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ONE
It started at dawn the way long days do when they run straight on from very long nights. Ada was on a streak of long nights and her days were relatively brief, starting in the afternoon and vanishing by lunch which was, in fact, dinner, but meals didn’t matter because she was twenty-six. Regimented mealtimes are for toddlers and families and the very, very old and to try to force an 8 p.m. curfew on the appetite of a twenty-six-year-old is to misunderstand the beast.
So the days were short but this dawn was in August, in Edinburgh, where the nights are lit like afternoons. When Ada first moved to London, it was summer and she was amazed by the flexible, bright evenings, eating dinner outside during European hours. She didn’t know then that the stretching light was to compensate for the months she’d be plunged into darkness. She called her parents in Sydney the following January and told them seriously that she was concerned the winter was permanent.
‘We’re eighteen days into this year and the sun hasn’t come out yet,’ and when they countered gently that that’s simply how seasons work, spring will come, it’ll come, she nodded like she believed them but actually she wasn’t sure. She’d never lived through winter like this. Sydney winter was London spring, composed of brisk baby days. Spring did come wetly in eventually but by then Ada knew not to trust it.
Next summer she spent desperately, suspiciously, outside, waiting for the drop.
And this was the summer after that.
It started at dawn and Ada was perched on the corner of a sofa at the party after the party after the closing night gig of the Edinburgh Fringe. Ada was at the end of a season of a particularly worthy play about London knife crime, written by a drama school student who grew up in the Cotswolds. It was a bad play, Ada knew, but the director came from money of some kind and was willing to blow that money on Equity rates. Ada hadn’t auditioned but had been recommended by her friend Ben, who was already in the cast because he’d gone to the director’s drama school and that was how Fringe theatre worked. Without those connections to fall back on, Ada relied on referrals. So she gave it her all in her three scenes playing the teacher everyone trusted, doling out advice to teenagers played by people her age. And then at night she did whatever she wanted.
She was talking to a friend of a friend – the kind of person who’s always at the parties after the parties but never at the parties themselves – though she realised this friend of a friend hadn’t been at any parties all month, not with her anyway, so maybe this was special. They were sharing a bottle of supermarket-branded bourbon, one of a selection Ada usually kept in her room but, as the month had dragged on and her pounds had drained out, moved into her handbag.
People found it charming, her carrying around a bottle of cheap bourbon, and she was aware that if she were a man or old or if she laughed a little less confidently or if she didn’t sleep with so many people, then? It would be worrying, this bourbon-bottle-in-the-bag situation. But she didn’t plan to stop laughing or fucking any time soon and age was a threat that was hard to take seriously at 5 a.m. It was particularly hard to take seriously as Sadie, the friend of a friend (of many friends actually, none of them close) shifted closer to her and nudged her so she toppled from the arm of the couch onto her lap.
‘That’s better,’ Ada said and touched Sadie’s face and Sadie shrugged and looked away. Sadie was wearing a plain white singlet and dark skinny jeans, an outfit that would barely contain Ada’s body but sat neatly over Sadie’s. Ada wanted to ask her about her name because Sadie was Australian and no Australians were called Sadie. There was this famous song from the seventies about a cleaning lady called Sadie and since then everyone avoided the name so she said, ‘Sadie, what’s with—?’ but Sadie was already talking to the person on the other side of her.
The party had divided into a grown-ups and kids table vibe, with Ada’s friends firmly at the kids table, which was covered in baggies and squashed-up cigarette papers with gum inside. Sadie was talking to Confirmed Adults, the actors who got reviewed by The Times and the comedians who were regulars on Mock the Week and didn’t cheat on their wives. Ada knew that Sadie was a playwright – because every Australian at the Fringe was vaguely aware of every other – and the people in this circle wanted to talk to her so she was probably pretty good. But when Ada leaned in to join the conversation Sadie made space for her, slightly squeezing out the older woman with the RADA accent who had opinions on Sadie’s career and no opinions at all on Ada’s.
Sadie liked her enough, Ada decided, for this morning only and the morning would end soon. Chatting about a song would waste their time so she tapped Sadie’s arm and, when that didn’t work, pulled on her ear so she had her attention. Ada said, ‘Can I take you home now?’ and Sadie said, ‘You don’t want to stay longer?’ and Ada said, ‘It’s morning’ and Sadie said, ‘OK. I’ll get our coats.’
