by Nell Stevens
He turned away, and let his forehead fall against the wall. He was breathing heavily, and each time he inhaled, his head pressed harder into the plaster and throbbed. Then he pushed himself upright and ran out of the room, down the four flights of stairs and out of the front door.
It had stopped raining, but only recently. The roads were still wet, reflecting the headlights of traffic. A bus passed and sent up a spray of water from a flooded drain. Billy didn’t look at the people he ran past, or the cars, or the drivers in the cars.
When he reached the high street, he dug in his pocket for his phone, found the 9 at the bottom-left corner of the keypad, and pressed it three times.
“Which emergency service do you require?”
“I don’t know,” said Billy. His words came out garbled. “I don’t know. Someone’s died. Someone’s died. There’s a dead girl.”
He just kept saying it until the operator redirected his call. He spoke first to paramedics, and then to the police. He gave them his name, his address, and Dave’s name and Dave’s address, and a description of where the girl was in the house. When they asked him where he was at that moment, he just said, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” and stared at the red-and-blue sign for the Tube station.
“I gave her the drugs,” he said. “I gave them to her, and I didn’t even look at what she was taking, and then she didn’t wake up, and I just ran away.”
“You need to calm down, Billy,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. Billy ended the call.
Inside the Tube station, people were passing through the barriers, vanishing down escalators. Some of them were smiling, as though nothing were wrong. He paced between the wall and a stand advertising planned line closures for the weekend. He called Dave the Bass.
“Billy Keys.” He could tell from the tone of Dave’s voice that he was lying down.
“Dave the Bass.”
“Where are you?”
“I just left your place.”
“You have a good time last night, Billy?”
“That girl, that girl—Tom Bone’s girl—is dead. She fucking died. I’ve called the police. I’ve called an ambulance.”
“What?”
“Go upstairs,” said Billy. “She’s dead. I just ran. I shouldn’t have run. There’s an ambulance coming.”
“What?” said Dave the Bass. “Who are you talking about? Gina? That girl Gina that was with Tom Bone?”
“The girl that was with us in the bathroom.”
“Oh, my God,” said Dave. “Gina. Where is she?”
“In the bathroom,” said Billy. “In the bathroom where we all were.”
Billy could hear thudding footsteps and Dave’s heavy breathing as he ran to the top of the house.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Dave said under his breath.
“I gave her pills,” said Billy. “I don’t know what she had, but nothing was left in the box when I woke up. Nothing.”
Dave continued to run, and then there was a silence. Billy imagined him standing in the bathroom doorway, staring at the body of the girl.
Dave said nothing.
“Dave?” said Billy.
“I’m in the bathroom.”
“What are we going to do?” said Billy. “I don’t know what the fuck is going to happen.”
“Mate, she’s not here.”
“In the bathroom,” Billy said. “The bathroom. The mat by the toilet.”
“She’s not here.”
Down the phone, Billy could hear sirens growing louder. After a moment, they were so loud that Dave was shouting over the noise.
“What the fuck, Billy? What the fuck?”
“She’s there,” Billy said. He couldn’t think clearly. “She’s dead on the mat.”
The sirens stopped. People were shouting in Dave’s house. The doorbell rang. There were more raised voices, another shrill ring, heavy footsteps. Dave hung up.
—
The year before, it had been Tom Bone, of all people, who had called.
“Mate, where are you?” Tom Bone had said. He was speaking so clearly that at first Billy thought one of the others was using Tom’s phone. “Something’s happened. Something’s happened to Amy.”
“What’s happened?” Billy asked.
“Turn on the news.”
“What’s happened?”
There was a pause and then Tom Bone said, “I think she’s died.”
Billy had run the entire distance from the Twelve Bar on Denmark Street to Camden Square. The sole had come loose on his left shoe and smacked against the pavement with each step. It had sounded like applause. When he reached the square, crowds were pushing against a line of police. He elbowed his way past sobbing teenagers, journalists with microphones, and tourists holding up cameras.
