Hands, p.6
Hands, page 6
Frustrated, we finally turned the light on, her jaw clenched in an annoyance soon shaken as we both discovered that the bright pink quilt was, in fact, gone. I was, obviously, immediately terrified. What kind of sick pervert breaks into a house only to steal a young girl’s quilt? It didn’t bear thinking about. And then – God, no, please – a skin-creeping violin-ascending question formed. Was he still here? The boiler was tucked behind the plaster wall that formed a part of the loft renovation and it often dripped and groaned and creaked ominously, and much to my dismay a row of floor-level cupboards opened into a ‘tunnel’ that skirted round the edge of the room. The perfect hiding place for any child playing hide-and-seek with a serial killer who has a shotgun while the house is also on fire. We scrambled to the top of the stairs to bravely peer over the banister, two floppy-haired heads. At the bottom of the stairs her pink quilt was pooled. It was not, as suspected, draped around the shoulders of a balaclava-clad man, turning him into some odd-looking superhero. Rather, Liv had thrown the single duvet down the stairs in her sleep and put herself back to bed. Her indignant expression broke into a stubborn, laughing smile. I probably laughed an ‘Oh my God,’ and rolled my eyes with a ‘You absolute doyle’ as we both walked the few steps back to bed.
Perhaps all children know something of the vulnerability of night-time, of sleep. A latent flame at first, soon fanned by playground stories of burglaries and home invasions real and imagined. And the one we’ve all heard, about the person thinking that their hand, falling off the edge of the bed in repose, was being licked by a dog only to find there had never been a dog. But Liv and I were always, I think, a bit more restless, especially with Mam being mentally unwell and prone to behaving unusually at times. To a child’s mind that can just mean being up late, but sometimes its the irrational belief that the house has been rigged with cameras. In my case this restlessness manifested itself in fear that I’d die in my sleep. Saying ‘Night, love you’ almost became preventative, a mantra that if forgotten would prove fatal. Even now, living hundreds of miles apart, I text her last thing, or she me, and we know what it means.
I used to ask our childhood friend Ashleigh, you know Ashleigh, constantly whether I was her best friend. Because there’s never been a tactic more absolutely successful to securing friendship than holding someone hostage by it. I knew I was, her best friend that is, but I just had to hear the words come from her mouth. The only difference with Liv was that I inherently knew she was my best friend. Know she is.
Though we were indubitably a trio, Liv and Ash were assigned the same form at secondary school – H in the MICHAEL while I was the E – and were best friends in the sense of two people who have chosen each other, as opposed to the best friend I was, in the more general sense. I’d fear that I only had friends because I was inextricably tied to Liv and she had friends, and I projected the worst of it onto poor Ash. We’d watch the latest music videos on the computer that used to sit in the corner of Mam’s living room when we were just starting out at big school – its bulky, overheating tower alongside a monitor bearing sticky finger marks. After Matt Cardle won The X Factor, Liv was utterly obsessed with the man, to the point of wearing a T-shirt with his face on for bed. She’d moved on from Jamiroquai, whose CD played often on our faded blue boombox, surrounded on the floor by hair straighteners and stray bobby pins. Before school we’d watch the bootcamp video of him singing ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’, which to her credit was goosebumps angelic, and other music videos of the songs we liked at the time. Our Freeview did have a couple of music channels, and E4 at that time did big themed countdowns and played chart hits, but YouTube meant we could listen as many times as we needed for Liv and Ash to nail the routines they’d choreograph. The best they ever did was to ‘Club Can’t Handle Me’ by Flo Rida; we rewound it so many times to get them in sync that I still know all the words
I don’t know why I never joined in. It wasn’t that I didn’t like dancing – on the contrary, at primary school only a year earlier we’d all three of us lead the morning ‘Wake Up Shakeup’ dance everyone would do in the playground before our first class. With the self-assurance and smugness gleaned simply from being the oldest in the school, five or six of us confidently stood facing the road that ran along the edge of the yard and led routines to ‘5,6,7,8’ by Steps and the like, the music blaring from a boombox placed on the concrete, awkwardly pulled through the window. Maybe I just liked to watch the two of them dance. The living room was only wide enough for two people throwing the moves they were throwing anyway. Perhaps I was too busy perfecting my heavily backcombed hair with Mam’s hairspray and comb, so it was nigh on rock solid and didn’t move (just one more spray, just in case) on the grey, oftentimes blustery walk to school.
