This Is Yr Life

Chapter Eight

‘What makes you think I don’t just like walking through graveyards?’

‘Do you?’

‘I was seeing my sister.’

‘How old was she?’

‘We’re the same age.’

She took another cigarette from the packet. The streets were emptying. Kyle looked at his watch, he was late getting back to work. Too late that he couldn’t just pass it off as getting lost or stuck somewhere. He wondered if anyone from the office had walked past them while they drank their coffees, while he was talking about things that didn’t happen, at least not the way he told them, and if they were one of the people who stared at Jessica as she smoked her cigarette.

He smelt burning and ash and smoke.

‘You were the same age,’ Kyle repeated.

‘She died when we were about fifteen. Cancer, before they were able to get it cured. She was too far gone.’

‘I’m sorry,’

‘It’s okay,’ she took a drag, exhaled above her. The smoke lingered for a bit and then disappeared into the sunlight. ‘It runs in the family. My dad had it. He was lucky, though.’

They sat in silence. Kyle waited for her to finish her cigarette. He checked his phone.

‘Do you need to get back to work?’

‘I don’t think so.’ He didn’t look up when he said this. He wondered if anybody had his number. He wondered if he would ever need to go back to work.

They stayed at the cafe for one more coffee, one which Kyle drank quicker this time, knowing to put milk and sweetener in from the start. Jessica asked him what he did and he told her data. She didn’t ask him to elaborate. He asked her the same thing and she said she worked for a company that develops artificial intelligence. She said she keeps asking her boss to create her sister and laughed.

Jessica smoked two more cigarettes before they left.

‘It’s Barnes, Jessica Barnes.’

‘Are you going back to work?’

‘No, I had a half day,’ she said, ‘No, no it’s fine. I’ll pay. I invited you,’ she said when Kyle reached into his wallet for his card. She asked if he was going back to work.

‘Yeah,’ he said, but he didn’t know why he said this. He had no intention of going back to work. He didn’t know what he was going to do. Perhaps he would go back to the cemetery and see Chloe. Perhaps he would go back to the flat and lie in his room. Perhaps he would just walk around the city and get lost.

‘Okay, well add me, like I said, my last name is Barnes.’

‘Barnes.’

‘Yeah, with an E. Add me,’ she smiled and started walking away.

‘My roommates might be having a party, on Friday, you want to come, you know, if they do?’

Jessica smiled. Kyle did not know where to look. He watched a bird hopping on the railing outside the cafe. He watched their mugs that were still there, freshly stained from the coffee, the remaining carrot cake crumbs he had not picked up with his thumb scattered on his napkin.

‘Add me,’ she said. ‘Or, if not, I guess I’ll just see you at the cemetery.’ She waved and walked away down the street that was once cobblestone, as Kyle remembered, from hanging around with his friends on school lunch breaks. There used to be other buildings on this street, older buildings. Buildings that were once used for one thing and then closed and then reopened as something else, typically a shop but on the inside, all the decoration was the same. It was kept and supposed to look old, smell old, feel old.

On these lunch breaks, Kyle and his friends would go in and look around. They never bought anything, but sometimes they tried the clothes on, never looking at the prices. They would grab clothes from hangers and put them on over their uniforms. They would pick up leather jackets or crombies and hang them over their teenage frames, admiring themselves in the mirror, the shop clerks lurking behind them, watching for any hands being shuffled into bulging pockets.

Sometimes, Kyle would see others from school or people he recognised who had since left school. These people wouldn’t be wearing uniforms, but their own clothes, as the students at the local college or university were allowed to wear. They would look at one another, meeting eyes and there would be an occasional nod of acknowledgement, but most of the time they would only glance, recognise, and decide they didn’t want to speak to Kyle or his friends that day.

Kyle often felt like an imposter in these shops. He never cared much for fashion, and these clothes were the clothes worn by people only who could afford them.

One time, one of the first times they walked in with their fingers greased with salt from the fast food they had just scoffed down in the town square, throwing the scraps to the pigeons and leaving the fat-stained boxes on the benches or walls where they sat, Kyle looked at the price, it was more money than he could afford then and it was probably more than he could afford even now. Too much to spend on such luxuries. He thought of his wardrobe. He couldn’t remember the last time he had bought new clothes.

One of them would always light a cigarette after they ate their lunch and typically be told by roaming policemen in their fluorescent jackets, even in the summer, who would watch him take the cigarette, stub it on the nearest bin, and drop it into the mouth where you pulled a handle to open its jaws.

Once, he tried just walking away. He received a £100 fine on the spot after getting chased down.

