*
And so, for the rest of her life, Caroline made sure she was careful whenever she rode her bike, whenever she crossed a road, whenever she left the house. She made sure that she wasn’t preoccupied, that she didn’t let hatred of people get in the way of safe progress through the world. Caroline enjoyed another seventeen years of swimming before she died. A brain tumour. Something vital snapped in her head and she was gone before there was time to sink to the bottom of the pool. Happily, the last five years of Caroline’s life had been her best. She enjoyed retirement, swimming twice a day, and avoiding most people most of the time.
The church was almost empty on the day of her funeral, but not quite as empty as Caroline would have liked. On the fifth pew back, on the left-hand side, sat the talking man from the desk next to Caroline’s. ‘What’s your favourite hymn?’ he asked, turning to the vicar.
The vicar spoke quickly and rattled through the essentials in a pleasingly brusque manner, and Caroline was buried, unmourned, with the warm sun beating down on her coffin, not a drop of rain in the sky, not a drop of water on the ground that day. But it didn’t matter. Caroline was gone. Caroline had swum.
HOW YOU FIND YOURSELF
SARA SHERWOOD
1. You decide, at thirteen, you like ‘bad boys done good’ because you overhear the phrase in a conversation between your mother and your Auntie Tina. That, and you have a crush on Jamie Mitchell off EastEnders. At your high school in Batley, the closest to this you can get is Stephen Dooley.
a. Stephen Dooley has a shaved head and a fake diamond stud in his right ear. He holds your hand at Bradford ice-skating rink one Saturday in November.
b. The same day, Stephen Dooley kisses you, your first kiss, with sloppy lips and a tongue which still tastes of bacon-flavoured crisps, at Bradford Interchange bus station.
c. As your relationship develops, one of your regular arguments becomes whether EastEnders or Coronation Street is the better soap.
d. You will, throughout university, work and beyond, have this argument with many other people. You will always gun for EastEnders.
2. Due to your notorious snogging sessions with Stephen Dooley in the Year 9 common area, you become irresistible to other boys in your year group. Most notably:
a. Mohammed Nassar in Year 10 (October to March).
i. The highlight of your relationship is when he fingers you on the sofa to the sounds of canned laughter in Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway when your mum is out at Auntie Tina’s.
b. Kieran Luther in Year 10 (March to July).
i. You go out with Kieran for four months until he kisses Aleena Ahmad at the end-of-term disco. From here, you will always associate Usher’s ‘Burn’ with the gut-punch of heartache.
c. Harry McDonald in Year 11 (September to June).
i. Harry McDonald is in Sixth Form.
ii. You get drunk for the first time with Harry McDonald.
iii. You lose your virginity to Harry McDonald at his brother’s flat in Huddersfield.
iv. You tell all your friends how romantic it was, but all you remember is a dusty spider web which spanned from the ceiling to the naked light bulb.
3. At sixteen, you tell your friends that you have outgrown rough-talking boys; you now like boys who are into the Ramones, books by Jack Kerouac and vinyl records. This is mainly because you stumble across a repeat of The OC over the summer holiday and decide that you prefer Seth Cohen over Ryan Atwood.
a. Your school’s equivalent to Seth Cohen is Sohail Sheikh. He’s the older brother of your friend Khadijah Sheikh.
b. Sohail is at college in Leeds, but you see him at parties.
c. Sohail writes poems – funny poems – about TV and craving cigarettes during Ramadan.
d. You spend your two years of Sixth Form devoted to Sohail. You change your Myspace profile picture to something poutier and more filtered in black-and-white to get his attention.
e. It never works.
