I am wading through a marsh, my clothes bogged down and filthy, the stench of rot humming in the air – and I shudder and open my eyes, my jittering phone the scissors that snipped the thread. I yawn. Pick the crust out of my eyes.
Katerina has texted:
Tonight at Soapbox – shall we go? x
A picture: Pete Doherty, Brandon Flowers, Karen O imposed on clashing neon yellow-pink-green, advertising a night called Utter Shambles. A thud from the past, from ripped fishnets and denim skirts, Converse hi-tops and clattering plastic bracelets. A kindling in my chest. A stab in my middle.
Is Pete Doherty nostalgia now? No. I’m off sick.
Katerina’s reply is instant:
We started uni twenty years ago. So yeah. Suck it up x
Three dots, rippling as she types.
You’re allowed to do things. Going for a few drinks and listening to landfill indie doesn’t mean you’re fit to teach a bunch of grotty teenagers.
A half-thought begins to rise: I could go, there’s nothing really stopping me –
I feel it, slick and heavy as I shift around. The sheets are damp again.
A ginger reach to assess the damage: my fingertips come away glistening. Fuck it, I think, wiping my fingers on the sheets. They’re going in the wash anyway. I wonder if the blood has seeped into the mattress, soaked into the fibres and spread. Once, the thought of it would have made me retch. Now I just feel weighed down.
I had surgery two weeks ago, three nicks through flesh, fat, muscle to burn away tissue that shouldn’t have been on my ovaries. I lie as still as I can, clenching my jaw against acknowledgement of what has oozed out of the bad wound and into my soft furnishings. To move is to accept. To move is to feel it, tacky and starting to dry on my bare skin. My horrible pink nighty – bought on three for two in the supermarket the week before I went into hospital – has rucked up, exposing my wounds to the sheets.
Two of the wounds are almost healed, pink and shiny. The other – the worst – is still soft and raw, held loosely by an undissolved dissolvable stitch. The nurse said just to leave it. Come back if it doesn’t start healing soon.
I tear off the boggy nighty, look down at the brown-red smears on my middle, the tide-marks on the coral sheets. Sniff the air around me. Maybe I could burn the nighty.
I pick up my phone.
What time shall we meet? x
*
On the bus, my mind tumbles with washing-machine thumps.
You’re off sick.
You’re in pain.
You’re off sick.
You’re not even healed!
Little thoughts that swirl from my head, through my throat to my stomach as we jolt over speed bumps and potholes. I try not to touch my middle. But I can feel it, gaping against the wadded dressings.
I stood in the shower for so long this morning that I almost fell asleep. Stuck new dressings on and spent the day dozing on the lumpy grey sofa, drifting in and out of Homes Under the Hammer, the sun piercing through my dreams of teaching a class of sixty while gore poured from me.
There was only a bit of crusted brown when I changed the dressing at teatime. Maybe it’s starting to improve. Maybe this morning’s blood spill was the final purge before my body starts to knit back together. Anyway, I padded myself well before coming out, made sure everything was properly stuck down. I don’t have to dance. I can stand against a wall and lean and drink and look cool, or something. If the walls aren’t sweaty, or sticky.
I look at my reflection in the dirty bus window, smooth my hair behind my ears. Wonder if I can get away with what I’m wearing.
I’m so ready for a drink. Two or three pints, a few glasses of gin. Anything to help me quiet the never-ending thoughts that have ticked round my head since Katerina collected me from the hospital and put me to bed in her spare room. I thought the anaesthetic would hang around a bit, keep me in a twilight world for a day or so. Instead, I lay in crisp, cool sheets, let a carousel spiral: new books and poems I could introduce at work, whether I could write poetry if I tried, where I could go on holiday next year, and the last, most torturous spin of the wheel, writing an essay on the stage directions in An Inspector Calls in my head until I was so exhausted I fell asleep mid-sentence. Codeine hasn’t silenced it. Maybe lager will.
