Woman Walks into a Bar

by Rowan Coleman

  “You in?” I called.

  “Yeah,” Beth called back from her bedroom. I nodded. I was always glad to hear her voice. Always glad to know that she was safe and well and had made it through another day at school without anything happening to change or hurt her.

  Beth never thought about school like I did, of course. She greeted every day with the same energy and joy. She never thought that the day would come when someone wouldn’t like her. Not because she’d done anything wrong but just because of who she was. She had scraps and fights with her friends, but she’d never dream that the girls she’d known since playgroup would suddenly decide to turn on her one day and make her life a misery.

  “That’s because Beth is not you,” I had to remind myself almost every day. “She’s a strong, popular girl. She’s not the sort of girl who gets bullied. She’s not you.”

  I paused outside Beth’s door for a moment, deciding whether or not I should tell her about the date. I didn’t have to.

  As far as she was concerned, I always went out on a Friday night. My mum always came over at about six and the three of us gossiped while I got ready. For the last few months Beth’s best mate, Keisha, would come over just after I’d gone, to watch DVDs and eat Maltesers. I knew it would only be a matter of time before Beth herself was getting ready to go out on a Friday night and I would have a whole load of new reasons to be scared for her.

  I didn’t have to tell her about the blind date, and part of me dreaded the thought of it. I’d never liked to compare her to her father, not at all, but if I had to say they had one thing in common it would be an unshakable belief that they were always right. Beth disapproved of Joy and all of her life choices, and she would disapprove of Joy setting me up for a date. Even so, I wanted to tell her, and not just because she’d kill me if she ever found out I’d kept it from her. But also because Beth was as good a friend to me as Joy or Marie. Because although I am the mum, she has always been the glue that has held me together.

  I pushed open her bedroom door. She was lying on her stomach on her bed, her feet in the air.

  “Doing your homework?” I asked her.

  “Nope.” She looked at me over her shoulder and held up a copy of Heat. “I think false boobs look stupid, don’t you, Mum?” I shrugged and came into the room and sat down at her desk.

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  “Like someone’s stuffed two big balloons up your top that might go pop any minute!” Beth said, holding up a picture of a bleached blonde who did look a bit overstretched, before looking down her own top.

  “Joy and Marie have set me up on a blind date tonight,” I said quickly, in a low voice.

  “A blind date!” Beth sat up on her bed, her eyes popping. “Who with? How do we know if he’s OK if we haven’t looked him up on the Internet? What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, smiling. “That’s why it’s called a blind date.”

  “Mum!” Beth protested. “You can’t just go and meet some bloke you don’t know. Anything could happen!”

  I sighed and tried to sound like I was the adult here.

  “I do know that, Beth. Anything could happen with some bloke I meet off your computer, too. You read about it all the time in the paper.”

  Beth screwed her mouth into a knot. I knew she was angry, not because I was risking life and limb by meeting a potential axe murderer for a drink, but because it had not been her idea.

  “Well,” she said, “I just hope you’re meeting him in a public place. And you’d better tell at least two people where you’ll be and call me when you get there—”

  “I’m meeting him in the White Horse,” I interrupted her, before she could tell me I have to be in by nine. “And Joy and Marie and everyone else from round here will be there too. So I don’t think you have to worry, OK?” I thought about Brendan and felt a little fizz in my belly. “It’ll probably be rubbish anyway,” I said, to calm myself down.

  “Bound to be if Joy’s picked him,” Beth said. “Her boyfriends are always right jerk-offs.”

  “Beth!” I said sharply. “I don’t like you using words like that!”

  “It’s just a word, Mum,” Beth snapped at me. “I don’t even know why you hang out with Joy. She looks a right mess in those clothes that don’t fit her! At your age you should—”

  “Beth!” My raised voice stopped her in her tracks. “Don’t you ever speak about Joy or any­one like that again,” I told her. “Joy has been a good friend to me. She has always been there—if it hadn’t been for Joy after your father did . . .”

  “Did what? Did what, Mum?” Beth shouted at me, and I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned Adam. “What’s this, what’s anything got to do with him!” She drew in a ragged breath and I knew she was trying not to cry. I know she misses the dad she can hardly remember. She doesn’t say it, but I know she hates him for not being around. And sometimes I think she hates me for keeping him away. But it’s hard to explain to her the reason why I do without making her hate us both even more.

  I sat down on the bed next to her.

  “This is stupid,” I said. “I don’t want to fall out with you. I just wish you wouldn’t be so down on Joy, OK? She’s a good person. The best.”

  We sat in silence for a moment until the tension faded.

  “I’m sorry, Mum,” Beth said. She put her arms round my neck and kissed me. She was wearing the perfume my mum had given me at Christmas. I decided not to mention it.

  “So what are you going to wear to this blind date?” she said after a moment, wrinkling her nose. “I tell you what, you’d better have a bath and wash your hair, anyway. You stink of fish.”

  Seven

  Beth ran the bath so that the bubbles rose over the rim like mountains of soft white snow.

  “What do you think of this?” Beth asked me, sitting on the loo and leafing through her joke book as I shaved my legs.

