Since moving to west Sheffield in January 2024, I feel like I’ve seen more rainbows than in the rest of my life put together. No doubt there’s an element of confirmation bias at play, but I think it’s also about local weather and geography.

Our house is 170 metres above sea level on the side of a big hill, creating views to the north and east. It’s also a lot wetter here than where we used to live. As I understand it (using that word loosely), wet air from the west is forced up over the Pennines, over our heads, and condenses as rain to our north/east. When the rain’s followed by sun, we see a rainbow.

In an effort to understand the science a bit better, I’ve started collecting all our rainbow photos in one place. Click each one to see a little mini-map showing the supposed location of the rainbow if it was a solid object, based on the camera position, sun angle and elevation data from Open-Meteo. It should update automatically when we see another one.

April–September

October–December

The station at Elephant and Castle has bleak views of high-rises, touched by the domestic - the tall white building with trees growing at the top. The old shopping centre with its sparse survivors - the girdle shop by the escalators, the kebab shop on the ground floor near Tesco - has been closed down.

The regeneration project had been upstaged by the new pandemic. We rode in on a misty Saturday in November, and came out on the side-street next to the new shopping centre, like a pristine, empty town in itself with signs advertising the locked-down shops. Our breath created personal whiteness in front of us. A man weaved towards the main road, periodically screaming FUCK YOU MAN. Under the overpass a woman was sitting on the pavement, her back against some railings, staring rigidly forward, wearing open-toe sandals.

We stood on a piazza outside Pret and watched a line shuffle efficiently, bringing people to coffees, while a man with a begging sign sat on the ground and watched them. We laughed at an advert for a Christmas sandwich and a foamy Christmas coffee. A man swung out of the mist, wailing a shanty. Xav said that it was the worst of both worlds - sterile gentrification and the deprived still wandering through, past the boarded-up site where local businesses had lived and died, past the christmassy face of Pret and the silent line of consumers. I said,

"Maybe Andi’s coming. Hanno said ‘We’re on the bus.’”

Out of the mist we saw two tall people cross the road - it was two tall men: Hanno and Billy.

We said hello. Billy and Xav took out flasks of coffee, Hanno said that the regeneration of Elephant and Castle was the worst of both worlds - sterile gentrification, etc. He gestured to my coat and said,

”Is this new? I like it!”

I said, “I don’t know about the buttons.”

He said, “No, it’s nice! The buttons make you look like an old sea captain. They make you look like a rotarian. I think that, empirically speaking, those buttons are racist. I mean, speaking about empire. People are going to see those buttons and expect you to start colonising them.”

We walked to the bridge, dividing into pairs, joining and dividing again, and stopped to make our official sighting of the yellowed furbelows of the houses of parliament - Dirty Ben. Hanno said they were a simulacrum of gothic architecture crowded onto a Victorian steel frame where their bulk wasn’t structurally necessary - “It’s very postmodern.”

“That’s why brutalism -” said Billy, and Hanno interrupted loudly,

“Brutalism is such a meme! Every crypto-normie twitter guy follows that brutalist fanboy account -”

Billy’s eyes went cold as he waited till he could speak again. He was wearing Adidas trainers, electric-blue joggers, a down-filled puffer jacket and a beanie.

When we got to St James’s Park, Hanno had a fact about Duck Island Cottage and Billy had a fact about the Governor of Duck Island and Xav had a fact about the poet Stephen Duck and his wife, Sarah Big Duck. I’m from London, but the way I live hasn’t involved information. I once dreamed I lived in Admiralty Arch and was making Big Money.

From St James’s Park to Green Park we looked at the birds: a pelican plucking its elastic breast like a lute with its huge bill, tufted ducks, mallards, pochards, moorhens. Hanno read from the information boards and declaimed the species. Billy knew their names already and dropped them in a casual way.

“I love the herons,” said Hanno, pointing, “I love the … cormorants.”

None of us corrected him. I for one felt profoundly embarrassed that he was in the wrong.

In Kensington Gardens, the boys opened a bottle of wine.

“It’s time now, isn’t it?” said Hanno.

“It’s time,” said Billy. They took out separate cups so they didn't have to drink out of their coffee cups. We walked as they drank. Hanno’s phone rang. He had a short conversation - yes, eight o’clock, perfect - and hung up.

“That was Andi’s mum.”

I said, “She calls you?”

“Yes - we’re all very tight. In a way that’s been one of the hardest parts of the whole thing: our parents have been talking among themselves, kind of having committee meetings, and if we have dinner or anything they keep bringing it up, and kind of insisting that it has to happen…”

“How have things been?”

“It looks like we’re not breaking up at the moment,” he said. “I don’t want to sound too certain. We’re together and we’re taking it very slowly … You know in your twenties, you rush into things, you pursue this career while caning it every night, get a forty-year mortgage ... I was going to ask her to marry me. I’d booked a hotel in Dubrovnik - you know, King’s Landing, I was going to propose, and then lockdown happened ... But it turns out she probably wouldn’t have said yes.”

I’d never been out of that side of Kensington Gardens, by the Russian embassy. We walked down a street of diplomatic houses: imposingly large, detached and set squarely in their plots, some of them were beautiful, most of all the Slovenian embassy. The boys were excited, running to and fro across the road, exchanging facts about the houses and the nations they represented. As Xav said later, it was nice to see them happy. We stopped in front of the Nepalese embassy, which was in a bit of a state, with an overgrown hedge and wires hanging loose from the building. The boys got another bottle of wine in Whole Foods when we were buying lunch.

“I know, you two are so good … we’ve been having a few lockdown dinners, just with Billy. We’re his bubble, and anyway it’s hardly a risk, he doesn’t see anyone, his girlfriend dumped him … Anyway, on his birthday we had a few people over, but Andi had to send them away. We had dinner, and drank all this wine, did all this coke, then I brought out the killepitsch, and Andi had to text everyone from upstairs and say, sorry, but you have to leave because Hanno’s being sick everywhere. She was really salty with me all the next day. She said, there's a disgusting stain on the tiles, what did you do? And I said, what do you think I am? I didn't poo on the floor, I vomited on the floor."

Billy said he’d been sick too when he got home. They’d been eating beetroot risotto so it came out red.

"I hope you don’t mind that we didn’t invite you,” said Hanno to Xav. “But you’re so observant, and anyway you have each other. Billy doesn't see anyone apart from me."

There was a certain contempt in the way he said this, and contempt in the way Billy ignored it.

We ate pizza sitting on a tree trunk, and walked on till we stood in front of the Albert Memorial. It looked bland, with its gold glimmer and top-heavy gazebo on a shallow plinth. We’d walked from empire to empire, from Parliament to Buckingham Palace and now here. Every corner had statues representing a continent with its emblems and vassals: Europe was represented by four people in crowns and a big cow.

The Royal Artillery Memorial. The Wellington Arch. The Commonwealth Memorial Gates. We walked back through Hyde Park and Green Park, talking about history. I was starting to think Hanno couldn’t hack it like he used to. His voice was getting slurred and his face looked fleshy and old.

Billy said, “What shall we do after this?”

“Get some beers and come back to ours. We can watch Star Wars… ”

“I think me and Xav are going to go home.”

“I think for someone like me it’s good to hear these things that no one ever says… she says these really devastating things but it’s good for me to know how she feels. And at least we’re talking. She said I used to be the best thing in her life, but now I’m the worst thing. So I hope I can go back to that ... I told my parents, and they said, the things that she’s complaining about are probably the same things she used to like about you - you know, I talk a lot, I party all the time. Last week we’d nearly decided to split up for good, and she was saying, it’s not working, but then we went for such a nice meal, and I was making her laugh, we were making all our old jokes, and she said, I'm having such a nice time! Why do you have to make everything so confusing? ..."

****

Billy and Xav and I went to see Andi in the flat that she and Hanno had bought together. I felt like I was touring the remains of a civilisation, with its bare walls and colossal monuments: the sofa they had bought and argued about, the mid-century table. When they moved in, the walls had been an inhospitable blue, but they’d been painted since then. We went and looked at the plant pot in the back yard.

