Saltwater Read online

  She stood up too quickly and knocked the cushion to the floor. ‘Do you want to see my dress?’ she asked.

  ‘You’ve got a dress already?’

  ‘Well, I’ve known for a while. I was scared to tell you.’ She disappeared into the hallway.

  ‘I hope you like it,’ she called. ‘It’s red. We’re having a Christmas wedding. I can hardly wear white again, can I?’

  They were married in a register office in Durham. She walked up the aisle to ‘She’s the One’ by Robbie Williams. I read an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem. I wanted to write something of my own but I couldn’t find the right words to fill the room, thronged with people I didn’t know.

  I got ready with my mother beforehand in the hotel up the road. We shared a bottle of Asti and I helped her fix red flowers into her hair.

  ‘Thanks, Luce,’ she said, as I heated up the curling wand. ‘And I don’t just mean for today.’ I chewed on a hairgrip while I tried to shape my feelings into a neat sentence. My eyes grew hot when I thought of all the things that had happened. I gave her a hug, being careful not to muss up her dress.

  ‘Mam—’ I started. There was a noise at the door. A frazzled-looking woman burst in wheeling a suitcase behind her.

  ‘I’m here to do your hair, Suze!’ she squealed, enveloping her in Tommy Girl. ‘Thought I wasn’t going to be able to get it off work, but I’m bloody here, aren’t I?’ My mother laughed. ‘Aw, thanks, Sharon. Aren’t you canny? You shouldn’t have.’ Sharon opened her suitcase and began to unpack fierce-looking brushes and threatening electrical appliances. She stared at my mother.

  ‘You look proper stunning, Susie.’ She put her hands on her hips and took in the bridal suite. ‘And this room! I tell you what.’ She winked at me. ‘That chandelier’s going to be swinging tonight!’

  128

  We didn’t tell my father about the wedding. We tried so hard to protect him.

  129

  Now a new person for you, one who is bigger than me. Who wraps his arms around your waist and shuts the bedroom door with a soft click. You are warm now in his safe dark but where does that leave me? His leather shoes by the front door mean that I am more free but once you were all mine and now I am just me.

  130

  The man drives his car drunk and I let him. I trust this person, with his shaky hands and fruity aftershave, with my life. I scrunch it into a small ball and shut it in his glove compartment, where it gets warm from the heat of the engine.

  In the morning he is bitter and hungover. I peel myself from the sheets, move softly, trying not to wake him.

  ‘Jesus.’ His breath is sour. ‘I am fucked.’ I stand up, making soothing sounds. ‘Christ.’ He casts around on the floor for his cigarettes. ‘Bring me a glass of water, would you?’

  ‘Okay,’ I reply, but I do not. I have seen something broken move across his face and it scares me. It is not up to me to put anyone back together.

  I go to the kitchen and fill the sink with hot, soapy water. It is too hot for my tired hands but I don’t care. I plunge them into the water again and again, scrubbing stains out of blouses and mud out of dresses. By the time he gets up my clothes are splayed across the washing line, drying slowly in the winter sun.

  131

  My A levels loomed neon over the summer, signalling escape. While my peers spent their free periods driving to McDonald’s and chatting each other up in the common room, I took to shutting myself away in the library scribbling essays. I did all my reading and got my homework finished so that the evenings would belong to me.

  I couldn’t bear the wet sulk of chips in the cafeteria and the way that everyone sat in little circles with their bags on their knees, nibbling paninis and making plans for the weekend. At lunchtimes I walked through the housing estates to the concrete shopping centre and sat on my own in Sainsbury’s café with a Thermos of coffee, flicking through a magazine. I called my mother.

  ‘How’s your day, Lucy, love?’

  ‘Same old.’ I sighed. ‘I’m in Sainsbury’s.’

  She laughed. ‘Oh, Luce,’ she said. ‘If it makes you feel any better I’m on my lunch, eating sandwiches in a car park.’

  I smiled, weakly.

  ‘Cheer up, sweetheart. You haven’t got long left.’

