by Matthew Crow
EACH WEEK I SHALL…
Perform an act of kindness for a friend, relative or neighbour.
Because fuck it, why not.
EACH WEEK I SHALL…
Do something I have never done before.
Pleasingly vague.
There’s a saying that madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I don’t know what I expected from my lists as I flicked back and forth between the pages, but I was certain that the sight of it was enough to make anybody crazy. I felt nothing as I stared at the list of activities I had set myself – the achingly dull touchstones of a normal life. And, more to the point, nothing was exactly what I expected to achieve.
It’s unusual to be bored and exhausted all at once, but as I looked down at my life on a page that’s exactly how I felt.
The only slight shiver of excitement came when I reached the back of the book once more.
MY LONG TERM GOAL IS…
To find Sarah Banks.
To my surprise Ross had replied almost immediately to my text. Sometimes, in the flat, the sound of our upstairs neighbours made me feel like I had been buried alive. That afternoon, thoughts of Sarah and Dan were like scorpions that had made their way into my cruel coffin. I needed to get out of the house. I needed to get out of my self. And in Ross I recognised an acquaintance who would be able to fill me in on gossip without the need to ask me if I’m feeling OK and other dumb questions like that. I texted back and within five minutes I was out the door.
I found him sitting on the ground, propped against the barrier of the promenade, holding a cigarette in one hand and feeding scraps of chips to a lost dog with the other. I smiled when I saw him and remembered Sarah’s summation of him.
‘Ross is backwards,’ she’d said warmly one night. We were playing a game whereby we’d list the boys in our school one by one, and either describe the ways in which we would have sex with them, or how we would destroy them completely. Sarah’s disdain for the male population was fierce. She probably had her reasons, but the vitriol was no less shocking. Ross, however, seemed to be a rare chink in her armour.
‘It’s like he got confused, and instead of being embarrassed about what a dickhead he is, he’s embarrassed about the fact that he’s actually a good person. He hides the wrong bits.’
I gently ribbed her for having a weak spot for the gawky troublemaker. Then it dawned on me.
‘You like him, don’t you?’ I was genuinely curious.
She had smiled and then frowned, looking far into the distance.
‘Ross is all right. He knows half the shit I get up to and he still likes me. That takes a lot.’ She sighed sadly, lying back in the cold sand. ‘But if he knew the other half, he’d probably kill me.’
Ross clocked me and stood up quickly, causing the kitten to dart beneath an ice-cream van.
‘Sarah used to do that,’ I said.
For a girl who always seemed to be in such a hurry, I never once saw Sarah pass an animal without stopping to admire it. She’d draw warm purrs from skittish alley cats in the dead of night, running a finger behind their ear, or waylay hungry hounds on a midnight prowl, offering old crisps from the depths of her bag.
‘Do what?’ he asked, blushing at having been caught red handed in an act of kindness. ‘And anyway how would you know?’
‘Here,’ I said, handing Ross a half-drunk bottle of Coke and ignoring his question.
‘It’s flat,’ he said, as he downed the dregs in one go.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
We sat in silence for a moment.
‘Town’s pretty mental right now,’ I noted dumbly as groups of police held micro-conversations on the beach below.
‘You’d know,’ Ross said, and I smiled.
‘Ha ha,’ I said. ‘Sarah liked you, you know?’ Ross stiffened.
‘What did she say?’ he asked, taking me aback with the urgency in his voice.
‘Nothing. God, only good things. She liked you,’ I said, ‘she said you were a good person, that you liked her and that that was no easy task in itself.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Calm down.’
Ross shook his head and looked sadly to the beach below.
‘Yeah well, either way she’s gone. And she’s never coming back.’
As the police made their way from the beach back into the vans in the car park Ross and I skimmed over the type of mindless small talk I’d been craving.
‘Is anyone at yours at the moment?’ he asked eventually, looking up like a lost child.
