Out of the Woods - 9. Five on the Bed

Despite that the occupant was by no means in need of one, Sophie’s bedroom was equipped with a king sized bed. A whale could have easily drowned in that bed. A giant might have dropped it, as little kids drop wriggling goldfish, and the poor thing would never have been found again.

I wasn’t complaining though. I was a big fan of Sophie’s king sized bed. And I’d come to the conclusion, upon seeing it for the first time, that anything else would have looked stupid anyway—Sophie’s bedroom was the size of a small house. Two weeks after my first Starbucks date with Chris saw four of us happily on that bed, watching the cinema screen that lowered, as if by magic, from the ceiling. And then there were five on the bed.

Even I couldn’t hide my dismay.

‘Chris?’

His wicked smile was for everyone, not just for me: Tom, Anna, Sophie and I, carelessly sprawled, limbs entwined at curious angles, propping ourselves up on elbows and pillows and all manner of things. Sophie’s head rested on her arm, which in turn lay on the small of my back; the Teddy Bear I rested my chin on squeaked ‘I love you’ each time I pressed its tummy.

Tom cleared his throat. ‘Sophie, Anna—this is Chris.’

‘Hi,’ said Sophie shyly.

‘Hey,’ said Chris, politely.

Anna smiled as if she honestly didn’t care less.

I thought I would die.

It wasn’t at all unusual for people Sophie didn’t know to turn up in her bedroom; its size meant that it was more of a common room than anything else, and kids were constantly dropping by on the invitation of kids already in the room and Sophie really didn’t seem to mind.

I minded though.

Sophie gestured for him to entangle himself on the bed with us, and he did so without looking at me. His limbs moved so smoothly, sliding under and over various body parts with his usual elegant carelessness—as if entirely by coincidence, his head ended up right next to mine.

He bumped me, sending me sprawling, and then apologised.

My Teddy Bear told him I loved him.

‘I don’t love you,’ I said. ‘I think you’re stupid, and at least an inch too tall.’

But you might have thought I’d told a joke from the way he laughed.

We were watching The Titanic, at Sophie’s insistence. The funniest part, I’ve always thought, was where the old lady throws the necklace in the water at the end. The small exclamation that accompanies the act of throwing sounds to me like the noise a woman might make orgasming, if she had been entirely unprepared for it and had no idea, beforehand, what an orgasm was. Every time I saw it I laughed and it was the only part I found at all entertaining—but now that Chris lay beside me, his breath softly stroking my ear, I found I couldn’t concentrate.

All I could feel was his warmth to the side of me, and Sophie’s gentle pressure on my back. The scene came and went, and I felt a nudge on my thigh.

‘You didn’t laugh,’ said Tom accusingly, as if he had been waiting for it too but only to hear me laugh, and now that I hadn’t the entire film had proven a huge disappointment.

‘Laugh at what?’ asked Sophie. She bit into my back gently, making me squirm.

‘The bit where the woman throws the jewel into the water. Elijah always says it sounds like a shocked woman orgasming.’

Sophie wrinkled her nose. ‘No, it doesn’t! It’s a nice scene.’

‘It sounds just like a shocked woman orgasming,’ said Anna dryly. ‘I’ve been trying to place it for ages, and now I know what it is.’

Chris laughed.

Despite that The Titanic is in no way funny, not even entertaining in its painfully overbearing melodrama, Chris somehow found something to laugh about throughout the entire movie. When Jack froze slowly to death in the ocean he chuckled to himself, and when Rose repeated, “I’ll never let go, Jack; I’ll never let go,” for a far greater length of time than I considered necessary—particularly because she did, in fact, let go, and not a moment later—Chris was moved by a fit of silent giggles that he muffled into his sleeve.

They shook the bed. They went on forever, until finally Anna lost her patience.

‘If you’re going to make this truly horrendous movie even more unbearable than it already is,’—she shot a black look at Sophie, who was silently crying onto the back of my shirt—‘then the least you can do is put the cookies in the oven.’

‘Oh my god, I’m starving,’ said Tom.

‘Sophie?’ said Anna. ‘Can we put the cookies in the oven?’

Sophie had read in Good Housekeeping that the cookies came out better if the dough was chilled overnight; we had finally settled for the duration of The Titanic instead.

But Sophie was too busy quietly sobbing to answer, and so Anna kicked Chris off the bed. ‘Hurry up,’ she snapped. ‘Do it before she starts listening.’

