by S. K. Perry
We win the quiz that night by three points. Ellie and Duane smash the sports round – they’ve been reading up – and we play our joker on current affairs and get full marks. I feel particularly smug as I answer a question about Iceland I learnt from the atlas.
Mira and Duane go to get drinks for us all afterwards and I ask Ellie if she knows why Danny couldn’t come. She says she isn’t sure and I say maybe he’d had a fight with Mira. She looks at me questioningly.
‘Aren’t they sort of together?’ I ask.
Sean glances over and at us. ‘Mira and Danny? What planet are you living on? She and Duane have been seeing each other since last time we won. Had you honestly not noticed?’
I look at Ellie who smiles and shrugs. I try to find my lip balm in my bag. Ellie leans in and says, ‘Danny’s definitely single.’
I’m pretty drunk by the time we leave; I’m glad I don’t have far to get home. In my room I take off my clothes and chuck them on the floor by my desk. I still haven’t got a chair – the room is exactly as I found it: a bed and a desk and a chest of drawers. Ellie’s told me it needs things on the walls but I like it bare. It’s too small to feel empty.
I don’t feel sleepy at all. The alcohol’s made me feel kind of turned on. I haven’t been able to come since you died and I don’t know if I can be bothered to try tonight. I always end up crying. There’s a chapter on sex and grief in my book, and it tells me to use a mirror when I masturbate. There’s a mirror on my desk; I use it to do my make-up, so I take off my pants and lie on the floor. There’s no lampshade on my light and the bulb hangs above me shining dimly. It’s trying so hard to make the room bright that I feel kind of sorry for it. I hold the mirror with one hand and watch the other one between my legs. I move it around a bit and slow down my breathing. But I’m cold without a duvet wrapped around me; I just feel lonely.
I get up and put my pants back on. I walk to the window and sit on the windowsill. I press my face against the glass. It’s wet and cold against my skin and I roll my head slowly, squashing my nose and lips along its surface. I open my mouth so my teeth are touching the glass too and push against it a bit. I notice that I’m shivering. They rattle against the window. I sink back, looking at the smudge of oil and make-up. They smear across my view of the streetlights and the night.
I think about how hard I’d have to push for my teeth to fall out. I think about you: the smooth curves of your face, your high forehead and your mouth, open and laughing, showing your one twisted tooth in the bottom row. The tiny scar above your left eyebrow. Your mouth. It hurts. I push my forehead into the window again and put my phone against my lips like it’s your tongue. I open my mouth and wedge the phone inside. I can feel its plastic edge jutting into my teeth and wonder what would happen if I bit on it. I don’t know if it would break or if I would.
33
It’s Jackie’s turn to host the book club. We meet in her flat above the cafe and talk about Chocolat. She makes roast chicken and apple crumble. Frank sends a message to say he has a migraine and can’t come. It feels flat without him and I worry about him, ill and on his own.
Afterwards, Ellie and I go back to Danny’s to drink whisky. His flat’s in Hove, up on the seventh floor of a block on the seafront. We go out onto the balcony and watch the darkness moving where the sea is, listen to it purr.
The whisky tastes of petrol to me, so Danny gives me wine instead. Sean comes to meet us and we sit outside with music playing through the window and blankets to keep us warm. Danny has a guitar and I ask if I can play it. It feels warm and familiar. We sit there and I sing and every now and then a seagull flies past or we smell a gush of salt on the wind. I play covers and take requests and everyone sings along. Ellie asks me to play something of my own.
‘I don’t know if I’ll remember anything,’ I say. ‘It’s been a while.’
I do remember, and when it makes my eyes well up Danny puts his arm around me and I lean against his chest playing the love song I wrote for you. It should be confusing but it isn’t, until I put my coat on and go to say goodbye and feel like I want to kiss him. I don’t know if the others notice but Danny looks at me for a bit too long, and I have to look away and go home very quickly.
34
You are a worn out house I walk around in. I try to imagine another kind of home.
