Three months ago, when I plucked up the courage to stand on my first pair of scales for years, I peaked at just over fourteen stone. And at five feet four inches tall, I struggle to carry it off. I didn’t consciously pile on the pounds with greed. At twenty, when my body went through an exceptionally early menopause, the hormone replacement therapy that followed made my weight balloon. It’s only recently that I’ve decided to do something about it. And through healthy eating and exercise, I’m thrilled to have lost almost a stone.
I move my face closer to the cubicle mirror and use my thumb and forefinger to peel down my bottom lip and read what’s tattooed inside. Only I can see it; nobody else has ever noticed it, aside from perhaps my dentist and her assistant and they didn’t pass comment. It wasn’t professionally inked; the lines have bled over time and parts of it have faded.
I wish I could remember the name of the man who scarred me, but each time I try and put a face behind the needle, I draw a blank. The middle of my teens are like a jigsaw puzzle with too many missing pieces to form a full picture. Sometimes it feels like I’m living a half-life, never knowing if what I’ve done today I’ve done before.
My weight loss has been coupled with a desire to update my appearance. It surprised Maggie almost as much as it surprised me when I turned up at her bedroom door asking if she could teach me how to apply make-up. I could have watched a YouTube tutorial or visited Boots and asked one of the overly made-up mannequins behind the counter to offer me a demonstration. But this felt like something she and I should have done back when I was a teenager.
‘I can show you how to do your nails as well if you like,’ she suggested, and I agreed. I returned to the room with a file and let her shape them and paint them baby pink. For a moment, it was as if we were an ordinary mother and daughter again. There were no lies or pussyfooting around one another, we were just two women enjoying a conversation about make-up.
It was only when I was leaving that I understood Maggie had palmed the nail file. She tried to pretend that she hadn’t, but it was easy to locate inside her pillowcase. I tutted at her, waved my finger in an exaggerated manner and took it back before she could do any damage with it. Then I stole her pillows as punishment.
Before I know it I’m changed and standing outside the Mounts building. I look at my watch. I’m too early for work so I take the long route in, passing the fire station, Campbell Square Police Station and the Roadmender venue. The latter is another place in this town that I know is tied to my youth but which I only vaguely recall. I think I spent a lot of time there watching music acts perform but I couldn’t give you any of their names. Well, with the exception of the one that changed my life. I often wonder if my best days might be the ones I can’t remember.
Soon after I arrive at the library, I assist a middle-aged, silver-haired man to compile his CV on one of the computers. While my client types with one finger and squints at the screen, a young woman with a pushchair and a child strapped inside it passes us. I leave him for a moment and gravitate towards them. I use the word ‘woman’ but the closer I get, the more I realise she can’t be much more than fifteen.Babies having babies. It might be her age or her fluctuating hormones that are causing a strip of acne to emerge and spread across her forehead. Her attempts to mask it have failed and her make-up resembles caster sugar sprinkled across the uneven surface of a cake.
The child is a little girl. She’s dressed in a greenPAW Patrolsweatshirt and jeans, and she is clutching a bag of sweets. There’s a ring of white chocolate spread around her lips. She has a huge smile and just two teeth, one at the top and one at the bottom. When her big brown eyes lock on to mine, she bursts into a fit of giggles and I cannot help but pull a silly face and laugh with her. She seems clean, well nourished and happy, so her mum can’t be doing a bad job even at her age. It doesn’t stop me from resenting her for having this healthy, cheerful child and against all the odds, keeping it alive. It’s more than I ever managed.
I’m not ready to bring an end to this playfulness so I casually follow mother and daughter towards the magazine shelves. Mum leafs through the celebrity mags, stopping only to glance at the photos of people I’ve never heard of.
I like being around children but less so babies. I remember last summer when our area manager Suzanne paid us a visit during her maternity leave. She turned up with her infant son in a sling wrapped around her body. Had there been prior warning, I’d have booked the day off. I spied her just as she passed through the sliding doors, and I quickly slipped away and locked myself in the disabled toilets until mother and son left and it was safe to emerge.
If I’d stayed, I’d have been expected to behave like the others and coo over the baby and patiently await my turn to hold him and tell Suzanne how beautiful her son was. I couldn’t put myself through that. If I held him in my arms I might never be able to let go.
