Fic: Not Exactly An Epistolary Romance (Skins, Tony/Effy) R
My last attempt at Skins fic ('Cherry', which I still think is cute) took me three days, (start to finish,) to complete. I literally began this story days later. I'm just now finishing it, oooh, three months later. *facepalm* There are a few slight canonical inconsistencies, due to the fact that I was writing it as episodes were airing. (In fact, at the end of the Effy episode, when it cut to Effy and Cook in the car, I exclaimed, "goddamnit, I've been Jossed!")
Anyway, here's some Stonemcest, with Cook thrown in, because I luff him.
Title: Not Exactly An Epistolary Romance
Fandom: Skins
Pairings: Effy/Tony, with some Effy/Cook
Spoilers: #3.04, 'Pandora'
Rating: R
Word count: 5,236
Summary: After two months without speaking to Tony, Effy goes to visit him in Cardiff. (Wherein: Cook can drive, in theory; Tony gets all his philosophy from Wikipedia; and Effy does not give bad head.)
Warnings: incest; Blazin' Squad lyrics.
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Not Exactly An Epistolary Romance
Prologue.
The couple in the house across the road were building an extension. It was a tacky, unnecessary thing. What they were building was a sunroom, which struck Effy as an act of optimism bordering on mental illness, since England never received more than two weeks of sun a year.
Now that Effy slept in Tony's room at the front of the house, she had to look out at the builders every day. There were four of them, which was mystifying, since, on average, only two of them ever did any work at any one time. There were two to dig the foundations and two to stand around pointlessly. There were two to lay bricks and two to drink tea.
None of this was relevant, except that the day they started work was the same day Tony left for Cardiff. Effy didn't keep a calendar; she didn't wear a watch or note the time passing. But she did look out of her window sometimes and see an ugly reminder of how long it had been since her brother was there.
Sometime in November, they finally finished the fucking thing. It had been two months and, in that time, Effy hadn't spoken to Tony once.
*
1.
Their goodbye at the end of summer was not sentimental.
She was on a residual ketamine high. She knew empirically that a version of herself lay on her bed, but she felt certain that she was hovering above, close to the ceiling. From her vantage point there, she watched as Tony entered her bedroom.
"Oi," he said. "I'm gone."
He used his thumb and forefinger to flick her between the eyes and she blinked in response. The sensation of blinking seemed to last for an age and, when she was finally finished, he wasn't there anymore. Hours later, when her two selves reunited, she moved her stuff into his room. Changing the sheets seemed like too much effort, so she curled up in the scent of him and went to sleep.
*
On her first day of college, she texted him to say:
so what's uni like? p.s. i think mum's having an affair.
He texted back immediately:
uni's full of pretentious gits (yeah, and i'm one of them, ha ha). p.s. you're paranoid. our parents aren't interesting enough to fuck around.
She still had her suspicions, but his answer pacified her for a while. She rolled the words around in the back of her head, like a charm. She could imagine the sardonic curl of Tony's lip if he spoke them aloud.
Then, of course, she walked in on Mum and "Steve" just-barely-post-coital. She texted Tony again, her fingers flying across the keypad, typos be damned.
it's officcial: munm's havin an aaffair. txt bck.
She waited two days for a reply. She fucked Cook into the floor repeatedly and, when that didn't satisfy her, she added her vibrator to the mix and waited for the complementary bzzzzz of her phone. When she did finally receive a message, it was only Pandora asking, what's a cock ring do?
She threw her phone across the room so hard that it broke. She emitted a tiny, uncontrolled scream and tightened her muscles reflexively, which had the annoying side-effect of making Cook come too soon.
*
Finally, a week later, she received a letter with a second-class stamp affixed, upside-down, to the corner of the envelope. It was written in blue biro on thick, yellowish faux-parchment paper. Some of the loops of the letters still betrayed a slight tremble from fingers that wouldn't co-operate with the mind. It read:
"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." Baudrillard. Don't get hung up on all this bullshit, little sis. Choose to exist on a plane of reality where you have a happy family. A sham isn’t necessarily a lie.
Stay safe,
Tony
"You fucking WANKER!" she yelled at the top of her lungs. In a moment of rage, she tore the letter up into a dozen jagged pieces.
When she'd calmed down, however, and reached a numb sort of loathing, she was almost sorry she'd done so. Any letter from her brother - even a trying-so-hard-to-to-be-witty letter - was better than the ringing silence that she was finding increasingly hard to bear.
She picked up the pieces from the carpet, shuffling them so that the word fragments mixed and muddled the meaning. On one piece, only the word Tony remained. She tossed the rest of the torn letter in the bin, but she smoothed out Tony carefully and placed him under her pillow.
*
In early November, Effy bumped into Michelle at the Horn & Strumpet. Their requisite five-minute "catching up" conversation was stilted and awkward. If it had been one of Tony's other girlfriends, Effy would have just walked away, but this was Michelle - she liked Michelle - so Effy chose to endure. Sipping Southern-Comfort-and-lemonade and taking precisely three puffs of a cigarette before stubbing it out ("I'm quitting, I'm really quitting"), Michelle yammered on.
She was home from York for Reading Week, because her mum had, like, insisted, but it was totally boring spending all that time all the way out in the middle of nowhere at their house. Plus, Bristol was kind of a shithole, no offence. York was beautiful - totally gorgeous. And oh yeah, of course, she was seeing someone. His name was Jerome. Perfect, right? Jerome. He studied Classics and his parents owned a castle in Scotland. The one just over from Balmoral. Or close by, anyway. It wasn't love, nothing crazy like that, but he made her really want to be a better person and stuff.
Michelle lit another cigarette and then made a face. "Ugh," she said. "I'm quitting. Seriously. It's so immature. So gross. I mean. Lung cancer. All that."
Effy said nothing, watching Michelle impassively as she took another slow drag from her own cigarette.
