by S. K. Perry
I think about the way I used to feel you breathing when you held me, my cheek against your ribcage. I think about your fingers in my hair and the way you’d always stand next to me to clean your teeth, watching me clean mine in the mirror. I think about waking up in the morning to your open mouth and the space between your thighs where I’d hook my leg, and then I can’t think about it anymore, and I turn back to today, and I slowly eat another jacket potato.
Frank comes and stands next to me, and puts an arm around my shoulders.
‘I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed,’ I say.
‘Yeah, I know,’ he replies. ‘But the thing to remember about fireworks is they’re just colourful farts that someone’s set fire to.’
He flicks his hand at the sky and a rocket explodes, settling in the shape of a heart before disappearing.
‘It won’t always be this hard.’
47
Last autumn, I didn’t take the bins out enough and you were always home late and it was stuffy in the flat with the heating on and too cold without it. I’d be asleep when you got home in the week, and I was mad at you, but now I missed you and that made me even angrier.
48
I hug Frank, and we shuffle closer to the others but I’m still somewhere else. Noel’s telling a story about going skinny dipping as a teenager. He and his friends had made a bonfire, and chucked their clothes down next to it as they’d run into the sea. When they got back he realised he’d thrown his straight into it. He’d had to walk back home stark naked and endure weeks of being called Burnt Nuts Noel.
I laugh again because everyone else is laughing too. I think about what we all look like from the sky, tiny people making noises no one hears. Ellie slips round next to me and fills up my glass. She smiles and says, ‘Come and stay at mine tonight. There’s something lurking in your eyes that makes me think you should be tucked up with Auntie Ellie and not on your own in that cramped room.’
I thank her and nod but then I feel selfish and ask, ‘Are you OK?’
She shrugs, ‘I’m a bit hungry.’
She laughs and takes my hand and we’re walking back to her house before I have time to reply.
49
We go to the pub for lunch one November Sunday and you push some swede around your plate. There is nothing to say. I try to make a few jokes but they aren’t funny. We look out of the window for a bit.
I want to tell you I feel lonely. I love you just as much as ever but I am bitter about the fact you don’t say thank you when I make you packed lunches and only seem to notice me when my hairs clog the bath.
On the way home from the pub you take a phone call from work, so we walk along the river while you talk to them and I play with the hole on the middle finger of my right glove.
We walk all the way back, you on the phone, me getting more and more wound up, having conversations in my head about how I never see you anymore, and the one time we have gone out you’re working again.
When we get back to the house you go straight into the living room – still on the phone – and close the door. I stand there for a moment, unsure where to go. Our bedroom has clothes on the floor and anyway, I don’t want to be on the bed, so I go into the kitchen. We’ve left some breakfast things out. I clear them away and start to clean. Half an hour later I’ve drunk two cups of tea and washed all the surfaces twice, and I’m pissed off.
When I go into the living room, you’re sat there watching TV.
‘You’re done with your call?’
‘Er, yeah.’
‘Didn’t you think you could have come and told me? I’ve been on my own cleaning the kitchen!’
‘I don’t know. I just assumed you were busy. Holly, what’s wrong?’
‘Are you being serious? You close the door on me, don’t talk to me and then just leave me in the kitchen cleaning up after you while you’re in here watching Come Dine with Me!’
‘It’s not Come Dine with Me. It’s MasterChef.’
‘It’s the same thing!’
‘No it’s not.’
‘It is!’
‘Seriously it’s not; it’s a whole different format –’
‘Are you joking?’
I can’t understand how you don’t get what I’m saying. I’ve just washed up your porridge bowl because you were using the sofa as your office, you haven’t talked to me for fifty minutes, and it turns out you’re just sitting here watching people chop up a fucking onion. I storm out of the room and slam the door.
