Saltwater

by Jessica Andrews

  ‘Can I get my belly button pierced?’

  My mother gave me a long look. I licked lip gloss from my lips with a nervy tongue. She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Yeah, alright,’ she said. ‘Should I get mine done, too?’

  We made an appointment at a cheap beauty salon and held hands as a stern woman with orange fingers pushed a large needle through the soft centres of our bellies.

  ‘How old is she?’ the woman asked my mother afterwards.

  ‘Thirteen,’ I replied, quickly. She flashed an understanding smile at my mam and I felt left out. We walked out of the salon with our tops rolled up, midriffs winking at the passing cars. Our belly buttons stung as we climbed onto the high stools in McDonald’s. My mother touched my arm as I dipped my fries in ketchup.

  ‘It seems symbolic of something, doesn’t it, Luce?’ she said, rolling down her T-shirt. ‘It’s a new start, isn’t it? Me, you and Josh. Just the three of us.’ I smiled at her as I stuffed the empty wrappers into my Happy Meal box, leaving the free toy to be thrown out with the rubbish.

  My belly-button piercing coincided with the stares of boys from school lingering on my skin when I boarded the bus, as though they could see right through my school blouse and into my navel to that small precious promise of the future.

  52

  There are parts of you I want for myself. I want to feel the shape of your hips fill out mine. I run my fingers along the lids of your nail polishes, craving Peach Sunset and Tropical Bliss. I slip your bracelets on and off my wrists; bigger and better than mine. I want to drip the eyes of strangers down my spine the way that you do. I want to paint myself new in Revlon and Rimmel. I cram your blusher brushes in my pockets, rosy with secrets.

  53

  All over Donegal there are abandoned, overgrown cottages. Some of them are shells built from crumbling stones and others are intact with vases and bottles of holy water rotting on windowsills and brambles creeping into crevices.

  Often, they are run-down family homes. Their newly built replacements stand beside them, freshly plastered and insulated with flat-screen televisions winking through the double glazing. Others seem much more desolate, as though a lonely old person passed away and their families live too far away to make returning worthwhile. When I first arrived here I was puzzled by these houses, rusting in the wind. I wondered why they weren’t demolished. I thought that it was better to get rid of old things, rather than letting them loom in the present like mournful relics.

  The answer is space. There is so much space here that there is no need to reduce old things to rubble. There is sentimentality somewhere in the history and there is something important in observing the way that nature takes over. At first, I thought that a reluctance to relinquish the past was a refusal to acknowledge the passing of time. Now I understand it more as a symbol of temporality and a reminder that there are layers of lived experience criss-crossing the surfaces of our lives, invisible to us. There is room for everything here. There are traces of the past in the present and there is space for the future, too.

  54

  The internet moved at a rapid pace and everyone I knew rushed home after school to sit in front of the peculiar electric of their dial-up connection to gossip through Myspace and MSN Messenger. I trawled through profiles for the kind of person I wanted to be, saving pictures of emo scenesters with leopard-print hair and cutting and pasting sepia indie girls with dolly beads clasped around their necks. I figured out the right brands of skate shoes and impatiently downloaded discographies on LimeWire, gleaned from trawling through someone’s ‘Likes’ section. Music assuaged some of the chaos brewing inside of me and the boys wearing girls’ clothes made me excited, as though boundaries were something that could be broken.

  55

  Sparks in the air everywhere I turn. Hair cropped on the back of a neck and a trembling hand. Blushing cheeks. Skin is shiny and armpits are sweaty and eyes are lurking everywhere. The boys at school play a game where they run their hands up our thighs and we try not to flinch. I am the best at this game. I can go very far without moving even though I am jelly inside. Can they sense the prickly heat in my knickers? I even think I like it. Breasts quiver under school shirts and everything feels tight. We are bursting into new shapes. The brush of a finger and I’m neon all over. You try to hold me but I will not let you now. I am on fire. Do not come into the bathroom when I am having a bath. I am all locked doors and hours in mirrors. I shave my legs and pluck my eyebrows into nothing because that’s what ladies do. You teach me to look after my body. Face wash and creams and deodorants. Spots are bad and sweat is worse and we must keep our bodies under control. There is a girl in our class who smells. No one has told her to wash under her armpits. She has no one to iron her clothes. We keep away from her and titter in corners. We don’t want to end up like that.