Three puffs and Michelle stubbed her second immature-gross-lung-cancer-cigarette out in the ashtray. Effy had been waiting for the inevitable question and apparently Michelle had now found the courage to ask it.
"So how's Tony?" she said brightly, the strain visible in her fake smile.
"Fucking his way through Cardiff," said Effy. "Probably," she added - a concession to the fact that she didn't know for sure.
Michelle's face fell, her fake smile caving in. It was an instantaneous reaction, as if Effy had just punched her. Effy sighed. The chair made a painful scraping sound as she pushed it back and stood up to leave. She never meant to hurt Michelle - she liked Michelle - but Michelle had always been far too easy to break.
*
Effy had always disdained social networking sites, but at past two a.m., she had to admit that Facebook always held an added lure. Late one night/early one morning, she logged into her account - a bare bones profile that she hardly ever used - and wrote on Tony's wall:
TONY STONEM HAS CRABS.
Looking at the vindictive letters made her feel marginally better. She shut down her computer and went to bed, finally.
A quick check of her email a day later revealed that someone had returned the favour and written on her wall:
effy stonem gives bad head.
She grinned at the computer screen. "I hate you," she said, with all the tenderness of a love poem read aloud.
*
2.
Effy and Cook had recently begun experimenting with a new game. It involved having sex as loudly and obnoxiously as possible while Anthea was in the house. If the game had a name, it would probably be called "payback". However, Effy was getting a little tired of amplifying her orgasms, so it was with relief that she heard the front door open and then slam shut - a sign that her mother had gone out.
She flopped back on the bed, stretching her limbs idly to check that she hadn't damaged anything over the course of the afternoon. Cook lay on his side next to her, playing a game of incy-wincy-spider across her abdomen.
"For the record, sweetheart," he said suddenly. "You don't give bad head."
It took her a moment to realise what he was referring to. It was funny: she wouldn't have picked Cook for a Facebook stalker. She pushed away his hands, which had begun to wander closer to her cunt. She wanted to talk for a minute.
Ignoring his other comment, she said, "Can you drive?"
"In theory."
"What does that mean?"
"It means"-he grinned-"in theory! I like to get my hands under the bonnet. Rub down a hot body. Take 'er for a spin."
"Can you drive or not?" she said, rolling her eyes.
"Yeeeah. Driving. Gonna… gonna flip reverse it, baby," he said with a filthy smile.
Without meaning to, she began to laugh. It took her a moment to recover, by which point, Cook's smile had turned almost fond.
"Tomorrow," she said, "you're gonna drive me to Cardiff." She leaned in to kiss him. "And maybe you'll get lucky and I'll flip reverse it on you."
*
The next morning, a Sunday, Effy and Cook set out for Cardiff at the bright and early hour of 11 a.m. The sky was unusually clear, a few rays of watery sunshine hitting the shell of her dad's car. Effy glanced across the road. She saw that the couple who'd built the extension were sitting in their sunroom, drinking tea. She looked away, avoiding the happy scene. Minutes later, she and Cook pulled out of the driveway, making a juddering start to the journey that Cook overcompensated for by slamming his foot down on the accelerator.
Borrowing the car had been depressingly easy. Her dad was living in a rented flat in Montpelier and he seemed unable to talk about anything except how much he hated his pierced, sloppy-looking neighbours. When she visited with Cook in order to pick up the car, Dad was standing behind a twitching curtain, looking out the window at an unassuming green-haired bloke in the street below.
"Need to borrow the car," said Effy.
"What's that, love?" her dad answered vaguely. "Where are you going, sweetheart?"
"Cardiff. To see Tony."
Her dad finally looked away from the window, his face flushed with unusual affection. "That's a really nice thing, Elizabeth, going to see your brother."
Effy could almost see him fabricating a perfect little family unit in his head, where Mum and Dad were happy and Sister missed Brother so much that she skipped off to see him.
"Cook's driving," she announced. "You remember Cook, right?"
Cook, who hovered close to the doorway, raised a hand in greeting. "Alright, Mr Stonem?"
A dark look passed across her dad's face, but he seemed reluctant to admit to any version of reality except the cheery fabrication inside his head. He passed Effy his car keys and murmured, "Have a nice time, love."
On the motorway to Cardiff, Effy kept her eyes closed and tried not to think. She let Cook pick the music: an incongruent mix of classic rock and drum & bass. Played at a painfully loud volume, it short-circuited her brain into white noise.
As they reached the Severn crossing, Cook yelled above the music, "It's like we're going to a different country, innit."
Effy opened her eyes momentarily, taking in the moment's liminality. The high arches of the bridge rose above them. Even the muddy expanse of water that surrounded them as they raced from England to Wales was strangely magnificent in the sunshine.
When she didn't answer Cook, he continued, "I mean, I guess Wales is a different country. But not really. It's like… Luxembourg or something. It's there, but it doesn't really do anything."
"Drive faster," she instructed and he obeyed.
*
Less than an hour later, they arrived at their destination, which seemed smaller and less distinctive than it should have been. With peeling paintwork and queasy modernist motifs, the building could have belonged at Roundview, next to the sports block. The only thing that betrayed it as a hall of residence was the university insignia emblazoned portentously on the sign outside.
The car park was mostly empty, a few spaces filled by rusted, dusty Ford Fiestas and Minis, plus the requisite glossy BMW that already showed signs of having been keyed maliciously and then repaired. Cook parked triumphantly at an angle beside the Beemer. He opened the car door, ready to leave, but Effy didn't react. The engine began to cool slowly. Cook thwacked his foot idly against the car's interior door, while Effy stared straight ahead.
"You wanna go inside?" he asked.
Effy was silent.
"You wanna call your brother, tell him you're here?"
Effy was silent.
"You wanna give me a quick handjob?"
