Saltwater Read online

  101

  There are worlds that are different to the one you built us. If I was small enough I could crawl through the tunnels that lead there. I am so lovely. So shiny. I am soft but I want to be spiky. My skin promises sex and gold but inside I am twisted and shapeless. I think too much about things. I have too much to say. My body takes me places that my mind does not want to go. My edges are beginning to fray.

  102

  The man and I drive out to Sliabh Liag, a nearby mountain where devastating cliffs crumble into the sea.

  ‘The highest cliffs in Europe, these are,’ he boasts. We climb to the top. There are slate steps at the peak. It is drizzling and they are slippery. We grab clumps of heather to stop ourselves falling.

  ‘Fuck!’ He slips on a wet patch and sinks into a mound of mud.

  I laugh at him.

  ‘It isn’t fucking funny, thanks,’ he teases. ‘Me new trainers! Cost a fortune, these did.’

  I roll my eyes at his Nikes. ‘How much?’

  ‘Two hundred.’

  ‘They didn’t!’

  ‘Sure, they did.’

  We scramble to the top, panting. It is dusk and gold lights glow in the valley below us. Everything is blue-grey and slate. It is difficult to tell where the sea ends and the sky begins. The waves crash beneath the cliffs with a force that leaves us breathless.

  ‘Who needs London?’ he asks me. ‘When you can look out at that.’

  I squint at the horizon. I can’t make sense of the vastness. My eyes make patterns in the expanding sky.

  ‘Forget London,’ I say into the wind.

  He looks shyly at me and pulls up his hood. The wind lashes the cliffs. We start to descend.

  ‘Where else would you like to live, then?’ he asks.

  I am quiet for a little while. Our shoes hit the slate with damp slaps.

  ‘Dunno,’ I tell him. ‘Anywhere. I feel sort of floaty. Like there’s nothing keeping me anywhere.’ I look at him sideways. ‘What about you?’

  ‘God,’ he says. ‘Everywhere. I’m gonna go to Australia, then Canada, then maybe South America. The good thing about being a labourer is that you’re always wanted, all over the world.’

  I look at the cliffs and sea and sky. ‘Don’t you ever feel guilty?’ I ask him. ‘I mean, it’s beautiful here. Don’t you ever feel bad for wanting something more?’

  He skips a step. ‘It isn’t something more,’ he says, decidedly. ‘Just something else.’

  103

  Each part of Washington had a parish, and parishes had Catholic clubs, which were essentially working men’s clubs attached to churches. We figured out pretty quickly that we could get served in the clubs underage, so that’s where we congregated. Working men’s clubs really were for working men. On Fridays women weren’t allowed in the main bar and we had to sit at a picnic table in a cold little porch with a plastic roof, tacked on as an afterthought.

  The first time I got drunk was in a Catholic club. Bands from school started to play gigs there, and big groups of us descended into carpeted function rooms, having lip-glossed discussions over who should go to the bar.

  ‘You look the oldest, Lucy,’ Lauren hissed.

  ‘What can I get you, pet?’ I scanned the rows of glass bottles for something I recognised. The woman behind the bar peered at me closely from beneath her Coke-can fringe.

  ‘Vodka,’ I blurted out.

  ‘Vodka and mixer? Or just straight?’ A long pause.

  ‘Straight? Please.’ The woman raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Single or double?’

  ‘Er. Double?’ She filled the glass and put it down in front of me. I walked back to my friends feeling victorious. We passed it around and took a sip each until it was gone. My friends coughed and wrinkled their noses. I bit my tongue in secret and finished it without flinching.

  I couldn’t go home to my mother smelling of vodka, so I spent the night at Lauren’s house. Her parents were together and easygoing and her dad gave us a can of cider to share. I drunkenly raided her sock drawer and threw all of her knickers out of her bedroom window. They floated down to the garden in pastel colours. In the morning, they were strewn across the patio like blossom.

  There was a barman at the club who grew to like us. We called him Terry, on account of the Tia Maria and orange juices he slid across the bar.

