Heading Inland by Nicola Barker

Author:Nicola Barker [Barker, Nicola]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2011-10-27T06:00:00+00:00

Popping Corn

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘If I had her breasts I’d become a topless model or a cocktail waitress, or I’d go to Saint-Tropez and lie on the beach all day.’

‘And get cancer.’

Mandy was sitting on the bus with her mother. They had met up outside the gym. Her mother finished work fifteen minutes before the end of Mandy’s aerobics class. She waited outside by the bus stop, frustratedly watching the buses go by. Sometimes she waited for twenty minutes, occasionally longer. The gym was in Deptford.

‘Breasts are for milk,’ her mother said. ‘You get pregnant, they fill up, you squirt it out. Like a cow.’

I wonder if it’s erotic, Mandy thought, feeding babies.

Her mother added, ‘When I had you my nipples cracked. They were chapped and they bled. Every time you sucked on them it felt like I’d shut them in a suitcase.’

Mandy imagined this. Breasts bare, suitcase open, packing for holiday, breasts jut forward, suitcase accidentally slams shut. Whap! Chop! Nipples sliced neatly off. Inside the dark suitcase; two soft, pink jellytots.

Then she remembered Imogen’s breasts. She had seen them in the showers, and then after, when Imogen patted them dry on a pale blue towel, 36C. Small tan nipples. No unsightly blemishes or stretch marks. She didn’t wear a bra! No! Not even in the class! Only a tight, high-cut leotard like the one Jamie Lee Curtis wore in Perfect.

By rights they should be down by her knees, Mandy thought, and secretly, in the back of her mind, I wish they were!

But the truth of it was this: Imogen could easily have no inkling of how fantastic her breasts were. She probably wished they were smaller, or that her nipples were a different shade.

I hope she thinks that, Mandy thought, imagining how it would be to carry two breasts like those around – light, soft trophies.

Mandy’s own breasts were much too heavy and much too round. She wore a bra to exercise in, a terrible contraption like the kind of restraining garment people were strapped up in at mental hospitals. To stop them from hurting themselves. Surgical.

Mandy pictured herself wearing no bra for the class, her breasts bouncing so much that after half an hour the skin holding them to her ribs becomes slack, thin, sticky, eventually tears. The breasts break free and travel downwards in her leotard, eventually settling either side on top of her hip bones, like two fistfuls of cellulite.

Her mother said suddenly, ‘When you were a kid, three or four, we were sitting on a bus, on the top deck, close to the front, and a brassy woman came up the stairs and sat close by. She had on a tight skirt, heels, blonde curls piled up high and a low-cut top, with her breasts on display, shoved together, like plums, shoved up. You stared at them for a while, all solemn, and then you turned to me and said, very loudly, “Mummy, why has that lady got a front bottom?”’

Mandy laughed. She had heard this story before, many times.

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