Effy shrugged, smiling reluctantly. There was rarely anything quick or, indeed, simple about their sex life. They were both too caught up in the game of it all, the need for idiotic one-upmanship in the pleasure stakes. So, as soon as she unzipped his trousers, he was immediately unable to just sit back and enjoy it. He drew her into a kiss and began to fondle and tease his way down her body. The line of impropriety - and the reminder that they were in a public car park - grew pleasantly fuzzy as they increased their attempts to get each other off without getting naked.
Minutes later, Effy heard a single tap of knuckles against the passenger-side window. With Cook's mouth still suctioned to her throat, she craned her neck to meet Tony's eyes. He looked on impassively. Effy extricated an arm and reached out to press the button to release the window. Slowly and with a mechanical whir, the glass that separated Tony and Effy disappeared.
"Alright, mate?" Cook threw out the greeting carelessly, but he had the good sense to betray a look of slight apprehension.
Tony ignored him, still looking at Effy. "News of your arrival precedes you," he said, in lieu of a greeting. "You have a fanbase watching from the kitchen upstairs. Wave."
Sure enough, there appeared to be a gaggle of people gathered at the open window on the second floor, looking down on them. Cook waved. Effy did not.
Finally, she disentangled the rest of her limbs from Cook's body. She opened the car door abruptly, sliding out in a way that momentarily positioned her inches from Tony. He hesitated and then stepped back. She noticed the way he fidgeted with his hands, the way he still held them as if they didn't really belong to him. She slammed the car door and strode away in the direction of the hall of residence, satisfied with the sound of her boots striking the concrete. She could feel Tony following in her wake.
"I'll wait out here in the car…" she heard Cook call out, though neither of them bothered to acknowledge him.
Effy and Tony traipsed up two flights of stairs. The sweetness of spliff that hung in the air did not mask the deeply-entrenched smell of body odour. Someone was playing a chart R&B song too loudly, the heavy bass line filling up her chest like a second heartbeat. Occasionally, other students ducked in and out of doorways. A guy, dressed unabashedly in a pair of Christmas-themed boxer shorts and lime-green Crocs, passed them on the second floor.
"Duuude," he said, in a bad American accent borrowed from a Judd Apatow movie. "You're the girl from the car park. Rock on."
"You're the girl from the car park," Tony repeated sardonically, once he'd gone. "Think how you could parlay this kind of fame into a career. It could be your pornographic calling card. You could fuck your way around the car parks of the world. The Girl From the Car Park Does Tokyo. The Girl From the Car Park Does Bermondsey."
When Effy didn't reply, Tony seemed to regret the harshness of his comments. "Don't listen to Russ. He barely leaves the building except for meetings of the Cheese Society," he said bracingly, as if it were Russ who'd called her a porn star.
They reached door number 43. The whiteboard affixed to the door was scrawled with the words, Tony, you grandiose wankstain. Pub tonight? Gina. Effy dragged a single, idle finger through the words and then examined her newly-blackened finger. Tony watched her for one distracted moment and then used his keys to let the two of them inside.
Tony's room was gloomy, but he didn't bother to turn on the light as they entered. The bed was unmade, a copy of Absalom, Absalom! half-obscured by the rumpled duvet. The space smelled like him; a little sour, a little spicy. She took two steps into the room and then stopped. Tony sat down at his desk chair and then stood up again.
"It's good to see you," he said, a shade too cheerily.
He stepped forward to give her a brief, belated hug. She remained still, arms at her sides, like a rag doll, as he held her awkwardly. She counted to three and it was over. He sat back down at his desk.
"Did you get my letter?" he asked.
Effy lifted her shoulders ever so slightly, the barest indication of a shrug.
"It was funny," he said. "It was supposed to make you laugh."
She said nothing.
"I got the Baudrillard quote from Wikipedia," Tony continued conversationally. "Wrote an essay on him last month, cribbed most of it from Wikipedia. Still got a 2:1. Uni's a piece of piss."
Effy remained silent. She picked her way slowly across the worn carpet to the window. It looked out over the car park. She could see her dad's car parked diagonally. She watched for a moment as Cook sang along to a song that she couldn't hear, drumming a beat on the dashboard.
Tony prattled on: "So what about you? Thought about university yet? I know A-levels seem ages away, but AS grades really matter when you apply to universities. And if you're gonna apply to Oxbridge, you have to apply even earlier. It's all really complicated. Dad would love it if you went to Oxford. He's still gutted I didn't apply."
"I think he's more gutted that Mum's been fucking someone else," said Effy, turning away from the window.
Tony sighed - a condescending, big-brother sigh. "They're fine," he said laboriously. "Don't get caught up in their mess. I've spoken to Mum. She's coping. Dad just needs to get through his grieving process and then he'll start coping, too. It's a process, that's all."
"Doesn't it bother you?" she retorted. "Separate Christmases, one at Mum's, one at Dad's. Mum selling the house. Dad moving to a one-bedroom flat. Doesn't any of it bother you?"
Tony was quiet for a moment and then he said, "I seem to remember you skipping out halfway through our lovely family Christmas dinner last year. Going to get wasted at the park. And you hate that house. You always said so." He smiled slightly. "Or are you feeling suddenly nostalgic?"
Effy lapsed back into mutinous silence. Tony stood up, moving to stand behind her. She stared out the window, deliberately not looking at him.
"Look, I care, okay," Tony continued, his voice softer, less patronizing. "But me being there when the shit hit the fan wouldn't have made any difference."
"It would have made a difference to me," she said dully.
"Yeah, I know. I'm sorry," he said. "But Mum and Dad have got to figure this out on their own."
Effy didn't say anything, but she felt her body relax, the pace of her mind slowing fractionally. She could feel the weight of his presence behind her, broad and reassuring. Slowly, he reached out a hand to brush the hair off her shoulders. He placed his palm against the nape of her neck, searing his skin against hers. As compared to his earlier shivers, his hand against her neck was still.
"So who's the pillock in the car park?" he asked quietly, a smile in his voice.
"Cook."
