My name is Laura, and I have been writing since I was seven. I show my age by telling you that I started my writing career on an electronic typewriter that I got for Christmas 1992. For the past 30 years, literature has defined my life: first, as a lover of English at school, then as an undergraduate English Literature student and finally as an English teacher, which I have been since 2008.

I have been working on a memoir related to my career and experiences as a student for years but doing the MA in Life Writing has changed my approach to writing and the memoir entirely. It has been an absolute thrill to work with so many talented writers and tutors and grow as a writer with their help and encouragement.

I am married to Phil, a geography teacher, and we have two daughters, Sadie and Esther. The four of us live in Havering, the London suburb that The Guardian has described as the ‘second least diverse borough after Bromley’ and by The Tab as ‘chav town supreme’. You can contact me at laurabourne85@gmail.com or on Twitter @hearmeplaypiano

 

_____

 

It’s all gone. 

 

There is nothing. 

 

I am laid the bed, on more Benzos than Judy Garland at the end and I am staring at the wall. The blank, white wall. 

 

The late autumn daylight fades away, seeping the colour from the sky. It cloaks the room in a grey mourning coat. I haven’t been out of the room in days, only the cycles of light clue me in as to the fact that time is still moving forward.  

 

Now that I have thought of Dorothy, I suddenly think to myself: 

 

I 

am

 

m

e

l

tinnnnnng 

 

and for some reason, this makes me laugh out loud in the silent room. 

 

The staccato ‘ha’ bounces off of the white wall, and not for the first time, I think about how much this room reminds me of a cell. All I need is a straitjacket. 

 

I look down at my arm and am surprised to find that my skin isn’t green. This makes me laugh out loud to no one again. 

 

I know that I am going mad. It’s unexpectedly prosaic though, this madness. Even in the middle of going insane I feel like it should be more ‘Jabberwocky’ than Prufrock: fewer coffee spoons and more gyre and gimble in the wabe. 

 

Time makes no sense anymore, I bounce between doses of drugs or drinking binges, never not drunk or hungover… but things still get dusty in my bedroom. My housemate still knocks on my door every Wednesday and reminds me that it’s bin day tomorrow. Graham next door still gets in his green Nissan every morning at 8.15 and returns to his parking bay at 5.30, just in time for ‘Neighbours’. Every evening the street lights still come on and go off, some nights I see both dances of the ballet. 

 

The world is apparently still full of things, even if everything inside of me is gone. 

 

I still get text messages from Nicola and voicemails from Paul asking me to phone them. They haven’t returned John’s calls, the messages say. They won’t return them. They’re on my side. They’ll always be on my side. 

 

I delete the messages and stop listening to the voicemails. 

 

To the right of the bed are the Blu-Tacked up birthday cards from six weeks before, each one of them brightly coloured, and with the number loud and riotous in the middle of the sentiment:

 

21! Woo hoo!

 

You’re a proper adult now!

 

Everything’s just beginning!

 

I never shuffle past them or open my eyes to them without muttering that they should fuck off, as though they’re doing it on purpose, as though I didn’t put them up there myself only a few weeks ago. 

 

I often think of taking them all down and throwing them in the bin, but that would involve so much more energy than I have. John’s is already gone though, ripped down and the Blu-Tack left behind still clinging to a tiny shard of the bright red card which had been proudly displayed at the centre of the collage:

 

‘To my Girlfriend on Her Birthday’

 

the card had declared in tall, gold letters. 

 

I had been thrilled that he had chosen a card calling me his girlfriend and not just the usual anonymous, arty greeting that he had given me every other year for the past six. I had seen that as proof positive that everything was going to be alright, that we were a legitimate couple now. What a fucking idiot I had been. 

 

The sight of the clinging Blu-Tack where the card had been hurts almost as much as the sight of the card did, and I know that I could take the Blu-Tack down from the wall too, but it would make no difference. I would still know that the card had been there. I will always know that the card had been there. I could knock down that wall, but I would still remember that the card had been there whenever I looked at the space in the air. 

