The Dark Part of Me by Belinda Burns Read Free Book Online Page B

around sharply. ‘Why? Where are you going?’ Like I didn’t have a life.
    ‘Just out. With friends.’
    ‘What friends?’
    I stared back at her, defiant. ‘You don’t know them.’
    ‘Don’t lie to me, Rosemary. I know you’re going over to Scott’s. He rang here this afternoon looking for you.’ My heart sang with those three little words –
‘looking for you’. She turned back to the wardrobe and started throwing suit after suit down on the bed. ‘I hope you’re not going to jump straight back into bed with him. I
hate to think where he’s been putting his thingo. Bet he’s picked up all sorts of venereal diseases overseas. I read in the paper that syphilis is making a comeback.’
    I squeezed my fists into tight balls and tried hard not to lose it. How dare she talk about Scott like that. I hated her with a passion. I hated the revolting apricot damask suit with gold
buttons and grid-iron shoulder pads she was holding against her small rounded frame. I willed Andy Bronson to be a small-dicked loser with a lisp, hairy earlobes and bad personal hygiene.
    ‘What do you think?’ She pivoted back and forth between the mirror and me.
    ‘Whatever. I don’t really care.’
    Her face collapsed like a crushed petal. She looked at me, her doe-eyes baleful with hurt like she was going to cry. ‘I thought you’d be happy for me. It’s not easy, you know.
After all this time.’ She put the apricot damask back in the wardrobe and picked up another one, sky-blue chiffon.
    My rage sludged into guilt. ‘I’m sorry, Mum, but you said yourself you’ve never been in love so how would you know anything about Scott and me?’
    She addressed her reflection in the mirror. ‘Face it, Rosemary, he treated you like dirt. You must have rocks in your head.’
    ‘You’ve got no idea.’
    ‘After all we’ve been through… ’
    I let her ramble on about all the stupid, psycho things I did when Scott broke up with me. Like the nights I slept in her bed because I couldn’t bear to sleep alone and the time I went
walking the streets in my PJs. I can’t believe now how mental I went. For months it went on. Thanks to Trish, I got better in the end. She toughened me up, got me into new things like tatts
and pot and not taking life too serious. But I never stopped thinking about Scott. I knew he’d be coming back, sooner or later.
    Mum put the sky-blue chiffon back in the wardrobe and held a purple paisley number with pearl buttons up against her.
    ‘How about this?’ she said.
    ‘It’s hideous,’ I said, and strode out of the room to take a shower.

    I washed my hair, shaved my bikini line in to a thin porno-strip (how Scott liked) and plucked the spider hairs from around my nipples. Later on, after everyone had left the
party and his parents had gone to bed, Scott would lead me into his bedroom, push me down on the bed and, not saying a word, undress me in the dark. He’d lick my breasts and tug at my nipples
and bite my neck, whispering how much he’d missed me, how much he still loved me. I positioned the stream of hard hot water up into me and waited for the shock, the little weakening in my
knees, then did it again. I turned off the taps. Fuck. No towel. I stuck my head out the door.
    ‘Mum! Can you bring me a towel?’
    Her heels clacked across the tiles. The linen cupboard squeaked open and closed. I stuck my arm out into the hallway, my body shielded behind the door. Mum didn’t understand that once you
got to a certain age it was no longer OK to see each other in the nude. A soft, lavender-fresh towel landed in my hand but then Mum was inside, decked out a pink gingham ensemble.
    ‘How about this?’ She twirled in the steam.
    I shook out the towel and wrapped it around me. Too late, she’d seen two things she wasn’t meant to see:
    My butterfly butt-tatt.
    My porno-strip bikini.
    For a moment I thought she would pull the towel off me for a closer look. I waited for the inevitable onslaught