Fragile Like Us

by Sara Barnard

  I felt a flash of hurt. Rosie? Who’d called her pathetic and made jokes about her victimhood showing?

  “She said once that I should just get over it,” she continued.

  “But that’s a horrible thing to say,” I said, frustrated.

  “At least it’s honest. And it’s true. Hey, we need to go left here.” She’d taken hold of the umbrella and was gesturing in the opposite direction to the one I’d gone in, toward the railway line.

  None of this made any sense to me. I followed her, ducking my head under the umbrella, unsure what to say.

  “So I should be more like Rosie?” I asked eventually.

  “Oh, God, no. I didn’t mean that. And don’t make it about you. It was just a passing comment.” She hooked her arm through mine. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  I’d never known anyone who could flit from mood to mood as lightly as she did. In fact, if I hadn’t had a sister with an actual diagnosed mood disorder (where the changes between moods were in no way “light”), I’d have thought she had one. Maybe it was a self-defense thing.

  We were both silent for a while. As we walked, I watched the droplets falling in front of us, gentler now.

  “Do you know that quote?” I asked. “The one about rain. Something like, ‘in every life there’ll be a little rain,’ or something?”

  “Oh, that shit can fuck off,” Suzanne said, surprising me with her vehemence.

  “What? Why? Isn’t it a nice quote?”

  “No, it’s total bullshit. I hate it when people make sadness all deep and beautiful and, like”—she waved her hands helplessly—“profound. That’s the word. It’s not profound. It’s not beautiful. It sucks. It sucks balls.”

  “Well—”

  She interrupted me. “I think it makes non-sad people feel better. Like, they think it must be a good thing to be sad, because you’re getting all this insight into real life and pain or whatever. Like how people say tears are like rain. Fuck off. Tears are just tears and they make your eyes hurt and they won’t stop when you want them to and ugh. You get all those arty photos of girls crying—it’s always girls, have you noticed?—and it’s so beautiful and tasteful and moving. When the reality is your face goes all blotchy and your nose runs and you can taste it every time you breathe.”

  “Taste what?”

  “It. Pain. Sadness.” She let out a breath through her nose and twisted her lip. “I’m just saying that sadness isn’t beautiful. And if it looks that way, it’s a lie.”

  “Liiike . . . you?” I couldn’t not say it. She’d basically given it to me on a plate.

  She looked at me, half proud, half bitter. “See, Cads? I knew you’d get there in the end.”

  * * *

  I wasn’t sure exactly where we were going, but I followed Suzanne through Brighton’s slick, winding streets, happy to let her lead. She’d cheered up, something about the freedom of the city at night having its usual effect on her. She’d got bouncy again. “So, if I’m the troubled one,” she was saying speculatively, after we’d been walking for about fifteen minutes, “and you’re the nice one, what’s Rosie?”

  “The sarcastic one,” I said. “Nice? Really? Why do I get the dull word?”

  “I’m sarcastic too,” Suzanne said, “so she can’t be that.”

  “Well, you’re both nice as well. So . . .”

  “We’re not nice.” She was grinning. “You’re the nice one.”

  Before I could give her hair a sort of playful tug, she’d moved away from me, swinging the umbrella back to her side.

  “Here we are!” she sang, gesturing to a huge, derelict building I’d assumed we were walking past. It was surrounded on all sides by dark blue fencing that was covered in graffiti.

  I looked up. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah!”

  “I think I’d rather go to the beach.”

  “Nooo.” She shook her head. “We can go up on the roof and watch the sunrise. It’ll be great.”

  “The roof?” I repeated. My last shred of bravado vanished and nerves set in. “You want me to go into an abandoned building and climb up onto the roof in the middle of the night?”

  “Yeah!” she said again.

  “Hi, I’m Caddy,” I said, stretching out my hand. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

  She laughed. “Don’t be like that. You said you wanted to do something fun. We can go to the beach if you want, but there’s nothing to do there. Plus, no sunrise.”

  “What part of this is fun?” I asked.

