Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [53]
One lunchtime I was waiting at the fruit counter when someone beside me said, ‘Hey.’ I looked up. The voice belonged to Tony, our floor manager. I had never spoken to him before. He was a tall, skinny man who always wore the same loose-fitting suit. He had a walkie-talkie clipped to his trousers and thick, slicked-back hair. Sometimes I saw him conferring with the white-shirted security men. I don’t think he liked Rory; he rarely came into our section. But I saw him in the distance sometimes, talking to an outraged customer. Women in particular became angry very easily, and it was his job to soothe them and make them want to come back.
He had a gentle Cockney voice and quite a large mouth. He grinned at me. ‘Hungry?’ he said.
I blushed and blushed.
‘Seen you in here before. This lady was first,’ he said to the woman behind the counter.
‘No, you go,’ I said, stepping back so fast I trod on someone’s toes. ‘I was just looking.’
It was not that I wanted to be a virgin. It just seemed to have happened. I had missed a chance once, with a nice boarder from the nearby boys’ school. I wished now that I had taken advantage of him. But all I’d had to do was look at him to drench him in blushes. He would turn up at our house to see if I wanted to go for a walk and be unable to talk to my mother while I thumped upstairs for my sneakers. And then we would walk down the green lanes of our suburb, leaves whispering, me talking too fast, him not talking at all, our shoulders occasionally, unhappily bumping. I was too embarrassed about my own lack of experience to take his on as well.
In London I couldn’t see how anyone, even a nice, shy, terrified boy who couldn’t get anyone else, would be attracted to me. All the young women I saw were softly beautiful, smooth as doves, or if not beautiful, finished somehow. Like Emma, with her Mary Quant coat and knee-high boots. And she was warm, while I was shivering in my bomber jacket and short skirt. Even the few punks still left in 1986 were perfectly made-up, their red or blue hair slickly smoothed into mohawks, their clothes shiny and black and convincingly studded. Nobody that I saw looked messy, the way I did, unless it was Karen and Ruth, with their creaking leather jackets and their weary, mascaraed eyes. I knew that somewhere there were men who appreciated girls like me; girls with clear white skin and round cheeks and big white boobs and slutty, grubby hair. But men; not boys. I was not ready for that yet.
We’d been told that it would rain often in London, but I hadn’t thought about the kind of rain it would be. I was used to rain or no rain: a tropical torrent that swept up out of nowhere, or days of incessant sunshine that crisped the parks and made the pavements burn your bare feet. In London it just rained, greyly, endlessly, like a weepy friend, always sorry for herself. I bought umbrellas but I was always forgetting them on the tube and having to walk home with my head down, my dyed hair leaking red down my neck.
One Thursday evening I got home, dripping, and Emma wasn’t there. Usually on Thursdays she finished half an hour before I did and would be cooking, the lights of the flat turned on to make a yellow box of warmth. As I switched the hall light on, the phone rang. I walked down to the kitchen and picked it up, looking out at the river of headlights on Vauxhall Bridge Road. It was Rory, who I had seen only twenty minutes before, buttoning himself into his long raincoat as we stood waiting for the lift. He wanted to know if I would go out to dinner with him.
How to describe the cold despair I felt on hearing those words? It was enough to endure that I had not made a success of living in London. This was the worst—this was not just lack of success, it was anti-success, the most wretched of failures. Rory must have