  132

  I don’t want to be nice and I don’t want to be pure. I want things that are mine that you don’t know about; love bites and bruises beneath my clothes. I want to build a world from precarious threads. Your sinews are too strong for me. I can see that it hurts you but I am fiercely me.

  133

  After school I took the bus straight into Newcastle, where I met my boyfriend and his college friends in the Dog and Parrot. We slotted coins into the jukebox and downed treble vodka mixers, desperate for the darkness to fall and the night to be ours.

  We often went to bed as the birds were singing, but no matter how late we stayed up, I always went to school the next day. One morning I woke up on the floor of someone’s flat surrounded by beer bottles. The room was veiled in nicotine and I stepped over bodies to find my bag and pull on my sixth-form polo shirt. A boy rolled over and watched me getting ready through half-lidded eyes.

  ‘Fucking hell.’ He snorted. ‘Someone’s keen.’ I smiled at him and let myself out, stopping to peck my sleeping boyfriend on the cheek. I walked down Chillingham Road and caught the two buses I needed to get to school, plugging in my headphones and resting my head against the window. Bowie’s voice spun inside of me like a secret. My heroes were rock stars but they were artists and intellectuals, too.

  Books offered me a gauzy version of reality and I stepped hungrily into it. I inhabited an in-between space of terraced streets and bridges laced with lines from novels and iconic film stills. Art layered another world over my real, perceived one and gave me a calm, quiet feeling inside. I had a special English teacher who let me believe that my ideas were important. She introduced me to writers who wound their words around my wrists and refused to let me slip through the net.

  I ordered prospectuses from all of the London universities that Google threw up and picked the ones that looked the best in the pictures: girls eating apples in courtyards, books stacked up by their knees. I knew the streets of Camden were lined with poets and rock stars waiting for me to step into their lives and fasten their trench coats over my underwear on Sunday mornings as I popped out for eggs and milk. I wanted a place that was more chaotic than me.

  I was called for an interview at Queen Mary, and my English teacher invited me into her classroom to practise some of the questions she thought the admissions team might ask.

  ‘Why London?’

  ‘Um. Museums. Art galleries. Literary history?’

  ‘Anything else?’

  I stalled.

  ‘I want to be at the centre of things.’

  ‘I see. And what are you reading at the moment?’

  ‘The Outsider by Albert Camus,’ I said, rhyming Albert with dirt and Camus with bus.

  ‘Albert Camus,’ she said gently, in a perfect French accent.

  My mother couldn’t afford an extra ticket, so I took the train all of the way from Durham to Mile End on my own. She was convinced I needed to dress in office-wear but I wanted to be glamorous. We had an argument and I flounced out of the house in a sequinned crop top and a leather-look miniskirt. I pulled my coat around my body and waited nervously in a room with a hundred other hopefuls, trying not to make eye contact with anyone.

  ‘She looks nice,’ I overheard a mother say to her son, nodding her head in my direction. Her son was mortified. I pulled a sparkly notebook from my imitation Marc Jacobs and tried to look worldly.

  When I finally entered the room, the professor gave me a copy of ‘Splittings’ by Adrienne Rich and asked me to analyse it. I didn’t know who Adrienne Rich was but I read the line, ‘The world tells me I am its creature’ and swallowed. The professor smiled kindly at me and waved her arm towards her bookshelf.

 
‘You know,’ she told me, ‘there are whole modules of critical theory based on the kinds of ideas we have spoken about today.’ I traced the spines with my eyes and I ached for it.

  134

  I rode the tube to Liverpool Street and walked down Brick Lane. I lingered outside of Rough Trade, ogling girls with short fringes and bright red lips. The door swung open and a couple of boys in tight turtlenecks sloped out with records under their arms, lighting up cigarettes. I skittered out of their way and made my way up the street, feeling drunk as black-clad couples with septum piercings posed for street-style photographers and the smell of hops and second-hand clothes bulged from the doorways. The possibilities of all the different kinds of people I could be; the books I might read and the parties I might go to, shimmered electric above the telephone wires. Flustered by the techno pulsing from cafés, I slunk into a Costa while I waited for my train. My fingers grazed the name badge I’d been given at the interview. I crumpled it into a ball and left it in my cup. Cold coffee seeped into it, obscuring the letters.

