by Clare Fisher
By the time I was done cleaning, Nicole and Lisa were at the Snack Station.
‘What, you’ve done all that?’ said Nicole, when I said how many screens I’d cleaned.
‘You only have to do like one or two things. And you don’t have to bother with the vacuum every day,’ said Lisa. ‘You just want to get rid of the big things that people notice, like Coke cups.’
‘But Chantelle said –’
‘Nah,’ said Nicole. She pushed a clipboard under my nose. ‘If you’ve done the obvious stuff you can write your initials next to ladies’ toilets, Screen One, etc.’
They were both wearing their hair in a side ponytail. Every time I looked at them I wanted to laugh.
‘If Chantelle’s in a good mood, she’ll let you initial it anyway,’ said Lisa.
‘But you’ve got to be careful,’ said Nicole, her voice super-serious, as if she was talking about nuclear war. ‘You can’t predict what mood she’s in.’
When no one said anything for a while, I asked, ‘What should we do now?’
Nicole and Lisa looked at each other. Then they both shrugged.
‘Wait.’
‘Yeah. Chantelle will tell us what to do.’
So we sat and stared through the glass doors at the buses and the people and the occasional dog lurch up and down the High Road.
Chantelle stomped in at about midday. ‘Don’t talk to me,’ she said so loudly that the two mums who were trying to pull their kids away from the Pick ’n’ Mix turned and stared.
‘Don’t talk to her,’ said Nicole.
‘Yeah,’ whispered Lisa. ‘Don’t talk to her.’
‘Cardo is such a dick. Such a dick. He said he was gonna take Jayden out for his birthday, Jayden’s been chatting about it for weeks, and I’m like, he’s just your dad, and one of these days you’ll grow up and you’ll see him for what he is, but he’s your dad, and you got a right to see him, but you know what he did? He fucking went and cancelled. Two days before and he cancelled. Sorry babes, I’ve got to take Lucy to Miami. Like fuck he’s going to Miami! He’s probably just round hers, getting high or whatever. Now Jayden’s acting up and I’ll bet you his school are gonna be on the phone by the end of the day, acting like it’s all my fault, I mean they never say it, but they say it without saying it, you know what I mean, and I’m like, you don’t know the full story, you ain’t even had one bite of the story, so get your head out of your computer screen for two minutes and stop judging.’
‘Cardo is Jayden’s dad,’ whispered Nicole to me.
‘Jayden is Chantelle’s son,’ whispered Lisa.
‘I said, don’t talk to me!’
‘We weren’t talking to you, we were talking about you,’ said Lisa.
Chantelle smacked her palm against the counter. ‘Jesus Christ, then what are you doing now? Seriously, I don’t know why I don’t fire you two. I could do that, you know. I am the deputy manager.’
Nicole’s face wobbled like she might cry. But Lisa opened her eyes wide, as if she’d just had an amazing idea. ‘Chantelle, who’s, like, the manager manager?’
‘The manager manager?’ For the first time since she’d walked in, she was silent. ‘It’s. Like. It don’t exist. It’s just so they can pay me less. Dickheads. But like I said, don’t talk to me.’
The air around Chantelle was hot and sparky, like if you touched it, things might get either very exciting, or very dangerous. I risked it: ‘Not being rude, Nicole and Lisa, but I got to ask you something. This morning, did you, like, text each other to wear a ponytail on the same side of your head? Or did you just know?’
Chantelle stared at me. Then she hit my arm and burst out laughing.
Lisa and Nicole looked pissed off. ‘No, she SnapChatted me to see if it looked good and I already had it so –’
‘No, I SnapChatted you first!’
‘You know who you are?’ I said, looking at Chantelle. ‘The Chuckle Sisters.’
‘The Chuckle Sisters.’ Chantelle slapped the counter again, but in a happy way. ‘Oh, you’re gooood. Chuckle Sisters. That’s what we’ll call you from now on.’
Chantelle looked at me as she said this and it felt good; it felt good to be part of her ‘we’.
‘Chuckle Sisters,’ said Nicole, like the words were foreign. ‘It’s kind of original?’
