It is six, maybe seven in the evening. I sit barefoot in the garden of a house that is not mine, watching a sky aflame over green. It is not often that I leave London for the countryside, but this weekend his parents are away and he asked me to come down. We can go for long walks, he said. And then we can decide.

The cold bite of autumn descended some time ago. No Other Youth by the Saturnines drifts through the windows. It’s a familiar melody, and I mouth along to the refrain.

When I first moved here, the Saturnines atreding was all people spoke about. It came up for the first time in the college dining hall, where I sat beneath high-arched ceilings and frames of wood and gold. I didn’t know about the Saturnines or atreding; I didn’t dare to ask. I was chewing on a tough piece of gammon and hoped I wouldn’t have to spit it out. Later, I would discover the Saturnines were a band, a good one, and, to my embarrassment, that they’d meant ‘at Reading’; thatReading was a city in the south, the ‘at’ implied a famous festival.

Now, the song ends and the glass door slides behind me. His voice precedes heavy footsteps. “Pie’s in the oven,” he says, pulling up a chair.  

The smell of detergent. Hair like dewy grass, still damp from the shower. He sits with shoulders hunched, legs bare beneath rugby shorts and matted with ginger-yellow fur. Usually I would make a joke about the shorts, which have the name of our university printed all over. But this time, I stay quiet. The shorts are a decade old, they’ve been through too many washes. I stare at the block letters. Some are cracking at the edges.

He looks out to the garden. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?” he says.

I take a sip from a bottle of lemonade. The glass is cool, and condensation trickles against my hand. The label, an artisanal brown, is already peeling.

He’s right, it is lovely – more than lovely, actually. Anyone who claims to have seen green without having been to English countryside is lying. It is a smell of oak and pines, of grass both freshly cut and overgrown. It is a nature that fills up silence. I look out at this garden, at its ground so flat it feels ironed, its edges swelling with bulbous green. Where I grew up, there was no flat countryside, no blanket of evergreen. There were hills that disappeared and reappeared in different shades, barren from summer’s heat and winter’s coat of snow. A dotting of houses into villages and towns, and a vague green that came only in spring. It overlaps, now, with what I see, so that I am not sure of what is flattened and what is hilled, what is memory and what is real.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

“I’m fine.”

“No, really.”

“I’m fine,” I repeat. And my hills are receding, they are already gone.

I’d given the same answer earlier, as we went into town. We’d gone to throw away time, past rows of terraced houses and shops and wide roundabouts. We’d sat outside the Costa until it started drizzling. I’d only managed one sip of coffee before we had to move. For a moment I’d hesitated, thought I shouldn’t be drinking so much of it. Then I’d remembered: it would not matter either way.

We’d walked through speckles of water that weren’t wet, the light as grey as every other day. Shadows of cars, gutters dripping with rain. He’d been talking about the weather, about pressure systems, and of how this year, so far, was colder than the ones before. I knew he was trying to distract me, to distract himself. I was only half listening.

Instead, I’d stared at people’s faces as they went. Lip filler and non. Jutted chins and small eyes and pale skins beneath straggled hair. The hair was blonde, usually, or mousy brown. The local population.

I was focusing in, like a documentary lens, onto their features, the little details replicated a thousand times over through time and space, in this town, across this country. A cigarette at the entrance of big Sainsbury’s. A bar advertising two-for-one cocktails, and teenagers walking in already drunk. A curry house, and through the window, four people sharing naan and straw-yellow wine. As we’d gone by, my own reflection had slowed, then paused. I’d seen myself, short and round, my face indistinct and enveloped in a cloud of frizzed hair. Of my eyes, I saw only the rotating whites. The black dots inside were empty, the people at the table were all that showed through. And against them, zooming out, mine was a foreign outline.

In the garden, now, a timer buzzes.

“Dinner’s ready,” he says.

I nod, sigh, stand. We move back inside and he double-locks the door behind me, although he knows it is not a town for break-ins.

The sliding glass gives way to an open-plan kitchen. There are pendant lights from the wood-beamed ceiling, a glow onto minimalistic décor. A kitchen island with a hot water tap carved into its counter, and drawers hidden beneath. In the pantry, I look for another lemonade. It is wide enough that in a different country, a different home, a different family, this pantry is a bedroom of its own. Its doors swing shut behind me, magnetised at their ends. In a way, even though he no longer lives here, it explains him, this house with every detail chosen by the people who raised him.

He pulls the shepherd’s pie from the oven. I watch him move between wood and glass. Holding, handling. Owning. Behind him, the windows are black slats.

It was left for us in a Pyrex dish, the pie, cling-filmed and tucked onto the fridge’s top shelf by his mother. She always does this; she knows that neither of us cook. At Oxford we were fed, and afterwards we learnt to invoice our Deliveroos and I to forget my grandmother’s recipes.

