Strange to think you have my number when several months ago we played the Flicky Eye Game from under our fringes. Over the fringes of other, less interesting, heads. I think mutual suspicion gave way when my tongue slipped and I told you, by total accident, that I can smell your hair from three daffodil-yellow corners and two corridors away.

If you want to believe I kissed a butch man-girl called Ursula in the pulsating strobe-infested dark, go ahead.

I am very sorry I didn’t make it to meet your sheep and the live-in army ex sleeping on your sofa. Some other time. But only if you refrain from telling yourself to shut up mid-conversation.

Saturday night, stumbling up curbs and snapping open shaken cans with a fizz. Two hundred unwieldy gazelles tripping past, lopsided, hobbling, screeching, fighting. A stab, a scratch, a nick, a moonlight scar running up (and down and up and) the taut skin of the back, a similar weave of silver criss-crossing tracks scritch-scratched over his wrists. In blind fits of rage he smashes his head against the wall, forehead coming away patterned with the irregular imprints of wooden chips from the wallpaper. Joins the chase, ungainly, hangs back catches up over-takes and stops. From behind a line-up of corrugated tin bins comes the revving, the pounding heart beats, the adrenaline. Two wheels, an engine, one carving knife. Four wheels, two engines, two carving knives. Six wheels. Eight. These gazelles don’t stand a chance.

Always someone waits at the phone, finger hovering over redial.

She is perched on the rim of the cold bathtub, bare legs sticking to the white porcelain, shifting uncomfortably. The picked at broken skin behind her knees weeps. She refuses to move, watches the way the forced cascade of steaming water hammers a relentless dent into the area between her mother’s shoulder blades. She herself refuses to shower. She refuses to leave, despite the choked drowning voice from behind the glass, which drips condensation. She refuses to leave the house. Only once in the past year has she pulled on her coat and climbed into the backseat of the car. Five minutes down the A34 and she’s screaming hollering pounding at the green-tinted glass windows. She refuses to breathe till they get back home. She refuses to look away when her mother pushes against the glass door and steps into her own wet footprints, asks, breathing resentment, for the towel.

It’s the not listening that’s eating him up. The not listening to his clumsy advice, delivered crouched down, eye-to-eye. He’d told her, he remembers, to stay away from boys now, boys and men, to imagine them as vampires. He’d formed with his fingers a cross and hissed. He cringes thinking about it. She had rolled her eyes and he’d laughed awkwardly, feeling decidedly too old and too male. He grits his teeth. He finds out she didn’t listen from the penultimate in a chain of Chinese whisperers, himself at the very end, breaking the circle with no one to whisper the distorted truth back to. He reasons with himself. How exactly would he liked to have been told? Um, you know how you said a few years ago… well I didn’t, and I’m … yeah. He shudders. Best someone else heard it first, maybe.

And on the bus

she asks what if questions and he says you’d kill it? and likens it to pushing a small child from a precipice.

I wish I were young and small enough to justify a temper tantrum.

My throat rasps roughly when I draw deep breaths.

I would like to stay at home and pick the crisp, curling strips of dried galia melon skin from between the keys of my keyboard. I want to watch Lolita again.

And then I would like to alphabetise something, and make fairy cakes with raspberry jam faces.

Ever since seeing Judith sprawled across the kitchen in her underwear last night, I have had an overwhelming urge to press my face into the terracotta tiles of our dining room floor, and have people step over and around me. Only I am not drunk.

(This might be a lie, I am not quite sure.)

I would also like to go back to bed, and not have to fill up my time with carefully measured out half-hour slots of (in)activity like

making bullet-point lists
or whispering French sweet nothings to myself in the forgotten top-floor corners of a university library I don’t belong to
or sticking yellow post-it notes to the slope of the ceiling above my bed, where they will fade in the sun and eventually rain down onto me as I sleep
or pushing indecipherable and half-hearted notes into plastic wallets whilst ignoring my father’s damning of the elusive essay condom.

Goddamn.

God, he says, the shadow of his fist obscuring my notes, I’m bored.

He sits down before he asks if I want company. He is doing everything backwards. Even in today’s sun he’s wearing his shin-length leather coat. When he takes it off I see he’s shrouded in black.

He tells me how great A Clockwork Orange is, and reels off a long list of the Russian words he’s picked up watching it. He tells me the Russian word for milk. He tells me his presentation would have featured himself standing with the whiteboard pointer in one hand, glass of milk in the other. Only he got up too late, and he’s shit at things like remembering. He laughs for a disproportionately long time.

I wish I could read your mind, he says. I hope he’s joking. I assure him he would not like to read my mind. This conversation is a bizarre reflection of one I had several days ago.

