It’s night, about 11 o clock. I brush my teeth at the sink of this rented holiday house, spit, and see blood streaked toothpaste fall from my mouth. Gum disease or something, I think. It will mottle my mind for hours now as I try to sleep.
I undress and creep into the cold bed. The people who owned this house have packed up their things and gone, tired of the endless stream of tourists inhabiting the little building that adjoined theirs. Sick to death of hearing the constant sounds of holidays and having to clean up before the next lot arrived. They sold this place at the end of the summer, and I struck a deal. I was lucky. The estate agents weren’t too sure at first. They said with stern faces that it would all have to be legal and above board. But the letting agency who handle holiday bookings knew it made good business sense. They recognised the importance of having someone in here during the quiet times so the house didn’t invite vandals and squatters. And then there’s the rent I continue to pay, of course. They had the estate agents draw up an agreement, which I signed while crisp boxes from the supermarket loaded with books and framed photos were being taken from the house and stacked in a van. The previous owners waved while their car sailed out of the drive, one hand still held from the window like a white surrender as they drove down to the sea and along the coast. I was left with a TV, a fitted kitchen, a bathroom with a white sink and shower cubicle, and a bed. A bed that’s had the same sheets on for eight weeks now.
I lie on the side of the bed I always lie on. I can hardly touch the other side, where there is nobody. Nobody that is bigger than the shape we made when we were together. Matthew is not here anymore. But he always is.
I close my eyes for a second and then have to open them again. The darkness is immense. It has no end. I think about the times, back at home in the north, when me and Matt met in our snatched lunch-breaks and sat in the park. Before everything changed. Sometimes we would just sit, eating from plastic take-away containers or picking at each other’s sandwiches, that our mothers had foil wrapped, like birds. And the moments between us were so used we could feel them disintegrate, flake and blow away.
And then he kissed me to avoid the angry face of a drunk. The hair on his chin, red like a warning, unshaven for days, new and bold, freed from the confines of his skin, felt soft like a doll’s brush.
He kissed me. Then he just looked at me. Tilted his forehead against mine in an apology. I should have known, of course. He was sorry before he started it.
We stood up together, collected our rubbish in our hands and got ready to leave the park. We walked away as if we were leaving everything that had happened up until that moment behind. He said he couldn’t stand to be in one place for more than two weeks. Said he was leaving his pointless job again. Heading south. Said he had itchy feet. I must have looked away, and maybe he felt bad.
“Why don’t you come with me?” he said.
“No, I couldn’t, I…”
“Come on. What do you have to stay here for anyway?”
And that same afternoon I chucked my job faster than a frisby. It didn’t matter. I could always get another job.
But that was weeks ago, months in fact now.


Now.
Now I am left here alone in this holiday house. He has gone and I have been forced to follow him to another country by phone. I held the little mobile in my hand, carried it from the house to the supermarket to work - the temporary job I had in the teashop here in the south - to the bus to bed, and I never let go of it, couldn’t put it down, couldn’t even put it in my pocket for fear of not catching his call the minute it came. The little paw like phone mingled silently with cakes and teacups by day, and at night it lay heavy and black on Matt’s side of the bed.
I followed him by dreams, by email to a land where I thought the sun would beat his pale skin too hard and scar him and burn him, but it was winter there, though it was summer here, and he said it was freezing cold. He never did phone. Texting was safer. Email colder still. And now, I don’t even have that.
So I follow him to Australia in my head, where the giant clams are fierce and the gropers bite. And I see every possible danger that could befall him.
I get out of the bed. It’s hopeless.
In my head I follow him still. I turn on a light and listen for the moths outside the window, drawn and hypnotised towards their cruel deaths, but they can’t see it. They are blind. Drunk with love for the light. And they think it will be beautiful.
I bat a small globe and watch it spin, trying to pick out Matthew’s next destination. Tokyo, where the streets are lit in ice white and reds and blues lifted straight from a child’s birthday party. Jelly red. Frosting blue. Neon pop and silver bullet balls. He walks the streets there, his backpack hung on his shoulder, and stops to reel in a moment or two of his childhood in the shops. Dancing flowers in plastic pots. Star Wars figures and Pac-Man games. The toys in Tokyo can help Matthew forget everything for a moment and make him a boy again. That’s why he went, to forget.
I touch the globe and look for Seoul. And I still can’t believe he’s gone.