‘Dad’s home,’ I said, a little too quickly. Ross had been persona non grata at the Flint household since he took it upon himself to initiate a food fight at my sixth birthday party. ‘Why? You want to jump my bones?’
Ross smiled and grimaced.
‘You wish. I need a shower, that’s all.’
My heart sank. Ross’s family arrangement or lack thereof never failed to fascinate me. His dad had never been a feature in his life growing up and by all accounts he’d been only a passing figure in Ross’s mum’s life too. Not that she was the maternal type, preferring to leave Ross in the care of various aunties, uncles and neighbours as she went from one doomed romance to the next.
‘He’s on nights,’ I said. ‘I’ll text you later. You can use the facilities but only if you wash and go. No messing about. He’d have a shit-fit if he found out I’d let you in the house when he was out.’
Ross thought and nodded.
‘Cheers, Claudette.’
I began readying myself to leave. ‘Thanks for the chat, Ross.’
He glared at the horizon like he was challenging the oncoming dusk; daring the dark in a fight he could never win.
‘Didn’t have much choice, did I?’ he said with a shrug.
‘Aren’t you going to ask how I am? Tell me you’re here if I need you?’ I said sarcastically.
‘Fuck off,’ he said shaking his head kindly. ‘I can see you’re fine.’
‘I’m never going to be fine,’ I said with a half-smile.
‘Then I’m never going to waste my time and ask then,’ he said, pulling anther sad roll-up from his pocket and attempting to spark its tip with a dying lighter.
‘Good,’ I said, and flicked his head as I stood up and made my way back across the green. ‘Because I wouldn’t tell you anyway.’
4
The French Resistance
My mum came from Normandy and left me with her name. My dad hails from Tyneside and bequeathed unto me his eczema. Neither heritage added to my overall school experience.
At first I was simply the French girl.
Claudette.
Courgette.
Regret.
Gannet.
My only saving grace was that it wasn’t the easiest word to rhyme. In that respect I fared better than Brady Tucker. But it was still different and foreign, still felt wrong on young, dumb tongues that spat it out – ‘Claudette’ – in a pitch and tone that was an insult in itself.
When I started losing patches of myself in a fine white mist of dead skin, I became ‘Frosty The Snowman’ (wherever she goes the blizzard will blow!)
Then I started scratching, bringing blood weeping to the surface of the cracks like ravines of lava, and I acquired the tag ‘Freddy Krueger’.
By the time the scratching became cutting I was already known as ‘Psycho’.
On my good days I’d convince myself it was a compliment in a roundabout way. It suggested a uniqueness and originality.
On my bad days I was so convinced I had died that the sound of most words fell off me like spit down a window. Abandon hope all ye who insult; for she feels not their intended blow.
I’m not sure which of my parents I have to thank for the crazy in me.
Maybe it was one of the few things Mum left behind after she fled, along with a gap on the road where the car should have been and a hurriedly written apology.
Maybe it was Dad. The way Grandma used to shift her many,
many china figurines throughout the day to mirror the journey of the sun suggested an obsessional streak in that side of the family that went beyond liking things Just So.
Or maybe I was just plain old broken.
I woke up the next morning and the sheets were pink with smears of blood. I’d been scratching in the night and my right arm felt raw and exposed. Even the gentle breeze from my window felt like a sandstorm that would flay me alive.
I smeared a glob of Savlon across my skin and felt it change from cold to scalding in seconds. ‘Can I come in?’ Dad asked from the other side of the door.
He seemed to have a sixth sense for my waking hours. It was like the moment I moved a muscle he knew it and was right there, poised for interaction. I had tried on several occasions to explain to Dad that even when I’m well, I come to morning like a weighted corpse reaches surface. It’s slow and ugly. It’s normally pushing lunchtime before I am ready to even feign civility.
‘Nnnnngh,’ I said as the door opened.
‘Hello love,’ he said, holding a duster, ‘how you feeling?’