I ring the bell, shuffle off the bus and every step I take towards the pub in the evening gloom, there is a twinge in my bad wound. No, no, no it says, in time with my feet hitting the pavement.
Katerina is outside The Ship, head buried in her phone, a vape in her other hand.
‘Leni!’ She slides her phone away, hugs me, the scent of vape clinging to her – some sort of fruity, minty concoction, probably with a name like ‘Pineapple Ice’ or ‘Applemint,’ all one word.
She pulls away, pushes through the door. ‘You go and see if our table is free. I’ll get the beers in.’
The pub is starting to get busy, but the nook we like the best is empty. I sit down, take out my phone, feel the beginnings of a slick of sweat in the small of my back. Our little corner glows, buttery and soft, the polished dark wood of the furniture gleaming.
I down a third of the beer Katerina brings in one go.
‘Bad day?’
‘Not particularly,’ I say, tracing my finger in the condensation of the glass. I wonder if I should have taken some codeine before I came out. ‘Just a bit warm.’
‘Well, you’re wearing a long-sleeved top.’
I take another drink, feel the lager fizz down my throat. Something like refreshment. ‘I thought it looked – I dunno. Chic.’
‘French.’
‘Exactly. I was always trying to look French at uni.’
‘Ah, yes. The beret years.’
We fall into a squabble about which of us had cowboy boots – I am sure it was her, she insists it was both of us. Talk turns to the boy we knew who had authentic Texan cowboy boots, who nobody would sleep with because he smelled of bananas and disinfectant. We speak of making ourselves sick in nightclub toilets so we could continue drinking, of getting the bus to a nearby market town to go to a real ale festival that neither of us were remotely interested in just because we both fancied boys we knew were going.
‘Another?’
Katerina nods.
The bar is busy, a modern-mulleted Australian boy bogged down on his own. I feel like a pensioner trying to understand punks with green hair and safety pins in their ears when I try to understand people with mullets in the twenty twenties. The lager is starting to take hold, loosening taut muscle, letting me sink down a little into the soft light of the pub.
Katerina makes me feel like the person I was back then, the girl who bought berets and cowboy boots and leg-warmers in the belief that they would make her stylish, and noticeable, and sleek. I think of that version of myself with a pull behind my lungs. She was hopeful and sweet, and had never been burned. And she had Tim.
I order another two pints from the barman, tap my phone on the pay terminal and see, at the other end of the bar, Damian. Lager and dread curdle in my stomach. I breathe through my nose, keep my eyes fixed on the pints the barman has put in front of me, tell myself that I cannot look right I cannot look right I cannot look right – I cannot speak to him, cannot risk seeing who he is with. I grip the glasses, turn, let the crowd of people part for me.
Katerina looks expectant when I put her pint on the table, the beer slopping over the side. I sit, turn my body so I am looking out of the window. The wound twists, hotly.
‘Damian. At the bar.’
‘Urgh.’ She grabs her pint, downs half. ‘Drink up. We’re off.’
My hand is sticky with spilt beer. I drink as much as my roiling stomach will allow. It balloons, knocking into my expanding heart, nudging my wound; I imagine a yellow-red ripple spilling over, soaking into the dressing.
‘We don’t want to miss them playing the Klaxons, anyway.’
I stand, straighten my denim skirt, don’t allow myself to look anywhere except my feet. I haven’t worn anything around my waist since the operation and the skirt was a stupid choice. I wince at my Converse.
‘Eleni!’
Flinch-start at the sound of his voice. Tim has walked through the door at the exact moment I am about to escape.
‘Come on, Leni,’ Katerina says, her presence behind me a cushion.
‘And Katerina. What a treat.’
My shoulders hunch; my body shrinks into itself, collapsing around a vortex of sickness. I hope he can’t tell I’m padded with gauze.
‘Tim, I have not missed you,’ Katerina says. ‘It’s so freeing to not have to be polite to you anymore.’
Tim opens his mouth, closes it, steps out of our way. Katerina ushers me through the door.
‘You’re going bald, as well,’ she mutters. I start to laugh-sob and as soon as I’m outside I am vomiting on the pavement. Katerina rubs my back.
