Work Text:
She is barely four years old when she is saved.
Tarmac under her bare toes. She remembers, still, just how cold she was.
How much every single step had hurt.
(There is a shriek still lodged in her mind. And another still stuck in her throat. It has been crying for days.)
And so she had ran. Barefoot. Until she felt as though her little lungs might give out. And the sky above her was growing dark.
(Mid-December. It was probably only four in the afternoon.)
Finally, a big girl had found her. Wandering about the estate absolutely alone. This girl is older. Almost a grown-up.
(No. Perhaps only ten years old.)
A big girl with a long, pretty plait. All the way down her back.
And she is beautiful. Carla thinks that she is the most beautiful girl in the whole world.
She looks like a princess from the cover of one of the pink magazines in the offie. The one with a little silver tiara sellotaped to the paper. Once a day, and sometimes twice if she’s lonely, she will dart through the door of the off-licence and gape, open-mouthed at-
Sometimes, she has a chubby fistful of change. Always enough for a 20 pack of cigarettes. Never enough left over for any sweets. She can barely reach the counter.
(Sometimes, the nice man gives her a little paper bag, and allows her to fill it up with penny pick’n’mix. Or hands her a ripe banana.)
(It is a shining flutter of kindness shown to a little girl who doesn’t know anything at all about gratitude.)
(She doesn’t ever say thank you.)
But she does allow herself just a moment to stare at the cherub faced princess, and at all the curling pink words she does not know how to read.
(Her jaw working furiously as she chewed down her sweets.)
Just getting to look is a treat. But she cannot, must not, linger.
And she must run all the way home, up the hill. Or her mam will be-
(Oh how she covets that magazine.)
But.
Today she is saved.
By the big girl. The almost grown-up-
(Perhaps ten years old.)
Who looks just like the princess on the cover of that magazine.
And so, she had allowed herself to be picked up, to be carried home. As though she were a baby.
She had squeezed her eyes shut.
(And reminded herself that is not a baby. She is a big girl too.)
(She is barely four.)
Safe in the girl’s arms, held tightly against her hip, her toes nearly scrape along the road. Long legs cold and dangling.
And the girl had said something about how her ‘mammy must be missing her.’
(She, very almost, doesn’t even know what that means.)
And the big girl had held her tighter, and looked both ways before crossing the road.
She is four years old.
She hadn’t looked both ways before crossing the road. Because nobody had ever told her to. It is just something else she has never been taught.
She is four years old.
And she knows she’s too old to cry.
(But she wants to.)
“Oh, you must be so scared, you poor thing.”
The big girl’s voice is very gentle. Very soft, against Carla’s mass of dark hair.
And she isn’t. She isn’t scared.
(This might be the safest she has ever felt.)
Held against another child’s hip. A girl with neat, long, shiny hair and a junior school uniform.
Her clothes look different. She smells different. There is some great contrast between them.
But Carla is barely four years old. She doesn’t know why they are so different.
(She will perhaps never know why.)
(But she feels it she feels it she feels it she feels it she feels it she feels it.)
In her arms-
Carla feels like a creature, not a child.
Because. At home.
On the sofa there is something that shrieks, something that wails. All day and all night. A bright, blotchy, angry red.
It scares her. But she cannot leave it.
This flailing bundle.
It needs her.
There are sharp things, and shiny things, on the kitchen table. The soles of her feet are muddy, and cut-up.
She wants to wrap herself in blankets and wail too.
But she cannot.
Because she is four years old.
So she clings around this big girl’s neck. The most beautiful girl in the whole world. And thinks of a pretty princess from the cover of a pink magazine.
She tucks her face into her soft hair, and breathes in an unfamiliar, clean, loved scent.
And allows herself to be carried back home-
And she doesn’t cry.
(She does.)
—-----
She is eight.
And her best friend is the most beautiful girl in the whole world.
There are twenty-eight other children in her class. Only one is her friend.
She knows that this is because she is different. And that she is different because she doesn’t have a PE kit. Or a swimming kit. And because she comes to school at eight in the morning to sit alone in the classroom with her teacher and eat a bowl of cereal from the box her teacher would produce from under her desk. Cornflakes or coco-pops doused in blue-topped milk pilfered from the staffroom fridge.