Andi handed us tea in mugs that looked like flint, with a characteristic expression she had when she was handing you something, as if she was about to be sick. She had that kind of beauty which could only be thrown into relief by vomiting. The kitchen was finished, and perfected. There wasn’t a single thing that looked grotty, or out of place, or only functional.

We went and looked upstairs. In the bathroom I had a look at the tiles but couldn’t see any stains. We went in the bedroom. I remembered when she came for drinks at ours when we first moved in, and looked at the heap of cushions and mats that we slept on at the time. She and I had jumped up and down on them silently to assess their quality. I remembered a time when she and Billy and Xav lay on a bed together because they'd had too much ketamine and couldn't move or speak. And the mattress that Billy had disposed of when he and his girlfriend broke up and he had to move to a cheaper flat. He couldn’t wait a month for the council to collect it, so he chopped it up like a body and distributed it in bins all round Lewisham.

The heat brought out a crisis of insect life in the flat - spiders crawled across blank stretches of wall, or would be revealed in cupboards, or dislodge themselves slowly from piles of paper or clothes. Heat had compromised our drone bodies - we had both been taking a lot of days off work. I started to feel young again, but with a mind and internal organs that were still soiled.

Michael came round for dinner and talked for a long time. I was sticking to my chair, and tried to drink water. Xav drank beers, smoked weed and had to be sick. He came back and sat down, and was inadvertently sick again the next time he opened his mouth.

“Whoops,” said Michael. Xav smiled politely. It was time for Michael to go.

Michael was sitting opposite me, Xav on the sofa between us, a broken wood frame with planks coming off it and a cushion balanced across. I finished my pack of cigarettes while Michael was talking. Xav had fallen asleep. I said,

“I think it’s our bed time now.”

In the night it was terribly hot. The surface of my skin was suffused with heat, and my whole body felt inhabited by it, swelling up against my boundaries. But I had to contain it. I kept flopping over, turning around and trying to find a cool bit of mattress. He kicked me punctually every time. In the morning hard light flung itself through the window - by 06:30 we were well awake. We slyly peeped and met each other’s eyes, seeing if they were open, then winked.

“Hello.”

*****

In an intensely febrile moment, I was walking down the street, trying to make it to the shops. I passed a woman wearing layers and layers of clothes, seeming indifferent though sweat was dripping off the ends of her hair. It was a public holiday, but that rang false. There isn’t public or private any more, we're much more like animals.

I’d met up with the two of them in the park. I said,

“I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.”

“That’s alright,” he said. “It didn’t become you, but that’s alright.”

“Do you think it doesn’t matter?”

“I don’t know. I guess I thought I could do what I like.”

“So you liked it.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t care about me at all, do you?”

Michael said,

“The thing is, maybe you think that I could be anyone’s. But the issue is more that I could be anyone. You don’t even know me.”

I wasn’t really sure of the point of this meeting.

Michael said,

“You don’t get me.” I looked at the two of them. “And maybe this time you don’t get anyone.”

“I just didn’t think it was that important.”

He said,

“Sometimes I can be a bit cruel myself.”

But I was going to the shop to get cans. Three armoured police vehicles stationed along the way. They’d opened the road where they’d shut the road where the police had killed a man by restraining him a week or two before. Black and yellow police tape had come down; by then the flowers were well dead. The sun set its foot on the back of my neck and trod down.

*****

We woke up again and as we lay in bed it got darker, as if day was an option that hadn’t been taken up. The side of his face that I leaned my head against was in shadow. His eye was a round pool like a rabbit’s eye, with one square of reflected shine on it. The room appeared in abstract shapes: two pillars of grey around white, one dark narrowing bar. I closed my eyes, saw grey and my headrush ached.

Clouds with jagged but blurred dark ridges premised sheer patches of cloud molten with light. Against this turbulent sky an equally disturbed landscape pressing obtrusively upwards crowded itself with diverse metallic shapes. We walked along by the river, all dressed in brown and grey. I could see it as a venn diagram of sky (grey), river (brown) and buildings (brown and grey).

We’d picked Michael up at London Bridge; he was waiting for us when we came through the barriers at Tooley Street.

He said,

“It’s not that I want to say these terrible things. I just don’t know who else I can talk to.”

“At least you told the truth.”

“It’s a relief that it’s not as hot now.”

“I’d like to say I was grateful for it, but I wasn’t.”

“You can’t live like that, in a constant state of exposure.”

“But it’ll come back.”

The sun represents cruelty and ego, and this hostility to life will go on till we lose our islands to a swollen, salty, arid sea.

“I do want to come! I’ve been wanting to go for ages. There are just too many reasons not to - it’s so hot, and the train will be crowded and I’m seeing my aunt next week... If it was any other day it would be fine. I wish -”

“It would be nice if you came,”

“I want to! But there are too many problems! Shit. I’ve got too many thoughts in my head!”

“I’m not going to put any pressure on,”

“You’re going to have such a nice time!”

“I have to go now. If you’re sure you don’t want to come...”

“Have a nice day!” she shrieked.

The door shut behind him.

Robbie cycled twenty minutes to the station and took his bike on the train. He hoped that Billy would make it - Billy had wanted to start an hour later but Robbie had thought they should set off in good time. And yes, at the next stop Billy was there, looking dishevelled and possibly unshowered. He lifted his bike aboard and sat down, a white mask like a pair of underpants stretched across his chin. Billy was large, and so handsome that he used to get jobs off it when he was a student, working in trendy bars, standing around in expensive shops. He found his appearance rewarding but secretly feared that the joke was on him. Once people knew him they’d think, that fool, why has he been so privileged?

He was pleased when he saw that Robbie was by himself, without Eudora. He wouldn’t have minded if she had come, but he thought it was even better that she hadn’t.

They got off at Ashford - it was still early, quiet and not too warm - and cycled past the outlet village, the brownfield sites and estates of family homes on the road out, brown walls behind frothy verges. The sun shone on the A2042. The bike lane was spacious and empty. The cars going past at intervals sounded like respiration - giant and soothing, rip and exhale and fade. The sky was blue and muggy with exhaust fumes, the leaves had a tint of sky.

When they were out in flat farmland they could cycle next to each other. The road had no camber and petered into grass on either side. The fields were studded with sheep. Hench lambs barrelled into their mothers and plundered their teats, nearly knocking them down.

“This reminds me of where I grew up,” said Robbie. “This kind of flat, agricultural landscape. But there weren’t as many sheep.”

“I grew up around sheep,” said Billy. “These ones are ready for slaughter.”

Such big boys.

“I meant to tell you - good news on the Astralopam project,” said Billy. “I’ve had an email from Megan, and she basically said it was a great idea and they’d definitely encourage an application…”

There had been a few incidents at Billy’s last couple of jobs - the time he’d decided to tell his manager what he thought of her, the time that he’d published some inaccuracies that turned out to be legally comprising, the time he trained a bot to do his work but the bot betrayed him. Now he was going freelance, trying to get funding to investigate a drug being stockpiled by the American government. Robbie had offered to help with writing a grant application, and over a few months the project had changed and extended in subtle ways till the whole thing implicitly depended on him. At times when Robbie was less involved and the project slowed, Billy would get anxious about money.

“Cool, I think your proposal’s pretty strong,” said Robbie.

“Yeah, it’s nearly there, we just need to tighten it up a bit,” said Billy. “We should firm up some dates - you can just schedule something in on google calendar - I’m totally happy to work around whatever you’ve got going on.”

For Robbie, being on his bike was a pleasure but also a torment as he couldn’t check his phone. There was work, and he had some issues with his landlord, who would only ever make contact with him and ignored Eudora. Men responded well to Robbie. They found him reassuring, and expected him to help them with things, which he did. The tire and the tarmac created the perfect resistance between them. He pushed forward with automatic movements that felt almost effortless: with the necessity of true momentum. He often felt that he was pushing people forward, with his well-developed sense of necessity. Billy, Eudora…

They came to the road that runs alongside the sea. It lay far off, past the depleted grass of the esplanade and the brown, flat beach of New Romney. They looked at its stillness that they knew was lurching with power, a grey line like a limit when really it was just getting started. Billy felt what he always felt at first sight of it: hostility. So this is the sea we’ve heard so much about. Robbie thought it looked nice in the sun.