Chris smiled wickedly. ‘Elijah, your assistance is required.’

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Nope, no, it isn’t.’

We had barely made it into the kitchen before he turned and backed me against the wall.

‘You haven’t been returning my phone calls,’ he said, his smile widening. One hand reached into my hair and insinuated itself into my curls. He leaned closer until his breath came hot against my face.

‘I have too,’ I said.

‘Have not. Don’t you like me anymore, Elijah?’

His other hand found my waist and snaked around it, burrowing under my shirt until it found skin, pulling me into his body. He pushed us both back against the wall. ‘Are you disappointed with my performance?’ he purred against me. ‘Is that it? Were you looking for more?’

His closeness made it difficult to think. The air was thick with him, like a blanket, weighing me down in a slow, hot delirium, making me stupid. I wasn’t touching him but I wanted to: suddenly touching him was all I could think of and I ached for it desperately, the longing made sharper by the knowledge that it would be wrong to do it here, in Sophie’s kitchen.

I swallowed.

‘Of course not. Your performance was fine. Not the best, I suppose, but nothing less than I expected from you.’

His whispering laugh tickled my skin. I closed my eyes and felt him slide in further until his lips burned my cheek. ‘Did you want fucking?’ he said softly. ‘Was that what you wanted? Because you should have said if you did…’

His body was firmly pressed up against mine, covering me, his hot tongue in my ear. His excitement blatantly pressed against my hip.

I couldn’t think.

And yet it was more than that, and I was both dizzy with desire for him and terrified by the sudden understanding that he was somehow more than the sum of his parts. He was more than just a body: he was everywhere and guttural, choking and overwhelming. He was all I could see and all I could feel, and the tiny details of his person, the unconscious things that lingered unspoken in my memory whenever I was reminded, no matter how fleetingly, of him—they all seemed so loud now and aggressive. His smell, which clung to my skin, and the headiness of his breathing, and his lips, thin and pliant and supple, that nestled in the hollow behind my jaw; all tugged at me insistently, pulled me into him, pressing me further against his body. His wide, arrogant smirk had moved from his face and laughed at me from his hands as they held me in place, from his thigh as it pressed between mine, from his breath as it clawed at my neck. ‘Do you want fucking?’ he asked again. ‘I could do that for you, if you wanted…’

God, I wanted fucking. I wanted it so badly that I had difficulty breathing.

‘You’ll never get to fuck me. Especially not in Sophie’s kitchen.’

I wriggled out of his grasp and turned away so he couldn’t see the flush of my cheeks. I reached for the fridge. I found the cookie dough and quickly turned to the oven.

It wasn’t even preheated, and I could barely stand upright for the tent in my jeans—and I could feel his eyes on my neck. I’d have to endure this for at least a quarter of an hour more.

And then he was behind me, his arms wrapped around my waist, his mouth on the nook of my shoulder. He ran his teeth along the sensitive skin and I shuddered and bit back a moan. ‘You want me,’ he whispered. ‘You want me, don’t you?’

I shrugged. ‘Sometimes.’

He smirked. ‘You want me all the time.’

He was relentless. It was rapidly degenerating into foreplay. I wouldn’t allow myself to touch him but I leaned against him, pushing myself into his chest, wanting to feel as much of myself against as much of him as I possibly could as he roamed and explored the contours of me. There was something cruel about the movement of his hand as it pawed over my torso and twisted my nipple, and the way that he rubbed at the cleft of my ass through my jeans; but it was desire and not anger that fuelled his aggression, and the knowledge of this made it beautiful.

‘Maybe I want you,’ I said. ‘But not in here.’

I moved to find a baking tray, and Chris sighed. He hopped into the counter by the stove, wordlessly following my progress. I couldn’t help but wonder at our little perversity of domestic routine—I, the fifties housewife, pottering about in the kitchen, silently observed by my husband, with a knowing little smile on his face. All I needed was an apron.

The thought of it suddenly saw me sober.

I watched as he ran his hands through his hair, pulling at the fiery strands as if to measure how long it had grown; against the light of the window it was an exercise in contrast, the bulk of it dark against the bright panes, almost purple, while the outline shone like finely spun copper. He did this for a while, not looking at me, and I wondered if he thought perhaps in the excitement of seducing me his hair had been messed up—it hadn’t. He was doing that perfectly well himself.

