Test Signal

by Nathan Connolly (Dead Ink)

  a. At first Rita asks you about Brexit, and you ask her about Trump. You both repeat things you’ve read in the Guardian and the New York Times.

  b. You and Rita then find common ground in Katy Perry’s documentary Part of Me, especially the bit where she’s mourning the breakdown of her relationship with Russell Brand.

  i. ‘I used to write fanfiction about Russell Brand,’ you say, feeling brave, after two Greek beers. The only other person you have ever told about that is Jasmine.

  ii. ‘Really?’ Rita says, delighted. ‘That’s awesome. Do you still write?’

  iii. ‘Just Tinder messages,’ you say.

  iv. Rita laughs. ‘That’s still writing.’

  c. You and Rita go to the open-air cinema in Athens and watch the midnight screening of Mamma Mia!, drink more Greek beer and eat nachos.

  22. You stop wearing your hair in a severe bun. People at work tell you that you look younger with your hair down.

  a. You let the soft vowels of West Yorkshire, of Kimberley Walsh, Jarvis Cocker and Jane McDonald, curl back over your tongue. It relaxes you. Some days you think it feels right, whereas at other times, you feel like you’re impersonating an older version of your former self.

  i. You wonder if that’s appropriation.

  b. You hear clients talking about last night’s episode of Love Island as you’re walking out of a meeting. Before you can stop yourself, you’re giving your opinion on if you think an islander is overreacting to another islander’s betrayal in Casa Amour.

  c. You find that they – Katie, Sarah and Rhys – smile at you across the meeting room table when you see them again.

  i. You start speaking more in meetings.

  23. You spend the entirety of Easter bank holiday with Jasmine rewatching Gossip Girl season two, which you both agree is the show’s imperial phase. You wonder why you didn’t realise that Chuck Bass and Blair Waldorf’s relationship was toxic at the time.

  a. You open the bottle of Champagne you got for a good performance at work and discuss with Jasmine until her Uber arrives.

  b. You pace around your room and feel something close to an epiphany about your relationships with men, identity, romance, society and expectations.

  c. Open your MacBook.

  d. Close your MacBook.

  e. No, fuck it, open your MacBook again.

  f. Register for a Wordpress.

  g. Call it Gossip Hurl.

  h. Finish the Champagne.

  i. Write.

  j. Write.

  k. Write.

  24. You never thought writing was hard – it came so easily when you were writing for the university newspaper, or your university essays, or your work reports, or your Russell Brand fanfiction, or your shopping lists, or to-do lists – but fuck is it hard.

  a. But you keep doing it.

  b. Time seems to glide when you’re writing.

  c. You write about Gossip Girl and The OC and Love Island and Riverdale and last night’s episode of Coronation Street.

  d. Jasmine is the only person who is allowed to read your blog.

  i. But you suspect that she’s sending it to other people because you keep getting more hits.

  25. In November, you book a week off work and a return ticket to Batley. Your mum takes you to visit the new shopping centre in the middle of Bradford. After lunch at Pizza Express, you wander around the exhibition on the history of TV at the National Media Museum.

  a. You wonder if growing up in a single-parent household where the TV was your babysitter, best friend and father has made you more respectful and reverent of TV.

  i. You may have needed to be taught how to pronounce Diptyque but you can talk about the significance of Danny Dyer’s pink dressing gown in EastEnders and what it says about contemporary masculinity.

  b. You have your photo taken next to a Dalek in the entrance of the National Media Museum.

  i. You caption it: ‘Exterminate me, Daddy.’

  ii. It gets 372 likes on Instagram, your most popular post yet.

  iii. One of the likes is Sohail, Khadijah’s brother, who you wasted your Sixth Form years on.

  iv. You click on his profile. You didn’t even realise he was following you, and see that he is now an accountant, not a poet.

