Let Me Be Like Water

by S. K. Perry

  I still sleep in your jumper most nights but sometimes – if I’m very tired – I forget to put it on. This makes me feel guilty.

  2

  It’s Sunday so I’ve gone to Gabriella’s. She opens the door, looks at me and says, ‘I’m going to run you a bath, Holly. Then we’re going to cook.’

  I guess I look as tired as I feel. I don’t argue with her. I sit in the hot water and curl into myself. Afterwards I put the warm socks she’s given me over my tights and go downstairs.

  ‘So, what are we making today?’

  ‘I thought we might get you cooking pastry. What do you reckon?’

  ‘Sure, sounds good.’

  Words are an effort but I say some things anyway to make me seem normal. Gabriella knows this so she puts on the radio and dances.

  ‘You’re looking quite glam, Gabby.’

  She’s had her hair done in a pile of braids stacked on top of her head in a thick knot. She spins around underneath them, gets ingredients out from the cupboards with strong hands. She dances like she’s liquid.

  ‘Thanks. I’m going on a date tonight. Don’t look so surprised. You’re not the only one with a social life, young lady. He’s a doctor I met in London over New Year. We’re going wine tasting.’

  ‘What am I doing here?’ I say. ‘Don’t you want to be getting ready?’

  ‘Doing what? I’m not going to sit around painting my toenails.’

  I smile. Gabriella turns the radio up and ‘Atomic’ by Blondie blares out. She says, ‘It’s funny; I had my first kiss with Joseph’s father to this song in 1995. We were at a roller disco and he was standing on the middle of the dance floor without any skates on. I remember thinking he must’ve been a bit of an idiot, but then when I skated past him he grabbed my arm. I was wearing these ankle socks with tiny penguins on and he told me he liked them. We got chatting and I asked him why he wasn’t skating. He said he liked to stand still; he was a bit of an idiot to be honest, but he was very handsome and when this song came on he kissed me.’

  ‘Where is he now?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replies. ‘We’re not in touch.’

  We make a lattice pie with chicken and peas inside and a slightly soggy bottom. Gabriella tells me it isn’t bad for my first attempt. We sit and eat it with broccoli for a late lunch and she doesn’t ask me any questions. She just tells me to come over any time I want. She says the weather’s been rubbish and everyone’s a bit down. It’ll get better now it’s spring.

  I don’t tell her I kissed Danny. I don’t tell her I want to wake up and see another person’s face on my pillow. I don’t tell her I’m so lonely I feel bent over with it; it rattles in my breath.

  After we’ve eaten she says she needs to go and catch her train into London. I say I’ll stay and do the washing up. I don’t want to go outside just yet.

  She gives me a hug and looks at me like she wishes she could help. I want to tell her she is helping but I don’t know how to say it without getting upset. I feel selfish for being sad when everyone’s trying so hard to make it better. I feel like getting back in the bath and resting my face in the water until it’s over.

  3

  At your funeral your dad stood apart from the rest of your family. He’d kept his coat on with his collar turned up, and where it grazed his hairline I’d noticed how his ears were shaped like yours.

  I’d only met him a couple of times. There was that first evening – right at the beginning – when we went back to his house, thinking he was on holiday. Your sister was at yours and we were still in the sneaking-round stages so we decided to make use of his empty house. We were making out in his bed and we heard him come in through the door, not on holiday after all. You pulled on a jumper and some pants; we were drunk and you fell over and I laughed at you hopping about. Then we realised my clothes were downstairs and I was trapped. I thought it was a lot funnier than you did but I didn’t know your dad then. You went outside to stall for time and I put on a dressing gown, fastening it with the belt from your trousers because I couldn’t find the cord. I’d decided there was nothing else for it but to go out and say hello as if there was nothing going on, and in the morning we all laughed about it over breakfast.

  I know he made a lot of mistakes with you. I know how angry you were with him: how much you wanted to prove the way to be a man in your family was not something you’d inherited. I know you loved me for not being scared of him, that he’d always been a person who demanded fear, even when you’d been a child looking up to him for love.

