Cera, by Sian Cummins
The North Sea heaves, and Cera stands behind the sea wall and won’t go down. Don’t be an idiot—obviously she’s been down there before. Last year she and Lott walked from Margate to Westgate along the beaches, but she forgot about the rocks and slipped and became frustrated and pissed off and cancelled their night at the Chinese buffet. Lott had been looking forward to it because she lives in London and the buffet overlooks the sea. She forgets the charred shell of Dreamland just behind. And all the shit on the beach.
Cera’s become preoccupied with the anorexic’s ideal—the condemned man’s last meal. Hearty, and never digested. She’s wondered why it exists as a tradition. In films they bring in a plastic tray heaped with scran like Grandma used to serve. It’s perfunctory, almost an extra kick in the face because it’s so actively pointless. Feeding a person before you kill them seems a waste, and she feels the people of Thanet would resent the cost to the taxpayer if hanging was brought back.
But—too dark. This is the sort of thinking the group would want notes on. Her best friend Lott is what they call “fun-loving” and she danced along the beach, barefoot the full three miles. She’s been to Cape Town and claims she has soles like bear hide. Cera envisioned microfibres of glass easing themselves into Lott’s feet; poison darts tipped with effluence from the Kentish towns. Tubular worms pushed deeper into the skin with every step. Dog shit and ship’s oil. Her best friend is twenty-six, but she skipped across the shingle like a crazed kitten. They reached rocks, a headland blocked their way and Cera suggested the road. But Lott started climbing the three-foot stone outcrop that would take them round it. For Cera in her T-bar plimsoles the rocks were too slippery. Seaweed and grime started to get on the fabric uppers. They’d be wrecked. Lott shouted over her shoulder that it would be quicker if Cera took her shoes and socks off and Cera shrieked back that there was no way, and—there—the mood of the holiday slanted, never to right itself.
Cera grew up in Herne Bay, will never live far from the sea these days, and has never taken her shoes and socks off on a beach. These are among the reasons Lott doesn’t come to Margate anymore. She lost patience, and just as well. They’d have been doomed forever to haul themselves up this coastline having the same conversations they had at university; subject matter atrophied to stumps. Lott flourishes in London and has started to realise that Cera doesn’t read The Mirror ironically. Cera can’t explain why she’s no longer engaged to be married.
When they reached the Esplanade at Westgate, Cera had managed to get her smile back a bit. But back at the flat she saw Lott looking at her housewife kitsch, fridge magnets with clever slogans, and felt defensive.
How did she end up back here? It’s savage. She’s tried—so hard—to be elsewhere but in the end her sensibilities were too delicate for it. Wherever she sees an endless horizon or the 2p pusher, her heart flounders, but it’s home. The seaside is reliable in spite of its own, many problems. Tubeworms. Tampax. Yellow foam beating against the groyne. She grew up here and that’s why she knew better than Lott and wasn’t going to let the shale grind into her skin.
Even when she was six and it was already just her and Karen she’d kept her jelly shoes fiercely on. Karen, divorced before she was thirty, sternly upbeat for the benefit of her little Tri-Sarah-Tops, tried to entice her child from scowling beneath her sun hat with a big ice cream full of windblown beach grit. Cera remembers the fishy taste of the ground glass squeaking between her teeth until she spat it and got the smack that ended Karen’s efforts to be cheerful. They rarely went to the beach again, or before that—the beach was for tourists, always there to be seen but not visited. The unexpected helping of grit in the ice cream proved them right and to the present day they work together, Karen and Cera, to avoid any pretence of cheer… too close to each other for comfort, a family unit of two prudishly single women.
Whenever sick burns in her throat, it reminds her of Graham and the long car journeys strapped in the back to see him, then back in the evenings with Karen quiet in the front, both of them in private tears and Killing Me Softly low on the radio. Cera was always carsick. Karen told her to read or focus on a distant landmark like Reculver Towers on the clifftop. When Cera once came to, knees to chin, vomiting onto her denim jacket in a toilet cubicle in a dying Manchester night dive, she won back a buried memory. How she’d once pebbledashed the roadside on the Isle of Sheppey approach with Karen smoking and, still ahead of them, Graham, waiting.
