This was my entry to the HG Wells Young Writers’ Competition but probably because I wrote it all the day I needed to submit it, it wasn’t shortlisted. I know this is a poetry blog but I guessed some people might be interested in writing as a whole and want to read my prose as well!
The overall theme is ‘peace’. It contains a beach, feminist ideals, a cafe inspired by a Tumblr post, 'tis lowkey the story of a lesbian relationship (they were meant to be friends, I swear), a really cool tree and some overcomplicated metaphors. Hope you like it.
TW; death, anxiety/ panic attacks
The tree stood atop the hill like an empress, but bent with the wind like one of her slaves. It was adorned with garments – jewellery, scarves and jackets were wrapped around its branches like bandages, willing offerings from those who owned it. Those two lay beneath it, staring up at the sky; shrouded with wisps of cloud, it had been purged of any blue, and was white; one pale, unseeing eye-socket staring blindly – and most importantly, without judgement – above them. Both had their eyes closed, their lashes casting spidery shadows across their cheekbones in the greying sunlight. Curled in circles, like foetuses, the mistresses of the tree fell asleep in the warmth and shade of their privacy.
Dylan remembered when she had first found the tree. It had been an accident – but then, many great things had been discovered by accident. Like penicillin.
It was the day that her grandfather had died. Dylan had hated her grandfather, and had not expected to mourn him. She remembered, vaguely, him moving about when she was little, but since she had been eleven he had been in his chair. Somehow he had gradually shrunken into it, as part of the mahogany as it had been of him, until she only really viewed the man as an extension of his seat. From his corner he had creaked and groaned and grumbled about whatever had irritated his sensitive fancies, and somehow – perhaps because he had gotten to the stage where he was partly ornament – she resented his presence in the house as an encroachment. Or, perhaps, the opposite – she felt that she was intruding in her own house, and he was as part of it as the furniture. Neither her parents nor her grandfather had space for anger or stress – or humanity, really – in a daughter; in their home they wanted to unleash their own emotion, not deal with hers. So upset was met with anger and stress with punishment, until Dylan knew her home not as a safe space but really as a second school.
Home and school. Home and school. Dylan was only fifteen. She knew there was life beyond those two things, and should she squint she could see a long, winding, gold-paved path ahead, one that led to light and laughter and greater things. But at fifteen, life was a relentless monochromatic monotony of home and school.
“At least he’s at peace,” her mother had said. Dylan had held her tongue. Death did not seem like peace, at least to her; her grandfather was no angel. She could not see him amongst meringue clouds, strumming a heavenly harp, but she was not quite sure if the old man really deserved Hell. She could see him there, though, thrashing and flailing as scorching tongues held him like chains, their burning tendrils snaked around his ankles, screaming and howling and cursing to the end. Although, the less spiritual side of Dylan imagined perhaps a more rational eventuality; lying in a wooden box, motionless, decomposing. Even then she could not imagine her grandfather’s death as any kind of sleep, but a fitful, reluctant rest, his eyes awake and staring behind his closed lids. He was not a peaceful person and dying would not change that.
You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, something, perhaps a conscience, said to her.
Perhaps it was the rigidity and the routine of it all that Dylan missed, because really she could think of nothing pleasant the miserable old man in the chair had brought, but she felt the loss when she looked at the empty chair all the same. Somehow her morning rung hollow without his harsh rasp of a voice there. It was with this dreary inconvenient sense of having something taken from her which accompanied her to school – no sadness, no grief, just an irritation that life had stolen something from her – and it came out in her eyes, in her words, in her tone. And her teachers – who were all aware of “the circumstances”, no doubt – abandoned yet another expected part of life: getting in trouble. All they had to offer were voices and words which were the verbal equivalent of a tablespoon of Golden Syrup being jammed down her throat, and Dylan hated it. The sun had lurked in the darkness, but had pounced like some great cat at lunchtime, roaring with an unexpected burst of blinding light and sudden stifling heat … Dylan had found voices and music and clinking cutlery annoying her, and she was sweating, and she was hot, and she was uncomfortable … her eyes slid and shuddered out of focus, she closed them and opened them again – it was dark … it was light … she could feel blood pumping behind her eyes – and suddenly her mind felt like it was concaving, collapsing, caged in on itself and ready to break; she could imagine it, her skull folding in on itself like paper, brain and blood, the cells a sad grey lump beside blood and shards of skull. Red wine and fine china.
