Child’s swimming costume (label reads: ‘4–5 years’). White nylon with red heart pattern. Frilled skirt attached.
Mid-morning, and already the air had taken on a lethargic thickness; it was like moving through soup. One of those days where all you could really do was lie naked in a dark room, twisted under sheets that have been run under the tap, moaning. Instead, we sought each other’s company, and the three of us were sprawled across the living room, forcing mugs of hot tea down our dry throats; Lucia stretching and twisting on her back against the carpet like a restless cat.
‘Let’s do something,’ she said, with sudden vigour. ‘We can’t just sit around all day.’
‘I’m up for that,’ said Josh, ‘but it needs to be this side of the Cally Road. Don’t want to bump into anyone.’ He had called in sick that morning, after a night of heavy drinking. He looked tired. A couple of days’ worth of thick stubble coated his jawline, and there were bags under his bloodshot eyes. He was holding one of the many novelty mugs that various transient flatmates had left behind when they departed. This one was a particularly bad example; a naked Greek-looking eighties Adonis with rippled muscles, cheaply photographed, whose penis became erect when hot water was poured in. Josh hated it and usually pushed it to the back of the cupboard, where we would retrieve it and move it to the front. He hadn’t noticed.
Lou, whose mug bore the legend ‘I pretend to work, and they pretend to pay me’, sat up.
‘The bathing ponds, on the Heath?’
‘Yes,’ said Josh, standing up. ‘I’ll get me trunks.’
‘Have you been, Harmony?’
I nodded. I hadn’t, but I disliked feeling like the non-Londoner amongst them. I felt such a fierce sense of home in this small triangle of city, but my territorial familiarity sometimes failed to stand up to in-depth scrutiny. I think I wanted to feel as though I belonged there more than I really did.
I threw a bikini on and a sundress over it and tied my hair in a messy bun above my head. It was too hot to make much of an effort, and I knew that once the dress came off there would be nowhere to hide. I stared into the mirror, holding a pinch of stomach fat between my thumb and forefinger. The skin around my collarbone was pink and mottled from the heat. I felt the unexpected hope that Josh would like my body when he saw it.
This was not an insecurity that I had usually felt with men. The academic, whose persistent late-night messages I had begun to ignore, could take it or leave it. It made no odds. There’s a liberating element to a relationship that consists of sex and nothing more, I’ve always found. The only validation you need is that of your body being used as it’s designed to be.
‘Ready?’ said Lou, when I walked into the living room. She was wearing a black and white striped short jumpsuit, a wide-brimmed white straw hat, espadrilles and a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses. As Josh eyed her from the corner, I looked down at my faded floral button-through dress and mentally declared myself a frump. Lou adjusted her hat to reveal a smooth, white expanse of armpit, and I felt every prickle of my stubby short hairs.
The chill in the stairwell was welcome relief after the torpor of the flat. As we paused outside Coral’s door while Lou flicked through the post – ‘I’m waiting on a cheque’ – I felt a guilty prod about the errand she had set me, and which I had yet to fulfil. It occurred to me that her weak, alcoholic heart could die of heat in there.
We bought cider in bottles from the corner shop and walked over Parliament Hill to the Hampstead side of the heath, too hot and panting and desperate for a drink to pause at the top to watch the glittering skyscrapers going up amidst a haze of smog and cranes. It was only upon arrival we realised we had neglected to bring a bottle opener. Josh struggled to open his using a lighter but eventually managed, before placing his hand over my drink. His skin felt rough against my knuckles. ‘It’s a question of leverage,’ he said, as he sliced the side of his finger open and winced.
It was a weekday, and the school holidays had not yet started, so the yellowed grass was empty of the usual picnickers. We spread out a blanket and sat down, Josh sucking his finger. I looked up at the expanse of bright blue through the unruffled leaves and held the cool of the bottle against my forehead. I felt sticky and unfeminine, coated in a thin film of sweat that I could feel in the follicles on my scalp, matting my hair which would soon inevitably curl, though not attractively. I felt the acute, embarrassed pain of being a girl, these minute flaws we amplify when in the presence of someone whose body we crave. I wanted him, I realised, not only for his tall good looks, indisputable though they were, but for his kindness. I’ll admit it was not a quality to which I had ever paid much attention in a man. All of a sudden it had become compulsory.
‘Toke?’
