We were both equally surprised.
*
At night, the garage often welcomed other, less accommodating visitors. Young men who stepped out from behind the wheels of their tin cans like small, showy princes. They all drove cars that looked like they were designed to be in accidents – scraps of metal with a colony of screaming girlfriends trapped inside. I squirmed at their clumsy, implied intimacy.
Was I always this quiet?
I was.
Did it not get boring?
No, not ever.
I was careful not to move during these conversations – I did not want to draw attention to myself even though I was on display. They had caught some of the films I had been in and you know what? I wasn’t nearly as hot in real life.
I was scum, trashy, that was the word, repulsive. Et cetera. They called me other names too. Wholly unimaginative stuff. Plain lazy.
Then there were others, who were worse. Smart and careful – they made assumptions. From whatever they had learned in college, they were concerned my self-esteem might be on the lower end of the spectrum. I said, ‘Of course, I have low self-esteem. You think I would be standing here talking to you if I didn’t?’
I entertained one or two of them, those who made a true first impression: new disasters. I liked conversation and challenging situations. If they pushed me, I pushed right back. Why not? I bit down hard on my bottom lip. There was blood drawn, but it didn’t bother me. I promised myself this would all end, at some point or another.
Many took greedy fistfuls of mints before they screeched off. I had to get Kevin to watch the till as I refilled the bowl. I had to be alone. I needed to rub my hand across my mouth and face while comforting myself with scenarios: telephone poles springing from hallowed ground, hard, unforgiving walls stretching soundlessly across the motorway, bodies thrown into the starless night.
I wasn’t feeling good about myself. I wasn’t feeling relaxed and it showed.
One evening, Kevin approached me with the bare and battered plant. His voice was not far from tears. ‘What happened?’
I looked at the plant. ‘We had a falling out.’
I returned to rearranging the chairs, my freckled back sadly exposed.
More and more people began drifting into the garage forecourt on a daily basis to watch Kevin and me. These ‘customers’ had no single defining characteristic; they were fuzzy, unfamiliar. It was as if Kevin and I blinked them in and out of existence. The garage was not our place anymore. Often, the strangers feigned indifference but their eyes followed us, their gazes alert as we performed. I was not aware my town had people like this. Middle-aged bodies in stretched jeans, with sharp, angry jaws. They rarely sat, instead they loitered around the chairs, exuding a dangerous energy. Occasionally, they made pointing motions, fraught signals as if guiding Kevin and I across the garage forecourt. Sometimes, they clapped their hands against their knees and cheered us on.
Management advised us to engage with them and I did. I asked questions like: ‘Is my hair nice pushed back?’ and ‘What have I done to deserve this life?’ I came back to life in their presence, was strangely reassembled as a homely hostess, with her hands spread wide open. I did not know who I was fooling, them or me.
But Kevin wilted. His eccentricities were very apparent under the strangers’ constant supervision. He was inelegant. I slicked back his hair with foul-smelling gel and tucked in his shirt. It didn’t help. All this time, I thought he was just an ordinary loser but it was worse than that. The people disliked him. Anytime he wandered onto the garage forecourt, the people looked away. While he worked, some even turned their chairs to face the opposite direction, like the garage was a stage and Kevin was a character they refused to acknowledge.
*
‘What was it like seeing yourself onscreen?’ he asked one day. ‘Was it scary?’
‘It was incredible,’ I said casually. ‘I mean there was a lot going on in the scenes I was in, a lot of distracting stuff. But I looked great.’
‘I’m sure,’ Kevin said, and he pretended to be suddenly invested in a balloon.
‘It was amazing. I could have been anyone, anyone at all.’
‘That must have been hard,’ he said.
Kevin always missed the point. That was going to be an obstacle for him, going forward.
