Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9

We stood outside Whitechapel tube station under the starless sky. Everything was cold and dark and loud. We were postponing the goodbye. Me, because I didn’t want to say it, but I wasn’t sure about him. I wanted to believe that he was feeling the same way, that he hated that we weren’t still on the beach, in each other’s arms, listening to the cicadas.

He looked at his phone and chuckled. He had been doing that all the way from the airport. I asked him what was funny, hoping that he would tell me something that we could laugh at together. He said that it was just Steph. I asked what she’d said, and he asked why I wanted to know. I told him that I didn’t really. He made an expression that I couldn’t decipher. I asked him if everything was okay, but he said that he was going to get pissed off if I kept asking.

He put his phone away, and I reached for his arm. At first he resisted, but then he unfolded it and handed it to me so that it sat in my palm like something I had picked up off a supermarket shelf. I asked if he was sure that he didn’t want to stay at mine, and he said that we had just spent the last week together.

Look, I know the last couple days were—

Let’s not do this now, Enola. I’m really tired. It’s been a long day.

I know, I had the same one , I thought.

I really do have to go, honey.

He was twisting his lips like I was holding him up. I hated that. I would rather he just leave instead of demonstrating that he wanted to. I told him that I wasn’t keeping him, and he shuffled forward and kissed me. I forced a smile and told him to have a brilliant time with Karen’s doll collection. Then we picked up our suitcases and he went one way and I went the other, the words “I love you” still unspoken.

O PENING THE DOOR , THE flat stirred as if someone had just run around the corner. Everything looked unfamiliar, like I had been away for years and years and nothing was mine anymore. I undressed and curled into bed. My muscles grew heavy and my brain peeled like an apple until I was at the beach house and—

H E IS WALKING TOWARD me. He wipes the tears from my cheeks. He opens his mouth but then changes his mind.

What? What were you going to say?

The sound of the train.

I scream at him to stop.

The train gets louder.

Please stop it. Please!

But piece by piece he vanishes, and I’m left clutching the dark with cartoon hands.

I WOKE TO FIND the bed cold and damp with sweat. I reached for my phone, hoping for an I miss you or The bed seems empty without you or I don’t want to go to Norwich in the morning. But there was nothing. I went to my suitcase and inhaled the smell of the beach on my clothes. It was a familiar feeling, an emptiness, like thirst: homesickness . And now he was a part of that. Now when I pictured the places of my childhood, he was there too, like he had been all along. I stood in my bedroom not knowing what to do or where to go, but then my eyes rested on my laptop.

I sat at my desk and opened the latest version of my novel. I looked at the careful words. The adjectives and nouns in perfect small font. Writing never used to be meticulous. When we moved back to England, and the therapist told me to write, I would sit up every night, surrounded by the safari wallpaper my grandparents chose to help me “feel at home,” and scribble frantically until my wrist ached and the pad of my thumb was black. And then it hit me: writing was never about control, it was about losing it. That was why I hadn’t been able to finish anything. I had been terrified of feeling as powerless as I felt back then. So I arranged sentences and placed words and changed fonts the way that I layered my makeup and color-coded my books. Because I wanted to make it flawless and perfect and correct. But to write, you couldn’t curate pieces of yourself—you had to bleed, you had to show the ugly parts, the parts scarred and darkened by the sun. Editing might be order, but writing had to be chaos.

Jump out that plane, Laa.

I started a new document. That beautiful blank page. But this time I wanted to fill it; I had to fill it. I hadn’t felt this in such a long time. This mania . I started writing and I couldn’t stop. I typed how Ruth ate a meal, as if she were scared the food would leave her plate, and memories of camping trips flowed like tears: lions roaring in the night; a pink sea of flamingos on a white shore; a mother cheetah nursing under a bush; wildebeest with avalanche chests, chewing grass like cowboys chewing tobacco, ready to spit it with a ping into a dirty bar glass. It was fiction, but it came from a real place, a place that I thought was destroyed when Mum destroyed the photographs. Honest but not truthful .

The sun rose and I stopped to look at my dust-covered bedroom and the truck that had crashed through the wall. My eyes were stinging; I had written all night.