Someday Find Me
Nicci Cloke
A beautiful debut novel about young love and finding your way.You don’t have to be missing to be lost…It’s a hot summer in the city and the nation is gripped by the disappearance of London student Fate Jones.But 25-year-old Fitz has a different blonde girl on his mind: his beloved girlfriend Saffy is slipping slowly back into the grasp of an eating disorder. Struggling under the weight of her self-doubt and self-hatred, Saffy becomes increasingly lost and Fitz finds himself unable to help. As Saffy’s behaviour grows more dangerous, he does the only thing he can think of – he calls for help and she is taken away.Petrified at the prospect of another stay in Happy Blossoms, a residential treatment centre, Saffy runs. In London, Fitz realises too late that he is the only one who can help her and sets off in a desperate bid to find her. Meanwhile the media’s obsession with the search for Fate Jones intensifies. Her image is everywhere, her last days suddenly public property. But how much does anyone really know about the girl on the poster?‘Someday Find Me’ is a shocking and thought-provoking love story. Told through the charming, funny and anguished voices of the two young lovers, it is a novel about how you find your way when you don’t know who you really are.
Nicci Cloke
Someday Find Me
DEDICATION
To Mum, Dad and Dan, with love
CONTENTS
COVER (#ulink_1755ba48-df08-533d-8782-23e26f9b2c2b)
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
(ALL BEGINNINGS HAVE AN END)
‘LOSING’
FITZ
SAFFY
FITZ
SAFFY
‘LOST’
FITZ
SAFFY
FITZ
SAFFY
A LITTLE EPILOGUE
THANKS AND LOVE TO
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
The sun always shines on our house. It shines all day every day, even when it’s raining and even when it’s dark. We stay up late at night and soak it up, talking for hours and hours about nothing at all. We like to hold hands when we’re finally falling asleep, because if we do, we’ll be together even in our dreams. When we go out we go to the park and walk in circles with people smiling and the sun shining and the world stretching out around us. We sit in the grass and make chains of flowers and then we lie down and look up at the clouds.
People say we’re made for each other and maybe they’re right. It seems like we’ve known each other for ever and life before seems dusty and faded, like old memories that belong to other people. Like we only really began when we found each other. We tell each other our secrets and our fears and everything that happens to us each day. When we’re at work we’re always thinking of each other. We finish each other’s sentences and speak each other’s thoughts. We’re not great minds but we always think alike.
We love to go out and catch a high and dance. We like to put the music up loud and dance together until the sun comes up. We dance on the furniture and we find each other’s fingers and we hold them tight.
We’ve both been in bad places but we don’t look back. Everything in the past has faded far into the shadows and when we think about everything ahead for us together we laugh and dance and sing. And then we look at each other and we smile and it’s just the two of us sitting in the sunshine looking forward.
(ALL BEGINNINGS HAVE AN END)
There are certain rare moments when it is possible (or so it might seem) to leave your body behind. It might be in a moment of pure joy, with love in your heart or a new life in your arms. Or a moment of desperate sadness, with bad news in your ear or a loss weighing heavy on your soul. A moment of boundless passion, of uncontrollable rage, of icy shock. At these moments in these lives, one thing is true. They are moments when it is suddenly irrevocably clear that things can never be the same again; that a feeling or an action has changed the landscape of everything believed and lived in. It is a window out, but there is no way back in.
I watched myself that day, lying helpless on the bed. I watched them bend and lift me, pulling clothes over my cold body. I watched him watching too, from the corner of the room, a bag of my things in his hand. I watched his eyes meet mine, in a moment that stretched on for ever, in a moment when the light between us flickered and died, and then I watched him turn away, tears falling down his face.
‘I’m sorry,’ was all he could say.
‘Losing’
FITZ
I still remember the first night I met Saffy clear as day, like it was yesterday. It was at some knobhead’s party – someone Alice knew or someone she wanted to shag or someone she had shagged was having a bit of a do and she dragged me along and I said yes even though I really didn’t want to. It’s not like I don’t like parties but I’m not exactly the life and soul and I get a bit weird with new people I don’t know and it takes me a few drinks to warm up and have a giggle so it’s not exactly my idea of fun, going off to some posh git’s Notting Hill pad when I know Al’s gonna sack me off the minute this toff’s waved his cravat at her. But she really wanted to go and I love her to bits, as a mate I should stress, so I said yeah and I went along and to be fair to her she did buy me a little bottle of voddy as a thanks, and you gotta hand it to her, she knew how to get me out of a funk cos I was made up with that and swigged it all on the way there.
So I was a bit happier when we got to the place, feeling a bit more limber and not like I was going to spend the whole night crouched in corners like a total leper. Anyway, when we got in the house I was buzzing a bit and she slipped me a couple of lines in the downstairs bog, and I was thinking how I’d given her a bit of a rough time, poor old Al, and so I had a little dance with her and then I went and got her a drink out the kitchen, but I was right after all cos when I got back to the lounge with two beers making my hands cold she was nowhere to be found. So I drank both the beers and stood at the side and watched people dance for a bit, and then I realised I still had Al’s wrap in my pocket so I did a bit more, knowing she wouldn’t mind, and secretly hoping someone would ask for a bit cos bag is quite useful like that in awkward social situations, and then I wondered what to do with myself and I thought I should probably bite the bullet and have a chat to someone instead of standing there like a right plum.
Yeah, that’s when I saw Saf the first time. I’d just stood up off my perch on the windowsill and was daddylonglegsing around looking for someone to chat to and not getting far, they were really twatty this lot and I’m easygoing me but even I didn’t want to chat to any of them. And there she was, leaning up against a bookcase and sipping at a drink instead of talking, up and down the cup was going to her lips, clink-clink-clink with the ice. And I don’t mean it in a wet way or anything but the room did stand still for real, just me and her looking at each other and that was it. We spent the whole night there leant up against the bookshelves, not really saying much just being together being special, her fiddling with the edge of my T-shirt and me twiddling a bit of her lovely yellow hair between my fingers. She was like a cartoon, Saf, big Bambi eyes and loads of big knotted beddish hair all falling down around her. Behind us the rest of the party were yelling out that they were our friends and that we’d never be alone again, and when I looked down at Saffy in her sequinny sparkly top and her little shorts and her biker boots, I did think, You know what, I reckon they might be right. About that last part anyway.
Those days rushed past in a big fizzy blur. I woke up every morning thinking of her little face and the way she laughed, how her eyes creased up and how she held on to her sides with her arms wrapped around herself in a hug, and anyone around would laugh too, because she was catching, she was like happiness in a lovely little bottle, opened up and spilling out. I’d spend all day long wondering if I should call or text her and the best thing was I felt like maybe she was in a room somewhere else in the city, thinking just the exact same thing, just the two of us sat there with our phones in our hands, like the matching bookends my mum had when I was a kid, but with buildings in between us instead of books, just waiting to be stuck back together. I’d go to bed and the last thing I’d think about would be her, and the way her voice would speed up when she was excited, all the words all squeezed together as they flew past you like lovely silver birds. I’d spend all my time thinking about her, and all the time I was with her staring at her, soaking her up and drinking her in and trying to remember exactly how she looked and how she sounded and what she said and the way she stared back at me, because I knew after she left I’d never believe that last bit was true. But it was. She stared at me with her big eyes and I’d feel like I didn’t want to breathe or move a single muscle in case the spell was broken and she looked away. Sometimes she’d touch me, really gently, when I was in the middle of saying something stupid or trying and usually failing to be funny: she’d reach out and stroke my hand or touch my knee and it would be like all my fingers and all my toes wiggled and all the hairs on my arms jumped up and did a little dance.
Not long after we met, she had to go away for a week, on holiday with her family; her parents and her three sisters. She didn’t like her parents much, you could just tell, not by anything she said but just by the way her face changed the tiniest bit without her meaning it to or even noticing when she talked about them. It’s funny the things you see when you’re watching someone, really watching them. The smallest silly things that seem like these amazing secrets. Now I know that it’s the things you miss that fuck it all up. The big fuck-off-in-your-face things that you just don’t notice until it’s too late. Seeing is a funny thing like that – it’s not straightforward like you think when you’re a kid. Sometimes the only things you see are the things you really really want to see.