‘Tired,’ I said.
‘But it’s morning,’ Dad added.
‘I’m edgy like that,’ I said, sitting up in bed.
‘What would you like for breakfast today?’ he asked. ‘I could make something.’
I thought for a moment; from the floor my Book of Aims stared up expectantly at me.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m going to have breakfast in a café today. I’ll take a book.’
‘Oh,’ Dad said and smiled. ‘… tres chic. Let me know if you want any company then.’
The café was too warm and the queue too long. The menu had changed since I’d been in hospital and the music on the loudspeaker was quick and jaunty. A niggling anxiety grew in my chest. Suddenly the task of breakfast seemed insurmountable so I slipped out and to the benches on the lawns, where I sat with my head between my legs, clawing for breath.
I tried counting to ten.
I made it to five.
I pulled back another long sweet breath and felt myself begin to calm.
I counted to ten.
I breathed out.
I breathed in.
I breathed out.
‘Hello,’ said a voice, interrupting my ritual. ‘Are you OK?’
A woman in a suit, holding a polystyrene cup, had sat beside me while I had been reacquainting myself with basic respiration. I did not know who she was and I did not particularly care to find out.
‘I thought I was going to have to call an ambulance for a second,’ she said as she sipped her tea.
‘I’m fine. I have asthma,’ I said quickly, rather than the truth. Something about panic attacks seemed to fascinate a certain sort of person. Maybe they thought it spoke to a delicate, artistic temperament; a tragic poetry of the lungs. Whatever it was, often it meant they wanted to delve into great detail. Which is the last thing you want when you’re hyperventilating, if ever.
Asthma was a safer bet. Nobody ever wanted to talk about asthma. It was like saying you had stew for dinner. People accepted it and moved on.
‘You just seem a bit out of sorts,’ she said, refusing to drop it.
She smiled and sighed and took another sip from her tea. Blotches of bright-red lipstick thickened around the rim of the cup, as though she was disintegrating slowly from the face down.
‘Must be a weird time, what with that girl disappearing…’ she said. ‘Sarah, was it?’
‘It still is, as far as anybody knows,’ I said and went to stand up.
‘Did you know her?’ the woman asked, throwing her half empty cup into the bin and following me across the links.
‘As much as anyone.’ I shrugged.
‘And what was she like?’
‘She was like a sixteen-year-old girl. I have to go home.’
‘You know we would pay, if you had any stories…’ the lady said, handing me a business card from a newspaper. The thought of giving Sarah’s story away made me feel uneasy. The thought of selling her secrets made my insides roar.
‘Oh, gross,’ I said, picking up my pace. ‘I’m not talking to you.’
‘We’re here to help.’
‘If you wanted to help then you wouldn’t be here,’ I said, trying to shake her off.
‘My name’s Nancy. You’re… Claudette, aren’t you?’
This stopped me in my tracks. There is something about a stranger using your name that makes your blood run cold, even for a split second.
‘How do you know that?’
‘I know everything,’ the woman said with a smile.
‘If that was true then you wouldn’t need these,’ I said, holding up her business card before slipping it into my back pocket.
‘You’ve been off school for a while, haven’t you? Having a little rest.’
‘I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital with bipolar one,’ I said.
‘Crikey, you cut to the chase, don’t you. I was trying to be polite.’
‘Piss off,’ I said, walking away from her, fast.
‘No harm done,’ Nancy called out, ‘I’ll be here. If you ever do want a chat. About anything. Nothing. No detail too small. I’ll be here.’
I ploughed on, her voice receding into the distance.
‘How was your morning constitutional?’ Dad said as I made my way back inside the house and slammed the door behind me.
‘Collecting friends and memories wherever I go.’
‘Classic Claudette,’ Dad said, bringing me into a hug in the middle of the front room. ‘You’re shaking,’ he said, holding me tighter. ‘Did something happen?’
