Very Nearly Normal

by Hannah Sunderland

  If you were born in those fateful years between 1981 and 1996, you were branded a Millennial and blamed for ruining everything from the napkin industry to golf. We were laughed at for our collective love of avocado on toast and gym memberships and for our obsession with houseplants. But, in the end, maybe we will need those impeccable biceps and that impressive stamina to pelt those people bitching about us for ruining everything, with said avocados and houseplants.

  We were told that we want too much by the generation that got everything they ever wanted and were called The Snowflake Generation by people who thought we couldn’t handle anything. Well, what I say to that is, try living with your parents into your late twenties, with no hope of moving out, and see how much you can handle then.

  It was a vicious cycle – every generation hated the one that came after it and blamed the one that came before. So, it was natural, in a way, for everyone to dislike my generation. But I didn’t know if other generations had been hated with the passion that seemed to fall the way of Millennials.

  I’m sure that Joy hadn’t dreamed that she’d have a daughter like me or that I’d still be living with her at twenty-eight years old.

  I know what she’d have wanted. She never told me but I always knew, and it was nothing like what she got. She’d rather I was thinner and flirtier, with fewer anger management issues and less of a drinking problem. She’d rather I was like Kate, living a fake existence in a fake apartment with fake friends fluttering fake eyelashes, where everyone smiles all the time and all the bad things are pushed away so that they didn’t discolour the ivory rugs. She’d wanted someone who hid their problems and acted like everything was fine. Well, I was never a very good actress. I failed Drama. Twice.

  She’d rather I was into something academic that she could boast about to her circle of friends who met up every Monday night at the exact same place where they ate the exact same meal, week after week. She’d have wanted me to have skipped the goth and hippy phases and gone straight through to preppy; that way we could have shopped together at Joules or Cath Kidston and bought matching wellies that we’d never wear because God forbid we’d actually go somewhere with mud. If she’d had it her way, I’d have married a doctor or an accountant by the time I turned twenty-two and I’d have walked down the aisle in the same dress she’d worn all those years ago.

  It’s a shame she got none of that.

  Like most people in my life, I’d disappointed her. She did well to hide it, but if you’re anything like me, you can smell disappointment a mile away.

  Maybe Theo’s family would be different. Maybe I’d be exactly who they dreamed their boy would end up with. Maybe this could be my chance to play at being the girl I’d always wanted to be, the one who giggles during small talk and knows what to say to carry on a conversation instead of stopping it dead. Or then again maybe not.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I stood at the window. The sun was rising on a new day and I saw it with clear, open eyes.

  Something in me seemed to have woken up since my outburst at the party and my argument with Theo.

  What he’d said on that hill a few days ago about me blaming everything on a higher power that forced me to fail had jolted me awake and made me realise what an idiot I was being. Whenever I’d messed up, missed out, said the wrong thing or just plain ruined everything, I hadn’t placed the blame with me. But it wasn’t a force that made me mess things up. It wasn’t some vindictive god that enjoyed seeing me squirm. The fault was mine and mine alone.

  It was as if the last seven years had seen me breathing on autopilot, the air doing what it needed to sustain me and nothing else, but now I felt it. I felt the air filling me up, igniting something inside me and oxygenating the blood that pulsed round my body so quickly when I thought of him.

  The door to my bedroom opened, the fairy lights overhead rippling as Joy walked through the door with bleary eyes.

  ‘Time for up, Effie!’ she said, walking to the bed and shaking the bedpost three or four times before seeing that it was vacant.

  ‘Morning,’ I said, my voice ethereal and calm.

  Joy started, her eyes wide and confused, her mouth hanging ajar in dismay. ‘You’re … you’re awake!’

  ‘Yes, I watched the sunrise this morning. I’ve never seen one before.’ Mission number one … CHECK! I turned back to the window and smiled contentedly when I saw Elliot sprawled atop the car, asleep.

  ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘Nope. I’m fine.’ I turned and walked over to her, giving her a hug before going to have a shower and leaving her, disorientated, in the overstuffed room.

