All the Good Things

by Clare Fisher

  ‘That’s not why I’ve been crying, not really. I was crying because, well, I was just starting to feel OK here; I’ve got the library, I’m studying for my GCSEs, I’ve got this, and twice a week I get to go on the treadmill, which isn’t as good as running outside, but it’s still good. Then the other day, the Lee invited me to sit with her lot at dinner, who are basically a bunch of misfits, but I didn’t care; people are people; I felt like I’d won the lottery or something.’

  I told her how I didn’t properly get their jokes because they were all to do with shit that had happened way before I got here, like when that quiet woman, Moira, she went missing and so the whole prison was on lock-down for days and days, locked in their cells and no choice but to start hearing voices, it was too lonely, otherwise, and then it turned out she was in the garden, half-frozen to death, or was she in the laundry, or had she been there all along, was it just a rumour, it was started by the screws for their own amusement, or was it an accident? What the truth of the story was I had no idea because the woman telling it, she’s called Jeannie, was stuffing bread into her mouth at the same time. The others kept looking to see if I was getting scared, but I wasn’t; I was just glad not to be eating alone.

  The trouble began when I ate dinner with them the next night.

  ‘Six days until Family Day,’ said the Lee. ‘I can’t wait. A whole day of people calling me Mum. Not the Lee.’

  ‘First thing I’m gonna do,’ said Jeannie, ‘is cane row my daughter’s hair. My sister-in-law don’t know nothing about Afro hair, she just lets it go mental. Last time, there was a pen lid buried in it. A pen lid!’

  ‘I’ve gotta tell my son to respect his girlfriend. She’s a good one, she is, and I’m not having him doing what his dad did to me.’

  ‘My son . . .’ Lanky Linda mumbled something into her plate that no one heard. While the others talked over her, I felt her big, brown eyes and their big, purple rings all over me.

  ‘My daughter’s gonna love the cards I been making her in Craft.’

  ‘No she won’t. They look like a dog’s dinner. No offence.’

  ‘She loves dogs.’

  If the words from all my reading and writing hadn’t been swirling round my head, concentrating on chopping my potatoes into smaller and smaller pieces would’ve been enough to push the real me deep down beneath the me everyone saw; whatever people said or did to me wouldn’t matter because it was way too far away to feel.

  But it’s like these sessions, maybe the books too, they’ve ripped some skin off me. Things are so much closer. Bigger. Louder. I never used to cry before but now I can’t stop. I even cried in the dining room. The Lee stared at me and said, ‘Come on, our chat’s not that bad, is it?’

  Thinking they’d had enough of me, I started to stand up, but Jeannie pushed me back down on the bench. ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ she said. ‘Wipe your nose. Fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Truth is,’ I said to Erika, her face all wobbly through the tears in my eyes, ‘I don’t deserve anything. I don’t deserve to be sitting here now. Talking to you about the good things.’

  Erika said lots of nice things after this, but I’m not sure what they were, I was crying so much. When the tears finally dried up, she was saying, ‘It’s at times like this that it’s most important to focus on the good. To prove to yourself that it’s really there. Now, what’s next on your list?’

  ‘I haven’t written it yet.’

  ‘But you have an idea?’

  I nodded. ‘It’s probably stupid.’

  She laughed. ‘That’s just what my second son says whenever he wants to tell me an idea for a new Lego creation. But once I weasel it out of him, there comes a point where his eyes light up and he’s talking without worrying about whether it’s good or stupid – he’s happy. The way you look when you get going – you remind me of him.’

  I didn’t even try to hide how good this made me feel.

  *

  There was a time when nothing scared me. When, even though I didn’t have all the things and the people around me that other people had, I belonged. Nineteen years old and I had a job, a flat, some friends, a life. I even started to believe this was how my life was going to be from now on. I never imagined it would only last a few months.