  I knew all this, but he stood there on his own at your funeral crying into his fist. He looked all scrunched up. I thought, maybe you wouldn’t want me to be scared now either, so I went and held his hand.

  I don’t know where your dad is now. I don’t know whether to feel guilty about this. There’s so much I’m sad about. I miss your mum and Danielle: us helping her bath Alfie, reading him bedtime stories. I don’t know if they’re still part of my family, or if you’re my boyfriend or my ex-boyfriend now. I don’t know how I could go and visit them when I feel guilty that you died and I didn’t.

  4

  So I’ve finished washing up and I’ve posted Gabriella’s keys through the letterbox and I’m outside on the pavement. It’s a gorgeous Sunday – even though it’s 5 p.m. – and standing outside her house I notice the sunshine for the first time. The light is making the pavement look clean but it’s still gruff enough to feel friendly. The debris from last night is scattered on the pavements in patches of sunlight. It’s like there are enough wonky bits I can be part of it.

  My phone rings and I look down and it’s Danny. I haven’t seen him since we all went out. I miss him, but I don’t know if I can tell him that. I let the phone ring out, watching the screen flash and trying to decide what to do. He calls me straight back, and this time I pick it up.

  ‘Holly? I’m sorry to call like this, but Frank’s been taken to hospital.’

  I can hear a bird saying something but the sounds feel like they’re coming from a long way away.

  ‘Holly? They think he’s had a stroke.’

  5

  It was Sunday 3rd June and I was in bed at a friend’s house in Dollis Hill. We had loose plans to get up and go see a bit of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee flotilla but we’d decided not to set an alarm. I’d put on my glasses and switched on my phone. It was 11.03. I had a voicemail. I went to the toilet, got a glass of water because I was feeling pretty rough, and got back into bed to listen.

  I expected it to be you, laughing at my sporadic texting the night before, finding my inability to type while drunk funny. I let the T-Mobile lady tell me I had a new message and waited for your voice. It took me a few seconds to recognise your sister’s. She’d called two hours before at 9.08 a.m. She said you’d been hit by a car and taken to the intensive care unit at York Hospital. You were waiting for brain surgery. Her voice told me I needed to get there as quickly as I could.

  My fingers were in my mouth now and I was biting them. My friend came into the room and I handed her the phone. I got out of bed and put on my coat over the shorts and vest I’d borrowed from her to sleep in. Then I sat down on the floor and started crying, because the only shoes I had were the ones I’d worn out dancing the night before. They’d given me blisters, and I couldn’t wear them to a hospital – they were too high – and I didn’t have any jeans or a jumper with me – only my dress and I’d spilt wine on it – and I didn’t even know how to get to York from Dollis Hill.

  My friend had taken my phone and got the lady on the voicemail machine to play the message again and she sat down next to me when it had finished and put her arms round me.

  I said, ‘Is he going to be OK?’

  ‘He’s going to be fine,’ she replied.

  6

  I can’t concentrate on what Danny is saying. There’s an Evian bottle filled with piss – lid on – placed on top of a litter bin about two metres from where I’m standing. I really wan
t to send it streaming, splash it out onto the concrete floor in the sun. I don’t think I could get the lid off with just one hand without spilling it on me though and I’m still on the phone. I think about picking it up and shaking it. I really want to feel how warm it is and I wonder whether – if it’s not fresh – the sun has enough heat in it today to have kept it at body temperature. The air does feel hot and I think to myself that maybe it’s the start of the summer. It’s too early for that really though; it’s still only March and it’s been raining almost every day but it’s a nice thought. I imagine the bottle like a blood-heated thigh in my hand.

  I don’t say anything and Danny’s voice keeps going.

  ‘Holly? Are you there? We’re in the hospital. It’s OK; he was with Jackie and she called me and we’re there now. It looks like it may have only been a TIA so it’s more of a scare than anything but I thought you’d want to come down here.’