Billy hadn’t had any breakfast and started cycling intently down the Grand Parade, towards the celebrated sandwich shack at Dungeness.

* * *

They were having a wonderful day and nothing was missing. She checked her phone. She wasn’t going to send any messages that might betray anxiety and boredom - those esteemed colleagues. There was a little drip of panic in her chest, pulse racing like a horse. She put down the cup of coffee - her third cup. It was the same every weekend, but the desire was too strong to overcome till the palpitations had already started.

She thought she should make the most of the day. It would be too hot, anyway, cycling in this weather. It would be nicer to go to the park. She imagined saying to Robbie later - “Such a chill day.” She picked up her phone and checked the sound was on. There were no new messages. Guessing at times, based on the National Rail App and google maps, they were probably there by now.

It was hot and stuffy and the windows wouldn’t open. The landlord was ignoring her messages. He didn’t respond, so she left more and more voicemails, but no result. Time dragged, it yawned out, then sometimes she sat in one place and it burned a hole in her mind and two hours had gone past. Her armpits felt sweaty.

She stood up - it was imperative she should at least stand up - and went to the fridge, opened the door, closed it. She started to eat a biscuit, then spat out the masticated lump into the bin. In the other room, her phone made a volley of pings. Billy had posted some pictures to the group: one of him and Robbie smiling at a picnic table, one of Billy looking large and naked, wearing very short shorts, in front of a lighthouse.

Everyone on the thread replied <3 and Well done, lads! They sent pictures of themselves in nature. This is me at the shack when I went to Dungeness last year! This is me when I went to Snowdonia, me when I went to Dorset. I hate you all, she posted, in her mind.

The trip to Dungeness would be something endlessly referred back to by Billy. Anything in service of the myth of his enjoyment. She opened the fridge again and took out a bottle of wine. “For the pain,” she said out loud as she poured a glass.

It hit her quickly. Her head was full of wet towels, dishwater on the brain. There wasn’t much left in the bottle so she finished it. This is hedonistic, she thought. This is almost as glamorous as having friends.

You can go any time. You can go any time and it will be just as good. The deluge of notifications had tailed off, but she muted it anyway.

You’ve been to places, she told herself. You’ve gone on trips. But her efforts to insinuate herself into the good times were still futile. “Were you there?” people would say lazily, reminiscing. Yes, I was there. Sulking in the backdrop.

“You ugly bitch, I’ll kill you,” said Eudora. “I’ll kill you every day of your life.”

* * *

A cruise-liner rested on the edge of the sea, bloated and weightless. The stress of work and London did seem far away. Despite the drugged atmosphere Robbie’s mind was clear, holding the featureless sky and not much else. Was this clarity, or was it the opposite? Moments of rest seemed like a deception - he was deceiving himself that it was a good idea to stop thinking about things, but wasn’t he at the top of his game when his mind was ticking over, meeting new problems as they came, and before they came?

They’d had lunch - Billy had extra chips. Robbie’s puritanism didn’t allow extra portions, but they both had an ice-cream after they’d seen Prospect Cottage. Standing in the garden, half aware of bright flowers at ankle height, they’d seen someone who wasn’t Derek Jarman hiding behind the blinds. They talked about which lighthouse they preferred - Robbie liked the older one that looked like a black pudding. Billy liked the newer one, with white and black stripes. They had paddled in the sea. Now they were sitting on the light-coloured shingle, warm and dry.

“Sorry to talk business,” said Billy - he wanted Robbie to put him in touch with a friend of his who might be able to help with some data for the project. Their bikes were next to them on the beach, lying on their sides looking broken and desolate, but they’d be good to go as soon as they stood up. They had a talk about lube. “Lube is great,” said Billy. “You can’t use too much lube. There’s no such thing.”

Robbie checked his phone - his landlord had texted, and asked him to tell Eudora to stop calling him. Billy waited while Robbie went through his emails and replied to them all - Robbie liked to get things done. He wished no-one would ever message him, but it was like holding back the tides. He checked his phone again. His sister wanted to know if he could help her boyfriend with finding a job - maybe in his organisation?

Billy was anxious about money - he had broken up with his girlfriend, a heartbreaking decision, but she had paid most of the rent and now things were difficult for him.

“Dude, no, it was so good,” said Billy, remembering a party he went to for Mack’s birthday. “It was this big house, they had a pool, it was so chill, all just hanging out, good people, good food...”

Billy was generous in his assessments of other people, as he wanted people to be generous with him.

“I used to love going to the beach with my parents,” said Robbie. “They had a beach hut. Actually, me and my sister were always quite bored.”

“Speaking of … dude, we should head.”

Robbie liked to remember the afternoons with his family, and the contempt he had felt for the whole ritual at the time. It felt good to be in relation to it, it felt good to be away. That was what you got from time with a friend - the understanding of coming together freely and going your different ways, a fundamental non-dependence. Perhaps the advantage of friendship was in its limits. It was good to be outdoors with someone who didn’t love you.

Billy was used to a general uneasiness, but the contentment that overlaid it that afternoon was warm and genuine. There was even satisfaction in the mistaken route and the sweat of the long cycle back. The experiences and the bonds he cultivated felt valid: it had been a nice day. They got on the train at Ashford and spread out across a four seater, with a few tins and a bag of crisps. A few more comments pinging in on the chat.

Billy felt all the relief and the achievement of having had a nice day.

“J-Crew? Me and Liv are ready to go out now.”

“Wait a minute.”

“Do you like having your own bedroom, J-Crew?”

“It’s beautiful.”

It was: a double bed with fresh sheets and a high mattress and diaphanous curtains covering the window to the narrow garden at the back. Children were jumping on a trampoline in the garden next door.

Down on the pier she said to herself, I can see a pink rock out there that looks like a whale.

“Are you enjoying your ice-cream, J-Crew?”

“It’s delicious.”

“Am I a good host?”

“You’re the best.”

On the street, she said to herself, there was a jewelled turd covered with flies shining blue and green which unclenched like a fist and showed itself when we stepped over it, not unlike London.

***

There was a mirror in the bedroom. Standing on a chair, so she could start with her legs, I wish I had a mask, she told herself. Like a venetian mask, like an animal’s head, and I’d just look at my body.

“- so I asked if she wanted to buy one, cos everyone else was, and she said no and she was kind of a dick about it. Obviously nobody has to buy my stuff, I don’t want anyone to feel obliged, but she could have looked at it properly and told me whether she liked it or not, or shown some kind of interest - like, follow on instagram or something. Are you going to get one, J-Crew?”

“Yeah, but probably not today, I might just get it off the website.”

“It’ll work out cheaper if you buy it now, you won’t have to pay postage.”

“Yeah. But I don’t really want to carry it back because my bag’s already really full.”

“I designed this one for you, with the sparrows because I know they’re your favourite. If you don’t want to carry it back, I’ll post it tomorrow. You don’t have to use the website.”

“Maybe. I don’t have any money on me right now.”

“There’s a cash machine down the road, J-Crew.”

I’m trapped with a monster, she told herself. An egotist’s lair, glistening with trinkets and reflective surfaces. All the photos on the walls were of the same person. All those beady eyes, all looking at each other. She counted seven pictures on the wall of the spare bedroom (and only one had Liv in it). I’m going to count the rest tomorrow morning, she decided, when I have the house to myself. Then I’ll text and tell him about it.

***

“Was she always this much of a dick?”

“You know she was.”

“I know, but I just mind it more now.”

“You keep inviting her, and she’s the same every time. Just don’t invite her.”

“Have you noticed that she keeps texting, the whole time she’s been here? Sometimes I just want to be like, say it to my face.”

***

“Liv, have you made coffee?”

“There’s none left. Sorry Cords.”

I had three cups before they came down, she said to herself. But it’s the least they could do, to provide me with a few cups of coffee. When I come all this way, and spend all that money, it’s the least they could do.

***

“- and she kept - she kept showing me the mirror, like I was a dog having its face shoved into its own faeces so it won’t poo in the house any more! I had to just close my eyes!”

