Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls by Danielle Wood Read Free Book Online Page A

into gooseflesh. In fact, not the kind of shiver I’d ever shivered before. It moved through my body, seeming to inject my bloodstream with some kind of magical cordial as it went. I was flooded with warmth, first in my pelvis, then in my stomach, and then somewhere dangerously close to my heart. I was sure that if I looked down at my wrists in the darkness, I would be able to see my veins picked out in pulsing blue light. What the hell was that ? I wondered.
    I thought that I could successfully conceal these newfound pleasures beneath winter clothes and a girlish manner. But now I suspect that those little blue lights, which began to pulse whenever I so much as thought of Julian, were visible to others in the small margin of flesh between my cuffs and the heels of my hands, and that they probably showed at the throat, too.
    One morning during those days of getting to know Julian, I stood in the shower deciding that I had always accepted too readily the wisdom of Geoffrey Smethurst.
    ‘I mean, you’re cute , but you’ll never be exactly sexy ,’ he’d told me once on the bus on the way home, as he compared me with our exquisite, buxom, part-Brazilian drama teacher.
    Julian thought I was sexy. He’d told me so. Although I doubted that I would share this with Geoffrey. If we ended up at university together, I would just give him the odd superior smile.
    The shower was of the pathetic, drizzly English kind, in which you don’t exactly have to run around in order to get wet, but you do have to alternate your body parts under the water in order to stay mostly warm. I was doing this, and practising my superior smile, when I heard the bathroom door open. I knew that Judy would already be at the markets, buying the day’s provisions. Larry, I thought, would have left to go shooting with his brother. But here was the shape of him, including the peak of his hunting cap, visible through the thin membrane of the shower curtain. I stood very still, feeling triply naked, and soon I was cold everywhere.
    ‘Where are you going today?’ he asked.
    ‘Actually, I wasn’t planning to go anywhere,’ I said, the arms I wrapped around my chest making me feel no less exposed.
    ‘You’re not going out?’
    I measured in my mind the metres between the end of the shower curtain and a big green towel hanging on its rack on the wall.
    ‘No, no, just staying around here,’ I said, trying to sound normal, and wondering why this seemed as if it were an important thing to do.
    For what seemed like a long time he stood there, although I couldn’t hear anything except water trickling around my ears, not even the sound of him breathing.
    Christmas wasn’t so much white as crystalline. Stretched across the narrow window of my bedroom at Larry and Judy’s house was a spider’s web threaded with sparkling beads of ice, and through it I could see the lawn frozen into spikes. Downstairs, there was a single, lonely present under the potted Christmas tree on the sideboard. It was for me.
    ‘Merry Christmas,’ said Judy, as I unwrapped the gift of a pair of lamb’s wool slippers. Guiltily. I was almost certain that she didn’t know about the gift I’d already received, the one I’d found at the end of my bed when I’d woken: a three-pack of Marks & Spencer underpants (white, embroidered, dainty) that wasn’t wrapped, but had a gift tag that read ‘FROM SANTA’ in Larry’s uptight capital letters. He had been in my room when I was asleep. Ick. I bundled the knickers into a discreet compartment of my suitcase in the hope that out of sight would soon transpose into out of mind.
    Lunch, held in the formal dining room and attended by Judy’s parents and Larry’s aged mother, involved a Royal Worcester dinner service, two pheasants with chestnut stuffing, and an entire vegetable patch roasted to perfection.
    ‘You are so lucky, Lawrence,’ said his mother from beneath her orange crepe-paper hat. ‘Judy is the most superb cook.’
    ‘Why