SOMETHING
BEGINNING WITH
SARAH SALWAY

To Scott Pack

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

Reading Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

Also by Sarah Salway

Copyright

About the Publisher

A
Ambition

My best friend’s nine-year-old cousin can’t decide whether she wants to be an astronaut or Prime Minister. When I was young, I used to want to be either beautiful or a farmer’s wife. I couldn’t be both because if I was beautiful, then there was no way I would settle for just a farmer. I would be good enough for my very own sugar daddy. I knew what a sugar daddy was before I had heard of an engineer or a chartered surveyor.

See Attitude, Bosses, Colin, Firefighting, Promotion, Ultimatum

Ants

I was sitting in a park during my lunch hour when an ant crawled over my leg. I squashed it with my thumb and flicked its body with my fingers. Then carried on eating my sandwiches. Ants have not always left me so cold. I must have been about eleven when I found an ant colony in our garden. You have never seen anything so marvellous. It was like watching algebra in action. The worker ants were walking in straight lines everywhere and seemed to know exactly where they were going.

But then I remembered something I’d learnt at school and drew a line with my black felt tip right across their path. It threw them into confusion. They wouldn’t cross it even though it was just a drawing.

I told my father this at lunchtime. He said that we should respect ants for their innate civilisation. They even milked aphids, he said, in the same way we milk cows. He went on and on about how clever ants were in a way he never talked about me. After lunch, I boiled a kettle and poured the hot water over the colony. I sat there and watch the ants die. My eyes hurt from where I squeezed them together to make the tears come. At supper, neither my father nor I said anything to each other. I was worried he might ask me why.

See Dogs, Engagement Ring, Jealousy, Outcast, Revenge, Tornados

Attitude

I work as a secretary in the media. The company I work for specialises in writing and producing technical newsletters for small to medium-sized industrial businesses. Working in the media is something I don’t always talk about because some people seem to think I’m showing off. This is something I would never do, but it’s hard when all everybody wants to know is what it’s like to have such an exciting job. Maybe this is why people in the media tend to stick together. But then again the strange thing I have noticed is when they’re together, the only thing they talk about is what they are GOING to do – and not what they DO do. It seems they are all just filling in time before they become writers, or film directors, or actors, or painters. It makes me feel dull for enjoying my job because there is absolutely nothing else I can imagine myself doing.

See Dreams, Impostor Syndrome, Wobbling

B
Baked Beans

My grandmother on my mother’s side was a young girl in Liverpool during the war. She can still remember the night the Heinz factory was bombed and how for days afterwards the city smelt of cooked baked beans. It made them even hungrier than they were already.

Her mother – my great-grandmother – once spotted an unexploded bomb caught in a tree near their house. For hours she ran around getting people out of their houses and down to the shelter where my grandmother was hiding. My great-grandmother wheeled the sick down, helped mothers with little children and reassured the elderly.

She must have saved many, many lives that night, so I can’t blame my grandmother for still being annoyed, years later, that they didn’t give her mother a medal for her bravery. Instead, they gave it to the lady who was in charge of making the tea.

See God, Mystery Tours, Noddy

Best Friends

At the age of twenty-five, my best friend Sally has become the mistress of a millionaire called Colin. This is not something that normally happens in our town. Just in films. She has given up her job, her nights out with the girls and living in her studio flat. Because Colin has set her up in a flat near his office, she has taken a lodger to pay the mortgage on her own flat. And all without a backward glance. Recently she spent five hours trying to find a dressmaker who was prepared to pick her jeans apart by hand and re-sew them so the tight seams would make no marks on her skin when Colin pulled them down. We are no longer such good friends. She says she can’t bear the way I look at her these days.

See Danger, Friends, Influences, Ultimatum, Yields, Zzzz

Blackbirds, Robins and Nightingales

Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between how you sound in your head and how other people seem to hear you.

For instance, I have noticed that I can make what I think is a perfectly pleasant comment but it can still cause offence. I do not mean to have a sharp tongue; it is just the way the words come out.

Perhaps it is because I have such low self-esteem and do not think as much of myself as someone like Sally, for instance.

Personally, though, I blame the nuns. At the convent school I went to, we were split into three groups for singing. There were the Nightingales who could sing beautifully, the Blackbirds who were all right, and the Robins who were what Mother Superior called ‘orally challenged’. I was one of only three Robins in the whole school, although I had a cold at auditions so it wasn’t really fair.

The Robins were hardly ever allowed to sing in public and particularly not if the song was anything to do with God. We had to mouth along instead, which got very boring, and sometimes it was hard to keep the words in. Once, an unidentified Robin joined in with an especially loud and lively hymn, one we all loved.

In the middle of our Lord stamping out the harvest, Mother Superior held out her hand for silence.

