guilty, half-grateful for what life had thrown at her, and not them.

I smiled bravely. I expected Mr Roberts to be kind to me now.

‘Can’t say I’m surprised if the only sentences you can manage to string together are about wheels and that crap,’ he said. ‘Or is she as bad as you? Is that where you caught it from? Psychobabble. Nothing worse.’

I opened my mouth to reply, but he put his hand up to hush me. ‘I can just imagine the set-up. Wind chimes, patchouli and no discipline. Yoga even.’ He spat the word out as if it were a bad taste he wanted rid of. ‘So where are you staying tonight?’

I started to get up. ‘Thank you for the tea,’ I said. Just because he was so rude, it didn’t mean I couldn’t remember my manners.

‘No, you don’t.’ He put his hand on my shoulder and pushed me back down. I looked round for the Church woman but now that I needed her she was busy sorting out the plastic teaspoons by size. It seemed to be taking every last bit of her concentration, although I noticed she was keeping in earshot. ‘You’re not quite what I thought but there’s something about you. Do you know how to keep quiet?’

I nodded.

‘Thought so. Had to learn, have you?’

I nodded again.

‘And how old are you?’ he asked.

‘Twenty-five,’ I lied.

He raised his eyebrows at me questioningly but I held my chin up.

‘I’ve a room above the shop you can kip down in temporarily if you want,’ he said. ‘Do you?’

I fiddled with the packet of sugar until he repeated himself, but louder.

‘Well, do you want it?’

Another nod. In my mind I was still the street-waif and this was just one more step along my journey, either down to degradation or back up with the clean shiny people. Only time would tell. I was a dandelion wisp twirled around in the wind of fate.

‘Although there are conditions,’ he continued.

I thought about how the girl in the television documentary would be used to conditions. I nodded again.