When you stood up, we were almost exactly the same height. Your hair was dirty blonde and white blonde mixed together; a kink in it from having dried in a ponytail maybe. I wanted to look at you, but I didn’t want to be too obvious about it.
I had half a roll-up in my hand. I was almost squashing it. I’d already smoked a little bit. Never every day, and not much, but even a little bit of kem makes you feel like your heart’s inside your head. There’s a beating. It feels hard to be afraid of anything. I lit it again. I wondered if I should offer it to you, but I’d accidentally made it a bit strong.
‘I’m guessing you don’t smoke?’ I said.
‘No,’ you said, then, ‘actually, why not…?’
I passed it to you. ‘Hey, slowly,’ I said, as you took a deep drag. Then your face exploded into a cough.
‘Jesus,’ you said. ‘Is that poison?’ You opened your mouth as if your throat could escape.
‘Course,’ I said. ‘It’s our public health crisis.’
I got another good look at your face then. You looked sweet and sad at the same time. Your chin dimpled a little when you spoke. There was something long and lean about your bones, something soft about your mouth. White teeth. A tiny gold nose piercing, and I don’t know, your eyes were nice. The way they flashed made me think of a candle.
‘Which lot are you with, then?’ I said. ‘Red Cross, Humanita, or one of the go-it-aloners? Van With A Plan?’ You looked at me. ‘Shit,’ I went on, ‘please don’t tell me you’re making a documentary.’
‘I’m not making a documentary.’
‘The amount of documentaries back in the day. I’m not even joking. Look at this face. Am I famous wherever you’re from? ’Cos they were here with their cameras and I never saw the films.’
‘Me neither.’
‘I could still be a star though.’
‘I’m not making a film. But yeah. How could you possibly tell I wasn’t from here?’
‘Because you ironed your shorts?’
‘They’re not ironed.’
‘Prefer it when they look smart like you, to be honest. When they look really shit, and they’re offering you charity, it’s like damn, things must be really bad.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ you said. The beginning of a smile, maybe.
‘It’s funny, ’cos other times they, like, try and dress down, so it doesn’t look so like, “Oh hi, I’m in my Christian Dior, do you want some baked beans or an abortion?”’
You laughed then. So I kept going. It was a monologue more than anything. A part of me was thinking, at least until I finish my sentence, she has to stay. ‘Don’t even know if they still do abortions, to be fair. Do they?’ I asked you. ‘There were some problems with that.’
‘I only just got here,’ you said. ‘Fresh off the boat.’
‘Well, if you need one, I know a guy.’
‘Need what?’
‘An abortion.’
‘Think you stepped in just in time.’ You pointed in the direction that the boys had left. Then you looked at your hand – it was still shaking.
‘Want to walk with me a bit?’ I said. ‘I’ll make sure they’ve gone. Get you to wherever you need to go?’
As we walked, I asked you when you got here. ‘How fresh is fresh?’
‘A couple of days.’
‘And you’ve been working since then?’
‘Yeah. But today was my day off so I figured… you know, an assault would be nice.’
‘A little chase,’ I said. ‘Get the heart rate up. It’s good weather for it.’
‘Start the week in style,’ you said. Your eyes flicked over the other people on the street. A man going by with a tiny girlfriend, her walking on the pavement, him in the road, so they were closer to the same height. A woman who’d stuffed tissue paper in between her toes to stop her flip-flops from rubbing. Pulling along a pit bull with markings like moonstone that changed in the light.
I looked at you from the side, catching you in flashes. There was a little shine of sun cream on your skin.
‘Want some more?’ I said. I held out the kem.
‘God no. My head feels like…’ You made a gun sign with your hand and shot yourself in the temple. ‘What even is it? Do I want to know?’
‘Just a local delicacy. Some places have, like, their special cheese, or like a Scotch egg or something. We have this. But don’t worry. It’s totally artisanal, you know. Seasonal ingredients.’ I touched my hand lightly on your shoulder. ‘Careful of the potholes.’
I guided you round one and took us towards the harbour. Down that close to the water, it’s like colour only starts from the knee up. Everywhere below where the tide reaches is covered with a yellow sludge, that dries again, gets wet again, never washes off. Years ago, they put rocks inside wire cages to break the water, but the water broke the rocks – they’re tiny now, they rattle around inside there, slip out.
We walked to the sea steps. I kicked away a little of the sand, silt, kicked a dead branch to the side, so we could sit down. On the part of the step between us, someone had written ‘Tom got Emma pregmant’ in marker. Pregmant with an m. ‘When they built these steps, the water hardly touched them,’ I said. ‘Only once a day or something.’ It wasn’t too-too high tide, but the water was a quarter of the way up the steps already. It was only afternoon but the moon was out, a little broken shell of it.
‘Is that the Turner?’ you said, pointing to the tall concrete body of the art gallery, the sea-smashed windows.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Mostly a shooting range now.’
‘For guns?’ you said. I looked at you. ‘Do you have a gun?’
‘Nah.’ I slapped my wrist. ‘Needles.’
After not long at all, the sea started creeping towards us. I wanted it to slow down. You sat with your arms around your legs. I looked out. The waves get darker on their way in. They kind of look like liquid rock, the way flint cracks in flat angles. ‘It’s not a choice about going,’ I said. ‘That shit’s brutal. The last five minutes it comes up fast as this…’ I clicked my fingers.
‘I might stay a bit,’ you said.
‘You can swim then?’ I said. ‘Better be the best swimmer in the world.’ I stood up. I looked down at your head. The wavy line of your parting. The bones of your shoulders. You stayed still.
‘Oh, so you’re tough now?’ I said.
You looked up at me. ‘There were four of them, there’s one of you.’
‘Yeah, there’s only one of me. And a whole ocean.’
‘Wait,’ you said. You turned round as I left. ‘I don’t know your name.’
‘That’s okay,’ I said. I knew most people’s names; I didn’t want to know yours yet.
The whole thing lasted no more than fifteen minutes. Less than that, maybe. And the thing is, no matter how many times I watch it over in my mind, I find no reason for what happened to us afterwards. We didn’t make each other laugh, really. All of our words were normal words.
I didn’t look at your face and think that it was a face I wanted to kiss. It wasn’t till later, when I got home, or after that, that I thought about how your face would look if your eyes were closed.
I don’t know why it happens. When there is no reason. When it feels like there’s no reason.
It was the start of the hottest winter we’d ever had. Old ladies used umbrellas to shade themselves. I started to sweat even if I wasn’t walking fast. Men rolled their T-shirts up over their bellies. That morning, I remember thinking, it can’t get hotter than this.
But it didn’t matter how hot it was that day. In my mind, when I walk away from you, it always feels like I’m breathing cold air into my body, and I can feel it fill every single space inside my lungs. Light. Like a light.