Already drowning

She had said to go down to the water. Now I sat with my feet bobbing lifelessly on the river. Disconnected skin boats that did not, for whatever reason, sink into the small waves that looked like thick, liquid concrete. It was true; I was disconnected now, more than ever, but I didn't see how watching my limbs become inane, undulating vessels would connect me to myself or the universe. It had the opposite effect. I sat there watching my body parts, thrown out from me, dismembered but for the skin and cloth tunnels that surprisingly led back to me, looking outwardly at their experience of cold, and wet, and grey, and wondering desperately what it was like to be them; how it was to feel that sensation, and that, and nothing else, and nothing else.

I turned my head dully to the side. A young girl stood there, her head almost level with mine. She was looking out at the water like I had done before. I had not heard the slightest indication of her approach and for whatever reason the sight of her did not make me jump.

Perhaps that was because of the disturbing kind of serenity she held within her, within her gaze.

She was grey faced. She was, in fact, described entirely in grey; her ragged clothes and limp, polluted hair had all been dyed in the same smog. I turned back to stare at the water, which spat at my former disdain with its many variations of clogged dark greys and shimmering off whites. Both of us stared at it, with its watery, horizontal vomiting, birthing new wide eyes strained into black ellipses which it then crushed in single blinks to a world of submersion below. I felt a ground fall away from me below.

I caught her arm as her body slid elegantly through the air like a solemn slate from a roof. 'What the hell do you think you're doing?' I said. I was holding her just above the water, and her toes were skimming the surface; ten little suspended skin stones wanting to slip over and under the surface. She stared at me with her eyes, her sunken black stones sunk in eyes, and stared. I set her back on the solid ground.

'Let me die,' she said.

I was taken back by the whirlwind force of her unfaltering gaze and the heaviness of her mind. 'Don't be ridiculous,' I said.

She moved to jump and I held out my arm instinctively. Two washed out galaxies fixed their gaze on me and permeated my mind until all I felt in my own head was blackness; a dusty, chasm blackness, that felt like grey filth between the fingertips.

'You must let me,' she said.

'No!' I shouted at her. She was applying increasing pressure on my arm with a body that wanted to give way in a moment of heavy, pre-meditated collapse. The wind was whipping strands of my hair across my face, pouring red streaks over my eyes, getting caught in the corners of my mouth.

'You must let me.'

Then something in me fell.
Something in me fell, like it wanted to in her.
Perhaps I had looked at her too long; perhaps a darkness from her or from elsewhere possessed me; perhaps events of the day caught up with me in some unconscious way and it was at that moment they overflowed, drowning my reasoning. Simultaneously a horror and a total stillness possessed me. I dropped my arm.

She held me, like I was an antique vase, within her eyes a little longer. I was entirely at her mercy and had transitioned effortlessly into her possession. Now, just as easily found, she would throw me away, and I already anticipated the ceramic fault line breaks that would soon splinter across my face.

'I can't watch you die,' I said, breathlessly.

'Go somewhere else then,' she replied.

Slowly, and very slowly, a pendulum of movement began to shift within me. It took some time to pick up pace, and energy, but it did so cumulatively, in increments. What started at moving my finger slightly forward built to the frantic scrabble for my shoes and socks and then I came to stand. I stood, and she still stared at me. She had the respect at least to allow me to leave before she did it. And she waited. Waited for me to go. And I wasn't going. I was stood, staring at her, now too far away to stop her before she hit the water if at any moment she let herself fall away.

'I can't-'

There was a splash. She slid in at a diagonal, her hair still hanging straight. Still grey. Falling in grey. It only happened the once but I swear now that it happened five, maybe ten times; or at least that is how my memory holds it.

I stood there. Turns out I was wrong.


*

'You here again!'

I looked up from over the paper. Yes; it was Olivia; of course it was. I gave her a sort of nod and stuck the end of the pen back in my mouth and stared into the swarming grey print. 'You're here again too,' I said. Then louder, as she moved towards the back of the coffee shop, to get her usual: 'Takes one to be observed, takes another to be the observer!'

