fic: Undertow (True Love: Holly / Karen)
Title: Undertow
Author: noclueontheloo
Fandom: True Love, Holly/Karen
Word Count: 3835
A/N: I doubt anyone would read this who hasn't watched the BBC series True Love, but just in case, this makes reference to events from episodes 3 and 5, with a whole lot of supposition thrown in, natch.
Summary: Holly tries to imagine beyond the now of tangled sheets and whispered declarations, but she can't escape Karen and this tiny world they have inadvertently created.
I just want you to know
that I love you so.
It's stupid and sappy and makes Holly roll her eyes and smile simultaneously. It's a cheeky reprimand from Karen; Holly had made some off-hand comment about teenagers in love always behaving like they'd discovered a depth of feeling previously uncharted, how they ended up the clichés they so aggressively derided, fighting in the corridors, kissing by the lockers and always with terrible terrible poetry.
"I dunno," Karen had breathed into her side, disturbing the fine little hairs on her arm, "Sounds nice."
Holly bit her lip, head dipping to kiss perfect freckles, "This is nicer."
"Yeah."
"Mm. Just don't go leaving me notes on my desk," she'd teased.
She reaches for the milk carton, post-it still attached, and her breath hitches ever so slightly. There' still something loaded behind the joke.
She's different. We're different...
That ability that teenagers have to love so quickly, so wantonly, so desperately in need of validation.
While the kettle boils she fingers the yellow paper, tracing the biro scrawl, breathes in and then shakily exhales as beside her the steam rises to a bubbling crescendo. She quickly crumples it into her fist, pauses for two heartbeats before tossing it with feigned nonchalance at the swing bin. She tells herself this is not a betrayal.
* * * * *
It's Friday and the streetlights are twinkling across the water. Karen sits by the window and paints her toenails Petal Pink, one skinny leg bent up along the narrow sill, her heel thudding as she shifts for position.
Before Holly, this would have been the start of a night out with Lorraine. A pre-cursor to a predictable evening, first the bus-stop, trying the newsagent just off Millmead, before darkness truly fell and all sorts of trouble kicked off. Still, it was easy to get served there, and they'd neck half a bottle of Archers between them, or sometimes some really rough voddy when they were particularly skint. Which Karen was, most of the time. After that, it was the bus into town, into hell and standing around waiting for Lorraine to cop off with some bloke she'd coerced into buying them shots or cider or whatever she could worm out of him. And while he was at the bar, they'd pretend they weren't freezing their arses off , shamefully lurking on the abandoned benches in the beer garden, as the collapsed umbrella rolled around the concrete and Karen cupped her hands around Lorraine's barely lit cigarette. These nights were always pretty terrible for Karen, but even Lorraine had her limits and when the weather had battered them enough she'd shake her head in disgust and suggest they might as well, "piss off home."
It was the other, warmer, busier nights that took their toll. The nights when the pub was just crowded enough for them to snag a table without catching the landlord's eye. Lorraine would start to make friends with anything with a wallet and a days worth of stubble. This meant that Karen had to form some semblance of interest in her surroundings. So she chatted and smiled sweetly and sometimes gave her real name and sometimes not, depending on what game they were playing that evening.
"You're my sister, right. My shy, older, no- no, younger, sister. Right?"
"What? Right, whatever. That makes no sense."
"What?" Lorraine had a propensity to get carried away after a couple of drinks and when her shouting began to attract the sniggers of a nearby table Karen would shrug and just go along with it. These games Lorraine imagined were like the whole night, without purpose.
But still, going along with it was easier than not going along with it. Or at least, less lonely. She could be sitting at home, watching some shitty reality show and eating cereal from the box, but that was just her talisman of comfort while she was surrounded by the clamour of the pushing, cackling bodies. The reality would have been a stale emptiness stretching out before her, with only a dying sunset and glowing screen for company. So Karen stayed.
She stayed and pretended, with varying degrees of success, to show an interest in the half-men half-boys that invited themselves to the table, that offered battered packets of B&H and lurid sex stories, as a means to impress. There'd been Liam or Luke or Darren or Gary, he'd bought her a lager top and she'd laughed at some semi-funny joke of his, and he'd taken that as invitation to slide his hand up her thigh, fleshy fingers diving under her skirt with no hint of an apology, so quick and so brazen, sitting there, wedged in elbow to elbow at their wobbly little table, that Karen had jerked violently away, upset her own glass as the ice skittered across the wood and he'd shamefacedly turned towards his beer.
The violence of her own distaste had come as a shock to Karen. Lorraine had evidently seen everything, or all she needed to, had hissed in Karen's ear, "What the fuck's wrong with you?"
Karen finishes her right foot, leans forward and delicately blows against the sticky polish as she twists the applicator back into place.
Holly's reading a review of something although she hasn't taken in more than the first paragraph in the last half an hour.
