This Is Yr Life

Chapter Six

On Thursday, he visited Chloe during his lunch break. It was not often that he saw the streets during the day anymore. Every day, he ate in the canteen of the office. Meals that mimicked the high-end, pseudo-luxury, that rotated day-to-day and then every three weeks. Sometimes, something new would be introduced, and another gradually phased out and repeated until it was learned and anticipated what was on tomorrow’s menu.

But it was free, and so he thought why not. Quick, convenient, fulfilling all food groups. Kyle didn’t like to cook at home. He hated buying ingredients, that too often were forgotten, left to rot, even after he and his roommates pooled their money together to buy a new fridge which solved most of that problem. Whenever Kyle did try to cook, Lewis and Finn would offer advice, and end up doing most of the work. Even though they were younger, by how many years, Kyle wasn’t sure, they still knew the ins and outs of a kitchen, something Kyle never did. On occasions when they were away, he relished the chance to make something and often did, but it was basic stuff that, even though he was proud of it, would often be told that, really, anyone with a frying pan and twenty spare minutes could cook up. Typically, he ate the most basic of food at home, sometimes made in his room on his hot plate. Quick soups or simple toasties that gave his room a scent of lingering grease. In the winter, like now, it was too cold to air it out; in the summer, the smell would fade, but the warm air blowing in from outside wasn’t much better. So, instead, of preparing his own lunch he sat in the canteen at tables that seated eight on either side and he would chat with coworkers about nothing worth remembering.

This was the atmosphere of work. Endless conversations that would be forgotten between the hour they had for lunch and then back to their desks that hid each other from the world. Other times, he would sit with strangers, it was just part of the day. People who worked above or below him, at the same company, but all different departments, they had nothing to talk about.

But today, in the crisp air and bright blue sky he walked along the streets as cars drove past silently and mothers or nannies held tight the hands of children walking down the street. People were wrapped up, their faces protected the chill but walking slowly, enjoying the day.

Kyle passed a park with school kids sat on benches eating fast food and playing video games on their connected phones. They accused each other of cheating every time one of their characters died. The accused would shoot back some vitriol about just sucking at this game. Not wanting to stop, Kyle carried on, but he still heard the conversation halfway down the street. It happened in a loop. Each would take their turn to cry foul play, and repeat.

At the cemetery, he arrived as a funeral was leaving. They exited the gates in pairs, deep in conversation. From his grandmother’s funeral, Kyle knew that people wore black. He had seen it on TV as well, but that was the only funeral he had witnessed live, been a part of, experienced.

These people, though, were dressed in all colours. They didn’t look morose, either. Instead, they smiled in their discussions. They laughed and joked and acted out scenes with their hands and their eyes, which Kyle assumed was of their dead friend. He let them pass, peering over the heads of those walking out to see how many people were left to come.

When they finally dispersed and climbed into automated hearses he could still hear them laughing as he walked along the path toward Chloe. She was hiding behind flags of countries that Kyle recognised from school. Those of EU nations that all followed a similar scheme: three colours, one of them typically white, separated into rectangles. Other flags he wasn’t so sure of, though. He caught a glimpse of the Canadian flag and the Nepalese flag, but only because he knew the shape was different, remembering from Geography class. There was a Spanish flag, an Argentinian one, the flag of Colombia, or perhaps it was Ecuador. These flags he knew only because of pouring over football magazines in his youth, remembering players’ names.

On the playground, he and his friends, or not so much friends, but other boys and girls in his class would proclaim themselves to be these football stars as they all chased a ball around the field or the astroturf if it was winter and wet. When they scored, they would copy the individual celebration. Teams made up of superstars. Dream teams. The kind of teams he used to create on video games.

Kyle had never seen this video before. But her tan, her hair, and the bracelets around her wrist told him it was at the end of her travels. She waves the flags, shaking them and cocooning herself within the fabric of faraway nations and was lost behind the colours.

As he watched Chloe, he heard footsteps behind him. He turned and the sun caught his eye, and winced, putting his hand up to his face. He saw a silhouette of someone walking towards him. From being sat on the ground, Kyle thought they looked tall, but as the silhouette moved closer, he saw they were smaller, and the silhouette became a person, a woman, who walked past with her hands in their pockets, breath steaming from her mouth. Kyle turned his head as she passed and watched as she walked across the grass and stopped in front of a small gravestone.

It was the first time he had seen someone else this far into the cemetery.

On the other side of the wall, where the tree hung down, he heard the walking and talking of people, either to friends or family by their sides or into phones clutched in their hands as they sidestep others in mirror image doing the same. He took a sip of coffee as Chloe, in fancy dress for a performance, some character from a TV show he half-remembered, changed to a party where she danced in high heels and in a living room, not on stage, and surrounded by people. Chloe wasn’t in the video much, but when she was she smiled and spun around.

