Tell Me Everything. Sarah Salway

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      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.

       Chapter Five

      The room Mr Roberts offered me was bare and uncarpeted. There was already a mattress up there, and Mr Roberts came in the next day with a sleeping bag he said I could have. Although it still had the price tag on, he told me it was an old one he didn’t want any more. There was some relief in his pretence that he was doing nothing for me really. It meant I could slip into my new life quietly, without too much obligation to anyone.

      I made myself a dressing table out of a few of the boxes of old stationery stored in the room, and piled the others against one wall so they acted as a makeshift shelf. I covered them with a piece of old blue curtain material I’d found in a skip in one of the roads being gentrified behind the High Street.

      The same skip yielded a broken coat stand that I painted with paint returned from a stationery order that had apparently gone wrong. It wasn’t surprising an office didn’t want it, because it was bright pink. ‘Nice for a girl though,’ Mr Roberts said when he handed it over. Again, СКАЧАТЬ