Saltwater

by Jessica Andrews

  6

  There is a timeless quality to the west-coast light at this time of year. When I look out across the bay it seems impossible to determine whether it is morning or afternoon or evening. Everything is misty and the clouds have a purple tinge to them, as though I am living inside of a bruise. It isn’t quite dawn and yet it isn’t quite twilight, either. I am living in a space outside of time, suspended in the perpetual present.

  Nothing changes in this place. I walk past the same houses and fields and cars that I did when I was a child. The same animals are in the same fields. The same people in the same houses. The same cars parked outside. Hair is greyer, there are wrinkles, eyes sadder, a few deaths, but largely everything remains the same. There is a comfort in that. No one can get lost. There is a safe and secure feeling in knowing that if you wanted to track someone down, it would be easy. No one is ever far away.

  I am panicked, too, when I think about the stasis. Everyone knows the details of each other’s lives. I get restless if I live on the same street too long. I grow to hate the colour of the bus stops and the warm smell of the shops and the same cracks in the same pavements, day after day. People and possessions get lost in cities. They are constantly moving and shifting and changing. If you leave your bag on the seat beside you it will be gone, lost or stolen, or it will simply fall onto the ground and be swept away. You have to hold onto things tightly. Nothing is ever the same twice.

  I thought I was a city kind of person. I thought I craved speed and electricity. I thought I got a kick out of the possibility of losing myself and the people who are close to me. I liked the feeling of walking down a teeming street and knowing that an important person yet to appear in my life might be walking right by me and I would never know. Everything is down to chance and opportunity among the multitudes. Here, things seem predestined. I don’t believe in destiny and I don’t believe in monotony and yet, for some reason, I am here.

  7

  My fake-tanned limbs that looked shiny and lustrous under the Newcastle club lights were orange in the sticky London sunshine. My artfully draped silk scarves were tacky and my high street dresses were obvious. At the weekends I rode the coloured snakes of the tube to parts of the city I’d read about and traipsed the streets, seeking out a better version of myself.

  My student overdraft was free money. Instead of ordering books for my course, I went shopping. I bought a vintage dress patterned with anchors, a pair of leopard-print boots, a camel trench coat, several pairs of polka-dot tights and an imitation Burberry scarf for a pound from the barrel at Portobello Market. I walked up and down Camden High Street for a week before my classes started, leaving red Rimmel kisses on the ends of Marlboro Lights and ostentatiously propping Burroughs against my pint glass in the Hawley Arms. I was chasing the kinds of people I’d spent years dreaming about, looking for traces of gold dust caught on their winkle-pickers as they darted through alleyways to parties where Z-list celebrities did lines off mirrors and had impromptu photo shoots in the bath.

  That kind of world had dissipated while I’d been supping coffee in Sainsbury’s and cramming my head with quotes for my A levels. It was a different city now, one of Hawaiian shirts and pool halls in Dalston, Hunter S. Thompson sunglasses and doors at the backs of kebab shops leading to underground parties. I was late, but I hadn’t realised yet.

  8

  We take a shortcut along a dirt track one night on our way down to Jimmy’s. I linger by a field of long grass for a moment.

  ‘What’s up?’ He squints to light a cigarette in the wind.

  ‘Did you ever see the fairy ring here when you were a kid?’

  He looks at me with a half-smile.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I did not.’ It is cold and I pull my jacket close around my body.

  ‘I used to come down here with my brother,’ I tell him. ‘There was a huge ring of purple flowers. One summer, I took a whole roll of photos, but when I got them developed, they were all black.’

  ‘Aye.’ He smirks. ‘Well. That’s magic for you, that is.’ He shoves his hands in his pockets and bends his head against the wind. ‘Come on.’ He groans. ‘It’s fucking freezing.’

  ‘I thought about it for years afterwards,’ I say, following him down the path. He takes a drag on his cigarette and winks.

