Someday Find Me

I had sat out on the front step to smoke the cigarette. The concrete was cold on my feet, and rain was slowly colouring the steps dark. It was beautiful rain, the soft misty kind that hangs in the air and sits in your hair in tiny diamonds. I’d looked up at the pavement but there was nobody there, just the occasional swish-splash of a car driving past on the other side of the road. They only ever drove past on that side of the road, out of the city, and never on the other, never on the way in. Sometimes it seemed like the city must be getting empty, all the people leaving and nobody coming to take their place.

I wondered what Fitz was up to at work. He’d be making up set-lists, probably, bent over an order pad on the bar with a pencil in his hand and his hair falling in his eyes. Filling up the big glass jar of pistachios, green in their pink shells, or the olives, all glossy and black, chunks of garlic and chilli floating in the oil. Stacking the crisps on their shelf, checking there was enough of each bright colour, crackling the foil bags closer together to fit more of them in. Cleaning the pumps for the soft drinks, sticky with sugar and bubbly in the drip tray. Another car drove past up on the street out of sight, leaving a little trail of faint music as it went.

My cigarette had gone out in the damp fuzz of the rain, so I lit it and lay back, head inside on all the post, wiry doormat tickling my back and legs stretched out in the wet. Smoke drifted upwards and I looked up at the ceiling with a pizza flyer slippery under my head. That day there were no patterns or shapes to be made, just miles of meringue stretched from corner to corner.

The cigarette ran out again after a while, and I stood up and wandered into the lounge. I was shivering: it got cold in the flat when it rained, damp patches on the wall seeping through silently. I went over to Quin’s rail and pulled out one of his millions of blazers, a sailor’s one with white piping and braid and stripes on the shoulders. It was too big for me so I rolled up the sleeves and snuggled into it. My favourite blazer was missing; a red velvet one, which was soft like a hug when you put it on. Quin would have been wearing it; it was his favourite too. It was still cold, so I crouched on Quinnie’s sleeping bag and pulled his duvet round me. It smelt like him, of posh cigarettes and hair oil and just a tiny bit sweaty. There was a DVD case on the arm of the sofa with a bit of a line left on it, so I dabbed some and waited and waited for a high.

Time crawled by, until at last I could escape the emptiness. I left early and walked slowly to cheat it. Delilah’s flat was in a big old building with pretty windows and tall steps leading up to the front door. Every time I climbed them I felt pangs of jealousy. Lilah always told me that from the inside the windows were draughty and there were mice in the basement where the bins went, but as outsiders we can see things only as they seem. Envy was a feeling I collected as a diehard habit so truths like these often fell around me unheard. I pressed the buzzer and shifted the bag with the little bottle of vodka Fitz had bought me from one hand to the other. Molly, Delilah’s flatmate, answered, a blue paisley apron tied around her waist and a pan in one hand, a spoon in the other.

‘Hey, Saf! Come in, come in. You look gorgeous!’

I liked Molly. She was clever and pretty, with round pink cheeks, and she always had nice things to say to everybody. ‘Lilah’s in her room,’ she said, stirring the pot. ‘You want some bolognese?’

I shook my head, touched my stomach. ‘No, thanks, I just ate. Smells amazing.’

She smiled and went back into the kitchen, trailing hot tomato-garlic-wine scent behind her. I walked down the hall, looking at the framed photos on the bright white walls as I went. Lilah’s door was half open, music playing out, so I knocked and opened it at the same time. She was crouched in front of her mirror, straightening her hair and spraying each strand wildly as she went.

‘Hey, gorge,’ she said. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Good,’ I said, sitting down on the end of the bed and taking the bottle out of the bag. ‘How you doing?’ And before she could answer, I added, ‘Glasses?’

We’d sat for a while like that, me with my back against the wall and my legs stretched out on the satin duvet, Lilah kneeling by the mirror, preening and powdering and straightening and shining. She had started seeing a man at work, a client, and she didn’t want her boss to find out.

‘He’s so beautiful, Saf,’ she gushed, her gold eyes widening, her own beauty reflected back in the mirror.

‘I’m happy for you,’ I said, and I was, the vodka warming my heart and making the room pink in the lamplight. I racked up two lines on the cover of a hardback book, but as she turned to look in her huge toolbox of make-up, I snorted one and quickly racked up another.

‘Here,’ I said, as she turned back round. ‘Let’s celebrate.’

I held out the book and the note and she grinned, ‘Little fairy with your pixie dust.’ She scooted forward and knelt at my knees to do the line. I watched the tiny particles zip up her nose as her hair swooshed across the cover. She handed back the note and squeezed my boot. ‘Thanks, baby.’ She went back to the mirror, turning up the music as she passed. She started to sing, humming the beat aloud in her beautiful sparkly voice.

