My Lies, Your Lies - Susan Lewis Page 0,37
into my plimsolls and short socks and I’ll pretend I didn’t have time to go back to the dorm to put on my uniform.
It’s the night before my private lesson and Sir has come into the boarders’ recreation hall where most of us fifth formers, after finishing an hour of prep, are playing our records and dancing. (First-to-fourth-year girls have already gone to bed and the sixth formers are either in their cubicles or their common room.)
‘Bend Me Shape Me’ is on the turntable and I’m not sure whether I’m relieved or sorry that he didn’t come in before while we were playing ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’. We’d all be put in detention if anyone heard us playing this record so it’s quite scratched because of how often we have to whisk it off and turn it over to ‘Ruby Tuesday’.
I think Sir would have been embarrassed if he’d walked in on us dancing to that, but I don’t think he’d have given us detentions.
He’s blushing now because a couple of the girls are gyrating up to him and trying to get him to join in to ‘Bend Me Shape Me’. I can tell he thinks they’re juvenile and wishes they’d leave him alone.
‘Come on, Sir, we know you can dance, Sir.’
I carry on as if I don’t know he’s there, jerking my arms and legs to the beat, writhing my hips and throwing out my hair. I think of him bending and shaping me however he wants me, and me telling him that as long as he loves me … A hand touches my shoulder. As I turn around I’m singing ‘… it’s all right.’ And then I can’t find my words because I hadn’t realized it was him.
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ he says in my ear. The music is loud and some girls are singing along at the tops of their voices. That could be one reason he’s so close to me …
My heart is pounding like the drum in the song and I can feel certain eyes on us. Eyes that belong to jealous and gossipy girls who’d kill to have Sir talk to them.
His hand is still on my shoulder and he’s leaning in to me again. He says, ‘I’m afraid I have to cancel our lesson tomorrow,’ and when I realize what he’s said I want to shout No! You can’t. I won’t let you. I see myself in my hockey skirt, my shirt open, his eyes on my skin, his hand moving on my thigh … It all flashes in front of me and I realize everyone’s looking at us. There’s fire in my cheeks, and shaking in my hands.
He says something else. I don’t catch it so he says it again, softly and very close to my ear. ‘Better run girl,’ and only as he walks away do I realize it’s a line from the song ‘Young Girl’.
CHAPTER NINE
Joely had finished ghosting her first pages for Freda’s memoir, pages that had contained no sex, explicit or otherwise. In fact, to Joely’s mind, they didn’t contain very much at all. Apart, she supposed, from a further glimpse into young Freda’s character, and the blurring of lines around who was the real seducer.
Perhaps there was more there than she was allowing for, something more subtle that would gain its proper significance the further into the memoir they went. As it was, having been given so little information during their discussion it hadn’t taken Joely more than a day to produce the few paragraphs she’d felt it warranted. After, she’d gone back over them several times, comparing them with Freda’s opening chapters to check that the style was similar enough for Freda to deem them worthy of use as a first draft. (It was Joely’s secret hope that Freda would find them so convincing that she’d feel confident enough to let them pass as her own work.)
In the end, having decided that her efforts portrayed young Freda in the light her older counterpart had intended – vain and arrogant, certainly na?ve but perhaps now there was the suggestion of her being as much a victim as a predator – she’d handed over the pages for inspection (feeling a little apprehensive she had to admit given how keen she was to impress).
Freda had thanked her politely, said she would read with interest and had promptly taken herself off to her room.
Twenty-four hours later she was still there.
They couldn’t be that bad, surely.
‘Mrs D won’t be joining you