‘Hark!’ she said, raising her other hand to her ear. ‘I can hear a Robin singing.’ Everyone looked at me.

That moment has always stayed with me. One of the things I hate most about myself is the way I blush in public even though I’m not necessarily to blame. It is the same feeling that makes you itch every time anyone talks about fleas.

See Captains, God, Outcast, Voices

Blood

It used to be a craze at school to scratch the initials of your boyfriend into your arm with a compass and squeeze the skin until the blood came up. Then you’d rub ink over the graze so you were tattooed for life. Luckily it rarely worked.

Once I was doing it with Sally, but as neither of us had a boyfriend at the time, we just dug the compass randomly into each other’s arms. It made me think of the time I punctured my aunt’s favourite leather sofa one Christmas with the screwdriver from the toy carpentry set I’d got from Santa. I did that again and again too.

It was Sally’s idea to mix the blood drops together. She kept flicking her cigarette lighter and we sang ‘Kumbaya’ as we did it to make it seem more meaningful. Sally said that we were sisters now and nothing could separate us, not even a boy.

See Codes, Mars Bars, Vendetta, Yields, Zzzz

Bosses

The only trouble with my job is the bosses. My current one is possibly the worst I have ever had. He is called Brian. He is from Yorkshire and has a short bristly beard which he is always fondling and if I don’t manage to look away, I can sometimes see his little tongue hanging out, all red and glistening.

Brian won’t leave me alone. He seems to think we have a special relationship. He’s always telling me that I mustn’t mind if he teases me, that he does it to everyone he’s fond of. ‘It means you’re one of the family, Ver,’ he says, putting his arm round me.

It’s funny though that while Brian is always standing too close to me, when it comes to work he likes to dictate his typing for me into a machine, rather than face to face. He’ll leave little messages for me which means I have to hear them twice. Once he said into the machine: ‘Good morning Verity, you’re looking very nice today,’ so I called across, ‘Thank you, Brian,’ and he told me off for spoiling his dictation. He said he’d have to start again now. I left the room and when I eventually listened to his tape I noticed that this time he didn’t say I looked nice.

Another time he dictated a rude joke to me. A man in an office asked to borrow another man’s Dictaphone. The other man said no, he couldn’t. He should use his finger to dial like everyone else.

I listened to this through my headphones with a stony face because I knew Brian was watching me, hoping I would blush.

See Ambition, Zero

Boxing

I didn’t tell Brian that Sally and I had started going to a Boxercise class at the local sports centre. It would only have turned him on.

I wasn’t very good at first. The instructor was American, a big man with a ponytail he was too old for. He followed me over to the punch bag and shouted out loudly that I was too much of a girl to box. He said it was because I was English and had been brought up to be polite. ‘Who would you like that punch bag to be?’ he asked. ‘Who really pisses you off?’

I couldn’t think of anyone. I wouldn’t really want to hurt Brian, even. Anyway, I told the instructor that I was half Irish. On my mother’s side. He said in that case I definitely had to hit harder. Harder, harder, harder. Eventually, I swung at it so hard that I kept on spinning even though I’d thrown my punch. The instructor clapped me on the back and called me a champ. He even started to sing ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’.

Sally and I couldn’t stop laughing afterwards. When we went for a drink, I noticed that we didn’t hang back as we sometimes do at the bar. We made sure we got served straight away and then we took the best seats in the pub. When a man came to talk to us, Sally didn’t flirt and throw her hair over her shoulder. She told him straight to go away. That she wanted to talk to her friend. ‘You gave it hell, Verity,’ she kept on saying, toasting me with her beer. ‘You gave it hell.’ The next day, I walked sharper, straighter. As if I wasn’t a girl at all.

See Gossip, Lesbians, Moustache, Weight

Breasts

Last week I was on my way home from work, walking past the wine bar, when a handsome Australian stopped me. He was dressed in a business suit, aged about thirty, very tanned, broad. He asked whether I’d have a drink with him. He said he was only in town for a couple of days, didn’t know London very well, and was lonely. I weighed up my options – drinks and a few laughs with him versus a microwaved meal in front of EastEnders.

When he ordered the bottle of wine, however, he asked for three glasses. Then his friend joined us. He was Australian too, but not tanned, not broad, aged around fifty. I didn’t know you could get boring Aussies with glasses, hairy ears and skinny bodies, but you can.

They talked together a lot of the time about intercomputer networking, html, broadband versus bluewave, although every so often Peter, the young one, would look at me and wink. I suppose he meant to include me but I was beginning to wonder why I was there. Then Peter went to the toilet, and after we’d sat there in silence for a bit, the other man leant across the table and asked me how much. His breath smelt of pear drops, I remember, and all the time I was thinking how much what? How much wine? How much time?