“I think it looks nice, it suits you. You look great, I like your shorts, Cordy.”

“You’re always full of flattery for me.”

***

In the afternoon they sat in the garden.

“Liv’s been gone ages - she must be doing her poo. I thought women weren’t meant to take as long! Maybe we should just go without her.”

“Does she love it when you tell me these things?”

“Liv, we were just talking about you doing a poo.”

“Fucks sake, Cordy,” said Liv, sitting down.

“She always does this! You always do this! Every time someone goes to the toilet: are they doing a poo? Are they doing a poo?”

“Oh no! I’m a terrible host! Am I a bad host, J-Crew?” A pause. “Shall we go to the beach?”

“Just a minute.”

She went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The closer to me you get, she thought, the uglier I am. I’m getting very close. From downstairs she heard Cordy’s voice say:

“Maybe J-Crew is doing a poo.”

And Liv said,

“Maybe we should go without her.”

***

The sky was misty blue and peach, and a fat white sun like a moon put a bloated light on the water. It intensified to a fierce, lucid spot which they looked at from the cliff, sitting on matted clumps of cut grass, loose and grey. A man was looking for some keys that he had dropped in the grass.

“- she said it would be two weeks till it worked and she gave me this bag of condoms - there were 26 condoms in the bag, and she was like, is this going to be enough? And when she put the scalpel in I could feel it wriggling around in my arm, even though it didn't hurt, and there was this millipede writhing across the wall right by my head, I had, like, synaesthesia -”

“Ew, can I see? Can I touch it? I’m glad I don’t have to modify my hormones, but I guess you just love dick. I hope you enjoyed your 26 condoms, J-Crew.”

A baby and its family were sitting near them. Liv had gone to play with the baby. They leaned back with their weight on their hands and watched.

“Do you think the baby’s doing a poo?”

“It probably is.”

On the horizon line the sky was a pale citric orange, a glass of orange juice held up against the night’s blues.

I woke up and rolled into a deep gulf of misery, as if I’d been sleeping on the precipice and waking up had knocked me in. Tears were running down my face, for no reason that I could think of. The world was absent of any detail, any information apart from this terrible despair, which was blank, like there was no need for a reason.

“I feel so bad,” I said.

“So do I.”

That came as a pleasant surprise - I hadn’t expected him to be feeling the same. I hadn’t expected anything. The world was filling itself in around me. He looked bad - his skin, his eyes, his sickly expression: suffering but friendly. His hair looked bad too. Actually, it did me good to see my inner state mirrored. Like seeing a chimp in the zoo when I was a chimp myself - seven years of age. I put my hand on the glass and the chimp did it too, palm to palm, touching in a way, and this foiled connection made me happy at the time and has made me sad ever since. 

He was on the floor with his head on a pillow that I’d thrown there, though sometimes we did fall asleep lying on the same bed or sofa. His attitude was limp like an invalid, but it seemed self-conscious. I was interested in the chemical nature of my emotions. At first I’d been worried that I’d tapped into some fundamental truth underlying everything, something I’d been ignoring this whole time. But my heart started to lift. He started crying - he turned over to wipe his face on the pillow.

“We just really need to do something nice today. I just really want to be positive.” 

He started looking at trains on his phone. The memories of every excellent day we had ever spent together flowed into me like physical strength. 

“I just really need to eat something but I can’t.” 

We’d got takeaway the night before but we never opened it. It was still on the counter, like a packed lunch lovingly prepared by someone’s mum. My mother took care of me studiously and loved me diligently, like an assignment. I liked the way he always looked up transport and worked out where we needed to go - he really pulled his weight that way. 

“Okay, I just don’t want to miss it -”

“Yeah, I’m nearly ready -”

“We need to get on, now -”

“I know, just one minute -”

He didn’t want to throw away the joint - nothing was more important to him at that time, it could have been glued to his fingers. We were in the underpass, trains reverberating the damp concrete.

As it happens I was right, we barely made it: jumping in through the doors when they almost closed on us, coming in hard like someone jostling you to start a fight, I had to push back, I was sweating, shaking, I really hadn’t needed to run, trying to catch my breath, almost fell into the seat as we started moving, as the crumbling fag-end of London stepped away and the train started its long march towards freedom. I saw a graffiti on a wall that said ANUS, like a secret message, like an accusation. We slid past and left it behind us.

“I don’t know what it is that means you need to smoke at the exact moment - the exact moment -” I realised I was crying. At the same time I realised that if I didn’t have a friend like him today then I didn’t have anything. The train shuddered to hold us. I looked out of the window. The sky and the town and the country shuddered to hold the train. 

Tantalising green was all around us but we were stuck on its borders and couldn’t get in. I didn’t see why we couldn’t walk across the fields. Morally, I didn’t see it - on a practical level there was barbed wire and hedges along the side of the road. Even the tall dark trees were part of a deliberate palisade. It was as if we had accelerated into spring, pressed fast forward on the seasons and travelled to spring’s native country, but even here we were choked off, and we couldn’t find the footpath.

“It’s strange to me that you’d say that you know the way -” I said.

“I do know the way, it just took me a minute. And I didn’t notice you helping -”

“I didn’t come out here saying that I knew the way.”

“So you basically expect me to conduct you around. Have you ever noticed? It’s not the behaviour of an adult.”

“I don’t even know why we came here. If we’re not going to do it right, it’s better not to do it.”

“Okay, cool.”

He walked on quickly. I stopped to identify an interesting leaf on my app. The mud path was dry, like my throat, I had a sensual desire for blackberries, hazelnuts, dew - all the comestibles of nature that should have been there, hidden behind tiredness and anger and the way things had turned out. 

I got to the end of the path and went over a style. I heard little bleats. He was leaning on a fence, staring at the lambs.

“You can’t look at them and be sad,” he said.

“No,” I agreed. We both started crying. The lambs made thin bleats and a ewe bellowed back in the voice less of a man than a god - some fruity god, drunk and horny. The lambs were running in pairs, on wooly diagonal legs. They looked at us with their pharaoh eyes and laughing smiles. We smiled back. 

“Look, there’s another sheep and it has a lamb -”

“It looks angry.” 

“It’s not -” 

It lowered its head.

“Oh my God!”

It thundered towards us. 

Jessie’s parents live outside Taunton, so the plan had been to go down the day before to be in time for the funeral the next morning. They’d booked a room at a hostel for her friends. It would feel bad to say it was inconvenient, but if things are hard that inevitably plays out in terms of what happens. I’m not the sort of person that lets logistical problems hold me back. We’d booked places on a coach, we just hadn’t thought about how long it would take to get to Hammersmith, but there was actually another coach that left at midnight and got there at four in the morning, so that was the new plan. He said he was nervous and did I want to do some MD? And that - the suggestion itself - made us both relax, and dissolved the tension and the hesitancy that had been building up. 

I watched him grind the crystals nice and fine but there was still a roughness I could feel, and a roughness to the whole experience. There was a smile that went through my bones. The decision had made itself. Now it was irreversible. The evening was opening up. I could feel all its possibilities, the way it was hanging in time, like a ruby on a necklace. My eyes swallowing everything. The same blood coursed through both of us: a reciprocal transfusion like the decision had made us blood brothers. 

I wasn’t thinking directly about the way that we might get judged. I didn’t care what people said about me. You’ve got to live according to your lights. That’s not to say you’ll always do the right thing. Something that makes sense at the time might seem different later on. 

Like when Nice Jen’s boyfriend told her he cheated on her then left her, then she lost her job all in the same week. She texted me and said what had happened and I replied, 

Ah!!! That sounds shit

Stay strong

I didn’t follow it through beyond that because at the time it seemed it would be wrong to give into my own curiosity and, almost, glee that a thing like that could happen to someone as good as her. So I let the air clear, then about a year later I messaged and she never replied, and she never spoke to me again. A while after that I understood that I shouldn’t have been thinking about my own motives, I should have been thinking about how she felt and what she needed from me. So then the fact of her not speaking to me and even telling third parties that she disliked me seemed fair. But I still held some rancour towards Nice Jen.  

“Shall we do some more?” 

It seemed like an incredible idea.

