Saltwater

by Jessica Andrews

  70

  Here in Ireland, I am often asked, ‘How long are you home for?’, which means ‘How long are you staying here?’ I resented that as a child. When the weather was bad the summer days stretched on into nothing, lumpy and bitter. My mother sometimes got an ocean look in her eye and I feared that we would never leave and the north-east would dissolve in the rain, my friends forgotten. I feared this place becoming my home and now, I suppose, it is.

  71

  I wandered around the shops at the weekends after drama club, catching the shock of my body under the lights in the Topshop changing rooms and learning the shape of hate. I bit my lip as I tried my best to memorise fashion rules and wriggle into the sliver of space I was expected to occupy.

  When the shops shut I went shyly to the pub to meet my mother and her friends, sipping Coke through a curly straw and fingering the gummy strawberries in my jeans pocket.

  ‘Sit down with us, darling!’ Toni cooed. ‘What a pretty little thing you’re turning out to be. Just like your mother.’

  ‘Ah, Tone, you’re embarrassing her, man.’ Jane took a gulp of her white wine and soda, her lip gloss coating the edge of the glass. Toni licked her cheek and she squealed and tottered off to the toilets to get changed. Jane always brought a tiny beaded handbag with her with an outfit change stuffed into it by some kind of magic. When afternoon segued into night she nipped into the loos and came out in a different dress or blouse, with eyeshadow to match.

  ‘Give us a twirl, Janey!’ Toni squealed, squeezing her bum. My mother was radiant among the half-drunk pints and the smattering of coins that people pressed into my fingers, streaked with make-up from the Collection 2000 samples in Superdrug.

  ‘And what do you want to be when you grow up?’ loomed Harry as the street lamps sputtered on.

  ‘A nurse!’ trilled Toni. ‘A perfect little nurse! I think she’d be a wonderful nurse, just like her mother. Can’t you see her in the uniform?’ I grimaced and my mother caught my eye.

  ‘I’m not a nurse, Toni,’ she warned. ‘I’ve got Josh now.’ I held onto the legs of my mother’s bar stool, drinking in her DKNY perfume and watching her laugh through the cigarette smoke.

  ‘Do you want to call a taxi, pet?’ she murmured to me. ‘Go on. I’ll pay. Josh’ll be home from your nan’s soon. You’d better get back for him. I won’t be long.’ I took the crumpled notes and shoved them into my backpack. ‘You’re my little star,’ she crooned into my scalp.

  When I came home I called Rosie and she rushed over. We barricaded my bedroom door so Josh couldn’t bother us, playing my dad’s old Travis album at top volume and cutting the feet off our tights to make them into footless leggings. When we got hungry I made pasta for the three of us, trying not to get ketchup on my glittery vest top as I squirted hearts and smiley faces onto the middle of our plates. I plonked Josh in the bath and he splashed water everywhere, soaking our wood-panelled bathroom until it began to decay. Months later my mother and I hacked it off with hammers and found smelly black mulch rotting beneath it.

  72

  Toni died unexpectedly one Saturday afternoon. He had been up all night on a cocaine bender and did a charity bike ride the next day. He had a heart attack before he reached the finish line. Jane packed up her things and went back to her life. She was only twenty-one. She applied to university and pretended none of it had ever happened.

  A few years later, when I was almost old enough, I went to a pub in Sunderland with my boyfriend. Jane was working behind the bar.

  ‘Jane?’ I said. She didn’t recognise me. ‘Susie’s daughter,’ I explained. Her eyes widened in recognition. ‘I’m so sorry about Toni.’

  A shadow of a sadness passed across her face. She looked so young beneath her make-up. ‘Oh, thank you.’ She emptied the dishwasher without meeting my eyes. ‘It all seems so long ago now, you know?’ She was just another student working in a bar, on her way to other things.

  73

  When I got home from school, my mother was often out collecting Josh or doing a food shop. She left me lists of jobs to do signed off with a blue biro love heart. I collected the washing from the garden in my bare feet, dropped the clean bedsheets in the mud and then ran myself a bubble bath.

