Sarah Salway - Something Beginning With

To Scott Pack

Cover

Title Page SOMETHING BEGINNING WITH SARAH SALWAY

A A Ambition My best friend’s nine-year-old cousin can’t decide whether she wants to be an astronaut or Prime Minister. When I was young, I used to want to be either beautiful or a farmer’s wife. I couldn’t be both because if I was beautiful, then there was no way I would settle for just a farmer. I would be good enough for my very own sugar daddy. I knew what a sugar daddy was before I had heard of an engineer or a chartered surveyor. See Attitude, Bosses, Colin, Firefighting, Promotion, Ultimatum

B B Baked Beans My grandmother on my mother’s side was a young girl in Liverpool during the war. She can still remember the night the Heinz factory was bombed and how for days afterwards the city smelt of cooked baked beans. It made them even hungrier than they were already. Her mother – my great-grandmother – once spotted an unexploded bomb caught in a tree near their house. For hours she ran around getting people out of their houses and down to the shelter where my grandmother was hiding. My great-grandmother wheeled the sick down, helped mothers with little children and reassured the elderly. She must have saved many, many lives that night, so I can’t blame my grandmother for still being annoyed, years later, that they didn’t give her mother a medal for her bravery. Instead, they gave it to the lady who was in charge of making the tea. See God, Mystery Tours, Noddy

C C Captains This is how Sally and I first became friends. Like the singing, in my head I am completely coordinated as far as sports are concerned. Now I am an adult I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to, but I still like to lie in bed imagining how I can catch ball after ball in hands that open and caress rather than sting painfully. My legs find such a sweet rhythm as I run the 800 metres that I almost levitate off the ground, able to go on and on and on as I race past all the other runners. In reality, I became the school expert at the rain-dance I created in the hope that games would be cancelled. It wasn’t just the humiliation. It was the way your legs would get so cold on the hockey pitch, the skin red and blue and sharp with pain. Sally walked in once just as I was jumping up and down in the deserted shower rooms, hands on top of my head, elbows flapping. I was chanting ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, rain, rain, rain.’ She took one look and left. I thought she might have been smiling but I’d been too embarrassed to look closely. Neither of us said anything. One hour later we were standing at the edge of the sports field in the perfect sunshine. Sally was at the front by the games teacher as she was always one of the team captains. I was standing at the back so I wouldn’t have to keep getting out of the way when the other, more popular, girls were picked for the teams. I thought it was a joke when Sally chose me before anyone else. I didn’t want to go up at first but everyone kept prodding me. Sally always picked me first after that. I never asked her why, even afterwards when we took a vow to tell each other everything. I always hoped it was because Sally was the one person who could look into my head and see those sweet catches I made in my dreams. How perfect everything was there. See Blackbirds, Robins and Nightingales, Kindness, Vendetta, X-ray Vision

D D Daisies My mother told me once that I was not sweet enough to be called after a flower. Something useful, yes, but not a flower. Her name was Rose and I thought if I also had a pretty name then I’d look more like her. I called myself Daisy in secret and would talk about myself in the third person. ‘Daisy’s nearly ready for bed now,’ or ‘Look how pretty Daisy looks in the mirror.’ It made me feel like I belonged. But then one day I blurted out something about wanting to be called Daisy and everyone laughed. ‘It sounds more like a cow,’ said my father, smiling fondly at my mother. See Ants, Names, True Romance, Zest

E E Ears I like to stick cotton-wool buds in my ears and turn them round, pushing harder and harder. I crave the satisfaction it brings. Sometimes even when I have friends round, all I can think of is that round plastic jar of baby buds until I have to go into my bedroom and clean my ears. It’s like an itch. Once I twisted too hard and my head filled with a howling pain. I vowed then never to do it again. Until the next time. There was a boy at school called Stewart Simmons. One day he was swinging on his chair during Geography when the teacher called him to attention. He was taken by surprise, and as he fell, the compass he was holding pierced right through his eardrum. He screamed. Three years later, when I joined the class, the other children were still talking about the loudness of that scream. When we were fifteen, I went out with Stewart Simmons and felt the reflected glory from his fame. He would still scream in the playground for money. The trouble was that Stewart was boring when he wasn’t making a noise. He wanted to be a lorry driver and sometimes when we were lying together on his bed, he’d be able to name the type of lorry that went past the window just from the sound of its tyres. He seemed to feel this was particularly clever as he was still deaf in one ear from the compass incident. See Captains, The Fens, Sounds

F F Fashion My favourite book when I was growing up was called The Little White Horse. There were two things about it I remember particularly. One was the sugary biscuits that were left in a silver tin in the heroine’s tower bedroom. Some even had little pastel flowers iced on them. The other was the heroine’s journey to the castle to stay with her unknown uncle. She was nervous, but still able to get pleasure from her beautiful laced-up boots tucked away under her long skirts. Even though no one else could see them, she knew they were there, and that was enough. It gave me a thrill of recognition. It probably shaped my life. Made me see the strength you could get from having the right kind of secrets. I spend a lot of time shopping. I search out clothes which have special things about them only I will know. I hug these to me. A certain colour that makes me want to eat it; a lining of soft plum silk; the Liberty print trim to a denim pocket; a perfectly shaped pleat which kicks up the edge of a skirt. Coco Chanel knew all about this. She used to sew a gold chain invisibly into the hems of her jackets so they would be ideally weighted around the bottom. I think if I could have a jacket like that I would die happy. I would be buried in it. See Codes, Underwear, Women’s Laughter

G G Glenda G-Spot I told Monica at work that I didn’t go out very much in the evening so she invited me around to her house. I thought it was just going to be the two of us, but it was only when I got there that she told me she was having a sex party. This is like Tupperware for desperate women although we didn’t do ‘it’; in fact not much of the evening was about actually doing ‘it’. There were just lots and lots of gadgets for sale which simulated doing ‘it’. There were about ten women there, all older than me. Monica’s age. We sat in a circle and passed these gadgets round, sometimes without saying a word. Every so often Monica walked round with a tray of little savoury biscuits smeared with hummus and pâté and filled up our glasses with fizzy sweet wine. The woman who was organising the party was like a perverted Mary Poppins. Just when I thought it was all finished, she put her hand into an enormous canvas bag and pulled out something else. She made us play games and gave us all silly names. I was Glenda G-Spot, Monica was Wendy Wetdream and the girl sitting next to me was Cathy Come. It was hard to know whether to call each other by our real names or the names on the labels the woman stuck on our chests. Cathy Come and I got into the final of one game where we had to pass an enormous black dildo under our chins between one another without dropping it. Cathy Come cheated because she kept angling it so it was difficult to get hold of. Mind you, I was quite pleased to come second because although Cathy won the dildo, I got a bottle of an apricot-flavoured sauce, which seemed nicer somehow. I left when the woman drew out a blow-up man from her bag. One of his legs was stapled up from when a dog had got hold of it, she said. The air kept fizzling out of him, and I don’t like to say where the nozzle was to blow him back up. See Liqueur Chocolates, Names, Toys