16

When we got to Bonita’s, Sofi sat motionless on her bike. She said she couldn’t be bothered to get off. We both sat there for a second, in a two-girl bicycle queue, in the dark, on tiptoes in our seats. What was it? The sun, the wind; the water, being scared, cold, Eddy, that all this would end. These things were heavy on us.

Then Sofi said ‘Blackberry’ and reached out for one in Bonita’s bush. And with that, she toppled over: very slowly, entirely complicit, like we were watching ourselves in a short film with an inescapable ending. When I helped her up, she kicked the bush for making her fall, and then the bike, and then held her hand out to me, fingers lightly spread, so I could hold it. We wandered up the garden path, past the sunlounger she sometimes slept in, past the gnomes.

Bonita was asleep on the sofa. Her head had slunk to one side, and her cheek was resting on multiple chins. We slap-footed into our tiny bedroom and flopped onto my bed.

‘Every time. Every time I forget how hard these things are,’ she said. We didn’t move for a while, we just lay there, flat on our backs; knees hooked over the edge, our sides next to each other, like two tectonic plates.

I was looking up at the ceiling, but I realized, out of the corner of my eye, that Sofi was looking at me. At least I thought she was. You think you can tell when someone is looking at you, but it’s so easy to imagine it. I tried to see if I was right without turning my head, but it hurt and my nose got in the way. She was definitely looking at me.

‘You have dandruff,’ she said. What was weird was she said it so softly, and kindly, as if she was telling me she liked the shape of my eyes.

I put my hands to my head as quickly as I could, and told her she wasn’t allowed to look at me.

‘Don’t be crazy!’ she said, trying to pull my hands away. ‘It’s dandruff.’

I’d curled into a ball by then and Sofi was genuinely fighting me, peeling at my fingers. She made a grab at a bit of hair just above my ear.

She said she’d got some, and inspected it on her finger. I tried to slap it out of her hand, but she stuck her finger in her mouth.

‘I don’t care – it’s normal, it’s dandruff. I don’t think it’s disgusting. It’s from you. How can it be disgusting if it’s from you?’

I put my hood up and did up the drawstrings so all you could see of my head was from my eyes down.

She said she was only looking at my hair because she wanted me to cut hers. She pulled her fringe down, almost to her nostrils. ‘It’s ratty. I thought we could have a beauty evening.’

I said dandruff wasn’t beauty, and at exactly the same time, she said she meant cucumbers on the eyes.

‘We don’t have any cucumbers.’

‘You know what I mean. A beauty evening. Moisturizer. Like girls are supposed to do.’

‘Like apes? Picking fleas off each other?’

She wanted to do her nails. I looked at her. She was not the manicure type. Her nails had a black hedgerow of dirt. She held her hands up to the light. It looked like she’d been digging without a spade. Then she folded her fingers into her palms, like she didn’t want either of us to see them any more.

I demanded that we do it on her bed, because even though she tried to catch the bits of nail, each curve pinged off and got lost in the duvet. Peanuts were fine, I said, but not fingernails.

‘Yellow,’ she said. ‘Smoking. Terrible. Wait. Do it again. Listen … listen,’ she said, eyes wide, ‘every time you do it, it sounds like someone opening a Tupperware box.’ It was true, there was this quiet hiss when you cut them. Her nails felt soft and air-pocketed under scissors, but they flew off hard, like bone boomerangs. When I’d finished, she ran her fingers over my face to show they didn’t scratch.

Then I cut her fringe. She crossed her eyes, trying to see what I was doing. I thought about her forehead, the lightest lines across it, that it was frowning and that I could smooth it, but I just cut and caught the hair that fell in the palm of my hand. She asked if I wanted to keep a bit of it, to put in a locket. She told me I was cutting it wonky. She looked through her hair at me and said she was counting my eyelashes. I wondered if someone letting you touch their head means that you have got close to them. I wondered what any of it meant, or if it meant anything at all.

After that, she stood in front of the mirror, dusting her fringe from left to right and seeing if she liked it. I looked at her in the mirror and she looked at me. We both looked different backwards; I was about to say that I liked having two of her, but she said, ‘Oh no you look all skewiffy,’ and that I was better in the flesh. She put her hands on my waist and turned me to her.

‘Better face to face.’ We stood there for a second. It was just a second.

‘Daddy-long-legs,’ I said, and leaned out of her hands to scoot one out of the window.

A bit after that, I came back from the bathroom in a thin tank top and pants, rather than pyjamas. I stood in the narrow alley between our beds, taking longer than necessary to set the alarm on my phone, not wanting her to look, but not wanting her not to see. And then, from behind me, from her bed, she said not to move.

‘Your legs,’ she said.

I had my back to her, and for a terrible moment, I thought she was going to reach out and touch me.

She didn’t though, and I finished setting the alarm, and climbed under the sheet. She stretched out her hand towards me, nails neat now, and turned off the light. Some time between the first night and that night, no light no longer meant silence.

There’s something about people lying together in the dark. It fills in the lulls, colours in the gaps. Other things do too; background television, cutting carrots, a third person. But lying in the dark at night is the best. Everything you say could be said quicker in the light, where you are not allowed to look away and think about something else, or be quiet. But in the dark, there is so much to say. You talk all night. You can’t see dandruff or chipped teeth or dappled skin. The camera is soft focus.

We talked the moon across the sky, in steep slopes and plateaux and stumbles. Then we slept. I’m not sure which one of us fell first.