A Selfie as Big as the Ritz

by Lara Williams

  * * *

  He came to see her at work.

  She owned a shop in South Manchester. Flowers In The Attic. “I don’t arrange flowers,” she’d say. “I curate them.” It had started snowing again and she asked Jo, her assistant, to take the display arrangements inside. Snow was bad news for flowers. Snow was bad news for a lot of things. Jo was a History student; making sense of stuff that happened, a discipline Melody could get on board with. He was gay; but didn’t think he had realized yet. She felt a little guilty in the knowing, like she had seen journal entries he hadn’t yet written, and would drop little hints, telling turns of phrase, “I believe you’re of the historical persuasion!”; or, “I wouldn’t Bette Midler on it!” believing these nuanced suggestions served to usher him along the path to enlightenment. She could be pretty nice like that.

  She watched Todd wander about the shop, picking up the arrangements, commenting on their comeliness. He looked so ragged and out of place, his thick khaki jacket and heavy boots moving among the petals. The worm in the bud, alright. Get the hell out of here!—she thought, but to her credit, did not say. “You know, this place reminds me of somewhere back home,” Todd said, and Melody felt suddenly annoyed; watching him swagger among the gladioli, manhandle the petunias. Why do things always have to be like something else? she thought. Why can’t they themselves be the thing?

  A couple came in. Melody had this strange habit of staring at couples, unable to believe they even existed at all. She liked it when couples came in to pick out flowers together. Last week she had sold a lavish bouquet to a young man for his girlfriend’s birthday. “We’re total soulmates,” he’d said, though it seemed the sort of statement that should be delivered only as a duet; speak for yourself, why don’t you? She helped them sort through some funeral arrangements; her livelihood depended on ceremony, on the punctuations of rites of passage; falling in love and dying.

  * * *

  They had dinner at Todd’s, drowsy on red wine, propped up by pillows. Todd flicked through the channels while Melody stared into space; happy in sleepy silence. They settled on a film about a boy with a growth on his face, who woke up one day without a growth on his face. He got made captain of the football team, prom king and valedictorian. He got invited to the best parties at the fanciest houses and had sex with all the prettiest girls. Everyone loved him. But gradually the growth grew back and he became fond of it, realizing everyone had only ever loved him when he didn’t have a growth on his face. He called the growth Kevin and sang “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” to it in the mirror every morning. The film ended with him shaving, nicking the growth with a razor, slicing it off, and it wouldn’t grow back. It was an ambiguous finale but basically you understood that the boy had killed himself. Melody thought it was a pretty funny movie. Todd reached over and stroked her hair. She curled into him like a cat.

  “Can I ask you something?” Todd asked softly.

  “Anything,” Melody replied, burrowing her face beneath his arm.

  “Can I pee on you?”

  A few weeks after Melody had split up with her ex-boyfriend some guy buzzed up to the flat knocking on her front door looking for his friend. Melody had leaned against the door frame; she had spent most of the day crying, feeling limpid and drooped, like everything had been sucked out of her. She wore gray sweats and a thinned white t-shirt, and her hair was scraped back into a high ponytail. She blinked wearily at him, said his friend must live on a different floor. He asked if he could maybe just hang out with her for a bit, and with a twitch of her shoulder she invited him in, and they’d had sex. She thought about the incident daily. She thought about how she was a person capable of doing that, if that was maybe apparent when looking at her. She lifted her head from Todd’s shoulder. She wondered how much time she could let lapse before answering the question.

  “We don’t really say pee here,” she replied. “Piss. Wee. Urinate. But not pee.” She tapped his arm with her finger. Todd wriggled out from beneath her, standing over the settee. He seemed suddenly boyish and lost.

  “I didn’t realize,” he said, searching the room, his face creasing. “I’m going to make a cup of tea,” he said. “Do you want a cup of tea?”

  She lay back into the couch as he walked into the kitchen, stretching out, pushing her toes into the arms, enjoying the freedom of the space. She wondered if this was what sex essentially was. Presenting ourselves at our most horrible and wanting still to be accepted. That we wanted more from it than what it essentially was. She had done this before; handing a stranger her big dopey heart. She thought about how things ended last time. There had been cracks, sure, the frosty silences, the late nights, but it wasn’t until he announced he was taking singing lessons that she fully understood how deep they ran. Oh, she knew she had been stifling him, holy hell, she knew full well. But … singing lessons! The thought! Well, let him sing, she’d said. Let him intone his heart’s song, whatever that might be. But then he announced he was leaving her for his singing teacher, an older woman with beautifully preserved hands.

