Interludes
"We need to talk", says Sharon.
The bottle of wine is empty and now only the pressure of need holds her upright by the table. She takes all the courage she can get, though she's not sure what makes her tremble more. Impossible things come together; when you fall in love with another girl, when you float up like a balloon over London.
She looks over to her friend, lover, by the window, her back turned.
"About what?"
Lucy is pinned by the washing up, her reflection holds her in the kitchen glass. Dark hair and chestnut eyes, long face and a sharp nose. Sorrow, secrets, and strange.
"About what you're worried about. Why you had Amy fu-....float that guy away last week. Basically about everything."
"I didn't know she told you.". Lucy is too tired for denials.
"Amy can't keep secrets, Luce. They bubble out of her. You know that." Her friend smiles, wanfully, "she's going to get us all in trouble one day."
"It doesn't work like that Shazz, this secret keeps itself." says Lucy, remembering in part. She feels the strange gnaw at her, as it always does when Sharon tries to raise it.
"How does it work, Luce? Really?" Sharon pulls a chair from underneath the pine table and straddles it in reverse. "How does this thing of yours work?"
Lucy sighs. Sharon is always the one with explanations. Control. Reason. And her gift is this least controlled part of her life. There's a danger even in discussing this, but she can't shut her out any more. She needs to tell someone.
Lucy remembers.
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Lucy is 13 years old today.
It is after the movie, after cake, after friends. A cloud-mottled sky folds over the garden. Under the ash tree sitting, Lucy realises her parents are not making as much money now.
A dozen small pink and yellow balloons lie hapless at her feet, not floating like last year. The cake was nice and she feels bad about feeling bad about her parents, but she wanted helium balloons. She wondered if she should have invited that boy from school and feels bad about that. She kicks the nearest balloon away, like a yellow sun in a grey world.
The balloon stops, as if caught by the wind, (but there is no wind) . A hand-span above the ground.
Lucy watches. Something buzzes in her head. Something strange. The balloon bounces once, twice, higher. Level with her eyes and just out of reach.
Lucy is not breathing. Her body feels suddenly taut. Ozone fizzles on her tongue. The balloon bounces a third time, five foot high and does not fall. For a moment it hangs uncertain between earth and sky. Then it rises, slowly, beyond the shadow of her entangling tree.
Her mother calls her in for tea.
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Lucy is 14 years old and chewing bubble-gum.
She is lying on her bed, pressed between a duvet and unsympathetic light. One arm is raised, blinking against it, but the weight of the light presses down on her, making her conscious of gravity and the confines of the room. Small and crowded with teenage obsessions, dreams, frustrations.
Lucy is now blowing bubble-gum.
She doesn't normally, as she knows it's bad for her teeth and she heard that someone lost a tooth stuck in gum once, or something like that. But Claire gave her some pieces as they waited at the bus stop, so now the taste comes to her like strawberry and artificial flowers. It seems to promise something forgotten from when she was younger. Something just out of reach. She closes her eyes; half asleep, one quarter awake, one quarter elsewhere. Time passes.
Lucy wakes. Downstairs her parents are arguing about bills again. Above her, the entire bright-puce splodge of gum is splattered on the ceiling six foot above her. A long trailing strand hangs down like the tether towards her lips. Her eyes widen in surprise, realisation.
"Oh Shit." She breathes.
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Lucy is 15 years old, and drowning.
She flails in the bath, wide-eyed and spluttering. Impossibly, her belly swells and rounds, flush with sudden gas. Lucy's hands are disbelieving, sliding from her inflated girth as she expands like a pink balloon. Her butt slides free of the bottom Lucy slips backwards into the water, striking her head on the bottom.
She swallows water, claws at the plastic walls. But the fierce buoyancy of her body arcs her back, pushing her head under water even as it lifts her thighs clear. She feels the coolness of the air on her womanhood, the hot, forcing power of the gas within her.
She tries to scream but there is only a thin consuming hiss reverberating through her ears. Bubbles that ripple through her mouth, nose, flowing out of her until her body comes back to itself.
The next thing she is really aware of is lying huddled on the bathroom floor, shaking and shaking.
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Lucy is 16 years old.
Girls her age are so self-conscious. Every day she spends half an hour in front of the mirror.
She has to squeeze her breasts back down or they'll keep blowing up.
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Lucy is 17 years old and naked in the long grass of summer, where Long Charl wood climbs away from the town to the moor with a cool wind and sapphire sky.