  ‘Did you never think that maybe you just had your finger over the lens?’

  I am quiet as we walk down the street in the dusk. I have never thought of that.

  9

  My friend Jake was at drama school and we drank red wine in the World’s End one night, saturating ourselves with the city. The streets were caught in our hair like smoke. He went to the toilet and I leaned against the windowsill on my own, trying not to look at my phone.

  ‘Got a light, babe?’ asked a woman with a peroxide pixie crop, flinging herself down on the beer barrel beside me. I proudly produced a Zippo from my pocket.

  ‘Cheers.’ She squinted through the flame. ‘Lovely eyes, you’ve got. You from round here?’

  ‘I live South of The River,’ I said, carefully straightening my syllables, claiming the phrase I’d heard other people use as my own.

  ‘Grow up round there, did you?’

  ‘No. I’m from the north-east, actually,’ I told her, keeping my origins purposely vague. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Bristol,’ she said. ‘But London’s got me good. It’s fucking brilliant here.’ She sniffed. ‘Do me a favour, babe. I haven’t got a coke halo, have I? Can you check?’ I looked at her blankly. ‘My nose. Any coke up there?’ I looked at her nostrils. They were pale and delicate.

  ‘You’re good,’ I told her.

  ‘Thanks, angel.’ Her cheek twitched. ‘I like you. You’ve got a good spirit. You should stick with me. I could show you a good time.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m here with my friend. He’s just gone to the loo.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘What kind of music you into? I’m good mates with Amy, you know. And I only fuck famous men. We’d be good together, me and you. We could fuck all the pretty boys in Camden. What do you think?’ I laughed. Jake came back from the toilet and found her in his seat.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘This is Jake.’ She looked him up and down disdainfully as a bearded man in a suede jacket passed her a drink.

  ‘Get this down you, Carmen, babe,’ he ordered. ‘We’re off to the Lock Tavern.’

  Carmen pushed her cold mouth to my ear. ‘Stick with me, Goldilocks.’ Her breath was chemical. ‘I could make you a star.’

  10

  I feel lonely and turn on the radio but the jangle of the news studio in London and all of the things that are happening in the world make me dizzy. Even though I am alone, quite far away from other people, and my days are filled with walks and books and cooking meals, I have not been able to hear the silence. My mind is roiling with anxieties, thoughts crammed thickly inside of my skull. When I close my eyes at night I hear police sirens calling to me, puncturing my sleep.

  11

  My lectures were a blur. I had to leave at least two hours early to navigate through the London traffic in time for a 9 a.m. class. I always seemed to be last, bursting through the door in a flurry of coffee and perfume, without my notebook. I ferreted around in my pockets for a pen as people around me calmly supped water and typed diligently on their MacBooks.

  We were assigned tutors to look out for us during our first year. I was invited to the office to practise talking about poetry before my first seminar. I crammed in there with four others, ogling the bookshelves and potted plants and looking at the buses trundling along the Strand below. I bit the insides of my cheeks, remembering the Adrienne Rich poem in the Queen Mary interview. We had to introduce ourselves and talk about where we were from.

  ‘I’m sort of northern, too,’ gushed the girl next to me, a hockey stick poking out of her Longchamp tote. ‘Well, I mean. My family home is there. But I grew up here. That’s why I don’t have an accent.’

  I
pushed the ‘ewk’ out of ‘bewk’ with burning cheeks and taught myself to say ‘buck’ that rhymed with ‘fuck’. I didn’t want heads to turn in seminar rooms while I bungled something vague about books I hadn’t had time to read, my voice clumsy and wrong as my classmates half-closed their eyes and pondered elegantly in long and complicated sentences about absolutely nothing.

  ‘It’s essentially a degree in bullshitting,’ my new friends said sagely as we nursed coffees between lectures at the Caffè Nero across the road.

