Extract from August Grape

Hannah Pollard

Joanie lies on her stomach and watches Nora get ready. The last time she saw her was two years ago and now, in her late thirties, Nora’s face has begun to hollow with the subtle concavity of approaching maturity. It suits her. Joanie meets her sister’s eyes and Nora smiles at her, full of warm knowing. For as long as Joanie can remember Nora had the face of a teenager. Wide dark blue eyes stuck in an impossibly pale face. Bruisable. That’s it; she always looked bruisable. Joanie wonders if her sister had been born looking different, she might have avoided the bruises. There was a time when Joanie had found it hard to look at her, scared that her fragile features might trigger something buried inside of her. Something destructive. How awful to admit. But as Nora runs a slick of moisturiser across her cheeks, Joanie thinks that her beauty sits more easily in her face. It is less flammable.

‘Isn’t it weird to meet with someone you used to date? When you’re both married.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Nora says scooping her hair up into a bun. ‘It’s possible to stay friends with people you’ve dated you know Joey.’ When Joanie was a teenager, she found the nickname grating. A distant grown-up sister had no right getting close to her, not in this special, secret way. Especially not when she had dug such a disruptive wedge into Joanie’s childhood oblivion. But now, aged twenty-three and resting in a patch of spreading sun, Joanie leans softly into the name. Eases into its affection. She might be twelve years older, might have been raised in a different country by a different father, but the woman standing opposite her is always going to be her sister. Nora turns and inspects her reflection in the mirror. ‘You just can’t do it at your age.’ 

‘Huh?’

‘Stay friends with people you dated. You can’t make it work in your twenties.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Hair up or down?’

‘Down.’

Nora undoes her hair tie with a tut. It falls long and red down her back.

‘Why can’t you do it at my age?’

Nora pauses and thinks about this for a moment.

‘Even if you’re the most mature twenty-something in the world it’s too messy.’

‘Not always,’ Joanie replies. She isn’t sure she means it, but it feels good to take a stance.

‘Hm.’

‘Do you and Ross even acknowledge that you used to date?’

‘It barely comes up. Mostly we just send each other emails. His wife Martha’s a chef – he sends me her recipes. Ross knows that I like to cook.’

‘What does he get out of giving you his wife’s recipes?’ Joanie sits up, frustration nudging into her voice.

‘Beyond friendship?’ Nora laughs at Joanie’s stern face. ‘Friendship aside, Amir always has book recommendations that I forward onto him.’ Nora spritzes some perfume onto her wrist. It’s always been the same scent; jasmine. Even at her lowest she smelt like honey and flowers.

‘Amir knows you send them to Ross?’

‘He picks them for him. He knows what Ross likes. It’s mostly new stuff that I’d have no idea about.’ Nora pulls on her shoes and pulls on a striped linen overshirt. ‘It’s probably colder than it looks,’ she says glancing at the steady, burning blue outside the window. ‘What are you going to do today anyway?’ Nora says gesturing to the large cardboard mountain currently barricading the door, ‘now that the packing’s done.’ Joanie thinks about it; what to do for her last day in the city?

‘I think I’ll go on a walk. Maybe Hackney Downs, I haven’t been since winter.’ She wants to move around today. She has become good at knowing when to distract herself. 

They descend together do2wn the narrow staircase and out into the street. Walking the two blocks to the tube station a hundred little topics flit between them like sparrows; the flowers that are coming up in front gardens; the way the neighbourhood has changed since Nora lived here fifteen years ago. And then Ines, how Nora misses her like she has never missed anyone, and that she wants to bring her to the city next year when she’s old enough to take joy in new things. Nora insists on buying Joanie a coffee, before slipping ten pounds into her pocket. Joanie tries to stop her, telling her she’s too old for pocket money, but Nora just shrugs and says for lunch Joey. Then she walks down the escalator and disappears into the belly of the station. Joanie stands alone on the pavement, her hands wrapped around the teal paper cup. The heat softens her fingertips, always cold, even on a warm May morning like this. She takes a sip and even though the coffee is burnt she smiles unhurriedly.