I wondered whether he had always cared so much about his hair—or if he even cared about it at all, and perhaps I was simply reading too far into things. When he finally spoke again I was surprised, because there was no trace of a smile in his voice.

‘Seriously, though, what’s going on?’

‘What?’

He sighed. ‘Don’t do that. What’s going on with you?’

‘I’m not following.’

‘I want to know what the fuck you’re thinking. You’ve been ignoring me for weeks. Are we not friends now?’

I buttered a baking tray. ‘Of course we’re friends.’

‘Fine. But are we more than that?’

I sighed and made to move away but he wouldn’t let me; he wrapped his long legs around my waist and held me tightly. ‘Are we more than that?’

‘I have a girlfriend, Chris.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘I don’t date guys.’

He snorted. ‘So you just sleep with them?’

‘Not while I have a girlfriend. Which is why I’m not looking for anything.’

‘That’s fucking ridiculous.’ He gave up his grip on my waist. He stood up and made his way to the fridge; he picked up the milk bottle and brought it angrily to his lips. He drank half of it, wiped his mouth, and put it back. I was surprised he hadn’t spat in it.

It was his way of saying, Fuck you, Sophie Priestly.

‘Who are you more interested in?’

‘It’s not really about that.’

‘Of course it’s about that,’ he snapped. ‘And it’s not fair, Elijah. I couldn’t have been clearer with you—I couldn’t have been any clearer than I was. I couldn’t have been more bloody obvious. And you know it.’

‘Chris—’

‘So now I want to know.’

‘What do you want to know?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘I want to know—’

‘Because, actually, you’ve not been as clear as you’d like to think. Actually, you’ve been bloody useless, because up until this moment I thought all you wanted from me was a quick fuck.’

‘Elijah—’

‘Because that’s all you’ve ever said. That’s all we did, because that’s all you ever said. Only, it turns out you don’t want that, do you?’

He frowned and looked away; he blushed. I watched the colour rush to his cheeks. I watched it spread, like watercolour, over the paper-paleness of his skin.

—And the sight of it made me feel immeasurably better, because Chris didn’t look good blushing. It should have been obvious, of course, because he was ginger, but when he blushed his skin clashed horribly with his hair, and I realised that it was a good thing he was usually so unflappably confident, because if he was shy he’d look like that all the time. ‘So what do you want, Chris?’ I asked, and he came to study intently the buttons on the sleeve of his shirt, head down, his eyelashes fluttering.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

It was a lie, of course—he just didn't want to say. I shrugged.

Outside in the garden two birds squabbled in a sudden flurry of noise and frenzied movement. I watched them for a moment, knowing that Chris couldn’t see it from where he sat unless he turned round; and he wouldn’t turn around, I knew, because if he did he’d feel that somehow he’d broken what limited contact we had.

I was grateful that he didn’t watch the birds with me. There was something about the knowledge that it was mine for the moment, that little scene I observed—something about the fact that it had nothing to do with Chris, that Chris wasn’t watching it with me, wasn’t invited to know of its existence… Something about it made me feel safer. For a moment I was glad of the reprieve.

The birds flew away.

‘You know what I want,’ he said. He still blushed, and he still wouldn’t look at me. He was mumbling now. He spoke so intimately to one of the buttons on his sleeve. ‘You know what I want, so I’m not going to say it. You can’t make me say it.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘And it’s not really about what I want at all,’ he continued. ‘Because whether or not I know what I want doesn’t make a difference to the outcome. I’ve waited for you since that night of house choir, and now that I’ve finally told you, you’re not interested.’

I snorted. House choir had nothing to do with it. He’d said it himself a thousand times before—I was different now. He hadn’t been interested in me before he’d left except as a mute object upon which to alleviate his sexual frustrations.

But admitting that to myself was easy—I’d never admit it to Chris. To admit, for a single desolate moment, that at one point I wasn’t attractive…

‘You know it’s not about whether or not I’m interested. I’m just not available.’

He shook his head.

‘It won’t last, anyway,’ I said bitterly.

It was true. Everything about Sophie now irritated me. Throughout the movie I had been repulsed by the feel of her head as it lay on my back.

And then last week, as we had napped on her bed in the afternoon, I had been moved by the urge to touch her as she slept. I leaned over and kissed her lightly on her soft lips, slightly parted, and I had been flushed with a sudden, foreign tenderness; and then she had opened her eyes and smiled at me, and moved to respond.

