The ceremony went on for hours – or that’s how it felt. In my thin dress I couldn’t stop shivering. I held my bouquet so tightly that the thorns of the rose stems bit through the white silk ribbon into my hands. I had to suck the little drops of blood from my palms while no one was watching.
Eventually, though, it was over.
But after the ceremony there were photos. My face hurts from trying to smile. My cheeks ache. The photographer kept singling me out, telling me I need to ‘turn that frown upside down, darling!’ I tried. I know it can’t have seemed like a smile on the other side – I know it must have looked like I was baring my teeth, because that’s how it felt. I could tell Jules was getting annoyed with me, but I didn’t know how to do anything about it. I couldn’t remember how to smile properly. Mum put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Are you all right, Livvy?’ She could see something was up, I guess. That I’m not all right, not at all.
People crowd around: aunts and uncles and cousins I haven’t seen for ages.
‘Livvy,’ my cousin Beth asks, ‘you still with that boyfriend? What was his name?’ She’s a few years younger than me: fifteen. And I’ve always felt like she’s kind of looked up to me. I remember telling her all about Callum last year, at my aunt’s fiftieth, and feeling proud as she hung on my words.
‘Callum,’ I say. ‘No … not any more.’
‘And you’ve finished your first year at Exeter now?’ my Aunt Meg asks. Mum hasn’t told her about me leaving, then. When I try to nod my head it feels too heavy for my neck. ‘Yeah,’ I say, because it’s easier to pretend, ‘yeah, it’s good.’
I try to answer all their questions but it’s even more exhausting than the smiling. I want to scream … inside I am screaming. I can see some of them looking at me in confusion – I even see them glancing at each other, like: ‘What’s up with her?’ Concerned looks. I suppose I don’t
seem like the Olivia they remember. That girl was chatty and outgoing and she laughed a lot. But then I’m not the Olivia I remember. I’m not sure if or how I’ll ever get back to her. And I can’t act out a role for them. I’m not like Mum.
Suddenly I feel like I can’t breathe again, like I can’t get the air into my lungs properly. I want to get away from their questions and their kind, concerned faces. I tell them I’m going off to find the loo. They don’t seem bothered. Maybe they’re relieved. I peel away from the group. I think I hear Mum call my name but I keep on walking and she doesn’t call again, probably because she’s got distracted talking to someone. Mum loves an audience. I go a little faster. I take off my stupid heels, which have already got covered in dirt. I’m not sure where I’m going exactly, other than in the opposite direction to everyone else.
On my left are cliffs of black stone, shining wet from the water spray.
The land drops away in places, like a big chunk of it has suddenly disappeared into the sea, leaving a jagged line behind. I wonder what it would feel like to have the ground suddenly fall away under me, suddenly disappear, so I’d have no choice but to go down with it. For a moment I realise I’m standing here almost hoping for it to happen.
Below the track I’m following I see little pockets in between the cliffs with beaches of white sand. The waves are big, white-capped far out. I let the wind blow over me, till my hair feels like it’s being ripped from my head, till my eyelids feel like they’re trying to turn inside out, the wind pushing at me like it’s trying its best to shove me over. There’s a sting of salt on my face.
The water out there is a bright blue, like the colour of the sea in a photo of a Caribbean island, like the one where my mate Jess went last year with her family and from which she posted about fifty thousand photos on Instagram of herself in a bikini (all totally Facetuned, of course, so her legs looked longer and her waist looked smaller and her boobs looked bigger). I suppose that it’s all quite beautiful, what I am looking at, but I can’t feel it being beautiful. I can’t properly feel any good things any more: like the taste of food, or the sun on my face or a song I like on the radio. Looking out at the sea all I feel is a dull pain, somewhere under my ribs, like an old injury.
I find a way down where it’s not so steep, where the ground meets the beach in a slope, not a cliff. I have to fight my way through bushes that are growing on the slope, small and tough and thorny. They snag at my dress as I go past and then I trip on a root, and I’m falling down the bank, tripping, tumbling forward. I can feel the silk tear – Jules will flip
– and then I’m down on my knees – bam! And my knees are stinging and all I can think is that the last time I fell like this I was a kid, at school, maybe nine years ago. I want to cry like a kid as I stumble down to the beach, because it should hurt, my whole body should hurt, but no tears will come – I haven’t been able to make them come for a long time. If I could cry it might all be better, but I can’t. It’s like an ability I’ve lost, like a language I’ve forgotten.
I sit on the wet sand, and I can feel it soaking through my dress. My knees are covered with proper playground grazes, pink and raw and gravelly. I open my little beaded bag and carefully take out the razor blade. I lift up the fabric of my dress and press the razor to my skin.
Watch the tiny bright red beads of blood come up – slow at first, then faster. Even though I can feel the pain it doesn’t feel like my blood, my leg. So I squeeze the cut, bringing more blood to the surface, waiting to feel like it belongs to me.
The blood is bright red, so bright, kind of beautiful. I put a finger to it and then taste my finger, taste the metal of it. I remember the blood after the ‘procedure’, which is what they called it. They said that ‘a little light spotting’ would be totally normal. But it went on for weeks, it felt like; the dark brown stain appearing in my knickers, like something inside me was rusting away.
