‘THAT BLOODY CAT HAS JUST PISSED ON THE BED! CAN SOMEONE PUT THE CAT OUTSIDE?! I DON’T CARE! WHAT SORT OF CAT PISSES ON A BED?!’
Oh, the sounds of being at home. It’s like music and it’s not just Mum screeching about how things should be done and how someone has left a yoghurt pot on the front bay window and accused us of being animals. It’s the sound of the second step from the top that still creaks, the gurgle of the central heating and knowing exactly when someone has entered or left the downstairs bathroom.
I’ve been sitting here for two hours on the sofa, just stroking it and letting its big oversized corduroy cushions envelop me. I remember this sofa. I remember I invited Josh Reid back here and kissed him on this sofa. We shared some salt and vinegar Twisties that he’d bought for me as a gift and I thought that sort of gift was unparalleled. We also did other inappropriate things on this sofa but we don’t talk about that to anyone else who sits here on a daily basis.
Some things in here have changed. There are new photos on the walls and I don’t remember that floral wallpaper on the chimney breast but this sofa, this carpet in between my toes, the piles of Mum’s books that she stacks in columns, still remain. I close my eyes for a second. A psychologist I saw before I left the hospital told me to use all of my Spidey senses to access my memories. I put my hands down on the sofa and remember Josh and me sinking into the fabric. He was decent at kissing and knew how to work a bra. But he was surprised I had more than one hole down there, which made me worry about the standards of sex education in his school.
‘Are you tired, Luce? Do you need to nap?’
Grace enters the room with a cup of tea. This is a child-free zone and, to ensure the dads of the family can handle the childcare, the majority of nieces and nephews are holed up at Emma’s house. Grace hasn’t seemed to mind moving back here but she’s an amenable sort, cut from the same cloth as my mother in terms of her organisational skills. She’s even brought house slippers with her.
I take the tea from her. ‘I’m good. I’m just taking it all in.’
‘Mum may fillet your cat for dinner, just saying…’
‘She doesn’t seem to like me or remember me,’ I mention.
‘She’s a scrappy feral cat, Lucy. But that was probably part of the appeal. So have all your memories come flooding back yet from sitting on the family sofa?’
I shake my head. ‘Nope. I like how Mum and Dad still have a turntable though.’
‘Oh, vinyl made a comeback so they’re not even old-fashioned any more, just retro, even cool.’
Upstairs, the sound of tools and air pumps echoes through the walls. Naturally, when the last child had left this place, Mum and Dad transformed my old bedroom into an office and so they’re shifting around furniture and beds to accommodate everyone. I’ll sleep on the sofa before I sleep on that. It’s not even retaining air. There’s a leak. Can you put all your crafting stuff in the loft? Why have you brought so many shoes with you?
I put my head on Grace’s shoulder.
‘You guys really don’t mind doing this?’
Grace shrugs. ‘If it’ll help. I have no doubt it will end in the occasional fight and I don’t like the idea of waiting for the toilet again in the morning. But this is just for a few weeks…’
‘Tell me about you then. Not the sad stuff if you don’t want to. This new fella of yours, Max. What does he do?’
‘We can talk about it all. You loved Tom, we all did.’
I don’t know how to broach that quite yet. In the last ten years, Grace gained and lost a husband, Tom, who I can’t remember. Beth has shown me the pictures and fed me the details but my heart breaks to think that happened before Grace even turned thirty. How did she do it? How did I help? I hope I helped.
‘Tom was a fitty at least,’ I reply. ‘Out of all of us, I think you did very well. I know Meg loves her Danny but the appeal is still very much lost on me.’
She laughs. ‘The girls and I have made pacts to travel and explore like he did. And Max might start coming with us.’
‘Max… with the ponytail.’
‘I’ve got used to that,’ she says, smiling. ‘I like this new side to you by the way, the one that asks pertinent questions. Old Lucy would have just asked about his skills in bed and the size of his dong.’
I try and summon up a laugh. The sisters talk about this new Lucy a lot. She still has remnants of some sweary bird I used to be but hasn’t been ruined yet by the last ten years. They keep reminding me of the old Lucy though. I like her gumption. It sounds like she was a character, bravery seeped out of her pores, she seemed to be scared of nothing. I can imagine her riding across a bridge and trying to take on a bus. Would new Lucy be able to take on that bus? Maybe after a good nap.
‘My hoodie looks good on you,’ Grace says, punching my arm.