And then I hated her. I fought to keep myself from pushing her off her own bed and onto the hard wooden floor.

‘That’s good,’ said Chris. He stood up and made for the door. ‘Then when I invite you for Thai food in one week’s time, there won’t be a conflict of interest. It’s not as if you’re invested with your current relationship—you’ve made that perfectly clear.’

‘I’m not getting Thai food with you,’ I spat.

Chris laughed.

‘You are. You are, or I’m going to show up at your house sometime next week.’

***

The cookies were no better for the wait, but they were gone within five minutes. All that standing around in the kitchen—all that unbearable talking—and, within five minutes, there was nothing to show for it. No evidence remained of my miserable half hour.

You’d have thought that would please me but it really didn’t.

Sophie was a demonstrative sort of person, always touching and holding and snuggling. I sat on the other side of the bed to her and she clambered over to join me, first sitting beside me and taking my hands in hers and then, when I didn’t shove her roughly away and kick her until she stopped, climbing into my lap and leaning back against me, so that my vision was obscured by her long golden locks and all I could smell was her strawberry hair conditioner.

And it annoyed me that we were in a room with other people—other people lay on the bed with us, talking, laughing perhaps, chewing slowly on the remains of their cookies, trying to pretend that two of their number weren’t blatantly ignoring them and practically making out to their left. It annoyed me that I was one of those people—those unbearable people—who can happily sit in company and act as if the social norm dictating that public displays of romantic affection be kept to a chaste minimum did not exist. It annoyed me when people did it to me, and it annoyed me now that I was doing it to them.

And it annoyed me that all her wriggling gave me an erection.

My unintentional admission that things weren’t all well with Sophie had propelled Chris into an overly cheerful mood; Anna in particular had taken to him, and they spent most of the afternoon happily bickering.

When he left she turned to us and said, ‘Does anyone else think Chris is a bit of a twat?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Hot though,’ said Sophie.

And she grinned wickedly at me, as if expecting me to be outraged at the very thought of her admiring anyone other than myself.

‘If you like gingers,’ said Anna, with a noncommittal shrug.

I smirked. ‘Do you like gingers?’

She stared at the door he had just left through before turning to me and positively leered. ‘Maybe. But he’s not crazy enough for me, I’m afraid.’

And as usual with her I found myself blushing—blushing and thrilled, terrified and desolate and deliriously reeling. How did she do it? How did she just open herself up like that? How did she open herself up so blatantly and so easily, as if she honestly didn’t care what anyone thought of her? I'd give anything to be her, I thought at that moment—anything at all.

I'd give anything not to care.

Sophie glared at her, and Anna eventually turned away.

Later, when we got up to leave, Sophie pulled me in for a lingering kiss.

How could she not see how uninterested I was? How could she not see—because it was obvious, it coloured every word I said around her and everything I did—that I was repulsed by the slightest contact? It was baffling to me how she could keep smiling at me, smiling and honestly meaning it, when even looking at her in that moment was an exercise in willpower.

It was baffling to me that I managed it.

‘So,’ she said with a smile—and gone was her shy smile now, now that the honeymoon period was over with. Now her smile felt smug. ‘Are we still up for tomorrow?’

I kissed her cheek. ‘Of course.’

I had arranged tomorrow—we’d go to the cinema, maybe wander round town, and then go out for a meal. We’d be spending the whole day together. I had arranged it as I had arranged all of our dates for the past few weeks: with that final date, that end date, in mind.

Tom nudged me towards the door. ‘Come on, Laurence. If you want feeding, you have to be near the table at dinnertime.’

The door opened and for a moment nothing happened, as if the memory of the door still lingered; and then it too collapsed like a plane of glass, and I felt a cool breeze touch my face, and with it that smell of dusk, pure and crisp and poignant. Outside in the fading light the trees swayed, moved by a wind too far above us to feel all but the faintest traces of it. Sophie’s house was surrounded by trees and they seemed to sway and groan in perfect harmony, creaking in unison, dark against the pastel-pale sky. My feet crunched over both gravel and a blanket of dead leaves.

‘You’re such a weird human being,’ said Tom, as he observed my psychotic grin.

In the car he was pensive and said very little. I tried holding a conversation but none would catch; each he answered perfunctorily, some of them barely coherent. After a while I began fiddling with the air conditioning instead.

‘Are you good friends with Chris now?’ he asked suddenly.

There was something in his tone that made me sit up and look at him.