‘No, Kevin,’ I said. ‘Being anyone was the entire appeal.’ The garage was not real but it was still the most real experience I’d had in years. In the city, my boyfriend was the director, but he was no artist. He didn’t have that sort of intelligence. All he knew was how to fuck people over, drink infinite blue cocktails, and make everything cheap. I had more vision than him. I had a lot of excellent suggestions for set design, but I kept them to myself. Trapped in our smooth apartment, in our terrible bedroom, I trained myself to sleep for only four hours a night. I had to be prepared to jump up and raise my fists to the dead night. It was so pathetic, it didn’t suit him at all.
Usually when he was halfway through hitting me it would occur to him just how obvious he was. Then he would curl up, say sorry, baby, sorry, sorry. Baby this, baby that, baby all the livelong day. It was possible that this person who owned me didn’t even know my name. It was all a dull attempt to get my attention, and the stuff he bought me was dog-ugly. He got it into his head that I was kitsch and he just went with it without my permission. He gave me one pair of costly pants meant for ‘leisure’. I wore them outside – they were okay pants – and this was a big no-no, apparently. ‘They are only for leisure!’ Those kind of rules. It was hard to know who to be minute by minute.
His friends were in the films too and I just put on a wig, let them do whatever they wanted to me, went home, practised falling asleep and then leaping awake. It killed time. After that, there was emptiness. Some wandering around, eating not-good stuff out of bags, doughnuts, Taco Bell. Enough loneliness to make you lose your mind. I got my nails done twice a week – there was a violence to it that I worshipped. The rooms where I was filmed were just like beauty parlours: the same glossies on the coffee tables, the same plastic furniture, nothing words snapping into the air. Girls, lots of them – all of us mutely conspiring, an exclusive club.
I spent the last two months of our relationship staring straight past my boyfriend’s head. I played a lot of Candy Crush. It was just easier for everyone that way. I was such a good girlfriend, god damn it. It was an outrage how lovely I was. I was the very best until the morning, the morning that came from nowhere, when I woke up and said, ‘I’m going home.’ He just rolled over onto his side, gave me a filthy look like I was quitting, slipping out early. His last words to me: ‘Don’t misrepresent the company.’
‘How did you get into it?’ Kevin asked. He was doing his version of eye contact.
*
On the first day of a freezing spring, I came in to find the light not working and Kevin absent. I loitered. I hung around late, scuffing the concrete, flicking bits of dirt from under my fingernails. He did not arrive the following day either, although I stood at a visible point on the motorway path waiting for him. I consulted the strangers, gazed into their flat, flavourless eyes, and they adopted innocent faces, like they had nothing to do with this disaster. Some displayed befuddlement at the mention of Kevin’s name. Others just laughed. It wasn’t confusing – it was the opposite. It was the first moment that made sense.
From that day forth, I decided to stay safely inside the garage. I swaddled myself in Kevin’s old sweatshirt and made advancements for us both. I consulted interior decorating magazines; I recognised all the women who posed languidly over chairs. I pushed the fridge to one end of the garage, using all my body weight and will. I unscrewed an overhead light bulb, held its cold glass in my hand, crushed it, threw the shards out the window and watched them fly towards the strangers. I told myself that when the lights went back up, everything would be di
fferent. I lit dozens of candles and left them in precarious places. I didn’t cry but, if it had happened, I would have allowed it. On the garage forecourt, I only appeared once or twice and that was to chase away the pigeons. I charged out into the fog and dirt, deliberately angry and ugly. I wanted these people to know that Kevin was capable of great, complicated feelings, and they had done something to him, something awful, and I did not like it.
Management arrived when I was sitting beside the fridge, in flattering candlelight, my fingers resting on my lumpy knees. She had heard of the temporary changes I had made to the garage and she expressed concern. She said that she couldn’t help but notice at the last Friday meeting that I wasn’t really there, my name had to be called at least three times before I snapped to attention. She hunkered down beside me, kindly, as if preparing me for bad news. Her body was uncomfortably close to mine: a body I did not want to know a single thing about.