  56

  I don’t get much phone signal in my cottage due to the thick stone walls. My friends and I communicate through WhatsApp voice messages. There is something nice about having their voices stored in my palm, to be turned on at will. Hearing their words fill the room makes me feel less alone.

  It is interesting to listen back to my own replies. I notice the pauses and repetitions and colloquialisms I use, and how I often seem to have trouble expressing what I want to say. It is similar to looking at your own Facebook profile, which seems narcissistic but is actually just a way of trying to find a sense of yourself and comparing the way you feel to the way that others see you.

  There is something nostalgic about listening to the voice notes. I smile and laugh as my friends tell me anecdotes; instinctively, as though we are having a conversation. My facial expression changes according to their joy or sadness and it is as though we are experiencing the emotion together, even though for them it has already passed.

  Sometimes I can hear the sound of traffic and people in the background. More than once, I have moved out of the road to make way for a passing car, only to realise that it is the recording and I am moving out of the way for a car driving in the past, hundreds of miles away.

  57

  I watched the boys in the year above as they skulked around school with guitars on their backs. Girls with dyed hair and heavy fringes carved shapes into their arms with compasses stolen from the Maths classroom. They held lighters to their wounds so that when the scabs fell off their skin would scar in heartagrams. I begged my mother for a pair of pink Converse All Stars. We went shopping one night after school and the next day I raced home from the bus stop to open my wardrobe and look at them in their box all rubbery with promise. They were a passport into a different kind of life.

  I got into trouble at school for wearing nail varnish and drawing all over my exercise books, but my grades were good and they redeemed me when I was called out too many times for chatting in class. I counted down the periods to English in secret. Books sent a terrible heat through me that I didn’t want anyone to know about. When I was asked to read out loud I struggled to feign disinterest and keep my voice at the socially acceptable monotone. Writing essays and stories took the knot out of my stomach and unspooled it across the page. When I wrote it was with an invisible part of myself; a lambent secret that only my teachers knew about. Reading made me feel like I was standing on the precipice of something very tall, and I suspected that one day I would jump off the edge of it.

  58

  For a time in London, I spent most days with the architect. He sat up late at the kitchen table designing buildings on his laptop. His strong lines and sharp corners slotted into place. They grew upwards and outwards, night by night, while I pulled pints and turned in on myself, like an ingrown hair.

  Once, he took me to see a school he designed. When he wasn’t looking, I pressed my palm flat against a wall and closed my eyes. I imagined the cold, heavy plaster seeping into me and filling my body, making me impenetrable. The floors and ceilings made me feel far away from him. It seemed unfair to me that he had so much proof of his existence, w
hile I was getting smaller every day.

  59

  I spent lunchtimes in the art and music rooms and breaktimes with the tough kids on the school field. I wasn’t sure where I fitted in. I felt intimidated by make-up and the cool girls in scrunchies and push-up bras who gave boys handjobs under the desk during Geography.

  60

  Now I understand that words are precious because I can carry them all around inside of my head. The architect needs computer programs and contracts and laws and builders and bricks and mortar and light fittings and skirting boards. All I need is myself.

  61

  The toughest girl in my class got her period on the seat in the Science lab. The boys behind her showed no mercy.

  ‘Sarah, love!’ they cawed, swinging on their stools. ‘Someone’s got fucking jammy knickers!’ I died inside for her as she swivelled around to face them, blushing beneath layers of orange foundation.

