The Tyranny of Lost Things

by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

  ‘Too high,’ I said. ‘Later.’ Josh nodded and she ran off, looking like a photograph of someone’s stylish great aunt.

  ‘She’s something else,’ he said.

  ‘You like her.’

  ‘I do, but not like that. Well, maybe a bit like that, but not really.’

  I raised my eyebrows.

  ‘She’s fragile. You have an urge to protect her, I bet.’

  ‘Lou’s always been one to look after herself. We’ve lived together for two years now, remember. She has her dramas and her crises but ultimately she pulls through.’

  I thought about her face the day she’d come back from that party, and felt annoyed at his dismissiveness, but more so at the notion that he might be right. Lou did have a tendency to embroider and amplify other people’s behaviour towards her. The thoughtless actions of a friend or acquaintance – an offhand remark, an absence of tact, or an innocent mistake – would be deemed an all-out assault on her very personhood, as she would sit there telling you about it in a spiked voice, chain-smoking and tossing her hair and calling them a cunt. The next, she’d be doing lines with them on the coffee table.

  It could be, I thought, that I had been overanxious about her welfare. It was my role, as I saw it, to maintain calm amidst the whims of the more volatile.

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Why? Are you jealous?’ he grinned at me. I held his gaze, then crossed my eyes.

  ‘You think a lot of yourself.’

  ‘Someone has to.’ He handed me another cider. There was a pause in the conversation as we drank. I suspect we were both thinking about the girls he brought home; there had been four or five already that month. You’d see them in the kitchen, in the mornings, sitting at the table as he jovially made them breakfast but no promises. He had a knack for treating women with sympathetic distance. This, he believed, was for their own good when in reality it was entirely for his; ‘here I am sensitively offering you a total absence of any guarantee, because I’m such a nice guy.’

  The week before, I had come out of my room to see him shepherding a girl hastily through the front door of the flat. A beautiful girl, who looked very unhappy, as though she had already caught a glimpse of herself several weeks in the future, checking the screen of her phone for the thousandth time. After she left he turned and dismissed her almost immediately. She was dull, he said, and poor at sex. But all the same I feel an intensely physical envy for that nameless girl and where her lovely hands, her perfect mouth had been. I felt sick about it. At least the physical aspects of it were tolerable. Most tormenting was not the thought of his lips grazing her ear while he moved inside her, but the unknown words he might have whispered while he did it, words conferring a private intimacy that would only ever be known to the two of them. It was agony.

  ‘Why is it that you hardly ever take anyone home?’ he said, with affected innocence.

  ‘To the flat, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. I assume you do, you know . . . shag people.’

  ‘I do. But I tend to go to theirs, or else a hotel.’ I stopped short of saying ‘the park’, or indeed, ‘the occasional stairwell’.

  ‘Mysterious,’ he said. ‘Why? Are you shy? You don’t seem shy, but it is slightly odd.’

  ‘You have more control that way. You’re the one leaving in the morning.’

  ‘Girls usually prefer it the other way, the first time at least. Aren’t you scared when you go back to theirs that they might . . . ?’

  ‘What? Rape me and cut me up into tiny little pieces? Not really. None of them have got the backbone.’ I was joking, but only slightly. The last person I had slept with had been a few days previously, a guy from university who had looked me up to ask me out and, being a Blairite, had suggested a David Miliband lecture at the LSE as the ideal setting for a date. I had gone, because he had a pretty face and was intelligent enough to be tolerable company. He asked me, I suspect, for almost identical reasons. A dropout waitress with mild substance abuse issues would provide him no challenge in the status stakes, so he’d not have to engage in the usual graduate career one-upmanship – one of the main reasons I avoided most of my former classmates. After the lecture I think he hoped that we’d repair to a wine bar where I’d stare up at him, all moon-faced, as he talked about New Labour. Instead, we got shitfaced in the Princess Louise on tequila shots and had some of the most lacklustre, reluctant sex I had ever experienced. It was so patently obvious that our hearts were not in it that when his mouth began to dawdle its way down towards my clitoris I simply grabbed him by the back of the T-shirt, pulled him upwards so that we were face to face, and said the thing every woman says when she can’t face the drabness of incompetent foreplay, which is: ‘I want you inside me.’ I could face a few phlegmatic pokes of his dick but indifferent cunnilingus was another matter altogether. So utterly sexless was our encounter that when, the next morning, he accepted a mug from me with the words, ‘you do make a very good cup of tea’, I felt almost flattered at the compliment.

