by S. K. Perry
‘Shut your face,’ I say, and he kisses me.
‘Go on, tell me about shearing the sheep.’
‘Well I thought it’d be fun but the sheep really didn’t like it. You have to kind of sit on them to keep them still and they get really distressed.’
‘Foolish sheep. How could anyone mind you sitting on them?’
I laugh and kiss him, wrapping myself up in his legs and the sofa.
Later we go upstairs to bed, and I stand in the bathroom cleaning my teeth, thinking about you standing next to me cleaning yours. After Danny has gone to sleep I lie awake for a while, thinking about the birthday card in the bottom drawer of my desk and your stiff handwriting etched inside it. I know exactly what it says and imagine you whispering it in my ear as I lie there.
I haven’t been sleeping naked, so in the morning Danny slides a hand under my top and rolls my left nipple through his finger and thumb. I’ve missed waking up with you behind me. Danny likes to touch my nipples a lot more than you did; you used your tongue on them but I like this too. I turn around to face him and find the line of his buttocks through his boxer shorts with my fingers. He asks me if I’m OK and I nod, and he slides down the bed to kiss my hips and the edge of my knickers. I put my fingers in his hair but when he takes off my underwear I start doing times tables in my head.
When I pull him up and kiss him, I can taste my saltiness on his lips. His eyes are closed and he’s frowning slightly. The joke about the duck who walks into the bar and keeps asking for bread is in my head and I start laughing. He opens his eyes and looks at me like he’s a bit concerned so I say, ‘Sorry, I was thinking about that joke with the duck and the bread.’
He goes to say something but I climb on top of him and push my mouth quite hard against his. I feel as though our gums are squishing together. I’m still sort of laughing into his mouth and I’m kissing him hard at the same time. I know I need to get it together but I also really want to push my finger into his belly button and then smell it, or bite his nose really hard, or do something that means I get to touch him but that isn’t this.
Instead I push my mouth into his shoulder and move my hips so that the top of his penis is in the right place for sex. I push down on him and he puts his hands on my back and pulls my body in to slow it down. He asks me again if I’m OK and he’s smiling, but it’s obviously confusing for him that I’m still sort of laughing about the joke. I am OK though and I feel calmer now. I say sorry but he shakes his head and kisses me. Everything stops for a minute. It’s like lots of flying ants take off from under the skin on my shoulders and leave me breathing better. It’s already familiar with him – his body and his mouth – and I don’t have to pretend this time; I come just before he does.
I understand how ivy feels, wanting to stay tangled up in him for the rest of the day like green creeping limbs around a tree trunk. We doze.
When I wake up again I find my towel and kiss him before I go to the bathroom. I stand in the shower, crying quietly and not understanding how I feel.
10
My family come down to take me out for lunch. I don’t invite Danny and we don’t talk about it; he just goes home. I hope he doesn’t feel sad. I’m trying to be careful with him, with myself, while this in-between space hovers. But I don’t know what I’m doing.
I walk along the front with Mum and Dad and Rob and we eat pizza at Alfresco, watching the sky dance with the sea. I laugh at Rob’s impressions of Lucy planning the wedding and not everything upsets me. I feel guilty about that. Your mum phones me in the afternoon after they’ve left and I sit on the beach talking to her. Her voice is still thick with pain and I’m confused. Of course I wish you were here, Sam, but you can’t be. I’ve forgiven you for that. Don’t be angry with me.
It’s the middle of the Brighton Fringe so walking home the roads are packed with people flyering and playing music, and I take a few leaflets from people wearing face paint and walking round on stilts. Some of the kids I teach at school are in a show with a community theatre group. I should find out where it is and go see it.
I sit in my room that night listening to the bikutsi music that reminds me of you. I keep putting off starting Jude because I’m not sure if it will still be painful. I hope it would. I don’t want to stop missing you.
