by Hazel Hayes
Everyone’s still waiting for Theo to speak, but he doesn’t. He just stares down at his feet, pretending to be unaware of the seven sets of eyes on him. Nobody else speaks either. The moment balloons with expectation, expanding unbearably outward, until finally, I can’t take it any more.
‘Well,’ I say to Maya and Darren, ‘today was absolutely perfect, guys. Congratulations again, to both of you.’
Maya smiles back at me with pity in her eyes.
‘To the bride and groom!’ shouts Joe, raising the bottle once again.
‘The bride and groom!’ we all say together, and slowly but surely, the conversation sputters back to life.
This is the moment I know that Theo has fallen out of love with me.
Summer Skin
It’s May, and already the nights are sticky. I can’t sleep.
Our flat is stifling. Even the furniture seems to sweat. I lean against a kitchen cabinet and my shoulder leaves a moist patch on the wood. I sit on the leather sofa and I have to peel my thighs off it as I stand up. I didn’t want a leather sofa – they’re hot in summer and cold in winter and they make awkward, squeaky noises every time you sit on them – but Theo wanted one and I wanted to be amenable.
We’ve moved into a new place on the second floor of a shabby Georgian house in Marylebone. We were so desperate to find somewhere fast that I overlooked the flat’s less-than-perfect features – like the light with no switch, the switch with no light, and the boiler that turns itself on and off at seemingly random intervals. I focused instead on its proximity to the Tube station, the marble fireplace and the bright, airy living room with enormous sash windows. But the things I once found quirky and charming have quickly become irritating. Also, I think we have mice.
Every day now the sun blasts through our sash windows from early morning until around five o’clock, then concentrates its efforts on our bedroom until an inevitable evening mist takes the heavy heat away. Each time I come home, I feel a wave of hot, lavender air hit me in the face – it’s like walking through department-store doors in winter, only I can’t pass through the blast of heat and out the other side. Instead of hanging above things, the way air should, it seems to sit on them, on me.
The lavender was supposed to help me sleep; Maya said a few drops of essential oil on my pillow would cure my insomnia. Instead I’ve spent the past four nights flipping my pillow over, throwing my head from one side to the other, trying to find a spot that hasn’t been contaminated. I send Maya a text message: ‘Take one pillow. Marinate in lavender. Cook in a preheated bedroom at gas mark 6 for two weeks. Come home. Enter bedroom. Faint.’
She responds with an extremely close-up photo of her derpy face, taken from just beneath her chin. This is her version of an apology.
I tell her to piss off.
She sends me another photo of herself and Darren on a sun-drenched beach, both sipping impossibly yellow cocktails.
I call her a cunt and tell her to come home soon.
She says she misses me too.
Theo is in Las Vegas at a conference. Every year the company we work for makes some extravagant, insanely expensive effort to distract its employees from the crappy reality of their cubicled existence, and this year is no different; over 2,000 people from six different offices were flown to Vegas on Monday morning for a week-long booze cruise disguised as ‘team building’. Theo thought I was joking when I said I didn’t want to go.
‘I’d rather eat my own shit,’ I told him. He laughed and said that wasn’t true.
‘Well, either way,’ I went on, ‘I could happily live my entire life without sitting around a continental breakfast buffet listening to laddish “bants” from male colleagues who just rolled in from an all-night strip club.’
We were watching commercials silently flash by on the telly while we waited for Game of Thrones to start.
‘And what if I go to a strip club?’ he asked. Defiance does not come naturally to Theo, so his question came across bolshie and a little pathetic.
‘You can do as you like, honey. Just know that no little girl dreams of one day dancing naked for you and your dickhead mates. Most of them have no other choice.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said, and he skulked off to finish the tea he’d left brewing. I turned around to look over the back of the sofa at him.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Oh, are you still here?’ he asked, feigning surprise. ‘I thought you might have another parade to go piss on.’