And then I realised.

I was running down the street, my face red, when Peter caught up with me. He grabbed my arm. I was shouting no, no, but weakly, so he turned me towards him and we kissed then. You know how sometimes when you kiss someone your tongues intertwine and you feel what’s like an electric shock racing through your body. As if your kiss has connected two wires between you but all the resulting fizzles, crackles and sparks are going on between your legs, not in your mouth. That’s what happened then. That’s why I agreed to go back to his hotel with him.

He touched my breasts a lot.

It is something I am sensitive about. You see, my breasts are very big. People can sometimes be cruel and shout out things about them in the street. I hated them when I was growing up. I used to wear a too-tight swimming costume under my clothes to hold them down so no one would notice them. It used to make going to the toilet exhausting because I’d have to take everything off. Plus at school we used to have these very short doors in the ladies so I had to hold up all my clothes at waist height with one hand so no one could see.

Of course, I wasn’t a virgin when I made love to Peter, but it was the first time anyone had touched my breasts like that. As if they weren’t dirty, weren’t something to be ashamed about. It seemed to mean something.

We had breakfast together in the morning and he kissed me goodbye. There in the restaurant, like we were a proper married couple or something.

When I got into work, I didn’t tell anyone. People kept saying how quiet I was. I went to the loo after a bit, and when I pulled down my knickers I could smell Peter. That’s when I started to cry.

I haven’t heard from him since. It was my first time with a stranger like that. I hope it will be my last. I thought Colin was going to be a one-night-stand for Sally at first. I get angry with Sally sometimes that she doesn’t seem to feel the same guilt I feel about Peter.

See Colin, True Romance

C
Captains

This is how Sally and I first became friends.

Like the singing, in my head I am completely coordinated as far as sports are concerned. Now I am an adult I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to, but I still like to lie in bed imagining how I can catch ball after ball in hands that open and caress rather than sting painfully. My legs find such a sweet rhythm as I run the 800 metres that I almost levitate off the ground, able to go on and on and on as I race past all the other runners.

In reality, I became the school expert at the rain-dance I created in the hope that games would be cancelled. It wasn’t just the humiliation. It was the way your legs would get so cold on the hockey pitch, the skin red and blue and sharp with pain.

Sally walked in once just as I was jumping up and down in the deserted shower rooms, hands on top of my head, elbows flapping. I was chanting ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, rain, rain, rain.’

She took one look and left. I thought she might have been smiling but I’d been too embarrassed to look closely. Neither of us said anything.

One hour later we were standing at the edge of the sports field in the perfect sunshine. Sally was at the front by the games teacher as she was always one of the team captains. I was standing at the back so I wouldn’t have to keep getting out of the way when the other, more popular, girls were picked for the teams.

I thought it was a joke when Sally chose me before anyone else. I didn’t want to go up at first but everyone kept prodding me. Sally always picked me first after that.

I never asked her why, even afterwards when we took a vow to tell each other everything. I always hoped it was because Sally was the one person who could look into my head and see those sweet catches I made in my dreams. How perfect everything was there.

See Blackbirds, Robins and Nightingales, Kindness, Vendetta, X-ray Vision

Codes

S all yan dI u se dt owrit eletter si ncod ebu twhe nyo utak ei ta sseriousl ya stha tyo uhav et ohav esomethin gt osa y. N othin gi swors etha ngoin gt oth etroubl eo funcoverin ga s ecre tan dfindin gnothin gther e. T hat’ swhe nw estarte dshopliftin g. W e’ dwrit elist so fwha twe’ dtake ni nou rcod e. I t hin ktha twa swh yw ewer eneve rcaugh t. I fpeopl ecan’ tunderstan dyo u, t he yten dt omak eyo uinvisibl e. T he ydon’ tbothe rwit hyo u.

See Friends, Indecent Exposure, Woolworths, Yields, Zzzz

Colin

I am starting to get suspicious about Colin. Maybe it’s a hangover after my escapade with Peter, but I worry about the way he seems to treat Sally so casually.

Sally says that as long as he pays the bills and keeps her happy, she doesn’t mind if he is the mad axe-man. She says his attitude is a relief.

‘I’m blossoming,’ she says, and so she is. I try to be happy for her but when I walk up and down the road where Sally says Colin lives with his wife and family, I see no sign of him. I can’t smell Colin in the air. Also, he is spending more and more time with Sally in what she calls their ‘love nest’. ‘Isn’t his wife jealous?’ I ask.

‘If Colin doesn’t mind, who cares?’ Sally says, and I must admit it seems a little bit odd that it’s me who does.

See Best Friends, Foreheads, Love Calculators, Stalking, Youth

Crème Caramel

Sally has a friend who can suck up a whole crème caramel from a plate in one go. I have seen her do it. She stands over the table, with her hands behind her back, and then she hoovers it up in one go without leaving a drop either on the plate or round her lips.

