A Fucked Up Life in Books (4 page)

‘Did you know that your Mum is my girlfriend?’ he asked me. ‘The other girls from Social Services won’t come and see me but I can always rely on my ___.’

Mum was giggling like a schoolgirl. His hand reached up and started to fondle her breasts.

‘You’re a good girl, ___,’ he said. ‘You always look after old ___.’

Mum sat, still giggling on his lap. Letting him touch her, letting this vile old cunt touch her fucking tits. I felt sick.

After what felt like forever of standing and watching, Mum got up.

‘Go and give ___ a kiss,’ she said.

No.
I didn’t move.

‘___, go and give him a kiss.’

I looked at my Mum. She was smiling at me.

‘She’s shy,’ she said to the Old Man. He smiled.

‘Come here, ___, come and say hello to me.’

I walked over to him, slowly. As soon as I was in arms’ reach he grabbed me and plonked me on his knee.

‘See? It’s not so bad, is it?’ he said.

I sat very still. I was fucking rigid. I hated this old man. I hated him so much.

His hands that had been clasped around me, resting on my lap, released and he put one hand on my thigh and squeezed, as the other hand moved up and began to stroke my stomach.

I jumped up and ran as fast as I could out of the house and back to the car. The fucking door was fucking locked. I ran to the barn where we kept the straw for the stables and hid.

I don’t know how long passed, but eventually my Mum came looking for me. As soon as she opened the door to the barn she saw me and called my name. I can’t have been hiding as well as I thought I was.

‘Is he with you?’ I asked, not moving.

‘Of course not, silly. Why would he come out here? He’s gone to bed. Come on, time to go home.’

I came out. We got in the car. I was shaking and frightened.

Mum said ‘He’s a very lonely old man, ___, it’s very sad to be out here in the countryside with no one to talk to, and my friends at work, they won’t come out to him. It’s not very nice, is it?’

I shook my head.

‘So that’s why we have to go and see him sometimes. You know, cheer him up. He’s a sweet man, really.’

I didn’t say anything. Mum drove us home and when I got home I went straight to bed and never told anyone about what had happened.

About five years later, when my Mum had left me and my brother and Dad for the farmer, she rang me to tell me that the Old Man had died. I said I was glad, and she called me an evil bitch and hung up. Another couple of years after that, at my Mum’s house, the farmer started talking about his Dad. I told him that his Dad was an evil cunt, and I got thrown out of the house. The farmer doesn’t speak to me any more. Neither does my Mum.

You’re not allowed to speak ill of the dead, you see.

I was about 12 or 13 when Mum decided that she was taking my brother and me on holiday to Gibraltar. She chucked some Goosebumps books at my brother and
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
at me to shut us up. About her reading selection for me, she said, ‘You probably won’t understand most of it, but it’s funny.’ I read some of it on the plane over, and it was funny, but rather than making me want to read more Sue Townsend, it just made me keep an incredibly cynical diary for the next two years.

Mum had made all these plans for stuff to do in Gibraltar. Gibraltar is not that big at all, so once we’d gone up the rock and looked at the monkey things (scary, grabby, I didn’t like them) she decided that we were going to get on a ferry the next day and have a trip over to Tangier in North Africa. A very common thing to do after you’ve spent a day in Gibraltar, apparently.

Gibraltar, if you’ve never been, is very, very English. Tangier is not very, very English. It was very foreign and exciting and frightening. I’d never been abroad before and nipping over the water to North Africa was my first experience of being completely surrounded by a difference culture and way of life.

I loved it. We wandered around the markets, and ate some weird food, and watched a bloke with a snake do some weird shit, and stroked a camel. It was brilliant. Then we went into an indoor market thing, where Mum and my brother went off to look at rugs, and I was left wandering around some pots.

A man approached me and asked me where I was from. I told him that I was from England. He nodded and looked very thoughtful. He asked my age and where my Mum was. I told him and pointed to the room with all the carpets in.

He said, ‘Come with me.’

I walked with him up to my Mum. He introduced himself to her as a very rich man and then pointed to me.