  26. That evening, your mum invites Auntie Tina around to watch Strictly Come Dancing. Your mum has made her own glitter paddles out of cardboard, which you hold up at the end of each performance. At the end of the show, all three of you cast your votes on your phones.

  a. At 11 p.m., when you get up to go to bed, your mum kisses you on the forehead.

  b. You open your laptop.

  c. Your mum pauses by the door.

  i. ‘Are you going to write one of your blogs?’

  ii. ‘How did you know about those?’

  iii. ‘Your friend Jasmine emails them on to me. They’re always interesting.’

  iv. You don’t know what to say.

  v. ‘You probably don’t remember, but when you were little you would leave these little stories, these lists about the telly, for me to read. “Reasons Why I Should Be Allowed To Stay Up To Watch EastEnders.” Always made me and Tina crack up.’

  vi. You don’t look at your mum. You look at the picture of you on the mantelpiece. It had been fancy dress day at your primary school for Children in Need. You and your mum had taken a cardboard box and made it into a TV, covered in tinfoil, with an aerial made out of bright-pink pipe-cleaners. You’d worn it as a headdress and won second prize in assembly for best costume. Your smile is joyous, straining your cheeks.

  i. It sits next to your graduation photo. Both you and your mum look stiff, too formal, out of place.

  d. Your mum kisses you on the head and closes the door behind her.

  e. You turn back to your laptop and start filling up the blank space.

  THE COORIE

  CARMEN MARCUS

  We’re never to walk the same way twice, we mustn’t lay down paths, our tracks must fall light so they can be blown away by sand or snow-forgetting. I told you that but you’re like Mammy, you don’t listen. Mammy walks her own way above the high-tide mark, her feet crusted in red muck as she churns a path straight to the Burn House. She cannot steady herself as she needs both hands to carry you. I walk ahead so’s anyone watching would see I wasn’t on her side. I spook a little crowd of plovers.

  —Get up. Get gone.

  I don’t want to see their dippy heads today. They clatter up.

  —This would be easier by road, Mammy says, but the island hasn’t got any.

  —We don’t need roads here.

  She knows that. She knows we’re supposed to follow the shuls: the deer paths; the rabbit paths – their dotty tracks. She knows that she’s not supposed to be wearing that lace dress that dips below her coat like sea-foam, asking for a finger to knot in it. She knows she wasn’t supposed to get all fat and have you at all. The whole island staring at your pebble roundness, like you were a bad winter they wanted to warm between their hands. And worst of all Mr Berengar coming round to our Coorie, right up over the yellow line, to tell Mammy off. Least she carries the box, least she knows that. She carries it high on her hip the way she used to carry you, your legs hooked tight round her and the islanders trying to find something else to stare at in the blank grey sky.

  I wait for her as she climbs the dune. Her feet crack the thin frost that flours the sand. Even though I hold out both hands she won’t let me carry the box. I run ahead; there are no clouds between me and the cold, and all I have to feel is the good numb the first dip into winter brings. I tread up and up to the Burn House door and Mammy shouts for me to knock. The damp wood eats the sound but Brak opens it before we can step back behind the line. He was watching for us.

  I like Brak. He’s maybe the biggest person on the island. I like the way he leans down to talk to me, like a cormorant when it dives. Brak has a way of making me feel held without ever touching, like leaning into the wind. You can say anythi
ng to the wind and it never tells. Brak never told about the feather.

  Mammy tries to put the box down on the cold table but Brak takes it from her without waiting to put his gloves on. He takes you from Mammy and she lets him, holding on until she’s sure he has the weight.

  *

  I wasn’t supposed to hold you when you first came but Mammy said she couldn’t do it all on her own. It was true, her eyes had sunk deep into her head and she was all hollows. She said I’d have to give you a bath and not to worry because the rules weren’t for babies. You were the only baby on the island, so I supposed she was right. I scrubbed and scrubbed until the marble path of my scald opened, and Mammy said —Stop, for god’s sake, stop, and then she handed you to me and went to find some sleep. I cleaned a guillemot once, at school, dug the soap deep into its feathers and scraped the oil off and the whole time it was going for my eye with its spear beak. It didn’t get sick just because I’d touched it. Nothing I ever touched before wanted to be held.