It was too much. She had left school, and walked. Across the coast, through some woods. It hadn’t been a long walk, maybe thirty minutes, before she came to the clearing. It was a wide green square of grass; not grass like on lawns, preened and pruned into little lime soldiers standing straight and moist, but yellow tangles of plant that scratched at her legs. The hill was not much more than a bump, so she climbed it to look for the shade that the branches of the tree would offer, and it was then that she noticed the necklace.
It was a gold heart. Plain, simplistic, typical, but expensive; the sort of gift you’d get for a loved one you didn’t actually know that well. Dylan had stared at the chain, and then she had found herself pulling off her scarf and wrapping it around the branch too. It was an expensive scarf, silk, that her grandfather had given her.
“It was your grandmother’s,” he had said, “and now it is for you. Do you like it?”
Dylan had said she liked it, and thanked him.
“I didn’t think you would. You aren’t a woman of much taste,” was all he had said. And then he had turned away.
Her grandfather had not been a fan of denim, or plaid, or the colour mustard, or Doc Marten boots, or high-waisted jeans, or stripes, or suits on women, and when Dylan had cut her hair above her jaw his ancient pumping heart had been aghast. Dylan had somewhat liked the scarf, enjoying the wet luxury of the silk and the crimson hue, but his remark had made liking it feel like a burden. Allowing the tree to take the boulder wrapped around her neck made her feel better.
Dylan had stayed underneath the tree, within its protection, until the evening, once its shadow had crawled into the shade eclipsing the whole field. Within the grass there were blotches of colour – daisies and poppies – and though her vision was speckled with sunlight for part of the day, she found she rather enjoyed the heat when she wasn’t trapped inside a box of a room. The buzz of the crickets and the susurrus of the leaves made for far less irritating background noise than populated areas, and she found the hours spiralling away, some endless curled golden ribbon in an eternal swirl that looped back and around and endlessly. Hour after hour was ate by the grass and the sky and the crickets, her phone leaping to catch up every time she had the inclination to check it; from four to six, from six to eight.
It wasn’t until eight that she realised now was the time to search for her home. She found it, eventually, and an extremely infuriated mother, who burst into tears when Dylan told her she didn’t have her grandfather’s scarf anymore.
Dylan could not bring herself to regret it or retrieve it. Leaving the scarf behind had made something settle. She felt at peace.
Two days later Dylan returned to her tree to find that the gift of her scarf had been reciprocated. It was a somewhat matronly white dress, with ballooning sleeves and a skirt of ludicrous length, the cream already marred and dirtied by however long it had been in the field. With it was a piece of paper, thoroughly challenged by the elements, but when Dylan picked it up she could make out the words.
Have you ever had to wear something you didn’t want to?
The handwriting was large, smooth and curved and extravagant, with hearts instead of dots over the I’s. Dylan had not brought a pen but she returned the next day with the dress her mother had made her wear to a cousin’s wedding rather than her preferred suit. It was a cold purple and so tight it made her gulp for breath and waddle like a duck, and so uncomfortably low-cut that she had spent the evening nervously adjusting it. With it were the cruelly painful shoes she had worn, the lack of platform and stiletto heels meaning she had come away limping with bruised and cracked soles.
The response was a demure pair of ivory shoes, propped by their kitten heels over the branches.
Over the next few months the tree became a tossing cupboard for all that disturbed them. The person who had hung the necklace hung two more – a black choker that looked like a belt, and a thick gold cross, as well as several scarves and a thick woollen jumper. One day Dylan came to see Malory Towers by Enid Blyton beneath the tree, and once GCSE exams were over Dylan – as she victoriously hung her school blazer – noticed a stack of exercise books and textbooks strewn and ripped over the branches.
So they had to be the same age as her, then. Sixteen – or perhaps fifteen still.
It was nature, she supposed, for curiosity to fester, smoulder, for her to want to know who left crosses and scarves and books, to want to know the story behind the choker belt, to want to know who wrote the notes. The questions were always little, yet large, obscure things. Do you have a book you want to dump? Don’t you want to get rid of your textbooks? Are you religious? Are you really religious, or is it expected of you? Some of the questions had gone unanswered, the paper wet and limp by the time she reached them, rain snatching the ink away.