She sometimes likes to pretend that she is a stray cat. When she brings her lips to the edge of the bowl, and drinks the sweet remnants of the milk.
(She feels a little like a stray cat. Sometimes. Hungry and wanting, circling around the other children, silently begging to be petted.)
So. She tips her head back. And she drinks.
The first time she had done this, her teacher had looked up from her marking with alarm-
But not a single drop had ever fallen onto her second hand blue cardigan.
(Her mother calls her greedy. And perhaps her mother is right.)
(And so, greedily, she also likes to pretend that, one day, her teacher might take her home with her. She likes to imagine that somewhere, one day, there might exist a house that isn’t scary. But-)
But she is eight. And her house is scary.
So she loves school, and she loves her best friend.
Who has round freckled cheeks and big brown eyes and a big smile with lots of gaps. And her name is Zoe.
Zoe sometimes doesn’t have a PE kit either. And sometimes she comes to school with her previous night’s dinner still smeared around her chubby cheeks.
And, together, they do a lot of pretending.
(And not very much being-invited-to-birthday-parties.)
(Or going-round-for-tea.)
But it’s okay. Because she loves Zoe. And Zoe is the most beautiful girl in the whole wide world. She likes it being just the two of them. Because she isn’t very good at sharing.
(She is a greedy, selfish, bad girl.)
They run around the estate together. Nick sweets and then share them out between their little palms. Play tig, take turns on Zoe’s little scooter. Speeding up and down the street.
Sometimes they play house. Pretend to be a family, just the two of them and a nude Barbie doll. Their baby.
(Carla isn’t very good at playing mummy. She sometimes gets sad, and then angry, when Zoe tells her that it’s ’her turn this time’.)
(And when Carla is angry she lashes out.)
(She doesn’t mean to. But she cannot seem to help herself.)
She’s only eight years old.
(She likes playing daddy though.)
Daddy is nothing like her mother’s boyfriends. He’s funny and kind and gentle. And big enough to look after the people he loves.
And Carla has a lot of love to give.
She drapes her arm protectively around Zoe’s shoulders, and together they look down at the pink bare body of their baby.
And she thinks that when she is big and all grown-up, she will one day live in a house where there is nothing scary or sharp. A house where there is no shouting and no strangers and no strangeness.
And Zoe will live with her, of course, because she wants to be friends with Zoe forever.
But forever isn’t very long at all, when you’re eight years old.
And so, when Zoe moves away to the other side of the city, to live with someone new, it breaks Carla’s heart a little.
(It breaks Carla’s little heart a lot.)
Zoe gives her the Barbie doll. To keep. To keep forever.
(Zoe is the kindest, prettiest girl in the whole world.)
And Carla promises she’ll write her a postcard, just like they were taught in school.
She never receives an address. But she writes the letters anyway. Keeps them tucked away, safe, under her mattress. To show to Zoe when she comes home.
And she fantasises endlessly, selfishly, about running away. Showing up, somehow, at Zoe’s door. She knows the door would be shiny and red, just like her shiny new family.
(It’s selfish because what was once a terrifying, wailing bundle is now her little brother. And he needs her, and she needs to keep him safe.)
There is an unclean pan of spaghetti hoops on the hob. She had struggled with the can for twenty minutes, wrestling its tin metal body apart on the kitchen floor, her hands too slippery and too shaky to work.
She needs to stir them, or else they will stick to the bottom of the pan.
So. She cannot run away. She must be very brave.
It is very hard.
Every night, she would hold Zoe’s Barbie doll to her thin chest. Cradle it. Stroke at its tangled matt of hair. And curl her body around it, attempting to block out the rest of the confusing, terrifying world. She tries her very, very best to keep their baby safe.
(And Zoe, of course, doesn’t come home.)
__________
She is ten years old.
And a new family moves in down the street from them.
Their daughter is thirteen, and her name is Pam. She is so grown up, and so beautiful.
Carla, of course, worships the ground she walks on, and Pam thinks of her as a weird, sad little project.
(Which is fine.)
(She would rather be thought of as weird and sad than not thought of at all.)
Pam has dark, neat braids, and sparkly nail polish, and a little box of her mum’s old makeup. Tucked away carefully, in a real wooden box. Lipsticks and eyeshadows and a double-ended pencil that neither of them, really, knew what it was for.