I say, I revel in being a glass maze. He looks at me like I’m crazy. Crazy crazy. So, castration… he starts. And I’m crazy?? So he holds forth about castration and its merits, and how he would like to kill quite a large number of people. Before assuring me I am not on his hit list. Clockwork Orange is amazing, he says again when he runs out of things to talk about.

When he says, sweetie, you’d be wasting your life, I get up to leave, very suddenly. My study notes blow themselves into the bushes. I get the feeling that even my inanimate things are desperately trying to escape him. My water bottle falls with a plastic clunk from the picnic bench, rolls quite a distance before he stoops his enormous evasive self towards the ground to pick it up.

I have to go, I tell him, as if it isn’t glaringly obvious anyway. He takes that as an invitation to stride along next to me with his coat flapping at his ankles until I pointedly say good bye.

Wishing yourself flattened between the pages of a glossy magazine never works. Nothing is ever so shiny, nor do any more than 2% of the population possess legs quite so long. Wishing yourself in small bold letters with your words italicised and everything describable and unknottable also never works. Because.

The Girl With The Priestly Admirer caught my reflection and said, Darling, nothing ever ends happily ever after.

I said, maybe you’re right, and she nodded half-heartedly, flushed and dreaming of Paris. She was calculating the chances of the receptionist having misunderstood her A-Level French over the phone. I watched her cross her fingers behind her back. I wondered whether she’d feel guilty praying for the accidental allocation of a double bed rather than the single she thought she’d asked for.

In a desperate attempt to prove everyone very wrong I strike poses in which I am immortalised badly, flattened without the gloss, and provide for myself a running commentary I can imagine in crawling black print, hanging suspended in bubbles rising from my head. Third person present, in which she pretends, with her eyes squeezed shut, at the non-existence of the spreading stain of damp above her bed. In which she rests one foot on the sill of her open window, exposing her toenails to the first ray of sun she’s seen since some time quite a while ago. And takes the milk from the fridge. Falls up stairs and listens to the engaged tone the phone makes when she picks it up.

Sometimes I get it wrong and channel someone else’s narrative. Like today, pretending badly not to notice my old best friend’s mother standing on the doorstep of her new house.

(She pretends badly, eyes on the cracks between the grey slate paving stones, which are only really worth looking at when it rains and they lose their lackluster dusty matte. And with one finger digging at her navel he twists, willing with his twisting and jabbing her eyes away from the point where the straight white paper folds of the room meet.)

By the time I’d walked (all the more conspicuously for my pavement-watching) past my old best friend’s mother and put a street corner between myself and her sticky eyes, I’d persuaded myself I could feel the ghost finger of this other third person narrative jabbing at my navel.

Hush, he says with his eyes closed, I want to be a pencil.

I hold my breath and wait for a pencil transformation.

No, he says despondently after several minutes of silence. It’s not happening. He turns his face back into the pillow.

I am sitting there inhaling the musty trapped sun in your room and trying really really hard to stop laughing at something. I’ve forgotten why I originally started, which makes me laugh harder, and I hide my grinning mouth behind a hand. It seeps out from beneath my fingers. Two hands, the fingers pinching the edges of my lips together. I am laughing so hard I am crying.

I have been doing this all day.

So I am sitting there, and have given up holding my face together

when you ask me a question.

You get my name wrong.

Completely wrong.

Not just any kind of wrong.

From out of nowhere you pick the name I have been stamping on with the hard heel of my heaviest shoes for a while.

I almost slide from my chair in horror. My forearms prickle coldly, and you are utterly oblivious. I think, maybe I have it engraved into my forehead, very faintly, and you have impeccable eyesight. Maybe you can read minds. Maybe you caught the torn out pages of my diary.

You look puzzled and say, I don’t know anyone else with that name. Sorry. How completely random. Your lack of justification is not reassuring.

I’ve stopped laughing, and next time you get my name right.

Naively, I am really hoping she will know. It has been bugging me for a while, a year or so.

I ask Mami what the ex does with everything he knows about me now that he no longer needs it.

He Knows a lot, I tell her darkly. She looks taken aback.

What does he know? Her hands are momentarily suspended in between suds and the weetabix bowls from this morning’s breakfast.

A lot.

She thinks for a while.

Graham and I were married for two years, she says, and we lived together for longer than that. I don’t know anything about his life as it is now. I only know how he used to be. People change.

The ex has not changed. My pen ran out in the silent study room, the only place I can find where peanut butter and banana sandwiches and studying are allowed to happen at the same time. The ex sat down on the other side of the room.

Hey, I called across to him, got a pen? He didn’t answer, stuck his head deep into his bag and rooted. I waded over to him, manoevering an ocean of empty desks. He pulled his head from his bag (I would like to say with a pen between his teeth, but it didn’t happen like that), frowned in the general direction of my larynx and pursed his lips.

