‘Just had a bit of a carry-on,’ he said. ‘I’m fine, though. There’s no need for all this fuss.’
I gawped at him. ‘You’ve been missing for weeks,’ I told him. ‘We thought you were dead.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ he said. ‘It’s only been a couple of days. And I’m not missing anyway, am I? I’m right here. The police are doing me head in. I’m going for a walk.’ I grabbed his arm.
‘You need to go to hospital.’
The police stood around, puffing up their chests, not knowing what to do.
‘Don’t be silly, Luce. This is all a bit much. Just leave me alone, please? I just want to go for a walk.’
I left him under the tree and walked to the end of the street. I called my mother. She let out a wail when I told her I was with him. I wondered why she had left, if she cared so deeply. Or perhaps that was it; she cared too much.
‘I really thought he was dead, Lucy,’ she cried. ‘I really did.’
‘What should I do? He won’t come.’
‘You’ve got to get him to hospital. Can you ask the police for help?’
I went back to the tree. My father was too weak to go very far.
‘Can you do anything?’ I asked the police. They looked at me sympathetically and I hated them.
‘There’s nothing we can do. He isn’t breaking any laws.’
I turned to my father.
‘Tell you what, Dad,’ I said, appealing to the part of him that railed against any form of authority. ‘Let’s get away from these police, eh? We’ll be able to think a bit better on our own.’
He rubbed his eyes with stained hands, streaking dirt across his face. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah, Luce, you’re right. Good idea.’
I took his arm and we hobbled slowly down the street. The police hovered in the background, looking concerned.
‘I’m okay,’ I mouthed and they nodded in assent.
I managed to flag down a taxi to take us to the architect’s clean, white flat. I didn’t know where else to go. We got him up the stairs and in the shower. The architect’s flatmate had a bag of old clothes in the hallway waiting to go to the charity shop. There was an old pair of boxer shorts printed with cartoon orange slices. I passed them through the bathroom door. I left my father with the architect and went to get some beers from the corner shop, to ease the withdrawal. I didn’t want him to try to escape. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing him again. I bought a tin of tomato soup and a pepperoni pizza. I didn’t know what kinds of food he liked.
He padded sheepishly into the kitchen in the ridiculous boxer shorts. I handed him a can of John Smith’s.
‘You haven’t got any Carlsberg, have you, Luce? I can’t drink this.’ I went back out to the shop and came back with lager. I wanted to get it right so badly. A perverse part of me clung to the responsibility. Maybe this would bring us closer.
72
I ran faster and harder all dizzy with marble. I am tough as anything. I have all this north deep in my soul. My muscles burned and crackled, white hot with blisters. The sky blurred and spun and I kept floating above people in public places. I was always reaching towards something I couldn’t quite grasp. I was iron inside but my skin was thin like tissue paper. My lungs filled with static and there were waves in my heart. I sat in a hospital with wires on my chest and electric shocks in my arteries and the doctors told me that nothing was wrong but they could not see inside. My veins were filled with concrete and I thought I might be dying. I gasped at loud noises and couldn’t go in tube tunnels. The walls were pressing in and the sky was dissipating. Everything was in pieces but still I was running.
73
I called my Uncle Pete, who lived in France. He was my dad’s brother and the only person I thought he might listen to.
‘You’re going to have to come,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know what else to do.’
‘I’ll book the next flight over, kiddo,’ he said. ‘Keep him there. Don’t tell him I’m coming or he might do a runner.’
That night I set my alarm on the hour every hour so that I could check up on him. The window of the room he was sleeping in opened out onto the roof and I dreamed about him escaping over the rooftops.
The next morning Uncle Pete arrived, looking too tall and too brown in the architect’s minimal living room. My father was shocked to see him sitting there. Everything was wrong and out of place. We took him to the hospital. He was seen straight away and the nurse wired him up so that rehydration fluids could be pumped into his veins. We sat in the room as his body shook and blood spurted from his arms and dribbled down his wrists.
‘I’m sorry, Lucy,’ he said to me.
‘It’s okay,’ I whispered.
He had to stay in hospital and the days passed in a flurry of tubes and taxis and bitter coffees from the café downstairs. I called in sick to work.
‘We’re in the middle of a heatwave, Lucy. We’re rammed,’ they snapped. ‘We need you tonight.’
I hung up.
I travelled back and forth across the city collecting things. I thought that if I arranged the objects of his life then it might make a difference. I wanted him to need me. I went to the Holiday Inn to collect his suitcase. His mouthwash had leaked all over the new clothes he had bought for my graduation. There were shirts and jackets with the tags still on.
74
The streets and sky are the colour of thunder. My skin has split in the sun and your name is peeling in flakes from my shoulders. I am walking around with my nerves wet and broken but nobody notices. I must remember to smile and brush my hair. To put on a dress and pretend nothing is happening. Swallow it down and keep it inside.
75
He was discharged with an envelope of letters to give to his doctor at home. The consultant drew the curtains around his bed and suggested therapy or rehab.
‘Why don’t you try it, Dad?’ I asked him, softly.