11
I go running that night, down the middle of the roads where there aren’t any shadows. There’s a stillness in the dark that gets inside me like music, and the air is easier to breathe. It makes me tired though. I like it better when running makes me feel strong: the power in my body, the speed I’ve built up and the familiarity of the pavements. The corners carry me round them and push me onwards.
Running in the daytime lets the world feel transient. I move along unfazed by the conversations walking past because I’m gone before I get caught up in them. Sometimes this is something I need. I’m scared to feel settled in case I get stuck. There are things I don’t want to lose and I get tired when I think about it.
Tonight I listen to the silence and the wind and worry about everything being gone. My feet hit the ground hard and it hurts. When I get home Ellie is sitting up in the kitchen with a cup of coffee.
‘You’re not meant to be out all night, Holly. It’s unnatural, unless you’re on drugs or having crazy al fresco sex.’
I smile at her.
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
‘Yeah me neither. Want to come stay in my room?’
I nod and we go upstairs and in the morning she wakes me up with a cup of tea.
‘How are your muscles?’ she says.
‘A bit achy.’
‘A bit sad?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s because you’re old now; that’s what birthdays do.’
We curl up together, sipping our tea. We don’t say anything; we let the morning be what it is.
12
It’s 3rd June and it’s been a year since you died. I phone your mum and your sister and then spend the rest of the day at the viaduct with Frank. We make sure to shout a thank you to Edward the architect again as we leave to go home, and Frank drives us back too quickly down the wide roads. I swim that night, and the sea is cold and wild. My parents call before bed.
‘It’s just another day,’ I tell them. ‘There’s nothing to say.’
13
I’ve been invited to sports day at the school where I run my choir. I’m always there on Tuesdays anyway and all the kids who sing with me will be racing. They ask me if I’m going to come, ‘Go on, Miss, it’ll be really fun. You can be on our team if you want.’
When I say I will, the head asks if the choir can perform, and we get a bunch of songs ready for the parents. Danny books the afternoon off work to come too. He’s being supportive and it’s sweet but there’s something in me that feels claustrophobic; I don’t know if I’m ready for us to live in each other’s daytimes. I know I’m not being fair; we wake up together most mornings and find each other at night. The longer it goes on the more confused I feel.
He looks at me like I’m somewhere he wants to settle and I want him to be a place I escape to. I think he must be a runaway too, or I don’t know why Frank would have found him. But he holds me like my skin was made to feel his fingers and his breath and I’m scared I can’t do that anymore. He asks me to love him with his eyes and I feel like all I am is empty space.
14
I still clean the cream house on Tuesdays. It still makes me angry with its locked drawers and mirrors.
Today I listen to a podcast about comets while I work and imagine the walls are the curves of a spaceship. I don’t follow all of it and I like a lot of the ideas that are wrong more than the ones the scientists say are maybe right. They talk about something called panspermia. I like the word, and write it down on a little piece of paper. I put it in my purse next to the fact you told me once about four-sided shapes: whatever kind of quadrangle you draw, if you connect up their midpoints you’ll always get a perfect parallelog
ram.
One of the people on the podcast says that comets are like frozen time capsules, with stuff in them from when the solar system had just formed. I like that thought, that if we could crack one open we’d find a message from the start of time.
When I was at school we buried a time capsule in our school field to mark the new millennium. Every class had to choose something to put in it and the headmaster wrote a letter that went in too, wrapped in a plastic bag. He read it to us in assembly, and we all had to write our own ‘Letter to the Future’ in English class. Mr Jenkins’s was the only one that went in the time capsule though. I remember listening to it and thinking that if I’d found it in a thousand years I’d have been pretty disappointed. It didn’t have any jokes in it and it just said a lot of stuff about our school values. I felt quite doubtful about the whole thing; when I’d accidentally left bits of my sandwich in a plastic bag they went mouldy in just a few days so I didn’t really think that a letter – which I was sure was less resilient than a sandwich – was going to last for hundreds of years. But when we recorded our school song to put in there too, I sung really loudly just in case.