Cera actually lasted in Manchester two years longer than Lott; two years Lott knew nothing about and believed had been spent in the same crazed way as the previous three. Cera didn’t feel she had to tell Lott everything. Had never told her anything really. Cera and Lott had kissed once. It was Lott who’d initiated it. Lott wasn’t in love with her—idealised her, yes, but her sexual ambiguity was too boringly expedient for it to be more. She loved all that sort of thing, Lott did. Got ratfaced on vodka sours and hung off Cera like a fashion accessory, groping for the hand-holding Cera herself had made a feature of their nights out; before it got too boring, and sad. Lott pretended they were fucking, for the benefit of friends, until she was almost convinced of it herself. She would have shat herself if she thought anyone really believed it. But once they drank all day in O’Neill’s then Lott kissed Cera in a club toilet. Cera was crying—those days before she realised why—and Lott played the right part, told her she was better than any man, and kissed the tears off her cheeks. Then, as suddenly and out of time as it happened with any broccoli-breathed boy they were kissing, properly, like Cera kissed anyone those days. Meaninglessly, with a lot of tongue.
A bland, offally taste, the last in your mouth before the executioner’s work. Would they make real gravy, or would a blotchy-armed dinner lady pummel a vat of granules with water in the prison kitchen?
They didn’t break apart in any dramatic way; they were too drunk and just drifted apart. Lott chose to continue the same attitude the next morning when she woke on Cera’s bedroom floor. It had been nothing more than drunken high jinks, it was a good story, why was Cera getting so wound up? It was uncool of Cera to question her sexuality after such a minor incident. Lott had to work hard to get back in Cera’s graces after that. Two rare E.P.s and a full month of not phoning until she was phoned.
Lott thought Cera’s return to Margate was a defeat… couldn’t hold down a life in the big city, so it rejected her like a bad organ. The truth is that no one here seems to mind if you live alone and don’t go out much. You can have your place as you want it and they don’t badger you senseless about moving into some cramped sharing arrangement because you’ll have more fun. Not many people question the shoes and socks on the beach thing. The way Cera insists the seaside is in her blood, but never, ever on her skin.
It was easy enough not to tell Lott about the memories that called at her hall of residence at night, or why it really was she visited the health centre more than anyone Lott knew. After a few rebuffs to her gentle concern, Lott stopped asking. Cera tried a few times in their last year at uni to tell Lott that she’d started to slide somewhere dark but Lott glossed over it because she’d had enough of Cera’s half-tales. The time had been when Lott worried herself sick and informed hall security that Cera had gone missing for eight days. When Cera turned up and found out what Lott had done she’d screamed at her to fuck right off. A week later, she popped a Forever Friends card through the door of Lott’s scratty shared house, with a note to say she was sorry but she just didn’t feel like talking to people at the moment.
When Cera did get back in contact, Lott had started out touchy, then thawed until their in-jokes and acrylic fur coats were back as if they’d never been away. But she refused to get into Cera’s problems anymore. So, three years later, Cera didn’t tell her much about Julian and that he’d proposed to her in Brussels instead of Paris and that she’d barely heard what he was saying, so dismayed was she with herself for thinking the whole Continent a bit unhygienic. She’d made it all the way to Canterbury for two years cohabitation with him, Julian. But that wasn’t far from the sea either, was it?
Julian threatened to kill himself when she told him in a few curt words that she didn’t want to get married with him any more. A click on the mixtape, and the song ends.
It wasn’t any one thing, and it wasn’t that she hadn’t loved him. It wasn’t only that he wanted to talk about her past and she didn’t think there was any need. She’d got used to her own company in the flat full of kitsch. But it wasn’t only that. He wanted too much engagement with her, he wanted to get his hands dirty on her inner machinery. Just because they were getting married didn’t mean anything was any of his business.
Oily mussels, chips and mayonnaise. A black fly hopping in albumen at the edge of the brushed chrome table. Isn’t it funny that the Judge never asks God for mercy on his own soul?
She heads inland but sticks to the canalbank. The sun’s come out and she feels better for turning her back on the fat sea between herself and Brussels. She crunches on the gravel. Past boats, some with people living on them permanently, a man with Silly Putty for skin sunbathing topless in a deck chair.
The woman in the basement flat hung herself two months ago and now there’s a new tenant but the same dark green walls visible through the bay windows. Crushed black shadows to greet Cera before the glare of the bannister up to her own desirable flat. “Move out,” said Lott in her mindless way. The she edited herself: “I mean you’re brave for still living there.” Lott knew that Cera did not consider herself incapable of taking her own life. There had once been a conversation about volunteering for medical research. Lott’s urbane older friends had it that you got thousands for amputation and reattachment of a toe, and the big Billy Bonus for a big toe. Forty thousand if you let them stop and restart your heart. “Forty thousand isn’t enough for a human life,” said Lott, naively. Cera disgusted her by saying it didn’t matter—if it works you get the money and if it goes wrong, well, you’re none the wiser.