My irresistible urge for open, constant affection and reassurance extended to St Michael’s dinnertime. Me and Liv were on free school meals, and the meagre budget meant you could get two out of the three things on offer: a drink, a dessert and a meal. She and Ash paired up every day – there was no question, that was the way things went – and I was self-righteously aggrieved that I should have to choose, when they shared a drink, and each got a dessert and main. I’d therefore sneak a crumbling brownie up my worn sleeve, picking out fabric-caught specks instead of paying attention in next period.
I was never naughty in any excessive – catchable – sense (she says, having just admitted to literal confectionary thieving). Other pupils jumped out the first-floor window when the teacher wasn’t looking and pegged it round the corner where people smoked. Someone might put a single bollock on a teacher’s keyboard while they were in the staffroom. A group of lads who called themselves ‘The Lynch Mob’ once locked a boy in the toilets and he was only let out after a dinner lady heard his increasingly desperate ‘It’s not funny any more!’ bangs on the door. We all cheered when he was let out. The single cubicles in there were absolutely tiny. I remember sitting in one listening to the rain pound down on the ceiling and wondering whether, as I had heard on the grapevine, the Mayans really had cracked it and the world was going to end that day. The sudden turn in the weather seemed to confirm it; no one played in the link-fenced AstroTurf outside the houseblock that day, so sodden was it with pools of rain.
This self-proclaimed Lynch Mob, who to my knowledge weren’t called out nearly half as publicly and loudly as such a vile moniker deserves, would hide behind the fence of the depressing memorial garden (I can’t remember who it memorialised) and grab unsuspecting people who walked past, pulling them over the fence and onto the floor. I nearly got scooped up once, but I didn’t mind too much because I fancied one of them. I never faced the kind of ordeal experienced by the little fat boy who was chased around the field panting for his life, catapulted through a fence when he was caught.
Sure, I stole brownies to be like Liv and Ash and because I wanted one and thought it unfair I couldn’t have one just because I didn’t have the money. And sure, if I bought a raffle ticket I’d sometimes purposefully pick out of the wrong bag (the one that had all the previous winning tickets in, all ending in 0s and 5s), feigning confusion that the Easter egg attached to ticket number 15 had already been taken, only to be given another one. It didn’t occur to me that the consolation egg I got meant someone else’s ticket would result in no prize, since it would by then be in my belly, nor that an almost life-sized Jesus on the cross loomed over the hall and saw it all. But really, I was polite in class and did my work, and to my credit didn’t catapult anyone through any fences. The bar I’m setting here is, admittedly, low.
The deputy head teacher looked like the slug who says ‘Wazowski, you didn’t file your paperwork’ in Monsters Inc. She’d been there even when Dad and his brothers had been at the school, and she resented how I looked. My skin was forever a fading patchwork of cheap instant tan, the white of my school collar daubed orange and brown. If I’d just buttoned up the top button (which would’ve been social suicide) I’d probably have got away with it, but it flopped open for all to see. The barely tied tie – a trend I still cannot understand, but the thicker the ‘knot’ the better, apparently – did not conceal the grubby, baked-in marks.
Also against the dress code, by Year 9 I had a pixie cut with the sides shaved. OK, it was also dyed using bright red dye that made Mam’s bathroom look like a crime scene. I wore lashings of mascara, first on lashes I’d cut using nail scissors so they could be short and stubby like the popular girls’ lashes, and then, when I came to my senses, on long, spidery lashes. Once, Mrs Monster’s Inc. called Liv and me into her office to demand we remove our make-up that very second. Thrust a baby wipe, I reluctantly went to work on my mascara and kohl-lined eyes. Liv, quiet as ever, did the same on hers, and she showed the remarkably clean wipe to the teacher. Her eyelashes were so long and thick and full that the teacher had mistakenly thought she’d been wearing mascara. As she left the office, it was all I could to do to hold in an eruptive ‘Fuck yeah!’ and jump into the air, Breakfast Club-style.