Without so much as a warning sniffle, this child in the pushchair lets out a huge sneeze and a large string of green snot shoots out of her nose and hangs from her nostril like a stalactite. It’s disgusting but funny at the same time and she’s oblivious to it. Her mother is too lost in an article about the Kardashians to notice, so I take a paper tissue from my pocket and wipe her daughter’s nose clean.
‘What are you doing?’ The girl has turned around and she sounds angry.
‘She had a snotty nose,’ I reply. ‘I was just giving it a quick wipe.’
‘Back off,’ she says loudly. It gets the attention of other users. ‘I don’t want you touching her without my permission.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I reply, taken aback by her aggression. My face reddens and I fight a sudden urge to cry. She waits for a moment until I leave, humiliated.
I take a handful of deep breaths until I am back in control of my emotions. Instead of shame, I’m now annoyed by that poor excuse for a mother. How dare she speak to me like that? What is it with women who, once they have a child, automatically think they’re superior to the rest of us? If she’d kept her eye on her daughter’s well-being then I wouldn’t have needed to step in. Well, she’s going to regret that.
My opportunity arrives much sooner than I anticipated when a few minutes later, the child is alone again. I pick two random books from a shelf and, checking that nobody is watching, I slip them into the shopping pouch under the pushchair by her daughter’s feet.
When the girl is ready to leave, I’ll make sure to watch as the barcoded books set off the electronic alarm. I doubt the police will be called, but she will feel as humiliated as she made me.
CHAPTER 10
MAGGIE
The bedroom is uncomfortably stuffy. The windows are triple glazed and the locks are glued shut, so the only way to allow new air to circulate is to open the door between my room and the landing. But even that makes little difference tonight.
I lift an electric fan that’s been sitting unused on top of the wardrobe for months and place it lower down on the dressing table. Months ago, I prized the safety guard from the front so I already know the blades are plastic and of little use to me as a weapon. Neither are the exposed floorboards. It’s impossible to prize up the nails, so I can’t use them or the wood to my advantage. I plug it in and point it in the direction of the bed and I watch as specks of dust dance inside the current of air it creates. It dawns on me that perhaps I’m using my preoccupation with the room’s ventilation as an excuse for feeling restless, and it’s Nina’s memory box that is really the cause.
Dinner with her earlier this evening passed without concern. But neither of us mentioned the box and I wonder which one of us will break first. I did ache to ask her why she had left it for me because her actions always have a reason. I try and read between the lines but I can’t imagine the box’s purpose. I keep trying to pluck up the courage to take another look, if only to dip in and out of it, but I haven’t managed it yet.
I fan my face. I can’t ask her to lower the heating temperature, because about an hour ago I saw her leave the house. Every other week, albeit on different days, she goes somewhere but never mentions it. I think that she enjoys having this little secret to herself, so I don’t ask what it is. I’m usually asleep by the time she returns.
Even if she was downstairs, she wouldn’t hear me if I yelled because the door and partition wall separating the second floor from the first have been professionally insulated and soundproofed. And for good measure, she’s even stuck cardboard egg boxes to the walls. I have yet to hear a peep from downstairs, and I assume it’s the same for her with me. If I’m away from the window, the first I’ll know of her arrival home is when the first-floor door unlocks and she appears.
I take off my top so I’m sitting in just my bra and wraparound skirt and think of how well I’ve adapted to my imprisonment. I wonder if I’ve surpassed Nina’s expectations. Spending so much time alone has given me the opportunity to learn a lot about myself. I want for little, which is fortunate, as it’s exactly what I’m given. I don’t have many luxuries, but I appreciate those in my possession more than I did when I was living a normal life.
Sometimes I wonder if Nina hasn’t stripped me of absolutely everything so that when she decides I need punishing, she still has objects to remove. It’s what happened with my perfumes, hairspray, transistor radio, shoes, pillows, some make-up and jewellery. One by one they all went to ‘teach me a lesson’. But I no longer allow her to witness how her cruelty upsets me. Maybe I’ve been taking the wrong approach. Perhaps she needs to believe she has broken me before this all ends. Exactly how it will end, though, remains unclear.
I think back to the box again and what else, aside from a twenty-five-year-old pregnancy test, might lie inside it. As soon as I saw that, I closed the lid and slid the box back under the bed. I both do and don’t want to know what else is in there. I have to take my mind off it.