  12

  Still, I am wrong. There is another kind of skin that I did not know about. It is posh-girl skin. Expensive and gold. Look how it glows. It is lustrous and shiny where I am mottled. Look at my bruises, my scratches, my scars. Those girls do not have these things. Perhaps I can pure myself out of it. I am dizzy with want. There is not enough space in this city to contain my desire. I want to be smooth and seamless. I want to be light and float through the streets. I want to bury the sad sick parts of myself deep dark inside so that no one will know I am swollen with want, like a dead body pulled from a river.

  13

  One morning I was on my way to a seminar when I received a text from the bank to inform me I had maxed out my overdraft.

  ‘Shit,’ I whispered under my breath. My entire student loan had gone on my rent and I didn’t have a penny left in the world. I called my mam. We spoke on the phone every day, sometimes more than once. She called me to ask my opinion on an outfit and I rang her to pass the minutes waiting for a bus.

  ‘Oh, Lucy pet,’ she said. ‘What are we going to do? I wish I could help you.’

  ‘It’s alright,’ I told her. ‘I’ve got bar experience. I’ll print out some CVs today.’

  ‘I’m so proud of you,’ she said. ‘You’re doing great.’ She posted me her collection of McDonald’s loyalty cards so I could collect a free coffee at lunchtime, until my financial situation improved.

  I trailed around bars and restaurants with my flimsy experience tucked inside of a book, ruffling my hair in shop windows and tugging my skirt before I went in. I feigned enthusiasm for bored girls in Dr Martens who shoved my name into a crumpled heap.

  I wanted to work somewhere cool and exciting. I felt I had done my time in stale waitressing jobs. I read enough music biographies to understand that I could be plucked from an obscure coffee shop job and into something glittering. I knew about Max’s Kansas City and the famous corner table.

  I sat at a table across from a manager in a converted warehouse bar.

  ‘Just so you know,’ he said, meeting my eyes. ‘Every member of staff has to work New Year’s Eve.’ It was September. I smiled, brightly.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And if you’re after part-time work that means you’ll be working every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. No fucking around.’

  ‘Right. Yes.’

  ‘And the girls are expected to wear full make-up. Skirts. Nice blouses. Heels for events.’

  ‘Yep, got it.’

  ‘Alright, then. Any questions? No? Okay. We’ll be in touch.’

  My feet ached as I traipsed from bar to restaurant to coffee shop, shying away from places that looked uninteresting or intimidating.

  ‘I’ll pass it on,’ sighed boys with vacant eyes and lurking managers.

  I was about to give up hope when I entered a pub off Spitalfields market, quivering in neon. It was filled with every kind of person: students in holey jumpers, fashion girls in black lipstick, old men watching the football and wired City boys in shirts and ties.

  ‘I was wondering if you had any vacancies?’ I smiled at the girl behind the bar.

  ‘Probably.’ She grinned. ‘We’re always hiring. I’ll just get the manager.’ She disappeared and returned with a man in cycling gear. He skimmed my CV.

  ‘King’s, eh?’ He winked. ‘Not just a pretty face.’ I tried to look upbeat. ‘Got experience?’

  ‘Yeah, loads.’

  ‘Alright then, baby. Trial shift tomorrow, okay? Show me what you’ve got.’

  14

  Living in a new place can go either way; you can cling to the signifiers of yourself or you can test them and blow them apart. We categorise ourselves in order to try and make sense of who we are. It is a survival mechanism to avoid the loss of the self in the maelstrom of human experience.

  Deconstructing your own self-image is thrilling. It is liberating to do things that seem incongruous with the kind of person you have made. I occasionally eat fish even though I am a vegetarian. I dance to music that would not usually make me twist. I kiss men who smell like dirt and metal and forget about the people in my past.

  In the city there are so many people and so many possible lives that you have to build strong boundaries in order to define yourself. And yet here, where there is more space, where there are no preconceptions, I am surprising myself.