So we were back at out separate ends of the table ocean with our heads down, my concentration given almost entirely to making a minimum of noise biting chunks from a Braeburn apple, and at some out-of-place sound behind me I turned with a grin. The ex’s grin collided with mine for a few long seconds before we remembered simultaneously and stuck our heads into our ringbinders.

I would like to think he has sellotaped everything he knows about me into a shoebox and put it somewhere very hidden.

As I am thinking this, Mami stands rooted to the spot staring through the Britta filter on the window sill. Her hands are still submerged.

She said with a hint of wonder, He left no impression! None at all! Shakes her head, and what little impression she might have held onto disappears.

Her face between two vertical rust-flaked bars. She has been stuck there for a long time, head inside, the rest of her hanging uselessly from this insignificant height. (Standing next to me, she would be very small.) The very tips of her toes are her only unsteady anchor. Her hurting flailing envy gives way, after several hours, to her toenail pain. This she finds altogether more pressing than the heart pain she holds, meticulously cling-film wrapped in an airtight plastic lunch box, which she brought with her expressly for this purpose. She planned on unwrapping it later. She wonders how it might taste between the spinach and ricotta of her piping vegetable lasagna. Bitter.

Help. She whispers it this first time. Hours, she’s teetered on her toes, cold body pressed against brickwork. Face stuck, and I am only several paces away. She watches, eyes level with the floor. From this angle, an evening glow catches the escaped strands of my hair adorning the carpet.

This situation she finds far more compromising than her nakedness in a hallway she barely knew several nights ago, reflected back on herself infinitely, nakedly, in countless angled mirrors. I don’t hear her this first time. A touch of the sadist in how she whispers when she could shout. She forces herself to watch a little longer. A tangle of murmured voices. (She daydreams indulgently, unhappily, for a few seconds: it is her we are discussing.) A gasp. One very bare foot. Her fingers scrabble uselessly, without purchase, at her face in between bars.

Her world shrinks. In it is her face flanked by these two hollow metal verticals, her aching toes and the waxing waning wash of cold somewhere at the core of herself. She finds herself very trapped, which matters more than catching me out. If she could choose, she would much rather be sitting at home with a glass of wine and her constant unconfirmed niggling, in which (it comes to her in a desperate flash of clarity) she revels secretly to a small but discernible extent.

She is at my mercy. She is completely at my mercy. She has never felt so entirely at another’s mercy. The second time she speaks louder - help. it is a disgruntled voice lacking both exclamation and intonation that arrests me, brings me temporarily to a stop in the middle of the room. She closes her eyes against my feet padding across to where she hangs. She wishes herself dead, for a second. She wishes herself bissfully semi-aware. She wishes herself chewing her hangnails, reflected naked and thoughtful and awkward in the hallway of the half-stranger.

When she opens her eyes her eyes again, it is to the complete obliteration of the room with its pot plants and strewn sheets and single strands of illuminated hair. My feet so close she catches the number stamped into my silver anklet. As I crouch down, sitting back on my heels, she paints over her features with a brush of stoic, and thinks, I am very at her mercy.

Snorkel and goggles in the bathtub.

Anything I let leave my hands crab-crawls sideways into an oblivious hole of mess. The shower head, when I turn the temperature right down, falls from where it hangs. I have several shower head shaped bruises. The bathroom lights take seven pulls of the light string before they flicker on, and the ancient green kitchen cabinets have finally given up the ghost.

I went to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. In the seat next to me sat a young man, by himself. No detail other than young and man. Cinema-going etiquette says thou shalt not observe the lonesome cinema-goer if thou art with a group of others. I felt his presence stiffen as the frequency of nose-blowing and tissue-crumpling became increasingly frequent. I cried silently so as not to alarm him further. The combination of silent teary hiccupping and the stiffening of a stranger I could not draw a picture of in my mind was very tiring. On the way back, Mami was talking about splaying cats. It was a conversation I could not muster up the emotional energy to partake in. Instead I watched the Potteries kilns flash past loomingly.

Judith came home with me for lunch, and swept away the debris of last night’s dishes. Please help, came the urgent message as the lights dimmed. What is it called when the lines of direction change in film? I write her mini-essays in SMS format, and she calls me her angel. Or maybe angle, she texts, maybe both. A cute angle.

The Girl With The Priestly Admirer clutches her chest. I can’t do it, she whispers, I can’t not breathe for three whole months. IwillfailIwillfailIwillfail. I have never known anyone to be so entirely committed to the cause of convincing the world they will fail.

Film theatre season ticket. Railcard. Money. These are things I have let leave my hands and have, as a result, disappeared indefinitely.