‘Can I have Kevin back please?’
I hated how wanting I sounded.
‘Kevin wasn’t panning out. He received a fine severance package.’
I glanced at the shelves and noticed where there were once three cans, there were now only two.
*
There were things happening out there in the world – history, events. But history was not happening in my town, not to me. I was just standing outside bars, without my coat, shoes and underwear, wondering where exactly they were because – sadly – I was not wearing them. My thoughts had reached a manic, fever pitch. I had taken to becoming a resigned passenger in cars that traversed the motorway; these were meaningless trips but I did not sleep well after them. I watched my old films on my phone, my legs curled up underneath me, my heart beating fast. All those devastating angles. I wanted them to be instructional, but they told me nothing about myself. I got weary simply fast-forwarding through them. The furniture was always wrong.
I watched early CCTV footage of Kevin and me, both of us sauntering around, looking oddly delighted in our own misery. It was amazing how little we did. I regretted not laying down in his lap when Management encouraged it; that was my true regret. I wondered when he knew it was his final shift, before or afterwards. I genuinely hoped it was after. I imagined myself, barefoot, sprinting down the motorway path after him.
I resolved to replace the light bulb and that became my daring project. With Henry’s assistance, I took a stepladder from the office in town and practised climbing up and down the three steps. I had never replaced a light bulb before. It was difficult work. I must have walked to the hardware shop, I must have put one achingly slow foot in front of the other, but I have no recollection of doing so. Suddenly, I was just there. I spent hours picking the perfect one; I had experience in the right wattage and what it could do for a scene. In the light bulb’s reflection, I was stretched and distorted to a stunning degree. On my way out, I heard the cashier advise a young lady to be careful while doing home renovations, but this did not apply to me.
*
On the day of the light bulb replacing, I felt an exciting charge like I was revved up. It was a special day, no doubt. I knew this because at the front door of the garage a new plant greeted me – a first-place pageant bow running around its black casing, its leaves in full bloom – a gift with no note, celebrating nothing.
‘Oh good,’ I said. ‘You got here just in time.’
I did not want to rush the task. I propped up the plant nearby to keep a close eye on me. I needed to take it easy, slow. It was important. I was a long way from the ground. I tried to steady myself while saying, ‘Woah, woah’. I caught only the bright tip of the wire as the ladder slipped from underneath me. And as I went hurtling through, all the way through the cement floors, everything – everything – looked familiar and enchanting.
Sweet Talk
All that summer, the flies were an irritation. They disturbed our dinners so we erected a fly-catcher, a bright sticky orange strip that displayed the lurid corpses. My father told me I swallowed them at night; they travelled down my throat and settled in my stomach. In the mornings, before my preening routine, I examined my mouth for evidence of badness – black stains on the bottom of my teeth, a broken wing lodged under my tongue.
The men lived in the caravan. They arrived in threes – mute, unfriendly, unsmiling – and it was my mother’s job to let them know when they were finished. My father would say to her, ‘Get that done,’ and she would set off across the lawn. If she liked the men, if she had spoken to them or they had been in the house, she took the time to compose a personal letter – her childish scrawl offering basic commiserations. If she did not have any sense of them she simply said, ‘Boys, get your belongings.’
My father used any excuse to sack them. He disliked evidence of effort, and he abhorred vanity in men. He considered it unnatural. He resented these sullen strangers, the suggestion of wax in their hair, their good complexions. Usually, he didn’t even bother to learn their names. As unceremoniously as they arrived, they made their way down the gravel drive. Some had suitcases, or large backpacks; others carried their things in plastic bags. I watched their departures from my bedroom window as it seemed important – becoming acquainted with men’s disappointed backs, watching their retreating shadows.