"You like?" asks Karen.
"Very pretty," she affirms, looking up from the magazine, a proper look as opposed to the sneaking glances she's been taking ever since sitting down.
Karen gives a small satisfied smile at her handiwork and Holly abandons the pretence entirely. Because here's this girl, sixteen years old on a Friday night, who's looking for all the world like she's readying herself for something. Something more than tea and telly in a flat in Palm Bay with her thirty year old teacher.
Karen pads gingerly across the carpet, her toes splayed to avoid a smearing disaster. She nudges her way onto the two-seater and picks up the magazine from Karen's lap, frowns and then grins, the title's reference to Sudanese basket-making giving Holly away.
"You so weren't reading that," she chides.
"It's very interesting, actually," Holly deadpans, sliding the magazine back across her legs.
Karen laughs, but it transforms into a sigh and the sigh turns into something else as she collapses into Holly's shoulder, eyelashes fluttering closed, something less like sighing and more like melting, like swooning.
* * * * *
Holly's father had died the year she graduated. He'd been a cheerfully gruff sort of man, ex-army with a fondness for scotch whiskey and an unquenchable need to walk three miles a day whatever the weather.
He'd loved his daughter in the only way he knew how, because she was a pretty and delicate little thing and pretty and delicate little things needed to be admired from a distance, cajoled into growing, hardy and strong. Loving up close was dangerous, it led to smothering; he would have crushed her to death with his love.
So when she'd limped through the front door the first time she'd failed her driving test, after God knows how many reminders of "mirror, signal, manoeuvre" and three point turns in heavy traffic - "they really don't expect you to do it on roads like this, Dad, they pick somewhere quiet and, well, wider" - "just watch the road my girl, if you can do it in this, your test will be an absolute doddle" - when she'd told him with shuddering shoulders that she hadn't made the grade, he'd barely raised an eyebrow beyond, "Buck up, Hols, go book yourself another then. What was it, the parallel park? Women always struggle with the parallel park."
And when she'd cautiously raised the topic of changing her degree, going so far as to hint at dropping out altogether, going back to Fine Art like she'd originally intended, there was no stony silence or attempted reasoning. "You bloody well won't," had been his only response, although Holly did note with some satisfaction that upon returning to The Times' Business section, he failed to turn it the right way up.
He'd been straight down the line with her, there were no grey areas, no "messes" as he called them, "Just don't get yourself into any messes, Hols, that's all you need to know." She reminded him of this advice the day he revealed his prostate cancer. It had been the last time she'd made him smile.
When her mother had revealed eleven months after his death, on a windswept Easter morning that in fact this same man of impeccable character and steadfast honour had been carrying on with his mistress for the last 18 years, Holly's revulsion had manifested itself as a splatter of vomit into her mother's floral handkerchief. What surprised her wasn't her mother's apparent nonchalance at the affair, the two had never seemed particularly fond of each other beyond that familiarity couples get after half a lifetime in each others company, but how so quickly her memory of him, the half-smirking, hard drinking colonel, had faded. It was replaced with something that she couldn't reconcile with the man she'd lived with, a being with secrets and duplicity and motives she could not understand. Everyday she thought of him for seconds at a time, this unknown ghost of a man, and everyday the anger knotted inside her, twisting tighter and tighter until it broke apart and left her with an emptiness even more unbearable than the anguish.
Holly's mother liked to attribute this revelation to her daughter's disastrous dating record. Holly once suggested that since her father's passing, her mother had far too much time on her hands to watch pop psychology metered out by chat show hosts and faded soap actresses. After that they stopped talking about him.
* * * * *
Holly has homework to mark, thirty-five 900 word essays to be precise, and Karen has a father and a chicken tikka masala waiting for her at home.
Karen leaves without fuss, a small smile and nod of acknowledgement, promises to meet the following afternoon away from prying eyes.
Karen never asks Holly about her marks or for help with her work, one of the few rules that hangs unspoken between them. She doesn't need to, she's the best student in the class, but Holly still hovers between giving her the 17 that guarantees her the top mark or letting that distinction fall to another.
And in that moment of indecision she's flooded with pre-emptive doubt: Will they check? Will it matter? Does it look....? It's a line of questioning with certain assumptions behind it, ones that she hasn't dared to make until now, one's that she refuses to consciously dwell on for too long.
She carefully presses down a firm red "16" into the margin, swigs from the mug beside her and shuts her eyes. Karen's conclusion was better than Lorraine's.
She re-reads it and quickly alters the 16 to an 18. Looking at it, she almost can't tell it was every anything else.
* * * * *
On the couch, crushed up together on the two-seater, half-draped across her lap, Karen asks, "Can I stay here tonight?"