It was nature as well, she supposed, that they’d eventually meet. The girl lounging beneath the tree lay like a cat, and when she saw Dylan approaching her eyebrows rose above her sunglasses. But she didn’t say anything.
Dylan tossed several books on the Study of Law beneath the tree, and sat down. Somehow she felt as if she knew the girl, by knowing the things that disturbed her peace.
She was blonde, and very unlike Dylan. In the winter Dylan guessed her skin would be pale, but as it was it was tanned and smattered with freckles. She was very pretty, so pretty Dylan felt a tinge of jealousy and a wave of attraction, with full lips and big eyes with eyelashes that would be long even if they hadn’t been combed through with mascara. She was wearing makeup, and a lot of it, though it was well done, and her eyes were green; her shirt was red and cropped and her shorts denim and fraying above her thighs, and her shoes were wedges; but what Dylan was immediately drawn to were criss-crossed knots of scarred skin along her forearms and inner thighs, and that her eyeliner was smudged with wetness around her eyes.
The girl smiled softly, shyly, and Dylan got the sudden impression that this was not how the girl smiled at most people. She understood that. When she smiled, she had to pretend that nothing hung on the tree existed or bothered her, but the smile she had just received was a smile of acknowledgement that Dylan knew the soft spots already.
She introduced herself as Cassandra, Cassie for short.
Two of the necklaces, Dylan learnt, had been gifts from Cassie’s ex-boyfriend. She had always hated the choker. The buckle made her feel like she was on a leash, a dog, and perhaps it stung because it was true. He had given her the heart as a make-up gift after a fight, but in the end Cassie had hung it up on the tree and broke up with him over text message. He had been angry and her family were on his side, but Cassie had thought it was about time she was on hers.
The third one – the cross – was a gift from her mother.
“I’m Catholic,” Cassie had said, when Dylan asked. “Like, really Catholic – as in, I would be if my mum didn’t make me. But it’s like I have to constantly prove to them how dedicated and devoted I am. The crucifix doesn’t say Jesus to me, it says expectations.” Her eyes slid to it, consciously or subconsciously, and rested there. “So I hung it up on the tree. What about your scarf?”
“My grandfather gave it to me. He didn’t think I’d like it. It’s like – I’m expected to go against everything they say and like and do, because I’m different. They don’t see anything in between miniature models of them and hating everything they stand for.” Dylan grabbed the scarf off the branch and pulled, pulled tight, hoping the threads would come unravelled and the thing would tear. “I was expected to be the perfect girl. And now I’m not, I’m expected to be the opposite of it.”
Cassie’s mouth sloped into a grin. “The perfect girl,” she repeated. “Girls who don’t have to have dresses picked for them by their mothers.” Her eyes had reached the white gown now. “Perfect girls don’t wear low-cut dresses and high heels.”
Dylan’s eyes had gone in the opposite direction to the purple one. “Or perhaps they do.”
What perfect girls do is obey. Conform. Acquiesce.
“You come to the tree often,” Cassie remarked. She was wearing a white sundress, today, the neckline cut in a triangle to reveal slices of tanned breast.
“It’s where I get my peace.”
“Nowhere else?” Cassie’s eyebrows slid into a slight frown. She was open, exposed, in her face; everything she thought a twitch of the nose or brows or lips would reveal. Cassie, somehow, had never learnt to pull her lips shut or her eyes blank like Dylan believed was necessary.
“Why, do you have another place?”
Cassie looked up, startled. “Of course. Peace is everywhere. You just have to know what to look at.”
Dylan felt her lower lip curve into a smile, the edge of a sardonic blade. “Is that so?”
“Of course some places seem more peaceful than others. Like here. But we don’t know. Someone’s probably been murdered here.” Cassie tore up some grass with pointed red fingernails. “Lots of people, actually. It’s a desolate heath.” She turned to look at Dylan, properly this time, seriously. “There’s no such thing as a truly peaceful place. You just have to ignore the bad things. Real peace-“ and she tapped her head – “is in the mind.”
“Okay, Doctor,” said Dylan, sarcastically.
Cassie smiled a smile as uneven and knotted as her scars. “Of course, I’m not really qualified to give advice. My mind is never at peace – but then, I wonder if there’s any such thing as a truly peaceful mind, either.” She crossed her legs. “If you want, I’ll take you to my peaceful places.”
