Pandora’s Box. Giselle Green

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СКАЧАТЬ there aren’t any biscuits left. It’ll be something like that.

      ‘I’m here. Where would I be?’ I yell back.

      My brother’s face is red and flushed as he pokes his head round my bedroom door.

      ‘We’re out of squash,’ he informs me.

      ‘I know.’ I wave the phone at him. ‘Drink water instead. I’m busy right now.’

      ‘Is that Mum?’ He eyes the phone suspiciously. I don’t talk to my friends all that often. I shake my head at him.

      ‘Who is it?’

      ‘It’s Kieran. A friend. Now scoot.’ My brother darts out the door again.

      ‘I’ll know it’s you because you are going to send me that photo of yourself that you keep promising me, right?’ Kieran’s voice is soft and coaxing. I get a crazy thought: maybe he thinks he’s falling for me too?

      ‘Right,’ my mouth says before my brain screams No! Too late.

      ‘Email me your mobile number, Pixie. We’ll firm up the times a little later. Okay?’

      ‘Okay.’

      ‘Thank you for your call,’ he says before he hangs up. Thank you for your call. As if I were a business associate. But he sounded as if he really meant it, though.

      I’ve got a date. Ohmigod. Who shall I tell? Surinda, of course, because I’ve only got a date if she’ll take me to it.

      And she will if she wants those Beat the Bank tickets.

      When I phone her, my fingers still trembling and sweaty on the keypad, her mum tells me that she isn’t there. Surinda is at school, she says. I don’t know about that, but I’ll have to call back later. Her voice sounds a little arch, as if she’s wondering why I’m not in school, too.

      Stuck on the back of my bedroom door there is an old, gilt-edged mirror. It used to be Mum’s. It came from the old house and she didn’t have anywhere else to put it. Maybe she didn’t want to be reminded, either, of the days when our whole world felt so much bigger—and so much more capable of expanding—than it is now. They were talking of moving to a bigger house in the countryside one time. That’s what Dad ended up with. We got Fetherby Road.

      This used to be my ‘dressing-up’ mirror. I used to put on Mum’s scarves and her high heels and her lipstick. Oh yes I did! I can’t believe it now but I used to twirl around like a princess. What a twit.

      I don’t think Mum even owns a pair of shoes any more that aren’t flats. She used to have some velvet-black stilettos that I loved, and a silver pashmina that she’d throw over her evening dresses (I loved that shawl, I think I’ve still got it stowed away in the back of a drawer somewhere, I saved it from the Oxfam bag). She used to wear a lot of emerald greens to show up the auburn in her hair, and dark russet-reds that showed up her real beauty. That’s a pity because she used to look so glam going out to Dad’s ‘corporate dinners’, as they called them. She told me they were very boring, really; it was only the chance to dress up that she liked!

      Well, this mirror. I never look at myself in it. Why would I want to see what I’ve come to look like now? But once I put the phone down I suddenly get the urge to look at myself. I close the door and take a deep breath. Then I peer at what I can see in the half-light.

      My arms are skinnier than I remember them. I look like a thin weed, struggling through a shady copse of bushes, all gangly and spindly and droopy in my chair. My face looks too pale. I could look a lot better than this if I took some trouble over it. I know this because everyone says I look so much like my Aunt Lily, and she was a beauty when she was my age. Naff fashion sense, admittedly, but you could see she had something when you look at her pictures. Perhaps I should send him a picture of her? Lol. Nah, not really; I just need to do myself up a bit.

      I wonder what I would look like standing up? I’m so sick of sitting in this hunk of metal. I haven’t stood up by myself for such a very long time. They tell me I mustn’t put any pressure on the bones of my legs. That’s why they gave me Bessie so long ago, even when I was well capable of walking by myself. I could walk, but they didn’t want me fracturing the bones in my legs.

      Now I’ve got this overwhelming urge to try standing up on my own two feet. I want to know what I would look like standing up, by myself, without anyone else there to hold me.

      Grabbing hold of the knobs on the chest of drawers near the door I pull myself up. It’s damn hard. My arms are so much weaker than I thought. Inch by inch I do it, gritting my teeth, gingerly feeling the weight resting on my legs. The effort is huge. The effort is Mount Everest to a crawling baby. For a second, just a brief second, I see what I might look like if I were normal. I’m not as tall as I thought I was. It’s just the stick-thinness of me that gives the impression of height. Yuk. I have dark circles around my eyes that most girls of my age would not have. My mouth droops down a bit at the edges. My complexion is a bit grey. My hair is okay-ish. I’m going to get Surinda to cut out the black bit that I dyed into my blonde fringe. Or else she can dye it back to blonde. What will he think if he sees me, looking as I do?

      Maybe he won’t notice anything but my eyes. My eyes are looking different today; talking to him has put a new light into them. He’s made me remember what it feels like to be alive.

      My legs give way just then and I collapse back into Bessie again, feeling every limb trembling with a strange fear and excitement and pleasure at the same time. I shouldn’t have done that, but it feels good that I did. It makes me think that there are other, unthinkable things that I still might be able to do.

      Just like Mum, really. She had to move beyond what was permissible or possible in order to get what she dreamed of.

       27 October 1978

       In the car on the way home tonight Dad said something that made me sit up. He’s heard that Gordon—that Ilkeley chap, he called him—is going to be needing a new partner soon. Amelie’s leaving, apparently. Dad said, perhaps we should ask his parents to take a look at what you two are capable of, eh? And he glanced at me in his rear-view mirror when he said it.

       Could it be true that they would consider it? I knew about Amelie leaving, of course, from Gordon, but even though we’ve talked about it secretly, what it would be like if we could dance together, I never in a million years dreamed that it might possibly come true. Mum and Dad have always been so strict about me and Lily sticking together; they never would have even considered anything like this before.

       Oh god, if it could happen, though, I would surely be the happiest girl in the whole wide world!

      I like the thought of that: my mum being young and having dreams and being happy. Once upon a time, when I was still a princess, twirling in my mum’s high heels in front of this mirror, my dad caught me in his arms and told me: ‘One of these days I’m going to make all your dreams come true, princess, you just see if I don’t.’ That’s the kind of sugar-coated person my dad is, really. He might be a corporate hot-shot and all that, doing law for the stock exchange, dealing in ‘futures’ as Mum once told me, but one thing I do know is he can’t deal with ‘futures’ that look less rosy than he wants them to be.

      Still, I remember him saying that now. Not because he stuck with us for long enough to ever find out what СКАЧАТЬ