‘All right then. It wasn’t good sex, it was fantastic sex. You enjoyed it, I enjoyed it – a lot. And I don’t understand why you’ve backed off without even an explanation. Is it Eliza?’
Who’s Eliza?
‘No. Well, a little, actually. She’s served me up another couple of dollops of crazy, but even without her, my life is too complicated. So much has happened I …’ Nika’s voice wavers and then stops. I know what she wants to say and it isn’t what she will say.
‘She doesn’t think she deserves nice things, or nice people, in your case,’ I say. I still have my back turned so I’m not sure if they’re looking at me or not. ‘Nika doesn’t think she has a right to good things happening to her or being around good people.’
‘I don’t need you to speak for me,’ she gently reminds me, probably with a smile pulled tightly across her incredulous face.
‘Yes, you do,’ I tell her. ‘You need someone to speak for you right now because Marshall seems a nice man and you have no right to bin him off to punish yourself. If he wasn’t a nice man or if you didn’t like him any more or even if you did like him but you didn’t want to go out with him, they’d all be legitimate reasons to give him the elbow, but not if it’s to hurt yourself. Doing that is like jabbing huge chunks of glass into your forearm to release the pain, when all you’re actually doing is causing yourself even more pain.’
‘What would you know about it, being a nun? And where does a nun learn expressions like “bin him off”?’ Nika says.
‘I know stuff. And I know how people talk.’ Mainly from watching the relationships of other people developing around me; often from sometimes thinking what I would like from a relationship and accepting how I would do everything I could to sabotage it because I would not feel worthy, I would not be deserving. Like not pursuing things with Cliff, who I actually quite like. Everything that I have come from tells me I cannot have nice things.
‘Well, this is awkward,’ Marshall says to the quiet in the room. ‘I’m not sure what I’m meant to do now, really.’
‘You can sit down and we can play card games, if you want?’ Nika says. ‘If you want. I’ve, erm, got a pack of cards somewhere, and we can put some music on. I think I’ve even got “No More Lonely Nights” somewhere.’
‘Hey!’ Marshall exclaims.
‘Sorry, only kidding. You can stay and play card games, if you want. I mean, if you want.’
‘Yes, I do want,’ Marshall says.
‘And you, Nun Face, you can stay too. As long as you stop speaking for me.’
‘OK.’ I didn’t realise me staying wasn’t a given, but I don’t say that. That would come across as very entitled when I owe her so much. ‘Thank you. Can I stop facing the wall now?’
‘If you want,’ Nika says.
I haven’t been to church. Nika is saying goodbye to Marshall at the front door and I haven’t been to church today. I haven’t prayed at all today. I’m a bit jittery, unsettled and uncomfortable in my skin. Like I’ve forgotten to brush my teeth.
I didn’t want to leave, though. Not even for a moment – I kept hanging on and hanging on to go to the loo because I was fearful that if I left the room, the atmosphere would shatter and all the good feeling would dribble out, leaving us as three strangers pretending we have anything in common while sitting around listening to music from nearly three decades ago.
Really, I should be going home. Now Marshall has gone, I should go and leave Nika in peace. I don’t want to, though. I want to stay.
‘I haven’t been to church today,’ I tell her after she has made me a final cup of tea. Someone should know this, I think.
‘Is that good or bad?’ she asks. ‘I don’t know, to be honest.’
‘As a woman of the cloth, I’d hope you were always honest.’
Is that a dig about what I did all those years ago, or is it her having a laugh? ‘I am honest. I don’t know how to feel about not going to church on a Sunday for the first time in over twenty years.’
‘It must be strange.’
‘Really strange.’
‘Thank you for what you said to Marshall. You shouldn’t have got involved, but thank you.’ She whispers this, like a young girl sharing secrets with her sister in the dead of night. She wants no one to hear, not even me.
‘Are you going to start seeing him again?’ I ask her.
‘I’ve got work at six o’clock tomorrow morning. If you want to stay, you have to be ready to leave by five-thirty. I don’t imagine that’s hard for you since you must have been getting up at that time for years.’
I’ll take that as a ‘Mind your own business’, then, I think while she gets up and leaves the room. At least I have another night, though, to try to say sorry and try to heal the hole that is slowly eating away at my soul.
Roni
London, 2016
I had to ask Nika four times before she would give me her phone number. The first three times she outright ignored me and got on with whatever it was she was doing, the fourth time I stood in front of her as she loaded her packed lunch and music player into her coat pocket, and asked her.
After a giving me a long, hard stare, as though assessing whether to say no or not, then sighing in resignation, she wrote the number down on a piece of paper and handed it to me without looking in my direction. What we had yesterday was gone, we were back to being strangers.
‘Can I call you?’ I asked her when we got to the road where we parted ways – her onwards to the hotel she told me she worked at, me left and up the hill to the station.
‘If you must,’ she replied. She wasn’t looking at me and that hurt. My pride again, or simply my feelings? I had hoped we’d slightly broken the barrier that time and my betrayal had erected between us, but no – she’d withdrawn from me, maybe even further than before.
‘I must.’ I hoped I’d sounded funny when I said that. ‘I really must. I found you again; I don’t want to lose you. Not when I have to say sorry properly.’