 

I hadn’t had the heart to actually throw John’s card in the bin, and so had jammed it into the middle of the copy of ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ that he gave me for Christmas 2002. As a little joke to myself that doesn’t make me laugh, I put it between the plates of ‘Little Girl Lost’ and ‘Little Girl Found’. He will definitely laugh at that when I tell him, I keep imagining…‘he’ll appreciate that’, I think to myself. Then I catch myself on it like a scratchy nail on a woolly glove and remember that he won’t. He won’t appreciate it. He won’t appreciate anything that I tell him ever again. I won’t ever tell him anything again. 

 

Unless it’s to go fuck himself, I suppose. I might tell him that. 

 

X X X X X X X X X X

 

Melting does feel like an accurate word though; I am dissolving, disappearing. Literally, because my entire diet is vodka and Valium and I have lost two stone, but figuratively too. My sanity has dissolved like salt in water, and I am becoming brine: distilled and caustic. I cannot think of how I am supposed to purify myself to get the salt out. And because it all seems so hopeless, I double down and souse my organs in poison; the salt of my tears, the pickling solutions that I pour into my mouth each evening and leave me hungover every morning. Whatever I was has truly gone, gone away. I am toxic to touch now. I stagger out of bed each day, the shakes of alcohol withdrawal tremoring through me, and catch sight of myself in the mirror, surprised to still have a reflection. 

 

My never healthy relationship with alcohol has turned completely dysfunctional, even I can see that. I am either drunk or hungover for almost every hour of every day. One night a lad down the pub who’s friends with our dubious housemate Donny has some speed, which I take despite both its unknown provenance and the fact that Simon has told me he will ring my mother if I start down this path. I tell Simon to fuck off and take the speed. 

 

WithinfiveminutesIfeelasthoughmyhearthasbeenputbacktogetherandIknowthatabsolutely

everythingisgoingtobeabsolutelyfineyeahyeahyeahmateIsaytotheladwiththedrugsmynameis

LaurayouretotallysoundthemostauthenticpersonIhaveevermethelaughsandgivesmeafagIthink

heisafriendofDarrensIdontevencareIlovehimandIwouldmarryhimifheaskedrightnowbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbut…

 

I have filled up the void with noise and laughter and the fastness of time, because when you think about it time goes so fucking fast, doesn’t it? This misery that I have been feeling for weeks and weeks is awful but luckily, I will be dead soon because time is just so fucking quick. I can feel my hair follicles too. Can I? Is that possible? Where can get enough of this to feel better forever? 

 

I quickly realise through even rudimentary calculations that I will need kilograms and kilograms of the stuff; I’ll never be able to afford it. This depresses me, even sped up, the depression is black. It doesn’t matter in the end, anyway. After 46 minutes the effects wear off and I am back to being empty and alone. 

 

I walk home and collapse in tears on the bathroom floor. 

 

X X X X X X X X X X

 

I still go to my Saturday job. I am still officially enrolled at university, but I don’t go, I can’t look at it. I still read though; reading is about the only thing that my brain can do that it did before, I just can’t read any of the books that I should be reading. I actually read five books a week, sometimes six or seven, all of them from the bookshop where I work. I read everything from Will Self novels and a reissue of ‘Vile Bodies’, to the Christmas season autobiographies of C-List celebrities who are on ‘Strictly’ this year. I read a manual on how to master decoupage and a book about the special stone used in the building of churches in Wales. I read anything to fill the time, fill my brain. Reading fills the hours. Reading sort of makes me forget when I can concentrate for long enough. Reading replaces sleep and stops me from staring at the cracked plaster on the ceiling for hours each day. 

 

One day a week I take my pale face and sad eyes to the bookshop and stand behind the counter, scaring off the customers. My manager, Gerard, a kindly man who seems so old to me but is probably only about 40, smiles at me frequently and looks worried. I told him the briefest version of why my face looks like this the weekend that I first came back to work after That Day, and he stammered and stuttered his way through awkward words of sympathy. He was posh and didn’t seem to be very in touch with his feelings. I was surprised then when he suddenly says:

‘He’s an idiot to throw away a girl like you.’ I was sitting across his desk from him, I could feel my own paleness glowing in the gloomy room and wondered what ‘a girl like me’ is. Or was. 