I took the joint from him and noted the amber inner circles of his irises. In the preceding days I had become acutely aware of the proximity of our bodies in that house. Just knowing he was there, in his room, less than five metres away from mine – bar one sturdy Victorian wall – made concentrating impossible. When we sat talking in the kitchen I found myself absorbed, unable to move my eyes from his face. One night I had a dream – a welcome respite from the endless nightmares – in which he quietly wound the crook of his little finger around mine, no more than that, and I woke up longing to launch myself upon him. Instead, in an attempt to hide my feelings, I became more circumspect, sarcastic even. I wished him luck when he went out with other women, I made loaded references to my exes. I even brought a man back, one evening, and laughed loudly at all his jokes in the hope that he would hear.
But there he was, in my thoughts, to the extent that it had become almost irritating, like the two lines of a song you just can’t shake. In order to combat this, I was stand-offish, sometimes even rude. Another symptom was that I often became incapable of speech around him. This was a side effect I was unfamiliar with until we held a party, and I ended up nose to chest with him in the packed kitchen, and due to some terrifying combination of alcohol, THC, cocaine and pheromones, was unable to utter a single word. Instead I stood and laughed, laughed right in his face, because it just seemed ridiculous – to want someone that much. I remember my grandfather telling me once that seeing my grandmother for the first time felt like being hit by a tsunami. This didn’t feel like that. It felt like floating on the stillest and deadest of seas. This suspended body felt unrecognisable as my own. It would not obey. There was something wrong with it.
Lucia yawned. It was too hot to talk, so we sat for a while, dreaming. After some time had passed, she stood up; the stretching of her slender arms and the tautness of her muscles drew your eye to her raised chest. All of Lou’s gestures were like this; not mannered, exactly, but somehow theatrical. The movements of her body demanded that you look at her, while remaining at the same time entirely natural seeming. She was completely at ease, whether you looked at her or not.
In contrast, I cultivated a studied indifference, especially in the presence of men I desired (and even ones I didn’t). I would manufacture nonchalance, ignoring them entirely if I could get away with it. But every movement, every utterance, every slight mannerism was performative, devised entirely for whichever man was present, as though I existed only through their eyes.
‘Aren’t we dull? I’m going for a dip.’ Lou shimmied out of her jumpsuit to reveal a plain black swimming costume beneath, cut slightly low on the thigh in a fifties style. As she stretched her pale body she was all angles, her black hair an oil slick on a slab of snow. She saw me staring at it and giggled.
‘I nearly forgot,’ she said, rummaging in her bag until she triumphantly produced a white, frilly swimming cap. She put it on. On anyone else, it would have looked absurd, but Lou’s aristocratic air lent her vintage mania and rejection of modern technology a precise authenticity. She was surprisingly tenacious when it came to avoiding the trappings of digital life – no social media, and for photographs, she used disposable cameras which lay gathering dust in her room for weeks until she took them in ten at a time to be developed and our overexposed faces with their blurred features were fashionably revealed. The only way of getting hold of her was via the rotary telephone she had plugged into our landline, or hoping that this would be the week she happened to look at her email. The rotary telephone had been particularly problematic because most companies have electronic menus necessitating the use of a touch-tone phone. Lou got around this by ceasing to check her bank balance.
‘Coming?’
‘Too high,’ I said. ‘Later.’ Josh nodded and she ran off, looking like a photograph of someone’s stylish great aunt.
‘She’s something else,’ he said.
‘You like her.’
‘I do, but not like that. Well, maybe a bit like that, but not really.’
I raised my eyebrows.
‘She’s fragile. You have an urge to protect her, I bet.’
‘Lou’s always been one to look after herself. We’ve lived together for two years now, remember. She has her dramas and her crises but ultimately she pulls through.’
I thought about her face the day she’d come back from that party, and felt annoyed at his dismissiveness, but more so at the notion that he might be right. Lou did have a tendency to embroider and amplify other people’s behaviour towards her. The thoughtless actions of a friend or acquaintance – an offhand remark, an absence of tact, or an innocent mistake – would be deemed an all-out assault on her very personhood, as she would sit there telling you about it in a spiked voice, chain-smoking and tossing her hair and calling them a cunt. The next, she’d be doing lines with them on the coffee table.
It could be, I thought, that I had been overanxious about her welfare. It was my role, as I saw it, to maintain calm amidst the whims of the more volatile.
‘I suppose.’
‘Why? Are you jealous?’ he grinned at me. I held his gaze, then crossed my eyes.
‘You think a lot of yourself.’