That week was like the longest week ever invented. Every day seemed like a million days all shoved together and stretching on for ever. We sent messages when we could and I felt like those few words were the only place I could breathe, like I’d open a text on my phone or type one out and send it to her, and I’d take a big gasp of air because that was like popping your head up above the surface when you’re swimming deep down in a dark scary sea. I thought to myself that I’d never be without her again if I could help it, and I guess she must’ve felt the same because the day she came back she asked me to move in with her.
I felt like my head might pop right off with happiness. She said it all shy, like she thought I was going to say no, and in the end I didn’t say anything, I just picked her up and swung her round and round and it seemed like by the time we’d stopped spinning I’d packed up all my things and plonked myself right in her life, like I’d always been there.
Life with Saffy was the best thing in the whole world, like living in the kind of picture you drew when you were a kid of a little square house with smoke swirly-whirling out of the chimney and a girl stick-figure and a boy stick-figure holding hands in the garden. Not that we had a garden, or a house, just a basement flat near King’s Cross with a strip of concrete at the bottom of the stairs off the pavement, but you get the idea. It was like a made-up happy dream that could never be true, except that the very best thing about it was that it was. She pottered about all day in her pretty dresses and her big fluffy socks, making me tea and big fat sandwiches and sewing things and putting up pictures and pretty paper-chain things around the flat, and she’d do this really cute thing when she was doing the washing-up or putting things on a shelf and she’d blow all the blonde hair out of her eyes and it’d go up whoosh and then fall straight back down onto her spiky black lashes.
The whole place was full of things she’d drawn or painted or made and even though I could never let on how properly bowled over by them I was, because she got all embarrassed and shy, I’d sometimes end up just staring at them, just completely done in by them, at how someone I knew and talked to and woke up next to every day could do something so beautiful and special that made you feel something she wanted you to feel, or see a story she wanted to tell you. I didn’t know much about art and she tried to explain them to me properly sometimes but even I could see that there was something big behind them, something real.
Al was pretty knowing about all that stuff and once she came round and saw something Saf had left up to dry and she said it was the best thing she’d seen in a long time and Al wasn’t really one for false compliments, especially seeing as Saffy wasn’t even there to hear her.
And that was how every day was, just chatting and enjoying this tiny space, these three little rooms – bedroom bathroom living room slash kitchen – we lived in and filled up, and forgetting it had ever been any other way. I’d sneak up behind her all the time and give her these big cuddles and growl into her neck even though if I’m honest I’m not really someone who can carry off a growl, and she’d squeal and giggle and it seemed like we were just laughing all the time. I worked the same hours I’d always worked, which was a shedload, but looking back now it pretty much seems like I was never anywhere else, just floating on my Saffy cloud and spending hours and hours cuddling or dancing or chatting or walking through the park or lying in the grass and looking up at the sky.
You can’t cuddle in parks for ever and we all know that. Sooner or later it’s going to rain or get dark or you’re going to sit in dog poo or get stung by a bee. Even when the sun’s shining on you you’ll get burnt if you try and stay there too long. But with me and Saffy, it seemed like time stopped if we wanted it to, and if we wanted to stay for ever and ever in the park staring up at the sky or lying flat on our backs on the floor in our lounge talking about the silliest things anyone could think of, we could.
I was thinking about those first weeks that night, sitting in my chair with the lappy in front of me, looking at the horses. Lovely smells were coming out of the kitchen, and lovely little Saffy singsong notes as she hummed away at the hob, stirring things and poking things and pouring things. One of her favourite things was cooking, sometimes for the three of us, me and her, and her best mate Quinton, who lived with us too, but most times just the two of us, all special even on weeknights. Quin had gone out, but he was always out, a proper social butterfly was what my mum would’ve called him.
I could hear her behind me at the counter, cooking away, singing a few lines of a song as she turned off the hob and opened the oven and took down plates and ladled stuff and spooned stuff and sprinkled stuff, and I thought to myself how home wasn’t a place, it was a person, and wherever that person was everything could feel okay and warm and magic. In she came then, my little Saffylicious, with a plate as big as her head held out in front of her and a big shiny smile on her lovely face. She shuffled the lappy off to one side and put the plate down and she said, ‘Bon appétit, baby,’ because she was good at everything Saffy, even speaking all kinds of languages. Maybe just French and Spanish, thinking about it, but those plus English is three and that’s a lot by anyone’s standards. And she skipped off to her corner of the sofa because I always sat in my chair to eat and then I’d come over to the sofa and snuggle her up until you could hardly see her for cushions and cuddle.
She turned the volume up on the telly as I got my fork and put a little bit of every yummy thing on the plate all squooshed up on it until it was almost too big to go in my mouth. I hadn’t been watching cos I’d been listening to the racing on the laptop and so it had ended up being on the news, which me and Saf always tried to watch because you’re meant to when you’re a grown-up and living together but we always got bored five minutes in and put cartoons on or whatever girly Next Best Really Ace Model and My Super Amazing Really Expensive Wedding thing Saffy was into that day. I put the fork in my mouth, and my mouth was so full of food it was hard to chew, but it was so tasty it was okay to just swallow it in big lumps.
The lady on the news had on her serious this-isn’t-a-story-about-the-world’s-oldest-milkman-or-the-smallest-kittens-in-history kind of face. Saffy didn’t turn it over; we both put on our grown-up serious faces too and listened.
‘A university student has been reported as missing in the capital today. Fate Jones, nineteen-year-old daughter of businessman Lowen Jones, was last seen leaving a pub in the City on Tuesday evening. Police are treating the disappearance as suspicious, and urge residents who may have any information to come forward.’
They showed a picture of her on the screen then, with a police hotline number underneath in bold. We looked at it for a bit without saying anything, and I stopped trying to chew, even though there was mashed potato falling out between my lips, because it seemed rude somehow, a bit like accidentally skipping or whistling when there’s a funeral driving past you. She was really pretty, but a different kind of pretty from the kind Saffy was. Saffy made people look at her when she walked in the room and listen to every word she said. Fate was pretty like girls in magazines are pretty, a bit shiny, and hair that you knew would go swish whenever she moved and pink cheeks like she went for lots of walks and played netball and hockey. We waited for her face to go away but it seemed to stay there for ever, so after a minute I slurped the potato off my chin and chomped up my mouthful so I could swallow it, and Saf hopped back in her seat and reached out with the clicker and changed the channel.
‘Yay!’ she goes. ‘Top Idol’s on!’
A few days after that, I popped into the casino on my way home after work. Fate Jones was still missing and all the way there I saw her shiny hair and pink cheeks on newsstands and tellies and scrunched up between people’s fingers in greyish print all framed with shouting headlines.
That year Lucky Chips was my casino of choice because you could be as scruffy as you liked and it was nice and dark and you could gamble with 20ps on some of the tables. It was full of a certain type of people most of the time so it felt a bit like a secret club for hairy and messy people with spare 20ps who smelt a bit of booze, a bit of fags and not a whole lot of soap or showering, generally speaking. The casino was the main bit, with the manky old tables in the middle of the floor and the fruities all lined up along the sides, and then in one corner was the bar, which only had plastic cups and cans of beer and boxes of wine, and then in the other was a Chinese takeaway slash chicken-and-chips shop without much in the way of ventilation so big clouds of greasy smoke tended to hang around in the air the whole time. Around the balcony along the top were three or four karaoke booths, which I’d never been in even though I was partial to a little singsong now and again, but regardless, I was pretty sure it wasn’t just karaoke that went on in them most of the time.