“I think it’s better that we didn’t go. I just think, if you’re not in the right frame of mind, it’s kinder not to -”

“If you go from a place of inauthenticity -”

“You’ve got to be feeling authentic. That’s a basic requirement -”

“And just cos you feel bad doesn’t mean you’re doing a bad thing. It actually means you’re a good person because you’re thinking about whether you should feel bad.”

“What’s actually bad is what my cousin did. Did you know? My cousin refused to go and see our Gran when she was in hospital, and she had cancer, and she kept asking to see him but he wouldn’t go, he said he was scared, apparently, and then she died and that was it.”

“That’s really bad. How old was he?”

“Eight.”

“He sounds like a dick. But this isn’t like that. I mean, she’s already dead...”

“It’s not like we’re offending her.”

We crumpled at the edge of a field. It wasn’t a particularly nice one - the grass was scratchy and it smelled of manure. His face was going in spasms and I was like him, I could feel the backwash of every chemical in my system, rinsing me, wringing me out. I hadn’t eaten in 24 hours, I was weak, burning like a wet fire. I had the take-away in my rucksack. But when I opened my bag I saw the lid had broken off the tupperware and inside my bag was now a sea of noodles, like those tubs of worms that fishermen have. I almost started to cry looking at it, and he said “What’s the matter?” Then he looked in my bag and screamed “NO!” 

I put my hand in the bag and closed my fist on the worms. 

“I’m not doing that, I’m not going to do it!” There was panic in his voice.

“You’re going to have to.”

I didn’t want to either. I almost couldn’t bear it - eating like a pig out of a bucket of swill. But I couldn’t go any further without food. I tried not to think about the places my rucksack had been - the floor of every public toilet without a hook on the door. 

He was sitting with his head between his knees, held in his hands. He said,

“Why do I have to feel like this? I don’t want to feel this way.”

My spirits buoyed up. He said,

“I think we should have gone.”

I said,

“If you think about who was there - her parents and family and stuff -”

“I really didn’t want to see her parents.”

We had met them once - we stayed with Jessie for a couple of weeks one summer, and one night we came back late, and when we got back the doors were locked and the lights were off. Obviously we weren’t going to wake everyone up by ringing the bell, so we climbed onto the garage roof and forced a window, and in the end accidentally broke the window and also his foot went through the roof, which was very weak and old, and after that, from the way her parents reacted, it was clear that we couldn’t stay any longer. It felt hurtful - I remember trying to gather up some pieces of my dignity when Jessie asked me where I’d be moving on to - it was like cradling broken glass. It was important that I didn’t show any hurt or ill-feeling. I’d been trying to follow my own rules of delicacy but in doing that I’d violated other, pettier, rules. 

I think - and I get the sense that everyone else thinks this, too - that I’m the guilty one. He’s clean in a way that I’m not. It’s not that he behaves differently, but he acts out of an unreflective state. He’s easier to forgive, or just to discount as a moral actor. But he’ll stick with me, and I will with him, and we’ll keep doing the same things. There isn’t anything else that either of us is going to.  

We found our way out of a wooded pit of dead branches and dry brown leaves on the ground, two seasons behind. We headed uphill. The chalk was soft underfoot, cut in white tracks across sweeping slopes, under harsh clumps of gorse with flowers that smelled of coconut. We came to the crest and more and more and more of it was laid around us, like a trick, taking us off balance, all this plentitude rolling away. 

There was a slight, disturbing breeze, and everything became more beautiful at such a pitch that we realised it was going to rain. The sun glanced off the long grass, the clouds made shapes. The ozone smell - the displacing smashed molecules of the earth releasing their scent!

“Shit! We should have taken our coats!”

“Crap!” 

But the rain was so slight, softening things and gently cooling us, and the haze and the mud were so bright in their dark way. It was like a fever had broken. This hooded, lambent atmosphere reminded me of a vision I’d had last night a few drugs in, a sort of half dream that I was looking at a sculpture or a rock made out of some meteorite substance, older than the earth, standing on a beach, and while the sands eroded beside it, the rock stayed the same. The rock was me. He was in the room, but some adventures of the psychonaut take you further apart, though some bring you together. He was too humble to have an isolated, megalomanic thought like I was having. He’s innocent compared to me. He’s like a lamb. I’m marmite, I’m moldavite - not everybody likes me. 

When we were out of the open spaces it felt abrupt - we were in country lanes lined by hawthorn bushes that were leading into the town, and the walk was nearly over. Everything was garlanded with little white flowers as if in preparation for a wedding and I stood up straighter, like a bridegroom or a best man. The air had cleared. It’s done now anyway, no changing things now. It’s still spring despite you. Ash heart, broke heart, sweet heart. It’s spring for us. 

So we felt the same: sad and happy, happy and sad. We got into town and went towards the high street where we found a dank, gloomy pub that suited our mood. It smelled of ketchup and of palpable dark.  I ran my hand across the table and felt wood grain and salt grains, stickiness on the surface.

“Do you remember the dream?” I said.

“I don’t want to talk about it!” He started crying. I started crying too, in an automatic process, like a carwash, like soft refreshing rain. 

“I just think that what happened to Jessie was so sad,” he said. 

It was.

The afternoon was at its peak and at its end. The sun drew slanted shadows on the pavement, which made it harder to cross, like a chessboard that required us to calculate our next move. The beer had refreshed us, and cast its comfort back over the whole day, strengthening us. We were ready for the journey - we just needed some more beer and crisps and peanuts for the train. An old man had left his dog outside a newsagent’s - a border terrier, who lay, stout and bristly, where the light overspilled the shadow in a pool like honey. What a face! My God, we mooned over him! Caught in the sun, all three, us orbiting him.

His face was wrenched open in a helpless grin. His tongue lolled out, his eyes filmed over, his limbs stiffly stretched, and he made emphysemic rasps with each pull of his chest, up and down to serrated breathing - basking and sleeping in the sunlight of absolute bliss.

Jessie used to tell me her dreams     in detail and I’d say mine -

Back then we never had anything     we needed to do or think about

So we had leisure for long talks     about anything at all. 

The dream, she said, showed a waiter,     an old man who works in a cafe

Opening onto a cobbled square.     People sit drinking coffee,

The air’s full of talk.     In a tank tall as a building

Full of water, the man’s son is waiting,

Suspended, for any opportunity to die.     Life has no meaning 

for some of us, says a voice in the dream    

(that voice is the dross that accumulates in your head).

The man looks up     and leaves because he has customers to attend to.

The son looks up     and suddenly he realises that life is bliss.

Beauty fills him     with fearlessness

And certainty,     a surge of uncontrollable joy.

He shoots upward, bursting     to the surface. But

Revelation reverses.     Intention ashes into despair.

As he rises, he changes,     ranging from youth to age,

A moment makes a rise a fall, flashes the fall like an x-ray

Shows a skull. He dives down and smashes on the pavement in putrid foam.

In the doorway,     the old man drops his tray. 

The cups and the coffee     break on the cobbles

Like waves     which is when Jessie woke. 

1.

Snow blew off the rooftops in puffs like clouds from dry ice. I watched from the window, looking down. It had taken the road, the black surface fading out. It wanted to take possession of everything, and I wanted to let it. I watched the houses blur and fog in the atomising air. I had been cleaning and a sick, penetrating cold worked its way into the flat; the walls were bare, white and damp, my own igloo. There was no need to put the heating on: they were at home on the middle floor, a warm reek in the stairwell outside their flat, it smelled like a hamster cage. That should be enough to stop the pipes from freezing.

My new compatriot, my clean bill of health, my manifesto. The next day it seethed down. My fingers were cold, pinched hard from the inside: like the flesh had shrunk, all vacuum packed onto the bone, it really hurt. Trudging across the playground I saw a child’s glove frozen to the ground, flat as roadkill. There were children coming in at the same time as me. Andrew, who had been put in charge of health and safety, was patrolling in a raddled scarf and gloves and a grey face. 

“Inside! Immediately!” His voice was hoarse and weak, but furious.

I followed them, slopping in the children’s footsteps. Angela was in the foyer, mopping up the brown water from their shoes. 

