Saltwater Read online

  The Turbine Hall was filled with Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds. There were one hundred million seeds on the floor, and each seed was made from porcelain and hand-painted in China. I looked at them from the upper level and marvelled at the scope of it and then I walked down to the ground level and picked one up. I could see the brushstrokes made by someone in a factory thousands of miles away.

  19

  Since I came to live here and gave myself room to think and to breathe, a liquid calm has begun to pool inside of me. I am coming back into myself. When I arrived in London, I wasn’t cool or collected and I felt ashamed of how desperately I wanted a chance. It is embarrassing, or entitled, or greedy to want things in a city where so many others are wanting. My dreams dissipated. I had no time or energy to read when my head was crammed with survival. Academia seemed fusty and distanced from reality.

  I have been reading a lot here. There is not much else for me to do. In thinking about language, I am becoming increasingly conscious of the way in which words and ideas shape our world. I am beginning to feel things again, and beginning to respect my own hunger, to listen to it rather than fear it.

  I am learning my tastes. I like bitter things like wine and coffee. Sour things. Spicy things. Lemon and chilli. Smells that are so pungent they almost hurt. I like the way that fish is on the verge of disgusting. I like the rotten brown sea smell and the taste of burnt cinnamon stuck to the bottom of the pan, vegetables overcooked and shrivelled into accidental crisps. I like the horrible carbon mulch on my tongue, like chewing coal. I like too much salt and too much pepper. Bare skin in the freezing wind. I like sitting so close to the fire that my legs break out in a pink rash and I like bruises on the insides of my thighs and to be bitten so hard it almost draws blood. I like the taste of sweat and oil and that day-old skin smell. I like that scalpy hair scent and seeing dirt under other people’s fingernails.

  20

  I wrote an essay for the creative assignment based on the sunflower seeds. I didn’t care about Dickens or Defoe or the countless flâneurs who traipsed the streets floating above it. I couldn’t identify with writers who ghosted around cities making observations, removed from the pulse of it. I felt everything so deeply. When the ground vibrated as the tube went past, it seemed as though it was running right over my bones.

  My new friend Amy and I collected the marks from our first assignment together, feeling wobbly.

  ‘Your prose is purple,’ mine said in the comments. A big, bold ‘F’ glowered in the corner. I looked at Amy. ‘What does it mean?’ I asked her, feeling wronged.

  ‘Haven’t got a clue, mate.’ She blinked back tears. ‘I got an E.’

  ‘I got an F.’

  ‘Do you think we should go and see him?’

  ‘I dunno. It’s kind of embarrassing, isn’t it?’ We walked along Fleet Street with the weight of history bricked around us in law buildings and offices and we felt like maybe we weren’t supposed to be there after all.

  ‘Fancy the pub?’

  ‘Yeah, alright.’

  The whole of our year was in the pub. There was some kind of cocktail deal and the tables were stacked with saccharine concoctions, sugar syrup and maraschino cherries leaking onto the tables.

  ‘Lucy!’ someone shouted. ‘Amy! Come over here. How did you do?’ Amy and I exchanged glances.

  ‘It’s alright,’ someone else said. ‘We all did shit. I got a C. A C! I’ve never had a C in my life.’ Amy made eyes at me and headed to the bar.

  She went to the toilet a few hours later and didn’t come back for a good twenty minutes. I twisted my hips through the sticky glasses to find her. I banged on the cubicle door.

  ‘Amy?’ She didn’t answer. ‘Shit.’ I dashed up the stairs to get a second opinion and one of our classmates told the bar staff, who broke down the door and then called an ambulance.

  ‘Can I come with you?’ I asked the paramedics when they arrived. ‘I’m her friend.’ They looked at each other.

  ‘Yeah, okay. That should be alright. Have you been drinking, too?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m fine, though.’

  They shone a light into my pupils as I climbed into the ambulance. ‘Can we get a few details off you? Do you know her next of kin?’

  ‘No. We just started uni together.’

  ‘We need someone. Do you have her phone? We can get a number out of there.’