I remember exactly where I was when I realised I hadn’t had my period. I was with my friend, Jess, at a house party some second years were holding at their place, and she’d been telling me she’d had to raid the cupboards in the bathroom for tampons, as hers had come early. I remember how when she told me I felt this odd feeling, like indigestion in my chest, like I couldn’t draw a breath – a little like now. I realised I couldn’t think of the last time I had to use a tampon, to use anything.
And I’d felt strange, kind of bloated and gross and tired, but I thought that was the crap food I ate and feeling shitty over things with Steven. It had been a while. Some months, my periods are really light, so they hardly bother me at all. But they’re always there. They’re still regular.
It was halfway through the new term. I went to the uni doctor and took a pregnancy test with her, because I didn’t trust myself to do it properly. She told me it was positive. I sat there, staring at her, like I wasn’t going to fall for it, like I was waiting for her to tell me she was joking. I didn’t really believe it could be true. And then she started talking about what my options were, and did I have anyone I could talk to about it? I couldn’t say anything. I remember how I opened my mouth a couple of
times and nothing came out, not even air, because again I could hardly breathe. I felt like I was suffocating. She sat there, looking sympathetic, but of course she couldn’t come and give me a hug because of all that legal stuff. And right then I really, really needed a hug.
I got out of there and I was all shaky and weird, I couldn’t walk properly – I felt like a car had slammed into me. My body didn’t feel like mine. All this time it had been doing this secret, strange thing … without me knowing about it.
I couldn’t even make my fingers work on my phone. But eventually I unlocked it. I WhatsApped him. I saw that he’d read it straight away. I saw the three little dots appear – it told me that he was ‘typing’, at the top. Then they disappeared. Then they appeared again, and he was ‘typing’ for about a minute. Then nothing again.
I called him, because clearly he had his phone right there, in his hand. He didn’t answer. I called him again, it rang out. The third time, it went straight to the voicemail message. He’d declined it. So I left him a voicemail – though I’m not sure he would have been able to work out what I was actually saying, my voice was wobbling so much.
Mum took me to the clinic to have it done. She drove all the way from London to Exeter, nearly four hours door to door, and waited for me while I had it done and then drove me home afterwards.
‘It’s the best thing,’ she told me. ‘It’s the best thing, Livvy darling. I had a baby when I was your age. I didn’t think I had any other choice. I was at the beginning of my life, of my career. It ruined everything.’
I knew Jules would like hearing that one. I heard an argument with them once, when Jules had screamed at Mum: ‘You never wanted me! I know I was your biggest mistake …’
It was the only thing I could have done. But it would have been so much easier if he’d answered, if he’d let me know he understood, felt it too. Just a line – that’s all it would have taken.
‘He’s a little bastard,’ Mum told me. ‘For leaving you to go through all of this on your own.’
‘Mum,’ I told her – in case through some freak chance she happened to bump into Callum and go off on a tirade against him, ‘he doesn’t know. I don’t want him to know.’
I don’t know why I didn’t tell her it wasn’t Callum. It’s not like Mum’s a prude, like she would judge me for the whole thing with Steven. But I suppose I knew how much worse it would make me feel, reliving it all, feeling that rejection all over again.
I remember everything about that drive back from the clinic. I remember how Mum seemed so different to usual, how I’d never really seen her like that before. I saw how her hands gripped the steering wheel, hard enough that skin went white. She kept swearing, under her breath. Her driving was even worse than normal.
She told me, when we got home, to go and lie on the sofa, and she brought me biscuits and made me tea and arranged a rug over me, even though it was pretty warm. Then she sat down next to me, with her own cup of tea, even though I’m not sure I’d ever seen her drink tea before. She didn’t drink it, actually, she just sat there with her hands clenched around her mug as tight as they had been on the steering wheel.
‘I could kill him,’ she said again. Her voice didn’t even sound like her own; it was low and rough. ‘He should have been there with you, today,’ she said, in that same strange voice. ‘It’s probably a good thing I don’t know his full name. The things I would do to him if I did.’
I stare out into the waves. I think being in the sea will make me feel better. I think it’s the only thing that will work, all of a sudden. It looks so clean and beautiful and flawless, like being inside it would be like being inside a precious stone. I stand up, brush the sand off my dress. Shit … it’s cold in the wind. But actually it’s kind of a good cold – not like the cold in the chapel. Like it’s blowing every other thought out of my head.
I leave my shoes in the wet sand. I don’t bother stepping out of my dress. I walk into the water and it’s ten degrees cooler than the air, absolutely freezing freezing cold, it makes my breath come all fast and I can only take in little gulps of air. I feel the sting of the cut on my leg as the salt gets in it. And I push further into it, so that the water comes up to my chest, then my shoulders and now I really can’t breathe properly, like I’m wearing a corset. I feel tiny fireworks explode in my head and on the surface of my skin and all the bad thoughts loosen, so I can look at them more easily.
I put my head under, shaking it to encourage the bad thoughts to float away. A wave comes, and the water fills my mouth. It’s so salty it makes me gag and when I gag I swallow more water and don’t manage to breathe and more water goes in, and it’s in my nose too and each time I open my mouth for air more water comes in instead, great big salty gulps of it. I can feel the movement of the water under my feet and it feels like it’s tugging me somewhere, trying to take me with it. It’s like my body knows something I don’t because it’s fighting for me, my arms and legs
thrashing out. I wonder if this is a bit what drowning is like. Then I wonder if I am drowning.