Sally herself can fit thirty-eight Maltesers into her mouth at once. She has to stuff them round her lips and in the spaces at the back of her jaw. It is not a very attractive trick, especially when she has to spit them all out again. But then neither is the crème caramel suckingup, but at parties, people always ask to see them. It makes Sally and her friend the centre of attention, and the rest of us feel jealous.

Unfortunately I don’t like either Maltesers or crème caramel and the one trick I do know is very complicated, involving three packs of cards. Could this be where I am going wrong?

See Captains, Underwear, Wobbling

D
Daisies

My mother told me once that I was not sweet enough to be called after a flower. Something useful, yes, but not a flower. Her name was Rose and I thought if I also had a pretty name then I’d look more like her.

I called myself Daisy in secret and would talk about myself in the third person. ‘Daisy’s nearly ready for bed now,’ or ‘Look how pretty Daisy looks in the mirror.’ It made me feel like I belonged. But then one day I blurted out something about wanting to be called Daisy and everyone laughed.

‘It sounds more like a cow,’ said my father, smiling fondly at my mother.

See Ants, Names, True Romance, Zest

Danger

Sally will always be my only real friend although I hope she never finds that out. She is so popular, she would probably think it was funny.

When we were growing up, our families were very different. Her parents used to go to the pub and drink sweet liqueurs that made her mother giggle. They were also what my parents called ‘Sunday drivers’, which meant they went on outings. If I was lucky, they’d take me with them sometimes. Sally’s mother called us ‘the girls’, which I liked because it made me seem like a second daughter. As if Sally and I were interchangeable.

Once, we all went to a fete in the country and watched a local girl being crowned the Rose Queen. She sat giggling on a throne, holding a bunch of roses and surrounded by Rose Princes. These princes were all spotty and fat. The dishy boys were too busy throwing grass over the Rose Princesses to look at the Queen. The minute they’d put the crown on her, she’d become too much for them although we couldn’t see why she’d been picked in the first place.

Sally and I soon got bored because no one was throwing grass over us, so we went to look round. We found a bridge that was very crowded so we joined the throng going over it. When we reached the middle, we suddenly heard the cracking and splitting of wood and the bridge gave way.

Later the man who owned the house and gardens came out and said that the trouble was that the bridge didn’t lead anywhere, just to a shut gate, so what had happened was that people were coming straight back at the same time as others were crossing and that meant there was too much weight in the middle for the bridge to hold. Considering the danger we’d all come through, he was surprisingly unsympathetic. It was the last time he was holding the fete in his grounds, he said, because he didn’t understand why the public were all so keen to go over a bridge that went nowhere. And now he’d have to have the bridge mended, which was going to cost money he didn’t have.

I read about an experiment that made men go over a very dangerous bridge and when they got to the other side, they were shown photographs of women. All the men found the women more attractive than they would have done if they had not had such an exciting experience. However, Sally and I both agreed that when the Rose Queen came to wish us well in the Red Cross Tent she was so ugly, we still wondered why she had been crowned.

Sally has always taken me places, shown me the way to behave, what to do. Sometimes I wonder if this is why she likes me. Sometimes I wonder if the places she takes me too are always the best places to go.

See Best Friends, Worst Case Scenario

Dogs

The chairman of our company has a Dalmatian dog called Jupiter. When he brings it into work, we have to take it in turns to walk it at lunchtime. He seems to think it is a treat for us, and makes jokes about how many girlfriends his dog has. It does make you wonder what he thinks we are.

Susan, the receptionist, once told me that she had taken a call from his French au pair. This girl was in tears because she had broken the vacuum cleaner when she was outside, hoovering the lawn. Susan told her to take the vacuum cleaner inside and pretend it had never happened, but the girl kept crying, saying how much trouble she’d get into if the chairman’s wife came back and found anything left on the grass.

Perhaps the wife was getting her revenge. I am always hearing stories about au pairs getting off with their bosses. The chairman is good-looking enough. I have often smiled at him on the stairs or when we meet in the office, but I’m not sure he even notices me. He always calls me Veronica and laughs in this coughing little way when he sees me.

I remember reading about a jilted girlfriend once who got her own back on her boyfriend by letting herself into his flat when he was away and planting grass seed all over the carpet. She went in every morning of his holiday and watered it. I would have loved to have seen his face when he opened the door.

I always used to want a dog. I would imagine waking up nearly every morning and hearing one barking for me downstairs. Once I picked a particularly beautiful leaf and kept it in a glass bowl as a pet until I got bored with it. I do realise how pathetic this seems now, but at the time I really loved that leaf.

