I Am Heathcliff

by Kate Mosse

  Cass would appreciate Heidi bringing her a scornful report as much as a piece of jewellery or a knitted shrug or a second-hand book. She began to prepare her report. She moved slowly through the throng and paid close attention to expressions and exclamations. To her right was a stall selling home-made fudge.

  Sugar’s what we really crave, Heidi thought. Sugar to keep us sweet. There was something funny in this that she could develop. An axiom along the lines of, but at the same time taking the piss out of, Marx’s opiate-for-the-masses. She thought she might like some fudge, and, more importantly, she thought Cass might get a kick out of her bringing her some, if she presented it in the correct way: a bag of pistachio-and-peanut-butter fudge and a new mocking proverb. ‘OK,’ Heidi said to this stall-keeper. ‘I’ll bite.’

  He raised his eyebrows. He was young and wispily bearded. He pushed his hair back over his head. He was doing his damnedest to look handsome.

  ‘This is atrociously bad for you, isn’t it?’ Heidi asked.

  ‘It’s all natural,’ he said. ‘Butter, sugar, and milk.’

  ‘Yeah, but naturally bad for you. Like it wouldn’t be good for, say, convalescents.’

  ‘Everything in moderation,’ he said, and coughed out shoddy laughter. ‘But I dunno. Probably not.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘My girl’s in hospital. And she’ll get such a kick out of this because it’ll drive her brother up the wall.’

  The stall-keeper filled a bag as she pointed around the display. ‘Sorry to hear your lady’s sick,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, she’ll be mostly hanging out in the waiting room,’ Heidi said. ‘Reading gushy magazines and listening to her brother admonishing. They won’t keep her in.’

  Lane off Bridge Street

  She threw the fudge against the side of the Spar on Bridge Street. ‘Fuck your fudge!’ she screamed. ‘Fuck it! Though’ – in sudden, hissing contemplation – ‘it might have fucking choked you, it was more like toffee … a fool and her money … Why the fuck is this happening now?’ Less hissing. Sickly mewling: ‘Like you didn’t fucking time this, Cass.’

  A young fella in a branded polo shirt came out of the shop and stared at her. She was thunderous again. ‘What?’ she roared at him. ‘What the fuck do you want?’

  ‘Calm down,’ he said.

  ‘Or what?’

  He hovered, shook his head.

  ‘Go and fuck off for yourself,’ she told him. ‘Clean up on aisle fucking two.’

  The young fella clucked and went back inside.

  ‘What my girl Cass badly wants,’ she raved after him, first at his back, then at the stickered glass of the door that slid closed behind him, ‘is a kick up the hole. Such a profound one. Like one where she could taste my fucking toecaps. Like one where I knock out her teeth from the inside. Fudge! Fudge, what would she say to that anyway? You’re a sap, Heidi. D’you love me that much, Heidi? How wretched you are, Heidi. Or, I’m not allowed fudge, Heidi. Are you trying to give me a heart attack? This is why my brother hates you, Heidi.’ She kicked out at the air, and the automatic doors came open.

  Inside the shop she saw two dears, two skinny dears in Capri pants and Hush Puppies sandals, two skinny, non-smoking, cappuccino mid-morning, book-club dears in Capri pants and Hush Puppies sandals, staring at her as if they had never been her, or never experienced youth like hers, which was to her a light-headed inconsistency, a shape that stretched in all directions.

  ‘Report me!’ she cried. ‘Go on, get your mobiles, call the police, tell them there’s an angry girl, tell them she’s offensive.’

  She made for the lane at the side of the shop. It connected Bridge Street with the wide square around which were the pubs and clubs and restaurants. The square was often the subject of letters to the editor by the kinds of people who had never seen it after ten o’clock at night – the rigid and scared and judgemental. Heidi thought she needed a drink. She was beginning to feel dizzy and nauseous. What she had thought, this morning, to have been a lack of the hangover due to her seemed now to have been nothing but residual drunkenness, and so she was feeling it – the late, late night with Cass, the tasting of the top shelf, the pills and powders, and the mad conversation. Wherever it was, in the dark, that Cass pushed against her and held her – Heidi’s face pressed to the wall, her temple to the brick – and didn’t even reach under her clothes. Just held her there, under her weight. In her long thin arms.