It was weird to hear an Australian say, ‘I’ll get our coats,’ Ada thought but didn’t say because she didn’t want their only connection to be their foreignness. Watching TV as a child lying backwards on her parents’ couch under a spinning fan and the mom on screen is saying, ‘Get your coat, we’re leaving!’ or the nanny whispers, ‘Children, get your coats,’ or the man leans in to the woman and says, ‘Should I get our coats?’ No one ever told Ada to get her coat in her whole sunny childhood because she simply didn’t own one and the ritual collection of coats as a means of exit was a northern hemisphere fantasy. Now Ada had three coats, none of them good.
Sadie was getting one of those bad coats when Bernie touched Ada’s arm. Bernie was probably thirty-five in human years but had an eternal carnie spirit, always at a festival, the host of the party though this wasn’t his flat. He had also hosted the mixed bill show that Ada had performed on that night, where she sang a passable version of ‘Nothing’ from A Chorus Line for drink tickets, a holdover from her musical theatre phase. Bernie liked her in the neutral sort of way men in their thirties liked her, because she was rude to them and conciliatory (and discreet) to any age-appropriate wives or girlfriends who would show up along the way.
‘You’re not leaving!’ Bernie said and then without pause, ‘Something for the road?’ and he opened the bathroom door and Ada followed him in. She said, ‘You should be leaving too, old man,’ and he laughed – thirty-five-year-old men loved to be called old though it had less of a hit rate when they were forty-five – and he said, ‘Ah, you’re probably right. But tomorrow we go back to real life!’ as he racked up four thick lines. Ada bent over the unsteady board he was holding – did he take this from the kitchen or did whoever owned the flat keep chopping boards in the loo? – and inhaled once, twice, then paused to watch Bernie take one of his own.
Sadie knocked on the door and asked if she was ready to go. Ada offered Sadie the final line – ‘Hey!’ said Bernie and Ada laughed and said ‘No more for you, pops’ – and Sadie leaned over and inhaled. After she stood up, she took Ada’s hand and the board hit the floor and they sprinted through the flat, opening the heavy door with three locks, and down the stone stairwell into the grey entranceway with bikes and fliers with bike tracks on them all over the floor.
They made their way out onto the doorstep and Ada turned to Sadie and pinned her lightly, watching her face in the pink and grey. They shivered and Ada was briefly annoyed because yes it’s dawn but shouldn’t it be warmer than this? Then she kissed Sadie and tasted coke in her mouth. She pulled away and said, ‘I had to make sure we had chemistry before you came home with me, wouldn’t that be embarrassing?’ and Sadie smiled and closed her eyes and said, ‘Yeah we’d never have recovered.’ Ada wanted her to open her eyes so she dragged her off the wall by the wrist. They passed crowds of university students, spending their holidays doing experimental dance pieces for audiences of eight and fucking for the first time and that was Ada recently but she felt contempt anyway.
Why would you be twenty-one when you could be twenty-six? Why would you be thirty-one? Ada’s contempt was usually gentle, sometimes closer to pity, but not now in the early hours as she pulled a woman steadily closer to her room. She had never wanted to be any age other than this one and she was going to be this age for as long as she was allowed.
They entered the building with Ada’s flat in it and it looked exactly the same as the building they’d just left. Every building in Edinburgh looked exactly the same to Ada, except the castle and the various Fringe venues that looked like they were also castles but were in fact part of the university. Ada had spent all night in a science building recently, watching immersive theatre about ancient Greece and being distracted by the Bunsen burners in storage cupboards behind her head. The actors were probably pretty good but then Ada thought everything was good at 1 a.m. and better at 2 and the guy playing Helios was hot which was probably the point. She wondered if he was in on the joke.
All four of Ada’s flatmates were asleep. She whispered to Sadie that she was living with some actors from her show who were ‘too serious about their craft to party’ and Sadie said, ‘Orson Welles would be horrified,’ and Ada said, ‘Very current reference.’ Sadie said, ‘Sorry, I’ve been staying with my producer who is literally fifty,’ and Ada put her finger to her lips. They crept through the creaking living room with leather chairs that were somehow too hot to sit in even here and they went into her room.
