Saltwater Read online

  115

  Rosie and I had the same white heat settling in our bellies. We hashed out plans for sneaking out at the weekends during our bus journeys to school. I dreamed of red buses and boys in turtleneck jumpers with tortoiseshell glasses, wine-stained copies of Joyce shoved in their coat pockets. She wanted champagne and rappers and bandage dresses. We hated the sad shopping centre and the sweaty smell of sausage rolls. A man pulled up at the bus stop and wanked at us. We saw the scarlet tip of his penis through his car window.

  We both took Drama class and our school was featured in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at the Customs House Theatre in South Shields. She was cast as Hermia and I was Helena. We showed up to rehearsals full of the tingle of the night before. We always giggled during the fight scene because we loved each other so much.

  On the day of the show, there was a matinee and an evening performance. I wanted to be an actor. I loved the ropes and the dirty brick walls behind the wings, all the metal and the light rigs, the industrial stuff that held everything together behind the red velvet façade.

  We were allowed to wander through South Shields on our own between performances. We passed the strip of chip shops and beach-themed bars that led to the sea. It had that melancholy feeling characteristic of seaside towns and Butlins holiday camps. It was tired and tacky but there was something exciting beneath the sun-bleached glamour and the sea salt.

  ‘Shall we get drunk?’ I suggested, the cold wind sneaking under my Beatles crop top. Rosie narrowed her eyes.

  ‘What about the play?’

  ‘I feel sort of nervous. It’ll give us a bit of courage.’ We walked along the seafront in silence. We felt inconsequential.

  ‘Yeah, alright,’ she said, her dark eyes glittering. ‘You only live once, and all that.’

  We bought a bottle of Lambrini in a corner shop. We were underage, of course, but passed sultry smiles across the counter, and the man handed the bottle over in a brown paper bag. We tripped out onto the cobbles clutching our prize.

  ‘Shit, Luce!’ said Rosie, checking her phone. ‘We’ve only got fifteen minutes.’ I pulled open the door of a nearby phone box.

  ‘We’ll just have to down it.’ We squeezed our bodies up against the glass and passed the bottle between us, fighting back bubbles and snorting between gulps.

  ‘I bruise like a peach!’ my phone shouted from my pocket.

  ‘Where R U?’ the message read. ‘Ur call is soon.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Rosie. ‘We’d better go.’ We left the empty bottle in the phone box and ran all the way back to the theatre, fizzy and light on our toes.

  We giggled our way into the dressing room, where everyone stared at us curiously. Our teacher gave us a long, cold look. I bit my tongue until I tasted blood and went to brush my hair in the mirror, trembling with silent laughter.

  ‘Where have you been, girls?’ she asked in a quiet, deadly voice. Our call came to take to the stage and there was no time for explanations. We rippled down the staircase and took our place under the hot lights. Our performances were better than ever and afterwards strangers rushed over, gushing compliments. Someone gave me a hug.

  ‘Ooh, you feel like you could snap!’ They smiled. ‘To be young again, eh?’ Our teacher narrowed her eyes as we slipped out into the night at the end of the show, our cheeks rosy with stardom.

  It was parents’ evening at Josh’s school, so my mother couldn’t make the show. My dad picked me up with the car windows down, blasting the Beautiful South.

  ‘How was it, Luce?’

  ‘Yeah, alright. Tired. Can I have a wine gum?’ I crammed a handful into my mouth and we played ‘Old Red Eyes is Back’ all the way home, slowing down to scream obscenities at pedestrians in quiet residential areas.

  116

  This morning when I put on my socks, I remembered the way my grandfather used to put them on for me when I was a child. He always turned them inside out then matched the toes to mine and rolled them up onto my feet. Maybe you have to turn something inside out before you can begin to stand the right way up.