Tony laughed, a low murmur against the back of her neck.
"Is that a name or an imperative?" he asked. "Some kind of Masterchef command."
"Who's Gina?" Effy countered.
"Gina is a menace. She likes to fight with me about Faulkner. And sometimes we break up the monotony by fucking."
His voice was devoid of remorse or shame. He was just stating the facts. The thought of someone else's hands on his body sparked something within her. She was jealous, naturally - the same way that he, beneath the jokes, was jealous of Cook. But the knowledge that he could never feel for Gina what he felt for her burned brightly between them.
She wondered how the tableau would appear to Cook if he looked upwards at this moment. He would see the two of them framed in the window, similarities blurred together - their dark hair, their secretive mouths and narrowed eyes.
"The windows are tinted," Tony murmured sardonically, reading her thoughts. "He can't see you."
"No," she said slowly. In fact, it seemed more probable by far that the two of them had vanished entirely from the face of the Earth.
They each savoured the final moments before surrender. Those slow exhalations seemed filled up with the loneliness of the previous two months. When he finally kissed her, she knew that her body would be her own again. Her desires had grown so hard to uproot in their time apart. There had been so much teasing and prodding required; the endless cocktails of drugs to allow her to feel anything at all. Now her route to orgasm hummed on the surface of her skin, as if it had been waiting for his touch all along.
He kissed her slowly, as if learning how she tasted all over again. She felt a prickle of irritation that this was not a matter of urgency for him - he had not missed her as much as she had missed him. She kissed him harder, demanding more of him. Reflexively, his fingers dug into the flesh of her arms, hurting her. He swept her away from the window, pinning her beneath his body on the unmade bed. Faulkner fell to the floor as they began to unbutton and unzip.
Each time they did this, it felt like the first and the last time. It was something that could not be sustained in the ordinary world. It existed only through a glass darkly.
*
3.
Effy slept peacefully. Her usual sleep patterns typically plunged her into deep wells of narcotic unconsciousness that she had trouble climbing out of successfully. Curled beside Tony, however, she seemed to skate pleasurably across the surface of sleep, spinning in slow, measured circles. She woke occasionally, feeling dizzy but sated. Each time, from beneath heavy eyelashes, she glimpsed Tony's sleep-slack face and then resumed her sleepy circles.
Perhaps the fifth time she awoke, it was to find Tony getting dressed. The small, narrow bed suddenly felt too big. She was aware of her dreamy haze hardening.
"Go back to sleep," Tony said, catching her eye.
The tone of his voice - brusque, a little smug, but not unkind - reminded her suddenly of being 10 years old. She remembered shuffling out of bed in her pajamas, leaning on the banisters at the top of the stairs and watching Tony put on a jacket and stop pedantically to tie his shoes. He was sneaking out to see a girl or to get wasted with Sid or maybe even just to wander the dark streets alone. It didn't really matter - it was the sneaking out that was the point; proving he could do something wrong and not get caught. She'd learned her worst traits from the best, after all.
"Where are you going?" she asked, as she'd asked then.
"Meeting of the Cheese Society," he said with a maddening smile.
She rolled over onto her back, irritated, so that the bed sheet twisted around her legs. Despite his big-brother bravado, she caught the way he followed the movements of the sheet with his eyes. She revealed the creamy-white expanse of her naked thigh, which was just beginning to show bruises. She knew, from the sudden hesitancy in his demeanour, that she could use her body to make him stay.
This was how it had all begun - with confusion and irritation and hubris and more; feelings that couldn't be named clogging up their hearts. They'd spent their whole lives preoccupied with redrawing the parameters of their relationship. It had not been a quick route to wickedness, but slow. First, kissing, which had always felt achingly natural. Then, inevitably, touching. After his accident, they spent their nights curled against one other, rediscovering the patterns of their childhood, when their parents claimed they couldn't bear to be parted. At first, his hands remained cramped unnaturally into fists. Then, slowly, as he was able to regain control of them, his fingers crept over her body, finding every crevice, until finally they slid inside of her. Touching, Effy always knew, was the only way to really know someone - to fit together the puzzle pieces and find them out.
At first, they had fucked only when they really needed it, when they needed each other so badly that to refrain was unbearable. But, the truth is, they began to realise that they needed each other all the time, always. The only thing to do was to make it increasingly harder to love each other. On that Sunday afternoon, in his dingy room at university, she knew that she could use her body to make him stay. But she also knew it was time for him to go.
There was a knock at the door. Tony hesitated a moment longer and then moved to open it.
Effy couldn't stop herself from craning her neck to catch a glimpse of the girl who stood outside in the corridor - Gina, presumably. She had red hair and an upturned nose. She looked healthy, as if she spent time in the sun, horseriding or pursuing other wholesome activities.
"Is there someone in there with you?" Gina asked sharply.
Effy was almost disappointed at how unruffled Tony's answer sounded. "My sister," he said. "She's visiting. She's tired from the journey, so she's taking a nap."
"Oh," Gina replied, her voice softening instantaneously. In that single syllable, Effy felt herself transform from lover to sister.
"Can I meet her? Later, maybe, when she's not so tired. I'm great with siblings, parents. They all love me. Side product of being a people-pleaser."
"Huh," came Tony's reply. "You've never tried all that hard to please me."
Gina socked him playfully on the arm. "C'mon. Introduce me."
"No. Trust me. She'd hate you." Tony offered the statement cheerfully, as he pulled the door shut behind him.
Effy listened to their footsteps grow fainter as they walked away. She gave herself a moment to adjust to Tony's absence, which she seemed to experience physically, as if someone had wrenched her arm out of its socket. The room seemed too quiet and she realised she didn't even know what time of day it was.
As she rolled over to face the wall, she noticed for the first time a sheet of paper lying on the pillow. Dear Effy, it read. In fact, that's all that was written on one whole side of the paper, over and over and over.
Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy.
