The Noodle Maker(54)

‘What?’ The girl drew in a sharp breath of air. ‘Why?’

The secretary didn’t want to jeopardise her friendship with the girl. So, keeping the girl’s hand firmly in her grip, she said in a comforting tone, ‘Haven’t you noticed what’s been going on?’

The girl with big breasts had no idea what the secretary was talking about.

‘Tell me what you know,’ she cried. ‘Tell me now!’

‘Try and guess first.’

‘Don’t play games.’ The girl’s face turned red.

‘It seems Chairwoman Fan was right.’ The secretary was deliberately dragging things out.

‘Please, sister, I beg you. Tell me.’ The girl shrank back into the role of someone who needs to be protected.

This wasn’t the first time the secretary had been called ‘sister’, so her expression didn’t change. ‘She’s jealous of you – that stupid old hen who can’t lay any more eggs.’

‘What did she say about me?’ The girl’s face turned from red to white.

‘It’s your breasts,’ the secretary said, touching the girl’s arm softly. ‘It’s because you have such large breasts.’ She was now using the tone of voice women adopt when speaking about contraception and sexual matters.

The girl covered her face with her hands and stopped in her tracks. The sense of inferiority that she had buried years before suddenly welled up inside her and dragged her back to the times when she would walk through the crowd hunching her shoulders like an old woman, the two lumps of flesh on her chest filling her with shame and fear. She remembered the time her mother humiliated her in front of her classmates, saying, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself wearing that T-shirt. Everyone can see your nipples!’ That night, she borrowed her mother’s white bra and clamped her breasts to her chest. When she left her home the next day, she sensed that everyone knew that she was a girl with bound breasts.

The self-confidence she had worked so hard to achieve was now crumbling into pieces.

‘What did they say?’ The girl’s faint voice was almost drowned by the loud footsteps on the pedestrian flyover above. The secretary hadn’t expected the girl to be as embarrassed as this. She felt as though she were watching a lamb drowning in water, a lamb she could save with less energy than it would take to blow away a grain of dust. As a married woman, she knew many things the girl didn’t know, but longed to know. Yesterday, she had told the girl about the pleasure of feeling a man’s tongue run down her stomach. When she had brought up the subject of the girl’s breasts a few moments ago, she had felt a dampness seep from between her thighs.

The secretary ventured a further question. ‘Did you rub foreign creams on them, or inject them with something?’ She gazed enviously at the girl’s youthful complexion. It was as rosy as hers was before she married. She could sense how uncomfortable the girl was, and how fast her heart was beating.

In just a few seconds, the girl seemed to age ten years, her entire body appeared to shrink inwards. ‘Never, never,’ she protested. ‘I have never had any injections, or used any foreign cream.’

‘That’s what I guessed,’ the young woman continued. ‘Perhaps Chairwoman Fan was right then.’

‘What did she say?’ For the first time in her life the girl was forced to discuss her breasts in public.

‘That old virgin’s a sly one,’ the secretary said, glancing behind her to check that no one was listening. They had almost reached the bus stop. ‘She said you’ve made them bigger by letting men fondle them. Actually, that’s what I thought too, at first.’

The girl’s face turned red again.

‘Surely someone must have told you!’ the secretary laughed. ‘The more men fondle them, the bigger they get.’

‘I’ve never let any man fondle them!’ The girl’s throat went dry. ‘They’ve always been this big, ever since I was fourteen.’ Her blush was spreading to her ears and neck now.

‘There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.’ Although the secretary sympathised with her new friend, she still examined the girl’s face, searching for the truth.

‘But it’s true!’ The girl’s head dropped in despair. She longed to extricate herself from this humiliating situation. ‘You still don’t believe me, do you?’

Without looking at one another, they quickened their pace, and the tenderness that had been established between them over the last weeks melted away. When they reached the bus stop, the girl joined the queue inside the barricade, while the secretary. stood outside. During the previous few days, the secretary had always waited for the girl to catch her bus before continuing her walk home.