  117

  I fell in love with a boy in the year above who wore eyeliner and four strings of glow-in-the-dark rosary beads. We went on a school trip to volunteer with pilgrims at a hospital in Lourdes. No one enforced a drinking age in France, and in the evenings after we had served the pilgrims their evening meal, we were free to drink Desperados at plastic tables and snog on sticky street corners. He pushed me into a swimming pool with all of my clothes on and I had to walk back to our hotel with my dress clinging to my body and nuns gasped and gawped as we passed them. He was dangerous and dishevelled and he didn’t seem to care about anything.

  My mother and Ben went on holiday while I was on the pilgrimage, and I beat them home by a few days. I invited my new boyfriend and all of our friends to stay, and someone sent a text message to everyone in my phone book. They all turned up wielding tinnies and tubes of Pringles. Someone brought a dog and the curtains got pulled from the windows. Beer exploded onto the ceiling in a dirty gold fountain. A guitar appeared and everyone lay on the kitchen floor in the early hours and sang ‘Your house is fucked’ to the tune of ‘Wow’ by Kylie Minogue.

  I woke up the morning my mother was due back to find bodies splayed all over the sitting room, curled up on bin bags. I threw them out and cleaned the house as best as I could, but there were cigarette butts behind the sofa and slops of port down the paper IKEA lamp. She wanted to know why my bedsheets were stained with blood.

  118

  I learn the slippery velvet of him. An electric fur that takes me away from you. There is so much tender in morning pillows and on rainy afternoons. Still it is not enough. There is a hard ball in my stomach. It fills the spaces between us. Are you all mine? he asks, and I say, Yes. But I am lying. I do not want to be his. I want to keep some parts for myself. This rough thing inside of me will not let me get close. There are things brewing between my bones. Big things. Embarrassing things. Dreams so gold I can barely contain them. I am bursting full of it but I don’t want anyone to guess. If I shrink into the small of his back where sweat beads in broken veins perhaps no one will find out. I will fold thin wrists and sit quietly in classroom corners. No one will know I have so much inside.

  119

  My boyfriend and I lay on my bed for hours, shutting out Josh and feeling safe in our postered cocoon. He sneakily smoked cigarettes and we lay on our backs without speaking, watching silver curl into shapes above our heads.

  120

  Drunk dancing lets me forget. I am liquid in sequins with vodka-coated synapses, spilling and melting in the pearly dark. My limbs are glossy in fake-tan shimmer as strobe lights puddle in spilt drinks and I fill my empty spaces with dry ice and smoke. You do not like my lies and my secrets, the smell of someone else’s pillow strung through my hair. I spend hours sunk in bubbles, locking you out, soaping the traces away.

  121

  We went out clubbing before we were old enough, dressing each other up and huddling in bars, sharing tabs and crooning to guitar bands, all skinny jeans and vintage tea dresses, lost in the madness before we could really understand it. We didn’t recognise the smell of dried-up Cactus Jack’s or detect the sadness in the air when the lights came on.

  Lauren and I supped rosé wine in our bedrooms together, throwing dresses on and then pulling them off. We cobbled a private world together from fake tan and fairy lights and the fibs we told our parents.

  ‘You’d better eat something before you go out,’ my mother always said to us, but we never did. We wanted to be skinny in our dresses, and if we didn’t eat we got drunk faster.

  It was the year of mephedrone, and everywhere we went the toilets had a chemical tang. The cubicle doors were plastered with ‘Plant Food’ stickers. Everyone did it. It was cheap, legal and unlike anything we’d experienced before. It made us feel like death the next day, but it shaped reality into something sparkly for a few magic hours. It kept us up a
ll night, which was great for dancing. All we wanted to do was dance.

  One night we went to see a band play in Sunderland. We all got smashed beforehand and twirled for hours under the lights, the world passing by in a blur of wet lips and smoky heartbeats. We stayed for the club night afterwards and Lauren and I shrieked and slipped over in our little crop tops and sequin skirts, all eyeliner and ribs. We held hands in the smoking area and went to the toilet in twos.

  ‘I love you, you know,’ she slurred to me in a dark corner and I wrapped my arms around her. I loved the feeling when we went out together, dusting glitter across our cheeks. The unknown rippled in front of us, waiting for us to fill it.