The thing with Lilah was that she started off each night like this. Full of happy, fun and glossy pretty. I’d look at her and feel so ordinary sat on the sides. She was shiny and new and I was growing-out roots and scuffed boots. She looked like the kind of person anything could happen to, like in fairytales and rubbish films, like she might drop her purse in the street and a prince or a footballer would bend to pick it up and fall in love with her. But as the night went on she’d get bored. She’d look around the room and she wouldn’t see anybody she liked or wanted to talk to and she wouldn’t know the music and she’d feel out of place. And her glossy would look too much, too bright in the dark loveliness of the night. And she’d sulk and start to whine, and she’d take her shoes off because her feet hurt, and she’d pull her hair back because it was too hot, and it made me realise that even beautiful people are only beautiful in their own place. Fitz thought that Lilah was a bit up herself, but I knew that she cried herself to sleep sometimes. I knew that she hated her job and I knew that she could never tell her parents about the abortion she had had or the married men she slept with and so I found a bit of her to love.

We did the lines and then we stood up and straightened ourselves out and then we left. Molly was pouring bolognese onto two perfect nests of spaghetti as we passed. There was a man’s shoe poking out from the kitchen table, but the door hid the leg and the body and the face. ‘Who is it?’ I asked Lilah, as we walked down the street, waiting to feel cold through the vodka but staying cosy in its warmth. She shrugged. ‘James, I guess. Someone boring like that.’ To Lilah, anyone without beauty or wealth was boring. It made me cross with her but it also made me feel relieved, because I knew that she couldn’t see the real wonder of Fitz and so he was safely mine.

The streetlights had been starting to come on as the sky turned darker grey, little globes of orange glowing along the long street. I took poppers from my pocket and offered them to Lilah. She shook her head. ‘God, no. What are you – sixteen? You’ll be sick …’ I laughed and put them to my nose anyway. The rest of the road rushed by in a warm lurch, lights brighter and cheeks warm, Lilah chattering away about everything and nothing.

I could feel the bass throbbing through the pavement as we walked up the drive, beating up through my feet and into my heart, leaving me short of breath and anxiously happy. The door was open and we stepped through into the dark. All of the light bulbs had been swapped for the coloured ones you could get in the pound shop, red in the hall. The walls had been covered with giant sheets of plain white paper, which people were already scrawling messages across.

We headed naturally for the kitchen, the place where everybody begins and ends a party. It was bustling busy, people perching on worktops and crowded around talking and reaching for things and filling glasses. The light bulb in the kitchen was green, everything and everybody suddenly seeming as if they were under water. I was already high and happy and didn’t want anything bringing me down, so I floated through without stopping, smiling at people and feeling the music rolling around my head. Alice was at the far end of the kitchen table, crotch glowing in the green light, and she jumped up excitedly and pulled me into her arms, showing me off to the rest of the table, like I was her pet, and then slipped a pill into my hand and danced off.

When we had gone into the lounge the light was dark blue, and people were dancing in a little clot in front of the decks. We danced in the blue dark for a while and I could feel my eyes starting to roll back behind my lids so I took Lilah’s hand and we sat down on the sofa. She was drinking wine slowly from the bottle, watching nobody in particular, and she ran her long fingers through my hair sending shivers over my rushing skin, tight and tiny pearls. My face and my mouth were dry and hot. The beat was pounding in my ears and I couldn’t breathe, like the darkest blue was shrinking in on me and the beat was growing and growing until it would crash down and cover me like a wave. Around me people were changing, shimmering gold glasses appearing over eyes and disappearing again, strange masks looming out of dark corners, faces melting into screams. I closed my eyes but the darkness sent me spinning. I stood, and the carpet lurched underneath me as I hurried out into the angry red of the hall and then into the toilet. I had to peel away a corner of white paper to get into it, and when I shut the door behind me, I could hear squeaky pens scribbling and scrawling messages on the inside of my skull.

The light was a normal greenish yellow in there, and I thought somewhere far inside my head that Alice must have run out of colours. I looked at my face in the mirror. My eyes were black and my skin was greenish yellow too, disappearing into the reflection of the walls and the door. My hair had come loose from its knot and was sticking to my scalp and cheeks like straw, falling limply down on my shoulders, and I pushed it and pulled it, disgusted. The bass pulsed through the door and in my veins, and as I pulled and tugged faster and faster at my hair and face my image blurred in the glass and the light seemed to shiver in its socket. I scraped my hair back and tied it with the band I kept round my wrist, but it was no good. I looked on the shelves and I found a tiny pair of nail scissors and I got hold of the ponytail between my fingers and hacked clean through it, the soft sound of the scissors snipping echoing around me in the pale light. Bleached clumps of fluffy hair fell into the sink like feathers. The sober me was stirring in the back of my head, panicking and fluttering anxiously, but I ignored her, shoved her back down. I left the hair feathers in the sink and pulled the band out so that my hair splayed around me, rough and uneven, and looked at my face for a long time until it stopped being my own and then I went back into the party. I went upstairs where the light was pink, and silvery strains of techno were spilling out and I did not look back.

