the treeand thebird andthe fishand the b e l l

julia barbour

this is the tree that never grewthis is the bird that never flewthis is the fish that never swamthis is the bell that never rang

mot to o f th e c i t y o f g la sgow

All in all I was pretty relieved to have met him, because I was certain by that point that nobody would understand. By all accounts, it was an ordinary day. I’ve been left with the most inconse-quential details of it, like how the sky was a weak off-white, sodden and tearstained, with blank reflections of it pooling in pavement cracks and gutters. It was the summer of my diagnosis, the year of little pink pills and after-school CBT. The afternoon I met him, a group of us had gone to the park in a black, sullen mass. By the stream we made a small circle and began to talk of our fashionable obsession with death, pausing now and again to draw breath and sweep fringes from our eyes. I met him there. A friend of a friend, and six months older; enough to pass for eighteen and be sold cigarettes at the newsagents by the station. His hair was in need of a trim and there were scabs on the knuckle of his left hand. Once intro-duced, he hugged me in that awkward, impersonal way we all did then, and made some joke about me being short. I didn’t think much of him until later. Our stories changed as he took his turn. His,

Him He; I always capitalised his name in my teen-age diaries, as if affording him some divine signif-icance - Him. He pulled the cuffs of his sweatshirt down over his scabbed hands and told us this: ‘My brother’s best friend had an undiagnosed heart condition. Died very suddenly. Literally keeled over in the middle of a match.’ I spoke up first. ‘But how could it be undiag-nosed?’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Shit happens.’ Mute, us self-proclaimed goths began to tug at our own sleeves. Then it rushed out. We all knew the girl in the year above whose mother had bro-ken her neck in a car accident. And the boy who had been quietly ill for months before slipping out of life, every so politely, just as if he’d gone into the next room. Then the girl who’d been stabbed on a bus, whose death had kept at least five therapists in the school’s employ for a year. We’d all known the boy with the illness, seen his skin waste to paper and then mould itself around the fine filigree-work of his skeleton. We still kept an online memorial for the stabbing victim. There

had been school assemblies about their lives, speeches and vague platitudes about how death was like a candle being snuffed out. But I feel that suggests traces. Smoke in the air, the smell of wax. It was less than that. It was too quick to be much like anything at all. Hearing the story about the brother’s best friend with the undiagnosed heart condition - who had literally keeled over - made me think of the way spent wicks sometimes curl back into the soft wax of the candle so they can’t be lit again. The important thing was that I met him there. By the time we walked to the station it was near dusk; we were handing the park over to the older kids who drank cheap beer in the playground and vandalised the swings. He offered me his sweatshirt because he had noticed me shivering. Yes, he said, it was unusually cold, for June anyway. Did I want to join them back at his house? He had an empty and, naturally, he could persuade the newsagent to sell him booze. I was three weeks’ shy of turning fourteen. I told him I’d be there. And that was the day his fingers

began to work at the knots around me.

*

It was a big group that he moved in and I was flattered that they took me under their wing, because my own friends had been avoiding me like the plague - as if what I had was contagious and I’d be the next reason for them to flock to the school hall in black clothes. If I remember the most inconsequential details about the day I met him, then I remember the most inconsequential things about the start of that summer too, alongside the hows and the wheres and the whys - like how diagnoses was a stopper to my friends’ voices and how, all summer, it rained buckets and I felt so alone and invisible I might as well have just stepped off the planet. Once he had the house to himself - which happened a lot, because his father had walked out five years previously and his mother pulled ten hour shifts at work - and invited us over. That day, the rain was so relentless that the kitchen flooded

at home. I had an argument with Dad before I left. He wanted me to stay and bail out the water, and I’m ashamed to say that I cried, fibbed doc-tor’s orders, wriggled my way out of every chore I could on the grounds that I was still fragile. This only felt like half a lie; the unfeeling couldn’t touch me in the daylight hours or during the banality of housework, but it crept up on me in the dark and night-time when the house was silent. Like I said, it rained buckets, but it was still hot, muggy. He’d opened all the windows in his house but the air still had a smothering about it. I wanted to impress him. I was pale, pliant, pretty, close to fainting in the heat. At half past nine the sky was the colour of a bruise and I sat on his desk, elevat-ed, perspiring, mute. His breath was hot and rankled me. It felt as though it had filtered through my lungs and torn holes in my muscles, unraveling bone and sinew until I felt like a collection of separate parts and spares that he had laid out before him with the thought of building a new girl in his own image. My pulse doubled pace to keep up. He knew

more than I did and lifted my face to his, pulled me towards him like I was on strings. It was the clumsiest kiss I could have managed. Flushed face, dry mouth, shaking hands. ‘I like you,’ he said. Those words were still too sincere for me, but my boy was a born liar. My reply trembled and expired on my faltering breath, the stagnant air. ‘Right back at you.’ He let me go, and the benefit of distance was seeing the cruel mouth he’d kissed me with. But even that couldn’t stop the rush those three words had brought; I was fourteen and already convinced I was done with growing up. So it really started there. These, I suppose, are the excuses for the way I am.

