Natalie Lucas - Sixteen, Sixty-One

I cried of course. I could hardly see the tiles on the floor as we stepped into the house. My brother was a smudge as he offered a shy hello and asked if I wanted a glass of water.

The phone rang at 11.46.

‘Sweetie, Nana’s passed away … No, it’s okay, there was nothing you could have done anyway. It would have happened before you got here … I’m fine … I have to sort some things out here and go back to her house, but then I’ll come home … Don’t wait up … Honestly, I’ll be okay … Goodnight darling … I love you too.’

I crawled into bed and saw a strobe of images in the dark. I saw my nana falling in the bread aisle, reaching out for the handle of her trolley and crashing into a display of muffins. My mum struggling for breath as the paramedics wheeled her mother into the ambulance. The blinking of a sad coffee machine opposite plastic chairs in the relatives’ room. A man in a paper suit and white shoes telling my mum they did everything they could. Her hand wrapped around the payphone, the dial tone buzzing from the receiver after I’d hung up. The walk back to her car, seeing Nana’s coat on the passenger seat, entering the house where the afternoon teacup still bore lipstick, the fridge still hummed and the VCR had kicked in to record Midsomer Murders . I saw my mum pacing around the house, flicking switches off and trying to avoid looking at knick-knacks. Locking the door behind her and sitting in her car, resting her head upon the steering wheel and wondering how she could drive down the dual carriageway with so many tears in her eyes. Finally getting home at almost two in the morning and looking in on my brother, tangled in his sheets and snoring lightly. Glancing at my old room and wondering if I too was sound asleep at my father’s house. Turning to her own bed and sobbing quietly into her pillow because her mummy was gone and nobody was there to hold her. Then I saw myself, writhing in Matthew’s sheets and laughing at a sordid suggestion. My foot sliding up his trouser leg as we ate and his lips nibbling my ear while I selected a CD. I saw my phone vibrating furiously in an empty room and my tongue forming a lie for my father about playing cards.

As I slept, my sheets turned to chains; I felt my lies wrap themselves around my limbs and imagined my nana in a sterile room, watching me on a projected screen, seeing my thoughts and knowing my crudest acts. I woke in a sweat and cried as I stared into the bathroom mirror.

I called my mum as soon as it was light and offered to help her sort everything out, but she told me to go to school, she’d be fine. I ignored his emails and didn’t return to Matthew’s for a fortnight.

There were other times I doubted our relationship too. When Simon Shaw asked me out in the common room and an image of a normal teenage relationship involving cinema dates and second and third base flashed before my mind; when my English teacher asked what I wanted to be when I was older and which universities I was looking at; when the kids in my Philosophy class finally learnt about existentialism but moved on to Foucault and post-structuralism the following week; when I tried to imagine myself in ten or twenty years’ time; and when I turned up at his house and his unshaved jaw, tatty slippers and complaints about sciatica made me imagine Matthew’s death. One way or another, though, he always brought me back to my safe places between the pages of books and the sheets of his bed.

From: Matthew Wright

To: Natalie Lucas

Sent: 4 November 2001, 08:27:31

Subject: O me! O Life!

I hear you, my darling. Why, if we are built to feel, do we construct a society that cuts off feeling? Why, if our loins ache with longing, do we instil in children guilt and fear of intimacy? Why, if we value learning, are we afraid of those with knowledge? Why, if your teachers want you to think philosophically, do they punish you when you ask questions to which they know no answers? Why, if truth and honesty are the highest virtues, is it necessary to lie to those who are close to you? Why, if humans are taught generosity, do thousands die in poverty? Why, if we are taught to be individuals, are those who raise their heads above the parapet shot down? Why, if love is pure in all forms, are those who feel it outside the heterosexual, mono-generational, singularly racial norms punished? Why, if you feel passion in your veins when holding a book or mouthing a verse, do others pierce your reverie with mundane expectations? Why is the world so sad? Why does your Ma not understand love? Why does your Pa run away from commitment? Why does your brother turn everything into a mathematical equation? Why does Annabelle want only a hand to hold? Why do people discuss the weather when Shakespeare lies on the shelves? Why, Why, Why, what good amid these sad questions? O me, O Life?

