Six Bedrooms (6 page)

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.

In London I couldn't see how anyone, even a nice, shy, terrified boy who couldn't get anyone else, would be attracted to me. All the young women I saw were softly beautiful, smooth as doves, or if not beautiful, finished somehow. Like Emma, with her Mary Quant coat and knee-high boots. And she was warm, while I was shivering in my bomber jacket and short skirt. Even the few punks still left in 1986 were perfectly made up, their red or blue hair smoothed into mohawks, their clothes shiny and black and convincingly studded. Nobody that I saw looked messy, the way I did, unless it was Karen and Ruth, with their creaking leather jackets and their weary, mascaraed eyes. I knew that somewhere there were men who appreciated girls like me; girls with clear white skin and round cheeks and big white boobs and slutty, grubby hair. But men; not boys. And I was not ready for that yet.

 

We'd been told that it would rain often in London, but I hadn't thought about the kind of rain it would be. I was used to rain or no rain: a tropical torrent that swept up out of nowhere, or days of incessant sunshine that crisped the parks and made the pavements burn your bare feet. In London it just rained, greyly, endlessly, like
a weepy friend, always sorry for herself. I bought umbrellas but I was always forgetting them on the tube and having to walk home with my head down, my dyed hair leaking red down my neck.

One Thursday evening I got home, dripping, and Emma wasn't there. Usually on Thursdays she finished half an hour before I did and would be cooking, the lights of the flat turned on to make a yellow box of warmth. As I switched the hall light on, the phone rang. I walked down to the kitchen and picked it up, looking out at the river of headlights on Vauxhall Bridge Road. It was Rory, who I had seen only twenty minutes before, buttoning himself into his long raincoat as we stood waiting for the lift. He wanted to know if I would go out to dinner with him.

How to describe the cold despair I felt on hearing those words? It was enough to endure that I had not made a success of living in London. This was the worst – this was not just lack of success, it was anti-success, the most wretched of failures. Rory must have recognised something in me, something that echoed inside his own miserable heart. He must have thought I was so desperate that I would say yes.

When I'd said no, unhappily fabricating a jealous Australian boyfriend, knowing that Rory didn't believe me, I put the phone down, and almost immediately it
rang again. It was Emma. She was having dinner with Jerome, and if I was sure it was okay, she would stay at his house. I nearly laughed. I said it was fine and put the phone down again. I switched the kitchen light on, and then, walking out into the sitting room, the lamps, and the television. All this luxury. At home I'd been living in a terrace house with nearly a dozen tiny bedrooms. Mine had been small and damp, but there was always the sound of someone on the stairs or in the kitchen. I looked out at the traffic and the bright lights of the off-licence, and the people coming up from the tube entrance, and pulled the curtains shut.

I will always love you
. That was what the last page of Peter's last letter said. I'd taken it out of the envelope, which had already been ripped open, and read it. It was a letter like a suicide note, only he wasn't committing suicide but quitting commerce to join the defence forces. Finally he would realise his dream of becoming a pilot.

I left it on the kitchen counter. It wasn't deliberate; the microwave beeped. My tinned soup was ready, and I forgot to put the letter back in the envelope.
Top of the Pops
was on, which I always had to watch through splayed fingers. Then I rang a friend at home and we talked until I could tell her about Rory, tears leaking out of the corners of my eyes as I laughed. I went to bed and slept heavily, without needing to be aware of Emma beside me.

Next morning I was in the storeroom, kneeling on the floor beside the overstock shelves, with a book open on my lap. I'd just unpacked a box of children's classics and I was reading
The Magic Faraway Tree
.

I didn't hear him approaching, just felt, suddenly, a warm hand cradling the back of my head, the way a mother does a baby's. I looked up, startled. It was the floor manager, Tony. He smiled at me, and said in his soft London voice, ‘All right, trouble?'

Behind him I saw Rory, hands on his hips, glaring at me. I flushed, and smiled up at Tony, and nodded. He nodded back, took his hand away, and left.

 

I could see that Emma was home as I crossed the road from the tube that evening. Our kitchen light was on. There was someone with her; Jerome, no doubt. I took my time scraping my feet on the metal doormat at the entrance to our building. It had been a long day; Rory was not talking to me, which was more tiring than I could have thought possible.

They hadn't been there long. As I shut the door I heard the squeal of a wooden stool on the tiled floor, the sound of the fridge opening.

‘Hello,' I called. I stopped to look at myself in the bathroom mirror, seizing a towel to rub over my hair.
Some of the red came off on the towel. The back of my head still felt warm where Tony had touched it.

When I came into the kitchen Jerome was reading Peter's letter, one long arm outstretched to hold Emma off.

‘It's private!' she was saying.

I put my bag on the floor. They didn't notice me.

‘Give it back!' said Emma. She was making surprising headway, given her size; Jerome had to brace himself against the bench with one foot to stop himself falling off the stool. Then he simply took his hand away, and Emma cannoned into him. She snatched the letter and stood back, panting.

‘I thought you'd finished with him,' said Jerome, crossing his arms. He said
wiv.

‘I couldn't finish with him,' said Emma. ‘I never started.' She put one hand to her chest, as if feeling her trotting heartbeat.

‘It's true,' I said. ‘It was unrequited love.'

They both turned to look at me.

‘Whose love?' said Jerome. ‘Whose love was unrequited?'

He was so beautiful. He was wearing a green scarf, high around his face. You could see the green in his dark eyes. His skin would be smooth to the touch.

‘Peter's love,' I said. ‘He's had a crush on Emma for years.'

‘So why hasn't she put a stop to it? Why hasn't he given up?'

I glanced at Emma. She had become very still, though tears gleamed in her eyes. I shrugged.

‘Were you sleeping with him?' said Jerome to Emma.

I felt my body glittering with embarrassment.

‘Of course not,' said Emma.

‘You're lying,' said Jerome.