 

It is a few weeks later and Gerard should probably have sacked me, or at the very least warned me some time ago for my shambolism. I am so clearly hungover, sometimes probably still drunk from the night before. I am frequently late, and I space out for minutes at a time, sometimes when customers are actively asking me questions, or I am in the middle of counting out change. But still, Gerard just edges around me, looking concerned. That’s how I know how bad I must look. I think that I could start stealing from the till and he still wouldn’t say anything. 

 

X X X X X X X X X X

 

The rest of the week I stay in my room, or I hang out with my housemates if I can face it. Sometimes I go out to the pub and get utterly wasted. I drink wherever I am, but the pub nights are the ones when I get most drunk. My friends look at me with the same worried eyes that Gerard has now, the same worried eyes that my parents have. I am not getting better; I am getting worse. No one says the words, but I can see it on their faces. Simon hasn’t yet phoned my mum, but I can see that he’s only days away from it. Everyone is talking about me now, about how sad and out of control I am. 

 

One hungover afternoon a friend of Simon’s comes around with a DVD of ‘Angels in America’. I only vaguely know what it is but within 20 minutes I am crying inconsolably. All of those men, dead of a plague that they caught from love; I can relate to that. 

We don’t have any contact. It is probably better this way. I keep saying that in my head: it is probably better this way. 

 

I listen to a lot of Smiths, a lot of Beatles. Some Elton John. Music that my parents played when I was a small child, Ray Charles and Smokey Robinson. Music that I loved when I was 12 and 13, The Barenaked Ladies and postTake That ‘Life Thru a Lens’ that I had thought was so deep. I play the music that belongs to me and to my childhood, to my parents. Not the music that belongs to John, to John and me, to all of these past five, six, seven years. 

 

I listen to music obsessively for a month or so, until I decide one drunken night to listen to John’s copy of ‘Holidays in Eden’ that I find in the bottom of the bookcase. I get through ‘No One Can’ without even crying and think that I am okay, think that I am too brined and dried out and cured to feel anything anymore. But then the opening bars of ‘Waiting to Happen’ literally hit me in the gut and I have to run to the bin by the side of my desk to be sick. 

 

I am sick four times and then five and then six in the four minutes of the song, heaving over the bin liner and feeling as gutted as a dead, salted fish. 

 

It’s not the music. This song holds no particular sentiment for me, it was not one of John’s favourites and I cannot remember a time that we ever listened to it together. It is John’s voice that has made me vomit into the bin, John’s voice which is causing me to sob over the plastic of the wastepaper basket like a person who has truly lost their mind. 

 

It was only three months ago, that night in Stratford-Upon-Avon, high on the summer’s evening and Shakespeare and white wine that smelt like lemons. 

 

I had forgotten the conversation until now though. Until I heard the song. 

 

X X X X X X X X X X

 

‘You’ve got a nice nose.’ This is apropos of precisely nothing. My nice nose is in my wine glass when he says this. 

‘Cheers!’ I say, but I pause. ‘Weird change of subject though.’ We had been talking about hayfever. 

‘I was just thinking about your face.’ He answers. I raise an eyebrow, confused. ‘I was thinking that you aren’t beautiful…’ I splutter in indignation, 

‘Wow!’ I exclaim. ‘I love you too!’ and I laugh. 

‘No, no, listen,’ he says, laughing too now, affectionate, hand on my arm, soft eyes like the runny centres of underdone eggs, ‘you aren’t beautiful. But your face is incredibly appealing. Like it’s exactly how it’s meant to be.’ I am really laughing now, and he is smiling broadly. 

‘You are pissed.’ I say, not sugar-coating it. 

‘I am.’ He agrees. ‘But I am right about this. Mathematically or something your face is just… right. It’s lovely. I could look at it forever. That’s true. I am not just saying that because I’m drunk.’ I smile into my glass of wine, knowing that I should probably be insulted but loving him more than anybody else ever has. 

