by Julia Bell
I catch her eye in the mirror but she doesn’t seem to see me, it’s more like she’s looking through me. She has dark make-up round her eyes, earrings, blue lipstick that glistens in the harsh light.
She starts to take off her top, showing me her back, her bra strap, the tattoos on her shoulder blades, the way that her skin folds and ripples. I realize I have let the curtain hang open.
‘Shut the bloody curtain, Carmen,’ Maxine says, loudly. ‘There’s a freak out there.’
She runs a hand over a belly that is flat and taut, smooth as a ski slope. She makes a face at the mirror.
‘I’m fat,’ she says.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Paisley says. She has a pair of jeans to try on even though she says she can’t afford anything.
Maxine puts on the glittery T-shirt. ‘Don’t look cheap on,’ she says. Then quickly, before anyone sees, she puts her old top over it and then her jacket.
‘C’mon,’ she says, ‘let’s go.’
Paisley has got one leg into the jeans. ‘Wait for us outside, Maxie?’
Maxine looks at me. ‘C’mon then, Carmen.’ She links arms with me when I stand up and makes me stride out of the changing rooms. The woman opposite has gone.
‘She was a right lezzer,’ she says, sneering.
Maxine gives the assistant a tag for four – but only three items of clothes. Then we’re walking so fast we’re nearly running. She squashes into me, like we’re best mates. ‘Just talk to me,’ she hisses. I don’t know what to say, my heart’s pounding. We go past the security and I expect the alarm to go off but it doesn’t. I wonder how she got the tag off, I never saw her do it.
We stand up the road a bit, outside Boots, watching for Paisley. Maxine bites her lip.
‘Come on, come on, hurry up.’
She lights a fag and coughs. The damp air makes my nipples stick out, hard and sore.
While we’re waiting the woman with blue hair comes out of the shop and up the road towards us.
Maxine giggles and sings the theme tune to the Addams Family.
The woman’s heels click on the pavement, hips swinging inside her skirt. When she gets level with us, she looks Maxine straight in the eye, her red lips stuck together in a little smile as if she’s going to give her a kiss. But she sticks her tongue out instead, showing us a silver stud in the middle of it. Maxine looks frightened for a moment, then pissed off.
‘Bitch!’ Maxine says, but only when the woman’s moved past us. I watch her heels, her legs moving with the same deliberate, steady rhythm up the street.
When Paisley joins us, Maxine is full of it.
‘Should be locked up,’ she says. ‘People like that. She was a right perv, wasn’t she, Carmen?’
‘You’ll get over it,’ I say, which makes Paisley laugh.
‘Yeah, serves you right, Maxie, you shouldda waited for us.’
‘Oh, piss off.’ She looks really cross now, her mouth turning down meanly at the edges. I give the finger to her back as we walk up New Street to Pret A Manger for lunch.
‘Ugh, what is it?’ I look at the rolled up bits of flesh and blobs of rice.
‘Sushi,’ Paisley says. ‘Japanese, innit? Raw fish.’
‘Looks weird,’ I say.
‘’S good for ya, got no calories in it. You should try it.’
‘Go on,’ Maxine holds a box out to me. ‘You’ll like it.’
It’s really expensive, but I get one anyway. We sit in the window with our sushi. Paisley and Maxine pick at it, eating tiny scraps of food.
‘What’s in it?’ I ask as I open the box.
‘Seaweed, prawns, soy sauce.’
‘Seaweed?’ I think of all the slimy fingers of bladder-wrack at the seaside and want to puke. ‘I can’t eat that.’
‘’S got no calories in it.’
The boys are meeting us by the cathedral in Pigeon Park. We sit on one of the tombstones, on a plastic bag to protect us from the bird shit. Paisley fixes her make-up in her compact mirror, Maxine lights a fag.
‘Witches’ tits,’ she says, shivering. ‘It’s freezing out here.’
The cold pinches at our faces; it makes Paisley look really skinny, highlighting her cheekbones. ‘There they are,’ she says pointing at two figures walking up an alleyway by the City Plaza, their trainers a dazzling white. ‘Pretend like you haven’t see them,’ she says, turning primly to face the other way.
