Charlotte is a writer of magic-realist and horror fiction, centred around female identity. 

This extract is from Babygirl, Charlotte’s new novel written through the eyes of May, a young woman who cares for her sister’s abandoned daughter, and deals with the consequences of their family’s generational curses. 

Email: cjlcole1989@gmail.com 

Substack: Ad Infinitum  

Babygirl

June 2006 

 ‘May?’ 

I started at the sound of my own name and woke up in bed, alone. My face was cold against the damp pillow. My head was rammed against the headboard again, my jaw stiff and aching. I rolled onto my back, wiped the sweat off my cheek and remembered the mouthguard I’d bought some days ago, now neglected on the bedside table. I ran my tongue across the edge of my teeth to feel if I’d been grinding them in my sleep. 

I stared at the cracks on the ceiling, running from corner to corner above me, and wondered at the sound of my own name. If I could get back to sleep, I would hear it again. I had dreamt of my sister Agnes every night after she disappeared, and each dream felt so big, so whole, I remembered them all. After the brightest, most solid dreams, she would speak to me. 

That night, I dreamt she was in the doorway and wouldn’t let me through. I pushed her, but she was as sturdy and immovable as a wall. I hit her harder, and the force kicked back into my arms, sending electric pulses into my elbows. I stepped back, searching for her face. I couldn’t find her. The space between us had become solid. I was stood in front of our back door, the broken panes of glass patched with cheap MDF. I rapped a knuckle against it; the door was hollow and light, but hard, like a dead tree. Agnes knocked back from the other side. I should have unlocked it and let her in again, but I wasn’t brave enough. When I woke up, my knuckles were red and sore. 

In bed, deliberating how best to fall back asleep, I made fists with my hands, rotated my wrists, then stretched out my fingers a few times. I traced rows of little red dents in my palms, made by my own rough nails. I sighed and coughed up a speck of phlegm onto my chin. Rubbing it onto my pillow, I heard a car alarm go off outside and looked out the window. The sky was iron darkness pitted with orange streetlights; I thought it must have been three in the morning at most. I could feel my body already tiring at the thought of the next day coming after a broken night’s sleep.  

I covered my eyes and enjoyed the sheer blackness for a moment, breathing slowly to dampen my spiralling thoughts. A few minutes passed in my dark, steady rounds of breath, and I drifted back into the heavy comfort of my bed.  

‘May?’ 

Again. It sounded so close to me. I opened my eyes and spoke into the empty room. 

‘Agnes?’ 

She didn’t answer. All was silent in my room, but down the corridor, I heard her coming and going. The back door opened and closed, rattling the shoddily nailed MDF in its frame. Then came the sound of her shoes being flung against the shoe rack. A chair by the kitchen table was pulled out, rubbing against the sticky lino floors. She moved from one side of the kitchen to the other, back and forth, before she was quiet again. A held breath of silence hung between us. I raised my voice. 

‘Agnes?’ 

No answer, and there was no point in trying again. The back door opened one more time and the sounds of my sister left the flat. I knew when I got up in the morning the door would still be open, the chair would be pulled from the table, but nothing of my sister would remain.  

I lay in bed and thought about changing my damp pillowcase. A calmer, natural quiet fell over the flat, and small snores came through the wall from Babygirl’s room next door. I reached out beside my bed, laid a hand on the wall between us, and felt the rhythm of her sleep.  

I was glad, at least, Agnes never woke her.  

July 1996 

Every room has a pitch. People with a musical ear can find it, sing it to the room, and the room will sing it back. If the bedroom my sister and I shared had a pitch, it would be the top note of a pneumatic drill. On the days Agnes wasn’t screaming and fighting with me and mum, we were laughing so loudly the neighbours would hammer on the walls to shut us up.  

She was a girl’s girl. She blossomed early. She was a Leo. These were the justifications I served up when challenged on who she was. Most people chose not to see the brighter parts of Ag. When she was on, my whole world was floodlit like a stadium, and our bedroom was the epicentre of it all.  

She hated the grunge thing that gripped our classmates; she said plaid shirts and baggy jeans were for ugly people. Ag preferred high glamour and higher hair. None of the girls at school had the balls to bully her for being different though, despite her listening to 80s music on an old cassette player and wearing mum’s going-out clothes during the day; she was just too blonde, alive and destructive to be picked on with any success. It was who she was before Babygirl came into our lives. When I was twelve, the age I remember with absolute, tender clarity, I worshipped and envied everything that made my sister sixteen.  

One Sunday morning she made us both over. She backcombed our hair using toxic amounts of Elnett. She stole one of mum’s old push up bras, which was already too small for her, and had me stuff it with toilet paper to give her boobs of terrorising proportions.  

‘I am going to get unbelievable fake tits as soon as I have the cash.’ She said, puffing out her chest and cinching her waist with her hands. 

She tried the same stuffing trick with me, but under a cotton training bra, on my prepubescent chest, the tissue looked clumsy and sad.  

