We were so close, I smelt a flowery sweetness on his breath I couldn’t identify. It was the first time anyone had held me like that since my mother stopped touching me. Since the biology teacher business. I tried not to cry, but just rested my weight against his chest, my head lying on the soft pad of his shoulder.
We didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem the need.
Eventually, he let go of my wrists and we walked out on to the path together. Across the far side there were a few houses with their top lights still on, but apart from that there was no sign of life.
‘Will you?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘Keep me safe?’
Tim nodded. ‘Tomorrow?’ he asked.
I smiled. He put one hand on my head, stroked my hair gently and then without saying another word, he turned. I watched him leave the park. He walked quicker than other people. He knew where he was going. When I couldn’t see him any more I sat back on the Seize the Day bench.
I wanted my heart to settle down before going back to Mr Roberts’s shop.
This is how I met Mr Roberts.
He caught me crying at one of the café tables they put up outside the Church on the High Street during spring and summer.
Despite the cold, I’d been sitting there for one hour, forty-two minutes refusing all offers of refreshments, even though I could see the volunteers pointing me out and tut-tutting amongst each other. Then a plump peachy woman came out wearing a white blouse and flowery skirt with one of those elasticated waists women her age wear for comfort although they’re always having to hoist the skirt back down from where it’s risen up under their tits. She told me I wasn’t to sit there any more. That the café tables were for proper customers only.
I started to cry, and suddenly this old man came up and told the waitress it was all right. That I was with him.
It was Mr Roberts, although of course I didn’t know that then. I was just relieved that everybody was now staring at him instead of me. He said nothing at first. Just bought me a cup of tea, pushed it over and sat there in silence until I raised my head.
‘What do they mean about being proper?’ I asked.
‘I suppose they want people who’ll pay,’ he said. ‘Although the Bible does have something to say about merchants in the temple.’
‘I might not want anything to drink,’ I said, ‘but that doesn’t mean I’m not proper. They should be more careful about what words they use. Words matter.’
‘I know that, pet,’ he replied. ‘You don’t want to worry about Church people. They’ve no taste. They can’t see how special you are.’
This made me cry even harder. Mr Roberts didn’t say anything, just got up so I thought he was leaving me too but he came back with a handful of paper napkins and handed them to me.
‘Dry yourself,’ he said. ‘And then we’ll sort you out.’
I wiped the tears away and looked up at him nervously, but he shook his head. ‘Not yet,’ he said, and pulled out a sheet of newspaper he had neatly folded away in the pocket of his tweed jacket. It was the racing pages and he started studying form closely.
He was right too. As soon as I realised his attention had wandered away from me, I started crying again, loud, gasping sobs. When he didn’t seem to mind, I ignored the sour looks I was getting from the Church woman and let it all come out. The pile of napkins was sodden by the time I was finished and his racing columns were full of little biroed marks and comments. He must have been about sixty, with steely grey hair cut forward over a bulging forehead. It was his mouth I noticed most. It was prim and womanly with perfectly shaped teeth he kept tapping his pen against. It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed that the older men get, the more feminine their mouths and chins become. It’s the opposite of women, who start to sprout bristles and Winston Churchill jowls. In fact, most long-term married couples look as if they’ve swapped faces from the nose down. Morphing into each other’s mother or father.
I coughed and he looked up. Then he looked again but slower, up and down my body. He even tilted his head to one side so he could get a gawp at my legs.
‘Well, you’re a big girl,’ he said. ‘What sort of weight would you say you were then?’
It wasn’t funny, but I was so shocked by him coming out with a statement like that, I just exploded into giggles. Since I’d put on all this weight, everybody pussy-footed around the subject. Fat-ism. But although I laughed I couldn’t help it when, just as quickly, the tears started to well up again. Mr Roberts creased his eyes in annoyance so I tried to stop both the laughing and the crying.
‘It’s glandular,’ I explained. ‘I eat nothing really, but I can’t help putting weight on. Mum says it runs in the family, although my father used to—’ I stopped.
‘Used to what?’ He stared at me as if he was weighing me himself. ‘So there’s a mother and a father in the background. Been mean to you, have they, or is it boyfriend trouble?’
I shook my head. Since that afternoon in the biology room, I’d found that the hurricane of feelings continually raging inside me was impossible to put into words for anyone, let alone a stranger. That’s why I’d come here, to get away from it all. I thought of the counsellor they made me see at my new school. The red chair I used to sit on for my weekly sessions with her, the box of ever-ready tissues like the ones I was clutching now.
‘There are times when nothing goes right,’ I told Mr Roberts, catching myself before I copied the counsellor’s long vowels too strongly. ‘This is just one of these times. I just need to sit it out, wait patiently and my turn to shine will come. Life is a wheel and sometimes we’re on an upwards circle and sometimes we’re heading down. It’s all natural. Part of living. You can’t fight it.’
He stared at me. ‘Got a job?’ he asked.
I shook my head. I was longing to pinch myself. It was one of my ways of coping when a conversation got out of hand. Normally this was fine because most of the conversations I’d had recently were just in my head but I knew pinching wasn’t OK in public. Particularly not in a church. I contented myself with squeezing my fingernails hard against my palm instead. I tried not to wince with the pain.
‘You’re not at school, are you?’
I looked down at the table. I was longing to look at my palms and see the marks from my nails but couldn’t risk it so I let my hands rest on my knees. ‘Not any more,’ I mumbled.
‘Too much time. That’s your trouble.’
I shrugged.
‘Drugs? Alcohol?’
‘No.’
‘Sex?’
I stared at the sugar bowl so he couldn’t how my red and hot my cheeks were. Sex wasn’t something you talked about in public, let alone so near a church.
‘Ah,’ he said, as if he’d discovered something from my silence. ‘So that’s it. And no one understands you, that’s the problem, is it?’
Silence.
‘Living at home?’
I twisted a strand of my hair so tightly round my finger the skin went white. It looked as if I was trying to slice the top off, to get down to the bone.
‘Stop doing that,’ he told me. ‘Where do you live then?’
‘Nowhere,’