*

I remember inconsequential things about the way the sky looked on a June afternoon, the exact wording of an argument about bailing out a

flood, the exact softness of a sweatshirt offered to a shivering girl at least five sizes too small for it. I remember, too, how a boy will wear scabs on his knuckles like jewellery but never bother to explain them, preferring the enigma of distance. I always imagined him punching his bedroom wall, pulver-ising the woodchip and the wallpaper his absentee father had plastered there. When I felt those scabs grate my skin I convinced myself it was for love - as though love was wanting to touch every ugly part of him to every ugly part of me - and love was something I still only knew in lines I cribbed from songs. When people hear my name it’s likely they’ll only remember this about me. So it will always be. These events, at the time, were nothing; like paper painted with water, making only the slightest im-pression. Thinking on them has stained them with colour. At the time, forgetting seemed most impor-tant, and I have neglected, overlooked, misplaced key details. Where did those scabs come from? Why did I never think to ask? Two things remain clear. You brought this - and

all things - upon yourself. And nobody can hear you.

* Two things: I am ill. I am tainted. So it will always be. My weakness was a three-word lie. It only occurred to me not to succumb when it was far too late. After our first meeting he had messaged me and asked me to rate him out of ten. As if completing a survey. I gave him a nine, think-ing more three, but by then I had learned to be coy and coquettish, I had learned to swallow empty words and make myself buoyant with them. I gave him a nine and he held it against me. His bedroom smelled of stolen cider and sweat. The blinds were always down. He had pinned a poster of a page three model above his bed, life-size, so he could lie beneath a woman who, like me, was afloat and silenced by the finger that balanced on the cupid’s bow of her parted mouth. This is how I remember him. A scab on his index finger, grating against my lips as he flattened

his hand. The dead weight of a corpse. Making a cage for him out of my interlocked fingers and wondering - in some part of me that wasn’t raw and open - how much force it takes to bend a spine. All the strength within me, perhaps. The best I could do was to scratch lines that marked the minutes I spent in his grasp. That is his legacy, and for that I award him a ten.

* * *

In our family, it seems that everything is an in-heritance. My aunt likes to believe that everyone is either born with a cup half-full or half-empty, and, according to her, I am unlucky enough to be one of those with the cup half-empty, always draining. I have inherited the things that women before me have longed to cut from their bodies. My inher-itance is of chillblains, of Reynaud’s, of anxiety, of depression, of neurotic excoration. My grand-mother had these gifts shocked out of her, but I have not been so lucky.

From my father’s side of the family, there is the anger. The scratching. I asked my mother why he does it and she said ‘He likes the feeling.’ So I suppose I must too. I’m sure anyone would understand now but, even at age eighteen, I thought that nobody would care, let alone listen. In the case of the boy, there were shrapnel-bits of him everywhere. I took up smoking at fifteen and thought with every drag: I will smoke you out of me. It felt as though he lived in my lungs and all it would take was one whooping cough to be rid of him forever. But everyone knew I had liked him. Everyone knew that he had asked for photos of my body and my hesitation to send them had been the subject of school gossip. I had liked him. He had been my best friend. Even at eighteen, I thought that victims were only the victims of strangers. He had been my best friend, and so many of my firsts - first kiss, first cigarette (which he steadied in my mouth, lit with a match, and finished off when I began to cough). Witness to the first time I got blackout drunk, the time he carried me indoors

from the snow and bundled me in jackets, rubbed my hands until they were warm. First love, maybe. And in these firsts I can think of him fondly, but in every other memory of him there is nothing to be admired. Raised voices, crying. Him phoning in the dead of night and threatening suicide. And me talking him into staying alive. At eighteen the summer was hot and muggy again, and after hours of arguing with my dad I left, and spent the hours in-between work living out of a suitcase in my mother’s spare room. I convinced myself that the thresholds of my two homes had become chokeholds, and that the only solution was to put three hundred miles between myself and the place. It was just after five in the morning when I left. I was exhausted, weak, and cried at every stop. The sun began to rise just as I slipped out of the Midlands. I could only think of my new home as Elsewhere. I started to drift off to sleep before the border and convinced myself that the low mists on the fields outside were clouds, and the lights of passing cars that streaked across the windows were

falling stars, and I was leaving them all behind as I ascended. And so the summer of my re-diagnosis came around.