  I took a hold of you by your head and bottom above the water and your eyes crinkled shut and you went so slack inside your body. Not like a bird. Birds are muscle smoothed around light that bobs and fights. Then you bucked and arched your back, your eyes and mouth popped open. I thought you could read it in my skin – the fear that tripped on the briar path of my scar. I shoved my whole hand under you to stop the water swallowing you down. I dabbed you, head to foot, with my fingers. One of your feet was curled up to your shin, it was smaller than the other. My hands knew what to do. I rubbed your soft bones straight. You took a hold of my thumb with your tiny purple hand and you didn’t mind one bit about my scald. I always bathed you after that.

  *

  Brak doesn’t say goodbye. He says —You mustn’t write his name, not on a tree, not on sand; not even a mark on your body. I had never thought of doing anything so mad as that and it was easy to promise not to.

  —Go home, nothing more to be done now. Brak closes the door on Mammy and me before the heat of the burner can reach our faces. I can see our Coorie from up here. It looks just like a bump in the ground where the snow can’t settle for the warmth. Mammy dug it out of the dirt like a den, a cup of muddy hands to hold us in our beds. She called it our Coorie. We’re not to tell because naming things is the same as leaving a mark or making a track, names mean something, they leave something behind. Coorie means to hold. Mammy means the same. When we lie deep inside it, no one looking from above would believe we were even there at all. We can’t go back there yet, not with all your stones and feathers and sticks all over the place. We can’t go back and clear a space that you won’t fill again.

  I hear the Burn House roar, the tall chimney sucking in cold air to feed the fire. It breathes out white ash. When a fox takes an eider duck: I’ve seen this. When the first snow comes in: I’ve seen this. The warm ash-down falls in Mammy’s hair and my hair, it settles on our eyelashes and smears our hands. I want this mark to stay. I want to cut it into bark, to score it in sand, I want it to splinter under my skin so that it will stay with me and hurt every time I touch something that isn’t you. But all I feel is the slow pinch of winter. I step on feathers and trip on stones all the way home. Mammy dumps our over-clothes into the scald-water by the door and it turns white like shock.

  *

  At school Mr Berengar says —Do your best to get back to usual, in his good-job-gold-star voice. —Those sad feelings will go. —Like snow, I said and he said —That’s right, Hura, just like snow. But he’s not Brak. He doesn’t promise. Brak doesn’t have much to say about teachings, he doesn’t worry whether I keep the rules, he only worries if I’m hungry. Brak is solid as a nut and Mr Berengar is wind-seed, spiky as a thistle and as hard to please. He said that he won’t think less of me for Mammy’s selfishness. He meant you.

  You didn’t get big enough to go to school. School is not like our Coorie, it is above ground, built over the marsh, there are no walls, there are only wooden roofs and wooden walkways. There is Mr Berengar’s station in the centre and the children’s stations jut out from his on their own islands like the toothy rocks that surround our island. The other children don’t ask where I’ve been or if I was sick, even though we always ask about illness: how much phlegm got coughed up; was there blood in it or just green gob? It makes our own bodies tingle, to know that we’ve all felt the same thing – even if it was a fever or the lung-punch of a cough – because we cannot reach a hand out to read someone else’s skin across our yellow-lined stations. We know what bodies do. We learn it all, but we never touch. The more we know about how our bodies work and stop working, the less there is to fear. We must be good at dying. So Mr Berengar says, and he is good at making us not scared, not because of what he says but because of the special voice he uses. It’s a loud and sleepy sound all at once, like the sea sucking itself back through stones.

  Mr Berengar starts every day talking about the Earth. He says we are the Earth, meaning the whole planet not dirt, and we, meaning our bodies, our heads and fingers and feet. We are full of bits of the Earth – iron, oxygen, water, carbon. Even inside our bones. He says that when we die, we go back to being the Earth again and in this we way we can finally touch. And he says this in that special voice, so that growing back into mud and stints and marram grass sounds like it might feel like a feather being drawn across my skin, not like being burned to pieces.