  ‘Bottle Rocket,’ Cass said. ‘Just stop. For a second. Just …’

  The bitch. The weak and drunk and fearful fool.

  Heidi was a third of the way down the lane. Behind her came a woman’s voice.

  ‘Can I help?’

  It was one of the skinny dears. She held a set of car keys in one hand and with the other balanced a paper bag against her chest. She returned Heidi’s stare. She didn’t repeat her question, though Heidi waited for it.

  ‘Is that what you think this is?’ Heidi said. ‘A cry for help? Like I’m not really angry? I’m just driven mad by the heat? I just need a cup of tea and a hug?’

  The woman was an inch or so taller than Heidi, but so slight, so open and normal, that Heidi’s coming for her caught her off-guard. She stood dumb as Heidi stopped toe-to-toe with her; when she stepped back it was awkwardly; she seemed at that moment a halfwit, and that was reason again for Heidi, whose spittle hit the woman’s cheek. ‘You don’t understand,’ Heidi said. ‘I could stand here till Christmas trying to make you, but you’d never understand.’

  River wall

  The first time she met Cass’s brother was in Cass’s living room, from which Cass had hurriedly excised the paraphernalia of their new and heady collision: philosophical texts with cigarette-paper bookmarks, wine bottles, paint pots. ‘So, how long has this been going on?’ Cass’s brother had asked, and Heidi had replied, ‘For ever, it feels like.’

  The first time she had a run-in with Cass’s brother was twenty minutes later, in Cass’s kitchen. Heidi had been filling a glass from the tap when he’d come up behind her. He was light on his feet, like Cass, though he must have been three stone heavier, strong and broad and severe. ‘Where did you come from anyway?’ he had said. It wasn’t a friendly question. ‘She doesn’t look good,’ he had said. ‘She doesn’t look like she’s sleeping. She’s being short with me. She’s dodging my questions.’

  ‘I don’t know what kind of relationship you two have,’ Heidi had said, sipping. She was lying. She did know. She and Cass knew each other wholly, even at this point.

  They had stared at each other for a while, Heidi and Cass’s brother.

  ‘I just want you to go away,’ Cass’s brother had said, steadily.

  ‘That’s unimaginable,’ Heidi had said, also steadily.

  Now Heidi, drained after her encounter with the skinny dear, dismayed that she had so furiously pelted away Cass’s fudge, crouched against the stone-clad wall of an office that backed onto the river. She took out her phone. She pulled her sleeve down over her wrist and rubbed at its screen. She went on to open app after app, reading no new headlines, or social updates, chancing no new moves in her games. She thought she should stay put a while, in case the police were called. She wouldn’t have bothered, if she had been the one wronged. But experience told her that there was something in her general air that made heavy implications, and in this way – in the set of her jaw or the roll of her eyes, in the evident chemical burstings in her brain – she was assumed to be a berserker. It might have been supposed that she’d do more damage further up the road. That she was in the midst of some episode.

  If they just leave me the hell alone, she thought, I can self-correct.

  She had taken her phone out because she needed to do something with her hands, and also because she thought she might call Cass’s brother, and tell him that she would make her way over, permission or no permission.

  If you let me see Cass, she thought, I will tell you anything you want to know.

  Cass’s broth
er. She could see the shape of the pain in him. She didn’t know what that kind of pain felt like, but the fear of it was such that she could imagine it. She felt great empathy for him, though she hated him too; she hated how he interfered, and she hated that he had made progress in demonstrating to Cass that she was better off without Heidi, and Heidi without her. Cass’s brother fabricated empathy and wielded it well. He didn’t understand Heidi, and she felt sympathy too, sorry that his world was so small and that he needed to confine Cass, that he couldn’t just trust Cass and let her be. But mostly her empathy came from understanding his love for Cass. She felt connected to Cass’s brother in a different way. An unrequited, sad compassion. The way one might feel for the recipients of overseas charity, a kinship based on knowledge of different kinds of suffering.