“It doesn’t make much difference, does it?” she said. More of them trouped in - more voices, more footsteps, more dirty water.

It was boring to be at work that day - especially boring because the children were excited: a damp over-heated atmosphere of drenched children drying off, a sweaty tang muddled by screams and laughter and adults shouting. 

“Year 4! Excuse me! Year 4!” 

I put my things away and went to the classroom. Elaine was there - sad-eyed and beautiful, like Zadie Smith. She was a higher-level TA, but they’d been using her as a teacher while Steve was signed off with depression. She was at the front of the room fiddling with the lesson plan while the children boiled and bubbled in their hell-broth. She had that perpetual serenity, which was just irritation held at arm's length. She turned on her chair as soon as I came near. 

“Do you mind filling the water-jugs, Miss?” 

She didn’t need to ask - I always did it, every day, except just one time. But since then she made a point of mentioning it, as if I was trying to get out of it and she had to pin me down. The tap in the corridor was out of bounds for spurious covid reasons, so the jugs had to be filled in the staffroom. The teachers got their TAs to do it, but since Yvonne used a walking stick and Lorraine had carpal tunnel, I did it for all the classes. Every morning I made my rounds, like a milk-maid, slopping to and fro, bringing the jugs into different rooms where the teachers thanked me without looking at me, or thanked me in a guilty embarrassed way that made me wonder why they didn't just do it themselves.

Morning briefing wasn’t cancelled, but it had to be short because the children were already in. The breakfast club staff had been commandeered to stay on while teaching staff went to the hall. We stood in a big circle, an arm’s length between us for covid reasons, the headmistress in the middle like she was in a circus ring. She always wore quite spiffy trousers, which added to the effect. There was a safety notice - “There’s not much chance of the children getting out today” - teachers would have to stay in their classrooms at lunch. A lot of parents had been getting in touch to complain about the rules - from now on we shouldn’t respond, just ask them to email the head directly. 

“Just think of it as vomit,” said the head. “They’re coming up and vomiting their emotions all over you. Bleurgh!” 

There was something naive about her posh voice, the flamboyant trousers: today they were pale pink with a red go-faster stripe. They seemed to proclaim a faith in something that definitely wouldn't happen - some positive social change. 

Outside, in the corridor, we were caught in a bottle-neck and forgot the show of social distancing, enacted in still scenes like tableaux vivants - in between, the actors milled around. The Deputy Head, Louisa Hart, fell in step beside me. 

She was shorter than me, and had a sculptured, elegant head and neck on top of a surprisingly wide, bulky body. I thought of her head as the tip of the iceberg.

“Monica, could I have a word? Did you get round to filling the water jugs?”

She spoke in a hurry.

“Right. I just wanted to check. Just make sure you do it as a priority - Elaine’s been finding that the jugs are running out mid-morning, which doesn’t make life any easier. She has a lot on and she really needs your support. So if you make sure that you do it first thing when you come in?” 

She met my eyes firmly. I was stung, I wanted to say to her that there was only one time I didn’t do it, and I didn’t see why I was the only one that had to do it anyway. I paused, preparing to speak, but she had already moved off towards her office. Everyone swept on around me, obdurate in their missions. Their voices melded with the din of the children waiting. Elaine walked past me as if there was a wall between us. She had a lot to do, and she couldn’t expect any help from me. She’d made sure that everyone knew that. 

2.

It stayed cold that week but the snow went threadbare, clinging to corners, retreating to shady nooks. In the mornings the children were kept loitering in the playground - Andrew was kept there too, pacing the asphalt, cadaverous, resentful. The children huddled in bombers, parkas with fur-lined hoods that hid their faces. There were always a few who didn’t have proper coats and it was debated whether they could come in - no - or stay outdoors in a fleece, or if they had to wear a coat from the lost property bin. Most of them would rather freeze than be marked out in a musty jacket that didn’t fit.

I went to the staffroom and hung up my things, then stood for a minute looking out at the grey, toneless sky, the bare branches and dirty white houses. The window was open, just a crack. There was defensive tape round the climbing frame; I could hear it creaking in the wind. 

Elaine asked me to work with Magnus. He was a shifty child; clever, but slow and inattentive. He didn't like having me next to him. I had to wedge myself in the space between him and the radiator, with the table behind knocking the back of my chair and the table in front jutting into me when the children rocked around. Magnus stared straight ahead during the lesson, pretending to concentrate: a difficult performance that took all his mental energy. 

The radiator was industrially huge, buttressed, painted a sticky brown, pumping out heat. I was sweating, especially inside my bra - it’s possible to get athlete’s foot under your breasts. The window panes distorted the view; jellied squares of air preserving us from what was outside. And I was a reversed baked alaska, piping hot at the centre of this cold world which I could see lying dormant, the empty playground where the snow was deserting us. I tucked in my elbow to avoid jostling Magnus. I leaned over to look at his work.

“You’re supposed to use a ruler.” 

He was holding it wrong. It slipped, and the line went wonky. 

“Not like that, do it properly.” I grabbed his ruler then gave it back to him. “Do it again.”

Halfway through the lesson, Louisa came in and bustled over, finely-turned head sailing above stubby legs, like a swan

“Miss Monica, do you mind doing break duty today?” 

“Okay.” 

“Oh good.” She seemed relieved; I started to wonder if I could have refused. “I just wanted to give Elaine a break, so she doesn’t have to go outside.”

It occurred to me that I would be going outside, in the cold, again, not that it mattered to anyone. I swallowed my bile.

“Shall I take my break now?” I said. I wanted to make sure that I’d get the full fifteen minutes. Louisa looked harassed. 

“If you ask Elaine, to make sure she can manage without the support.”

Elaine said it was fine. As I was leaving she added, “Can you make sure you get to the playground before break starts, Miss? So you’re not late? Just because if you are late, then someone has to wait for you till you get there.” 

The only thing she ever remembered about me was everything I’d ever done wrong. 

3. 

I went to the staffroom. That was an advantage of break duty: I got to go off when everyone else was in class, so I could sit alone, with the whole room to myself. Except if Cindy was there, which she was. Cindy was a playground supervisor, she also did breakfast and after-school club, picking up any scraps of employment that came her way. She had been at the school long before me, for years, always in these peripheral roles. She had to wait in the dead periods of time between bouts of work, and she often spent the time on site, or sometimes went to the shops and took her grocery bags back to the staffroom. 

I came in and found her scavenging among an array of cakes and biscuits that had been put out there - someone’s birthday. A card was propped open on the table which would have explained the occasion. Something to do with the teachers, always, but they couldn’t forbid the rest of us access to the commons.  

At first she didn’t talk - she had the furtive look people get when they’ve been found hovering over cakes. She chose a yellow one. I started to feel a little tempted myself, though I had brought my own healthy snack of garibaldi biscuits. I didn’t want to join her, vulture-like, picking over the morsels. I sat further away and hoped she wouldn't say anything. 

She sat at the table with a sigh and started eating with a dreamy expression. It didn't look like she was going to chat. I felt safe, and raised myself to my feet (like something being erected by a crane) and took a yellow one, and a pink, for later. I went back to my chair and sampled it, looking at my phone. This was close to relaxing - in this world where I could never relax. 

“That’s the problem,” said Cindy. I looked up. She was looking at me with a quizzical raise of her eyebrows. “They put these things out, don’t they? And the weight stays on.” Now the crumb-lined paper doily littered the table in front of her. She pursed her lips. 

I missed a beat, then I said, 

“It’s terrible isn’t it?” That was the sort of thing she’d expect me to say. “I’ve got no self control!”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” she said again, with that histrionic, lost look. With that weird nagging humour. She looked at me a bit too long, and raised her eyebrows again.

My second cake sat next to me. I didn’t want it any more, but I couldn’t put it back. I sat for a moment weighing the possibilities, and my feelings, and everything mounted. I had to make a decision, so I ate it, tasting the cheap dryness, imagining the battery egg mixture, the disease-ridden suffering in this stale confection, overly sweet icing, calories spreading into my body, spreading me out like a lizard’s frill. I felt hatred surge into the room and swirl between us, a current of silence. 