‘Just like the old days,’ she says. ‘Tactical vom.’
I laugh, and spit a chunk of something onto the greyness.
‘God, I am gross.’ The wound feels leaky.
‘Shut up,’ she says, passing me a packet of Polos. ‘Let’s look at your face.’ She wipes the tears from my cheeks with her thumbs. ‘Thank god for waterproof mascara. You look fine.’
We walk along the high street with arms linked, my heart shrinking back to its normal size, its beat and rhythm steadying with my footsteps. I don’t look fine. I’m not convinced it’s dignified or chic to clutch onto things you thought were stylish two decades ago. My thighs ripple with cellulite, my face has gone doughy and soft, and the hole in my abdomen is hot and pulsing. I imagine flakes of mascara on my face, foundation clogging my pores, my nose a slick of oil. I crunch a mint.
*
‘You’re really fit.’
‘What?’ I can’t have heard him right. A song by, I think, the Pigeon Detectives, that sounds like a football chant, is pounding out of the speakers, bouncing off the walls, thumping my skull. I’ve lost sight of Katerina.
‘You’re really fit.’
A man in an embarrassing uniform of trilby, white vest and black blazer, who smells of cigarettes and something rotting-sweet, is lying to my face. He dresses like Pete Doherty dressed twenty years ago. He is at least forty-five.
‘I need to find my friend,’ I say, turning, not waiting to see his reaction.
The heat of my wound thrills through my stomach, recoils off my scorched ovaries. The feeling propels me towards the toilets, where Katerina is leaning against a sink, holding court about hyaluronic acid serums.
‘There you are!’ Her audience begins to peel away, leaving us alone, a whiff of armpits hanging in the air. ‘I thought you were talking to that guy?’
‘He smelled like he had fag ash in all his pockets.’
‘Shame,’ Katerina says, turning to inspect her reflection. She widens her eyes into the mirror, wipes away a tiny smudge of eyeliner. ‘He was at least six foot three.’
At university, I would have devoured him whole for being tall and telling me I was fit. That was basically all Tim did to get me into bed. The difference is, I believed Tim. Tall Trilby must be desperate. Maybe the first man to chat me up in a decade. If I looked in the mirror, now, I would not see someone who is a candidate to be chatted up. I would see someone whose hair has dulled, dried; whose skin has started to sag. Who looks so different to the picture of herself on her twenty-fifth birthday she has tacked on her classroom wall that children ask, ‘Is that your sister?’ I look at the glittered black grouting and white-tiled walls instead.
I don’t know who I am anymore. My abdomen throbs.
‘Shall we get another drink?’
The bar is quiet, the people pulled from it to the dancefloor, moving their bodies to the Futureheads’ cover of ‘Hounds of Love.’ A man with an overhanging gut and too-long hair and a woman with over-plucked eyebrows and the beginnings of double chin are pivoting, jerking, stamping like their twenty-year-old selves, in their forty-year-old bodies. Still, they’re feeling something. I pull my skirt down.
We stand by a potted plastic palm tree and drink luminous cheap gin, surveying the crowd through the darkness.
My middle is tight, and hot, and I am too scared look down, or to test the damp fabric of my top to see if it is just sweat or if there is something more viscous, more vital, seeping through.
The Futureheads fade out and an insistent riff starts to build, its knuckles knocking at my throat. Katerina squeals, drags me by the hand to the dancefloor, pushing between two women in neon visors and tutus and yes, this is my favourite song, and yes, I would never normally miss the chance to dance to Bloc Party but I am certain that the wound is gaping and weeping, bleeding, and flinging myself around is not going to help that, and everyone will see the growing blood stain on a top that doesn’t even look French, anyway, it looks like I’m an ageing millennial who is unable to let go of her younger self –
Katerina sings along, raising her arm to twirl me. I duck and spin, blinded by flashing red and white lights on the DJ booth, feel my insides liquefy, my feelings leak out of my belly.