  Sometimes I pushed open the door of her bedroom and walked around it, breathing in the hot smell of her hair where it lingered after a blow-dry. I opened her wooden jewellery box and fingered her hoop earrings in their nest of hairgrips. I opened her wardrobe and stroked her dresses; the bobbled ones with supermarket labels and the glitzy, floaty ones she ordered in secret from the Next catalogue. My favourite had a band of gold sequins around the middle and we called it the Cheryl Cole.

  If I stayed in her room long enough, the objects in it began to seem divorced from meaning. A lipstick was just a lipstick without her fingers pushing colour to the surface. I felt scared that the things I admired became static and meaningless without her to breathe life into them. Before I left, I slid my tights over the carpet to brush away any traces of my feet. I always made sure everything was exactly as she left it. I couldn’t let her know how much I craved her when she wasn’t there.

  74

  School lunchtimes are steamy hot and greasy. Crammed into rooms smelling of other people’s sandwiches. We sit together with lunch boxes and scrutinise. That girl is a swimmer so she eats lots and that girl has cottage cheese, a healthy thing, and we all sit in circles breathing in. Is there too much chocolate in mine? We are all blushing. We should have yoghurts and raisins not milkshakes and pizzas. We compare our thighs in the reflection of doors and people tell us that’s where our value lies. Fat is bandied around like a swear word and we learn that it is the worst thing we could ever be. We look at pictures in magazines and watch music videos in ICT and someone says that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels and we scoff at that but somehow it gets in.

  75

  There have been times when my skin has been so thin it is as though the morning light might leak through me. Like those IKEA paper lamps that started off cool and ended up crumpled on the floor, red-wine-stained and sagging from cheap skeletons in sad student rooms.

  I have stood on the tube as the doors opened and held onto the bar until my knuckles turned white in fear that I might get blown out onto the tracks with the rats and crumpled crisp packets.

  That is the wrong kind of lightness. It is better to have weight and to be able to pull stars and planets towards you. I can see that now. The beaches here are vast and empty and on a clear night the Milky Way is visible from my garden. I have been avoiding the sea and the stars because they make me feel small. I am trying to grow bigger.

  76

  Sometimes Rosie and I hung out in Durham with her friends from dance school. They had brown limbs and leathery handbags and names like Jojo and Bebe. They toted skinny Vogue cigarettes from the cuffs of Jack Wills blazers and I felt pale and dirty around them, my syllables clumsy and lumbering.

  One evening we missed our bus home. My flip phone buzzed and flashed, coated in silver nail varnish.

  ‘Where are you, sugar-plum?’ my nan’s voice cooed. ‘We’re about to pass your house. We’re dropping off Josh.’

  ‘Shit.’ I tugged Rosie’s ballet cardigan. ‘We’ve got to go.’ Bebe and Jojo rolled their eyes.

  ‘Oh, stay,’ they pleaded. ‘We’ve got a bottle of vodka for later.’ I made wistful eyes at Rosie and she shrugged them off.

  ‘Next time, bitches!’ she called over her shoulder. We walked along the side of the motorway all the way home. My phone rang into the traffic as Rosie whimpered and cars tooted at us as they flashed by our small bodies, joined at the hands.

  77

  The buzz of hunger wears away at hate. Skirts too tight and skin dimpled in changing room lights. We get bad haircuts and put toothpaste on our spots and we learn the opposite of love. I cannot tell if I am a pear or an apple or an hourglass or even which one I am supposed to want. You tell me it doesn’t matter but I know t
hat it does, even to you. Boyish seems best because boyish means exempt from these things. I am not boyish. I do not want my body to cause a stir. I don’t want it to be the first thing that speaks. I think of sex, of course, but I think of other things, too. People look but they do not listen.

  78

  ‘You can’t wear them shorts around the house any more, Lucy pet,’ my mother said one morning over toast. They were pink silky hot pants with a matching pyjama top.

  ‘Why not?’ I pulled them down so they covered my bum cheeks.

  ‘They’re indecent. Poor Gordon doesn’t know where to look.’