‘Someone has to.’ He handed me another cider. There was a pause in the conversation as we drank. I suspect we were both thinking about the girls he brought home; there had been four or five already that month. You’d see them in the kitchen, in the mornings, sitting at the table as he jovially made them breakfast but no promises. He had a knack for treating women with sympathetic distance. This, he believed, was for their own good when in reality it was entirely for his; ‘here I am sensitively offering you a total absence of any guarantee, because I’m such a nice guy.’
The week before, I had come out of my room to see him shepherding a girl hastily through the front door of the flat. A beautiful girl, who looked very unhappy, as though she had already caught a glimpse of herself several weeks in the future, checking the screen of her phone for the thousandth time. After she left he turned and dismissed her almost immediately. She was dull, he said, and poor at sex. But all the same I feel an intensely physical envy for that nameless girl and where her lovely hands, her perfect mouth had been. I felt sick about it. At least the physical aspects of it were tolerable. Most tormenting was not the thought of his lips grazing her ear while he moved inside her, but the unknown words he might have whispered while he did it, words conferring a private intimacy that would only ever be known to the two of them. It was agony.
‘Why is it that you hardly ever take anyone home?’ he said, with affected innocence.
‘To the flat, you mean?’
‘Yes. I assume you do, you know . . . shag people.’
‘I do. But I tend to go to theirs, or else a hotel.’ I stopped short of saying ‘the park’, or indeed, ‘the occasional stairwell’.
‘Mysterious,’ he said. ‘Why? Are you shy? You don’t seem shy, but it is slightly odd.’
‘You have more control that way. You’re the one leaving in the morning.’
‘Girls usually prefer it the other way, the first time at least. Aren’t you scared when you go back to theirs that they might . . . ?’
‘What? Rape me and cut me up into tiny little pieces? Not really. None of them have got the backbone.’ I was joking, but only slightly. The last person I had slept with had been a few days previously, a guy from university who had looked me up to ask me out and, being a Blairite, had suggested a David Miliband lecture at the LSE as the ideal setting for a date. I had gone, because he had a pretty face and was intelligent enough to be tolerable company. He asked me, I suspect, for almost identical reasons. A dropout waitress with mild substance abuse issues would provide him no challenge in the status stakes, so he’d not have to engage in the usual graduate career one-upmanship – one of the main reasons I avoided most of my former classmates. After the lecture I think he hoped that we’d repair to a wine bar where I’d stare up at him, all moon-faced, as he talked about New Labour. Instead, we got shitfaced in the Princess Louise on tequila shots and had some of the most lacklustre, reluctant sex I had ever experienced. It was so patently obvious that our hearts were not in it that when his mouth began to dawdle its way down towards my clitoris I simply grabbed him by the back of the T-shirt, pulled him upwards so that we were face to face, and said the thing every woman says when she can’t face the drabness of incompetent foreplay, which is: ‘I want you inside me.’ I could face a few phlegmatic pokes of his dick but indifferent cunnilingus was another matter altogether. So utterly sexless was our encounter that when, the next morning, he accepted a mug from me with the words, ‘you do make a very good cup of tea’, I felt almost flattered at the compliment.
Josh was still looking at me when Lou came back from the pond – ‘It’s filthy in there, all slimy. Cold though’ – and flopped down on her towel with a sigh, her eyes closed. Soon she was breathing rhythmically. I worried she might burn and thought abstractedly that perhaps I should wake her, but didn’t. It was the hottest part of the day.
‘Swim?’ said Josh, taking off his T-shirt. I looked at his bare arms, strong from the gym and freckled from weeks of summer, and felt such a desperate desire to sleep with him that I thought my knees might buckle when I stood up. I looked at his slim hips and wondered if they would dig into the flesh of my thighs as he moved above me. If they would leave a mark.
Despite my earlier loss of confidence and the acute feeling that he was watching me carefully, I nodded and pulled my dress over my head. My bikini, which had come free with a magazine and was cheap and flimsy in comparison to Lou’s designer suit, nevertheless had the desired effect. His eyes flickered downwards twice in quick succession.
‘Let’s do it,’ I said, and walked briskly towards the wooden gate beyond which the sounds of splashing and laughter drifted towards us.
‘C’mon, let’s jump off the jetty,’ said Josh. I thought of my flimsy bikini top and how I would probably lose it, then decided I didn’t care. He grabbed my hand and we took a short run up, then launched ourselves into the muddy coloured water, which filled my eyes and mouth and ears. Grit beneath my tongue.
