by Kate Hamer
My insides feel liquid as I turn to the correct page, my sweaty, dirty fingers making marks as I go. There it is. I read, then close my eyes and stay like that for a long, long time.
Another normal day ahead. Will anything ever happen?
10
Grace
One, two, buckle my shoe.
There’s this rhyme I remember from when I was a kid and I use it as another way to make myself do the things I have to do when I’m tired. Five, six, pick up the bits. Seven, eight, no time to wait.
Or, at other times, seven, eight, bit of a state. Nine, ten – fuck that then.
Sometimes I look at my skinny-bitch body in the mirror. There are muscles popping out like little apples all over from the unnatural heaving and hefting. It doesn’t matter, though. I don’t even know why I look.
Three, four, get in that door. The door in question? The one to the concrete community centre. Through the windows that are criss-crossed inside the glass with wire are my compadres, apparently. They are wavy through the glass, like people who are time-warping. In my hand I have the referral letter from Miss Kinsella introducing me to the Young Carers’ Support Group. I have never remotely thought of myself belonging to a group called something like this.
I also have absolutely no idea if I have to do this, if it’s some kind of condition of being able to carry on as we are, and I didn’t feel like I could ask. If I refused, it might be a signal to the Miss Kinsellas of this borough that I’m not coping, hiding myself away; ‘not engaging’ is a term I could imagine her using. It could be that the referral to come here is one of those complicated instructions with a meaning I can’t quite stitch together and I simply have to obey so life can continue as normal. It seemed safer just to come. Have a cup of tea with them. Not say too much. Slope off home afterwards and forget about the whole thing.
I run my fingers through my hair, tidying it back. It’s got much longer and it feels silken and luxurious between my fingers. It’s felt like a dare to grow it like this so it tickles my ears.
I crack open the door a little to peek in, but in the room every single head arranged in a circle turns towards the noise and I have no choice but to plunge inside. Every chair is full except one. I guess that’s mine.
A woman who looks only fractionally older than everyone else stands.
‘You must be Grace. I’m Cherry. Help yourself to tea or coffee from that table over there and come and join us.’
She smiles and sits back down. All these young faces in charge. It confuses me. When they’re old they are both easier and harder to resist. Cherry has smooth black hair that fits neatly over her skull and falls in a wave over one shoulder. The end that rests on her collarbone is curved upwards like a boat. It glistens and I’m momentarily transfixed by it. The sheer maintenance of keeping your hair in that exact state astounds me.
I am too busy marvelling at her hair to realise the moment has gone on a beat too long. I turn away to the table loaded with thick cheap white cups and saucers and an urn, and I help myself from the jug of bright-coloured orange squash there. I take the empty seat and sit, uncrossing and crossing my legs, sipping repeatedly on the squash and feeling totally exposed as the one hundred per cent useless bitch I am. A girl two down, wearing a cardigan a dirty red colour, lifts the eyelid closest to me and pierces me with a gaze that says she’s seen that I’m a useless bitch too. The room is sweltering. She must be just about dying inside that thick wool cardigan that goes halfway down her hands.
Cherry says, ‘Let’s pause now and welcome Grace properly.’
They seem used to this because there is a round of applause and I flush bright pink and knot my legs together even more, because, even though I can fully recognise the essential lameness of it, I’ve never actually had a round of applause before.
‘We’re not normally so formal,’ she explains with a tiny laugh in each word. ‘But there’s a lot to get through today.’
While Cherry drones on about some trip or other in a minibus, I use the time to look at everyone else over my glass: the plump boy who seems about twelve but could be older sits with his hands cupping each other in his lap, his round glasses catching the light every time he tilts his listening head; the girl with patches of rash up her bare arms that look like salt has been stuck on there; the older boy wearing an Arsenal T-shirt and staring at his own outstretched jiggling foot.
After I’ve carefully looked at each one, I have to go searching for a name for what I am feeling because it is surprising and so new I can’t identify it. But when I do, I see that for once I am sitting in a room with a group of people that can roughly be called my peers and I am not feeling in the slightest bit jealous or superior – which would be the norm for me, swinging between the two – because it’s clear as day that all of us, bar Cherry of course, have come crawling out of broken little shells to be in this room. We all have this in common and it’s so utterly obvious that for a bright heated moment I hate them all with a burning intensity because I thought I hid it so damn well and I can see now that I’ve been fooling myself all along about this.
Then I have to chase up what’s happening because I haven’t been listening.
Cherry blows through her lips, past her shiny pink lip gloss. ‘Would you like to say anything, Grace? Perhaps you could share a bit about yourself before we finish?’ She’s trying her absolute hardest, I can see she is, but I’m drowning. The room feels wet. I seem to have trouble understanding everything. It’s what I’ve learned here about myself. I didn’t want to be shown that. It’s floored me. There’s the LSD that’s still swirling round my brain too, I realise. The river – I could almost feel its coolness washing over me as I watched – is here again in this room. I shake my head. The tinkling of it is in my ears.