It was just starting to get busy that time of the evening, lots of people in suits who’d popped in on the way home from work for a flutter or a spot of special karaoke if you catch my drift. There were some students piling into one of the booths and I guessed they probably were actually going to do karaoke and soon enough you’d be able to hear them all bouncing up and down on the sofas and singing the words wrong, even though they had them on the screen for you. I went and sat at an empty spot on one of the tables and changed a couple of quid to chips. I watched the cards being turned over and the chips being raked in and it was nice to just watch and listen and not have to think just for a bit. Looking back now it’s easy to see I was beginning to have the tickly prickly feeling at the bottom of my belly that things weren’t quite how they should be and so maybe that was why I was finding myself in Lucky Chips or on the lappy more and more. I learnt a long time ago that when you’re winning or waiting to win – and you can wait for ages and ages but if you still reckon it will happen one day someday then that’s still all right – any tickly prickly feelings go away. Because everything can change on a gamble, even if it’s made with your feet sticking to the sludgy carpet or with a bloke dribbling on your shoe. Magic’s everywhere if you take a chance on it, and only people who live in the too-late hours in the grimmest of gambling joints know this for sure. Your whole life is waiting for you on the stickiest cards or on the last creaky spin of a wheel. And for me it was like Saffy was too, like a tiny Borrower-size Saffy was peeking out from behind the stacks of chips under the dirty glass in front of the croupier, or just perched on the roulette wheel on black number 7 with her little legs crossed under her, grinning up at me with all her long hair whirling up as the wheel spun round and round. And I knew that one day I’d win and I could bundle up my little beauty in money and love and lovely things and we could stay happy for ever and ever. And that for sure was worth a little flutter on.
Thing was, money wasn’t exactly lying about ready for fluttering. Saffy was studying for her degree so she got a bit of a loan and she still worked at a clothes shop at weekends and on her days off when she could and I kept taking as many extra shifts in the bar as I could, sometimes splits all week. But with the rent and bills and everything, we didn’t have much spare for gambling on dreams. And more and more Saffy was wanting us to use what we had left over to snuffle up our noses. It’s not like I didn’t enjoy a bit of a buzz every now and again, or all the time when we first got together, when it was all highs and woahs and we could just jabber on at each other for hours and hours and float around on happy wonder. And I felt like a bit of a wet, thinking we should give that a rest, but I was starting to think I’d quite like to snuggle up with her every night and drink big buckets of tea and watch the telly and eat our tea and not wake up with mouths that had been PrittSticked up on the insides and runny noses that hurt your head too much to sniff back up. I just wanted me and Saf to have a real life, you know, something that we could still be doing when we were old and grey and didn’t have big enough lungs to snort up a yummy line of gak. But I did want her to have fun and be happy, more than anything ever. And I wanted to have fun with her. Sometimes I just wanted to burst out laughing, right in the middle of us doing the dishes or making the bed, just crack up chuckling, because I was that happy. She just made all the air sing and everyone dance and it was just by being, just by wandering around the world and not even realising how ace she was.
So I guess that’s why when she sent me a text a minute later as a nine of clubs and a five of hearts were turned over, asking if I fancied picking up on my way home, it didn’t take me long to say yes. And to be fair to her, that’s a good hand to twist on.
It only seemed like a bad idea for about five minutes but for those five minutes I sat there all smug and happy with myself, like I was king of the church or head boy. And then I remembered how it felt, just sitting in the same saggy spot of our shit sofa and chatting away to her with all our half-started conversations crashing into each other and carrying on in each other’s directions, and deciding to rack up each line and looking at each other with that naughty face and being the first to say, Shall we … and seeing the sun coming up at the top of the concrete wall through the tiny window and looking at each other with that same naughty face and saying, Oops, but just not caring because we were in a tiny bubble of wonder, where you can talk about everything all at once and still have so much more that there just isn’t time to say. So even before my chips had run out I’d started standing up off my stool and looking for Alice’s number on my phone. Her bloke – who was the same guy she’d sacked me off for on that very first party night, as it goes, so I guess you can’t bear a grudge – had started dabbling in dealing, so I sent her a text asking if I could pick up and I got my stuff and shoved the last couple of sticky-chip-fat Lucky Chips chips in my pocket and I walked towards the door.
It’s always a bit confusing, seeing that little rectangle of daylight through the glass in Lucky Chips’s doors when you feel like it’s been nighttime for about a million years, but that’s just the magic of casinos – they have all sorts of tricks for you, like having no windows and making the carpets all swirly-whirly so that you can’t see your chips if you drop ’em and you can’t see the sick you’re walking in and so on and so forth. But I blinked my mole eyes at the light and then I made it out and I walked slow waiting for Alice to text me so I could have a little diversion round there to pick up a present for the Safster.
Across the road and down a bit from Lucky Chips was a concrete square with a couple of bus stops around the edges and concrete blocks as benches in the middle and a big screen that showed the news to the pigeons and the crisps packets which were scuttling around and to the two people waiting at opposite stops where I’d never seen a bus stop ever. Up on the screen Fate Jones was having a little flick of her hair and the newsreader was telling us that it was three days now and she was still missing. I felt a bit shit actually, looking up at her and wondering what had happened to her. From what they were saying, her parents were proper nice folks, well off but into charity and all of that, nice little sister and a boyfriend who loved her. I stopped and watched for a bit, waiting for the jumpy buzz of my phone in my pocket. They were doing a video-link interview with a police bloke, who was still asking people who’d been around that night to come forward. She’d been at a pub quiz at her local, the same one she went to each week with the same group of mates, only this time round she’d left early, on her tod, because she was feeling a bit dodgy. Nobody had seen her since. It made you think about how it’d feel to be one of the mates, and whether or not you’d have been different and left with her and got her home okay, or whether you’d have just taken a chance because it was the same place you went every week and things that are the same feel safe.
My phone was buzzing in my pocket and it was time to chip off. I looked up at Fate Jones’s fluttery hair and I had a little secret thought, which said, Hope you’re all right, chick, and then I scarpered off to Alice’s.
It got to Friday, with the happy end-of-the-week feeling bursting out of both of us and we decided to have a couple of people round. We went through phases, me and Saffy, where sometimes we just wanted to live under a duvet for as many hours as we could stretch a weekend into, and sometimes we wanted to let everyone we loved into our little bubble, the more the merrier. So Alice and her bloke came round, and Saffy’s friend Delilah and my mate Eddie and his housemate Weird Brian, who wasn’t all that weird turns out but it was quite a catchy nickname so it had stuck. We were all standing around the kitchen even though there was the sofa and the chair and Quin’s duvet to sit on, because that’s always what happens at parties, it’s like there’s a magical magnet in a kitchen. Although it might be a bit to do with being closer to the booze, thinking about it. I’d set my decks up on the bit of the counter nearest the lounge – and furthest away from the sink and the drinks – and kept going over to have a little fiddle. Weird Brian was licking his lips and looking at Lilah’s boobs, which if I’m honest we all were a bit because sometimes you just can’t help it when you’re trying to talk about Top Idol or music or the weather and they’re just there all boobylicious. I flicked through some of the plastic wallets of songs I had stacked up and stopped listening to the conversation while I tried to remember what kind of music each person liked best.
Alice came over and started looking through my new records and bopping her head along to the music. She’d tied this spotty scarf round her hair and had big round red earrings in. She was looking really nice and Al always looked nicest when she was happy so I smiled a little smile to myself and gave her a squeeze with one arm. She grinned up at me.
‘How’s it going, love?’
I changed the song with my other hand and took the headphones off my neck. ‘Good, yeah, Al. Everything good with you?’
‘Oh, yeah.’ She winked over at her bloke and I tried for about the millionth time to remember what his name was. I’d met him loads of times and got on fine with him but his name was one of those things that never stuck in my head, which is a bit like a sieve as my mum used to tell me all the time. She looked back at me and it was like she was going to say something then changed her mind and took a sip of her beer instead. ‘Everything all right with Saffy?’ she said, as she swallowed.
I looked over at Saf. She had a big pretend daisy tucked behind her ear, and this floaty pink dress on with tiny flowers dancing about all over it. She looked gorgeous-fantastic and she was laughing at something Eddie had said. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Everything’s great.’