Effy realised immediately that Tony had tried to write her a letter. She also realised that he had found no words to describe his feelings. An A-level in English and an outsize vocabulary - all those words and still none were adequate.
She flipped over the piece of paper. On the other side, his frustration erupted from the left-hand corner. The words FUCK FUCK FUCK, capitalised and biroed deep into the soft paper, grew steadily larger, repeated 20 times, with the same compulsion evident on the other side of the page. She could feel the harsh strokes of those expletives as if they were cut into her arms.
Lower, there was a drawing of her asleep, feline, curled almost in a ball. Tony was never an artist, but the drawing was surprisingly deft. She remembered him attending art therapy last year, part of getting his hands to work again. She'd never known he was actually good at it. She rubbed her fingers over the drawing, imagining him drawing her as she slept. Belatedly, she noticed a word hidden among the FUCKs. Nestled between them, very small, was another word.
Love.
*
The time, as it turned out, was 7:30 p.m. She'd left Cook waiting outside for more than seven hours. When she returned to the car, still parked diagonally in the car park, Cook was lounging upside-down in the driver's seat. He tilted his head to the side when he saw her and said, "Alright?"
His face was bright red from the bloodrush, but he looked perfectly at ease. If he was pissed off by her long absence, he didn't show it. If he wondered why she'd entered her brother's halls of residence wearing a short black skirt and green fishnets and exited, hours later, dressed in baggy jeans and a striped polo shirt, he didn't ask her why.
"Alright," she echoed.
She clambered into the passenger side and hooked her legs up over the seat, so that she was hanging upside-down, like Cook. It was a disorientating sensation, but weirdly pleasurable. As the blood pounded in her brain, it became easy to think of nothing at all.
She and Cook hung like that for a while, not saying anything.
"Let's go home," she said at last, casting one last look up at the building's second floor, as she righted herself in the seat.
For the entirety of the drive home, she kept Tony's letter, which she had folded into a small square, clasped securely in the palm of her hand. She could almost feel a heartbeat emanating from it.
Anyway, here's some Stonemcest, with Cook thrown in, because I luff him.
Title: Not Exactly An Epistolary Romance
Fandom: Skins
Pairings: Effy/Tony, with some Effy/Cook
Spoilers: #3.04, 'Pandora'
Rating: R
Word count: 5,236
Summary: After two months without speaking to Tony, Effy goes to visit him in Cardiff. (Wherein: Cook can drive, in theory; Tony gets all his philosophy from Wikipedia; and Effy does not give bad head.)
Warnings: incest; Blazin' Squad lyrics.
-----
Not Exactly An Epistolary Romance
Prologue.
The couple in the house across the road were building an extension. It was a tacky, unnecessary thing. What they were building was a sunroom, which struck Effy as an act of optimism bordering on mental illness, since England never received more than two weeks of sun a year.
Now that Effy slept in Tony's room at the front of the house, she had to look out at the builders every day. There were four of them, which was mystifying, since, on average, only two of them ever did any work at any one time. There were two to dig the foundations and two to stand around pointlessly. There were two to lay bricks and two to drink tea.
None of this was relevant, except that the day they started work was the same day Tony left for Cardiff. Effy didn't keep a calendar; she didn't wear a watch or note the time passing. But she did look out of her window sometimes and see an ugly reminder of how long it had been since her brother was there.
Sometime in November, they finally finished the fucking thing. It had been two months and, in that time, Effy hadn't spoken to Tony once.
*
1.
Their goodbye at the end of summer was not sentimental.
She was on a residual ketamine high. She knew empirically that a version of herself lay on her bed, but she felt certain that she was hovering above, close to the ceiling. From her vantage point there, she watched as Tony entered her bedroom.
"Oi," he said. "I'm gone."
He used his thumb and forefinger to flick her between the eyes and she blinked in response. The sensation of blinking seemed to last for an age and, when she was finally finished, he wasn't there anymore. Hours later, when her two selves reunited, she moved her stuff into his room. Changing the sheets seemed like too much effort, so she curled up in the scent of him and went to sleep.
*
On her first day of college, she texted him to say:
so what's uni like? p.s. i think mum's having an affair.
He texted back immediately:
uni's full of pretentious gits (yeah, and i'm one of them, ha ha). p.s. you're paranoid. our parents aren't interesting enough to fuck around.
She still had her suspicions, but his answer pacified her for a while. She rolled the words around in the back of her head, like a charm. She could imagine the sardonic curl of Tony's lip if he spoke them aloud.
Then, of course, she walked in on Mum and "Steve" just-barely-post-coital. She texted Tony again, her fingers flying across the keypad, typos be damned.
it's officcial: munm's havin an aaffair. txt bck.
She waited two days for a reply. She fucked Cook into the floor repeatedly and, when that didn't satisfy her, she added her vibrator to the mix and waited for the complementary bzzzzz of her phone. When she did finally receive a message, it was only Pandora asking, what's a cock ring do?
She threw her phone across the room so hard that it broke. She emitted a tiny, uncontrolled scream and tightened her muscles reflexively, which had the annoying side-effect of making Cook come too soon.
*
Finally, a week later, she received a letter with a second-class stamp affixed, upside-down, to the corner of the envelope. It was written in blue biro on thick, yellowish faux-parchment paper. Some of the loops of the letters still betrayed a slight tremble from fingers that wouldn't co-operate with the mind. It read:
"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." Baudrillard. Don't get hung up on all this bullshit, little sis. Choose to exist on a plane of reality where you have a happy family. A sham isn’t necessarily a lie.
Stay safe,
Tony
"You fucking WANKER!" she yelled at the top of her lungs. In a moment of rage, she tore the letter up into a dozen jagged pieces.
When she'd calmed down, however, and reached a numb sort of loathing, she was almost sorry she'd done so. Any letter from her brother - even a trying-so-hard-to-to-be-witty letter - was better than the ringing silence that she was finding increasingly hard to bear.