I stared at a traffic jam clot of black squares while I inevitably listened to her chat to Isobel, the proprietor. I liked Isobel, for the most part, I had never had any problem with her – I liked her, at least, more than Olivia. I think what I liked about her was her responsiveness to other people's needs. With Isobel it was possible to decide, entirely for yourself, on what terms the two of you would interact, and she would be fine with whatever that was. I had chosen to keep our interactions fairly matter of fact, and still within the confines of customer/waitress. And maybe we might be friends, one day, and maybe we already were. On the other hand, Olivia...she would definitely class Isobel a friend. Isobel would probably reciprocate this too, but, part of me doubted that she would if she didn't also effectively pay her wages.

The black on the page hadn't yet swallowed me. I heard a puff of a sigh from the armchair opposite me as it gave to Olivia's weight. I felt the dousing of coffee scent in the air; a cat's paw swipe through my consciousness. I looked up. Olivia was unbuttoning her statement green coat, with its large, almost novelty sized buttons, and she had a deep smile on her face. Too deep, for my liking; it seemed like if she yawned she would expose her eye sockets, and I'd see the ideas in her like filaments behind her bulbous eyes...drawing a train wreck ride all the way down to see her meaty, spilling ribs, derailing her body's natural order.

'Oh it seems like you're everywhere to me at the moment!' This was spoken from fathoms inside her grin.

'Ubiquity's not in my nature,' I replied. For the most part I kept my gaze on my paper. I was always threatened by the danger of seeing her undress her skin in front of me, either by suggestion, thrown imagination, or just by the horror of how she was liable to make me feel.

'Still, still, it seems like we've barely been apart.' All her tassels and trinkets and clasps and buttons were now freed from her hands. They orbited her now, spread over the spare chair next to her and the coffee table. She was always a spilt universe. 'Four across, nine letters, burial chamber.'

'Oh you know I'm no good at those things, love.'

That was another thing. She wasn't one of those people who called people 'love.' She never had been. Not when I met her. She seemed to have transitioned into one of those people. I had supposed that either you were born that way or you weren't. It was handed down alongside what side your hair parted on, whether you preferred tea or coffee, and how you pronounce the word 'scone.' I was still waiting to witness her call anyone other than me a 'love.'

'Neither am I, that's why I do them.'

'Hope I've got time to even drink this, he just rang to said he's coming early today. They let him go just so he can go back to do a late this evening. I swear, that man works too much!'

'Don't we all,' I said, with abject disinterest.

She sipped from her mug. 'So, looks like I'm going to be free tonight.'

Two across. Three down. Three letters? No four. Do I know anything about Prussia? I don't think I do. How about four....

'Are you...doing anything...?' she said.

Fuck.

I chewed on my pen lid. And pretended not to hear. Then I looked up and saw her, hands clutching her mug (actually her mug, she was such a regular that Isobel kept one back for her), like she was some sort of inflated dormouse holding a steaming berry. Then I pretended to think, and constructed a calendar in my mind, busied myself with creating its lines, choosing a font for its numbers and the letters for the dates...now should I put Sunday at the start of the week, or the end?

'I mean...'

She was talking again.

I looked at the black squares. Then I looked up at Isobel, and thank god, she was walking over. The place was dead apart from us, as it always was, at this time. I swear if we didn't come she would close and go home early. It could hardly be cost effective to light and heat the place for a pound coin and fifty pence from each of us.

'We've got a late opening tonight,' began Isobel. 'You know I was saying about us trying to do more events and things? One of the first ones is tonight, a sort of...cultural exchange. There'll be some kids from disadvantaged backgrounds coming along with their parents who don't know English too well.'

'Uh...huh...' I said. I felt like I was missing something like I was two across.

'Well, you're...you're an English teacher, aren't you?' Isobel said, tentatively.

I probably looked like I'd been punched in the tongue by a fist made of lemons. 'Um, yes...' I faltered, trying to convey at once both the sense of violation I felt by her correct guess at my personal circumstances and resistance to her implication that I might be in the slightest bit inclined to attend such an event.