  ‘Is she going to be alright?’

  ‘She’ll be fine. We’ll get her on a drip and she’ll be right as rain.’

  I sat beside her bed in the hospital all night as she slept wired up to liquids and people groaned in the darkness around us. The nurses popped in and out occasionally, narrowing their eyes at me and holding information about her condition tightly to their chests.

  ‘Students, are you?’ Their words were barbed.

  21

  I doodled on my essay and reread the notes while I waited. I looked up the definition of ‘purple prose’ on my phone. It said, ‘Purple is widely seen as immoral and insincere. The artsy, exterminating angel of depravity.’ I quite liked the sound of that.

  22

  I come home and you hurt at how my collarbones poke out. There are things inside of me that you do not recognise and I do not belong to you any more. That deep, dark place between us is going. I am giving it away to strange boys between my black sheets. To hungry faces in the street. To nightclub queues and coffee shop corners. I can see the sharp between your shoulder blades and I am pleased. I am stifled by people who think they know what shape I should be. I can take you by surprise. Look at my power.

  23

  I want a life that is full, which means dirty and delicious. Order seems to mean emptiness, or at least it does for me. I want coffee spilled on the carpet and stew slopped across the stove. I want stacks of dirty plates and cups and bowls, evidence that people have eaten. I want to hold solid shapes in my mouth; boiled potatoes and penne pasta and whole hot tomatoes. I want paper and pens and scraps of things.

  Dead wildflowers and clouds of incense ash. I want my hands stained with beetroot juice and bedsheets streaked with the dirt of my days. Compost heaps and biscuit crumbs.

  I am so afraid of consuming, of taking, of whether or not I have the right to things. I want to expand and leave traces of myself. I want evidence that I am existing.

  24

  I went for coffees with classmates who linked my arm and spun internships in New York and futures in publishing into the air above our heads. I made friends with Alex, who was older than me. He was clever and cynical and we sat up in his room all night drinking cheap red wine and talking about our ideas, penning first chapters of crap novels and smoking out of the window. Talking with him gave me that building block feeling again, as though our ideas might grow arms and legs and go out into the world and change things.

  No matter how many late nights I worked at the pub and how many lectures I missed or how inadequate I felt, walking over Waterloo Bridge was always special. Bridges are in-between spaces and I was in between, too. I liked straddling the north and south of the city and tensing my body against the current of the buses. I looked at the buildings huddled along the river, seeming old and delicate next to the swell of the Thames. I liked how it all looked small and fragile, as though it could be crumpled carelessly in a fist, when in reality I knew that money and power ran beneath the pavements like electricity cables. I liked looking at Westminster and Tower Bridge and the way it seemed real and unreal simultaneously. It was a gaudy dream; all that tinsel shimmering just out of reach.

  25

  I would like to build a dry-stone wall. I like the thought of being taught how to do it by a stoic stone expert, who will roll his eyes at me and my dyed hair and my patent raincoat and assume that I will not be able to do it. I will surprise him by choosing my stones very carefully and slotting them together in impossible ways. I will be so dedicated to my wall. I will build all night with a torch at my side. When I am finished I will stand back and l
ook at it. It will be a small wall; one that people can easily step over. I don’t want to fence anyone in, or keep anyone out. I only want to build a real, solid thing in the world. I will come back and visit my wall from time to time. I will say to friends and lovers, ‘I built that.’ They won’t believe me but I will press my thumbs into the scars on my fingertips, and I will know, and that will be enough.

  26

  Working at the pub became a lesson in style. I studied people from behind the bar, noting the chunky boots I would wear, the calf-length dresses, the eyeliner and the flash of glittery lurex, the leather jackets and the different washes of denim, as soon as I was free from the world of comfortable shoes and dresses with garish patterns to mask the beer slops and the red wine stains.

  In the summer people spilled onto the pavement in raucous groups, while I wound my way through the crowds collecting glasses and sweeping up cigarette butts. I longed for the day when I might be one of them. I served obnoxious City boys who racked up a year’s worth of my university fees in gin and tonics, and girls with silver nose rings and empty eyes. Old East-enders in flat caps sighed into pints of bitter over the changing face of their neighbourhood as tourists counted out pennies with confused fingers, repeating ‘blonde beer’ over and over with anxious smiles.