‘Thanks. I went through my clothes and everything was a little…’
‘Brief and see-through?’
‘Cropped. Cold.’
‘Well, I have many hoodies.’
‘Me too,’ Beth says, entering the room, clutching a cup of tea. ‘Uniform of choice these days: hoodies, leggings and trainers.’ She kisses the top of my head and then comes to sit down next to me.
‘Gracie… Emma’s going to come in here in a minute with a sketch of how the bathroom shelves will now be arranged. Emma needs a whole shelf for her skincare crap.’
‘It’s not crap, B. It’s organic,’ Grace informs her in accentuated tones.
‘I literally wash my face in shower gel so I am the wrong person to ask. She’s even sorting my sanitary pads into rows. Marie Kondo has turned her into a militant organiser of sorts. All her pants are rolled into tennis balls.’
Beth realises I have no idea who this Kondo woman is. ‘She’s on Netflix – she’s Japanese and adorable. It’s a show about tidying your house, decluttering and finding joy in your belongings. It’s nice to watch but one of those things you know is impossible in practice.’
I still look confused. ‘What is the Netflix?’
Grace and Beth sit there for a moment, cups paused to their mouths.
‘Geez… really? Oh, so it’s, like, this magical place where you can watch stuff. TV, films, it all gets streamed to your house or phone, and man, it got me through 2020,’ Beth explains, taking out her phone. ‘And you don’t have to wait for episodes weekly, you just binge-watch everything in one. It’s a beautiful thing.’
She hands me her phone. This touch-screen technology is new, fiddly. Like I’m buying train tickets but it’s just lists of films and TV shows.
‘And is it expensive?’
‘Less than a tenner a month. Though you spend most of the time just choosing something to watch. You and I used to watch stuff together all the time, we had a whole thread of conversation going on about a show called Sex Education.’
‘That I have no recollection of…’
Both of them go a little quiet to think about what I’ve missed and what they need to tell me about. A simple thing like watching the television is new, it’s bigger and brighter and there’s infinite choice. Next they’ll tell me toilets have changed, we don’t cook any more, you can teleport and they’ve made aeroplanes obsolete.
‘Oh, by the way, I got you a new iPhone because your last one got squished by the bus,’ Grace explains to me, reaching over to a box on the table. ‘We’ll walk you through it but you were really good at backing up your stuff so we retrieved lots of it off the Cloud. Notes, photos. There were a lot of photos. I organised some of them for you,’ she explains, with a hint of hesitation.
Beth tries her best not to laugh too hard. I want to know when we started storing stuff in Clouds.
‘Explain…’ I say.
‘I mean, it wasn’t a surprise, but the one thing phones have been good for is that they become a conduit by which you can engage in relations without having to be in the same room,’ she explains.
‘It’s called sexting,’ Beth utters plainly.
‘People don’t even have sex any more?’ I ask, wide-eyed.
‘Oh, they do but people are also lazy and we explained the Tinder thing to you. So people use that to find their long-term loves but they also now use it for hook-ups and things. They use all sorts… Instagram, Snapchat… They’re all ways to just swap photos and videos and chat…’
‘And I take it I was active on those things…’
Grace takes my new slimline fancy phone and goes to a photo icon and clicks on it. There is an album there called Hidden and she clicks on it. She puts a tongue to the inside of her mouth and then shows it to me. I’m not a prude, I never was, but it’s basically a wall of genitalia before my eyes. Female bits, man bits, piercings and tattoos, boobies, chipolatas and one man who seems to be wielding a baseball bat of flesh between his legs. How? More importantly, who?
‘That penis is obscene, that can’t be real?’ says Beth, huddling into me.
‘Are we saying I may have shagged that man?’ I ask.
I wasn’t an angel at eighteen. I’d slept with four boys before I went to university but to approach that penis looks physically impossible. I look at all the photos. That’s me. And that’s what my pierced nipple looked like. I have nice boobs and I seem to have no problem in showing them to people via the medium of photo in a variety of poses. I also seem to have no problem showing them other parts of me too.
‘I don’t have pubic hair. Did it not grow past my teens? Did it fall out?’
‘Oh no, you liked to wax down there.’
I click on a photo with a white triangle to the bottom. It’s moving. He’s holding his penis. He’s moving. Oh my… We all let out a collective screaming laugh and I drop the phone into my lap.
‘The pictures also move?’
‘Yes,’ Beth tells me.
I pick the phone up tentatively again.
