Page 87 of Glitterland
“It wasn’t complicated, honey.”
I’d never heard someone use an endearment as an insult before. I could hardly meet her eyes. “Maybe it wasn’t. I have no expectations that he’ll forgive me, let alone want to try again, but I need to tell him.”
Her foot tapped an angry rhythm on the floor. “Tell ’im what?”
“H-how I feel.” Thankfully, she let that one go, so I rushed on. “And that I’m sorry and I didn’t mean any of the things I said.”
“Then why you say ’em, honey?”
A question I had asked myself repeatedly, obsessively, and still hadn’t answered. Because I can’t be trusted?
“We all say things we don’t mean sometimes,” I offered.
“Yes, we do,” she agreed, nodding, and I had brief, ill-conceived hope that I might have won her round, “but it’s fings like ‘no, you look good as a brunette,’ and ‘no, you ’aven’t got a big bum,’ not fings like ‘I’m only wif him cos he’s cheaper than a prostitute.’”
“It was because I was scared, okay?” I pulled convulsively at my cuffs. “Because it was easier to pretend I didn’t care than admit I did.”
Chloe watched me squirm without much sympathy. “I fink that’s pafetic. Well pafetic. I don’t care what Robbie Williams finks abaht it.”
“To be honest, I haven’t asked him.” I took a deep breath. “Will you please tell me where I can find Darian? Or give me his number. Or something? Anything?”
“If it was up to me,” she said flatly, “I wouldn’t.”
“Well, it is kind of up to you,” I pointed out.
“Well, no, it ain’t. It’s up to Darian. Cos if you wonnid to talk to ’im and I was like ‘no way, cos you’re a dickhead,’ it’d be like in that movie where Leonardo DiCaprio is all…y’know—” She held up her hands and looked sadly at the ceiling, doing quite a good impression of a frozen, dead Leonardo DiCaprio sinking slowly into the depths of the ocean.
“What,Titanic?”
“Oh no, not that one. The uvver one.” She thought about it for a moment. “Where he’s trying to get it togevver wif this girl but she has to pretend to be dead or whateva and there’s a message what says ‘I’m not really dead, just faking,’ but he don’t get it and it’s all bad.”
“You mean,” I asked carefully, “Romeo and Juliet.”
“Yeah, and don’t look at me like that cos at school we done the one wif the witches. But the point is, I fink Darian shouldn’t talk to you like ever again, but that’s up to him, innit?”
“That’s a very enlightened attitude.”
“Yeah, it is.” She nodded gravely. “And if you hurt ’im again, I’ll cut your bollocks off.”
My eyes fell on a pair of dress shears lying by the till. “Right.”
“He’s probably at home wif Nanny Dot.”
“Of course. He lives with his grandmother. I should have guessed.”
Dear God. Of all the men in the world, why did I want this one above all others? A glottal-stopping glitter pirate who still lived with his grandmother. In Essex. A joke, it had to be a cosmic joke. But it didn’t feel like a joke. It felt like the realest thing I’d known for a long time. The clearest and the simplest. As though everything else was white noise.
Chloe scowled at me, and even through the Botox, it was ferocious. “Well, where else is ’e supposed to live?”
“I don’t know. With friends? By himself, like a normal twenty-three-year-old?”
“Then who’d look after Nanny Dot? She ’ad a fall.”
“His parents?” I shrugged.
Her eyes burned like twin fires. “’E don’t know who ’is dad is and ’is mum left when ’e was two.”
There was a silence so awful that a girl came in, presumably to buy one of the interchangeable, tiny dresses, took one look at us, and ran out again, wedges clattering on the wooden floor.
