‘Did you get it?’ I said. I put one hand on the stone wall for balance while I flexed my stiff feet.
‘Pretty much,’ said Emma.
They were a civilised group of people – all men except Emma – working in a white, light-filled space with its tilted desks set up at a sociable angle. They rarely designed actual buildings – everything they did was a renovation, a conversion, of one of the many difficultly small houses, apartments and offices owned and rented by the well-to-do of London.
Emma’s office was only a few tube stops from our flat, and I met her for lunch sometimes, but mostly I sat at home, too weary to struggle along in the fine bubbles of her wake. I couldn’t get warm. It was only September, and the flat was centrally heated, but I was doing nothing except sitting at the table in our white kitchen, whose window overlooked Vauxhall Bridge Road. Sometimes I ate porridge oats, dry, from a bowl. There was something solid and sustaining about them. You could make porridge in your own mouth, mashing the oats into a warm paste with teeth and saliva. I could eat two or three bowls at once. I looked in the newspaper for work. Sometimes I had baths to try to ease the cold ache in my sides and legs.
One evening Emma brought a friend home from work. When they came into the kitchen I slipped down from my stool, shoving the book I was reading to one side. I wished they’d found me doing something, being busy. I saw myself in the face of the microwave, eyes ringed with black, mouth thick with red lipstick.
‘Your voice sounds English already,’ I said to Emma, unable to speak to Jerome. He was black, and we were white, and he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. He grinned at me, knowing he’d caught me off balance. He wore a grey t-shirt, close-fitting, and dark jeans. His smile made the skin on the back of my neck feel hot and tight.
‘Not to me,’ he said. His voice sounded flat London. He was looking around him at the kitchen, at its broad white counters, deep drawers, its double-glazed view of the traffic and the city beyond that. ‘Nice place,’ he added.
‘It’s not ours,’ said Emma quickly.
I looked curiously at her.
‘We’re paying rent,’ she went on.
Mates rates, I wanted to say, but it would not have been fair to her.
They wanted to know if I would like to come out to dinner with them. I knew Emma would have talked Jerome into this. He kept his body turned towards hers.
I didn’t. I said so. I didn’t have an English accent; I was not in England enough to acquire one. At home in the flat with the porridge and the paper, my voice was not needed at all. A friend had once said to me that I was like a shark that had to keep swimming – if I stopped talking I would die. It did feel as though I was sinking.
I stood up when the door had closed behind them and went into the bedroom. There was only one bedroom, with twin beds. There was a long mirror fixed to the wall between them. I looked at myself, lifted my Clash t-shirt and clawed a bit at my soft, white stomach. Then I lay down on my bed. Soon I was too cold, so I pulled off my jeans and forced myself between the sheets. After a while, I fell asleep, and didn’t wake when Emma came in.
My cousin Karen and her best friend were also living in London, somewhere real, somewhere they had found for themselves. They were nursing in one of the hospitals in the centre of the city. They did a lot of night shifts, and had plenty of time to visit me during the day. Karen wore a leather jacket covered with studs and told me how she’d stamped on the toes of a man who’d shoved her at a Smiths gig. Her Docs had extra-thick soles. Her face was set in a defensive snarl, which faded after an hour or so in the creamy quiet of our flat.
‘I’m fat,’ I said to my cousin – something I could never say to Emma.
‘I’m fat too,’ said Karen, who was looking in our fridge. Her spiked blonde hair brushed the shelves as she bent down to take out a block of cheese.
‘I’ve got a new way of losing weight,’ said Ruth from the living room. She was lying full length on the cream sofa, her boots splayed on the cushions.
‘Yeah?’ said Karen. We came to stand in the doorway, Karen holding the cheese.
‘The twist,’ said Ruth, staring down at her boots.
‘What do you mean?’ said Karen.
‘You know those fifties movies? You never see a fat girl, do you?’
We watched as she swung her boots round to the floor and stood up. She began to twist on the white pile of the carpet, her dyed hair flopping into her face. It was like the traffic that you could see through the window – odd, jerky, no soundtrack – except the hushing of her boots on the carpet.
