I don’t believe in proof or tests of faith, I don’t think they matter, or have half so much to them as the trust you hold inside yourself without a steel cocoon of facts and figures and things you can touch to keep it safe and warm. Trust is something we put on other people ourselves, they have no part in it, no choice in the matter and if you want to keep trust alive you have to breathe life into it yourself, that’s up to you - to test it is to abandon it. I trusted my father to love every part of me, but never presented him with all the inches of my life, I didn’t need to. He never let me down and I never asked him to.

But the honesty of other people is galling sometimes, kisses on the street and unchecked words and birthday cards and never having to examine every word you say before you say it. I never wanted to leave home; to throw myself on the mercy of easily honest strangers but people grow old and things change and I don’t - leaving home became inevitable. A longer life has always been the second secret, what’s shameful about a face that doesn’t fall apart as the years move on, about a body that stays strong, a girl who just keeps going? What’s anything about it. Gay is better and worse all at once, a whole world of heartache and beautiful faces I’ve held, I’ll hold in my hands and sex and fear and everything unfair.

Fitting in was always going to take some time and I knew, I kept telling myself, you’ll get it right, eventually. You’ll work things out and this will all make sense and the nights will feel shorter and I won’t live that fall and rise; wake up broken, spend the day fusing together, go to bed solid as a stone.

But fitting in takes time and in the time I kept quiet, kept out of it, kept away. Didn’t take any chances, you know? Because I’ve seen and everyone knows that trying is death. Human beings have been socially interacting with one another for thousands of years  - this should be easy. This should come in a pinch, there should be no need to try and if there is don’t let on. Keep it to yourself, keep quiet, keep away.

Fitting in took time and in that time I stood back, as far as I needed to, but that’s still separate so people still notice. At best that’s mysterious and at worst I’m a stuck up bitch, I think I’m better than everyone here, I act like my shit doesn’t stink. 

So Emily said to me one morning, “When I was your age I didn’t believe a word anyone said. I thought, no, I knew they were all full of it. Liars, every word out of their mouth, even, “pass the milk” you know? Do you feel like that?”

I shook my head no and she looked at me for a long time. “Everyone else speaks and I see you staring and I can hear you chanting in your head like I used to, “bullshit bullshit bullshit”

I shook my head again and she shrugged a perfect shrug like she’d planned it, rehearsed it. Perfect lifted height of shoulders to long swan neck, perfect hair bouncing next to perfect ears - perfect shrug. She said, “You don’t talk much though. When all I heard was lies I couldn’t keep quiet, I had to join in, collaborate, make up some of my own. But I stopped because it hit me one day, maybe this is just me. When you’re a liar everyone’s a liar but you’re not everyone and everyone’s not everyone. Sometimes you have to give people the benefit of the doubt.”

“I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside of us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that’s an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.”

Today I’d like to talk about harrowing yet philosophical children’s literature with ties to seventeenth century romantic poets and awful movie adaptations I mean it don’t any of you ever watch The Golden Compass, it’s really bad. Not The Last Airbender bad but still, really bad.

I’ve read Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials three times; at eleven, sixteen and twenty two - just a couple of weeks ago. As I come to write this I’m starting to feel like my picking the book up at these ages was particularly serendipitous. It is, after all, a series that deals with the difference between innocence and experience, grace and knowledge, between children and adults, with what happens to us when we grow up, what changes within us. At eleven I read three books about the wonderful adventures of Lyra and Will as they travelled between parallel dimensions, fought monsters and spectres and wars and encountered angels and armoured bears, but at sixteen it was a tragedy, like most everything I loved in that year. It spoke to something in me; my sadness and fear and lack of faith, my contempt for religion and wilful ignorance - that spark of hope in me, “this is what people are for”.

A fortnight ago I picked up an old favourite and read it knowing how much I’d cry and at which parts. Knowing where my favourite characters would appear and where the best words were. Since last reading the series I’ve been introduced to both William Blake, John Milton and their poetry; all of which featured heavily in the inspiration for and writing of these books, all of which make reading them an entirely different experience. I think there’s something to understanding an obscure literary reference that has to do with, just for a moment, being a genius, having your ego stroked, feeling like you and the author are sat in the smart people house, sharing an in joke. Reading the books this time around was nice; indulgent; revelatory. Part of a larger tradition.

