Cordiform

Tick tick. Some animals need their loves far away from them. With the canned freeze, phone flickering under a blanket, I could almost understand. Pinecones in the boreal forest are right now closing up on their own warmth, Mr. Attenborough tells me, while long ears and pads have become pelt casings for organs, more vegetal than mammal. Winter is about distance and deferral. 

Earlier, at the crook of my neck, Gia had spent hours luxuriously braiding and unbraiding my hair, wordlessly picking out the imagined flecks, breathing very shallow like an anxious mother monkey. Now, everyone is asleep or shivering in the grey dark. I am thinking about how a floating plane is also a dead pod, with shifting metal plates and stuck gears designed to crinkle inwards. The seatbelt sign flicks off. 

***

There are these blues and greens, the same colour as the temperature. I feel like something that’s just been turned out from under a rock. A man shouts in my ear and I see a crowd containing my friends lunge towards a shuttlebus; the bus is full and leaves for god’s sake. Ten trollies of bouncing suitcases overshoot it; there is blinding silver coming off the plane wheels and the stairs rolling away. We wake up hunched between food kiosks, slightly evaporating, and completely astonished, probably, that we have decided to do this with these people. 

Tick. At one point, I turn while chewing and my nose grazes Gia’s shoulder, who has a mouthful of chili. I look up. You have a little bit of hair trailing into your mouth, I want to say. A little tomato blood at the corner. You could hang your little sunglasses on your hair, I think, have them dangling on gold-yellow strings. The luggage is a stupid weight and all rounded so it keeps rolling over and blocking doors. (Aargh, Mo, why didn’t you tell me, snapping shut Lily’s mirror as we flatten into the taxi). 

Two days into the trip, I am swimming, reminding myself that there is snow on top of that volcano. This could almost be my birthplace – it is, at least, another warm island. Hard to float on your back here – the waves come straight up your nose, and I notice how close the lifeguards watch you. I notice, too, how that blaring green of the mountains doesn’t change underwater: it just keeps expanding like you’ve spooned its yoke open. The city blocks wobble. I keep rolling under, back up, letting myself under again.

Gia screams. I stand up – it is only waist deep – and see a cluster of pointing figures. I traipse back. A lady in a tipped straw hat, carrying a sandwich-board of beauty items, has tried to sell Gia a massage by massaging her feet. The lady is leaving. Three tan lifeguards lean over from the tower. Amarie is sat wrapped in a towel, Lily is stress smiling and glancing around, and Guy’s friend Rob-with-the-moustache sits up with his drink, shading his eyes. Guy and Gia are whisper-shouting 

     Jesus / you saw her! You saw her come over, I’m so uncomfortable with that / You know you didn’t have to SCREAM like that, we look like idiots, it’s normal you just say –

So I say yeah that’s, ok, but Gia / Not now Mo / And I’m kind of…because I got distracted…has anyone seen my sandals? I left them by the sea / Well, they probably got washed away, you idiot / Wow, really ecofriendly / Shut– / I just don’t like that feeling of sand sticking to my feet / Yeah, and I don’t like people’s hands on my feet / But…what do I do? Do I go barefoot or / oh god Mo, of course that would happen to you –

 So we go and buy a pair of jelly flip-flops; I go back later and find my sandals where I left them. 

***

There are lots of photos and I love yous at dinner. It is a sharing platter of spaghetti bolognese. Near the restaurant there are lampposts lined up and down with leaflets – dance showcases, local elections, anti-tourism campaigns, nannying services. One of these red-letter posters, with its crumpled NOT YOUR ISLAND, blows around the empty street in front of our house, along with a cabal of skinny cats who flit around the corners. One of us includes an artsy picture of the leaflets in a carousel post; another of us makes them take it down. I’m up in the mountains that loom over the plaza.

Someone seems to be waving a hand in front of my face. The air is so thick here. That one story about me in museum is being told again (…aw, it’s ok to tell us how you feel you know), and looking up everyone seems to be smiling at me; the blue punch bowl is being handed round. That’s interesting. Something seems to flash across my drink. The table keeps rattling, but it’s not an earthquake. Imagine an earthquake. It’s just people’s elbows making the ice turn on its corners (tick, tick) in the glasses. I return to the mountain. 

Even at night, it is a more green than green, and you feel stupid. I feel stupid. 

Maybe I’m just not subtle enough. Once, you believed yourself a savant, but you were an old man fishing in a teacup – you glossed on sunsets over scratchy fields with the “touching pedantry” of the deprived classes. But now I look at this blue palm in front of me and see the lungs that rise behind it in the dark. I think about a green that you can never get to the end of, and I think about what that is as I trail behind, am pulled along, fall back. I follow through the streets with the mountain in my eyeline, along with the five thin volcano plumes of smoke ahead of me, spiralling upwards.

***

Gia takes me shopping, separately. She takes pictures of things but doesn’t buy them. And I think – I always find myself with a Gia. Like each time, it has just been Gia again. Versus a Lily, who makes me itchy, a little twist of something – Always here if you need to talk! Xxx. I’ve known her for five years and she won’t even make fun of me properly. 

