Things You Keep

Fake NUS card

At big comp, you dress almost identical to your best friend in a red hooded coat and cork-heeled shoes. You got yours first. Her coat was more expensive: something you won’t afford babe, she said but to think of it like this:  you are processed marrowfat in a tin whilst she is organic split peas. She told you that your flat chest reminded her of a little boy’s and all the time she was speaking she pushed her conical AA tits towards passing fifth-form guys.
You went to all the parties and nights out in shabby bars where bouncers saw your badly doctored ID card but let you in all the same. They put their hands on your spine, white as oysters under a lit pier, and ushered you inside to a darker version of your kohl-eyed reticence. All that year you grew smaller inside and your voice betrayed you when it agreed with people you didn’t much like.

Whistle on a string

This night you came up in the basement of Essance convinced you were the petite girl from Sound of Eden’s video with the face and strut that gave men bulges. Black walls wet and fidgety. The small crowd whooped with an intensity you could only compare to a mass requiem at your village church where the grief softened people and the Catholic in you felt right at home. 
A boy was there with a Peroni and smiles and dilating eyes and twos on his cigarette and a whistle. You saw yourself dancing in the mirrors: five foot nothing in a fur dress with atomic red lips and jumping higher with every sweep of the rotating blue lights, every rise of the base that shook the wood floor underfoot, your watched body a vibrato.

A Rizla paper with a love heart drawn on it

The boy with the whistle lived the wrong side of the Meadows. You walked back at the hour when the milk float whirrs with the sky plummy above desolate streets and the two of you contained in that strange vault between night and day. His parents upstairs in bed. His spliff cracked, red, in the clay ashtray as the birds began to jabber outside and you laid out on his living room floor with the telly flickering ghostly colours across your faces. 
You didn’t watch it. Quiet as but the small sounds still made you self-conscious: sucks, sighs. Your bodies felt new and pulled as though all the gaps were finally closing and his fingers on your skin moved so slowly it hurts. First, outside your pants. Four weeks. Then it was underneath. Inside.

An opera ticket stub

You keep this because it was never yours. Found on shorn, butter soft grass at The Testmatch amongst empty Moet bottles and lip-sticked butt ends. Lesley Garrett, 1997. Opera still repels you. You saw her of course, the grand act in her fur snug and silk frock, that falsetto voice chafing on the strings of your nerves. That boyfriend got you in through the back door. A taste of the high life, he promised, with little bottles of warm Stowells stuffed in his donkey jacket pockets. 
Feeling feral amongst the leafy green, you turned barefoot cartwheels amongst the middle-class bourgeoisie and kicked over a mother’s glass of Cava so that the displaced froth settled on her Boden baby’s curls. The baby smiled at you in spite of its mother. On the walk home along the council estate side of town, that boyfriend said, sure, I’d want one someday but not now ‘cause there’s a future screaming my name. You agreed with him, your left hand in his, the right rubbing your flat tummy where cells multiplied, the baby inside pin-size and trivial as a full stop. 

A Clinton’s card with a cat on

When the baby was gone, he gave you a ‘get well soon’ card and a bottle of Sambuca. Gifts for a job well done. The haemorrhage was a Monet landscape in your plus sized knickers: beautiful in fact, a palette of antique maroons, claret and Red Riding Hood reds. The NHS advised large sanitary towels and to call them if you passed any clots. You felt like crying. You did not cry. He said such a near miss had made him think about how quick things were moving – well fast – and after all, you were only a baby yourself and it was for the best and he kissed your forehead for one last time before going down the pub to wet some other’s blokes baby’s head.

Size 6, purple thermal socks

This man stalked you at the beer-off where you worked; arranged to come in on your shift. When he gave a description of you to your manager, he used his finger to point out precisely where the scar was on your forearm never mentioning the obvious things: your tits, your legs, that your butt was two eggs under a handkerchief. Two dates in he held your hand on the way in to the cinema and you mocked him for being too proper to get past first base. Your palm got clammy from the novelty of non- sexual contact.
During your first vicious argument on a mid-winter journey, you told him to stop the car and let you out. He stopped the car. He came round to the passenger side with a pair of thermal socks in his hands. What the hell are you doing, you shouted, and he shushed you whilst crouching down in the blueish snow to prise off your threadbare trainers and pull socks over your cold, stockinged feet. He slipped your uncooperative wellies on with ease. Why do that, you asked him – stunned – and he said there’s nothing worse than struggling to get your boots on when you intend to make a dramatic exit.

An infant’s wrist tag

During labour you have a high risk infection. Antibiotics must be absorbed with two hours clearance of birth. Kinks in the intravenous wire mean the antibiotic feed virtually stops. The midwife promises to sort it for you after she has delivered a baby up the ward. She doesn’t come back. You can hear time passing audible as a slammed door. You visualise them cutting the baby out, of bad things happening. Your stalker unravels the wire himself; pulls it out in critical stages in between each contraction as one might untangle a set of flashing Christmas lights so painstaking a job yet with no obvious urgency and taking care not to yank the needle from an aqua vein. When the baby comes fast as a fish you catch him underwater on a rush of rusty blood. 
A sequence of events: diverted. On the journey home, he takes the bends delicately as though two glass dolls are sitting in his rear seat.