Once he reached the front, he had a clear view of the white wall in front of Amy’s house, the fortified black gate and the police cordon around it. He stood with the crowd, waiting for something to happen. He waited for hours. Nothing happened. She was already gone.
—
Billy’s phone didn’t stop ringing as he walked towards Camden Square. He felt it buzzing in his pocket for minutes on end, and then the battery died.
Outside the house that had once been Amy’s, a police officer was standing guard. Billy walked along the wall in front of the building. People still left flowers there, and other things: cups of coffee that got kicked over so that the pavement was awash with soured milk and brown puddles; cigarettes; bottles of booze.
He crouched down and stared at the pavement between his feet. When he tried to focus on the situation with Tom Bone’s girl, his brain froze and all he could think about was Amy. He wanted Amy. Wind and drizzle rushed through the trees in the park across the road: a hissing sound like suppressed laughter.
The police officer’s hand on his shoulder made him jump. He looked up into the woman’s face.
She was frowning. “You OK?”
She was trying to look into his eyes. Billy glared at his knees.
“Important to you, was she?” said the woman.
Something about the word “important” made tears spring into Billy’s eyes. He heard the woman move off, and the clink of glass a few feet away. He looked across, then, and saw her take two bottles of whisky from the cluster of gifts by the house.
She walked back to him and held them out. “Here.”
He wiped his face with the insides of his wrists. He didn’t move to take them.
“Safe to say your need is greater than hers,” she said.
She put the bottles into his hands. The glass was cold; the whisky sloshed inside. He slid them into the inner pockets of his jacket, one on each side.
“Now get on home, have a drink, and sleep it off,” said the policewoman. “You’ll be OK.”
—
The tree outside Billy’s flat was gone. The hole in the pavement was cordoned off with yellow tape. Billy’s front door was ajar. He inspected the door frame. The paintwork was scratched where someone had forced the lock.
He pushed his head through the gap and called up the stairs. “Hello?”
“Mate?” said a voice. “Billy?”
“Who is that?”
There was no answer. Billy stepped inside, kicked the door shut and ran upstairs. His head throbbed with the effort. His vision was spinning as he stepped into his room.
Tom Bone was sitting amongst broken glass on the bed. The room and all the furniture looked smaller beside his bulk. It was dark. He hadn’t turned on the light, and the normal orange glow of the streetlamps outside was absent. The window had been covered with a black bin liner, stuck to the walls with police tape.
Billy flicked the light switch and Tom Bone raised a hand to shade his eyes. He had sheets of paper in his lap and envelopes that had been torn open.
“The police were here,” Tom Bone said, waving the letters, “because of the tree. They forced entry in case there were casualties. Your landlord came and cha
nged the locks—he stuck a note to the front door because you weren’t answering your phone. You can go and collect the new key from him.”
Billy nodded. His eyes turned to the glass on the floor, the twigs and leaves the tree had left behind, and then back to his friend.
“How did you get in?”
“I fucking kicked the door until it opened.”
Tom Bone laughed and looked around as though searching for someone other than Billy who could share the joke. He clenched his fists, then laid his palms flat on his thighs. Billy sat next to him. Pieces of glass clattered as the mattress sank under his weight. He slid one of the bottles of whisky out of his pocket and handed it to Tom Bone.
Tom Bone twisted the cap off, and tilted the bottle into his mouth. A trickle of liquid slid out of the corner of his lips.
“So we’re all at Dave’s,” said Tom Bone, after a silence. He wiped his chin on his sleeve. “Everyone’s waking up, feeling like shit. But we’re all right. We had a good time.”
Billy opened the other bottle and drank.
