Sarah 1

Prologue
Cinema

I found the video while I was trying to repack the boxes in the work room.

The film starts with a window, black and rain picked. As the camera pulls back, patchwork curtains bracket the shot with squares of discordant colour and you can see the reflection of the room in the glass: a figure headed and armed with an old-fashioned video camera, big enough for a television studio, backing away from himself; two battered-looking sofas pushed back against the walls; a leafy pot plant; a floor lamp; the drab unreflective screen of an expensive TV set. Next to the pot plant, under the lamp, on the corner of one of the sofas, a girl is sitting. She leans to grind the end of a joint into the pot plant’s roots. There is no sound to the recording, but you can see that she is laughing. There’s another girl in the doorway, a silhouette against the light coming from the next room, but your eyes are drawn to the laughing one. The seated blonde with her mouth full of smoke.

It’s irritating when the camera swings to meet the face of the girl we’re not interested in. This girl’s hair is dark and you could, I suppose, call her pretty. The cameraman must have a bit of a thing for her, because the shot dips to take in the swing of her breasts under a loose cotton vest. She holds a hand up to the lens, smothering our view for a couple of seconds and then we see her face again. She opens her mouth and we get a shot of near perfect teeth (marred only by a single amalgam filling, bitten into a back tooth) and the fleshy workings at the back of her throat. Screaming or singing. The camera ignores the dilemma and glances down to where the other girl, our girl, is sitting.

She is literally doubled over, folded neatly in the middle, laughter vibrating out of her, leaving her helpless. A hand reaches round from behind the camera to ruffle her hair and pull her face up to meet the lens. This is the best part. The pale oval of the girl’s face is streaked with a red blush that reaches down to caress her throat and chest. There are tears in her eyes and her blonde hair has come loose from her ponytail to lie in sticky strands across her brow. She looks both glorious and horrific. The dark girl slides in next to her on the sofa and they embrace, pushing their heads close and pulling faces at the camera.

There is so much laughter in this room. The fuel of it: the fug of cannabis smoke and smeared bowls of half-empty wine glasses that sit ignored on the coffee table in front of the entwined women, do not negate the happiness and freedom of those few captured minutes that I watch, with Dad sleeping at my back, on a kitchen chair in the front room of the studio. This is a time before us, before we wrote ourselves into her story. Sarah and her friends playing together in a room I’ve never visited, except in this short film. It’s all a lie. I know what it was really like; Sarah told me all about it.

***

SARAH

Chapter One
Manchester

A handful of grape hyacinths have joined the red tulips in the vase on the white painted iron mantelpiece. Sarah had neither gathered nor arranged these flowers; their company has been forced upon her. It was easier last week when the vase held only three bare branches that Lucy had collected on her walk home and the week before that when Neil snipped a collection of dead nettles from the patch in the yard and brought their gloomy blooms to sit above the Victorian fireplace. Spring will not stay outdoors where it belongs; Sarah’s house mates insist on bringing it in to colour the living room. The window is open and she can hear Neil pushing the bins back and forth in the back yard. He’s on the phone to his girlfriend again. Lucy’s on the landline in the hallway reading numbers into the receiver. Sarah is surrounded. Her tea has gone cold and the birds are singing. It’s a lovely day outside, as she’s already been told.

She sits on a rented sofa in a rented house threading her fingers through the rings in the crochet throw that her mother made in the ‘70s. She watches the wool gather on her fingers: red and black and green and yellow. There’s a photograph somewhere of her wrapped in its folds, five years old with a gap-toothed grin and her hair tied in pink ribbon. She was safe in that photograph: cocooned in bright wool, unstartled by the camera’s flash, knowing that arms were waiting to lift her, hold her.

The fear is back today and Sarah will not be going to work. She works in an embroidery shop, surrounded by silks and needles, printed patterns and canvases of different sizes and densities. Usually, she likes her job. Her mobile is sitting on the coffee table next to her cold tea, but she can’t summon the energy to dial a number and fane an illness; to join Neil and Lucy in their happy chattering. This is the sixth day that she has sat here trying to imagine herself back in a childhood photograph. There is no family to run to now, just this friendly room where she comes to escape her friends.

‘Hello you,’ Neil comes in through the back door, snapping his mobile shut and brushing rain from his hair. ‘It’s just started to come down out there. Dawn says hi.’

He moves through to the tiny kitchenette which links the living room to the rest of the house via a doorless doorway. Sarah can hear him fussing by the sink, running water; shifting plates.

‘No work today?’

‘No.’

He drains a glass of water and stands there with the empty glass in his hand staring at her.

‘You all right, Sarah?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s two o’clock in the afternoon you know?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re still in your PJs.’

‘Yes.’

He shrugs and walks back though to the kitchen. She’s worried him. They’ve started to notice her. It must be the weekend, usually this is a safe place to be; Sarah can sit and observe the latest flower arrangements without interruption, but now they are both here. She can hear Neil speaking to Lucy in the hallway. If she moved a little to the left she could probably see them through the kitchen door: two huddled figures bent on discussing her varied oddities. She should pull herself together, wash and change her clothes. Brave it out. She could make them all a cup of tea and offer to cook supper. She’d have to go shopping first; she has been living off the basic essentials that the household all share, but Lucy would lend her ten pounds if she asked. A list of possible actions line up in front of Sarah with the calls she should have made to work, the smiles she should have returned, the steps she should have taken. She sits on the sofa and gathers her fistfuls of wool. Not yet.

‘Sarah.’

She looks up. Lucy is standing in front of her. She looks freshly minted; brisk and clean. Neil’s standing behind her in the kitchen doorway. Backup.

‘It’s a lovely day outside.’

‘It’s raining.’

Lucy frowns at the window.

‘That’ll pass.’

Lucy is a teacher; she is used to being disobeyed, but she that doesn’t mean she likes it. She used to have a special voice for her students: her ‘teacher voice’, they would tease her about it. She used to say that it was like putting on a one-man show every hour on the hour, playing a role, but recently the ‘teacher voice’ has started to take over. Everyday after school she comes home and takes a short nap, cooks her dinner and takes it to her room where she works on her lesson plans. They’re pinned up on her walls, a paper carapace from which she emerges in tailored shirts and black trouser suits. Miss Spencer, nothing to do with Lucy.

She starts to gather the cups and newspapers that have settled into place on the coffee table. Lucy tidying is not a good sign.

‘How long has this been going on?’

‘What?’

‘This…’ She takes Sarah in with a wide gesture, her hands still full of the debris she has collected. Sarah catches Neil’s flinch as Lucy moves. Did he expect Lucy to strike her? How far were they going to take this? ‘How long have you been sitting here, doing nothing? Me and Neil have been trying to work it out. It seems like forever. You’re not ill, are you?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘This is what I’m talking about, Sarah. You don’t even know what’s wrong. We all have down days, days when we’d rather not get up and go to work, but we still do it. You need to get out of this house and out of those clothes.’

Sarah closes her eyes. If she could just get some sleep.

‘I’ve got some time now.’

Sarah opens her eyes. Lucy is turning to Neil now, they have some kind of plan that they are putting into action. Lucy’s lines have been rehearsed and Sarah is powerless to stop the production.

‘We should go out. Go for a walk, we haven’t done that for ages. It will do you good.’