  The manager, Jay, had a lot of dodgy deals going on. He was always showing up to work with a black eye or a bruised jaw and he let the City boys do lines of coke off the bar in full view of everyone. It was rumoured that his wife had thrown him out and he spent most nights on the scummy sofa in the office upstairs. One Saturday, some of his mates had a stag party in the private dining room. I went up to collect glasses and found a naked woman dancing on the table. The men had their ties wrapped around their heads like schoolboys on the back seat of the bus. I left the glasses to pile up and padded quietly downstairs.

  When Jay was in a good mood, he was charming and let us drink as much as we wanted to get through the night. He made us special shots mixed with lemon juice and sugar syrup and asked the kitchen to send down steamed vegetables and giant tubs of houmos sprinkled with paprika, for us to snack on mid-shift. When he was in a bad mood he was foul, swearing at us and leering drunkenly on the bar.

  ‘Pretty little Lucy,’ he spat at me one night when he was off duty. ‘You think you can get anything you want, don’t you? Just by fluttering your eyelashes.’ I bit my lip and went off to clear tables.

  Every week we did a line clean, which meant the pipes that snaked their way from the cellar to the beer taps had to be emptied. We sat at the bar after hours as the remnants were poured into jugs and ice buckets. Astrid the fashion designer always stayed, in her painted leather jacket, and a couple of boys in baggy white T-shirts who stumbled into work bleary-eyed after their DJ sets, claiming to have been up for days. There was a strip club across the road where we often ended up in the early hours, and the dancers and bouncers occasionally joined us.

  One night we locked the doors, turned off the lights and settled in for a party. I loved that time of night, when everyone else went home to bed and the city became ours. There was something feral about it, the bar staff and the people who didn’t have to get up for work in the morning cut loose, trying to find an outlet for the sticky heat that built up during the hours watching other people dancing. There was something dangerous in the energy sweating from our collective skin.

  ‘Adnams or Addlestones?’ asked Max, sliding a pint glass along the wooden bar. I groaned inwardly. Both made me sick and sluggish.

  ‘Addlestones,’ I said. My feet ached and my arm hairs were gooey with sambuca. I couldn’t bear the thought of heading back to my single bed in my student room, alone with my exhaustion, away from the warmth of the tall city buildings. They made me feel safe and important, blocking out the forever of the sky. The night unfurled across my back like silk and I forgot there were such things as stars and planets and all of that time stretching on into infinity.

  Jay pressed his hands into the small of my back, making me jump.

  ‘Tough night, eh baby?’ He smirked at my glass. ‘Fucking students. Can never say no to free booze.’ Max played the beer taps like a musical instrument, relishing his position of power behind the bar, even after closing time. Astrid plugged her phone into the speakers and played ‘Heart of Glass’ by Blondie, singing along in her gravelly voice. The night passed in illicit glasses of wine and shots of Jägermeister pilfered from the fridge when we thought Jay wasn’t looking. The chef nursed a pint drowsily in the corner, his face pale against the red welts on his forearms. He vomited chicken casserole onto the table and Max lurched over with a wad of blue roll.

  ‘Okay, mate.’ He laughed. ‘Home time, I think. Come on, you lot. I’ve got to be back here in a couple of hours.’

  ‘Oh, just one more.’ Astrid pouted, scrolling through her phone for more music. ‘I’m only just getting started!’ Max made a face and turned on the dishwasher.

  ‘Nah, come on,’ said Jay, with red-rimmed eyes. ‘Max is right. You’ll all thank him in the morning.’ He looked at me. ‘Isn’t that right, Lucy?’ I hated Jay when he was drunk. His eyes sneaked under my clothes and coated my skin in something frightening.

  ‘Anyone seen my smokes?’ he asked. He picked up his jacket and his keys and an assortment of coins and lighters skittered across the floor.