Cassie’s first peaceful place was a café. It was a tiny little shop, long and narrow, the outside painted lilac. The walls and shelves were lined with rows of clocks. They all ticked together, as one, and it was oddly comforting, like one whole consistent regular heartbeat.
As they passed the clocks Dylan noticed the times were all different. She wondered if any were correct and, if they were, in what part of the world. The timelessness had her suddenly reminded of her first evening under the tree, where the peace had seemed to swallow time.
Peace isn’t sentient, said a voice that sounded like Cassie’s. Peace is in your mind.
Lunch there was quiet but not awkward, and they ate and laughed and didn’t bother about what time it was. Dylan’s mother was upset, again, when she came home late, and demanded to know which friend Dylan had been with, despite not knowing Cassie anyway. Dylan felt her anger leap to the surface, a lion or a lynx, a smouldering fire gasping and pleading to be ignited, but somehow green eyes and freckles faded her vision and she found herself dousing her mind in cold water.
She didn’t snap at her mother like she was inclined to. Not at first. But she had followed, demanding answers, demanding names, and when Dylan could not even produce a phone number she had insisted the whole story was lies. Dylan hated the sense of injustice she felt when wrongly accused, hated how it made her furious and devastated at the same time, hated that her mother had so little faith, trust, belief in her. And so her lynx reared its furred head and unleashed its gaping jaw and anger tumbled out, crimson and burning, an incessant relentless fury strumming through her-
Dylan could feel her anger like a pile of stones. Some pebbles, little rocks, and then boulders. She knew it wouldn’t be long before the next rockslide.
She longed for some peace, some quiet, some respite, but she had essentially been a prisoner since she had shouted at her mother. It had been two weeks but still no peace, no tree, no Cassie, and she missed all three. She wondered how Cassie was doing without her. Never had she met someone so vulnerable and so strong.
Fires devoured and destroyed with a terrible fury, she reminded herself, but they could be doused with water.
Cassie was curled up beneath the tree, her head bowed between her legs. She could feel her panic rising, like a river or a lake, constant rain like wet ropes uncoiling from the sky, until the level rose and rose and rose until there was nowhere to go but overflow-
Acidic heat scorched behind her eyes. She could feel unwanted tears welling, uncontrollable breaths heaving, unexpected upset spiking; her hands were shaking, her pupils were dilating, and she could feel little whimpers, tiny outbreaks of breath, pushing past her lips.
Cassie knew there were machines designed to never stop running, but minds were not meant to run like machines. She could feel her cogs and gears turning, and it brought fatigue and bitterness but mostly panic. Dylan no longer liked her… Dylan was a figment of her imagination … Dylan had been hit by a bus …
Cassie scrabbled at the tree bark when her breathing sped up further. It was now desperate gulps of breath, drowning not in water but in the scenarios her own mind had created … she wanted quiet, she wanted silence, she wanted peace …
She lay there, sobbing, shaking, her stomach cramping and contracting in the aftermath of her tears, until late – so late she remembered she had to be home. When she came there the next morning there was a quick note in Dylan’s careless, spiky handwriting. She had seized her chance late at night; there was a quick summary of the situation, but, most valuably, a phone number.
Their relationship had been either lowered to reality or transcended the tree. Regardless, there was an undeniable connection, now – something real, something physical, something as tangible and everyday but nevertheless imperative as a phone number. They were not two estranged girls linked by loneliness and a tree. They were friends, perhaps more, but Cassie did not think they were less.
They had texted since, but minimally. Dylan decided that texting seemed too typical, too detached; not right, not right for a relationship that had begun at such a high and such a low. It was too conventional, and somehow too intimate and yet not enough. They had agreed to meet up again, this time at another peaceful place and, at Cassie’s encouragement, the permission of Dylan’s mother.
The second peaceful place was on the beach, a cove seemingly cleansed of all other human existence. Dylan wore her bikini top but a pair of “boys” swimming shorts because she always felt uncomfortable in the bikini ones, and Cassie wore a sleeveless strip of white on her top and a similar set-up on the bottom, and neither of them judged the other. They ended up in the sea until Dylan saw Cassie’s left arm recoil like a muscled snake from the salt water, and brought her back to the tide to collect shells. She didn’t mention why, but she knew that Cassie knew that she had noticed, and was grateful for it.