  “Who does a monster ask for a date?”

  I waited.

  “Any old ghoul he can find!” Beth screwed up her mouth.

  “Worst yet,” I told her, groaning.

  “Totally!” she agreed with a giggle that reminded me of when she had been very small.

  “So how was school today?” I asked her, my heart in my mouth.

  “Cool,” Beth said, like she always did.

  “Cool how?” I pressed her like I always did, watching her carefully for any signs that she might be hiding something.

  “Well, my team won at football, I got a B for my history homework, and we had a right laugh at lunch because Keisha fancies this lad in the year above so we spent all break trying to find him so she could ask him out and then when we did she totally bottled it! And Miss Childs said we’re going to be doing Grease as the school play—but, Mum, it’s not fair because all the sixth formers get the best parts, right? And all we’ll get to do is paint scenery or something, so I said . . .”

  I let Beth’s words wash over me, as warm and as comforting as the bath water. Everything she was telling me now she had told me before in one way or another. It was normal for her. It was amazing to me.

  My average day at school had not been the same, at least from the year I turned thirteen. That’s when the bullying started.

  I didn’t notice it at first. It took me until break to realize that no one was talking to me. When I went up to Christine Parker and Hannah Milton as usual, both of them turned their backs on me and walked away without saying a word. I wanted to run after them and ask them what I’d done wrong. But I didn’t. I wasn’t the sort of person to be pushy. I thought I’d wait until they were OK with me again, then say sorry for whatever it was. But at lunch they ignored me again. At the end of the day I didn’t bother trying to talk to them. I just walked right past them toward the school gate.

  “Stuck-up bitch thinks she’s too good for us,” Han
nah said. I stopped in my tracks.

  “I don’t !” I said, smiling. “I just thought you didn’t want to talk to me . . .”

  “We don’t want to talk to you, bitch,” Christine said. “Who’d want to talk to a stinking fat bitch like you?” And they walked off, laughing and nudging each other. A couple of other kids who had heard them were laughing too.

  I didn’t say anything to Mum when I got home. We had fallen out before, the three of us. Sometimes it was me and Christine against Hannah. Sometimes me and Hannah against Christine. Now it was those two against me. I told myself everything would be back to normal in a couple of days, like always.

  But it wasn’t. It was the same for the rest of the week. And by the beginning of the next week it wasn’t only Christine and Hannah that were saying things, calling me a bitch or telling me I stank. It was my whole class. The week after that it seemed like it was everyone in my year. I would be walking down a corridor and someone would shove me against a wall, but when I looked round everyone was acting like nothing had happened. Little things like that, every day.

  There was one time when we were getting changed for PE. Someone squeezed a packet of tomato ketchup all over my white shorts. Our PE teacher was a hard old cow. She didn’t like excuses. I had to do cross-country in my pants.

  I had to tell my mum about that. She was livid, because the shorts were ruined. As she scrubbed at them in the sink she told me that the girls that were picking on me were just jealous of me because I was growing up so good-looking. She told me to ignore them and they’d soon get bored.

  But they didn’t get bored. For the rest of that year they found new names to call me, new ways to torment me. And it wasn’t just the girls, it was the boys too. I was one of the first in my year to wear a bra. The boys were always trying to ping the straps or grab my top and yank it down. They thought that because I was quite big up top I should be up for it. Like the size of my chest made me a tart all by itself.

  And I never really knew why it happened. I never knew if I’d done anything wrong or offended someone so badly that the rest of my year slowly turned against me one by one. It felt like a tide of hate slowly building and rolling toward me day after day, a little bigger each time. And there was nothing I could do. I had no idea why they had decided to hate me, single me out. And sometimes I wondered if there was any reason at all. I hope that there was, because otherwise . . . otherwise it’s too painful to think about.

  So I went off sick and bunked off whenever I thought I’d get away with it.

  When the summer holidays came, I lay on the living-room floor with the curtains drawn and watched telly for six weeks. I hadn’t wanted to go back in September. I begged Mum to let me stay at home, but she wasn’t having it.

  “You’re not going to let a few little girls scare you off, are you, Samantha?” she asked me firmly. “You’ve got to be strong to survive in this life, my girl. You can deal with this.”

  She meant well, I know that. And if I’d really told her how bad it was for me she would have done something to make it better. But I never told her. I never told anyone.

  I was so scared the day I went back. But on the first day of the new year nobody paid any attention to me at all because there was a new girl in class. Joy.

  Back then there weren’t that many black kids at school, not many black people in the town at all. Having a black girl start in our year was sort of an occasion. It’s different now. Beth’s mates are all different shades and none of them see the color of each other’s skin. They just see a friend.

  But when Joy started school, she was different. You might have thought it would have been Joy that the bullies would pick on, but no. Every­one wanted to hang out with Joy. She had this kind of natural confidence that made you want to look at her. And she had the whole class laughing right from the first day she started. For a week or two, while Joy was the center of attention, nobody even looked at me. I hoped that they had forgotten me completely.

