Cleopatra and Frankenstein

by Coco Mellors

“It’s been different without you,” Frank says. “At the office, I mean. No one to give me shit about my bad puns. My confidence is skyrocketing.” “Soz about that,” I say. “What’s that?” “Soz.” I shrug. “It’s how British teenagers say sorry.” “How sorry can you be if you can’t even spring for the second syllable?” “Since when was word length correlative to sincerity? ‘I hate that’ sounds a lot sincerer to me than, say, ‘I anathematize that.’” Frank laughs. “Like ‘There’s truth in that’ versus ‘There’s verisimilitude’?” “Exactly. Or ‘I love you’ versus …” I stop. So I said it. Accidentally and to illustrate a linguistic point, sure, but I said it. “… I can’t think of a longer way to say that,” I say. “Adore,” says Frank softly. “Cherish.” “Love is better,” I say. “It is,” he says. “And I do too. Love you, that is.”

“Could you ever …,” he says. “Could you ever be with a man who did all that?” I put my hand on his. “Have you ever heard of something called kintsugi?”

His heart swelled like a wave returning to her shore.

He felt like a great tent collapsing around the central pole of her body.

“He’s the last living romantic. Remember the speech he made at our wedding?” “I do. He said we were both made of gold or something.” “I don’t know about me, but you certainly are.”

Talented people were often unhappy, but unhappy people were not often talented. Frank always thought that Cleo’s main gift was her way of being. She was uniquely attractive, not just in her looks but in her essence. She had a way of bringing the light into a room with her, like a window being flung open.

“And you and I didn’t get that, not because we didn’t deserve it, we just got dealt something else. But the people who did get that love, they grew up to be different from us. More secure. Maybe they’re not as shiny or successful as you and I feel we have to be. But it’s not because they’re not interesting. They just don’t feel they have to do the tap dance, you know? They don’t have to prove themselves all the time to be loved. Because they always were.”

A young couple was running with loose-limbed abandon across the large flat stones and laughing loudly, shouting to each other for no reason, it seemed, than the joy of being youthful and beautiful somewhere ancient and beautiful.

‘Wherever you are going, it is waiting for you.’”

“But how do they do that? All move together?” Cleo had read about this when she first moved here, and she was happy to know the answer. “Each starling is only ever aware of five other birds,” she said. “One above, one below, one in front and one either side, like a star. They move with those five, and that’s how they stay in formation.” “But who’s the leader? Who decides which way they go?” “There isn’t one.” Cleo smiled. “That’s the mystery.”