Page 7 of Go Lightly

Ada leaned back in her train seat and put her phone face down on the plastic fold-down table in front of her. She looked out the window and tapped her fingers against it, trying to keep rhythm with the fat raindrops hitting the glass. It would start soon, she knew, the bad grey bit of the year, and she needed to find a way to enjoy this time. She stopped tapping and pulled out a bag of Percy Pigs, grabbed three and crammed them into her mouth. She chewed briefly then took them all back out again and turned the pink mess over in her hands, rolling it into a gummy ball then popping it back in. Her appetite was reckless but not careless, these tics of teenage diets past creeping in when she was tired. The morning was already dripping away, sliding off the windows and under the train.

Mel sat back down in the seat next to Ada and reached over, shoved her hand into the Percy Pigs bag Ada was still holding and pulled out a fistful. She dumped them on her lap, picked one up and nibbled at its ear.

‘The toilet was bad. Do not use the toilet. Why does Branson think I want someone talking to me while I’m pissing?’

Ada smiled. ‘Maybe he’s got a piss fetish?’ and Mel said, ‘That makes sense, he’s very rich.’ Ada leaned against Mel’s shoulder and felt grateful that everything seemed the same.

Mel and Ada had been living together in London for over two years but had been living separately up in Edinburgh, and Ada realised now that she’d been afraid it would take them time to get their rhythm back. Intimacy was important to Ada and she’d never managed to maintain it over distance. She worried that without her immediate presence, all her shortcomings became more obvious, her flakiness and irritability looming in a person’s memory without the counterbalance of her body. She didn’t photograph well, needed to be seen in motion, and she wondered if she was an experience more than a girl. She was aware that a lot of her value was in how she made other people feel about themselves, and when she wasn’t working with that skill she flickered out.

Ada glanced sideways and saw herself reflected in the window, blank, and forced her face to listen. She thought about a habit she’d had when she was small. She would climb onto the sink in her family bathroom and kneel on the porcelain with her face as close to the mirror as she could get. Knees wet and a little bit soapy. And she would think about a feeling she’d had or even one she’d just heard about and she’d make the face for that feeling. She’d keep going over and over until the face in the mirror matched the one in her head and then, next time she spoke to her family or a friend, she’d try it out.

Her mother would say, ‘This week has been a thousand days long and it’s only Tuesday,’ and Ada would think ‘sympathy’ and her features would shift and her mum would look at her and smile. ‘You’re a sensitive little bug, aren’t you?’ Or Harvey at school would yank her ponytail towards his table and she’d feel angry but her brain would say ‘superior’ and she’d turn towards him and say, ‘Can I help you?’ and next time Harvey spoke to her it was while running down the hall with the book that she’d intentionally dropped, to see if he’d pick it up.

When Ada was sixteen she was reading the weekend paper, her feet up on her dad’s lap, ignoring her sister slamming a distant door. The front-page profile was about female psychopaths, how they presented differently from men because women are socialised to please. And one of them, this CEO of a pharmaceutical company, she said, ‘From a young age I knew I didn’t feel things like other people. But I knew no one would like me if I was too weird. So I became very good at pretending. I used to look in the mirror and make my face look like other people’s faces so no one would suspect me.’ Ada hadn’t thought about her mirror thing for years and it hit her suddenly that this wasn’t something other kids did. Unless those kids were psychos apparently.

For weeks, Ada carried round the fear that she was going to turn out to be a murderer. She checked her reactions constantly – like was it OK to be so angry when her sister ruined another dinner by storming out over some bullshit fight with their mum? Why were her crushes more like obsessions and why did they rarely last longer than a week? And then she was watching the news and they were talking about the war – they were often talking about the war when she was sixteen, though not as much as they had when she was thirteen – and a reporter was interviewing an activist and the activist was saying that journalists always reported the deaths of allied soldiers: ‘But it’s not just soldiers who are dying. The US army and their allies are killing innocent Iraqis every day. The numbers are staggering but even if they weren’t, one child dead is one child too many.’ And Ada felt her chest pull in on itself and she started to cry because it was true, of course. One child dead is one child too many. But a psychopath wouldn’t know that. And so she let that theory of herself go.