I didn't need to look over at Olivia. I already knew what her face would say. I guessed that her head would be bobbing up and down uncontrollably, like a balloon jolted about by a hyped up child, that there was a risk of it detaching clean off to ride its own crazy journey through the atmosphere.

'Fancy coming along?' Isobel said, and I felt the dread that had been queued for my emotional response jump forward and stab a nausea into my stomach. To make it worse: 'I really would appreciate it, especially with getting these events off the ground, just for the numbers.'

'You seem like the generous type.'

It was this that made me more indignant than anything else.

My fear that Olivia would be reddening towards a tomato-like state of total explosion of her gooey, internal matter meant I just had to look over to her to assuage my anxiety. She had a marshmallow poking out of her mouth. It looked like she had been corked. By a particularly solid, round cloud that had momentarily taken pity on me. I hoped that whatever she said when she swallowed it would not pour like some foul, diseased champagne over my nerves.

'Sounds lovely, doesn't it Cait!' she ended up saying.
'-lin,' I replied.
'You want to come tonight, Cait, love?'
'-lin.'

I didn't say anything for a while. I know I sound ungrateful but, I do sometimes hate that people like me. With the two of them there, with no escape route, commanding of me something I did not want to give...well it was all a bit like eight down. (forced offence). Entrapment.

'Cait??'
'-LIN!' I said, far too angrily, so much so that I tangibly felt the blowback of my explosive tone. I had to soften. 'My name's Caitlin. And, sounds a bit too much like work to me. Hope it goes well.'

Olivia's mouth was a descending, decaying crescent moon. 'I'm busy anyway tonight,' I added, just to feel what it was like to punch a new crater onto the lunar surface.

Isobel smiled, I felt it, I received it from where I was embedded in rectangles of black and white. 'Thanks, no worries. Maybe another time,' she said, cheerfully, and in a reassuringly non-committal way.

I chewed on my pen and into this morgue of awkward silence there thankfully came an aural intrusion to grant us escape. Without looking up I said, 'Your ride's here.'

Olivia stared at me (I know she did; she does it every time) incredulously. 'How did you know...?' She looked through the glass front of the coffee shop and braved a smile at the driver who had just parked outside.

I shrugged. 'Four across. Intuition.'
'Was that what the answer was?' she asked.
'No. Four across was mausoleum. Have a nice evening.'
'Thanks,' she said. The utterance jutted out of her mouth and then each of the particles of sound fell slowly and mournfully downwards, like a snow cloud of regret and sadness. All her bows and zips and straps and more bows were assembled again, and they came to her, and found their places, as if attracted by a magnetic field that she wistfully activated.

She was trudging to the door. I didn't want to look up, at all. I mouthed counting numbers, as if I was concentrating. What I was concentrating on was mouthing numbers so I didn't have to look up. 'Oh! Cait-'
'-lin,'
'Love, did you go down by the water?'

I looked up. In the foreground, her deadened face, splashed by a small paint pot of eagerness. And hand, holding tenderly onto a bag decorated with frills and lace. Behind her, and over her right shoulder, the driver of her ride out of here and away from me. He was staring adamantly away, steeling himself in forced attention to a focus in the opposite direction. At this moment, for whatever reason, something gave way. His shoulders caved and he looked right at me. I held his defeated, horrified eyes in gaze while I answered his girlfriend's question of me. I must have looked so dreamily reminiscent of the occurrence in question.

'Yes...'

Olivia was overjoyed and clasped her hands together in delight. It was so rare I did anything she ever suggested, asked or occasionally told me to do. 'Did it help?' she asked.

'Uh...
Let's...
Yes, Olivia. Yes. Thank you. Thanks for your suggestion.
Thanks. Thanks Olivia.'

I threw my newspaper down, picked up my empty mug and placed it on the side before Isobel, then charged headlong through the door to the toilets, leaving a totally bewildered Olivia behind me to walk out again into that cold, cold world.


