Nicola Barker - Three Button Trick and Other Stories

Tina felt lead in her belly. And rage. ‘Take that back, Ralph. I mean it.’

Ralph’s lips were smiling. Ha. Ha. Ha.

His head remained clamped between her knees. Tina took her index finger and waved it calmly in front of Ralph’s eyes. ‘See this?’

He blinked yes. She took the finger and placed it over the tip of the pen shell. The shell stopped whistling. Ralph’s eyes bulged. His chest stopped moving. He stopped smiling, finally.

‘Want to take it back yet, Ralph?’

Ralph struggled to nod. Tina tightened her knees around his skull.

‘Mean it, Ralph?’

Again, he struggled. His hands flailed, helplessly. His brown eyes, not blank, not empty any more, but saying something, emphatically. He was sincere. Just this once. He’d taken it back. He’d meant it.

Tina smiled, nodded, and casually asked Paolo how long he thought the ambulance would be.

‘About four metres,’ Paolo said, grinning, trying to win back her favour.

‘Did you hear that, Ralph?’ Tina asked softly. ‘Paolo made a joke. He made a joke. Ha. Ha. Ha .’

Ralph wasn’t smiling.

‘I can hear the sirens,’ Paolo said. ‘Can’t you?’

Tina listened carefully and then nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I think I do hear them.’

The sirens grew louder. Her eyes filled with tears. They sounded strange and strong and quite beautiful. Tina sniffed, blinked, looked down for a moment, and then, so regretfully, and with the sweetest, the softest, the gentlest of sighs, she lifted up her finger again.

‘OH !’ SHE SAID. ‘IF I had her breasts I’d become a topless model or a cocktail waitress, or I’d go to Saint-Tropez and lie on the beach all day.’

‘And get cancer.’

Mandy was sitting on the bus with her mother. They had met up outside the gym. Her mother finished work fifteen minutes before the end of Mandy’s aerobics class. She waited outside by the bus stop, frustratedly watching the buses go by. Sometimes she waited for twenty minutes, occasionally longer. The gym was in Deptford.

‘Breasts are for milk,’ her mother said. ‘You get pregnant, they fill up, you squirt it out. Like a cow’

I wonder if it’s erotic, Mandy thought, feeding babies.

Her mother added, ‘When I had you my nipples cracked. They were chapped and they bled. Every time you sucked on them it felt like I’d shut them in a suitcase.’

Mandy imagined this. Breasts bare, suitcase open, packing for holiday, breasts jut forward, suitcase accidentally slams shut. Whap! Chop! Nipples sliced neatly off. Inside the dark suitcase; two soft, pink jellytots.

Then she remembered Imogen’s breasts. She had seen them in the showers, and then after, when Imogen patted them dry on a pale blue towel, 36C. Small tan nipples. No unsightly blemishes or stretch marks. She didn’t wear a bra! No! Not even in the class! Only a tight, high-cut leotard like the one Jamie Lee Curtis wore in Perfect.

By rights they should be down by her knees, Mandy thought, and secretly, in the back of her mind, I wish they were!

But the truth of it was this: Imogen could easily have no inkling of how fantastic her breasts were. She probably wished they were smaller, or that her nipples were a different shade.

I hope she thinks that, Mandy thought, imagining how it would be to carry two breasts like those around—light, soft trophies.

Mandy’s own breasts were much too heavy and much too round. She wore a bra to exercise in, a terrible contraption like the kind of restraining garment people were strapped up in at mental hospitals. To stop them from hurting themselves. Surgical.

Mandy pictured herself wearing no bra for the class, her breasts bouncing so much that after half an hour the skin holding them to her ribs becomes slack, thin, sticky, eventually tears. The breasts break free and travel downwards in her leotard, eventually settling either side on top of her hip bones, like two fistfuls of cellulite.

Her mother said suddenly, ‘When you were a kid, three or four, we were sitting on a bus, on the top deck, close to the front, and a brassy woman came up the stairs and sat close by. She had on a tight skirt, heels, blonde curls piled up high and a low-cut top, with her breasts on display, shoved together, like plums, shoved up. You stared at them for a while, all solemn, and then you turned to me and said, very loudly, “Mummy, why has that lady got a front bottom?” ’

Mandy laughed. She had heard this story before, many times. Another breast story. Ha Ha. Funny breasts, tits, boobs, dugs, knockers.

One good thing about my breasts, she thought—focusing on herself again, on the two soft pieces of fat in flesh under her sweatshirt—when I drop off food from my fork, it lands on my chest instead of on my lap. Why was this so good? She couldn’t decide, only knew that it was. Her breasts were a buffer zone, they protected her, padded her, covered her heart. If she ate popcorn at the cinema, eating in a scruffy way, fistfuls shoved in at once, to avoid embarrassment, she had to take care to remember to collect and consume the formal white line of fluffy kernels before lights up.

SELINA MITCHELL HAD NEVER been particularly free-thinking. Since she was fifteen she had been completely under the sway of her dominant and rather single-minded husband Tom and her dominant and rather light-headed friend Joanna. She had always lived in Grunty Fen. If you grow up somewhere with a name like Grunty Fen you never really see the humour in the name, and Selina was no exception to this rule. She never thought it was a particularly amusing place to live. In fact she hated it most of the time. It was physically small, socially small and intellectually small. It wasn’t even close enough to Cambridge to bask in any of the reflected glory; but if ever Selina had cause to write a letter to London or Manchester or Edinburgh for any reason she invariably wrote her address as Grunty Fen, Cambridgeshire. She hoped that this created a good impression.

The only scandal that had ever caused real consternation, discussion and debate in Grunty Fen was when Harry Fletcher had started to wear Wellington boots to school (in summer) and the school had been forced to alter their uniform rules in order to acknowledge that Wellingtons were a legitimate item of clothing for school wear. The teachers had seen this new allowance as a victory for the environment over the purity of education, a muddying of the intellectual pursuit. The kids all wore wellies to school for a while and then switched back to mucky trainers after their initial joie de vivre had worn off.

Selina had been a quick-witted student—by Grunty Fen standards—and had been one of the few children at the village school bright and determined enough to go to teacher training college. At seventeen she had packed her suitcase and had gone to Reading to learn how to be a teacher; to spread discipline and information.

At seventeen she had thought that she would never return to Grunty Fen again, but inevitably she went home during her vacations to visit her parents and wrote long, emotional letters to her boyfriend Tom, who had tried to stop her going to college in the first place by asking her to marry him.

After three years at college Selina had returned to Grunty Fen, ‘Just until I decide where I really want to go.’ Eventually she had married Tom and had started teaching at the village primary school.

She disliked children and didn’t want any of her own. Tom liked children—probably because he wasn’t forced into a classroom with thirty of them every day—but he realized that if he wanted to hang on to Selina (she was one of the intellectual élite) then he would have to bow to her better judgement.