Saltwater Page 12

  ‘Sounds lovely, Luce,’ my mother said absently. ‘Are you going to have some tea? There’s chili in the pan.’ I went into the kitchen and helped myself.

  I started eating less, serving myself smaller portions and stopping before I was full. The internet forums I trawled through were concerned with hip-bones and clavicles, and I wanted to give myself the best possible chance of becoming someone different.

  88

  The endless skies are important but all that space can be claustrophobic, too. There is so much of it. After a while, the pinks and purples start to make me feel seasick. It is all too conspicuously beautiful.

  89

  My friend’s dad ran an Italian restaurant and he gave me a weekend waitressing job. I wasn’t allowed to take orders but I ferried pizzas to and from the kitchen and prepared desserts in the tiny back room, where a sullen woman washed hundreds of dishes by hand, night after night.

  My mother bought me a card that said, ‘Congratulations!’

  ‘You’re so independent, Lucy.’ She smiled proudly. ‘I knew you would be.’ I bought a little black dress and old men crinkled when I lugged the heavy dessert board over to their table.

  ‘Is she on offer?’ they asked the waiters, twinkling conspiratorially across the restaurant. I hated serving people from school. I put down their Four-Cheese Specials and Half Pasta Half Chips with burning cheeks, dying to rush out to the back step with the waiters Joe and Sam, where they skived smoking joints and I could have a break from the eyes and the chip grease.

  Francesca was the manager. She had angel wings tattooed across her shoulder blades.

  ‘I like your tattoos,’ I told her when I first started.

  ‘Baby,’ she said. ‘Let me tell you a secret. If you want to get a tattoo, get it somewhere you cannot see it. That way, you will never get sick of it.’ She winked at me and went off to clatter plates.

  One weekend we were rammed. Everyone was sweating and I was doing a good job, rushing plates rapidly from the kitchen without mixing up the orders. I ran into Francesca as she came hurtling around a corner, shiny and breathless.

  ‘Baby!’ she exclaimed, grabbing me by the shoulders. ‘You are banned from that kitchen.’ I looked at her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard. You’re not to go in there any more.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘All of those chefs, they look at you all over with their eyes! All the time! I cannot bear it.’ I reddened.

  ‘But how will I take the food to the tables?’

  ‘Your problem,’ she said, going to attend to something else. Joe laughed softly into my ear.

  ‘Don’t worry about her,’ he said. ‘She’s just jealous.’ I wavered, uncertain. I felt hurt but I couldn’t explain why. Joe shoved a bowl of hot pasta into my hand, scalding my fingers.

  ‘Take this to table two,’ he told me. ‘And how about a drink after work?’

  We were allowed to order pizzas and chips to take home with us after our shift.

  ‘What are you having, Lucy?’ someone shouted from the kitchen when the last customer left in a flurry of garlic and perfume. ‘Chef needs all the orders in now.’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I called, cleaning the tables. Francesca glanced at me.

  ‘You are not eating anything?’

  ‘Not hungry,’ I told her. ‘Ate loads before I came to work.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ she said, breezing into the kitchen to collect her pizza, gold heat seeping through the cardboard.

  90

  My brother spoke a lot of languages. He understood invisible things that I did not. He felt the cold, clear colour of the sky in the mornings and the taste of worry on my mother’s skin. He was fluent in the shapes of strangers’ lips and the particular shudder of the car as it passed over familiar tarmac, but he wasn’t able to express all of the things that he needed to say. As he became used to his cochlear implant, he relied on sign language less and less. He wanted to be part of the hearing world. He wanted to dance to music and to enjoy the delicate nuance of spoken language. He learned the way that putting feelings into words and out into the world could ease the pressure inside, like letting air out of a balloon.

  He went to a school for the deaf but he didn’t identify with the other kids there. He wanted to be hearing, but he wasn’t. He didn’t want to be deaf but he was and so he cut himself off from a world that could have offered him answers. He moved through different cultures speaking different languages, never feeling like he fit into any of them.

  My mother explained that sign language users sometimes think in binary terms.

  ‘You’ve got to explain everything to him, Lucy,’ she told me gently. ‘It’s harder for him to understand meanings that you imply but don’t actually say.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know. All the unsaid stuff. The spaces between things.’

  I started writing all of my thoughts in my journal, staying up late into the night with white heat expanding across my chest. I wrote until I fell asleep and woke in the morning with my notebook rumpled under my duvet and a fresh calm inside of me.

  ‘What comes first, Mam?’ I asked her one morning over toast. ‘Thoughts or words?’ She was rushing around looking for Josh’s exercise books.

  ‘I don’t know, Luce,’ she said, brushing her hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Ask me later, eh? I’m a bit busy at the minute.’ I stared at my toast until the butter disappeared and tried to think a thought without words in it.

  Josh’s frustration at being unable to express himself grew bigger and bigger inside of him. He turned wild. His school didn’t know how to deal with him. It was in York, which was too far for him to come home every night, so he had to stay there during the week. He hated it. Every weekend he brought the entire contents of his bedroom back in his suitcase: his duvet, his clothes, his books and pictures and even his bedside lamp. My mother hated sending him back on a Monday morning, but she didn’t know what else to do.