I wish you’d left a time capsule for me, something I could hold now I can’t hold onto you. I’ll hold Danny’s hand later. Your hands were bigger than mine, thicker. His are bony and wide.
I feel a bit panicky as I lock up the house and walk into school, but I take comfort in the fact that even the wonkiest quadrangle makes a parallelogram. Sometimes I guess you just have to keep on going to find out what the future’s meant to be.
15
The sun is out. At school, Danny’s waiting for me. I smile into his face and he reminds me of things that end: a different man who spills out of me when I laugh. I look into his eyes and see you splattered in front of me. He makes a joke about the parents waiting nervously on the sidelines and it’s funny. I pull him in and kiss him.
‘Thank you for coming,’ I say, and I mean it.
The races at school go on all afternoon and the kids sing at the end before a big sit-down barbecue with the parents and staff. We’re outside for all of it, in a big field behind the playground. The sky is so high up and so blue. It’s impossible not to enjoy it with summer bursting in on us.
One of the boys in my choir wins the whole-school 100 metres and he sits opposite me and Danny to eat.
‘I’m pretty fast, aren’t I, Miss? I’m probably going to be in the Olympics when I grow up.’
‘You are fast, Luke, yeah. Do you want to be in the 100 metres?’
‘No, I want to do gymnastics. I’m even better at back-flips than I am at running. I’m really good.’
He gets up and runs off to find his dad. Danny laughs and I squeeze his hand under the table. He looks at me with mischief in his eyes.
‘What?’ he says.
‘You can’t laugh at him; he’s so earnest. Don’t crush his dreams.’
Danny laughs at me then and kisses me and doesn’t care that people can see.
‘You’re so sweet with them,’ he says.
Afterwards, as we’re getting our stuff together to go home, the girl who’d been sitting next to Luke comes over to me. I don’t know her name – she isn’t in the choir – but she’d looked upset and worried all through my conversation with Luke so I ask her if there’s anything wrong.
She says, ‘I’m not fast enough for the Olympics, Miss.’
She looks on the verge of tears.
‘Don’t worry about that, poppet; not many people are,’ I reply. ‘I’m sure there are other things you’re good at.’
‘I don’t think there are, Miss. I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up and everybody else does.’
‘Well it’s a difficult decision to make. What things do you like to do?’
‘I like looking after my little sister and I like aeroplanes, but I don’t know if I’d be very good at driving one.’
‘That’s OK. The thing is you don’t have to decide right now. To be honest you’ll probably end up trying lots of different things. I still don’t really know what I want to do yet.’
She looks confused. ‘But you’re a teacher aren’t you, Miss? You teach the singing club.’
On the way back to the car Danny holds my hand. Our palms sweat into each other. He says, ‘You do know what you want to do, Holly. You’re a musician. When are you going to start doing that?’
I look at him and I can see myself how he sees me. I’m a singer, and I’m beautiful, and I’m someone capable of all this love. It’s what I’ve been looking for: somewhere calm to stop. There’s this stillness all around us, but I’m even more lost than I was before. I don’t see the woman who’s in his eyes when I look in the mirror; I see a girl who’s ashamed and confused and trying to find out who she can be when she’s alone.
We drive back to Danny’s. That night in his bed, he uses his mouth on me and I feel my spine stiffen. I try to make myself smaller. I wrap around him like I’m a swimming pool he’s moving through. When he touches me he can’t tell this is a part of me that hurts. You are curled up inside me. When we move like this I feel so lonely. He uses his tongue to find the wet between my legs and holds my hand while I think about you.
I don’t want him to catch my sadness, so I roll over after he’s been inside me, with my face to the wall.
16
Frank texts me in the week to say he has a surprise for me. He says to come to his house that evening if I can.