He plunges the spoon inside. “How much do you want?” he asks.

“Just a little.”

The pie is still steaming. He wallops some into a bowl.

“That’s enough, thank you,” I say.

“You haven’t been eating.” His eyes narrow as he glances up. Beneath, his hands continue: breaking, scooping, dumping.

“Stop,” I say, but he shakes his head.

“You need to eat.”

With a broad movement I grab the bowl, tip it into the tray, watch mince slop back into its container. The smell of trite meat that was left for too long. Only a small lump of food remains in my bowl, less than expected, but it will have to make do. Sauce trickles from the sides, I wipe it away with my thumb and suck it dry. He looks at me; I turn away. I should apologise – by his standards, by all standards really, this is an outburst. But I can’t speak. There is something stuck at the back of my throat and I can’t quite get it out.

I sit cross-legged on the sofa, rest the bowl on my knee like a child.

Of the habits I was raised with, most I have tried to forget. It was easier that way. But they were more than habits; they were details that made up a life. For instance, I grew up eating only at the dining table. It was a wooden table with mismatched chairs, cramped between the gas stove and crooked cupboards, in a kitchen that smelt of cardamom and olives and fresh bread. It wasn’t open-plan, this kitchen, and although the door was always open, eating anywhere else would’ve been unthinkable. I would try, sometimes, to sneak out with a bread roll or a square of cheese that I wanted to eat alone, in my bedroom or the living room – and always I would be reprimanded and sent back as quickly as I had left.

The smells from the kitchen, those became a sort of habit too. My grandmother’s cooking was inhaled familiarity. Here, she would say, pushing a pot towards me that was still bubbling. Smell. How many ingredients can you name?

It was an impossible feat, she would chuck in so many spices and meats. Still, I would try. As I grew older, I learnt that salt, pepper, olive oil were guaranteed wins. I would watch pleasure light up her brown eyes. If she knew I was cheating, she didn’t seem to mind.

In this living room, now, he arranges himself on the armchair opposite. The space between us stretches long and dark against oak-panelled walls.

He balances the wet bottom of a lager against the armrest. “You look like you’re thinking too hard,” he says. “What do you want to do?”

I shrug, stare at my lap. “We can watch a movie.”

“No. About that.”

I press down with my fork, turn mince and mash into a jelly-brown pulp. “I guess I’ll go on Monday,” I say.

“Look, I don’t want to change your mind. But I think you’ll regret it.”

“Okay.” I pick at my nail, shred off a splinter of white.

“It could work. It could be good,” he continues. He finishes his beer and gets up for another. I look at the black of windows, the green that I know lies behind. “You need to grow up,” he tells the shelves in the refrigerator.

A whizz, the cracking open of a bottle. 

“How many are you having?” I ask.

“It’s the third. This could be it, you know.” He takes a swig and turns towards me. “Listen. You can’t undo it once it’s done.”

“You can’t undo it either way.”

 “I don’t want to change your mind -”

“Then don’t,” I say.

And the resignation comes all at once. It distorts the lines of his face and then smooths them out into something else. He’s a good boy, raised by good parents. He won’t force me into something I don’t want. In a way, I wish he would. It would make everything easier. It would give me someone to blame.

And now there is only a clatter of forks against ceramic, and neither of us with anything left to say.

Afterwards, he presses a remote and a television rises from the cabinet. I knew it was there, the hidden screen; I’ve seen it many times before. But a part of me is still in awe. We had a fat TV, back home, thicker than it was wide, and so heavy that my uncle had enlisted two friends to carry it up to our flat. We’d rearranged the entire room to fit it in, and there it was, then, an English-speaking channel. The blurry colours, the blonde woman delivering international news on screen. Thank you, I said to my uncle, over and over, and he’d nodded like he didn’t really understand.

It’s been a long time now. I wonder if that TV is still there, if it’s aquired more than one English channel.

“What movie should we watch?” he asks. I shrug; it doesn’t matter. In the end, he chooses a cheap horror recommended by the streaming service.

We settle in, each beneath our own cashmere blanket. Blood and guts and gore flood the screen. It reminds me of my first time in London, the chaos of streets and monuments and tube lines that penetrated like a religious wounding.

“Did I ever tell you,” I say, quietly, as red spatters towards us, “that the first time I came down to London, I was eighteen? It was Samira’s birthday.”

He twists his neck around. “Yes,” he replies.

I remember her black hair that fell in waves to her tailbone. I remember the curries her mother made that filled up our freezer. I remember her nervous laughter before an exam, the flashcards scattered everywhere after. 

“I miss Samira,” I say.

