hair fell into the sink like feathers. The sober me was stirring in the back of my head, panicking and fluttering anxiously, but I ignored her, shoved her back down. I left the hair feathers in the sink and pulled the band out so that my hair splayed around me, rough and uneven, and looked at my face for a long time until it stopped being my own and then I went back into the party. I went upstairs where the light was pink, and silvery strains of techno were spilling out and I did not look back.
I sat at my desk, still pulling at the new short chunks of my hair, the sketchbooks lying forgotten around me. I wondered, for the first time since I’d remembered cutting it, what it looked like but I didn’t get up to check. I sat, and I waited for Fitz to wake up.
There are places and rooms where everything can be taken away from you; words and thoughts and strength, until you are a child again, small and adrift. You feel invisible and caught in the headlights all at once. The things you have tried to build up around yourself, the things people have said you can be, fade away in the shadows of others around you. At school you are instantly comparable, instantly assessable. There are suddenly other players in the game you play with yourself.
I looked around the room but there was nothing to see except the tops of bowed heads as people pored over their work, scribbling notes on sketches and leafing through pages torn from magazines, scraps of fabric and glossy photographs. I rolled a pencil slowly back and forth along the table enjoying the dull clatter it made each way. The tutor, John, sat in a chair by the window playing on his phone. He was young, with blondish curls and an earnest enthusiasm for most things. If he’d had a tail, it would always wag. On the board behind him, he’d cheerfully scrawled the number ‘14’ in scarlet. This was the number of days we had left to work on our final pieces, weekends not included, and it glowed against the bright white of the board. The degree show hadn’t meant anything to me when I’d first begun, not like the others, the serious ones like Millie, who’d tagged along to the show each year even though we didn’t have to, making notes and talking to the students who were graduating. But now, with the red numbers on the wall and the feverish energy around the silent room, I felt the pangs of real panic rise. I looked down at the blank page in front of me, and I wondered how I’d ever thought I could do this.
I’m too old to be a student. I’m miles older than everyone else.
He bounces onto the sofa next to me. Don’t be silly, he says, rubbing my back. Only a couple of years. Bet you nobody even knows if you haven’t told them.
I know, though, don’t I?
He ruffles my hair. You’ve come this far, babe. You’re brilliant, Saf. You’re gonna knock their socks off.
You think so?
I know so. Now give us a cuddle.
With my eyes closed, I could see him so clearly and feel his arms around me. But I knew if I tried to open my eyes and draw, he’d disappear like steam, float away out of reach and be gone. With my eyes closed, everything was in its place in my head, the ground was still and the desk was in front of me. I knew if I opened them the buzzing in my head would get louder and everything would start to spin out of control and away from me.
John had got up and was pacing slowly around the room, offering his services, which seemed primarily to be the aforementioned enthusiasm. He stopped to talk to Grant, two seats away.
‘So how will the videos work in the show? You don’t have masses of space, you know.’
‘I’ve got three little plasmas from Hardy’s downtown, on loan. They’ve said they’ll fit them as well. I want them in a diagonal, you know, left to right.’
‘Great, yes.’
‘And I’m adding in this footage, the CCTV, see?’
‘Fate Jones? Great, great. Perfect.’
‘Yeah.’
The sound of patting on the back, footsteps moving on. I didn’t have any electronics in my work. I didn’t know how to make films. I could take photographs. That was all. I had been out the weekend before and taken pictures of things and people who caught my eye without thinking too hard about them. When I looked back through the pictures at home there was shot after shot of people eating, food in their hands and hanging out of their mouths, empty wrappers on the street, pigeons picking at a takeaway, a baby with ice-cream smeared over its face. These things did not sound great or perfect.
I felt the first familiar prickles of anger. It wasn’t fair to move the boundaries, to include videos and CCTV and free TVs. It was the same story but with different rules, different people pulling the strings – I was used to moving my own goalposts, but having someone else to edge them away made my skin begin to crawl and my chest feel tight. Everyone else was filling space so fast there wasn’t time or place enough to fit everything they could do. My pages were blanker than ever.
John was talking to Millie now, little Millie who was a year younger than everyone else because she’d skipped a year of school, and two years younger than most because she hadn’t had a gap year, and four years younger than me because I was backward, Millie with her study in still lives, objects taken from people she’d met in the street, in interesting places, and arranged together and painted to represent a cross-section of modern society in an old style, and John thought that sounded great, great, perfect too. I closed my eyes tighter.
The flat is cold and lonely, so I turn on the radio and start to fill the sink so I can wash up the dirty plates before he gets home. This will make him happy, and as the sink begins to fill with bubbling water, I imagine his dimple and the hair falling in his eyes as he reaches down to cuddle me.
The radio plays old songs, it’s Motown hour, they say, and I hum along as I put the plates on the draining-board. A song comes on that I know. My dad used to sing it to my mum when I was little and she’d get annoyed and flick at him with a tea-towel, even though she wanted to laugh really. It’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ by Marvin Gaye and I begin to sing along.
I hear his voice behind me. He puts his skinny arms round me and we sway along and sing even though we don’t quite know the words, my hands in the soapy water and his cold against my skin.
He turns me round and suds run down the back of his neck as I hold him close and we dance, round and round, in circles. We dance for the whole of Motown hour, with Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Four Tops and the Temptations spilling out of the little radio and him and me dancing round, spinning and clicking our fingers, wiggling and laughing and kissing. When Quin finally comes home he laughs and joins in and the three of us sing until Crazy Bob and Ket Kev next door start knocking on the wall.
John moved past me, invisible me, and began leafing through Gennifer’s sketches of her handmade dress, formed of photographs printed on fabric, painstakingly stitched together. I opened my eyes and looked down at the page in front of me. I knew that I had to be better.
The smallest things can be the biggest jobs, if you let them. Fitz liked to take his time choosing which song to put on, weighing one up against another and fretting about whether people would like it, watching their faces in fear as the first bars began to play. Quin could never choose an outfit to wear each day. He’d spend ages putting things on and then pulling them off, leaving them in tiny piles on the carpet like shed skins. Lilah spent an hour every day straightening her hair, over and over again, tiny strand by tiny strand. My mother found it difficult to tell someone awkward or unpleasant news. You could hear her on the phone, skipping and skirting round what she needed to say, tripping up on the words and jumping out of the way of questions. When my sister seduced her maths teacher in the store
