A couple of hours in, Anna slipped me a note: You asked for it. I wrote: Stop distracting me. Then an elbow in my ribs.
Halfway through a talk, a group of people stood up in front of the stage. The speaker asked questions to which they answered a solemn ‘Yes’. As orchestral music began to play again from the speakers, they filed out through a side door. ‘This is the baptism,’ Anna whispered. I nodded like I understood.
A few minutes later, two men in white T-shirts entered the pool at the end of the stage. One by one, they took hold of each of the ‘baptismal candidates’ and lowered them gently into the water. The audience gave a solemn clap each time. When they lifted the person back up, each baptiser turned to a window at the side of the pool, where a man gave a nod.
‘Who’s that?’ I whispered.
‘He makes sure the person goes completely under. If even a finger is out the water, they have to do it again. Total submersion. There can’t be any doubt.’
I raised an eyebrow and she bit the tip of her finger.
At midday, we sat in dining rooms to eat the meal deals we’d grabbed from the service station. Pete poured tea from a Thermos Jen had made him.
‘How you finding it, Nick? Following along okay?’
‘He does have a degree,’ said Anna. ‘So you don’t need to talk to him like he’s a moron.’
Pete put up his hands. ‘Hope I didn’t cause offence there, Nick.’
I shook my head. ‘You’re fine. There is a lot to take in.’
Anna looked at me with a sad smile, then her gaze went to the window behind. Her expression clouded over. ‘Back in a sec,’ she said, giving my shoulder a light nudge as she went out.
Pete and Jen turned to look through the window and exchanged knowing looks. ‘Young love,’ said Pete to me in a hushed voice, although he can’t himself have been older than twenty-five.
It seemed right for me to turn and look. On the other side of the glass, Anna was talking intently with someone who I assumed was her (ex?) boyfriend. The first thing I noticed was how good-looking he was. I’m talking straight from a magazine: sandy hair that fell exactly where planned, expensive clothes, white teeth. Anna had her back to me, but she stood with her arms folded as he talked, his hands on his hips and an occasional flick of his Robert Redford hair. He seemed upset, and I recognised the look of desire that plagued his face.
I turned away, craving a cigarette.
The door opened, then Anna was by my side.
‘Trouble in paradise?’ said Pete.
‘Ready?’ Anna said to me.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Anywhere but here.’
Anywhere meant walking around the grounds.
When we were out of view of the crowd milling about outside, I took the nicotine patches from my pocket. I rolled up my sleeve and removed the old one, screwing it up into the packet before slapping a fresh one on my skin.
‘Your willpower is impressive,’ said Anna, watching.
‘Give me a few hours and I’ll throw you under a bus,’ I said, fixing my sleeve.
‘I bet you’re regretting the trade-off now.’
‘Will you stop? I’m glad to be here. I’m glad I came.’
We walked around the car park, a respectable distance apart.
‘That thing they did,’ I said after a while. ‘The baptism. What does it mean? I listened to the talk, but being a newbie, I couldn’t follow it all.’
She was quiet for a moment and folded her arms. ‘It’s a dedication that you make as an individual. You promise yourself to God forever and swear to do his will.’
‘Like a christening?’
‘Yes, except we don’t baptise babies. You have to be of an age where you can make such a huge decision, because really, it’s the biggest decision of your life. To commit yourself to the faith.’
‘Have you done it?’
She looked past me into the distance. ‘When I was twelve.’
‘Twelve?’ It came out shriller than I had intended. ‘So they do practise child baptism.’
‘Very funny.’
‘Twelve’s hardly an age you know your own mind.’
She gave a sort of shrug and avoided my eye. ‘I would have had to do it eventually. What’s the difference between twelve and twenty-one?’
‘Nine physical years and probably twenty mental ones.’
Anna frowned and went to punch my arm, but thought better of it. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Twelve is young, and I’ve felt nothing but guilt ever since. It feels at times like it wants more than I’m able to give.’
I knew how this felt. ‘It does seem a huge commitment.’
‘Sorry about Pete,’ she said after a while. ‘I’m not his biggest fan, as you can probably tell.’
‘You’ve met Daz?’
She laughed and played with her hair as we walked.
‘To be honest,’ I said, ‘I’m surprised you’re friends. He’s not someone I would put you with.’
‘I’m not, really. Jen and I were close once. Same age, same congregation. Then she married Pete and we’ve drifted apart. He doesn’t like me either – apparently I’m a bad influence – so there’s no love lost.’
‘Why are you a bad influence?’
‘I’m a sister with opinions.’ She made quotation marks with her fingers and smiled, but her laughter sounded sad. ‘I’m meant to toe the line. Do what I’m told.’
‘You are indeed bursting with your point of view.’
Anna looked surprised. ‘Have you got a problem with it too?’
I shook my head. ‘I like it.’
‘Yes, well, I have to pick and choose who I’m open with. I can indulge that side of myself with you.’
‘What a compliment.’
A blush spread across her face. ‘It is.’
‘Your friend seems super young to get married.’