 

Loving him more than anybody else ever will.

 

After a moment or two I swallow. I want to tell him how much I like his face, but I don’t know how to. 

‘Yours too.’ I say. He screws up his eyes and shakes his head. 

‘God, no, I’m a gargoyle.’ He sort-of-laughs but sort of doesn’t. I put my hand over his on the sticky, pub table and I am still laughing. But then I look at his face and am surprised to find myself staring into the eyes of a little boy. It is incredible, like magic. I have never seen this version of him before.

I will never see it again. 

 

I stop laughing. 

 

‘Oh, John.’ I say now. 

 

I am surprised to find myself tearing-up and I suddenly feel like an idiot.. I squeeze his hand. I feel stupid, but that little boy is still there inside his eyes, and I can’t not say it. ‘You are beautiful.’ He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t break my gaze. The child in his eyes has never been told that they were beautiful, no one ever sung him that lullaby. I think of words from childhood now, vague, and half-forgotten, but there:

 

‘Beautiful baby,

child of my dreams,

the sandman says maybe he’ll bring you a dream,

up where the girls fly on ribbons and bows,

where babies float by, just counting their toes…’

 

He doesn’t say anything in response, he just squeezes my hand back and I can see the tears in his own eyes and it’s both awful and wonderful all at once, the vulnerability of him. 

‘Only to…’ he begins, but I cut him off. 

‘…Don’t make a joke.’ I say. There is silence. He closes his watery eyes. 

 

He doesn’t try and carry on with what he was going to say. Instead, he breathes out, one long sigh that goes on for longer than seems usual. His eyes are still shut, but then they blink open, and I expect the burden in them to be gone and am surprised when it isn’t. Then he says:

 

‘We talked about our faces ,
You said you didn’t like yours. 
I said, ‘I disagree’.’

 

There is a moment and I blink because I know the lyrics and I remember the song, although perhaps I only really heard it once, on one of those CDs he made me back at the start, when I would listen to them like I was revising for an exam on love. 

 

It is too heavy and too real, and I know that he is telling me that I am beautiful without saying the words and I appreciate that probably more than if he had just outright told me that I was beautiful; I wouldn’t have believed the words, but I believe this. 

 

But it is too heavy and too real anyway, even like this and I won’t be able to acknowledge it without crying, so I make a joke anyway. because I am weak and inauthentic and not strong enough and not substantial enough. I never was. The gap before I can make the joke is a void though. A heavy, aching nothing. 

 

‘Please John, if you’re going to quote love songs to me, at least let them have been songs that made an impact on the charts.’ He smiles widely and laughs heartily. He is relieved to have been given a way out too. 

 

And the little boy that I 

glimpsed 

for just a moment 

is never 

seen again. 

 

X X X X X X X X X X

 

I lay on the carpet next to the vomit-filled bin for so long that the CD spins back around to the start and the jaunty electro-pop of ‘Cover My Eyes (Pain and Heaven)’ which, in spite of myself, I still quite like. 

 

Once the memory of that night has sufficiently faded enough to stop me from being physically sick, I stagger across the room and press the ‘drawer open’ button so that the music abruptly stops in the middle of the lyric ‘Like the girl in the novel in the wind on the moors…’ 

‘Fuck you,’ I say out loud to nobody. 

I pluck the disc from the machine and fling it, and the blue, plastic case it came in, out of the open window beside me. I hear the case shatter as it falls onto the street below. 

I do not listen to music on purpose for years after that. I never turn on that stereo ever again. I avoid music like I avoid Penicillin, knowing that it is likely to put me in the hospital. I consider getting one of those bracelets: ‘ALERT! ALLERGY! DO NOT GIVE CHRYSOGENUM BASED ANTIBIOTICS OR MUSIC!’

 

X X X X X X X X X X

 

It is a dark a lot, even for December. The daylight feels like it is a shade underneath what it should be. At home with my parents and sister they have put up the Christmas tree and the fairy lights; I manage to smile and say that they’re nice, but they feel sarcastic. 