Liv’s eyes are insane. She has heterochromia, which means they’re different colours, like David Bowie’s and some cats’ eyes. In all the baby pictures they’re of course blue, but slowly they began to change until one was brown with a fleck of blue and the other green, like my mam’s. They’re also big as a bug’s eyes, and lined with sky-reaching lashes that make her look like a doll. When we were little and on holiday, Mam had to shield her from grasping hands and a trail of ‘ooh’s. Meanwhile, I stood squat, pre-hair dye and make-up, like a miniature Wayne Rooney. I’ve of course teased her for the sake of it, calling her ‘alien’ and ‘bong-eye’, before finally landing on ‘Bong-eyed Steve,’ who she remains to this day.
As is my birthright. If anyone else dared say anything about her, I was all over them like a rash. Surprisingly, I never actually had a fight at school, despite a burgeoning anger problem and, well, puberty, but I saw plenty of hair-grabbing scraps between girls in the bus bays after school. One rumour had it that a girl in Year 11 had once stabbed someone in the face with the heel of her shoe, but heels weren’t allowed so she was either an off-the-rails renegade or the story was bullshit. All you’d need to see against the green of the field between the school and the bus bays was a hive of navy-jumpered bodies huddled and jostling this way and that like a swarm of bees to realise a fight had broken out. Also, someone always shouted ‘Fight!’ to get the crowd in. I got close once, though. A girl we weren’t friends with had called Liv ‘bong-eyed’ (Excuse me?) and I saw red, confronting her – flanked by our friendship group – in front of the science block one break time. ‘You don’t fucking say anything about Liv,’ I spat. ‘Do you understand?’
My anxiety around whether I had any friends, which persists to this day, never really extended to Liv. Of course, I’d have preferred her to lavish me constantly with the adoration I believed was my womb-sharer’s privilege, but she and I found comfort in each other’s presence – our relationship, if unspoken, nevertheless God-given. Once, we pushed our single beds together so we could sleep in a double bed, getting a double duvet to complete the transformation. When I went to university and spent my first ever night away from her – apart from the short stint when, tired of my crap, she moved into the tiny spare bedroom at Mam’s house – I hated it.
For one thing, I was scared of the dark. Being constantly full of mischief, I’d try and scare her as we tried to fall asleep in our single beds at Mam’s, asking her what she’d do if there was a man in the wardrobe right now. ‘You’re only scaring yourself, Lauren.’ She was right, of course. Even our innocent mental explorations of the night sky and the probability of extraterrestrial life eventually scared me. I’d have to smooth the curtains so there were no cracks or creases that someone, however impossibly thin, could hide behind. When I went away, I wasn’t used to not having someone to whisper to before bed. I was used to knowing she was there, even if she was deathly quiet. I knew it was her coming up the stairs even if she didn’t say a word. It broke my heart. I still miss not being able to hear her, if not see her, moving around our space, coming up the stairs, brushing her teeth.
Even now, years later, I still sleep like I’m on the first shift. The slightest bump in the night and I’ll shoot up, immediately wrenched out of sleep, babbling ‘Liv, Liv, Liv, Liv, Mam, Mam, Mam,’ as though someone were taking them away.
Before any of this, I had the same fear for myself. When I was much younger, maybe five or six, I’d go and sleep in my mam’s bed if I’d had a nightmare. Pretty normal kid stuff, except I’d insist on holding one of her fingers. She’d ask if I could please instead just hold her hand because it was more comfortable for her, but I insisted. I remember how indomitably I believed it would provide the safest possible link to her in what seemed to me the likely event that someone would lean down and try and pull me away. I’d hold her finger so hard I’d be surprised if I didn’t nearly snap it off, certainly restricting blood flow. But it felt so safe. A lingering pre-memory, perhaps, of tiny newborn fingers and fingernails curled around an enormous finger. I’d hold on for dear life.