  She was forever getting phone calls that tore her out of her day and sent her down to collect him. He started fights and smashed things. He poured hot oil out of a window onto someone’s head and claimed he had been making pancakes.

  One night we got a call to say that he had set his room on fire by reading a newspaper in bed, propped up against a lamp. The fire service was called and he had to sleep in a different room for a few days, while they checked his carpet for smoulders.

  Another time he ran away. He was ten years old and full of secrets. Nobody knew where he was. My mother sat by the phone saying prayers, chewing the insides of her cheeks until they bled with worry. They found him in the chip shop down the road, warming his hands against the counter.

  The tension that built up inside of him led to extreme temper tantrums. He flailed around and punched and kicked and spat and bit until he had to be held down so that he wouldn’t injure himself or somebody else. He came home one weekend with bruises flowering across his arms, finger-widths apart, where the care staff had restrained him. My mother put him in the bath and gently soaped the hurt away. I sat on the toilet lid and watched them, feeling a twist in my stomach.

  My mother worried about him so much. She was scared that one day he might do something irreversible. I came home from school full of some kind of classroom drama or ideas for an essay or an art project that involved me hanging upside down from the climbing frame and sketching all of our washing on the line.

  ‘Can we chat about it later, Lucy?’ She frowned, her face taut with worry. ‘I’m going to have to go and get Josh.’ It felt like she was at the opposite end of a very long tunnel and I couldn’t get through to her.

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ I offered.

  ‘No, no. It’s okay. It’s a long journey there and back, and you’ve got school tomorrow.’

  She sped off down the motorway with stern words from Josh’s teachers ringing in her ears and I savoured the silence, drawing and c
hatting online until the inevitable explosion arrived with a banging and slamming of doors. He went into his bedroom and let out his anger, smashing his toys and throwing them down the stairs. My mother and I barricaded ourselves in the kitchen until the outburst was over.

  I knew how he felt. It was as though there were small, sharp springs coiled up inside of him and he needed to scream and scream until everything was gone. Afterwards he curled on the sofa whimpering apologies, while we smoothed out the evening.

  ‘Lovely, lovely Lucy,’ my mother crooned when she was in a nostalgic mood, playing David Gray and cradling a cup of tea in the sitting room. ‘You’re our hope.’

  91

  We dissected frogs in Biology at school and when we got to the hearts all soft and wet I wanted to cry. I shoved mine back into the frog’s body with my fingers, away from the callous eyes of my squealing classmates.

  92

  The man is never still, even for a moment. He is always smoking and texting and driving his car all at once. His whole body trembles.

  ‘Relax,’ I say to him, resting my hands on his shoulders.

  ‘I am,’ he says. I can feel the raw energy beneath his skin.

  93

  Bodies are fragile; fleshy and strange. You slather your legs in cream beneath your silky nightie and I look for your most delicate parts; the creases on your elbows and the skin between your toes. I pull your hairs from the plughole and count them as the water gushes down. I want to remember this imprint of your body when it is mine and no one else’s. I want to hold the small parts of you tightly. I want to save them and thread you back together.

  94

  I go for a walk across the fields. It is windy and the coffee-coloured cows stop to look at me. When I first arrived here I was afraid of the cows, but now they seem impossibly gentle, with their long eyelashes and sad mouths. I call Alex to update him on my recent discoveries.

  ‘I’m so stuck in my head all of the time,’ I tell him. ‘But he is completely in his body. I want to be like that.’

  ‘Maybe he can sense that, too,’ Alex says. ‘You need to find a language that both of you can speak.’ Alex is a painter writing an MA thesis on the way that different artistic mediums convey different sentiments, like alternate languages. We have spoken about it at length together, but I haven’t thought to apply it to people.

  ‘I think art is the link,’ Alex says. ‘Between mind things and body things. It brings them both together, and that’s why it’s so important.’

  ‘And maybe sex?’ I ask him. He pauses.

  ‘Some of the time,’ he replies.

  95

  I plastered my bedroom walls from floor to ceiling with cut-outs from magazines. Kate Moss, Brigitte Bardot, David and Angie Bowie, pictures of my friends, club night posters, set lists from gigs and notes and drawings and plastic flowers. I wrote song lyrics and lines from poems straight onto the walls and scribbled slogans across my mirror in lipstick. I created a world that was simultaneously real and imaginary, of music and art and mavericks; people who were more than the spaces they inhabited.

  I became obsessed with clothes. An idea for a perfect outfit filled me with manic energy. I spent all of the money from the restaurant on tiny dresses, the shorter and sparklier the better. I soaked my long blond hair in peroxide, much to the dismay of my mother’s hairdresser.

  ‘You’ll never be able to stop now,’ she sighed, fingering a straw-like strand. I looked at her in the mirror and felt satisfied. I didn’t want to stop. I didn’t know where I was going but I was moving in a definite direction. I liked tacky, trashy, terrible things. I sighed around the shops touching dresses I couldn’t afford. I saved up for a faux leather jacket. I tore old jeans into tiny denim skirts and slithered the belts out of the trousers Gordon left hanging on the bathroom door.