Her gaze found mine then and we stared at each other. I suddenly saw her as she was the day we spotted each other across the ballet studio. She had pigtails on either side, with pink ribbons on the ends, and she had that look that said she was going to be a dancer, that being a ballerina was the only thing she ever wanted to be. It was best friend and soul mate at that sight, for me. For her, too, from what she had said to me over the years. I wanted to kiss her again. To connect to her without words, just like we used to when we were young. After staring at me for a few more seconds this morning, she shook her head as though exasperated by me. ‘Bye, Roni.’
‘Just to be clear, you don’t want the knickers and bra you lent me back, do you?’ I was trying to hold on to her a little while longer. If I couldn’t hold her hand, couldn’t hug her, couldn’t kiss her, I wanted her to be near me just that bit longer.
‘No, I really do not want them back. Bye.’
‘Bye,’ I said. Disappointment washed through me. I didn’t realise it until I’d seen her on the steps – Nika was where the silence was. Being with her gave me peace. Maybe because she could understand, she was the other half of me, the missing part that quelled the raging inside. If I could find a way to tell her I was sorry, then maybe the silence would be there all the time, and I would be able to let her go. She’d be able to choose to be my friend or not and I would be able to accept that.
She walked away quickly, before I could say anything else to prolong our time together and I had to reluctantly turn towards home.
The second I walk through my parents’ door, the oppressive nature of being there and having the secret history of that house bearing down on me is almost too much. I can’t breathe properly; I have to squint my eyes a few times because the noise in my head has jumped up a few notches.
By the telephone there is a notepad and pen and even from the front door I see Mum’s passive aggression waiting to pounce on me. She has used red ink, and large writing with several instances of underlining, to
write messages that cover the whole of the front page of the notepad. I approach it with trepidation. I bet Cliff has called again and that has sent her over the edge. In my defence, I did return his call(s) but he didn’t answer when I rang, so I had left a message saying basically, yes, OK, I understood he was ready to ask me that question, but as I had explained, I wasn’t up for dating at the moment but I would be in touch at some point when I had done what I needed to do. It is not my fault if he didn’t understand that as ‘stop ringing me’.
I pick up the pad when I see there are four pages of messages. Four pages in red ink, each more aggressively written and underlined and exclamation marked than the last. I didn’t know someone would actually take the time to fill half a line with !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!s, but there it was, another facet of my mother I had been introduced to.
I flip to the last message to see when she took the last one, since I have been gone less than forty-eight hours. At the bottom, she has written in capitals and underlined six times:
GET YOURSELF A MOBILE PHONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I was going to anyway. I have it all worked out: I will get myself a mobile and I will use it to forge links with Nika. I will send her text messages, I will call her once a week, I will slowly build up contact so we can be friends again. Once we are friends again, I will apologise. I will explain everything, about why I lied to the police, and she will hopefully understand. Not even forgive me, just understand how sorry I was. How sorry I am. How sorry I will always be.
I flip back to the first page of messages, start to read. With each message I read faster and faster, flipping the pages as quickly as I can until I get to the final message. They are all calls from one person. I rip off my coat, throw it down where I stand and take the stairs two at a time. I have to get showered, get changed and get out.
The messages are from Mrs Cecile Frost: Gail has tried to kill herself.
Nika
Brighton, 2016
Seeing Roni has wrecked my head. More than I thought possible. That she wanted my mobile number was a normal request from someone you want to keep in touch with. But do I want to keep in touch with her? I think sometimes I hate her for lying to the policeman. It wasn’t only that, though. It was all of it, really. I was sucked into her orbit, made to live out what she did. The sounds of her being screwed by horrible men from the various clubs and bars never went away. They smeared themselves into the shells of my ears, immediately sliming across my memory. I would relive the sounds, the experiences, and it would be like whichever man it was would be grunting in my ear, not hers, and I would be powerless to stop it. I would have to lie in bed at night, listening to it all over again until the memory had played itself out and another, a worse one, would rush in to take its place.
And because I loved her so much, I could never simply walk away and leave her. Not until she lied to the police officer. She had backed away from ending the pain so many times over the years, but that was the final straw for me. I couldn’t take any more. I had no way to make it better after the visit to the police station. I stood on the pavement outside and she was talking to me, and I realised I had to leave. Unless I wanted to sleep on the streets, I would have to be single-minded, save up, leave home – basically take my parents up on their offer to allow me to stop the lessons when I stopped living under their roof.
I thought I was ready to see Roni, that I’d know how to deal with her if she was right in front of me. But I couldn’t.
After work, I am going to get drunk. It’ll be the first time in over ten years, but I am going to get drunk and I am going to put my music on really loud. I am going to let go for once and try to claw back the time I had before life in Brighton started to be about my past again. After work, I am going to start again, again. And this time, it is going to stick.
