Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [52]
In London no one touched you, except on the tube, and that was either by accident or horrible design, the hand that wormed its way past other bodies to slip between your sweaty legs. People would shove you backwards if you tried to pass them on the escalator, but no one ever looked at you. Once I wore a dress that had a swirly skirt, and as I fought my way onto the escalator a blast of hot wind came and flipped the dress up right over my head, so I was snatching and scrabbling to get it back down again. It was so stupid it made me laugh, but when I’d finally got the dress back in place not a single person was looking at me. They all stared, steadfastly, straight ahead.
Emma and I certainly did not touch, unless it was by mistake, Fatty and Skinny bumping around the inside of our luxurious flat like balls in a broken pinball machine. I might not have had sex with anyone, but at home people had at least touched me. My girl flatmates and I hugged each other, called each other ‘mate’, gave each other massages when we had been smoking dope. Most of my male friends were teetering on the brink of being gay, but this didn’t make them any the less physically affectionate. Maybe it made them more so. I often held hands with a male friend when we went to the movies or a party.
Once I was standing by the fiction shelves, re-alphabetising, when I heard Rory, beside me, gasp; a sharp little intake of breath that made me look up. What he’d seen was Emma, coming towards us from the lifts. She was pretty, I thought, watching her. Her pale hair had grown and she wore it in two plaits. She had on a woollen coat, deep red, with buttons, a sort of Mary Quant thing that she wore with her long boots.
Rory was working on his smile when Emma said to me, ‘I came to see if you wanted to have lunch.’
Her office was quite near, in Covent Garden, but she’d never come over before. She was looking around, sizing the place up. We were too high in the building to ever be busy; our section covered only a corner of a floor that was mostly taken up with fashion for large people. The bridal registry cowered in another corner, but you could see it wouldn’t last.
‘This is my sister,’ I said to Rory. ‘Can I have my break now?’
I could feel him looking more closely at me. Emma and I were not unalike. We had the same eyes and skin and big straight noses. It was more as though, using the same materials, an adult had built Emma and a child had built me, fumbling over the bottom and the arms and legs, forcing the clothes on, adding red raffia for hair.
‘Half an hour,’ said Rory, finding his voice.
‘Is that all?’ said Emma. ‘What about an hour?’
‘She’ll have to work late,’ said Rory, straightening himself.
I grimaced at Emma, and she raised her eyebrows back at me. ‘We’ll have sushi,’ she said. ‘Get your bag.’
After a month or so I gave up eating in the cafeteria at work, no longer exercised by horrible fascination over the other staff’s eating habits. At first I had just sat and watched as slender, clear-faced girls collected trays of lasagne and chips, bowls of chocolate pudding, and Diet Cokes. Everything came with chips. London was the only place I had been where you were offered chips with Chinese food. Not even Parkes, not even Dubbo had food like that.
It was partly the food, but partly also that I didn’t like people to see me eating. Later on I would wonder why I’d thought myself so fat—I was merely plump, a word that I hated nearly as much as I hated chubby—but back then there seemed to be no doubt about it. Whenever I could, now, I went over the road to Harrods to buy my lunch. In the food hall you could get a mango, or a bag of dates or figs. I always tried to get outside if it was sunny, but often enough I spent my whole lunch break in the food hall, sneaking figs from a paper bag while I stood in front of the bread display, or the butchery. Everything was beautiful in the food hall—the tiled floors, the columned