Let Me Be Like Water - Softcover

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S. K. Perry was longlisted for London's Young Poet Laureate in 2013 and is the author of the poetry collection Curious Hands: 24 Hours in Soho. She lives in London and Let Me Be Like Water is her first novel.

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Let Me Be Like Water
Autumn

If you were here still,

I’d curl into your ribcage,

my concave lover.

1

I was sitting on a bench staring at the beach when Frank told me I’d dropped my keys. I was watching this little girl playing with a kite. She was quite a long way away, but she gave me something to look at. I can’t give you any details: maybe that her front teeth were missing, or that she had tangled hair. I don’t remember what I was thinking about, although I know I was wearing my red gloves.

I’d decided to get up and go, ready to continue walking. I was cold and sore from sitting, and at that precise moment I needed something that wasn’t the sea to be in front of me. I was about to stand up when Frank – who I didn’t know was Frank at the time – told me I’d dropped my keys.

He’d been watching the girl too, it turned out.

He pointed at the kite.

‘I have days where I’d like the wind to take me up like that. Some days it’s wanting to escape, I think, but on others, I’d just like to be a kite.’

I smiled. He handed me my keys.

‘Thank you. I didn’t know I’d dropped them.’

‘That’s OK. I dropped mine on a train track once, between the door and the platform. They had to be hooked back up again by the man from the ticket office. It turned out his name was Noel and he lived down my road. Funny world. What about you; would you like to be a kite, or would you pick something else?’

2

I stripped our bed the night before I left and sat on the floor while the washing machine spun. I watched the sheets twisting round. The bulge of the bowl made me think of a belly with a baby growing inside it. It hurt so much I thought there must be bruises. I needed to find something to hold that felt like you, so I pushed my fist into my mouth and bit down and cried into my knuckles.

It took me nine days to pack. When I got lonely I’d sit on the floor of the shower with the water switched on. Sometimes I’d feel tired, and I’d put down the jeans or the pants or whatever it was I was trying to put into a suitcase, and I’d slide into our bed. I’d lie still and think about how much I miss you. Other times I’d just cry, and my body would shake in that small way that starlings do when they fly together and their wings shudder like sadness in the sky.

I lay awake for most of the night and thought about the woman who was moving in in the morning. I put my suitcases into a big van, and it drove them from our little place in Hammersmith to the sea.

3

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’d be a yo-yo.’

‘That’d be good,’ Frank replied. ‘Kites get to fly though; a yo-yo would be more like a permanent bungee jump.’

We laughed.

‘You were about to get going. Are you walking towards the pier?’

‘I thought I’d walk to the sailing club. I like the sound the boats make.’

‘Me too: the clinking,’ Frank said, and he smiled.

4

I’ve always loved London, so when I started to hate it I knew I had to leave. I didn’t want to lose the feeling the river gives me in the morning – even on mizzly days – dispersing the early light on the Southbank as it waits for the sun to get a couple of centimetres higher; or the way the smell of rain gets in between taxis; or how wet, bitter grass springs up outside offices and in parks; or the glow the city gives me at 5 a.m. when I’m dirty from the night before and edging into the day with dry shampoo and muscles still tight from dancing and smoke. But I heard you everywhere: our residue on pavements and the seats of buses, reminding me of a conversation, a look, a half-hour I’d spent waiting for you, or sitting in the office counting down the conversations until I’d step onto the District line to find you. And I walked past grubby doors with newspaper headlines ringing in my mind, hearing the arguments we would have had about them, dissecting the nitty-gritty until you laughed and pushed me up against a street wall, stopping our debate under a pile of bitty kisses.

And without you, the boating lake, and the pub gardens with their wooden benches and fairy lights, and the wind tunnel when a tube pulls away and you tip on the edge of the tracks, and the lines of commuters in walking queues with frowns, clutching coffee in cardboard cups; they all seemed empty.

5

‘I feel like some company and Harris isn’t quite cutting it.’

Frank pointed at his dog, who was running across the beach. ‘Would you mind if I walk with you?’

His voice sat on the wind like they were friends. He was maybe seventy, I reckoned, and there was something solid about him.

‘That would be good,’ I replied. ‘I thought I wanted to be on my own but I don’t think I do anymore.’

‘Blame the kite,’ he said. ‘It’s made you feel wistful.’

I thought about you: holding my hand and watching me up in the sky.

6

You were in the middle of the dance floor at a university club night; a song I hadn’t heard before was playing, and I’d never seen anyone I wanted to talk to so much. My friend was off snogging the DJ, and I was standing by the bar feeling awkward and wishing I was back in my room with a cup of tea. But then there you were, dancing, covered in sweat – amongst a group of bodies that seemed to take up more room than the club could hold – all spiralling arms and beautiful, grinning eyes.

You were laughing at something a girl had said in your ear and then the song wound down, and you started to head for the bar where I was standing in these stupid shoes that were too tight and which made me feel overdressed and clumsy. You never got to the bar though; the first beats of the next track – I can’t remember what it was, some indie anthem with too much electric guitar – sucked you back into the bodies, skanking and laughing.

I didn’t see you again that night but I sketched your face on my eyelids as I lay in bed falling asleep.

7

‘I often see people sitting in their cars just watching the water,’ Frank said. ‘It makes me want to climb in there with them. I’m sure most of them are fine, but I always wonder if they’re sitting there because they’ve got no one to be outside with. I don’t think people should be alone by the sea.’

‘Unless they have some very good music playing.’

Frank laughed. ‘Yes. Are you a musician?’

‘I don’t know what I am.’

‘Ah, you’re in the best possible position. Would you like a ginger nut?’

He got a packet out of his coat pocket and offered it to me.

8

I didn’t think you’d noticed me that night in the club but you told me afterwards you had. I never knew whether you were just saying that because you were being nice. I wonder if I’d been looking the other way, or if we hadn’t got on the same number 254 bus from Holloway Road to Whitechapel a week later, we’d have found another place to collide.

I was sitting upstairs and you were behind me. The bus went round a corner a bit too fast and I fell off my seat. You burst out laughing and I turned around and saw you, the man I’d drawn on my eyelids.

‘How did you manage to fall over when you were sitting...