lover

We were born at the same time on the same day. Neska was a soft curl of flesh with a handful’s worth of a head, like a huge pinto bean, and she was pink; pink seeming a simplification of the colour, but really perfectly pink, think of a sunset in the city, a skyline snag of those milky hues battling out the grey; think of an unripened rose apple, or of something else as bittersweet: seeming edible, but definitely not, but seeming so tantalisingly so. 

I appeared beside her not a moment later than the nurses having bathed and blotted her dry, as a spec. Undeserving of any further description: I was capable of thought, and though no one could really see me, I could see very well. 

A man with a yellow ribbed sock with three holes cut into it for his eyes and mouth on his head bursts into the Wetherspoons and moves with quick, determined steps through the enormous pub, around and between tables, leaning about like a palm tree in the wind to dodge women throwing their heads back in horse-like brays of laughter and men whose elbows are out like knife traps over the backs of their chairs while they orate loudly their tales of pissing in all but one of the thirty roadchefs in the United Kingdom. The man in the sock takes a small switchblade from his waistband and no one sees or cares because this isn’t too far out of the ordinary in this Wetherspoons. A group of lads at table one hundred and thirteen are on a bar crawl, dressed as their favourite live-action talking-animal performances from films before the year 2000, and they have all, by coincidence, chosen Babe the pig; their costumes executed with varying degrees of accuracy: one young man is on all fours at the bar, his latex tail has fallen off in the toilets, and he can’t be served because the barmaid can’t see him from where she is. He doesn’t want to break character and stand up, so he’s oinking so loudly, snorting over the hubbub, the carpet is leaving imprints on his palms and smells bad this close to his face, even worse than usual. 

 When she was born her mum couldn’t hold her straight away. Mum was far too weak and could hardly keep her eyes open. The doctors put Neska in a shallow crib, where she wiggled seismically, her eyes tightly shut and her tiny mouth sending ribbons of noise through the NICU, twirling about the hallways like the frantic birdsong of a flightless thing hopped from the branch only to flap and sputter to the pavement, abandoned for all time. We were both so alone, which is not the thing to be when you are immediately in the world; when you are so suddenly a thing. It helps to have something, like a brochure or a thirty second infomercial, but Neska and I had only each other – and though she couldn’t see me, I know my presence was at least felt, as it always has been, in her life. 

So when yellow sock-head comes up behind her, the denim mounds of his crotch at her back, she spins on the barstool to face him; but sees only his hairy navel peeking through his risen bauhaus t-shirt which has caught on the inside of his bomber jacket, just a thread sucked into the zip, and she looks up and catches her brown eyes’ distorted reflection in the painfully lame rainbow chrome switchblade, and isn’t immediately concerned, because nothing like this has ever gone badly – for her, at least – because I am here, and nothing; like the tragedy of her dad running away to Helena; or having chicken pox three times; or having to share a bedroom with her brother; or Tanya giving her heroin when they were fourteen; or having to have plastic surgery on her little finger after jamming it in the door; or being groped by celebrity chef Keith Winner; nothing has ever ended in complete disaster. It will all be ok, because I am here.