‘I dunno. That sort of thing isn’t for me, Luce. I’ll be okay.’
‘Are you going to stop drinking?’
‘I’ll try. But you know, it’s a bit like crossing the road, right? You know you might get hit by a car, but you do it anyway. You can’t live your life not crossing roads because you’re worried that you might get run over.’ I struggled to understand his muddled logic.
76
I want to make things light for you but this is too heavy for me to carry alone. My body is aching for the safe of yours but this darkness does not belong to you any more. My muscles are straining beneath the bulk of him. I cannot bear the weight.
77
Uncle Pete took my father back to France with him. He sat at streetside cafés drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, attempting to make sense of what had happened. I took my shoes off and lay in the park. The grass seemed to tower above me. His face flickered behind my eyelids, wrinkled and pink.
The city dirt forced its way through my sandals as I tried to navigate my way through jobs and flats. The future I had imagined for myself dried up in the sun. My ideas had no gravity. They could not be traced back to a reputable source. My dreams were gauzy and loose, balloons without strings, drifting into the grey.
My mother called me and I didn’t know what to say to her.
‘Come on, Lucy,’ she said. ‘It’ll be alright.’ I didn’t know how to spell out my hopelessness; the feeling that it had all been for nothing, that I would always be wrong and never find the right place. I didn’t know how to explain that the responsibility of my dad felt like mine now.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I whispered.
‘Come home for a little while,’ my mother offered. ‘Take some time to think.’
78
The impossibility of protecting the people I love blooms bruises around my heart, purple spilling across my chest.
79
I seal myself up to stop the dirt leaking out. I tell lies, green and pulsing. I sit in the bath while my friends are in bars and restaurants and I whimper on the Ol
d Kent Road in the rain in the middle of the night. I empty myself of all that want in the same way that you did, because the love we grew got us nowhere. He will always choose that dark over us. Now I know those raw parts of you and feel how sore they blister. Sunlight streams cruel through slats in blinds. Unwashed hair and dirty clothes. All of those towers, stacked without meaning. The city is a circus and I want to be alone in a white room where none of these things can touch me. I want to be cold and detached, like an ice cube in a glass of water. My clothes drip from my body and my muscles ache with the effort of dragging myself through the days. I am drowning quietly and patiently. Watch me slip away.
80
I am cycling in the rain and I skid on the slippery road and fall off my bike into the mud. I am not hurt, but I am trembling. I grasp at wild ferns. The old man who lives across the road comes out of his house and helps me up. He takes me inside and gives me a hot cup of tea and a plate of creamy shortbread.
‘You want to be careful, girl,’ he says to me, kindly. ‘You should be wearing a helmet. You’ve got to be looking after yourself, you know?’
81
I went home. I sat on dank buses and felt my teenage self claw her way back into me. The shopping centres and motorways threatened to swallow me up. I sulked around the house, moody and despondent. The low sky pressed into my temples, brewing dark headaches that pulsed behind my eyes.
My mother and I walked into the centre of Sunderland together. She put her arm through mine as pigeons scattered across the pavement. We walked down Holmeside, where I used to go out dancing. The indie club had been knocked down, leaving a hole leaking rubble.
‘I’m sorry about your dad, Lucy, love.’ My mam squeezed my elbow.
‘It’s not your fault,’ I told her.
‘You can’t stop him, you know.’ She spoke quietly. ‘He’ll always find an excuse to drink.’
‘What do you think it was this time?’ I asked her. ‘Maybe the graduation was a bit much. Too much pressure.’
‘It’s everything, sweetheart. I stopped looking for the logic a long time ago.’ Sea air blew across the city. I buttoned up my coat. I looked up at the buildings and noticed the Christmas lights had not been taken down.
‘You can’t let it affect you, baby.’ My mam’s voice was soft. ‘You can’t let it stop you from living your life.’
‘Maybe it will be different this time,’ I said to her. ‘Surely this is enough to make him want to stop.’
My mother stopped walking and looked in a shop window. I searched for her face in the glass.
‘I used to think like that.’ She moved her shopping bag from one wrist to another. ‘If I’m completely honest, I sometimes still do.’
‘Think what?’
‘That I can save him,’ she said. ‘That it might be my job to save him.’ My stomach tensed. Seagulls cawed and I felt sick.
‘That’s not what I think,’ I lied.
‘Isn’t it?’ She sounded sad. I couldn’t see her expression. Our reflections were watery, obscured by the mannequins.
Part Four
1
then
later
something
different
2
I am swimming in the cold sea one afternoon and there is a sharp snap in my chest. I hear something shatter. My elastic nerves were pulled too tightly and now the disparate parts of myself are torn and ragged, dangling nerve endings. There are people in my life who are too big for me to carry but I am beginning to suspect I don’t have to. I must learn how to knit my tissues back together.
3
I keep my bike in the hallway, just like Auntie Kitty. I wheel it out too carelessly and the paint has begun to scrape off the wall. One afternoon I find a crusty pot of magnolia in the shed and decide to repair the cracks. I find an old shirt of my grandfather’s and pull it on over my dungarees. As I paint over the tyre marks and pedal scuffs, I notice the hairs from the paintbrush my mother used when she was here, small and fragile, caught beneath the surface.