*



The night bled thick shadows over everything. Placed, one by one, rounded, sharp and bounding shadows, like cold duvets laid by a brittle night. This place was always sparsely lit. There were a few floodlights stood around, metallic beacons, like modern day skeletal angels, with their fat, fanned mouths of light. A yawn into luminance. It didn't stretch far. Practically everyone wanted to be anonymous here, so it was the kindest thing for us all, individually, to draw this wad of black blank around ourselves, filled with cold spite.

I leaned against the black pole of the bus shelter. A minute skipped by and then an opened pack of cigarettes, with one extended like a pointing finger, performed a still wave into my vision from my left side. I shook my head.

'Are you ill?' he said.
I laughed. I shook my head.
We stood there a moment while he smoked leisurely. Then; 'Didn't you always say that you wanted to feel like something was destroying you?'
'Mmm,' I conceded. I had said that. I had. I remembered saying it. I said it pretty much in those terms too. 'You're right of course. But...I already feel enough is destroying me. I think that would be overkill. At present,' I added, hastily.

We hung about on our stuck, pole like bodies. There was even something automaton-like about the drags on his cigarette. The atmosphere felt decidedly gloomy.

'Oh fuck it, give me one,' I said, at last.
'Are we still talking about cigarettes now?'

I looked at him sneakily, but any expression now had rocks in it. No emotion was pure, totally made of itself, these days: there was emotional sand everywhere, dirtying everything: absolutely nothing, nothing, was clean, clear cut, or easy. Sand is a bastard to get rid of.

The candy stick was in my mouth and he offered a lighter. I stood there while he lit up the space before me. I felt his breath. I heard his breath. I melted into the space between us and, at the point where it was most light, I closed my eyes, so I could enjoy the darkness of not knowing how far away he was from me but knowing, more than anything, that he was close.

Alight and his hand rippled across my shoulder, and rested there a while. Hands like eels through the air that had sparked electric. He was slidey to the touch, I knew he would be, from the rain. And as soon as I felt that I had shoulder blades again, illuminated into existence by his touch, the sensation was gone again, and I ceased to have a body. I swam in my head and it was full of smoke. I coasted down a slide of long, smoke breath exhale.

'You're tense.'
'I'm always tense,' I said. 'Relaxing is for losers. How did the oncologist's go.'

This was not a question. I did not want the answer.

He paused. I could have eaten my cigarette; crushed it between the walls of my teeth.

'Treatment's working well. Maybe three, four weeks...she needs to,' he cleared his throat, 'be seen by the psych team though.'

'Oh Jesus. It's never one thing, is it?'

'Mmm.'

'What do they think's wrong with her now?'

'What's wrong with anyone? I mean Jesus, she has cancer, don't they think we all need some happy pills to get through that?'

'Mmm.'

'How's your dad.' This was not a question either, but this bit had to, had to be done.

'Still alive,' I said. 'Poor bastard.'

'There's a consolation.'

'Mmm.'

'Stable?'

'He's possessed by the spirit of a yo yo.'

'Makes things interesting.'

'Mmm.'

We smoked and stared glumly forwards. A car coasted past us and came to a stop not too far away. Following behind was the sound of dainty trotting, like the world's best behaved miniature horse. A well-to-do woman, carrying her head higher than her neck seemed to sensibly permit almost broke out into a canter before us. But no, she stopped. She screwed up her face like a piece of paper deemed a failure. She pointed past us to the sign on the bus shelter.

'It is illegal to smoke on these premises even in the sheltered areas...'

'Fuck off,' we both said to her, in unison.

The look on her face was priceless. It felt like an extra floodlight had been snapped on just to grant us the pleasure of seeing this half a minute cinematic presentation.

Maybe that's how prunes are made.

It's bad; it'll only encourage me to be more openly rude in public again.

She was drawn into her carriage and sped off. I dined on a childish grin for a while in the emerging exhaust pipe silence.

'Olivia's talking about going away on holiday,' he breathed, like it was his last ever emission of air. It was more sigh than carbon dioxide.

'Oh?'

'Every excuse I come up with she has a counter argument. It doesn't help that she came into that money recently. I've literally no idea what to say.'