His Dark Materials is a trilogy made up of Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Northern Lights introduces us to Lyra Belaqua, apparent orphan of a count and countess, niece of the imposing Lord Asriel and feral child of Jordan College in the Oxford of Lyra’s world - which is sort of like our world only more steampunk and with Zeppelins. Also everyone wears their soul on the outside in the form of an animal that talks and changes into different animals at will until adolescence.

Northern Lights was, initially for me, the slowest of the three books that make up this trilogy and, without the inclusion of daemons, the name given for the animal souls each human in Lyra’s world has, it might be nothing more than a well written but otherwise unremarkable piece of children’s fantasy. Daemon’s fascinated me when I first picked up this book, I wanted one, I longed for one - a beautiful, soft, animal Jiminy Cricket that I could love, who would love me, who would allow me to love myself. Like all the great children’s authors (who can honestly say Enid Blyton changed their life?) Pullman doesn’t sugar coat, he isn’t afraid to scare a child, in fact he seems to relish it as he puts the more than capable Lyra through one ordeal after another. The menacing gobblers steal her friends away, she meets the beguiling/morally repugnant Mrs. Coulter, she encounters a probable paedophile, she learns some harsh truths concerning her parentage (illegitimate, some murder went on, both Mum and Dad are negligent and super self-involved), she fights off kidnappers and evil lobotomised scientists and creepy monkeys and I haven’t even gotten into the armoured bear stuff yet. Lyra gets through all this by being the sort of stubborn and precocious child that adults in stories just seem to adore. Also by lying, Lyra’s lies get her further than anything else and earn her, by the novel’s conclusion, a new name - “Lyra Silvertongue”. 

The end of The Northern Lights marks a real shift in the series, which goes from charming and clever fantasy to something a lot more ambitious when, as the book comes to an end, Lord Asriel rips open a gateway between the world Lyra lives in and countless more, including our own. The second installment in the trilogy, The Subtle Knife, opens in our world and introduces us to the second protagonist  a disarmingly capable twelve year old boy called Will Parry. Will is a young carer, struggling to cope with a cat and a deteriorating Mother and accidentally murdering some guy, possibly a burglar or a mobster or someone from MI6 it’s not too clear, what is clear is that Will has to hide, which he does when he finds a gateway to another world. Unfortunately, a wandering Lyra has found this parallel place, which connects the world of daemons and our own and she’s gone a bit feral. Will, a practical kid, cleans her up and shows her how to use a can opener and a fridge and I guess they become sort of friends?

What follows is both an endearing and engaging children’s adventure fantasy story and an epic reworking and reinterpretation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, with Will and Lyra recast as Adam and Eve.

One of the most difficult things about really loving a book, really losing yourself in something is that you have to accept the author’s truth as your own and once you’re finished that’s a hard thing to let go of, to stand back from and examine critically. It’s something that’s especially true of fantasy novels, books like His Dark Materials, really captivating children’s literature but unlike it’s contemporaries; other works of fantasy or sci fi, other books for young readers, HDM isn’t just a gripping, immersive read. It’s a lesson, it’s a vision of Pullman’s morality, his alternative to the teachings and the lessons of the Christian faith.

Most of the legitimate criticism levelled at the trilogy (I’m choosing to disregard the Catholic Herald’s ”Parents, do you know the evil words your children are reading?”) was concerned with the heavy handedness of the whole thing, Sublte is not a word Pullman has ever come across. Except it is, because the second book is called The Subtle Knife and I guess he’s pretty subtle about the way he handles a lot of things, but, whatever, you know what I mean.

It’s not even that I disagree with what Pullman is saying, I think we should be talking about these things; we should be discussing the Churches role in shaping our society and our personal morality, the influence it has upon the way we choose to behave as human beings, how it affects our autonomy, the way it controls it’s followers with fear and promises of scientific improbabilities, how it interprets it’s own source material to best benefit those already in power, the obsession with innocence, the loopholes, the hypocrisy, the get out of jail free cards, the lies. Serefina Pekkala (a sexy nordic witch who can fly) tells Lyra that, “all the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity. The rebel angels, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed.” I suppose what I really object to is Pullman’s “new atheist” rhetoric; religion is the root of all evil and knowledge and intelligence the root of all goodness, religious people are stupid and the scientifically minded, enlightened, knowledgeable members of society are the righteous - that our worth can be measured by these things, literally measured within the trilogy by the amount of dust a person, human endeavours and intelligence attracts.