  15

  My flat had bedbugs. Everyone’s sheets were crawling with tiny, wormy creatures. We discovered them at the same time and spent a horrified night curled up under coats on the kitchen floor. We told reception and they arranged to have our rooms fumigated.

  ‘You will be required to be absent from the premises for at least twelve hours,’ they informed us. ‘The fumigation process can be harmful if you breathe in the chemicals.’ Everyone else in my flat went home for the weekend, back to Essex or Paris or some far-flung corner of London. The day of the fumigation I woke early and spent the day wandering the streets in the cold and listlessly drinking coffees on my own, the city flickering behind my eyelids.

  My head was too full to do any reading. I was memorising street names and coffee shops and how to get a good head on a beer in a Staropramen glass and the year of the Chablis and what the celeriac is marinated in and how to pronounce the word Holborn and how to use the Dewey Decimal System and dancing at parties and changing the shape of my sentences, the texture of my skin and the weight of my skull.

  When I opened my books the words wriggled and I couldn’t make anything stick. I felt exhausted constantly. I rarely ate meals and I perpetually clutched a coffee and rubbed sleep from my eyes. I took up rolling cigarettes so that I would have something to focus on.

  I was full of ideas but they didn’t seem to be the right ones. I couldn’t even figure out how to use the website to find out where my lectures were. I envied how easy it seemed to be for other people as they showed up in their expensive patent brogues and leather jackets. Their Moleskines were neat and organised and they had quotations pursed between their lips like peregrine fruits. They leisurely supped lattes and made dinners and joined each other for wine in East End bars that I didn’t know about. They liked indie cinema and small presses and delicate pastries purchased from bakeries on quiet Sunday mornings.

  I was too full. I was brimming with the possibility of everything. Other people’s lives were carefully curated whereas I was a tangled knot of all of the people and places I had ever wanted to be. I was distracted by every bright thing and enamoured with every person I met who promised a more solid version of myself.

  I had burst out of my own skin but I hadn’t grown a new one yet. All the tiny shards of myself were loose and drifting, caught with the dust on the roads, illuminated in car headlights. I watched as they landed in the gutter with a lazy sort of panic. I didn’t know how to put myself back together.

  16

  I avoid people. Itchy at mealtimes. Sup coffee slowly. Guzzle white wine. Watch strangers. Get nervous. There are so many things I do not know the names of. There is pho and plantain and falafel and tagine and food is luxuriant in this place. Meals trickle richly into afternoons like incomprehensible poetry and my tongue is too thick to comprehend the taste. I am not delicate enough to understand nuance. The potato smiley faces of my childhood are beige mush now. Dairy causes acne and gluten is the devil. Tapioca and soy milk and Maldon sea salt. Almonds are unethical and cheap beer causes migraines. If our bodies are defined by the things we put into them, then I am too afra
id to put anything into mine. I am cheap things, sad things, small and unrefined.

  17

  I know that an individual life is precious so I have to hold on to it very tightly, with both hands. In London, things move too fast for anyone to hold on to anything. Restaurants and bars open up and then close down, friends move from flat to flat, buildings are built and then demolished again. The skyline looks different, year after year.

  18

  I took a class called Writing London. We had lectures about writers like Arthur Conan Doyle and Daniel Defoe, and our first assignment was to write something related to the city.

  ‘What we’re really looking for,’ said my lecturer, ‘is a creative response that is rooted in an academic context. We want you to use the set texts as a springboard for your ideas and really interrogate the process of constructing your identity within this ever-changing landscape.’

  I felt excited. Reading and referencing and even just finding my way around the library made my vision blur, but a creative response to the city sounded like something I could do.

  I spent a Saturday before work at the Tate Modern. The clean, white spaces helped me to focus and allowed me to take in other people’s thoughts. The thematic arrangement of the artworks gave me solace in a structure that was lacking inside of my own head. What impressed me most about visual art was the way that people could have tiny thoughts in their minds that were taken seriously and made manifest in the physical world.