4. As part of your devotion to Sohail, you develop an all-encompassing crush on the host of Big Brother’s Big Mouth, Russell Brand.
a. You create a LiveJournal devoted to Russell Brand. You find pictures on the internet and use Paint to draw hearts around his backcombed hair.
b. You stumble across FanFiction.net. You write long messages to your fellow writers on the strengths and weaknesses of their stories which revolve around Russell’s madcap adventures through London with a female sidekick (with whom, of course, he eventually falls in love).
c. You develop friendships with these online girls. They’re much more interesting than your friends at school: they live in happy-sounding places like Guildford and Hereford.
d. Over the course of Year 12, you write a 90,000-word romantic comedy fanfiction in which Russell Brand is forced to pretend you are his girlfriend as part of an undercover operation.
i. You win Best Overall Fic at the online awards on LiveJournal.
ii. Your Head of Sixth Form says you cannot put this on your UCAS form.
5. When you finally kiss Sohail, at a Year 13’s birthday party at Ackroyd Street Working Mens’ Club in Morley, his tongue feels small in your mouth. You remember walking away from him, to the smirks of your friends, the soles of your shoes coming unstuck from the beer-stained floor.
a. Your crush melts and flutters into the air like confetti. You try to catch it. You force yourself in his bed, in your bed, in someone’s parents’ bed while a cruel house party rages on beyond the bedroom door, to like him – to want him – again.
b. You become his girlfriend.
c. You realise Sohail is deeply boring; you develop a furious dislike of the Beat poets and listen to Beyoncé loudly, obnoxiously and with joy.
d. Your break-up is triggered by an argument about the ethics of reading novels by William S. Burroughs.
i. He calls you inauthentic.
ii. You call him a knobhead.
e. You find comfort in assuming the identity of a grieving ex-girlfriend (you’ve been told you look pretty when you cry) but really you feel like a failure, like you’ve been scrubbed clean and found to be less than.
f. When Sohail leaves for university, you’re relieved, but you are unmoored without your hobby of the crush.
6. At university – York, where you study English Literature – you meet Jasmine. She has long blonde hair and hardy thighs; she’s used to riding horses, sloshing through mud in Hunter wellies and eating her breakfast – porridge, with blueberries – in a flagstoned Shropshire kitchen. You’re surrounded by girls like these on your course, in your halls, on the student newspaper, but Jasmine … Jasmine is magical.
a. You bond by watching Gossip Girl on ITV2.
i. Jasmine has blonde hair which makes her the Serena van der Woodsen to your Blair Waldorf.
ii. You both agree that Chuck Bass, rather than Dan Humphrey, is the romantic lead of the series. This is mainly because of Chuck Bass’s hair which, unlike that of many of the boys in your seminars, is parted at the side and swept romantically across his forehead.
iii. The subject of your daydreams, which was previously a man in skinny jeans with riotous hair, morphs into a suave New York hotelier with a transatlantic accent and a bottomless bank account.
7. In your second year at York you meet Ben. You both review albums and books for the university newspaper. He’s from Sheffield, and his accent – harsh and deep – sends electric sparks down your spine and into your knickers. Ben likes Peep Show, coffee and Modest Mouse.
a. You quickly school yourself on all three.
b. When he catches you scrolling through Oh No They Didn’t, your favourite celebrity gossip website, in the library, he uses this as an example of your shallowness.
i. This becomes a running joke throughout your relationship.
8. You allow Ben to fuck you – and your heart – and mock your love of celebrity stories for two years.
a. In the run-up to your final exams, you walk out of a seven-hour stret
ch in the library to get a coffee and KitKat Chunky with Jasmine and see Ben kissing Charlotte, his housemate, outside a cafe on campus.
b. When he changes his Facebook status to ‘In a relationship’ two days after your final exam, you delete him from your Facebook and cry for three days.
c. On the night you get your final results (a First despite the fact you spent your exam worrying more about Ben than Patrick Hamilton), you text him a topless selfie from the pub toilets. He doesn’t respond.
9. You move back home and are unemployed. Batley has always been depressing, but now it’s even more so. You hate it. You wish you didn’t have the lazy vowels of the West Riding cursing your voice. You wish you were Jasmine, who is staying with her godparents in Barnet and has just scored her third unpaid internship at a fashion website.
a. You’re not jealous of Jasmine.
b. You direct your anger at your mother, who has kept you stuck in a two-bedroom terraced house on the outskirts of three useless cities.
c. You wish you had:
i. Rich godparents.
ii. A successful aunt.
iii. A cousin who works at The Telegraph.
