13.

When her balance became unsteady, Biddy jumped down onto the bumpy bathroom lino and pulled on her dressing gown. She took a small paper bag from her pocket and tipped the contents onto the old rickety table beside the sink. A pale pink Miners lipstick, rose-coloured blusher, blue-black mascara and bright blue eye-shadow. The girl in the chemist shop said Miners was the best for teenagers, and that these colours were all the rage. Biddy hadn’t asked for help, but the girl, Debbie, as her name badge said, decided she needed it.

Biddy didn’t know where to start. Perhaps she should have let Debbie do a demonstration after all, as she’d wanted to do, then at least she’d know what to do with the stuff. She knew all the other girls at the disco would look perfect. She opened the jar of eye-shadow, rubbed her forefinger into the blue powder and smeared it once across both eyelids. Next was the lipstick. The shiny pink stick looked good enough to eat. She ran the tip of it over her lips in a circular motion as though she was colouring in, half expecting it to taste like a sweet: a bonbon, or a strawberry sherbet. She used her forefinger again to apply the cream blusher, smearing a rosy stripe, tinted blue from the remnants of the eye-shadow, below her cheekbones. Then she rubbed each cheek roughly in a circular motion, spreading the now purplish colour across most of her face. Finally she twisted out the long mascara brush, closed her eyes and rubbed it left to right across both sets of lashes. She had difficulty opening her eyes as her lashes instantly clogged together with lumps of the black liquid. She blinked furiously, her eyes stinging from bits of mascara that had escaped from her lashes. Now it was time to look in the mirror.

If Gracie Weir had not run away, she would, no doubt, have witnessed the scene that her daughter was now surveying at some stage of Biddy’s younger life, just as most mothers who have little girls and bulging make-up bags inevitably do. But Biddy was fifteen, not five, and this make-up was hers, not her mother’s. Yet the effect was virtually the same. And Biddy knew it. Her tears pulled streaks of black mascara with them as they ran down her cheeks, dripped off her chin and splashed onto her chest, staining her new crisp white bra. She rubbed furiously at her face, the blue and pink and purple colours blending with wet black tears like a toddler’s first painting. ‘Bloody Weirdo’, she sobbed, rubbing at her face with the backs of her hands before collapsing on the bathroom floor. ‘Bloody, bloody, fucking, Bloody Weirdo.’