‘It’s dumb,’ said Lisa.
‘Sisters,’ said Chantelle, a smile spreading across her face. ‘Chill out. It’s funny.’
We all laughed.
Soon after I started at the Odeon, I got back into running. I’d run past the African men playing football on the grass outside my block, and I no longer hated them for laughing and joke-punching each other, i.e. having a good time. When I stopped to tie my shoelace and the goalie nodded at me, I nodded back. I smiled, then he smiled. Then he leapt for the ball and I ran away from the game and on down the high street, ducking and weaving between yawning young men in suits and mums trying to juggle a child and a scooter and a Smartphone and a bag of shopping at once. I ran to the park, which was covered with groups of blonde women in red bibs who’d be doing whatever the real-life Action Man instructor told them to do, e.g. ‘110 press-ups and no chat! Chat means fat. Chat, ladies, means fat!’ I ran past couples wriggling about on benches. Past big men walking small dogs, small women walking big dogs. I didn’t hate these people the way I’d hated them when I’d first moved back to London; they were living their lives and I was going to keep on living mine.
Right now, I don’t have a fleece blanket, a fur coat or a clean T-shirt. I don’t have a soap dish and I have gross grey powder instead of proper soap. I’m not in the Visitors’ Centre with the others, laughing and chatting and fighting and drinking Coke and eating Skittles with my family on Family Day. But I do have these words and the world, just behind them, where I can be with you.
6. Reading out loud to people who listen
‘Did you really have no one to see you on Family Day?’ Lanky Linda’s voice poked a hole in the snuggly silence of the library.
I could’ve slapped her. Instead I bit my lip and stared at the title of the book on the shelf in front of me: Computer Programming for Dummies. I read the title forwards then backwards. I breathed in and out for five breaths, like Erika had taught me to when breaking things felt like the only thing to do. Then I looked at Linda. You could see right through her skin to her veins, and her cheekbones stuck out, but not in a model-way, in a bad way; my heart softened; how could you be angry with someone who’s hardly here?
‘I wish it was a joke,’ I told her. ‘I wish I had really met up with my family in some other Visitors’ Centre where none of you lot could see me. But I didn’t. I don’t. Spent most of the day in my cell.’
Linda’s eyeballs roved around their sockets. ‘Oh.’
Finance for Dummies. Travel Writing for Dummies. Catering Management for Dummies. Why was everything for dummies?
‘I didn’t have a good time anyway,’ she said.
The librarian screeched her trolley to the end of our shelf. She gave me an eyebrow wiggle like, is everything OK? Which made my heart race. What if the Lee and Jeannie and Lanky Linda and all the other weirdos had been pretending to like me just so they could get me alone and do bad things to me? This was the first time I’d seen Linda in the library, after all. Or what if that was all bullshit? What if Linda just wanted to chat? For once, I chose to believe the better option. I forced my mouth into a smile and the librarian and her trolley screeched away.
‘That’s a shame,’ I said.
Linda jerked, like she couldn’t believe I’d listened. ‘You read good, don’t you?’
It felt strange to admit I did anything well. But I did; I nodded.
‘Thought so. I seen you, coming here. Carrying your books. And you looked, well, I could tell you weren’t just coming because you’re in Education or whatever. You looked like you liked it.’ For a moment, she looked pleased with herself, but as her eyes skirted up and down the she
lves beside us, her pleasure faded. ‘I don’t read good. Never did. I tried. Just never seemed to get nowhere. Last week, my son, I was trying to tell him how he had to behave at school, how it seemed stupid now but if he settled down and got on with his work, he’d be able to do clever things later, he’d be glad he tried, but he was like, Mum, you don’t understand, my teachers have got it in for me, my English teacher especially, she kept me in for a whole lunch just because I said the book we’re studying is stupid . . . I was like, Brandon, she’s a teacher, she’s not gonna be stupid. I asked him what the book was. He didn’t want to tell me but I pushed him and I pushed him because these are the things you miss, you know? Little things. Like knowing what book they’re doing. Maybe finding it at the bottom of their school bag, under an empty bag of Doritos. Eventually he said: Of Mice and Men. I said that sounded fun. Animals were good. He laughed this mean laugh that reminded me of his dad, who isn’t a man I like to be reminded of, and so I lost it then, a screw came over and said the visit was over and my son said, good. I don’t want to talk to my dumb mum, any more, he said. Then he was gone. That was it. Family Day. The End.’