See Ambition, Revenge, Tornados

Doors

Apparently, it is impossible to have an advertisement in Britain that features a shut door. This is because so many children were locked in their bedrooms as a punishment and now, even as adults, they automatically start to panic when the door isn’t open. Even just an inch makes things better.

There were times when my mother used to tell me to stay in my bedroom. It wasn’t cruel, she just wanted a break from looking after me. I’d have as many books as I wanted, treats to eat. I’d make myself a nest up there.

I’d keep the door shut then. Close out the rest of the world. Keep it all safe.

See Houses, Noddy, Property, Velvet, Yellow

Dreams

Sally once went out with a man who liked to record her dreams in a diary. She had to break off with him because she got too exhausted. She’d be awake all night trying to think of interesting things for him to write about.

See Codes, Mistaken Identity, Utopia

E
Ears

I like to stick cotton-wool buds in my ears and turn them round, pushing harder and harder. I crave the satisfaction it brings. Sometimes even when I have friends round, all I can think of is that round plastic jar of baby buds until I have to go into my bedroom and clean my ears. It’s like an itch. Once I twisted too hard and my head filled with a howling pain. I vowed then never to do it again. Until the next time.

There was a boy at school called Stewart Simmons. One day he was swinging on his chair during Geography when the teacher called him to attention. He was taken by surprise, and as he fell, the compass he was holding pierced right through his eardrum. He screamed.

Three years later, when I joined the class, the other children were still talking about the loudness of that scream. When we were fifteen, I went out with Stewart Simmons and felt the reflected glory from his fame. He would still scream in the playground for money.

The trouble was that Stewart was boring when he wasn’t making a noise. He wanted to be a lorry driver and sometimes when we were lying together on his bed, he’d be able to name the type of lorry that went past the window just from the sound of its tyres. He seemed to feel this was particularly clever as he was still deaf in one ear from the compass incident.

See Captains, The Fens, Sounds

Elephant’s Egg

When we went to London Zoo for my eighth birthday, I fell in love with the elephants. I wanted to move in with them and be the little elephant who never strayed from her mother’s side. I wanted people to say how sweet I was, and take pictures of me, and have my father wrap his trunk around me, swishing the flies off or sprinkling water over me to wash my back.

The following year, the day before my birthday, I asked to go and see the elephants again. My mother got cross and said money didn’t grow on trees, but when I got back from school that afternoon, there was a message from the Zoo. Apparently the elephant at London Zoo had laid an egg especially for me and my family to eat. It was going to come on my birthday.

The only trouble was that the zookeeper left it on our doorstep during the only two minutes in the day that I stopped watching for him. I took it into the kitchen where my mother was waiting to cook it. She was cross with me for not keeping a proper look-out because it meant she couldn’t thank the keeper for bringing it all that way.

This happened every year until I was fifteen. I never managed to catch the zookeeper. My mother never managed to thank him.

An elephant’s egg is not like an ordinary egg. The white tastes like mashed potato, and the yolk is never runny, being a bit like a large round sausage. I’ve had sausage and mashed potatoes many times since, but never anything as good as those elephant’s eggs.

See The Queen, The Queen II

Endings

Ever since the Australian incident, I have been spending more time in my flat. My best treat is to pop into a bookshop and pick up a book to read. Then I curl up on the sofa with a bottle of wine and read myself into a trance.

The sort of books I like best are those in which I can completely lose myself. At first, I sit with the unopened book on my lap waiting to meet the main character with that sense of anticipation I always get on blind dates. Is this person going to be my new best friend? And then there’s a moment – normally just over half-way through – when my heart grows until it’s too big for my body because all these dreadful things are happening in the book and there’s nothing I can do to stop them. I can’t even tell the character they’re making all the wrong decisions. I’ve just got to keep on reading. But then I get to the last words and I can’t believe it, I keep my fingers on the end sentence because it can’t all finish there. It’s as if they’ve shut the door and left me on the other side, unwanted. And I cared so much. And there’s no way to make the characters see how much I cared.

A teacher at school told us that fairy stories always end with the prince and princess living happily ever after because what the writers were really saying, but couldn’t, was that they would die eventually. Apparently it’s a way of helping children to understand life and death. It was raining when he was telling us this.

Anyway, what he told us, very sternly, was that no one could expect to live happily ever after. It just didn’t happen. There are no happy endings, he said. I’ll never forget the sound of the rain falling on the flat roof of the classroom. Somehow it always rained when he read us stories that year.

See Breasts, Stepmothers, True Romance, Yellow, Zzzz

Engagement Ring

Colin has given Sally a ring. It isn’t an engagement ring, but that’s the finger she wears it on even though I tell her it’s bad luck.

She won’t let me try it on or even touch it. She says she remembers me telling her about how I posted my mother’s engagement ring into my piggy bank when I was six.