Ada tried to tell a boyfriend about her psychopath phase once. She was twenty and she loved him and they’d been together for two years so had talked about most of their stuff and one day she said, ‘You know I went through this phase where I thought I was a psychopath, like, clinically,’ and he laughed and said, ‘You? Come on. If anything you have too many emotions, not no emotions. You have an exhausting number of emotions.’ And Ada dropped it and made a note to start telling him less internal shit. Eventually they broke up and if she’d been charting the decline of their relationship objectively, that psychopath conversation would’ve been an inflection point. But she barely remembered it after much worse stuff got said. Later she would accuse him of psychopathy, the very thing she’d feared in herself, and he had said, ‘It’s not psycho to want you to shut the fuck up sometimes,’ and it was the hottest she’d found him in months. When he finally left her she wept at his feet and now five years later she couldn’t tell you a single identifying thing about his face.

Ada’s current theory of herself was that she had done the mirror thing as a child not because she didn’t have the same feelings as other people but because she did, and she needed that to be obvious. She felt things so sharply they’d cut her open if she didn’t let them out, and her face, her round soft canvas, was the release. As she got older, she realised that people’s motivations generally ran counter to hers – they wanted to be known less, not more – but by then she’d also realised the power that came with her openness. Everyone felt they were intimate with her and they felt it so quickly. She would never be alone if she kept everyone’s secrets but her own. She would also never become the CEO of a pharmaceutical company and that was probably for the best.

‘How’s Gabby?’ Ada had hoped that when Mel came back from the bathroom she’d want more details of her morning with Sadie. Ada had told the story like a comedy, pitching the line about Paris as though it was something hilarious that her too high brain had vomited up. But as she’d told it, she felt her story lacked something. She wasn’t getting across just how good it had felt to draw Sadie to her, how goofy she’d felt singing to her when what she wanted to do was fall in love.

She knew she wouldn’t see Sadie again even though Sadie had mentioned spending a few months in London. Ada had sent her a message earlier thanking her for the orgasms, which was only polite in her opinion, and Sadie had just written back with a laughing face emoji. Because she was a joke to her. Not in a cruel way, people like jokes. But there wasn’t any magic in them. So Ada wanted to tell Mel how she’d allowed herself to collapse on this person because it would never amount to anything and how the longing for Sadie, the idea of her if not the reality, was going to feel so good, sustain her so much over the grim months ahead, but she hadn’t had a chance before Mel went to pee and now she was asking about her sister.

Ada yawned. ‘No idea, I haven’t checked in on her personal pregnancy diary this week.’

Mel leaned over and said, ‘Go on then, fire it up, let’s see how the Madonna is faring.’

Ada opened Instagram and saw Gabby’s most recent post straight away. Mel’s obsession with her sister had fooled the algorithm into thinking Ada was obsessed with her sister so now Gabby was inescapable. She clicked over to her profile and opened the Stories section and chucked the phone to Mel. ‘Go nuts, stalker.’ She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes as Mel chatted.

‘She’s at this giant supermarket … OK this is actually pretty funny! She’s looking for big pads … That’s weird she isn’t getting her period while she’s—Oh wait, OK they’re big pads for after the baby comes. Why do you need pads after the baby … never mind, I don’t want to know. OK so she’s looking for the pads and they keep them in the PICNIC aisle! I guess because they’re all freaky Christians in the south and they don’t want to talk about vagina blood? Anyway—’ and at the same time Ada and Mel said, ‘hashtag Florida Baby,’ and Ada opened her eyes.

‘You know, you could just follow her yourself and then I could occasionally, oh I don’t know, use my own phone.’ She looked over at Mel who was now scrolling down Gabby’s feed, checking all the recent bump photos.

‘I don’t use Instagram,’ she said, without looking up, and Ada was warmed by Mel’s lack of self-awareness.