'But surely she has to stay here for her treatment?'

'Well I thought so. But...she doesn't really seem to care.'

'She's mad. I've always thought so.'

'She wants to be destroyed...god she's....just...intolerable these days. I actually can't bear it.'

I stole a glance over to him. But there was just a pit of shadows where his face should have been.

'Things...will get better. It's just a rough patch. You'll get through this,' I said. I tried to fill my empty caskets of words with a sentiment more tangible than the ones my mind were naturally producing.

'I don't love her, Cait.'

'I know Flynn.'

'She's not even in love with me. I don't know if she ever was. Recently it's like a change has come over her. She has this excitement when she goes out sometimes, like she's meeting someone else. I can see something else – or rather – someone else, is bringing her alive, bringing her out of herself. When it's just going with me, when it's just me and her, she's down, she's docile. It's about her cancer, it's about her life. When she's happy, when she's – when she's going to the café, it's like none of that matters. Have you noticed her talking to anyone at the café? Got any idea about who this person might be?'

I dug my nails into my palm and hoped I might keep digging and digging until there was a well deep enough to pour the present into, where I could freeze it, or else mould it to my will, inside me. 'What are you two doing with each other then,' I said desperately, 'if she doesn't want you and you don't want her?'

I saw a mouse's bonfire fly through the air as he discarded his cigarette. I watched the embers chill on the ground as a click explosion of light burned out of darkness Flynn's troubled, heavy features.

'I can't just do that. Not just now. I mean...timing??'

I swallowed. My throat felt like those burning cigarette fibres. There was silence. In the dark I mouthed the word 'timing,' over and over again. What would a month matter? What would six? What would twelve? Twelve of feeling this way, of chewing burning fibres that would carpet the insides of all my sensations.

'I can't just do that,' Flynn whispered, in echo of himself, as if he was distanced from the man who delivered that phrase into the previous moment. 'I can't....just...do that.'

My last smoky exhale. 'What are you going to tell her then?'

'About what?'

'Holiday.'

'Oh. I don't know. Maybe I'll have a go at starting an argument.'

'Oh yeah?'

'Yeah. Seems like one of the things they'd have on a list of fifty things to do before you die. Might be nice.'

I stuck my hand in my pocket and flashed the screen of my phone towards me that carried the time. 'Are you...'

'Yeah.'

'Right.'

'Don't worry, I'm not late yet.'

'What days you working this week.'

'Thursday, Friday, then Tuesday through Friday next week. Lates.'

'Right.'

'It's half term week after that isn't it?'

'Yeah. Well remembered.'

He stuck his hands in his pockets. I could feel the air hunch. 'We should elope, or something.'

'Yeah?' I asked. 'You think that'd sort all this shit out?'

'Oh god I fucking hope so.'

'It would be lovely,' I said. I drew closer to him. Wherever 'he' was. It seemed all darkness. 'But you know I couldn't abandon dad. I don't do things for the best of people. If I abandoned him I'd have to do the same to you, by all rights.'

'Masochist.'

'Something's got to kill me,' I said. I felt heartbeats and the air was thick with something. The solidified space between two dragons. I reached and slid my hand through his hair. 'It's best when it's you.'

We both blinked a concrete blink of trying to stop time. Then his arms slid away from mine and he walked towards the A&E department of the hospital.

'I love you,' I whispered after him.

I watched his footsteps puncture black onto the increasingly lit walkway. I wouldn't have thought in a million years he'd have heard my whisper. Without turning, he shouted back at me,

'I know.'


*


'Ride's here,' I said.

Olivia looked like my words were a train had just driven through her face. In their wake they had left an opening black tunnel. All light was drawn out the back of her head.

Yes: she was insufferable.

But today was different. Somehow. She seemed so frantically adorned that it almost seemed like each individual hair of her eyebrows had its own, handcrafted bow to decorate it. She was an absurdity of effort and still, I barely looked up at her. What I desired was the visual cleanliness of blocked monochrome. Where my words would fit, neatly, like they were meant to be there. Like life had some order, meaning and answer to it.