  I arrived at work to find Arthur and Toby sharing a coffee and looking through a travel guide of the Czech Republic. They barely noticed me when I walked in; they were too busy blushing and smiling at each other.

  ‘Good morning,’ I trilled in a sing-song voice that sounded nothing like my own.

  Arthur looked up, his bottom lip jutting out, his brow knitted in a frown.

  ‘What’s wrong? Are you ill?’ he asked with genuine concern.

  ‘No, why is everyone asking me that?’ I placed my bag in the corner, thought about taking a complimentary mint imperial, then decided against it and took the box of new arrivals to the shelves.

  ‘You look good,’ Toby said with a smile that implied I’d been up to something naughty. ‘I tell you what, that boy’s been good for you. There’s nothing that broad shoulders can’t fix.’ He sipped his coffee and smiled to himself, as if reminiscing on a particular pair of broad shoulders. Arthur looked at his own regularly spaced shoulders and frowned in disappointment.

  He left Toby perusing a map of Prague and came to pass the books up to me as I climbed the creaking stepladder.

  ‘What’s Toby doing here?’ I lowered my voice and asked with a smirk. ‘Did you lie about your accounts again? I’m not sure you can keep using that excuse for much longer.’

  Arthur breathed a laugh and passed me a handful of thrillers. ‘No, I actually came clean about the tax returns.’

  ‘He knew already, didn’t he?’

  ‘He did. We ran into each other at the supermarket and neither of us had eaten, so we had dinner together.’

  ‘And you confessed your undying love.’ I sighed dreamily, holding my hand dramatically to my chest and squeezing my eyes shut.

  Arthur shushed me and smacked me hard across the thigh with a John Grisham. ‘You’ve been spending too much time in the Mills & Boon section.’

  ‘I’m happy for you,’ I said, leaning down from the stepladder and kissing him on top of his head.

  When I drew back, I saw him staring at me, brow furrowed, eyes wide. ‘What the hell happened to you? You’re … happy. You’re never happy.’

  I shrugged and continued stacking the shelves.

  ‘It wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with the call I got from Theo this morning, would it?’

  ‘He called?’

  ‘Yeah, he asked if you could have the weekend off to go to Wales and meet his family. Moving a bit fast, aren’t we?’

  ‘What if it is?’

  ‘I like this new you. Let her stay.’ He leered a one-sided smile. ‘So, are you going?’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘A weekend away, huh? Have you … you know, done the deed yet?’ He shrugged.

  I stopped stacking, suddenly feeling like being sick. I hadn’t even thought about that. ‘No,’ I mumbled, keeping my eyes firmly on the books I was arranging.

  ‘Well, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’ He grinned and turned back to his reclining accountant, whose nose was still between the pages of his travel guide.

  What Arthur wouldn’t do? That didn’t leave me much.

  ‘Oh, Effie, before I forget,’ Arthur said, retracing his steps back to me, ‘when you get back, we need to have a chat.’

  ‘That sounds ominous. Should I be worried?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’


  I slumped my shoulders and frowned his way. ‘Can’t you just tell me now? I’m going to worry until you do.’

  He grinned. ‘That’s the thing about working in a bookshop. You get a flair for dramatic cliffhangers.’

  That evening I left work half an hour early and made my way to the nearest department store and to the lingerie section that was on the third floor, tucked away in the back corner like some sordid little secret. I perused something I liked, a dark purple set with just enough lace to look like I wasn’t trying too hard. I looked at the price tag and recoiled.

  Did I really need these?

  Maybe I could just buy the bra and not the matching knickers, but then I thought of what I had at home: several pairs of decade-old full briefs with little holes in the front for my pubes to poke through like a hairdresser’s highlighting cap.

  No, I definitely needed them both.

  It pained me to tap my card to the reader but I told myself that it was for the greater good as I headed out to the nearest chemist.

