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OK this is disgusting, I’m going to sleep
FORTY-THREE
Ada woke up alone and early and she would have loved to have that moment when you wake up in an unexpected place and you don’t know where you are or what happened. That moment would have been a relief. But she woke up with full knowledge that she was in the bed of a casual acquaintance who had once rejected her and she was completely alone. It was as though the realisation had lingered behind her eyes the entire time they were closed, waiting to pounce on her as soon as she opened them. She rolled over, looked at her phone, saw no messages and rolled back.
When she woke up again, rain was spitting against the window and she felt queasy and too hot. She pushed the duvet off her and went to the toilet, sitting on it naked and scrolling Twitter, checking Gabby’s Instagram feed for pictures of Orion or a hint at how she was feeling. But the pictures were well lit and obscured everything and she liked them and clicked out.
Ada stayed naked through the morning, heating up the second plate of noodles in the microwave and eating them in bed while watching a YouTube make-up tutorial about contouring by a drag queen. Ada had never contoured, wasn’t convinced she ever would, but she appreciated the transformation and needed noise and colour to keep her going. She wondered why Rob didn’t have a TV but figured he watched everything on his laptop, like her, unless she was watching with Mel and maybe Mel would take the TV to Bristol with her? Or was it in the flat when she moved in? She supposed they’d have to have a conversation about that but it wasn’t time yet.
Around eleven, Ada checked her messages to Stuart and saw that he had, officially, finally, seen them. Ada considered what this meant. Had he turned read receipts off yesterday before doing whatever it was he had done? And had he turned them back on now for an extra dig? Or had he really not opened her messages yesterday? Had he muted her or simply looked at the notifications rolling in and avoided tapping them? What kind of self-control, what kind of psycho, did you have to be to not even look at the messages someone was sending you when they were desperate for you?
Ada knew she’d never have the willpower. In fact on the few occasions she had definitely, absolutely not wanted to message someone, she’d given her phone to Mel until the urge passed because she knew she couldn’t trust herself. One of those people had been Rob, Ada remembered now. She had showed their relatively one-sided conversation to Mel and Mel had gently said it seemed he wasn’t looking for anything romantic with her. Ada conceded that she had no real reason to think he was and so for the next few weeks whenever she thought of him she would give her phone to Mel.
And eventually the need for contact left her and she hadn’t messaged him in ages, actually, until she frantically asked if his flat was free so she could bang someone else in it. No wonder he hadn’t wanted her. Who does that? Ada did, and that was OK, she told herself, that was fun and wild and she was young and cute but today wasn’t the day for that kind of self-talk. Her reserves would refill but not yet.
The sky cleared a little so the air still looked watery but wasn’t actually raining and Ada decided to go out. She had briefly considered getting the train home that day but what if Sadie was there or if Mel asked questions? And she couldn’t really afford another ticket, if she was honest with herself, and apparently today that’s what she was doing. So she showered and washed her hair with Rob’s two-in-one to get the vague scent of grease out of it. She dressed and shook her head like a dog and rubbed it with a towel and couldn’t quite get it dry so gave up and went out with it damp.
Ada passed a cafe and realised she hadn’t had coffee and she figured things might feel a little better once she did. She bought a flat white and thought about when she first moved to London and only certain cafes sold flat whites and they were the ones run by Australians and Kiwis. And now this corner spot with overstuffed lounge chairs in Brighton sold them, and the caffeine hit her as she drank it and walked, and she did, actually, feel better. It was still despair and it was still devastation but at least her addiction had been fed and that’s why you have addictions, right, so that some sensation is guaranteed.
Ada walked to the beach without thinking about it and saw it was mostly empty because it was wet, and it was a Friday and most people were at work or at school or had better things to do than visit a beach out of season. She lingered over drinking her coffee as it was pulling double duty keeping her warm and when she finished it, she threw out the cup and stepped down onto the rocky shore, pulling her denim jacket tight as her still-wet hair hit her face. She searched in her pocket for a hair elastic and tried to tie it back but she could only gather about half of it at a time and she gave up, letting it fly.
Ada walked towards the water, the rocks pushing through her pink Converse as though she were barefoot. A beach wasn’t really a beach without sand, she had said to anyone who would listen when she first moved to the UK. If you can’t take a bucket down there or turn your legs into a mermaid tail then what are we doing here, really? But after so long, she had acclimatised to the rocks, like she’d acclimatised to the cold, and the screaming underground, and the distance from her mum. Reluctantly but enough to survive and sometimes find joy.
Ada walked until she reached the water where there was a little sand peeking through. She sat and put her backpack behind her and looked over at the rusty burnt pier that was kept there as a monument or a haunting or some sort of English obsession with the past that she couldn’t fathom. It looked dramatic and dead today with the grey clouds rolling behind it and she wondered, if she stayed long enough, if she would ever see it struck by lightning. Was it safe having all that metal standing in all that water and then, wait, is that how it burned? Ada considered googling it but decided not to know.
She got on her hands and knees and leaned forward, trying to touch the water without getting the rest of her wet. She held out her right hand and touched the tip into the salt and then the tide pushed in a little further and her arm was drenched up to the elbow. It felt fantastic and heavy, the denim of her jacket sodden and her skin frigid underneath. She pulled herself back and sat up on her haunches, just out of reach of the sea.
Ada shook her hand, the water flying off, then absentmindedly put a finger in her mouth to chew on. She tasted salt, realised she was very close to just drinking sea water, and felt exhilarated by her almost madness. Did drinking sea water make people mad or was it a symptom though, she couldn’t quite remember. She reached her other hand towards the water and dunked it in then rubbed it across her face. The coldness of it shocked her and as she sat there letting the wind dry it, her cheeks felt cracked by the salt. This was healing, she decided. This was time to heal and by the time she got back to London she’d be better.