  And then one day before lunch, Joy was standing by the lockers with some of the other girls, including Hannah.

  “Here she comes,” Hannah said. “Slapper of the year. I can smell her from here.” Everyone in the group laughed, except for Joy.

  “Don’t speak to her like that,” she said.

  Hannah took a step back. “We’re only having a laugh,” she said, looking at me. “She’s used to it, aren’t you, slapper?” Joy gave Hannah a little shove so that she took another step back.

  “I said, don’t talk to Sam like that,” Joy said. I couldn’t believe that Joy was sticking up for me. I don’t think I had heard another kid use my real name for months.

  “What’s your problem?” Hannah said, her voice a bit shaky.

  “You’re my problem. I don’t like the way you’re talking to her,” Joy said. “She’s a person too, you know.” Hannah’s jaw just dropped.

  Joy turned to me and put her arm through mine. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get away from these losers.”

  “Yeah, well, you should just go back where you came from!” Hannah called after us.

  “What, Kensal Green?” Joy shouted over her shoulder and laughed.

  The bullying was worse after that, but some­how it didn’t matter. With Joy by my side, we stuck it out together. I still got that feeling of dread in the pit of my belly whenever I left the house every morning, but Joy would be waiting for me at the end of the path, by the gate. And even though they had even worse names for her than they did for me, she’d always laugh it off and have something much funnier and more cruel to say back.

  By the time Joy and I were fifteen, we were used to the idea that while we were at school we would always be outsiders. Never invited to the girls’ parties, never asked out by the boys. But we always said we didn’t care. We said we were just waiting until the time when we’d be free of school for good, when we would really start living our lives. Then we would show them.

  The beginning of ninth form started out OK, just because Joy was my friend. I even stopped feeling frightened and started feeling almost normal, if not accepted. I stood up tall again and stopped trying to hide my boobs under my arms. I spoke up in class. I let myself laugh out loud when Joy was being funny. I really thought that I’d come through the worst and that everything was going to be all right.

  But all of that changed after everyone found out that I’d had sex with Luke Goddard.

  Eight

  “Don’t screw your eyes up!” Beth yelled at me.

  “Sorry!” I said, but it is hard not to screw your eyes up when your twelve-year-old is coming at you with a mascara wand. I didn’t usually let Beth do my make-up, but she’d shown me this article in one of her magazines about how to make your eyes look bigger.

  “Your eyes are a bit small,” she’d said, cocking her head to one side as she looked at me. “I’ll do your eyes for you.”

  Several layers of color later I caught my mum’s eye as Beth studied my old and tatty make-up collection. Mum winked at me.

  “You haven’t got any pink,” Beth said. “Pink is totally the best color for bringing out blue eyes, it says here.” She waved the magazine article at me and I looked at the face of the model with her perfectly smooth, blemish-free skin.

  “Or making you look like you’ve got an eye infection,” Mum said, chuckling into her cup of tea.

  “It’s fashion, Nan,” Beth said, shooting Mum a look over her shoulder. “You must have had fashion too when you were alive!”

  “I’m not dead yet,” my mum said, but she wasn’t cross.

  “Am I going to look like her?” I said nodding at the model. Beth laughed.

  “Don’t be mad,” she said. “She’s about sixteen and anyway it’s all done on computers now. She’s probably got bags under her eyes and loads of spots. Everyone knows that magazine models aren’t real.” She turned back to me and surve
yed my face. “You need pink. I think I’ve got some pink in my room,” she said brightly. “I’ll get it.”

  I turned to my mum.

  “What’s it like?” I asked her, pointing at my face.

  “It’s like you’ve had one of those extreme makeovers from off the telly and it’s gone really wrong,” Mum said, her voice wobbling with a hidden laugh. I picked up my make-up mirror.

  She was right.

  “I’ll redo it later,” I said. “When I get to the pub.”

  “What, go out of the house like that?” Mum exclaimed. “I don’t know why you let her do it in the first place,” she said, handing me a cup of tea. “Sometimes I think she’s too bossy for her own good, that girl. You shouldn’t let her bully you.”

  A flash of anger shot across my face.

  “She is not a bully,” I said sharply.

  “No, no. I didn’t mean that,” Mum said quickly. “You know what I mean.”

  “I know that she likes to feel involved. She likes to feel a part of it,” I said. “I would hate her to think I was going out there to find a bloke without her having any say in it.”

  Mum sat down at the kitchen table and looked at me. “You have to do some things just for you,” she said. “That’s what I thought all this computer dating stuff is about.” I stared at the reflection of the kitchen light shimmering in the surface of my cup of tea.

  “You think all this is stupid, don’t you?” I asked Mum. “All this dating stuff.” I looked up at Mum’s face, but her expression did not change.

  “I don’t think that, love,” she said carefully. “I want you to get someone in your life. It’s just . . . you haven’t always made the right choices, Sam. I just want you to be careful. And so does your father,” she added, because she thought I paid more attention to Dad than her.

  I sighed. “I have been careful, Mum. That’s why I’ve been on my own since Beth was three!” I forced my voice to lower to normal again. “I need more.”