  79

  ‘Look at the moon,’ the man and I text each other at night, and sometimes I can see it and he can’t, and sometimes he can see it and I can’t, depending on the weather. We try to send each other pictures on our phones but it is almost impossible to photograph the moon without proper equipment.

  80

  My friend Lauren’s dad was an old punk. He wore a Harrington jacket, subscribed to the NME and bought us tickets for gigs at the local student union. Those frantic evenings were a portal into another world. Gigs were a space where the rules and norms of everyday life were suspended and anything could happen. The grease and glamour released some of the weird energy spiralled inside of me.

  Lauren and I linked arms to stop each other from going under as the crowds pressed in. We twisted with dads at Supergrass and laddered our tights for Funeral For a Friend. We lurked around the merch stall to ask Bullet For My Valentine to sign our knickers after their supporting set.

  ‘Is this even legal?’ they drawled, swigging beers and exchanging glances. Big men without shirts spun the crowd into whirlpools as circle pits whipped us faster and faster into the centre.

  81

  The man and I become obsessed with the moon. We drive out to the mountains at night to look at it. We measure the passing of time through its fragments. I read obsessively about the links between tides and emotions and circadian rhythms. I discover that more babies are born when the moon is closest to earth and the gravitational pull is strongest. I wonder if the moon could pull things out of me.

  82

  We slouched into school the next day with pink dye streaked in our hair and the smell of spilt beer wafting from under our uniforms. It seemed incredible to me that anything as dreary as a Maths class could possibly exist when hot lights flashed behind fire doors in unassuming parts of town.

  Musicians became our role models. We knew there were other lives beyond the chip shops and the bus stops but we didn’t know how to get there. We didn’t know anyone who was a doctor or a lawyer, but most people had a brother or an uncle who played in a band. My mother was proud that I knew all the words to ‘Wonderwall’ before I learned any nursery rhymes, belting it out at playgroup while the other kids sang ditties about sheep and lambs.

  When I was at school we were swamped by bands like the Arctic Monkeys; working-class lads who cut their lines with offhand Shakespeare and made it big on Myspace. The internet made art permeable. We could download songs illegally and send them to each other over MSN for free. We danced at indie discos to bands like Art Brut and nursed cans into the early hours singing Billy Bragg’s ‘A New England’, spread-eagled on someone from school’s stepdad’s carpet. We loved the Holloways and Jamie T. for their socialist whimsy and delighted in Tim Booth jangling across music channels in a dress. Women like Kate Nash and Lovefoxxx were special, singing about Escher and bird shit, twirling in trainers and tie-dye catsuits.

  I scrawled ‘Red Squier Strat’ across the top of my Christmas list and in the morning it was waiting for me, a Santa hat hanging jauntily from the neck. I had been wearing a plectrum on a necklace for weeks in anticipation. My eyes were full and gold with plans for my band, the sequins we would wear and the songs we would play: rock covers of Girls Aloud and the Sugababes.

  I started lessons in an outbuilding at the back of someone else’s school, with a man called Scott we found in the paper who taught me Green Day songs. My mother dropped me off and he watched her car pull away through the window.

  ‘I didn’t realise your mam was so lovely,’ he said, turning tuning pegs. I shrugged non-committally and pulled my stripy rainbow strap over my head.

  The next week he stood at the window as my mother paced the schoolyard on her phone. ‘You look nice,’ he said, turning his attention back to me. ‘You and your mam going somewhere after this?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘No. Not really.’ His eyes snagged my knees as he adjusted the music stand, still scabbed and bruised because I wasn’t quite there yet.

  ‘I’m not looking at your tits, by the way,’ he said, unzipping his guitar bag. ‘I’m just reading your T-shirt.’

  I smiled uncertainly.

  In our third week, while I was packing my guitar away, he came out to my mother’s car after class and asked my mother out on a date. She laughed it off until I told her about the T-shirt comment. We stopped the lessons after that. I never progressed beyond ‘Basket Case’.