It’s been a beautiful day and now the sunset’s filling the sky the colour of orange juice and grenadine. I walk along the prom from Hove where I’ve been cleaning. There are people filling the beach like crabs and someone with a guitar and a smooth candlelight voice is busking at the bar by the sailing club. I cut up to Frank’s when I get to the pier and wind through the streets to his house.
Frank opens the door and starts to lead me into his kitchen.
‘Before you panic, I just had it tuned for you. I got it for free from someone who wanted to throw it away. But I got fed up with hearing you talk about playing and I wanted to hear for myself so…’
He opens the door and along the wall opposite the oven and the sink there’s a piano. I look at him in disbelief and he laughs.
‘Play me something?’
He puts the kettle on and I pull a chair up to the piano and open the lid. It has a beautiful sound and by the time Frank’s made the tea I can just about speak enough to say thank you.
I play Frank all the things I can’t say. I play my confusion and my sadness. I play feeling better and feeling lost and wanting so much to keep running. I play the guilt that sticks to my lips like red-wine stains and the hangover of you I’m stuck breathing in. I play the wind and the sea and wanting to fly away.
17
Most evenings I stay at Danny’s or he stays at mine. I start to feel cramped. I spent so long wanting to wrap around a body and now I go days without sleeping. I don’t think he knows this. He lies next to me and I peel the day from out under my fingernails. I pull at the skin around the edges of my fingers until they bleed. I play a game where I try not to let their bleeding get on the bed sheets. When it does I feel bad.
In the morning he always makes me a cup of tea; there are too many holes in my bones for me to hold liquid but I drink it. I wash him off in the shower and write songs about you when he leaves. He doesn’t know this, that I am a cave: a hollowed-out rock full of the dark. I love you. I don’t know what to do with this missing.
On Saturdays Mira makes scrambled eggs, and we all sit and eat together with croissants and tomatoes. I’ll put my new lyrics to music and try not to think about my skin and the way it wants to rub against someone else’s. The way I want to peel it off altogether. Then Danny makes me laugh, or draws a picture on my spine, or I see something I need to tell him and I feel full again and safe.
He smiles at me from across the room when we all go to the pub together; he replies to every message I send him. I worry about him when he�
�s tired from work or anxious about a deadline and I like the way his mouth nuzzles into mine.
I go to Frank’s almost every morning before work and play it all out on the piano. Some days he has requests for songs he wants to hear and he sits next to me and sings along. Other days he’s acquired some sheet music somewhere and asks me to try it out. After a while I offer to teach him, and I start giving him lessons twice a week. Magic has left his hands nimble and strong and he quickly picks up the basic techniques. He struggles with reading music but he has a good ear so we mostly abandon that and I teach him pieces by memory.
Sometimes Frank talks about Ian; sometimes he pushes his hands through the wood of the piano like it’s air and pulls out a picture of Ian laughing, or walking through the woods, or curled in bed. I won’t know where it’s come from. He’ll say, ‘Let’s play a song about this today,’ and I’ll laugh because I still don’t understand how he makes things appear from nothing.
We both need the music, relishing the stories it holds in the quiet morning lull. We need each other too.
18
It’s our party at the end of June and my friends are mostly heading down to Brighton from London after work; they start to trickle in around 9-ish. We’re all a bit pissed and high already so everything feels kind of sepia-toned and easy, and Mira’s made the kind of playlist that everyone wants to stay in the kitchen dancing to all night. Ellie and Sean have always lived in Brighton so lots of their friends get there early and soon our house is packed.
The evening is a montage of greatest hits and snapshot conversations. At one point I’m sat outside in our back yard with my friends from home, smoking and talking about nothing.
‘Fuck, Hols, it’s been way too long.’
‘This place is sick; now you’ve had us down here this summer will basically just be us crashing every weekend.’
‘Oh God, it’s so good to get out of London.’
‘It’s so good to see you.’
‘We’ve missed you.’
‘We’ve missed Sam.’
‘Are you OK?’