“Do you want me to pause the movie.”

I count the empty bottles lined on the floor. He’s finishing number five. “It’s fine,” I say. And as he turns away, I let my mind drift.

Early in our first year at Oxford, Samira had invited me to her parents’ home in London. We hadn’t really known each other, not yet. On the train down, the conversation had been strained. Besides, I’d moved only recently and was still conscious of the clunkiness of my accent. I still preferred to listen and not to speak.

From the station, I’d followed Samira onto a double-decker bus, slipped a coin stamped with the Queen’s head to the driver. The bus was full, and we crammed by the doors between colours, smells, accents that were difficult to pry apart. There were Caribbean women with shopping trolleys, ladies in hijabs and henna-decorated hands gripping the poles. An Eastern European girl balanced on her mother’s knee, her straw-blonde hair folded into braids.

The movie pauses on an actor’s grimace. “Was it Samira,” he asks suddenly, “that you wanted to bring to Glastonbury?”

“Yes.”

“That was funny,” he says without laughing.

A few years after university, he’d bought me a ticket to Glastonbury Festival. I would go with him and his school friends, who attended every year and had already sorted the drugs and parking and tents. Glastonbury was bigger than Reading, bigger than any festival really. I’d invited Samira, and on my way home from work we would speak on the phone about the artists we would see (the Saturnines were headlining) and the outfits we would wear (sparkles and sheer tops). But there hadn’t been enough tents or enough cars, and someone had complained about having an outsider come along – a second outsider, really, after myself. In the end I’d had to choose, and our friendship dissipated quickly after that.

I still thought about her with a tinge of guilt. I’d made a choice to gain something but to lose something too.

Samira – well, Samira had been the first to take me in. She had shown me that London had become her home, that it could become mine. She had shown me pictures of her life, of dinners at elegant restaurants and trips to Paris and surfing off the coast. That first afternoon, before the birthday celebrations, we had wandered the streets – there were so many that I thought I would never cross them again. The sky was still pearlescent then, it would be for a while before turning grey. The drizzle still sparkled with light before becoming rain.

On the tube home, that first night, I breathed in warm wind and fantasised of riding all the way to the end.  Of rising to suburbia. Of a future where I could live here, work one of those jobs that at home did not exist, see things and do things like Samira, things that if I hadn’t come, I could never have done, I would never even have known about.

*

I hold up a shaky hand.

The lighter is new. It takes a few tries before the flame bursts, and along with it the relief. I blow smoke into London haze. The pack in my hand promises I’ll die faster – we’ll die faster. Good. The pack is new too, I picked it up on the way in. I haven’t smoked in years.

Outside the hospital, I look at black cabs weaving through traffic. At home, taxis are white and smell of cheese and we only used them for emergencies, they were too expensive otherwise. I look at the traffic lights that blink red-yellow-green. like a Christmas tree.  At home, the colours light the other way around.

I stare. Red-yellow-green, like a song. I wonder why they had to be programmed differently. By then, the cigarette has burnt to its end.

Inside, I follow the signs to the waiting area. There’s a woman behind the desk in too much eyeliner. “Fill this out,” she says, barely raising her head, sliding over a sheet in the faded ink of photocopy. I stare at her eyeliner that stretches all the way to her temples, like a cat. She hands me a token, a loopy ‘8’ over laminated paper. “The doctor will call your number.”

I find a seat all the way at the back before I remember I don’t have a pen.

The room, later, will be in flashes. An examination couch glossy-wet, a smell of disinfectant. A trolley filled with plastic contraptions, and beside it, two women sit with stethoscopes snaked around necks. There needs to be two of them, they explain; it’s the legal requirement to sign this off. They just need to know why.

I sit on my chair, stare through the window. It’s drizzling again.

It drizzles most days. It was drizzling that wet afternoon some weeks ago, at the back of a pub when none of this had yet happened. When yellow lights trickled down walls and raindrops ran along the other side of the glass. A sloppy kiss that tasted of Polo mints, and I could tell he was drunk. We were sat beside his friends, my cheeks aching from holding a smile. I’d listened to their voices, the oblong vowels, his friends who had somehow become mine, conversations that slipped along so easily they could be reading off a script. He’d offered me another pint; I’d declined. “What do you want, then,” he’d asked without hesitation. And at the time, I hadn’t been able to answer.

The women are still staring. I watch tiny drops fleck off the sky. The clinic room, the smell of disinfectant, the white lamp replacing the pub’s fairy lights. They just need to know why.

They nod as I tell them. One of them scribbles onto the page, pushes it into my face for me to sign. She explains that it’s simple, it happens all the time. Two pills, one today and one tomorrow. The first will prime the tissues, the second will cause the bleeding.