My throat was lumpy by the end of her story; lumpy with how little she thought of herself, how hard she tried anyway, and with missing you.
‘Of Mice and Men,’ I said. ‘You want to see if we can find it?’
Linda smiled.
‘Let’s get away from all these Dummies books. Come on.’
Of Mice and Men was squashed at the bottom edge of Modern Literature. Its pages were curled at both ends and there were greasy thumbprints all over the cover, which showed two men, a short white one and a tall black one, squinting into the sun, a thick forest behind them.
‘I remember this!’ I said. ‘We did it for GCSE.’
‘Oh, GCSEs! Bet you did well in them, didn’t you, with all your reading?’
My English teacher had said the same thing. She was young and her name was Miss Watson and I bet she smiled even in her sleep. She’d keep me behind after lessons and, in this Quiet Yet Serious voice, she’d say things like, ‘Is there anything you want to tell me? You’re capable of so much more than this, I can tell. When you try, you do great work. But most of the time you don’t. Impressing the boys may seem like the most important thing now, but it won’t always.’ Her hope was so bright, it hurt my eyes to look at it directly, the way it hurts your eyes to look at the sun directly. And so I didn’t tell her what had happened with Cal, and how I’d decided, since then, that caring was too dangerous; people would just take the people and the places that you cared about away from you. I didn’t tell her that the future felt as unreal as the diagrams of the solar system we had to draw in Science. I couldn’t explain why I couldn’t give up impressing boys and being bad just as I was getting good at it. I just said rude things to her and stormed out and then bunked her lessons until, eventually, she gave up.
‘No. That’s why I’ve got to do them all over again, in here.’
‘Oh.’
We both stared at our feet.
Then she said: ‘But at least you can read now.’
‘Yeah.’ I liked the lessons, too. It was better than school. People actually stared at the teacher’s mouth and they listened. I didn’t worry what the others thought of me; I just tried to listen and read and write down as much as I could. Sometimes, if I didn’t think about what was outside the classroom, about the walls and the locks and the cameras and the screws, I’d forget where I was; it would seem like I was just living my life, going to college like I’d planned to.
‘Do you think . . .’
‘What?’
She shuffled backwards. ‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘No, go on.’
‘Well, do you think you could read me a bit of this?’ she asked my feet.
‘Yeah!’
‘Don’t tell anyone, though. It’s so I can show him that I’m not, you know . . . stupid.’
‘Course you’re not.’
‘I probably am.’
‘You’re not. Look. Let’s start.’
We sat down in the study area and I whispered the story into the air between us.
As I read, I remembered reading to Chantelle’s kids. How they’d yell that they weren’t tired, not one bit, but how, as soon as I got them under their Frozen or Action Man duvet covers, as soon as I filled up their room with my reading voice, they’d go still. The world of the story would squash between us, like a huge pillow. By the time I reached The End, they’d be asleep. I’d look at them for a few minutes before I slipped out of their beds and tucked them in and turned the lights out. When Chantelle came back, full of vodka and orange, and stories of how her date tried to take liberties, she’d never believe I’d got them to look at books. ‘Normally they fall asleep in front of the telly and I carry them to their room. And let’s be honest; those kids’ books are boring.’ I didn’t tell her that they interested me. They made me think of my own mum, and how she’d read to me; I couldn’t see any proper memories, but I felt them. I felt her voice reading to me as my own voice read to her kids. All I said was that I’d be happy to babysit, any time. ‘You don’t have to,’ she said. ‘Oh, I know,’ I said. ‘But I want to. They’re good kids.’ She sobered up at these words. ‘For real?’ ‘For real.’ Then I’d tell her how Jayden had said a prayer for each spaghetti hoop before he ate it. Or how Sharina sang me what she called an ‘X Factor’ but was just a song, then pretended to be a judge, and gave herself 125 out of 10. Chantelle would stay quiet while I told these stories and for a few seconds afterwards, too. Then she’d squeeze my shoulder and say thank you.
