TWENTY-SEVEN

I was ten minutes late to meet Helena, but she wasn’t there when I arrived. I ordered a flat white and sat down at a table in the darkest corner of the room. Perhaps she had already given up waiting and left. Perhaps she had forgotten about me. Perhaps she had never intended to come at all. The longing I felt for her was reminiscent of the way I used to feel about Owen, near the beginning, when I had fallen in love with him and was unsure if the feeling was mutual. The desire I felt for her was physical, like my bones would dissolve if I didn’t see her.

I didn’t notice Helena’s arrival until she swung her Design Museum tote bag into the seat opposite me. I jumped.

‘Hey!’ she smiled as she pulled me into an unselfconscious hug. My body was weightless in her arms. I spread my feet to steady myself when she let go. ‘Do you want anything?’ she asked, and I shook my head because I didn’t know what I would say if I started to speak. The minutes between her heading to the counter and returning to the table were blank, as if I now only existed in her presence.

‘I’m so glad you replied,’ she said when she returned. ‘I’ve really been looking forward to this. You know, I thought you didn’t really like me.’ My lower lip dropped.

I hadn’t expected confrontation. It hadn’t crossed my mind to consider how Helena felt about me, or rather it had seemed obvious that she thought I was pathetic, Owen’s silly, clingy girlfriend. I took a deep breath, ready to release the new me.

‘Well, maybe you weren’t wrong,’ I said. Helena’s face dropped fast, like it was about to slip right off her skull. She hadn’t expected me to tell the truth. I pressed my lips together in an apologetic smile. ‘I mean, I was kind of frightened of you, threatened I guess.’

‘By me?’ Helena laughed but she wasn’t laughing at me.

‘I guess I was worried that Owen liked you more than me.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked, even though she must have already known.

‘I guess I was… jealous.’

‘There was nothing to be jealous of,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing like that between us, trust me. Anyway, he really loves you. It’s obvious.’

‘He moved out,’ I said.

‘What? What happened?’

‘He just left. On New Year’s Day. We haven’t spoken since.’

‘What did he say?’ Helena’s surprise seemed genuine.

‘Not a lot.’ I had my story straight by then. ‘He just said he didn’t want to be with me any more.’

I held my breath while I waited for her to ask more questions or slather me in pity. She took a sip of her drink and sighed.

‘I haven’t heard from him either.’ She seemed wistful and distant, as if she had just been told her own boyfriend had left her and wasn’t quite sure how to deal with it yet.

‘You guys were together for a while, right?’ she asked.

‘Ten years.’

‘Wow.’

‘Yeah.’

We drank in silence for a few minutes.

‘You want to smoke?’ she asked.

We went out into the empty garden and sat at a table beneath a shabby awning. It had started raining and the drops hammered the canvas. Helena pulled her chair a little closer to mine.

‘So, you’re single then,’ she said.

‘I guess so.’

s

I let Helena lead the conversation away from Owen, and I was impressed with the ease and grace with which she distracted me. She talked about her art for a few minutes and then asked me if I had been doing any writing. The truth slipped out naturally. I told her I had hardly written anything for almost ten years, that what I wrote before that was really an experiment in talent (that failed immediately) and personality (in which I took longer to notice the failure). I told her about my job at the council, how I had intended to help people, but became so wrapped up in myself that I just stopped caring. I told her I quit because I had felt I needed to, but that I had nothing else lined up and I was afraid. I said I didn’t know how to define myself as a person, especially since Owen had gone. I told her a lot of things, but I didn’t speak for long. The words just tumbled out and Helena caught each of them with care and tact.

She smiled and said, ‘Tell me about it,’ but instead of waiting for me to tell her, she told me how she felt much the same. She had got into set design as a means of finessing her artistic talents while earning money, but now she had painted a series of portraits that she couldn’t persuade anyone to show, let alone buy. She wasn’t really into her day job, the constant struggle to have her vision taken seriously, and wondered if she would not be better off in an office perhaps, in a job with a salary and holiday pay and a physical space where she could leave her work where it belonged.

‘Why don’t you just do it?’ I asked. ‘Get an office job, I mean.’

She wrinkled her brow. ‘Why?’

‘Well, if you think it would be easier.’

‘Sure. But it’s not what I want.’ She tipped the cold dregs of a long black down her strong, slender throat.

I hadn’t considered that it was possible for people like Helena to feel disillusioned. She had always seemed so laid back; even now, as she opened up about her failures, she was relaxed. She didn’t seem afraid that she would be unfulfilled until she died. She knew life was unfair, harboured fantasies of giving up, but she knew what she wanted, and she would never stop pursuing it.

