Tell Me Everything (12 page)

“Your hair,” I said instead. “I've been thinking about it. It's not really Julia Roberts at all.” She looked worried. “No,” I continued, “it's Jennifer Anniston but prettier. It's perfect.”

“Oh you,” she cooed before she wobbled back across the road, but I could tell she was pleased.

“Ve-rrry satisfying in-deeed,” I copied Mrs. Roberts's voice as closely as I could remember as I walked back to the stationery shop, taking a final theatrical puff of my cigarette and grinding it out under the sole of my imaginary black stiletto shoes. Bugger being pretty; maybe if I'd just been born French then everything would have been all right.

T
hat night I was sitting on the Seize the Day bench staring at a thin red ribbon that was tied to the young tree opposite. There had never been anything like that since I'd been coming to the bench. At first I thought it might have been put there by some kid mucking around, and then that it must be a treasure trail of some kind but I couldn't see any others in the park. It was tied on with a pretty bow as well. Someone had spent some time over making sure it was neat. It worried me in a way I couldn't describe.

“Hello Molly.”

Tim was standing in front of me. I hadn't noticed him coming, he must have been doing one of his weaving walks, but I was so happy to see him I burst out laughing. He'd told me he might have to go away again. “I didn't expect you,” I said.

“But you're here, waiting for me. You must have sensed something.”

“Let me look at you,” I said. “I've missed you.”

If you had to pick one thing to say about Tim's appearance, it would be that he was thin. His bones almost caved in on themselves
with no flesh in between to hold them up. T-shirts flapped on him, trousers looked half-empty. When he held his arm up, the gaps around his body were more noticeable than the filled-in bits. His face was beautiful though. His cheekbones cut across like knives, his eyes were sunken under his thick eyebrows but were the bluest of blues so once you noticed them they seemed to be shining just for you, and his teeth were the straightest I'd ever seen. Under his chin, his Adam's apple bounced up and down even when he wasn't talking. But that wasn't the only thing about Tim's face that was mobile: his expression could flit from laughter to anger to passion within seconds, and back again. Yes, I could stare at Tim for hours.

Now he sat there impassively, letting me look at him as if he was a statue. His gaze was fixed on the path. He was wearing faded jeans and a navy T-shirt with the words “No Angel” in yellow. I bent down and lifted up the hem of his jeans. Again no socks. I ran my finger over his ankle. His legs were surprisingly hairy.

I had this intense need to pull him to me, to squeeze him into the outline of my body. My desire suddenly felt cannibalistic; I went cold with fear and drew away. My hands were shaking so I placed them on my thighs to steady them, and myself.

When I was able to look up, Tim had his eyes shut.

“Did your meeting go well?” I asked brightly. I wanted to get things back to normal.

“Meeting?” He opened one eye and raised his brow.

“Isn't that where you've been?” I said. “You said you were going to advise someone, so I presumed you'd be meeting them.”

He nodded; both eyes were open now. He had his head on one side and was staring at me.

“So you were waiting for me, Molly?”

My heart turned over. I still had a residue of panic from my own feelings left inside, but something else was there too now. Filling me up so it was hard to breathe.

Fear?

Maybe.

A shiver of anticipation, certainly.

I let him pull me toward him and waited for him to give me one of his kisses. His delicious kisses.

Instead he held onto the back of my head with both hands, his fingers splayed through my hair, nails scraping my scalp. I tried to rest back into him comfortably, relaxing my neck as if I wasn't scared. In biology, once, we'd measured our heads, resting them on bathroom scales to check the teacher's statement that your head is a third of your body weight. As a scientific experiment it had been a disaster, but maybe that wasn't the point. I would have bet anything that the heaviness of our heads was one of the few things we'd learned at school that none of us forgot.

I was half-wondering whether you put on weight in your head too when the rest of your body got fat and if so where it would go, when suddenly Tim yanked his hands tight against my scalp.

“Oy!” I tried to pull away but his fingers were entwined in my hair now and he wasn't letting go.

“Ow! Gerrof, Tim. That's sore.”

“So tell me again exactly how you knew I was going to be here.”