  Josh was still looking at me when Lou came back from the pond – ‘It’s filthy in there, all slimy. Cold though’ – and flopped down on her towel with a sigh, her eyes closed. Soon she was breathing rhythmically. I worried she might burn and thought abstractedly that perhaps I should wake her, but didn’t. It was the hottest part of the day.

  ‘Swim?’ said Josh, taking off his T-shirt. I looked at his bare arms, strong from the gym and freckled from weeks of summer, and felt such a desperate desire to sleep with him that I thought my knees might buckle when I stood up. I looked at his slim hips and wondered if they would dig into the flesh of my thighs as he moved above me. If they would leave a mark.

  Despite my earlier loss of confidence and the acute feeling that he was watching me carefully, I nodded and pulled my dress over my head. My bikini, which had come free with a magazine and was cheap and flimsy in comparison to Lou’s designer suit, nevertheless had the desired effect. His eyes flickered downwards twice in quick succession.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ I said, and walked briskly towards the wooden gate beyond which the sounds of splashing and laughter drifted towards us.

  ‘C’mon, let’s jump off the jetty,’ said Josh. I thought of my flimsy bikini top and how I would probably lose it, then decided I didn’t care. He grabbed my hand and we took a short run up, then launched ourselves into the muddy coloured water, which filled my eyes and mouth and ears. Grit beneath my tongue.

  ‘It ain’t Biarritz, but it’ll do,’ said Josh, in mock cockney, as he swam in circles. I brushed my wet hair away from my face, and watched his strong shoulders as they moved above the water. My foot grazed the bottom and I felt sludge between my toes, so I kicked them up towards the sky and lay, floating on my back in a Christ-like pose, for several moments.

  It was a little while later, when I twisted my body back to a vertical and began treading water, that I noticed that Josh had moved closer and was staring at me intently. I laughed, and the noise sounded sharp and abrupt even against the oddly muted background noise of boisterous teenagers bombing from the jetty.

  Josh spoke quietly. ‘Come here.’

  I swam towards him. We were about a foot apart when he placed a hand on my face. He looked at me through long eyelashes. I started to count the freckles on his nose as a way of steadying myself, preparing to lean in to kiss him. I was still high. He was brushing drops of water away from my cheeks with his large thumb, which then moved down to graze my lip. I came closer, so that I could almost feel the heat of his breath. He raised his other hand, placed it on my head, and dunked me.

  My mouth, which had been open in preparation for Josh’s tongue, was filled with brown pond water as I sank, and for some reason it didn’t occur to me to close it. Nor did I really feel like going back up there, perhaps because of the embarrassment I felt from having fallen for his trick. But I was running out of air and would have to resurface soon, so to save face I swam several metres underwater until I was near the ladder, then cli
mbed out.

  I sat, legs over the side of the jetty, catching my breath. His face was a blurred pale circle across the water as I inelegantly spat out fluid. It was as I coughed that deep cough that seemed to come from the very depth of my lungs that I saw a flash of red and a memory assaulted me. A little girl with long brown hair, probably aged around four, was being chased along the side of the pond by her father, who was grasping a towel, but it wasn’t the little girl that reminded me of myself: it was the swimming costume she was wearing. Bright scarlet, with a little frilly skirt attached, and covered in small white hearts all over. I had had the same one, I realised, the summer my mother and I ran away. She had bought it for me soon after we arrived, as it became apparent that this summer was to be a scorcher. We bought it in Camden town, and I picked it out myself. It is funny how an object that was once such a part of your life, so treasured and admired, becomes forgotten and insignificant. I had loved that bathing suit. I had worn it in all the padding pools to which she had taken me. I had worn it the time I nearly died.