It’s very simple, to write off the nastier chapters of our history and the parts of our society that we know do us harm and keep us back, as ignorant, as stupid and call religion the source of that ignorance but to me it’s starting to feel increasingly like a cop out. Bad things are not always ignorant things, more often they are selfish and cruel and free from empathy and compassion and human solidarity - all things you don’t need a great deal of intelligence to express and yet we continue to say - homophobia is ignorance, sexual repression is ignorant, racism is ignorant, the church is ignorant. This feels way too easy to me, a predictable conclusion drawn by someone who surrounds himself and fills his life with knowledge and wisdom and reasoned thinking - because those are all wonderful things but they’re not the only wonderful things and they’re not free or unrestricted or exclusive ingredients in what makes, “a good person” or, “a real person”.

So yeah, Pullman, and these books, have a number of things going on in them that I have a problem with, but what His Dark Materials really does have going for it is beauty. How stunning and intricate the world Pullman creates is and how seamlessly he folds a thousand references to Blake and Milton and all sorts of spiritual philosophy into the text. As a lesson, His Dark Materials is flawed; heavy handed and preachy and predictable but as a vision, as an odyssey, as a love story? It’s beautiful, it’s heart-breaking. And as a re imagining of a story so fundamental, so ingrained into the way we see the world, it’s staggering. This is a book for children that’s brave and bright and complicated. In one scene towards the end of the series final installment  The Amber Spyglass, Mary Maloney, serpent, tempter, tells the two children about love and her life with it and without it. 

“…But it gradually seemed to me that I’d made myself believe something that wasn’t true. I’d made myself believe that I was fine and happy and fulfilled on my own without the love of anyone else. Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would. I’d spend all my life without ever going to China, but it wouldn’t matter, because there was all the rest of the world to visit… And I thought: am I really going to spend the rest of my life without feeling that again? I thought: I want to go to China. It’s full of treasures and strangeness and mysteries and joy.” 

In a lot of ways the character of Mary Maloney, a Nun who left the church to become a physicist, who proudly declares, “The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.” is the embodiment of everything I don’t like about Pullman’s approach, but in this scene there is nothing jarring about her or her words, she is not a snake holding out an apple but a woman talking frankly about her life and when it started to make sense and why and Will and Lyra are not the first man and the first woman, the downfall of man but a boy and a girl who recognize love the way millions did before and will do after them.

I would recommend this book for any number of reasons; it made me cry my heart out, it made me question things I might not otherwise have started to question, it frustrates me and  it engages me. I think my daemon would be a fox and I would really like to go to china.

What I’m used to is long days in empty rooms and people five feet away and conversations that end with that smile like, I’m safe with this. Took nothing, learnt nothing, gave nothing away, tried and tested, said it all before, so have you. Tell me all about that new air freshener you got for your car and what you had for tea last night and the shitty sexist piece of crap movie you saw this weekend I’m really interested I swear. I swear, I swear I always fucking swear it’s the most I dare do.

What I’m used to is stranded, like the road from my house is a way out but it’s full of dead men and barred by metal monsters and the only escape route is Trojan horse so stranded. Most days, stranded, most places stranded and living off scraps on an island full of people who like their own space, keep to themselves.

I mean I lie for a living and I hate it because my dream is to lie for a living, art you know. Lie lie lie truth lie, selling exterior home improvements works the same because I want to write how I feel, some truth about how I feel but it comes out obscene and the price of these windows, it’s obscene. You have to wrap it up nice, go in with the three for two and the existing customer discount and the ninety six hour sale and the working in your local area for a limited time only bullshit. Push it push it, sit lying on the phone all day, get pissed off the moment someone calls your out on it, say, “Some people are so fucking rude”. I go to work, get on the phone, sell a conservatory. I come home and I write and I sell myself.