A bit later we were chomping on the big bag of crisps Al had brought round and talking about whether we’d rather be Richard or Judy. It turned out that on balance both had pros and cons and so it was quite a tough choice. Then there was that little break in the chat that you get sometimes when everyone’s just finished laughing and nobody says anything for a minute or two and you all kind of go aaah and look at your feet.
‘So,’ Weird Brian said after a bit, ‘what do we reckon’s going to happen with this Fate Jones thing?’
You see what I mean? He was a bit weird. Not really party chat, is it?
‘Horrible, it is,’ Al said. ‘I feel so bad for her parents.’
‘Rich though, aren’t they?’ Eddie said, like that was okay then, because Eddie was a bit like that, always thinking bad about people. ‘Must be something to it.’
‘Ransom, you mean?’ Saffy said, looking all thoughtful and clever like always.
‘Yeah, yeah, that’s the word,’ Eddie said, getting into it then. ‘I reckon someone’ll send them a note soon, you know, with all the letters cut out of newspapers and magazines and that. And if they pay up, they’ll get her back.’
We all thought about that.
‘It might be like that girl a few years ago, remember?’ Al’s bloke said. ‘You know, the one who was kept prisoner for years and years and fell in love with the bloke in the end?’
‘Stockholm syndrome,’ Weird Brian said, and I thought, I bet he watches all those true-crime programmes in the middle of the night, definitely his thing.
‘Nah,’ Lilah said. ‘Cos they’re always little girls, aren’t they, and then they don’t know any different. She’s grown-up. I reckon it’s just another normal horrible thing, some randomer off the street mugged her or whatever.’
Luckily she didn’t go into what ‘whatever’ meant because, fair enough, news and current affairs and that are party talk if you’re that way inclined but as far as I was concerned rape and murder aren’t all that suitable for a social atmosphere and I was feeling a bit shifty on my feet with the turn of events. I wanted to ask everyone whether they’d rather be Ant or Dec but now it seemed all inappropriate.
‘I mean,’ she said, ‘I don’t really get why it’s on the news all the time. It must happen, like, every day to loads of people. What’s the fuss?’
‘I’m telling you,’ Eddie said, even though he hadn’t, ‘it’s cos they’re posh and important and la-di-da!’
Lilah took another swig of her wine and nodded a bit too hard. ‘AND white.’
There’s not much you can say to that without falling into a big hole of awkward and so Al piped up and changed the subject a bit. ‘You seen those new billboards everywhere? The moving ones? Must have cost a mint.’
I went and turned up the music a bit and Lilah started dancing. The night turned back into little pockets of chat instead of one big circle, and Al started dancing too, a bottle of wine under one arm and her headscarf coming loose and falling in her eyes when she laughed.
I was halfway in the fridge getting beers out of the back and noticing how mouldy the cheese was when I heard her.
‘Dave,’ she said, which was Al’s bloke’s name and Saffy never had a problem remembering it, ‘got any bag?’
There was a bit of a pause and my breath puffed out all frosty.
‘No, mate,’ he said. ‘Meant to say – can we settle up tonight?’
‘Oh, shit, I forgot all about that! So sorry, hun – I get paid next Thursday, can I drop it round then for you?’ Her voice sounded all sweet and singsong, like little birds and bunnies might hop through the door any second and start pouring drinks and emptying ashtrays for her.
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘Thanks for reminding me – don’t let me forget again!’
With that she floated off to dance with Lilah and I came back out, bumping my head on the shelf on the way.
A while later I rolled a ciggie and went out to the front step. It was fine to smoke in the house and we did it all the time, but Lilah’s singing was getting a bit much and Weird Brian kept trying to talk to me about the girl who lived across the road from him, but mostly I went out because I thought Saffy was there because she’d disappeared. So I ducked out and found the front door open but out on the concrete no Saffy. I lit my cig and craned my neck to look up at the pavement to see where she’d gone. My heart did a little skippity-skip to the beat, but as my first drag was filling up the last pink bits of my lungs, I heard her tippytoe footsteps along the concrete and then she was at the top of the stairs like a miracle or a dream.
‘Hey, beautiful,’ she said, and her hair was all lit up from behind by the orange streetlight like an angel’s.
‘Hello, lovely,’ I said, and she skipped down the stairs and hopped off the last one to stand next to me. ‘Where you been?’
‘To get us a little something,’ she said, and she waved a baggy between her tiny fingers, catching the same orange light like it was glowing from inside or on fire.
I was about to ask her where she’d got it and how she’d paid for it and to tell her that everyone was going to make a move soon, but just as I looked down at her smiling face and opened my mouth, the door burst open and Weird Brian came strolling out, followed by Dave carrying Alice in his arms and then Lilah with her arm round Eddie’s neck.
‘Sorry, guys,’ Dave said, hitching up Al’s head where it was dangling over his elbow. ‘Ally was sick in your sink. Better get her home.’
‘No worries.’ We both nodded. ‘See you, guys.’
They bobbled off up the steps and their chit-chatter faded into the dark as they walked away.
‘Oh, well,’ Saf said. ‘More for me and you, baby.’
Her nails were painted dark dark inky-pen-blue and they drew beautiful patterns all over my arms and round my cheeks and down my neck. ‘I love you,’ she said, right into the middle of my ear, and the words swirled all round my brain and made everything inside me glowing and bright.
The next day while I was clinking all the empty bottles about in a binbag, I listened to the radio where everyone was still talking about Fate Jones. It had been longer than a week by then and all kinds of characters were sneaking out of the woodwork to talk about her and how sad it was. So far I’d heard from her primary-school teacher, the bloke who drove the bus she got to work, the old girl who lived three doors down from her mum and dad, and the busker who sang Beatles songs outside her university library. It wasn’t exactly stirring stuff. Simon Cowell had apparently said that all the Top Idol contestants would wear Fate Jones T-shirts on that night’s show. Which was nice. Even though it was really bad that she was gone, it kind of made you feel a bit warm in the heart, seeing how everybody wanted to help. Made you feel a bit happier about people, in a funny way, because even though there were baddies who might or mightn’t have done something to this blonde clever girl who volunteered at an animal shelter in her spare time and taught little kids ballet, there were a million other people in the world who were good and would look out for her. It somehow made the odds seem a bit fairer.
Once all the bottles were picked up, I put the bag outside the front door and wandered back in. I stood in the doorway to the lounge and looked about for a bit with my hands on my hips like I was about to do something important but I didn’t know what it was yet. The radio had started playing music again and it was a bit lonely without all the sad and worried voices chatting out of it, but it was quite dancy music so on the plus side it did make you feel like doing something. Saffy was out at uni in the library and I knew she would be for ages. She was really near the end of her course and so she had loads of work to do that she needed a lot of space for. And that’s what made me think.
I went over to the corner where the telly was, and I stood there for a bit with my hands on my hips again. I pulled the telly over to the middle of the wall and scuffed away the dented square on the dodgy carpet. I rolled Quin’s duvet up a bit and moved it more behind the sofa. I knew he’d understand, he was just that type of bloke. He hadn’t ever complained about having to kip on the floor or about people dancing around him half the time when he was trying to get an early night. He hadn’t been about that much of late and I knew Saffy was probably missing him. He’d been there for her through things I didn’t really understand, things she’d never told me about, about her illness and the place they’d sent her. For ages and ages it had seemed like it was nothing, just something she occasionally accidentally got close to mentioning and then speedily steered off in another direction so I figured it was just all in the past and didn’t matter any more. It had been Quin who sat me down once, when Saf was out at work, and said to me, ‘William,’ cos he always called me William, just him and my mum really, ‘I think you should probably know a bit about Saffy’s illness even though she probably won’t ever tell you,’ and I’d said okay, not sure what to expect, and he’d made me a cup of tea and explained how bad it had got when she was younger and about the place her parents had sent her and how that was why it was really important that we took care of her and kept her out of that dark space she’d been swallowed by before. And I’d nodded and agreed and we never mentioned to her that we’d had the little chat and after a few more months of everything being fine had passed I started forgetting myself because I knew Saffy couldn’t go back there now, not when she had me and this little flat of love and light to live in. Regardless, even though that was all in the past and we didn’t need to talk about it, having Quin around was important. I knew that and I made a note to myself to organise a night in, just the three of us, when Quin wasn’t out at one of his parties or on a date or logged on to Grindr.
