Let Me Be Like Water Read online

  Let Me Be Like Water

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Melville House UK

  Copyright © 2018 by S. K. Perry

  First Melville House Printing: August 2018

  Melville House Publishing

  46 John Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  Suite 2000

  16/18 Woodford Road

  London E7 0HA

  mhpbooks.com @melvillehouse

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Perry, S. K., author.

  Title: Let me be like water / S. K. Perry.

  Description: Brooklyn, NY : Melville House Publishing, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018028529 | ISBN 9781612197265 (pbk. original)

  Classification: LCC PR6116.E775 L48 2018 | DDC 823/.92–dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018028529

  ISBN: 9781612197265

  Ebook ISBN 9781612197272

  v5.3.2

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Autumn

  Winter

  Spring

  Summer

  Acknowledgements

  Reading Group Guide

  For Kate and David Perry – who nurtured my love for stories and the sea, and taught me to believe in magic.

  You are like muscle memory; a spasm of heart – limbs – lungs toward the once familiar.

  I am resisting rehabilitation in case I forget.

  AKI SCHILZ

  Autumn

  If you were here still,

  I’d curl into your ribcage,

  my concave lover.

  1

  I was sitting on a bench staring at the beach when Frank told me I’d dropped my keys. I was watching this little girl playing with a kite. She was quite a long way away, but she gave me something to look at. I can’t give you any details: maybe that her front teeth were missing, or that she had tangled hair. I don’t remember what I was thinking about, although I know I was wearing my red gloves.

  I’d decided to get up and go, ready to continue walking. I was cold and sore from sitting, and at that precise moment I needed something that wasn’t the sea to be in front of me. I was about to stand up when Frank – who I didn’t know was Frank at the time – told me I’d dropped my keys.

  He’d been watching the girl too, it turned out.

  He pointed at the kite.

  ‘I have days where I’d like the wind to take me up like that. Some days it’s wanting to escape, I think, but on others, I’d just like to be a kite.’

  I smiled. He handed me my keys.

  ‘Thank you. I didn’t know I’d dropped them.’

  ‘That’s OK. I dropped mine on a train track once, between the door and the platform. They had to be hooked back up again by the man from the ticket office. It turned out his name was Noel and he lived down my road. Funny world. What about you; would you like to be a kite, or would you pick something else?’

  2

  I stripped our bed the night before I left and sat on the floor while the washing machine spun. I watched the sheets twisting round. The bulge of the bowl made me think of a belly with a baby growing inside it. It hurt so much I thought there must be bruises. I needed to find something to hold that felt like you, so I pushed my fist into my mouth and bit down and cried into my knuckles.

  It took me nine days to pack. When I got lonely I’d sit on the floor of the shower with the water switched on. Sometimes I’d feel tired, and I’d put down the jeans or the pants or whatever it was I was trying to put into a suitcase, and I’d slide into our bed. I’d lie still and think about how much I miss you. Other times I’d just cry, and my body would shake in that small way that starlings do when they fly together and their wings shudder like sadness in the sky.

  I lay awake for most of the night and thought about the woman who was moving in in the morning. I put my suitcases into a big van, and it drove them from our little place in Hammersmith to the sea.

  3

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’d be a yo-yo.’

  ‘That’d be good,’ Frank replied. ‘Kites get to fly though; a yo-yo would be more like a permanent bungee jump.’

  We laughed.

  ‘You were about to get going. Are you walking towards the pier?’

  ‘I thought I’d walk to the sailing club. I like the sound the boats make.’

  ‘Me too: the clinking,’ Frank said, and he smiled.

  4

  I’ve always loved London, so when I started to hate it I knew I had to leave. I didn’t want to lose the feeling the river gives me in the morning – even on mizzly days – dispersing the early light on the Southbank as it waits for the sun to get a couple of centimetres higher; or the way the smell of rain gets in between taxis; or how wet, bitter grass springs up outside offices and in parks; or the glow the city gives me at 5 a.m. when I’m dirty from the night before and edging into the day with dry shampoo and muscles still tight from dancing and smoke. But I heard you everywhere: our residue on pavements and the seats of buses, reminding me of a conversation, a look, a half-hour I’d spent waiting for you, or sitting in the office counting down the conversations until I’d step onto the District line to find you. And I walked past grubby doors with newspaper headlines ringing in my mind, hearing the arguments we would have had about them, dissecting the nitty-gritty until you laughed and pushed me up against a street wall, stopping our debate under a pile of bitty kisses.

  And without you, the boating lake, and the pub gardens with their wooden benches and fairy lights, and the wind tunnel when a tube pulls away and you tip on the edge of the tracks, and the lines of commuters in walking queues with frowns, clutching coffee in cardboard cups; they all seemed empty.

  5

  ‘I feel like some company and Harris isn’t quite cutting it.’

  Frank pointed at his dog, who was running across the beach. ‘Would you mind if I walk with you?’

  His voice sat on the wind like they were friends. He was maybe seventy, I reckoned, and there was something solid about him.