  135

  Unless I look at my phone, I can go weeks without reading the news or learning what is happening in anyone else’s life. Of course, living here, away from everything, is my reality and yet it seems as though there is some kind of wider reality, some kind of commonality we all participate in. I feel distant from that, which is good and bad simultaneously.

  I teach English to kids in Asia via Skype, which is real and not real all at once. Due to the time difference, the classes are early in the morning and my students have usually finished their days. Sometimes their parents are in the background, making dinner in different languages. We communicate intangibly, via electronic documents and words typed in pixels, and yet all of it is real.

  A friend from Sunderland living in London wrote me a letter. He said he was homesick and that he wanted to go back to the north-east, to reality, where the place names and colloquialisms felt like wet stones in his mouth.

  This morning my student read a passage about heat shimmering. She had never seen heat shimmer before. She didn’t understand what I was talking about. I tried to show her a picture on Google Images but I couldn’t find one. It is impossible to photograph heat shimmering. Somehow that seems like the most real thing of all.

  136

  I threw myself into my A level revision with a kind of madness. I plastered the walls of my bedroom with A3 sheets of paper and worked myself into a frenzy memorising notes and drawing complex diagrams with highlighters. My mother found me sobbing on the floor the night before my Psychology exam, books and papers strewn across the room.

  ‘Lucy,’ she said, bending down and gently brushing my hair out of my eyes. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I can’t do it,’ I choked through trembling fingers. ‘I can’t remember it all. It’s too much.’ She coaxed me into the sitting room and poured me a glass of wine.

  ‘Drink this,’ she soothed, running her fingers lightly along my arms. ‘Calm down. You can do it. It’s going to be okay.’

  My mother and Ben were on holiday when my results came in. I waited at home for as long as I possibly could before I went into school to collect them. They called me from Greece, supping cocktails with sparkly umbrellas in the sun.

  ‘Tell us, Lucy!’ they pleaded. ‘We’re having a drink for you, in celebration.’

  ‘I haven’t got them yet,’ I confessed.

  ‘Why not, Luce? You’ve had all morning. Get on the bus. Go on.’

  I walked tentatively through the hall to collect my envelope. The local press was there, photographing the students with the top results.

  ‘Here she is!’ said my Head of Year, touching my arm. ‘We’ve been looking for you! What took you so long?’ I didn’t say anything. ‘Come over here,’ he said, ushering me towards the photographer. ‘Let’s get you in the Echo. Where are you off to, then? Oxford? Cambridge?’

  ‘I haven’t opened them yet,’ I told him. He laughed.

  ‘Well, go on, then! You’ve done very well.’ I looked at my teachers, and the photographer, and the school hall that I never had to sit in ever again. I squinted in the sun streaming through the window and remembered all the days I had spent between those walls, struggling to breathe.

  ‘I think I’m just going to go, if you don’t mind,’ I told them. ‘I’ll open them at home.’ My Head of Year frowned. He started to say something but I walked away and out into the day, away from them all.

  137

  At the end of the summer, Rosie, Lauren and I went out together for the last time. They both wore red dresses and pulsed like heartbeats under the strobe lights. We shared a carton of chips in the Happy Chippy, where you could buy bags of drugs as an extra with your hot and spicy pizza, and a hot-water bottle for the cold walk home.

  I stuffed all of my possessions into an ugly floral suitcase, lying in a star-shape over the lid as I strained to fasten it up. My mother laughed when she saw me.

  ‘You’re coming back, you know, Lucy. You don’t have to take it all.’ I crammed sequins through the sides as my voice wobbled.

  ‘I don’t want to leave anything behind.’

  138

  We walk along the pier and pass an old engine and a rotten dashboard, rusty and forgotten.

  ‘That was a car,’ the man says, kicking a piece of plastic.

  ‘Did it just disintegrate?’

  ‘Aye. Things fall apart pretty quickly out here, with the sea spray and the salt in the air. You leave something metal out here and it’ll disappear in no time at all.’