  My boyfriend and his friends often came out with us. We were a gang and it felt great. One night ‘Chelsea Dagger’ by the Fratellis came on and that was our song. We screamed it as loud as we could, our voices lost below the damp fug of the smoke machine. The club wound down but none of us were ready to end the night. We sought each other out through the dark.

  ‘Let’s go back to Rob’s for a party,’ someone decided. ‘There’s no one in. We can get some tins on the way.’ My boyfriend leaned in for a kiss and I felt a shiver in my knickers.

  ‘Coming, Lauren?’ I asked, twirling a strand of her hair around my finger as we waited for the boys to collect their coats.

  ‘Don’t think so, babe.’ She smirked. ‘Jonny’s coming to pick me up.’

  I pouted. ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘Nah, I didn’t text him back all night. He left me a voicemail, seems pissed off. I’d better go.’ She was seeing a pizza delivery boy who worked late. He used to pick her up after nights out and drive her back to his in the pizza van, often passing stray slices to us through the window.

  ‘Oh-kay,’ I sighed, pulling my boyfriend’s jacket around my shoulders. We clattered down the stairs and into the street. Jonny’s car was parked outside.

  ‘Alreet, Jonny fella?’ shouted my friends. ‘Give us a slice of pizza, eh?’ Rob twirled Lauren around on the end of his arm and she stumbled, laughing under the streetlights. Jonny’s face was strained.

  ‘Alright, babe?’ he shot at her. She leaned through the window and planted a kiss on his lips.

  ‘Aw come on, Jonny. Don’t be like that! I’m not coming back if you’re gonna be sour.’ She fluttered her false eyelashes at him. One of them came unstuck and crawled down her face like a sad caterpillar. He laughed.

  ‘In you get then, princess.’ Lauren gave me a sticky hug.

  ‘Call me tomorrow, alright?’ I told her as she hopped into the passenger seat.

  ‘Will do!’ She blew a kiss at me and Jonny winked through the wing mirror as they pulled into the night.

  ‘Hurry up, Luce,’ my boyfriend called from further up the street. ‘Rob’s getting us a taxi.’ It had rained and I slipped off my heels and raced after them, enjoying the slap of the damp pavement on my blistered feet.

  122

  Jonny raped Lauren that night. Her spin with Rob under the streetlights sparked an argument and he pushed her into the back of his van and held her down and raped her among the empty pizza boxes while her tears pooled in her ears.

  I met her a few days later at the bus stop.

  ‘You look fucked,’ I told her. She groaned.

  ‘Hangover from hell. I’ve been chucking up for the past three days.’ I raised my eyebrows.

  ‘You’re a halfer, you are. I feel fine.’ She rolled her eyes and rooted through her bag for her free school bus pass.

  She didn’t tell me what had happened until years later.

  ‘I couldn’t say the words until now,’ she told me as I held her cold hand across a crowded coffee shop. I had to go into the toilets and rest my head on the cool cubicle door until I stopped shaking. I couldn’t get rid of the image of us running away up the street, my drunkenness making me oblivious to the sharp stones in the gutters as I rushed towards the next bright thing, leaving her behind.

  123

  I am grabbed and touched against my will. Hands brush legs and eyes lurk in shadows and it thrills me at first because it smells adult; perfume and fear. The graze of someone’s fingers in a place I did not ask for is a shock like cold water and gives everything sharp edges for a minute or two. I am too big for you to hold me now but there are people in the night who are bigger than you. Later it is special in the lining of my stomach because this is what grown-ups do so now I must be grown up, too.

  124

  It isn’t something more, just something else.

  125

  I was still working at the restaurant. I graduated to the bar, where I opened bottles and washed glasses, which solved the problem of the chefs in the kitchen but presented a plethora of drunken dads.

  ‘You’re a lovely-looking thing, you are,’ they said wisely, as though they were experts. ‘If I was ten years younger, eh?’ They took their bottles of Peroni off to their wives and daughters while I restocked the fridges.

  One evening two women came in and ordered their drinks at the bar while they were waiting for a table.