She'd also eaten two muffins. And she never eats two muffins. Two muffins is bad.

And now that the car was outside, now that we were both staring, determinedly, in our separate directions, cut by a precise incision and laid so we would never overlap, she was left, in between one place and another, wanting to be somewhere, and no doubt wanting another muffin. At three muffins though I think I would have immediately left and found the nearest scrap metal yard to hastily construct a bomb shelter.

The next thing I knew was a tugging at the fabric of my trousers and a grabbing clamminess on my knees. Now I had to look up. I might never work out what 'deposition of sediment' meant. 'What are you doing??' I pleaded.

Please not me.
Please not this, now.
Please don't.

'Please come home with me,' Olivia spewed from out of her gaping mouth and twin gaping eyes. I wanted to look away because I was sure that her mouth and eye holes would soon swell so large they would become one massive face hole that would peel backwards over her head and expose, not her skull, but a portal into a black, watery hell that I could not escape. She was wild. And what was worse was, in spite of all her colour, and all her decoration, like a lavish Christmas tree strung up with garrotting Christmas tree lights, she looked grey to me. She looked grey and she had sinking black rock eyes. She reminded me of the grey faced slum girl and, as she stared, there was a calmness within her mania. She was staring into the sea she would die in: and that sea...was me.

'What are you talking about??' I said, trying to keep my cool.

'Please come home with me. You need to be home with me. Please come with me. We can have...we can have...coffee together!'

She cackled, like a madwoman, at this idea; held it within the bent fingers of her hand like a perfect orb she could paint a world onto. And my thought was:

what an awkward beverage that'd be.

'Don't want a caffeine rush now,' I said. I tried to coerce her hands to leave me and thought constantly about how this would look from his perspective outside.

I stood up. It seemed logical at the time. If I couldn't make her stop, I would just escape. But now she was knelt on the floor below me, and that, in a lot of respects, made things much worse. She looked even more pitiful than before, and in this incidence, I had no natural impulse to do anything to help her, because I had literally no clue as to what would. All options – all options – seemed bad. For everyone.

'It's time to go home now, Olivia.' I waved my hand and tried to laugh it off, while turning towards the toilets. She'd have to beg at my back now. Possibly making things yet worse.

I started to walk away and I heard nothing. It was too silent. I got to the toilet door and looked around. She had stood up and she looked pale. She was stood by the front door staring at me, with his car behind her, to the side of her face, from my perspective. Like he had half parked inside her brain. Then, in a cool, calculated, and detached tone, she simply said,

'He beats me.'

And I felt my knees go weak.

'What?'

But she just stared.

'What?'

I walked up to her, like I was trying to make out something strange and disturbing in the distance. But she just stood there, like she was made of water, staring at me.

And then nothing happened.

She just turned and left.

I watched him smile and greet her as she slammed the car door shut silently and they both slid away soundlessly like a bullet shot out of a silencer.


*

'She...she said that if I went down by the water, and hung my feet over the edge, it'd make things better,' he said.

His words fought to find a breath that could deliver them through his incredulity at bumping into me here and under these circumstances.

I felt the handle of my suitcase in my hand and I saw the darkness pour an austere atmosphere around him. He might well have turned to bronze at any moment and be left there as a statue to an excess of simultaneous mental processing.

'She said that to me, too,' I said, slowly.

'Did it work?' We were talking in slow motion now, like survivors of catastrophic injury to our consciousnesses.

'No....I saw a girl commit suicide.'

'….Right....'

'She gives shit suggestions,' I said, attempting a firework smile.

He grabbed my shoulders. 'What the hell do you think you're doing??' Real time had now caught up with us, it seemed.

I stared into his big, beautiful eyes, that the lights of the ferry sign reached out to hold. They were dark coals sat amidst a country fire. But his touch fed his wildness into me and struck at the false serenity I had glided on to get here. 'Do you want to die?' I almost screamed at him.

'What?' he cried. Even though he understood me perfectly.