It’s true my mother cried in secret for days after the ring first went missing. The strange thing was that she didn’t tell anyone. Not even my father. I’m sure about this because I think if she had, he’d have started one of those inquisitions he was so fond of. Instead, she was quieter than normal. I’d come across her in odd rooms, frantically searching through cupboards, drawers, pockets, piles of things. Sometimes her eyes looked white and strained as if she was forcing herself not to weep.

Sally still can’t understand why I never told my mother what I had done, but it was one of those china piggy banks you had to break to open and I loved the spotty smoothness of my pig. And then, of course, I left it too late. I wouldn’t have been able to put the ring back on the dressing table and pretend it hadn’t happened because Mum had moved the table to the other side of the room. I guess now she’d been taking up the carpet to check the ring hadn’t fallen down there.

Dad went mad when he eventually found my mother had lost her ring, but it was such a long time afterwards that I couldn’t feel guilty any more. If my mother had really cared she’d have made a fuss at the time. She was always losing things.

See Daisies, Mistaken Identity, True Romance, Voices

F
Fashion

My favourite book when I was growing up was called The Little White Horse. There were two things about it I remember particularly. One was the sugary biscuits that were left in a silver tin in the heroine’s tower bedroom. Some even had little pastel flowers iced on them. The other was the heroine’s journey to the castle to stay with her unknown uncle. She was nervous, but still able to get pleasure from her beautiful laced-up boots tucked away under her long skirts. Even though no one else could see them, she knew they were there, and that was enough.

It gave me a thrill of recognition. It probably shaped my life. Made me see the strength you could get from having the right kind of secrets.

I spend a lot of time shopping. I search out clothes which have special things about them only I will know. I hug these to me. A certain colour that makes me want to eat it; a lining of soft plum silk; the Liberty print trim to a denim pocket; a perfectly shaped pleat which kicks up the edge of a skirt.

Coco Chanel knew all about this. She used to sew a gold chain invisibly into the hems of her jackets so they would be ideally weighted around the bottom.

I think if I could have a jacket like that I would die happy. I would be buried in it.

See Codes, Underwear, Women’s Laughter

Fat Women

I am the last person to judge anyone else based on appearances alone, but I wonder if anyone else notices how difficult it is to see a fat woman and a small thin man together and not think of them having violent, needy and possibly perverted sex?

See Indecent Exposure, Sex, Toys, Voyeur, Weight, Wrists

The Fens

Every time I tell people I come from the Fens, the only thing they can think of to say is, ‘Well, there’s certainly a lot of sky there.’ But here are three other things to know about the Fens:

1. A lot of the children I went to school with had webbed feet. In the Fens, this is quite usual. They weren’t heavy like duck feet, but just a sliver of thin skin, so transparent as to be like silver, between each toe and the next.When these children flexed their toes, it was the most beautiful sight I could imagine, especially after swimming when the drops of water would glisten and sparkle.

2. The roads in the Fens are long and straight and run alongside treacherous dykes. They look even straighter because the houses on either side are slipping lower and lower back into the soil. If I was quiet, I could almost hear it sucking at me. Anyway, because it gets so dark at night – all that sky – a lot of people have accidents and drive into the ditches and die. Often when we were driving in the Fens during the daylight, we would see bouquets of flowers by the side of the road from the night before.

A doctor and his wife once had a terrible accident in the ditch opposite our house. He managed to get out of the car before it got submerged but she drowned. He was so grief-stricken that he sat on the side until he was sure she had died. It became a craze for many months afterwards, imagining just what it must have felt for the wife with all that water pressing against the car window, and being able to see her husband through the waves, watching her scream.

3. Not many people appreciate that if you lie in a field of broad bean plants in flower, just as the sun is going down, you will find yourself surrounded by the smell of Chanel No 5. It just goes to show that if you know where to look there is beauty in even the most unlikely places.

See Fat Women

Firefighting

Sometimes when I’m busy at work, I think of Sally’s new life as a mistress, and wonder how she is keeping herself occupied. When we left school and started work, we had so many plans. We were going to start a business together and although we could never decide what to do we had lots of ideas. We were going to train in martial arts and hire ourselves out as bodyguards. We’d look like classy dates, but if someone tried to kill our partners, we’d be able to high-kick our way out of trouble. We were going to run a truly caring removal company, make novelty cushions, revamp people’s wardrobes. In the meantime I went to work for a bank and Sally got a job selling advertising space for the local newspaper. That’s when she persuaded me to follow her into the media, although I was worried at first because my personality has never been as bouncy as hers. I could never cold-call like Sally could.

For example, one summer holiday Sally got us both a job selling fire extinguishers. We were supposed to walk into shops and while one of us distracted the shop assistant, the other would start a small fire that we would then put out with the fire extinguisher to show how efficient it was.