“Then we hear the sirens. They’re getting louder and Dave is yelling on the phone at the top of the house. The doorbell rings. Dave goes, ‘It’s the police, it’s the fucking police.’ People are going mental, flushing everything they can find, but it’s pointless, because everything was everywhere. The police are in the house. The fucking paramedics are there, yelling, ‘Where’s the girl? Where’s the girl?’ and people are running around trying to find the corpse that was supposed to be in the top bathroom but wasn’t, and eventually the doctors are like, ‘Is this a joke? Are you wasting our time?’ and then Gina bursts into the room going, ‘We’ve searched everywhere and nobody’s dead. Everybody’s fine.’ ”
“You don’t mean Gina,” Billy said. “You mean someone else.”
Tom Bone ignored him. “And I’m just staring, staring at her, and nobody says anything for fucking ages, and then Dave goes, ‘It’s you, though. It’s you. You’re supposed to be dead. Billy Keys told us you were dead.’ And she says it again—she says, ‘Nobody’s dead.’ ” Tom Bone’s hands were trembling around the bottle. Inside, the brown liquid shivered.
“ ‘Nobody’s dead,’ ” Billy repeated. He stamped on a fragment of glass on the floor. He felt it splinter through the sole of his shoe.
“She was fine. Hungover as hell, but we all were.”
Billy nodded. It was hard to stop nodding. He felt his jaw wobbling as his head moved.
“So it’s OK,” he said. “It’s all OK.”
“Meanwhile,” said Tom Bone, “the police barge into the room asking whose house it is. Dave holds up his hand and his face is white. They charge him on the spot with possession with intent, and he just sighs. They cuff him. Off they go.”
Billy was still nodding. “OK,” he said. “OK. But you’re OK. They let you go.”
“I came round here and I wanted to fucking kill you, Billy, for the spectacular shit you just pulled. But then I sat here and I waited and I looked around at all your stuff covered in glass, and I realized that’s not why I came—not to hit you, mate. You have fucked up, Billy, and part of me still wants to smash this bottle in your fucking face, but I wanted to see you before—before—to tell you that I—that we –” Tom Bone stopped and took a long swig of whisky—“that mates stand by mates.”
Billy put a hand to his own forehead. He rubbed the skin. “Gina, how old is she?” he said.
Tom Bone began to say, “Sixtee—” but before he could finish the word, he leaned forward and threw up. The muscles of his back churned as he retched. The vomit covered their shoes and seeped over the broken glass. It splashed onto Billy’s legs. The sharp smell of alcohol and bile burned in his nose when he inhaled.
“So the police are coming here, then?” said Billy. “They’re on their way?”
Tom Bone was still bent double. His hair had fallen forward and was covering his face. He nodded and almost at once the banging started at the door.
Four Photographs of My Face
When you live in a small and constant world, and the view from your window every morning is the same patch of moss and rocks and water and sky, and the Internet is slow, expensive, and normally down—when you have lived alone on Bleaker Island for fifty-six sachets of powdered soup and 60,000 words—little changes become big news.
The weather is a soap opera: the wind is in the west! The south! The south-west! It’s snowing. The snow is melting. Snow is falling again.
The caracaras have eaten one of the hens! There are glossy green-black feathers strewn all around the coop, and further off, in the grass, a pink and flimsy skeleton.
Sometimes the little red planes fly overhead—occasionally there are larger military aircraft too—and I stare up at them, gaping, until my mouth gets filled with sleet. Soon George and Alison will be back, marking the beginning of the end of my time on the island, and the anticipation of this feels almost ominous, though I don’t know exactly why.
—
My body is becoming unfamiliar. It is a garden turning wild. Things expand. Things contract. The bulges and wobbles of fat with which I have, in recent years, made an uneasy truce, are gradually deserting me. Underneath: a rougher, leaner person.
These are the assumptions under which I have been labouring: that if I spend long enough on Bleaker Island, if I spend enough time entirely alone, my own true self will be revealed to me; that I will strip away all but the essentials of myself and discover within a kind of authentic core; that finding that core will be good, and solid, and healthy, and strong, and will make me a better writer.
