“Tell them you’re eighteen, and you’re a model.” He looked at me lovingly and smiled as he straightened my scarf a little and tucked a stray wisp of hair behind my ear.
“Oh, okay.”
But I wasn’t eighteen, and I wasn’t a model. Why did I have to lie?
I was a nobody sixteen-year-old, a school dropout who smoked cigarettes and weed, who drank cheap cider, someone who’d just survived child molestation, bullying, gender-based violence, and a suicide attempt. I wasn’t anybody special. I lived alone in a single room above a video-rental library and fish-n-chip shop on ‘Molly Way’.
…
Mollison Way – or Molly Way as we called it – was an endlessly long road. Originally a runway belonging to the aerospace factory and flight school that were there before residential development and a shopping arcade took over, it was named in honour of two pilots, Jim and Amy Mollison. Amy had learned to fly here and had gone on to break several long-distance aviation records in the 1930s, including becoming the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia.
I wondered what Amy would have thought of this pathetic ‘runaway’, as I believed I was, living where Amy had flown once upon a time. She had been fearless, a pioneer, proof that women can do anything. I couldn’t conceive of doing anything like that. I had only to survive.
I’d manned the video library some afternoons during the school summer holidays to earn a little extra cash. In those days, there was no internet and certainly no streaming. A movie on demand meant getting dressed, walking or driving to the video library, and renting a video cassette to play at home on the Video Cassette Recorder (VCR). Thankfully, while I’d been working at the shop, the owner, my boss, mentioned he had a room in the flat upstairs to rent for £50 per week, bills included. He said no contract, no security deposit, or rent in advance were needed as he knew and trusted me. He knew I really needed it and said I could stay there for as little or as long as I needed. I told him that once I could afford it, I’d take it. He didn’t need a full-time employee at the video shop, so to move out of my parents’ house, I needed a proper job.
Every year, from October onwards, during the run-up to Christmas, the catalogue store on the High Street, Argos, hired bonus seasonal staff in the form of high-schoolers. I jumped at the opportunity. Argos paid me ‘teen’ rates, not ‘person with rent to pay and food to buy’ rates, and it was a temporary contract, just until the end of the year. But it didn’t matter to me. I was desperate to move. As long as I had enough to cover my rent for a few weeks, I’d somehow figure out the rest.
At the end of December, the high schoolers I worked with went back to their cushy lives of school, responsible adults, and hot dinners on the table. But I had none of that. I had to figure out a way to keep going. Luckily for me, Argos thought I was competent enough and kept me on as part-time staff. It meant I had time to look for a full-time job, but the pay wasn’t enough to survive.
The whole time I worked at Argos, I skipped breakfast and bought a McDonald’s ‘Happy Meal’ for lunch (I got it without the toy, so it was cheaper, although I reeeeally wanted the toy. They were promoting the Disney animated movie, 101 Dalmatians, and the little Dalmatians were so cute! I think I did get one once. Anyway, I digress… !) and dinner was usually a Pot Noodle. Sometimes the chippy downstairs gave me free chips at the end of the night, the ones that had been sitting in the fryer that nobody was going to eat anyway. I’d always been tall and slim, but now I weighed only around 40 kilos. I was underweight and malnourished.
…
But to him…
…I guess I looked like a model (makeup did wonders for me), and there I was at a swanky bar in London’s famous West End where a single drink cost more than I spent in three days on food, and with the most gorgeous man I’d seen in my life – a privately educated professional, so handsome, suave and sophisticated, about to meet his friends and their girlfriends for the first time.
And how on Earth did I end up there?!
Well, on Friday nights, a particular bar in Park Royal played the kind of music I LOVED: Old skool RnB, hip hop and swing. Nina, a friend I had made who’d also left home and was living in a YWCA hostel, and I would make sure we had £1 saved up at the end of each week to pay the entry charge. Then we’d jump the train barriers at the station when no one was looking, because we had no money for train fare. We were lucky not to get caught. And so, every Friday, we made it to Park Royal ready to dance the night away.