‘Hold up, these aren’t my boobs?’ I say, my finger hovering over one picture.
Beth pulls a face, trying to understand how to broach that subject next. ‘So, you were bisexual. You are bisexual. It was something you discovered about yourself in your twenties. You dated a woman you met at uni for a while.’
I stare into space for a moment. Wasn’t this more important information to reveal to me compared to the workings of the Netflix? Old Lucy had some redefined sexuality, she was on a different part of her journey, setting sail, discovering new lands. I’m still in the docks. Christ, I don’t even know how to drive a boat at this point.
‘We should have told you sooner,’ says Grace. ‘God, this is hard, Luce. We just don’t know what you know and what you don’t. Can you even forget your sexuality?’
I sit here soaking it all in, this wall of genitalia staring at me. And I’m not aroused, just immensely confused.
‘How did you guys know?’ I ask.
‘You announced it on the sisters group. I think we laughed it off to start. Like when you said you were going to join a circus and have an act involving steel knickers and an angle grinder,’ Beth explains.
‘We just let you do you,’ Grace explains.
‘These penises don’t even have faces or names. I don’t even know who these people are, whether I’ve been intimate with them. Do you do this with Max and Will?’ I ask.
Both of them look at each other, shrugging.
‘Yeah, maybe not to this degree of detail. I know you were safe and you got yourself tested a lot. That was one thing Emma drummed into you. She used to show you lots of medical journals on genital disease.’
My fingers jab at random buttons on the phone and Beth reaches over to show me how it all works, trying to encourage me to be a bit gentler. This thing tells the fricking weather. The screensaver is a photo, of all the sisters, on a night out somewhere. It looks like a picture I’d recognise because I look like the me I remember. I press an icon that says Contacts and scroll through the names.
‘So I know all these people?’ I ask.
The names go on for days. I seem to know four Lauras that I differentiate in a multitude of ways. Laura the Bitch. Old Housemate Laura. Laura Hair. Laura Paul’s GF. And people who don’t even have names. They seem to be represented by pictures. I like aubergines for a reason. Do I like aubergine? I don’t remember that being a favourite vegetable. Grace looks over my shoulder.
‘Well, maybe we can put some names to faces? We can assume that Adam with the three aubergines is maybe the man with the big appendage in your photo roll?’
‘We can?’
‘Aubergine is like the secret emoji for a penis,’ Beth informs me.
I close my eyes, exasperated. There is SO MUCH TO LEARN. And people have not made it simple. What happened to the classic winky face? How do I type out an aubergine? And why an aubergine? It’s purple. No penis is that colour unless it’s very unwell. They look more like courgettes? Cucumbers? Carrots?
And there are so many names, so many pieces to fill in this very colourful jigsaw puzzle. Do I text each one independently? Hey, it’s Lucy here. I’m texting as last month I suffered a traumatic head injury that resulted in amnesia. Please can you remind me who you are and whether we may have slept together. Thanks and best.
‘I mean, this all can wait, Luce. You’re here now with us to just try and piece together the little things, to get your strength back. It’ll come back in time,’ Beth tells me, slipping her hand in mine.
I click on notes. It’s a jumble of things but one thing seems to be pinned to the top which I will assume is there because of its importance. I open it. It’s a name and a date.
Oscar, 9th February.
I look over at Grace.
‘Maybe he was a kid whose party you did? I really don’t know, babe,’ she replies. ‘I’ve also accessed your social media accounts. You can have a scroll through those. That could be useful. It would seem your password has not changed since you were eighteen so that made things easier.’
‘Passwords_suck_balls?’
‘Yeah. And we’re having fish and chips for dinner,’ Beth explains.
‘My favourite?’
Beth nods. ‘Some things didn’t change, Luce. Don’t worry.’
I put my magic phone on my lap and allow the sisters to envelop me from both sides, sitting here in silence. I hope in the last ten years we did this a lot. I’m glad they’re here. I’m glad this still feels familiar.
‘Can we just sit here all day and stalk people on Facebook? Josh, I wouldn’t mind seeing what he looks like now?’
Beth’s eyes light up, like this might be one of her favourite pastimes.
‘LUCY, THE CAT! THE CAT! THERE’S A REASON I NEVER HAD A CAT! SHE’S EATING A BOX OF PANTYLINERS! SHE’S A FUCKING ANIMAL!’ Mum’s shrieking rings through the house, and we all laugh. I remember this too.