Karen laughed scornfully, and began to tear open the plastic wrapping of the cheese. ‘It wasn’t the twist. It was the Ford pills. They were all taking laxatives.’
‘I wonder if that works,’ I said. Ruth kept twisting. Karen and I met each other’s eyes.
Oh, Jerome. I heard Emma say this one night. I had been asleep but woke at the sound of the key in the lock. I was suddenly rigid in my bed. The bedroom door was open. What should I do?
But they were only saying goodnight. I turned quickly on my side before Emma came in, and didn’t answer when she said softly, ‘Jane? You awake?’
The next day was Saturday. Emma made me come with her to the National Portrait Gallery. We were early, and sat on the steps in the pale sunlight, watching the pigeons milling and crashing in the square.
‘You should stay at Jerome’s house if you want to,’ I said. I was clacking the toes of my Doc Martens together. I had recently noticed that I could not sit without some part of my body moving.
There was a pause. People were beginning to line up around us; we kept having to lean sideways to let them pass.
‘I wouldn’t want to leave you alone,’ said Emma.
‘I’ll be all right,’ I said. Then added, ‘You’re not my mother, you know.’
‘What if someone broke in?’
I looked straight at her now, as witheringly as I could. I kept my feet still. There were three separate security doors between us and London, and anyone who did manage to breach them would not bother coming down the lengths of carpeted corridor, turning the corners, passing the stairwells, all the way to our flat. I couldn’t imagine commanding that much attention from anyone, not even a murderer.
Jerome had a friend who managed a chain of bookshops. There was a job available in their smallest branch, which was on the fifth floor of a department store in Knightsbridge. In my letter of application I invented a bookshop back in Sydney, and named it after one of my university friends. I rang her up – long distance, still an event in those days – and asked her to make up some letterhead and write me a reference.
At the interview the manager of the tiny book section said, ‘You seem very nervous. Why are you so nervous?’
I was nervous because I had written the letter too quickly, I didn’t have a copy and I couldn’t remember what I’d said about my time working at Wood’s Books in Enmore. He was holding my friend’s letter and I kept trying to peer at it. I could see that she must have used one of the computers at university to type it up. I could see that she had changed her signature to make her seem more like the proprietor of Wood’s Books. I couldn’t tell if it was obvious that she, like me, was only eighteen.
I think I was probably clacking the toes of my boots together again, too. I said, ‘I just really want the job.’
‘Well,’ said the manager, looking down at the letter, ‘I suppose I’ll have to give it to you then.’
I watched him as he sorted through his desk drawers for the right forms. His name was Rory. He had white skin that looked as though it would be cold to the touch, a tightly knotted woollen tie and a patterned waistcoat. He would only have been three or four years older than I was but his I suppose I’ll have to give it to you then was elaborately patronising. I tried to imagine being friends with him – perhaps eating lunch with him – and felt my mouth make an involuntary grimace.
But I was glad of the job. I was grateful to b
e on the move again. I loved catching the tube in the mornings. I loved feeling as though I was the same as everyone around me. I enjoyed feeling exasperated with the tourists who stood in front of the turnstiles, holding their tickets, trying to work out how to get through. I wore headphones and listened to The Smiths or The Triffids. I learnt to make my face impassive as I stood in the swinging aisles of the train, hanging on to a strap. I learnt not to look at anyone. My friend from uni who’d lived in London had not learnt this lesson fast enough – a woman in her office used to shout at her, if she caught her, ‘What the fuck are YOU looking at?’
Did Australians gaze openly around them? I tried to imagine myself doing this. I remembered exchanging smiles with people on a Sydney bus; it seemed a long time ago.
Every few weeks Emma got a letter from Peter, who was finishing his commerce degree in Sydney. I got letters almost every post, having channelled my lost voice into aerograms. My friends drew pictures and sent me bits of their lives – some hair, a leaf folded into the blue paper. Emma showed me one of her letters before putting it in the bin. Peter said that he hated his degree, and hated the other students. I always wanted to be a pilot, he wrote, but my mother wouldn’t let me. I shall never forgive her for that.