“I didn't.” I had to keep my head facedown to stop him hurting me any more. “I was coming to the bench anyway to speak to Jessica.”

“But you didn't know her. You told me that.” “She's become like a friend now.”

“Jessica's dead. Are you telling me you have dead friends?” I mumbled something I didn't quite understand myself. He relaxed
his hold slightly but I didn't want to risk that pain again so I held my head still. I could taste that old familiar fear in my stomach, how I used to feel when my father got into one of his moods, the same sense that I had to think calmly, not to make things worse. I tried to concentrate on the individual strands of grass underneath the Seize the Day bench.

“I can't hear you,” Tim said, gently raising my face. He cupped my cheeks with both hands, looked deep into my eyes. “What did you say?”

“I don't have any other friends but you,” I repeated. “Only you.”

“Only me,” he said and then thankfully, at last, he smiled at me and with that same gentleness he moved his fingers over to trace my eyebrows, a fingertip skirting my nose. My lips parted as he rubbed them up and down, and I darted my tongue out to lick his finger. But it was only after he bent his head down to kiss me that I relaxed.

We walked back to my room hand in hand.

“Maybe we could go to your home one time?” I asked as we climbed up the back stairs of the stationery shop. Living in the present is all very well, but I wanted to find out where he lived, who he lived with. There were so many questions about Tim I didn't have the answers to. I didn't want to ask him directly because I knew I was hiding secrets too; maybe that's what made me so curious about him.

“Nope, safer not to. There's no one looking out for me here,” he said, linking my fingers in his and stroking my hand with the pad of his index finger. We were in the room now, standing just the other side of the doorway. “I have to be careful. I explained that.”

“Kiss it,” I said suddenly.

“What?”

“You know, lift my hand up to your mouth and kiss it. Like the French do.”

And without smiling, looking right at me, he let go of my hand straight away but then just when I was feeling like the biggest kind of idiot there was, he caught it again. He held my fingers very gently and pressed them against his lips, kissing each fingertip precisely.

I melted inside.

“Tell me something nice,” I said. It was that same “wanting to eat him” feeling I'd had in the park. I was breathless with the possibility of power over him.

“You're beautiful,” he said. “Inside and out.” But this time he sounded as if he was quoting something he could only vaguely remember.

Then I tried to pull him down next to me on the mattress, but he was too twitchy. He stood up and bounced up and down on the balls of his feet as if he was getting ready to run. He was breathing in and out deeply, as if he was counting the air entering and exiting his body.

“Tim, sit down,” I said. “You're making me nervous.”

“Can't we go back down and look round the shop?” he asked. “There might be something useful for me to use in my work.”

“I suppose Mr. Roberts wouldn't mind so long as we don't put the lights on. I've never done it before.”

Actually I had. I often walked round the shop in the dark at night, when it was too hot to sleep. I breathed in the smells. Sometimes, I even shut my eyes to experience them better: the dry-wood whiff of paper; the petrol aftertang from the bottles of Wite-Out I opened; the strange sweetness of the glue sticks. I held paper files up to my face and tested to see if each different color had an individual smell, opened notebooks at random to revel in the blankness of the empty pages. I even buried my whole face
in the bowl of erasers, chewing into ones that caught accidentally in my mouth so I had to hide them afterward in case puzzled customers complained to Mr. Roberts of bite marks in their stationery goods.

“Come on. Let's explore.”

“Can't we just stay here?” Kiss my hand again, I was praying to him silently. And more. Let's play Colette and Cheri, but make it real. Let's climb Mr. Roberts's ladder together and watch it rock. But I didn't say anything. Tim had turned blank against me. I couldn't put my finger on why it was, but he seemed different all of a sudden. All my courage as far as he was concerned was seeping out and there wasn't anything I could do about it.

“Are you being a scaredy-cat?” he asked.

I stared at him. He didn't seem to be mind-reading; he was smiling but not in the way he might if he knew what I'd been thinking. Just in case, though, I kept on talking to him in my head. I'm not a “scaredy-cat,” I told him silently, but I am more than six years old and I don't want to play truth or dare anymore. I want more than your kisses. I want all the things I've been telling Mr. Roberts about. But I want them to be sweet, not harsh and furtive. I want it all to be loving and gentle and sharing. Those things had to be real; I'd read about them in books. But Tim was right in one way. I wasn't brave anymore. When I still didn't say anything out loud, he made for the door and I followed him quickly. I didn't want him wandering round the shop on his own.

