By Emily Black.
My father strangled the family cat. It felt more like an arbitrary fact than something that had really happened. I have no memory of the event itself, just the aftermath. He had those white rings around his nostrils and his eyes were tight. He was back from another night out pub-crawling along the seafront, and he’d been arguing with Mum. I could guess what it was about, but I don’t know how it came to that. I just know he wrapped his fingers around the cat’s throat and snapped its neck. Mum howled, but she didn’t tell anyone. She hugged me in my princess pyjamas, snot dripping down to my chin. She had pit stains on her nightie and blood under her nose. She got nose bleeds when she was stressed.
We buried Bubbles in the garden the next day. When our neighbour Sally leant over the fence to ask what we were doing, collectively digging a hole in the dry loam, Mum told her Bubbles had been attacked by a fox and we were all very sad. Sally said she was sad too and thought a fox wouldn’t dare attack Bubbles. He was a fat cat. Only the day before he’d been lying in the sun, a puddle of dark fur, distinct white bubbles dotted over his body. Sally said he’d be missed and said, to me, that I must miss him. I nodded, I did. But I was mainly scared. Fear has a taste when you’re young, like a mouthful of blood.
My father dropped worm-filled earth over what had happened that night. The cat lay in the soil, contaminated.
I think about Bubbles when my plane lands in Stansted. I think about Bubbles when I’m in the taxi to Southend, and when I check into my hotel and lie on the dry bed sheets. I think about the fat cat in the sun as I pop open a bottle of wine from the minibar and pour a large glass. The liquid swims, then settles. At midnight, I pass out fully clothed on top of the sheets.
Clean. Weather. Rock. Three words I write on my notepad. The paper will only fund my trip if I come back with something exciting; something sexy and new. Sexy and new. Sex. New. I wipe off last night’s makeup and run an ice-cold shower. I get in for a few seconds, a quick blast, then step onto the bathmat, shivering. I’ve always been sadistic like that. An only child, you’ve got to make yourself hard and interesting. It’s the rules.
I wander around Southend-on-Sea. It’s a hot, dry day and I’m unacclimatised to the brutal July heatwaves back in England. In Oslo, Liv and I usually spend weekends driving through the mountains, visiting friends, swinging around the city blanketed in mist. When it’s warm in Norway it’s never too warm: a modest sunshine. Liv would undress me in the mountains, where sex feels precious. In Southend, I want my body covered by my taught pinstripe suit, notepad under my arm. Three new words. Naked. Boardwalk. Soil.
I walk along the beach for an hour looking for a place to start. I take my loafers off and dig my toes into the sand. My feet disgust me; a single brown hair extends from my big toe. It took me three months of dating to even admit to Liv that I wasn’t a natural blonde. When I told her, she laughed, and said she knew, but admired my devotion to attacking my roots every two weeks. She asked what I was trying to hide.
The sun is angry today. Children scream as their parents apply sun cream to their noses. On the end of the pier is a casino, a square building, imposing on the edge of the walkway. Waves crash against the dark wooden beams that rise from the sea, and I squint to check if the casino is real. There are fake palm trees to either side. I think about the fake tooth that used to sit on my father’s bedside table. It had a wire running either side of it, and he’d slot it into his gum so you couldn’t tell his front tooth was missing. He said he lost it in a fight. Mum saved up for six months to fund the realistic replica. She wouldn’t let him go to the pub until he’d got it replaced. Instead, he drank beer in his rotting deck chair in the garden. When I went outside to sit with him sometimes, you could see the strawberry pink padding of his seeded tongue through the gap in his teeth. He’d put his sunglasses on and pretend he was asleep so he didn’t have to make small talk. This was long before Bubbles lay in the patch of earth below that greying chair.