15
Roni
London, 2016
When you’re a Sister or a nun, people don’t see you. They see what you wear and they see what it symbolises in their minds and memories, but they don’t see you, the person. I am still adjusting to walking down the road and people smiling at me and men giving me a once-over to see if they think I am ‘hot’, as the girls I teach say. I also am still getting used to walking through a hospital, say, and people not noticing me. There is no veil, no large cross, no plain blue uniform of skirt, blouse and cardigan, so they do not see me as there to offer spiritual aid and comfort in someone’s time of need. Without the items that usually made me blend into the background everywhere else, in a hospital I am just another visitor, seeing a loved one who isn’t very well.
I find Gail in a bed on the children’s ward of the hospital she has been taken to. There are four other beds in there, the two opposite are occupied, and it is as pleasant as a hospital ward can be – cream-painted walls and brightly coloured pictures of animals and familiar TV characters stencilled and stuck up around the room. The curtains around the beds are cream with tiny blue flowers and each little bed bay has a television hanging down over the bed and a padded easy chair. She is sitting up in bed, staring at the television, remote control in hand, but she doesn’t seem to be using it. Instead her eyes are wide, wide open and her body is rigid as though she’s been petrified by something that she has just seen.
‘Took your time,’ she says when she sees me. Slowly I pull the curtain around us and stand by her bed on the opposite side to the chair.
‘I was visiting a friend in Brighton,’ I said. ‘I only just got the messages and came straight here. And by the way, hello to you too.’
‘You’ve got a friend? I doubt it,’ she says.
‘Did you ask to see me because I’m the only person you feel comfortable insulting?’ I ask her.
‘Probably,’ she says. Her body has relaxed a little since I’ve been beside her bed, the muscles that stood out, the probably hyper-vigilant nerve endings, all seem slightly soothed for the moment. She smiles shyly at me from under her lowered eyelids. ‘Thanks for coming.’
‘How could I stay away when I knew the welcome would be this warm?’ I say. ‘And it’s no problem at all. I wish I’d been able to get here sooner.’
‘My mum’s freaking out,’ she states. ‘Everyone else is calling it a cry for help.’
‘Was it?’ I open my mouth to ask. In the nick of time I hold my tongue – she needs to admit it to me so she can admit it to herself. Me asking won’t make her question herself; it will make her give me the answer she thinks I want to hear. If I wait, she might tell me the truth.
I sometimes wonder, after all I know about life now, all that I have prayed about, if it would have been a cry for help if I had taken my mother’s sleeping tablets all those years ago. Or would it have been what I truly wanted? I remember very clearly, as though it is something I experienced merely seconds ago, the agony that was the inside of my head. Every thought scraped a fresh line of unmitigated pain across my mind. If I reached up, I would have been able to feel the pulsating pain as it throbbed all rational thoughts out of my head. When I was where Gail is, I know that I was chasing the silence and relief from the agony within. Taking the tablets might not have been a cry for help at all.
‘It wasn’t a cry for help,’ Gail says. ‘Who would help me? Who would even listen to me, let alone help me? I was so tired. I wanted to sleep for, like, a thousand forevers and wake up to find all the stuff making me tired had gone away. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, I understand. I really do.’
‘Aren’t you going to tell me off? Tell me I was being selfish and that it’s a mortal sin and all that other nun stuff?’
‘I’m not a nun any more. And even if I was … I couldn’t tell you off for something I almost did myself.’
‘You almost killed yourself? Why?’
I sit down on the bed and stare down at the blue waffle blanket she has on her bed, the large strip of folded-over white sheet. It reminds me of the veil I used to wear. ‘My life was rubbish. I shouldn’t say that because I truly believe al
l life is valuable and precious, but at the time, it felt like my life was rubbish. I had stuff going on at home, my parents barely noticed me, my best friend hadn’t spoken to me in eighteen months and then she ran away. I felt so alone.’
‘Why didn’t you do it?’ she asks.
‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But the fundamental reason is that I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live, and just wanted everything that was awful about my life to go away. It didn’t really, but I managed to focus my attention on the new goal I had, which was becoming a nun.’
Gail raises her eyes (ironically) to the heavens and drifts away from me like a cloud blown away by a sudden gust of wind. She thinks I’m trying to convert her, to bring her into the fold that I have left, instead of simply relaying to her a part of my story.
‘You need to tell someone what he’s doing to you,’ I tell her. ‘Even if you don’t think it’s that bad because it hasn’t gone beyond brushing up against you, you need to tell. He has no right to touch you, to say stuff to you, to show you inappropriate pictures. None of it. He has no right to make you feel like this. It doesn’t matter who he is, he has no right to do this.’
Her face twists in pain and terror. ‘What if she doesn’t believe me?’ Gail says inside a sob. I am being turned inside out, violently eviscerated by the memory of feeling like this. Poor Gail. I remember what it was like. To have the smell of another person all over you mingled in with the scent of your own fear, to be constantly on edge waiting for it to happen, to be terrified that you will be blamed. I hate that another person is going through this. I hate that Gail is going through this. At moments like this, I remember the other reason for leaving. It was there, and I did not want to face it, did not want to examine it in any detail because I would be behaving like Judas again – I would be betraying another love. At moments like this, I question why fragile, lost souls like Gail have to go through what I did, what Nika did, what thousands and millions do. Free will is the answer, of course. Humans have free will, and we often seem to use that freedom to harm others.