I went into our bedroom and I got the little table that was folded up behind the wardrobe and took it back in with me. I set it up and put a folded-up bit of paper under the wobbly leg and gave the dusty top a brush with my sleeve. I’d had this mad idea to set up Saffy a little work station, so she could get all her stuff done properly. She always ended up spread across the floor and never being able to get comfortable and I thought she’d be made up to have her own space. I went back into our room and looked about for her easel, which I eventually found under the bed, which did strike me as a bit odd and I did have to think for quite a long while about when the last time I’d seen her use it was, but I shrugged it off and wandered back out with it and set that up too. Then I went back in to get her work, all the big piles of thick white paper and the sketch books and the giant black folder she carried them around in, which was bigger than her almost.
I didn’t mean to look. I was always good at letting Saf get on with things, cos I knew she’d show me when she was ready. I knew I wouldn’t like it if she sat listening to me when I was trying to put a mix together because I’d get all flustered and fiddle things about in the wrong way and it wouldn’t work. But as I was putting the papers all carefully on the desk, I couldn’t help sneaking a peek. No matter how much I got to know her, I never stopped being totally completely blown away by Saffy and how clever and talented she was without even trying. Seeing things she’d made or done made me feel like I was about to zoom through the roof and into upstairs’s flat with all the pride and amazement I felt. She’d been working on this project for ages and ages, spending whole weekends in the library and carting all kinds of things back and forth with her and going off into the little dazes she did when she was thinking of an idea and so I knew it was going to be good and meant a lot to her. So I peeked. Just one sheet at first, and then another. And then one more. And then I was looking through them all, through the sketchbooks and the big sheets and the little sheets, feeling confused and a bit like my feet were sinking very very slowly through the floor. There was nothing there. Some of them had sketches that had been scrubbed through with fat black pen, some had words and ideas on them that had been scratched out with a biro. Lots of them had half-started things in faint ghosty pencil, but you could tell they’d never get finished with real lines and colours. All the other pages were empty. There was nothing there.
She was at it again, I knew she was. I tried not to look like I was looking at her, sitting there all bunched up in my massive woolly jumper with just her fingers poking out of the sleeves, pulling at the bit of toast I’d made her that just had a midget nibble out of one corner. But she saw me anyway and she got in a huff, jumping off the sofa with her legs unravelling and speeding off like Fred Flintstone’s – you know, when he’s pedalling along in his car or just running somewhere really fast and they go round in a little circle and make that twiddly noise. Quinton looked up from behind Brideshead Revisited, which was all he ever read, he had a million different copies and DVDs of it, and then looked down all hasty and fiddled with his parting.
It seemed like it had all changed just like that with no warning. There was no sign of lovely pottering Saf any more, there was just sulky-secrets Saf huffing about and pulling at bits of toast. There were dry old lines of coke all over the flat on CD cases, basically my whole last two years’ worth of album purchases: Gui Boratto and Bat for Lashes and LCD Soundsystem all sitting there sadly covered with craggy crumbs that had been forgotten about, and the night before I’d caught her about to rack up on a Brideshead DVD and it was a good job I did, Quin would’ve gone flippin’ spare if it’d been him that walked in. I sat there staring at a bag of apples, pink ones, her favourites, but you’d never have known it cos they were untouched, just sat there going brown and soggy, and pink apples didn’t come cheap, much more pricey than red or green ones and they didn’t taste any different to me but then I figured I was no expert. And that had got me a bit wound up because I didn’t like money being wasted. When I was in a better mood than then, I sometimes laughed at how we’d both spent too much of our lives thinking of pounds; at how Saffy had spent her past trying to lose pounds off her body and how I spent our present trying not to lose pounds on the tables. It’s not so funny now, when I think of what happened next.
There’s me looking at these pissing apples and wondering how to turn them and Saf back pink when Quin gets up off his sleeping bag and stands there tweaking at the creases on his trousers and smoothing down his blazer and his parting with his pudgy fingers.
‘Shall I have a word, Fitz?’ he goes, shuffling from one foot to the other.
‘Do what, mate?’ I said, still a bit distracted by the apples.
‘A word,’ he goes again. ‘You know, about eating.’
‘Oh, right, yeah,’ I said, tearing my eyes away from the bag. ‘I think so. You know best, Q, but she doesn’t seem right.’
‘Yeah,’ he goes. ‘Look, don’t worry about it. Sometimes she just forgets. When she’s stressed, you know.’
‘Okay, thanks, mate.’ I had a swig at my can of Coke and sat up a bit. ‘You off out tonight?’ I asked, because I really wanted to be nice to him all of a sudden because I couldn’t help thinking again that it was lucky we had him around.
‘Yep,’ he goes, big smile, ‘I’m off to this thing at Hector’s club – it’s champagne baths and a pool party. You’ve met Hector, haven’t you?’
I had met Hector as it goes, and it was hard to forget because the bloke was wearing tweed chaps when I’d made his acquaintance. Nice fella actually, bare arse aside. Well, Quin was off then on some spiel and he was rubbing his hands together and then holding them out wide and chortling away to himself, and I was glad I’d tuned out to be honest because who knows what he was describing the length of, you never could be sure with Quin – one minute he’d be telling you he was nipping down the shop for some of the special clove cigarettes he was always puffing, and the next he was on about a party he’d been to where they’d all snorted ket off the host’s cock. He was that kind of kid. It might seem strange that the sort of guy who plonked his tubby little bod in Bolly every weekend spent the rest of his time kipping on a My Little Pony duvet in our front room and looking out for Saffy, but underneath all his frilly shirts and dirty stories I was just properly learning that he had the biggest heart going.
So he toddled off out and I got up and had a quick look around for Saf, just in case she’d heard that little conversation cos that’d be the end of it if she thought we were talking about her. She was in the bathroom in the shower, and that wasn’t all that surprising cos that was where she always ended up, always in there buffing and scrubbing and rinsing until the cows came home. I even bought her a little shower radio for her birthday the year before, this little blue fish that suckered on there and warbled out tunes right next to your ear. It was like the best present she’d ever had, her eyes went all shiny and she stretched right up on tippytoes and gave me the biggest hug in the world. Shot myself in the foot there really, because there was no getting her out after that, songs tinkling out and pennies trickling away down the drain with the suds and the bubbles and the little grainy things from her scrubby stuff, which incidentally is not suitable for manly bits as I learnt the hard way. But at least it was only pennies not pounds trickling away cos she didn’t like her showers too hot like I did, she had them lukewarm so, you know, that was something I guess, if you liked to look for the bright side like I did.
She wouldn’t be out for ages so I wandered into the bedroom and had a bit of a half-arsed tidy-up, pulling the duvet up and picking up the glasses Saffy seemed to collect like a little magpie, and the big pot of salt that always wound up floating around out of place because she said that drinking saltwater was really good for you. I wandered back and stuck them in the sink and I was gonna wash them up but then there was no hot water cos Her Highness was still in the shower, so I just stood at the sink and looked up through the tiny jailhouse window at the top of the wall at all the feet and ankles trekking past. It was almost time for me to go to work and I was glad if I’m honest. Right about then the flat was feeling like it was shrinking, like I’d been looking at Saf’s mardy face and Quin’s side parting for too long and maybe the outside world had ended and there was nothing except us left in this flat and outside there was just people’s zombie legs wandering around, just stubs that ended at the knee marching around with bloody chips of bone sticking out the top and nowhere to go. I grabbed my work shirt off the radiator where it was steaming away happily next to a row of crispy socks and pants and shoved it on over my T-shirt and grabbed my bag off the side.
‘’Bye, Saf,’ I yelled, as I was opening the front door, and the bathroom door opened and she stuck her little blonde head out rubbing at it with a flannel.