‘I just bumped into someone from school in the café,’ I lied. Something from the back of the flat made a clanking noise and caused my bones to stiffen. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Ah, and there you were thinking your morning couldn’t get any better,’ Dad said.
My stomach dropped.
‘Donna’s in the kitchen. I didn’t know you’d be back so soon. She came to see you and I offered her a cup of tea, and well, you know…’
‘Oh, Dad, no…’ I whispered.
‘I can get rid of her if you like?’ Dad said. ‘I can say you’re not up to it, or I can simply assassinate her. Whichever you feel would cause the least amount of social awkwardness.’
He gave me a proud smile when I told him I’d see her despite my misgivings.
‘I’m promising nothing,’ I said, eager to curb his enthusiasm. ‘And you’d better keep an eye on her through your crosshairs. I may yet signal for rescue.’
‘For you, my girl, anything,’ he said.
We sat in my room mostly in silence.
‘Would you like some music on?’ Donna asked me.
I said not, and that if I did I would put it on myself. Donna looked like she was going to burst into tears, which was not her style.
‘I’m trying,’ she said. ‘This is weird for me too.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and meant it. ‘I really am. It’s not you. It’s just… I’ve had a pretty odd few weeks.’ We both laughed awkwardly.
Donna was the tallest girl in our year and the first to get tits. She was pretty enough to sit with the popular girls, which she did for a while, but too smart to be drawn into the viper pit of their conversations. So for a long time she just sat, mute, at the edge of the table, staring out at the dinner hall longingly, like an owl in a battery farm.
It was only when Mrs Swift separated the popular girls in Biology that Donna was sat next to me and we became fast friends.
‘What was it like? Hospital I mean,’ Donna asked, as she pretended to scan the posters on my wall that she’d seen hundreds of times before
‘It was… helpful,’ I said. ‘I mean, I don’t feel like I want to explode any more. So it worked in that respect. Now I just feel plain old depressed.’
‘Were you frightened?’
‘At times.’
‘Are you… better?’
&
nbsp; ‘For now,’ I said.
‘They tried to give me tablets once,’ she said, ‘after Dad died, when I was off school.’ Donna looked at me hopefully.
‘Donna, don’t.’
‘What?’ she said. ‘I’m just saying, you’re not alone.’
‘God, please Donna, not you too,’ I said, sitting up. ‘I know. OK. I know. But something shitty happened to you and you felt bad about it. I’m not saying it wasn’t awful but it wasn’t some lifelong condition you had. It was a perfectly reasonable human response. What happened to you and what I’m like… it’s not the same.’
‘I was only trying to help,’ she said softly and then hardened. ‘And don’t do that. Don’t make out like you’re the only person this has ever happened to. Why do you always have to be the one?’ she said, angry now. ‘Why does your pain have to be the pain we all worry about? The one we all have to make space for? When most people feel like shit they just get on with it. Life’s hard and it happens to us all, Claudette. You’re nothing special.’
She lay back down.
She was right and I knew it. Having spent four weeks in hospital focused on nobody but myself I was finding it hard to relearn the to-and-fro of life outside. I had to remind myself that not every moment of every day was geared towards me and my recovery; that I had to share the stage with others.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said after a pained minute and Donna shrugged, clearly still pissed off. ‘I missed you,’ I tried eventually.
‘I didn’t miss you,’ she said, still raw but acting a little more indignant than she really was.
‘I’m sorry about what I said. The thing about depression is it makes you self-obsessed,’ I told her. ‘I’m trying.’
‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘very,’ in a waspish, camp voice, mimicking the favourite comeback of our history teacher, Miss Dent.
It made me glad that it had been Donna that visited first, before anybody else. We’d known each other long enough to have a shorthand that could diffuse almost any awkwardness. Certain phrases, even a look if timed just right, could lead us into hysterics that bemused anyone and everyone else. With Donna there was always an off button, always a quick escape from a sticky situation. And I loved her for it.