  Todd returned with two cups of tea. He looked like he was poised to make some grand, romantic gesture, running across the room, sweeping her into his arms, but considering the practicalities, the setting down of the tea, the waxy slip of the hardwood floor, thought better of it, instead winking and half-turning his face; what’s cooking good looking?

  “I’m going to bed,” he said. “Are you coming?”

  It was silly, she thought. All this squeezing onto one raft when two would do.

  “I’ll just pee a minute,” she replied.

  “What?”

  “I’ll just be a minute,” she said.

  She switched off the television, thinking about the boy with the growth on his face, half wishing she had some terrible physical deformity she could sing to, a reason never to leave the flat.

  * * *

  They went to the countryside at Todd’s insistence. He was getting fed up of the city, he’d said and so they drove out to Cheshire, to the countryside, the fields clotted with lumps of snow; the leafy idylls and pastoral pastures sweeping past in mopey grays and greens. They passed a cemetery. It looked strange blanketed in white. Animated, really. The headstones peeping up like erect postage stamps, stone crosses like limbs burst through the ice. It was good to drive past a cemetery. It could give a day a sense of gravity.

  “There’s no Pret,” Melody said stepping out of the car. “There’s no Starbucks. What the hell are we doing here?” She felt vulnerable and unmade; when sleep still lingers dimensionally around you. She yawned. Todd was wearing, she noticed, the same hat he wore when they first met. She hadn’t seen him wear it since, and was happy of this small, shared history.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  The walk was beautiful, damp and cold; the snow adding an additional eeriness; the crackling sludge, black twigs piercing the icy white; it looked extraterrestrial. They walked through the fields and farms, stopping to pet horses; dabbing the flat hair of their necks. They climbed the hills. Todd helped Melody bumble over stiles, pulling her away from puddles. They seemed to have regressed to a more chivalrous time; returning to a natural rural order. They reached one of the snowy peaks, leaning against the fence, looking out over the view.

  “This is a view,” Todd said. “Now this is a view.” Melody looked at him, wanting to fix him in the moment, to screenshot him, to figure him out.

  “I hate Manchester,” he said, pushing himself from the fence. “I gotta tell you. I can’t stand Manchester.” He turned and walked back downhill.

  On the way down they followed the meandering lines of a river, the water moving sluggishly, iced in the snow. It was nice to have a line to follow. It was like coloring in. “I wonder what river this is,” Melody said. “It’s not a river,” Todd replied. “It’s a tributary.” Melody studied the water; it looked pretty wide, commanding. It looked like something you could drown in.

  “What’s the differen
ce?” she asked.

  “Tributaries don’t flow into the ocean,” Todd replied. “They’re not the main stem. They’re more like the drainage system. They’re just the little things that make up the whole.”

  Melody followed the rippling waves of the stream with her eyes, the water bubbling up and over the rocks, carrying with it twigs and leaves. How could one spot the difference? How could one know whether or not it was the main affair, the definite article.

  “I dunno,” Todd said, looking at her, and then the stream, flippantly. “You just know.”

  * * *

  Todd dropped Melody off at the tram station. He rested his hat on the dashboard and she picked it up and put it on her head. She turned to Todd and smiled. He swiped it from her head and placed it back in front of the wheel. A feather fell in her palm, ragged and bitten, too old and crumpled to float. “Look!” she said. “Look!—It did have a feather in it!”

  “Your hat!” she said. “Remember when I first met you, you said it didn’t; but it did. It must have been tucked into the lapel or something.” She let it go and it twirled, sort of, falling onto his knee. He wiped it off and it landed beneath his feet on the car floor. Todd parked in front of the tram stop, turning off the engine. You were lots of little things. You were the deflection until you were the one. And even if you were, it hardly made any difference, you still found yourself crying into your pea soup, swirling it around, sniffling. She sat quite comfortably in the car seat, her clothes damp and sticky, her shirt clinging to her back. She spent her life, she realized, impassively content and yet unable to settle. Like being full and hungry at the same time. She could graze forever.