This is unusual because it's Wednesday and Karen's father is usually home after doing night runs to the airport. Short drives to Kent International, sometimes he gets lucky and can squeeze in five or six. Sometimes he gets a young couple heading to Southened on a cheap package deal to Malaga or Alicante. But though the meter eats up the miles, they're never as lucrative as the numerous shorter runs. And no one in Southend ever wants a taxi back to Margate.
So Holly's caught off guard by the request, asks "What about your Dad? Won't he miss you?"
Karen shuffles her shoulders and looks down, "He's got some girl coming over that he met online."
"Oh."
Karen's righted herself now, avoids Holly's gaze and starts studiously picking at her nails.
It's not a complete rebuttal, but Holly's aware of the change, a thousand million tiny particles displaced in the air, frantically searching for a new arrangement to settle into.
She ventures, "Well, that - that's nice for him, isn't it?" and Karen just clicks her tongue and shifts onto her other hip, angling her body away.
Holly waits. Her mouth is drying up like cotton wool and her nerve endings start to hum against her skin. She's beseeching with her trailing fingertips, tracing loose patterns across Karen's shoulder.
Karen refuses to ghost a smile, her mouth remains a hardened line as she takes the cushion beside her, picks at some loose threads.
"What is it?" Holly asks, and her nails graze against the cheap cotton of Karen's school shirt. "Don't you want him to be happy?"
"Yeah," Karen murmurs, but with an inkling of defiance in that single word. Because it's her Dad and this is something Holly's adultness does not automatically entitle her to take propriety over. Only Karen gets a say in her Dad and how he should be.
"She's not even from here. He's shipping her over from Hong Kong. I mean, how desperate is that?" And finally her blue eyes flicker up, impossibly translucent and searching.
Holly offers a watery smile in return. She shouldn't speak. Speaking now is dangerous. Speaking now could cause the unravelling of everything she's been suppressing since they'd crossed that treacherous line.
But it unnerves her too much, how casually Karen can slight her father, how she doesn't even recognise what she's doing.
"You know, maybe your Dad's just lonely, Karen..." and her voice peters out before she's managed to finish the sentence.
"Yeah well, it's just," Karen shakes her head, resettles herself, crossing her arms over Holly's leg, "It's just sad."
And as quickly as the rebuke comes, her fingers contract around Holly's knee, nails scratching against stretched denim. Her eyes are wide and her pink mouth hangs open, startled into a perfect O.
"I'm not saying..." she stutters," It's nothing like us. You and me."
Holly quirks her lips into a tight smile, stills her heart and says nothing.
* * * * *
At night when they're lying together beneath a cool sky with a sea breeze sifting between the curtains, Holly tries to visualise the future, but all that comes up is the past. Laughing as a child, graduating to the big swings in the park, her feet dangling miles above the tarmac - grass - sky - grass - tarmac again. And then the past of yesterday, breakfast and a kiss pressed to her naked collarbone.
Holly tries to imagine beyond the now of tangled sheets and whispered declarations, but she can't escape Karen and this tiny world they have inadvertently created. The bed, the sheets, the kitchen cupboards, books no longer flush with the shelf, a gossip magazine protruding like a lost tourist among her collection of Tate Etc, a school tie wrapped around the chair leg in her room, a plastic hairband teetering on the edge of the bathroom basin. Everywhere she looks, everything has become suffused with Karen, with her very essence.
And there are nights, usually when she's alone, when Holly remains awake and overcome with love.
Karen is all thin arms and legs, sharp elbows and an impossibly soft mouth that seems to know, had leant so awfully quickly, just what to do; such a clever girl.
The questions that need to be asked remain half-formed in Holly's head, lingering long enough to unsettle her. The what of their doing, not even the how or the why, but the actual mechanics of this relationship - and really just calling it that is enough to make her body tremble and her heart flutter and her feet scrunch up with delight and terror - the logistics of what will makes this work or fail, start gnawing inside her.
We can't just lie like this forever.
Why can't we? Why, when it's so warm and so good...
Because Karen needs the chance to experience more, everything...because....
We should go somewhere... Get out again...
Maybe the cinema? We could drive down to Ramsgate, unknowns for the evening, get lost in the darkness... We could... we should do this...
* * * * *
Her eyes flick restlessly along the platform - the warning shrieks at her in flecked white paint, stamped inches from the edge of safety: MIND THE GAP.
Out in the open like this, with the rain heckling the station roof, Holly cannot pick apart Karen in the crowd.
She was just a girl, one of a hundred girls, girls with pink wheelie suitcases and overloaded holdalls, girls with rucksacks and satchels and more wheelie suitcases, all refusing to stand still for longer than thirty seconds without checking their phones or fiddling with their ipods.
Holly jumps when Karen touches her shoulder, she'd been hypnotised by the rain, which had now formed a dynamic wall of water between them and the neighbouring platform.