  This, I had not forgotten. The sensation of almost drowning is not something that slips the mind, though it was not something I spoke about often, mainly for reasons of shame. Because the secret thing about the nearly drowning was that I hadn’t wanted to be saved. After the initial struggle, the gasping for air as my lungs filled with water, the fear in the knowledge I would die, I felt an incredible sense of calm. To horrified onlookers, I was a dying five-year-old face down in a paddling pool in Hackney, but to me, it was like taking a Valium pill. I was floating, beatific, and the last thing I wanted was to be dragged back to life, as I was, brutally and abruptly, and not – this was new – by my mother, but by the same red-headed woman who kept intruding in my thoughts, and whose presence I had hallucinated at the party.

  She had held me, crying on wet concrete, as we both lay prone and shivering by the side of the water.

  ‘You’re all right, pet. You’re ok. I’m here. There, there. I love you.’

  She had been there that summer, I had gathered that much. My blurred recollections of her – playing ring a-ring o‘roses, making daisy chains, teaching me to roll pastry between my palms – evoked a familiar fondness, and I was sure that she had meant something to me at a time when, in light of our running away from our lovely, safe family home, any five-year-old would have felt confused and off kilter.

  Coral had suggested that this woman was now dead, and that Stella was somehow responsible. A strong instinct, the same kind that jumped to my mother’s defence whenever I thought anyone spoke ill of her, urged me that it was probably better not to know. As Coral had said, I was doing all right. But as I sat there, dripping wet and hyperventilating, I vowed that I would not allow Coral’s reticence to prevent me from finding out the truth about my parents. For too long Stella had fobbed me off with opaque, offhand remarks – ‘oh it was all so long ago’ – and – when my questioning became too pointed – veiled threats that my probing would provoke yet another relapse.

  I was so absorbed that I had forgotten completely about Josh, who was now floating beneath me, at toe level, wearing a hangdog look.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It was just a joke.’

  ‘It’s fine. I’m just tired all of a sudden. I want to lie down.’

  ‘Let’s get you home then,’ he said, climbing out and putting his arm around me with a gentle authority that was almost like a brother’s. I knew then that we would.

  Spring 1986

  I’d know those signs anywhere. I’ve seen it time and time again. Back home, you’re an old maid by the time you’re twenty. They used to say Mam had a gift for telling, but by her age, I imagine she’d seen so many girls succumb that it was second nature.

  ‘I was going to tell you,’ Stella says, after she has run to the back door to be sick. She is half-bent, swallowing the cold fresh air. The smell of my boiled egg was what set her off.

  Now we are lying on her and Bryn’s bed, a patchwork quilt crumpled underneath us. Looking at her from this angle, with her smock pulled taut over her belly, I wonder how I didn’t see it sooner. She is pale from the sickness but also vividly, radiantly beautiful, her face brimming with the warmth of her secret. She smells of soap and rose geranium, the bile a sour undernote to the sweetness tugging at my nostrils.

  ‘Are you happy?’ she says, and I smile and kiss her forehead, moving the damp hair away with my hand.

  ‘How could I not be?’ I say. ‘A whole new little person. What could be better?’

  And I am happy, of course I am. They are my friends, I want the world for them. The things that he and I do to each other in bed doesn’t change that. What they are to each other doesn’t change that. Husband and wife, yes, and in a few months, there’ll be a child too. To the outside they are a unit, a family. But we’re all of us a family. We are bigger than the sum of our parts, than personal agendas and petty jealousies. Just look at Stella and the way she has given me her friendship and generosity, allowed me to go into her bed and share her husband without ever saying a word. I know she knows.

  She lets it happen because we all love each other.

  Last time I visited Mam said I’d gone all happy-clappy. But she said it smiling. She knows that I’m better down here. ‘You’re in love,’ she said, nodding at my fleshier figure. ‘It looks good on you.’

  I will love this baby because of who it came from. It may not have my genes but I will love it and care for it as though it were mine too, and I hope the bairn will come to love me, and look to me when it is lost or frightened.

  ‘Have you told Bryn?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m telling him tonight,’ she says. ‘Do you think he will be pleased?’