  83

  One night, I take a video of clouds drifting in front of the moon. The moon itself is not visible but I can see the light changing as it fills the different shapes and textures of the clouds. This proves to be the most effective way of capturing the moon. We observe the way the light is reflected in other things.

  84

  I started spending my Saturdays at Goth Green in Newcastle. Hundreds of teenagers congregated on the grass by the war memorial, wielding skateboards and instruments and two-litre bottles of White Lightning. Lauren and I smeared red eyeshadow across our eyelids and layered dolly beads before we went out, giggling on the metro as the Tyne flickered by. We skulked around with people from school as they drew faces on tampon wrappers and set their shoes on fire and we ogled Myspace celebrities behind their Scene haircuts. Sometimes we went to Exhibition Park to watch the skateboarders, checking out people’s outfits while poppers were passed around and girls got fingered in the bushes.

  One afternoon I plucked up the courage to enter the gilded caravan that sat at the edge of the green. A woman sat at a small table among cluttered ashtrays and crystal balls. She had a sausage dog buried beneath the frills and flounces of her skirt. I crossed her palm with silver and she grasped mine in her thick fingers. She fixed her eyes on a spot on the wall and murmured an unintelligible prayer.

  ‘Eat lots of salad,’ she finally declared, without looking at me. ‘And stick with God.’ I thanked her and clattered back down the painted steps, blinking in the daylight. Disappointment sagged in my chest.

  A skateboarder cornered me on the green one day and offered to give me a lesson on his knackered-looking skateboard. He had dirty blond curls and a trucker cap covered in marker pen. I smiled sweetly and hopped onto his board while Lauren chatted to his friend and watched me out of the corner of her eye. I poised my feet artfully, swallowing yelps as I smacked the concrete over and over again. He put his hands on my waist to steady me and we sailed across the pavement together.

  ‘Luce,’ Lauren called from the grass, brandishing her mobile. ‘We’re gonna have to go. Me mam’ll be going mad.’ I picked my military jacket up off the floor and explained to the skater that we had to go.

  ‘Thanks for the lesson,’ I said, coolly.

  ‘That’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk with you to the metro.’ Lauren gave me a look but said nothing. As we waited in line at the machines to get our tickets, the boy suddenly spun me round and kissed me, pressing my body against the ticket machine with his. I tentatively kissed him back. He took off his cap so that he could stick his tongue deep into my mouth without poking me with its peak. We forgot about the tickets and Lauren and I jumped the barrier and ran for the train, spluttering and shrieking.

  ‘I cannot believe you!’ She laughed in disbelief as we squashed onto a seat.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Give us a spray with this, will you? Don’t want me mam to get a whiff of the tab smoke.’ I took the sp
ray from her and masked our afternoon with vanilla-flavoured Impulse. It lingered on our skin for a long time afterwards.

  85

  I no longer hunger for your hands on my skin. Now boys touch my body and decide if it is good or not. I am lucky. I have a nice one. He kisses and sucks and licks and fucks but there is a mad, sad thing growing in my belly. I always want more. I do not want to be me for reasons I do not understand. I have read too much or seen too much or had too much of something. I cannot settle. I am itchy all of the time behind my eyes and between my bones. I get so drunk that sometimes I pass out in spangly dresses, purpling headaches on chip-shop floors. I can’t remember what I did but I like it that way. I am losing the us and pulling away.

  86

  There is so much space here. Space to breathe and spread myself out. When I cycle into town I pass bogs and sea and sky that seem to go on forever. The sunrises and sunsets seep in pastels and because there is so much sky they seem like a main event. I love the stretch of brown rocks in the bay when the tide is out. I love the cloud formations. I love freewheeling down the hill on my bike into the yellows and oranges. I go for walks across the beaches and I am the only person around for miles. There is room to grow and to think about things, as opposed to the city where everyone clamours for the same sad vantage point from a dirty train window.

  87

  My mother and Gordon started going to the pub less. He parked his Jaguar outside of our house and they spent their evenings squashed on the settee watching the soaps. He sighed dramatically and turned the television down when I burst through the door, spilling the dramas of my day into their silence.