  On the way I passed by a beauty salon and I considered getting a spray tan, lest I vaporise the poor boy’s eyes with my blindingly white skin, should he use that smile to lure me out of my clothes.

  I’d had one before so I knew the drill and I had enough time to fit it in.

  Then I remembered the indignity of standing topless in front of a complete stranger in a too-tight paper thong that cut me in half like a human sausage.

  I remembered having to waddle around the room while I dried and the cloying feeling on my skin for days afterwards. No, if he was going to touch me, I wanted to feel it and not through a layer of tan-coloured coating.

  Not to mention the bed sheets I’d had to throw out when I’d woken up and found them smeared in brown, like some kind of knock-off Turin Shroud.

  No, I didn’t want to stain the Morgan family’s linens.

  I carried on walking.

  I stepped through the door of Boots chemist and immediately began scanning the aisles for anyone I knew before heading to the family planning section.

  I grabbed what I needed and was on my way to the till when my shoulder collided with someone. I managed to grip the box of condoms enough for it not to fall to the ground. I spun around to apologise, but when I saw who it was, I felt my throat close up, the blood draining from every part of my body and pooling in my cheeks.

  Marcus Roe.

  Why was this happening to me? What kind of sick monster had I been in a previous life to deserve this?

  Maybe he wouldn’t recognise me; I didn’t look anything like I had when we’d shared our … encounter.

  ‘Effie Heaton?’ He raised one brow and smirked.

  Fuck!

  Shit, he’d aged well. He had long brown hair that was tied in a topknot on the crown of his head and a short beard that looked like it had just been trimmed.

  ‘Marcus. How have you been?’ I asked, shoving the box up my sleeve.

  ‘I’m great, living in London now but I’ve come home for a visit.’ He stepped forward, his long Sherlock Holmes coat swishing behind him.

  ‘Yeah, our mums met the other week.’

  ‘That’s right. You’re still living at home, aren’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ I begrudgingly admitted and felt the familiar shame flood through me.

  ‘I was speaking to your friend at Kate’s party. Theo – he seems like a nice lad.’ I’d forgotten how condescending he sounded when he spoke. Lad. Theo was older, wiser and much less punchable than Marcus was.

  ‘Yeah, he’s great.’

  ‘Are you dating? It’s just my mum mentioned that Joy said you were single.’ His mouth donned a self-gratified smile.

  ‘Early days,’ I replied.

  We stared at each other for a moment, our brains clearly replaying the exact same memory; his lips curling, my gag reflex flexing.

  ‘Excuse me, miss.’ A woman in one of the shop’s white uniforms approached me with a puckered look on her face. Thank God, a distraction. ‘I’m going to have to ask you to remove the unpaid-for item from your sleeve. Otherwise I will be forced to let the authorities know.’

  My heart dropped. ‘Oh no, I’m not trying to steal anything,’ I assured her. I smiled at Marcus. His brow knotted.

  ‘Miss, I clearly saw you place something in your sleeve. Hand it over to me or I’ll have to alert the security guards.’

  Please, please fuck off, I begged her with my mind.

  ‘Listen, I was always going to pay for them. Just don’t make me get them out here,’ I said through gritted teeth, my eyes motioning to Marcus.

  She didn’t get the hint.

  ‘Miss, this is your final warning. Please remove the item from your sleeve.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. Fine!’ I pulled the condoms out and lost my grip on them. The box sailed through the air, hitting the toe of Marcus’s brogue with a soft thud.

  He bent down and picked it up, glancing at the packet and then looking to me with a one-sided grin. ‘Latex free, huh?’

  My cheeks burned like the surface of the sun as I glared at the woman with such hatred that she stepped back a few paces.

  I snatched the box from his hands and didn’t look him in the eye as I said goodbye. ‘Well, this has been just fantastic. Let’s do it again sometime.’

  I turned and walked towards the tills as Marcus called one last thing after me.

  ‘Maybe do it on an empty stomach this time!’

  I looked at the ground and wondered why a sinkhole never appeared when you needed one.