My father found out what we had to do on the day we were supposed to start, and banned me from joining Sally on safety grounds. Although she kept telling me how much fun she was having and how much I was missing out, I was secretly relieved. Sometimes the things Sally makes herself do frighten me.

See Attitude, Danger, Impostor Syndrome, Sex

Forehead

Sally asked me what I thought of Colin.

I said he was OK. Nothing special. Nothing worth throwing your life away for. But then Sally said that Colin had told her I was a bit intense. Apparently I keep staring at him.

At first I didn’t know what he was talking about. But then I realised. Colin plays rugby. He’d come to the pub with a group of his friends after they’d been playing in the park. It was true. I couldn’t stop looking at them. They all had the same foreheads. A bulging shelf that hung over their eyes and made them look unfocused and brainless. Other men didn’t have this. The rugby players even shared the same wavy wrinkles across their foreheads. It was as if an empty space had been badly filled with cement and then someone had made patterns on it with a comb when it was still wet.

I wanted to ask why rugby players look and sound permanently concussed, but they were all busy talking to each other and ignoring Sally and me. I didn’t think Colin had seen me looking.

See Nostrils, Vendetta, X-rated, Youth

Friends

Every time I go out now with the girls, we talk about Sally.

I think that nowadays we spend more time thinking about her than we ever did when she was spending time with us. We wonder if she’s really happy, if she thinks Colin is genuine in his desire for her, what it must be like to have such a one-sided relationship. We agree we only have her best interests at heart.

We are supportive even though Sally doesn’t always deserve it. I know that Miranda hasn’t forgotten the time we were talking about making love and she was explaining the importance of truly caring for the other person and how necessary it was to be treated as if you were someone precious.

‘I could never have inappropriate meaningless sex,’ Miranda said finally. She was so earnest that Sally was the only one round the table who didn’t nod.

‘I could,’ Sally said, staring at the businessman on the next table, and ignoring Miranda’s frown. She left the restaurant with the businessman, and afterwards she wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened. Not even when we begged. She said we wouldn’t approve.

It was so typical of her, but even so, the last thing we all want is for Sally’s relationship not to work out.

Whenever I ring Sally to pass on everyone’s best wishes, she laughs.

‘We’re here waiting for you if things don’t work out,’ I tell her but she says that’s just what she’s worried about.

See Outcast, Vendetta

G
Glenda G-Spot

I told Monica at work that I didn’t go out very much in the evening so she invited me around to her house. I thought it was just going to be the two of us, but it was only when I got there that she told me she was having a sex party.

This is like Tupperware for desperate women although we didn’t do ‘it’; in fact not much of the evening was about actually doing ‘it’. There were just lots and lots of gadgets for sale which simulated doing ‘it’. There were about ten women there, all older than me. Monica’s age. We sat in a circle and passed these gadgets round, sometimes without saying a word. Every so often Monica walked round with a tray of little savoury biscuits smeared with hummus and pâté and filled up our glasses with fizzy sweet wine.

The woman who was organising the party was like a perverted Mary Poppins. Just when I thought it was all finished, she put her hand into an enormous canvas bag and pulled out something else. She made us play games and gave us all silly names. I was Glenda G-Spot, Monica was Wendy Wetdream and the girl sitting next to me was Cathy Come. It was hard to know whether to call each other by our real names or the names on the labels the woman stuck on our chests.

Cathy Come and I got into the final of one game where we had to pass an enormous black dildo under our chins between one another without dropping it. Cathy Come cheated because she kept angling it so it was difficult to get hold of. Mind you, I was quite pleased to come second because although Cathy won the dildo, I got a bottle of an apricot-flavoured sauce, which seemed nicer somehow.

I left when the woman drew out a blow-up man from her bag. One of his legs was stapled up from when a dog had got hold of it, she said. The air kept fizzling out of him, and I don’t like to say where the nozzle was to blow him back up.

See Liqueur Chocolates, Names, Toys

Glitter

It worries me that all everyone thinks about these days is sex. I asked Sally about this and she told me a story the other day about a friend of hers who is a nurse. The friend’s elderly mother came to stay the night before she was due to have a gynaecological examination in the hospital Sally’s friend works in. The mother was very nervous so she spent a lot of time preparing in Sally’s friend’s bathroom before her appointment. She wanted to be very clean because no man had looked at her ‘down there’ before, not even her own husband.

The examination went very well, but just as he was finishing the doctor said: ‘I would like to thank you for making such a big effort.’

Sally’s friend and her mother discussed this afterwards. Could it just be because Sally’s friend’s mother was so clean? Eventually, they went through to the bathroom and looked through the cupboard to see the lotions the mother had used.