And that's where it happened. Of all the places I used to imagine, dream of even, losing my virginity in the stationery shop, on the floor between the shelves of padded envelopes and the display of desk-top fans wasn't one of them. Although it probably wouldn't have come as any surprise to my father. Hadn't he always expected the worst of me?

As we walked round the shop, in the dark, Tim grabbed me
unexpectedly, lifted up my skirt and prodded me painfully with his fingers. Then suggested we both lie on the floor, do it there. He asked if I wanted any money first. No, I said, and then a bit fiercer; No! I had a sudden picture of Mr. Roberts taking notes from the till to give me. It's all been taken care of then, Tim asked, and I said yes because I didn't know what he was talking about. Then he told me to take my pants off as he undid his trousers and got on top of me. I wondered if I should tell him it was my first time but it seemed rude to interrupt him. I just braced myself for the pain I'd read about. I was all set to be brave but … nothing. I could hardly even feel Tim come inside me, but he must have because he humped up and down a few times on my stomach and then after a swift moan, rolled off. His back was turned toward me, his T-shirt pulled down now to hide his still-bare bottom.

Was that it? I just lay there, looking up at the polystyrene squares on the ceiling. I felt numb. Not upset, or deliriously happy, or even slightly weepy. Just numb. I must have been waiting for an emotion to hit me. Surreptitiously I put my hand down to feel between my legs. The skin on the inside of my thighs was wet. I didn't pinch. When I brought my fingers up again it was hard to see whether it was blood in the dark. I smelled my fingers, but they reeked of paper. The stationery shop at its driest and dustiest. I shifted over to pull my pants up. I was worried Mr. Roberts might be angry if I bled on his carpet.

Tim sat up too. He should hold me now, tell me I'd been a good girl, but he said nothing. I felt everything heave inside me, but I wasn't connected to my body. Not just at that moment. It had nothing to do with me anymore. I hated it when that happened.

“That was lovely,” I lied. “Thank you.”

He nodded.

“So do you want to come upstairs?” I asked. “There's room for us both to sleep on my mattress.”

“I'd better go,” he said.

“Please stay. We could do it again.” To my horror, now I could feel tears prick at the back of my eyes. “Please, Tim. I love you. Don't go. Perhaps we could go for a drink? To the pub?”

“Another time,” he said. “I've really got to leave. You'll be OK—” And then he paused and I had a sudden realization that he couldn't remember my name.

“Molly,” I said dully. “Tim, are you OK?”

He turned his back to me as he pulled his trousers up and buckled his belt in a businesslike manner.

“Please don't go,” I begged again. I put out my hand to hold onto his jeans.

“Molly,” he said, then, deliberately, looking down at me, nodding as if he finally recognized me, “I'm so sorry, Molly. I'm not all right in myself. I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me then. I shouldn't have let that happen. Not to you. Can't you understand that?” He kept brushing his hair off his face. Again and again.

I felt ashamed of myself. But before I could tell him that it was all right and how I'd really wanted him to do everything he did, he left. He didn't wait for me to answer.

T
hree days.

That was all it took for Mr. Roberts to put the ladder back up again. I was helping a customer in the front with a special order, and when I turned round quickly I caught sight of him clicking the top rungs together.

Not now. I shut my eyes as my stomach lurched. Please not now. I looked over to the spot where Tim and I had made love. Nothing. Not even a stain.

“Are you OK?” The customer was only a couple of years older than me. She was starting a philosophy course up at the adult education center next term and wouldn't stop talking. “Strange really, because I'd been so keen to leave school in the first place. And now here I am going back voluntarily.” The pencil case she was holding was one of our most popular lines. I made a mental note to tell Mr. Roberts to order more.

“My friend keeps talking about going back to college. She's a hairdresser. I should get her a case like that.” I tried to smile. “You'll be wanting some pens to go in it.”