  ‘Just like Terry’s Chocolate Orange,’ he remarked sagely every time. We nodded in agreement. ‘These ones are on me, girls.’ He winked.

  We vomited them up later in the church courtyard, frantically chewing spearmint gum before our parents came to pick us up. We backcombed our hair and wore T-shirts emblazoned with bands that our dads listened to. We tore away bits of the fabric, so that our small cleavages would be not be outdone by Joe Strummer smashing up his guitar on the cover of London Calling. The boys knocked over amplifiers and kicked guitar pedals while we danced on the tables in our Primark brogues, sweating under fake leather jackets.

  104

  Vodka smells like paint and danger and twists me into a lighter version of myself. Roundabouts blur into merry-go-rounds and I slip in the sludgy silt caught in car parks and on viaducts. All the want and weight of my days evaporates, until the morning comes.

  105

  Something was happening. Stickers started appearing in strange places. Two boys with rumpled hair, arms emblazoned with the world ‘Libertine’, pouted at us from posters pasted over the cupboard in the science lab. They stared at us from fold-down seats and bus timetables, obscuring the routes. Old ladies puffed out powdered cheeks in disapproval as they heaved their pulley-trolleys onto the bus, while we shared earphones and scribbled lyrics on the backs of our hands in blue biro.

  Pete Doherty became a vessel for kids who had never heard of Rimbaud to pour their tortured souls into. We trawled forums and Myspace pages to glean his literary references and maybe catch a grainy BlackBerry picture from one of his infamous Whitechapel flat gigs. We were worlds away from London, where the streets were paved with troubadours and Amy Winehouse slunk around Camden in her bloody ballet flats, but we could taste the excitement from dining chairs plonked in front of computers in stuffy sitting rooms.

  ‘You’re wasting your life on there!’ my mother exclaimed, threatening to pull out the ethernet cable. ‘Go and read a book or something!’ Boys recorded songs in their bedrooms and sent them to me, changing the lyrics to fit my name. We chatted about Kerouac and Morrissey and wrote terrible poems and saved them in secret folders on our desktops.

  We loved the unpredictability of it. The Libertines played a gig at Northumbria Student Union and kids from school thronged the streets as the police turned up in riot vans. In classic fashion, Pete didn’t show up, and we surged past the pubs, throwing orange traffic cones into the crowd and belting ‘Time for Heroes’ in unison. We had grown up stuffed full of stories from other people’s youths and we were desperate to be part of something significant. Our time felt cheap and unimportant.

  106

  The tanning booths and pawnshops and the awkward shape of my school uniform coaxed something mad and reckless inside of me. As I watched the clock hand slide through minutes and hours from my school desk, I could feel the wasted days of my life piling up behind me. They dug into my back, crushing my lungs and making it difficult to breathe. I felt like a small, shy shard that could easily slip through the cracks in the pavement and be lost in the dirt. I didn’t know what it was that I wanted, but I wanted it so badly it sent shooting pains through my ovaries. I retreated further into books and music. Lauren and I started skipping lunch at school, so that we could save our money to sneak out to the pub at the weekends. We shared a Diet Coke and celery sticks, while our friends rolled their eyes and tucked into ham and cheese paninis.

  107

  The man fantasises about being in an accident. I watch him light a cigarette, his face hungry in the flame.

  ‘I think about it sometimes. How someone would find the car flipped over on
the road and call an ambulance. They would have to cut me out. Everyone would know about it. They would take me to hospital, but it would be fine; superficial like, just a few cuts and bruises.’

  His cheeks hollow as he breathes in smoke. I imagine his mother’s small face at his hospital bed. I picture the horror down in Jimmy’s as people retell the story in dark tones, and him, laughing, emerging unscathed.

  108

  Everyone’s parents seemed to have split up. There were empty houses most weekends, as mams and dads went to climb hills in the Lake District with new lovers. We descended on their free sitting rooms, supping their beers and snogging on their sofas. We were mirror images of each other. They were rebuilding their worlds and we were defining ours for the first time, testing our parameters.