Kyle tried but couldn’t remember which friend it was. He felt as if it happened to all of them at one time.

Mike. Mike was the one who used to get fined. He stole wallets from the shop where the staff stared at them, but these stolen wallets ended up just being borrowed. He tried selling them, his mother found out, and she made him return them.

Near his girlfriend’s birthday, he tried stealing a pair of shoes by putting them down his jacket sleeves, under the armpits. Again, he got caught and none of them were welcome in the shop any longer.

Kyle felt they were never welcome there to begin with.

Chloe seemed like the girl who would have worn those clothes. They had style, they represented someone who didn’t care. Someone who lived life like they wanted to.

As he walked, not knowing where he wanted to go, he thought about what Jessica had said, how she had never seen anyone at Chloe’s grave.

He thought this was because Jessica only visited her sister in the middle of the day, but she told him that she sometimes went after work, on weekends, or anytime, really. He wondered how long her sister had been dead for.

They were twins.

But why did no one visit her grave? Perhaps her family had moved away. He didn’t see many people who looked like family in the videos. Friends only, enjoying their youth, enjoying her youth that would so soon be torn away from her.

It wasn’t fair.

Maybe her family were uncomfortable going to the grave, but why spend the money to install the highlights? Maybe it was part and parcel of every burial now. He had only heard they were installed, he didn’t know about any extra cost.

But maybe they were just not in the country right now. Maybe there will be one day where he is there and they arrive and maybe they will listen to him and tell him more. Maybe they will take him back to their house, to show her old friend, who they probably wouldn’t remember, how she lived. Perhaps her room is how she left it the morning that she died.

Kyle had once read something while hiding away in his room at his parents’ house that said it was friends, not your biological relations that are the true family. These people who you spent most of your time with anyway. At school, out of school. Sometimes you speak to them more than you do your own mother and father and siblings and any other often unfamiliar family members who you only see at birthday parties for grandparents where their influence spreads further than just your surname. Or weddings or, sometimes, funerals.

He knew that some families were closer than others and that some saw each other every week and grew up with cousins the same age, or near enough the same age. At school, some of his classmates talked about travelling to other countries with these cousins and they said they were their best friends.

He had watched Chloe dance and jump from aeroplanes and drink in pubs and bars and wander through bush and jungles. He would see some friends once or twice, but others would be in every video. Wherever Chloe was, there were always others who he remembered. They smiled with her, fell over with her, danced and laughed and walked along with her.

He wondered how long she had known these people.

He turned down a road where students passed him, clutching laptops, their jackets fastened. There were three of them. One in a blue jacket and the others wearing matching coats the colour of sand, sand like he had seen Chloe lying in as the surf lapped at her toes. In one video, she had fallen to sleep with her book on her stomach and a wave had approached out of nowhere and washed her bag and book and bottles of suncream and sandals and soaked her feet and legs and towel and Chloe sat up, jumped up, really, and chased the items that were being dragged into the ocean before them.

Kyle smiled thinking about this. The students had long passed and he stopped halfway down the street and stared at the houses that ran all along with only small gaps every other house for alleyways with dropped wooden gates that had been painted and repainted. They were student housing. Old student housing and he wondered if Chloe had stayed here while she was at school. He wondered if she had met her friends here and had nights doing whatever students did. Through the windows, he saw people sat on sofas switching their gaze between their computers or tablets and the wide screens in front of them.

These houses had been forgotten as the rest of city was systematically torn down and built back up again. He wasn’t sure if there were plans to tear and rebuild here, also. And he thought of the reasons that this was.

He was still thinking about this as he walked through the front door. The room was dark but on the sofa he could make out the shape of Lewis and Finn sat back, their mouths agape with virtual reality headsets covering their eyes and noise-cancelling headphones, matching, over their ears. Despite knowing they couldn’t hear him, he closed the door quietly and walked on his toes to the kitchen to pick out something to eat. There was nothing in the fridge except for some bottles of beer, a slab of meat covered in spices and wrapped in cling film, and some fruit. Kyle picked up an orange without the skin, which is how they were sold now, he remembered watching his father, stoned, picking at the skin of an orange before throwing it at his mother, defeated. At first, Kyle thought his mother might shout and yell and scream but instead she, also stoned, laughed and picked the skin off for him, before throwing it back.

He took the orange to his room and lay on his bed, pulling off one section at a time as he stared at his ceiling.

‘Search: Jessica Barnes.’

But as the profiles loaded on the projection, he changed his mind.

‘Search: Chloe -,’ he started.

The autofill completed the name for him.