"Isn't it funny," she says to Karen. "All these people here. All just to say hello or goodbye."
"What about the people actually leaving?"
"Well, that would be goodbye."
"I dunno," Karen murmurs as she rummages around her coat pocket, checks her phone for any possible change in the last ten minutes since she'd looked at it. "Goodbye is what you say when you're going to miss something."
"Are you saying there's nothing here worth missing?"
Karen sucks in her lower lip and shrugs. She'd been doing that a lot this morning.
"Really? Nothing?"
"What's to miss?" Karen replies, blue eyes sparkling from tiny droplets still clinging to dark lashes. "This place is a dump."
Holly sighs, trails her fingers along a cool damp cheek. "How about big skies and beaches? Running in the rain, that sort of thing?"
Karen fights the smile tugging at her lips, "You were cursing the rain less than an hour ago."
"Well, running in it's one thing, sitting on a train for three hours with soggy knickers is quite another. Remind me again, why I'm not driving?"
"Because, you sold your car."
"Mm. I was referring to why I was car-less."
Holly lets Karen pull her inwards, gripping both sides of her jacket and taking a miniscule step forward into that invisible ring of space, the space reserved for the confessions and secrets and violence and intimacy.
"You needed the money."
"That's right."
"And this way is better. More romantic."
"I never said that," Holly narrows her eyes as Karen presses their foreheads together.
"No, I'm saying it now."
The station announcement crackles out the train's imminent arrival in a static haze barely audible over the downpour, reminds them to take all personal items with them, not to leave baggage unattended at any time.
Karen looks desperately to Holly and squeezes her fingers too tight.
"Don't be scared," soothes Holly.
"I'm not, it's just-"
"I could wave a handkerchief from the window. Would that help?"
And now Karen is crying, but it's a mixture of rain and tears and it's impossible to tell one from the other against her thin white face.
"Don't be like this," she husks out.
"Like what?"
"Like you're saying goodbye."
"Don't you want me to miss you?"
"No. I want you to call me. I want you to call me the minute you get there. And everyday after that. And then I want you to come and get me. Okay?"
"Of course. Darling, of course I will." And Holly doesn't even hesitate in kissing Karen's lips and pulling her head into her shoulder, nails clicking against that slender neck while her handbag thumps against her back.
Karen screws her eyes shut and breathes in Holly, but all she gets is the muggy air, the neutral scent of a pressured sky and the faint waxiness of her Barbour jacket.
If Holly hadn't used so many words, had only said yes, had not the need for emphasis they would have been all right. There were too many words for Karen, too much reassurance. Things should be simple between them. Why couldn't it all just stay simple; After all, it was only love.
"Here we go, then. What is it?"
"I dunno, nothing."
"I'll call. Promise."
"It just, it feels like an ending."
"Nothing's ending, Karen," Holly whispers, juggling the straps of her bag with Karen's fingers, trying to keep hold of everything all at once.
"But you're leaving. And I'm still here. And summer's nearly over. Our big summer of love, Holly. "
Holly's half smiling because anything else is too much to get into right now. The future was rushing up to meet her with every click-clack of the approaching engine.
"So, is this on towards the Winter of Discontent."
Karen squeezes out a final tear and shakes her head, "What's that from?"
"From? It's not - it's, I mean it's referring to '79. You know, when the trade unions went on strike and it was the coldest winter on record and the country was just a mess."
"Great," sniffs Karen. "See, I don't even get what you mean, anymore."
"That's because they don't teach enough social history these days."
Karen is about to tell Holly that they didn't really teach enough of anything these days, but the loudspeaker breaks in again to announce the arrival of the 12.17. Holly watches its approaching headlamp shimmering down the line.
They meet in a frantic tangle of arms and baggage and bedraggled hair, Holly's sticking to Karen's cheek, Karen's slicked back against her scalp, eyes screwed shut, fingers knotted together around Holly's neck.
And then the carriage doors are sliding open and Holly's fighting with the little wheels on her suitcase, forever leading her in the opposite direction.
She promises to call, she promises to start working as soon as possible. She says, "Love you," as the doors slide shut between them and Karen only hears the missing "I".
She watches as Holly struggles down the aisle, darkened, separated Holly, Holly through tinted scratched glass. She shadows Holly down the platform until she's settled in a seat by the window. She waves a forlorn hand and Holly raises her own and cups it against the pane.
The whistle sounds and Karen stands there, not minding the gap, staring at the grey glass, peering through it so that she can see her own reflection alongside Holly. And then it's sliding to Karen and an elderly man, spooning something carefully into his mouth, and then Karen and a boy in a baseball cap, cheek scrunched up against his fist and then, faster to Karen and a woman, a woman that isn't Holly, Karen and a blurry child, Karen and another boy, Karen on her own... and then nothing...
In the wake, a flattened coke can chimes against the rail, the hiss of rain fills the empty platform.
