Underneath the shocking pink lipstick and the tasseled leather jacket, Christelle was a practical, get-things-done type — the kind of friend we will all be thankful for at some point in our lives. She took more care of me than I took of myself. Each morning during our bus ride she would succeed in mapping some order onto the frizzled mess of my hair. “Promise me,” she would say, drawing a wet finger across my hairline, “that you’ll go to the hairdresser’s this weekend. It’s out of control, baby. I don’t think I can rescue it any longer.” But she always did rescue it, somehow.
She took me shopping and helped throw out my old clothes. She lent me tapes and took me to the only café in our quiet provincial town where we could see live, loud rock bands. Another of her bright ideas was to toughen me up.
I had been a rather delicate, sensitive child. I was terrified of many things, especially germs. I saw germs bristling everywhere: on toilet seats, on the rims of drinking glasses, and on people themselves — their fingers, lips, ears, eyelashes. Sometimes I couldn’t stand to look at anyone. I saw only filth.
As a result, I had always been a target for bullies and wind-up merchants. At school, gooey substances found their way onto my chair, dead insects into my pencilcase. Whenever I fell victim to one of these pranks, I would shriek and shriek, but my body, although it trembled, refused to move at all. I heard nothing but my own terror. The teacher would approach in silence, stare down at me, move her lips, but it was all useless: I would carry on screaming. When medication was proposed, my mother would not allow it: the fault, she said, lay with all the spiteful children in my class.
I did get better with time, but as I began to rationalize the old dangers, new ones emerged. Christelle, for example, had become obsessed with crime. At first she took her stories from the estate where she lived, but soon she was poring over lurid articles in the papers: muggings, beatings, date-rapes, domestic abuse. “You don’t understand what it’s like out in the real world,” she warned me. “You’ve got to buy a whistle. And get yourself down to the club.”
But I was reluctant. Taking up judo had not made Christelle feel safer in the world: she'd simply discovered new ways she might be attacked. On her lapel, next to the Led Zep badge, she took to wearing a white ribbon, the edges roughly hashed away. One morning while we were on the bus, she pinned the ribbon on me, onto a bleached denim jacket she’d persuaded me to buy. Thinking that the pin had pierced my skin, I screwed up my eyes and began to scream. But a hand ran through my ever-thickening hair. “May this ribbon keep you from all harm,” I heard Christelle whisper. “Though you’d still be better off coming down to the club.”
I showed up at the club, I think, to spite her. I knew I would be hopeless at judo: I was small, slight and out of shape, hopelessly cumbersome, and hadn’t an ounce of aggression in me. I felt like a clown in the oversized outfit I was made to wear. When Christelle tied up my hair, I made a point of loosening it again.
I felt self-conscious from the beginning, when the instructor started rolling around on the mat, encouraging me to do the same.
“You need to learn how to break a fall,” he said. “It’s how all of us began.”
But everyone was watching me and I couldn’t move. I curled up in a ball, with my hands over my head, desperately trying to roll forward. My feet would not leave the ground. I don’t know how long I stayed there in that ridiculous position: there was no sound. I certainly don’t remember Christelle lifting me onto her shoulder and carrying me out through the gym doors. I do remember being dumped onto the sidewalk, though: it was raining, and Christelle was screaming at me. “If you’re still out here when some guy draws up and bundles you into a car, and then he rapes you really viciously before drenching you in acid and setting fire to your skin and that stupid fuzzball on your head, please remember this, Pippa: it’s your own fucking pathetic fault. Not anyone else’s. We tried.”
I lay for a while on the wet sidewalk. A few cars sizzled past without noticing me. Gradually the feeling returned to my body, but my mind was giddy with rage and thoughts of vengeance. In these thoughts, my arm, infused with righteous anger, taut like a bowstring, swept forward, the clenched fist flowering open, the palm flattening and the fingers spiny, striking Christelle in the jaw: a thread of silver spittle gushed out, the blonde tints in her hair arrowing across her face, sweeping her backwards, pulling her down.
I stormed through the gym doors, throwing the damp kimono off my shoulders. I saw Christelle immediately, kneeling on the mat, facing me, her eyebrows raised. All around us there was a hullabaloo and I ran at her, drawing back my right arm. I read her lips — “Leave her” — and all of a sudden her head disappeared. As I lunged forward I felt a dull pain in my forearm, and another between my legs. Then I was whistling through the air, the ground approaching at an odd angle. With a thud I landed on my head.
Before I’d had time to move, my arm was being heaved out of its socket, and there were legs wrapped around my neck. I started to cry. It was a big, regretful cry: flushing out all the bitterness and envy that had been poisoning me since Christelle joined the very club where I now found myself hurting, sobbing, and crumpled in a miserable heap, wearing a wet t-shirt and a pair of Charlie Chaplin trousers.
“Ude gatame,” said the instructor as Christelle let my arm go. “Nice.”
Humiliating as it was, I would have been perfectly happy to stay down there on the mat. For one thing, I hurt all over. But worse, there were several pairs of eyes watching me, and I didn’t want to stimulate them too much by moving. If I lay still for long enough perhaps they would mistake me for a sarcophagus or one of those silhouette drawings at a murder scene. They would get bored, turn away, switch off the lights, go home. I would be alone in this hall with its strange acoustics and faintly mucky smell. I could pull my trousers back up to my waist without anybody noticing.
But I wasn’t to be allowed such a discreet escape. Something was tugging on my hair. I looked up and saw a long blue trouser leg stretching upwards into the distance. I followed it as one follows the trunk of a sequoia up into the sky; I could make out Christelle’s pink lips and, beyond that, a sleeve, a hand, a finger pointing up, up, ever up.
The soft sole of a foot glided onto my forehead.
“Point taken,” I said breathlessly from somewhere inside her trouser ankle, “about self-defense. I submit.”
She took her dirty foot off my face. I got up.
I could not bring myself to take the bus the next morning, or the morning after that. I stayed at home reading novels about luckless maidens and dashing, unreliable suitors. In the evening there was a knock at the front door. My roommate answered. When I heard the visitor’s voice, I got out of bed and locked the door of my room.
“Pippa,” my roommate shouted. “Pippa!”
Buckled boots rattled along the corridor; there was a pause and a splutter and a gentle tap at my door. My heart was pounding.
“Pippa, baby,” said Christelle in a low voice. “Are you in there?”
I waited a while. “No.”
“We’ve got things to talk about.”
“You hurt me.”
“Just let me in.”
“You hurt me!”
“Open the door.”
She was standing in the doorway wearing a long black trenchcoat I hadn’t seen before. Various bottles were poking out of its numerous pockets. She held a cigarette in one hand, a pair of scissors and some pins in the other. She had brushed all her hair up into a point like a church spire; it looked as though she had been hanging upside-down above a golden lake.
“First things first, baby,” she said, looking me in the eye. “You need a haircut.”