‘At least Christmas might cheer you up a bit!’ my father says. I don’t answer, although I don’t disagree because my family so desperately wants me to snap out of it. I have been walking around like a hollow-eyed ghost for eight weeks now and they so want me to be better. I nod and say ‘hopefully!’ But when I come home late one night to find the lights still on and everybody else already in bed, I snap them off at the plug, killing the blinking joy of yuletide and wondering if I could strangle myself with the cord. 

 

Instead, I walk into the kitchen and drink a third of a bottle of neat Vodka in one hit. 

 

In front of my parent’s sarcastic Christmas tree that weekend, I cry like a baby at the X Factor winner singing a song called ‘A Moment Like This’. This is a low point on so many levels and I tell myself to get a grip, but I can’t… those lyrics, oh those fucking lyrics. The stab in the guts, the stab in the heart. 

 

‘Some people search forever

For that one special kiss

I can’t believe it’s happening to me

Some people wait a lifetime

For a moment like this…’

 

This is why I stopped listening to music, I think. The thing is, it’s fucking everywhere. It’s not so bad in the pub when you’re off your face, but I went to Boots this afternoon and they were playing ‘Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’. I wanted to slit my own throat with a Venus Comfort Glide. 

 

I drink to forget because I can’t help remembering and music doesn’t help that. It is involuntary, I can remember everything. I wish that my memory had been this good when I was doing history A Level. 

 

I remember kissing in the park and sore lips. 

 

I remember being battered and the delicious ache of the bruises that felt like a kiss. 

 

(A kiss with a fist is better than none, after all). 

 

I remember when he loved me. 

 

I remember so much joy that I thought I couldn’t possibly contain it all inside my coat. 

 

I remember fear and loathing in Lambeth, Lewisham, the Limehouse Basin and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. 

 

There just isn’t anything left anymore. Nothing to hope for, nothing to imagine, nothing to get out of bed for. Imagine there’s no heaven. No hell below us, above us, only sky. I have loved John from the time that I was a child; I have loved him for as long as I have been me. 

 

If I don’t have John, what do I have? 

 

I phone him one night and say that onto the hollow silence of his answer phone. His wife sends me a text message:

 

Stop phoning the house. 

 

I reply:

 

He was mine just as much as he was yours. 

 

She comes straight back:

 

He was never yours.

 

And the truth of that sentence means that I cry until I fall asleep on top of another half a litre of cheap vodka, thrown back through ugly, snotty tears. 

 

He was never hers either, of course; he’s no ones and never was 

or ever will be. 

 

But knowing that doesn’t make me feel any better. 

 

After all, he’s in Sarah’s house at least. 

 

X X X X X X X X X X

 

The bookshelf has gaps. The absence is him, his books, thrown into a cardboard box and dumped on his doorstep with a scrawled note: ‘Dear John, Fuck you.’ 

 

I am laid the bed again, on fewer Benzos than before but drunker than I was that day. I wonder now what he did with those books when he got them back…did he put them back on his own shelves? Pretend that it all never happened, that I never happened?

 

That’s exactly the kind of thing he would do. 

 

I have started to plug these gaps with my own new books. 

 

but there are still glaring holes. 

 

I have put all of the books he’s ever bought me in a line on the mantelpiece above the dusty fireplace while I think about what to do about them. I haven’t had the strength yet to look through them and decide what to keep and what I want to burn in a fire. 

 

I get up off the bed for the first time in hours, stand on the chair next to it and with one fell swoop I knock all of the remaining books from the mantelpiece. I don’t want them anyway, I suddenly realise. Not one of them. All that they do is remind me. 

 

I watch 

them 

fall 

to 

the 

floor and

 

end

in a

hap haz ard

pile 

 

and I don’t care.

 

They stay in that pile on the floor for the next four months. 

 

X X X X X X X X X X

 

I am worried that the nothingness will swallow me. To compensate for all of the absence, I have the TV on in the background all day and all night, the radio too. Sometimes I have both on in different corners of the same room, competing for my ear, news of Alexander Litvinenko’s burial in a lead-lined coffin mingling with the comforting babble of Countdown contestants. 

