Sad stories 

Halfway through my abortion, in a bath which was almost overflowing with bubbles and surrounded by fairy lights, I said out loud, but whispering, I’ll never get a wax again. It already hurts this much to be a woman. I won’t lie on my front in a starkly lit room and hold my bum cheeks open so that a woman can burn the space around my asshole with hot wax and then tear it away so that I get a rash but am hair-free for two weeks. I won’t do that again I thought as my body doubled again from more cramps shuddering further down.

The worst bit actually was getting out of the bath to put two more pills to complete the process inside my vagina, line my pants with another maxi pad and stumble out of the bathroom into the kitchen. That’s where I’d fall to the floor for a while. Unable to do anything but clutch my head with one hand and my belly with the other. Tears leaking but not crying, whispering. I needed a fan. It was too hot.

The problem is that without a wax there is no great solution, I try to trim and shave and I hate the way I straddle the bath to try to see and catch places that shouldn't be caught with a razor that is too sharp for this delicate space but not sharp enough. The problem is that condoms aren’t a great solution when you don’t want to have a foriegn object residing at the base of your cervix or a body crammed with hormones. It’s how we got into this mess in the first place. Nature got louder and my mind slipped to worry about what it might feel like for just a few minutes of skin to skin. Flesh to flesh. Maybe this was meant to happen now anyway?

But I still haven’t had a wax. Though, I’m braced for the next man I sleep with to tell me how he prefers hairless, but that’s not his fault he’s just been conditioned - poor thing - by the things he watches on screen. I get it, I have too. Even though none of it turns me on. Not like the women in my books about childbirth who were photographed in the 70s with masses of feminine hair spilling beyond their thighs as husbands and midwives hold them up.

I am 10 or 11, I can’t be sure exactly, but it’s a summer holiday and we are in a Caravan. I imagine in Devon or Dorset. It’s definitely close to the sea because I remember being on a stony beach the next day sitting next to my Dad more embarrassed than anyone has even been about becoming a woman. It was Devon I remember now, the inside of the caravan, East Prawl. Dad said in the morning in the living space, I heard about last night, I hope you’re ok. Well I died inside then. There’s a red phonebox in the village where we used to go to call Gemma at home.

Anyway, it was the middle of the night and I couldn't hide it anymore. Even though I’d managed to hide it when I was the crystal star in a white leotard in the school play. But this time it was realer because it covered the sheets and stained my pyjamas and there was no way to use bunched up tissues to tidy this away. It was too late and now I’m creeping through the caravan with paper walls in the middle of the night, maybe I am sobbing a bit. Enough for mum to hear ready with a packet of sanitary towels as she had been planning for this anyway. Probably she knew it was coming from the way my body odour had changed recently. I think I have started my period I said crying more. And it was ok because she was ready to put me back to bed and take away the blood stains. So the next day on the beach when my womb was cramping I was initiated in first stages of pain that my body would learn to remember. The pain I learnt to love.

I tell Sian on the swing in the garden how I have my period now. It must have been sometime in the summer holidays. She tells me she got hers too. We must be the only ones in the whole of primary school, we imagine. I think that was the day we bought a can of fizzy drink with the change left over from a bag of lentils and lied to mum when she asked for change. I think that was when she found me out and I had to confess all at the side of the house.

It didn’t hurt me the first time I had sex. I was 16 and ready and I wondered if it meant that there was something wrong with me because it didn’t hurt and I didn’t bleed and actually I liked it. It was the summer holidays again, the endless space of days that blend into each other and the days of him. I wonder still if it didn’t hurt because I’d been horse riding for six years of my adolescence.

What were the other signs? Watching Beth cry when I decided to give up playing the flute because I’d never be as good as her at it. The notes I left on my parents bedside begging and pleading to let me have a horse, making them out of chicken wire and paper mache, until my birthday that year when I got everything you need in a grooming box and a bad tempered pony called Milly to loan. When we found Brillo’s dead body frozen and cold in the hutch years before his time. Watching Beth sob her heart out in the attic. The rage as Kate stamped her feet and screamed blue murder on walks and got her own way, agian.