Cherry carries on. ‘Is there anything in particular that worries you that perhaps we could help you with? There may be someone here in this room who also has that specific concern and can share with you their experience of it. I’m aware that doesn’t make problems go away but sometimes it can be good to know about the different angles of it.’ You have to hand it to her. She is a trier.
I clear my throat. ‘Ummm.’
‘You don’t have to.’ She smiles. ‘It’s not compulsory.’
‘Umm.’
‘Honestly—’
‘I often think about the homeless,’ I butt in.
Cherry’s smile freezes. I don’t stop, though. Everything in the room has become heavy with meaning. Being with all these people has opened a little door in me that I can’t seem to close. Flies swarm out of it.
‘Have you seen the way they have to sleep in car parks, and all the money that’s right here in this city? Have you even seen it? Sometimes I think they must be, like, invisible, and that maybe it’s only me that can see them because people go past without a glance. Sometimes they look like they’re about to tread on their hands, like these people don’t even have three dimensions or are even really human, like they’re rats or something.’
I’m fully aware that this is not the kind of concerns Cherry meant. Still, I can’t seem to stop myself. There’s a restless wind outside that bangs the branches of a buddleia tree against the misted glass of the window, over and over. I stretch my hands.
‘And then there’s the bees. Did you know that Einstein said that every mouthful of food we eat is only there because of the bees and currently, right as we speak, there is something happening to them? They’re only just finding out – and they don’t know why – that bees are abandoning their hives, and if the bees go, so do we. The more I think about it the more I worry. I mean, how will the human race survive without them?’
All the time, I’m thinking, Will nobody – please – stop me? Because I know that spewing out all this stuff is the only way to stop me naming the one actual and real fear that I have, that I’m guessing everyone in the room has so it’s gathered together and made strong, like the holy spirit gathering above our heads: it’s what can I
do to keep my mum alive and how will it be if she dies.
Red-cardigan girl snorts and mutters something that sounds like ‘Nutter’ under her breath, and it’s this that finally brings me to a stuttering stop.
‘Well,’ says Cherry. ‘Phew.’
I stare miserably down. She’s wearing yellow suede pumps with yarn bows that are curled at the ends like old-fashioned moustaches.
‘That’s a lot to get off your chest,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’
Then I think, Maybe I will come back here again one day. Maybe it’s a good thing that something was set loose in me because I usually am so tight-screwed shut it hurts. Maybe it’s among the girl twirling her black plait round and round her finger and the boy with the glasses who keeps pressing his damp-looking hands together that I finally get to let go just a little.
*
A pale fingernail of moon shows in the blue day sky as I walk home. Gusts of wind rattle rose petals to the ground. It was that fucking day at the wishing bowl, I think. It’s gone through and through me. It made me see whole layers of things I barely knew about. Phoebe and her wishes, her predictions and the possibilities they’re loaded with. Flinging them around like sweet papers, like it’s that easy. It made me think that anything was available to me, that I actually had choices and could make them happen if I only willed it enough.
The wind dies down. Coldness begins to fall like a blanket. It pecks at the dried sweat on my face. It’s happened so quickly, like the river that threads through the middle of the town has sucked all the hot air into its brown snake belly.
When I get home I take the stairs. I dawdle, pausing near our flat to catch my breath and look through the slit of window over the rooftops. A mist has begun to creep in so they look like ghost houses. The feeling of possibility is still all over me, sticky and insistent. It’s not good for me; it’ll seep into my bones and make them soft. I want to shower it off. Get back to the bare hardness of things. Today was the opposite. It showed me exactly who I am and where my place is. And yet – and yet my real desire is to stay with the first one, the feeling of the wishing-bowl day. I want it so much my sincere wish now is that it’d never happened. I realise I’ll never go back to that community centre and those people. Despite everything, I’m voting with the wishing bowl and its shitty magic.
I arrive at the flat. Three, four – now get in that fucking door. I realise the moment I put my hand on the door handle that every single time I touch the cool metal I have a jolt of anxiety that courses through me like an electric shock. I hadn’t acknowledged it before, how I linger, shuffling my feet about for a moment before I plunge inside. It’s the fear of what I might find inside.
*
Later it gets worse. I’m restless in my legs. All over. Even my ears twitch.
I put Mum to bed and plant a kiss on her forehead as I always do, and she says, ‘Night, night, Grace,’ turns over and falls to sleep almost immediately as she nearly always does.
I prowl the night spaces of the flat. The moon is slim but it still exudes light so the areas near windows are lit weakly. I crack my knuckles. I pace, feeling the warm wood of the hallway under my feet turn to thin carpet and then cold concrete out on the balcony. I light my cigarette and wonder if anyone can see me from down below, if anyone notices the glowing point going up and down to my mouth from so far away.
It’s Saturday night and the only time I’ve been out was for the carers’ group. I put the radio on. They’re playing music I don’t recognise with a jumping beat. I do my own little dance in the kitchen even though the light’s off. I screw my feet into the cold lino doing the twist. When the track stops I stop too and stand in the dark, panting. I do a stupid walk halfway down the hallway, duck-like, then ski the rest.
