My parents were sitting at the dinner table, or, to be more specific, my mum was sitting at the dinner table, a pair of chopsticks in her hand, and my dad was on top of it, his eyes wide open, mouth clamped shut and his naked body covered in sushi.
‘Hello, love,’ Mum said calmly, standing to reveal she was wearing nothing other than a full-length apron featuring a blacksmith’s body on the front, which I remembered Jo bringing back from a school trip to Ironbridge. She leaned across the table and puffed out a candle burning awfully close to a sensitive part of my father’s anatomy, which thankfully had been covered with a napkin.
‘We thought you’d already gone to bed,’ she said, her face fixed in a tense smile.
‘And I thought you’d put the chain on the door,’ Dad muttered through a clenched jaw, not moving so much as a muscle.
Horrified, I was stuck to the spot. Why did this keep happening to me? Why couldn’t I have walked in on something civil, like some nice armed robbers, instead?
‘Are you hungry?’ Mum asked, smiling at me with manic eyes.
‘I don’t think I’ll ever be hungry again,’ I replied. ‘I mean, no. I’m fine, thank you. This is all fine.’
‘You said you’re going into the loft?’
I nodded, holding onto the door handle as though it were the only thing keeping me upright.
‘Be careful with the ladder,’ Mum cautioned lightly as a salmon roll slid slowly off Dad’s chest and fell onto the carpet. ‘Your dad oiled it when we put Jo’s stuff up there and it sometimes comes down a bit fast.’
‘OK, thanks, good to know,’ I said, walking backwards out of the living room and closing the door firmly behind me. ‘Perhaps it’ll hit me in the head and I’ll get amnesia and forget everything I just saw.’
When I got upstairs, I looked at my hand and saw I was still shaking. Did I need to start wearing a bell around my neck? What was wrong with people? I took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on the task at hand rather than the tuna rolls that had been covering my dad’s nipples.
‘Get the diaries,’ I mumbled to myself, using the torch on my phone to light up at least four lifetimes’ worth of cardboard boxes. ‘Get the diaries, go back to the shed, bleach your eyes and go to sleep.’
Ignoring the boxes marked ‘Books’, ‘Ornaments’ and ‘Kitchen stuff’ in my block lettering, I reached for a smaller box labelled ‘Ros’s Shit’. It was nice of my sister to help me pack up, I thought, frowning at her looping handwriting. Holding it tightly under one arm, I made my way carefully back down the ladder.
‘Night Mum, night Dad,’ I shouted as I dashed past the living room and into the kitchen, making a beeline for the back door.
‘Christ almighty, Gwen,’ I heard my dad screech. ‘Careful with the bloody wasabi.’
Once I was showered, scoured and tucked up in bed, I opened up the box. It wasn’t just my diaries I’d kept, there were all manner of mementos, including one special shoebox dedicated to all things Ros and Patrick. A beer mat from the bar we went to on our first date, an Indian takeaway menu he’d scrawled his number on, the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign I’d nicked from the hotel when we’d gone on a minibreak to Dublin.
Dublin …
I turned the flimsy cardboard sign over in my fingers, remembering the thrill of first-time hotel sex, tearing each other’s clothes off as soon as we walked in the room, not even making it to the bed. But there was also the terrible afternoon we’d spent traipsing around the city in the rain, looking for the house from Dubliners, only to discover it had been knocked down years before. He’d been so annoyed, I’d tried to assuage him with a trip to a whisky distillery and given myself my worst hangover of the decade, which only annoyed him further. It was impossible to vomit subtly in a hotel bathroom. But those parts were easy to forget when I remembered the first day, spinning through the streets hand in hand, eyes only for each other, laughing and breathing and feeling so free. And did I mention the hotel sex? I would never be the same woman again.
This diary still felt new compared to some of the others in the box, the ones covered in stickers and scribbles, postcards of bands stuck to the front, whose songs I could barely remember now, but had meant everything to me once upon a time. The creamy pages were thick and lush between my fingers – total stationery porn – and my illegible handwriting looped and sloped all over the place, ballooning off the lines on some pages, slanted with the speed of my script on others. The first few entries were full to bursting, words running into each other as I documented my every thought and feeling, from meeting Patrick at some ridiculous party I’d been dragged to by my parents, to the first date, the first touch, the first kiss, the first everything else. It was all written down, the things I couldn’t say out loud, not even to Sumi or Lucy. It felt alien to me now: had I ever felt this strongly about anything? I certainly hadn’t felt even a fraction of this since we broke up. My love bled through the page with blistering vulnerability and it was almost too painful to read. Cool, composed, sophisticated, intellectual, passionate, gorgeous, bold, brave, adventurous Patrick was mine and I was ecstatic.
And then the anxiety crept in. The concerns, the worrying, the second-guessing. He cancelled a date, was he over me? He forgot we made plans, did he not care? Was I ever even good enough for him? It was a side of myself I didn’t care to be reminded of.
By the time we got to the end of the nine months, twenty-two days and fourteen hours, my writing didn’t flow quite so freely and I’d eased up considerably on the adjectives. Just the facts, ma’am. I told him about the job offer in DC, he said I should take it, he wanted to go travelling anyway. A clean break is always for the best. No hard feelings, let’s stay in touch, yeah? And then nothing. I’d left this diary behind and given up keeping one altogether. The only record of my time in America was in photo form, tiny digital squares of memories saved on my laptop and not nearly as affecting.
A handful of photographs fell into my lap, blurry, overexposed candids, a million miles away from the pictures we took on our phones. Every photograph I took now was ruthlessly cropped, filtered and edited, and anything less than deeply flattering was immediately discarded into the digital wasteland. These were different. I leafed through them, smiling. It wasn’t that long ago but we all looked so much younger, sharper angles but softer edges. We took disposable cameras everywhere that summer, me, Sumi and Lucy, determined to break free of our phones, an ahead-of-the-curve digital detox. It lasted exactly one month until Sumi balked at the price of film development and I ran the camera we’d taken to Lucy’s hen do through the wash.
There was a rush in these photos you couldn’t get in phone pics, I realized, tracing the curve of my arm in another photo: it was slung carelessly around Patrick’s neck, my head thrown back, him holding a hand out towards the camera to wave the photographer away but still laughing. So much genuine emotion packed into one frame that I suddenly had to wonder if our ancestors had been right all along. Did the flash steal your soul? Did we give a piece of ourselves away with every selfie?
There was one photo in particular, curled at the edges and sticky on the back from a time it had taken pride of place on my wall, one photo that hit me right in the heart. It was me and Patrick at Lucy’s wedding. Lucy had given it to me, rather than keeping it for the album, it felt too personal, too intimate, to share with strangers. The sun was behind us, a bright white light sharply lining our features, and we were holding hands, eyes on each other, as though we were the only two people on earth. Our faces were inches apart, either pre- or post-kiss, I couldn’t recall, but we looked so happy. So, so happy. And three weeks after it was taken, we broke up.
Slipping the photos back in the diary, I threw it as far as I could. About four feet. The shed really wasn’t very big. I pulled the sheets up to my chin and let out a loud huff. Probably not the best idea right before bed, I thought as I threw my hot and bothered body around, my legs tangling themselves up in the bed clothes as I went.
Grunting,