‘Off to work,’ I said at normal volume. ‘See you later.’
‘Okay, lovepuff,’ she sang, and she blew me a kiss with her lovely pink lips. ‘Ooh, Fitz,’ she said, hurrying out after me.
‘Yes, babe,’ I said, turning back with one foot up the steps to the pavement. She was standing on the doorstep in her big beach towel hopping from one foot to the other on the cold concrete. ‘It’s Alice’s party tonight, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Have you forgotten?’
‘’Course not,’ I said. ‘I’ll come after work but you go ahead with Lilah if you want, hun, cos I might be a bit late if it’s busy.’
‘Okay.’ She smiled, giving me a little curtsy in her beach-scene beach towel. ‘See you there then, sexpants.’
‘You will,’ I said, skipping up the steps two at a time, and I turned near the top to blow her a kiss but the front door was already shutting.
Work was pants but then it was never exactly my highlight of the day. In general it wasn’t all that bad to be truthful – Cadbury, my boss, was pretty decent and it was usually busy enough that the time whizzed by, and even though it was stressful when you were in the thick of it, it was always nice when you suddenly realised your shift was over just like that. Much better than just sitting there watching the clock, which was what I was doing that day, just watching the hands tick tick round slow as you like while the only two lunchers we had were sat there sliding down the plasticky sofas and staring at the last half of the last bottle of wine they’d ordered. The pub next door was heaving but that was because it was a blokey pub and football was on. I just stood there with an order pad and sketched out some set lists. There’s something lovely about set lists – it’s like maths and art all swirled into one because the timings have to fit and you feel dead clever when you work out how to make two songs go together, when you crack the code and slip the two beats together – like the two bits on a zip – whoosh. And when people tell you something was good you feel like it’s a compliment just to you yourself and nothing to do with the songs at all. Not that many people got to hear my mixes, just sometimes at parties if I managed to shuffle my way behind the deck at the late hours when everyone starts to fidget and stare at the ceiling and think about their real lives and get restless and worried and pick at their faces and wonder how they’re going to get home, and nobody’s really listening then anyway. But I did still carry on doing them, and I’d play them to Saf sometimes, in the middle of the night when we were both magically awake, and she’d listen, lying in bed on her front, wiggling her feet with her face propped on her hands, all blue from the glow off the laptop screen and it was in those secret special moments that I thought, Nothing will ever be as brilliant as this, nobody in the world is as brilliant as her.
Cadbury was out the back and he said he was drawing up rotas but he definitely wasn’t, he was snoozing away at his desk with slinky soul playing softly in the background so we couldn’t hear his bear snores from outside the door. The two chefs were sitting outside on the damp step next to the bins smoking away and getting angry about nothing much at all, but they were just working themselves up ready for the dinner shift because the angrier you are the better chef you are or something, seemed like that’s how it worked anyway. Jenny the little waitress was in the kitchen chopping up lots of leaves for the salad garnishes ready for service, and stopping every five seconds to count the number of blue plasters on her fingers, but you couldn’t blame her really after that one time. So it was just me and the two early-peakers in the corner and I was feeling proper restless, and even trying to work out when the optimum point to drop Soulwax’s Krack was and whether putting that and Green Velvet in one set was being too much of a crowd-pleaser couldn’t keep me busy. Staring sadly out the window I watched the blokes spilling out of O’Phalley’s next door for fags and phone calls and so it must’ve been half-time.
Fate Jones was on the telly again. Her parents kept doing these press conferences with the same two fat coppers either side of them, her mum and her dad and her boyfriend, who was all greasy and spotty and tattooed and not anybody you might think would have such a pretty and giggly girlfriend. All the papers reckoned it was him that had done it so when you watched them on telly you knew that everyone was just staring at him and looking for clues, like a drop of sweat on the forehead or a pulsing vein and if you saw one you knew it would be in all the papers the next day. Some of the news channels had started up twenty-four-hour coverage by then, so you could get interactive and press the button for round-the-clock coverage – you know, press red for news, green for sport, yellow for celebrity and blue for Fate Jones, that kind of thing. There wasn’t all that much to report so it was just live round-the-clock coverage of her parents’ front door, which wasn’t much to look at unless the milkman was popping by or the postie but other than that it was a bit pointless. But you still found yourself watching for ages just in case anything happened. Like you wouldn’t want to miss breaking news so you had to watch all the unbroken news just to be sure. The telly was annoying me that day, though, with just the red door staring out at me and not even a pint of milk on the step for a bit of variety, so I turned it off and looked away.
I had a text on my phone when I had a little sneaky check of it under the bar, and there was still nobody around so I looked at it. It was a picture message from my sister, Hannah. It was of her face cos they’d been having another go at it, I remembered then. It did look a bit better even though it was still all red and tight and scarred and her eye still drooped and gaped in a weird way and it still wouldn’t move with the other, I knew that even though obviously I couldn’t tell just from a photo but they’d told her all along that it would never work properly again and I think she’d just got used to that. Her face probably looked loads better but it was hard to judge when the photo had half the normal side of her face in it, half her nose and half her mouth and half her forehead, all normal pale smooth skin and then the jagged monstery part across her cheek and her eye. You couldn’t see the arm in the picture, just a close-up of her face but that didn’t really matter cos they’d done all they could do with the arm, they’d already told her that, and it didn’t look all that bad when it was in her sleeve; it just wasn’t much good for anything any more, that was all.
It was weird, thinking about how it wasn’t all that long before that all the news had been about the bomb and now it was about Fate Jones. In a weird way I sort of knew how Fate Jones’s family felt, but when it was Han’s face on the screen it was with loads of other people’s pictures too, flashing up as they listed the injuries and even worse the dead, and later as they filmed her and other people attending court to testify and to hear the verdict of the inquest and all the other stuff that dragged on and on long after it was over. Fate Jones was on the screen on her own and that must have been a lot worse. I looked up at her front door again and thought about the people behind it and whether their TV was on and showing the same picture and whether they ever pressed blue for Fate Jones.
Thinking about what it had been like back then and the horrible sadness and worry of it all, I felt terrible thinking Hannah’s face still looked bad and that I hadn’t seen her for a long old time, so I texted her back and said nice things about how good it looked and then I put two kisses instead of my usual one. The lunchers were finally staggering out and they’d have headaches by teatime, I reckoned, but I smiled and waved ’bye and then I went over and started clearing their table.
Well, I was right about being late, that was for sure. Must’ve been after three by the time I finally took the drawer out of the till and shut it in the storeroom and said night to Cadbury. By the time I got to the house I was knackered and I knew I needed to get in the mood quickly or I’d just end up curled in a corner of the sofa all night like a right miserable git. Al was sat on the front step and she looked dead pleased to see me but her whole body was bobbing to the beat and her eyes were like big black marbles and she looked pretty spangled all in all, so I just patted her on the head and carried on up to the front door, leaving her conducting the beat with one finger and smiling at the little moustachioed guy next to her. Inside it was all a bit much for my fragile tired mind. It was just one of those things. I knew if I’d been there from the start I’d have been having a whale of a time cos it was pretty impressive: the whole hall had giant sheets of paper taped up and all of it was covered in doodles and slogans and lyrics and love, and all these different-coloured lights were creeping out from under doors with snatches of bass line and people were milling about looking at each other and the walls happily. But because I was sober and shattered I couldn’t be arsed with it all, really, even though I wanted to be. I felt a bit out of it so I sort of waded through the crowds into the lounge, grabbing a can bobbing in a wastepaper bin on my way past. I caught a glimpse of Delilah stomping about in the corner with a tall brown-haired girl so I headed over, stepping round another girl casually gagging into a plant pot on the way.
‘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 house 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.
