It was a slow Friday midway through an unusual October heatwave and my shift was dragging, just the occasional sticky customer inside, sweat stains on the back of recently occupied chairs because the air conditioning wasn’t working. I pushed a strawberry sweet into my mouth, bagged up the afternoon’s rubbish and thought about what my gap-yah girl would be called, what her favourite colour was, her favourite food. I settled on Poppy, red, steak. A theme emerging. Any discerning listener would see right through the lie.
Later, working the tills, I played games to pass the time, guessing people’s orders before they made them. A skinny girl approached, legs poking out from the frayed hem of her denim skirt, a gingham blouse on her top-half tied with a bow. I guessed her order just as she asked.
‘Diet Coke,’ she said, avoiding eye contact with me, shoving a twenty-pound note on the counter as though it were Monopoly money. I took it, slid the note into the till, plucked out her change, then prepared her drink.
‘Your Diet Coke and…’ I reached beneath the counter, feeling for the paper wrappers. ‘A straw,’ I said, handing them both to her.
‘Thanks,’ she said, then scooped up the change I’d left on the counter, leaving behind a cluster of brown and silver coins.
‘Keep the rest,’ she told me. ‘Your tip,’ she smiled nastily, and I ground down on my back teeth as she left the restaurant with her friends, laughing. Though I wanted to stand there, offended and angry, I stole a glance behind me and scooped the coins into my greedy palm, shoving them deep into my shallow pocket. Nowhere made me hate myself more than inside this garish red-and-yellow McNightmare.
Once my shift was over, I cycled the route back to halls – couldn’t risk a job that was nearby – and, just as I arrived, the heavens opened. The heatwave vanished with the rain and, rather than T-shirts and jeans, the boys were getting ready with jumpers and blazers and expensive leather jackets for tonight’s night-out. I joined in as best I could, wore a dark-grey coat I’d found in a second-hand shop back home, and headed with the rest of the boys to their preferred nightclub, forced to spend all the money I’d just made on expensive rounds for my moneyed mates. I thought about the 80p in the pocket of my uniform when I handed over thirty pounds for a round of Jäegarbombs and shook my head at my stupidity. When I handed the drinks out, none of my friends blinked an eye, only a few of them even said thank you. That wasn’t because they were all horrible people… they just didn’t understand. The people here weren’t like me, the previous rounds had been Veuve Cliquot and Krug. I’d watched as one of the boys had bought an extra bottle and chugged it straight from the neck, champagne drooling down his face as he’d tried to finish it in one, half of it tipping to the floor, jeers from the other boys. Down it, Down it, Down it! He’d puked it up almost immediately –inside, right on the dancefloor, he didn’t care, someone would come to clean it up. He’d laughed about it afterwards. Bought another round. It would be my turn again soon. And you know what was bad? I wanted, more than anything, to be like them, to buy champagne like it was tap water, to make the people who couldn’t feel inferior.
Later, drunk, gone midnight, I laid eyes on a girl with chunky highlighted hair and pink pearly lips. She was walking towards me, her round face illuminated by a shaft of white light from the strobe overhead, and I watched a smile break across it when our eyes met. The light clicked off, the club dark, and when it fired again, strobe-effect, her smile was gone and her position had changed. She was in front of me, now, saying something about the university. I morphed into one of the boys – she didn’t know any better – and it felt good. I let her know I was the heir to a confectionery company, coy with the details.
‘Really?’ she asked.
‘How old are you?’ I fired back, changing the subject, and she replied, eyes to the sky, that she was twenty-one. I knew she was lying – there was no way she was older than me – and we debated, jokingly, on the dancefloor. Eventually she handed me her driver’s license, a naughty smile on her pearlescent lips. She was eighteen, and only just, finishing her last year at school. Her white lie resonated with me. She wanted to be someone else, too. I looked at her, a little sad, and leaned in.
‘Never lie about who you are again,’ I slurred into her ear, a gold stud in the middle of the lobe. ‘Who you are is enough.’ And, even though I was drunk, distracted by the way her halter-neck gaped at the front, her shiny hair twisted round her finger, I really meant it.
She told me about herself, about her foster parents and normal high school, about the fact she was going to drop out because she hated being there. She reminded me of the girls at home. The summer-soaked sixth-formers I’d meet on the beach in Great Yarmouth with loud-mouths and short-skirts. She made me realise what it meant to be homesick. I fancied her and, not only that, her humour was the exact same as mine, her references, her interests.
Though we’d only just met, it was as though I’d known her for years. I think she even said it, her blue eyes blinking up at me. I was so happy to have found her, a piece of me in a haystack of others.
‘This might sound weird but… I feel as though I know you already.’
Annabella
Now
I duck into the moss-green shed of number 50, the frantic scene before me illuminating the night. Red and blue kaleidoscope sirens, high-vis yellow uniforms, blue and white tape, a stretcher loading a woman into the back of an ambulance. I hope she’s OK. A tumble of Mandy’s blood-black hair identifies her as she’s wheeled past and I watch as neighbours’ curtains flicker, snatches of yellow-light breaking into the dark. A few of the more curious among them are already outside, slippers in huddles, arms crossed over waists, excitement dressed as concern dancing across their faces. A man with a haphazardly tied dressing gown walks, head bowed, towards the activity. A few of us, you know, are just a bit concerned. Could you tell us what’s going on, please?
The policewoman he approaches shakes her head.
I retreat into the shadows of the shed, remove my balaclava, the gloves I’m wearing, pull off my black windbreaker and change into a smart coat and scarf from my rucksack. Then I wait. The couple from number 50 are either out, or heavy sleepers, and the windows behind me remain black. I sigh deep with relief and wait for the commotion to begin. What have I done?
I sink to the floor of the shed and let my mind travel back to my teenage years, connecting the dots from then to now, showing me who I’ve always been, revealing that tonight wasn’t a one-off, freak event, but entirely and utterly in character. I bottle up my emotions, I always have, allow them to fester. For some reason I’m always surprised when the glass explodes.
I spent my formative years growing up in a mews house just off Holland Park with my eccentric parents. Whenever I think of that house, I remember the tiny ground-floor toilet first, the plush pink hand towels and the rose-scented candle that sat on the windowsill for years and never burned. I think of that room first, then remember my mother teaching me how to bake, watching endless repeats of Murder, She Wrote together. I adored that show and that tenacious old woman who’d get to the bottom of every crime thrown her way, thirsty for justice, satiated only by unravelling the truth from a pack of lies. When our family cat went missing that summer, I’d used her as inspiration and broken into the garden of the big house at the end of the road. I was caught looking for cat-poo among the bushes and, though I was told off, I was found again the following week when I thought the family were out, picking through the gravel of their front drive with my father’s antique magnifying glass. Don’t tell me your mysteries: I will only try and solve them.