Author: noclueontheloo
Fandom: True Love, Holly/Karen
Word Count: 3835
A/N: I doubt anyone would read this who hasn't watched the BBC series True Love, but just in case, this makes reference to events from episodes 3 and 5, with a whole lot of supposition thrown in, natch.
Summary: Holly tries to imagine beyond the now of tangled sheets and whispered declarations, but she can't escape Karen and this tiny world they have inadvertently created.
I just want you to know
that I love you so.
It's stupid and sappy and makes Holly roll her eyes and smile simultaneously. It's a cheeky reprimand from Karen; Holly had made some off-hand comment about teenagers in love always behaving like they'd discovered a depth of feeling previously uncharted, how they ended up the clichés they so aggressively derided, fighting in the corridors, kissing by the lockers and always with terrible terrible poetry.
"I dunno," Karen had breathed into her side, disturbing the fine little hairs on her arm, "Sounds nice."
Holly bit her lip, head dipping to kiss perfect freckles, "This is nicer."
"Yeah."
"Mm. Just don't go leaving me notes on my desk," she'd teased.
She reaches for the milk carton, post-it still attached, and her breath hitches ever so slightly. There' still something loaded behind the joke.
She's different. We're different...
That ability that teenagers have to love so quickly, so wantonly, so desperately in need of validation.
While the kettle boils she fingers the yellow paper, tracing the biro scrawl, breathes in and then shakily exhales as beside her the steam rises to a bubbling crescendo. She quickly crumples it into her fist, pauses for two heartbeats before tossing it with feigned nonchalance at the swing bin. She tells herself this is not a betrayal.
* * * * *
It's Friday and the streetlights are twinkling across the water. Karen sits by the window and paints her toenails Petal Pink, one skinny leg bent up along the narrow sill, her heel thudding as she shifts for position.
Before Holly, this would have been the start of a night out with Lorraine. A pre-cursor to a predictable evening, first the bus-stop, trying the newsagent just off Millmead, before darkness truly fell and all sorts of trouble kicked off. Still, it was easy to get served there, and they'd neck half a bottle of Archers between them, or sometimes some really rough voddy when they were particularly skint. Which Karen was, most of the time. After that, it was the bus into town, into hell and standing around waiting for Lorraine to cop off with some bloke she'd coerced into buying them shots or cider or whatever she could worm out of him. And while he was at the bar, they'd pretend they weren't freezing their arses off , shamefully lurking on the abandoned benches in the beer garden, as the collapsed umbrella rolled around the concrete and Karen cupped her hands around Lorraine's barely lit cigarette. These nights were always pretty terrible for Karen, but even Lorraine had her limits and when the weather had battered them enough she'd shake her head in disgust and suggest they might as well, "piss off home."
It was the other, warmer, busier nights that took their toll. The nights when the pub was just crowded enough for them to snag a table without catching the landlord's eye. Lorraine would start to make friends with anything with a wallet and a days worth of stubble. This meant that Karen had to form some semblance of interest in her surroundings. So she chatted and smiled sweetly and sometimes gave her real name and sometimes not, depending on what game they were playing that evening.
"You're my sister, right. My shy, older, no- no, younger, sister. Right?"
"What? Right, whatever. That makes no sense."
"What?" Lorraine had a propensity to get carried away after a couple of drinks and when her shouting began to attract the sniggers of a nearby table Karen would shrug and just go along with it. These games Lorraine imagined were like the whole night, without purpose.
But still, going along with it was easier than not going along with it. Or at least, less lonely. She could be sitting at home, watching some shitty reality show and eating cereal from the box, but that was just her talisman of comfort while she was surrounded by the clamour of the pushing, cackling bodies. The reality would have been a stale emptiness stretching out before her, with only a dying sunset and glowing screen for company. So Karen stayed.
She stayed and pretended, with varying degrees of success, to show an interest in the half-men half-boys that invited themselves to the table, that offered battered packets of B&H and lurid sex stories, as a means to impress. There'd been Liam or Luke or Darren or Gary, he'd bought her a lager top and she'd laughed at some semi-funny joke of his, and he'd taken that as invitation to slide his hand up her thigh, fleshy fingers diving under her skirt with no hint of an apology, so quick and so brazen, sitting there, wedged in elbow to elbow at their wobbly little table, that Karen had jerked violently away, upset her own glass as the ice skittered across the wood and he'd shamefacedly turned towards his beer.
The violence of her own distaste had come as a shock to Karen. Lorraine had evidently seen everything, or all she needed to, had hissed in Karen's ear, "What the fuck's wrong with you?"
Karen finishes her right foot, leans forward and delicately blows against the sticky polish as she twists the applicator back into place.
Holly's reading a review of something although she hasn't taken in more than the first paragraph in the last half an hour.