Time crawled by, until at last I could escape the emptiness. I left early and walked slowly to cheat it. Delilah’s flat was in a big old building with pretty windows and tall steps leading up to the front door. Every time I climbed them I felt pangs of jealousy. Lilah always told me that from the inside the windows were draughty and there were mice in the basement where the bins went, but as outsiders we can see things only as they seem. Envy was a feeling I collected as a diehard habit so truths like these often fell around me unheard. I pressed the buzzer and shifted the bag with the little bottle of vodka Fitz had bought me from one hand to the other. Molly, Delilah’s flatmate, answered, a blue paisley apron tied around her waist and a pan in one hand, a spoon in the other.
‘Hey, Saf! Come in, come in. You look gorgeous!’
I liked Molly. She was clever and pretty, with round pink cheeks, and she always had nice things to say to everybody. ‘Lilah’s in her room,’ she said, stirring the pot. ‘You want some bolognese?’
I shook my head, touched my stomach. ‘No, thanks, I just ate. Smells amazing.’
She smiled and went back into the kitchen, trailing hot tomato-garlic-wine scent behind her. I walked down the hall, looking at the framed photos on the bright white walls as I went. Lilah’s door was half open, music playing out, so I knocked and opened it at the same time. She was crouched in front of her mirror, straightening her hair and spraying each strand wildly as she went.
‘Hey, gorge,’ she said. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Good,’ I said, sitting down on the end of the bed and taking the bottle out of the bag. ‘How you doing?’ And before she could answer, I added, ‘Glasses?’
We’d sat for a while like that, me with my back against the wall and my legs stretched out on the satin duvet, Lilah kneeling by the mirror, preening and powdering and straightening and shining. She had started seeing a man at work, a client, and she didn’t want her boss to find out.
‘He’s so beautiful, Saf,’ she gushed, her gold eyes widening, her own beauty reflected back in the mirror.
‘I’m happy for you,’ I said, and I was, the vodka warming my heart and making the room pink in the lamplight. I racked up two lines on the cover of a hardback book, but as she turned to look in her huge toolbox of make-up, I snorted one and quickly racked up another.
‘Here,’ I said, as she turned back round. ‘Let’s celebrate.’
I held out the book and the note and she grinned, ‘Little fairy with your pixie dust.’ She scooted forward and knelt at my knees to do the line. I watched the tiny particles zip up her nose as her hair swooshed across the cover. She handed back the note and squeezed my boot. ‘Thanks, baby.’ She went back to the mirror, turning up the music as she passed. She started to sing, humming the beat aloud in her beautiful sparkly voice.
The thing with Lilah was that she started off each night like this. Full of happy, fun and glossy pretty. I’d look at her and feel so ordinary sat on the sides. She was shiny and new and I was growing-out roots and scuffed boots. She looked like the kind of person anything could happen to, like in fairytales and rubbish films, like she might drop her purse in the street and a prince or a footballer would bend to pick it up and fall in love with her. But as the night went on she’d get bored. She’d look around the room and she wouldn’t see anybody she liked or wanted to talk to and she wouldn’t know the music and she’d feel out of place. And her glossy would look too much, too bright in the dark loveliness of the night. And she’d sulk and start to whine, and she’d take her shoes off because her feet hurt, and she’d pull her hair back because it was too hot, and it made me realise that even beautiful people are only beautiful in their own place. Fitz thought that Lilah was a bit up herself, but I knew that she cried herself to sleep sometimes. I knew that she hated her job and I knew that she could never tell her parents about the abortion she had had or the married men she slept with and so I found a bit of her to love.
We did the lines and then we stood up and straightened ourselves out and then we left. Molly was pouring bolognese onto two perfect nests of spaghetti as we passed. There was a man’s shoe poking out from the kitchen table, but the door hid the leg and the body and the face. ‘Who is it?’ I asked Lilah, as we walked down the street, waiting to feel cold through the vodka but staying cosy in its warmth. She shrugged. ‘James, I guess. Someone boring like that.’ To Lilah, anyone without beauty or wealth was boring. It made me cross with her but it also made me feel relieved, because I knew that she couldn’t see the real wonder of Fitz and so he was safely mine.
The streetlights had been starting to come on as the sky turned darker grey, little globes of orange glowing along the long street. I took poppers from my pocket and offered them to Lilah. She shook her head. ‘God, no. What are you – sixteen? You’ll be sick …’ I laughed and put them to my nose anyway. The rest of the road rushed by in a warm lurch, lights brighter and cheeks warm, Lilah chattering away about everything and nothing.
I could feel the bass throbbing through the pavement as we walked up the drive, beating up through my feet and into my heart, leaving me short of breath and anxiously happy. The door was open and we stepped through into the dark. All of the light bulbs had been swapped for the coloured ones you could get in the pound shop, red in the hall. The walls had been covered with giant sheets of plain white paper, which people were already scrawling messages across.
We headed naturally for the kitchen, the place where everybody begins and ends a party. It was bustling busy, people perching on worktops and crowded around talking and reaching for things and filling glasses. The light bulb in the kitchen was green, everything and everybody suddenly seeming as if they were under water. I was already high and happy and didn’t want anything bringing me down, so I floated through without stopping, smiling at people and feeling the music rolling around my head. Alice was at the far end of the kitchen table, crotch glowing in the green light, and she jumped up excitedly and pulled me into her arms, showing me off to the rest of the table, like I was her pet, and then slipped a pill into my hand and danced off.
When we had gone into the lounge the light was dark blue, and people were dancing in a little clot in front of the decks. We danced in the blue dark for a while and I could feel my eyes starting to roll back behind my lids so I took Lilah’s hand and we sat down on the sofa. She was drinking wine slowly from the bottle, watching nobody in particular, and she ran her long fingers through my hair sending shivers over my rushing skin, tight and tiny pearls. My face and my mouth were dry and hot. The beat was pounding in my ears and I couldn’t breathe, like the darkest blue was shrinking in on me and the beat was growing and growing until it would crash down and cover me like a wave. Around me people were changing, shimmering gold glasses appearing over eyes and disappearing again, strange masks looming out of dark corners, faces melting into screams. I closed my eyes but the darkness sent me spinning. I stood, and the carpet lurched underneath me as I hurried out into the angry red of the hall and then into the toilet. I had to peel away a corner of white paper to get into it, and when I shut the door behind me, I could hear squeaky pens scribbling and scrawling messages on the inside of my skull.
The light was a normal greenish yellow in there, and I thought somewhere far inside my head that Alice must have run out of colours. I looked at my face in the mirror. My eyes were black and my skin was greenish yellow too, disappearing into the reflection of the walls and the door. My hair had come loose from its knot and was sticking to my scalp and cheeks like straw, falling limply down on my shoulders, and I pushed it and pulled it, disgusted. The bass pulsed through the door and in my veins, and as I pulled and tugged faster and faster at my hair and face my image blurred in the glass and the light seemed to shiver in its socket. I scraped my hair back and tied it with the band I kept round my wrist, but it was no good. I looked on the shelves and I found a tiny pair of nail scissors and I got hold of the ponytail between my fingers and hacked clean through it, the soft sound of the scissors snipping echoing around me in the pale light. Bleached clumps of fluffy hair fell into the sink like feathers. The sober me was stirring in the back of my head, panicking and fluttering anxiously, but I ignored her, shoved her back down. I left the hair feathers in the sink and pulled the band out so that my hair splayed around me, rough and uneven, and looked at my face for a long time until it stopped being my own and then I went back into the party. I went upstairs where the light was pink, and silvery strains of techno were spilling out and I did not look back.
I sat at my desk, still pulling at the new short chunks of my hair, the sketchbooks lying forgotten around me. I wondered, for the first time since I’d remembered cutting it, what it looked like but I didn’t get up to check. I sat, and I waited for Fitz to wake up.
There are places and rooms where everything can be taken away from you; words and thoughts and strength, until you are a child again, small and adrift. You feel invisible and caught in the headlights all at once. The things you have tried to build up around yourself, the things people have said you can be, fade away in the shadows of others around you. At school you are instantly comparable, instantly assessable. There are suddenly other players in the game you play with yourself.