It's her first time and she's nervous. She can tell it's not for him and that's OK because he's cute and popular and that makes her feel special. And he may love her as he says or at least yearn like she does which if not love is something she can fool herself with.
The kiss is fumbly and she giggles in that mix of excitement and embarrassment, her throat clenched with sudden heat. His hands are aflame at her waist but that's alright as she just wants to wriggle deeper onto him and it helps slide her thighs aside. The ache in her loins is wrapped about his hardness, so tight against the flush of her flesh. She should be talking about protection but the tingles are forming like bubbles going up and up her spine. A part of her tries to hold on and be a good girl but this is strange and needful; her body washed about his rock, ready to burst over.
She loses it when he pushes and the pressure in her breaks and she can't stop herself and it's like bursting only not because she can feel him filling more and more and she wants and she wants and she wants. And it hurts because it feels so right. It feels like bubbles. And he's so big and big and bigger and bigger and bigger and he can't stop and she can't stop till her orgasm comes with the wind and he blows helplessly away.
She'd like to say she tried to catch him, before he got too high. She thinks she did. She can't remember.
Two days later, at school, the police show up. They talk to other, more popular, girls then leave again. There's talk of drugs. Or an accident. It's not clear. She doesn't see him again. The matter blows over. Blows away.
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Lucy is 18 years old and bleeding.
She knows him, of course. He's on the rugby team and not bad looking. He's friends with Josh so she's seen him around a couple of time but not at Quicksilver before. And maybe they were dancing and he brought her a Margarita, but so what? It's a college night and she had to leave early, and no she doesn't need a lift 'cos she can get home ok.
She cuts across Broadwater, where the estate narrows against the railway line and he's there. Stepping out from the shadow and the noise of the goods trains. Maybe she has had too much to drink or said something but then he was touching her and she pushed him away. And then he hit her.
Now he pushes her down and there is salt on her lips. The ground stinks and his breath is acrid; rasping as he calls her a slut. He weighs far too much and she can't lift her head or her body as he presses down and if she screams he'll break her fucking neck.
Something snaps then, something strange. He weighs far too much. Lucy finds herself taking his cock, livid and twitching. Behind his chlorine scent she can taste strange gasses on her tongue.
Yes I'm a fucking slut. A fucking helium-filled slut. I'll give you a blow-job….
The exhalation is endless. She just flows out, vomiting gas. Her body heaves as it fluxes from her lips to his hapless nozzle. Above, she sees his eyes are anger, stultified by disbelief. But the shock or pressure holds him rigid, rocking him back like a drunken man.
Within seconds his belly starts to round and swell, so she doesn't have to see his stupid face anymore, just the buttons on his shirt plucking apart. With his trousers off there's nothing to stop his legs joining the expansion. His feet, still shod with designer boots, look ridiculous as they slip off the ground, kicking futilely.
She continues to blow, her breath moderating to a steady hiss. (I sound like a fairground cylinder, she thinks, stupidly). His strong limbs bloat, then starfish likes Vitruvian man, pointing the corners of his ballooning globe. He is making noises now like she doesn't know what but is bouncing, lighter and lighter as he progresses from boy to buoyant. She has to stand up to follow him and there's a rattle as they brush the chain link fence. The alley is barely big enough to contain him, a discoloured moon straining at the sky.
She realises he is begging her to stop and she should stop and he's sorry and so tight and please stop he's going to burst but she keeps going. Her arms fall away as she lets the air cradle him, lift him, until his throbbing manhood is tugging up at her lips. She arcs back savagely, gives him too much gas, kisses his bloated body goodbye.
He rises straight up, shining in the sodium streetlight, and Lucy realises that he's translucent, that she's gone too far. The pressure is reverberating within him, expanding beyond limits. When the detonation comes it is soft, like distant thunder or a fart muffled under bedclothes. Something comes down, perhaps.
She tells herself it's not a person.
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Lucy is a mess and showing it. Each day for a week she waits for the police to come. Strangely, they don't.
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Lucy is 19 years old when she returns to the high moorland and is pulled to tiptoe.
The large red balloon swells taut in her arms, wet-windowed where her tears touched it. It kicks upwards with gas as if struggling to overwhelm the weight of its human ballast.
Her arms can barely embrace its circumference now. But she's very nearly lighter than air. If she holds on just a little more it will carry her up and up and away and never come down. Or just enough to freeze and be unconscious all the way down and never hurt anyone again.