Six months of homesickness as we lived our dreams around the world. A panic attack on a short-haul flight somewhere in Malaysia. The internal silent panic on every flight since. The impending doom on holiday in Greece counting down the days until it was time to come home. I’m not ready yet. A nightmare that begins with footsteps from high-healed shoes echoing through a dark alleyway. The first time I write a letter to him, maybe I’m 14, and get no reply. A pattern emerges. The crush that haunted the corridors of year nine after I met him in my dream. MSN conversations he could barely reply to. Something Jessica Watts said about him and me in the future in a nightclub that never happened because I got to snog him at a party when I was 15.

A bench in a park in Hong Kong as zero to the truth suddenly came out of my mouth and our eyes widen, did you sleep with someone else? Yes. He’s on his knees now. That’s why he got so thin this time he’s been away, anxiety burnt through the muscles I loved, as he wondered if she’d given him a disease. As a sore like a blister grew on the side of his penis. It was nothing. And in 24 hours we sat in the greyest room that there has ever been and waited for the STI test to say, no you don’t have AIDS. And we got a train outside of the city, ate pork and rice at the side of a road and walked for hours into the night with only fireflies until there was enough beach for us to put our tent. Horrible sticky buns for breakfast and a beach that I’ve only ever seen in dreams since then. I think cows came close to the tent that night. I don’t think I’d ever take such risks again. I don’t think I’ve ever been that happy or completely un-worried about how much water we were carrying. There was a bottle of coca cola halfway through the next day.

Two months of going through Facebook albums of someone called Lizzie. Wondering where they all got their dresses from. I’m not even old enough to buy drinks in bars yet. A whole relationship of asking, who did you speak to last night? Scrolling through messages as he leaves the room.

I suppose there were nights in the dark not saying anything and definitely not touching across the abyss of the bed. More nights of waiting for him to come, the sounds from the tv on the other side of the wall. Walking home across the river to the flat in Bermondsey where I’d eat dinner on the top of my bed. There was Sunday mornings in a blizzard running for two hours until every song on the playlist irritated me and my legs screamed to stop. The injuries and the limping and wanting that marathon more than anything in the world. The flu that was almost certainly coming on the night before as I didn’t sleep. The docklands and 10K still to go. The night of no sleep after, adrenaline coursing still, my legs in too much pain to let me go.

The perimeter of a playground and no one to talk to. Hands in pockets. Sometime in November. That sinking feeling? Father Christmas is not real. Every single Sunday evening. Taking down the Christmas tree, the light in the house is flat now. The last week in August, it’s raining now anyway. The earliest hours of the morning after he’s left you. The darkest hours of the night when you dreamt that he didn’t after all.

The drive home was quiet and we were sad and grumpy anyway because we didn’t want to leave Gemma’s. We had the time of our life when she let us drink white wine and eat as many chocolates as we like - not that many Annie. Still, the whole of Sunday was heavy because we were leaving and she was staying. And mum says nothing in the car and we think it’s because she’s annoyed with us for going. At home in the kitchen, Panda died last night. Beth is crying in the attic again. The way the tyres screeched on the gravel as they tore away and round the corner with my horse who I couldn’t have anymore. It only took 30 minutes to get her in the horse box and me and Dad are crying now anyway.

The man in M&S choosing a chocolate bar, a small one, close to the cashiers with a basket full of meals for one. The daylight after the Lion King. Why did it have to be that sad? Dad against the radiator sitting on the floor, head in hands. Mum stirring bechamel sauce, small tears rolling down her cheeks. David Gray Lost Songs is playing again. 3pm on a sick day when everyone comes home from school and I didn’t get to feel what I was meant to. The end of a magazine that promised everything and now I feel hungry.