  My mother and father legally separated. They were still married but they had been living apart for a couple of years. My mother started to reclaim her space. We took hammers to our rotten front door and hacked it off. She painted the hallway turquoise and decorated it with stars and moons. Our bathroom was hot pink and we tacked strings of fluffy fairy lights from Argos along my bedroom walls.

  She couldn’t afford to redo our kitchen, so she bought a paint-n-grain kit and spent a weekend covering the ugly white cupboard doors in faux wood print. She painted the whole thing light brown, then stencilled faux grains over the top, so that from a distance, with a squint and the lights turned off, the cupboards actually looked like they were made from wood. We were barricaded out while the cupboards were drying, so we couldn’t ruin the illusion with our sticky fingerprints.

  ‘Looks alright, doesn’t it, Luce?’ She frowned and bit her lip.

  ‘Looks great, Mam,’ I promised.

  I came home one night to her on the sofa, bundled up in her fluffy dressing gown, pink and gold from the shower.

  ‘Lucy, love,’ she said, drawing me close to her. ‘There’s someone I’d like you to meet.’

  I widened my eyes. ‘Who?’

  ‘Have you got plans next Thursday?’

  ‘I’m supposed to be going to a gig with Lauren.’

  ‘Do you have to go? This is important to me.’

  I turned around to look at her. She seemed relaxed. I inhaled her satsuma body butter.

  ‘Alright,’ I agreed. ‘We haven’t got tickets yet.’

  Ben was a teacher at the local college. He had worked as a fireman, crawling on his knees through thick black smoke, until he got too old.

  ‘Ooh, I hope he’s still got his uniform!’ my mother’s friends smirked when she told them. I was struck by the image of water on burning buildings and strong hands soothing charred bodies.

  He came over to cook for us. My mother spent the day cleaning the house. She went through the fridge and threw away mouldy jam jars and furry tubs of cream. She took down Enrique Iglesias and threw him in the bin. She spent a long time in the bathroom, steam leaking into the hallway. I painted my fingernails black at the kitchen table, feeling nervous.

  Ben was shy, too.

  ‘Lovely to meet you, Lucy.’ He smiled, unpacking ingredients. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’

  I looked at him from behind my hair. ‘Need a hand with anything?’

  ‘No, it’s alright, I’ve got this. Why don’t you and your mam wait in the living room? Relax, watch the telly. I’ll give you a shout when it’s done.’

  We did as we were told, pulling faces at each other. Josh was at school and our house was calm and quiet. It was new to us; someone else chopping and slicing our evenings into a different shape.

  He made peppers stuffed with goat’s cheese and watched us nervously as we tucked in. I had never tasted goat’s cheese before. It was bitter in a nice way, a sensation I was coming to associate with grown-upness.

  ‘It’s lovely, Ben,’ my mother said, smiling at him.

  ‘Yeah.’ I swallowed. ‘Thanks for cooking for us.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ said Ben, refilling his glass with water. I was impressed by the peppers. They were posh and creamy with promise.

  109

  There is an island just off the mainland called Inishfree. It was populated in the past, but it is so remote that most people were forced to leave to make a living. The last remaining resident was an old man who lived there alone, writing poetry and playing his saxophone. He claimed that the isolation gave him the time and space he needed to make his work, and the lack of streetlights meant that he could always see the stars at night.

  He lived on the island for twenty years, until his wife, who lived and worked in Essex, persuaded him to go home. The local newspaper turned up to document his return to the mainland. He was carrying one suitcase, three saxophones, a flute and a clarinet. When the journalist asked him what he was looking forward to about returning to England, he said, ‘My wife, Alice, is a wonderful cello player. I’m looking forward to making music with her again.’

  110

  The tension inside of me twisted tighter. I couldn’t bear the smell of the corridors and the whispers in groups in the schoolyard. I was a drifter and felt under constant scrutiny. Gaggles of girls looked each other up and down and boys boasted about who got off with who and whether or not they were decent kissers. At breaktimes we sat in circles in the cafeteria reading blowjob tips in Glamour magazine and taunting each other about our naivety. I found the pressure of getting things right excruciating. I kept my eyes on the clock, desperate for the bell that signalled the end of the periods that slowly trickled into evenings and set me free.