I sat at my desk, still pulling at the new short chunks of my hair, the sketchbooks lying forgotten around me. I wondered, for the first time since I’d remembered cutting it, what it looked like but I didn’t get up to check. I sat, and I waited for Fitz to wake up.

There are places and rooms where everything can be taken away from you; words and thoughts and strength, until you are a child again, small and adrift. You feel invisible and caught in the headlights all at once. The things you have tried to build up around yourself, the things people have said you can be, fade away in the shadows of others around you. At school you are instantly comparable, instantly assessable. There are suddenly other players in the game you play with yourself.

I looked around the room but there was nothing to see except the tops of bowed heads as people pored over their work, scribbling notes on sketches and leafing through pages torn from magazines, scraps of fabric and glossy photographs. I rolled a pencil slowly back and forth along the table enjoying the dull clatter it made each way. The tutor, John, sat in a chair by the window playing on his phone. He was young, with blondish curls and an earnest enthusiasm for most things. If he’d had a tail, it would always wag. On the board behind him, he’d cheerfully scrawled the number ‘14’ in scarlet. This was the number of days we had left to work on our final pieces, weekends not included, and it glowed against the bright white of the board. The degree show hadn’t meant anything to me when I’d first begun, not like the others, the serious ones like Millie, who’d tagged along to the show each year even though we didn’t have to, making notes and talking to the students who were graduating. But now, with the red numbers on the wall and the feverish energy around the silent room, I felt the pangs of real panic rise. I looked down at the blank page in front of me, and I wondered how I’d ever thought I could do this.

I’m too old to be a student. I’m miles older than everyone else.

He bounces onto the sofa next to me. Don’t be silly, he says, rubbing my back. Only a couple of years. Bet you nobody even knows if you haven’t told them.

I know, though, don’t I?

He ruffles my hair. You’ve come this far, babe. You’re brilliant, Saf. You’re gonna knock their socks off.

You think so?

I know so. Now give us a cuddle.

With my eyes closed, I could see him so clearly and feel his arms around me. But I knew if I tried to open my eyes and draw, he’d disappear like steam, float away out of reach and be gone. With my eyes closed, everything was in its place in my head, the ground was still and the desk was in front of me. I knew if I opened them the buzzing in my head would get louder and everything would start to spin out of control and away from me.

John had got up and was pacing slowly around the room, offering his services, which seemed primarily to be the aforementioned enthusiasm. He stopped to talk to Grant, two seats away.

‘So how will the videos work in the show? You don’t have masses of space, you know.’

‘I’ve got three little plasmas from Hardy’s downtown, on loan. They’ve said they’ll fit them as well. I want them in a diagonal, you know, left to right.’

‘Great, yes.’

‘And I’m adding in this footage, the CCTV, see?’

‘Fate Jones? Great, great. Perfect.’

‘Yeah.’

The sound of patting on the back, footsteps moving on. I didn’t have any electronics in my work. I didn’t know how to make films. I could take photographs. That was all. I had been out the weekend before and taken pictures of things and people who caught my eye without thinking too hard about them. When I looked back through the pictures at home there was shot after shot of people eating, food in their hands and hanging out of their mouths, empty wrappers on the street, pigeons picking at a takeaway, a baby with ice-cream smeared over its face. These things did not sound great or perfect.

I felt the first familiar prickles of anger. It wasn’t fair to move the boundaries, to include videos and CCTV and free TVs. It was the same story but with different rules, different people pulling the strings – I was used to moving my own goalposts, but having someone else to edge them away made my skin begin to crawl and my chest feel tight. Everyone else was filling space so fast there wasn’t time or place enough to fit everything they could do. My pages were blanker than ever.

John was talking to Millie now, little Millie who was a year younger than everyone else because she’d skipped a year of school, and two years younger than most because she hadn’t had a gap year, and four years younger than me because I was backward, Millie with her study in still lives, objects taken from people she’d met in the street, in interesting places, and arranged together and painted to represent a cross-section of modern society in an old style, and John thought that sounded great, great, perfect too. I closed my eyes tighter.