‘She was seventeen. I know, I know. It must seem insane. But if you want to be with someone, you have no other option.’ She kicked at the ground with her heel. ‘Welcome to my world.’
She looked so lovely standing there. Strong and vulnerable, hard and soft. I thought of the hunger I had seen in his eyes. I knew the damnation.
When I returned from the gents, I found her surrounded by an animated throng of people. Her friends. Redford was there, standing with a group of lads. He gave me a sideways look and made no move towards a handshake or introduction. Anna was laughing at something being whispered in her ear, and she seemed perfectly at ease in their company. I wanted to stand and watch her look so alive, but then one of them saw me and tapped her arm.
Anna’s expression immediately changed. Her eyes shifted towards the floor, her fingers pulled at the ends of her hair. She was embarrassed of me. God, Nick, you idiot. She didn’t want you here. My skin began to itch. This would be a moment I would bookmark for years to come.
She gestured for me to walk over. ‘Everyone, this is Nick.’
‘Hi Nick,’ the girls chanted, looking me up and down. I was a specimen in a jar. Other.
Friendship with the world is enmity with God. They said this a lot throughout the day. Those outside the faith seemed to be lumped together into a body called The World. This was painted as a cruel and terrifying place, where non-believers prowled and looked to bite, and where true love did not exist. She had described me at Dungeness as worldly, and now that I thought of it, even in the moments when I held her close, there was something in her eyes that was fearful.
Birds and fishes aren’t meant to mix, my Nana used to say. One is hunter and the other is prey.
I’d not been home two minutes when her text came through: You survived. Let me make it up to you. Pick you up in an hour?x
I took a deep drag on my cigarette and felt the sweetness of the high coursing through my veins. Sure, I replied.
We went back to Dungeness.
The sun was beginning to set as we drove, the clouds stretching out like fingers, the light spilling
through. Everything was golden. At times it was hard to see the road ahead, but she didn’t open her visor.
‘God, look at that,’ she said, leaning forward in her seat.
I nodded. ‘It’s nice.’
‘Nice is a cup of tea with a slice of cake, or opening an average present. How can something as majestic as that sunset, which you’ll never see again, be “nice”?’
‘You like the sunset, I like the sunset. What does it matter which word I use?’
Anna sank back and fixed her hands at ten-and-two on the wheel. The sun soon set and took our voices with it.
When we reached the beach I got out and put my hands in my pockets against the sharp wind coming off the sea. She stood on the other side of the car, facing the coastline, not speaking. I didn’t know what I was doing there. It felt like everything was unravelling.
I followed as she walked across the stones.
When we reached the sea, she stopped and shivered, and I took off my jacket and put it around her shoulders.
‘I don’t want your jacket.’
‘You’re cold and I’m not. Take it.’
‘I don’t want your jacket,’ she said again.
‘Will you stop being so proud? I’m trying to help and my jacket fixes the problem. I don’t need it.’
‘It’s not the jacket I want, Nick.’ Her voice was quiet now. She made no move to shrug it off from her shoulders but turned her face away.
My name sounded foreign on her tongue. I’d rarely heard her say it, and there was something unsettling in her use of a word so familiar to me. It is strange how in the most intimate relationships, a name becomes pointless and redundant. It’s replaced with another word – Mum, Darling, Dear – formations of letters imbued with something stronger. Few have permission to use these words. Our names are labels for strangers.
But Anna and I had no word for each other. We transcended letters, those man-made things. There was a feeling and an instinct, and it was through this that we connected. But stuff gets missed this way. Loves, lifetimes, ghosts of what could have been. We should mark in bold the important things.
My name on her lips sounded like an ending, and in that moment, I hated it.
‘Sorry if I made you uncomfortable today,’ I said. I’d thought about it all the way home.
‘Why would you think that?’
I shrugged. ‘Maybe coming along was a stupid thing to do.’
I felt Anna look at me, the wind whipping up her hair. Time seemed to lengthen, and I steeled my body for the rejection that was sure to come.
‘I was thirteen the first time I went to a school friend’s house,’ she said. ‘We bunked off and walked back to hers to watch telly. But I spent the whole time staring at the things in her house, the photos on the wall, and I kept thinking, this is what a worldly house looks like. It looked exactly like every other house, but in my mind, it was different.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’ve learned to do that my whole life. Divide everything into two camps. I know the behaviour expected of me in each one. Today there was a fuzzing of the edges, an overlap, and I didn’t know how to be.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I did want you there.’
‘I pushed you into it.’ I threw a stone into the water.
‘I’m glad you came. I am.’ She looked away. ‘And I thought maybe …’
I threw another and it skimmed the surface of the water before sinking. ‘Maybe?’
Anna pulled my jacket tight around her. ‘Why don’t you finish the sentence?’
‘But I don’t know what you’re trying to say.’
She threw back her head. ‘I took you, didn’t I? If I stuck my tongue down your throat, I bet you’d get it then.’
‘Now you’re talking,’ I said, but she didn’t laugh.
‘Maybe that is why people stick their tongues down each other’s throats,’ she said, half to herself. ‘They’re trying to get inside.’