Shore. Tin. Structure. These might be the three words that’ll trigger the beginning of my think-piece. Some deep reflection for my three-page spread. I’m usually good at these things, but now my brain feels blunt and muted. I go to a café and order a double-vodka soda and a plate of sushi. The waitress brings over chopsticks but I’m already eating the fish with my hands, spearing salmon with my nails. I finish my glass and ask for a receipt when I pay. I add it to my list of expenses.
I take a bus back to the hotel. Three men share the coach and I can feel them staring. I feel their hands in my lap, their teeth in my hair. I wonder if they’re weighing up the size of my tits and wondering what it would feel like to put a finger in my mouth. I sway as the bus rattles around corners, over speedbumps. My entire body shifts upwards momentarily before coming back down to earth. I’m slick with sweat, and my eyes are lopsided. I imagine what it would be like to be my father, a man surrounded by girls. My mother, his prize pig. Me, a sad, sappy kid. My grandmother when she visited the house, her purple hair and yellow teeth. Sally the neighbour, who used to come over for barbecues with her mute husband (he didn’t count). All my father’s relatives were dead. He was his only man.
At the hotel, I order pasta and a bottle of champagne from room service. I drink half the champagne and take a photo of myself eating the pasta naked, to send to Liv. She replies: YUM. I drop the plate when replying and watch the slick creamy sauce drip down the centre of the twin mattresses. Strings of spaghetti disappear into the crack, like the soft, pliable bones of a long-gone cat. I pour the rest of the champagne down the sink. Stream. Soak. Skin.
I try to write something else, but nothing happens. Drool splats from my lip onto the page. I fall asleep instead and dream I’m at the pub with my father: a little place on the seafront. I am his friend, and I am a man, with deep lines in my forehead and a wife at home. I refer to her as the old shlag and the men around me laugh. My father is greying and losing his hair. I am also greying, then I’ve lost my hair. The cat is resurrected from the back garden and it walks to the pub, a brittle skeleton, cracking along the pavement.
Somewhere, in the same house, a woman moans alone in her bed, and a little girl cuts her hair with blunt children’s scissors, waiting for someone to notice. I’m with her father, and we drink beers until our stomachs are so full that we might cut through the earth and fall into its core. His fake tooth falls out, then so do the rest of them, ugly bits of his skull on the floor, until he’s flaking away and his skin is sagging, everything dragged slowly down and into the ground. With him I walk from the wet bar and roll onto the beach. I am his friend, and we stand on the beach together as we die. He lies face-down in the sea. I make the joke that he’s just thirsty. He’d have loved that, had he been able to laugh. Were he not dead in the water.
Orange pours through the window. My eyes are sticky, but they’re now open. It’s sunset, and the world is still very much alive. I scratch my own thighs to check I’m not dying with the sun. I masturbate on the hotel bed, then put my pinstripe suit back on. It smells like salt.
I take the bus back to the seafront, sharing it this time with lots of people. There are children with sunburnt faces, swollen balls of dough. Their mothers have thin lines in their skin, like patterned paper. I chew gum and thank the bus driver when I get off. Liv texts me to tell me she’s having seafood for dinner at our favourite place in the city centre.
Dazed. Blue. Superfluous. I walk through town, along the seafront, staring at the mottled pavement. The pier is dark and flickering in the half-light. I kick off my loafers, one by one, and watch them drop over the edge of the boardwalk into the sea. They make a delicious splash, and I wish I had more shoes to drop. I remember finding my father’s shoes by the door the night he died. Despite being blackout drunk, he’d tucked them away neatly on the shoe rack, a habit I suppose, and snuck upstairs to the bathroom as he always did. He ran himself a shallow bath, another routine of his. He’d wash off the smell of smoke and booze from the casino, so as not to piss off Mum. He spent every night he could there, sat at a table gambling away our money until he was so dizzy he got kicked out.
I heard the immersion heater turn on between one and four every night. It always woke me up; I’m certain that’s why I remembered all my dreams as a child, torn out of sleep by the throaty hum of the boiler. That night, the heater ran forever, and Mum was fuming when she realised it was still on the next morning. My father was missing, and she was in a bad mood. I was the one who discovered him face-down against the white plastic. He appeared to float lazily on the surface, although, thinking about it now, I know he couldn’t have been. He was a large man; it was a small bath. It wasn’t the water that killed him.