‘Maybe not,’ she said, stuffing the tissues back into the centre of the cardboard loo roll. ‘You’re all leg anyway. Let’s shave them.’  

I didn’t actually have body hair, just light gold fluff. But I sat on the bathroom floor and watched her hands, her eyes, the tip off her tongue poking out and held between her lips as she ran the pink razor over my shins. When she was done, she threw the razor in the bath and smiled at me.  

‘I would kill for those legs. And your bum. I’m going to put you in a literally mini skirt.’ 

Once swathed in Impulse body spray, she put on a Bananarama CD and placed her hands on my face, singing directly into my eyes.  

‘I am your Venus. I am the fire of your desire.’ 

She was feeling full of it, wanting to chance what she could. She packed a tiny bag with Marlborough menthols from mum’s work bag and told me we were taking our makeovers for a walk.  

‘Janine called before. Mum picked up first. So embarrassing. She said Kyle’s at the park. He has weed.’ 

We crossed the estate, turned a corner and ran over the road before the green man flashed, down the path, past the nursery school next to the shit flat roof pub, through the gate behind the bottle bank and into the nicer, newer housing development. The streetlamps were brighter down those roads, the spaces between them were smaller, and each one had petunias and violas crammed in tight baskets around its neck. The parks between the housing plots didn’t smell of dog shit, and the basketball courts had actual nets. We’d go to the skate park there, sit on the bridge of a ramp and smoke in full view of the boys. She smoked. I pretended. She knew I didn’t like to do it for real, so she taught me how to fake inhale. 

‘Don’t stare,’ she told me. ‘You’re being obvious. Pretend like they’re not there.’  

But I wasn’t staring at them. I was staring at them staring at her. It was my first real school, studying how she moved. I’d lose myself in how she held a cigarette between her index and middle finger, how she bent the wrist back and held the elbow with her other hand, pushing her boobs together with her arms, how she tilted her head down, eyes up, never breaking contact with any boy brave enough to smile at her.  

Most days it didn’t go much further than talking. We’d buy sweets, eat them, and eventually a boy or two would come over and ask for some. She did kiss a boy in front of me once, his wet, hungry tongue lapping at her mouth like a flat nosed dog panting in the heat. She looked at me after, told me to stay put, took his hand and led him into the woodland stretch between the housing estates. She left me alone in suburban silence with nothing but a damp sherbet dib dab and the drone of the nearby motorway. I waited for an hour, gave up and walked home alone to an empty house and a cold bed. I told myself bedtime stories. 

‘I am here. I am here. I am safe. I am in bed. Ag will be home soon and we’ll sleep next to each other forever.’ 

I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up the next morning, she was curled up next to me, her eyeballs flickering under lilac painted lids. 

April 2008 

There was a storm in the night. I felt it while I slept, and dreamt of my sister again. She was hanging from the ceiling, caught in a net above me. When she opened her mouth, rain came out. It filled my throat like a shallow pool, the raindrops rippling its surface. I woke at seven with my alarm, and the sound of Babygirl slamming the bathroom door. 

Dead tired, my eyes dragging down onto the counter tops, I stood hunched over the kettle, fussing to make a tea. Low vibrations flowed over me, unsteadying my balance. I covered my ears to make them stop and closed my eyes, breathing slowly. It was only when I lowered my hands that I heard Babygirl saying my name.  

‘Aunty… Aunty.’ 

She was pressed flat against a wall in the corridor, opposite the bathroom. She was bare legged, holding her school skirt in her hands, her little chest rising and falling with shallow, panicked breaths. Her inner thighs and knickers were stained brownish red. I ran to her, grabbing her shoulders, holding the weight of her into my body. 

 ‘Fuck fuck fuck. It’s fine. It’s just your period. Come with me, we’ll run the shower and…’ 

‘Let me go.’ 

‘Honestly it’s fine. We can just shower you down and I can get you the sani pads we bought…’ 

‘Let me go!’ 

I dropped her arms. She looked at me, hollow and misplaced, and gently lifted off the ground. Her body rose further; she managed to get a few inches up into the air before I snapped back into action and dragged her down to earth. The pressure of her body lifting up against my hands was as strong as a loaded spring. I shoved her against the wall and held her in place with my knee. I slapped her cheek, just enough to bring her back to me.  

‘Babygirl. You’re here. You’re here. You’re here.’ 

She rejoined me, her brown eyes seeing mine as if for the first time. 

‘Where am I, Aunty Babe?’ she said, resting her head on my shoulder. 

‘You are here. You’re laying against my body. You’re holding my hands. Feel them, feel them squeezing yours. You can feel them because you are here.’ 

‘I’m here.’ 

‘You’re here. You’re with me. Say it again.’ 

‘I’m here.’ 

The journey had drained her. She melted into me as I pressed one hand against the wall, letting us move slowly together, down onto the floor. She lifted her head and turned to face to the slim sliver of a window in the bathroom. She pointed a finger and smiled.  

The sky outside was blue, clear blue.