35
February 12th is Shrove Tuesday. I go round to Frank’s for breakfast and he makes a giant jug of batter. We fill pancake after pancake with lemon and sugar and golden syrup and fruit and ice cream. We make them wide and flat in his frying pan and hurl them into the air to turn them.
When a pancake is flipped there’s an exact moment when it’s suspended between one way down and the other way up. Frank chucks one into the air and it seems to stop and hang there. Then he jiggles the pan and it falls back out of the sky the other way round.
‘That moment there,’ he says, ‘that in between; it’s OK just to be still in that sometimes.’
36
Do pancakes feel like astronauts do in zero gravity? Do you know that you don’t exist anymore? Do you miss me too, Sam?
37
At the house I clean on Tuesdays no one is ever in. I have my own key and there’s always a mug and a tea bag out for me on the side with a cheque. I’ve only met the lady who owns it once when she interviewed me. Beyond that I only know what I’ve pieced together from the house. It’s completely spotless with no clutter or clues to help me. All the drawers and wardrobes are kept locked shut and the rooms have mirrors where I’d expect pictures to be.
I’ve got used to it, but at first it made me feel uncomfortable. Walking on the cream carpet in my socks I felt like I was the first person making prints in the sand after the tide’s gone out. I wear plain clothes to work there and put my phone on silent because if I don’t it makes me jump when it rings. The ceiling in the hall is high, and there is a round clock on the wall that looks like it should tick but it doesn’t.
It’s a blue-sky day: cold but sunny, like the winter is slowly letting go. Outside, shop fronts belt out music, and the people milling around clutch cups of tea that seep heat into their hands and make them feel hopeful.
Inside, the house makes me furious. I switch the lights on in every room and hoover the floor as though I want to bruise it, sucking the carpet hard with the nozzle and slapping it down again. I push it into the skirting boards, making it thump. The house pushes back. We’re hurting each other.
I go upstairs and sit on the bathroom floor. The tall window opposite the bath lets the sky in. From inside, the blueness looks blank and heavy. I take off my socks and put my feet down on the bathroom tiles. They’re cold. I look around at the barren room: the bath sat empty like a huge stomach; the curtains light, like they should twitch and jerk in the slightest breeze. The house is always comatose though; they hang limp.
A fly groans somewhere near the back corner of the room and I feel like the air is dry enough to crack. I can smell the cleaning products I’ve poured into the sink and the toilet, that I’ve used to scrub the bath. I stand up and put my feet into the tub, switching on the tap and letting water wash over them, climbing up the ankles of my jeans. I sit down on the edge of the bath, take off my clothes and slip in. I lie there on my back with my knees up like I’m giving birth. I haven’t put the plug in and the water mostly drains away but small puddles linger, and nestle in my pubic hair.
I lie there – angry – and for a good few minutes I think about touching myself. I want to come in that cream house where I don’t feel like a person, and I move my hand down my stomach and between my legs. I start to move my fingers slowly but I’m tired and I have to put the hoover away. I sit up and turn the tap off. The water drains away but I stay sat there. I’m damp now, and it’s cold. Then I get out slowly and pat myself dry with the hand towel. It’s thick and luxurious; it makes me feel worn away.
In the bathroom mirror, I’m surprised I still look the same. I thought maybe I’d be
smaller, or more see-through. I don’t look different, Sam, but my skin doesn’t feel anything except the cold anymore, and I think I’m disappearing. I’m scared, and something in me wants to push against it, to move faster than is safe. I want to find places outside my body where I can sit and be nothing except the wind and the grip of someone else’s hands. I’ll find them in a bar; I’ll know them because they’ll be lonely like mine are: looking for a body to remember how to feel with, touching everything a bit too hard.
I’ll pinch my skin between fingers until it’s blue like water is, when it lies flat beneath the sky. I’ll lie flat beneath a stranger and be nothing but limbs.
