I Hope You Love Birds Too - Pt. 3
When night is almost done,
And sunrise grows so near
That we can touch the spaces,
It ’s time to smooth the hair
Naomi begins to feel like herself again in the subsequent weeks, it doesn’t seem to matter that it’s only around Effy, because it’s something she now has for herself, and doesn’t instantly associate with Emily. Effy takes her places, nowhere important, just sometimes drags her to the park for a bottle of vodka or out to a club where no-one knows their names - It’s in the anonymity of these sticky carpeted bolt holes that Naomi laughs for the first time since Emily died, and it’s strange and unguarded that she laughs and she is hit with the guilt almost instantaneously; she swallows the laugh uncomfortably, but Effy just says something else that sets her off as they stumble outside in near hysterics grasping for a cigarette.
‘Got a light?’ Effy mumbles, patting herself down, which seems a bit pointless really, considering she’s not wearing much of anything, and there doesn’t seem to be any place for her to keep a lighter to begin with.
‘Yeah, but it’ll cost you,’ Naomi says with a slight smirk.
‘I’m not going to fuck you again,’ Effy says with a straight face which just sets Naomi off laughing. Effy sees her first, chokes uncomfortably on a mixture of hastily inhaled smoke and an interrupted laugh. Naomi turns to see what’s going on and ends up face to face with Katie who is staring at her blankly with drunken doll-eyes that are far too glassy to be real.
‘Katie…’ Naomi begins, and watches as Katie walks away. She doesn’t follow her this time, because she knows exactly what will happen when she catches up.
‘What was that..?’
‘Don’t,’ Naomi says quietly.
----
It takes a while before she feels ready enough to go to the lake again, it’s like she knows what’s waiting for her; there’s no way for her to even gauge what it will be like, but she knows it’s going to be something terrible. She puts it off until she can’t anymore, and cycles down on the Saturday after she finishes her coursework.
Katie has been waiting for her, that much is evident in the shaking twitchy way she is already in some vague state of readiness, standing and shifting from one foot to the other. She charges forward, grabs Naomi by the collar and smashes her into a tree; Naomi does nothing to stop her, lets her - in some far-off pretence of charity.
‘You’re Emily’s!’ She shouts, and it takes Naomi a moment to understand what she’s even talking about. ‘You’re Emily’s girlfriend, and you don’t fuck other people yeah? You don’t fuck other people, and you certainly don’t fuck Effy Stonem...Right?’ She says desperately and she’s shaking, pushing Naomi into the tree with one well-placed hand that’s trembling from the strain.
‘Right,’ Naomi mumbles quietly, and when Katie turns her back opens her mouth again without thinking. ‘Does that include you?’ She thinks it will end like it did last time, with a bruising kiss; she’s wrong - Katie swings her fist recklessly and messily collides with Naomi’s eye. She falls to the ground gracelessly in surprise, and clutches at her face. Her eye waters involuntarily and she’s a little relieved to find that she has tears still left to cry. She does the simplest thing she knows how to and runs, runs until her lungs hurt and waits for the pain to pass in a ditch by the side of the lane.
‘You’ve been fighting,’ Gina says with some horror, as Naomi comes through the door, and she reaches to touch Naomi’s rapidly aggressive bruise.
‘Fuck off, mum!’ Naomi yells and goes straight to bed and waits for it to get dark - Hopes that all this thinking might actually get her somewhere, other than some place where she finds she misses Emily in yet another tiny, unknown way.
----
When she gets home from college the next day, the trap has already been set; they’re waiting at the kitchen table for her, and it feels far too much like an intervention even though it’s only her mum an Kieran, who is clearly only there to make up the numbers on her mum’s side; he’s only there to outnumber her.
‘We thought these might help,’ Gina says, pushes a paper bag with a big green cross on the side over the table. Naomi opens it, because it feels like a role she should play.