The act of consumption had finished the conversation. I stood up to get to the playground in time for 10:45. She’d be going there too. She raised her eyebrows again, pinching the forehead between them, and stared at the kitchen unit and hot water urn opposite her. 

4.

“Magnus, did you bring in your lunch box?” said Elaine. She was looking through the crate at the back of the classroom. 

Experience had taught him to be equivocal, but he committed himself:

“...Yes?”

“Where is it, then?”

He looked sly.

“I don’t know.”

“Can you have a look for it?” 

Magnus got up and scouted in the places where it might be - a small figure, face averted, like an EH Shepard drawing.

“It’s not here.”

“Because your mum has been complaining, hasn’t she? She’s been a bit worried because all your lunch boxes and water bottles have been going missing and you’ve been coming home without them.”

Magnus opened his mouth. His eyes crawled towards the door on his left, then to the right. 

“So how are we going to deal with that?” she said.

“I ...don’t…. know.”

“Where do you think you left it?”

“In the playground … maybe?”

“Miss, can you go out and get it?” said Elaine. 

This time it was a relief to be sent outdoors, given a task that took me outside the tomb of my routine. I told myself to linger, but instead I walked fast, as if charged with a great purpose. I vaguely believed that if I found it quickly I would impress her and convince her of my efficiency. I felt myself fill like a balloon with importance (so rare were my occasions) - no one was charged with this mission but me, it depended on me. I galloped downstairs and into the playground, flinging myself through the air, bursting through the doors.

Cindy was there already, waiting for Key Stage 1. I felt an urgent need not to smile at her, or look at her, not to let her speak to me, but at the same time felt a mounting anxiety that I should smile or nod. I walked briskly and she seemed to be minding her own business, in her own world, staring into the middle distance. But as I went she stiffened and I sensed a disturbance in the air, coming from her mind, and even though I’d already gone past, she yelled after me.

“Slow down, Miss! There’s no need to run! You look stressed!”

I got round the corner to the bit of the playground where the Year 4 bubble spent their breaks. I scanned it, searching for the lunchbox - I saw it in an alcove next to the boys toilets. I looked around again, pretending that I hadn’t spotted it. There were various bits of detritus on the ground - an abandoned fleece, a crisp packet blowing around. A deflated football sagged on the edge of the storm drain. Brown water clung to it, like one of those little lakes that gather in a rocky crevice up in the mountains. My face felt like another piece of rain soaked litter. The chunter of cars behind the wall breathed their pollution and the wet, dirty air belonged to those sights and sounds. I felt calm, noticing the fishbowl reality in which we were contained. Morning, boys - how’s the water?

I got to the lunchbox and picked it up. I wanted to stay another minute - no one would care, no one was timing me, not even Elaine. But some internal pressure compelled me to take big strides and hurry back.

“Don’t run everywhere!” Cindy was ready for me round the corner - she’d been lying in wait the whole time, like a stupid dragon. “Don’t stress yourself! You’ll die young!”  

5. 

The houses in my neighbourhood were white and low, neither especially big or small. Some were semi-detached, flush on the pavement, with small courtyards to the side. Some were set back with a lawn in front. They had a kind of uniform diversity: like a group of socially similar people with their different features, their quirks: pitched roofs or mansard roofs, white render or clapboard, square modern windows or old ones with shutters and juliette balconies. But they all managed to feel the same, and suggest the same aspirations. They made their own community. It was a very quiet neighbourhood. 

The old couple next door had a cherry tree, sometimes they’d bring round cherries on a plate. They had a white cat. I remember trying to pet it - it sprang away and hissed viciously. My mother said it was a French cat, that was why it didn’t want to speak to me. There were red squirrels. In the car, on the road through the woods, I used to look up and see them leaping from branch to branch. It's foreign to me now. Manageably foreign, nostalgically foreign, like the near past.

My dad speaks English at home, French at work. I asked him if he ever spoke Flemish growing up, and he said that probably he’d once known a bit. “Your mother speaks Flemish better than I do.” She does speak it, vigorously, when she’s out and about. It seems typical of him to have forgotten a whole language, but I guess he learned from people who learned to forget when they had to. His parents were refugees from Antwerp - they made the journey I take in reverse on the Eurostar, a repetition made bathetic by convenience. My mum takes a keen interest in the whole thing, of course. Last time we spoke, she was reading ‘When I Lived in Modern Times’. I asked if she’d ever read something by a Palestinian and she said that was an interesting thought, but she’d never got round to it.

6. 

Sunday morning in bed, the window covered itself with mist and jewels of rain. I tipped myself up to look at something other than the sky, aching white. Things on the ground were desolate - black, wet trees, gardens disheveled, fences blown down. The empty, soaked street. I couldn't bear to go outside. It was evening, in the living room with the light on and a glowing fog pressed against the window, with a dark undertone. The shapes of shadows decorated the room.  I was tired, resigned, even content. My feet were cold blocks, the warm pool below my face was a double chin, stomach squirming like some disgusting pet in a tank, loins burning mysteriously in the distance. Some fullness, some emptiness, some hope, some kind of feeling. I wanted to express something, like milk.

7.

I woke up in the night. Light pollution in my room, spoiling the dark, grey instead of black, nagging at me. A sense of objection filled me, bloating me up, strangling every limb like a tourniquet, a choking impasse, a poisoning. I turned in the sheet. Its texture filled my skin with grain, sliding and grating on my pores. I was walking along a pavement and I saw Christelle through a car window. 

I went over and tapped the window. I said Christelle! Oh my god, ca fait des lustres it’s been so long ca fait des lustres so long since I’ve seen you que je t’ai pas que je t’ai pas vu. I realised that I'd missed her, all these years. She said she was sorry - she didn’t remember me. She spoke in gentle, jagged, half-coherent sentences, no more knowledge or assurance than a shy child. She said she’d had a stroke and she’d forgotten everything. Elodie was in the car, looking after her.

The window rattled. Horizontal rain outside, aspirating gusts of spray along the street - on the path of air between the upper floors of the houses. I'd been indoors all week, with a wart on my finger providing most of my entertainment - bulbous and red, warping my knuckle. I coated it with four times the prescription of wart mixture: a soaked skinless lump with patches of residue, galloping with virus. My white walls, a stain in the corner of the ceiling, like the armpit of a white shirt turning yellow. Beading of milk-like rain on the windows, thickening in spurts.  

That was a sign of sickness, the dream about Christelle. Coming at me like a visitor to my lonely days - my flatmate was staying with her parents. Some random episode of the past discovered, unassimilated and unbearable, like a tumour. I remembered having lunch in the cantine - I knocked my plate and spilled food all over myself. A few people laughed or yelled. I jumped up and started trying to clean myself off. 

“Are you going just to leave it there?” said Christelle. There was ratatouille on the table and my chair. “People are sitting here, you can’t just walk away, it’s disgusting.”

“I’m not leaving it - ”

“You have to clean it. I’m not sitting next to that.”

I started wiping it up. People were handing me paper napkins - I tried to laugh as more and more came - they had stains and bits of food on them already, people were throwing them at me. I wiped the table and my seat. She was watching to make sure I got it all. It had splattered on the floor. I knelt, smearing with serviettes that were too already wet to be any use. My skirt felt cold and slimy, bits of courgette dropping off or clinging on, as if I’d been sick down myself. I looked up and saw Christelle’s face, looking at me, contemptuous but elevated, energised, on one of her crusades. 

I remembered other times - falling behind while she and Elodie and Laure set their pace faster, linking arms. They didn’t turn back, they didn’t say anything, I knew I was being shaken off. I remember staring at her across the table, talking, trying to make her like me. They sent her to the school psychologist in the end, because she couldn't stop bullying people - she’d even started bullying the teachers, it was like a kind of Napoleon complex. 

She was still coming to school but we didn’t speak much towards the end, I have no idea what happened to her. 

8.

