The Guest List(58)
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.