by S. K. Perry
‘I’m sorry, Rob.’
‘Don’t be, I get it. Just wear the watch, OK, and know I’m thinking of you.’
It’s difficult to be reminded of how it feels to be loved. I hug him and we cry for a bit while the wind blows and I smoke another cigarette, and a robin sits and watches us from the garden fence.
That evening my mobile flashes up with a number starting 01904: York. I know it’s the number I deleted in the summer, the landline of the house your mum moved into eight months ago. It’s the house you went up to for the weekend to help your mum move in. It’s in the road where you were hit by a car, and it’s where your family will be spending Christmas. I don’t answer my phone.
15
At my primary school, every winter, we played conkers. There were other obsessions that took over the playground for a while, but none of them with the same reliable annual recurrence. The weather got colder and knuckles got raw and we’d go conkering.
Mum would still collect a pile every October and leave them in our porch, so on Boxing Day I asked my brother to play. We sat on the stone steps of our patio and carefully threaded five conkers each onto a string.
You win a conker fight if your conker is still on its string when your opponent’s comes off and – for every battle you win – your conker gains the points of its opponent. So if you defeat a conker that’s on fifteen and you’re on seven; you immediately become a twenty-two pointer. This means the original conker is key, and everyone at my school favoured a certain type. For me it was a toss-up between one that’s small and hard and resilient under attack, and a larger one with a lot of power behind it but less compact force in defence.
On Boxing Day we just played. Rob won, and afterwards we sat there talking: me about the kids I taught piano to and the pub quiz team, him about his girlfriend Lucy. I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed him.
The next morning a little packet arrived in the post. In it was a note from Frank that said: With love to my little baker; put this somewhere airy and bright.
He’d sent me a little plastic bag with some buttons in it, and I emptied it out on my bedside table where the light came in.
16
Dad took me out between Christmas and the New Year to practise my driving. We took the A23 towards Reigate and I drove us down the high street, past the bell tower where the Salvation Army were out collecting money. The Christmas lights hung over the road like giant penny sweets. Dad asked me how things were and I told him alright.
‘You’re driving really well,’ he said.
‘About time. It’s been seven years.’
‘Don’t worry about it. I didn’t pass until my fifth test. Runs in the family.’
I smiled. Something crap came on the radio and we both reached out to flip the channel. ‘Problem is it’s all naff Christmas songs this time of year,’ Dad said. He kept scrolling until he found a station playing ‘Fairytale of New York’.
‘Ah, I spoke too soon! A classic.’
We reached that road between Reigate and Dorking where it’s flat and wide like a runway. The song was at that part where the drums kick in for the first time and Kirsty McColl’s character meets Shane MacGowan’s on a cold New York Christmas Eve. I put the car into fourth gear and I thought about you, the Christmas before, dressed up as Santa with Alfie on your knee. Your mum and Danielle had laughed at you singing along out of tune but he’d put his hands over your mouth and cried until you’d stopped.
The chorus started playing on the radio and I must have hit the brakes because I was standing in the road, leaning on the door. Dad got out of the passenger seat and walked round to where I was starting to crumple, sliding down the car. I let him take my weight, resting on him as cars sped past and the song finished.
‘It’s OK, Holly,’ he said. ‘It’s alright.’
17
The winter of year four, my best friend Anna backed the bigger conkers while I went for small and hard. We teamed up and fought other pairs feeling completely unbeatable. By the last week of term our conkers had a joint score of 568 and everyone wanted to fight us in a bid to take our title as champions.
Three days before the Christmas holidays James Wilson and Raymond King took us on between the school shed and the netball courts. It was a Tuesday lunchtime and it was raining and Anna’s conker went first. I remember the shock of seeing it split open and explode from its string across the black playground floor. It was over. Two hits later and mine was gone too. Whatever James and Ray had soaked their conkers in had worked and they were left with a massive 892 points. Our conkers were finished, the insides of their shells soft and yellow, splattered across the hopscotch court like bits of brain. Suddenly the game seemed brutal.
After the bell rang for the end of lunch I pretended I needed the loo and told Anna I’d meet her in the classroom. Instead I snuck back round to the shed and picked up all the broken pieces of conker. I covered them in a bit of kitchen roll that Mum had used to wrap up the orange in my lunch box, and when I got home that night I put on my wellies and went out into our garden. Using my blunt fingernails I dug the earth out and watched the wet soil rub into the grazes on my knuckles. I pushed my conker-born brain pieces into their little grave and put a miniature notebook I’d got in my cracker at our school Christmas dinner the day before on top. Inside I’d written James’s name surrounded by hearts on the first page. James Wilson had freckles on his nose and was excellent at the recorder, but those things would never bring back the 568-point conkers that he’d stolen from me and Anna, and my love for him was over.
I thought about that conker when you died. I thought about the doctors waiting to give you a craniotomy and wondered whether – if you’d held on long enough for them to cut you open and lift the pressure on your brain pieces – you might have made it. I thought about conkers smashing into each other and about you walking out into the road. I thought about the scar above your left eyebrow, and the first time you’d told me you loved me, and about dancing with you on a street corner at midnight, sharing headphones and standing hip to hip.