Dylan saw themselves blurred in the water – beautiful Cassie and then herself, with her short dark hair and sloping nose and dark eyes, and then looked back at their bodies wrapped in their swimming costumes. They seemed achingly and jarringly and physically real, wet and caked in sand, and then there was suddenly lips on her own. She was not sure how they had got there, if it had been her that had come to Cassie or the other way round, but now it was an entirely equal situation; a tug-of-war, but Dylan didn’t know whether she was enticing Cassie forward or hopelessly drawn to her. There were hard planes of bone and muscle but soft stomachs and thighs and breasts, and there were legs and arms and hair, and there was sand and sea and it wasn’t really peace, not quite, it was something like champagne or laughter, a whirlwind of excitement with it, but her mind went blank and unworried like it did when she was just beneath her tree.
Maybe peace didn’t have to be passive. Just nice.
Afterwards she was peaceful too, lazy and satisfied, so when her eyes finally found Cassie’s and saw her panicking, it struck her like sea spray. Cassie’s eyes were darting nervously, the green blurred grey with brimming tears, and she was rubbing her left arm and right thigh forwards, backwards, forwards, backwards, into the harsh ridges of the stone and sand.
“Are you upset?” she asked.
Cassie looked up at her with eyes of sea-coloured terror. “It’s not you-“
“I know.” A beat. “What is it?”
Cassie looked up to the sky, as if to her God, and laughed a laugh that sounded nothing like joy. It was if she had spat bitterness and panic up to the air. When she lay back down, her chest was heaving.
“Don’t you worry? About what people will say? About what people will do?” She was drawing frantic circles into the sand. “I try not to. But I worry all the time. Anxiety steers my brain. I worry about what I’ve said, about what other people have said, I imagine them saying things behind my backs. I worry about things I could have done and get embarrassed or upset about what might have been. And this – this! It happened, it really did happen, and people will say things. They will.”
Dylan rolled over to look into the sky through Cassie’s pupils. “We could pretend,” she said. “Lots of people do that. We could meet up like we’re just friends.”
Even as she said it, she knew Cassie wouldn’t. She was bold, authentic, frank and freckled and Cassie. Cassie hated to change clothes she liked because she couldn’t stand the notion of ‘appropriate.’ Dylan was surely more than clothes.
“I won’t do that. You know that.” Cassie’s voice was angry, but angrier with the world than with Dylan. “Don’t you ever get scared?”
“Peace is in the mind,” Dylan teased. She fell back on her elbows. “You can’t be at peace if you’re constantly in fear,” she said, and her tone had a sudden soft slant to it that she was surprised to hear. She had never been particularly kind.
Cassie rolled over so all Dylan could see was blonde hair and tanned back and sandy legs. She couldn’t see Cassie smile, but she knew she was.
Dylan thought about the way Cassie had taught herself to regulate breaths and limit cuts when her mind went unconscious. She thought about how she tried to keep her anger under control and thoughts to herself. She thought about how clinking cutlery could break her, how Cassie could be in tears because she thought that someone’s tone was wrong. She thought that peace was in the mind. Maybe the mind had to be taught it.
Beneath the tree peace was learnt. Dylan brought a meditation CD of her mothers and an ancient player out to the tree, and they learnt to close their eyes and keep their breathing steady when anger roared or fear screamed. Cassie moved from throwing out her razor to scratching her nails against her thighs to snapping a hairband against her wrists to colouring in her thighs with markers to days and months and years clean. Dylan learnt to swallow shouts and retorts, quiet the voice in her head that howled to be offended, angered, and got a punching bag and took up boxing instead. Her grandfather would have been scandalised.
Of course the mind, however formidable, could not survive on its own. There were GP appointments, and counselling sessions, and medication. But the courage to grasp those things took its own kind of mental strength.
Even when Cassie and Dylan moved onto light and laughter and greater things, the tree stood, some grand pariah on top of its hill, nothing more than a shadow against the sky in the right light. Its branches were spread like limbs, like some martyr ready to shoulder their burdens, nothing more than branches and rags and pages whipped about by the wind until they were eventually snatched away.
But that evening, they were only girls, babies, curled up in circles like foetuses, and the tree stood above them like a mother rocking her children in their shadow. It was warm but cool and they were tired but happy, and the sun shone and their lashes turned into shadows on their cheekbones once they had closed their eyes.
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