Then it will be done.

*

Our living room is a collection of cultures. A conk shell from the Caribbean, a print from New Orleans. Memories of holidays and work trips. The pale vase I bought in Venice holds daffodils. They wilted a while ago, but I keep forgetting to throw them out.

Our living room isn’t big. It’s comfortably-sized; it takes up the ground floor of our house. The area is Zone 3 suburbia. We rent, although he told me recently that the landlord wants to sell. I pay my half with a job that back home does not exist, that has allowed me to do things that if I hadn’t come, I could never have done. I can buy nice clothes, eat out, travel and buy things abroad and bring them back with me. Yet, from the collection of cultures that stares at me now, not a single one marks my own.

I’m on the sofa when he comes home. Hearing the key turn in the lock, I recoil almost involuntarily. Knees to chest, a hoodie and leggings and fluffy socks pressed tight together.

Those socks were a present from my grandmother. She’d given them to me before I left, a long time ago. They’ll keep your feet warm, she had promised as she’d slipped them into my hands. It must’ve been sometime towards the end of August, the days still torrid hot. I remember fingering the fleece material, surprised that anywhere even sold such a thing. I’d taken them along with me as I’d moved from Oxford to London. I’d discarded them to the back of a drawer, almost forgetting. But this morning, somehow, I’d remembered that scene and the smell of freshly baked bread that used to follow her around like a cloud, and I’d dug them out from the back of the drawer and ripped them from their package and pulled them on.

I’ll be waiting for you, my grandmother had said, watching me drop the socks into a suitcase. Come back soon.

But I never had.

The room is thick with smoke, I see it in his face as he walks in. The Marlboro pack sits on the floor, torn. I called in sick at work today, spent the day shredding it between one cigarette and the next.

He drops the takeaway bag onto the table. “Did you take it?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“The second one today?”

“Yes.”

The bleeding has already started.

Around noon: a twisting inside, and ache became agony. Later, in the afternoon, came the clots. Thick and burgundy, a dark almost black. The smell of pork past its sell-by date.

He sits next to me, snaps the lids off the Tupperware boxes.

“Forks,” I say.

“Forks,” he repeats. He goes into the kitchen, slides the drawer open and shut.

The food in front of us, we pick at it without really eating.

“Do you remember,” he asks, after it has gone cold, “the night we met?” 

I tuck my hands into the pouch of my hoodie. I remember the union bar, the ochre light that bounced off the wood of tables, of counters, of walls. The bodies clamped around me, sweaty and shiny and unruined. The indie rock, the Saturnines blasting through speakers. I must’ve been nineteen or twenty at most, this was their new album, their music was everywhere. Sometime after that, I can’t remember exactly when, they’d begun to disappear.

“Of course,” I say to him.

I’d been standing on my toes, trying to catch the barman’s attention. He’d pushed into the space beside me.

“What are you drinking?” His vowels were long and slick with the entitlement of someone who belongs.

I’d turned. He’d been standing close enough that I could see the texture of his skin, smooth and quasi-translucent. The bluish squiggles of veins around his eyes. The thin lips lined with yellow bristles. I could smell the soap – a bar of soap, never liquid, I would find out later – beneath his cologne.

“Gin and tonic,” I’d replied.

I’d already chopped my name to an anglophonic syllable, straightened my curls each morning, shopped online for tops that were too cropped or too low-cut.

“Alright.” He’d lifted his hand. The skin of his fingers was taut and pale, his nails perfect pink crescents. A gold signet ring had caught the light. “Two gin and tonics.”

Later, he would admit he hadn’t been able to locate my accent. Almost British, he would say. Almost right.

“You got what you wanted,” he says to me now.

Silence edges in. The house lies very still and damp. I shiver. Suddenly it doesn’t feel like our house, like my house, at all; it feels like four walls and two people inside it. I stare at the conk shell, the New Orleans print, the glass vase holding dead flowers.

“What now?” he asks, stretching out the palms of his hands. In these years, the gold of his signet ring has dulled.  

“Can we talk tomorrow?” I say. “I’m tired.”

As I head upstairs, I don’t hear him follow behind.

The clock on the wall announces it is not yet ten in the evening. In the bathroom, I wrap two pads around my underwear, know it won’t be enough. I pull on a T shirt, a loose pair of shorts. I think of gammon, of my college dining hall, of paying for the bus with a one pound coin.

I crawl into bed. He’s already there, lying on his back.

He reaches out his arm, switches off the bedside lamp. I find him in the darkness, rest my head into his neck. Eyes wide open, not even a sliver of light.

The quiet rise and fall, the swellings of his chest.

“Whatever happened,” I whisper, “to the Saturnines?”

By Francesca Carter

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