  ‘That would be good,’ I replied. ‘I thought I wanted to be on my own but I don’t think I do anymore.’

  ‘Blame the kite,’ he said. ‘It’s made you feel wistful.’

  I thought about you: holding my hand and watching me up in the sky.

  6

  You were in the middle of the dance floor at a university club night; a song I hadn’t heard before was playing, and I’d never seen anyone I wanted to talk to so much. My friend was off snogging the DJ, and I was standing by the bar feeling awkward and wishing I was back in my room with a cup of tea. But then there you were, dancing, covered in sweat – amongst a group of bodies that seemed to take up more room than the club could hold – all spiralling arms and beautiful, grinning eyes.

  You were laughing at something a girl had said in your ear and then the song wound down, and you started to head for the bar where I was standing in these stupid shoes that were too tight and which made me feel overdressed and clumsy. You never got to the bar though; the first beats of the next track – I can’t remember what it was, some indie anthem with too much electric guitar – sucked you back into the bodies, skanking and laughing.

  I didn’t see you again that night but I sketched your face on my eyelids as I lay in bed falling asleep.

  7

  ‘I often see people sitting in their cars just watching the water,’ Frank said. ‘It makes me want to climb in there with them. I’m sure most of them are fine, but I always wonder if they’re sitting there because they�
��ve got no one to be outside with. I don’t think people should be alone by the sea.’

  ‘Unless they have some very good music playing.’

  Frank laughed. ‘Yes. Are you a musician?’

  ‘I don’t know what I am.’

  ‘Ah, you’re in the best possible position. Would you like a ginger nut?’

  He got a packet out of his coat pocket and offered it to me.

  8

  I didn’t think you’d noticed me that night in the club but you told me afterwards you had. I never knew whether you were just saying that because you were being nice. I wonder if I’d been looking the other way, or if we hadn’t got on the same number 254 bus from Holloway Road to Whitechapel a week later, we’d have found another place to collide.

  I was sitting upstairs and you were behind me. The bus went round a corner a bit too fast and I fell off my seat. You burst out laughing and I turned around and saw you, the man I’d drawn on my eyelids.

  ‘How did you manage to fall over when you were sitting down?’

  9

  Frank and I start to walk. The sea is the colour of pigeons. I can smell September in the sky: leafy and salty and ripe. Two seagulls are bickering over something they’ve found on the stony slope down to the sea and they hoot at each other before taking off.

  I ask Frank if he lives here. He tells me he does, that he’s a retired magician, and when he and his partner Ian stopped working they’d moved to the coast.

  ‘What kind of magic do you do?’ I ask.

  ‘All kinds,’ he says, and he smiles. ‘These days I earn a bit of money baking cakes for a friend’s coffee shop. Her name’s Jackie; you’ll meet her soon enough I’m sure. You can smell her shop three miles away so everyone gets sucked in sooner or later.’

  Then he pulls a £10 note out from behind my ear and laughs at my surprise.

  10

  I don’t know if you’ll remember this, but one of the first times we hung out I was working, I only had an hour free at midday, so you came to see me and said you’d bring lunch. We met in the little park in Stratford and all you’d brought was chocolate cake. There were no sandwiches but you had paper plates and plastic cutlery and little napkins and I laughed, and you didn’t understand why I was laughing because you didn’t know how else anyone would eat cake except with a fork.

  You’d only just moved back here from Paris and you called the cake ‘gâteau’, and your voice curled around your words like you were cradling them.

  I think about that, four years later, when we share a bed and a flat and you curl round me, squeezing into my knees and the small of my back the same way your accent holds your words, the same way that books made of leather squash into the shape of the bookshelf they sit on.

  After we’d eaten you took a kite from your pocket. You unravelled it slowly and we watched it climb into the sky. I remember feeling it tug on my hand, jerking like it didn’t know which way to fly. You had the night sky in your eyes: somewhere between navy and black, and you said we should let it go and we did, and it took off over the grey buildings like a firework.

  You kissed me then, and I walked you back to the underground and watched you slide through the ticket barrier to the Jubilee line. You walked away, not looking back, like you knew exactly where you needed to be. You texted me later: Where do you think our kite got to, Holly? Let’s go looking for it soon.

  11

  ‘You’ve just moved here?’ Frank asks.

  ‘Yeah, two weeks ago; I’m staying in Kemptown.’

  ‘Ah, excellent. You can join our book club. We’ve been hoping for a new member.’

  Frank asks how long I’ll be around for and I say I don’t know. He says he hopes I’ll stay long enough to learn to bake. I tell him I don’t make cakes but I do like eating them, and I ask him what he thinks about cutlery when doing so. He says fork or no fork, as long as you leave it in your mouth long enough to taste it, it doesn’t matter.

  The water is very still despite the wind; the waves aren’t breaking, just rippling in and dimpling the surface of the sea like bark. I don’t know what to make of Frank; he asks me questions like he cares a lot about the answers. He tells me that the book club meet every month to discuss a different book and eat together. He asks me if I’ve read Narcopolis; I haven’t but he says I can borrow his copy and if I read a bit I can come to their next meeting on the Wednesday coming. That his friend Gabriella will be cooking and it will be unmissable. That there will be cutlery but it won’t be obligatory. We both laugh at that.