‘We?' Naomi laughs in a way that's devoid of any amusement, 'You as well?’ she mutters biting a nail and glaring at Kieran, she’s only a little bit shocked he would willingly partake in this ambush, but it bothers her. ‘What the fuck is this?’ She says, picking up the bag and opening a box. She looks at the little coloured pills in their rattling tin foil casing.
‘Sometimes, during grief, your body can get a bit mixed up, and your...’
‘Christ mum, I’m not fucking five, I know what they are - I’m just curious why you’re giving them to me...’ Naomi folds her arms, lets the paper bag hang limply from her finger tips.
‘You’ve lost someone, it’s okay to get help.’
‘I’m not going to find her again; she’s not missing, Mum - She’s dead, as in, not coming back any time soon. I get it - I know what it means.’
‘It’s not the semantics I’m worried about, love,’ Gina offers quietly.
‘Whatever,’ Naomi says and it manages to come out sounding half-way defiant as she turns slowly and climbs the stairs to her room. She spends the rest of the evening reading the flimsy instructions and side-effects by the light and white noise of her TV. She wonders how her mother even got the pills in the first place, it probably wasn’t legal, and was almost certainly sneaky in some way which hurt her for some reason, stabs her gut like betrayal. She palms a mixture of them and swallows them with some stale water by the bed and waits for sleep.
She goes back.
It’s the unpredictability of it all that lures her in, knowing that she doesn’t have a clue how Katie is going to be with her, whether she’ll be wild and angry and barely human, or soft and unguarded, whether she’ll cry - It’s such a leap from the routine of her post-Emily life where she knows exactly what pitying glance her mother will give her when she comes down for breakfast, or just exactly what it is those girls in the corridor are whispering about her behind their hands.
Naomi drops a bottle of vodka into the soft dirt with a thud beside Katie, and sits down so they can both look at the lake together.
‘I’m sorry,’ Naomi says. Katie turns to look at her, but Naomi won’t meet her eyes because all of this still feels so dangerous and desperately uncertain. She doesn’t want Katie to know that she’s lying, that she’s not at all sorry she fucked Effy, that she’s not going to apologise for the only thing that didn’t make her feel terrible since all of this started; she doesn’t want Katie to know that she’s lying, except that she’s not -and that’s worse somehow.
‘For what?’ Katie says, continuing her stare.
‘For a lot of things,’ Naomi answers, honestly. It’s the right answer, if such a thing exists, and Katie goes back to looking at the lake. Naomi offers Katie a cigarette which she takes dutifully and Naomi watches her smoke it, sighing between each drag and occasionally closing her eyes for curiously long periods of time.
‘I haven’t slept.’
‘Since when?’ Naomi asks, remembering to smoke her own cigarette.
‘Since it happened.’ Naomi knows a hundred scientific reasons why that can’t possibly be true, but looking at Katie - she’s never had more reason to doubt what she knows.
‘Have they tried to give you anything yet?’ Naomi asks tentatively; this could all go so horribly wrong, so very quickly. Katie digs into her pocket and throws a plastic and tinfoil pocket at Naomi’s feet that’s not dissimilar to the one she has in her bag.
‘Dad took me to the doctors; hasn’t helped,’ Katie mumbles, and it’s shocking just how stringent she’s become with her words.
‘These work - At least for me, anyway,’ Naomi says and throws her packet at Katie’s feet in turn. They sit there until the sun goes down, in complete silence.
‘Katie, it’s...it’s getting dark,’ Naomi says standing up and looking at Katie, who won’t face her any more.
‘I’m not making you stay,’ Katie says and frowns in the direction of the lake.
‘Fine,’ Naomi says blankly, and leaves - She can’t get anything from Katie she’s not willing to give.
----
Katie’s in the same spot when Naomi returns the next day, she feels a little silly for hoping she would be there - It seems like such a pointless thing to hope for. The vodka bottle’s empty and the pills have moved.
‘Katie?’ Naomi says, and approaches slowly, and she’s filled with a sudden and urgent sense of dread; a definite feeling of doom.
‘Katie!’ she shouts again, moving quicker until she’s running and she drops her bag at Katie’s side and bends down. ‘Fuck,’ she mutters and slaps Katie’s face hard. Nothing.