I watch the swirl of people in front of us, coats and leaves flying in the stiffening breeze, making us shiver. I count to ten and they still haven’t come up behind us. Paisley makes it to twenty before she turns round.
‘Hey? Where’ve they gone?’
‘Mebbe they never saw us.’
‘What the—’
Suddenly they’re on us, roaring and shrieking and tickling Paisley and Maxine. They nearly knock me on the floor.
‘Oooh, you bastards,’ Paisley says.
Carter has big red spots and a gold earring; Dean has blue splodgy tattoos on his wrists. They look older than eighteen.
‘Who’s this then?’ Carter asks, pointing at me.
‘Carmen. She’s new.’
‘Please t’meet you,’ he says, sitting down and pulling Paisley on to his lap by her hips. Dean and Maxine are already snogging; she is straddling him and sticking her tongue right in his mouth.
‘C’mon,’ Carter says, ‘let’s go back to mine.’
Paisley gets up and grabs my arm. ‘You coming?’ she says, as if I was about to leave. ‘C’mon, he’s got Jack Daniels and everything.’
Carter’s got an old brown Fiesta, parked on the double yellows round the back of the library. It’s got big rust stains up the side and a Magic Tree air freshener hanging off the rear-view mirror.
‘It’s the Turdis,’ Carter says in a silly voice. ‘If it looks like shit and goes like shit, then it is shit.’
He gives it some on the expressway out of town though. The chassis starts to rattle and the engine makes a strained, whining noise.
Dean and Maxine whoop, but Paisley’s scared, she asks him to slow down. I watch Birmingham flashing past so quickly it turns to a blur, a rush of houses and people. I press my cheek against the glass and wish that I were back in Yorkshire.
Carter’s flat is in a road of houses, opposite a tall warehouse. The warehouse is so big I have to hold my breath when I look up. Rubbish spills into the road out the front of Carter’s flat; there’s a shopping trolley and an old bike frame half buried in the long grass.
Inside, the lounge is bare apart from a sofa, a TV, a stereo and a withered pot plant on the window ledge. A postcard of Bob Marley is stuck on the wall with curling sticky tape. Dean has made a joint and he’s passing it round, Maxine’s nearly choking herself trying to smoke it. Paisley’s slugging on the bottle of JD, wincing every time she swallows.
‘School’s wank, isn’t it?’ Paisley sighs, flicking her hair. ‘I’m gonna leave when I get a modelling job. Get a private tutor.’
‘I’ll teach you a thing or two.’ Carter tickles her and she squeals really loudly.
‘Here, Carmen.’ Maxine passes me the spliff. I take a few pulls and pass it on. I can feel myself getting dizzy from the nicotine. I put my hands under my armpits to keep them warm.
‘It’s freezing,’ I say.
‘God! She talks,’ Carter says, jumping. ‘I was beginning to wonder what you sounded like, babe. I thought you were going to sit there all night like one of them sphinxes.’
I smile, but I don’t say anything. Keeping quiet weirds people out; it makes them paranoid, it makes them think that you’re thinking about them.
Maxine shows off her robbed top, telling the boys how she nicked it. She flashes her belly button and her silky white bra at us while she talks, holding the centre of attention. They look impressed and start telling us a story about how they swagged four bottles of Jack Daniels between them from Safeway in Kings Heath.
‘Stuck ’em down me trousers,’ Dean says,
grinning.
Carter gets a bag of grass out of his pocket and starts to skin up on his knees. ‘Someone put some tunes on.’
When the joint’s gone round, Dean and Maxine start really going for it, almost doing it in front of us on the couch. Maxine’s got her mouth open so wide she looks like she’s going to be sick.
‘Hey, you two, wanna use the bedroom?’ Carter taps Dean on the shoulder.
He looks up at us and grins. ‘Yeah, right, sorry, c’mon, babes.’ He squeezes the flesh of Maxine’s arse.
We can hear them doing it over the music. Maxine makes little squeaking noises, Dean grunts loudly. I try to ignore it, focusing instead on the warm, stoned feeling I got from the joint, but Carter starts laughing.
‘It’s disgusting,’ he says, grinning. He starts making exaggerated humping noises. ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, yes, yes, yes, oh, baby.’