10. In February, after months of endless applications, London beckons you with a graduate scheme at a multinational marketing firm which offers career progression and a pension, and you oblige.
a. You find a flat in Clapham on SpareRoom.
i. You choose Clapham because Jasmine’s brother lives there and he’s the only person you know who lives in London.
b. You gradually get rid of your New Look mini-skirts and stained Primark knickers and, with your new money, buy minimal dresses and structured blazers from Whistles, Hobbs and Jaeger.
c. You tie your hair in a severe bun. At first it hurts; you feel like your hair is being twisted away from your scalp.
d. You attend a training session for women in leadership where you learn not to talk about what you watched on the TV last night or apologise for your mistakes.
e. You start saying things like ‘Why don’t you just find a better job?’ when your mum complains about her ongoing pay freeze.
i. You roll your eyes when she tries to explain that there aren’t any better jobs around there for her, and besides, she likes her friends at the school, likes the summer holidays, the pension. Why would she sacrifice that for a couple of pounds more at the end of the month?
11. You start to construct a narrative about yourself, about your past.
a. You were born into an ambitionless household.
b. You are the product of social mobility.
c. You try to scrub away all the automatic references your brain makes to EastEnders and Gossip Girl and Big Brother.
d. The new identity fits over you, like armour.
e. You do battle in it every day.
12. You’re twenty-five. You’re at a networking event in a bar in Canary Wharf and you meet Andrew. He’s tall. He’s handsome. He’s a perfect fit for you, the new and shiny you. Everyone says so.
a. At first you tell Jasmine that you think Andrew speaks like he’s got a cock in his mouth. Eventually you forget you ever said it.
b. You meet his friends, his parents, his granny – a woman so unlike your own chain-smoking Nana – in Winchester.
c. He comes to Batley to meet your mum.
i. He tells you that he’s never been in a house where you step straight off the pavement and into the living room.
13. When you’re six months into your relationship, you and Andrew go on a bank holiday trip to Whitstable.
a. You have oysters for the first time on the seafront.
b. Across the table, you run your fingers along his cheek and let his day-old stubble scratch under your fingernails. You can’t stop touching him. He can’t stop touching you.
c. Back at the hotel, you fill the deep, wide bath with Neal’s Yard bubble bath.
i. You both get it. He smiles across the bath at you, his two front teeth resting on his sea-salt lips.
ii. You tell him that when you were small you would fill the bath up to the top, clamp your legs together and wiggle about, pretending that you were a mermaid.
iii. You tell him how lonely you were as a child.
iv. With no brothers or sisters, you would read or watch the telly so your imagination could explode with stories to keep you company.
1. You were a lost princess trapped in a boarding school.
2. You were an orphan sent from India to live in Yorkshire.
3. You were a mermaid who longed to live on the land.
4. You were the secret daughter of spies.
5. You were a lion running away from the death of her father.
v. ‘I’ve never told anyone that,’ you say.
vi. ‘I love you,’ he says.
14. You and Andrew have been together for two years. You suspect something is wrong.
a. You only have sex once a month.
i. Once every three months.
b. He rolls away from you in bed.
c. He spends more time at the gym.
i. You suggest you go together – you normally go to Spin on a Saturday morning with Jasmine, but you’re desperate enough to forgo this to save Andrew.
ii. He bats the suggestion away with a scrunched-up mouth like a punch to the chest.
d. You try to resist but you end up going through his phone. You find what you’re looking for: flirty messages from a woman – Polly – who he works with.
i. Of course it would be a fucking Polly.
ii. You find her LinkedIn and feel smug when you find what you’re looking for: a nursery-to-Sixth Form private education in the south of England and a First Class BA (Hons) in Classical Civilisation from Christ Church, Oxford.
iii. Of course, Andrew would leave you for a Polly. Someone who wouldn’t need to be taught how to pronounce Diptyque and whose family also has a bolthole in Norfolk.