I wondered what Helena thought we were doing here. Was she trying to befriend the girlfriend of the man she wanted, or did she really just want to be friends? The desire I felt for her grew stronger, heady and disorienting. I felt myself leaning in too close, like her body held some magnetic draw over mine. I wanted to touch her. I stared at the spot on her neck where her blood ran closest to her skin. Could I follow the beat of her heart? She noticed me looking and blushed. We had both finished our coffee. I asked if she wanted to go somewhere for something stronger.

It was warm and dark outside, still raining. The atmosphere was thick, and the sky was heavy with the threat of thunder.

‘There’s a place just up the road,’ Helena said. ‘Come on, quick!’ She took my arm and we walked towards the pub.

‘I’m sorry I was shitty to you,’ I said.

‘You weren’t shitty. Don’t worry.’

I didn’t know what to say, so I clung on to her arm and followed her through the rain in silence.

‘I know,’ she said, as we walked through the door into a kitschy old pub. ‘It’s not really my taste either, but at least it’s dry.’ The bar was a big room, but there wasn’t much space in it. It was packed with broken bits of rotten, old boats, mouldy typewriters and moth-eaten taxidermy. The man behind the bar had a tiny moustache, a severe haircut and a lot of tattoos.

Helena asked for an IPA and I said I’d have the same. It was what Owen would have had. I got my purse out to pay and she told me to put it away.

‘You can pay next time,’ she said. She wanted there to be a next time, then.

We sat at a small table in another dark corner. Helena sat close to me and pulled up a stool to rest her feet on. She was happy to take up space; she deserved to get comfortable in public.

s

The sky was yellow and purple, and while the rain had let up a bit, fat drops still fell sporadically. After one pint with Helena, I said that I needed to go home.

‘Are you sure you don’t want another?’ Helena asked.

‘I can’t, I said I’d hang out with my flatmate tonight.’ It was difficult to say. I wanted to stay with Helena desperately. My guts were wriggling, like hundreds of tiny fingers were scrabbling around inside me, trying to find a way out. The pain had been quiet while I was with her, a dull memory, a whisper of an ache. But something inside me was stirring. It felt familiar, and I was afraid of what might happen if I stayed.

We were going to the same bus stop, so I couldn’t tell Helena not to walk with me. She fished an umbrella from her bag and I huddled close to her in the pretence of dry comfort.

‘Let’s walk through the park,’ she said. ‘I think it’s quicker.’

We walked around the park in silence. There was no one around. Rats rustled in the undergrowth by a bleak, man-made pond. Helena’s coat was thick but fitted; I could feel the tension in her arm as it rubbed against mine. I brushed her hip with the back of my hand and felt her shiver. I stopped. I didn’t let go of her arm. She stumbled and turned to look at me.

I knew then what I wanted, what I needed; I knew what was happening inside me and what would happen next. I understood why I had wanted to meet up with Helena, and why I should have told her we couldn’t leave together, that I needed to be alone. She was everything I wanted, everything I wished I could be. She saw the hunger in my eyes. I gripped her arm tighter, so she couldn’t pull away, but she didn’t try. I imagined her skin bruising as I dug my fingertips through her sleeve. Her free hand floated up to her cheek, into her hair. Her lips parted. She licked them. She had not misinterpreted my desire, exactly; she just hadn’t understood the depth of it.

‘Allison,’ she said, and my name died on her lips, floating into the clouds until it was free, and I was left unlabelled, nameless. I took a step back, and then another, slowly moving away from the path, drawing Helena with me. We crept towards the bushes. I stopped, and she took a step closer. She reached again for my name, but it was gone. Her lips hung open, ragged breath escaping between them. We were silent. I held my palm near her cheek, close enough that she could feel the warmth. She closed her eyes and pushed her face into my hand like a cat. I wrapped her hair around my fingers and tugged her to the ground. Our faces fused at the first kiss.

I absorbed Helena in one smooth movement. It wasn’t like sinking this time. It felt like my body was stepping into another soul. Unlike Owen, Helena was not afraid. She gave herself to me fully, as only a woman can, I suppose.

I wondered if perhaps I was not the first person in this chain. Perhaps I had already been absorbed by someone else; something else. Perhaps the vessel that I knew as my body was really the shell of a demon that had absorbed me. It would explain my birth parents, my past, why I had only ever felt like a fragment of a person, in need of an impossible love to complete myself. Could this really have been what my birth parents wanted for me? How many people would I have to take before it was over?