‘Why doesn’t he do it now?’ I said, handing the letter back to her. ‘He’s twenty-two. He doesn’t have to do what his mother says anymore.’
Emma just looked at me, then did what she always did, ripped the letter, once, twice, and stamped on the bin pedal to flip the lid up. I didn’t know if she was writing back to him.
In my aerograms I told my friends how wonderful, how amazing London was, and with Emma, Karen and Ruth I dutifully went to see bands, new movies, exhibitions. I was so often bored when I went to see bands, but found it hard to admit this to myself. This was London. I had read about these bands in the NME. If I could get drunk enough I would not be bored, but often my capacity for the large, plastic cups of brown, watery beer fell short of drunkenness. I got sleepy standing there next to Emma, holding my cup, watching the other two dancing, yawning till my ears ached.
I made a friend at work, out of necessity. Her name was Lauren, and we were united in our hatred of Rory. Poor Rory. His face seemed always to be sweating – pearls of it on his upper lip and forehead – while I was still cold and getting colder, clutching my coat around me as I stood in the lift going up to our floor. Sometimes I wore my coat all morning. Rory was not bad-looking: he had a classic, English look, dark hair and plenty of it, regular features. But the sweat, and the froglike skin, and the whining drawl he spoke in. I nicknamed him Rory the Reptile and taught Lauren to play How much would you charge? We always ended up at the same place – how much would you charge to sleep with Rory? Lauren was one of those conscientious players who tried to put a realistic price on things. Two hundred pounds? Three hundred pounds? I was always unreachable – a million pounds. A billion pounds.
I hadn’t, of course, slept with anybody, but Lauren had. She had a boyfriend called Michael, who often used to stay at her house, though her parents wouldn’t let him sleep in her bedroom. So they had to sneak into each other’s rooms at night. She told me everything they did. All day she talked about Michael and I suppose I encouraged her, for we were the only people who worked in our dwindling section, and I had no other friends. It was her or Rory.
‘We couldn’t make love this morning because Dad was up early. But we had a shower together after he left.’
I would be on my knees in the storeroom, slitting open a box of books with a Stanley knife. Lauren would be sitting at the desk with the invoice. It was my job to unpack and count the books while she marked them off.
‘Michael told me he wants me to buy some sexy underwear. So he can tear it off!’
‘Can you two hurry it up? I want to get those on the shelves before lunchtime.’
We glanced at each other and rolled our eyes as Rory walked away. Rory was not fat, but he had a broad bottom and solid thighs, which made his trousers tight. I despised him for this, the way I despised myself. Lauren thought he was gay, but that was too obvious. He wasn’t anything. I knew people like that at home. Perhaps others thought that was what I was like. I never had any boyfriends. But I had desires, powerful desires, and needs, and I was young enough to think that Rory did not.
In London no one touched you, except on the tube, and that was either by accident or horrible design, the hand that wormed its way past other bodies to slip between your sweaty legs. People would shove you backwards if you tried to pass them on the escalator, but no one ever looked at you. Once I wore a dress that had a swirly skirt, and as I fought my way on to the escalator a blast of hot wind came and flipped the dress up so that it caught right over my head, so I was snatching and scrabbling to get it back down again. It was so stupid it made me laugh, but when I’d finally got the dress back in place not a single person was looking at me. They all stared, steadfastly, straight ahead.
Emma and I certainly did not touch, unless it was by mistake, Fatty and Skinny bumping around the inside of our luxurious flat like balls in a broken pinball machine. I might not have had sex with anyone, but at home people had at least touched me. My girl flatmates and I hugged each other, called each other mate, gave each other massages when we had been smoking dope. Most of my male friends were teetering on the brink of being gay, but this didn’t make them any the less physically affectionate. Maybe it made them more so. I often held hands with a male friend when we went to the movies or a party.