Guy, I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to on my own. Because he doesn’t see me as a ‘girl’ girl, I don’t think he knows what category of creature to perform to. He has settled on “alright mate” and “legend” around the others and just sort of grimaces otherwise. When it’s just us in a kitchen and he shifts around the kettle with his chicken breast, muttering, it is very funny. 

You should look at actual clothes though –

Amarie, who doesn’t live with us, we can talk. Or we have talked a few times when everyone was doing something else. She rolls her eyes, sighs, and I share it. Around the others, we’re back to the third person – “Mo probably would…”.  

Then Gia. 

Gia #1 in primary school, a tall, bullish girl who slams me against the fence every playtime and calls me ‘Porridge’. She gives me a gift for Leavers’ Day, an animal eraser set, because that’s such a Mo thing to like, she tells the class proudly. Gia #2 in secondary school, all she does this, that’s so like her. I am the class mascot. Somehow, I am also proud. Gia #3, at university, actually once a friend of Gia Prime, lives next door and we share classes. She lets me borrow notes and takes me to have my hair cut. The only time I see her and proper Gia together, when I meet her for the first time, they disagree on this – short or long.

Gia takes a picture of me with a seashell bikini on my head, grins so lovingly. 

***

Tonight, we find out that Rob will not be paying back his part of the Airbnb cost. In fact, we will need to split it between us, along with Rob’s plane ticket. It’s not that much, Guy keeps saying thinly. 

If you can’t fucking afford it, why are we even here? – You planned this! You chose this greedy bloody house with a POOL and a massive –

GREEDY? How fucking dare you, how dare you, Guy –

Nothing surprises me. Actually, everything surprises me, that the things that appear in front of me could be so obvious, so paperback. 

That someone could actually be angry. And angry out loud in real life. That people can argue. I could laugh and laugh. Won’t a giant pointing hand descend and jab at it: “that’s too obvious!” I’m so jealous and lonely, not to be part of the play they’ve all rehearsed. 

STILL OWE ME –

No, I don’t. I don’t. God, you’re loud.

I try Amarie in a whisper – it…it’s weird how it’s all in miniature, and she ignores me. I eat some more of the pineapple, and like she senses it, Gia snaps round and spits can you stop fucking eating and be fucking part of this Mo! 

I just can’t really…what? It is just incredible. 

From under a parasol in the dark, Rob murmurs wow, these holidays – I realise for the first time that he has a French accent.

***

The next day, everyone has gone out. I have a cold. I do, I do – more a hot-cold fever than anything. Hot chills. So now I shiver under the mountain window with a wool blanket and ice water and remember things. I get two stacks of the old cookbooks and Conrads from the lounge out on the deck, make a little den with the blanket, and fold under it in child’s pose. My head feels better against the wood, and I can cover my face when the trees get too bright. 

I start assigning people colours. Gia and all the other Gias are stubbornly vermillion. The others are distinguishable but slightly vaguer. And I think – maybe I am actually quite an incredible thing, to have existed like this all this time. But, even so, sometimes it is like a train is coming without a station to stop at. 

Right now, my breath hitches somewhere between my chest and neck and gets lodged up in the green. Colour ‘green’ was there, but I can’t see it – as much as it is all around my aching head. I try to picture snowy photo negatives. 

I sit in colour for a long time. Shiver with it. By evening, it is still as bright in the pitch black, like a sunspot I’ve got permanently. Tick tick, tick. But I’d rather never have seen you, I think. Better to be a concept in another country. 

I knock over the books and lie backward on the deck, upside down in it. I wish you were far away, I think; if I can’t bear you. Tick. I take a bowl of the cold tomato spaghetti and seem to tip it over my head, sit bleeding reddish with fine yellow strands. It doesn’t calm or cool down. 

Although now I can be blonde, she thinks. The palm leaves scattering as a street crossing of insects. Warm winds make her an anemone, something like force moves through while a dial starts turning. An old man nods to her as he’s tumbled down the hill in the dark. Not yours! 

***

Two days later, we are packing to leave. I’m irritated – I am. I am somehow furious with everyone, and yet aware that it is not exactly their fault. I go back on the deck, behind the curtains, saying that I’ll make my own dinner. I notice that my voice can also be thin and whiny and tetchy, like a child’s, like a teenager’s, and notice too that the world has not ended. 

*

It felt like for the first time she was living in the same world as everyone else. Maybe. 

Her hands are both up in the sky. In the porch light they are deadly yellow. The outlines wobble like stars flung up underwater, everything wobbles and tick – the lichen on the trees is neon, too. 

Hmm. If I, move my leg, it moves, curl my arm, it curls. If I toss a palm nut sideways at the porch light, the flies spin off it for sparks. And the light lurches, it goes up the forest, and tick – makes a brief path of lichens up the mountain. A dog goes off. Everything can lurch. I think if my nails are scratched hard enough along the deck, they can create a little glitter from the wood. 

I imagine heat and the sunspot to expand unstopping from all broken outlines. Something comes kicking out, tick tick tick. I just wonder what it does.

 

Words by Olivia Sandhu. Art by Clara Hill