Time turns elastic.
Naomi reaches in her bag and babbles instructions into the mouth piece and though she hates to do it, leaves Katie’s side to wait for the ambulance. She can hear the words come out of her mouth but they don’t feel like hers, it doesn’t sound like her voice as she tells them what she’s taken and they tell her to calm down, tell her everything is going to be alright.
Her eyes hurt terribly in the ambulance, she can’t watch them as they force Katie to swallow something and Katie keeps making this horrible gagging sound which Naomi is certain she’s never going to forget for as long as she lives.
She lies, tells the doctor she’s Katie’s sister, waits for them behind a curtain to fix whatever’s wrong. It’s unbearable, in a way that the word has never bore meaning of until now, and Naomi waits to the sound of her own heartbeat deafening in her ears. She hears the words “Too late,” and is sick into the wastepaper basket. The doctor pats her on the shoulder silently and she looks up, wipes her mouth on her sleeve.
‘We’re too late to pump her stomach, but she seems to have got most of it out herself, and she's responding well to the course of drugs we’ve given her - She’ll have to stay overnight,’ he says in a calm voice that Naomi would like to know whether it’s fake, or perfected through years of bad news.
‘But she’ll be okay right?’ Naomi says blankly. The doctor nods sombrely and walks away leaving her there to cope. She sits next to Katie on the rubbery plastic chair and waits; she waits numbly for her brain to reactivate, to tell her what to feel. The nothingness gives way to rage and she clenches her fists dumbly, digs the nails into her palm until she can’t bear it - then presses a little more.
She’s never hated Katie more than she does at this moment, pure white rage is going through her so violently she can feel it burning her veins. Katie doesn’t get to do this; she just doesn’t get to do something so stupid and expect Naomi to cope - it’s now how things work, and Naomi’s through with coping with things. She wants to fucking hurt her, to smash her face off the metal headboard, she wants to scream, but she does nothing, not a fucking thing, just sits there shaking.
Katie makes a noise, and Naomi gets the nurse - she’s waking up, in tiny jilted steps it seems, and she opens her eyes for a little bit and stares at Naomi. Katie tries to say something but Naomi doesn’t understand her, leaves her to the doctors to check over while she goes and picks up her prescription - It’s light outside when she walks down the corridor; it doesn’t register.
Katie doesn’t say anything; at least not to her but when Naomi returns Katie’s got two pamphlets about dealing with overdose in her hands and Naomi says nothing - they wait by the main entrance after reception calls them a taxi.
‘I can’t...’
‘I know,’ Naomi says, and directs the taxi to her own address. ‘First on the left,’ she says to Katie who goes upstairs silently while Naomi takes off her shoes. By the time she’s upstairs Katie’s asleep on Emily’s side of the bed, like she knew somehow- The nurse warned her Katie would be tired, and sick, and confused; Naomi feels the same.
Naomi can’t sleep, lays on her side and waits for Katie to wake up. She reaches over to touch Katie’s back, to check if she’s breathing - It reminds her of too much, overwhelms her so completely that she passes out, her hand still in place.
----
Katie wakes her up, stirring in the afternoon sun. Naomi feels exhausted, like she'll never get enough sleep no matter how hard she tries. Katie's distinctly not comatose any more, and Naomi gets up, tries to keep her mind busy; a skill she's recently been honing. Naomi goes downstairs because she's still not sure she'll be able to restrain herself from at least slapping Katie if she so much as opens her mouth.
'Who's up there?' Gina asks, nodding directly upwards where Naomi's room is.
'No one,' Naomi says, because explanations can only hurt things here.
'Naomi, even if you don't want to take your pills, would you at least...' she sighs, to herself mostly, 'Could you just talk to someone?'
'What's the point?' she says, clicking the kettle on, and dropping some bread into the toaster. 'Have we got any butter?' Gina nods toward the fridge and Naomi jabs the knife into it visciously, and it stands out of the tub looking accusatory. Naomi stares at her mum, really stares at her, lets her know something; anything that suggests she's not going to just roll over. Gina tears up.
