Saltwater

by Jessica Andrews

  37

  I have noticed that many of the young men in Donegal have shaking hands. When they pass over change in the supermarket, or put salt and pepper on their food, or hold out their keys to unlock their cars, they are all trembling. In the pub after my grandfather’s funeral, I ask my mother what it is that makes them shake.

  ‘It’ll be the drink,’ she says, sagely.

  38

  My parents blew all their wages on holidays in hot places and supped cold beers wearing imitation Ray-Bans. They slathered their skin in baby oil and played Talking Heads from a portable radio, collecting iridescent shells and leaving streaks of sand between their bedsheets.

  They went to Florida and posed for pictures in front of the fairytale Disneyland castle. When I was born they bought me a plastic version. It had a button that made gold lights flicker above the turrets like fireworks. They drove through Miami with the car windows down and hired a motorbike to explore the beaches. They both wore denim shorts and big white T-shirts. My father got drunk one night and went to kiss my mother, but threw up in her mouth instead.

  They always spent Christmas at my uncle’s house. He had a dodgy car business and a fancy cottage panelled in dark wood with a Jacuzzi and a walk-in wardrobe. Everyone pulled crackers at the table, tingly with the promise of the future.

  ‘Happy Christmas, pet.’ My nan kissed my mother on the cheek, her paper hat falling down over her eyes. ‘Tom thinks the world of you, I hope you know. We all do.’

  They danced around the living room to ‘Fairytale of New York’, screaming, ‘You scumbag! You maggot!’ and clinking glasses of Asti. My father passed out on the faux sheepskin rug in the living room while everyone frolicked around him.

  39

  How to make sense of soft shapes in the dark? The shiver of milk. Cold hands on my face. Hankering after softness. A pink jumper. The swell of a breast. I am fluent in the language of your body. Brown freckles in the raw of you. My dimpled knees. My fat, strange elbows. A dark, secret space of warm things and good things but he is a hard thing. Lurking around my edges. Fingers rough and smoky delicious. Cradling me like he doesn’t know how. My skin is not tough enough. My unlearned fingers cannot hold. So quick there is a space in me, where other things should be.

  40

  I was blonde and shiny and ate pears and ice cream. I liked stories and magic and roller-skating in the street. I shuffle-ball-changed around the kitchen in my silver tap shoes, pattering out the rhythms that grew under my pillow at night. My mother dressed me in frilly socks and floral dresses with matching hairbands. She ruffled the tops of my puffball sleeves.

  ‘There! Just like a princess.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a princess.’ I pouted. I dug worms from the garden and took them to school in my pockets, kissing their slippery heads under the desk when no one was looking. I was worried they had no one to love them.

  41

  My parents met in the Queen Alexandra pub in Grangetown, just before Christmas. ‘The Whole of the Moon’ by the Waterboys had just come out and it played on repeat. My mother had been shopping and carried a blue silk dressing gown painted with flowers in a paper bag. My father put it on and slithered off his jeans, flouncing around the pubs in his bare legs and big work boots. He wore it to walk home in the cold and my mother had to go and collect it from his house the next day. She sponged off the wine stains and wrapped it up and gave it to her mother on Christmas morning.

  ‘It’s lovely, pet.’ My grandmother put it on over her dress, holding her cigarette like a French film star. ‘Dead glamorous.’ My mother never told her the story.

  My mother and father went out one night and walked home along the Wear as morning seeped through the clouds. There was a sour sort of stillness in the air, the kind that comes before the brightness of the dawn, when it feels like the world belongs to someone else.

  They wandered hand in hand, not wanting to go home and let the magic pass. They crossed Alexandra Bridge and paused in the middle to eat ketchupy chips from a warm carton. My father swung himself nimbly onto the big iron girders and sat with his legs dangling over the edge.

  ‘Tom?’ My mother was nervous.

  ‘Come on, man.’ His eyes crinkled. ‘Give is your hand. We won’t fall.’ She giggled in spite of herself and offered her hand to him, leaving the chips by the side of the road. She stuck her legs over the edge and exhaled quickly.

