by S. K. Perry
3
Now I’m by the sea and it’s winter. This year the excitement of advent – roast nuts and ice skating and wrapping paper – feels a long way away. The sky is stripes of grey and white and steel blue. I bury myself in cleaning jobs, take on extra work and stop answering my phone. I don’t want to hear people being kind. I’m going back to London and I feel like I’m going to see you and I know I won’t, but I don’t know what to do about that.
I keep walking past the mini Christmas market outside the shopping centre and thinking about last year when we went to Winter Wonderland and drank mulled wine on a picnic table by that ridiculous talking Rudolph. And when my hands get cold I think about you being there to hold them.
I buy you a present and wrap it up and write a little card that says: I miss you. Merry Christmas. I post it to your mum’s house in York, and after it slips out of my hand into the mouth of the letter box I go for a run, slapping my feet down on the dry, frozen concrete and filling my lungs with air that scratches my throat and tugs at my face with the cold. I run for an hour, listening to Christmas carols on my iPod and letting my muscles find a frantic, whirling rhythm that’s just too fast to be comfortable.
I run past Jackie’s cafe on the way home but don’t look in through the window. When I get back I turn the shower up a bit too hot and feel the water dig into my muscles. My skin is burnt when I get out and I can’t sleep so I sit outside again and watch the sea. It’s angry, like it doesn’t want to be part of the ground when it’s the colour of the sky. By the time I go back to bed there’s a thickness in my chest and my throat is sore.
4
After you died I tried to smell you everywhere. I stayed at your mum’s house in York for the funeral and no one was sleeping in the room she’d decided was yours. It stood like an empty bottle of red wine in the recycling, stained by you.
I stood in there after the service: wanting to be on my own, or with you, or both. Your coat was still hanging on the back of the door. I remember thinking you must have been cold in the ambulance.
I took it off the hook and put it on. I put my right hand into your pocket and pulled out some spearmint chewing gum and three paper clips you’d threaded together.
You told me once that I love the smell of sun cream because the parts of our brain that smell things are in the same bit that memory is. You told me smell and memory are built the same way, and so sun cream makes me think of holidays.
I sat there, crying on your bed. I pushed my nose into your sleeve and inhaled, but you’d gone.
5
Frank decides he’s going to take me on what he calls a Chrismukkah trip to London to visit Borough Market. I think he knows I’m dreading going back and wants to give me a practice run. We do it on the second weekend in December – as Hanukkah begins – and we take a fast train to Victoria. There’s a woman there in a Santa hat with a four-piece band, singing carols with lots of vibrato and jangling a bucket with a cancer charity logo on the side. People are already milling furiously: bags crammed into clenched, sweaty fists and armpits stuffed with parcels. Hands flick at ticket gates and hips swing through them to plunge towards escalators: down the steps, turn left, up the stairs, swipe at the barrier, swing to the left and eastbound, more stairs, platform. Doors open and beep and close and speed under the ground, slicing through the networks of bars and shops and mosques and traffic lights and dustbins. It all gets up inside me and I don’t know which bits to feel.
We take the District line as far as Embankment and cross Hungerford Bridge. We dip down onto the Southbank and walk along past the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the National, on towards the market. Frank smiles at me as we emerge into the daylight and our feet slap the concrete path of the river bank.
The cold air gets inside my chest and makes me cough, so we walk slowly. I’m scared by the familiarity of the noises, and the river, and the fairy lights in the trees. It’s what I’ve been running from. At the skate park the rush of wheels and the smack down of a board jerking onto the ground merges with the voices of more buskers: a choir twirling ‘Jingle Bells’ out in robust harmony. It’s caught by the wind and by the feet of children who’ve broken away from their parents to dance in front of it: tiny arms bent and feet kicking with startling, ridiculous joy. We stop to watch for a bit and Frank sings along.