They sit together, cross-legged on the clean carpet of Pam’s bedroom. Their tools laid out before them.
She treats Carla as though she were a doll. Something to dress up, to make pretty. And when she tells her she can open her eyes and holds a plastic pink mirror up before her?
Carla feels very, very beautiful for the first time in her life.
Not because of the wobbly lines of lipstick smudging around her mouth, or the mass of blue eyeshadow all the way up to her browbone.
But because Pam was looking at her as though she were some great achievement. Her dark eyes shining up at her, as she fusses about with Carla’s hair.
Telling Carla to pout ‘like this’. ‘Like they do in the magazines.’
But Carla is ten years old. And still silently coveting a magazine with a silver tiara sellotaped to the cover. She knows nothing of Vogue. She knows a little of Page Three.
(Still. It is possibly the best afternoon of Carla’s entire life.)
And so, two weeks later when Pam pulled out a sewing needle and an ice cube, Carla had only hesitated for a moment.
Because she wants, wants so, so badly a repeat performance of that glorious afternoon in Pam’s bedroom. Wants her face to be cradled neatly between Pam’s soft palms once more. But also knows quite a lot about needles, and doesn’t want to-
But Pam’s smile had been blinding, as she assured Carla she knew what she was doing. And Pam had two piercings in each ear, and she was very grown up, and so Carla had believed her. And then she pulled out a little pot of old earrings, and told Carla she could choose a pair, and that they would be hers. Hers to keep forever.
(Carla’s little hands had trembled. As she had picked out-)
(And then changed her mind-)
Dithering, unsure and unable to decide.
(She feels very, very nervous. And this feeling, somehow, has nothing at all to do with the long thin sewing needle, nor the prospect of it being pushed into her body.)
She settles, finally, upon a little silver sun and a little silver moon. Each with a tiny white stone in the centre.
She could hardly believe her luck.
As she blinked up at Pam, as though she had hung both the sun and the moon in the sky. A melting ice cube held against her earlobe. A gentle hand against her chin. Able to see her own adoring reflection thrown back at her in Pam’s dark eyes. And thought, in that moment, that she is the luckiest girl in the whole world.
She feels much less lucky when the horrible ordeal is finally over. And a drop of blood falls against her soft, chubby little jaw.
But Pam had raced to the bathroom, and held a damp square of toilet paper against each of Carla’s ears, and begged her not to cry.
So. She hadn’t.
Simply because she was told not to.
(She will do absolutely anything Pam tells her to.)
For days, her ears had hurt so badly that the pain seemed to radiate, down along her jaw, almost cupping her face.
(As Pam had done, with her safe, soft hands, as she pushed the needle-)
(Her mother doesn’t even notice.)
(And her earlobes bleed onto her pillow for two weeks straight.)
(And, very soon, before the bleeding has even stopped, Pam bores of her.)
(She is no longer Pam’s weird, sad little project. And so, instead, she becomes Just Weird. Weird and sad.)
____________
She is twelve years old.
And she is so scared of men. And scared of boys too. And scared of girls, sometimes.
Her fear of men, of boys, is rational. She has seen enough of her mam’s boyfriends to know why she should be scared of them.
Her fear of girls though? Makes far less sense.
(Almost no sense at all, really.)
Because it’s the nice girls she’s scared of. The kind girls. The girls with pretty, long hair, and sparkling pencil cases filled with scented gel pens. The girls who lean towards her conspiratorily in the middle of a maths lesson and whisper ‘it’s okay, you can copy mine’ into her hair.
(And she is twelve years old. And she believes that she already knows everything that there is to know about fear. Yet she has never known a fear quite like that before.)
(It twists at her.)
And so she is gobby, too loud, too much. Her facade of confidence as flimsy and as transparent as clingfilm. And wrapped around her body just as tightly.
Sometimes she feels suffocated by it. Sometimes she thinks it’s the only thing in the world that can keep her safe.
So she has friends now. And they don’t ever need to know how scared she is. How scared she is all the time.
And after school, as the sky grows dark, a little group of them gather behind the shops. An ever-changing group of faces. Boys and girls. A single can of cider passed between their small hands.
