Summer in the City

by Fiona Collins

  ‘Large.’ I was chewing gum, too. I didn’t really like it but it seemed required, for the copycat pals. I took it out of my mouth and flicked it off my finger on to the grass. We took our candyfloss and tramped off, in the pursuit of good times. Cone heels on damp grass; floss sizzled between eager tongue and scrubbed teeth. I was hoping things might change that night, just temporarily, in all the distraction of the neon and the pop and the fun of the fair. Perhaps, for one night, I could forget who I was.

  ‘Oh my.’ Georgina had stopped. Her mouth was hanging open; a melting cloud of floss was threatening to fall to the ground. ‘Shaun’s working!’

  I stopped, too. ‘Who’s Shaun?’

  ‘Shaun on the Waltzer. He’s fit.’

  The Waltzer was coming to a stop. Grinning teenagers shouted, ‘Oh my God!’ to each other and scampered from their bucket-like carriages under flashing lavender and emerald-green lights. A tanned, skinny man in tight black jeans and an even tighter black vest was riding one of the slowing Waltzer tubs like a Roman chariot racer, one black Monkey Boot up on the silver rim so it looked like a purple lightning bolt was casually coming out of his foot. Shaun was typical of the type who work the Waltzers. A bit sexy. A bit scary. The sort of bloke who would usually have sneered at my face then turned away in disgust, but my Hide-the-Blemish/Maybelline combo was cement-thick that evening and sometimes miracles do happen.

  ‘Oh Lord, he’s coming over!’

  Georgina wedged a shaft of hair behind one ear. I chucked my candyfloss on the ground and slotted my hands into the back pockets of my jeans as though I was not excited. Shaun loped over, a scraggy cigarette of man.

  ‘All right, Georgie?’ he said, but he was looking at me. My instinct was to raise a hand to my cheek, like I always did, but both were frozen like clams in the back pockets of my jeans. I scratched a bright pink, shell-hard nail against the smooth card of the tube ticket we had bought at Chalk Farm.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Who’s this, then?’

  Shaun had a tiny mole beneath his left eye. It was cute, unlike my affliction. I prayed he couldn’t see my birthmark; he was dissecting my face with laser-like precision and I was afraid I hadn’t covered my heart-shaped monstrosity enough. He was looking at my winged eyeliner, wasn’t he? My glitter eyeshadow? I also prayed I wouldn’t blush, as then my birthmark would have shown itself with the efficiency of nuclear-reactive radium.

  ‘Roo,’ I said.

  ‘Roo. What sort of a name is that?’

  He smelled of dodgy rolled-up fags and generator diesel. His eyes were dark brown, almost black. I didn’t answer but I shrugged. I was a little frightened of him. He looked knowing, like he really knew everything. His eyes were wrinkled top and bottom, even when he wasn’t smiling. A flash of red neon glanced across his face and lingered there for a moment, making him look devilish. I felt a blush cast across my face and Shaun laughed. It was a deep and throaty laugh cracked with a thousand furiously sucked-on cigarettes.

  ‘Do you think she likes me?’ he asked Georgina.

  ‘She’d like anyone,’ laughed back Georgina, which I thought was a bit cheeky of her – my usual defender – but I needed her as my only friend so I didn’t pick her up on it. Instead, I slid my right hand from my back pocket and absently chewed the hangnail of my little finger. I had a silly silver plastic ring below the second knuckle, from one of last year’s Christmas crackers. Dad had found it in one of the drawers of the sideboard, before I left the flat – while he was tidying up – and, after pressing each of my fingers to work out which it would fit best, had put it on me, saying it might look pretty. It kept rotating and catching on the inside of my next finger. I flicked it off and let it fall to the grass. Dad wouldn’t know. He had threatened to come here tonight; said he used to love the fair and might come to wander round and soak up the atmosphere. I hoped he wouldn’t.

  ‘Let’s see,’ said Shaun, and I didn’t know what that meant, but without warning Georgina pushed me on to him, causing me to stumble against his concave chest. My hand thumped against hot skin, tight under ribbed cotton. My little finger, now free of its plastic collar, was millimetres away from a hard, jutting nipple. I could feel Shaun’s skinny heart beating. My other hand, startled out of its pocket, floated near a left bicep, which was smooth and almost painful looking; he had a tattoo there – an anchor – faded, with indistinct edges. I wished my birthmark was faded and indistinct. It was throbbing under the make-up and my flushed face, trying to push itself to the surface. I didn’t want to be exposed. ‘Fancy it?’ he asked.