I pulled a pouty face and placed my chin on my arms coyly, speaking in a baby voice that I know he detests, ‘Oh I’m sowwy, sweetie. I’m sure the nice ladies are all rich CEOs who let drunken men maul them cuz they love it so vewy much!’
I could see him trying not to smile as he stirred the tea.
‘Fucking feminist,’ he grumbled, and I laughed.
‘That’s not actually an insult, you know.’
‘Yeah, well, it used to be!’ he cried, in faux rebellion. ‘Back when men were men and strippers were just … objects. Then you lot came along, fucking personifying them!’
‘Come and watch Game of Thrones with me,’ I said. ‘There might be tits!’
‘Yeah, okay,’ said Theo, as he rejoined me on the sofa and handed me my tea.
‘I put too much milk in yours on purpose,’ he muttered. I just rolled my eyes.
A few minutes later, while some poor fellow was being beheaded on screen, Theo randomly announced that he went to a strip club once and it was shit.
I appreciated the olive branch, but what Theo doesn’t understand is that my problem with Las Vegas is far less literal than strip clubs. Something about the synthetic nature of the place unnerves me, as though at any moment the veneer might crack and I’ll be face to face with whatever it was hiding. It’s the same problem I have with Disneyland, which I’ve been to several times and hated even more with each visit. I’m simply averse to any place or event where I’m supposed to feel a certain way – that includes Christmas, New Year and Valentine’s Day. As far as I’m concerned, failed actors in gaudy costumes, $10 cups of water and a polystyrene castle do not a magic moment make. I’ll feel magical when a goddamn miracle happens, and not a moment before.
*
My boss gave me the option of ‘working from home’ for the week, knowing full well there was nothing for me to do while the rest of the company took part in a glorified piss-up. So I’ve decided to use the time to work on a new story. I recently graduated from an intermediate to an advanced creative-writing class and the calibre of my new classmates is nothing short of debilitating; their work at once inspires me to be better and convinces me I am trash by comparison.
There’s another Irish girl in the class. Maureen. She’s lived in London for six years and her work has been published in several journals. On weeks when we hand in assignments I always read hers first, usually on the bus ride home. Her last piece was a personal essay about motherhood. It was devastating.
We have a reading coming up, which means our friends and family will drink cheap wine and eat cubes of cheap cheese from paper plates while our teacher, Omar, a stern-looking bald man with a formidable goatee, introduces us in far too formal a fashion. Then I, along with my twelve classmates, will read a story in a very serious writer voice reserved solely for very serious writer occasions. I know my story won’t be the best – Maureen’s will be the best – but I want so desperately not to be the worst.
I asked Omar if he’d like us to focus on a particular theme for the reading but he just told me to write ‘whatever story keeps me awake at night’. I thought that was incredibly profound, but then everything Omar says seems incredibly profound. I think it’s his goatee.
*
Omar finds me infuriating. I know this because he told me so last Tuesday night in front of the entire class.
‘I find you infuriating,’ he said, cutting off a small, pointy woman named Pamela, who was giving me feedback on my latest story. Omar was sat at the head
of a large wooden table, which we were all gathered around. We watched as he shook his head slowly from side to side, then drew his lips into a straight line.
A long silence followed.
Pamela glanced at Omar, the way you might check for oncoming traffic. Then, presuming it was safe to proceed, she continued her critique.
‘So, um, I was quite drawn in by the—’
‘Everything you write begins with such promise,’ blurted Omar, ‘but the endings …’
He dragged the palm of one hand down the length of his face, as though the mere thought of my endings caused him great distress.
The class nodded along solemnly.
‘They’re so … fucking …’ said Omar, presumably struggling for a suitably cutting adjective.
‘Nice,’ Maureen offered, her face a sympathetic grimace.
‘Yes!’ Omar erupted, pointing a pencil at her with gusto.
‘Nice!’ he repeated. Several mm-hmms echoed around the room while Omar stared at me, unblinking. I waited for an uncomfortable amount of time to pass before finally speaking.