And I’m not used to fingers on my spine and I’m not used to five feet closer. And I want to write you poetry but poetry is just metaphors and shopping lists of chiseled out contradicting feelings; you make me happy and sad, hot and cold, alive and dead and none of that gets close and no metaphor applies and it’s too soon for poetry. And too soon is what? Time and the talking you fit in that time? Taking time and sitting on the train with my eye on the time, hands shaking, right up there on the richter scale, we’ll see each other soon.

People go out of their way to fall in love and they push themselves right into romance even if it’s not the best thing for them right now, even if they know they’ll get all ripped up, I don’t know. You get something from crawling inside another heart that you can’t find in anything else and I guess you feel like you need it because all the other sorts of love are so far away. Like you can know your friends love you, your parents love you, your dog would get it’s head stuck in a bin without you and you know it - technically, deep down, “yeah I guess” know it but you can’t wallow in it, make a meal out of it, live on it. If nothing else, romance has routine and maybe that’s because it’s a bad thing, ultimately, a lot of the time but at least if you say the things you’re meant to say to a schedule you’re safe. You’re loved, you know it, really know it, for a while.

I’m starting to struggle with a few things, one or two of those things people say. A child is happy and hopeful but then they grow and see the world and see everything unfair and they lose it, it all falls away and cynicism sets in and innocence is lost. Except I’ve never seen that. Children can be happy and have a lot of stupid, happy ideas about the world but they can also be miserable and lonely - because it’s hard to be little and always lied to sometimes. The next part is even worse, being a teenager, having your whole body turn in on itself and your brain too and nothing making the same sort of shaky sense it did before. Hope and joy and innocence are not finite things we start off with and lose, little by little, as the cruel world crashes down around us. We pluck them out of thin air when we can or when we feel like it and when everything else lets us or lets us down, when we have no other choice.

I don’t want my life to be as complicated as it is, I want all of those things. I want to be happy and fulfilled and safe, as much as it is possible to be and I want to want those things all the time. I want to never feel reckless and restless, feel it bubbling in my blood and I want a poor memory. I want to be surrounded by people who can fit together, who don’t hate each other, who don’t tell me why they hate each other. Who don’t have me realising that everyone is wrong and right and hated and loved and good and bad and that’s possible because those words don’t mean anything but people mean everything.

I don’t know what I expected. Nothing, probably. A black hole where she should have been; nice hair, a young face and nothing in the eyes that said, “I made a boy and raised a boy and now he’s a man you know and now you can’t imagine where he came from but is me.”

She was tall and tucking her hair behind her ear where it curled and licked at the lobe. She made tea, she touched her temples. She said, “Be careful that’s hot.” She was clean and careful.

“Tom isn’t very well,” I said, before I said anything. She sat down and said, “Who? I don’t know any Toms.” She didn’t laugh at the look on my face, like he might have, but pulled a picture from the fridge. Him. Exactly the same as now but with longer, dirtier hair pushed back, more freckles, either trying to climb a tree or wrench a branch from it’s trunk. Concentrating. The film was old and yellow, like it was taken in the seventies, seventies photos are always yellow.

“This is my son.” She said and I nodded and I asked his name. She only sighed at me. “He’s living with you?” She asked, “He’s not well?”

I didn’t know how to explain. I was there but I couldn’t remember why. “There’s a big group of us. I… We don’t know what to do with him. He’s not sick he’s just ill. Like mentally ill. I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it. But I thought, maybe you could… I don’t know.”

She threw me. I wanted to ask her age, I wanted to know her name, how tall she was. I wanted to stay in that warm, clean kitchen drinking that tea forever. She looked at me and said, “What do you think of him?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know anything about it.”

“Him. Not what’s wrong with him, him.”

I was sick of it. I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know anything about him, you won’t even tell me his name. I put down the tea. “I never liked him. But I don’t even know his name, so.”

“It’s Jack, like the story. Take him to a doctor. When he’s feeling better, you can tell him, I’d like to talk. His last visit was years ago. He could call, at least, tell me all about you.”