  ‘Fancy what?’ I tried to sound cool. George Michael was singing about his careless whisper to the thudding beat of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Relax’. The air around us was hot and charged.

  ‘Something,’ he said and, winking at Georgina, he thrust a callused hand in mine. Signet rings chafed against my palm, scratching. I wished I still had my plastic ring, to somehow counter-attack. Closer, Shaun smelled of alcohol, pure nicotine and danger. He had a missing tooth, on the bottom. He pulled me – quite roughly – round the back of the Waltzer. I was giggling but I couldn’t see Georgina any more and wondered if she was going to go on the Hearts and Diamonds without me. A generator was chuntering and vibrating, issuing the smell of diesel or kerosene I knew would make me feel sick after a while. But I didn’t care. He liked me. He wanted to do something with me. Was he going to kiss me? I hoped so. My heart was pounding under my T-shirt. Something exciting was finally happening to me. Something, despite my face and my fears.

  He was breathing into my face. My back was against the generator. It was warm and pitted with a meteor shower of rust. ‘You ever played chicken?’

  ‘Chicken Square?’ This was a game we had used to play in Clerkenwell, growing up, and still played, sometimes, by our school. A bunch of eight or so kids had to cycle around each other, in a square of tarmac, marked off by tar lines, staying within the square and fully mobile; if you put your foot down on the ground you were out. If you came to a wobbly, screechy stop because some little shit had cut you up and laughed at you when you fell off your bike, calling you an ugly witch, you were also out.

  ‘What the hell’s “Chicken Square”?’ He looked borderline-angry, mocking. Shaun didn’t look pleased with me now and I imagined it didn’t take much.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ I needed to backtrack, keep the momentum going here; not put my bloody foot down.

  He snarled at me, his deep voice a further three octaves lower. ‘Chicken is I touch you, as far down as you dare. Do you want to?’

  Touch me? I didn’t know, I thought, because I didn’t know what that involved, and I was scared to ask. Why wasn’t he going to kiss me, like I wanted? Why did he have to touch me? Still, I was curious. I’d never had a boy so much as hold my hand. They were too busy staring at me; huddling in packs as I walked by – laughter escaping them like gas from one of the Bunsen burners in Chemistry; telling me with uncontained mirth that they would need to put a bag on my head to do what they didn’t want to do to me.

  Shaun grabbed my hand again, squeezed it and it hurt a little. My dad was the only one who held my hand or put stupid rings on it. But I would let Shaun do whatever this ‘chicken’ thing was. ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘Lean back and close your eyes,’ he growled. I was already leaning back. I pressed my back further into the stinky rust, knowing my Blondie T-shirt would probably be stained, but it was OK, as I had been stained all my life. The smell of kerosene caught at the back of my throat; I wanted to cough but I wasn’t going to. Nothing would spoil this moment. Shaun liked me, didn’t he? If he wanted to do stuff with me?

  Shaun placed his forefinger in the middle of my forehead. I could smell it, above me; it stunk of cigarettes and something pungent I couldn’t identify. He moved it very slowly down the centre of my forehead, his other fingers and thumb splayed out, like the prongs of a fork, and his palm descending like a red road map over the top part of my face. The finger journey
ed between my neat and iridescent eyebrows (I was the furthest from the pages of Vogue I had ever been) and slid down on to the bridge of my nose. It reeked, but I didn’t want it taken away. I wanted it to keep going. The finger moved further down and Shaun held it on the tip of my nose for a few seconds, giving me cause to repress a giggle, before he ski-jumped it off to land in the cleft above my top lip. I held my breath. This felt so strange and intimate. I could have reached out with my tongue and touched that finger if I had wanted to. Tasted how bad it stank. He paused for a few seconds. I wanted to open my eyes and lock them with his, to see what that felt like, but I didn’t dare. The finger dragged down to the space between my top and bottom lips and I was still not breathing. He pushed my bottom lip down slightly, let it softly ping back. This was sexy, wasn’t it?

  ‘OK?’ he said, gruff.

  ‘Yeah.’ My breathing was laboured, I felt giddyingly out of control.