"You like?" asks Karen.
"Very pretty," she affirms, looking up from the magazine, a proper look as opposed to the sneaking glances she's been taking ever since sitting down.
Karen gives a small satisfied smile at her handiwork and Holly abandons the pretence entirely. Because here's this girl, sixteen years old on a Friday night, who's looking for all the world like she's readying herself for something. Something more than tea and telly in a flat in Palm Bay with her thirty year old teacher.
Karen pads gingerly across the carpet, her toes splayed to avoid a smearing disaster. She nudges her way onto the two-seater and picks up the magazine from Karen's lap, frowns and then grins, the title's reference to Sudanese basket-making giving Holly away.
"You so weren't reading that," she chides.
"It's very interesting, actually," Holly deadpans, sliding the magazine back across her legs.
Karen laughs, but it transforms into a sigh and the sigh turns into something else as she collapses into Holly's shoulder, eyelashes fluttering closed, something less like sighing and more like melting, like swooning.
* * * * *
Holly's father had died the year she graduated. He'd been a cheerfully gruff sort of man, ex-army with a fondness for scotch whiskey and an unquenchable need to walk three miles a day whatever the weather.
He'd loved his daughter in the only way he knew how, because she was a pretty and delicate little thing and pretty and delicate little things needed to be admired from a distance, cajoled into growing, hardy and strong. Loving up close was dangerous, it led to smothering; he would have crushed her to death with his love.
So when she'd limped through the front door the first time she'd failed her driving test, after God knows how many reminders of "mirror, signal, manoeuvre" and three point turns in heavy traffic - "they really don't expect you to do it on roads like this, Dad, they pick somewhere quiet and, well, wider" - "just watch the road my girl, if you can do it in this, your test will be an absolute doddle" - when she'd told him with shuddering shoulders that she hadn't made the grade, he'd barely raised an eyebrow beyond, "Buck up, Hols, go book yourself another then. What was it, the parallel park? Women always struggle with the parallel park."
And when she'd cautiously raised the topic of changing her degree, going so far as to hint at dropping out altogether, going back to Fine Art like she'd originally intended, there was no stony silence or attempted reasoning. "You bloody well won't," had been his only response, although Holly did note with some satisfaction that upon returning to The Times' Business section, he failed to turn it the right way up.
He'd been straight down the line with her, there were no grey areas, no "messes" as he called them, "Just don't get yourself into any messes, Hols, that's all you need to know." She reminded him of this advice the day he revealed his prostate cancer. It had been the last time she'd made him smile.
When her mother had revealed eleven months after his death, on a windswept Easter morning that in fact this same man of impeccable character and steadfast honour had been carrying on with his mistress for the last 18 years, Holly's revulsion had manifested itself as a splatter of vomit into her mother's floral handkerchief. What surprised her wasn't her mother's apparent nonchalance at the affair, the two had never seemed particularly fond of each other beyond that familiarity couples get after half a lifetime in each others company, but how so quickly her memory of him, the half-smirking, hard drinking colonel, had faded. It was replaced with something that she couldn't reconcile with the man she'd lived with, a being with secrets and duplicity and motives she could not understand. Everyday she thought of him for seconds at a time, this unknown ghost of a man, and everyday the anger knotted inside her, twisting tighter and tighter until it broke apart and left her with an emptiness even more unbearable than the anguish.
Holly's mother liked to attribute this revelation to her daughter's disastrous dating record. Holly once suggested that since her father's passing, her mother had far too much time on her hands to watch pop psychology metered out by chat show hosts and faded soap actresses. After that they stopped talking about him.
* * * * *
Holly has homework to mark, thirty-five 900 word essays to be precise, and Karen has a father and a chicken tikka masala waiting for her at home.
Karen leaves without fuss, a small smile and nod of acknowledgement, promises to meet the following afternoon away from prying eyes.
Karen never asks Holly about her marks or for help with her work, one of the few rules that hangs unspoken between them. She doesn't need to, she's the best student in the class, but Holly still hovers between giving her the 17 that guarantees her the top mark or letting that distinction fall to another.
And in that moment of indecision she's flooded with pre-emptive doubt: Will they check? Will it matter? Does it look....? It's a line of questioning with certain assumptions behind it, ones that she hasn't dared to make until now, one's that she refuses to consciously dwell on for too long.
She carefully presses down a firm red "16" into the margin, swigs from the mug beside her and shuts her eyes. Karen's conclusion was better than Lorraine's.
She re-reads it and quickly alters the 16 to an 18. Looking at it, she almost can't tell it was every anything else.
* * * * *
On the couch, crushed up together on the two-seater, half-draped across her lap, Karen asks, "Can I stay here tonight?"