I think about the night before I left London and the words of my friend the actor, the note of doubt in her voice as she said, “Perhaps you know yourself quite well already?” How well did I know myself then? Do I know myself better now? I wanted to find out everything about myself: not just the profound and often boring things to do with childhood memories and self-respect, but also the practical stuff, like what my first book will actually be about. I assumed I would have discovered all of these things by now.
Related to this assumption, albeit tangentially, was the belief that by doing nothing, or as little as possible, in the way of personal grooming, I would arrive at a kind of physical equilibrium, an entirely natural state, which might not be beautiful but which would nonetheless feel somehow “right.” My physical changes would run parallel to my emotional and literary ones, so that, by the time I left the island, I would take off in the little red plane as a coherent and robust identity: a body, brain and book that all made sense in relation to each other.
My concessions to grooming have consisted of soap, shampoo, moisturizer, a nail file, deodorant and sunblock. When I write it out it seems as though it should be plenty—not much of an achievement, in fact, to live without anything else—and yet without tweezers, without conditioner, hand cream, lip balm, a foot file, the stony-faced woman at the salon who shapes and buffs my nails, or the girl with the soft voice who tries to make waxing seem like a luxury experience, I become foreign to myself. My hands are excruciating, dry, raw, cuticles a mess of cracks and tears. I measure out moisturizer as carefully as I do my daily ration of almonds, trying to make it last and last. My eyebrows, which were somewhat over-pruned by a threader in Boston on my final visit, are now so thick and unruly they resemble my grandfather’s. My legs and underarms first turned prickly and are now exuberantly furry. The skin on my feet has become so hard that I sleep in socks to stop my heels grating against the sheets.
I do not feel that I have become a truer version of myself. I could deal with the body hair, I think, but not the eyebrows, which are now so distracting that I have to cover the mirror hanging by the door of the sunroom. I don’t really mind the bushy, knotted, unconditioned tangle of hair on my head, but the pain of my dry lips, splitting heels and torn fingernails surprises me.
There is no natural point to which I can return. There is only a variety of states, each one as pecul
iar as the others.
—
Though I’ve covered the mirror in the sunroom, where I write, I allow myself unrestricted access to the one in my bedroom. It is comforting, when I wake up, to see the movement of my reflection. It looks so strange and unfamiliar, it is almost as though there were someone else there. At the end of the day I often find myself standing immobile in front of the glass, scrutinizing my own image; sometimes I stare for so long I no longer recognize myself at all.
I become obsessed in a way I know is not healthy with a small patch of skin beside my top lip. It is pink, slightly flaky. I use valuable Internet time looking up what it is: cancer, the Internet tells me, at once. You have cancer.
The reasonable part of me is dubious of this diagnosis, but without anyone to talk me out of my neurosis, my paranoid self takes charge. I layer so much sunblock onto this particular patch of skin that, as time passes, I’m not sure whether the mark I can see is the original, or simply a reaction to all the sunblock I’ve put on it.
Offensive, too: the asymmetrical slant of my nose, broken when I was a toddler. It is flabbergasting to me that I have had this odd, tilted, dissatisfying nose almost my entire life and have only just noticed it. The unnatural angle appears so outrageous, so disfiguring, that I’m suddenly unsure how I have functioned in society until now.
My face, under scrutiny, looks as though it has been assembled by a child in nursery school: one eye higher than the other, one brow raised and the other flat, the nose swerving off to the side.
I am not a symmetrical person. I am a wonky person.
I am a wonky person with face cancer.
—
I take four photographs of my face at two-week intervals. Juxtaposed, the pictures chart a woman going to seed. The eyebrows thicken. The cheeks sink. Freckles creep across the nose. Most noticeable, though, are the eyes that get wider and glassier each time. In the final photograph, taken the week before George and Alison are due to return, what strikes me more than the newly emerged cheekbones, more than the pale, watery eyes, more than the flaking lips, is how young I look. It is as though I have fallen backwards into myself. I could be eighteen in the photograph, I think—or at least, I could be eighteen if, as a child, I had been lost on the moor and had spent a decade wandering through the elements, trying to find my way home.