A boy is dared to throw stones at a cat in a nearby garden.
(Carla feels a twist of protest in her throat. But she says nothing at all.)
(She needn’t have worried. He misses spectacularly.)
And then a girl is dared to kiss somebody.
And she chooses.
She chooses.
Chooses.
‘Carla’
And Carla thinks, very suddenly, that the name her mother had chosen for her is beautiful as it is breathed into the space between them. And her world narrows.
(One more swig of cider.)
(It fizzes, sickly sweet, against her tongue.)
(And Carla fizzes too.)
Their friends laugh and jeer, as they press their faces together. And Carla doesn’t dare close her eyes.
(She doesn’t want to forget this.)
(She cannot, now, even remember the other girl’s name.)
(Can barely picture her face. She becomes a blur. A soft smudge.)
So, she watches as dark eyelashes blur into nothing at all.
She can smell warm, cheap cider on the girl’s mouth.
And it is terrifying. But not scary.
(And, today, those are two different things.)
(Still, it somehow tears through her carefully constructed clingfilm armour.)
This simple, innocent press.
Wet lips, somehow both chapped and sticky.
It is her very first kiss.
A dare.
A girl.
(But nobody, ever, needs to know that.)
__________
She is fifteen years old.
And so is Jodie.
And Jodie isn’t very nice to her.
(Jodie is also the prettiest girl she’s ever seen. She has bleached blonde hair and dark eyes and chipped black nail polish and two tattoos.)
She also has a boyfriend. And they have sex.
(And everyone knows all about it.)
And Carla feels.
Well.
She definitely feels something.
She thinks that Jodie knows what that something is. That Jodie could somehow simply look at her and see her every thought drawn out over her skin. As though Carla were tattooed, too.
(As though Carla’s very skin were made of clingfilm now. As though she had been wrapped in this flimsy armour for so long it had simply become a part of her. And through it, she feels very sure that Jodie can see the shape of her bones.)
So.
Carla doesn’t like when Jodie looks at her.
But Carla loves looking at Jodie.
(She is not quite sure why, but-)
She hangs around in her orbit. Circles her. Not exactly friends, more of an obedient lapdog than an equal. They never talk, just the two of them, but sometimes they would pass in the corridor between lessons, and Carla would throw her an odd, anxious smile.
(And then think about the split-second interaction for two hours. Run her hot palms over her school skirt, rub away the sweat that seemed so, so close to her skin’s surface these days.)
One lunchtime Jodie had said, had announced to the group, that she was going to the corner shop. The one near the school that would sell them cigarettes even though they were wearing their uniforms. And Carla had jumped to her feet too.
Half a dozen heads had swivelled towards her, as she stood there silently for just a moment too long.
And then, too late, far too late, she had found her voice.
“I’ll buy some fags too.”
(She doesn’t have any money, but-)
But Jodie had narrowed her eyes a little at her. And then nodded. As though Carla somehow needed her permission to-
To do anything at all.
Their walk to the shop is mostly silent. Until Jodie starts chattering about their science teacher.
(She calls him a ‘balding fucking nonce’. And Carla has forgotten most of the English language, but she nods along vehemently.)
In the shop she had hung back. Muttered something about leaving her purse in her locker, in response to Jodie’s quizzical, searching look.
(She thinks Jodie might know things about her that she herself hasn’t discovered yet.)
And then, together, they had stepped out into the sunlight, as Jodie tore open her packet of cigarettes. Little square of silver paper thrown carelessly to the cracked pavement.
“D’you have a light?”
Carla does, and she fishes around in her pockets a little desperately until her fingers meet the smooth plastic. She holds it out to Jodie.
An offering made on the alter of teenage angst.
But Jodie?
Jodie just props the cigarette between her own fucking lips.
And narrows her eyes once more at Carla.
It feels like a challenge. As though perhaps the other girl thinks that Carla doesn’t know how to light a fucking cigarette?
(She feels her hands shake.)
(But she doesn’t know why?)
Because she does know how to-
It is, probably, because Jodie has two tattoos and bleached blonde hair and has sex with her boyfriend.
And because Carla is, for a moment, inexplicably thinking of wrapping her arm around her first best friend all those years ago. And the flush she had felt at the mere thought of looking after her.