  When I first moved back to London, I didn’t believe I’d make any kind of life, let alone a good one. To get to my flat from the main road, you had to walk up a ramp, across a piece of grass, through a gang of huge metal bins, then up another ramp and six flights of stairs, by which point you’d be 100% knackered. The bathroom ceiling was black with mould, the furniture smelt of people giving in, giving up. The walls and the ceilings and the windows were so thin, there was always some chunk of some other life in my ear – a laugh, a shout, a bass line, an exploding can of Coke – and I was glad: silence was the worst. It was in the silence that I’d see the things and the people in Somerset I’d been so desperate to leave. The things that had come between me and my GCSEs, me and, as my last English teacher put it, my future. It was the silence where I saw the faces of my last foster parents when we said goodbye; they were sad and disappointed about the way things turned out, but they did care. They cared more than I let myself see at the time. Now, I was in London, but it had almost nothing to do with the place I remembered, the place where I’d met Paul and Cal. The place where my life had begun. When I finally made my way out of the disgusting flat, the city pushed and shoved and shouted until there was no kidding myself that it remembered me, either.

  ‘OK, so it’s not exactly the kind of thing you’d see on Location, Location, Location. But it’s yours and you’ll be surprised how little it takes to make it nice.’ These were the words of Marcia, my Personal Adviser. I thought she was just going to tell me which forms to fill, which bus to get to the Job Centre, etc., etc., but she turned up for her second visit with a big box of cleaning stuff.

  ‘I’ve already cleaned it,’ I said, which was true.

  ‘You’ve made a good effort,’ she said. ‘But, and don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not being funny or anything, but there’s cleaning and there’s cleaning. Let me show you.’

  She showed me how to cheat the mould with a ‘violent scrub’, how to clean the inside of the fridge and the oven, how to unblock the drain in the bathroom and dust the windowsills. Then she told me to put on my coat because she was taking me to spend my moving-in allowance, which I hadn’t even known about.

  ‘But you filled in the form for it last time, remember?’ I didn’t. I didn’t have a coat, either, just a hoodie, and when we were waiting at the bus stop, which was just a lamppost with numbers on it, not a shelter, and rain splatted all over our heads and our shoulders, she tutted. ‘Life’s hard enough with a coat,’ she said. ‘Never mind without one. What sort of coats do you like?’

  I shrugged. ‘Never had one that I liked.’

  ‘That’s about to change,’ she said. ‘Don’t you worry.’

  The problem was, I didn’t know what I liked. When Marcia held up two different bath mats, two different rugs, two different sets of plates and cups, I couldn’t choose, and the not-knowing scared me; it made me feel like I was less real than the people who marched in and grabbed the lamp in the shape of a pineapple because it somehow matched up with who they were.

  ‘You must like one more than the other.’

  ‘I don’t.’ I picked things at random: a tiger-print fleece blanket, a turquoise bath mat and soap dish and toothbrush cup, a set of plates and bowls edged with rainbow stripes. I was acting moody and I knew it but she acted as if she didn’t know it, she just smiled and chatted and chatted and smiled, and by the time we were eating cream cheese bagels in some deli where everyone was Polish apart from us, I started to perk up.

  ‘What do you like doing, Beth? What makes you happy?’

  ‘I don’t normally like eating that much but this bagel is really good,’ I said. ‘It’s better than the ones we used to get from Sainsbury’s.’

&nbs
p; ‘That’s good – athletes need their food. Because you’re an athlete, aren’t you?’

  ‘An athlete? Nah. I just like to run. And I was good at it. I . . .’ And suddenly it hit me, how bad things had got in Somerset. How long it had been since I’d done anything for me – rather than for other people. Bad people. ‘It made me feel really good. Like God. Like magic.’

  ‘So do you think that’s something you can do here?’

  ‘Here?’ I looked at the boxes of biscuits and dried sausages that dangled from the ceiling. The aisles of pickled pickles and olives and cabbage. ‘It’s a bit cramped, in here.’

  Marcia laughed. ‘Not right here, silly. I mean in this area. You live right between two parks.’ Then she got out her phone and was showing me the best shortcuts. ‘Not that I run, mind you,’ she said, patting her belly. ‘Zumba’s more my thing. You got some trainers?’

  I did. They were in the bottom of my suitcase, still caked in Somerset mud. Thinking about them made my belly ache in a good way. My leg twitched under the table.

  ‘And what else do you like doing?’

  It was a simple question. The kind we had to write to imaginary pen pals in French in Year 8. But it was a question no one had asked me for a long time, or, if they had, they’d asked it in a rushed way that made it clear they wouldn’t listen for a real answer.