I continued getting into bed next to my mam when I was scared until I was in secondary school. One night when I was sleeping in her bed with her, I woke up in the early hours and didn’t feel scared any more. In fact, I couldn’t remember why I’d felt fearful. So I tiptoed across the landing back to Liv’s and my room, lifted the cover ready to get in my own bed and someone was there. I shit myself. Not literally, thank God, but it was one of the worst experiences of my existence. It soon became apparent why I’d no longer felt fearful, indeed was amnesiac about the root of it: Ashleigh was sleeping over (duh) and we were at that awkward age in growth terms that we couldn’t really top and tail any more. I hadn’t been scared in the first place. I was there in Mam’s bed out of logistical necessity, too old now for finger-clutching. It was as though the years had been laid on top of one another like tracing paper and I’d muscle-memorised a short carpet-trodden route, best completed when half asleep and years younger, between the two parallel bedrooms. I was so shaken by the experience I had to crawl back in with my mam. Ashleigh, I’m still your best friend, right? Could you just say it please?
4
Beach
Our friend from primary school, Rose, had the world’s most enviable magical house. To get to the house, you’d either come at it from behind and walk up a slightly sloping road, or else round the front, past a pub, and descend a ramp where the row of low houses stood. Before the tall wall that separated the row was a patch of grass with trees, and in the corner closest to the pub an unruly mess of brambles sat – though that seems too static a word to describe them. They were chaotic, dense, wild. We’d walk the thin wall, arms outstretched for balance, nervously giggling as we got close to the perilous corner. The laughs would turn smug as we passed it, but then when the wall came to an end we had to compose ourselves again to go back the way we came.
I think Rose’s older sister had fallen in once. The horrifying thrill of the image, her falling while her long, wavy hair rushed up into the air above her, slower to react, made the wall-walk feel almost like a noble challenge, something out of CBBC’s Raven – the brambles to be respected, revered. Sometimes, when we weren’t skirting that scratchy mess of weeds, we’d scour the bricks for slugs and put them on our hands and arms. I remember when Rose put one on her face and we squealed, grossed out and fascinated by her boldness. I envied her intensely; she was so alive and carefree.
Walking into her house as a seven- or eight-year-old felt like walking into Aladdin’s cave, my eyes twinkling with wonder no matter how many times we visited. It was a touch gloomy, I remember, and on the right-hand wall as you passed through the white wood-and-glass door was an array of gilded Venetian masks plucked from a fairy tale. They stared out from eyeless visages that always seemed to have a devilish smirk in them. Their brooding presence, suggestive of another world, entirely transfixed me. In the living room was a plain wooden piano, the sort we had in the main hall at primary school, a marvel to me and perhaps the inspiration for my accidental purchase of several pianos on Mam’s eBay account once, for which she got banned. I’d wanted to learn to play so, so badly. Sometimes I’d sit on the comfy piano stool, my legs dangling, and stretch my tiptoes to reach the pedals. Rose taught me how to play ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, and I did, often. Even at so young an age, I was aching to understand myself, define myself. To find some activity that I could crawl into and find perfect shelter in, knowing it fit me snugly. If only I could find that one interest that I could point to and say ‘That’s who I am; that is my interest,’ I’d somehow be whole, would have reconciled the shifting tectonic plates of myself like a jigsaw. In that illusion I saw certainty where around me, in me, there seemed to be none. It turns out the piano, no matter how much I wanted that to be my thing, wasn’t after all. But the pull of Rose’s piano, nevertheless, was almost supernaturally strong for me.
In the living room the ‘arty’ feel continued, with little panels of stained glass catching the light to the sound of wind chimes. The house had a beautiful eeriness that I couldn’t and didn’t want to shake. It felt like a doorway to a mysterious world, but one that went two ways and made me shiver. A liminal space, a space of freedom and possibility. The sisters had a dressing-up box – a great oak trunk is how I remember it. We’d gleefully dive into it, making ourselves look like hippies or witches, or just like adults: slapping our faces with make-up and wrapping strings of beads around our necks. Sometimes we’d stay over for tea and have tiny glasses of wine (juice) and what were to my mind unfathomably fancy meals. I remember having a spaghetti dish – it might have been carbonara – and in the middle of the table was a glass bowl of salad from which you were to serve yourself with ‘tongs’. How civilised it seemed to me! Candles flickered in the room and I could feel their warmth.
