Someday Find Me

by Nicci Cloke

  ‘All right, Lilah,’ I said, tapping her on the shoulder for a bit until she finally turned round.

  ‘Ooooh, Fitz,’ she goes, all squealy. ‘You’re here! Isn’t it great? Have you met Meg?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s awesome,’ I said, half waving at Meg. ‘Saf about?’

  She looked at me all confused and gurning her chops off and said, ‘Who? OhSafyeahsheiscoursesheissorryforgot! She’supstairsintheotherlounge.’

  A little tiny warning bell went off in my head in between the bass of the music. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she goes. ‘It’s nice up there, allpinkandplinkyplonk-music!’

  The warning bell quadrupled in size and started ringing cheerily against the back of my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘The other lounge is a ket party – you’ve not left Saf with a ready supply of K, have you?’

  She’d stopped listening ages before cos she just nodded and said, ‘IdunnoFitzsorry!’ and then she carried on grunting the beat with grinning Meg, sloshing their mugs of wine about and hugging each other and the people around them loads.

  I gave up and wandered off up the stairs, stepping over people sprawling about, mumbling at each other and trying to focus on each other’s faces. I made for the pink glow at the far end of the landing and pushed the door open, feeling weird and nervous and scared about what I was going to see without knowing why.

  The room felt empty even though it was full. Nobody was DJing, someone had just stuck an iPod on shuffle, but some bald bloke off his head seemed to think he was, listening dead serious to one of the headphones round his thick neck and grinning round at the room really proud of himself. Everyone else was melting into sofas, giggling and stretching themselves out, a leg or a finger at a time, pawing at each other or the air. In the middle of the room were these two guys, one of them I thought I recognised and he might’ve worked with Al but it was hard to tell because they were lying down with happy looks on their faces – well, the one I thought I recognised was face down but the back of his head looked happy anyway. They obviously couldn’t move and that’s why I didn’t do K – apart from this once in the summer holidays when I was a kid – I’ve got a fear of being still. Spike, Alice’s rescued Staffy, was sniffing about them with a bow of tinsel round his neck and this toy in his mouth that Al had bought him a few weeks back. The dog had chewed one end and when it looked up at you with the toy in its mouth the bit sticking out had on it a big cartoon grin so it looked like the mutt was smiling at you. It would’ve been funny but Spike didn’t like being laughed at so you wouldn’t chance it, you just smiled along politely like he was telling you the joke not like he was the butt of it. There he was, trotting around the two blokes, grinning like the Joker and sniffing around, getting his nose right into some unfortunate places. He casually cocked a leg against one but that was okay, I reasoned, because it didn’t look like the smell’d make much difference to him if I’m honest. But then he was looking round with mischief on his cartoon grinning face and he was sizing up their heads and while I was stood leaning against the door and he knew I was watching, and he was glad, he mounted the poor bloke’s face and began humping it, I mean really going at it, and there were a few squeals from the rest of the room and a few people sat staring at the scene like it was one of those toga fellas being eaten by a lion and nobody was moving, even I couldn’t for a minute, his stubby tail bobbing up and down in and out was hypnotising me and I’d only had half a beer. I stared at the tinsel rustling away on his neck and the bloke’s floppy foot, which was rocking back and forth ever so slightly with the movement, and then at all the people around the room staring all transfixed and it all seemed unreal and slow, like things are in a dream. But when Spike leant onto one paw to get a better angle, the spell was broken and I steamed in and grabbed him by his tinsel collar and yanked him off. He dropped the grin and it rolled next to the skullfuckee’s face like a crazy old lady’s false teeth and he looked up at me sadly and then up at my finger pointing to the door and I said, ‘OUT,’ just to really get the point home, and he did slink out, looking longingly back over his shoulder at his new love.

  The room around me went back to melting and pawing and stretching and I finally saw Saffy’s black boots poking out from behind the sofa, so I marched over there and there she was, with her yellow hair sticking out around her face, and it was all short and wrong and I realised someone had cut it as a joke while she was in a state and didn’t know any better and I felt like finding the scissors then and poking whoever it was right in the eyes but there was no time for that. Her fingers were flexing to a beat that wasn’t there any more and her eyes were rolling back in her head. I knelt in front of her and I touched her face gently and said, ‘Saf,’ as quietly as I could, because I didn’t want to scare her, ‘Saf, you idiot, wake up, it’s time to go home.’

  And then her green eyes rolled back into view and she looked at me in confusion and wonder. ‘Fitz?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s me,’ I said, pushing hair out of her eyes, ‘Thought you were hardcore, you numpty.’

  She smiled but it was all weak and pretend and her face looked droopy and she was chewing at her lips, mashing them against her little white teeth. I picked her and her handbag up and she put her hands round my neck and nuzzled into me. By the time I got to the bottom of the stairs her eyes were gone again.

  SAFFY

  Sometimes, if you stare at something for long enough, you can make it into whatever you like. You can do it with the clouds in the sky, you can do it with the Artex on a ceiling, you can do it with shadows on the ground. You can do it with swirls in the snow and ripples in wet sand.