She picked up the pieces from the carpet, shuffling them so that the word fragments mixed and muddled the meaning. On one piece, only the word Tony remained. She tossed the rest of the torn letter in the bin, but she smoothed out Tony carefully and placed him under her pillow.
*
In early November, Effy bumped into Michelle at the Horn & Strumpet. Their requisite five-minute "catching up" conversation was stilted and awkward. If it had been one of Tony's other girlfriends, Effy would have just walked away, but this was Michelle - she liked Michelle - so Effy chose to endure. Sipping Southern-Comfort-and-lemonade and taking precisely three puffs of a cigarette before stubbing it out ("I'm quitting, I'm really quitting"), Michelle yammered on.
She was home from York for Reading Week, because her mum had, like, insisted, but it was totally boring spending all that time all the way out in the middle of nowhere at their house. Plus, Bristol was kind of a shithole, no offence. York was beautiful - totally gorgeous. And oh yeah, of course, she was seeing someone. His name was Jerome. Perfect, right? Jerome. He studied Classics and his parents owned a castle in Scotland. The one just over from Balmoral. Or close by, anyway. It wasn't love, nothing crazy like that, but he made her really want to be a better person and stuff.
Michelle lit another cigarette and then made a face. "Ugh," she said. "I'm quitting. Seriously. It's so immature. So gross. I mean. Lung cancer. All that."
Effy said nothing, watching Michelle impassively as she took another slow drag from her own cigarette.
Three puffs and Michelle stubbed her second immature-gross-lung-cancer-cigarette out in the ashtray. Effy had been waiting for the inevitable question and apparently Michelle had now found the courage to ask it.
"So how's Tony?" she said brightly, the strain visible in her fake smile.
"Fucking his way through Cardiff," said Effy. "Probably," she added - a concession to the fact that she didn't know for sure.
Michelle's face fell, her fake smile caving in. It was an instantaneous reaction, as if Effy had just punched her. Effy sighed. The chair made a painful scraping sound as she pushed it back and stood up to leave. She never meant to hurt Michelle - she liked Michelle - but Michelle had always been far too easy to break.
*
Effy had always disdained social networking sites, but at past two a.m., she had to admit that Facebook always held an added lure. Late one night/early one morning, she logged into her account - a bare bones profile that she hardly ever used - and wrote on Tony's wall:
TONY STONEM HAS CRABS.
Looking at the vindictive letters made her feel marginally better. She shut down her computer and went to bed, finally.
A quick check of her email a day later revealed that someone had returned the favour and written on her wall:
effy stonem gives bad head.
She grinned at the computer screen. "I hate you," she said, with all the tenderness of a love poem read aloud.
*
2.
Effy and Cook had recently begun experimenting with a new game. It involved having sex as loudly and obnoxiously as possible while Anthea was in the house. If the game had a name, it would probably be called "payback". However, Effy was getting a little tired of amplifying her orgasms, so it was with relief that she heard the front door open and then slam shut - a sign that her mother had gone out.
She flopped back on the bed, stretching her limbs idly to check that she hadn't damaged anything over the course of the afternoon. Cook lay on his side next to her, playing a game of incy-wincy-spider across her abdomen.
"For the record, sweetheart," he said suddenly. "You don't give bad head."
It took her a moment to realise what he was referring to. It was funny: she wouldn't have picked Cook for a Facebook stalker. She pushed away his hands, which had begun to wander closer to her cunt. She wanted to talk for a minute.
Ignoring his other comment, she said, "Can you drive?"
"In theory."
"What does that mean?"
"It means"-he grinned-"in theory! I like to get my hands under the bonnet. Rub down a hot body. Take 'er for a spin."
"Can you drive or not?" she said, rolling her eyes.
"Yeeeah. Driving. Gonna… gonna flip reverse it, baby," he said with a filthy smile.
Without meaning to, she began to laugh. It took her a moment to recover, by which point, Cook's smile had turned almost fond.
"Tomorrow," she said, "you're gonna drive me to Cardiff." She leaned in to kiss him. "And maybe you'll get lucky and I'll flip reverse it on you."
*
The next morning, a Sunday, Effy and Cook set out for Cardiff at the bright and early hour of 11 a.m. The sky was unusually clear, a few rays of watery sunshine hitting the shell of her dad's car. Effy glanced across the road. She saw that the couple who'd built the extension were sitting in their sunroom, drinking tea. She looked away, avoiding the happy scene. Minutes later, she and Cook pulled out of the driveway, making a juddering start to the journey that Cook overcompensated for by slamming his foot down on the accelerator.
Borrowing the car had been depressingly easy. Her dad was living in a rented flat in Montpelier and he seemed unable to talk about anything except how much he hated his pierced, sloppy-looking neighbours. When she visited with Cook in order to pick up the car, Dad was standing behind a twitching curtain, looking out the window at an unassuming green-haired bloke in the street below.
"Need to borrow the car," said Effy.
"What's that, love?" her dad answered vaguely. "Where are you going, sweetheart?"
"Cardiff. To see Tony."
Her dad finally looked away from the window, his face flushed with unusual affection. "That's a really nice thing, Elizabeth, going to see your brother."
Effy could almost see him fabricating a perfect little family unit in his head, where Mum and Dad were happy and Sister missed Brother so much that she skipped off to see him.
"Cook's driving," she announced. "You remember Cook, right?"
Cook, who hovered close to the doorway, raised a hand in greeting. "Alright, Mr Stonem?"
A dark look passed across her dad's face, but he seemed reluctant to admit to any version of reality except the cheery fabrication inside his head. He passed Effy his car keys and murmured, "Have a nice time, love."
On the motorway to Cardiff, Effy kept her eyes closed and tried not to think. She let Cook pick the music: an incongruent mix of classic rock and drum & bass. Played at a painfully loud volume, it short-circuited her brain into white noise.
As they reached the Severn crossing, Cook yelled above the music, "It's like we're going to a different country, innit."