Once I was standing by the fiction shelves, re-alphabetising, when I heard Rory, beside me, gasp; a sharp little intake of breath that made me look up. What he’d seen was Emma, coming towards us from the lifts. She was pretty, I thought, watching her. Her pale hair had grown and she wore it in two plaits. She had on a woollen coat, deep red, with buttons, a sort of Mary Quant thing that she wore with her long boots.
Rory was working on his smile when Emma said to me, ‘I came to see if you wanted to have lunch.’
Her office was quite near, in Covent Garden, but she’d never come over before. She was looking around, sizing the place up. We were too high in the building to ever be busy; our section covered only a corner of a floor that was mostly taken up with fashion for large people. The bridal registry cowered in another corner, but you could see it wouldn’t last.
‘This is my sister,’ I said to Rory. ‘Can I have my break now?’
I could feel him looking more closely at me. Emma and I were not unalike. We had the same eyes and skin and big straight noses. It was more as though, using the same materials, an adult had built Emma and a child had built me, using her thumbs to shape the bottom and the arms and legs, forcing the clothes on, adding red raffia for hair.
‘Half an hour,’ said Rory, finding his voice.
‘Is that all?’ said Emma. ‘What about an hour?’
‘She’ll have to work late,’ said Rory, straightening himself.
I grimaced at Emma, and she raised her eyebrows back at me. ‘We’ll have sushi,’ she said. ‘Get your bag.’
After a month or so I gave up eating in the cafeteria at work, no longer exercised by horrible fascination over the other staff’s eating habits. At first I had just sat and watched as slender, clear-faced girls collected trays of lasagne and chips, bowls of chocolate pudding and Diet Cokes. Everything came with chips. London was the only place I had been where you were offered chips with Chinese food. Not even Parkes, not even Dubbo, had food like that.
It was partly the food, but partly also that I didn’t like people to see me eating. Later on I would wonder why I’d thought myself so fat – I was merely plump, a word that I hated nearly as much as I hated chubby – but back then there seemed to be no doubt about it. Whenever I could, now, I went over the road to Harrods to buy my lunch. In the Food Hall you could get a mango, or a bag of dates or figs. I always tried to get outside if it was sunny, but often enough I spent my whole lunchbreak in the Food Hall, sneaking figs from
a paper bag while I stood in front of the bread display, or the butchery.
Everything was beautiful in the Food Hall, the tiled floors, the columned rooms, the elaborate plaster ceilings. There were no windows, but the lighting was generous and warm. There was nowhere to sit, but I sat all day at work anyway, and there were always enough people to prevent me from feeling conspicuous as I wandered around.
One lunchtime I was waiting at the fruit counter when someone beside me said, ‘Hey.’ I looked up. The voice belonged to Tony, our floor manager. I had never spoken to him before. He was a tall, skinny man who always wore the same loose-fitting suit. He had a walkie-talkie clipped to his trousers and thick, slicked-back hair. Sometimes I saw him conferring with the white-shirted security men. I don’t think he liked Rory; he rarely came into our section. But I saw him in the distance sometimes, talking to an outraged customer. Women in particular became angry very easily, and it was his job to soothe them and make them want to come back.
He had a gentle Cockney voice and quite a large mouth. He grinned at me. ‘Hungry?’ he said.
I shook my head, smiling with embarrassment.
‘Seen you in here before. This lady was first,’ he said to the woman behind the counter.
‘No, you go,’ I said, stepping back so fast I trod on someone’s toes. ‘I was just looking.’
It was not that I wanted to be a virgin. It just seemed to have happened. I had missed a chance once, with a nice boarder from the nearby boys’ school. I wished now that I had taken advantage of him. But I only had to look at him to drench him in blushes. He would turn up at our house to see if I wanted to go for a walk and be unable to talk to my mother while I thumped upstairs for my sneakers. And then we would walk along the back streets, leaves whispering, me talking too fast, him not talking at all, our shoulders occasionally, unhappily bumping. I was too embarrassed about my own lack of experience to take his on as well.
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