A whirl of colour and spark: Katerina’s hips move exactly like they did two decades ago when this felt so easy; her hair is glossy and neat, her clothes cling to her body in all the right places. I am trying so hard to mirror her, to let the music seep between the strings of my muscles and compel them to move, to fill myself with the surge of joy I am tamping down, keeping small, not allowing to grow.
‘I’ll go back, if you ask,’ Katerina shouts, punching the air, knocking into a shaven-headed tall man in a Fred Perry jacket, and then I see him: Tim is here, Tim and his stupid fucking mate Damian, and my wound bursts open: clots and gristle and gore spill out of the hole and my top is drenched, and Katerina is dancing with blissed-out half-closed eyes, and I drop my glass and my life is pouring out onto this dancefloor and my ex is skirting around it and I turn and hope he doesn’t see the red-black-pulpy mess and I put my fingers to it, assess the damage and –
Nothing.
My stupid French top is dry. I look down: it is white and navy – not bloody, not drenched in shredded tissue and crust. I feel the dressing with my fingertips, dry, not moving –
Katerina has bounced off and Pound Shop Pete Doherty is there when I look up and I grab him, hoping that Tim is looking, and I am straining my neck to kiss him and his mouth tastes vile, like alcopops and pear drops, he’s a terrible kisser – I pull back and trip and almost fall over the glass I dropped but Katerina is here. I butt into her. Stop.
‘Woah,’ she says, taking my elbow, steering me towards some seats.
‘Mate. Your mouth is all – have you kissed someone?’ Her excitement is a lurch of liquid in my stomach.
‘I’m going to the loo.’
I grip the sink, squint, force my gaze to the mirror: frizzy, smudged, the kind of look that only incredibly thin posh girls in their early twenties called Lettice and Flossy can carry off. I lock myself in a toilet, pull my top over my head, peel back the dressing to inspect my wound. Fine. The edge is a little red, chafed, maybe, by the dancing and the sweat and the rubbing against people on a dancefloor – I can’t remember the last time I have done this, gone out on a night and danced – if you can call it dancing, my inhibitions pinning my limbs, the joy I used to feel in flinging and flailing and spinning drained away to reveal hideous self-knowledge. I sit on the toilet for a bit.
Pound Shop Pete Doherty is waiting for me when I emerge.
‘I didn’t mean to offend you before –’
‘No,’ I say, holding up a hand. ‘It’s fine.’ I put my feelings on a shelf, so high I can’t reach.
Katerina is wedged between groups of men at the grubby seats opposite the dancefloor, taking a surreptitious toke of her vape. Tim is on the edge of the dancefloor, a pint in his hand, his bald spot gleaming.
‘Do you want to come back to mine?’
Pound Shop’s eyes widen.
‘Yeah.’
I grab his hand, pull him over to Katerina.
‘I’m going to go home.’ She looks up, assesses the sad ex-hipster in my grasp.
‘Alright,’ she says, her eyes sharpening. ‘Text me when you get in.’
I drag Pound Shop along, the sweet-grot taste growing in my mouth – I want to spit – but I want Tim to see me more. I barge past him, don’t look back. Trust that he has clocked me leaving with a man who is taller than him. The older I get, the more I realise that it’s the little things we need to sustain us.
*
I wake covered in sticky blood, sheets stuck to my middle. No sign of Pound Shop.
The sex was rushed – the taste in of mouth started to occupy every thought, every movement, and I couldn’t wait to get up, run to the bathroom, brush my teeth and tongue to try and cancel out the disgusting sweetness. I was glad to throw on a ratty old t-shirt, put something between my skin and his.
It wasn’t awful to feel another body next to me as I fell asleep, for the smell of sweat and cigarettes and boiled sweets to seep into my dreams. But when I realise I don’t have his number – have forgotten the name he slurred at me in the cab – I don’t feel much at all. Don’t even worry if I bled on him, or what he thinks of my thighs, or if my face puddled into a double chin as I slept.
I rip the sheet back. Let myself bleed.