Nothing to write home about
Illustration by Violet Cable
Sometimes, all she wanted to do was stare down the mirror like someone else, find meaning in every freckle and contour and caress her collarbones and nascent hips manically like a leering camera. Pink lips consciously jaded enough to suck on a cigarette, as the first delicious mistake colonised her lungs she had felt her movie start, but it ground to a halt on the wrong bus home when she googled if mild nausea was a symptom of lung damage. So the child inside her was not dead but stoppered with a dummy on the short road to surrender, it couldn’t keep up with these new rules.
The old rules scoured the faces of smokers for shadows of illness until she realised that every adult had smoked at least once, that everyone was a bit grey. Even if the bike shed, when in Paris and every morning with coffee converged in deeper furrow on the forehead or a velcro laugh. That tactile morality that only the very young and the very old abide by began to fade from polarised shades, as Roald Dahl threw wispy heros and villains in opposite directions, she stuffed it back on the top shelf. So contradiction was her new love. It was the way she skipped home, heavy everywhere but her lobotomised core, after that day in the park with people she would never see again.
It was the way coronavirus flew around each other’s mouths with soggy filters and fevered tongues that day in Hyde Park. A week before the government declared pandemonium. They were framed in a postcard advertising British adolescence, stalwart fixtures in any park, until they were uprooted and transplanted back in the gaze of their parents. She didn't mind at the time, the narrowed decision-making cradled her back into comfort. It was dull, but so was everything apart from someone else’s cigarette and the films about other peoples’ lives which she piled up methodically in her malleable consciousness.
A few mornings later her teacher was backlit and backcombed as she stared blankly at 30 blank boxes on a computer screen: Alice, Ana, Anisa, Beth and she tailed off on the rest. She stammered through the bulletin like a lullaby filtering through their lie-ins, gently reminding them who they were, contextualising their names with monotonous equality while they sat at home, either courting or avoiding a mirror for dear life. Painting thick black warpaint either side of their wide eyes for when the command would come to climb out of the trenches. The battalions of boys would be waiting with their home-shaven heads and they were ready to match them.
but nothing waited on the fertile ground except for:
“Some of you may have picked up certain unacceptable habits over lockdown that the school cannot accommodate”
“Does she not know how to say drugs?” she said to the girl sat beside her who used to talk instead. She turned around, her bored eyes had grown sleek black wings and were all too ready to fly away.
This girl took drugs instead of thinking about them, she kissed boys instead of her pillow and she didn't laugh at her jokes anymore on principle. But they were both equally trapped in the teacher’s eyeline, well the first was taller so loomed out of that official frame. She still held the time an adult thought she was 12 when she was 8 like a dated monument to something undeniably adult. She itched to convert it into some concrete transgression as she watched Skins for the first time, wondering when the colour and sex would filter through the hospital-blue of the pandemonium and her bedroom walls. When she turned 16, it felt like she had skipped 15 entirely, convinced some sparkling buffet of experience was just out of view. But doesn’t everyone believe that at 15? Nothing to write home about, especially when home was the legally enforced extent of it.
But now there were other people again. Delicately mastered hairstyles in a row and teachers to hem us in. The eviction from our womb-like bedrooms felt either premature or way overdue, ultimately nothing was decided.