I looked around the room but there was nothing to see except the tops of bowed heads as people pored over their work, scribbling notes on sketches and leafing through pages torn from magazines, scraps of fabric and glossy photographs. I rolled a pencil slowly back and forth along the table enjoying the dull clatter it made each way. The tutor, John, sat in a chair by the window playing on his phone. He was young, with blondish curls and an earnest enthusiasm for most things. If he’d had a tail, it would always wag. On the board behind him, he’d cheerfully scrawled the number ‘14’ in scarlet. This was the number of days we had left to work on our final pieces, weekends not included, and it glowed against the bright white of the board. The degree show hadn’t meant anything to me when I’d first begun, not like the others, the serious ones like Millie, who’d tagged along to the show each year even though we didn’t have to, making notes and talking to the students who were graduating. But now, with the red numbers on the wall and the feverish energy around the silent room, I felt the pangs of real panic rise. I looked down at the blank page in front of me, and I wondered how I’d ever thought I could do this.
I’m too old to be a student. I’m miles older than everyone else.
He bounces onto the sofa next to me. Don’t be silly, he says, rubbing my back. Only a couple of years. Bet you nobody even knows if you haven’t told them.
I know, though, don’t I?
He ruffles my hair. You’ve come this far, babe. You’re brilliant, Saf. You’re gonna knock their socks off.
You think so?
I know so. Now give us a cuddle.
With my eyes closed, I could see him so clearly and feel his arms around me. But I knew if I tried to open my eyes and draw, he’d disappear like steam, float away out of reach and be gone. With my eyes closed, everything was in its place in my head, the ground was still and the desk was in front of me. I knew if I opened them the buzzing in my head would get louder and everything would start to spin out of control and away from me.
John had got up and was pacing slowly around the room, offering his services, which seemed primarily to be the aforementioned enthusiasm. He stopped to talk to Grant, two seats away.
‘So how will the videos work in the show? You don’t have masses of space, you know.’
‘I’ve got three little plasmas from Hardy’s downtown, on loan. They’ve said they’ll fit them as well. I want them in a diagonal, you know, left to right.’
‘Great, yes.’
‘And I’m adding in this footage, the CCTV, see?’
‘Fate Jones? Great, great. Perfect.’
‘Yeah.’
The sound of patting on the back, footsteps moving on. I didn’t have any electronics in my work. I didn’t know how to make films. I could take photographs. That was all. I had been out the weekend before and taken pictures of things and people who caught my eye without thinking too hard about them. When I looked back through the pictures at home there was shot after shot of people eating, food in their hands and hanging out of their mouths, empty wrappers on the street, pigeons picking at a takeaway, a baby with ice-cream smeared over its face. These things did not sound great or perfect.
I felt the first familiar prickles of anger. It wasn’t fair to move the boundaries, to include videos and CCTV and free TVs. It was the same story but with different rules, different people pulling the strings – I was used to moving my own goalposts, but having someone else to edge them away made my skin begin to crawl and my chest feel tight. Everyone else was filling space so fast there wasn’t time or place enough to fit everything they could do. My pages were blanker than ever.
John was talking to Millie now, little Millie who was a year younger than everyone else because she’d skipped a year of school, and two years younger than most because she hadn’t had a gap year, and four years younger than me because I was backward, Millie with her study in still lives, objects taken from people she’d met in the street, in interesting places, and arranged together and painted to represent a cross-section of modern society in an old style, and John thought that sounded great, great, perfect too. I closed my eyes tighter.
The flat is cold and lonely, so I turn on the radio and start to fill the sink so I can wash up the dirty plates before he gets home. This will make him happy, and as the sink begins to fill with bubbling water, I imagine his dimple and the hair falling in his eyes as he reaches down to cuddle me.
The radio plays old songs, it’s Motown hour, they say, and I hum along as I put the plates on the draining-board. A song comes on that I know. My dad used to sing it to my mum when I was little and she’d get annoyed and flick at him with a tea-towel, even though she wanted to laugh really. It’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ by Marvin Gaye and I begin to sing along.
I hear his voice behind me. He puts his skinny arms round me and we sway along and sing even though we don’t quite know the words, my hands in the soapy water and his cold against my skin.
He turns me round and suds run down the back of his neck as I hold him close and we dance, round and round, in circles. We dance for the whole of Motown hour, with Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Four Tops and the Temptations spilling out of the little radio and him and me dancing round, spinning and clicking our fingers, wiggling and laughing and kissing. When Quin finally comes home he laughs and joins in and the three of us sing until Crazy Bob and Ket Kev next door start knocking on the wall.
John moved past me, invisible me, and began leafing through Gennifer’s sketches of her handmade dress, formed of photographs printed on fabric, painstakingly stitched together. I opened my eyes and looked down at the page in front of me. I knew that I had to be better.
The smallest things can be the biggest jobs, if you let them. Fitz liked to take his time choosing which song to put on, weighing one up against another and fretting about whether people would like it, watching their faces in fear as the first bars began to play. Quin could never choose an outfit to wear each day. He’d spend ages putting things on and then pulling them off, leaving them in tiny piles on the carpet like shed skins. Lilah spent an hour every day straightening her hair, over and over again, tiny strand by tiny strand. My mother found it difficult to tell someone awkward or unpleasant news. You could hear her on the phone, skipping and skirting round what she needed to say, tripping up on the words and jumping out of the way of questions. When my sister seduced her maths teacher in the store cupboard, my mother told everyone for months that he had assaulted her. All of them were just putting off the real thing they had to do; the going outside or the telling of the truth or the letting yourself be seen. They reminded me of my sister Lulu when she was tiny, when she knew that putting your toys away was the thing you did before you went to bed, so she’d put the things back in her toy-box, one by one, then take them out, one by one, and lay them on the floor in neat rows, then start all over again. If you watched her from the doorway, without her noticing, sometimes you’d catch her giggling to herself; maniacally happy that she’d beaten the sequence of things.
Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if we’d all just done the things we were afraid of.
Fear was the feeling knotting my belly that evening, though I didn’t realise it then; a weird creepy feeling all over my skin and crawling in my insides. I was standing by the counter with my hands just floating above the surface, frozen. The sound of Fitz singing in the shower and the water hitting the tiles were the only noises in the flat.
The things were lined up on the counter. They were staring at me.
This was not how it was supposed to be. These things were my routine, my security. I chopped and sliced and created and looked and saw and did not eat, and in this way the world stayed upright and Fitz was happy and I was strong. I looked at the globs of chicken in their purple polystyrene tray, the plastic peeled back. I looked at the knife in my hand. I reached out and took a pepper instead, holding it in my hand like a grenade. I tried to ignore the feeling of its skin against mine, ignore the smell of it, sharp and green. I sliced it, singing a song in my head, wishing the radio was on. When it was done, when I had won, I slid the strips onto a plate and looked again at the chicken. I reached out to pick up the first thin slab. I imagined the feel of it in my hand, the wet it would leave on my fingers, the thin white veins of fat stretched across its pale, flabby flesh. I put my hand down. I put the knife down.
The peppers and the purple tray of chicken went to bed in the bin.
By the time Fitz came out, I had put the telly on and turned off the main light and turned on the lamp. I held out ten pounds, crisp and dry in my hand, safe.
‘I think you deserve a treat,’ I said. ‘Fish and chips? Kebab? Proper pie and mash …?’
His eyes lit up and he looked at it like it was a million pounds. ‘Where’d you get that, lovely?’
‘My mum sent it to me. Think she knows I’m working hard. Here, go on. You deserve it, for looking after me when I’m being such a pain.’
I loved the way his face creased up all the way to his ears when he grinned.
Later, as we sat in front of the soaps with our feet tucked up under each other and our fingers laced up together, I tried not to smell the scent of frying fat on his skin, or feel the grease on his fingers, seeping into the edges of mine. On TV they were showing a special programme, a live show about safety in the city, a woman’s guide to avoiding crime. I leant my head against his shoulder and tried not to breathe.
When you take drugs, things that were once opposites become the same.
Too much = Never enough
Standing still = Spinning around
Feeling at ease with someone you know well = Falling head over heels in love all over again
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