I stand at the casino reception, cold and bloodless. The man at the desk can’t see I’m barefoot. The fact that he doesn’t know makes me happy. He takes my address, my job title, my email address, my ID, and a photo of my gaunt face. In the image on his screen I think I look like a seagull.
Illusion. Snap. Turf. I’ve never been to a casino before. It’s thoroughly underwhelming. My father spent the last hours of his life here, out on a small patch of land at sea. I feel as though I ought to be more haunted. Instead, I just wander to the bar and order two vodka sodas. The woman asks if I want that as a double. I say no, I’m with someone, and she looks around, then pours the two drinks anyway. I pay, take one in each hand, and sip, sat on the velvet stool. There are a few men at tables and a short lady on a slot machine. Two women talk on the other side of the bar. All the green and red and black. Everything is a curve, melding into the next object. Smooth.
For a month after my father died, Mum just sat in the garden, unspeaking, sinking into that crusty chair. Greenery now grew over the patch where we’d buried Bubbles. Moss and spider weeds shot up across the soil where the cat was hidden. As I became older, I wondered why we didn’t just throw it in the bin. Then when I was older than that, I understood the importance of ceremony, and knew it would be more suspicious to dispose of the thing.
In Biology, I learnt about asexual reproduction in plants, and how runner plants form from the original: they’re genetic duplicates of the parent. I struggled to understand how I was part of both my mother and my father, when the identical replication of plants was the only thing that seemed to make sense now that he wasn’t around. I wasn’t a duplicate, but something hatched from two halves. Like a grub in the dirt, a pearlescent little larva. I thought about the moss that grew on top of Bubbles’ grave. The only time I visited my father’s plot of earth in the local cemetery was for the burial. Whenever I thought about going back, I was too scared of what might grow there.
Sally came over sometimes and read to Mum: the Bible, maybe, or at least I imagined it was. It sounded faintly religious. Once she’d finished reading, they’d sit together, Mum leaning into Sally, her spine bent like a child. Sometimes Mum would have a nosebleed and it would pour all over Sally’s nice cotton shirts.
I spent my time cross-legged on the floor of my room, and no longer used the upstairs bathroom. I wanted to move as far away as possible when I became old enough. The house stank of gritty old sadness. You never become immune to the stench.
I place fifty on red—I’ve seen them do it in films. The wheel spins, and I feel sick. The company brief sits on the stool next to me: A flight back in time: the significance of travel and memory, a personal account. My boss had asked if I was really okay with that when I pitched her the idea. She was wide-eyed and I could tell she was excited but trying to hide it. Emotional clickbait: delicious, gooey currency. She said she’d provide therapy on the company if I wanted support before and after the project. We’d get a tonne of clicks if I called it something about travelling back to the spot where my father had lost to addiction. Cash. Hard. Distance. The wheel stops on black. I don’t feel very hooked.
I lived in London for a few years but never visited Southend. Mum came to see me in the city whenever we wanted to meet up. When we did, we sat chewing expensive food in silence. A wet bite of octopus. Squid. Fancy restaurants and silence. When I moved to Norway to settle down with Liv, she didn’t visit once.
The bathrooms have tall emerald walls. A soft synthy song plays from hidden speakers. I lock myself in a cubicle and wrestle the baggie out of my bra. I don’t remember how I got it. I just arrange three stiff white lines on my screen protector, losing some in the cracks. I inhale them dutifully and snap a picture for my records: nostrils like my father’s. Mum always said I had his face. The rush smacks me in the cheeks and bites my eyeballs. I lean into the mirror and poke the squidgy whites. If it doesn’t kill me like it did him, then I’m not real. None of it matters.