(In this minute way, she can care for Jodie too.)
(She can do this.)
So, it takes her three attempts. But she lights it.
And Jodie watches her, as she takes her first drag. Keeps her eyes fixed intently on Carla’s face.
“Your hands were shaking. You must really need a fag.”
Her voice is soft, yet almost mocking. And her words appear in the air between their faces. Grey, curling cigarette smoke.
She finds herself teased, but she doesn't quite know what she is being teased about.
It’s disorientating.
(It makes Carla flush.)
(And she feels something else, too. Something curling, like the smoke. Something seeping into her, not into her lungs this time but into her belly. Something she has never, really, felt before.)
But she cannot, and must not, interrogate this new feeling. Because Jodie is holding the cigarette out, offering Carla a drag. Chipped nail polish and a tarnished ring on every finger. Jewelry that started out gold, now turned to silver.
(The moment feels distinctly precious, to Carla.)
(And, later, this too will tarnish.)
Because there is a little pink smudge against the filter.
And Carla very almost drops the cigarette.
She thinks of Jodie’s lips. And where else they had been.
(Surely around her boyfriend’s-)
(Tells herself that’s why she feels so-)
(So.)
(She has no name for this feeling, but there is certainly a lot of it. And it gathers, wet and solid and horrible, against her body.)
As she presses her lips carefully against the faint trace of Jodie’s lips. Inhales.
They don’t really talk, as they share a cigarette on the way back to school. But Carla feels Jodie looking at her.
And she decides she likes it.
She doesn’t like it anymore, two weeks later, in the changing rooms after PE.
As Jodie had fixed her gaze against Carla, who was standing there dumbly in her supermarket polo top.
It feels, once again, like a challenge. Like a test.
And Jodie had confidently whipped her own top off, and shown off a little tattoo of a rose. On her tummy. Against her hipbone. A dark, wonky smudge of ink.
And a curving silver bar pressed into her navel. Stark and painful and red, against the white skin of her stomach.
(Carla thinks of the pain in her ears, and how it had spread to her jaw.)
(She feels this new, horrible feeling spreading too. Running through her body like wildfire. Unwelcome and burning hot.)
As she looks at Jodie. New tattoo and newer piercing.
(And a hot pink bra, but-)
(It somehow hurts to look at her.)
And the girls, all of them, had crowded around her in various states of undress. They had all stared, chattering amongst themselves.
(Jodie. Hot pink bra.)
So Carla?
Carla had looked too, and-
(Everyone else was looking-)
(She surely wants to be looked at.)
“EWWWWW, Carla’s fucking staring at me-”
Her voice had been high. Mocking and loud and cruel.
Reverberating through the tiled room.
(Crashing down upon Carla.)
“I knew you were a fucking nasty lezza-”
The words are spat at her. And ignite something-
And Carla?
When Carla is angry, she lashes out.
So. She swings her fist back.
And she hits her.
(It earns her a week in detention. She doesn’t ever tell anyone what Jodie had said.)
Still, cruel rumours swirl around the school for weeks. And those words ring around in Carla’s head for much, much longer. And so Carla isolates herself. Doesn’t even want to be seen speaking to another girl. Her friendships become fearful. Terribly tentative. She keeps her head down, and her hands to herself.
It is disorientating. School had always been a refuge for her.
Somewhere she could be safe.
And now even that had been ripped away from her.
(She almost stops going to school altogether, and spends a lot of time smoking with older boys. In playgrounds, beside bins. Boys who stare at her and paw at her body. She likes them.)
(Or maybe she just likes that they like her.)
(It doesn’t matter.)
(She doesn’t feel like a lost little girl anymore.)
A teacher pulls her aside and tells her that they are going to ring her mother.
(She laughs in his face.)
And then, very suddenly, it’s a hot August day, and Jodie’s parents are in Tenerife.
Carla is still fifteen years old. She feels as though she will be this way forever. Fifteen and scared and angry.
She is learning a lot of new things about herself, and she finds that she doesn’t particularly like any of them.
She is neither a girl nor a woman. She is a gaping open wound.
And so, of course, she is at Jodie’s house party simply because everyone else is there.
(She and Jodie have made up now, anyway.)