  If you don’t stop me seeing her, she thought, I will try to help you understand her.

  She opened her Recent Calls list and looked at Cass’s brother’s phone number.

  If I could make you see that Cass and I are one soul, ripped, she thought. If I could show you that it’s not only futile to try to keep us apart, but a great cosmic error that would bring you nothing but the shittiest of karmic payback. If I could find a way for you to understand, will you bless us? Will you let her shrug off your petty concerns about biology and morality and how life should be lived? Will you finally give her permission to be fucking well?

  On the river wall opposite, someone had painted the words Global Warming Is Your Fault. The water was speckled with insects. It was brown. Not the brown of its mud bed reflected, but the brown of rust and industry and discarded things.

  Heidi stood. She flung her arm back, so as to throw her phone at the far river wall.

  She held her arm like that until the potential went. She bowed her neck. She put her phone back in her pocket and rubbed her forehead.

  She would fix things as best she could. She would put their living space in order, she would give routine a chance, she would extol its virtues to Cass, she would get her out of bed in the mornings, she would placate the brother, she would keep a job, she would take painkillers only on prescription, she would make green juices, she would be diligent about recycling, she would write to the county council, she would campaign and lobby, she would be unflappable and intimidating, she would stop global warming.

  Junction

  There were red lights at the crossing, and she considered walking on anyway, into the traffic, taking her chances when her chances weren’t good.

  At this point nothing looked real.

  There were various degrees of unreality as witnessed by Heidi and Cass, there were positive renditions and negative renditions. There were times when the streets were lit by hidden sources and everything took on a golden, under-skin glow. And there were times when it felt like their skins were so thin they were see-through, and their seams were likely to split and their insides were in danger of spilling onto the paths. There were times when Heidi thought of Cass as her evil twin, that she had been split from her in early childhood, and that, knowing this and feeling the distance keenly, the separation had damaged her. There were times when she’d wept for gratitude that they’d found each other. People looked on, in fast-food queues and ghost estates and patchy country raves, as she wept and clung to Cass. She didn’t care. The corners of these spaces warped and peeled inwards. Space was a construct. Their bodies were unreliable. Nothing was real.

  She had run away once. This was before Cass. She was a teenager then, and prone to such carry-on. The running away was not successful, and its duration measured hours rather than days. Just before she had run away she had thought of nothing but ferries, forging signatures, and honing wiles, and then she got only as far as the bus station in the very early morning. It was startlingly cold and hunkered on the only bench was a cockeyed man, who grinned at her. She had circled the station, gone to a friend’s house, sat for hours in McDonald’s, and returned home. But the planning of that unsuccessful escape had been sufficiently liberating. The mere act of considering flight had lasted her months. There was hope in it. To come to a point of despair but see beyond that another horizon … to run away from, but towards something … She understood it now. ‘Cass,’ she had said some months back. ‘I was stupid, before you. But I was also brave.’

  ‘Cass,’ she had said. ‘The problem with you is that with you I don’t need to be brave.’

  Running away was no longer a possibility because running away meant there was hope of better things, and what use was hope? If Cass was taken from her now – and if it didn’t happen in the hospital it would happen through her vicious, hateful, fucker brother – what would she do? Cass had made it so that Heidi had forgotten how to be brave.

  So she could run instead into traffic.

  She did not believe in an afterlife as a rule, but rather, life in forms as yet incomprehensible to her. Life in terms of matter neither being created nor destroyed. Ongoing existence on a molecular level. Ongoing existence in vapours or spirit. Non-corporeal practical-nothingness, where maybe she and Cass would be each other, if they couldn’t be with each other. And so on that basis—

  —if Cass were to go—

  —Heidi would have to go.

  This thought, on this normal day, this thought was the one that buckled her.

  If truth is a place, it is barely habitable

  ‘Cass,’ she had said. ‘Listen to this.’

  ‘Love is patient, love is kind,’ she had read. ‘It does not envy, it does not boast.’

