Ross Armstrong - The Girls Beneath

When her late-homes stretched to late nights, I stopped asking questions, as I disappeared into my world. One dominated by online gaming and films I’d seen when I was younger but wanted to watch again to check if they’re still good. Or the lure of sports results on my phone, or direr still, merely staring blankly at the screen glow waiting for that appetising hit of something. Not even current affairs; I can’t handle that, everything is a killing or a manhunt and it gets me down. No, I prefer the safer land of sports news. Where the only tragedies are poor tactics. Where the only manhunt is inane ‘gossip’ about a Portuguese manager ‘tracking’ some sixteen-year-old French-African midfield wunderkind.

The Thursday night before the Monday I’m due to start my latest career experiment begins typically. Anita arrives home and I detach myself from the smart phone umbilical cord to greet her with my best conversation and the second half of a bottle of wine that I’ve started before her arrival. Already one in, having apparently ‘decompressed’ with a single glass on the way home ‘with her colleagues’, she tells me about her day and I listen loyally, retroactively defending her where appropriate from the passive-aggressive comments made by the head of the History department, my mind only occasionally drifting to how much a truly world class defender costs these days and what exactly I’m going to do with the rest of my life.

I’m always a good listener because it’s easier when the other person talks. After all, I know all my stories and listening is more relaxing than talking.

She suggests we go into the bedroom so she can tell me something. This is nothing particularly new as we both like lying down and the light is more relaxing in there. She’s never loved the feel of my parents’ old house but it suits our situation and I like it just fine. But then, I’m easy going, genial to a fault perhaps. I’ve always wanted a simple life, which is the subject our conversation turns to as we both stare at the childish glow-in-the-dark stars we’d put up on ‘the night of the moving in’, which had somehow stuck around to bother the ceiling with their pretty and naive shimmer.

It feels like we’re on the cusp of so many new things tonight. I don’t know why I’ve chosen tonight, in particular. But I have. Call it instinct.

I go to kiss her but she instinctively lifts a limb to flick me away like a holiday fly. It’s a feeling I’ve become used to of late. Her eyes flicker with uncertainty before she speaks.

‘What do you do in your training anyway? Is it all rolling over cars and firing at moving targets?’

‘Yes, it’s a bit like that but without the guns. Or the car, or the excitement,’ I reply, adjusting my head on the pillow.

‘Ha. I think you’re going to be really good,’ she says, turning her head to me, her cheek gaining a green sheen from the plastic stars that barely light the room at all.

‘I did do a personality test the other day though,’ I say.

‘Did they find anything?’

‘Ho ho. Yes actually. They said I was very empathetic.’

‘Good,’ she says, pushing her hair behind her ear.

‘Compassionate.’ ‘Good. Well. You are.’

‘And they thought compassion might be my main strength, as they said I’d scored very badly on observation.’

This does make her laugh, like hot tea, warming and over-stimulating me. But she soon cools. She seems to pull away, sensing a renewed push for intimacy in the air. Not that she fears my close proximity; we’ve remained very intimate, in all ways but one. And I’m told that’s a bit of a thing with relationships after a while.

‘They said that if I’d scored any lower they’d have had to declare me legally blind.’

She laughs, somewhat nervously, I think.

‘Although he said that some blind people have scored very well on these tests, so that’s probably unfair on them.’

As she laughs, I realise I don’t have to tell her anything about my personality. She’s the person who knows me better than any other. Who has been witness to my best and worst emotions. This is the being that I had picked above any other to eat with and sleep next to, the one person whose hair it is vaguely permissible to randomly stroke and smell, who has looked at my face over the past six years a good deal more than I’ve had to myself. She knows me from the tiniest colour in my eyes to the softest things I’ve ever said. I reach down into my pocket.

‘You’re just… I’d say your personality is… doughy.’

‘Sorry what?’ I say.

‘Doughy. Just a lovely, happy, doughy man.’

‘Kind of sounds like you’re saying my personality is fat.’

‘No, you’re not fat,’ she says.

‘No, I know I’m not,’ I say, vocally straining.

‘I mean, soft. Lovely. Like bread.’

Our eyes lock and she withdraws her hands, as if thinking four moves ahead and wanting no part of what comes next.

We turn and look up at the fake stars in a silence that turns over many times. It has endless pockets where it feels like one of us may speak. It runs on and on until at one point it has a little hate in it and at another a delicacy so fragile that it would shatter if you were to reach out and touch it.

Then I feel something. One of the tiny stars has fallen and is resting on my thigh. Then Anita looks down at it and finds a look somewhere between care worker and executioner. As she tells me that she’s been doing it with Gary Canning in the staff room after school for a term and a half. Her back against the pigeonholes. Her pencil skirt hitched up.

She doesn’t say all of that of course, but that’s what I hear. I want to be angry and after she leaves I do a lot of pacing and fist clenching as I examine Gary Canning’s social media output. I’m not really the sort of guy who raises his voice. I’m naturally better with compassion than passion, I suppose, and it’s not good to force these things. And she’s my best friend. It’s hard to be angry with your best friend with tears in her eyes.

The fact that she’s already arranged to stay with a friend leaves me logistically as well as emotionally lonely. But I’m always good with my own company and nothing if not resilient. Although resilient isn’t the word she used in the only moments of our conversation that bordered on unkind. Something about ‘ambition’, I don’t know. I log onto a gaming community as my heart pounds away further back in the mix.

The last time my heart pumped so hard, was during a training session with a self-defence specialist. I made myself a dead-weight to prove the demonstrator couldn’t lift me and the next thing I knew we were both on the matted ground, him with his knee poised over my chest, having dug it into me as we fell together. I gasped for breath as I looked up at the crowd of faces who leant over me. I hadn’t been so vulnerable since I was a child. And here I am again.

I met Anita at the party of a university friend I was already making plans to see less. I was pretending to be a smoker, and doing it pretty badly, as an excuse to not be inside with some awful people. Passable on their own, the flat was small and the men in particular were drunk and brash, which was a potion that ensured we were both having a terrible time. She spotted me coughing on a light cigarette, like a child taking it as a punishment, and we quickly decided that as we both hated smoking we should persevere together, mostly to stay away from the noise and fury of fellow twenty-two year olds newly arrived in London and convincing themselves they were ‘cool bro’, and having a ‘wicked time’. Batting away my cynicism on a cluster of topics, she made me laugh more than anyone had in my three years as an undergraduate and when it rained we sheltered under a tree and stayed until the last drops from the fern tumbled into the mud below our huddled bodies.