Rot

Kate was starving. Quick stop in Tesco’s for a sausage roll. Then home. No funny business tonight.

A tall blonde woman with a boy’s haircut crossed the road ahead of her. Kate supposed that really, it was a haircut normally seen on a boy- Kate still had to self-edit a lot these days, still lagged mentally behind the reality of the world she moved in. The woman looked a bit like Jen. Ha, christ, remember Jen. Jen next door. The things she’d called her - to her face. God, she'd piece of work back then. And not hard work either, ha ha.

The woman who looked like Jen went through the sliding doors of the Tesco Express and started looking at the herbs. Her long thing hands rifled through the coriander packets as if they were files in an old cabinet. As Kate entered the woman who looked like Jen turned to the door and her face went cloudy at first, then all screwed up and weird so it looked like she might just bite Kate’s face right off, and then she said

“Fuck, Kate - is that you?”

and so it turned out that the woman who looked like Jen was actually Jen after all, and she wasn’t biting, she was trying to smile.

“Wow, Jen! It’s so nice to see you!”

Kate always said that, as if she had been waiting dormant until this acquaintance or that one finally uncovered her, like a mushroom. Fed shit and kept in the dark, ha ha. She’d read that on a t-shirt and it was a bit woke-brigade, but still a good one.

They were blocking the entrance and a man with hair like a woodlouse was frowning at them and they both giggled together without thinking, before stepping out into the street again.

“How are you?” she asked quickly and before Jen could ask her back. She tried to make her face all open and warm, kind of like that man that had helped her onto the bus last night, like she was sorry for what an unbelievable cow I was to you all those years ago and please don’t bring it up.

“Yeah great! Really great, actually, I’ve just moved back down, started up this new shop…” as Jen started cataloguing her life, listing off her travels and conquests, Kate’s eyes began to rise over her head. Before she could ask them to stop, they took off down the street. They took her past the pubs filling with post-work-drinkies, past the high street where girls her age, also wearing black Primark blouses and different types of black trousers (tight if you were new, baggy if you knew) were clocking off, past the beach where families were leaving for the day and the stones smelt like warm blood and groups of teenagers sat laughing and shouting, too loudly for the families, out to the choppy open sea which was the same sea which lapped here and on that other shore, and she wanted to wade out into it and not hear Jen’s life, her success despite what Kate had said to her, done to her, without Kate being there at all- she wanted to be part of that blue-green mass entirely so it filled every cell and atom in her body and she never had to know anything ever again.

Kate’s stomach gurgled audibly and she realised Jen had stopped speaking some time ago.

“Well, you look great! Really” she said, seemingly apropos of nothing, as that cloud flashed across Jen’s face again.

“So tell me about you? Did you stay here all this time, after…” Jen tailed off as the conversation got a bit closer to that unseen, unsaid thing between them. Yes, Kate saw it now, as her eyes dropped to the pavement and the rubbish that pooled round them like a flood. An apple, grotesque in it’s bigness, and rotten so it had turned from red to a tan brown, leather brown like the shoe of a man who gets off that commuter train from Victoria, but with bits of fluffy white like the wool of a lamb caught on a fence - the wool, she thought, not the lamb. It sat between them, this stinking pustule of the past, festering and fermenting, and as their words crept closer into it, the putrid stench of all that horrible shit Kate used to say and do could be detected on the sharp edge of the air.

“Do you work in the clothes shop?” Jen asked. “I noticed your uniform” she added, as if in answer to Kate’s puzzlement.

Bet you did, ha ha, said Kate’s brain from the deep back seats near the pointy bit of her skull. They still lived in there, those bits of her brain from back then, when she didn’t know.

“Yeah, Vogueology, up near the square.”

“How is it?”

“Yeah it’s alright, you know, pays the bills ha ha, but yeah…it’s flexible you know? I’m still working on my blog…”

Every time Kate dropped another empty phrase out onto the pavement, the stench diminished, filler words and hedges littering the floor around and blocking the rot, soaking up the fetiditity.

Their conversation had limped along for longer than polite conversation should, though it contained none of the laughter, eye contact, or connections of something akin to a catch up between friends. Kate could feel the pull of the blue-green again, and knew she had to get away. Even if she had to sack off the sausage roll.

Before she could begin her goodbyes, Jen cut in.

“Listen, Kate, it’s been great to see you but I have to get off - I’m meeting someone for dinner.”

Kate noticed now - Jen’s trousers, ironed sharply and turned up over gleaming balck loafers; blusee hugging the strong, smooth frame of her shoulders; face made up simply, eyes gleaming blue out of eyeshadow and looking at Kate now, deeply - looking at her and seeing her completely, and Kate smelt that rot - stronger than ever - as she was brought so close to herself, right up so she felt huge and tiny at the same time, like in a fever.

“I’m sorry, Jen” she spewed out into the street. But Jen was gone; Kate’s words pooled on the pavement and she was left standing, sausage roll-less, in the empty shrug of the night.