  I have so many things to leave out here on these rocks. Too many things to carry.

  Part Three

  1

  I stepped off the train at King’s Cross and bundled myself into a taxi with all of my bags.

  ‘Where to?’ grunted the driver. I fumbled in my bag. ‘Just a second,’ I told him. ‘I can’t find the address.’ He turned on the meter. ‘Maybe just start driving?’ I told him. ‘I’ll find it as we go.’

  ‘But where are we heading, lady?’

  ‘Oh. Erm. I dunno. The Gherkin, maybe? Think it’s somewhere round there.’ The driver raised his eyebrows and we set off into the uncertainty.

  2

  I often walk towards the pier past the old fish factories as the sun begins to set. I think that winter sunsets are the best kind. The water is so still and the clouds are streaked with pinks and oranges so sweet they make my teeth ache. I like the juxtaposition of heavy, dirty industry with the fragile sky.

  3

  Student halls were a flurry of faces and fire doors. People Blu-tacked up band posters and book covers or photos of their mates back home, depending on the kind of portrait they wanted to paint of themselves. There were new ways of shaping old words and subjects I had not known existed. People came from state schools and public schools and leafy boroughs in Essex. They had step-siblings and no siblings and their parents were doctors and lecturers and earls and cousins of kings. They were big and small and wore hoodies and dresses and trainers and riding boots. They liked poetry and netball and MDMA. Rather than clinging on to the place I came from, I felt the old markers of myself dissipating in the pasta and vodka fug. I could be anyone and no one would know any different.

  4

  On our first night together we went out in Shoreditch. We tapped onto the bus with our shiny new Oyster cards and went to see a band play at the Queen of Hoxton. I wore a pink dress with a floral hairband and did shots of tequila with boys in ruffled shirts, as miniskirted media babes dripped spritzers and plucked flashing BlackBerries from slogan tote bags. I left my new friends and spun in circles on my own in the dark, closing my eyes and swaying to the bassline. I was surprised when I opened them again and the room was made of solid objects. Behind my eyelids, everything had melted into molten gold.

  A boy in a fedora and an open-necked shirt lolled around next to me. He smiled at me and I grabbed his arm and shouted in his ear, ‘I just moved here!’

 
‘You what?’

  ‘I just moved here. Today!’

  He took in my eager face with a slow smile. ‘Cool, man.’ He regarded me hazily. ‘To do what?’

  ‘I’m studying literature,’ I said, trying out the phrase on my tongue.

  ‘Sweet.’ He closed his eyes for a few moments. ‘What kind of books you into?’

  ‘The Beats, mostly,’ I said in an offhand manner. ‘Kerouac. Ginsberg.’ I pronounced the ‘G’ as a ‘J’. ‘You know.’

  His lips twitched. ‘Yeah,’ he mumbled. ‘I know. Ever read any Burroughs?’

  ‘Naked Lunch.’

  ‘Like it?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  He pulled a paperback from his coat pocket. ‘Here.’ He pressed the book on me. ‘Take this.’

  I took the torn copy of Junkie from his hands and crammed it into my shoulder bag.

  ‘Thanks!’ I said. He waved me away and slunk off into the crowd.

  I flicked through it on the top deck of the night bus and found words scrawled in biro across the inside cover. My new flatmate peered over my shoulder.

  ‘Aw, it’s got his poems in it! I bet he forgot. You should find him and give it back.’

  I shoved it into my bag and looked down at the dark ache of the river as we crossed London Bridge. ‘Maybe.’ I shrugged. I had no intention of trying to return the book. I put it on the shelf in my sickly student room and looked at it from my pillow. It was my first pearl in a new world.

  5

  I am far away now and I can see how the motorways wind around your heart and coat it in tarmac. Tense phone calls and scrawled postcards. I like this fast and reckless city that does not cradle me. I throw myself into it, just to see what will happen. I like the sting and I love the violence. I collide with other bodies. On dark dance floors. Cold streets. Stuffy bedrooms. There are no rules here. I can do anything I want. I will taste all of the sweetest things. I am mad, bad, chaos. I don’t want your softness. I have broken out of my bones.