  Aran, he’s the oldest boy, he says even the dirt wouldn’t want to touch me. He knows that it’s only sickness on the inside that matters, but he still looks and I can see his eyes following the raw dips and creases of my winter-hand. Lucky it can’t feel him, lucky it’s always cold. He looks and looks but those lines won’t take him anywhere by looking, I’ve tried.

  Mr Berengar doesn’t hear him. He’s too busy because it’s Log Day and the islanders who are well enough have already started to take their places in the queue. They’ve all walked down from their shelters, stepped careful over rough, uneasy ground, hoping they haven’t walked that way before. We don’t know about direction but we know about distance and how to keep it. No one is still as they drift to keep the gap between each other even. They grip their Logs, little square books filled with little squares that are only big enough to hold what is relevant, accurate and true about our bodies: pains; fevers; if we have touched someone; who and when and where.

  You didn’t have a Log. Mammy had to make space for you in hers. Mammy wrote about you when you were new, before you could walk even. She wrote ‘dark blue grey dusk’ in and around the tiny square for eye colour.

  She wrote that you would only go to sleep on her tummy, turning until you fitted snug under her collarbone. She wrote that there was no more day- and night-time: only feed-time, sleep-time; that your tongue was a clock and that she was as thin as the moon when it shows up in the day-blue sky. She wrote how your mouth was the first thing to wake up, popping for a feed, and if she waited till you cried, her boobies would cry milk back at you. Mr Berengar read her Log, tugging at his spiky gold hair and rubbing his red beard, scrit-scratch, rubbing her words away. He crinkled his grey eyes at Mammy and shook out a breath. He said —None of this is relevant. Mammy laughed with just her body so she didn’t wake you. She can do that. An angry shaking laugh that could easily be mistaken for a fever. Mammy said he didn’t want her to write anything about you because you scared him.

  I stand in Mammy’s place in the queue. She is not here today but I hold her space for her. The woman who goes in the place behind us shouts.

  —Is your Mammy sick?

  —No.

  —Is she late?

  —No.

  —Grief is a luxury we can’t afford. We all know why we’re here.

  She doesn’t shout this but breathes it into the space I left for Mammy.

  I open my book for Mr Berengar and he checks my yeses and noes, and I watch to see if I can tell when he reads about my bleeding stopping because of the pills he gave me. I can’t. I don’t write about the ash-sno
w and the marks it made on me. He closes my Log, swabs my throat and gives me a ‘Well done’ smile when I gag.

  —Why don’t you take Kora and go tracking today?

  *

  On the west beach the wind rushes at the side of the cliff, bringing a gust of spray with it, all salt and alive. My winter-hand prickles with splinters. This is a change but I don’t log it. All that’s relevant here is when will the winter come; how long will it stay; how many will get sick and leave no marks behind.

  —Is it always this cold? Are these curlew tracks?

  Kora never shuts up, so all the birds get scared away.

  —There are no curlews, they’re summer birds. Everyone knows she’s only allowed to measure rainfall because she can’t draw, even though Mr Berengar says it’s because she’s the best measurer. I can draw, that’s why winter is my job. —Star, star, star, Mr Berengar says about my tracks. The trick is not to draw the shape of feet, because they have already gone, but the pressure of touch on mud and snow-crust.

  You were good at being quiet, even when I tied you to my back when your legs got tired. And when I got tired, I’d set you down in the deep grass, like the deer-mammy does, so I could keep following bird signs for Mr Berengar’s gold stars. I won’t tie Kora to my back even if she cries to be carried. I’m not her deer-mammy.

  —Are these curlew tracks?

  —Husht.

  I want to shout at Kora. I want to dig my hands into her puffy cheeks until the splinters stop hurting but I don’t, not because it’s a rule, but because it’s not her fault and the splinters aren’t real. They’re just the cold eating my burned fingers.

  —You need to look at the ground.

  —I am. What are these? Shall I draw them?

  —They’re black-headed gulls’ tracks.

  —They’re rubbish. I’m not drawing them. Why were you off yesterday?