At Borough Market we’re surrounded by people – almost so many we can’t move – and they work like an anaesthetic; I can’t think about anything else. We drink mulled wine and eat turkey rolls, mine loaded up with bacon too: the hot salty meat collapsing on our tongues with each mouthful and oozing its juices. I’m talking quickly, pointing things out to Frank like a flag clutching at wind: flapping in its gusts and scared of being still. We laugh at everything: the tourists’ excitement and the over-zealous enthusiasm of little children. We’re caught up in it. We eat sweet tarts that fall off our forks and are shovelled in with hands instead, etching their hot liquids into our fingerprints and steam scalding our tongues. Frank buys a huge cheese for our last book club of the year; I tell him it’s the size of a head, so he calls it Percy. We suck in the smells of wood and pepper, and thick hot fats that glimmer alongside sweating dough and crisp, sharp vegetables.
6
Sitting on a bed you’d slept in twice, I listen to your relatives downstairs sharing hot, sweet drinks and sangah and brochette. They speak in French and Yemba and I can’t remember who lots of them are. I feel so far away from you.
You gave me a lift to a rehearsal once, for a gig I was doing in Guildford. I didn’t know exactly where the venue was and we drove down the same road three times while I tried to get to grips with the map. You were furious, unable to understand how I could find it so hard to navigate. You pulled over to look at the map yourself and I sang John Denver’s ‘I’m Sorry’ at you, changing the lyrics to make it about driving and Guildford and me being useless, until you laughed and threw the map at my head.
You told me, ‘You’re intolerable,’ and kissed me.
I sit there, smelling for you in the arm of your coat, and looking at the tiny pink roses on the wallpaper. You would’ve hated them. I think it’s odd in a newly built house, which are normally very neutral, and I wonder what would happen if I need to go to Guildford again.
Your sister Danielle slips upstairs with a plate of food for me and we lie on the bed together.
‘You know,’ she says. ‘One of my uncles just told me there’s a Yemba proverb where if you scratch the skull of someone who’s died, you can save them.’
She looks at me. Her eyes are a bit watery, but she’s smiling ironically.
‘Shall we dig him up?’ I say.
We both start laughing. It isn’t funny at all but it’s a relief to feel something. After a while your mum comes up carrying Alfie and says, ‘He was looking for you.’
Danielle takes him and we all stand there looking at each other – tired and numb – your mum and your sister and your nephew and me.
7
When we’ve exhausted the market we walk back out into the refracted light of the waterside and keep going east, ducking under the criss-cross of balconies at Shad Thames and stopping by the Design Museum to sit and drink coffee.
I’m startled by the calm but Frank fills the quiet with conversation. He tells me about the day he met Ian. He was working in Covent Garden at the time, and most days Ian would come to watch his show. Frank would watch him watching him but he’d always disappear into the crowds as soon as Frank finished. Frank tells me he’d been trying to pluck up the courage to say hello, and then one morning he’d been cycling into work and a cat had run out in the road. Swerving to avoid it, he’d veered onto the pavement and driven straight into Ian. Ian had let Frank buy him a coffee to say sorry, and the two had barely spent a moment apart since.
‘You have to understand, it was illegal then,’ Frank said. ‘We had to be so careful, but we knew we wanted to be together.’
They’d practised magic and travelled th
e country, and then the world, performing, and they’d settled in Brighton when arthritis had slowed Ian’s knees and they’d wanted to live a bit more quietly.
There’s a baby in a pram just along from where we’re sitting, and while Frank is talking I watch it play with a plastic hoop that rattles when it’s shaken. The baby laughs every time it hears the noise, and its parents laugh at it laughing. It makes me feel sad.
Maybe Frank’s been watching the baby too because now he’s saying how he and Ian didn’t really think about children; even when things had got easier they were so used to being just them. They’d grown friends instead, he says.
‘We felt like there were people who loved us as much as children would’ve done. There are certainly enough people in my life I love. There are no lingering regrets.’