  A smattering of vintage shops opened in Newcastle and my friends and I tried on fur coats in musty attics, prancing around in front of the mirror and seeing ourselves differently. I was tall and shiny but I wanted to be rougher; stranger and skinnier. I wanted to be taken seriously and to shake things up like Debbie and Courtney and all of my heroes. I didn’t want to be lovely at all.

  I bought a fur coat in secret. I skipped school one stale afternoon to get the bus into Newcastle and go to my favourite vintage shop, the weird one that had surfaces cluttered with telephones in the shapes of lips and dolls’ heads glued to the mirrors. I picked the fluffiest, most ostentatious coat I could possibly find and bought it with a beating heart, guilt pooling in my mouth.

  The shopkeeper dressed like Slash. He had thick dark curls and always wore a top hat. I nervously passed over greasy notes, waiting for him to ask me what I thought I was doing, or to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to be there. He winked at me.

  ‘Perfect for autumn, that is, love. You’re gonna be a dream.’ I hurried the coat home and stuffed it in the back of my wardrobe.

  I never dared to wear it in public but later, when I fell in love, my boyfriend did. We went on a trip to Paris and he wore it over his suit as we skulked around cemeteries having loud arguments, pretending we were Jim and Pamela.

  96

  I get a text message from Alex.

  ‘Listen to the animal part of yourself.’

  97

  My mother met an art teacher with a mullet who wore long coats with Chelsea boots. He made her a mix CD and scrawled ‘I’ve Got a Safety Pin Stuck in my Heart for You’ across the shiny silver surface in permanent marker. The first song was ‘Gordon is a Moron’ by Jilted John.

  She was dizzy with everything else going on in her life and she listened to the CD once and then forgot about it. I pinched it and kept it in my Walkman for months, learning the words to the songs I believed would help me gain respect in the eyes of the people I deemed cool. Rosie came to my house after school and we put it on and flailed madly around the house to X-Ray Spex, whipping off our tights and munching KitKats at the same time.

  98

  There is a splitting and a tearing between what was once us but is now me. I want too much. The violence of it scares me. I am oozing with it, unchecked and unbridled. Girls like me are not supposed to want things. Everything is difficult for him and I have it all. I am pretty and clever. I do not have holes in my head or in my heart. How dare I want any more?

  99

  I have started drawing. I haven’t drawn since I was a teenager, but in the cottage in the evenings I am drawing and drawing. Vines and houses leak from my pen, faces and animals and words in unknown languages. Splintered black lines fissure out of me and I can’t stop them. My fingers and elbows are stained with ink.

  100

  My school belonged to an in-between town called Washington. It was technically in Sunderland but equidistant from Newcastle. Our school crest had three stars on it to mirror the American flag. George Washington’s family originated there and went on to form Washington DC. We were the forgotten beginning of things; ugly and unassuming, overshadowed by our famous cousins across the ocean. We clung to the story because we wanted to feel like we mattered.

  Washington was made up of retail parks and motorways and there didn’t seem to be anything natural or organic about it. It was split into numbered districts like a paint-by-numbers picture where someone had run out of colours and swirled everything into a greenish brownish grey.

  There were lots of housing estates made up of identical houses with bricked backyards and there was a river with a couple of pubs and a working men’s club. There was a big, brutalist shopping centre where mams pushed prams in velour tracksuits and babies with snotty noses and frilly socks clutched sausage rolls like pasty pastry angels.

  It was the site of the Nissan car plant, one of the north-east’s biggest employers. Boys at school knew the factory was looming in their future, waiting for them to grow into the overalls.

  At the weekends we usually ended up at a party in a council flat rented by someone who used to go to our school. People combed the carpets
for spilt drugs with their fingernails at the end of the night and fucked quickly in cold bedrooms, wasting the days away before work or school again on Monday morning.

  There was a certain charm surrounding the pebble-dashed houses and the bus stops and the endless drama of our lives played out between cities on bridges and abandoned railway lines. There was a sense of camaraderie at those flat parties, the feeling that we were all in it together and just looking for a good time.

  High-rise tower blocks and the despondency of stale, squat houses are aesthetically pleasing when you are removed from them. Middle-class architects with utopian ideals might be able to appreciate the solidity and the magnitude of a huge hunk of concrete with lives carved unapologetically into it, but when that becomes your reality and you have no choice and no way out, when you’re living every day under the shadow of someone else’s vision, it becomes oppressive, the weight of their dreams crushing the life out of you.

  A set of disused railway lines ran the whole length of Washington, a proud scar from our colliery past. We hung out on them sneaking cider and people climbed onto the old viaduct and snogged in damp corners, daring each other to hang off the edge, legs dangling down onto the motorway below.

  We spent evenings trudging through parks and around the perimeters of misty football fields. We pushed each other on swings that we couldn’t quite fit into any more and followed the railway lines from one house to another, where we took tokes on joints and listened to heavy metal in boys’ bedrooms while they groped our breasts through our T-shirts. The smell of Lynx and weed and socks was a new kind of delicious; getting under my skin and bringing my veins and capillaries to the surface.