*

Months of weeping and self-imposed imprison-ment and desperate, dawdling walks up and down a local bridge under the watch of the Samaritans placard went by before I was back on the little pink pills and the CBT, and onto a new set of little white pills that went up in ten milligram doses each month and slowly cranked the crooked cogs of my brain back into place. After the first prescription-slip I phoned my mother from a bus stop near the doctor’s surgery and told her, tearfully, how the past six years had failed, how I was back to square one, back on the medication again, and why couldn’t I function like everyone else? It was genetic, she said. I had come into my full inheritance at last. So she told me the only thing she could; that I was loved. Like the

doctor, she framed my pain in euphemisms. How often do you feel like you don’t want to be here? they always asked me, never choosing the simpler, but crueller, suicidal. I always said the same thing, that I wished existence was as easy to blow out as a candle. I didn’t want to be dead, but I didn’t want to live either. Silly things set me off, like any poor bastard un-fortunate enough to share the boy’s name. I gave a mouse that had infested my kitchen the same name and then caught him in a trap, watched him die a slow and squealing death. Then I sat in the tray of the shower and cried as I lathered shampoo into my hair. I felt sorry for the mouse, but more sorry for myself. I had to go back to the doctor every month, and the five-minute appointments went like this: ‘How are you feeling?’ ‘Uh…I don’t know.’ And so every month, every pill-strip, felt like a relapse. I went four months clean but still had a habit of scratching, picking, hitting, any form of pain that wasn’t as neat as the blade I had tried

to cure myself with for six years. I incised my skin to let out what was beneath: I will cut you out of me. But I wasn’t always sure it was the boy with the scabbed knuckles. I think, in the end, it was me, all the ugly bits I thought he’d loved, all the pain and anger and miserable, inherited bits of my brain. I wanted to carve those bits out and let the skin heal, leave me shiny and pink and new again. Healthy. I hated to be touched. But the pills and the talk-ther-apy were slowly starting to work. The last story to tell is this. Maybe it was inten-tional on his part. In this day and age it’s easy to track someone down. Despite deleting his number, his presence possessed my phone up to ten times a day with a shrill, unwelcome beeping. What would you do if I was there with you? he would ask, from time to time. Then: I’m visiting today. Can we meet up? The new city was my safe space and then, one day, it was soiled by his footfall. He saw me in the street and smiled, made a point of stopping, did not acknowledge the miles and years I had put behind us, the things I had excoriated and destroyed in his name.

‘Long time, no see,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ I replied, unfeeling. He motioned to my hair. ‘Since when?’ The sharp, new-cut bob brushed past my ears as I dipped my blushing face to the ground. ‘Just fancied a change.’ ‘Did you do it yourself ?’ ‘No.’ ‘It suits you.’ ‘Maybe.’ My doctor had referred to the feeling as fight or flight. All I knew was that I was a bird, and I was afloat, doing my best to smile and show all my teeth and keep my trembling body still. ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘I should be getting on. We should get a drink sometime,’ he added, with a wink. ‘Maybe,’ I repeated. He lingered for a second, looked me up and down, maybe thought about pestering me further. But then he smiled again and bade me farewell. Walked down the street. Was swallowed up in crowds. I wished he’d get hit by a bus. He hasn’t

bothered me since. I kept walking. Kept on. Down the cobbled streets and the wynds and found myself at the foot of a hill, which I began to climb. I had to shake the prickling of his gaze from my skin. Birdsong sounded from the trees. Somewhere, a church bell rang. And the air hummed with life, and I came across a pool with rippling water that ebbed to the same rhythm as the breeze on the back of my neck. Like being doused in cold water, the world clari-fied. I knelt, and let my fingertips drift in the silken algae-water of the pond. There were two hundred scars on my body and perhaps darning my skin had made me more broken than whole, but there were parts of it unhidden that had feeling in them yet. There were days to come. Days to wake and eat and talk and be better. Cold water. My vision sharpened, cleared, and I knew, in an instant, where and who I was.

a story about some things I wanted to say, and some I didn’t.with thanks to e, for being the first to read it

www.jhb-r.tumblr.com- julia