Candy Read Free Page A

Sheesh, I dunno, what am I like, eh? What an idiot…
    I was just starting to practice the look when a young woman came up and handed me a £1 coin.
    “Thanks,” I said.
    She smiled and pointed across the room. “There’s another one over there—it went under that table.”
    “Right,” I said, looking anxiously at the black guys sitting at the table—shaved heads, hammered eyes, skullcaps. One of them turned his head and gave me a look that froze my blood. “Uh…yeah, thanks,” I told the woman. “I’ll probably get it later.”
    She shrugged and went back to the line. I looked down at the floor. I could feel the black guys watching me, and I could feel my face getting hotter and hotter, and I could feel the sweat seeping out from under my hat—and then someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You want me to get it for you?”
    I was too flustered to recognize the voice at first. It was just another voice, just another Good Samaritan sticking their nose in, making things worse. I sighed to myself and turned around, getting ready to say thanks-but-no-thanks, but when I saw who it was, the words disappeared from my head.
    Everything disappeared.
    It was the girl, of course. The girl from the station. The girl with the smile and the skin and the eyes…
    “They’re not as bad as they look,” she said.
    I tried to say who? but my mouth had gone numb. All I could do was pout my lips and look stupid.
    The girl smiled. “Those guys at the table…they’re not as scary as they look. They won’t mind you getting your quid back.”
    “Oh,” I said.
    She looked at me.
    I could feel myself drowning in her eyes.
    Her head shook with a little laugh, then she turned away and walked across to the table where the black guys were sitting. They looked up as she approached, and she raised her hand and said something to one of them. He shrugged his shoulders and showed his palms, then smiled and said something back. She laughed, touched his arm, then bent down and picked up the £1 coin from under thetable. As she stooped down, her skirt rode up, and the guys at the table leaned across to get a better look. One of them closed his eyes and shook his head, as if it was just too much to take.
    The girl straightened up, nodded at the black guys, then turned around and came back to me.
    “There you go,” she said, passing me the coin.
    “Thanks,” I told her. “You didn’t have to…”
    “No problem.”
    “I was just…I was going to…”
    She touched my arm and looked behind me. “You’re next.”
    “What?”
    She nodded at the counter. “You’re next. They’re waiting for you.”
    I looked around. I was standing at the counter. Somehow I’d managed to get to the front of the line. A lanky kid with floppy hair was standing behind the register, looking expectantly at me.
    “Help you?” he said.
    “Yeah…sorry. I’d like uh…I’ll have…um…” I was looking up at the menu board again, not seeing anything, just looking for the sake of looking, because I didn’t know where else to look and I needed time to think, to find the courage to say what I wanted to say. I must have stood there for a thousand years, looking up at that menu board, staring blindly at the senseless blur of pictures and words, my heart ticking away like a frantic clock, pumping blood and oxygen into my muscles, my cells, my nerves…heightening my senses. It was a really weird feeling. My mind was racing, but I couldn’t think. I could see everything, every dot and every movement, butnone of it made any sense. The silence inside me was deafening.
    In the end, I took a deep breath, swallowed hard, emptied my mind, and turned to the girl.
    “Would you like something to eat?” I asked her.
    She smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.”
    We found a table by the window, cleared off all the rubbish, and sat down. I’d gotten myself the usual, and the girl had gone for a chocolate doughnut with an extra-large Coke and tons of ice. I