‘I did just have a mint, by the way.’
She looked at me like I was a fucking idiot.
‘I don’t understand you men,’ she said, turning to face the sea. ‘You’re hungry so you eat. You’re thirsty so you drink. When you’re horny, you screw, and when your ears are tired of listening, they close up.’
‘We’re simple creatures.’
‘You’re damned simple. Dinosaurs. All you care about is satisfying your craving and lust, and when you’ve had your fill, you throw what remains away. It’s such an archaic way to be. Fleshly. Like cavemen.’
I remembered Lisa’s words in the club, how Anna had been hurt before, and a warning: If you hurt her, you’ll regret it. My hands pushed deeper into my pockets. I wanted to speak, but the memory of her embarrassment at my presence had jammed itself in my throat. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
Anna turned and looked at me. That dark, wild stare.
‘You don’t? Truly?’
She walked closer and stopped a foot away, the moon illuminating her edges. All I could get was a sense of her.
‘When you see a sunset,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t make you ache. When you see the fading light, golden, the way it hits the trees, it doesn’t make you feel alive, or present, or root you to the ground. Men are obsessed with the physical. They measure strength by their biceps, and when they feel desire, it’s just a stirring in the trousers. You rise and fall, like a traffic signal. Nothing seems to linger.’
‘We’re not all like that.’
‘No?’ She took a breath and looked out towards the lighthouse. ‘So tell me what you are, then. Tell me how you feel. Say it now.’
I watched her.
I wanted to say many things, of how when she brushes my arm, it stuns me, so that I cannot find the words. When she gets up from my bed, I turn and inhale the pillow, and the smell of her pores and skin and hair drug me so that I’m light-headed. When she sits on my lap and drops her head to kiss me and her hair falls down around us, I’m covered with darkness and can no longer see, and I want to stay there forever. These are the things I wanted to tell her. These are the things I would have liked to say.
I shrugged and she looked away.
I was halfway through my shift and the only one in the booth. The projectors were on their final run of the night, and it would soon be time to lace them up again, ready for tomorrow.
I waited beside the first projector scheduled to finish. The screen was packed with people. I loved it up here, controlling things. Playing God.
The sound of the projection room in a multiplex is hard to describe. The air is thick with the noise of machines, whirring with life as film is pulled through the projector so fast that you cannot see it. Now, of course, everything is done by downloads and hard drives. These days, it must be almost silent in the booth, those learned hours of skill replaced by the flick of a switch. Play. Repeat. But that’s not how it used to be. It used to be that you could hardly hear yourself think.
The door to the booth swung open and shut as the film ended. It made no sound in this jungle of mechanical noise.
I watched Anna look up and down the long length of the room before noticing me. I pulled at the cloth tucked into my back pocket and got busy cleaning the machine.
Her silent footsteps were quick.
‘Hey,’ I called from behind the projector. ‘Didn’t know you were on tonight.’
She stopped on the other side of the platters, a frown etched into her face. ‘I’ve just heard …’ She put her fingers in her ears. ‘I’ve just heard you’ve handed in your notice?’
I took my time coming round to her side. It had been a week since her assembly, since I’d realised she was embarrassed of me. I handed the duty manager a resignation letter on my following shift.
‘Why? Why have you done that?’
‘It just feels like the right time.’
‘For what?’
‘I never meant this to be long-term. The job. It was just a transitional thing while I looked for something else. You k
now, the first rung of the ladder I want to climb.’
‘So where are you going?’
I hadn’t even got that far, but said, ‘I’ve got a mate who works for a company in town doing market research – running polls, phoning people for their views, that sort of thing. He says there’s a job going.’
‘So you – someone who never talks – are getting a job that requires you to find out what people really think? That’s a joke, right?’
I smiled as I ran the cloth around the edge of a platter. ‘That’s very good.’
‘But, I …’ She looked down at her hands. ‘I’d get it if you were taking a step up, but market research? Come on. You’re swapping one minimum wage for another.’
‘I like learning new things.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It seems you like to collect new experiences. Like religious assemblies. Is it that thing they say writers do, try stuff out for fun because everything is copy? Will that turn up in a book one day?’ She folded her arms.
‘Why does it matter if I’ve handed in my notice?’
‘Give me a reason for doing it.’
‘Tell me why you care.’
Anna made a frustrated sound through her teeth. ‘Are you ever going to talk? Is this why you took the job up here, to surround yourself with noise and have an excuse not to open your mouth?’
‘Why am I the one who has to talk?’
‘You want it to be me? You want a girl to throw herself at you?’ She shook her head. ‘Well, I can’t do that.’
I could tell she was hurt. I’d known her long enough to recognise her defence mechanisms, how she’d cut with words or make jokes to hide her sadness. She didn’t want the world to see her broken. We were alike in that way.
But we were a lost cause. I knew now I could never share her faith, and I didn’t believe she could ever leave. It’s as natural to me as my arm or foot, she’d said at Dungeness. I don’t know how to separate from it. Lisa’s words still reverberated around my head. What would be the point of saying something now, when there could be no resolution? What would be the point in hurting her more?
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