There were rituals involving water and rebirth and other witchy things though Ada couldn’t recall the specifics from her brief teenage Wiccan phase. But she knew enough to know that these rocks were grounding, even as her bum went numb, and this ocean was forgiving, even as it whipped and retreated. She had been rejected, vastly rejected, she saw that clearly now, and no amount of rationalisation would take it away. If Stuart called her today, all apologies, all promises, she would forgive him, she knew. But the balance would never reshift between them. She was sunk forever.
And she also knew that in years to come, when her life moved on, when her life was beautiful, she would still feel the sharpness of this rejection. Not every day but enough to colour her years. She would be in a supermarket, picking between two different pasta shapes, did her lover or her new flatmate or her baby prefer spirals or bowties? – and she would be winded by the memory of sitting alone in a flat in Brighton, waiting for a man who didn’t respect her at all.
A rejection by someone you feel yourself above is a disorienting experience and, Ada acknowledged without shame, that was what was happening. She wondered if someone who held themselves in less esteem would feel heartbreak less acutely because they felt it was what they deserved. Ada didn’t feel she deserved this. She felt she deserved the worship of Stuart’s early attempts. Because he had no right to hold her at all and even less right to stop when it suited him. That kind of injustice could really ruin your nice day out by the seaside.
Ada picked up a time-smoothed rock and threw it into the ocean, not getting very far, her arms heavy with damp sleeves and the whip of the wind. She tried to imagine what a relationship with Stuart would have looked like in the longer term. Mel wouldn’t have liked him, she was sure, but that barely mattered now that Mel’s likes and dislikes were increasingly obscure to her. Her parents would be kind to him but privately find him sullen, a word too juvenile for a man his age. Ada would lay herself out for him and he would take her then abandon her then blame her for her abandonment. Or worse, they would simply become bored once the distance wasn’t forcing the issue of romance. It would have been a sad downward spiral with tiny highs and banal lows and Ada felt furious that he hadn’t let it play out as it was supposed to.
Love was a way of passing the time, Ada thought, as she threw another rock into the water. Did she have a lot of love to give or a lot of hours to fill and was there any difference? A seagull landed nearby, its feathers standing up and out, styled by the weather. It looked at her and she raised her hands to show she had no food then wondered what made her think a seagull would understand her. But it did, evidently, because it flew straight up and was thrown off course by a gust immediately.
Ada’s feet were hurting with the cold and as she stood up she felt her bones grind back into place, stiff and over-salted. She blew a kiss up to the seagull, still attempting to steady itself in the sky, and then looked around to see if anyone on the beach had seen her. But it was empty, still, and she felt the rare thrill of being alone in a public place. She went back to the flat, her progress squishy and slow.
Once inside, Ada realised how icy she had become and pulled off her damp clothes, lying her jacket across the radiator by the bed. It was cold to the touch but the room had been toasty when she woke up so she hoped whatever mysterious mechanism turned it on would activate soon. She went into the bathroom and turned the shower on as hot as it would go without burning her skin then stood under it, letting herself thaw. With some effort she started to cry, figuring it was a good time to get that out of the way because she knew it was coming.
Ada heated and ate some of the leftover eggplant in her towel and considered what to do with her evening. She knew other people in Brighton but none of them seemed right for either a consolation conversation or a distraction kiss, and anyway, the rawness of solitude was sitting right with her. But she knew she couldn’t handle the flat all night alone.
She made it to six, listening to podcasts about rewilding Somerset and an algorithm that predicted people’s purchases with alarming accuracy and an interview with an author she had never read talking about the death of his wife. She put on the final dress she’d packed and took a bright orange waterproof out of Rob’s only wardrobe as her jacket was still soaking on the ice-cold radiator. The waterproof hung to mid-thigh and the sleeves covered her hands and Ada wondered who these women who looked good in ‘boyfriend jeans’ were. Sadie, probably, ironically. She combed and braided her hair, still damp from salt spray and two showers, and looked younger than she felt. When she let out the braid the next day, her hair would be wild, and she found that was a nice thing to look forward to.
Ada left the flat and decided to go into the first place she could smell from the street which was a game she liked to play when she travelled. When Mel had flown them to Madrid for three days for Ada’s birthday, they had ended up eating churros for dinner on the first night because the smell of dough overpowered the more appropriate establishments on that street. When they’d got back to their Airbnb Mel had brought out a block of expensive parmesan she’d bought earlier and they’d eaten slices of it, desperate for something savoury.
Ada smelled garlic at the end of a lane and walked towards it. It was dark, the sun running away earlier already, the grey thick cloud obscuring any lingering hits. Ada found a bright corner Italian restaurant, the kind with a board outside with actual chalk writing. All the visible tables were filled with families eating over checkered tablecloths. Ada went inside.
The waiter didn’t react when she said she was eating alone and she wasn’t sure if she was disappointed or relieved. Ada liked eating alone in restaurants and drinking alone in bars but often the person greeting her was either concerned – a young woman alone! – or overly conciliatory – a young woman alone, how normal but also chic! This waiter simply directed her to a round table set for two near the back and took the other setting away without comment.
Ada ordered calamari to start and a glass of house red and they both arrived quickly with a basket of warm, pre-sliced baguette and a mound of salty butter. She spread the butter thickly on a slice and popped it in her mouth whole, the pooling butter running onto her chin. She followed it up with crisp calamari, dipped in aioli, the various shades of creamy beige filling her with comfort and joy. When the waiter came back, she said she’d have a pizza for her main, the mushroom and artichoke, but as he wrote it down she changed her mind and asked for the four cheese instead. He smiled like she’d made an exceptional choice and when she asked for another glass of wine he smiled again.
