‘That’s terrible,’ Chris murmured. ‘Your boyfriend lying about you like that.’
Something in his tone made me suspect he was making fun of me again. But when I shot him a sharp glare, his face was empty and smooth. Back to the crying.
‘Luke Costello is a complete bastard,’ I wept. ‘I must have been out of my mind ever to have gone out with him.’
I turned to put my head down on the table. The move jostled my lycraed thighs against Chris’s denim ones.
Oh, it’s an ill wind…
Chris rubbed my back for a while as I lay bent over the table. I stayed there longer than was strictly necessary because his hand on my bra-fastener felt so nice. When I finally sat up again we had another tantalizing thigh jostle. How fortunate I was wearing such a short skirt.
From the far end of the table, heads looked at us with interest. If Neil didn’t watch himself he was in danger of losing his captive audience. I clenched my teeth and sent powerful thought rays out to all the brown jumpers. Go away. If any of you come near me now, I’ll kill you.
But strangely enough, apart from when Fergus, the acid casualty, passed me down a box of tissues, the others did leave us alone.
Chris made more soothing noises. His attention was calamine lotion on the stings of Luke’s rejection, the antidote to Luke’s poison.
‘I don’t understand why he had to lie to Dr Billings about me,’ I told Chris mournfully. The more of a victim I acted, the better. I’d bind Chris to me with ropes of sympathy.
I was vaguely aware that I’d lost sight of my true pain. Yes, I was devastated at what Luke had said. Not because he was lying about me – because it was true. But I couldn’t tell Chris that. Honesty was a luxury that I couldn’t afford.
Instead I tailored my pain in the hope of making Chris like me. Brave heroine remains dignified, although baffled by cruel boyfriend’s lies, that kind of thing.
‘What exactly did Luke say?’ Chris asked.
‘I’m so unlucky,’ I said, sidestepping his question. A new crop of tears arrived. ‘Nothing but bad things ever seem to happen to me. Do you know what I mean?’
Chris nodded, and his face was grim, in a way that made me nervous. Had I annoyed him?
At the moment I became convinced he knew I’d made it up about Luke lying, Chris suddenly pulled his chair closer to me. I jumped from both the abrupt movement and my own guilty fear. He’d moved so close his right thigh was wedged between both of mine. Practically up under my skirt, I noted with alarm. What was he doing?
I followed his movements with fear as he brought his hand to my face and lay his fingers along my jawbone. Was he going to hit me? For a second that stretched on for hours my face rested in the cradle of his hand. Or was he going to kiss me? When he moved his face nearer and it seemed that he was, I went into a mad panic about how we could do it without the tableful of brown jumpers seeing us. But he neither hit nor kissed me. Instead he moved his thumb along my cheek and rubbed away one of my tears. It was done efficiently but with strange tenderness.
‘Poor Rachel,’ he said, doing the other tear with his other thumb. There was no mistaking the compassion in his voice. Passion, even? Maybe…
‘Poor Rachel,’ he said again. But even as he did so, Misty O’Malley brushed past us and, to my great surprise, I heard her laugh. She wasn’t supposed to laugh. Everyone was supposed to feel sorry for me.
Poor me! Chris had said so.
She eyed me, an expression of excoriating scorn on her green-eyed little face. As I filled with rage and hard-done-by-ness, I looked at Chris, ready to take my cue from him. When he compressed his beautiful mouth, I eagerly waited for him to say ‘Shut up, Misty, you little bitch.’ But he didn’t, he said nothing at all. And neither, reluctantly, did I.
Misty swaggered away and, without meeting my eyes, Chris slowly and thoughtfully said ‘I’ve a suggestion to make.’
One involving me, him, no clothes and a condom? I wondered hopefully.
‘You mightn’t like it,’ he warned.
He didn’t want to wear a condom? OK, we could sort something else out.
‘I know you feel lousy now,’ he said carefully. ‘You’re hurt. But maybe you owe it to yourself to have a think about what this Luke said, because you might find that it isn’t actually a lie at all…’
I stared at him open-mouthed, while inside me a voice whimpered I thought you were my friend. He stared back, deepest sympathy in his eyes.
What was going on?
Just then Misty O’Malley marched back into the room and said ‘I need a big, strong man.’ As the stampede of middle-aged porkers began, like feeding-time in the pigsty, she held up her hand and said ‘But, in the absence of that, you’ll have to do.’ She reached out, gave me a special all-of-my-own smirk that no one else could see, and grabbed Chris by his hand.
He went! He stood up, brushed past my knees, sending a brief tingle through me, said ‘I’ll catch up with you later,’ then left.
I almost burst into tears again. I hated Misty O’Malley for her ability to make me feel like the village idiot. I hated Chris for choosing Misty over me. Worse again, I was mortified beyond belief that Chris had known I was lying about Luke. And what I really didn’t understand was why he was so nice about it.
But when the other inmates came to talk to me I realized I might as well be honest about what Luke had written. It wasn’t as if it was even that bad, I reminded myself.
First to arrive at my side was Mike who, like Chris, knew before I told him that a questionnaire had arrived.
‘S’obvious.’ He grinned, puffing out his barrel chest. ‘When you’ve been here three weeks you’ll know the signs. Anyway, what did me-laddo have to say for himself?’
‘He said that I sometimes took cocaine in the mornings before going to work.’ As I said it out loud for the first time, the impact of Luke’s treachery hit me with renewed force. Bitter rage at his betrayal of me welled up.
‘And did you?’ Mike asked.
The word ‘No’ hovered on my mouth, but I forced myself to swallow it.
‘Now and then,’ I said impatiently, annoyed at having to explain such things to this unsophisticated farmer.
‘It’s no big deal,’ I said hotly. ‘Lots of people do it in New York, it’s different from here, you see. Highly pressured. It’s no different from having a cup of coffee in the mornings. You wouldn’t understand.’