4
Living out here, all alone, I am a balloon inflated to full capacity, shiny and proud. The sharp things of the world cannot chip at me here. I want to hold on to this feeling but I know when I go back into the city all the old pressures will press down on me and make me small. I might crack open again but now I know there is something whole beneath it all.
5
Sometimes at night I dance in the kitchen. It is a new kind, the sort of dancing that I can only do alone. It is a bubble that snakes through my muscles. It is dirty water spurting from a power hose after a winter curled in the pipes at the bottom of the garden, rusty and sour and desperate to be free. I turn on the radio and my limbs make shapes I didn’t realise they knew. It is something like sex; the best kind when I lose myself and stop thinking. It is my body welcoming me back. I have missed you, she tells me, sliding her feet across the tiles.
6
It is the middle of the night and the man and I are out driving. We don’t have a destination. There is something nice about being together in this enclosed space. We are the only two people moving at this speed at a particular point in time. He is relaxed when he is driving. It is as though he needs adrenaline in the same way that other people need oxygen. There is nothing but the road and the bogs and the clumps of trees smudging past the windows. His arm grazes my thigh as he changes gear. The speed dial inches up to 100. I glance at him. He has his eyes fixed on the road.
We can only be together in this specific time and place. We are like the rock pools that settle in the afternoons. We know that the tide will pull us out to sea again yet here we are for now with the shrimps and the sea anemones. The things we have done are ours and they will always be here, caught in the wetness of this place.
7
I am no longer ashamed of my own desire. I want rich and dirty things. I want dark things, like whiskey and bloodstains. I thought these were things you did not understand but now I know that all the longing in my bones is carved from yours. You put aside your needs to care for others but I have learned that I do not have to do the same. I was afraid of the depths of your body for a while but now I want to taste the salt in your blood on my tongue and remember those deep pink bonds that only we know about. The sinews that bind us will stretch and shrink but they are too strong to ever be broken. I want to fill the spaces between us. I want to return to that deep and dangerous place.
Epilogue
The runway at Donegal airport is right by the sea and on a clear day all the unruly beauty stretches below the planes, making it difficult for people to leave.
A few days after the burning, my mother and I walk towards the airport building. It is cold and the wind stings our eyes. The waves fizz in the distance, coughing up silt. I think about how heavy the brackish sea must be. I sense the pull of the waves. Standing in the spray and breathing the coarse air makes me feel better. It smells of rotting seaweed and storms closing in. It is an all-consuming, painful kind of beauty, wrapped around my heart like fat velvet.
I look for her face beneath the hood of her coat and think of our beginning, and all of the endings that have led us to this place. I think of her standing by the motorway in her glittery T-shirt that summer she wanted to run away, strong in the failing light as cars rattled by us. I think of my dad with his rough, clever hands and the way that it is neither of our jobs to hold them.
‘Mam,’ I start, but the wind takes my words and tosses them into the dunes. She tucks a strand of my hair behind my ear.
‘Take care, Lucy, baby,’ she says. ‘You’ll be alright.’ Sadness crests inside of me. All I want is for her to stay.
‘You’ve got the number of the builder, haven’t you?’ I nod. ‘You can give him a ring if anything goes wrong.’ I give her a hug and inhale her smell; Elizabeth Arden make-up and DKNY perfume.
‘Let me know when you’re home,’ I tell her.
I go to the beach and sit in the dunes for a long time.
I watch her plane take off, getting smaller and smaller in the sky above me. I wonder if she is reading the in-flight magazine, or drinking tea from a paper cup. I wonder if she is sitting by the window, looking down at the sand, searching for a glimpse of me.
Acknowledgements
So much of writing this book has been about making space in places where there is not enough.
I am grateful to my grandad, whose savings allowed me to do an MA in Creative Writing and to Nan, for her generosity.
Love to Miranda and Colin, for travelling to Ireland with me, baking messy blackberry crumble, hanging up my dresses and telling me that I would be just fine. Cat, who taught me new ways of understanding the world and my place in it. Aitan, for all of the late night phone calls in the garden, searching for signal. Lee, for being a first reader.
A huge thank you to Una, Sandy, Alice, Liam, John, Michael, Rose and Jonathan. They washed my clothes, let me use their printer, cooked me a tagine, poured me whiskey, fixed my toilet, sat up all night talking and welcomed me into their community during my winter in Donegal. Especially to Roisin, who gave me the key to her home and encouraged me to send out a first draft of this novel when I was feeling reluctant.
Love to Rowan, Sumena, Fergal, Greg, Matt, Ella, Katie and Josh who drove through the Blue Stack Mountains to dance around my sitting room and swim in the icy sea. A special mention to Kate, who cycled through the hills in the heavy rain and championed this book from the start.
Thanks to Lauren Vevers, Oliver Doe, Keano Anton and the deeply supportive community of artists in Newcastle who gave me a platform and a sense of solidarity.
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