  I’m glad to get out of my head for a while; his voice is a relief. He speaks slowly, letting the air fill the gaps in our conversation and laughing at all his own jokes. Soon we are past the old pier and the boats, and we stop for some cider in a little pub on the seafront that turns into a club at night.

  He tells me that on a Thursday he hosts a drawing class he used to go to until he realised he couldn’t draw at all. I tell him everyone can draw, they just need to practise, and he says that’s probably true but he prefers to knit, which is also very useful because you can never have enough socks.

  ‘I started when Ian died. I’d sit in the evenings and the room would be so quiet. I thought about how sad he’d feel to know I was just sitting there missing his noise in the room. Knitting needles make this sound, clinking together, and it made me feel like he was chatting to me. I think it’s why I like the noise the boats make so much; it’s similar; it’s like they have something to say.’

  ‘How long ago did he die?’ I ask.

  ‘Six years. Do you know, he is still the only person who made no sense to me at all the first time I met him. Completely haphazard.’ He laughs. ‘But he had red hair and he walked assertively, and he liked to drink tea in thin, cold china cups. I didn’t have a choice but to be with him in the end.’

  I want to tell him about you but the words feel like cement in my mouth. Frank looks me straight in the eyes. It’s disconcerting, from a stranger. I ask something vague about him being a magician. He says it’s the best job in the world but that anyone can do magic and he can tell I have it in me.

  He tells me to open my hand, I do and there’s a flower in it, and I shake my head and ask him how he did it. He says that it was me, and I really shouldn’t feel sad when I can make flowers grow out of thin air. I don’t ask him how he knows I’m sad; I just slip the flower into my bag and listen to the water swaying. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘when you’re by the sea everything works out alright.’

  12

  There are seagulls playing in the waves. It’s 2 a.m. and I’m sitting on the beach looking at the sea. The birds dart around and the night makes them glow like the round bits in Pac-Man. And I just stand there and I shout. And I don’t know if you can hear me, Sam, but if I don’t try to talk to you I’m scared my tongue will stop working and I’ll forget how to move my bones. I’m scared my skin will forget how to feel anything at all without your hands on my spine while I sleep.

  13

  A week after the date in the park you’re sitting on my bed. We’d been out to dinner; we ate Mexican food with our fingers. You’d told me about growing up in Cameroon and moving to be with your dad in London and then university in Paris. Now you’re studying in London again. We’ve got guacamole and chilli in our fingernails. I’ve told you I grew up on the edge of the city, that I still feel like I’m growing up now. I’ve looked at your hands moving to your mouth, and at your mouth, and we know that none of this stuff matters anyway, that we’ve known each other all along.

  You tell me you’ve never seen anyone you wanted to talk to so much as you did when I fell off my seat on the bus. I tell you that although I’m studying philosophy, I want to write songs. You tell me how hard you find it being the son of your father. I tell you I like how you dance, although I don’t like indie nights and you shake your head at me and laugh. We walk home holding hands. Now I’m lying down next to where you’re sat and you say, ‘Sing me a song.’

  ‘Wha
t? No.’

  ‘Please, sing me something. I want to hear you sing.’

  You lie back on the bed next to me. We face each other and I look into your sky-eyes.

  You say, ‘If you sing, I’ll sing.’

  I laugh at you.

  ‘What are you talking about? I don’t want you to sing.’

  ‘You want to be a singer; why are you so afraid to do what you do? You’re gorgeous too. Are you afraid of that?’

  I can’t hold eye contact but you put your hand on my hip as I look down and you move my chin up with your other hand and kiss me. There’s chilli on my tongue.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I say. ‘I’ll sing to you tomorrow, maybe. Let’s do this for now.’

  I put my feet on yours and move in closer so our whole bodies are touching. When you breathe out, I breathe you in. The skin on my lips brushes yours and you pull me closer, move your hands under my jumper and hold the cradle of my back. I’m scared by how quickly I become part of you.

  14

  Frank and I arrange to meet the next day by New Steine Gardens so he can lend me Narcopolis. He’s waiting there with Harris when I arrive. It’s drizzling and the memorial statue splits the sky like broken wings. Frank has a flask of tea and he pours me a cup and hands me a ginger nut. We decide to walk along the front for a bit. The rain is heavier now but he tells me there’s no point living by the sea if you don’t like getting wet and I laugh and zip up my mac.

  We go down the steps to Madeira Drive. The railings are the same kind of green as hospital overalls so I look at the water instead. It’s moving slowly, like the extra wetness in the sky gives weight to its rhythm. I take Harris’s lead from Frank and let him pull me along. When Frank lets him off to run ahead, the wind carries me instead. Little kite.

  ‘Is there anywhere you need to be today?’ Frank asks.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d say that. I’m going to walk to Ovingdean for some cake. I’ve always found that cake in the rain is surprisingly good. Do you want to come?’