He sat watching this scene for a long time. After a while, he heard the footsteps of the silhouette-turned-woman moving towards him and then stopping right behind him. They didn’t say anything for some time but instead made small breaths that sounded like they were resisting something. Kyle turned around.

‘She’s beautiful,’ the woman said. Looking up, Kyle saw she was standing just an arm’s length away. From the shoes up, she was wearing brown and buckled leather boots that were flecked with damp from the grass and from under one sole stuck a brown leaf, folded and its stem curling upwards. He looked past the tight blacks jeans with holes in the knees, but black tights underneath, hiding any hint of skin and flesh.

Her coat was buttoned all the way up to the top, hiding her chin and perhaps a scarf or something she had wrapped around her neck. The coat was teal, with tortoiseshell buttons and a pin of a 1950s style rocket ship, with fireworks flying from its exhaust, on the lapel.

‘A friend?’ she asked. She pulled her hand from her pocket and flicked her wrist toward the screen.

‘I -,’ Kyle stuttered. He turned back toward Chloe, running into the ocean, the surf splashing with every footstep. She was wearing her red bikini, high-waisted, so it concealed her belly button. He had seen this video before, and thought about it, sometimes, before going to sleep at night. It was one of the few videos that were solely her. Other videos featured friends and family and random people who he knew she never spoke to again. How did he know? He wasn’t sure, but it was something about the way she looked at them throughout. She looked at them like she was playing a part and would forget them as soon as they parted, whenever that was.

But her high-waisted bikini. He also knew she hated her belly button, protruding outward. An outie, it was called, according to old TV shows they had watched, sometimes ironically, at school. Kyle had the same.

He wondered why she hadn’t had it corrected like his parents had always suggested he should do. What his sister had done when she was fifteen. The surgery wasn’t expensive now. Some people’s parents had done this, sometimes as soon as they were born, reverted into itself, became an innie. Aesthetics.

For the most part.

But it wasn’t just belly buttons. Ears that stuck too far out, eyebrows that arched in ways that made you look like some pantomime villain, or cleft lips, even birthmarks. All of them had the option to be fixed upon birth, should the parents so wish. Or, later in life, the child could decide for themselves.

At school, he had seen classmates disappear over lunch and then return just hours later with something different, but different in a way that wasn’t obvious at first, like a trick of the light. An illusion or sleight of hand that you wouldn’t notice unless you were searching for it.

‘Sister? Cousin?’

‘A friend,’ Kyle said, finally. He turned back to her and then back to Chloe dipping and diving beneath the turquoise water, whipping her hair up.

‘You know, I’ve never seen anyone at this grave before. I always felt so sad for her. She was so beautiful.’

She is, Kyle thought.

He glanced back, more splashing, then underwater chasing fish, reaching out feeling so close but really not that close at all. Swimming over the coral, back when it was authentic coral, that the fish hid away into.

‘Were you close?’ She stood beside him now and then squatted down so that her coat was fringed by the grass.

Kyle had been to this graveyard nearly every day for the past month. He had never seen this girl before, but then, he had never visited at lunchtime during the week. He checked his watch. He still had forty minutes until he needed to be back in the office.

Now that the girl was next to him, he could see her hair was black but in the light, it seemed purple sometimes. It hung down just above her shoulders in a perfectly straight line.

‘We were old friends,’ he said.

But Kyle wasn’t sure why he said this. The girl nodded, but didn’t say anything.

‘I knew her at school. We were best friends, actually. We sat next to each other, she helped me with maths, I helped her with -’

But he couldn’t think of another subject. He had never really helped anyone with school. He had wanted to, but his own self-consciousness never allowed this to happen. The girl still remained silent.

‘I don’t really know what I helped her with,’ he said and then laughed but just a little. The kind of laugh that happens when remembering something in your head, a brief exhalation, a half-throat chuckle.

‘You must have helped her with something,’ the girl said.

‘Maybe. Maybe I helped her by being her friend.’

‘That’s cute. What happened then?’

‘I moved away for years, other side of the country, I just got back a couple of weeks ago and wanted to reconnect.’

The girl put her hand over her mouth, gasping.

‘It must have been horrible for you to, you know.’

She wanted to say it must have been horrible to find out she died, but Kyle assumed that she thought it may have come across as insensitive. He was glad she didn’t say that.

‘Yeah.’ He looked back at Chloe. The videos were looping now, he had seen them all. He didn’t know what else to say.