I need to finish up so I clean the bathroom again. Then I switch off all the lights and start to walk home. I choose a road that I don’t know and then take every first left turn until I’m lost. Sometimes there isn’t a left turn for a while, and I start to jog, like I need to find one soon. I don’t know where I’m going. I think I want to turn back; I’m tired, and this game seems to have gone on for too long. I want to be still in the air like Frank’s pancake. At some point I find a pub and I go in, and I order a bottle of wine that I drink on my own. I order a whisky coke and then another and then I’m in a taxi I think someone else must have phoned for me, and the driver asks me where I want to go. She’s a woman, and I find that surprising. I ask her to take me down to the sea. She asks which bit, and I say wherever’s nearest. When she drops me off she won’t let me pay, and she gets out of the cab and asks if I’m OK. I look at her. I want to ask her for a hug.
‘Is there anyone I can phone for you?’ she asks.
So I give her your number and she rings it.
‘It’s just cutting out,’ she says. ‘Are you sure you got it right?’
I run away from her then, as fast as I can, down to the sea and along the front. I climb over the groynes and keep running until I know where I am. Then I sit and stare at the water.
In the morning I’m hungover and covered in scratches. I go to the bathroom, and kneel in front of the toilet. When I’m sick, I wonder if letting go always has to hurt this much. I don’t want to let go of you though, Sam. I don’t want to let you go.
38
I always forget that winter seeps into the days you expect to be spring; that the beginning of March is an extension of February’s white gazpacho skies: chilled and bitter. Even the sea is quiet. Everyone’s tired.
I pass my driving test on 2nd March, in a week that fitfully spurts warmth, as though the weather is fighting its own monotony. Frank takes me for a celebratory drive on the Saturday, and we go back to his house for hot chocolate with Ellie and Sean. It’s a cold day and Frank lends me the cream-and-brown jumper he’s always wearing. He tells me he’s just finished knitting a new one so I should keep it, that young people never wear enough clothes anymore anyway.
‘I feel like I’ll turn into you if I wear this though, Frank,’ I say. ‘Suddenly a pack of biscuits will burst out from one of the sleeves.’
The four of us sit around chatting, and Frank tells us a story about a magic show in Berlin where his hat had accidentally caught fire. Everyone’d thought it was part of the act and they’d all gone wild for it, so he’d decided to keep it in.
‘Ian was furious the first time it happened though; he thought I’d added a fire trick to the show without telling him. Then we started to try and catch each other out every time, adding sneaky bits into the routine.’
‘So what you’re telling me is it’s not biscuits I should worry about in this jumper but catching on fire. Thanks, Frank; I’m not sure I want it anymore.’
‘Have you ever played any good pranks, Holly?’ Sean asks me.
‘I don’t know.’ I think about it. ‘Sam came home really, really drunk once, so when I woke up in the morning I turned everything upside down in our room to try and freak him out. But he was kind of too hungover to notice so it didn’t really work until the evening when he went to get something out of a drawer and it was the wrong way up. He was so confused though, it was just kind of feeble and I felt sorry for him.’
We laugh. I’m surprised by the story, even as I tell it. I guess I don’t talk about you that much. There’s no one here who’d know how funny you were when you were hungover: kind of squishy and perplexed, when normally you were so self-assured. I think about our friends, who would’ve got it. They’ve mostly stopped calling since I didn’t see any of them at Christmas. I feel so far from home, and it’s how I wanted it, but I’m suddenly sad.
I go to help Frank wash up the mugs in the kitchen. I pass him one to put away, but when I turn around he’s leaning on the kitchen counter with his eyes closed.
‘Are you OK, Frank?’
He looks up and out the window, where a sparrow takes off from a tree outside. He smiles and whistles to it. He looks at me looking at him and says, ‘Well it’s rude not to say hello, don’t you think?’
He takes the mug from me and I decide not to push it, but before we go I ask him if he’s had any more migraines.
‘Only when I eat too much cheese,’ he says. He wafts us out of the door. ‘Look after my jumper, Holly. Stay warm.’