The balloon is as big as a beach ball. It is so light and buoyant and she is so heavy and useless but it wants to take her anyway. Her eyes close and she barely feels her feet leave the ground. One inch. Two. She starts to rotate in the wind, floating free. One foot. Two. Ballooning up…last chance…
The fear gets her. She lets go. The balloon shoots upwards like a rocket. She falls back on the soft earth, trembling and cold and alone.
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Lucy is 20 years old and at college.
There's a girl in her arts class. Hippie type. All colour and swirls, in motion. But there is something in the way she smiles, or shows a smile to Lucy. They sit opposite in still drawing, where eyes catch across the room. Lucy tries to pretend it means nothing.
They talk. They have coffee. They go to the cinema. Her name is Kathryn and she likes watercolours, animals, and can sing. Really sing; high and pure and honest in the way your friends think they can but can't. It's my gift, she says, her eyes twinkling; what's yours? She says she wants to sing for a living, but has to finish college as a favour to her parents 'cos they pay the rent on her maisonette.
Evenings turn into days which turn into nights. The two girls sit drinking Amaretto on a large kilim-style cushion while the late cabs prowl outside. Kathryn talks about getting away to London and for a moment looks so innocent in the world that Lucy feels a fierce surge of protectiveness come over her. In a moment she realises why.
No boyfriend? Never needed one. If I met the right person. Yeah. The right person. The liquid in the glass is empty, and there is nothing more to say..
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Lucy and Kathyrn paint with water colours: strawberry lips, peach skin, plum nipples. A brushwork over a landscape of bodies, filling in the details.
"Tell me a secret?" Lucy smiles in the dark, twirling her hair. The strange touches but does not take her. For the first time, Lucy feels her own artist, in control.
"I'm auditioning for a contract. I have a manager. Seriously. Now tell me a secret"
"You won't believe it"
"Go on. I'm curious now".
"I can…inflate things." There she said it.
"That's doesn't sound like much of a secret."
Lucy rolls over, shedding the duvet to be naked, honest. She props her head on her hands, and smiles, deadly serious.
"Wanna see? "
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Lucy is 21 years old.
"It's about Kathryn" she says.
He looks at her blankly as she reclines in the car next to him. The Merc is parked in a lay-by of a quiet road, an open field to one side resplendent in the spring sun. Lucy figures they won't be disturbed if only because he brought her here with the intention of fucking her. She can't complain; she did rather lead him on.
"If it's about the contract…." he begins but she interrupts.
"Listen, I know that you slept with her. That's alright. It's just business. And she has a hot little ass, Harry. I should know. But you shouldn't have led her on, Harry. You shouldn't have promised all that if you didn't mean it."
She wants a cigarette but that makes her think of Kathryn again and she checks herself. At the back of her mind she realises that she'll have to leave after this; leave town, leave Kathryn. She'd call it running away but its more like being blown by the wind, blown by the strange yearning that takes her.
Maybe London.
"I'm going to give you one chance to make it up. You're going to get her that contract Harry; I don't care what it takes. Do it. Give her the chance, she deserves it"
And she deserves better than me. Lucy thinks. But she loves her.
"And why should I do that?" He asks, one eyebrow raised with the confidence that he knows her answer. The smell of cheap aftershave clashes with the leather of the upholstery. She leans across as if to kiss him, letting one hand slide over his stomach, parting the buttons of his shirt to indent fingers in his belly button.
She settles herself and breathes in.
"Let me show you something"
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Elsewhen. A field in West Yorkshire, in the cold pre-dawn light. Two pairs of feet, suspended, skim the grass. There's a gasp and a crumple and two young women settle into the wet earth like lovers. For the merest moment, their embrace parts and the taller one immediately starts to drift upwards with a shriek.
ShitDo'tLetGoDontLetGo.
The other girl grabs at her rising body and holds her tethered beneath a globular rainbow cloud. The wind rocks them backwards and forwards like a teeter-totter, dragging them slowly up-hill.
Shithurryupsomegonnaseeus
There's a snap as the harness parts and two dozen giant balloons shoot heavenward. Suddenly normal again, heavier-than-air, Sharon and Katie stagger in the mud as if stunned by gravity. In the far corner of the field a herd of cattle low, unconcerned.
"Well," gasps Sharon, "We're down."
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