~

When we were kids. When our summer holidays were melded in caravan parks. Crazy golf. Indoor pools. Children’s disco. The smell of chips and beer soaked carpets. When we teased each other about this girl, that boy, but stayed together all the same. And in winter we dressed up for Halloween and went round the streets trick-or-treating, built a guy for bonfire night and made our names swirl in the black air with fizzy sparklers.
When we left school and looked out on our lives as some big, simple adventure. When you got a job in the stock room of that record store and I worked in the bakery, and I used to sneak out at break time and come and lean right up against the counter to watch you crouch on the floor in the tiny corridor like room, rows and rows of CDs packing you tightly into your space, cushioning your body as you flicked the little cases and lovingly checked them. Do you remember Matt? I wish I could haul it all back again. Innocence. You and me, kids, touching in the only way we knew, teasing, hitting, punching, play-fighting. Our mothers always telling us to stop…

…See them swimming there in the cold sea. Her. She’s taken off her frilly skirt and left it up on the rocks, a black one-piece swimsuit cling-filming her middle. Him. In navy blue swim shorts that make him even more conscious of his changing body. They are young. Him aged twelve. Her sixteen.
Her mother knots her dress around her thighs and wades in after them. Her legs are slim and pale and strong. She persuades the girl to pose on a large rock, her thighs still wrapped in puppy fat, and the mother holds a silver camera up to her eye.
His mother, more playful than hers, stands on the shore and picks up a sod of seaweed, then throws it into the water where they are crouching. He grabs the seaweed and throws it at the girl, the slimy leaves sticking to her bare shoulder. He’s laughing. And she always did love it when he laughs. They throw the seaweed at each other for ages, not tiring of the sight of it hitting their bare flesh, until they are too close to each other in the water, and the game has to stop. They don’t laugh or do anything for a moment, just look, their eyes becoming liquid like the sea. Then he begins to flick the murky saltwater at her, and their mothers move away, up the beach, smiling and chatting quietly.

~

I can see myself and Matthew in an old pub, not so long ago. Jobs sacked. Mothers hanging on the other end of the phone. Oak tables wobbling as we laugh and fall against them. What have we done?
This is mad!
Yeah, isn’t it great?
A pint of black beer, a glass of golden wine. It was the beginning. It was the end. It was everything.
When we drove down here to the south we’d both left our lives behind with smiles on our faces. Just got in the car. Said we’d find somewhere. We streaked down the motorway with raindrops the size of babies’ fists banging on the windscreen. Couldn’t see half a meter in front of us. A gust of wind or a car driving too fast beside us forced a tidal wave of rainwater up against the front of our car. And I screamed. And Matt laughed at me. He said I always over-react. Maybe I do. But I swear I can feel danger so closely on my skin it’s like I’m wearing it. I can sense all possible disaster that swims within an inch of me…and him. We are connected like that. It is more than any other relationship. Everybody always said so. Kissing cousins. And they teased us at weddings when we sat side by side. Matthew blushed. A blush that made the pit of my stomach ache. I had no idea why.
So of course I over-react.
It was later the same day. After we’d unpacked and been out. He suddenly felt he had to tell me this, be honest, let it out. I cried when he told me that he’s been seeing a girl for years. Girlfriend. It’s serious, he said.
Years? How can that be? How can I not have known? Not felt it? He didn’t seem as if he was part of a couple. Then again, I was spectacularly good at believing we were a couple all along, even when we weren’t.
The following week she was here. In the south. I was stunned that Matthew dared to bring this woman to the place that was ours, to this house. A whirlpool began inside me when I looked at her. She is an actress. I struggle with the thought that maybe we will see her face everywhere one day. On billboards. On TV. Folded inside magazines, her skin touched up, her eyes cleared and perfected, everybody saying she is gorgeous. And she is. Here in the flesh she’s criminally beautiful, but I know that can quickly become nothing to Matthew. It would be boring, would it, to have someone so pretty?
We spent the day together. We took her out and showed her things, places we’d never been before. The cottage of a long dead poet. A harbour. Fields we took picnics to. Fields scattered with sheep like smoke, cows like couches. But it was too much. Matthew hardly spoke to me and by lunchtime his flawless girlfriend couldn’t look at him at all.
“What’s a matter?” he coaxed her, but she stood firm, her hands on her hips and wouldn’t look at Matthew.
Does she realise that I am constant? Our births have seen to that. Her Madonna face, her sheet-perfect skin. She’s the kind of girl who will be horrified, because me and Matthew share a great-grandfather and yet we have further mixed our DNA so freely, so carelessly, it swims inside us and thickens our blood. I smile. I can’t help myself. She can never compete with that. But then I look at her black hair, her blue eyes, her mermaid body, and I know it’s the other way around.
I stood back and I saw it all –
- She came here for one reason. She knows. Someone whispered it or let it crash loud from their mouth. Someone told her. Matthew and his cousin, didn’t you know? And now she’s seen us and she’s smelt it in the house and she’s seen our eyes flicking fast from one to the other and she’s noticed that we don’t smile at each other, only at her.
She left. I suppose she caught another train, went back home to the north, couldn’t stand the humiliation.
I expected Matthew to say he didn’t care about it. But he kept his sunglasses on so nobody could see his eyes, not even his girlfriend before she went, her sullen face reflected in the glass of Matthew’s shades. And he didn’t acknowledge me at all. Maybe he thinks I told her. Maybe I did. With my smiles and my enthusiastic “hello”, with emotions that can’t be kept under my skin, with my face when I look at her, when I look at Matthew.
It was a matter of days after this. And he’d gone too. Round the world, he said.
“I need time. Space. To be alone. To think. I’ll work as I go.” he said. “It’ll be all right. I’ll send postcards. I’ll write to you from the beach where I’ll be thinking, can’t imagine ever working a normal, boring job again.” And he punched my arm as if nothing had happened.
Was I crying? Is that why he was kind one last time? I said I didn’t understand. And I don’t. What is there to think about in months filled with another city, another country, another night?
I stayed here. I don’t know which is worse, the north with my memories of years of longing, or here in the south with passion so young I can still touch it on the bed frame and the pillows and the sink in the bathroom where he left pinpricks of cedar red after he finally decided to shave. I conclude, if I am not with him, everywhere will hurt in one way or another.