39
This morning the sea was completely flat with thin stripes running across it like pyjamas. The sky was white with a bit of grey underneath it, and the day felt like it was aching. I wondered if the seagulls were bored with being the same colour as the sky.
Now it’s evening and the sun is out on my right-hand side and the sea in front of me is glowing. It’s patchy: blue in parts, silver in others, and it looks like the light’s underneath it, pushing up through the water like it’s determined to be seen. I sit on the beach with an ice cream.
To my left the white cliffs glow like teeth. The sea curls; there’s still no foam to the waves but they’re rising up and rolling into themselves like they’re lungs, keeping the world alive.
40
It’s Sunday. Gabriella and I are cooking. We’re watching Hunger, and the rain is whipping up a playground for slugs outside the window. Not long after the film starts Gabriella stops what she’s doing. We sit still and watch it through to the end.
When it’s finished we both turn back to the hob and when the meal’s ready we sit down to eat together. It feels like there’s something in the air we’re both still trying to unpick, like a knot in one of Frank’s balls of wool.
‘What did you think of it?’ I ask.
‘It was beautiful,’ she says. ‘But quite brutal too.’
She gets two mugs out of the cupboard and starts to make tea.
‘I don’t know. It sort of hit a bit of a nerve. I can relate to some of the stuff in it, you know. That sense of having to fight from a place of being seen in a certain way, of being perceived as inherently bad or wrong and everything being stacked up against you. It was painful in that way.’
I take the tea as she passes it over.
‘Thanks.’ I add some milk and get up to find a teaspoon from the drawer.
‘I don’t know,’ she continues. ‘I think it was also partly about the way history shifts our perspectives.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I guess in terms of how our identities position us in relation to others, and how that changes over time, maybe? Like, there are so many people I love who are white but who are part of this history that makes me angry. About where I’m from, what my ancestors went through. That’s difficult sometimes, and it’s complicated.’
‘The bit that confused me was the part when the priest was talking about negotiation, about it being preferable to suicide or fighting. I didn’t know whose side we were meant to be on.’
‘I don’t think we were meant to be on a side,’ she says. ‘It’s what Sands says; life and our experiences have focused our beliefs differently. I know that life can change drastically for the better with a push from the right person at the right time, but if not, in a situation like that, maybe all there is is dying.’
‘You
sound like Danny.’
She laughs. ‘We think the same way sometimes. It was interesting – that conversation between Sands and the priest – what they said about terrorists –’
‘I don’t know if I believe there’s such a thing as a terrorist anymore, Gabby. I think maybe there are just different types of hate, or power, or whatever it is –’
‘Right. But as long as people are taught to be scared of other people there’ll be terrorists; that’s what terror creates.’ She reaches for another spoonful of sugar. ‘You just have to question who’s creating that fear. Whether it’s coming from what’s supposed to be our side or what’s supposed to be theirs. And, like I say, I don’t really know who “our side” is. History hasn’t always put me on the same team as it would like to now.’
‘Can we be on the same team?’ I ask.
She laughs. ‘Yeah, we can be on the same team.’
We clear up slowly and I hug her goodbye. As I walk down the road my mind’s on Ellie. I don’t know what it feels like for your body to starve. I can imagine the pain but I feel like there must be some will to keep living, despite the high from controlling your body so tightly and riding the hunger out. I can see Ellie’s illness hurting her, but I can understand wanting to turn your body against itself, making it go numb.
41
You used to laugh when I got upset about films or books or stuff I’d read in the news. Sometimes you’d kiss me. Other days, you’d tease me; you’d tell me I used it for catharsis, that I’d sit and get upset over other people’s bad stuff in order to let my own sadness out.
You’d said that that was what I was doing the day the boy on the bus called you the N-word. You told me I was being selfish, that crying wouldn’t solve anything and my empathy was self-gratifying. You were upset. You said I should be angry or pragmatic but not sad. We had got off the bus and were about ten minutes from home.