I’ve broken twelve bones in my body and, yeah, seven of those were fingers and toes but that hurts; more than this, that fucking kills. It’s smooth like an ache and sharp like a sting all at once and wrong, because bones hold you up and together and all that, they’re not supposed to snap inside you like twigs. Next to a broken bone a stabbing is nothing.

I tell her that, I tell her, “I’ve broken twelve bones in my body. Next to a broken bone a stabbing is nothing.”

“You’ve not been stabbed,” she says, “It’s just a cut, it’s just where you fell on that glass.”

“A shard of glass went into my leg,” I say, “That’s a stabbing. You’re not taking this away from me - I’ve broken twelve bones in my body, I’ve been set on fire and now I’ve been sad. Stabbed. I’ve been stabbed. Sad.” It hurts and I can feel something in my throat like strings for my tongue maybe, like puppet strings making it dance. “I’m stabbed and you’re sad.”

“I’ve been sadder” says Emily. It hurts.

It hurts. It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts I look up and her eyes are wide and at me and then hovering on their own; she leaves her eyes behind for at least three seconds when she walks away, she has her phone out. The grass is green but red too, underneath my leg, green and red like christmas and it hurts. If it’s worse than a broken bone it’s better because all I’ve got right now is how much it hurts and I’ve not been so focused on any one thing in years. A broken bone is nothing next to a stabbing, a stabbing is all there is - a center of gravity in the middle of my leg, I can feel everything else rushing around it. I haven’t slept this well for forty years.

I don’t stay on the ground but I don’t stand either and at first I thought this was a room but now I’m less sure. If it is then they’ve pinned black hair to every inch of the ceiling and let it fall, let it stretch between the roof and the floor in wide curls, in soft, dark hair. I move through it and I realise it’s stuck to the sky; this is the world now. It hurts and I hope I can come back here. It hurts and I open my eyes but it’s still there. I was set on fire once and it was there then, I smelt it, her hair burning and now, black strands of it across my face like curled fingers, stretched between her head and my jaw. She sits back and stares at me.

“I was stabbed.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“It’s better than a broken bone. Not as good as being set on fire.”

“Well,” when she breathes out I can hear the leaves in the trees, “nothing’s that good.”

You can feel the flu fermenting in your limbs; right the way across your shoulder blades and down from your thighs to the backs of your heels, a thick, solid ache like you’ve worn something heavy around your neck for days, like you’ve slept in a lemon press. That’s your body breaking you down, building you back up, bit by bit, ready for the fight,

I don’t often fall ill but it’s crept up on me and into me and then out again - dripping from my nose, hacking from my throat, shivering from the tip of my fingers. I’m thinking of passing it on, infecting the whole house, being the plague carrier and shuffling from room to room, smearing my mucus over telephones and kitchen utensils with red hands. Toby told me once, through the crying end of a tantrum, “When you don’t have dignity, there’s always spite.” No one likes catching a cold.

I don’t believe in proof or tests of faith, I don’t think they matter, or have half so much to them as the trust you hold inside yourself without a steel cocoon of facts and figures and things you can touch to keep it safe and warm. Trust is something we put on other people ourselves, they have no part in it, no choice in the matter and if you want to keep trust alive you have to breathe life into it yourself, that’s up to you - to test it is to abandon it. I trusted my father to love every part of me, but never presented him with all the inches of my life, I didn’t need to. He never let me down and I never asked him to.

But the honesty of other people is galling sometimes, kisses on the street and unchecked words and birthday cards and never having to examine every word you say before you say it. I never wanted to leave home; to throw myself on the mercy of easily honest strangers but people grow old and things change and I don’t - leaving home became inevitable. A longer life has always been the second secret, what’s shameful about a face that doesn’t fall apart as the years move on, about a body that stays strong, a girl who just keeps going? What’s anything about it. Gay is better and worse all at once, a whole world of heartache and beautiful faces I’ve held, I’ll hold in my hands and sex and fear and everything unfair.

Underneath everything I have always been incredibly hopeful, I’ve always burnt with it. Every insecurity is wormed into a root of good feeling, a certainty that, “This will turn out well for me,” but that becomes rotten when it doesn’t, when it never did. I packed and planned and stopped and started and didn’t move because I was so hopeful, because I knew one day I would. I had to. I hadn’t.