  As I told her about reading and writing and making things up, about watching people and doing impressions of them, about finding people you could laugh and be weird with as well as silent, the inside-me sat up. Yes, she said, I’m going to do this. I’m going to make a fresh start.

  On the way back to the bus stop, I noticed a fur coat in a shop window. I stopped and stared at it.

  ‘You like that?’

  To my surprise, I did. ‘But it’s in a charity shop. It’s trampy, buying stuff from charity shops.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ She pushed me towards the door. ‘Try it on.’

  ‘Nah.’

  But I did. It smelt a bit like Brenda, but when I saw how it looked in the mirror, I didn’t mind; it looked good.

  ‘Stunning! Like a film star.’

  Looking at myself in that skinny charity shop mirror with Marcia’s smiling face behind me, I didn’t think ‘ugly’ or ‘spotty’ or ‘minger’, not like usual; ‘film star’ was a bit much, but I did look on the good side of all right.

  ‘I’ll get it.’

  Marcia was disappointed to find the fur was fake but I didn’t mind; the main thing was that this coat was different from anything I’d worn before.

  There was a huge bookcase by the till. Marcia caught me looking at it. ‘Anything take your fancy?’

  It had been ages since I’d read properly. I didn’t recognize any of the titles.

  ‘How about this one? Oh, and this is really good. And this one, my sister’s always going on about it. I’ll get them for you. My treat.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I wore the fur coat all the way home and even at home, until I got too hot. I laid out the soap dish and the toothpaste cup and the plates and the blanket, and suddenly, it didn’t matter whether or not I’d chosen them; what mattered was that they were here. When I looked at them, I didn’t feel the people who’d lived here before me, or the me I’d been in Somerset; I saw Marcia’s hands flying about as she told me some story about the state of her daughter’s shared house at Uni and how I’d learnt how to look after myself a hell of a lot quicker than most people my age. I snuggled up close to my new fleecy blanket and I had to admit, it was really soft. The tiger print made me feel like maybe my life might become fun.

  It was the same when I got an interview for a job at the Odeon: yeah, so it wasn’t my dream job – I didn’t have a dream job – but it was a job. After weeks of boring appointments at the Job Centre, it was the only interview I’d got. The woman at the Job Centre told me to talk about my key skills and qualities, but Marcia, who I’d rung as soon as I got the interview, said, ‘Rise above that claptrap. The key is to act like you can do anything. Even if they ask you if you can do something you’ve never done before, say you can.’

  ‘Basically,’ I said, ‘you mean I should chat like I’m the best person in the world?’

  This made her laugh. ‘That’s about it.’ She hung up before I had a chance to say thank you.

  The Odeon was just down the road from the Polish deli. There were pigeons chilling on the massive ‘O’ above the doors, kids chilling on the steps below. Inside, a big mixed-race girl and two short, round white girls were chilling behind the Snack Station. The air was sticky and sweet with popcorn. I already felt at home.

  ‘Rah, are you Beth?’ The big girl swaggered towards me. She waved a Walkie Talkie in one hand, a bag of Maltesers in the other. ‘No offence, but, like, how old are you?’

  ‘Nineteen.’

  ‘For real?’

  ‘For pretend.’

  She screwed up her over-pencilled eyebrows and threw back her head. ‘You’re weird.’

  My heart, my belly, everything sank. I’d already messed up. I could imagine Marcia watching me, shaking her head.

  ‘But weird is OK as long as you’re not a retard. Can you read good?’

  Best person in the world. Best person in the world. I repeated until it felt maybe 10% true.

  ‘I can read a whole book in a night. Long words, short words, weird words; I can read them all.’

  She kissed her teeth and turned around to mouth something to the two short girls by the Snack Station, who immediately giggled.

  ‘Well, you ain’t gonna have to read no books in here. It’s just we keep getting these retards who can’t even read the title of the film. Or maybe they’re too lazy to, I don’t know. But it’s long. And it makes the queue bare long, especially on Orange Wednesdays. You worked a till before?’

