Sweet Talk

All that summer, the flies were an irritation. They disturbed our dinners so we erected a fly-catcher, a bright sticky orange strip that displayed the lurid corpses. My father told me I swallowed them at night; they travelled down my throat and settled in my stomach. In the mornings, before my preening routine, I examined my mouth for evidence of badness – black stains on the bottom of my teeth, a broken wing lodged under my tongue.

The men lived in the caravan. They arrived in threes – mute, unfriendly, unsmiling – and it was my mother’s job to let them know when they were finished. My father would say to her, ‘Get that done,’ and she would set off across the lawn. If she liked the men, if she had spoken to them or they had been in the house, she took the time to compose a personal letter – her childish scrawl offering basic commiserations. If she did not have any sense of them she simply said, ‘Boys, get your belongings.’

My father used any excuse to sack them. He disliked evidence of effort, and he abhorred vanity in men. He considered it unnatural. He resented these sullen strangers, the suggestion of wax in their hair, their good complexions. Usually, he didn’t even bother to learn their names. As unceremoniously as they arrived, they made their way down the gravel drive. Some had suitcases, or large backpacks; others carried their things in plastic bags. I watched their departures from my bedroom window as it seemed important – becoming acquainted with men’s disappointed backs, watching their retreating shadows.

That summer, the summer I turned fourteen, was warm. We had no language for the weather. We wandered around like people burdened and we pointed at the sky. The missing women of the Midlands peered out of the papers; their vague and vanished faces seemed to understand the tedium of the heat. The women had all disappeared from nothing places. It was a long walk into town from our house, a town with a heavy thrum of dark traffic. I did that walk daily, sometimes wearing shoes, sometimes not. I had adopted a uniform of flimsy halter-strap tops and pedal pushers with beads oddly, and uncomfortably, attached to the cuffs. I brushed my hair out and made necklaces from multi-coloured rope. People asked if I was a hippie and I said, yeah, I was.

I was happy for the break from school – I had become too good at being who I was. When one of the more established girls gave a blow job beside the Virgin Mary statue outside the school, I declared myself unimpressed by the obvious symbolism and others followed suit. I had a quiet sort of pull in that way. There was speculation that I might have significant breasts underneath my school jumper, but it was not a card I would be playing so it didn’t warrant much discussion. There were faint rips in our universe – the missing girls, the blow job – but nothing ever ruptured in the way we wanted it to. We sowed pleats into our skirts to make them tighter, we snapped our hair into humourless ponytails. That summer, we watched scary movies we selected brazenly from the back of the video shop. At night, our film minds whirring, we fell asleep with our hands on the small of each other’s backs.