  I don’t want to go down there. I feel like I really need to go somewhere but not there, and I start to cry a bit so I ask, ‘Where’s Harris?’

  ‘We left him with Jackie’s neighbour. Holly, are you OK?’

  ‘Danny someone’s weed in a water bottle and left in on top of a bin. I don’t really know why they’d do that. And what about Gabriella? She’s gone wine tasting.’

  ‘I know; we’ve spoken to her. She’s OK; she’s going to visit him in the morning. Look, do you want me to come and get you? I’ve got the car here.’

  ‘It’s OK, I’ll catch a bus.’

  ‘You want the number 1. I think it goes from the station and it won’t take long. Or grab a cab. I can come get you if you want?’

  ‘Is he OK?’

  ‘I think so, yeah. I think he’s going to be fine. See you in a bit.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I stand outside Gabriella’s house and think about Frank lying in a building full of people who are dying.

  I think about corridors and machines and double doors that are pushed open by trollies being rushed from one department to another. I wonder why all hospital entrances have revolving doors.

  I reach out for something to steady myself with but I’m standing on the pavement so there isn’t really anything there to hold.

  7

  London was packed for the Jubilee celebrations but the distraction of other people’s bodies rammed onto tubes was easier than the quiet empty carriage on the train up to York. I don’t remember buying a ticket at King’s Cross but I did, and I found my train and I got on it. I sat on one of the seats with a table, facing backwards.

  As I’d left her house my friend had pushed a puzzle book into my hand. She’d said I might need something to do on the train. I sat there staring at a crossword. I was dehydrated. The crossword was one of the cryptic ones you hated and I pretended to understand to wind you up but I felt useless because I couldn’t do any of the clues. I had a headache and I probably smelt. I tried to google the words your sister had said in her message but my signal kept going in and out. I bought a Snickers from the trolley and looked at it.

  8

  I can’t do it. I can’t go to the hospital to see Frank so I turn off my phone and walk back to the house and sit in my room. I think about the time at Borough Market when Frank told me he didn’t mind not having children because he hoped his friends saw him as family. I know Danny will have told him I’m coming, and I think about him sitting in a hospital bed waiting. Maybe Frank isn’t even conscious; maybe he doesn’t realise he’s wrapped in clean sheets and attached to a machine that beeps. I leave my room again and go running like a river that needs to find somewhere to be.

  The hospital is only a fifteen-minute walk from my house but I’ve never been that far. I always run the other way, or down along the front. Tonight I turn right and run along the prom towards the West Pier, but I have to stop because I can’t see where I’m going. I walk down to the edge of the water, tripping a bit where the stones fall away under my feet and where my tears get in the way of my eyes. I pick up the biggest rock I can find and throw it at the sea. I keep going, picking up stones and throwing them, and I’m crying too much to watch them land but I keep chucking them until I can’t stand up anymore.

  Frank makes the stones dance when he throws them into the water. He’s always been magic. Now he’s had a stroke and I don’t understand what that means. I sit down and put my head on my knees until the shaking stops. I sit there as it gets darker. I watch the birds dip and wish I could be brave enough to go and find Frank. I wish I could be brave enough to believe in something again: to believe in a love that isn’t always awful because it’s ending.

  9

  You can watch car accidents on YouTube. People have made compilations of them: like mix tapes or photo albums. Normally the driver loses control, and then there’s a bit of skidding and crumpling metal or branches breaking. If you watch them with the sound turned on you can hear people say things like, ‘Watch out!’ or ‘Oh boy!’ If the camera’s inside the car the driver normally screams.

  The woman who killed you was called Elizabeth Whitworth and she was driving a red Renault Scenic. She hit the brakes but you didn’t even look. She says she screamed. She cried a lot too; I heard her, on the statement she gave the police. Your body broke the windscreen. You slid back down it while she tried to stop. Your arm was crushed under the car and your insides all came open. You were unconscious right up until your brain gave in at the hospital and you died. These are all facts. Renault Scenics are big cars and you were just a person.

