The Gift of Girls Read Free

talent.
    I hesitated. I was on the banks of the Rubicon. Once I crossed the raging river there was no way back. This was my last chance to say no, to apologise, to rush off and find another taxi to take me home.
    Kate, another girl who finished at two, ran down the casino steps to where her boyfriend was waiting in his car. She gave me a wave as if in encouragement and, as I waved back, I stepped into the taxi’s dark interior. I was on autopilot. I wasn’t making my own decisions. They were being made by some power outside myself. I sat in the corner of the seat trembling and silent, my fingers laced together in my lap, like a prisoner in the dock.
    My companion introduced himself. His name was Sandy Cunningham. It was all very formal. Magdalena Wallace, I said. He patted my knee as you would pat a restless pony. It was all so weird and all so easy.
    There was nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with making it with a sixth-former from the local grammar school on the bottom field; heavens, the third-year girls were at it like rabbits. But Sandy was a man, an adult, and I really had no idea how I had come to be sitting there in a taxi with him and how I should behave now I was there.
    ‘You’re not nervous, are you?’ he asked me.
    I blushed. ‘No …’ I paused. ‘Yes, I am a bit.’
    He patted my knee again. ‘I can have the taxi drop me, then you can go home,’ he suggested. He looked into my eyes. My pulse was racing. There was a throbbing in my temples. A tightness across my chest. I felt like a reprieved prisoner and, now I was free, I wasn’t sure what to do with my freedom. I watched the shop lights race by, a few late-night couples wandering home, a drunk sitting in the gutter drinking from a bottle wrapped in a bag.
    There are in life few moments that are of the essence, direction-making or changing, few decisions that determine who we are and what we might become. This was one of those moments, one of those decisions. It was as if sitting in that taxi in high heels and fishnets there were two girls, the me I thought I was and the me I really am. Freud says we are all someone else underneath, and the real person underneath has different feelings. The feeling I had as the black cab slowed outside a hotel in Kensington was that if I didn’t take this opportunity to learn the system I would have an entire lifetime to look back and regret it.
    The taxi stopped.
    ‘We’re here,’ I said.
    ‘Remember, anything,’ he said.
    I nodded and bit my inflamed lip.
    The uniformed desk clerk gave Sandy that man-of-the-world sort of grin as we entered the soft light of the foyer. I felt like shouting, ‘I’ve never done this before,’ but that would have been childish and, anyway, the moment had passed. I was standing facing the row of three lifts watching the numbers rise and fall and trying to work out square roots as they shifted and changed.
    The silver doors in the middle lift pinged and, as they whispered open, it felt as if a rock were being rolled away from the mouth of a cave. It was like the beginning of an adventure. Once I entered the cave I would be setting out on a journey.
    I paused. Like the two girls I had imagined in the taxi, I was one person outside the lift. I would be another if I entered.
    ‘Shall we?’ he said.
    As the lift was about to close, Sandy put his arm in the space. The doors shuddered impatiently, then opened again. There was still time to make an excuse and leave, but dire straits call for desperate measures. Sandy Cunningham knew how to beat the system and I entered the mirrored cubicle thirsting for knowledge. He pressed 7: the fourth prime number; VII in Roman numerals; the Hindus invented it and the Arabs shaped it. There was a girl at school who had the number tattooed on her bottom after sleeping with seven boys in three days at Glastonbury during the rock festival. Seven is said to be a lucky number and my stomach lurched as we glided through the void, our reflections