'Naomes,' she says quietly, reaching her hand across the table.
'Don't. Don't call me that,' Naomi says through gritted teeth and turns around to see to the tea and toast, but mostly because she just can't stand looking at her mother who has started to make sobbing noises.
Katie opens her eyes when Naomi re-enters the room, they follow Naomi across the room slowly, they look odd, Naomi notes; different, not quite real.
'Fuck,' is all Katie says, and it seems so terribly appropriate that Naomi doesn't bother to press her for any more. Naomi sips her tea and glances at Katie who is squinting into the light and slowly sitting up. 'I feel like shit.'
'Right,' Naomi sighs and refuses to look at her any longer on some kind of principle.
'I'm, fuck...I need to, I'm fucking...'
'Toast's getting cold,' Naomi says and nods toward the plate on the bedside table. Katie looks angry, like she's about to shout, or throw the plate or something, but she sighs and looks away instead. Naomi is shaking, but she's determined to not let Katie know she's won, she's beaten her, she's left her so fucking defeated that the only thing left to do is leave. She runs Katie a bath and leaves a towel by the door.
'Bath's done - Take whatever you want from the wardrobe, I probably don't have anything you'll like...'
'Yeah. Right,' she says cautiously and tucks some stray hair behind her ear. It makes Naomi feel sick to look at her, and she winces. Katie leaves and Naomi puts on the TV loudly to distract her from wherever her thoughts are threatening to lead. She returns dressed in a funny mixture of Naomi's clothes that Naomi notes looks abstractly good on her, before frowning at her severely.
'Look, Naomi...I didn't fucking mean too,' Katie begins but Naomi cuts her off by holding a hand in the air.
'Don't. Just fucking don't -You could have died Katie!' She says weakly, her voice trembling and her eyes stinging impossibly.
'I didn't mean to!' Katie insists, and Naomi sighs at her.
'I would have had to call your mum, and I would have had to tell her what you'd done...'
'I didn't fucking do anything! I was just tired...' Katie trails off weakly, tears of frustration in her eyes threatening to spill.
'You ever do anything like that again and I'll fucking kill you myself,' Naomi snaps. 'Just go.'
'But...'
'Just fucking go! I don't want to see you ever a-fucking-gain got it?' Naomi yells as loud as she can, as she clears the top off her drawers off in one sweep of the hand and everything falls to the floor and shatters at their feet. Katie shoves past her and lets herself out, and Naomi watches Katie leave out of the window, rubbing furiously at her eyes as she jogs down the street - Naomi lays back on her bed and does nothing. Thinks of all the things that could have happened if she hadn't been so fucking fortunate this time - It would all have been her fault, and she can't hold that weight on her shoulders any more.
'Mum,' she says quietly, knocking on the living room door like she's a guest or something.
'Yes sweetheart?' Gina says, whipping her head round far too fast to conceal all that bare hope that's written on her face.
'I think maybe if I could talk to someone, that might...It might make things a bit easier,' Naomi says and fiddles with the hem of her top. Gina smiles meekly and nods.
'Okay, I'll make you an appointment,' she says and returns to her book.
'If they want to talk about Daddy issues I'm out the fucking door right?' Gina nods and laughs and returns to her book. 'Mum?' Naomi asks tentatively after a long pause in which her mother doesn't turn the page and Naomi doesn't move from the door way.
'Yeah?'
'Thanks.'
----
'There's a girl on our porch,' Gina says a few days later, and Naomi looks through the glass and sees Katie's huddled form on the front steps and excuses herself to go outside. She makes a point of slamming the door so Katie turns round.
'I thought I told you to never come back,' Naomi says with a slight smirk, drawing a packet of cigarettes from her pocket and handing one to Katie before plucking one for herself and putting it between her lips.
'You were mad. I didn't think you meant it,' she says lighting it.
'I didn't - Emil...' She stops, unable to say the last syllable. 'She was never very good at figuring out what I meant or not.'
