Читать книгу Adults - Emma Jane Unsworth - Страница 15

screens at bedtime are bad for your brain, but the sensation of holding a phone is, I find, therapeutic. I find the shape of it reassuring. Soothing. I press it to my chest like a bible. Every few minutes I lift it up and look to see what has changed in the world. I feel the weight of my thumb. My heart pounds. My veins thrum. I am in every way alive and progressing. My brain is lit up like the Earth from space at night.

I have a couple more likes for the croissant. I think it’s reasonable to conclude now that it wasn’t worth it. I squandered an entire morning on that. I can’t keep building these cathedrals out of crumbs.

I scroll.

A friend of mine, a semi-famous scriptwriter, has posted a picture of herself in a lift. She isn’t smiling. She looks like she’s in a perfume ad. Like she’s thinking: Look at me, don’t look at me, who are you, I don’t trust you … It is very effective and confusing. I comment:

Looking reflective

We’re real-life friends but she doesn’t follow me on here, which has always been a point of hurt. I know she seldom uses social media and she has a strict sense of how she is ‘seen’. But why don’t I fit in with however she is seen? Why am I not perfect follow material? Also, cuttingly, she follows some truly trashy vloggers, which is a real kick in the teeth. Now I’ve posted the comment I start to worry. It’s like I forget this stage of the process; like I set myself up for it. She might not reply. She hasn’t in the past. So why does that boil down to a failing on my part? I have to ask myself that, because it does. I didn’t use to have this – this innate distrust of myself. I feel like I have lost my pace. It’s like everything has been speeding up and up and up and I reached my own terminal velocity. I thought my twenties felt like rush hour, but no. My twenties were just pleasantly hectic. The thirties are the real rush hour.

She replies, three minutes later.

Miss you Mac

Well now follow me back and you wouldn’t have to, is what I want to say. Then you could see me regularly. It is within your grasp! But I don’t have the gall.

I don’t know when all this started feeling like …

Like …

I see a picture Mia has posted of her dog.

I decide to have a think about whether to like it. A like is never just a like.

My phone beeps. I look.

It’s a text.

From my mother.

I am supposed to pick 12 women who have touched my life and whom I think might participate. I think that if this group of women were ever to be in a room together there is nothing that wouldn’t be impossible. I hope I chose the right 12. May my hugs, love, gestures, and communications remind you how special you are. Please send this back to me. Make a wish before you read the quotation. That’s all you have to do. There is nothing attached. Just send this to 12 women and let me know what happens on the fourth day. Did you make your wish yet? If you don’t make a wish, it won’t come true. This is your last chance to make a wish! Quotation: ‘May today there be peace within. May you trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith in yourself and others. May you use the gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you. May you be content with yourself just the way you are. Let this knowledge settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love. It is there for each and every one of us.’ Now, send this to 12 women (or more) (you can copy & paste) within the next 5 minutes. In addition, remember to send back to me. I count as one. You’ll see why xxxxxx

I instantly feel harassed. I stare at the text for a moment. As I’m staring, another text from her arrives.

How r u? xx

It doesn’t feel right that someone older than me abbreviates more than I do, but this is the way it is. She texts me approximately once a week. When I ignore her, she turns up in my dreams. The other night she was in the doorway of my room, wearing a pair of wings – fine-boned and iridescent, like a dragonfly’s. They glistened in the moonlight. When she turns up like that I have to remind myself that the visions are only my version of her – the real her is three hundred miles away.

I close my eyes and see it. That house. Mock Tudor. Mock everything. Our street was adjacent to a big-dog housing estate and the kids would come and chuck crab apples at the garage doors. I’d look down from my turret bedroom window, feeling quite the oppressed royal. Someone wrote ‘WITCH’ in chalk on the wall and my mother looked at it proudly while I burned. Thousands of years ago, witches were respected as healers, she said. They were wise women in the community.

And then we got doctors, I said.

Did we, though, she said, did we ever really ‘get’ doctors like we got witches? What I’m talking about is a gift, not a career choice.

In the garden there was a huge laburnum tree where caterpillars grew in the buds and dangled down on invisible threads in late spring. She liked bright plants. Pinks and yellows, for good energy, to ward off evil spirits. Lupins, azaleas, bleeding hearts. She dug up the pampas grass after I told her it was code for swingers. In the middle of the front lawn there was a monkey puzzle tree, its base beaded with grey stones, Japanese-style, after something she saw in a magazine. Other things: the crack-spangled patio, the planters polka-dotted with moss, the eternally unoccupied bird box. I’ve been back a handful of times. Birthdays. Christmases. Odd times off the slingshot of another failed love affair.