Effy opened her eyes momentarily, taking in the moment's liminality. The high arches of the bridge rose above them. Even the muddy expanse of water that surrounded them as they raced from England to Wales was strangely magnificent in the sunshine.
When she didn't answer Cook, he continued, "I mean, I guess Wales is a different country. But not really. It's like… Luxembourg or something. It's there, but it doesn't really do anything."
"Drive faster," she instructed and he obeyed.
*
Less than an hour later, they arrived at their destination, which seemed smaller and less distinctive than it should have been. With peeling paintwork and queasy modernist motifs, the building could have belonged at Roundview, next to the sports block. The only thing that betrayed it as a hall of residence was the university insignia emblazoned portentously on the sign outside.
The car park was mostly empty, a few spaces filled by rusted, dusty Ford Fiestas and Minis, plus the requisite glossy BMW that already showed signs of having been keyed maliciously and then repaired. Cook parked triumphantly at an angle beside the Beemer. He opened the car door, ready to leave, but Effy didn't react. The engine began to cool slowly. Cook thwacked his foot idly against the car's interior door, while Effy stared straight ahead.
"You wanna go inside?" he asked.
Effy was silent.
"You wanna call your brother, tell him you're here?"
Effy was silent.
"You wanna give me a quick handjob?"
Effy shrugged, smiling reluctantly. There was rarely anything quick or, indeed, simple about their sex life. They were both too caught up in the game of it all, the need for idiotic one-upmanship in the pleasure stakes. So, as soon as she unzipped his trousers, he was immediately unable to just sit back and enjoy it. He drew her into a kiss and began to fondle and tease his way down her body. The line of impropriety - and the reminder that they were in a public car park - grew pleasantly fuzzy as they increased their attempts to get each other off without getting naked.
Minutes later, Effy heard a single tap of knuckles against the passenger-side window. With Cook's mouth still suctioned to her throat, she craned her neck to meet Tony's eyes. He looked on impassively. Effy extricated an arm and reached out to press the button to release the window. Slowly and with a mechanical whir, the glass that separated Tony and Effy disappeared.
"Alright, mate?" Cook threw out the greeting carelessly, but he had the good sense to betray a look of slight apprehension.
Tony ignored him, still looking at Effy. "News of your arrival precedes you," he said, in lieu of a greeting. "You have a fanbase watching from the kitchen upstairs. Wave."
Sure enough, there appeared to be a gaggle of people gathered at the open window on the second floor, looking down on them. Cook waved. Effy did not.
Finally, she disentangled the rest of her limbs from Cook's body. She opened the car door abruptly, sliding out in a way that momentarily positioned her inches from Tony. He hesitated and then stepped back. She noticed the way he fidgeted with his hands, the way he still held them as if they didn't really belong to him. She slammed the car door and strode away in the direction of the hall of residence, satisfied with the sound of her boots striking the concrete. She could feel Tony following in her wake.
"I'll wait out here in the car…" she heard Cook call out, though neither of them bothered to acknowledge him.
Effy and Tony traipsed up two flights of stairs. The sweetness of spliff that hung in the air did not mask the deeply-entrenched smell of body odour. Someone was playing a chart R&B song too loudly, the heavy bass line filling up her chest like a second heartbeat. Occasionally, other students ducked in and out of doorways. A guy, dressed unabashedly in a pair of Christmas-themed boxer shorts and lime-green Crocs, passed them on the second floor.
"Duuude," he said, in a bad American accent borrowed from a Judd Apatow movie. "You're the girl from the car park. Rock on."
"You're the girl from the car park," Tony repeated sardonically, once he'd gone. "Think how you could parlay this kind of fame into a career. It could be your pornographic calling card. You could fuck your way around the car parks of the world. The Girl From the Car Park Does Tokyo. The Girl From the Car Park Does Bermondsey."
When Effy didn't reply, Tony seemed to regret the harshness of his comments. "Don't listen to Russ. He barely leaves the building except for meetings of the Cheese Society," he said bracingly, as if it were Russ who'd called her a porn star.
They reached door number 43. The whiteboard affixed to the door was scrawled with the words, Tony, you grandiose wankstain. Pub tonight? Gina. Effy dragged a single, idle finger through the words and then examined her newly-blackened finger. Tony watched her for one distracted moment and then used his keys to let the two of them inside.
Tony's room was gloomy, but he didn't bother to turn on the light as they entered. The bed was unmade, a copy of Absalom, Absalom! half-obscured by the rumpled duvet. The space smelled like him; a little sour, a little spicy. She took two steps into the room and then stopped. Tony sat down at his desk chair and then stood up again.
"It's good to see you," he said, a shade too cheerily.
He stepped forward to give her a brief, belated hug. She remained still, arms at her sides, like a rag doll, as he held her awkwardly. She counted to three and it was over. He sat back down at his desk.
"Did you get my letter?" he asked.
Effy lifted her shoulders ever so slightly, the barest indication of a shrug.
"It was funny," he said. "It was supposed to make you laugh."
She said nothing.
"I got the Baudrillard quote from Wikipedia," Tony continued conversationally. "Wrote an essay on him last month, cribbed most of it from Wikipedia. Still got a 2:1. Uni's a piece of piss."
Effy remained silent. She picked her way slowly across the worn carpet to the window. It looked out over the car park. She could see her dad's car parked diagonally. She watched for a moment as Cook sang along to a song that she couldn't hear, drumming a beat on the dashboard.
Tony prattled on: "So what about you? Thought about university yet? I know A-levels seem ages away, but AS grades really matter when you apply to universities. And if you're gonna apply to Oxbridge, you have to apply even earlier. It's all really complicated. Dad would love it if you went to Oxford. He's still gutted I didn't apply."
"I think he's more gutted that Mum's been fucking someone else," said Effy, turning away from the window.