 

When even that doesn’t work, I do Sudokus. I very rarely complete one, I am not very good at them, but I collect them from newspapers in pubs and the ones that plonk onto the front mat for free. I  tear them out, leaving them all over my room and picking them up at random when I can’t get Radio 4 or LBC or Cash in the Attic to fill up the space inside of me. 

 

At night I cannot fall asleep unless I am paralytically drunk or sufficiently drugged (or both) so I do that. I always do that. But sometimes the void’s jaws are still too close, it’s teeth too sharp. So, I put on all of the lights, the TV tuned to the BBC News Channel, radio on some nattery phone-in on 5Live until the Shipping Forecast is over, and I won’t have to hear the weirdly haunting words that bother me for reasons that I can’t quite articulate. 

 

5Live is great at midnight, the insomniacs and the mentally ill of London ranting about car parks and street lights. I don’t feel so mad with them around. I pick up one of my many Sudokus from the pile on the side and I fall asleep with the pencil in my hand and numbers, only insignificant numbers at the front of my brain, not John or the lack of him and his missing books.  

 

X X X X X X X X X X

 

It is almost the end of the year now. I am still staring at the gaps. 

 

I remember a poem or a bit from a book, because I always remember a poem or a bit from a book: I am doomed to live a life with a head full of quotations.

 

‘You can see how it was’. 

 

The fat gap in the bookcase by the wardrobe used to have John’s green 1990 ‘Norton Anthology’ in it, next to my 2003 edition. Mine is yellow, his was green. Mine looks lonely now.

 

I always fantasised about our house, the one we would live in one day, and the bookcases. I imagined putting all of the books that we had in common together, rows and rows of what made us the same. I imagined putting the twins together, perhaps we would dedicate a whole bookcase to everything that proved we were soulmates. 

 

Our children would ask why we had two of all of these books and I would tell them it was because their mother and father were the same and now, we had made them, made them the same too. 

 

He is more myself than I am, I think, looking at those gaps. I imagine jumping into his grave with him and decomposing alongside his flesh and find it strangely comforting. I like the idea of him and I dead together, becoming dust. There would be no absence of him inside our shared tomb, we would be together forever. 

 

As it is he takes every form, haunts me, drives me mad, leaves me in this abyss where I cannot find him. 

 

I stare at the space in the room where my children are not and find it impossible to imagine any offspring of my own who are not his too. 

 

Without him, I don’t even have any imaginary children. 

X X X X X X X X X X

 

And then one night as I am falling asleep, drunk of course, I wake to the sound of ‘Sailing By’ before the Shipping Forecast. 

 

I am so inexplicably gripped by terror and pain that I finally decide to do it. 

 

It is as easy as that in the end. 

 

‘The general synopsis at midnight: High west Sole 1028 expected east Sole 1019 by midday tomorrow. Low southern Portugal 1010 losing its identity. The area forecasts for the next 24 hours. Viking, North Utsire: Northwesterly 4 or 5, occasionally 6 at first. Moderate or rough. Occasional rain. Good, occasionally poor’ 

 

I turn off the radio and pop the 12 Valium I have left from their blister packet and swallow them with the glass of water on the side of the bed.

 

Which actually turns out to be gin. I splutter and choke and worry that I am immediately about to throw all of the pills up, but I manage to keep them down and put my head on the pillow. 

 

I shut my eyes and the world drops dead. 

 

John, my love, you have become a story, a myth, an idea, a poem. I think I made you up inside my head. 

 

Bitter bile at the back of my throat from the Valium and the gin regurgitates upwards and even almost gone, I shiver with distaste at the flavour on my tongue. I cough into Desdemona’s hanky, tight in my fist. 

 

‘Thy drugs are quick.’

 

‘Wrong play.’ I think, as I die. 

 

X X X X X X X X X X

 

I am disappointed to wake 15 hours later. 

 

It is New Year’s Eve. I have a headache, but I am most definitely still alive.  

 

_____

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