50
My Sundays with Gabriella become something of a ritual. Frank’s been teaching me to bake cakes too, so sometimes I practise while she cooks dinner. If it’s a Sunday evening – rather than an afternoon – she puts on a film while we cook. Afterwards, I walk home clutching little parcels of food for the week ahead: soups and spicy chicken and these deep-fried goats cheese and beetroot balls. They’re my favourite; they fall apart in my mouth, sticky cheese infecting the earthiness of the beetroot with an oozing sweetness, coated in breadcrumbs, the creamy molten flavour dissolving on my tongue.
They’re the best thing I’ve ever tasted. Gabriella teaches me to cook them for my dad’s birthday, but the weekend I’m due to go home I change my mind. I don’t know what I’d do with myself there, in the warmth of my parents’ sitting room. Instead I send a text to wish him happy birthday and I drift here, to the shore.
There’s a fog in my head, matched by the wet haze clogging up the sky and making everywhere an effort to get to. I feel cold. I imagine picking up my phone and calling someone: Ellie or Gabriella or my parents or Frank. I know my mouth won’t co-operate though; my tongue is too thick between my teeth and my face won’t move.
51
For our November meeting we’re at Jackie’s house and we read The Collector. Noel tells us he’s a lepidopterist too; he has his own collection of moths and butterflies at home. He says he’s surprised by the way the book links collecting butterflies with imprisonment. He tells us that when butterflies die they become brittle and locked into a kind of rigor mortis that snaps their wings closed. The process used to collect them is called relaxing, and helps them unfold again. He says he’s always thought of this softening as a release, and that – in truth – in order to collect butterflies you have to understand how to set them free not how to keep them locked up.
‘But setting things free can be painful too,’ Frank says. I’m too tired to work out what he means.
52
You feel so real still that whenever my phone rings I look down and expect to see your name. I leave you a voicemail and feel ashamed. I’m starting to miss you in a new way that feels like I’m being ripped up into little pieces and hurled hard in your direction, only for the wind to pick up all the bits of me and fling them the opposite way.
53
I go to meet Ellie from the library where she’s studying. I’ve made fridge cake and it’s been semi-successful so I take her a piece wrapped in cling film. When I get home that night I pull it out of my bag and put it on the side: unoffered. I feel angry with myself; I see Ellie all the time and couldn’t exactly have failed to notice the gaps in her body or the fact that if I go for food with Sean or Danny she arrives after we’ve eaten. But I say nothing and pretend not to notice.
As my baking gets better I gain confidence, and with confidence I gain flair. Under Frank’s exuberant coaching and Gabriella’s expertise I mix beetroot and chocolate or apple and rum, and one day Frank decides that one of my cakes should go to Jackie’s cafe with his to be sold. I offer to go on the cake run before work the following morning. I often go anyway, popping in to say hi to Jackie on my way to my first house of the day. She always gives me a coffee she won’t let me pay for, so I put a pound in the tip box and slip away to drink it in the street as I weave through commuters and ironed shirts, and silently guess the names of the people I pass in my head: Becky, Aidan, Jennifer, Jay, Edith.
That morning – armed with the cakes we’ve baked – I arrive ten
minutes early and sit inside with my coffee, smiling as I watch what we’ve made get sold to the breakfast crowd; Jackie’s wink as she hands it over makes me want to climb onto the table and jump off again cheering.
On the counter by the till Jackie keeps a huge glass sweet jar with little slips of paper in it, each of them with a word and its meaning neatly typed across it. I stick my hand in as I put my coffee cup back on the counter and say goodbye, and as I swing the door shut behind me and step out into the swell of people whisking themselves off to their mornings, I look down and read: ‘Sonder, noun: the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.’
54
What I want to know, Sam, is will I ever run out of things I wish I could tell you? Things that sit in my fingerprints you’ll never get to read there. What about the things you know would make me laugh? Are they really just gone now?
55
At the following week’s pub quiz we come second. We celebrate with red wine, generously poured and drunk too fast. I’ve come straight to the pub from work without eating and the alcohol is quickly starting to flow in my blood. I start to feel my fingertips buzzing as I get tipsier.