Paisley moves ever so slightly away from him. ‘We’ve gotta go soon. Right, Carmen?’
‘Whenever,’ I shrug.
This is obviously not what she wanted me to say and she pulls a face at me. Carter’s hand is creeping up her leg, pushing between her thighs. She gets up.
‘C’mon,’ she says, grabbing her bag. ‘Mum’ll kill me if I’m not in by six.’
‘Hang on,’ Carter says. ‘Aren’t yous gonna wait for Maxine? I’ll give ya a lift back uptown.’
The noise from the other room has stopped.
‘Nah,’ she says, ‘C’mon, Carmen.’ She grabs my arm. ‘Let’s go.’ She pushes me out of the door in front of her. ‘See ya at the party, Carter.’
On the way to the bus stop we pass a chippie.
‘You hungry, Carmen?’ Paisley asks, looking at me slyly out of the corner of her eye. I can feel my stomach cramping with hunger.
‘Nah,’ I say.
She pauses. ‘Me neither.’
11
Mum is polishing an apple on her skirt like a cricket ball. She holds it to her mouth and rubs the shiny surface over her lips. She sniffs it and licks it and bites it a tiny bit, chewing off a fleck of skin.
‘Can I stop over at Paisley’s on Saturday?’ I ask.
‘Who’s Paisley?’
‘Friend from school.’
‘The lard bucket?’ She takes another nibble of her apple. Her eyes are fixed on the TV.
‘No, that’s Kelly. Paisley’s the one I went to town with.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘Kings Heath.’
‘What you going for?’
‘A party.’
‘Will her parents be there?’
‘Think so,’ I say.
‘All right. But I want her address and phone number. I don’t want you going missing so I don’t know where to find you.’
She puts the apple in her mouth almost whole, like she could eat it all in one go, then she spits it out again, and takes another, tiny nibble. I look at her ears; I can see little pinprick scars where she used to have rings in.
‘Can I get my ears pierced?’ I ask.
She puts her hand to her ear, then smiles. ‘You can spend your money on what you like, long as it isn’t food.’ She looks at me benevolently. ‘What you going to wear?’
She gets out her catalogues from work. The ring binders with all the latest designs. Apparently, women in Birmingham like a brassier kind of look than the women in Yorkshire.
‘See that shift dress?’ she says pointing at a model wearing a flimsy powder blue, nightie-type thing. ‘Now your average Londoner bought those by the vanload. They couldn’t get to them fast enough. It’s the kind of fabric that makes most women feel glamorous, but not too tarty, kind of sophisticated. But I didn’t sell one in the shop back home. Not one—’
She breaks off, stares into space.
‘Why?’ I prompt.
‘Women up north like to call a spade a spade. No pretensions. They know what suits them, they wouldn’t be seen dead in stuff like this.’ She taps the page with her fingers. ‘Make you look like a sack of potatoes unless you’re Claudia Schiffer.’
‘Oh.’
‘Now here,’ she points to an embroidered black dress with a similar cut. ‘This covers all your sins. Little black number. You can hide all your lumps and bumps under one of those and no one will notice. Sold more of those than I’ve had hot dinners, even with all that hippie trim.’ She pauses, chewing on a bit of apple. ‘What d’you reckon?’
I look more closely at the photograph; the dress has a kind of Red Indian theme, with feather tassels at the waist and orange embroidery round the hem. I shrug.
‘’S all right.’
‘Well I think you’d look just perfect in it. You’re getting old enough for party frocks now.’ She sighs. ‘Really, you’re so lucky, whole world ahead of you. If I had my time again I’d, well—’ she stops, scrapes another fleck off the apple with her teeth. ‘No knowing what I could have done.’
12
The Sea Life Centre is a round grey building right by the canal, opposite the Indoor Arena where they film Gladiators. As part of a publicity drive Miss Burton got free tickets and glossy souvenir programmes from the company that runs the Centre.
‘Told you it was crap,’ Maxine says as we go through the doors and look up the landscaped slope of tanks and waterfalls and fake rocks. She’s been here before with her family. ‘Gladiators was miles better.’
Paisley nudges her. ‘Maxine, I was into that when I was, like, eight.’