Joanie puts her headphones on and heads past the corner shop and overstuffed hardware store. She cuts down into a narrow side alley and begins to wend away from the high street and towards Hackney Downs. It’s a short walk but by the time she gets there her last dregs of coffee are tepid. She tilts back her head and swallows the remaining liquid, creamy and thick with sunken coffee grits. Everything is quiet. She wonders why; perhaps the day promised rain, maybe this is the typical calm of a Tuesday morning. She wouldn’t know, up until today she has been sitting behind a desk in central London at this time on this day; she would probably be on her second tea of the morning. Joanie looks around at the park, glad that it’s empty. She turns up her music and begins down the dusty path which tracks a broad parallel to the river. The smell of the groaning road is swallowed by the protective greenness and Joanie looks into the distance to the point where the rolling grasslands meet the silhouetted housing blocks; it is satisfyingly far away. Turning back to the river she watches the insects flash across the glazed surface in knotted coils of wings and motion. Today is the first day that spring has begun to give way; she knows this because summer’s imprint is etched into the landscape, loudly and decisively. Joanie draws away from the river, feeling the tug of the swallowing grasses from a nearby field. Walking into their clasp, they graze against her elbows, and Joanie notices how she softens into the grass and breeze’s twin sway. On days like this she can’t bear to acknowledge any past or future, can’t stand to see anything beyond the light hitting the ground. Yet as she thinks this the pressure to think of things gouges at her, the rot always positioned at the periphery of calm. A soured shadow pries at the corners of the cloudless sky.

She shuts her eyes, suddenly tired. She reopens them and spots a darkly stagnated form at the far end of the field, its head just skimming the top of the grass. It creaks slowly but diligently at her. The Toad, back again for the first time in months. She recognises its shape without having to look into its eyes. They stand at opposite ends of the path, players on a chess board all eyes, all breath, waiting for the other’s first move. Her legs grow cold, then hot, and then she can’t feel them at all. A fuzz grows in her chest, a bubbling, contorted tightness that surges into a suffocating flash. 

Joanie. I want to talk. I’m so lonely. You can’t imagine, I have no one. I’ve been back to that place I come from and I hate it, I hate it.

The voice thrums through the quiet morning, cutting a dark stain across late spring. It skims over the leaning field and wraps itself around her in a long viscous leash that grabs hold of her ankles and digs into the soft of her stomach. She searches wildly for something to grip hold of – the sky, focus on the sky. She looks up towards the midmorning blue and exhales into it. It balloons, so she tries again, breathing fully and pointedly. Just when she thinks her chest might catch fire the sky exhales back. Joanie feels a slackening inside and turns to meet the Toad’s eyes.

Joanie. I’m so lonely, listen to me, I have nothing. I need you to talk to me. You know me. I know you, without me you’re not you.

Things churn and curdle but she keeps her eyes on the Toad. There is a dull ache in her arm in the exact spot where she broke it as a child after falling from a tree. A tree she climbed for his sake. Joanie tries not to concentrate on the throbbing bone, instead forcing herself to hold his gaze without saying anything, just listening to its voice swell and froth until the words have ebbed their way into a white background murmur. The cord between them drops to her feet, thin and grey. Relief floods her like something solid. She steps out of the leash, flimsy but clearheaded and turns to the flowing river. It unkinks just for her. Some leaves have caught in the wind – they rise before landing on the water where they float, silk on water. Joanie’s body eases some more, and with a strange jolt of perspective she sees herself, momentarily suspended and standing at a threshold. She turns back towards the field, but the toad has gone. In its place is a weak glint of sun that spills like plasma across the field. Her body is slick with a cold sweat so Joanie searches for a comfortable handhold at the back of her mind. She scans a series of things; tomorrow, yesterday, this morning. The things that spool around the folds of her brain, furling and unfurling as little ferns. Nora and her non-date, the outfit she will wear tomorrow for the car ride north. The feeling of her feet, heavy in her shoes, the pink t-shirt packed in the bottom of one of her boxes, worn thin but so full of memories that she cannot throw it out. Then, out of nowhere, she lands on a buried anchor, a well-worn echo of experience. Ira. A word humming with solace. It’s strange, she hasn’t thought of that name, that person, in so long. He used to take up so much of her, used to be the first thing she spun into upon waking alone in the night. Now his memory sits inside of her, a benign, cloaked contour dug into her anatomy, only obtainable through a select few entry points. A particular song about feathers and time, a shaft of light falling orange across her legs like it did one morning spent with him; things she doesn’t forget.