  ‘Want to say “chicken”?’

  ‘No.’

  The finger had moved on, to the cleft of my chin – I had a spot there, also thickly covered – I wanted him to avoid it. He sped up a little now, his finger travelling over the mound of my chin and down the plane of my neck. He was accelerating, searching for something new. He stopped his finger in the hollow above my sternum; I had a pulse in that silky notch I’d never noticed before. The finger moved on, pressing flat on T-shirt cotton, against my breastbone, then into the slightly sweaty ravine of fabric between my breasts. It was probably on the ‘O’ of Blondie; I didn’t dare look. Underneath, I was wearing a pretty bra, one my mother had left behind when she first left, which now fit me. I couldn’t think about her now. Her ‘Choose Life’ nonsense. Her endless running away. Panda Pops. Margarine. Sweden.

  Shaun stopped above the band of bra beneath my breasts. I knew there was a little embroidered rosebud sewn to it, with a pink heart at its centre. His fag breath was in my face. My heart was pounding; my eyes still closed. I felt weightless but also that I was tethered, against that generator and on that dry grass. I wondered where Georgina was. The finger set off again, down towards my stomach, which I instinctively pulled in. Too many doughnuts, too many sweets, on the way home from school. That’s when I’d met Georgina, on the way home from school; she’d nicked a bag of sherbet off me then we’d got talking. She was different, like me. We got each other. Shaun’s finger was travelling lower, down my stomach, as though squelching through mud. Through my T-shirt it rested in the fleshy pool of my belly button for a few seconds. I didn’t like my belly button being touched but I let him touch it. I wanted this revolting, sexy man to touch me. His hand was now at the top of my jeans. He circled the edge of the brass jeans button, popping it free of the buttonhole, then he pulled down the zip below it; fast, abruptly. He was breathing in my right ear as his hand waited at the bottom of the zip, a claw.

  ‘What are you doing?’ My words were involuntary. My eyes were wide open.

  He sneer-smiled. ‘Do you want me to stop?’

  ‘No?’ I answered, but it was also a question. I didn’t know.

  He smelled really horrible now. Bad breath, booze, ciggies – I didn’t want him to kiss me any more. His hand moved up from the bottom of the zip and that same grubby forefinger nudged inside the elastic at the top of my knickers; dirty against my pale virgin flesh, my chub of chunky flesh. I was wearing knickers with a pink and green flower on the front. He pinged the elastic; he was grinning right in my face, his mouth moments from mine, his eyes black like he couldn’t really see me. His finger began to push slowly downwards, puckering the eighty per cent cotton, twenty per cent polyester.

  I gasped. ‘Chicken,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that?’ he murmured and he removed his finger from burrowing through pale pink cotton blend and in one swift movement cupped me; his whole hand a clutching dirty bear’s paw, his thumb bent and pressed into the skin at my pubic bone, his fingers curling under me and clutching me underneath. He had me in a grubby vice; his forefinger and the one next to it squeezed down hard where they found themselves. I froze.

  ‘Chicken,’ I said. Louder. I wanted him to stop. This was not what I wanted. I tried to shift my body backwards, away from him, but there was nowhere to go.

  ‘Sorry? Can’t hear anything.’ His other hand was pinning me against the rust, by my right shoulder. It hurt my neck. He pressed his fingers down harder. And his horrible thumb.

  ‘Chicken!’ I shouted. ‘Chicken! Stop, please! Chicken!’

  I sounded ridiculous and he laughed at me. He didn’t stop. He left his pressing hand where it was, the vice, and I was reminded of hideous woodwork lessons, where I had been humiliated in so many other ways, but he took his shoulder-pinning hand and raised it to my face. With a closed-mouth smile, he dragged two rough fingers down my left cheek and when he held them away from me I could see a smear of Hide the Blemish, shade 1.

  ‘What we got under here, then?’ he asked, his breath hot and fetid, and I was terrified for a second he meant under my knickers. ‘Hiding a little secret, are we? Let me see.’ His other hand still cupping me tight, he spat on his forefinger and scrubbed hard at my face, scouring the Maybelline off my birthmark until a half-moon of beige foundation was wedged under his already filthy nail. ‘Oh, that’s a beauty,’ he said, staring at my birthmark and tipping his head from side to side as though admiring it. ‘A pretty little thing, ain’t ya? You should be grateful,’ he spat in my ear. ‘No one else will want to do anything to you, with that face.’

