Selected Stories

Just coffee, she said when he offered her a burger, and he said he’d bring it to her. Her father had gone when he found out her mother was going with Holby. Her mother said she didn’t care, but six months later she made Holby marry her, because she’d been caught, she maintained, having not been married to Jasmin’s father.

‘I like a McDonald’s,’ the man said, coming with the coffee.

He was smiling again, and she wondered if he had smiled all the time at the counter. She didn’t know his name. Three weeks ago she first heard his voice on the chat line. ‘I’m Jasmin,’ she’d said, expecting him to say his name also, but he hadn’t.

‘I could nearly tell your age,’ he said now. ‘From talking to you I nearly could.’

‘Sixteen.’

‘I thought sixteen.’

They sat at the counter that ran along the window. People on the pavement outside were in a hurry, jostling one another, no cars or buses allowed in this street.

‘You’re pretty,’ he said. ‘You’re pretty, Jasmin.’

She wasn’t really. She couldn’t be called pretty, but he said it anyway, and he wondered if there was a similar flattery he would particularly enjoy himself. While they watched the people on the street he thought about that, imagining the baby voice in which she gabbled her words saying something like he knew his way around, or saying he had an easy way with him.

‘You think I’d be younger?’ he asked her.

‘Yeah, maybe.’ She gave a little shrug, her thin shoulders jerking rapidly up and down. The blue anorak she wore wasn’t grubby but had a faded, washed-out look. Other girls would have thrown it away.

‘I like your charm,’ he said, and pointed because she didn’t know he meant the brooch that was pinned to the flimsy pink material of her dress. Her chest was flat and he could have said he liked that too because it was the truth. But the truth didn’t always do, as he had long ago learned, and he smiled instead. Her bare, pale legs were like twigs stripped of their bark and he remembered how he used to do that, long ago too. Her shoes were pinkish, high-heeled.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said, referring to her brooch. She shrugged in the same jerky way again, a spasm it seemed almost, although he knew it wasn’t. ‘A fish,’ she said. ‘It’s meant to be a fish.’

‘It’s beautiful, Jasmin.’

‘Holby gave it to me.’

‘Who’s Holby then?’

‘My mother got married to him.’

‘Your father, is this?’

‘Bloody not.’

He smiled. In one of their conversations he’d asked her if she was pretty and she’d said maybe and he’d guessed she wasn’t from the way she’d said it. They went in for fantasy, they put things on. Well, everyone did, of course.

‘Same age as you, Jasmin – you think that when we talked? What age you think?’

‘You didn’t sound a kid,’ she said.

She had a stud in one side of her nose and a little coil pierced into the edge of one ear. He wondered if she had something in her belly-button and wanted to ask her but knew not to. He wanted to close his eyes and think about a gleam of something nestling there, but he smiled instead. Her hair was lank, no frizziness left in it, brightened with a colouring.

‘You take trouble,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d be the kind. I could tell you’d take trouble with yourself.’

Again there was the shrug. She held the paper coffee mug between her hands as if for warmth. She asked him if he was in work and he said yes, the law.

‘The law? With the police?’ She looked around, an agitated movement, her eyes alarmed. He could take her hand, he thought, a natural thing to do, but he resisted that too.

‘The courts,’ he said. ‘If there’s a dispute, if there’s trouble I have to put a case. No, not the police, nothing to do with the police.’

She nodded, unease draining away.

‘You going to be a nurse, Jasmin? Caring for people? I see you caring for people, Jasmin.’

When they asked, he always said the courts. And usually he said he could see them caring for people.

The Gold Mine was a place he knew and they went there to play the fruit machines. He always won, he said, but today he didn’t. He didn’t mind that. He didn’t raise the roof like Giggs did when his money went for nothing. He didn’t say the whole thing was fixed. Good days, bad days, was all he said.

‘No, you take it,’ he said when she had to explain she hadn’t any money, and in the end she took the two-pound coin he gave to where they broke it down for her. He picked up a necklace for her with the grab, guiding the grab skilfully, knowing when to open the metal teeth and knowing not to be in a hurry to close them, to wait until he was certain. He’d cleared out everything there was on offer once, he said – sweets, jewellery, dice, three packs of cards, two penknives, the dancing doll, a Minnie Mouse, ornaments. He swivelled the crane about when he got the necklace for her, asking her what she wanted next, but this time the teeth closed an instant too soon and the bangle he’d gone after moved only slightly and then slipped back. They spent an hour in the Gold Mine.