  111

  The man and I drive along the road one night in the dark. It is foggy and we can barely see in front of us. Car headlights make ethereal orbs in the fog, moving towards us from somewhere in the distance. A family of deer dart out from the trees and he swerves to avoid them.

  ‘Christ,’ he breathes. We catch their eyes in the headlights, glittering and afraid.

  ‘You know,’ he tells me, ‘if we hit them, the impact wouldn’t kill them. They are strong as fuck. They would break through the windscreen and panic and we would be kicked to death by their hooves.’

  I watch his hands resting on the steering wheel and feel him willing them towards us. I think about hooves raining through glass. I want to open the car door and run into the forest, away from him, where I can lie down in the wet pines. I must remember to look after myself.

  112

  I get lost in the pang of the gutters and the bus stops in the rain. People shape the kind of future they think I should be dreaming of but none of them seem like the right life for people like me. I can break up the hopeless with kissing and drinking. I can dance and spin and press my body into someone else’s. Look at the crescents my fingernails leave. I do not know how else to show you I am pushing my limits. I know I do not have much weight in this world but I want to know how much I am worth. I do not have much to give but I am offering this.

  113

  Through our sojourns in the Catholic club, we became friends with the parish priest. He was young and lonely and every year he threw a New Year’s Eve party in his house. He had a fully stocked wine cellar and gave us whatever we asked for in crystal flutes. We solemnly observed the lighting of the advent candle in the front room, then we were given free rein of the house.

  One year we came across the keys to the church building. We toasted midnight on top of a pool table in the liturgy room, burning church incense and blasting the Stones. We played drunken Twister in the aisle, flashing our knickers to the Virgin Mary from beneath our sequinned party dresses. Some boys who used to go to our school were in a famous band. They turned up in the early hours while we were taking pictures of each other in the bathtub. The singer’s girlfriend worked as a dancer in a strip club, but she told the priest she was a waitress. I toppled off the pool table and woke up in the new year with a big black bruise on my thigh. Someone set my text message tone to a recording of me wailing, ‘I bruise like a peach’ over and over. I couldn’t figure out how to change it and it follow
ed me around for months.

  114

  I don’t believe in religion, but the aesthetics of Catholicism have stuck with me. I love the way church incense coats my hair and skin. It is a safe smell, like a blanket, waiting for me to curl up in it. I love stained-glass windows and religious portraits, the colours of Mary’s clothes and the bright red drops of blood on Jesus’s face. I like the Stations of the Cross. I like pausing to run my finger along an emaciated rib and wrinkle my nose at the thought of the vinegar being offered on a sponge. I like prayer cards and medallions and rosary beads. I like advent candles and Bibles edged in gold and the way the skirt over the tabernacle matches the colour of the priest’s robes. There is so much attention to detail.

  I envy the faithful. There are shrines dotted around the hillsides here in Ireland, places where saints have supposedly appeared and healed the sick. There are wells of holy water and statues in the rocks, huts filled with prayer cards and gardens filled with painted stones in memory of loved ones who have passed away. I like to visit them occasionally. I sit in the stillness and observe people crying and praying and I close my eyes and try to let some of their hope get carried on the air and through my pores. I would like to believe that everything is accounted for, that there is life after this one and that all of our decisions hold some kind of significance or moral worth. There is weight in religion. It is an anchor of sorts.

  I cannot believe in the vengeful patriarch of the Catholic Church but sometimes, in the daytime, when there’s no one around, I go into the church and light a candle. I like sitting in the quiet and sensing my own insubstantiality against such old and serious things. I am learning that there is a good kind of smallness; a smallness in the face of the universe rather than a smallness in my own body. I like the ritual of prayer and reverence, even though I can’t identify with it. I like the feeling that other people believe in something.