The noise in the pub is heightened, and the temperature of the room is warmer because the outside is so cold. We’re in the corner: Ellie and I, sparring with Duane about something. Sean is listening – amused – his fingers drumming on the table to the song that’s playing through the speaker system. Mira is at the bar picking up another round and Danny’s gone to help her, me just conscious of my inclination to watch them together. I’m still unsure if they’re more than friends and I’m even less sure why it would matter to me either way.
Danny sits down next to me when they come back, and when I say I’m cold he puts his arm round me. I let him, but it doesn’t warm me up.
56
It’s 4 a.m. and I’ve been in love with you for almost five years. We’re lost in Soho on our way home from a party and we can’t find a taxi. There’s a sweaty woman in a doorway dressed in navy blue. It’s been raining and the pavement shines like her armpits. Someone walking past says, ‘We won’t be allowed in there again.’ The ground tips; my toes are numb. There’s a bouquet of flowers in the road. Its cellophane dances in the wind. I tell you I’m jealous of the rain on your face. You laugh into my mouth and I have never felt so happy.
My stomach hurts, partly from the wine, swinging like a magnet in the roundness above my hips. Partly from the laughing. We push our mouths together again. Waterlogged and clumsy. The sweaty woman’s gone. We find another street to swing down.
57
I teach four children the piano now. I like watching their hands move over the keys. Sometimes I open up the lid and get them to watch the little hammers at work while I play. I tell them it’s good to understand why the sound comes out like it does, and they watch it like it’s magic.
Sometimes Frank walks down to the sea with me and throws stone after stone into the water, like he’s playing a piano. He makes the splashes get bigger and bigger until the water dances in rhythm. I know it’s fine not to understand why it moves like it does, and I watch it because it’s magic.
58
In the last week of November we finally win the quiz and we go dancing afterwards to celebrate. The music is louder than I’m expecting and the bodies and the noise around me make me dizzy. I feel battered by the beat of the bass and I don’t know how much longer I can keep standing. I’m worried I’ll get trampled. Someone’s dancing right behind me now with their back rubbing against mine and I don’t want them to touch me. Someone else pushes into me as they jostle past. All these feet stomping to the music.
I look around; Mira is with Duane and Danny a little way away and I can’t see Ellie and Sean; I think maybe they’re smoking outside. I can’t remember how to breathe. I’m hot, so I try to get to the exit but there are too many people in here. They’re twisting their bodies into rectangles and boxes and shapes that bodies shouldn’t be in. A tingling starts in my fingers and I’m starting to get black dots in my eyes and suddenly your arms are round me; you’re holding me up and I start to cry, shaking all the panic out into your shoulder, but it’s a small hand that wiggles into mine and when you step away to look at me you’re not you; you’re Sean, and it’s Ellie saying, ‘It’s OK, Holly.’ And I tell her, ‘He’s dead, Ellie; he’s dead.’
Winter
I can’t stop moving;
it’s easier not to fall if
I’m the hurricane.
1
I feel like I’m going to see you over Christmas. I’ll be back in London for a couple of weeks and I’m sure we’ll bump into each other somewhere. We’re connected by the footsteps we left on the city’s blueprint.
2
That first night, after the funeral, I took myself out to dinner. I’d got the train back to King’s Cross and I didn’t want to go home, so I thought about going to the British Library for a while. I’ve always liked it there. I like the landings outside the Reading Rooms, and all the different levels, and the chairs that you stand up in by sort of leaning backwards. I don’t know why I decided not to; I think maybe my head was too full of you for me to read, or even just sit quietly. You were filling me up so much I had to walk around and rub a blister, or not rub a blister, but at the very least be on the move. I walked to Russell Square and thought about visiting a friend there but headed instead to Covent Garden, and then down past Piccadilly to Regent Street.