  ‘Imagine that,’ she had said. ‘What kind of love is that?’

  ‘How sanitised,’ she had said. ‘And sexless. How pure and lifeless.’

  Love, as experienced by Heidi and Cass, as discovered or excavated or eventually understood, was brutish and unpredictable, was as much from the viscera as the soul, was a physical pushing and pulling, was a state that caused insomnia and encouraged tantrums, was integral but occasionally unbearable, was defined by strife because mind and body craved and rejected it in cycles, was all of these fucking things, was raised voices, was sore knuckles, was pungent, was withdrawal, was music, was, at the sharpest point of it, hate.

  Heidi sat on the low wall of the car park just outside the town centre and took out her phone again. Her fingers slipped on the plastic case. There was a feeling of mass in her throat. The roof of her mouth was parched and hot. She swallowed, and swallowed again.

  There were things that perhaps now couldn’t be fixed, but she needed to admit to having broken them. This pulled at her in the familiar way. The way Cass always did.

  She phoned Cass’s brother.

  ‘There’s more,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘We bought a couple of grams of cocaine,’ she said. ‘I didn’t have much, so if you didn’t find it today, then she had the guts of that. She was taking Valium to sleep sometimes. She had a stock of it at her place, in the drawer of the bedside table. She’d only just gotten some, two days ago. So I don’t know if that’s still there, but if it’s not it means she took that too.’

  ‘I’ll have to go and look,’ Cass’s brother said. ‘I could have looked hours ago.’

  ‘I know,’ Heidi said. ‘I’m sorry—’

  ‘You’re a coward,’ Cass’s brother said. ‘I’d tell you to pray that she wakes up, for your sake, but you won’t understand why, will you? Because you’re not all there, Heidi.’

  Heidi said, ‘I know that,’ or she said, ‘Isn’t that, after all, the problem?’ She made some affirmation of understanding and acquiescence, some verbal agreement that she offered to the brother, some parity of the truth. Thus informed, Cass’s brother navigated their monstrous love and went looking for what kernel of sickness he could crush, so he could bring Cass back to her, or lead Cass away from her. Heidi waited. In that moment the sky flashed, and she thought of new futures, and even the best of them frightened her.

  KIT

  * * *

  JUNO DAWSON<
br />
  I DESERVE NO LESS, but before you judge me harshly, I need you to know I’m not that girl. I’m really not. I’m not the cartoon-silhouette girl on the chick-lit novel with the kitten heels and shopping bags. I don’t girlishly trip and stumble into whimsical new love affairs every time I leave the flat. I don’t wait by the phone. I don’t imagine what I would sound like with a different last name.

  But he was different.

  With him I became someone else. And so fast I shocked even myself.

  The first meeting – mere weeks ago, although it feels like years – has taken on sweeping cinematography. They were refurbishing Pret A Manger, and I don’t care for the battery-acid aftertaste of Café Nero, so I went, with a certain smugness, into our local independent, Roaster. It’s all exposed copper pipes, Edison bulbs, and upturned tea chests as tables. I was raging at how a coffee shop could have possibly sold out of almond croissants before nine in the morning when first I laid eyes on him.

  He emerged from behind the coffee machine, a vortex of steam hissing and swirling around him. Under his apron – thumpingly masculine with its coarse fabric and rusty fasteners – he wore a Breton shirt, rolled almost to the shoulder. Both forearms were a jotter pad of tiny tattoo doodles. Across his knuckles, from right to left, were the words CRUEL ABYSS. A tidal wave of raven-black hair, with flecks and stripes of silver, tumbled over his forehead and over his right eye. His beard was long, but not unkempt.

  But it was the eyes. Isn’t it always? Framed by a flat, dissatisfied brow were the bluest blue eyes I’d ever seen. Not wishy-washy grey-blue. Blue, like the sky.

  He slammed the metal milk jugs around as though he was mad at them. I suppose no one particularly delights in making coffee for strangers on a Monday morning.

  ‘Can I help you?’ the girl asked, and I suspect she was repeating herself.