  ‘Proper good, isn’t it?’ He put his hand on her thigh. They watched the grey river swelling underneath them and heard the beginnings of the traffic sputtering into life. They sat in silence for a long time, watching the sun glint off the bits of metal in the old shipyard and noticing the way the empty water towers were like giant trees that had shed their leaves. They tried to read the graffiti scrawled on the walls along the river banks in dismal neon.

  ‘Do you do this a lot?’ She watched the sun work its way through his curls.

  ‘Sometimes. Helps me to think about things.’

  ‘What kind of things?’

  ‘Just stuff. You know.’ A car tooted on the bridge and they both shuddered, wavering on the edge of the girder. A man wound down his window.

  ‘Fucking jump then, you pussies!’ My father turned around and blew him a kiss.

  ‘Come on.’ He swung his legs back over the bridge and into the day. ‘Let’s go home, eh? I’m bloody freezing.’ My mother jumped down after him. She picked up the box of chips and threw them into the water where they sank, making lazy ripples that barely disturbed the surface.

  They went to see Lloyd Cole and the Commotions at the Telewest Arena in Newcastle. My mother changed in the toilets on the hospital ward when she finished work. She wore a Princess Diana dress with a lace collar and her Elnett threatened to set off the fire alarms. They drank warm lager and twisted and spun together. My father fell asleep on the train home and she let him rest his head on her shoulder, watching the lights drip across his face as they passed over the Tyne.

  There was a strange sprig of madness that grew inside of both of them.

  ‘Made for each other, you two are.’ Their friends pulled faces behind their backs, itching to drag them away from each other so that they could head to the next bar or club. They slid winkle-pickers across slippery dancefloors, tottering in kitten heels and writhing in the stretchy quality of the night. Cameras flashed in the darkness trapping moments in bright whiteness, developed later and shoved into an album somewhere, my mam hanging off my dad’s arm, all pearly teeth and crinkled eyes and my dad shy and lost, gazing off into the distance as though he couldn’t quite believe his luck.

  42

  I didn’t see a picture of their wedding until I started university. I asked about it over Christmas and my mother dug her album out of the loft. The plastic figures from their cake were tucked inside the cover, wrapped up in cream tissue paper, icing sugar clogging their feet.

  43

  There is a home video of my christening. The house is filled with light and unwrinkled versions of the people I grew to love, toasting fizzy wine and smoking in the garden. My father is passed out in a chair and I am dozing on his lap in a mushroom of white lace. He has blue eyeshadow smudged across his eyelids.

  44

  There was an unpredictability about him that appealed to her. She couldn’t bear the feeling of all of the years of her life stretching out before her in a series of jobs and cars and weddings and grey Tuesday afternoons with freshly Hoovered carpets. He was inconsiderate and unreliable but he was a nicotine sort of electric that kept her on her toes. He rejected the smallness and the staleness of things and so did she. There was something beyond the factory car parks that they could both sense, in the crumpled lyric sheets slotted inside of their Oasis albums.

  45

  My sweat has begun to smell like the Atlantic sea. My clothes are coated in rusty dirt from the ash pile and I can taste wet grass and cool stars and satsuma-scented kitchen cleaner. There are small stones inside of my socks and I ru
b out my lacy knickers in the sink. The sunsets are crisp and smell of cardigans. My nights are filled with candlelight and sleepless hours twisting under icy bedsheets. The soles of my feet are black with dirt and there are bits of firelighter smushed into my fingertips. I drink red wine and I eat apples and spinach and chickpeas, bananas and raisins and porridge with honey. I scrub my skin with minty shower gel and spill candlewax on the floor, where it hardens into a long white scar. The very atoms of this place are burrowing their way under my skin, mingling with my neutrons and electrons and all of those other tiny, complicated things.