After a bend there are lads, fishing, poles right across the towpath. Cera gives a frustrated sigh, more or less out loud then realises there’s a curve in the path that takes her around where they’re sitting. She keeps her head down and goes round them. One of them smiles and starts a passing conversation so she scowls and speeds up and then thinks she hears bitch behind her.
She shouldn’t be so unfriendly, but sometimes people just want to talk. There’s another lad now; ahead of her, sat there giving her the eye when she’s ten metres away. It’s shameless! Then she feels bad: he’s in a mobility scooter, and as she gets close he manages, with effort, to pull his trembling head back to where he wanted it—the job in hand, threading a maggot onto a hook, probably one of the few pleasures he has.
How the hell did he get himself down here and is anyone keeping an eye on him? His scooter is terrifyingly close to the water. Then she understands that he probably values his independence and is capable of getting wherever he wants to by himself, however slowly.
She spends some money in Coffee Republic and reads their Mirror. Lott doesn’t “do” the Mirror any more. There’s a woman in there, confident, a tiny fleck of croissant hanging from her shiny bottom lip. Cera estimates for her a BMI of 24.9. She looks happy, but could be teetering on the brink of abnormality. Like Cera; more than one meeting to attend. A croissant now haunting her digestive transit.
Cera heads back along the towpath.
Through a cloud of greenfly she sees commotion at the place where the lads were fishing. The mobility scooter is now some distance from the water, and empty. The lads are in a cluster. No sign of the trembling fisherman but a pair of thin legs splayed and still among them. Cera gets a feeling that should be fear but is already more like boredom. They hear her and one of them looks up from what they’re bending over. He’s sweating, eyes panicked.
“Miss,” he says, “notation?” But that isn’t what he’s said, she’s just misheard. Does she know resuscitation.
She does and yet she’s a breath away from saying she doesn’t. When she was on the Eurostar with Julian he went on and on about whether he was going to get to use his GCSE French or if the Flemish would take issue with it. Whether it was true that “you have to be really careful what you say.” She’d snapped at him over the plastic champagne glasses; “just pretend you don’t speak either!”
She sinks down with the lads behind the mobility scooter. Even now, she doesn’t kneel like she’s always imagined she would because the ground is dank and covered with discarded maggots. He’s damp but not soaking, sparse hair stuck down, eyes shut, mouth hanging half open where the last one tried.
“I can’t be doing it right,” gasps the lad on his knees. “I been trying but he isn’t breathing!”
She pinches the guy’s nose and leans forward. As her mouth clamps round his she hears oblivious seagulls creaking out on the front and smells fish and rot on the guy’s airless passages. She never was very good at blowing up balloons and her first breath is tentative, collecting mostly in her mouth, unlikely to inflate anything.
And for a moment she thinks it’s coming back at her, bouncing off an obstruction she should have thought to clear but then it’s not just air it’s a tongue and soon it’s much more and it’s her own breath she’s fighting for as her mouth is crammed. Carrion risotto with trampled grass textures, and moving, forced wriggling and wet up to the roof of her mouth. The guy’s mouth is full of maggots. She wrenches herself up but pinching hands hold her down until the laughing starts and she breaks free and runs. One laugh behind her is louder and more rhythmless than the rest, the intractable muscles gathered hard to make sure he doesn’t miss her retreat.
Home above the suicide pad, Cera wails with her forehead on the furry toilet seat cover. She’s impressed by the star turn, his ingenious use of his gift and the effort it must have taken to keep the maggots under his tongue until the golden moment. Surfacing, she notes a razor lined up nicely beside the toilet but instead she goes into the lounge and turns on her laptop. She reads about the fist-sized boulders on the beach at Brighton.
She’s gone in the morning, her underpacked Fiesta hugging the coast roads, avoiding the belligerent tentacles of London. The new flat is dirty, squalid in a way she couldn’t have imagined and much smaller than what she could afford in Margate. A tiny skylight overlooks a brick wall six feet away; colicky toddlers scream in the night. She couldn’t get a transfer from work, so she microwaves chips in a bar. She begins to see that she’s made a mistake with Julian and there will be nights she cries until her throat is sore. But on the fourteenth day, she walks down to the sea wall, takes off her shoes and rolls her socks together in her bag. Cera walks slowly down the steps and carefully, one smooth boulder at a time, to the sea.