I hesitate by the front door, then turn and ski back down the hall, take a turn around the living room, dance back to the front door and stand panting behind it, looking up at the orifice of the spyhole, then skirt away again. I force myself to reverse into the stuffy clutches of the flat. I feel resistance, like I’m pushing myself back into a bouncy castle; the impulse for the opposite forward motion is so strong.
I spin round three times. Stop, dizzy. Unsteadily take a few steps, then spin round three more times. Is this a magic number? It must be, because I lunge, quick and sure so there’s no time for mind-changing. Take the spare key we keep on the shelf by the door. Slide it into the back pocket of my jeans. Feel my hand reaching up to grasp the cool metal lozenge of the handle, then yank. Step through.
The door clicks behind me and I’m outside. My heart pulses painfully underneath my collarbones. I can feel it in my neck, going off like an alarm clock.
I start walking away and the automatic light pops on to my left. I look down. I have no shoes, just baggy socks with rounded half-empty toe boxes. They’re ones Dad left behind years ago that I wear for slippers. I stand undecided and the light extinguishes itself. I hesitate, breathing hard, then walk towards the slit of window where the moonlight permeates. I think: This feels dangerous. This feels so fucking dangerous. Mum is sleeping upstairs and with each step I’m feeling more and more like a balloon floating away and the threads between us are snapping. Another security light pops on, spreading its beams, and I halt, bathed in its rays.
This block of flats is a modern anthill, I decide, mounded, rising above the city. All of us tucked in our little compartments. All the breathing that goes on in here, all of us, in and out. The light goes out and I grin stupidly into the darkness. I explore each floor, traversing the hallways, lights clicking on and off, the only things alert to my presence. Once I’m down to the ground floor, Mum seems like a little bug, tucked away so far above my head, her unsteady breathing the very highest and lightest breath of all. I begin climbing again. Floor two. Third floor. I stop and tap on the door. I’d known it all along. From the moment I skied down the hallway, no, before that, as I did my solitary twist in the dark kitchen, I knew this is where the night would end.
There is a long silence and I nearly turn to go but then I detect a scuffling from inside, someone against the other side of the door using the eyehole to check who’s outside. The alarm hammer in my neck starts up again. I swear I feel the roots of hair at the nape of my neck stand to attention.
The door chain rattles as the door opens a crack. I see Daniel’s smile flash in the dark recess of his hallway as he recognises me. He unhooks the chain and the door opens wide. It’s ages since we’ve seen each other properly and I don’t really know how things stand.
‘Grace!’ He’s pleased to see me. ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’
‘Oh, is it a bad time?’
‘No, no—’
‘I mean, is it convenient for you?’ I interrupt, and my laugh sounds like a silly bitch’s high-pitched whinny, even to my own ears.
‘Sure. Sure. Come in,’ he says, and leaves the door wide and swinging, and I plunge after him, almost dreading but also longing for the click behind me because that would mean two doors between Mum and me, and somehow with that it’s so much easier to muffle the thoughts of her. What the fuck are you doing, Grace? I think. What the fuck? But all the same the door clicks and I’m on the inside.
His flat is always spare. A real boy pad. The objects ordered neatly on the sideboard that’s in the same position in the living room as ours: a polished cow horn; a carved wooden box; a deck of playing cards neatly aligned with the wall. So different to our raucous jumble of false poppies, lace doilies, display cups and saucers patterned with more poppies and with improbably gold rims, all of it coated in a layer of dust. I know that his mum no longer lives here, that she met someone down on the south-east coast and moved in with him, although it is still her name on the rent book. She does this because she wants to do right by Daniel; she loves him, and would rightly lie through her teeth to ensure he keeps a roof over his head.
I resist the urge to crack my knuckles. ‘Sit down,’ he says, and I do, shucking off my horrible thick socks when he’
s not looking and balling them up into my pocket. Without them, my feet look long and thin. I tuck them under my thighs as I sit on the sofa so he can’t see.
‘Hey,’ he says, after he’s opened the wooden box and extracted a small plastic bag stuffed full and a packet of the extra-sized Rizla that all get placed on the sideboard next to the cow horn. ‘Hey, it’s good to see you. How are you? Do you fancy a smoke?’
He puts his hand to his chest and I try not to acknowledge how I see – no, drink in – how it makes a muscular brown starfish against the white of his T-shirt. I do not need to notice that. It will do me no good.
‘Yeah, why not?’ I smile up at him.
‘You OK?’
‘I could do with a bit of company, truth be told.’
He stands, scratching the dark curls on his head, looking at the grass and the Rizlas. ‘Hey, how about starting off with a little vodka? Do you fancy one?’
I nod and he brings the bottle, icy and dripping from the freezer, and pours me a slug in a proper shot glass. The liquid is glutinous from the cold. As I sip I feel binds, wrapped around my core, breaking section by section in the wake of its passage. I’m surprised he can’t hear them crack.
I look up, my smile all loopy.
He sets down the neatly rolled joint so it’s precisely aligned to the deck of cards.
‘Have you had anything to eat tonight?’
I shake my head. I had some beans when I came back from the meeting. I ate them cold, spooning them from the tin as I leaned against the kitchen counter. I could’ve made something better but often the bother seems too much.