This room, like all the rooms in the flat, usually housed a university student, and when Ada had arrived at the start of the month it was empty but for a bed and a desk and a melted stub of a candle stuck to the mantlepiece. Students fled Edinburgh in August to go back to their families and the friends from home whose news they were mostly indifferent to, and Ada felt contempt for that too. August was the only time she wanted to be in Edinburgh, when people like her climbed into the nooks left behind by the students, smeared make-up on their sheets and covered their old musty buildings with posters. She was aware that this wasn’t how she was supposed to feel – it was disrespectful to the locals and to history, probably, to care so little about the city that was home for one twelfth of her year – but she found the place frictionless without the Fringe. She’d been a plus-one to a wedding in Edinburgh in February and it was so quiet and cold and no one in the streets smiled at her when she passed them and she wondered what the point was. There was a beach just outside town that no one even used and that was all she needed to know about that.
Ada and Sadie undressed by the window, each removing their own clothes, Ada staring hard at Sadie and Sadie with her eyes closed, again, closed to Ada, smiling. Ada didn’t like that at all and she said, ‘Open your eyes, my god,’ and Sadie did, looking surprised, then kissed Ada with her teeth a little bared and pushed her over to the bed. Sadie came and kneeled over her. Ada knew that Sadie thought she had to take over now – hard-edged women like Sadie expected certain things of girls like Ada and those things were ‘very little’ – and Ada loved to surprise them. Because Ada was exactly herself when she was naked with someone. Some people are more themselves, some people retreat but Ada was exactly the same and it unsettled her partners.
Ada pulled Sadie down and climbed on top of her and Sadie raised an eyebrow then closed her eyes again and said ‘All right, Ada,’ and just saying her name almost made up for the closed eyes. Ada bent to her neck and grazed it with her teeth while running her nails down the space between Sadie’s breasts. Sadie’s skin was dark and Ada wondered briefly why her nipples hadn’t been visible through her white top. She felt Sadie ease towards her and smiled then sat up. And saw blood. Blood smeared on Sadie’s cheek and neck and on the blue and brown striped sheets that had come with the flat – ‘I’m like a boy of fourteen again,’ she’d said to her flatmate Ben the first time she put those sheets on and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ and she hadn’t bothered explaining. She touched her nose and when she pulled her hand away, blood, right from the source.
She sat back on Sadie and said, ‘Sadie, I need to tell you something,’ because she was still lying there with her eyes closed and that would normally have upset Ada but it was pretty funny under the circumstances. Sadie smiled and said, ‘Tell me anything,’ and Ada started to laugh, right from her belly, which made her rock forward on Sadie in a way that they both liked until Sadie finally, finally looked at her and saw her covered in blood, her long dark hair dragging in it, and Sadie drew her legs in and backed up the bed. Ada kept laughing but gestured to her nose and said, ‘It’s this, it’s just this,’ and Sadie gradually understood and she laughed too, though she looked uneasy, possibly revolted, and Ada thought, Good.
Ada stood up eventually, grabbed her make-up wipes from the desk and threw them at Sadie. ‘Clean yourself up girl, you’re a mess.’
Sadie laughed again, a little more assuredly this time as Ada tipped her head back to stop the bleeding. It stuck in her throat, mingling with the leftover chemical taste and she felt powerful. Once it stopped running, she opened a water bottle over her head and it drained off her onto the floorboards and she was vaguely aware that she needed to move out of this room in twelve hours but instead of drying the floor, she dabbed herself with a towel, turning it streaky and pink. She turned back to Sadie, who was watching her, and who said in a flat voice, ‘The black-widow look is good on you,’ so Ada dropped the towel and crawled towards her, climbed up the bed and wrapped her many legs around this woman who could take or leave her an hour ago. She licked her fingers and Sadie shuddered but she just used them to scrub the blood from Sadie’s left ear.
‘This is our Paris, you know,’ she said conversationally as Sadie tightened her grip on her hips.
‘What does that mean?’
‘You know, the line “We’ll always have Paris”? Well we’ll always have … this.’
Sadie shook her head and said, ‘You’re disgusting,’ and later Ada sang ‘Incy Wincy Spider’ as she moved down Sadie’s body and it should have been embarrassing but it wasn’t at all.