It was the coke that stopped my father’s heart: the coke after all the years of drinking, the cigars, the stress, the resentment, the lack of direction, like attempting to steer a great ship at sea with no clue how to operate it, in a storm—in a rage—smashing against rocks—eroding like the shore—every fragment of his being—cutting up the ocean with a fork—grinding, snapping—like it was dinner—like it was—like it was—
I return to the tables and play a few more games. I lose three hundred. It’s fine, I’ll expense it.
The slot machines are lurid and sticky like the top of a cake. I want to dig my fangs in. The coke makes time feel delicious and funny. I land on three cherries. The console flashes and my heart lights up.
If I could, I would run back to that house and tear the weeds from the dirt, dig up the soft bones of the cat, wrap myself in the hungry earth and lie down in the cool. I’d smoke my first cigar, staring up at the sky. I’d wait for it to take me, my own body feline and dead.
I win some cash that spills out of the machine dramatically, like in the films, lots of silver coins. I play again and lose everything. Irritated, I push more money into the slot. The coke is wearing off; I’m bored. I miss Liv, lying on the bobbly old mattress with her, feeling like a human being. She traces my eyes and nose and mouth to remind me that I am there.
I order two more vodka sodas. This time the lady doesn’t ask any questions. She flattens her waistcoat as I slurp the remains and check my phone: it’s six, it’s dawn. I leave the second vodka soda, stare at it for a bit, then get up to go.
Outside, the sun is rising over the southeast of England. There’s a strangulating sea breeze, but the water looks sharp and cold. I can see the waves through the cracks in the boarded pier. I remember that my loafers are down there somewhere, sitting on the bottom of the ocean. Weight. Lose. Lost.
I have an ulcer on the side of my tongue—I always do—and my eyes are raw. There’s no-one on the long pier. The sun is a hotplate.
As I walk back to the beach, I can see a few people on the shore in the distance. I keep thinking there’s someone behind me. There’s not.
The beach is cool and new. I am new. I walk along the sand, shells cutting into my toes. I hope my feet bleed. Waves lap against the sand. The sunrise has a flavour. I can still hear the synth from the emerald toilets. I walk into the ocean. The cuffs of my pinstripe trousers get wet first, soaking through my ankles and up to my knees. It’s so cold it burns, but I like it—I’ve always been sadistic like that. The water rises until it’s around my sinful hips. The sea is brown and muddy. I can’t see my legs, but I can feel the bottom. I wonder if aquatic life reproduces asexually, spreading across the sea floor like weeds.
My shoulders are submerged when I can no longer touch the sand. Blonde hair sprawls across the surface of the sea and I kick gently to stay afloat. Everything is drenched. My pants, purse, credit cards, phone, nail file, ballpoint pen, bag of coke. My notepad.
Still kicking, I take the paper out of my pocket. The sheets are mushy and sodden. Ink runs across the pages. Sunlight cracks on the surface of the sea like shards of glass. If I were made of water, I would dissipate like the light. I would reach the bones of my father, meet the soles of his neat leather shoes. And I’d stroke the remains of Bubbles. If I were to land on the sand, I would feel the long feline arch of his back again, that fat cat that sat out in the sun in our garden when I was only six. I’d feel the weeds that run over the seabed, and the hard surface of my father’s fake tooth: all the relics submerged in the swamp of time.
Hands above the water, I tear the most recent sheet from my notepad. I open my mouth and bring the page to my cracked lips. I eat the final three words. Doze. Daze. Habit.
Saltwater fills my mouth. The paper turns to pulp.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emily Black holds an MA in Creative Writing and a BA in English Literature, and currently works as a Senior Writer for a tech company. Her work has appeared in publications including The Tilt, Ellipses Zine, The Final Girls, The York Journal, The Phare, Oranges Journal, and Disgraceful Magazine. She has been longlisted for an open-call Tate Prize and the 2021 White Review Short Story Prize. You can find her on Twitter @Emily__Beee and her website.