  ‘That,’ she said, looking each of them in the eyes, ‘is what you call The Facts of Life.’ She stalked out of the classroom, leaving wet blood smeared in her wake. I treated her with reverence after that.

  62

  My body is the wrong kind of body. I have full breasts and a small waist and grown men stop and stare in the street. At first it is thrilling when boys from school touch my bum on the stairs but soon it turns sour. I want it and I do not want it. I want to be visible and I want to be invisible, or perhaps I want to be visible to some people and not to others. It seems unfair that I can’t choose. I let some boys touch, slowly. Maybe hands in knickers but no more. I go home all tingles up my arms and in my chest but still I am wrong. It is my legs I think, too thick in my school skirt. I look at your legs and they are perfect. Sculpted in fake-tan shimmer. Things get better with age, you say, but I don’t have time to wait.

  63

  On the bus one morning, me feeling shy in a short skirt, two boys with their feet on the seats licked me lazily with their eyes.

  ‘Aw, yeah mate,’ they said in voices that were too gruff for their small faces. ‘I’d do them both, like.’ They craned around to get a better look at me and another girl around my age who had got on afterwards.

  ‘What about her head,’ said one, nodding in my direction, ‘on her body?’ he said, gesturing towards the other girl.

  ‘Fucking rights,’ agreed the other boy, salivating in his seat. ‘I’d bang the fuck out of that.’ I put in my headphones and pretended not to hear. I tugged my skirt over my knees and spread my palms across my thighs, trying to ascertain their width in comparison to everyone else’s. I sneaked a look at the other girl out of the corner of my eye; small and skinny in jeans and a crop top. My skin felt prickly, like a mohair jumper that was too small for me, stifling me as I tried to stretch beyond it. The boys blasted New Monkey from their mobile phones and old ladies tutted and tsked among themselves, too afraid to do anything about it.

  64

  We don’t leave the house for three days. Our lives take on a timeless quality, punctuated by coffee in the mornings and hot whiskey in the evenings, blurred with limbs and duvets and thick, strange sleep. We share cigarettes in bed and I watch as the smoke curls in the curtains, coating everything in its stink. I leave the windows closed. We are snails leaving trails. I want there to be a reminder, the essence of what we did lingering here. We giggle our way through the hours and make paintings spread out on the living room floor. We burn candles to the bone and play each other music. We like to bite and scratch.

  ‘I’m scared I might hurt you,’ he says, holding back.

  ‘I’m pretty strong, you know,’ I reply. Pleasure pools in my stomach like warm honey. I trace my fingers over the outline of his tattoo; a dove and a wooden cross.

  ‘A good Catholic boy,’ I tease with my head pressed into the pillow.

  65

  Springtime brought gypsy skirts and white linen trousers. My mother was young and beautiful with a whole life behind her but a whole possible life ahead of her, too. She had dancer’s legs and everyone swore she looked just like Rachel Stevens from S Club 7. She got blond highlights in her hair and bought tiny brown miniskirts with plastic medallions from New Look. She came home from the shops rustling bags filled with vest tops, cork wedges, cropped denim jackets and Rimmel Good to Glow instant tan, shimmied down the legs for a glimmer across cobbles in car headlights. I bought her Life for Rent by Dido for her thirty-ninth birthday. We took the lyric sheet out of the CD case and looked at the pictures of Dido with her feathered hair and boot-cut jeans and dreamed that was what our futures would look like. We ripped a topless picture of Enrique Iglesias from the Top of the Pops magazine and stuck it on the fridge.

  66

  There is a smell in your skin that scares me. Sweet. Sour. A smell that thrills me and makes me sick. I note the gentle ooze of your hips over your jeans, the molten, gorgeous spill of you. The world is full of eyes on fire in ways I could not see until now. I dye your hair copper brown in the kitchen and I do not wear the little plastic gloves. You frown at my stained fingertips but I am pleased. You: streaked across me in semi-permanence.