  “Oh.” Suzanne’s face fell. “I didn’t think you’d be this against it. I’m sorry.” She took a step back toward the road. “Let’s just go to the beach.”

  It was the immediacy and sincerity of her acquiescence that made all the difference. If she’d tried to convince me or guilt-trip me I’d have carried on disagreeing.

  “No, you’re right,” I heard myself say. “The beach will be boring. And wet.”

  She looked thrilled. “Really? Great! If you don’t like it, we’ll leave.”

  “What’s to like?” I asked, but still I followed her around the corner of the building. “What is this place anyway?”

  “I think it used to be a factory?” She didn’t sound sure. “Or maybe something to do with the railway? I don’t know. It’s been abandoned for years though, apparently.” She twisted her lip thoughtfully. “On the Internet it said one of the fence panels is loose, so we just need to find it . . .”

  “What if we can’t actually get onto the roof?” I followed her as she ran her hand along the fencing, pushing slightly on each panel.

  “You must be able to, because there were skylights up there in the pictures,” she said. “You wouldn’t have skylights if you can’t access them.”

  “When did you see pictures?” I asked, confused.

  “This is it!” The panel had moved against her hand and she eased it forward, creating enough space for us both. She turned her head to grin at me. “Come on.”

  It was completely dark inside the building, and the dusty air tasted and smelled like something left to decay. I stopped by the doorway, ready to let my eyes adjust, when a stupidly bright light lit up right beside me.

  “Fuck!” I closed my eyes instinctively, turning my head. “Thanks for the warning!”

  “Sorry,” Suzanne said, not sounding very sorry. “Better than the dark though, right?”

  I opened my eyes, still shielding them with one hand, and looked over at her. “Is that your phone?”

  “Nope. This is a silly little torch thing I have on my keys. Useful, right?” She sounded pleased with herself. “Ooh, stairs!”

  “Do they look like the kind that will collapse when you’re halfway up them?” I asked, my heart clenched tight by anxiety.

  “I don’t know. I can’t tell from here.”

  How could she be so blasé about this? Didn’t she get a little nervous?

  “This is starting to feel like an episode of Trauma: Life in the E.R.,” I said.

  “Don’t worry.” She managed to sound both sympathetic and amused. “People come to this building all the time.”

  “Definitionally untrue,” I said.

  “Trust me.” She turned away from me, along with the light, and I watched her shadow rise up along the wall. “Come on. We’ll take it really slow.”

  There was a little more natural light once we got to the roof, which was surprisingly (worryingly?) easy to access through an extra set of stairs and a door. The rain was starting to ease off and the clouds had mostly cleared, leaving the stars and a crescent moon in full view. The roof was almost completely flat, with surprisingly low rails around the edge. In the dark I couldn’t make out much of the surface, but I could feel something like gravel, crunching but squelchy with mud.

  “Now what?” I asked, imagining the mulch soaking into my shoes. That would be interesting to explain to my mother.

  Suzanne darted away from me, skipping over the roof as lightly as if
it was solid ground, and peered over the edge. My stomach lurched.

  “It doesn’t seem as high as I expected,” she said cheerfully, her voice carrying easily with the wind. “But a good view, right? You can see most of Brighton. Do you know which way the sun will come up?”

  I took a cautious step, trying not to think about the emptiness beneath my feet. The beams and floorboards left to rot. Stop it, Caddy.

  “East,” I said. Another step.

  “So . . . that way?” She pointed first toward the sea, then turned herself left so she was pointing east.

  I smiled at her back. “Yep, that’s east.”

  “Cool.” Suzanne put her arm back to her side. “So I guess we just wait.” She leaned forward again and I resisted the urge to grab her arm. “Do you think you’d die if you fell?” she asked conversationally.

  “Okay, time to move away from the edge,” I said. My voice sounded a little shrill and she glanced over her shoulder at me, flashing a grin.

  “Would you rather I stayed in the middle?” She took several unnecessarily bouncy leaps into the center of the roof and spun around on the spot. “Hey! It’s raining, and there’s no one around. This is a perfect opportunity.” She opened the umbrella with a dramatic flourish, then began twirling around, raising the umbrella high above her head. “Have you ever seen Singin’ in the Rain?”