Imagine Sally’s friend’s horror when she realised her mother had sprayed her pubic hair with green glitter spray for the doctor. When she went into work the next day, everyone was laughing about her mother’s private parts and how when her legs were wide open, they were lit up like a Christmas tree.

Sally and I laughed too, although I stopped after a while.

‘Why did your friend have glitter in her bathroom anyway?’ I asked, but Sally said I was always too literal.

But now I can’t stop wondering if she sprays herself with glitter for Colin.

See Indecent Exposure, Sex

God

I used to spend a long time listening out for messages from God. Despite what the nuns said, I thought I had a vocation and if I didn’t concentrate, I might miss the sign. In the same way, I used to check my hands for stigmata every morning.

I never got a message. I know now this is a blessing. Imagine if I had spotted the Star of Bethlehem one night on my way back from a club. Could I really tell anyone without being locked up? Or what if the sign I did get was so stupid, it made people laugh? Like that Victorian couple who also gave up a lot of their lives to listening out for God. When the message finally came, they were beside themselves with excitement. They probably told all their friends, so imagine their humiliation when they eventually deciphered it.

‘Eat more slowly,’ God told them.

See Ambition, Codes, Phantom E-mails

Gossip

Every time Brian finds me talking to someone at work, he tells me off for being a gossip, but why is it that two men found talking together are thought to be discussing something important but two women are always gossiping?

See Boxing, Glitter, Moustache, Women’s Laughter

Grief

There was a little boy in the park the other day. He was dressed in the full England kit, like a miniature footballer. He even had those long socks on and when he ran, he did that sideways swagger at the hips men do to make it look as if they aren’t properly running. Just getting to somewhere quickly.

But then he fell over and his face went all square. Not just the shape of his face, but every little feature in it went square. His mouth was the most obvious. It turned into a letterbox in the middle of this red block. But even his eyes looked like small angular black stamps. His whole body went rigid too and when his shoulders shook, they turned into straight lines that went up and down, up and down, like a lift. I watched as his mother ran up and tried to grab hold of him. It was difficult for her at first because his edges were too sharp, but then he suddenly deflated into a rag doll and she picked him up and took him over to the bench and made him happy again.

Just like that. I saw how she made him happy. One second he was crying and the next he was pointing at a dog and laughing.

I think the secret is in getting the tears out. Some mornings I wake up, and I know I’ve been crying in my sleep, but I just can’t get the tears out. That’s when you think you’re drowning. You’re not sharp or square. Just an empty outline filled up to the brim with lukewarm water that numbs everything inside you. You’re too full to take anything in, and too blocked to let anything out. That’s grief. Everything else is just sadness, and seeing a funny dog can make you better.

See Happiness, Illness, Why?, You

Gwyneth Paltrow

If I looked like Gwyneth Paltrow, nothing else could possibly go wrong in my life. And that’s all I want to say about her. Basically.

See Breasts, Star Quality

H
Hair

My hair is very long and black. There’s a little nub of black at the end of each strand. Like a small pool of ink. I can squash it between two pieces of paper so it sticks and leaves a dark streak when I press on it. I can even write with it. Sometimes I find marks I have left in books and forgotten about. Once I even did it to a library book. If I am ever captured, I will be able to write a note with my hair. It is possibly the one advantage brunettes have over blondes.

Actually, I have started to pull my hair out. Each time I tug at a strand, there is a second when I don’t think I am going to be able to bear the pain. It’s the only thing I can think about, but it never lasts long enough. When it’s over, I flick the hair to the ground and immediately pull at another.

I was trying on some clothes the other day and I saw what I thought was a bald patch at the back of my head in the mirror. My legs nearly buckled, but when I went closer I saw that it was just the reflection from the light shining on my hair. I told myself that I would stop pulling. Not that day, but one day soon.

When I was at school, I played netball with a girl called Susan Armstrong. One day she was just standing on the court itching her head and daydreaming. When the ball suddenly came towards her, she put her hands up in a panic to catch it, but she was still holding on to her hair and she yanked out the whole handful. It never grew back. The skin underneath was tighter and shinier than her face. It was like looking at the moon. She couldn’t have minded because she used to show it to everyone.

Mind you, she was a bit of an exhibitionist. When she left school, she went to work in a fish and chip shop and had to wear a little hat over her head. Maybe it was because she couldn’t let us see her bald patch any more that she would let us smell her arm. It was as if the oil and vinegar from all those fish suppers had soaked into her skin. I used to love smelling Susan’s arm, but one day when there was no one else around I couldn’t stop myself from leaning forward and licking her. Not hard. My tongue didn’t actually reach the flesh, it just brushed the hairs on her arm backwards and forwards. I could almost feel each grain of salt in my mouth.

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