~

I have lain down again. I don’t know why. I can’t sleep. I see the stars through the skylight in the bedroom and I wish on them before a curtain of cloud rainbows over and hides them away. But it’s too late. The estate agent phoned me three days ago and told me the new owners are coming. I had an image of people riding over the fields on horse back, come to claim their property. The letting agency have written, probably because they can’t face me, and told me that these new owners, these settlers want to use this house that I lie in for their aging mother and father to end their days in.
“Not very often you here of that, is it?” the estate agent said.
I made a noise that must have sounded like I was muzzled.
It is unusual. It’s the kind of thing people did years ago when they still had a conscience and time and no other alternative. But now we all realise we don’t have those obligations anymore, we are free of the responsibility, and yet here it is, alive and well in a seaside town in the south. Just my luck.

As I leave the house I touch the globe again. I feel my fingertips move over countries far away. Maybe I’m dreaming. My body feels so heavy, so strange, I’m not sure.
It’s late, a night black like the beer you slugged in bar after bar with me here in the south that time, Matt. That first night. The rain had dried. We unpacked and hurried down to find the beach heavy with wet sand. We ate chips that tasted like the sea. Then we ducked in and out of old salt bitten pubs until our faces burned and our vision was blurred.
We came out into the early evening and I felt the wine gush in my veins, making me think anything could happen, making me believe everything would be all right. You held my hand as we crossed the road, boy racers pushing their engines harder at the traffic lights. We saw someone break the glass in a bus shelter, saw the tiny crystals of the window pane fall to the ground. And you made me hurry away, leading me up the hill back to our rented holiday house. Made me feel like you cared.
But maybe it was the beer. If I were rational right now, perhaps I would think so. It was the beer and the scuffle in the bus shelter and the reckless boys revving their engines in the road as we crossed. It was the sea air that made you kiss me again. The sand in your trainers that made you feel you could put your arms around me and take me to bed.
But I am not rational. I am in love.

I run down to the sea. I have nowhere else to go. No home. Nothing. I wade out into the water, my skirt flowing up around my waist. The waves are going out and then coming back in like huge liquid breaths. There is no one else here. Of course not, because it’s the middle of the night and it would be mad to swim or even stand on the beach at this hour. But I do it. He does it. Out of the corner of my eye I’m sure I see him.
The sea is so cold I think it’s frozen my mind, made my senses ache like my heart does.
I am in my sea. Matthew is in his. The wild Atlantic that roars and foams angrily and beats the shore with resentment - the sea that I have been forced into by love and obsession and dull loneliness. And the Pacific, warm and still, a vast pond that seems as if it will never stir - Matthew’s ocean now, his adopted sea.
The sky above is a soft ceiling of safety. The stars are so near to us we feel we can reach up and touch them. I understand the night at last. Learn to love it. Realise there is no reason to fear it. After all, it wasn’t the black night I was afraid of, but sleep and blank dreams and the endless struggle to see his face properly again.
He is in the sea. I know it. Millions of miles away. But on the globe it passes so quickly, so easily. It’s nothing, just a single turn of the world, a single breath, not even as long as a kiss.
The same sky is above our heads, the same water sways around our thighs. The water is cold as it licks my skin. I go down into the water like a heavy sigh. I swim. The cold is a shock only for a moment and then my body has changed to meet it. I swim. Further. We swim further. Our clothes weigh our bones and pull them down. We dive. Deeper. Under the ocean, out across the huge sea. I think if I am deep enough, far enough under, I will touch his hands at the other side, where the water is warm, where the giant clams are, where the gropers bite, as he swims towards me.

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