  “Oh, God,” I said. “Please don’t.”

  “ ‘What a glorious feeeeeeeling,’ ” she sang, deliberately off-key. “ ‘I’m haaaappy again.’ ”

  I rolled my eyes, smiling, and turned to look out across Brighton. It was a good view. I could see right out to the pier.

  “How did you even know about this place?” I asked, turning back around and taking a few more tentative steps across the roof.

  “Brian,” Suzanne said. She was still moving her feet in some approximation of the steps from Singin’ in the Rain, twirling the umbrella like a fencing foil. “He likes to think he’s a photographer, and he sent me a list of links to buildings he wants to photograph when he visits. Properly visits, I mean. Last weekend doesn’t count.”

  “When’s he coming?” I asked.

  Suzanne lifted the umbrella over her shoulder and began sashaying around with it. “Not sure—it keeps getting postponed. Hopefully soon though.”

  It had finally stopped raining completely, but her performance with the umbrella had left me open to the elements enough that I was pretty drenched. I gathered my wet hair in my hands and scraped it into a temporary ponytail.

  “You know, I don’t really get why you talk about him differently.”

  Suzanne stopped mid-spin and looked at me, the umbrella balanced on her shoulder. “What do you mean?” Her face was suddenly anxious. “Didn’t you like him?”

  “Well, yeah. But that’s not what I meant. That story you told in the car? About him locking his door? That was horrible. I just think . . . Isn’t he just as bad as your parents? He’s older, and you said your dad never hit him. Couldn’t he have done . . . something?”

  Suzanne made a face, then moved closer to me, light on her feet. Her hair was stuck to her face in wet tangles. “When I was ten I fell against a radiator after Dad hit me. It was one of those really old ones—you know, the fat round ones?—and it had a jagged edge. I must have fallen weirdly, because it cut my shoulder really badly. Blood everywhere. Brian tried to clean it and patch it up, but it was too deep. He was barely fifteen at the time. He said I had to go to the hospital, that it would need stitches. He tried to get my dad to drive us, but Dad said no. He’d been drinking anyway, so it probably wouldn’t have been safe.”

  She drew in a slow breath and glanced up at the sky, closing the umbrella. “He tried my mother next. Mum was in one of her moods, when she’d barely get out of bed for weeks at a time, you know? She said no too. But Brian wouldn’t let her off. I don’t know what he said, but eventually she came downstairs and got her keys. She just put a coat on over her pajamas and got in the car. Brian sat in the back with me, holding a towel to my shoulder and testing me on Beatles lyrics to distract me. When we got to the hospital, Mum said she’d wait in the car—”

  “Wait in the car?” I interrupted. “Are you serious?”

  “She could barely talk to us when she was like that. She’d have been useless. Plus, like I said, she was wearing pajamas. Anyway, Brian took me into the hospital and talked to the doctors and told me jokes and held my hand when they did the stitches. He said I’d have a battle scar forever, and when I said I hadn’t been in any battles he told me I was going to be a warrior queen one day.” She paused. “He looked after me. He was the one who’d hug me if I was crying. When he got his driver’s license he used to take me on drives in the evenings if my dad was going off, and we’d listen to music and it was so safe. When my dad told me I was worthless, Brian was the one who’d tell me it wasn’t true.” She looked at me, and even though she’d just told me an unbearably sad story, her eyes were clear. “That’s why I talk about him differently.”

  “Okay,” I said simply.

  But it wasn’t, not really. I still didn’t get it. So he’d hugged her and said she wasn’t worthless. Didn’t those things constitute the bare minimum of what he should have been doing? Her adulation of him seemed to be entirely undeserved. Sure, in comparison to her parents he was a saint. But it wasn’t exactly a high bar.

  “I’m not saying he’s perfect or anything,” she said quickly, her voice a little defensive, answering a question I hadn’t actually asked. “And, I mean, it would have been nice if he’d visited me properly since I moved here. But, you know, he’s got uni and stuff. And, if you’re going by numbers, there are two of my parents, and just one of me, so really it makes more sense for him to go to Reading.”

