Salt Slow

by Julia Armfield

it’s hard to remember your ribs connect to your backbone until the chill in your chest reaches around for your spine —

When I was twenty-seven, my Sleep stepped out of me like a passenger from a train carriage, looked around my room for several seconds, then sat down in the chair beside my bed.

My Sleep had no one to fight with and so mostly preoccupied itself with rooting through my personal belongings, pulling out old photographs and Allen keys and defunct mobile phones, then placing them like treasures at the foot of my bed.

I had found that people seemed to speak more freely in the night-time – a strange release of inhibitions that came with talking in the dark.

The article was anonymous, but the tang of femininity was obvious, the way hips can be.

Sleeping gave me time off from myself – a delicious sort of respite. Without it I grow overfamiliar, sticky with self-contempt.

Someone had once told Miriam that she looked like Princess Anne and this throwaway comment had come, over time, to form the basis of her whole personality. She wore green velvet loafers year-round, pinned her hair in the shape of a pumpkin, spoke like her molars were made of glass.

Until recently, I had been seeing a man called Stephen Connolly, who had been a good kisser and appalling in all other aspects. The realisation had come upon me only in stages, for I liked kissing well enough to ignore for a while the books he read and the way he spoke about women, the fact that his chin was feeble and his back pocked from waxing hair away.

That’s the problem with kissing. In theory, when someone’s good at it, you should be able to keep kissing forever. But of course, forever is too long to do anything without getting bored.

My Father said a town was only as interesting as its bad apples and only as safe as its lunatics.

Their clothes lie puddled together on the carpet, two sets of skinny black jeans slithered out of like a tandem shedding.

There is no way to love a man. Not well, or rather, not correctly.

Sluicing through her twenties illuminated only by the glow of terrestrial television, finding much to her dismay at the age of twenty-nine that she longed to amuse and to be longed for. A faint life. Eating apricots and growing bony and forgetting how to talk to people. Loneliness like a taste on the skin.

Mornings have been the hardest things to adapt to; company after three decades of waking up alone. She has always considered herself the kind of person seen to best effect at four p.m., once the day has burnt away and softened up her difficulties. Having someone with her from the outset gives her no rehearsal space, no time to sink down into some more pliable version of the creature she is to begin with.

A disgusting sort of perversion, love.

He sleeps as if murdered, as if set in concrete, flat out and immobile. On one of their first nights together, he had set seven alarms to go off at three-minute intervals and in the morning had slept through every one. She had lain there confused, dead man in her bed. Had realised that there could be no way of loving sensibly if every morning started with the relief of finding him still alive.

In this way, she becomes aware of the curious history of the world, the wide gulfs of experience that can exist between lovers.

No one, she is sure, is capable of loving all the time, without interruptions or reprieves.

The culmination of these fantasies always scares her and she finds herself calling him up at his house just to hear him, bleary and irritated at some throwaway hour of the night. ‘I just called to say I love you,’ she will say and he will tell her to stop quoting eighties pop music at him and to call him again at nine.

The issue, of course, was that she had been buried and now she wasn’t, although this could be said to be the case for a lot of things.

It can be hard, sometimes, for them to come together, the boat’s nervous balance easily upset without one of them each at bow and stern to keep it even. Moving is an act of faith, eyebrows furrowed deep. They cross the centre and hope things won’t upend.

The bar will be underwater now, of course. The university towns drowned quickly – porous stone, too much paper.

They had spent their time together watching movies and fucking and arguing about the movies they watched, which had turned out to be a thin but workable foundation on which to hang the best part of five years.