Marion and John went and sat in the mouse bumper cars and made noises like they were crashing into each other. Then Marion felt something scuttle over her foot. When she looked down she saw a real mouse, trapped in the footwell of the bumper car. Shrieking, she jumped out.
John laughed and then spent ten minutes trying to kill the mouse by throwing stones at it while the poor little thing raced around in a panic. Marion thought that was funny; a real live mouse trapped inside a pretend one. John made her throw stones too, but she didn’t really want to hurt it, so she missed on purpose and was glad when it finally found a way out through a hole in the metal shell.
When the sun disappeared behind a mountain of twisted metal, they went back to look for Dad. The cabin was locked, and the parking lot empty. Together they wandered around the dump.
“What’re we going to do?” Marion asked her brother. She wanted to take hold of his hand but knew that would make him angry.
“We’ll just wait here, stupid. Why, are you scared or something?”
“No, just hungry. Do you think it’s time for dinner yet?”
“You’re going to have to wait a bit, fatso.”
John went off to find a place to go to the toilet, leaving Marion alone. Everything seemed spookier in the falling light. The octopus became a giant hand grabbing at the sky, loose bits of metal creaked in the wind, and the skeletons sitting in the ghost train glowed eerily.
He seemed to be gone for an age. She called out. “John, what’re you doing?”
Then her brother jumped out from behind a fake tombstone and shouted “Boo!” right in her face.
Marion screamed and stumbled away from him. She lost her balance, falling backwards onto a pile of scrap, then felt something sharp stick into her hand. When she got up, the palm was wet with blood.
“You stupid idiot, why did you have to do that?”
“It wasn’t my fault,” she protested. “You jumped right out at me.”
Then John did something weird; he grabbed her wrist and licked the cut. His tongue felt rough and warm and in a funny sort of way she liked it.
“You have to do that to stop it going bad. If that happened, they’d have to take off your whole arm.”
He gave her a handkerchief to wrap round the cut. Miraculously this treatment stopped the bleeding.
“How did you know to do that?” asked Marion.
“I read a book about survival skills,” said John dismissively. “Just don’t tell Dad.”
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t have to open your fat mouth about every damn thing, do you?” he yelled.
When they saw the white glare of the Bentley’s headlamps staring at them through the gates, Marion nearly burst with relief. They heard Sally laughing as she struggled with the padlock.
On the way home Dad stopped at Murphy’s chip shop and bought them a fish supper each. Being allowed to eat on the backseat of the car made the two of them feel like kings—Dad normally had a fit if Marion even tried to nibble so much as a fruit gum on that sacred calfskin upholstery. While stuffing lumps of delicious fried potato into her mouth Marion saw something glint in the darkness. Sliding fingers greasy with chip fat down the back of the seat, she pulled out Sally’s silver hair bobble, a few strands of black hair still attached. She was about to remark on her find, then remembered John’s words about not opening her “fat mouth about every damn thing” and slipped the bobble around her wrist before carrying on eating.
A few months later, Dad gave Sally a job at the warehouse. She swapped her jeans and work boots for miniskirts with long rainbow-colored socks and had her long hair cut in a Prince Valiant bob that cunningly hid the birthmark.
? ? ?
DAD’S OFFICE ABOVE the warehouse was filled with the dry, pleasant smells of new cloth and freshly sharpened pencils. Through the windows you could look down at workmen moving giant rolls of fabric below. While Dad talked to clients on the big black telephone, twisting his fingers through its long curly cord, Marion would sit in a corner, turning the floppy pages of sample books, flooding her mind with colors and patterns.
Regatta Stripe made her think of aristocrats drinking champagne on boats with pure white sails; Bermuda Mirage—a man bleeding to death on a sandy beach; Turquoise Duchess—an aging yet beautiful woman putting on diamonds to meet her young lover.
Sally shared the office with Dad, and as far as Marion could tell, she did nothing all day but read fashion magazines and apply cherry-scented lip gloss that came from a small bottle with a roller at the end.
When Marion grew bored of the sample books, Sally would lend her magazines. They had titles like Girl Trend, Jacey, and Modern Chic and were far more exciting than the fabric sample books. Even the adverts fascinated Marion. Her favorite was for deodorant. In the picture a girl in a white dress rode a horse along a country lane, with a wistful expression on her face. Marion longed to be that girl. The horse would be called Jester and she would ride him every day to visit her best friend, Anna, who was slowly and beautifully dying of consumption.
Girls wrote to the problem pages wanting to know if their breasts were normally shaped or if they could get pregnant by sitting on their boyfriends’ laps; there were detailed diagrams of female parts that showed you how to put in a tampon properly and where pubic hair was meant to grow on the female body. To Marion the business of becoming a grown-up woman seemed terrifyingly messy and she wished her body could be as clean and changeless as a plastic doll’s.
Sitting on a floppy book of damask swatches, she studied articles about how to make your eyes look bigger by putting a darker color in the socket and highlighter on the lid, then curling your lashes with tiny little tongs. She learned that vertical stripes made you look thinner, and girls with short necks and round faces ought to wear their hair long and straight to give the illusion of length. Marion believed if she followed all these rules to the letter, then she’d be just like Sally.
The men in the warehouse were always whistling at Sally. She didn’t seem to mind, but Dad got furious when he caught them doing it. He would tell them they were a “bunch of uncouth buggers,” then threaten to fire the lot of them and see how they liked that. John said Sally was a flirt and knew how to twist men around her little finger. He pretended that he didn’t like her, but Marion knew he’d stolen one of her woolen mittens and kept it hidden in his sock drawer.
After Sally had been working at the warehouse for a few years, she started dating a sales rep called Owen. Dad didn’t like his secretary going out with this charming Welshman, who visited the warehouse extolling the virtues of stain-resistant velour. He claimed it was “unprofessional.”