Maxine blushes and turns away from us. She gives Paisley the finger in a way that makes it obvious that she isn’t being funny. She’s still pissed off with us for leaving her in Carter’s flat. ‘You couldda waited for me. We’d nearly finished.’
There’s a Captain Pugwash theme to all the displays, obviously intended for much younger kids. Miss Burton leads the way, explaining about lifecycles and habitats. We straggle behind, taking the piss, Paisley making jokes about Seaman Stains and Little Willy.
‘It smells in here, Miss,’ Paisley says.
‘Yeah, tell Kelly to put some deodorant on, Miss,’ Maxine says, quietly, but still loud enough for Kelly to hear.
In one room there’s a tank with two blue catfish. They are like cats that have been turned into fish: round, cartoon-cat faces and whiskers and soft, flabby bodies that settle about them as they wiggle on the bottom. I fold my arms across my chest, try to push my breasts back in.
‘They look like Kelly,’ Maxine says, giggling. ‘Where is Belly? Hey, Kelly, look over here, it’s you. Belly’s gonna get you, Belly’s gonna get you,’ she chants. But Kelly is ignoring her, walking close to Miss Burton for safety.
Next to the catfish, mackerel shoal in a circular tank, round and round and round, making me dizzy. They are silvery and streamlined, designed for speed, for zipping across thousands of miles of ocean. Their eyes shine balefully as they swim past.
‘Doncha think it’s cruel? Keeping them in like that,’ I say.
‘Naah,’ Paisley says. ‘This place is well into conservation, it says so.’ She points to the souvenir programme.
We’re mooching behind everyone else. When we try to go in to the Digital Domain, Miss Burton shoos us out. ‘You’re late,’ she says. ‘You’ll have to miss the film, I’m not having you spoiling it for everyone else.’
Maxine starts to moan, but Miss Burton shuts the door on us. ‘’S crap anyway, c’mon let’s go and have a fag on the balcony.’
She goes off with Paisley, and I stay behind to look at the rockpool display. In one tank, all by itself, is a hermit crab, right up close to the edge of the tank, propping itself up on a huge pair of claws.
The programme says that hermit crabs are shy, that they steal shells from other molluscs because their bodies are too soft to grow their own. A diagram shows what one looks like without its shell: a shapeless sac of membranes and organs.
I hold my nails up to the glass and wave my fingers. The crab has eyes that stick out on stalks. They twitch and follow the movement of my h
and. Then suddenly, as if startled, it scuttles sideways across the gravel, towards the fake rockery at the back of the tank, withdrawing into its shell so only the tips of its claws are showing.
The toilets at the entrance to the Titanic Adventure have doors done up like airlocks with wheels on them and metallic paint. Maxine nudges us. ‘Kelly’s just gone in there. C’mon.’
Miss Burton’s not looking, she’s listening to the guide, her hands clasped in front of her legs, head cocked to one side. The guide is reading from a script about the Titanic and the amazing fishtank downstairs, where we will get to walk underneath the water.
Kelly’s the only one in the toilets. Paisley knocks on the door of her cubicle. ‘C’mon, Kelly, we’re bursting.’
‘Yeah, let us in Belly.’
‘Go away.’
Maxine stands on the toilet of the adjacent cubicle and looks over the top.
‘Oi,’ she says, ‘you’re not doing anything. Why aren’t you doing anything? You should be having a piss if you’re sitting on the bog.’
She jumps down off the toilet. ‘She’s not doing anything,’ she says again.
She kicks the cubicle door. It flies open, hitting Kelly with a crack and bouncing back with a slam.
Paisley steps back.
There’s silence for a moment then Kelly wails pathetically. ‘You broke them.’
When Maxine pushes the door open Kelly’s sitting there with her knickers round her knees, holding her glasses. One of the lenses is split in half.
‘Poor Belly,’ Maxine says.
‘Smelly,’ says Paisley.
‘Lezzie.’
We go down in the lift, a breathy woman’s voice telling us to get out at the third level. The doors open and we are staring at the bottom of a huge tank with a tunnel underneath it. Miss Burton is in the middle, pointing out something to swotty Sally Jenks who’s taking notes.