  ‘You’re about the same age as my daughter,’ said the woman. ‘This is Sophie.’ Sophie smiled shyly and twirled her straw in her Diet Coke.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘We’re up from London for the weekend. Sophie’s thinking about applying to Durham for university, so we thought we’d come and see what it’s like.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Durham’s lovely. Good uni, too.’ The woman squinted at me.

  ‘Aren’t you doing your exams soon?’

  ‘Erm. Yeah. My A levels.’

  ‘And you’re still working?’ She looked concerned. ‘Don’t you need to take time off?’ I looked at Sophie. Her eyes were round. They both smelled expensive.

  ‘Ah, no. It’s alright. I only do weekends.’ Francesca came to take them to their table and I started to unload the dishwasher too quickly, hot glasses burning my skin.

  I went out for a break with Joe later in the evening, after the rush when the tables had settled into their spaghetti. He lit a joint.

  ‘Want some?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ I liked the sting of cold air on my hot neck. The car park bordered a prison and at night the floodlights bounced across the back of the restaurant, making everything seem dramatic. In the daytimes I could hear the shouts of the prisoners as they exercised in the barbed-wire-rimmed yard.

  One afternoon a wrinkled man came in and heaved his body onto a stool. He was jittery and kept jumping at the noises that clattered from the kitchen.

  ‘Just give me a pint,’ he said, tossing some change onto the bar.

  ‘We only do bottles.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Bottles of what?’

  ‘PeroniEstrellaCoronaSolandBud.’

  ‘Whatever. Just chuck me whatever.’ I stuck a bottle of Budweiser in front of him.

  ‘We haven’t got a licence to serve without food, so you’ll have to have a packet of peanuts as well.’

  ‘You what?’ I started to repeat the sentence. ‘Yeah. No. Fine. Whatever.’ He downed the beer in one and then went off into the afternoon, leaving the unopened peanuts in his wake.

  ‘Just got out,’ Joe said ominously, nodding his head in the direction of the prison. I envied him that beer. I tried to imagine how the first sip of freedom might taste.

  126

  The cottage is by a small fishing port that used to be very busy but is now mostly abandoned. My favourite place is the water’s edge down by the old fish factories. There are warehouses that were once filled with pools and crates and conveyor belts sitting empty, and rusty boats and water tanks and piles of junk rotting in the caustic rain. There is a huge metal container covered in orange rust and when the light shines onto it, it looks as though it is flaked in gold.

  As I walk down by the rocks, I realise that one of the reasons why my thoughts are thick and heavy in London is the lack of abandoned spaces. Everywhere belongs to someone and everything costs money. There is not mu
ch ruin or desolation, or places that are forgotten or on the fringes. Everything is fast and new or being knocked down and renovated and built up again. The public spaces are shaped by other people’s visions. Even the ancient buildings have a certain kind of shine.

  Some of my favourite parts of London are the tower blocks by Burgess Park, the railway bridge over Lower Marsh leading to Waterloo Station, the gasholder on the canal by Broadway Market and the swimming ponds on Hampstead Heath. These are all spaces where life is allowed to happen on its own terms.

  The sense of abandonment here makes me realise that it is good to be in these kinds of spaces in order for my thoughts to wander. The places we inhabit affect our psychologies, and here among the sea daises and the discarded lobster pots and disused bits of metal, there is space to forget.

  127

  I came home from school one day to find my mother prickling on the edge of the settee.

  ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea, shall I, pet?’ She picked up my jacket where I’d dumped it on the floor and draped it gently over the armchair.

  ‘Yeah, okay. Thanks, Mam,’ I said, kicking off my shoes and sitting on the rug. She clattered around in the kitchen and returned with steam rising from her hands.

  ‘I have to tell you something, Lucy,’ she said, crossing her legs and fiddling with the fringing on the cushion next to her. I felt worried.

  ‘Me and Ben are getting married.’

  I blew on my tea and attempted to swallow this new information. ‘Woah,’ I choked. ‘That was quick.’ Her face was tense. ‘But it’s good, Mam. I like Ben. I want you to be happy.’