Mel loved everything she pretended to disdain whereas Ada just loved everything, and she knew Mel appreciated the cover that provided her. A month after Ada moved in with Mel she’d been watching Bring It On on her laptop and Mel had asked her what the hell it was and had gradually sat down to watch with her and mocked every second. But then at the end she said it was pretty interesting how the Clovers won. ‘Kind of progressive for the time, right?’ She still joked about the ‘terrible’ TV shows she’d started watching since Ada moved in, and their artsy friends smiled at Ada indulgently like she was a very stupid puppy who was teaching Mel how to love. The artsy friends had of course all seen Bring It On years ago and that was the difference between them and Mel. Some people would be put off by Mel’s snobbery but Ada knew that Mel grew up with three older brothers and her elegant parents and no one else close. Her highbrow taste wasn’t her fault.

Mel handed her phone back to her and said, ‘This one’s actually pretty cute,’ and Ada looked at the post that was open. It was two pictures of Gabby in a bikini (in her kitchen? Why was she wearing a bikini in her kitchen? Why was Gothy Gabby wearing a bikini at all?), the first featuring Gabby’s partner, Hank, kissing her naked belly and the second featuring him pointing at the big lipstick mark he’d left behind around her belly button, the same colour smeared across his face. She stared hard at Hank, trying, as she always did, to figure out if he was hot. She settled, as she always did, on him looking American. It was the teeth of it all, probably. And the clear eyes of a one-beer-with-the-football guy. Enough of this. A message from Stuart flashed up on the screen and she opened it then closed it without replying.

Mel leaned over to try to see the phone and said, ‘Wait, what was that? Who’s messaging you? Are you hooking up with someone?’

Ada pulled the thread up and handed it to Mel to scroll. ‘No, just some guy who found me on Facebook. I think he’s like … a fan.’

Mel scanned the messages then gave back the phone. ‘He seems kind of crazy, why did you respond?’ and Ada said, ‘You went to the toilet! I was bored!’ and that was all the answer Mel needed as Ada put the phone away.

She wasn’t playing the ‘who’ll message next’ game with him, though she was sure he’d think she was, that everyone did at the start of something. She didn’t though, didn’t believe in making people wait for her if she wanted them, nor of holding on to them when she was ready to move on. She prided herself on emphatic come-ons and respectful break-ups because what she wanted more than anything was reciprocal honesty. Mel told her all the time that people didn’t obfuscate on purpose. They just didn’t know how they felt as clearly as she did. But Ada could never quite believe that. Feelings announced themselves in her experience and it was a choice not to hear them. But while it frustrated her, she also knew that if everyone started feeling things fully and openly she would no longer seem special. She sometimes thought she’d do better in LA than London but everyone there seemed sort of like her but thinner and that would be an exhausting tide to rise above.

One day she was walking past Mel’s room and Mel was playing an old record because Mel had a record player because of course she did. And a song that she’d never heard before pushed through the door and she started to cry, immediately, and she threw the door open and startled Mel, who said, ‘What’s wrong?’

And Ada gestured hopelessly at the record and finally squeaked out, ‘Song … is so sad,’ and she fell into Mel’s arms.

Mel said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know Pink Floyd was a thing for you,’ and Ada said, ‘Is that who this is?’ and Mel held her out and stared at her. She couldn’t believe that a song Ada had never heard before would tear at her like this. Surely it reminded her of a long-lost love or maybe a troubling childhood memory? A scene from a favourite film? But it was just a sad song. It made Ada sad. Since then Mel would call Ada her crazy diamond and Ada would shrug and say, ‘It’s a really good song!’ and they’d drink their wine and laugh. It was one of their bits and they both loved it.

Ada was falling asleep now. She eased off her sneakers and tucked her feet under her, leaning her head on the gently vibrating window. She was nearly gone when she decided to be kind. She pulled her phone back out, responding to Stuart, ‘I’m passing out, not ignoring you I swear,’ then closed her eyes and let go.

FOUR

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