This is unusual because it's Wednesday and Karen's father is usually home after doing night runs to the airport. Short drives to Kent International, sometimes he gets lucky and can squeeze in five or six. Sometimes he gets a young couple heading to Southened on a cheap package deal to Malaga or Alicante. But though the meter eats up the miles, they're never as lucrative as the numerous shorter runs. And no one in Southend ever wants a taxi back to Margate.
So Holly's caught off guard by the request, asks "What about your Dad? Won't he miss you?"
Karen shuffles her shoulders and looks down, "He's got some girl coming over that he met online."
"Oh."
Karen's righted herself now, avoids Holly's gaze and starts studiously picking at her nails.
It's not a complete rebuttal, but Holly's aware of the change, a thousand million tiny particles displaced in the air, frantically searching for a new arrangement to settle into.
She ventures, "Well, that - that's nice for him, isn't it?" and Karen just clicks her tongue and shifts onto her other hip, angling her body away.
Holly waits. Her mouth is drying up like cotton wool and her nerve endings start to hum against her skin. She's beseeching with her trailing fingertips, tracing loose patterns across Karen's shoulder.
Karen refuses to ghost a smile, her mouth remains a hardened line as she takes the cushion beside her, picks at some loose threads.
"What is it?" Holly asks, and her nails graze against the cheap cotton of Karen's school shirt. "Don't you want him to be happy?"
"Yeah," Karen murmurs, but with an inkling of defiance in that single word. Because it's her Dad and this is something Holly's adultness does not automatically entitle her to take propriety over. Only Karen gets a say in her Dad and how he should be.
"She's not even from here. He's shipping her over from Hong Kong. I mean, how desperate is that?" And finally her blue eyes flicker up, impossibly translucent and searching.
Holly offers a watery smile in return. She shouldn't speak. Speaking now is dangerous. Speaking now could cause the unravelling of everything she's been suppressing since they'd crossed that treacherous line.
But it unnerves her too much, how casually Karen can slight her father, how she doesn't even recognise what she's doing.
"You know, maybe your Dad's just lonely, Karen..." and her voice peters out before she's managed to finish the sentence.
"Yeah well, it's just," Karen shakes her head, resettles herself, crossing her arms over Holly's leg, "It's just sad."
And as quickly as the rebuke comes, her fingers contract around Holly's knee, nails scratching against stretched denim. Her eyes are wide and her pink mouth hangs open, startled into a perfect O.
"I'm not saying..." she stutters," It's nothing like us. You and me."
Holly quirks her lips into a tight smile, stills her heart and says nothing.
* * * * *
At night when they're lying together beneath a cool sky with a sea breeze sifting between the curtains, Holly tries to visualise the future, but all that comes up is the past. Laughing as a child, graduating to the big swings in the park, her feet dangling miles above the tarmac - grass - sky - grass - tarmac again. And then the past of yesterday, breakfast and a kiss pressed to her naked collarbone.
Holly tries to imagine beyond the now of tangled sheets and whispered declarations, but she can't escape Karen and this tiny world they have inadvertently created. The bed, the sheets, the kitchen cupboards, books no longer flush with the shelf, a gossip magazine protruding like a lost tourist among her collection of Tate Etc, a school tie wrapped around the chair leg in her room, a plastic hairband teetering on the edge of the bathroom basin. Everywhere she looks, everything has become suffused with Karen, with her very essence.
And there are nights, usually when she's alone, when Holly remains awake and overcome with love.
Karen is all thin arms and legs, sharp elbows and an impossibly soft mouth that seems to know, had leant so awfully quickly, just what to do; such a clever girl.
The questions that need to be asked remain half-formed in Holly's head, lingering long enough to unsettle her. The what of their doing, not even the how or the why, but the actual mechanics of this relationship - and really just calling it that is enough to make her body tremble and her heart flutter and her feet scrunch up with delight and terror - the logistics of what will makes this work or fail, start gnawing inside her.
We can't just lie like this forever.
Why can't we? Why, when it's so warm and so good...
Because Karen needs the chance to experience more, everything...because....
We should go somewhere... Get out again...
Maybe the cinema? We could drive down to Ramsgate, unknowns for the evening, get lost in the darkness... We could... we should do this...
* * * * *
Her eyes flick restlessly along the platform - the warning shrieks at her in flecked white paint, stamped inches from the edge of safety: MIND THE GAP.
Out in the open like this, with the rain heckling the station roof, Holly cannot pick apart Karen in the crowd.
She was just a girl, one of a hundred girls, girls with pink wheelie suitcases and overloaded holdalls, girls with rucksacks and satchels and more wheelie suitcases, all refusing to stand still for longer than thirty seconds without checking their phones or fiddling with their ipods.
Holly jumps when Karen touches her shoulder, she'd been hypnotised by the rain, which had now formed a dynamic wall of water between them and the neighbouring platform.
"Isn't it funny," she says to Karen. "All these people here. All just to say hello or goodbye."