  He laughed that husky, cigarette-coated laugh and I tried to whip my head away from him, but he was still pinning me to the generator. I thrashed from side to side. ‘Stop, stop!’ I shouted, right into his wizened, smirking face and I intended to carry on shouting it, louder and louder, until he got irritated enough to let me go.

  ‘Roo?’ called a voice. ‘Roo, are you there?’

  My heart froze. I whipped my head in the direction of the voice and was horrified to see my dad – red Fred Perry polo shirt, Adidas Italias, a bridled Labrador sniffing at the damp grass – standing over at the back of the Hearts and Diamonds; delighted teenagers strapped on to padded playing cards screaming above him. He was tapping his cane on the grass in front of him and reaching his other arm, usually holding on to Milly, out in front of him, his palm outstretched, grabbing at the air. ‘Is that you, love? Are you there? Are you all right? What’s going on?’

  I remained frozen. I knew Dad couldn’t see me but I felt ashamed, so ashamed. All those times he had stood in the corner of discos waiting for me while I wished I had been doing something with someone, and now here he was and what was happening was bad, very bad.

  ‘Roo?’

  I kept my mouth shut. If I spoke again Dad would come running forward, Milly surprised and excited, by his side, I knew he would, and I couldn’t have him getting into a confrontation with Shaun. I had to protect Dad. I had to protect myself. I drew my knee back as far as it could go with the rusty generator behind me stopping its trajectory and I rammed it at the zip of Shaun’s fly.

  The knee was chubby; it was ineffectual. Shaun laughed again, full and throaty in my face. I would never forget his smell. He squeezed his hand around me, one more time, his fingers like pincers – I knew I would be bruised – then, with a smoker’s husk, and a quick final desultory ping of my knickers, he removed his grisly paw and unpinned me. I staggered away to the left, humiliated and silently weeping, leaving Shaun leaning insouciantly against the generator and my dad standing there, at the back of the Hearts and Diamonds, under a sign saying, ‘This ride may not be suitable for those with a medical condition.’ In a matter of moments, I would compose myself and come round the other way to get him, as though nothing had happened and the girl shouting ‘Stop!’ round the back wasn’t me. In a day or two, I’d pretend what happened that night hadn’t scarred me as much as my birthmark always had and always would. But then, to the mournful tap-tapping of my dad’s cane, mangled with Wham!’s ‘Freedom’ and t
he imagined laughter of my former best friend, I ran.

  CHAPTER 35

  ‘It’s finished, Prue. Shall we go?’

  I realize there has been some clapping, which is just dying down. I realize my eyes are still closed. I open them, jolt myself back to the present. The lights have come up. People have begun to gather their belongings. The man next to us re-wraps what’s left of his sandwiches in cratered tin foil. Places them in a canvas rucksack.

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  I don’t want to gather anything to me. I want to stand up and shake my body and mind until I am clear of my memories, like a dog whipping itself into a car-wash-brush of a tornado after an escapade in a muddy river. Dad’s cane has ended up under his chair so I retrieve it for him. I brush down my denim skirt although there is nothing to brush away. I put a hand to my face and wonder how badly my tears have eroded my make-up.

  ‘Were you bored senseless, love?’ Dad asks, as we stand.

  ‘No. No, not at all.’

  We make our way out of the room, walk through the lobby and I guide Dad down the stone steps and back on to the street. It’s fiercely sunny already. It’s as hot as a furnace. I’m glad of the light.

  ‘So you enjoyed it?’ I ask Dad, as we head for the tube.

  ‘Yes, it was very interesting.’

  ‘Would you go to another?’

  ‘Yes, I think I might. If you’d come with me again.’

  ‘Of course I would.’

  Would I come and sit in the dark with Dad again? Let him take my hand and have my memories flood me like poison? Yes, I would – for him. I want to do right by Dad. To continue bringing him out into the world. To stand blinking with him on the pavement, like two moles emerging from the hibernation of a very long winter. To be good for him.

  ‘You know,’ he says, as we near Westminster station, ‘I’ve listened to some podcasts and things, over the years, read articles, but to be present in a room and feel a person’s – an architect’s – enthusiasm; well, that was quite something. I was surprised by it.’