‘I struggle with endings,’ I said.
‘You do,’ said Omar. ‘I’m glad you understand.’
Then we moved onto Edgar’s story about a mushroom he found outside Sainsbury’s last week, and I resumed breathing.
This isn’t the first time my endings have been called into question, but they’ve never been described as ‘nice’ before. I hate that word. I hate the idea that anyone would ever describe me, or my work, as ‘nice’. I’d rather be loved and loathed in equal measure than for everyone to just tolerate me.
What did you think of her? Yeah, she’s nice.
Only the most bland, insecure writer, who never dares to be anything but safe and pleasant and utterly fucking vacuous, would ever want to be described that way.
Fuck that.
And fuck Maureen. That talented cow.
I know full well what my problem with endings is; I hate closing doors on my characters. I imagine each one like a train, and their story is a track, which branches off into infinite possible outcomes with each decision they face. Every time a character chooses a track, all other possibilities are erased by default. And I can’t bear it.
I sketch out diagrams of these timelines, turning my pencil over every now and then to use the eraser, blowing away the tiny pink fragments as I go. My pages are covered in the faint indentations of tracks that never were. And each time I imagine a little piece of the character being left behind, a faded copy of themselves travelling along one of the ghost-tracks. This is why my endings are lacking; I can never fully commit to one.
I find myself drawn to science fiction – in particular time travel and alternate universes – because this way I can explore numerous eventualities within the same narrative. Maybe that’s cheating, I don’t know.
The story I’m working on for the upcoming reading involves a woman who can visit her past and future selves. That’s not what my story is about, of course – it’s about regret – but this is why I love sci-fi; it’s never about the aliens or the robots or the wormhole to another dimension, it’s about human nature, and how we react to such phenomena. I can give a character the ability to time travel then see what she does with it. Like giving a lab rat a laser gun, I suppose.
I’ve been working on this new story for a while, after work and on weekends, and I thought this week off would be enough to finish it. But instead of helping, the alone time seems to have hindered progress. I am desperate to write. I know the words are in there – I can feel them piling up inside my head like water behind a dam – but right now I’ve got creative constipation. Eventually the dam will break and the words will gush forth, like so much proverbial shit, but until then I can only sit and wait with a pencil at the ready.
Theo has been gone for five days now. Every day I open all of the windows and doors to let a draught through, then I sit in the middle of the sofa and build a nest out of books, notepads and loose pages. There I stay, sometimes scribbling notes, sometimes staring intently at nothing for hours on end. Occasionally the curtain billows inward, impregnated by a thick, warm breeze. Scraps of paper, weighed down by random objects – a spoon, a remote control, some sun lotion – flutter wildly for a moment, as though excited by the prospect of escape. Then, wearied by the attempt, they settle once again.
I have discovered that one o’clock is the optimal time to observe dust motes. I imagine that they’re alive and my living room is their universe; an entire race of tiny life forms going about their business – things to do, places to be – never stopping, never waiting, never lying in a lavender-soaked room unable to sleep. Sometimes I choose one and follow its trajectory around the breezy room. I had one for over two minutes once, then a bird flew by my window and I lost it. I was angry – with the bird for distracting me and with the dust particle for escaping me.
I go for long walks to inspire myself. But the city feels somehow more oppressive than the apartment; people everywhere, all cleavage and bare legs, breathing and walking and sweating together. The weather forecast says it will get hotter.
I bought a new pillow today and threw the old one out. This evening I lit jasmine- and eucalyptus-scented candles – anything is better than lavender – then I rolled up my duvet and shoved it on top of the wardrobe, opting to sleep naked under a cotton sheet instead.
Lying in bed, I wonder if I miss Theo. We’ve barely spoken this week save for a few perfunctory texts – on the first day he let me know he’d landed safely and sent me a photo of the view from his Las Vegas hotel room: a fake Eiffel Tower amid buildings and branding. I replied to say the weather looked nice. Since then it’s been brief reports on one another’s activities; he seems to be having fun and I’ve lied several times about how much writing I’m doing.
