1
Sometimes I think I can only feel it because I know it’s there. It’s more muscle memory now than anything else; my thumb finds it in that tiny crater of a scar on the heel of my right hand, catching and rolling on the fleck of stone embedded there. It looks black under the skin, or sometimes dark grey or brown like a little cancer mole, depending on the light. Some dark thing of undetermined colour, never the red it’s supposed to be.
I circle it with the pad of my thumb, press and roll as it crunches softly against the insides of my hand, all the muscles and tendons that were there before it. It’s an old wound now, long past hurting, but there’s something left behind that’s almost the same as pain; the sharpness and hardness of it, pressing into the softness of my hand, reminding me it doesn’t belong inside a body.
I look down at it. I can’t remember if it ever looked red once it had got stuck in there. Not bright red, not primary colour red, but red like that rust colour that autumn leaves get. Dried-blood red. I don’t know how anyone who went to our primary school managed to escape red gravel embedded in their hands. Or their knees.
Ana had gravel in her knee from when Calum McCready tripped her up while she was running, so that everyone would laugh at her. She crashed onto her bare knees and elbows in the grit, but got back up and wobbled to her feet giggling, doing that odd little ta-da pose she used to do, like an old music hall star, and maybe it was that they were laughing at instead. But then when we were walking home together I could see her limping very slightly, both of her knees opened up and dazzlingly red. She didn’t say anything the whole way home, her eyes shining with wetness just a little, her lip barely trembling.
It’s got to that time of evening where it’d be dark already if it was a little later in the year. The lowering light discolours the green outside, almost into something else entirely. The colour starts to lose its cleanness. It looks older, the way bronze looks older when dirt gets into the texture of it. The green picks up brown and grey like it’s grown patches of mould or damp. All the while, the wilderness gets thicker and more complex, turning into this jumble of tree trunks all twisted into the wrong shapes, and everything growing over everything else. It’s all kind of a mess. It’s all kind of feral.
They’re ugly things, the hills outside the window. They’re beautiful; on some level I know they’re beautiful, but they’re swollen and amorphous, growing on the earth like cysts on a scalp. Those ugly hills blend the green with brown and ochre into disjointed patches of colour. And then out of nowhere, with nowhere it could logically be coming from, this rusted, autumn-leaves, dried-blood red.
The train shudders now and then in the wilderness, where it ran smooth through the city. The train’s movements have taken on that colour, now; red-tinged green. Green, tinged red.
I remember a few weeks later at school when she dug into her knee with a blade she’d unscrewed from a pencil sharpener, unflinching as the blood bloomed out from the wound then slowly began to trickle down her shin, almost reaching her ankle before she thought to wipe it away with a scratchy blue paper towel from the bathroom.
It was an operation; all of it in service of removing the dirty scrap of earth from inside her body. She became a surgeon then; her brow set, her eyes hooded and focused on the hands that were maiming her, the same expression she had when she was drawing jagged, colourful fantasy animals on the blank pages of her workbook. She did such a fine job of not showing the pain that I just assumed that she had managed not to feel it somehow, and didn’t think to comfort her afterwards.
A crowd of five or six had gathered round her, and me, by the time it was finished. The blood trail she had mopped from her leg had left a red smear on her skin like smudged lipstick, and blackened the clinical blue of the now-crumpled paper towel, which she attempted to flatten out, one-handed, on the concrete bottom step at the back of the school building. Then, she scraped the corner of the bloody sharpener blade onto it. And sure enough, there in the middle of the dark stain on the paper towel, was a piece of bloody gravel the size of a sunflower seed.
She looked up at me and beamed. There was still blood dribbling out of the cut on her knee.
I became conscious after that of the smaller, subtler scrap of grit still beneath the skin of my own hand. Of the courage I lacked that might allow me to cut it out and be done with it.
It was gigantic, that red dirt pitch. Picturing it now, it stretches from horizon to horizon like some African desert. There were skeletal metal goalposts at either end, the white paint taking the metal with it as it peeled. From one goal post to the other was too far to run. But then, I wasn’t an athletic little girl. The pitch isn’t there anymore; it got built over years ago, turned into council houses. I can never go back to see if it was really as big as we always thought it was. So the pitch has stayed vast and red in my memory.
I don’t know the name of the stuff it was made of. I’ve never encountered anything like it since. That brownish, orange-red grit that stained your sandshoes, and tore up your hands and knees like a cheese grater if you fell. You’d knock handfuls of the stuff out of your shoes, and still find tiny red stones digging into your feet when you put them back on.
The movement of the train makes it feel wrong to be picturing something so still.
It was even redder in the flickering pinkish-orange of the floodlights, which would hum into being after the home-time bell rang. Right there, that image right there; that’s where Ana has her flag planted. That was where we built our friendship, and where we each became certain, without ever needing to voice it out loud, that what we had built would last forever: at the sides of the pitch, sitting in the roots of the half-dead trees, our shoes stained with the gravel and our jumpers sticky with tree sap, staring out over the vast red. We were fairies, we were witches, we were cats or wolves or dragons. And the red pitch was watching us.
It watched us as we played in the roots of those trees, knowing that it had dug itself into our bodies, and that one day, long after I had watched Ana cut it out of herself, it would be under my skin to remind me of her.
I open my eyes sharply. It all goes from red to green too quickly. It makes me feel kind of sick.
It’s almost dark when the train pulls into Queen Street. In the concrete of the train platform there’s gum spat out and stuck so long that it's as grey and cracked as the ground. A couple of pigeons peck at nothing. None of them have all their toes: the unluckiest just has a stub of leg curled under it, useless. I used to think it was the chewing gum that did it: that the birds would step in and get stuck fast, so they couldn’t even move. And their only hope of ever flying away again was to peck their foot off, or else just fly away from it, just let it tear off like a lizard’s tail. I’ve never seen a pigeon’s foot stuck to the concrete with chewing gum. I can picture it, though; it’d be curled up on itself like a dead spider.
My hand unclenches, then folds in on itself as I wait for the ticket barrier, the middle and ring finger rubbing and scratching at the fleck of grit stuck in the heel of my thumb.
I get my phone out, finally, as I walk to the bus stop. The battery’s almost dead. Doesn’t matter now. I bring up Ana’s profile on Facebook. And there’s the quickening heartbeat, the tightening of muscle in my gut, the stomach-acid burn in the centre of my chest, but it’s all old news to me now. I scroll through the posts on her wall, trying to see if there’s any new ones I haven’t seen yet, but the kind messages have dried up. Her profile picture irritates me, because it messes with the tone of the whole page. It’s the same picture it’s been since Halloween last year, where she’s dressed up as Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York, with a moustache drawn on in eyeliner, holding a plastic carving knife. I wish she’d picked something more sombre, but she couldn’t have known. I wish someone could change it. I refresh it. I refresh it again. There’s nothing I haven’t already seen, so I read the most recent seven or eight posts, even though I almost know them by heart now.
I’ve walked past the bus station, I realise. I refresh the page.
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