‘I like your daughter. She is very beautiful. How much for your daughter?’

My Mum laughed. ‘She’s not for sale.’

He looked puzzled.

‘I want to marry your daughter when she is sixteen. I take her now and pay you. How much?’

Mum laughed a little less easily this time and told him again, no.

He looked thoughtful.

‘I give you thirty camels for your daughter.’

My Mum’s eyes bulged. She turned to me.

‘Thirty camels! Thirty fucking camels!’

‘Mum, what the fuck are you going to do with thirty camels?’

She looked back at the man and said again, no.

He upped his offer. Forty camels.

‘FORTY CAMELS! Forty FUCKING camels!’ she said to me, a kind of weird pleading look on her face.

‘Mum,’ I said, ‘you are not selling me for forty camels to this man. You don’t need any camels. Where would you keep forty camels?’

‘I could sell them!’ she said, seemingly delighted that she’d found a solution.

Time to put my foot down. ‘Mum, if you sell me to this man I will never speak to you again.’

She looked at me for a long time, and then turned to the man and told him for the last time:

‘No.’

We left the weird indoor market and got back on a ferry over to Gibraltar. Mum drank a lot of wine. My brother and I stood out on the deck watching North Africa vanish.

I still don’t know whether she actually would’ve sold me.

I was fifteen years old when after many doctor’s appointments and consultations I was referred to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge for breast reduction surgery. (I’m not really comfortable with that term. When talking about it I am much more likely to say ‘when my tits got chopped off’.)

We travelled down on the train, arrived at the hospital, I was poked and prodded at and then put in a bed on a ward with other women who were waiting for various kinds of cosmetic surgery. Then my family went home and I began to unpack my bag.

The book of choice for this trip was
Angela’s Ashes
, by Frank McCourt. Before I left home a family friend named Anne had shoved it at me saying, ‘I saw the film of this, it was quite good. You don’t really like films, do you? I got you the book.’ I unpacked this, and my clothes, and my toothbrush, then got in to bed and began to read.

After about an hour, I was visited by the surgeon. He wanted to talk some things through, so we did. He told me that I might lose sensitivity in my breasts, that I may not be able to breastfeed my children if I ever chose to have any, that he was confident that this would fix my depression and sore neck and back, that my breasts may still grow after surgery, and that the worst case scenario was that I could die from a blood clot, but he didn’t think that likely.

This is almost twelve years ago now. I was a lot slimmer but the same height. Standing at a mighty five feet and rocking a size eight figure, my 28G tits looked ridiculous, and made me very sad. I was worried about the operation, of course, but I knew that the feeling afterwards would override any discomfort, and hopefully make me a little bit more confident and social. Maybe my tits would turn black and fall off, who knew? I did feel in safe hands with the surgeon, though. He seemed like a nice enough man.

Now, as you may or may not know, Addenbrooke’s is a teaching hospital. This means that student doctors and nurses from The University will pop along every so often to get a lovely bit of
hands on
experience.

So there I was, in my hospital bed reading
Angela’s Ashes
when my surgeon comes back.

‘I’ve got a couple of students that I’m going to bring in, okay?’

I had already consented to this by signing a bit of paper, and didn’t see the harm anyway as soon these tits wouldn’t be mine anymore.

However, when he said a couple, what he actually meant was seven. Five boys and two girls. He unbuttoned my rather fetching hospital gown and pointed at my tits with his pen. I have no idea what he was saying to the students but they were all fucking entranced by my chest as he gabbled away telling them what he was going to do and how it was going to look. Then he got a big pen out and did some scribbles around my nipples. I looked down.

What the fuck is he going to do to me?
I wondered. The scribble was an incredibly arty shape.

Mr Surgeon then invited a couple of the student to have a draw on my tits. I watched them – you should
always
watch anyone who is drawing on your tits. The first one stepped up and drew what looked remarkably like a cock and balls on one tit. The surgeon
hmmmm
ed and the next student came at me, pen in hand and drew an even bigger cock and balls on the other tit. A lovely fat cock, it was. I was vaguely impressed. I’ve always loved drawing penises. He tentatively looked up at the surgeon for approval.