  “I have a wife,” Todd said, turning to her. “In Canada.”

  Melody blinked.

  “Come on,” he said. “You knew.” She did. She did know. Of course she did. She stared out at the windscreen. She was already gone. She was already outta there!

  “Do you hate me?” he asked, caring; but also, not caring at all. She watched his mouth move, imagining the squinting twang of his accent, and thought she’d always thought he’d sounded stupid, like he was putting it on. It started snowing again and she got out the car and stood at his window. He rolled it down.

  “It was nice knowing you,” she said, kissing his cheek. And it was.

  * * *

  She sat quietly on the tram, not listening to music, not reading, just watching the countryside slowly populate with life. She hopped off the tram at Deansgate, the snow falling lightly, whipped up by the breeze, swirling in a peculiar migratory pattern. She turned onto Whitworth Street, the cold delicious and tingling, like someone blowing on your neck. The red brick buildings were tall and warm against the dark; the snow, like dancing pieces of stray fluff, floating hypnotically around them. How could he hate this city? How could anyone? She walked down Oxford Road, the busiest bus route in Europe, as everyone seemed so keen to espouse, a street he had walked down, her friends had walked down, her family had walked down. She thought how lucky she was to have loved so many people all contained within one place, how any one of them, as unique and arbitrary as the snow, could step outside their house and feel it fall coolly on their face; how weird and beautiful it was that they were, in this way, connected.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Adrian for taking a chance on the collection. Thanks to Robbie, Laura and all the people at Freight for doing such a great job with it and being completely excellent all round.

  Thanks to Becky, a real pal and to Rodge for being an amazing (patient) editor.

  Thanks to Nick and the Manchester Writing School.

  Thanks to Suzanne Barron, Cristina Delgado, Eddie Harris, Victoria Hutton, Frances Walker(s), Roz Webster, Emily Wykes and all of the Pins. Thanks to Alex my kin, Claire my first love, Charlotte my darling girl. To Matthew for a giant heart, Clare for unbridled support and inspiration, Amanda for knocking me off my feet. Thank you Peet for all things.

  And to all my other brilliant friends, friends of friends, and everyone else who has helped. I love and appreciate you very much.

  Finally, thanks to my family for absolutely everything.

  Credits

  It Begins first appeared on Litro

  A Lover’s Guide To Meeting Shy Girls; Or; Breakup Record first appeared on Metazen

  The Small Written Thing appeared as a Little Fiction title

  Dates first appeared on The Pygmy Giant

  Taxidermy first appeared in The Lighthouse Journal

  A Single Lady’s Manual for Parent/Teacher Evening first appeared on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

  The Getting Of The Cat first appeared on Blank Media

  As Understood By The Women first appeared in Unthology 8

  About the Author

  Lara Williams is a writer based in Manchester, England. Her writing has been featured in The Guardian, The Independent, Vice, The Times Literary Supplement, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and featured in Best British Short Stories 2017. She writes and teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. A Selfie as Big as the Ritz is her debut.

  Visit her online at www.larawilliamswriter.com, or sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  It Begins

  A Lover’s Guide to Meeting Shy Girls; Or; Breakup Record

  One of Those Life Things

  Both Boys

  Where I Am Supposed to Be

  This Small Written Thing

  Beautiful Existence

  It’s a Shame About Ray

  Dates

  Treats

  Taxidermy

  Penguins

  Toxic Shock Syndrome

  Here’s to You

  Sundaes at the Tipping Yard

  Safe Spaces

  A Single Lady’s Manual for Parent/Teacher Evening

  A Selfie as Big as the Ritz

  The Getting of the Cat

  As Understood by the Women

  Tributaries

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A SELFIE AS BIG AS THE RITZ. Copyright © 2016 by Lara Williams. All rights reserved. For information, address Flatiron Books, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.flatironbooks.com

  Cover design by Janet Hansen

  Cover art by Nathan Manire

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request

  ISBN 978-1-250-12662-7 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-250-12663-4 (ebook)

  e-ISBN 9781250126634

  Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  Originally published in the U.K. by Freight Books as Treats

  First U.S. Edition: October 2017

 

 

 
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