The day I left she was there to press the suitcase into my hands but they wouldn’t work. I dropped it and everything spilt out and I might as well have hit the ground myself, it might as well have been brains not clothes all over the carpet but she picked it up, packed it up, took it to the car herself.

I said to her, that was why she could do this and I couldn’t, “Some people aren’t hopeful, they aren’t insecure. They just do what needs to be done when they need to do it.” She was driving by then, eyes on the road, one hand on the wheel, but she looked at me for half a second. Said, “I’m as hopeful as anyone.” and nothing more.

writingspaces:

2. Frankie Drew // hurryuppleaseitstime

In my experience two things will tell you everything you need to know about a person; their room and their hair - I’ve always had the latter in abundance but the former gets away from me. My hair is fresh dyed red today, I’ve been thumping about the house in a dressing gown that belonged to my grandpa, smells of attics, is indecently flimsy. I’ve gained so much weight recently and it isn’t fitted, or flattering; I’m all rolls of flesh and hips and breasts and the hair; bright red, unwashed hair still curled from the night before, still reeking of fags and whatever it was I drank so much of - I feel like a filthy Botticelli. A good room or good hair can do that for you; turn a fat, stinking, grub girl who hasn’t dressed all day into a work of art for an afternoon. It’s about setting, it’s about decoration.

I’ve lived in the same house my whole life and we’ve always suffered from lack of rooms and room. Hide and seek was pitiful, sleepovers a nightmare, it’s only gotten worse over the years as my Mum collected other people’s children while I collected pets and siblings. My Dad is a problem solver, he built our house bigger, he made two new rooms and a garage, which became a bedroom, which became a bedroom and a half. These days I sleep in the half, which is fair. I left, after all, for university, for rooms that weren’t mine no matter how much money I shelled out and came back three years later with my tail between my legs and a car full of stolen kitchen utensils. A sister stole the perfect bedroom and writing sanctuary I’d carved out of concrete since I was twelve. You snooze you lose.

I might not have a place to write but I have a time, I have four thirty in the morning and at four thirty in the morning I have everything; or at least a house, and a whole one. I don’t settle straight away, like a dog turning in circles before it sits I scour the terrain, I write what I can where I can, on sofas and beds, on kitchen floors and dining room tables. I collect posters and bookends and candles and I imagine the room I’d make for myself, if I could. I’d fill it with books.

A room without books is a body without a soul, I’ve been told, but that seems so melodramatic and I do enjoy a good bathroom. I can’t sleep in a room without reading material but I like to think it’s for more pragmatic reasons, that I’m no romantic, that I don’t graciously bestow an unmerited mystique upon those bound up bits of paper I’ve collected over the years. I need to know, Sarah, Thomas, Virginia, that you’ll be there in the morning, in the middle of the night if I need you, to read you. I need to know, I need a promise, not a half hearted plan: “Perhaps I’ll get up in time to go to the library, perhaps they’ll have it” because they won’t, they never do and it’s bullshit - I want to remember Prufrock now. I want to learn it, I want to learn every book I own off by heart. If I can’t have a room I want to be a room, full of important things and beautifully decorated, an interior designer’s wet dream with really great hair.

This is a thing that I wrote for writingspaces. You should write something for them too.

A plan won’t help me here, like all those ideas you have for the future, this year, the next ten, the rest of your life; there’s no point in mapping it out, you’ve got no use for that kind of structure, not now. The only thing to be shooting for is happy and I know, that’s the point of ambition anyway, but we’ve not got the luxury of something less vague. Get a job, save some money, make sure you’re put of the house most nights of the week, have sex regularly if that’s what you need, just keep going.

When I first arrived it was as unlucky number thirteen in a house built for thirty, an old school, all dark bricks thick with misery sponged up from its former inhabitants. “you brought the rain” they said, they all said, every day for the first week, looking at me a little wistful but with a fair amount of blame.it was torrential, pissing it down day and night until the smooth, rolling front lawn was a battlefield,a quagmire,a swamp.no one left the house, hiding indoors and pacing around like tigers in tiny cages-it was the worst introduction possible. “they’re all afraid of going outside and catching their deaths,” Lissy said, “when they grew up a cold could kill you.” She sniffed and opened the door to head into the downpour for a cigarette, “in theory, anyway.”