He smiles, and looks away over the river, but I can see he’s crying.
‘I miss him every day,’ he says.
Frank and I pay for the coffees and walk back to the tube. Frank’s sad. I wish I could do magic to make it better, but that’s what he does. Instead, I hold his arm and we drift.
We look around at Christmas disguising the city’s aches in bright lights and music. We smile and laugh at things and let life look the way we want it to feel. I wonder if lonely people just need to be around other lonely people sometimes.
I want the day to seep out of me in dreams that rattle like the underground, and smell of cloves, and pork, and river salt. But even in sleep I’m panicked, like there’s something I’ve forgotten to do, someone I’ve forgotten how to be.
8
We have a week of cold blue skies. The starlings swirl over the old pier. They shake in the sky: tiny wings moving fast to keep them up. I don’t know where they’re going. They don’t seem to want to leave. We watch each other moving, travelling nowhere. The sea curls, throws itself at the rocks. I go for long runs. My muscles shake and I try to be still.
9
It’s Sunday and we’re making a Christmas roast. Gabriella tells me this is the hardest time of year for her. She says the first year after Joseph died she’d told all her friends she wanted to spend the day alone. On Christmas Eve she’d chopped all the vegetables, stuffed the turkey and put a Christmas cake in the oven. She says she felt giddy, hysterical with excitement almost, her body numb and anaesthetised by the carols she played all day on her CD player. That night – before bed – she filled a stocking and put it by Joseph’s pillow. She’d been shopping for him for months, buying utensils and CDs and a calendar for his wall. She’d wrapped every little present and crammed them into his Christmas sock with sweets and oranges and handfuls of nuts. On Christmas morning she’d woken up and crept into his room, ready to see him sitting there unwrapping his presents.
She tells me that on Christmas Day – when she saw his empty bed and still-bulging stocking – she’d really known he was gone. She says she hadn’t even realised she was crying until her legs gave way. She’d lain on his bedroom floor, staring up at his map of the world. Then she’d climbed into his bed and cried some more and unwrapped all the presents she’d bought for him, laying them out on the bed around her. Eventually she fell asleep, tucked between clean sheets and dreaming of nothing, her mind tired by the sharp Christmas sting and the strange hole inside her where love seemed to be trying to stay alive.
Frank and Ian eventually woke Gabriella up by ringing on her door around 4 p.m. Pretending they’d forgotten it was Christmas Day, they told her they’d popped round to see if she fancied a stroll by the sea with Harris. Together they’d walked along the seafront – Gabriella and Ian hand in hand – and they’d eaten fish and chips out of paper cones on the pier. They’d done it every Christmas since, and Gabriella and Frank had kept doing it alone after Ian had died too.
She cries when she tells me this. I don’t say anything. I’m tired and my head aches and I don’t care about Gabriella’s son, who I’ve never met and never will because he’s dead. I leave before we’ve finished cooking and brush off her offer of a lift home. I know I’m not going back to my room anyway. I sit on the beach with a bottle of cough mixture and I sob.
10
Yesterday my big toe cut a hole in my tights. The nails are too long but I can’t find the clippers. The open window lets in the sound of wind, and I see naked tree curls and crisp packets blowing like tiny kites across the pavement. They can’t take off into the sky. My feet are chilly. When I scrunch up my toes they catch on the carpet. The ladder from where the hole is moves up my tights in a thin, waving line. There’s frost in my belly. I’m not used to being cold without you; your back – broad and smooth as a playground slide – was last year’s winter.
11
In December the book club meet at Ellie’s. She’s chosen Life of Pi. The film has just come out and she wants to read the book before she sees it. We meet on 13th December: eight days before I’m due to go home for Christmas. Everyone exchanges gifts and mince pies and hugs, but I can’t think of anything to say, even though I read the book and I liked it. I’m aware of people talking to me and answering them but I don’t know what we’re saying. I’m tired, Sam, and my chest hurts. I smile a lot and we’re all so happy and I think maybe I run home afterwards, but I don’t remember exactly how I got there.