"What about the people actually leaving?"
"Well, that would be goodbye."
"I dunno," Karen murmurs as she rummages around her coat pocket, checks her phone for any possible change in the last ten minutes since she'd looked at it. "Goodbye is what you say when you're going to miss something."
"Are you saying there's nothing here worth missing?"
Karen sucks in her lower lip and shrugs. She'd been doing that a lot this morning.
"Really? Nothing?"
"What's to miss?" Karen replies, blue eyes sparkling from tiny droplets still clinging to dark lashes. "This place is a dump."
Holly sighs, trails her fingers along a cool damp cheek. "How about big skies and beaches? Running in the rain, that sort of thing?"
Karen fights the smile tugging at her lips, "You were cursing the rain less than an hour ago."
"Well, running in it's one thing, sitting on a train for three hours with soggy knickers is quite another. Remind me again, why I'm not driving?"
"Because, you sold your car."
"Mm. I was referring to why I was car-less."
Holly lets Karen pull her inwards, gripping both sides of her jacket and taking a miniscule step forward into that invisible ring of space, the space reserved for the confessions and secrets and violence and intimacy.
"You needed the money."
"That's right."
"And this way is better. More romantic."
"I never said that," Holly narrows her eyes as Karen presses their foreheads together.
"No, I'm saying it now."
The station announcement crackles out the train's imminent arrival in a static haze barely audible over the downpour, reminds them to take all personal items with them, not to leave baggage unattended at any time.
Karen looks desperately to Holly and squeezes her fingers too tight.
"Don't be scared," soothes Holly.
"I'm not, it's just-"
"I could wave a handkerchief from the window. Would that help?"
And now Karen is crying, but it's a mixture of rain and tears and it's impossible to tell one from the other against her thin white face.
"Don't be like this," she husks out.
"Like what?"
"Like you're saying goodbye."
"Don't you want me to miss you?"
"No. I want you to call me. I want you to call me the minute you get there. And everyday after that. And then I want you to come and get me. Okay?"
"Of course. Darling, of course I will." And Holly doesn't even hesitate in kissing Karen's lips and pulling her head into her shoulder, nails clicking against that slender neck while her handbag thumps against her back.
Karen screws her eyes shut and breathes in Holly, but all she gets is the muggy air, the neutral scent of a pressured sky and the faint waxiness of her Barbour jacket.
If Holly hadn't used so many words, had only said yes, had not the need for emphasis they would have been all right. There were too many words for Karen, too much reassurance. Things should be simple between them. Why couldn't it all just stay simple; After all, it was only love.
"Here we go, then. What is it?"
"I dunno, nothing."
"I'll call. Promise."
"It just, it feels like an ending."
"Nothing's ending, Karen," Holly whispers, juggling the straps of her bag with Karen's fingers, trying to keep hold of everything all at once.
"But you're leaving. And I'm still here. And summer's nearly over. Our big summer of love, Holly. "
Holly's half smiling because anything else is too much to get into right now. The future was rushing up to meet her with every click-clack of the approaching engine.
"So, is this on towards the Winter of Discontent."
Karen squeezes out a final tear and shakes her head, "What's that from?"
"From? It's not - it's, I mean it's referring to '79. You know, when the trade unions went on strike and it was the coldest winter on record and the country was just a mess."
"Great," sniffs Karen. "See, I don't even get what you mean, anymore."
"That's because they don't teach enough social history these days."
Karen is about to tell Holly that they didn't really teach enough of anything these days, but the loudspeaker breaks in again to announce the arrival of the 12.17. Holly watches its approaching headlamp shimmering down the line.
They meet in a frantic tangle of arms and baggage and bedraggled hair, Holly's sticking to Karen's cheek, Karen's slicked back against her scalp, eyes screwed shut, fingers knotted together around Holly's neck.
And then the carriage doors are sliding open and Holly's fighting with the little wheels on her suitcase, forever leading her in the opposite direction.
She promises to call, she promises to start working as soon as possible. She says, "Love you," as the doors slide shut between them and Karen only hears the missing "I".
She watches as Holly struggles down the aisle, darkened, separated Holly, Holly through tinted scratched glass. She shadows Holly down the platform until she's settled in a seat by the window. She waves a forlorn hand and Holly raises her own and cups it against the pane.
The whistle sounds and Karen stands there, not minding the gap, staring at the grey glass, peering through it so that she can see her own reflection alongside Holly. And then it's sliding to Karen and an elderly man, spooning something carefully into his mouth, and then Karen and a boy in a baseball cap, cheek scrunched up against his fist and then, faster to Karen and a woman, a woman that isn't Holly, Karen and a blurry child, Karen and another boy, Karen on her own... and then nothing...
In the wake, a flattened coke can chimes against the rail, the hiss of rain fills the empty platform.