  Elizabeth wrote to me once, after the funeral. She said she has nightmares where she sees your face hitting the windscreen. Loud noises give her panic attacks. She said she knows it wasn’t anybody’s fault but she’ll feel guilty for the rest of her life. She asked me if I was OK for money and signed the letter ‘Lizzy’.

  I don’t know what the difference is between the fear that makes you move and the fear that freezes your bones and holds you still. Maybe you didn’t see her at all. But when I think of how scared you must have been I have to hold the top of my head to stop it coming off.

  I wrote back and asked her if she watches the videos too. If she sits at night on her own trying to understand how it happened. If she could help me find one that looked like you did so I could stop searching. She didn’t reply. I think of her when I don’t sleep, knowing she’s replaying it all too.

  10

  Before my driving test Gabriella told me everyone worries about their reaction speed, that it doesn’t take losing someone in a car crash to make driving frightening. She told me I just had to change the image of you I saw when I blinked. She said, ‘Put a picture of Sam smiling on the dashboard. You’ve got to get the hospital bed out of your eyes when you look at the road.’ She told me death slows down the imagination for a while, gets it stuck on nightmares.

  I’ve learnt to drive, but I can’t get up to go and see my friend. I feel selfish and ashamed but I sit on the beach and hope that Frank will forgive me for letting him down. I feel cold and my ears are hot and I’m sick. I go and buy some crisps and a bottle of water. I walk back down to the sea again afterwards and sit with my back against one of the groynes, hidden in the shadow of it. Up to my right the buildings and the streetlamps lining the edge of the town are like bleached white teeth. To the left, the sea is a mouth with its tongue ripped out: wide and dark and only able to choke.

  I think about Frank sitting on his roof and drinking tea and him telling me not to worry about anything. I close my eyes and send magic into the sky and hope and hope he’ll be OK.

  I sit outside all night. It rains twice but I stop feeling cold after a while. I’ve chosen a bit of the beach where I can disappear into shadow. Sometimes there are voices behind me but I know I’m hidden; whoever they belong to won’t see me. I hold my breath until they’re gone; I don’t want to share the air.

  I think about the water washing me away like I’m a pebble. I hope it doesn’t, but I’m tired so I curl into a ball. I fall asleep af
ter a bit, sheltered by the pier and the slope of stones behind me.

  When the sun rises I feel empty. The sky over the sea felt so expectant but it’s just daytime again; nothing’s happened. The noise of cars and people is getting thicker, so I get up and start walking. It hurts because I’m cold and my knees and elbows feel shrunken and tight. There’s a pain in my chest and I’m struggling to breathe but I go all the way down past Marrocco’s.

  There’s a woman sat outside with a baby, feeding it ice cream with a teaspoon. She looks so calm and serene and I want to shout at her to watch out because anything could go wrong. I start running past the tennis courts and Danny’s flat and I keep going. I think about kissing him and try to stop thinking about anything. When I get to Millionaire’s Row I turn right and walk around the streets, jogging a bit sometimes, but mostly walking. I have £2.73 left in my pocket so I get some mini cocktail sausages and another bottle of water from a grocery store. I nearly shake the person behind the till but I don’t know what to say except it’s dangerous here; be careful and it comes out as a whisper and I don’t think anyone hears me. Then I walk a bit further and I think about looking for the ice cream lady and her baby but they’re probably gone so I sit on a bench until it gets dark.

  I wonder if the bottle of piss is still there on that bin or if someone has taken it away.

  11

  The first time I got my period after you died, I lay on my side on the bathroom floor and cried. I held onto my stomach and it hurt. We were always so careful; I don’t know if I’d been hoping for an accident or a miracle. I think I just hadn’t stopped believing in forever yet; I thought maybe you’d find a way to stay with me. My insides left my body and it felt like losing a child.

  I wanted to hold something I loved as much as you. I wanted to see your face in someone else’s.

  Instead I lay there on the floor and let myself bleed. I’d failed to grow you back inside me. I was completely alone.