I check the clock – midnight – then count backwards eight hours on my fingers. Four o’clock in the afternoon. I call Theo but there’s no answer so I decide to read for a while; I’ve been rereading Stories of Your Life as inspiration and I drift off after a couple of pages.
Sleep comes in short bursts; one or two hours at the most. At some point I wake and I can’t move my arms or legs; they’re bound in awkward directions by what feels like ropes. I was dreaming of drowning again and I can’t shake the sensation of sinking slowly through salty water. The more I struggle the tighter the ropes squeeze around me, like a Chinese finger-puzzle. My panic reduces me to paralysis. I give up and allow myself to sink. But as soon as I stop fighting, one of my hands comes free, so I reach to free my other arm and find that I’m tangled up in my sheet. I sit up, fully awake now, and unwrap the sheet from around my ankles, then I toss it at a chair in the corner, where it lands soundlessly and seems to hover in the dark, like a cloud in the night sky.
The back of my neck is wet and there are trickles of sweat under my breasts. I move towards the open window, desperate for even a gust of cool air, and I see another girl in the window opposite. She’s smoking a cigarette. I watch its orange tip glow brighter every time she takes a drag, and then I notice a low, monotonous chugging coming from outside.
Craning my neck to the left, I spot a bus waiting on the corner with its engine idling. Just then, a gaggle of chirping women emerge from a nightclub. They stagger to the bus, shrieking laughter, and as each woman steps inside, the volume gradually lowers until they are muted completely. I watch them move soundlessly down the aisle and clamber into the seats on either side. Silence returns to the street, save for that deep hum from the bus. When it pulls off, I look for the girl in the window, but she’s gone. I lie back down and wait for sleep.
I wake around midday to the muffled din of daily life outside; a car horn, a child wailing, the beep, beep, beep of a reversing truck. Noise rises like heat from the street below and seeps into my room. I feel separate from it. Apart.
I have a missed call from Theo so I call him back, but there’s no answer. It’s 4 a.m. there now. He’s lived a whole day
.
After twenty minutes of staring at a small patch of sky, I pull on a sloppy t-shirt, pad down the corridor to the living room and open the windows and doors as usual. Then I stand in the kitchen, drumming my nails against the countertop while I stare into a cupboard, trying to decide between cornflakes and Coco Pops.
I have no appetite lately, for food or for sex. Theo and I are still having sex; we did it on Sunday night before he left and I enjoyed it in the moment – just like I enjoy food when I do eat – but lately, eating and fucking both feel more like necessities than luxuries. This would usually worry me, since my appetite and anxiety are intrinsically linked, but I put it down to the heat and go back to choosing cereal.
A few minutes later, I’m draining the dregs of chocolate milk from a bowl when a bumblebee drifts through the front door. I watch the bee navigate the room, dipping and diving, inspecting objects, then quickly losing interest in them. He reaches the window and bumps clumsily against the wooden frame over and over. I grab a notebook from a stack on the sofa and try to usher him outside with it, but as I lean across the ledge, my knee knocks against something. I turn just in time to see a potted plant teetering towards the edge and I dive to catch it, but I’m too late; the clay pot plummets downwards, crashing onto the bonnet of a parked car below. The sound blasts through the empty street and a man walking his dog stops to glance in my direction, before carrying on, uninterested.
The bee glides casually past my face and out into the day.
I hear a woman’s voice say, ‘Oops,’ and I look up to see the girl in the window again. She’s sitting with her back against the frame and one leg on the ledge, and she’s wearing what looks like a man’s pyjama shirt. Her hair, which I can now tell is blonde, is piled in a loose bun on top of her head. She has a book in her hands but she’s not looking at it, she’s looking straight at me, and I am suddenly aware that I have no underwear on.