The Answer:

That you are here—that life exists, and identity;

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

Yet, throughout my bizarre yo-yoing of passion and guilt, happiness and misery, I maintained some element of teenage normalcy. Despite my devotion to Matthew, alongside sitting exams and applying to universities, I flirted with boys at school and wove myself into such difficult situations with Nathan, David, Stephen and Pete that I was branded a cock-tease. Sometimes I felt guilty about Matthew or about the boys themselves, but my actions were not deliberate, just gestures of self-preservation to keep me from going insane in my unreality. I felt the only part of school and the teenage Nat I pretended to be that connected to the real me, the one only Matthew knew, was my continued attempt to drunkenly seduce sixth-form girls.

Though Matthew hadn’t made me come, I enjoyed sex with him and adored the secret eroticism of my life and the power I felt it endowed me with. But there was an ache. A hole beneath my intestines that throbbed when I watched pop stars gyrate in music videos. I’d lie for hours on Matthew’s couch, demanding deep tissue massages while I channel-hopped through Britney, Beyoncé and B*Witched. My fantasies were fed by Matthew’s stories of threesomes in his past, our mutual appreciation of Helmut Newton and his promises to find me a girl so he could watch me enjoy her. I ached from the beginning to the end of the school day, barely able to check my desire to ogle the popular girls in their skin-tight jeans and navel-rising tees. I wondered if they could see into my head and blushed when a male friend jokingly sought my opinion on Suzie’s behind. My one saviour was the regularity of house parties. I rarely got very far, but alcohol and a lack of parental supervision made everyone more open and I managed to content myself throughout Years 12 and 13 with periodic lesbianism.

After the parties, of course, I heard whispers in the common room like, ‘Hey, that’s the “keeno” girl who gets drunk and becomes a lesbian.’ But, thinking of Matthew and how all these people were just plebs watching the wall of the cave from their chains, I shrugged off their ridicule. I tried not to be discouraged by the popular girls who avoided me and regularly punched my male friends with whom conversations about my fantasies always ended: ‘But of course you’re bi, though.’ I attempted to develop a collection of witty responses behind which to hide my feelings of isolation. When Steve slouched beside me in the common room as I was eating a granola bar and asked, ‘Is that a dyke bar?’ I responded calmly, ‘Yes, and I’m about to shove it up my cunt.’ He ran out of the room in shocked disgust and I laughed to myself on my lonely couch.

I tried to live on the glory of each drunken party for as long as possible, but was always looking for another opportunity. Kissing Jenna before she passed out at my birthday bash saw me through the summer. Spin-the-bottle at Ruth’s house party made September bearable. In October, at Holly’s Hallowe’en do and with my best friend Claire’s encouragement, I whirled around the Lambrusco-littered rooms in search of a girl called Leah. She was the year below and only slightly pretty, but I’d heard she’d properly come out as bi and I was totally in awe. I found her downing Becks and we kissed with tongues on the couch until she deserted me for a rugby player. Sipping more fruity alcohol, I returned a skinny ginger girl’s gaze and idled up to her with what I thought was a flirtatious line about getting another drink. She admitted that I was the first girl she’d kissed and I cracked lame jokes about popping her lesbian cherry, feeling almost experienced. On the way home with Scott, the boy who gave me flowers for my birthday and would eventually be my platonic date for the sixth-form ball, I invented a story about dating a secret older woman that I couldn’t tell anyone about. I elaborated on my lie, making Matthew younger, female and a supremely attractive teacher stuck in a loveless marriage, until I began to believe it myself. I fell asleep with my clothes on, dreaming about Radclyffe Hall.