We only got a page or two in before the bell went and Library Hour was over. The chairs were hard and the library was freezing but every part of me was warm.
‘Next week?’ I said.
Linda nodded. There was colour in her cheeks, too.
‘Thank you,’ we said, at the exact same time.
7. Flirting on Orange Wednesday
‘You’re smiling,’ was the first thing Erika said to me this week.
‘No I’m not,’ I said, but my lips kept jumping away from my chin.
‘Any particular reason?’
I told her about reading to Linda. ‘Before then, I felt like I was the problem. But now, well, it’s reminded me how good it feels to help people.’
Erika smiled extra-wide and I saw all her teeth and also the spinach trapped in the narrow space between them, and I told her so.
‘Thanks,’ she said, digging it out with her nail. ‘The number of times I’ve looked in the mirror at the end of the day, seen a huge herb, and thought, Jesus, I’ve been walking around like that all day and no one dared tell me!’
‘Would your husband tell you?’
‘He wouldn’t notice.’
‘What about your son with . . .’
‘Autism?’
I nodded.
‘It’s OK. You can say it. With him, it depends on the day. But let’s bring things back to you. What do you want to talk about?’
‘I want to talk about what we’re already talking about.’
She raised her eyebrow. Don’t switch back to teenage Bethany, is what this meant, so I tried not to.
‘OK,’ said Erika. ‘Let’s put it another way. What don’t you want to talk about?’
I knew. I knew exactly what it was. ‘Him. Her dad. I wanted to write about him all week but I couldn’t. I couldn’t remember why I’d seen him as a good thing. I was so dumb.’ My hands jerked, wanting to punch my thighs, but I sat on them instead.
Erika grinned. There was still a shred of spinach trapped in her teeth but I didn’t say anything. ‘You’ve been writing then?’
Sucking in my lips so I didn’t smile, I nodded.
‘Have you been surprised by how many good things you did find?’
Another nod.
‘In that light, I think your past self deserves a little more respect, don’t you?’
I hate to say it b
ut she was right.
When Chantelle wasn’t in, the rest of the Odeon staff would bitch about her: ‘Why can’t she buy clothes that fit? I don’t want to see her arse on a morning!’ ‘How come she never gets on the toilet rota?’ and ‘You noticed how she just ticks off that she’s cleaned shit when she’s spent two hours jiggling about to shitty music on her phone?’ ‘She never shuts up!’ ‘It’s her kids I feel sorry for.’
‘You shut up,’ I’d tell whoever it was who said this, ‘or I’ll be telling her. And she’ll be firing your hairy arse before you know it. She’s, like, the manager.’
I meant it, too, because Chantelle filled my life with jiggling and teeth-kissing and buzz. The air always buzzed wherever she was and no matter how long I hung around her, trying to breathe it in, I could never get enough.
There was always some boyfriend or ex-boyfriend or sister’s ex-boyfriend swaggering up to the Snack Station, to see her. ‘Chantelle about?’ they’d ask, and I’d try not to laugh at how scared they sounded, despite their hard man bulging muscles. I’d Walkie Talkie the Chuckle Sisters, who’d tell Chantelle, who’d either appear a few moments later, squash the guy in a bear hug, or would be ‘somewhere else’ and, once the guy had slouched off, would come out of the cleaning cupboard or wherever she’d been hiding, and then she’d tell some long, twisting story about how that guy used to be safe but then that thing happened with his friend and her cousin and he took liberties and no way was she gonna let that go, although if the rumour was true that he was buying up some place in Marbella and would let his mates stay there for free, she might.
When someone – and it wasn’t always a guy; often it was a friend or a cousin or an aunt – walked in and she wanted to talk to them, she would. If she was midway through serving a customer, she’d yell at me to take over, and I’d step right on to the spot she’d been standing and I’d smile like I was the luckiest Odeon Customer Services Assistant (CASUAL) in the world.