  46

  My parents were married the year before I was born. Her dress was white satin with stitched peonies. She wore pink roses in her hair and silky slippers on her feet. My father went out the night before the ceremony and got so drunk that he lost his shoes. He turned up late to the church with red-rimmed eyes, wearing his brother’s brown brogues, two sizes too big. He shuffled up the aisle with trailing laces and spent the rest of the day in his socks. He sat at the bar, so nobody noticed. My mother ordered a cream basque from the Freemans catalogue, tied up with a tiny blue ribbon. She looked at his unconscious form on her wedding night and quietly changed into her nightie, folding up the basque and wrapping it in plastic. She sent it back the next day for a refund.

  ‘I should have known then, shouldn’t I?’ she sighed, every time she told the story.

  47

  When my mother was a child, my grandfather started spending every night after work in the Irish Club down the road. He nipped out to the betting shop between pints to put his wages on the horses. He liked the ones with religious names like Holy Trinity or Mary Magdalene. He stumbled down the aisle of the last bus home.

  ‘English Trash!’ he spat at the other passengers when he reached his stop.

  There was a billboard opposite their house that advertised Pretty Polly stockings and tights. The girls tucked their skirts into their knickers and can-canned around the sitting room, crossing and uncrossing their legs like the long, tanned pair in the advert.

  One afternoon while my grandfather was at work, a man turned up with a ladder and a bucket of paste. The girls watched him from the window as he papered over the peeling legs with fresh strips of paper. They felt sad, as though something had been lost. The man stepped back to admire his work.

  ‘The British Army Needs You!’ A soldier smiled from beneath a salute. My grandmother made the sign of the cross.

  ‘What the bloody fuck is this?’ my grandfather cursed when he got home, throwing the gravy boat at the wall. It bled down the faded roses. ‘Bloody British bastards!’

  My grandmother ushered the girls out of bed and toggled their duffle coats over their nighties.

  ‘Come on.’ She shook them out of their dreams. ‘Let’s go on an adventure.’ They walked around the streets in the cold, trying to stay wrapped up in the orange fur that pulsed from the streetlights. When enough time had passed, my grandmother took them home and they crept up the stairs, being careful not to wake him as he snored on the settee with his mouth open.

  48

  Soon after my parents met, they went for long walks on Seaburn Beach in the cold, standing on the edge of the pier and looking up at the lighthouse.

  ‘Me and our Pete got stuck out here one night, when we were kids,’ my dad said. ‘It was dead stormy and the waves came up over the pier. We would have got pulled under if we tried to go back.’ My mother ran her thumb along a smooth pebble in the palm of her hand.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘We called the coastguard and he told us about a trapdoor in the floor around here somewhere. We climbed down it and there’s a tunnel that leads all the way down the inside of the pier and back to the shore.’

  She looked at him. ‘No there’s not, man.’

  ‘There is, I promise. It was pitch black and stank of rotten fish. Brought us all the way back to land.’

  ‘Show us now, then.’

  ‘I can’t remember where it is.’

  She rolled her eyes.

  ‘Honest. It was dark. It’s something to do with the war.’

  He was always telling stories like that. He had a big white scar that puckered the length of his thigh. He told me he’d been chased by a lion that escaped from the circus. I pressed horrified fingers to his skin. It was smooth and cold like marble.

  ‘Really?’ I fiddled with the hem of my Tinker Bell nightie.

  ‘Really, Lucy Lou. It was in the Echo. Your nan’s got a clipping of it somewhere in the loft. Ask her to get it out next time you’re round.’

  My mother told me he lit a bonfire and was caught up in the blaze.

  49

  And then, growing. Moving and changing and sprouting and bulging. New things coming and old disappearing. Teeth under pillows and locks of hair on barbershop floors, rescued and taped into baby books. You rub suncream under my T-shirt and I touch your freckles with my fingertips. I can smell the sun in your skin. It is lemony strange and not the way it smells in mine. I have fewer layers for the light to penetrate.