‘Very good,’
he said. He was right. It was very good.

They all left, thanking me nervously, and I picked up my book again and read all evening, right through to the end.

I had my surgery and it was fine. However, twelve years on, the combination of putting on some weight, and the fact that I did a considerable amount more ‘growing’ from the age of fifteen to eighteen means that my tits almost completely grew back. I don’t mind though, they look fucking fantastic now that I’m old enough to appreciate the power of a pair of good tits.

Like most people I knew at the time, when I turned 16 I started working in a high street clothes shop on weekends and after school so that I would have money for all the important shit I needed like cider and fags and condoms.

Unlike most people I knew at the time, instead of going outside and talking to people on my breaks, I used to stay in the staffroom and read Ben Elton books. I fucking loved Ben Elton. He was my first real dabble with swearing in books. If I finished a book on a break, it was just a five minute walk to the bookshop to get another. On one lunch break I nipped out and bought
Stark
and sat pissing myself in the staff room at the description of a family eating some bad oysters and then shitting themselves. Teenage comedy gold.

I was still laughing when I emerged from the staffroom to continue my shift. I went and checked the rota, grinning like a fucking moron, and then went to the front of the shop: it was my turn to spend an hour tidying the rails and greeting people and helping customers and doing all the other shit that you’re supposed to do. They tell you that it is a very important job because you are the ‘first contact’ that a customer will have. I didn’t like it so much because it was a bit far away from what everyone else was doing, and I fucking hated talking to customers.

A man walked in. As I worked in a shop that sold clothes for women, men walking in on their own were usually either:

1. Looking for the wife/girlfriend/daughter/mate/mum/sister/mistress they had lost
   
2. Looking to buy something for their wife/girlfriend/daughter/mate/mum/sister/mistress
   

These were the men that we were supposed to attack with our knowledge of all things clothesy. We’d confuse them with words and they’d end up spending 200 quid in about five minutes because they were frightened and alone and vulnerable. A quick glance around revealed my manager at the tills, clocking the lonely man, so I thought I’d better do what I’d been trained to do.

‘Hello, are you okay there?’ I asked him.

He looked at me, and then back at the clothes rail he had been touching, and then to the till, and then back at me.

‘Not … reaaaaally,’ he said. ‘I need to buy something for my … girlfriend.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What kind of thing do you have in mind?’

He glanced around the shop, and whispered, ‘Maybe some underwear?’

Not a problem. I knew all about the underwear. I was fucking great at underwear. I led him over to the back of the shop where the stands where all the bras and knickers (that I had tidied fucking beautifully earlier) stood.

‘If you’d like to have a look at these and think about what she might like. I’ll be just over here if you need any help.’

‘Could you help me now?’

Fuck sake.

‘Of course! So, erm …’ I picked up what I would describe as a ‘pretty’ bra and pants set.

‘How about these?’

‘Do you like those?’

‘Well, they’re very pretty.’

‘I want something more … sexy.’ I put the pants down and picked up a lacier set.

‘These?’

‘No … more … sexy.’

I put down the lacy pair and picked up the set that had come in a couple of weeks earlier and I had bought for myself. Proper slaggy bra and tiny little pants. Silky lacy slutty goodness. I fucking loved them.

‘These?’ I offered, holding them toward him.

‘Do you like those?’ He asked.

‘I love them.’ I replied.

‘Maybe those then,’ he said.

‘And the other set, the lacy ones.’

‘Do you know what size your girlfriend wears?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Oh. Well is she quite petite? Maybe have a look at the mannequins and tell me which she is most shaped like?’

He looked at me. ‘Well, she’s your size, I’d say.’

Righto. I picked up my size bra and my size pants from the stands and handed them to him. I told him that she could bring them back if she didn’t like them or if they didn’t fit, and that he should keep the receipt. He nodded.

‘I’ll just pass you onto my colleague now …’ I told him, taking his things over to the till. ‘Have a nice day.’