  67

  She started hanging out with her father’s old friends in Luma Bar in Sunderland in the afternoons. There was Harry from Londonderry who played the spoons. There were the chefs who joined them after work, their arms coated in burger grease, clutching cheesy chips in tinfoil cartons, fat congealed around the edges. There was Toni who owned the caff and his 21-year-old girlfriend, Jane. Their landlady told Harry that they never ate anything and stayed up all night doing coke and drinking champagne naked in the kitchen under a giant umbrella. Jane sometimes did sex work when the money got tight and Toni pretended not to notice as strange men shuffled upstairs in the dark, touching their way around the door handle because the bulb had blown and no one cared enough to buy a new one.

  An army of joiners from Glasgow descended on the scene, sweating over girders and wires during the weekdays, building a nightclub and casino in the centre of town. They hit the bars in Park Lane after their shift, easing out the knots in their muscles with cheap pints of lager and casting oily eyes at the local ladies. They were nicknamed ‘The Meerkats’, on account of the way they craned their necks to get an eyeful of the women walking past.

  I envied the ease with which my mother existed in her body. I slouched uncomfortably in my ripped jeans, pulling at my jumper, trying to obscure my breasts, while she perched at the pub table, jangling bracelets and reapplying her lipstick in the back of a silver knife. Sometimes I could actually sense my skin growing and stretching. Shooting pains stung my limbs like electric shocks.

  The joiners’ gaffer was Gordon. He drove a Jaguar with tellies pressed into the backs of the front seats and kept a loose change jar on his kitchen counter filled exclusively with two-pound coins. My mother was full of something special and traces of it lingered in the air when she turned her head to give whoever she was chatting to her full attention. Gordon offered her a lift home one night. I imagined her crossing her legs over his leather seats as they took off into the streetlights together.

  68

  I can feel something new inside of me. The desires of others break over my skin like the coloured flowers shone onto walls of clubs I used to go to. I have twisted myself so far into uncomfortable shapes to please other people that I have forgotten my most natural form.

  This is a place that shaped my family. Living here, in the smallness and the silence, I am learning how to listen to myself. I am cycling through mountains and playing my favourite albums on repeat. I am reading and thinking and watching films, wrapped in a duvet by the fire at night. I am writing letters to my friends and teaching myself how to cook slow, careful meals, creamy curries and thyme-speckled vegetable bakes, goat’s cheese seeping through my layers, salty and soft.

  Some days I am very raw, as though my outer layers have been peeled away, exposing the new parts of myself to the wind and the sea spray. When you have been distant from yourself for some tim
e, coming back into your body is alarming. Acknowledging that your desires are plural and even contradictory is a difficult realisation, but it is necessary if you are going to live in a way that is true to yourself.

  I feel very sensitive to different consistencies of light. The speed of the wind. The pull of my clothes against my arms. Everything has a texture. I had stopped noticing it. I have a new pleasure in holding objects. A cold, round apple is solid in the palm of my hand. I stroke the smooth, hard squares of Scrabble letters. I run my fingers over the rough wooden surface of the table. I wonder if this is how my mother felt when we came here during those long, brooding summers.

  69

  My father moved into a house in a different part of town. Occasionally he picked Josh and me up and whizzed us to Frankie & Benny’s or the cinema. We sometimes stopped by his house on the way home and I wandered around it, wondering at the emptiness. He slept on a mattress in the corner of the room and an empty IKEA shelving unit covered the back wall.

  ‘Why don’t you get some more things, Dad?’ I asked him, sitting on the floor. ‘There’s too much space in here.’

  ‘I dunno, Luce,’ he said, looking around. ‘I don’t see the point. It’s just a house, this is. It’s not my home.’

  One night he cruised the streets looking for my mother. He borrowed a friend’s car and wore a wig and thought that she wouldn’t recognise him peering in at her new life through the pub window.