  50

  During my bike rides into town to pick up lentils and cans of tinned tomatoes, I listen to podcasts. I do not speak to many people over the course of a day but I listen to radio hosts and writers and musicians and news reporters as I push myself up the hills. I have been thinking about voices a lot; the way that some are louder than others. I often speak aloud to myself while I’m cooking or brushing the ashes from the fire. I imagine telling people difficult things I have not had the words to speak aloud until now, rolling the hurt across my tongue to see how it sounds. My own voice is much louder here in the silence, away from the city that was drowning me out.

  I have been thinking about language as a place to put your feelings. Before language, everything is mixed up and curdled inside. Babies cry all of the time; they are full up with feelings and don’t know where to put them. Children bury their feelings in objects to keep them safe. They grab handfuls of their hurt and smush it into the middle of sandpits and swimming pools and old stuffed toys like buried treasure. Occasionally in adult life we find objects with our old feelings locked deep inside. A packet of Fruit Polos. A face caught in the folds of a curtain. A scratched Oasis CD.

  51

  My grandmother died when I was one year old. She had oesophageal cancer and the doctors cut out her voice to save her life. She wrote down the words she couldn’t say on a little yellow notepad. My mother went to visit her and found her slowly knitting woollen squares.

  ‘It’s a blanket,’ she wrote, her thin hands quivering with the effort of pressing down the biro. ‘For the baby.’ She died before she had a chance to finish it, and years later I found an old carrier bag stuffed in our loft with the knitted squares and the notepad inside of it. I followed her handwriting with my fingertips; traces of a person I could not remember existing.

  My grandmother was born in a poppy field embroidered on a carpet in a boarding house in Sunderland. She had a twin sister who didn’t survive. Her parents buried the broken foetus in the garden and planted a geranium over the spot. They didn’t say a word about it until ten years later, when next door’s dog dragged up a tiny femur.

  Her father was a shoemaker. He spent his days stitching and sticking and pressing and hammering. He made tools and stools and bicycles. He built her a doll’s house and painted it yellow. He smelled of leather, superglue and love.

  Her mother looked after a boarding house for foreign workers, and women and children on the run from mad husbands. They were sometimes Polish and often Italian but mostly Irish. A lot of drinking and swearing and sweating and fucking went on behind her thin lace curtains. They all missed their mothers, and treated her like she was their own.

  My mother said she lost a part of herself when her mother died.

  ‘I was never really the same again,’ she told me. ‘A loss like that.’ She shook her head, sadly. ‘She was so young.’ I wrapped my arms around my knees and squinted
at her, trying to see what had changed. ‘I used to be different,’ she said, turning up the electric fire.

  ‘What kind of different?’

  ‘Just different. Ask your dad.’

  52

  We lived in Houghton-le-Spring, an old colliery town comprised of a Kwik Save, a Greggs and a library full of gory crime novels. There were a few pubs struggling under soggy St George’s flags and a park where gay couples and teenage goths got stabbed on Saturday nights. I slid my feet around Woolworths after school, begging my mother for stale pieces of fudge from the pick and mix section and twisting for bottles of pirate-shaped bubble bath from Savers.

  My dad worked away a lot. When I phoned him he told me his hotel room was so small he had to sleep with his feet hanging out of the window. I stretched my bare toes over the edge of the sofa and pointed and flexed them, the way I learned in ballet class.

  ‘Do the birds not peck your toes?’ I asked him.

  ‘Sometimes.’

  On the odd weekend he was home, we used to get up early on a Saturday and go to car boot sales. We traipsed through discarded bits of people’s lives in the white of the morning, plunging our fists into plastic buckets filled with mismatched wires and fingering bits of fabric and broken gadgets. My dad always bought a cup of tea from the van that sat in the corner of the field and he let me cradle it between my cold fingers as he smoked his cigarette, nodding, ‘Alright, mate?’ to the men toting cyberpets and jigsaws with important pieces missing. I dragged home dolls with scribbled faces and teddy bears smelling of other people’s dinners. My mother wrinkled her nose and shoved them in the washing machine.