What for? To play heads or tails to decide who serves first?
‘For the toilet.’ I gesture to the turnstile, convulsing with the urge to urinate. I’m suddenly aware of water around me – a hose being deployed outside, the drip of a tap inside, an abrupt flush as some fortunate shopper concludes their evacuation.
She sighs like I asked her to mint it herself. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Could you look? I’ve got a pound.’ I brandish it for reassurance.
Her expression brightens at the prospect of an 80p profit, and she starts digging around in her purse.
‘Hmm . . . I don’t think . . .’
She delves, muttering to herself, while I fidget and squirm in agony, proffering my pound with a shaking hand. What if I just let rip and flood the ladies’ entrance; would it be so very bad? My usually heightened sense of embarrassment and shame is noticeably absent today, but I draw the line at public micturition. Plus, I’m worried about volume – it wouldn’t be a leak, more of a torrent. Please let her have a 20p.
‘No, I’m sorry, I haven’t got one.’ She glances at my pound coin regretfully, mourning its loss.
She’s dead to me. I whirl around, searching for another saviour. ‘Has anyone got 20p?’ I bellow, holding my reward aloft. ‘I will give you this!’ Then, thinking better of it, ‘No, all these!’ I grab the remaining pound coins in my purse. ‘Four pounds for 20p!’ My kingdom for a horse.
Within thirty seconds I have three potential 20ps in return for my four pounds. The dilemma then is which offer to accept. Despite the thrumming of my groin, I find myself dithering over it, before finally taking my piece of silver from a sweet old lady who has ‘basic pension’ vibes. That extra £3.80 should keep her in tomato soup for a bit. Gibbering my thanks, I cram the coin into the slot and barge through. Please let there not be a queue, or I’ll have to start handing out fivers to jump it.
It’s quiet, thank the Lord. As I approach a cubicle, the imminent purging causes a slight anticipatory spurt – I can barely get the door closed and my pants down before Niagara Falls gushes forth. Oh, the relief. The cubicle is fairly grimy, and there’s no paper, but I think it’s the nicest and best toilet I’ve ever had the privilege of urinating in. I feel like writing a note of thanks on the wall, which is already liberally scribbled on. Charmaine was here, apparently; Billy and Danika are forever; and Boris can suck my dick. What a refuge this is; I might just stay here, reposing on the now-warm cracked seat. When I left the office this morning, I wanted to find comfort in stillness and solitude, and I’ve found it, here in this lavatory. Or loo, as my mother would say. As the last drops dribble out, I scroll on my phone, enjoying this rare moment of uninterrupted bliss.
Thanks to my unavoidable pre-pee trickle, and the lack of toilet roll, my pants are wet for the second time today, but my joy is profound. I skip to the boutique, enjoying the feel of the full skirt swirling around my new sandals, chucking my old clothes and shoes in one of the bins on the way. I feel like Jack Reacher hitching a ride out West – free, unfettered, and about to get into a fight. I wonder if the police have arrived yet?
Breezing into the shop, I hold my bank card aloft. ‘I’m back!’ I announce cheerily, slapping it down on the counter.
There’s a burly security guard standing next to Cruella, looking strapping and impassive. She sneers, then turns to him, gesturing towards me dismissively. ‘This is the shoplifter.’
He looks me up and down, so I give him a little twirl. ‘Do you like it? I think it suits me.’
If possible, he looks even more inscrutable. Maybe he’s Jack Reacher. A British Reacher would definitely be working in security at a Bristol shopping precinct. Just as a day job while he hunted down gangsters in Knowle by night.
Cruella sniffs. ‘You stole it.’
‘But I’m right here. In a stealing situation, he’d be chasing me down the high street, calling for back-up.’
A tight smile creeps across her face. ‘We apprehended you in the nick of time.’
‘Capital!’ I’m finding the Regency style of this dress quite inspiring. ‘Should he get me in some sort of chokehold, to make the story stick?’
Cruella’s smile fades. ‘He has the authority to make a citizen’s arrest. With force if necessary.’
Reacher’s inscrutable expression tips towards boredom – it’s clear he doesn’t take his low-level crime-fighting role particularly seriously. I bet he’s got bigger fish to fry. Probably a gunrunner operating out of the docks on Harbourside. A real nasty piece of work. Forget citizen’s arrests; Bristol Reacher will be pulverizing a trafficker later.