  I stared at myself for years and years and the things I saw never changed.

  As morning came, I lay on the bed looking up at the ceiling. I was waiting patiently to see if pictures would form, willing the lines and swirls to show me a story. I hadn’t been to sleep yet, even though Fitz was flat out in a contagious kind of floppy sleep, warmth and dreams wafting off him into the room. The room looked so glaringly dirty and dusty, mould spots speckling all the walls brown and green. I wondered why we never cleaned more. The skirting-boards were thick with scum and the light fixture had a rust-coloured tidemark around it, left over after a leak from the flat upstairs months before.

  Everything seemed to be running away from me, the longer I looked, as though new layers of dirt and decay were forming right in front of me. I could see mould crawling over the walls, taking over everything. The TV would explode and my laptop would stop working. Quin’s copy of Brideshead would become all bloated and misshapen, pages soft and mildewed. All our clothes would get wet and putrid, even my favourite dress, which lay on a chair from Fitz undressing me the night before. I knew it was getting damp even then, all scrunched up and abandoned.

  I looked away, back to the ceiling, but the dress kept flashing into my mind, brown spots over its lace. It was happening at that second, the fabric drawing moisture out of the air and soaking it up like a gorgeous frothy sponge, and I was going to end up like some poor man’s Miss Havisham in my Miss Selfridge dress and my forgotten flat. I leapt up and grabbed the dress, clutching it to my chest. My head was spinning and the fabric felt far away between my fingers. I slipped it onto a hanger and tucked it carefully between two others in the wardrobe – not between jeans, in case they left a blue stain – and made sure it was hanging down straight so mould couldn’t form in the creases. I squeezed some of the other dresses hanging there, the blue denim pinafore and the pale pink tea dress and the polka-dotted one with the sticky-out skirt, and they felt wet. Everything felt wet suddenly, even my hair and my scalp. And they felt cold, but maybe it was my hands that were cold. I wondered how you could ever tell. How could we ever know whether it was our hands that were cold, or wet, or hot, or dusty, or the thing they were touching? Do we make things happen or do they happen to us? I walked out into the living room, feeling the carpet soggy between my toes.

  I liked silence in the h
ouse sometimes. On days like those, it was a soft silence that you could almost reach out and touch. It was peaceful; the house and I were at peace because he was there, sleeping. Everything was in its place.

  Quin’s duvet was turned back and his pillow still had the oily dip where his head had been. He spent a lot of time away from the flat, but it didn’t matter: the room felt warm and safe even with just his things in it. Quin and I were like two leftover bits of the same puzzle. We fitted together even though we were misfits. I straightened out his sleeping bag and smoothed down the duvet, making his corner nice for him.

  The rest of the room was tidy, everything put away. I stood in the middle and looked around. Though I tried to pull away, the corner kept calling me back.

  The canvases were stacked neatly against the wall, backs to me. The papers and loose sketches were piled carefully underneath the desk. My sketchbooks sat on the desk, big, medium and small fitting one inside another. I sat down in the foldout chair and ran my finger along the edge of each one. I liked the way they lay together like this and looked like a shrinking version of one item, the stages laid out for you to see; the large original to the perfect miniature. I took the small one down and opened it, letting the fat cover flop over on its spirals. Here are the things that lived inside:

  Portrait of a Lady. Picture of Fate Jones torn out of the free paper and taped in. Pencil question mark across left half of page.

  True Love Never Dies. Still-life of a bed of roses with a junkie lying among the flowers – work in progress.

  Outline of arm, three unfinished flowers. Half-page torn out.

  Things I’ll Never Say. Crying child. Half a head of hair, one eye, unshaded lips, outline of nose. Jagged biro line through centre of page.

  Untitled # 1. Blue dots of paint, flicked with the edge of a paintbrush. Work in no progress.

  Untitled # 2. Circle drawn with black kohl. Artist’s intention unknown.

  Stick Man Feels Sad. As described.

  Self-portrait #1. Blank page, faint traces of pink eraser over surface of page.

  As I turned the pages, I felt my skin begin to creep and crawl with all of the feelings that couldn’t get out and swirled half-formed and stormy. I grabbed hold of the pages, tore them out and slammed the notebook against the wall. It slid down all the way and when it reached the carpet it tipped over sheepishly. I grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled that instead. I felt the newly shorn shortness, the uneven patches and the way it brushed my shoulders where before it had trailed down my back, and I remembered it in a rush. How the day before had started and how the party had ended. I started at the start and I thought it all through carefully like I was remembering a dream.

  The silence in the house had been too loud for words that morning. It always was just after he left, as the sound of him loping up the stairs and across the pavement above me faded away. Sometimes there’d be the tinkle and fumble of him dropping his keys or his apron and bending down to pick them up, a quick flash of his thin fingers in the tiny strip of window and then he’d be gone. I had dropped the towel and stepped one foot, two feet naked across the little hall. The carpet had felt thin and cold between my toes, and the hairs on my arms stood up in a thick fuzz. I rubbed them hard to get rid of it and stepped carefully into the bedroom. Everything felt slow and dizzy, as if all the sounds had gone out of the flat with Fitz and I was left trying to balance in an empty room off-kilter and unsteady.

