Briony

Pulling pictures off the walls, watching smiles as they fall. Hers was reserved for someone else, a room in a hotel, and she snatched it back from me as she realised her mistake. It didn’t so much fall – there was no motion, no graceful arc. It simply snapped, blinking out, and her eyes blinked too, Bobbi Brown lids widening into cherry blossom white.

She was sitting on the platform at Paddington, the nineties girl at nineteen. She looked exactly the same as she always had, except the clothes. She was dressed more carelessly, dressed in a way that defined her differently, and I guess I might say it suited her better. There were no frills, no fancies. Except the daisies laced in her blonde hair. Otherwise she was dressed bluntly, stubbornly. Her jeans were washed out, and ugly too, rolling at her skinny ankles. A tanned stomach peered out between the high waisted denim and the black crop top she wore underneath a grey shirt. It shrugged on her shoulders, unbuttoned. There were no bracelets on her wrists. She looked effortlessly cool, a brown leather rucksack sprawled on the floor next to child-sized shoes. Stainless steel style, a girl with her own set of knives in a kitchen drawer: peppers julienne, onion tear cheeks cooking on a student stained hob.

She dressed less deceitfully at nineteen. She showed herself as sharp, she let you know in her clothing that she was harder than she had previously pretended. But her face might still trip you up. The cheekbones were starker, the make-up was more adult, but she still looked fresh and elegant; the Malory Towers girl. Her hair had grown long again quickly and she wore it in a deft fishtail plait which scooped round her neck, like a noose.

She looked at me indifferently before throwing her gaze back on the empty rails. Static iron on the slow moving earth, going nowhere. Briony wasn’t like that at all. Briony always had a person or a place to call home, always a voice at the other end of the phone. ‘Hey,’ she said, lips never-getting-back-together red. She started swinging her foot backwards and forwards, the sole of her P.E. pump plimsoll scraping loudly against the gravelly platform.

Post-box mouth with bleak expectations, I stiffened and failed to utter a word. I took a seat next to her on the pigeon-shit bench, politely respecting her personal space, maintaining the distance of strangers. It felt like a gulf separated us. God, I hated her, how she could sit there and swing her foot as if she didn’t give a damn, after everything.