‘I guess so,’ I said carefully.

‘Sure,’ he nodded, but he seemed to be nodding for more his own benefit than mine. ‘Sure, I guess that makes sense.’

We fell silent, and I took to watching the trees as they passed by through the window. He was perfectly still, stiff almost. His hands gripped the wheel too tightly. His gaze never once left the darkening road but I could feel his mind wandering in its place.

‘He’s a good guy,’ he said.

‘Sure.’

‘He’s gay, you know.’ He frowned. ‘Or at least, I think he is. He hasn’t actually told me. Maybe he’s bisexual.’

‘Okay.’

‘Not that it matters, of course.’

‘Okay.’

He was fishing for something.

We reached a red light. Without the drone of the tires on the road, the car fell silent. I considered reaching for the radio but to do so would be to acknowledge the intensity in the air, the terseness of which, so strange and unexpected with Tom, had me aching to say something, anything, to alleviate the strain of our thoughts. Tom and I were never uncomfortable—or, that is to say, I was uncomfortable all the time in his presence, constantly, but he was as constantly oblivious to it; and I’d rather have endured all the discomfort in the world than inflict the least of it on Tom.

So the car stayed agonisingly silent.

There was a chance, for a rapidly fleeting moment, in which I thought he might not have been aware of it anyway—so absorbed he might have been in his own thoughts that the tense mood might well have passed by him unnoticed.

He turned to me suddenly and took my arm. ‘You know you’re my best friend, right?’

‘Sure,’ I said, hoping that my response would satisfy him and he’d turn away without forcing me to look at his face.

It didn’t. He didn’t let go of my arm. No matter how I silently begged it, the traffic light stayed mockingly red. I sighed and turned to look at him.

I’ve always wondered how it could be that pale eyes can convey warmth when their colour, by definition, is not warm. I’ve never understood it. It’s probably an attempt at persuading myself that brown eyes are more attractive, when they aren’t. Tom’s eyes weren’t brown but there was no lacking warmth in them when I turned to face him—I tried to be annoyed by the sudden, childish insecurity of his that had forced upon me this awkward conversation but once I’d turned to him I knew that I couldn’t. Being irritated by him, I knew, was a lost cause when he looked so upset in that moment, for no reason that I could see; he looked so upset suddenly, and so serious, and so desperate to convey to me his affection for me and the value he placed on my friendship.

Even though I lied to him scarcely any less than I lied to the rest of humanity and even though, as a result of my shallow, selfish facade, the quality of my company was insipid at best.

‘I know,’ I croaked, and after an agony of my hand lingering in the air slightly above him, I patted his arm as I gripped mine. ‘I know I’m your best friend.’

‘Am I yours?’

‘Of course. You think I can’t be friends with Chris without ditching you first?’

‘Okay,’ he said. He visibly deflated with relief. ‘Good.’

He let go of my arm when the lights finally turned green; without another word he began driving again. I was so unsettled that the thought of dinner waiting for us on the Harding’s dining room table filled me with dread.

How was I going to endure another of their dinners, so buoyant, as they were, with affection for each other? As it was I was drowning in my little boat, moments away from capsizing.

I thought he would kiss me. It was the stupidest, most fleeting thought, the stupidest fleeting thought I ever had—I hated myself for thinking it, but I did. I thought, for a moment, as he looked into my face and begged me to acknowledge how much he felt for me, how much he valued me, that he might have leaned over and kissed me. And I would have kissed him back, of course, and probably burst into tears soon after; and they would have been such happy tears, goofy, stupid, happy tears, the happiest tears of my life—and he’d have called me a dork or a retard or a weirdo, and he’d have wiped them away as he leaned in again, his breath on my cheek, to lay his lips against mine once more. Perhaps he’d have pulled me closer for a moment, before the traffic lights turned green, and then he’d have driven off still holding my hand. Maybe he’d have parked up somewhere secluded and just held me—nothing would have happened. We’d probably just have held hands, maybe kissed, and laughed about how stupid we were for waiting so long.

All that separated my reality from that one was a moment. A tiny moment that could almost be missed if you blinked—a moment in which he leaned forward instead of turning away.

God, I was stupid. But the dissonance was jarring, and I thought about it all the way back until we parked up in his driveway.

‘Do you know how hungry I am?’ he asked as we walked to the door.

