That part hadn’t even occurred to me. The idea that people I didn’t know would be pressing their thumbs onto surfaces unseen, leaving foreign smudges which I might never find and that could be there forever caused my insides to squish up. It would seem only fair that Art could do the clean up, as they were his friends. His friends, his mess.
“Aren’t Eleanor and Rosa coming? Didn’t you invite anyone?” he asked.
What immediately followed was a rushed round of text messages to both of them, full of autocorrect errors, begging them to come to a party I didn’t want to host. I had trouble reaching Eleanor at first. She wasn’t reading the messages so I tried calling. My first few calls rang on and on, and then the next two went straight to voicemail.
I cursed under my breath and tackled Rosa. She picked up quickly, and after a few seconds of confusion as to why I was calling, I explained the situation. She seemed reluctant to come along, having arranged to spend the night in with Mike. With a hollow heart I begged her, promising that she could just drop by, she wouldn’t have to stay late, and she could bring Mike. Her replies became increasingly blunt, and in the end she said she’d ask him what he wanted to do. So, I had to wait again.
I went back to trying Eleanor. This time she picked up, but she sounded strained, as if speaking to a stranger. When I laughed it off and told her it was me, she still didn’t soften and in as few words as possible told me that she was in the airport, heading to Belfast to see her brother.
“Have I done something, Elle?”
There was a silence. “No,” her voice was thin. “You’ve done nothing.”
“OK,” I said, not even trying to hide my frustration by this point. “Rosa’s bringing Mike–”
Eleanor interrupted me. “Don’t you want to ask me something?”
I held my breath. I didn’t.
“Don’t you want to ask me how my tests went?”
I swallowed. I knew that when I next spoke my voice would sound different, and I didn’t know what to do to normalise it. “Has something happened?”
“Months ago, Norah. Months ago.”
“I haven’t heard from you.”
“I tried contacting you. You weren’t there.”
The flurry of missed calls soon after the birthday meet-up. I could’ve pretended to not have seen them, I’d had a lot to do. She should know that. She should know the pressure I was under. The demands on me.
“Norah. There’s nothing they can do. Nothing. Even though these private institutions can grow a new fucking spinal column from scratch, they can’t help me do what I was born to do. Ever.” She spat this last word at me like it was my fault.
“Surely there’s some sort of treatment or–”
“Well, that’s the thing, there’s not. A year of dabbling for the NHS to tell me I can’t, and there’s nothing to be done. ‘Not enough research’, ‘not enough funding’. Isn’t it hilarious, Norah? Hilarious.”
I didn’t know what to say. Something had broken. We both felt it, I know we did.
“Maybe there’s more to it all than kids,” I whispered. “You can make your mark in other–”
“Shut up, Norah. I don’t want to hear that shit. Especially from you.”
I wanted to tell her. I wanted to tell her everything. That I understood, more than anyone. But I couldn’t. That bridge would never be built.
Eleanor’s final words were spoken more to herself than to me. They weighed heavy, as if etched in stone. History. Facts from a book.
“Decades of looking in a mirror. That’s all this is. People who see only themselves. Don’t look left or right. Licking their fucking chops. What a day it’ll be when there are no faces left for mirrors to reflect.” Silence, then, “I’m glad I’ll not be here.”
She ended the call shortly after that, already distracted, murmuring something about the storms in Belfast. I sat on the bed for a while afterwards on my own, wondering if there was something I should do for her. But anything I thought of seemed too trite, too trivial, and to tread further in would’ve been stamping my boots somewhere I shouldn’t be. Either me or Eleanor was an alien, but I couldn’t tell who’d changed.
You see, in her eyes I’d picked the wrong side, and maybe a year before this that might have been true. But things were different now. Eleanor couldn’t possibly know how wrong she was to think that I didn’t want to see something grow, nurture a living thing made from me. Someone that loved me.
But I had nothing to show her to prove it. Not yet. I could say the obvious, the idea that had been burning in me since the summer, but she wouldn’t understand. She’d laugh at me. Tell me I was wrong.
And that’s when I started to clean. Wipe and scrape and score.
Nut padded after me, stretching up to watch the sponge sweep across the kitchen counters, playfully tugging at the microfibre cloth as it squeaked over the window. When I came back in from taking out the recycling I found her sitting with an old shammy between her teeth, flailing her head backwards and forwards in front of the kitchen cupboards. Aghast, I took it from her and threw it in the sink. Who knows where that old thing had been, how many toxic substances it’d soaked in?
It was late and I was exhausted, but eradicating smudges and smears gave me a buzz. With every surface cleaned, a room in my head cleared too.
I checked my phone every few minutes until Rosa replied a few hours later, agreeing to bring Mike for a couple of