The flat is cold and lonely, so I turn on the radio and start to fill the sink so I can wash up the dirty plates before he gets home. This will make him happy, and as the sink begins to fill with bubbling water, I imagine his dimple and the hair falling in his eyes as he reaches down to cuddle me.

The radio plays old songs, it’s Motown hour, they say, and I hum along as I put the plates on the draining-board. A song comes on that I know. My dad used to sing it to my mum when I was little and she’d get annoyed and flick at him with a tea-towel, even though she wanted to laugh really. It’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ by Marvin Gaye and I begin to sing along.

I hear his voice behind me. He puts his skinny arms round me and we sway along and sing even though we don’t quite know the words, my hands in the soapy water and his cold against my skin.

He turns me round and suds run down the back of his neck as I hold him close and we dance, round and round, in circles. We dance for the whole of Motown hour, with Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Four Tops and the Temptations spilling out of the little radio and him and me dancing round, spinning and clicking our fingers, wiggling and laughing and kissing. When Quin finally comes home he laughs and joins in and the three of us sing until Crazy Bob and Ket Kev next door start knocking on the wall.

John moved past me, invisible me, and began leafing through Gennifer’s sketches of her handmade dress, formed of photographs printed on fabric, painstakingly stitched together. I opened my eyes and looked down at the page in front of me. I knew that I had to be better.

The smallest things can be the biggest jobs, if you let them. Fitz liked to take his time choosing which song to put on, weighing one up against another and fretting about whether people would like it, watching their faces in fear as the first bars began to play. Quin could never choose an outfit to wear each day. He’d spend ages putting things on and then pulling them off, leaving them in tiny piles on the carpet like shed skins. Lilah spent an hour every day straightening her hair, over and over again, tiny strand by tiny strand. My mother found it difficult to tell someone awkward or unpleasant news. You could hear her on the phone, skipping and skirting round what she needed to say, tripping up on the words and jumping out of the way of questions. When my sister seduced her maths teacher in the store cupboard, my mother told everyone for months that he had assaulted her. All of them were just putting off the real thing they had to do; the going outside or the telling of the truth or the letting yourself be seen. They reminded me of my sister Lulu when she was tiny, when she knew that putting your toys away was the thing you did before you went to bed, so she’d put the things back in her toy-box, one by one, then take them out, one by one, and lay them on the floor in neat rows, then start all over again. If you watched her from the doorway, without her noticing, sometimes you’d catch her giggling to herself; maniacally happy that she’d beaten the sequence of things.

Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if we’d all just done the things we were afraid of.

Fear was the feeling knotting my belly that evening, though I didn’t realise it then; a weird creepy feeling all over my skin and crawling in my insides. I was standing by the counter with my hands just floating above the surface, frozen. The sound of Fitz singing in the shower and the water hitting the tiles were the only noises in the flat.

The things were lined up on the counter. They were staring at me.

This was not how it was supposed to be. These things were my routine, my security. I chopped and sliced and created and looked and saw and did not eat, and in this way the world stayed upright and Fitz was happy and I was strong. I looked at the globs of chicken in their purple polystyrene tray, the plastic peeled back. I looked at the knife in my hand. I reached out and took a pepper instead, holding it in my hand like a grenade. I tried to ignore the feeling of its skin against mine, ignore the smell of it, sharp and green. I sliced it, singing a song in my head, wishing the radio was on. When it was done, when I had won, I slid the strips onto a plate and looked again at the chicken. I reached out to pick up the first thin slab. I imagined the feel of it in my hand, the wet it would leave on my fingers, the thin white veins of fat stretched across its pale, flabby flesh. I put my hand down. I put the knife down.

The peppers and the purple tray of chicken went to bed in the bin.

By the time Fitz came out, I had put the telly on and turned off the main light and turned on the lamp. I held out ten pounds, crisp and dry in my hand, safe.

‘I think you deserve a treat,’ I said. ‘Fish and chips? Kebab? Proper pie and mash …?’

His eyes lit up and he looked at it like it was a million pounds. ‘Where’d you get that, lovely?’

‘My mum sent it to me. Think she knows I’m working hard. Here, go on. You deserve it, for looking after me when I’m being such a pain.’

I loved the way his face creased up all the way to his ears when he grinned.

Later, as we sat in front of the soaps with our feet tucked up under each other and our fingers laced up together, I tried not to smell the scent of frying fat on his skin, or feel the grease on his fingers, seeping into the edges of mine. On TV they were showing a special programme, a live show about safety in the city, a woman’s guide to avoiding crime. I leant my head against his shoulder and tried not to breathe.

When you take drugs, things that were once opposites become the same.

Too much = Never enough

Standing still = Spinning around

Feeling at ease with someone you know well = Falling head over heels in love all over again

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