  ‘Of course he will,’ I say, stroking her hand. ‘Of course he will.’

  Later, I cook a veggie curry for everyone, to celebrate. Stella and Bryn have been upstairs for a long time, and when they come down from the room they are flushed and shiny-eyed.

  ‘Look at her! My clever wife!’ he laughs, after they have announced it to the room and Mikey has opened a bottle of cava, the cork popping so hard it hits the ceiling. Everyone is hugging her, and she stands, smiling in the golden glow of the lamplight, her hand resting on her stomach. She looks like a queen, bright and fecund with promise, laughing as her husband dances around her.

  Coral walks over and puts an arm around my shoulders.

  ‘Such happy news,’ I say. I cannot read her face, and she doesn’t reply, and so we stand there, side by side in silence with our backs to the kitchen counter, my fingers tightly gripping the handle of the wooden spoon as we watch them bask in the joy of a new life.

  Boule

  Weighted boule in green plastic. Manufacturer unknown. 80 mm diameter.

  Morning, and as the dust flitted through the stream of dawn light, in my half-sleep I felt his fingers flutter beneath the seams of my muddied bikini bottoms. I had not changed after returning to the flat – instead we had drunk and smoked more, until we had both collapsed as a tangle into his bed, too wasted for sex but craving that boozy closeness. Now, he was tiptoeing towards it, as I squirmed and let out a heavy series of breaths to let him know that I had woken and was decidedly into the idea. Then: nothing. I must have fallen asleep again, and when I woke for the second time he had gone.

  I took a cool, lengthy shower in an attempt to break the inertia of the morning after, and succeeded to an extent, my hair a freezing sheet against my skin, which bristled with alertness. I had plans. I threw on a floral sundress and stepped outside into the arid fug, making my way down Longhope Crescent and through the streets of terraced houses, stopping to admire the acid green parakeets that congregated noisily in our local trees. Then up the steep hill, past my much-loved atomic sun, to the hospital. I passed groups of pale, nervy smokers on the steps, and entered a clinical-smelling reception area, noting the juxtaposition of the bright framed pictures and the ominous automatic locking systems. Their buzz resembled a tinny drill. Visiting ho
urs had just begun.

  ‘I’m here to see Michael Dunt,’ I said. ‘I phoned last week?’

  ‘Take a seat,’ said the Nigerian nurse, whose name badge read ‘Progress’. I sat, the backs of my thighs sticking to the teal-coloured plastic of the seats, and hummed a tune under my breath. A fan standing on the reception desk oscillated noisily, but the people in the room were silent. A middle-aged white woman with the demeanour of a concerned mother avoided my gaze; a young Afro-Caribbean man who, with his smooth, dimpled cheeks and long eyelashes could have been a grown-up Gabs, tapped his fingers rapidly against the stiff fabric of his jeans. The automatic doors whirred and opened every time a smoker shifted slightly just outside. Somewhere in the distance I heard a guttural sob.

  ‘Come through please,’ said another nurse, sent to fetch me, and, taking me through several secure doors, led me to a closed ward, then, to the left of the nurses’ station, into a common room in which people sat, murmuring, in groups of twos and threes.

  ‘Michael,’ she said. ‘You have a visitor.’

  A huge, brick shithouse of a man with grey, waist-length dreads, whose eyes had been fixed on the flat screen television, turned around to greet me.

  ‘Bleeding hell. For a moment there I thought you were Stella.’

  ‘Hi Michael,’ I said, walking over to shake his hand. ‘I’m Harmony, Stella’s daughter. Like I explained on the phone.’

  ‘I’ll be having none of that gubbins.’ He frowned at my hand and pulled me into a bear hug. ‘And it’s Mikey D, or Dunty, or sometimes Cunty, if the nurses ain’t listening. Or just Mikey.’

  ‘Cool. I’m sorry I don’t really remember you.’

  ‘Why would you? You were tiny last time I saw you.’

  ‘Coral sends her best.’

  ‘How is my favourite sour-faced alchy? Haven’t seen her for time.’

  ‘She seems all right. I moved back in – upstairs. She’s been telling me about the commune.’