(Jodie had said ‘it was just a fucking joke. Don’t be so sensitive.’)
And Carla is many, many things. Most of them bad. But she certainly isn’t sensitive.
(She can’t be.)
But she is forgiving.
And she has a boyfriend now.
(So, she can’t be-)
He is two years older than her.
And he is nice. He will keep her safe.
He smells like a teenage boy and cigarettes and weed.
(He thinks she’s sexy.)
(And she thinks he will keep her safe.)
And he passes her a joint, as they stand together by Jodie’s kitchen sink. Drinking vodka mixed with fucking squash.
She inhales.
She has never before in her entire life met a man that she trusts.
(And so she thinks that she probably loves him.)
(They’ve been going out for less than a week.)
So.
So, when he asks her to go upstairs, she can feel Jodie looking at her from the doorway. Can feel her hot, dark eyes against the back of her neck.
It feels a little like another challenge. Like yet another dare.
(She thinks of a single can of cheap cider. And of the very first time, that first sticky press.)
So she follows him up the stairs.
And loses her virginity in the bathroom of Jodie’s family home. Music presses, loud and insistent, against the locked door. Her back against grubby tiles and a tattered old bathmat.
(It’s almost romantic.)
She tips her head back.
Against the tiles.
(She tells herself that it doesn’t hurt.)
Hard. And cold. In the midst of that midsummer heat.
His body sticks against hers. They are both sweating.
(She thinks of the tiles in the girl’s changing room at school. Thinks of how Jodie’s cruel words had reverberated against them.)
(How they had impacted her. The damage they had caused.)
And she wonders if he can fix her.
(He can’t.)
(Nobody can.)
__________
She is nineteen.
She is never going to go back to that house again.
(She still loves her mother. And she hands over £20 to her little brother once every two weeks. She knows he spends it on weed, but if she kept the money she would only spend it on vodka. And he needs it more than she does.)
(He isn’t exactly grateful. But she knows that he has never been taught the first thing about gratitude.)
So. She is never going back to that house again. And here, the lights are bright. Red and blue and green.
And she is drunk.
And a girl she barely knows, the sister of someone’s girlfriend, or something, spins her around a dancefloor.
She is not the most beautiful girl she’s ever seen.
But the man Carla is with has bought her half a dozen drinks. So nothing at all matters.
(She doesn’t even know where she is.)
Her world consists only of this dancefloor. And this girl.
As she is pulled in close.
Hot breath against her cheek.
It doesn’t feel nice.
It doesn’t feel safe.
“See those boys over there looking?” the girl’s voice is slurred, Carla can barely understand her, nor hear her over the music. Her voice little more than a hot puff of air against her face. But she nods along. She goes along with it.
She thinks of Jodie.
Of a trick. Of a challenge. Of a dare.
As she allows herself to be pulled in close.
And then closer still.
“They’ll love this-”
It’s hardly a kiss.
It’s a trick. But this time, Carla is not the victim.
(She will never, ever be the victim again.)
(She will.)
But this simple press of their lips is certainly not about her. This is about the staring gaggle of men beside the bar.
She is tricking them.
So. It’s hardly a kiss.
Until it is.
Another girl’s tongue in her mouth.
Her lips hot and insistent.
And it makes Carla feel-
(Nothing at all.)
Until there is a wolf-whistle from a faceless man at the bar. And another drink pressed into her damp palm.
Then, she very suddenly feels much too much.
She falls into the smoking area, and fumbles for a moment, drops it, and then, finally, props a cigarette between her red lips.
It takes a long time to light, properly. The flame of her lighter flickering unsteadily. On and on and on and on and on.
(She cannot see straight.)
Her cigarette finally lights but-
But it burns far, far too bright for a single, terrifying moment.
The end really, truly, aflame.
Until she drops it from her mouth, straight into the fucking gutter.
And realises she had lit the fucking filter.
There is no time to inspect what exactly is wrong with her.
Because a man who might be her boyfriend is stumbling through the swinging doors, and wrapping his arm around her shoulders. Tilting his stubbled face into her hair, and telling her exactly ‘how fucking hot’-
She doesn’t exactly want to hear it, but she listens nonetheless.
