I said I felt sick (2010)
I said I felt sick and we went outside. The trees were rattling. That was the wind. Then I started to feel better and we went into the shadows and started kissing. I was listening to the sounds from inside the marquee. They were glittering in the back of my head and I felt dizzy still. We fell on the floor. We moved our hands over each other clumsily and that was warm in the cool breeze of the night which was scuttling over our backs. I saw shadows of people walking past us. I closed my eyes and tried to squeeze myself into the night itself. The sounds behind me were drifting away everywhere into the starless sky. It was a dull, brown colour and everything was impermanent, crashing around us with a whoosh. And I wanted to go back inside.
The lazy, persistent, make-believe love. One of the straps of her dress had fallen off of her shoulder, sitting there. And somehow everything was pathetic. I thought about the faces of everyone I couldn't see inside. In the distance I heard someone I knew say something, heard it get sucked up by the night like everything else. And we kissed harder and she pulled me tightly against her.
My hand was on her chest and I could smell it then. The smell of milk rose up from under her dress. The horrible scent filled my head. And then I saw it, with her face obscured in the darkness beneath the tree, how she had done it to spite me. How she knew I couldn't stand the smell. How she was wearing a secret smile at that moment, wondering about my pain and how much I was just a weak boy with an over-fitting jacket and an unremitting nostalgia for the things that would never come back to me. How she hated me and I hated her and how we pretended these things weren't true. I rolled onto the floor and we laid there doing nothing. She gingerly put her hand over mine. The smell was everywhere.
It was silent in the car on the way back with my parents in the front. I put my face against the window and watched as we passed all the sad sites of my childhood memories. The shattered bus stops with their glinting carpets of glass extending into the road. The stinking halls and pub function rooms, boarded up like wet cardboard boxes. The littered parks and side roads where I met awkward girls I found in the unique darkness of the school discos, walking with them always on a grey day, saying little and knowing less, sitting in strange places and waiting for something to happen.
We reached her house and I wasn't sure how to say goodbye to her with my parents there. We hugged outside the car and it was short and she hurried to her front door. In the car my father waited whilst she fumbled with the locks. All three of us watched her. Then we were hurtling backwards through the night.
On the seat beside me I found her hairpiece. It was made of small, delicate feathers. I turned it around in my hand and it reflected the glow of the streetlights. I smelt it and it smelt of her. I held it in my hand for most of the journey home. Then I opened the window to get some fresh air because I started to feel sick again. And then, when my parents weren't looking, when we were all silent, listening to the sounds of the late night radio and not thinking about anything at all, I dropped the hairpiece out of the window and never saw her again.