1. ‘What the fuck is a bolthole, anyway?’ you rage at Jasmine.
e. Days later, when you confront him, Andrew tells you it’s nothing, but he wishes that he didn’t feel so stifled by your relationship.
i. And, by extension, you.
ii. He suggests some time out.
iii. You suggest getting engaged.
15. You find a flat. You pack up your life (half a life, because who are you without him?) into boxes. You cry into the pillow on your first night in your new flat in Stoke Newington. Quietly, so your new flatmates – Sophia and Beth – don’t hear.
a. When you wake up on Saturday morning, you reach for him but there’s nobody there.
b. The bed smells of nothing.
c. Food tastes of nothing.
d. You are nothing.
i. Just another girl whose voice melted away into a regionless blur, whose only true interests are Kylie Jenner’s Instagram Stories and the new series of Gilmore Girls on Netflix.
ii. You wish other people didn’t have so much when you feel like you have so little.
iii. Basic bitch.
iv. Working class.
v. Shallow cunt.
vi. Boy-obsessed.
vii. Stupid twat.
viii. Ex-girlfriend.
16. Time passes slowly.
a. You learn what loneliness is.
b. You stand in front of a Jackson Pollock painting and feel … nothing. It’s just red and black.
c. You sleep in the middle of the bed.
d. You give yourself to Netflix at the weekend.
e. You start watching EastEnders again because there’s nothing else to do in the evening.
f. You download Tinder.
g. You stare at the ceiling while a Durham-educated civil engineer, with a body like a mountain, fucks you.
i. He invites you to watch him play rugby and to meet his friends.
ii. You ghost him.
h. You learn that Sundays are the worst.
i. And bank holidays.
ii. And weddings.
iii. And
hen parties where everyone seems to think that squealing ‘He put a ring on it!’ is an acceptable form of congratulations in 2016.
17. On 16 June 2016, you see your phone ringing in front of you on your desk. ‘Mum’ flashes on the screen. She hangs up. She rings again, and again, and again. You ignore it.
a. There’s breaking news on the BBC. The alert interrupts your stream of WhatsApps. The name of your home town, Batley, makes you pay attention.
b. Your MP, the MP at home – proper home – has been stabbed in the town centre. She is being airlifted to hospital.
c. You call your mum back. She’s crying. You can hear shouts in the background – you imagine Janice and Michelle, your mum’s office mates, are having panicked conversations with their husbands and children.
d. ‘Have you seen what they’ve done to her?’ your mum manages to choke out.
18. She was murdered outside the library where you used to borrow books and videotapes.
19. That weekend, after watching a repeat of Mamma Mia! with Jasmine, you book two weeks off work and a return flight to Greece. You’ve had a bottle of wine and three double gin and tonics, but you’ve never been on holiday on your own. You’re feeling reckless, and you never feel reckless.
a. You wonder if you’ll get bored of yourself.
b. You wonder who you’ll talk to.
c. On the plane, you wonder if this is self-care or self-destruction.
d. Reading Heat magazine makes you forget your inevitable death for twenty minutes.
20. You’re desperately lonely in Athens. You thought you were lonely before, but it turned out that was just the origin story of your loneliness.
a. You write a poem about it, go to bed and fall asleep scrolling through Twitter.
b. The poem is so horrifyingly bad that when you read it back in the morning, you laugh at your self-pity.
i. Weirdly, this seems to help snap you out of it and you visit the Acropolis.
21. You stumble across a free night-time city tour on TripAdvisor while eating your tea in a cafe. On the walk, you make friends with an American woman around your age: Rita from Ohio. She’s just finished her MFA in Creative Writing at Evergreen State College and is travelling around Europe for the summer, writing as she goes. She tells you that after Athens she is planning to travel up to Berlin, stopping at Thessaloniki, Sofia, Belgrade and Budapest on the way.
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