I thought about you in the ambulance and about the fact I didn’t know what we’d said in our last conversation. I thought about why you hadn’t been wearing your coat when it was such a cold day, and what it was that made you so distracted you hadn’t stopped for the traffic. I think about those things now and I wish that burying your name in a notebook surrounded by hearts would make it all go away.
18
Just before New Year I called the 01904 number back and hung up after two rings. I went to the bathroom, looked around me at the pretend wood panelling for suggestions and threw up. I took the battery out of my phone for the rest of the day so that if anyone tried to phone me again I wouldn’t need to know.
When I drew my curtains that night I looked down at Frank’s little pile of buttons on my bedside table. I don’t know what I’d expected to happen but they seemed so stupid sat there, so I scooped them up and chucked them out the window.
19
On New Year’s Eve I went to a party with a friend from school. It was at the house of one of her friends from university, and she’d persuaded me to crash and go along with her. It was a black-tie do and involved all sorts of fancy nibbles being handed round on silver trays, and proper champagne, and beautiful tiny gold decorations hanging from the ceiling at well-placed intervals across the whole of the room in a delicate kind of a way. And everyone there was really posh with surnames like Bumley-Pompington, and I’ve never been at home in that sort of environment anyway, but especially on New Year when I’ve always got smashed and done the splits and not been able to get up again, so sit spread eagled on the floor singing along to Whitney Houston, even if the song that’s playing isn’t by Whitney Houston.
I spent quite a bit of the first half of the evening wondering how long it had taken to fix all the dangly things onto the ceiling. I was also concerned that the tiny pieces of Sellotape would take strips off the white paint when removed. I wa
s a bit nervous because I could feel myself getting drunk really fast, and I also knew that I was feeling weird about you, and would probably end up crying, and as soon as we’d got there I’d known that it just really wasn’t that sort of an event. So I kept drinking to try and distract myself from it all, and I ate quite a lot of canapés and stood on the edges of conversations nodding and laughing.
The music at the party was the kind of music you only ever play at New Year or if you’re feeling really depressed. I’ve never really understood why that’s the same thing, but it does mean that if you’re not feeling really great at New Year the music always makes you feel bleak. So I was dancing and getting worried about crying and then I was kissing a man whose name I still don’t know in a room upstairs with lots of coats in it. There was a shelf in the corner of the room with a purple soft toy dragon wearing a T-shirt that said, ‘Vote Alex For Welfare’ on it and I asked the boy if he was Alex. He looked confused and when I pointed at the dragon he said, ‘This isn’t my house.’
The kissing was good but he kept using his tongue like a sledgehammer. I pulled my dress over my head and he sucked a bit on my right nipple without taking my bra off, which was awkward so I looked at the dragon and then pulled on his hair so he stopped and came back to my face. I tried to keep my lips mostly closed but he was really persistent with his tongue, which wasn’t great at first but I was starting to get turned on so it got a bit better. I could taste the vodka he’d been drinking moving between our lips and something spicy that tasted like pepperoni but there wasn’t any food with pepperoni in it at the party so it probably wasn’t that. I thought the purple dragon felt very at odds with the room with the dangly things in it downstairs, which had a shiny wooden floor, and the man started kissing my neck and taking his trousers off so I concentrated on that.
The faint sound of the party downstairs was somehow holding me upright and I took my bra off and closed my eyes. I felt the moving and him pushed against me and my breasts pressed between us. His arm gripped round me and he pushed my knickers to one side and let his boxers gather round his ankles like a puddle. It wasn’t really working so he pushed me onto the bed to get on top, and I pulled my underwear off properly. He had a long body, spilling away between my hips like a translucent tongue. That song by Bryan Adams that was Number 1 for ages and was the theme tune for Robin Hood came onto the speakers in the room below us. I was looking at the ceiling now so I couldn’t see the dragon anymore. I didn’t know how I felt about having sex in front of it so I closed my eyes. The man was sucking on my nipple again but it was the left one this time. He pushed my legs up, crab-like, and started grunting. I grunted a bit too, to remind me I was still there. I knew he was finished when his body slapped down and he lay on top of me: beached on my belly. I felt sticky. He handed me my pants and grinned. I think I smiled back and he said, ‘I love this song.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’
He went to go to the toilet and I went downstairs. I found my friend again and sat outside on the pavement with her, crying a bit. I’d lost one of my shoes and I had the other one in my lap. We drank a bit of something out of a bottle she’d found in the kitchen and I think she was sick. We slept in her car curled up together, her hand holding mine and too drunk to feel anything anymore as the sun rose on 2013.
20
You notice the pigeons more in London in the winter. I think it’s because there’s nothing left with any colour, and you have to sort of admire them for clinging on. I know most people hate pigeons. Frank calls them flying rats and I understand why, although in reality rats are incredibly friendly and intelligent and make great pets. So it’s not really an insult to pigeons to be compared with them but I know what Frank means.