A bench marks the outskirts of the field, so she sits on it and peels off her jumper. Arms buzzing with heat, she closes her eyes, feeling the warmth seep through her eyelids. She wonders what Ira is doing in this exact moment. It’s a weekday morning; perhaps he is sitting behind an office desk, bored and filing through emails. Maybe he is still in bed, bent double around a book. He always enjoyed reading in bed when the morning was lazy. The last she heard of him he had put his Classics degree to good use and joined an archaeology dig in Greece. She had seen a photo of him on Facebook lounging on a dusty bank next to two other tanned archaeologists. The photo had caught her like a slap. It had hummed with companionship and a glowing sense of purpose. But the photo was from over a year ago now, so he’s probably somewhere else, somewhere she doesn’t have access to. She wonders if he ever thinks of the time they spent together; more than this, if he ever wonders about who she is now, on this very morning. The person she grew into. His specific Ira feeling rises from somewhere permanent and crystal inside of herself. It climbs through her stomach and lungs, creeps up through her throat. But as it ascends it does so lightly, swimming in a diluted version of the space it once took up. It used to be so unwieldy. A sharp necessity serrated with the weight of loss. 

She finds his image behind her eyes. His arms, his back, his thin quicksilver mouth. She can see him just as easily as ever, but the feeling has changed. Recast itself into something dustier, thinner. Ira’s imprint has bled into the burnt orange of an autumn leaf. Admitting this change is strange. He always seared so heavily in her chest. Now his memory has been filed away next to all the other complicated and simple things that she has lived through. If he saw her now he would see a speckled version of the Joanie he knew. Sure, she looks the same as the day she turned seventeen, but everything’s different. The grey of her eyes, the space between her ribs. The way she starts and ends sentences. A familiar supercut undone. Sitting on the bench Joanie burns with now and then and everything in between. Aches with all that has happened and all that she knows will come and come again. The things which will arrive when she least wants them to but which she will try to greet without surprise, without animosity. She’ll greet them like she expected them to return. A duck rustles its way through a tall clump of reeds, pecking noisily in pursuit of insects. It’s head flashes in and out of the water in a brown gleam of slick feathers. Joanie is back in her body.

She gets up, trailing behind her the crumbling cocoon that still wraps around her sometimes. Joanie surrenders the silver carcass to the morning. Continuing on her walk, the sun drifts down towards her with expanding tenderness. It climbs through the gaps in her hair and presses its woolly palms against her scalp. She breathes out, softly but unmistakably.

Joanie walks for a while, feeling her body tighten and then release with the exercise. Her stomach gives a growl; she checks her watch, two minutes past midday. With a last look at an outcrop of buildings outlined in the distance, Joanie decides to turn back the way she came, following the river’s path back through the centre of the grassland. But just as she makes the turn, there is a small chirp; something in the undergrowth is rustling. It emerges between the stalks – a little bird with bright orange legs, taking her in firmly. Joanie very slowly lowers to her knees, hello little bird, but just as her knees graze against the ground the bird cuts into the grass, the stalks rustling as it tracks the bird’s path. Without waiting, without thinking, she follows it, and together they dart this way and that, bending and skimming around the scythes of grass. Joanie keeps her eyes trained on the spindled orange ankles as they skirt around the tangled stems of meadow foxtail and pussy willow, pressing on into the centre of the field, why don't you fly? Use your wings! Heat pulses from her back and she breathes heavily— 

The bird stops and looks straight at Joanie. Then it lifts off from the ground and flies away. And even though it’s absurd, even though it’s illogical, Joanie feels herself float for just a moment after the bird. Then her legs fold upon the floor, and filled with a lightness, she sits calmly upon the dirt and watches the bird settle in the arms of a distant tree. She looks up at the sky; clouds have begun to form, and a soft wind is making the grass whistle. It is a high undulating song and Joanie lulls back her head to watch the clouds darken and congeal like scabs. With no warning they burst, releasing a torrent of sun streaked rain. Despite the water that is soaking everything, the day’s heat remains; she feels it in her body, the air, the ground. Her fingers find the soil and the rain finds her face, and how lovely the mud and warm water feel working twofold. As quickly as it came on, the rain begins to subdue, so Joanie gets up and digs out her headphones from the bottom of her bag. 

She picks the song that makes her think of Ira, the song she hasn’t listened to for years now. After he broke up with her, she listened to it daily; listened to it walking to class, in the bath, listened to it as her body posed heavily on the bed beside her in the evening. She listened to it until she could predict every chord change, every unintentional catch of the singer’s voice; the song span circles around her as she slept. Then all of a sudden, she had grown sick of it; sick of the melody, sick of the lyrics, sick of feeling for someone who didn’t feel for her. But now, walking home, with the sun on the back of her neck, she listens to it and thinks of the music in empathetic, objective terms. The song rises in her ears, sloping upwards in a half-moon of familiar sound. She allows back in the cold winter memories of being nineteen and ascendant.