'Or do you want to elope? Do you want to, actually? We could fucking go. Now. Let's do that! Or let's fucking die. Or...? Any other suggestions?'

'Is this really that fucked up?'

'You tell me!' I said. 'You tell me.'

I stared at him for a few moments while he frantically sought for an answer to this situation that didn't end up with both of us dying in a waterfall of context or admitting we were already drowning.

'Shall we die then?' I don't know when I got so impatient. His wild eyes locked back onto me. His face was screaming in horror at me and yet still, I wanted to hold my fingers to his skin and touch him delicately, to escape to a world of sensation that existed outside of morality and outside of time.

I was hit on the back of the head by her words from before; so much so I almost fell forward. 'And what the fuck – Olivia said you beat her??'

His eyes widened even further still and his hands flew off me and to his face. There, he became a finger mess of self soothe massages. He peered through a forest of fingertips at me, shaking his head. 'We had an argument. You know,' he nodded at me, 'that argument. Oh god, it was awful. She said...she said she would ruin me, and she'd tell everyone, spread it around everywhere that I'm an abusive person. God. But. I didn't at one point think she was serious. It's getting so ugly. She is a demon, Cait, a demon.'

We were approaching some sort of weird equilibrium. Our collective gaze had drifted backwards to the ferry sitting solid on uneven waters.

'Give me -'

'Timing,' I said. It had stayed with me, like a bell, going off in my lessons, making my pen stumble over words...it echoed while I led in my bed, trying to teach me a lesson I couldn't learn. 'When's it going to be right?

When's anything going to be right?

When am I going to feel like anything – is going – to be – right?

I don't know what I'm doing, Flynn. But that's not much different to normal. I just need to do something. It'll probably be wrong. I do not know how to solve this. I don't know how to change it. I just know I don't know what to do. And maybe...you want me to die.'

His mouth wanted to splutter like a car exhaust pipe misfiring. I shook my head. 'Look, it's like my dad. You think he's going to go, then he doesn't. He keeps hanging on. It's emotionally bankrupting. Maybe if he just went we'd all be out of our misery and then some of us, at least, would be able to heal. You can't heal, you can't be, while I'm here. This is eating away at you and all I can do is watch. There's literally nothing I can do. I've never felt so helpless. Maybe I just need to die, so you can recover what you've lost to me.'

I stepped back from him. I couldn't believe that I was doing this when it was the exact opposite of what I wanted. Surely it should be that my body would step in to prevent me committing this to reality? And yet there I was, about to walk away from him, and my body was fully complying.

He looked full to burst. 'I need you,' he whispered.

I looked into the truth of his eye stones. Then I closed my eyes and screamed. 'I KNOW!'

It did at least make him smile, for a small part of one second.

I tried to swallow my bottom lip and turned to go. Then I was walking. I was actually walking. Putting one foot in front of the other. And motion. Motion was happening.

There was an arm in front of me, like a skin and cloth barrier had jutted out from the side. 'I can't watch you go,' he said.

Then go somewhere else, I thought.

I just stared at the ground like the concrete was about to dissolve in front of me.

'What about those moments, with your dad. What about those days when it's worth it. I've seen you. I've seen you with your hair all over the place and so many tears in your mind you're salty to the touch. But I've also seen you come out of that hospital and felt a joy, felt a connection in your heart, that you were glad, that day, that you had someone in the world, that you were still around for him, and that he was still around for you. And isn't that...

isn't that what it's like?'

Slowly, I raised my head to look at him. His hands had me by the shoulders again. I was weakening, from the centre of me outwards.

'Did you actually sit with your feet in the water like she told you to?'


We sat and watched that ferry go. Feet in the water, travelling restlessly, going nowhere, just feeling cold and feeling the movement. At times I held my head in my hands and other times I just stared. We didn't speak for a while. At long last, and at a doomed hope that this time, he might have the answer, I asked,

'How are we going to deal with this?'

He offered me another cigarette. I sighed but I sort of laughed inside too. We sparked up and I poured smoke towards the moon. His thoughts were lost between the waves.