  ‘Time for bed, Jay?’ I teased. He grunted and made for his racing bike, propped up against the wall. Max frowned. ‘Maybe sleep here tonight, eh, mate?’ he offered. ‘You’ve probably had too many to cycle.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he mumbled. ‘Alright, boss.’ He stumbled. Max sighed in mock exasperation.

  ‘Give him a hand upstairs, would you, Lucy?’ I rolled my eyes and took Jay’s weight as he dragged his feet on the landing in protest. My head started to spin when we got to the office.

  ‘Just a minute,’ I said, collapsing into the sofa, flaked with paint from the ceiling. I closed my eyes for a second and opened them to find Jay steadying himself on the fireplace. I snorted.

  ‘You should get some sleep, Jay. Are you working tomorrow?’ The voices of the street cleaners thudded against the windows.

  ‘No need to worry about me, baby,’ he said, sadly. I wondered about his wife as I turned to leave.

  ‘Wait,’ he said, fumbling in the dark.

  ‘What, Jay? I’m knackered. I’ve got lectures tomorrow.’ His hands found mine and he pulled me roughly towards him and burrowed his face in my neck. It took me a second to realise that he was pressing my hand onto his hot, hard penis. A sharp pain shot through my head, sobering me up. I snatched myself away from the beery, dirty stink of him.

  ‘What the fuck?’

  His eyes met mine for a long second. The shape of something irrevocable settled between us in the early-morning light.

  ‘Jesus,’ he grunted, collapsing onto the sofa. ‘Sorry.’

  Downstairs, people were blearily pulling on coats, calling taxis and looking up bus routes on their phones.

  ‘Will you be alright getting back, Lucy babe?’ asked Astrid, jangling Max’s keys with black fingernails. I pulled my too-big trench coat tightly around my body.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, waving her away.

  I sat on the plastic seat at the bus stop next to a boy with cat’s whiskers dripping from his cheeks. I took Jay’s cigarettes from my pocket and lit one, enjoying the sting of it in my lungs.

  27

  The sheets on my bed in student halls were my old set from home. I had chosen black so that my fake tan wouldn’t ruin them. When I pulled the covers over my head it was velvet-dark and silent. I fell into thick, impenetrable sleep.

  28

  One night we go out to an island by boat. Someone is having a party in one of the abandoned houses on the rocks. There is no electricity so we bring a bag of tea lights. There is a sheen to the night like polyester. The moon hangs precariously above us. It is so full that it seems as though it could fall into the water at any mome
nt, tearing a hole in the sky. The man lights a cigarette and sits on the side of the boat. We career violently over to one side. I laugh, thrilled at the thought of falling into the deep unknown together. I pull my sleeves over my hands as the cold leaks under my jumper. The man wriggles out of his hoodie and hands it to me.

  ‘I’m alright,’ I protest. ‘I don’t need it.’

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I’m a bit claustrophobic, sure. I want to feel the wind. This is fucking living, this is.’ He pulls his T-shirt over his head.

  Our driver rolls his eyes. ‘Fucking header, you are. She’s not impressed.’ I slip his jumper over mine, despite myself. It is warm and smells of tobacco. I watch his ribcage expand as he sucks on his cigarette. I can see the shape of his skeleton. He looks young and fragile in the moonlight. There is a smattering of acne across his shoulders, pink and raised, as though his skin is struggling to contain the life beneath it. Just for a moment, I want to push him overboard.

  29

  It is not enough to be pretty and I am not clever enough and it is not enough to be clever and I am not pretty enough. I thought I was coming to a place where my brain would be enough but my brain is in a body and it is my body that moves through the city, even though my thoughts do, too. I have to dress myself up in the right kinds of clothes so that people can guess that I am thinking the right thoughts but what thoughts are the right thoughts and haven’t they all been thought before?

  30

  ‘I’m going to take up dancing,’ I declare to the man sitting at the bar. It is almost Christmas and we are in Jimmy’s, surrounded by coloured lights. The Waterboys are playing an old song on the television. I pick at some faux branches.