'She wasn't very good at loads of things; shock fucking horror,' Katie says bitterly and turns back into the wind. 'I brought your clothes back.'
'Oh, thanks,' Naomi mutters.
'I was just so tired,' Katie says and yawns on cue, it takes Naomi a moment to understand what she's actually saying but reaches out and touches Katie's shoulder.
'I believe you, right? It was just...you were passed out in your own sick Katie, I thought you'd had it, and all I could think was how fucking mad at you I was, how much I wanted to beat the fucking shit out of you for being such a selfish cunt.'
'Now?' Katie says looking slightly intrigued.
'Don't get me wrong, I still want to like, fucking, slap you around a bit...' Naomi dares to show a slight smirk, and almost chokes on a cloud of smoke when it's returned.
'Fucking mutual,' Katie adds.
'I'm not going back there, to that fucking lake again...' Naomi says before stubbing her fag out into a plant pot.
'Right,' she nods, and Naomi watches her for a long moment, the way she's just thinking. 'Just because Emily died doesn't mean you owe me anything,' Katie says, standing up and brushing herself off, there's a little bit of colour in her cheeks and Naomi feels an uncertain rush of relief.
'Fuck off then,' Naomi says, in semi-defiance. Katie's smirk is so close to a smile that Naomi won't allow herself to forget it.
----
Therapy is easy. Naomi figures out what she should and shouldn't say very early on, (tells her therapist about Emily, and her “friend” Katie, because there's no word in the English language to describe that yet so she leaves out almost all of it,) and she feels some kind of sense of accomplishment when she walks out of the office - She wouldn't say it went well by any stretch, but it was better than expected; it's something she can handle at the very least. She goes straight to bed when she gets in, mostly to avoid any smug glances off her mother. A ridiculous clanging wakes her up in the middle of the night; she checks the window and it's Katie, teetering uneasily on her feet downstairs.
'It's open,' Naomi says in the loudest, most futile whisper and turns her back on the window. Katie collides with her almost immediately, staggers across the room and lands on the bed on top of Naomi.
'Katie, what?' Naomi begins but is silenced by a kiss she's not sure how to stop, and instead her hands instinctively travel up Katie's side and pull her closer, and inexplicably she hates herself less for it this time . It's changed, morphed into something else as they exchange biting kisses lit by the street-light outside.
'Help me fucking...ugh!' She grunts and tugs at the zip on her dress. 'Get this thing off...' And Naomi yanks once on the zip and it slides down, and Katie's naked far too quickly, and Naomi holds her tightly, skin on skin; doesn't have a clue what's going to happen next. Katie takes initiative, grabs Naomi's hand and shoves it forcefully between her legs and Naomi shudders involuntarily. Naomi shakes her head repeatedly, wills this to be anything apart from exactly what it is.
'Katie, you're...fuck,' she mutters when Katie knees her between the legs harder than necessary. 'Katie you're drunk.'
'So?' she says defiantly and carries on kissing her, ordering Naomi's hands where she needs them. Naomi resists, her hands wrestling with Katie's until Katie whimpers 'Please...' and Naomi doesn't know how to say no. It's on her terms this time, and she's not sure what that means, not sure that she wants to; she dictates the slower pace, and the steady force of her fingers and she's being so fucking deliberate in kissing her, and Katie reciprocates in allowing herself to be kissed, tangling her hands into Naomi's hair and pulling her closer. Naomi does her best with the weird angle Katie won't allow herself to be moved from, and holds Katie's hip firmly in her left hand and fucks her unrelentingly with her right, it takes a little longer, but then the angle becomes apparent and Naomi's palm inadvertently brings Katie off and she chokes, pushes their foreheads together, scrunches up her face as she crushes their mouths together before collapsing on top of her.
Katie starts crying almost immediately, and Naomi does nothing, feels utterly useless until Katie sobs herself to sleep on her tits; Naomi makes no effort to move, just soundlessly lists the things she can never tell her therapist.