12
On the 16th December a physiotherapy student in Delhi goes to see the film of Life of Pi and on her bus journey home she’s attacked. I read about it in an internet cafe the day after, before my first cleaning job of the last week before Christmas.
Three days before, twenty-six people have been shot at a US primary school: twenty of them children. That evening – the 17th – Bradley Wiggins is named BBC Sports Personality of the Year, and 16,000 Chinese lanterns are let off in Mexico in a world-record attempt.
I don’t care about any of this. I have little cuts on my knuckles from where I’m scrubbing things so hard. My shoulders ache from hoovering.
On 21st December – the day that according to the Mayan Calendar the world is supposed to end – I catch the train home. My mum’s eyes fill with tears when she opens the door and she tries to wipe them away so I only see her smile. I pretend too, and smile back.
‘Merry Christmas!’ I say.
13
Every Christmas Eve my brother and I sit at the table in our kitchen and peel potatoes. We put on Christmas socks and a CD of carols. After the potatoes are done my brother puts a layer of marzipan on the Christmas cake and I make royal icing to flick into stiff, snowy peaks all over it, topping it off with little snowmen and robins and Father Christmases.
This year we go through the motions as usual. I can’t tell if I’m really there but my brother keeps squeezing my hand and sometimes we sing along for a bit to the songs.
In the evening we go up to the Albert Hall to a carol service, and I remember being here before. Afterwards, we eat pizza and drink wine on the Southbank, and even though I’m not too sure what I think about God, I go to midnight mass and close my eyes to pray. I don’t know if praying ever works, but I met Frank this year, so I know that magic does. I’m a bit drunk by the time we get there. I pray for flowers to grow out of my hands and for the wind to play me music, and think that if there is a God, he shouldn’t need us to tell him what it is that we need.
14
At Christmas lunch I’d just started chewing a mouthful of potato and peas when I needed to be on my own. I slipped out of the room to the toilet and sat on its cold rim. The edges of the seat cut slightly into my thighs, and I looked around me at the dark wood-effect panelling. Dad has always said there were rooms more important to redecorate than the toilet, so it’s lingered like a bad hangover from the people who lived in the house before. I felt grateful for it in that moment though. The weird strips of wood-coloured plastic seemed to soak up whatever I was feeling that made me need to walk away from bad cracker jokes and wine and roast parsnips, to sit on a toilet for ten minutes when I didn’t need to go, and stay there even though the hole in the s
eat was starting to pinch the backs of my legs.
I sat on the loo and counted in my head until my breathing calmed down. Then I flushed a handful of wet tissues down the toilet, reapplied my mascara and went back to the table for Christmas pudding.
After lunch we went for a walk on the Downs. Mum and Dad had given me a new lens for my camera so I took a few photos and we had a bit of a kickabout. It was cold, in a good way, and we came home and ate leftover turkey and roast potatoes and watched the The Sound of Music and drank Baileys.
I’d popped outside for a cigarette halfway through and my brother joined me.
‘How you doing, Holly?’
‘I love Christmas. And carols; I love carols.’
‘I’ll sing you one now if you want,’ he says. ‘Good King Wenceslas looked out, on the feast of –’
We laugh. He pulls a parcel out of his pocket and hands it to me.
‘I got you an extra present. It’s nothing big, it’s just –’
I smile at him and unwrap it slowly. Inside is a watch with a navy-blue leather strap.
‘I hope you like it. Look, Holly, everyone says that time makes stuff better, like one day we’ll wake up and be in this future where everything’s great. I don’t believe that. We just have to make it better ourselves. You moving to Brighton, starting again on your own; it’s really brave, Hols. I’m really proud of you. But keep an eye on time moving by, OK, and if it’s been more than a week just let one of us know you’re alright. We’ve all really missed you.’