It was busy – I mean of course it was – it was a summer evening in the West End so the streets and shops were heaving: steaming with the heat of tourists and vendors and the rats under the ground. I had quite a heavy bag from where I’d been staying at your house and I was sweating and needed the loo. I kept thinking about this Denise Riley poem that you would’ve felt apathetic towards – and I say apathetic because you wouldn’t have understood it, but you wouldn’t have minded that you didn’t understand – not like me who would’ve really hated something because of that – but you, you would have just read it and felt nothing or only very mild consternation, and thinking about that was making me really angry because I’d made an effort with economics for fuck’s sake, and we’d hardly ever talked about reading, and all the books you owned were two copies of Jude the Obscure, and I’d never understood why you needed two copies, especially in comparison to your lack of other things; I mean you didn’t own any pens on the principle that you typed everything, and after you lost your phone charger you didn’t bother to buy a new one and always just used mine and you had no mugs or a corkscrew and no soap – ever – but you did have two copies of Jude the Obscure. And when I asked you about it, you didn’t tell me it was because you loved it, and loved Hardy, and had bought both copies because it was the best thing you’d ever read; you just said nothing, didn’t even acknowledge it actually, and I felt like that would have been your reaction had I shown you this poem that the line I had stuck in my head had come from. And maybe I’m not being fair but I was feeling sort of sweaty from the bag and the sun and the buses and my make-up, which was running off a bit – and that was the Riley line, about how much mascara washes away each day and internationally – and I didn’t feel angry, not really, except in my knuckles, which were getting clenchy, and the back of my neck where I felt a bit sick, and I wasn’t angry but I did feel like I might burst into tears at any moment and I just wanted – needed even – to be absolutely still.
So I stood in the street and I cried, and it came out really loudly so I faced a shop wall. I didn’t want anyone to think they had to talk to me. I stood and sobbed loudly and kicked the wall and shouted at it, ‘Fuck,’ mostly. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’
Then it started to hurt, so I started walking again, up Oxford Street and right onto James Street and up onto Marylebone High until I reached this bar that looked alright, and I went in and used the loo and the mirror and ordered a glass of wine that I couldn’t really afford, and sat down at a ta
ble facing away from the window, with my back touching it almost; my back was directly against the window. And I didn’t look around; I just looked straight ahead mostly, and I felt like I was making a tunnel spanning out from my head that bore into everything around me: the light bulbs, people, walls, ceiling. And I filled the tunnel with white noise and I sat perfectly still. I could still feel the city moving around me – because of the tunnel it felt like a long way away, but this actually seemed to make it move faster – and it seemed to be moving like wheels: spinning with the bicycles and cars and men on unicycles in Covent Garden and the balls they’re always juggling. The spinning was spinning too, and suddenly someone was telling me that the table I was sitting at was reserved for someone else, and I looked around and all the other tables were full, so I stood by the bar: sipping my wine until it was empty and eating a bowl of pasta, slowly, standing there amongst all the people jostling for drinks and tequila shots and little pots of olives and then drinks again.
And all this time everyone else was spinning around me, like the people were turning cartwheels and the bar staff were clowns or tap dancers, and their feet were shuffling and stamping, and the people in the bar were shouting and the shouting just got louder as more of them shouted, and the music – although it didn’t have a heavy bass or anything – was still louder than just an itch or an irritation, and it honestly felt like the music and the shouting was hitting me over the head, or in my head, even: hitting me on my brain. And the noise got louder and all up in my armpits which were sweating again and I was still standing there, like a silent drill or something, and I felt really frightened, like I wanted to scream – actually scream – from my intestines or my stomach or wherever a scream comes from: my hips maybe. I couldn’t scream though, like I couldn’t cry anymore, like I couldn’t finish my pasta because my mouth was suddenly dry, and what I really wanted at that exact moment was not to be there with all those wheels and the circus and the spinning and the city with its gutters full of banana peel and copies of Metro and dust blowing in circles around me.