‘It ain’t Biarritz, but it’ll do,’ said Josh, in mock cockney, as he swam in circles. I brushed my wet hair away from my face, and watched his strong shoulders as they moved above the water. My foot grazed the bottom and I felt sludge between my toes, so I kicked them up towards the sky and lay, floating on my back in a Christ-like pose, for several moments.
It was a little while later, when I twisted my body back to a vertical and began treading water, that I noticed that Josh had moved closer and was staring at me intently. I laughed, and the noise sounded sharp and abrupt even against the oddly muted background noise of boisterous teenagers bombing from the jetty.
Josh spoke quietly. ‘Come here.’
I swam towards him. We were about a foot apart when he placed a hand on my face. He looked at me through long eyelashes. I started to count the freckles on his nose as a way of steadying myself, preparing to lean in to kiss him. I was still high. He was brushing drops of water away from my cheeks with his large thumb, which then moved down to graze my lip. I came closer, so that I could almost feel the heat of his breath. He raised his other hand, placed it on my head, and dunked me.
My mouth, which had been open in preparation for Josh’s tongue, was filled with brown pond water as I sank, and for some reason it didn’t occur to me to close it. Nor did I really feel like going back up there, perhaps because of the embarrassment I felt from having fallen for his trick. But I was running out of air and would have to resurface soon, so to save face I swam several metres underwater until I was near the ladder, then climbed out.
I sat, legs over the side of the jetty, catching my breath. His face was a blurred pale circle across the water as I inelegantly spat out fluid. It was as I coughed that deep cough that seemed to come from the very depth of my lungs that I saw a flash of red and a memory assaulted me. A little girl with long brown hair, probably aged around four, was being chased along the side of the pond by her father, who was grasping a towel, but it wasn’t the little girl that reminded me of myself: it was the swimming costume she was wearing. Bright scarlet, with a little frilly skirt attached, and covered in small white hearts all over. I had had the same one, I realised, the summer my mother and I ran away. She had bought it for me soon after we arrived, as it became apparent that this summer was to be a scorcher. We bought it in Camden town, and I picked it out myself. It is funny how an object that was once such a part of your life, so treasured and admired, becomes forgotten and insignificant. I had loved that bathing suit. I had worn it in all the padding pools to which she had taken me. I had worn it the time I nearly died.
This, I had not forgotten. The sensation of almost drowning is not something that slips the mind, though it was not something I spoke about often, mainly for reasons of shame. Because the secret thing about the nearly drowning was that I hadn’t wanted to be saved. After the initial struggle, the gasping for air as my lungs filled with water, the fear in the knowledge I would die, I felt an incredible sense of calm. To horrified onlookers, I was a dying five-year-old face down in a paddling pool in Hackney, but to me, it was like taking a Valium pill. I was floating, beatific, and the last thing I wanted was to be dragged back to life, as I was, brutally and abruptly, and not – this was new – by my mother, but by the same red-headed woman who kept intruding in my thoughts, and whose presence I had hallucinated at the party.
She had held me, crying on wet concrete, as we both lay prone and shivering by the side of the water.
‘You’re all right, pet. You’re ok. I’m here. There, there. I love you.’
She had been there that summer, I had gathered that much. My blurred recollections of her – playing ring a-ring o‘roses, making daisy chains, teaching me to roll pastry between my palms – evoked a familiar fondness, and I was sure that she had meant something to me at a time when, in light of our running away from our lovely, safe family home, any five-year-old would have felt confused and off kilter.
Coral had suggested that this woman was now dead, and that Stella was somehow responsible. A strong instinct, the same kind that jumped to my mother’s defence whenever I thought anyone spoke ill of her, urged me that it was probably better not to know. As Coral had said, I was doing all right. But as I sat there, dripping wet and hyperventilating, I vowed that I would not allow Coral’s reticence to prevent me from finding out the truth about my parents. For too long Stella had fobbed me off with opaque, offhand remarks – ‘oh it was all so long ago’ – and – when my questioning became too pointed – veiled threats that my probing would provoke yet another relapse.
I was so absorbed that I had forgotten completely about Josh, who was now floating beneath me, at toe level, wearing a hangdog look.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It was just a joke.’
‘It’s fine. I’m just tired all of a sudden. I want to lie down.’
‘Let’s get you home then,’ he said, climbing out and putting his arm around me with a gentle authority that was almost like a brother’s. I knew then that we would.