Morning came and whitewashed my flat like a spring clean, except that it showed the dirt, the limescale on the draining board and the desolation, bare and stark, that was unfortunately there. I made coffee, toast and margarine. I ate and drank sitting on the floor to save effort. Then I had a shower, fortified to bear the water’s assault and the tiring ritual of drying my body, which does not seem inherently dry - always moist, like a marshmallow. I wound a towel round my head and another on my body like a strapless dress - probably the sexiest outfit I would wear for the rest of my life; perhaps the sexiest I had ever worn.

I’d been bleaching the mould in my bedroom. I removed the plastic bags that I’d sellotaped over the plug sockets and the carpet, and put these and the rest of the detritus in a fungus-ridden bag-for-life that I normally kept my recycling in, which had absorbed the slime of generations of poorly washed-out bottles and tins. I was keeping the bleach-plastic inside the slime-plastic till I could think of a way to dispose of them both responsibly. In the kitchen I had tupperwares of old batteries, old lightbulbs, and corks, all of which I intended to take to a recycling centre one day. They had been building up for years, for a day of atonement. 

I looked around the place, in all its clutter and meanness. All of my care, all my schemes dragging me down, taking my strength pointlessly, to be added to the junkyard of wasted human effort. But if I threw it out, all the toxic plastics and chemical waste and garbage that I've accrued, it would still be there, choking out life somewhere I can’t see. Some landfill in Malaysia. I wanted to give beauty back to the world, or at least see it and preserve it, at least not destroy it. But I knew it was waiting for the day when some imperative would make me put it all in a bin bag. Some positive change. 

The bleach smell was faint but sickening - it had soaked into the atmosphere. I pulled the windows open and cold clean air came in to meet all the layers of bleach and petrol and children’s farts that lined my lungs. Dear rain - you have reached a part of me that no one else reached - you made me cry. It touched you, Monica? Monica. It sounds like you want to have sex with the rain.

9. 

I hate the toilet where someone comes in like a thief in the night and has diarrhoea every morning before work and it never fully goes away because of the very weak flush. I try to avoid it, but it's the only staff toilet upstairs. My face in the mirror was bloodless, dull.

Everyone was busy before briefing, hurrying here and there. I did the jugs, criss-crossing between rooms. Coming up outside a door, I heard Louisa talking to Elaine.

“- outdoors PE. But if you don’t fancy the weather you can send Monica out - ”

That’s right, send her out, like a dog. Bark, bark, I’m Monica. Hello! Are you feeling better? No, actually, I’m feeling worse. I wanted to lie low, but there was task after task, we were behind on readers, then it was maths, then I had to help the children get changed and take them outside for PE with Grant, the sports coach. I led them, cavorting in their little tracksuits like woolly dolls. 

I wrestled with the door of the cage. The children crowded behind me, excited and noisy. There was an awkward sliding lock, the grill walls rattled while I forced it.

“Thanks Miss,” said Grant, shouldering past me with two sacks full of equipment, and the children jostled joyfully after him.

“Run to the end!” shouted Grant. “Run back! Grab your sticks! You're going to go weave round the cones, and you’re going to dribble!” 

It had rained overnight, everything was soaked, it was chilly, no patch of sun. A comfortless day. I tried to stay busy. He always wanted me to do something but I never know what, only that if I loitered at the sides he’d start making comments, even though when other TAs came out they just sat on the bench and he bantered with them, such mates apparently. I tried to disguise my uselessness by following the children around, chivvying them. 

“Magnus, hold your stick lower down, like Mr Grant said. Like this -”  I grabbed at it. Grant looked at me with dislike. 

“Good job Magnus,” he said loudly. “You’re doing well! Nice one!”

I didn’t know why I bothered, or what he wanted from me. The lesson dragged on - races, relays - “Who scored most, Miss?” I don’t fucking know. 

“Are you watching the time, Miss?”

I didn’t know why he couldn’t watch the time - it was his lesson, he was the teacher. I wasn’t even wearing a watch. I looked round, as if there might be a clock somewhere, floating above the basketball hoop. I heard a tide of children - the bell must have rung; classes were already spilling into the playground where Cindy was waiting. We were late.

“Line up! Follow Miss!” 

I strode out of the cage, a lumpy straggling trail of children behind me. They needed to get changed but they couldn’t miss break, we’d be running behind all day and Elaine would feel the need to mention it to everyone, another reason to tell everyone how unhelpful I was, and how she had to take all the burdens of the world on her long-suffering shoulders.

“Miss! Miss!”

Cindy’s voice - that nasal oboe. Suddenly I was suffocating with rage, hardly breathing. I didn't turn my head, my neck was stiff, I was determined not to hear.

“MISS!” I looked back. “You haven’t closed the gate!” She was pointing at the door of the cage, left swinging open.

“Why don’t you shut it?” I yelled. I could feel my voice, everything about me, act out the hate I felt for her, her nasty little balled up face, her pointless indignation, her querulous urgency.

Then I saw that Elaine was standing near the door. She must have come out to see where we were. I hadn’t expected anyone to hear me yell - any adult, I didn’t give a shit about the children. But Elaine was eyeing me, coldly, deliberately, like she wanted me to know that I’d shown my true colours.

10.

There was coldness coming from every person for the rest of the day. She must have told people in the staffroom at lunch. That was where they could have all got together - I could imagine it - her telling everyone the way I had spoken to Cindy. Harmless, helpless, impoverished Cindy, old faithful servant. Who they all ignored but I’d be getting the punishment, and they’d feel like they’d done something moral.

When I came in the next morning the coldness was still there. More than just being dismissed or thanked hastily and awkwardly - a conscious reserve.

We all went to briefing. I took my place in the big circle. It was running on my mind, this atmosphere, what was being said about me. It took me a minute to tune in to the Head, giving her notices.

“ - and at a time like this it’s more important than ever to speak to each other kindly. However we might be feeling, it’s not acceptable to come in here with our emotions out of control.” Her voice sounded plaintive and chiding. “And I’m sorry, but I really just cannot accept members of staff talking to each other without courtesy. We might be stressed, but I cannot accept rudeness to fellow members of staff, let alone in front of pupils.”

It dawned on me, what she was referring to. She went blustering on.

“- and I really think we owe it to each other - ”

The public telling-off. It had happened before, but not to me. Her face was pink with embarrassment and she was staring past me, no names mentioned. I wanted to puff out my chest and cry: not guilty! No, not guilty. I stood up straighter, l tried to meet her eyes. It felt like bravery, but her gaze was frozen in position, I was met with nothing.

What I was seeing started getting wet. I thought I was numb but - hot and wet - some artist, some Monet, had been daubing across my eyes. I looked round the room, but I couldn't latch on to anyone - a wall of unseeing faces. I knew I was blotchy, mortified, begging for what I wouldn’t get - pity. I’d been rude - wasn’t I tough enough to hear a few words of criticism? I’d been hurting people, but I wasn’t brave enough to carry a bit of hurt myself. Couldn’t even bear this negative punishment: so polite, so distant. Well, if you aren’t looking at me then you aren’t looking at this.

Tears fighting at the back of my eyes, pounding them. Heart drumming like someone was beating it with a stick. Face like I was branded. Monica, you’re ugly, you’re stupid. No one likes you. Look what you’ve done. 

I almost forgot to move when everyone started leaving - they were circulating around me. I joined in the flow that went down the corridor. My vision still wasn’t clear - like I had a heavy cold, I made the excuse to myself. But the six weeks of sick leave was nearly over. Soon Steve would be back, whether he liked it or not: impatient but basically uninterested in me, shouting at the kids, short-tempered, unpleasant. I much preferred him to Elaine. 

At the end of the day I walked out and spurned them all. I left them, symbolically. A private drama, enacted for my benefit. I knew I’d be back tomorrow. I knew the whole incident would be, not forgotten, but absorbed into a general muddle. My life, and Cindy’s, the school, the road, the borough, a fabric made of every quarrel, and everything else.

I went home, took off my shoes, watched TV on my laptop. I made myself a heavy dinner - potatoes in cheese sauce. I made enough to save some for another meal. But I had seconds and, inevitably, thirds, and then it was all gone. I sat back down in a stupor, the frenzy over. I played the next episode. While I watched it, the food expanded in my stomach - my stomach journeying in the dark like a submarine, facing unbearable pressure. I wondered if I’d have to call an ambulance.