  “You seemed pretty angry with him,” I said cautiously. “In the car last weekend, I mean.”

  “Oh, that.” She shrugged dismissively, but she’d looked away so I couldn’t see her expression. “I’m sorry you had to see me lose it like that.”

  “No, I didn’t mean it was bad of you,” I said. “I guess I think it’s okay to be angry about that kind of thing. And sad. You know that, right?”

  She looked at me then, but she didn’t say anything for what felt like a long time. “Yeah, I know. I just . . . I don’t want it to affect me like this. I don’t want to be like this.”

  I hesitated, unsure what to say. I was surely unqualified to have this conversation. “What do you mean, ‘like this’? Like hurting?”

  Her hands moved to clutch her elbows in a gesture of self-protection I now recognized. “It’s over. I know that. But it still hurts just as much. I just wish that would go away. What if . . . what if it never does? What if I always feel like this?”

  “Well, it probably makes it worse if you tell yourself you’re not meant to be feeling it,” I said. I didn’t know quite where I was getting that from, but it sounded right so I carried on. “I mean, being hurt by your parents? That’s awful. You’re allowed to feel awful about it.”

  “But, see, it’s not even that.” She breathed in a deep sigh. “It’s not so much that they hurt you; it’s that they don’t care that you’re hurt. That’s the bit that . . . stays.” She made a face, like she thought she wasn’t expressing herself well enough. “I mean, bruises fade. Obviously I remember how it feels to get punched, and that’s completely shit, but the bit I really remember is sitting on the edge of the bath, by myself, trying to clean up my face. And I was in the house with my family, you know? But I was doing it by myself. They just . . . left me to do it by myself.”

  I both understood and didn’t understand what she was saying. What I did know was that I was the wrong person to hear it.

  “You need to talk to someone, Suze.”

  Her voice was soft, fragile. “But talking about it hurts.”

  I felt a wave of a helpless kind of sympathy rise in my throat. “Well, what about Brian? Do you ever talk to him?”

  �
�Yeah, I always used to. But ever since I moved here it’s been different. Like, I can’t pretend that things are the same for the two of us anymore. He’s got a normal life, at uni and everything, and I . . . don’t. And I think he feels like that too. I’m just this crappy burden for him, getting in trouble all the time and whatever. He used to try to help me out when I needed space and stuff, but now he’s all, like, ‘Stop fucking around, what’s wrong with you?’ You know? Like he misses me being this little kid who didn’t realize how bad it actually was. Because you don’t, when you’re a kid. It’s just your normal.” She let out a sudden choke of breath. “God, this makes him sound awful, doesn’t it? He’s not. He’s really not.”

  “You don’t have to defend him.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  He didn’t defend you, I almost say, but I stop myself just in time and choose a less cutting response. “But why hasn’t he visited you?”

  “He helped me move,” she said. “He came with me and Sarah and stayed for a couple of days. I was still pretty bashed up, so I couldn’t really leave the flat. He was a big help.”

  I knew I would regret this. “What do you mean, bashed up?”

  “I . . . Well, I didn’t move out with a hug and kiss.” Her smile was pained. “There was no sunshine; let’s just put it that way.”

  I wanted to know. I didn’t want to know. Despite myself, I tried to remember all the snippets of information she’d revealed over the last few months. Hadn’t she said that Sarah had lived with them for a while? So what had she been doing? There was something about the hospital as well, wasn’t there?

  “Well, it’s good you got out,” I said, stating the obvious because I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Is it?” She turned away from me again, taking a few steps closer to the edge. “Maybe things would have got better. You know, if I’d been better.”

  “It wasn’t anything to do with how good you were,” I said.

  “How do you know? You weren’t there.” She was still facing away from me.

  “I don’t have to have been there to know that.”

  She shook her head. I caught a glimpse of the frustration wrought on her face. “You’re saying that because that’s what you think you have to say. But I know it was me.”