It was a rhetorical question, strategically employed as a buffer with which to distance us from the unmanly conversation we’d just had in the car. He’d tell me just how hungry he was whether or not I chose to reply.

‘I’m so hungry,’ he said with a grin. ‘Starving. And it’s lasagne. I love lasagne… Ugh, give me beef.’

And then Mrs Harding opened the door, and I immediately knew something was wrong.

Her eyes were red. Normally she was the sort of person to exude, if not happiness, then a deep sense of contentment and peace, as if she had thought about it long and hard and arrived at the conclusion that, whilst perhaps things hadn’t gone quite as she’d planned, they had turned out as well as she’d hoped. Normally her eyes were perpetually touched by a smile.

And she was smiling, but it was wan and watery. There was nothing content about it.

‘Elijah, dear,’ she began, still smiling at me; but she turned quickly and ushered Tom into the house, kissing him on the shoulder.

I kissed her cheek and gave her a sympathetic smile. ‘I’ve got to get home,’ I said. ‘I hope everything’s okay.’

***    

Later he rang me, and he sounded tired.

‘It’s my grandmother in Devon,’ he said. ‘She’s got cancer. Mum and dad are going down to visit her tomorrow.’

‘God, that’s awful,’ I said.

‘Yeah, mum’s taking it pretty badly. I didn’t really know her.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. And then, ‘I’ll come over tomorrow night and we’ll bake a cake.’

We’d tried baking a cake once; god only knows why. I’m just as moderately capable at baking as I am at cooking but Tom was so utterly useless that everything he touched either broke or turned to shit; the chocolate cake came out soggy in the middle and burnt at the edges. It sagged horribly, and a whole punnet of raspberries couldn’t hide the uncomfortable droop.

I had been horrified by the outcome, to the extent that I could barely talk for dismay; and Tom had called his mum and she had brought home a real chocolate cake, and he’d spent the evening trying to cheer me up with his unfunny jokes.

Later, it became one of those anecdotes he brought up from time to time to tease me with; and I pretended I hated it when really I was quietly touched he remembered it at all. We kept promising to do it again sometime.

‘Thanks, Laurence,’ he said.

And then he hung up. I had the feeling that I was more unsettled by his grandmother’s cancer than he was.

***

We sat on the stairs. I don’t remember why.

We sat on the stairs, and I reached up tentatively, to touch the skin on her face; and I reached for the skin below her ear, not sagging but lined, faintly, soft as leather and thin; and I pulled it, gently, and smoothed out the wrinkles around the ball of her jaw.

It was the first time I ever thought of her as anything other than my grandmother. It was as if I had hidden in a cave, never even dreaming of the sky, and suddenly the stone above my head was lifted and the horizon fell away; because I’d only ever thought of her as my grandmother, an idea more than an individual, and suddenly in the smooth, elegant line of jaw I found there was a younger woman, a person in her own right, who had once been beautiful—who had once been someone else entirely, and hadn’t even been aware of my existence.

She was reluctant to look at me, and when she did, it was a single darting glance, like the movement of a shy fish amongst anemones. I was shocked to find that she was terrified.

She was terrified of my tiny fingers on her face, and she was terrified of my tiny body, so tiny that it could fit, still, in the space underneath the door handles. There was something so horribly raw about it, that single darting glance; and it was accidental, she hadn’t meant to tell me anything at all—she hadn’t even meant to look at me, except that she was too terrified of my reaction to not look, and I found I was overwhelmed by the urge to hug her.

‘You’re the prettiest grandma I ever met,’ I said, and even though I meant it—and even though I was trying to reassure her, even though I didn’t know why or what from, all I did was acknowledge her fear, when all she wanted to do was deny it.

Even then, at the age of six, I wondered why she looked at me like that. How could she possibly have been afraid of me?

I know now that it wasn’t me she was afraid of. She was afraid of that minute change in perspective, like the shift in your vision when you stop looking at the waves and focus instead on the depths just beneath, and all the strange things you find there; she had been crouching behind the title of Grandmother, because grandmothers aren’t meant to be young and beautiful. While she was only a grandmother, she was protected from the despair of her lost beauty. She felt the lack of it every day, but once I noticed it too that absence became real.

Because I can persuade myself of anything in the world. I can pave over any hole in the road I come across. Such is my supremacy over my own thoughts that I can do it at any time, whenever I want—but only while the hole lies in my head. Once it leaves my head I lose the ability to deny its existence.

It was the same, I’d imagine, with grandma.