I once went on a school trip where we stayed on a boat in Scotland with some Royal Navy sailors. On our first day they gave me and a couple of others the task of preparing two crate-loads of wood pigeons they’d shot down for a stew for dinner. We were shown how to start by clawing up our hands and pulling the feathers out from the pigeons’ chests in thick bunches, releasing them off the sides of the boat where they’d float, clinging to the surface of the water like an oil spill, and disguised in the froth where the water breaks. We kept on tugging, jerking more feathers from pigeon skin until all that was left was a cold, bald rawness. Then we cut off their heads and tossed them off the boat too, letting the dismembered pigeon skulls sink down through the waves and past the fish to rest on the seabed like strange bodiless statues, or odd trophies belonging to the squid or the lobsters or something. The wings went next: ripped from pigeon shoulders, and then we sliced them open, straight down the sternum to peel back the skin and expose their insides.
I don’t know whether birds maybe don’t have that much blood, but there was a strange, clean precision to cutting up the pigeons. My fingers and knife plied open their bodies and as bits of bird got threaded under my nails and into my pores I was struck by the intricacy of the insides I was delving into. The birds were filled with these tiny mechanisms that had kept them alive and I remember feeling something very strong about the fact they all had hearts – I mean, obviously they did; I’d always known pigeons must have hearts so it wasn’t surprise I was feeling exactly – but I’d never really thought about how weird it was, and these organs looked exactly like the ones we’d learnt about in biology. I don’t know whether pigeon and human hearts are the same, but it looked to me like this bird had all the atriums and ventricles and veins and capillaries leading inwards and outwards to keep its tiny body alive that we did and – maybe because I’ve never seen the inside of a body before – I was struck by how much more beautiful this pigeon seemed now I was looking at it inside out. It felt incredibly cruel to be cutting into something so perfect. I wondered whether – if I could turn myself inside out – my body would seem perfect too.
Years after that trip on the boat I learnt that pigeons have a very wide visual field and so – while most humans see only 180 degrees around them – pigeons can take in 340. Oddly, one of the other animals with a visual field of 340 degrees is the rat.
You liked facts like these. You would tell me that my body is beautiful, that I am a bird who should be less afraid of the sky. You would kiss the space between my legs and call me little kite and use your hands to scratch wings into my shoulder blades. I don’t know if I will ever be able to let anyone love me like that again.
21
I headed back to my mum and dad’s on New Year’s Day with the worst hangover of my life. I had to go back to Brighton the next day to start some post-Christmas holiday cleaning but I needed to stop crying first. I don’t know why I did it, but I looked at my phone to check the time and I ended up calling your mum.
She said she was pleased to hear from me and asked me how I was. I told her I’d had a bit of a chest infection before I’d come home but it seemed to be clearing up now, although I didn’t think the hangover was going to help. I told her the pigeon fact and asked what she’d got for Christmas and laughed a lot, and then I started crying and we both went quiet.
I could hear her breathing into the phone and I wanted to tell her that she sounded like the sea. That I loved her son so much I thought all my bones were going to break, that I hadn’t called before because there was nothing at all I could say that would change anything. The waves had taught me that, when I watched them breaking into the beach at night; even the most beautiful things are relentlessly cruel. You were the most beautiful thing.
Instead I tell her I’m sorry and that I have to go, and I hang up the phone. Afterwards I feel like screaming but my head aches and I smell of alcohol so I have a shower and go to find my parents so I don’t have to be alone.
22
I drive myself back to Brighton in Mum’s car, with her in the passenger seat, going the long way round to avoid the motorways. There are dead animals splattered periodically along the road and they make me flinch. They’re pigeons, not people, pigeons not people, I think, but it doesn’t work because pigeons have l
ungs and things too and even conkers look like they’re bleeding when they’re broken open on Tarmac.
When we arrive we go for a walk along the front before Mum drives home, and we sit together at the little cafe at Ovingdean, sipping coffee. I’ve started to play a game with hot things, holding them in my mouth for as long as I can take the burn. Mum sips hers slowly, blowing on it.
The seagulls soar over us yelping at the wind, and I wonder if they can feel the turn of the year too. I wonder if they notice winter’s rotting, if they know calendars have been chucked out and gym membership rates have soared, and another January has arrived to host our circuits of hormones, rhythms, songs stuck in our heads, voices stuck in our throats, lovers stuck in our bones, and the tide crashing in again and out again like it can’t find the place it wants to stay.
I wonder if the birds can hear us when we wish each other happy new year. I think they probably don’t but wonder if they have taste buds in their beaks, and I ask my mum what she thinks. She says she reckons they do but that they probably can’t smell because they don’t seem to have noses. I’ve never thought of that.
That night on the radio I listen to the news. It tells me the United Nations have released a statement saying the number of deaths in the civil war in Syria has reached 60,000, and I fall asleep dreaming of fish and chips that turn into seagulls and fall from the sky like bombs.
23
I go over to Frank’s the next evening and we sit in his kitchen drinking tea.
‘Harris missed you,’ he says.
‘I missed him too.’
‘Did you make any new year’s resolutions?’
‘I don’t know; I think I want to work out what to do with my life.’
He laughs. ‘Well you can’t exactly put it in a box and paint it purple, can you?’
‘Maybe I’ll read Jude the Obscure. Or pass my driving test.’