  For my Year 10 work experience I’d worked at Yeovil Morrisons. I was only there four days, but in those four days I did spend two whole mornings sitting beside a woman on the checkout and pretending that I was watching carefully, rather than thinking about my boyfriend, and how I’d spend my lunch hour getting off with him in the park (which would eventually stretch to two and then three hours and so get me chucked off).

  ‘Yeah, it’s fun.’

  She kissed her teeth. ‘You won’t be saying that on Orange Wednesday, trust. OK, what about tickets? You ever done box office?’

  I shook my head. ‘But I pick stuff up quick.’

  ‘What about cleaning? You know how to clean?’

  ‘I know all the tricks.’ By now, the Marcia in my head was beaming.

  Chantelle absent-mindedly dug the aerial of her Walkie Talkie into her cheek and stared me up and down, down and up. ‘You ain’t no mouse, either. Even if you are, like, the size of a ten-year-old. I mean, no offence.’

  Normally, I went mental when people went on about how small I was. Or when they said anything about me, really. But there was some wild, warm thing in her voice that made me laugh. It made me want to hang around her until she liked me.

  ‘If you want the job, you can start tomorrow.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Come get your T-shirt then.’

  I followed her over to the Snack Station, enjoying the few moments when no one was looking at me and I could smile as much as I wanted to; I’d got the job and I hadn’t even had to answer any of the dumb questions the Job Centre lady said I’d have to answer, e.g. ‘Can you give me an example of a time you used team work to solve a problem?’

  ‘Nicole, Lisa, this is Beth. Beth, you just heard who they are.’

  ‘Hi!’ they said together.

  ‘Don’t just say hi, get her a T-shirt then.’

  They shuffled away. Chantelle shook her head at them. ‘Fuck’s sake, it’s not like they both need to go. They’re retards, but you got to love them. They’re good in here,’ she banged her boob. ‘Which is what counts.’

  ‘You mean, they’ve got good boobs?’

  She scrunched her
face at me again. Maybe this time I really had gone too far. Then she laughed. ‘Boobs, heart, what’s the difference?’

  Nicole and Lisa returned, holding a huge grubby T-shirt on stretched-out arms.

  ‘It was Jake’s.’

  ‘He ain’t washed it.’

  ‘It stinks of skunk.’

  ‘And cum.’

  ‘And –’

  ‘His breath stank of cum. I reckon he sucked his own –’

  ‘That’s not possible. Remember, I looked it up on that site and –’

  ‘Maybe it was someone else’s?’

  ‘All right,’ said Chantelle. ‘I’m sure Beth don’t mind cleaning the boy out of it, do you?’ Then she shoved the T-shirt in my face and got out her phone, and while Liking a Facebook photo of someone’s kid sitting in a box, she said to come back tomorrow at 7 a.m.

  ‘Seven?’

  She made a don’t-mess-with-me face. ‘If you think you’re just gonna swagger in here and get the best shifts straight away, you’ve got another think coming. You’ll be here at seven. Darrell will open up and you’ll clean up from tonight.’

  I got there at 6.35. It was freezing but I unbuttoned my fake fur coat and looked at my reflection in the Odeon door window. My T-shirt, which was soft and fresh against my skin, was too-bright blue, and baggy, so my legs dangled out from under it, like they weren’t sure whether they belonged there or not. It clashed with the coat, but not in a bad way; it clashed in a way which made me feel being me was strange but OK.

  By the time Darrell whizzed up on his micro scooter – he wasn’t even embarrassed to be riding a micro scooter – my feet were numb but I didn’t mind; it was so good to know I was about to get into a place that needed me.

  ‘You’ve gotta, like, vacuum and stuff?’ said Darrell, as he showed me into a cupboard crammed with buckets, mops and cartons of bleach. ‘I’ve got to sort out the box office.’

  By sorting out the box office he meant sitting in the box office and looking at his phone, but I didn’t care; pushing the vacuum across the carpet of Screen One hours before any film would show on its screen, I felt sure I was in on some secret, even if I wasn’t 100% sure what it was. The Odeon vacuum had an extension lead that went on for almost ever, plus all these special extensions so you could suck out stray popcorn and jelly babies from under the seats. I was hot and sweaty by the time I was done, but not in a bad way; it was satisfying to know that people would sit down in a clean cinema, and all because of me.