There were always people and new friends around to buy us drinks and give us a ride home at the end of the night. We weren’t so bothered about picking up any love interests, though; Nina and I went there to DANCE. It’s what I loved more than anything: downing some drinks, hearing music that was impossible to sit still to, and losing myself and my inhibitions on the dance floor. For me, there wasn’t a better high than that. High heels, dresses, and miniskirts, as the other girls wore, were a hindrance. I always wore a crop top, baggy jeans worn off my hips, and a pair of trainers so I could be really comfortable and dance my little heart out.
It was on one of these Friday nights that I caught the eye of someone. He wasn’t dancing. He was watching. Watching and smiling, an enigmatic expression played on his handsome, exotic features. He didn’t look or dress like the regular boring boys that usually tried to chat me up. I was intrigued. Cradling a drink in one hand, with a flick of his index finger, he beckoned me over. Cocky move, but it worked.
Maanav was the knight in shining armour any girl could dream of. He was 24, well-spoken, polite, chivalrous and witty in his banter. He told me he’d just gotten back from celebrating New Year’s Eve in New York and gave me his business card. I saw he worked in research for a Television company in London’s West End. We had a fun night of talking, drinking, dancing and laughing. I told him honestly how old I was. It didn’t faze him. At one point, while on the dance floor, Maanav picked me up, wrapped my legs around his waist and kissed me. My head was dizzy with all the cocktails he’d bought me and the rush of the music and being held by him. It was a feeling of ecstasy. At the end of the night, Maanav and his friend dropped Nina and me back to Molly Way in the friend’s car. Maanav insisted I call him the next day.
I fell asleep thinking of him and woke up dreaming of him.
I didn’t have a phone, but I knew a trick with the Molly Way payphone on the street. You had to put in a pound coin and dial the number and talk as usual, but before the money ran out, you had to press *, a code, and then #. Then, when you hung up, the coin would be automatically returned below. Like this, I could make as many free phone calls as I liked.
And so, courtesy of British Telecom (thank you very much), I called Maanav the next morning. After downing a litre of water and a couple of paracetamols (he said, because I’d made him keep up with me at the bar the night before), he came to pick me up to take me out for a bite to eat the same afternoon… and the next day, and the next day, and the next. Lunches or dinners every day. We went out dancing again, too, and I asked Maanav if Nina could come, but he said he didn’t like her hanging around me, so, no, she couldn’t come, and it would be better if I were not friends with her at all.
Nina and I lost touch after that, and Maanav became my everything.
He said he loved to watch me eat. And boy, did I eat. I loved the crêpes and Mississippi Mud Pie in Hampstead Heath, and my favourite was the cannelloni at Pizza Express. I could eat the whole thing myself, plus starters and a cheesecake, and a slice of his pizza, naturally, and, of course, a glass or two of wine. The conversation flowed, and there was never an awkward moment. I told him all about what had happened in my life, about my parents, the violence, the suicide attempt, my hospitalisation, even my previous intimate partners and why I lived where I did. Maanav listened to it all. There wasn’t a single thing he didn’t know about me.
Inevitably, within the first week, I fell deeply in love with him, just as much as the cannelloni, well, alright, a little more than the cannelloni (although I really loved the cannelloni). And it was absolutely that head-over-heels, sixteen-year-old, all-consuming, nothing else exists in the world kind of love. I thought of nothing but him every waking moment, and at night, my dreams were filled with him.
I remember he’d given me some photographs of himself, and I’d stuck them onto the wall next to my bed and surrounded them with little hearts and his name that I’d cut out from pink paper. I’d kiss his photos goodnight, I’d kiss them good morning. At the end of our first glorious week together, when Maanav didn’t have work the next day, he slept over in my little room in my single bed with me, and we cuddled and slept in each other’s arms all night. He was patient with me, and we didn’t get intimate at the start of our relationship.
It was pure, it was perfect, it was beautiful… and then I saw where he lived for the first time, and I tried to break up with him.
(Originally published on os.me on April 20, 2021)