That summer, the summer I turned fourteen, was warm. We had no language for the weather. We wandered around like people burdened and we pointed at the sky. The missing women of the Midlands peered out of the papers; their vague and vanished faces seemed to understand the tedium of the heat. The women had all disappeared from nothing places. It was a long walk into town from our house, a town with a heavy thrum of dark traffic. I did that walk daily, sometimes wearing shoes, sometimes not. I had adopted a uniform of flimsy halter-strap tops and pedal pushers with beads oddly, and uncomfortably, attached to the cuffs. I brushed my hair out and made necklaces from multi-coloured rope. People asked if I was a hippie and I said, yeah, I was.
I was happy for the break from school – I had become too good at being who I was. When one of the more established girls gave a blow job beside the Virgin Mary statue outside the school, I declared myself unimpressed by the obvious symbolism and others followed suit. I had a quiet sort of pull in that way. There was speculation that I might have significant breasts underneath my school jumper, but it was not a card I would be playing so it didn’t warrant much discussion. There were faint rips in our universe – the missing girls, the blow job – but nothing ever ruptured in the way we wanted it to. We sowed pleats into our skirts to make them tighter, we snapped our hair into humourless ponytails. That summer, we watched scary movies we selected brazenly from the back of the video shop. At night, our film minds whirring, we fell asleep with our hands on the small of each other’s backs.
At the edge of our town, a new housing estate was built – the first of many – and it brought with it a sense of novelty. There were boys in those cheaply built houses, boys who had to move schools, boys who had hurriedly left cities, and we all lied to each other about our levels of experience. The three-beds faced an area of stubby, patchy grass and the boys called it the green. We always split up according to some hierarchy I couldn’t fathom and I was left with the quietest, the kindest, the one who had spent the least amount of time in a juvenile detention centre. He would pull down my bra-strap, pull it back up, pull it back down as if to say: Nope, I have no idea what’s happening here either.
In the evenings, when my friends and I were alone, we talked about the missing girls. We admitted we thought some of them were plain.
Before the Australian arrived, the missing girls were the main priority. They had been sucked into a blood-red sky, summoned into a gaping, flame-filled ground. The man who took them was Freddy Krueger, his claw-hand stretching out of a silent car, skirting slender upper arms. We dripped ice cream onto our laps, our bare stomachs. The girls said ‘Candyman’ three times into an unforgiving mirror. We sat on walls, we skipped through side alleys. We sauntered around, bare-shouldered,
waiting for cars to beep at us, seeking any tiny confirmation that we were alive.
My mother, threatened by the modernity of the new estate, had decided to gut the kitchen. The Australian was recommended to my father by a friend, but it was clear from the start that he didn’t know what he was doing. His talents extended to drawing elaborate sketches of a wood-panelled kitchen, but no further. He pored over these squiggles with a look of wild concentration, but resisted doing anything as serious as actual physical labour. My father liked him in the way that men who don’t say much often do like each other. He was rewarded with a key to the caravan and my father insisted that once he got started on the farm – once he settled in – he would be an excellent worker. The kitchen project was abandoned, as my mother always knew it would be.
He was in his early thirties and if you didn’t know him, you would have presumed him to be stupid. He had one of those unlucky faces that could so easily be described as slack-jawed, and a great braying laugh. He also had a sad, lazy way of confirming people’s low expectations of him. On good days, he was a charming stranger. Other days, he was simply the man who stood squinting in our yard. His clothes were not well cared for – a button missing, a shirt cuff frayed or torn, the material faded in places from the sunlight. He had no passions, nothing he talked about with enthusiasm. It takes a special kind of hard-working mind to fall for someone so helplessly and honestly ordinary.
‘I’m in love,’ I announced to my mother, refusing to elaborate.
I had a babysitting job in the next town over, something I’d acquired in an effort to overthrow my parents. The Australian collected me each night in my father’s filthy car and I endured five-minute journeys that felt like actual physical suffering. I baffled myself with the blandness of my own conversation. I inquired about the length of the train trips he had taken around Europe. Did he have a normal cabin or a night cabin? Did they serve food on board? Was it fast?