  I’d stood in front of the cracked half of mirror, which was propped against the wall. It had been full-length, once, if you balanced it at the right angle and stood far enough back, but one night when we were drunk and silly and happy and kissing the kind of kisses you can’t stop, when you keep raining kisses like butterflies on each other until you can’t breathe any more, we’d stumbled into it and smashed it right in half. I had been frightened at the time that it was bad luck, that maybe we’d be cursed, but Fitz had said that if you didn’t look in the pieces you were all right. And so I’d sat on the end of the bed as he picked up each of the pieces, looking at the ceiling the whole time and humming, because he always did that when things were good or okay, and there was one piece left, almost a whole half, which wasn’t cracked, so we kept that.

  Looking at it then, alone and quiet, I’d wondered if we had been cursed all along. A draught blew in from the hall and I shivered, trying to shake the thought out. I turned away and went to the wardrobe. I ran the clothes hanging there between my fingers, denims and jumpers and soft dresses. When I looked down, my favourite lacy dress was in my hand. That happened sometimes; I’d told Fitz once that it must like going out, but secretly I wondered if sometimes I made it jump out of the wardrobe just by thinking it.

  I’d pulled the lovely, frothy loveliness of it over my head and wiggled it down. Kneeling back in front of the mirror, I drew on fat lines of black liner without really looking at my face. I stuffed my hair up into a kind of knot and stuck some pins in to hold it up, and then I fluffed at my fringe a bit until it started going static in my fingers and I had to stop. I bounced on the bed a few times, but it wasn’t fun with nobody there, and the creaking of the springs echoed around the room, so I flopped down and lay in a heap of duvet. My phone was hidden in a little coil of the smoky quilt and I picked it up and checked the time. Three thirty. Still two hours before I could go to Lilah’s because she was at work, and nothing left to do.

  I hadn’t wanted to go to Alice’s party all that much. I didn’t even like her really. She was always shouting and burping and talking about sex or shitting. She made me feel or seem shy, which I wasn’t. Always wearing leggings and tops that were too short, so that all you could look at was her crotch, which was perhaps the point. She wore her hair in a tight bun on the top of her head, held up with chopsticks, which made her face look huge. I could never say these things out loud because she was a good friend to Fitz and he loved her. She wanted to fill Hannah’s spot, to support him and care for him when he had suddenly had to become so many things to so many people. And, really, I wanted to be everything to him. And she was in the way.

  I’d sat up and fiddled around in the duvet some more until I found the packet of tobacco and papers. Then I sat on the edge of the mattress and rolled a cigarette in my lap. Alice threw parties all the time, like she was Father Christmas or Hugh Hefner, so this one wasn’t exactly special. But with the quiet house and all the time to wait, I felt full of a weird curling anticipation and baby butterflies started circling in my belly.

  I had sat out on the front step to smoke the cigarette. The concrete was cold on my feet, and rain was slowly colouring the steps dark. It was beautiful rain, the soft misty kind that hangs in the air and sits in your hair in tiny diamonds. I’d looked up at the pavement but there was nobody there, just the occasional swish-splash of a car driving past on the other side of the road. They only ever drove past on that side of the road, out of the city, and never on the other, never on the way in. Sometimes it seemed like the city must be getting empty, all the people leaving and nobody coming to take their place.

  I wondered what Fitz was up to at work. He’d be making up set-lists, probably, bent over an order pad on the bar with a pencil in his hand and his hair falling in his eyes. Filling up the big glass jar of pistachios, green in their pink shells, or the olives, all glossy and black, chunks of garlic and chilli floating in the oil. Stacking the crisps on their shelf, checking there was enough of each bright colour, crackling the foil bags closer together to fit more of them in. Cleaning the pumps for the soft drinks, sticky with sugar and bubbly in the drip tray. Another car drove past up on the street out of sight, leaving a little trail of faint music as it went.

  My cigarette had gone out in the damp fuzz of the rain, so I lit it and lay back, head inside on all the post, wiry doormat tickling my back and legs stretched out in the wet. Smoke drifted upwards and I looked up at the ceiling with a pizza flyer slippery under my head. That day there were no patterns or shapes to be made, just miles of
meringue stretched from corner to corner.

  The cigarette ran out again after a while, and I stood up and wandered into the lounge. I was shivering: it got cold in the flat when it rained, damp patches on the wall seeping through silently. I went over to Quin’s rail and pulled out one of his millions of blazers, a sailor’s one with white piping and braid and stripes on the shoulders. It was too big for me so I rolled up the sleeves and snuggled into it. My favourite blazer was missing; a red velvet one, which was soft like a hug when you put it on. Quin would have been wearing it; it was his favourite too. It was still cold, so I crouched on Quinnie’s sleeping bag and pulled his duvet round me. It smelt like him, of posh cigarettes and hair oil and just a tiny bit sweaty. There was a DVD case on the arm of the sofa with a bit of a line left on it, so I dabbed some and waited and waited for a high.