I hate all the tiny conversations people have every day so much and I’m the worst for it, today I might have asked eight people how their Christmas went and did they get anything nice and ooooh isn’t the weather nasty but maybe it’ll brighten up later and what a lovely lovely top that is, where did you get it blah blah blah. Why do I say all these things I don’t mean or think? I feel like my mouth is wired up to some small talk, “supposed to say” database that completely bypasses my brain and for just one day I want to not be that and start talking about things I actually want to talk about. Like I’ll be sat in the same room with someone and I’ll ask them what their favourite smell is or if they ever feel like their internal organs are suddenly a thousand time heavier than the rest of their body. Or maybe, when was the last time someone touched you on purpose and I mean, on purpose. Not because you’d given them a gift or because you were arriving, or leaving, or because you initiated it - but because they really wanted to touch you and is it normal to go without that for a year, maybe two, it’s hard to keep track.

Maybe three years back someone said to me, “You’re the sort of person who’s hard to be around for very long” which was a hard thing to hear and I don’t think it has anything to do with all the cloying, convoluted crap I come out with, but maybe those things I don’t say and what comes after not saying and why you don’t say it. I think it could be desperation, which I hear is an unattractive quality, but then, so is self pity. Christmas was just lovely. It’s raining.

“Don’t you think it’s just…impossible” she said, tilting her head back, pressing the back of her skull into the wall.

“What?” I was wary, but she had this look on her face; distant but happy. It suited her, everything suited her, but this look, it especially suited her.

“That we keep still and keep doing things and we don’t just explode.” She sighed and wiggled her toes, “sometimes I feel like this, I feel like I could run and run until I ran off a cliff and then keep running, you know?”

I didn’t know. “Are you high?” I asked.

“No!” She sat up, head up, looked right at me. “Don’t you ever feel like that? Like something’s about to break but it’s beautiful and you have to feel it and what else can you do? You can’t just keep going, it’s huge, it’s overwhelming. You’ve never felt that way? It’s like sex, sort of. When it’s good, really, really good and you’re looking at the other person like you’re horrified and you sort of are but it’s something else. Don’t you know what I mean?”

I couldn’t look at her then. Sometimes I think there are only two types of talking; expression and manipulation and Emily’s conversation tried so hard to be the former that I couldn’t help but suspect it of being the latter. I couldn’t look at her because my face was red and I was ashamed and ashamed of being ashamed. I knew what she was talking about, sort of, like what she’d said had rung a tiny bell in my head, but even so I was angry because I was ashamed.

“I hate the way you talk,” I snapped, “Like you’re so wise, so superior. You just… it’s never about what you’re actually thinking it’s about what other people aren’t thinking. Like you’re better than everyone else.”

“I don’t think I’m better than anyone else.”

“Right.”

“No, fuck off I don’t.” She sat up and started, looking at a place just past me.

“I know my limits, I know what I can do. I went to school a lot; I don’t remember much of it but I know all the bones in the hand and this really long Victorian poem off by heart. I’ve looked good for a few years and I can fall asleep when it’s cold and I can talk like this, I can think of things to say right off and not trip over my words so. I know what other people can do, I know what I can’t do. I know that all of it has value but not in a way you can hold up and, and compare. So I don’t think that, I know I’m no better than anyone.”

She had such a beautiful face. Faces and bodies are easy, I knew that, I’ve always known that. You can find anything to like in a face, you can focus on a face, you can even be uncomfortably aware; you’re mixing up their face and something else, something less easy, you’re fusing the two together. So, when she’d finished talking and talking and talking, I only said, “Your eyes are brown,” because it was easier. She sighed and looked my way and looked me up and down and sighed again - a sigh is like, the physical disappointment, trying to breathe all those shattered hopes and dreams right out of you.

“I’m so desperate to impress you” she said.

I wanted to tell her, “You have impressed me, your brown eyes are impressive” but my brain felt heavy and unruly out of nowhere, like an independent creature - a vertebrate,  full of bones that had instantly and simultaneously fractured.