(She feels a little bit sick. But that might be the eight vodka sodas in her empty stomach.)
(Which is just another thing for her to try to not think about.)
And thinks that maybe, just maybe, nineteen years of tearing her own flesh apart is somehow worth it for another free drink.
(It is.)
__________
She is twenty-one.
And she had not said yes. But she had not really said no either.
(Her best friend is the most beautiful girl in the whole world. She will save her.)
She had just been too fucked up. Too messy. Which is the story of her whole life.
So it is her own fault. It is her own fault, that she feels like this.
(A gobby loudmouth bitch, who had been unable to-)
She had thrown up on his bathroom floor, unable to make it to the toilet, as soon as it was all finally over.
(She needs her best friend. Needs her hair to be pulled gently away from her cheeks, as she gags against the fucking tiles.)
(But she is not here.)
(She needs to go find her.)
(She is running away once more.)
And so she had pulled the rest of her clothes on. And left.
He didn’t even try to stop her.
And it is half past seven in the morning. She is somehow still so drunk that she can barely see straight. And so she props herself up and waits at a bus stop for something to change.
She wants to skin herself alive. Peel away her own body, and become something new entirely. As mums and kids on their way to the school gates stare at her. Their mouths agape.
(There are probably still flecks of vomit sticking against her cheeks.)
(She is twenty-one years old. She had always, always thought she would be a mother by now.)
(Had never exactly wanted to be, but-)
(Had thought it would just happen to her.)
(Bad things just happen to her all the time.)
And a lot of bad things had happened the previous night.
Her best friend had been dancing with the some guy that had finally become her boyfriend. His hands large and groping and confident. Right there on the dancefloor. Against her hips, against her breasts, and between her thighs.
And Carla. Forgotten entirely. Her eyes dark. Watching.
(Wanting.)
And something about watching him touch her best friend like that had made her feel so-
(She is a greedy, selfish, bitch.)
Feel so-
(She recognises, at last, the flaring jealously within her chest. But cannot quite pinpoint the reason for it. She knows the cause, but cannot discover the effect.)
She, certainly, doesn’t want to be touched like that. Out on the dancefloor. By some bloke with big, clumsy hands.
But she, equally certainly, feels-
(Jealousy. It’s jealousy, and it burns at her from the inside out.)
(Right the way through her. Hollowing her out.)
And so she had found a man who was handsome enough. Kissed him there, on the dancefloor, her eyes open and fixed against her best friend’s body. And then sucked him off eagerly in some dark staff corridor. Let him wipe his thumb gently against her chin. And then fixed her eyes against her best friend’s boyfriend’s possessive grip at her waist, as she told her she was leaving.
(She almost wants some fight. Some disapproval. But her best friend had simply grinned, gripped at her arm, not at her waist, and murmured ‘have fun’ into her jet black hair.)
So. She had tried to have fun.
Tried to do as she is told.
(She hadn’t had fun.)
Instead, in some stranger’s flat, she had drunk most of a bottle of cheap red wine, and then neatly vomited most of it back into his fucking kitchen sink.
And then. She had gone to bed with him.
God.
She wants to cry.
But she doesn’t.
She wants to pinpoint exactly when and where something had gone so wrong within her.
(Needs to find something to blame.)
But she cannot.
(Perhaps she has been wrong from birth. She was certainly wrong at four years old.)
(Some ten year old looking both ways before crossing the road could not possibly, ever, save her. She had carried her home. Back into the midst of screaming, howling fear.)
So.
She wants to cry.
She has had twenty-one years to learn that her tears will solve absolutely nothing. And they will certainly never protect her.
(She didn’t need twenty-one years to learn that. She knew that by the time she was four.)
(She just wants somebody to keep her safe.)
She calls her best friend from a phone box, has her number memorised. Who drops everything to drive over and pick her up. Takes her back to her house.
Soft, hesitant hands against her body. As she allows herself to be undressed, and then pressed into a hot shower. They’ve seen each other naked before. They’re just girls. It doesn’t matter.
It will certainly never count.
(Nor will it save her.)
(She is catatonic.)
Soft, hesitant hands wrap her up tight. And she finds herself showered and settled onto the sofa.
Kisses are pressed against her forehead, against her cheeks.
(Oh, it is lovely.)