I raise my eyebrows. ‘Only if there are reasonable grounds. And I think you’ll find my peaceful presence here indicates there aren’t.’ Did a bit of googling on my phone in the bog, among other things, and it’s paying dividends. Emboldened by my new legal nous, I carry on. ‘I’m here, ready and waiting to pay. If you want to drag this out, then we could call my lawyer?’ Robbie deals in intellectual rather than sartorial property, but she doesn’t need to know that.
Her brows snap together; she’s both angry and nonplussed, and it’s time to wrap this up, particularly since I have no other clothes to wear, having thrown my old ones in the bin. I rest my elbows on the counter.
‘I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. I’m going to pay for the dress, and we’re going to agree it was a misunderstanding. Or else . . .’ I get out my phone, fount of knowledge, source of information, locator, identifier, amplifier, online warrior.
‘Or else what?’ She’s breathing hard now; she’ll need moment in the back room staff toilet when this is all over.
Keeping my back to the stony-faced security guard, I discreetly show her my Instagram page. The hipster at Avon House was some kind of influencer with two million followers and I’ve picked up over fifty thousand of them since 11 a.m., thanks to Petroc tagging me. Obviously, I’m only on there because Vince insisted we ‘get with the memes’. Never mind that my page is just photos of our cat, Grizelda, perching on various precarious spots around the house, or that the only story I ever put up was an accidental screen grab of all my weather apps. It seems everyone is keen to view a clip of a middle-aged woman kicking against the pricks in a posh swimming pool. I’m sure my newfound fame will fall off a cliff along with my fertility, but right now it can be useful.
‘I can be very kind to you here,’ I murmur. ‘Or I can be . . . mean.’
There’s a long silence as she looks at the figure on my phone. I lower my voice, conspiratorial, chummy. ‘I really want to be kind. Let me pay for this gorgeous frock, and we can all get on with our day.’
She meets my eyes, and there’s grudging respect there. When you’re a bitch, meeting a superior bitch can be a salutary experience. Nodding a dismissal to the guard, free to go back to his day job stopping teenagers nicking the condiments in Nando’s, she takes my bank card from between my fingers.
‘I can give you a ten per cent discount,’ she says, and I pat her on the arm in a motherly way.
‘That would be splendid,’ I say, and we complete the transaction.
My mother doesn’t know it, but the wedding dress she chose for me had a fitting end. Last year, Hazel got invited to a Halloween party – it was fancy dress, but she didn’t find out till the last minute, and had nothing to wear. After covering her face in talcum powder, together we unearthed my £1500 meringue, and slashed it to ribbons. Then I took a lighter to the veil, making the netting furl and blacken. Hazel sailed off as the Corpse Bride and when she came back, the hemline was muddy and the bodice drenched in Red Bull. I rolled it all up, stuffed it higgledy-piggledy in an old suitcase and left it to decay in the attic, feeling electrified by the vandalism, animated by a belated rebellion which would go entirely unnoticed. I wondered what Rose would say if she knew?
Outside in the sunshine, I do another twirl and take a perky photo of the swish for my new fans. Not Emily in Paris but Clover in Bristol. I’ve got a great new dress, and my bladder is gloriously barren. What next?
14
I grew up in a genteel Oxford suburb, far enough from the city that we could afford a detached house, as my mother considered semis lower-middle class. One of my earliest memories is going to some sort of play group when I was tiny. It was a drop-off thing – Rose would leave me with them to get her hair done and then collect me at lunchtime. Maz wasn’t there – I think she got left with a woman who lived down the road. I must have been about four, so don’t remember much about it, just that there was a floaty dressing-up skirt that me and another girl used to fight over, and they gave you milk in blue plastic cups.
But one day I do remember, I was playing with a particular toy when my mother came to pick me up – it was a drill, and if you pressed a button the chuck actually moved around. I loved it, and was running round firing it at people, in the swishy skirt I’d managed to wrest off the other girl. But there was a boy who wanted the drill who was following me round, whingeing. He kept trying to take it off me, grabbing it and pulling it – sometimes pulling my hair too. I suppose we would have worked it out somehow, but Rose had arrived and decided to get involved. She marched up and held out her hand to me.
‘Now, please.’
My mother didn’t ask twice, so I handed it over. She immediately gave it to the boy, who ran off with it. Then she found a toy supermarket trolley, and closed my fingers around the handle, her rings pressing into my skin as she bent to whisper in my ear.
‘Much better for you,’ she said. Then she went and had a cup of tea with the other mums, while I pushed the trolley around aimlessly. We went home shortly after, and I didn’t know what to make of it, but I suppose on some level I did. Give them what they want. Your place is behind the trolley. Every time I wanted something, wanted to stand up for myself, say no, I’d feel her rings pricking my skin, pushing me back.