  I sat on the cold bathroom tiles nursing my bloody leg and cursing the discarded razor that lay halfway across the room with a chunk of my shin between the blades. I may as well have nicked an artery with the amount of blood that dripped down my leg onto the floor.

  I dabbed at it with a tissue, managing to mostly just smear it across the teal tiles, making them an attractive purple colour.

  I knocked my forehead against my knee and squeezed my eyes shut, trying my best not to picture Marcus Roe and his stupidly handsome grin.

  Marcus and I only seemed to deal in disastrous interactions, but my disasters were not limited to him when it came to my sex life, oh no. There was a compendium of stories involving my previous lovers that I had locked away inside my brain, in a box, before submerging that box in concrete and casting it into the black hole of my mind. But occasionally it would find its way back out of the black hole to torture me, and tonight was one of those occasions.

  I took my mind back to my seventeenth year, to when I’d had a few too many drinks at a party. It was at the house of someone from my year, but I’d never spoken to them due to the gargantuan distance between our levels of social status. I had only managed to get an invite because Kate had insisted on me tagging along; we were still trying to save the dying relationship in those days. I’d stood by Kate for most of the night, watching her effortlessly mingle, flirt and laugh, while I quietly drank too much and fretted about the hangover I’d have the next day. I drank until the ground began to swim beneath me, my eyes lolling shut. I wasn’t the alcoholic back then that I was now, so a glass or two of cider and several shots of some unknown concoction was enough to lull me to the edge of unconsciousness.

  That’s when Marcus Roe came into the picture. Every school had a Marcus Roe: seriously good-looking, could charm the crown jewels from the Queen herself given half the chance.

  He had the long dark hair, pierced ear and skater look that was the peak of hot back then, and for some reason all he wanted to do was talk to me. Back then I thought that someone had finally seen me. That he’d spotted me across the crowded room, stopped, and his world had fallen away until all he saw was me. Now I think it’s more likely that he saw the drunkest girl in the room, and decided that I was his best shot at a quick shag.

  I was still in the midst of a fully fledged emo phase back then, with a heavy side-swept fringe, black skinny jeans tucked into high-top sneakers and about eight
quids worth of kohl stick smeared around my eyes. He’d made me a coffee and we’d sat in the kitchen while we both sobered up. It was our first conversation ever and it was going well. He’d asked if I wanted to go somewhere more private and, when I agreed, he’d led me up to the attic that had been renovated into a bedroom that was bigger than any of the rooms in my house.

  He’d kissed me as soon as the door closed and it was a hungry, passionate kiss that I’d seen in films but never thought actually happened in real life. I felt fire inside me as we clumsily undressed and went over to the bed. The alcohol numbed any sense of self-consciousness that I most definitely would have felt, had I been sober. He climbed on top of me after I’d lain down on the Egyptian cotton bed sheets and I’d let him take the lead. He was bound to be more experienced than I was at this sort of thing, especially seeing as the only reference I had for sex was when I’d accidentally leaned on the remote at two in the morning and had a brief but scarring introduction to the adult channels.

  Everything was going well until he rolled over and pulled me on top of him. I looked down at him, his pretty-boy face morphing into some sort of melting plasticine mess in front of my eyes, and then I’d felt the vomit rush up my throat like water from a fireman’s hose. It covered him from head to pubes in one fell swoop. He’d flung me off and run, cursing, from the room.

  I lay on the vomit-strewn bed, the pain of my first time still blooming between my legs, naked and with the sound of laughter from downstairs creeping into my ears.

  I fell asleep and when I woke, I found myself lying in Kate’s bed. My hair had been washed in a bowl of water that sat beside me and I’d been wrapped in a fluffy pink dressing gown before being bundled into bed. On the nightstand I found a pack of aspirin and a bottle of water and lying next to me was Kate, soundly asleep and making those strange laughing noises that she made whenever she was in a deep dream. The next morning I’d gone straight to the doctor and ordered an STD test and the morning-after pill and promised myself that I would never again be so goddamned stupid.