(To be clean and warm and taken care of.)
(Not loved. Never loved.)
‘Oh, Carla,’ breathed, cooed, into her hair.
Her name sounds beautiful. From between her best friend’s lips.
And there are no shouting men, here, in her best friend’s home. Her boyfriend is a nice lad. A boy with a good job and sweet parents.
(He treats Carla as though she were some wild animal. Giving her a wide berth and never quite knowing what to say to her. They speak two entirely different languages, and they both love the same woman.)
(But he had fingered her best friend on the dancefloor.)
She knows that her best friend loves her.
(Surely?)
She looks up, to thank her. To tell her not to worry, to say that she’s okay, because she always is, to say something.
To say anything at all.
(To say ‘I love you’, and simply pray that her voice doesn’t break apart.)
And-
(Everything is already broken.)
Because it’s very almost an accident. As their lips meet.
(Almost an accident.)
(Not quite.)
It’s a simple, chaste press. Nothing at all, really.
(It’s not a big deal. Jodie had once said that it was ‘just a fucking joke’-)
She certainly isn’t laughing now.
(She thinks of that first time. Her very first kiss. By the bins, behind the shops. She has never told anybody-)
(It’s a relief. To feel something that isn’t dark and angry and scary.)
But it warps, and it changes.
And, very suddenly, it is-
Because her best friend is pulling away. Too quickly. Wiping the back of her hand over her lips, and frowning.
(Carla feels her heart rate pick up. Feels her pulse race?)
“What the fuck did you do that for?”
And she isn’t exactly shouting, but she does sound angry.
Of course. Because anger and destruction follow Carla everywhere she goes. There has been shouting in every single house she’s ever stepped foot in.
All Carla can do is apologise. Over and over and over and over and over.
(‘It was an accident I swear, I think I’m still drunk, I don’t know what-’)
But it is too late.
She finds the door closed in her face. Finds herself out on the street once more.
They remain friends. But they never speak about it again.
And so it festers. Carla feels it grow between them. She feels it stretch out, like a stray cat in the sunshine, all snarling teeth and sharp bones. And it casts a long shadow over their friendship.
It was just a kiss.
It was barely anything at all.
Yet it ruins them.
(She buys the morning after pill again from the disapproving hard-faced cow at the pharmacy.)
Some tiny little mistake.
(An accident? A fucking car crash.)
(And, just like that, her best friend simply doesn’t love her anymore.)
_______
She tucks it away. Tucks it all away.
Because there are so many women that she loves.
And yet she proves, time and time and time again, that she loves men. That she is no longer scared of them.
She can make them do whatever she wants.
And there is nothing they can do to her that will make her afraid again.
(She is a little girl. And she is scared of boys. And scared of girls too. Her fear is paralysing.)
(She is still scared of needles.)
So.
She tucks it all away.
As she had tucked those love letters to a little girl with round messy cheeks under her thin mattress.
She thinks of nothing but a wailing, terrifying bundle of blankets. And of the hard plastic body of a Barbie doll. And, worst of all, a smudge of life on a black and white screen.
She has lost every baby she has ever loved.
Which is, probably, for the best.
Because she never, ever liked playing mummy. She wasn’t good at it.
So she never, ever again clutches their baby to her chest.
(She is very, very afraid of losing herself.)
______
She is pushing fifty.
She gets into a parked car. And stares at a crying blonde.
(She is sobbing.)
Stares at a woman she very almost hates.
And, inexplicably, thinks of a fistful of change, a packet of cigarettes, and allowing herself the simple luxury of another moment to stand and stare.
(So. She stares.)
And thinks of a princess on the cover of a pink magazine in the offie.
Of love letters long before she had any idea of what love was. Of a soft hand cupping her cheek as she tips her head to the side and allows herself to be hurt. Of a sticky sweet kiss and the stench of rotting bins. Of an angry red hole in another girl’s stomach, and furious red words. Of a cigarette burning far, far too brightly. Of a simple press, and how it had pulled her world apart.
She thinks of the most beautiful girl in the whole world, in her junior school uniform with her neat plait and kind words, who had once saved her.
(She thinks that, just perhaps, she can be saved once more.)
(Or maybe, this time, she can play the saviour.)