Tony sighed - a condescending, big-brother sigh. "They're fine," he said laboriously. "Don't get caught up in their mess. I've spoken to Mum. She's coping. Dad just needs to get through his grieving process and then he'll start coping, too. It's a process, that's all."
"Doesn't it bother you?" she retorted. "Separate Christmases, one at Mum's, one at Dad's. Mum selling the house. Dad moving to a one-bedroom flat. Doesn't any of it bother you?"
Tony was quiet for a moment and then he said, "I seem to remember you skipping out halfway through our lovely family Christmas dinner last year. Going to get wasted at the park. And you hate that house. You always said so." He smiled slightly. "Or are you feeling suddenly nostalgic?"
Effy lapsed back into mutinous silence. Tony stood up, moving to stand behind her. She stared out the window, deliberately not looking at him.
"Look, I care, okay," Tony continued, his voice softer, less patronizing. "But me being there when the shit hit the fan wouldn't have made any difference."
"It would have made a difference to me," she said dully.
"Yeah, I know. I'm sorry," he said. "But Mum and Dad have got to figure this out on their own."
Effy didn't say anything, but she felt her body relax, the pace of her mind slowing fractionally. She could feel the weight of his presence behind her, broad and reassuring. Slowly, he reached out a hand to brush the hair off her shoulders. He placed his palm against the nape of her neck, searing his skin against hers. As compared to his earlier shivers, his hand against her neck was still.
"So who's the pillock in the car park?" he asked quietly, a smile in his voice.
"Cook."
Tony laughed, a low murmur against the back of her neck.
"Is that a name or an imperative?" he asked. "Some kind of Masterchef command."
"Who's Gina?" Effy countered.
"Gina is a menace. She likes to fight with me about Faulkner. And sometimes we break up the monotony by fucking."
His voice was devoid of remorse or shame. He was just stating the facts. The thought of someone else's hands on his body sparked something within her. She was jealous, naturally - the same way that he, beneath the jokes, was jealous of Cook. But the knowledge that he could never feel for Gina what he felt for her burned brightly between them.
She wondered how the tableau would appear to Cook if he looked upwards at this moment. He would see the two of them framed in the window, similarities blurred together - their dark hair, their secretive mouths and narrowed eyes.
"The windows are tinted," Tony murmured sardonically, reading her thoughts. "He can't see you."
"No," she said slowly. In fact, it seemed more probable by far that the two of them had vanished entirely from the face of the Earth.
They each savoured the final moments before surrender. Those slow exhalations seemed filled up with the loneliness of the previous two months. When he finally kissed her, she knew that her body would be her own again. Her desires had grown so hard to uproot in their time apart. There had been so much teasing and prodding required; the endless cocktails of drugs to allow her to feel anything at all. Now her route to orgasm hummed on the surface of her skin, as if it had been waiting for his touch all along.
He kissed her slowly, as if learning how she tasted all over again. She felt a prickle of irritation that this was not a matter of urgency for him - he had not missed her as much as she had missed him. She kissed him harder, demanding more of him. Reflexively, his fingers dug into the flesh of her arms, hurting her. He swept her away from the window, pinning her beneath his body on the unmade bed. Faulkner fell to the floor as they began to unbutton and unzip.
Each time they did this, it felt like the first and the last time. It was something that could not be sustained in the ordinary world. It existed only through a glass darkly.
*
3.
Effy slept peacefully. Her usual sleep patterns typically plunged her into deep wells of narcotic unconsciousness that she had trouble climbing out of successfully. Curled beside Tony, however, she seemed to skate pleasurably across the surface of sleep, spinning in slow, measured circles. She woke occasionally, feeling dizzy but sated. Each time, from beneath heavy eyelashes, she glimpsed Tony's sleep-slack face and then resumed her sleepy circles.
Perhaps the fifth time she awoke, it was to find Tony getting dressed. The small, narrow bed suddenly felt too big. She was aware of her dreamy haze hardening.
"Go back to sleep," Tony said, catching her eye.
The tone of his voice - brusque, a little smug, but not unkind - reminded her suddenly of being 10 years old. She remembered shuffling out of bed in her pajamas, leaning on the banisters at the top of the stairs and watching Tony put on a jacket and stop pedantically to tie his shoes. He was sneaking out to see a girl or to get wasted with Sid or maybe even just to wander the dark streets alone. It didn't really matter - it was the sneaking out that was the point; proving he could do something wrong and not get caught. She'd learned her worst traits from the best, after all.
"Where are you going?" she asked, as she'd asked then.
"Meeting of the Cheese Society," he said with a maddening smile.
She rolled over onto her back, irritated, so that the bed sheet twisted around her legs. Despite his big-brother bravado, she caught the way he followed the movements of the sheet with his eyes. She revealed the creamy-white expanse of her naked thigh, which was just beginning to show bruises. She knew, from the sudden hesitancy in his demeanour, that she could use her body to make him stay.
This was how it had all begun - with confusion and irritation and hubris and more; feelings that couldn't be named clogging up their hearts. They'd spent their whole lives preoccupied with redrawing the parameters of their relationship. It had not been a quick route to wickedness, but slow. First, kissing, which had always felt achingly natural. Then, inevitably, touching. After his accident, they spent their nights curled against one other, rediscovering the patterns of their childhood, when their parents claimed they couldn't bear to be parted. At first, his hands remained cramped unnaturally into fists. Then, slowly, as he was able to regain control of them, his fingers crept over her body, finding every crevice, until finally they slid inside of her. Touching, Effy always knew, was the only way to really know someone - to fit together the puzzle pieces and find them out.
At first, they had fucked only when they really needed it, when they needed each other so badly that to refrain was unbearable. But, the truth is, they began to realise that they needed each other all the time, always. The only thing to do was to make it increasingly harder to love each other. On that Sunday afternoon, in his dingy room at university, she knew that she could use her body to make him stay. But she also knew it was time for him to go.
There was a knock at the door. Tony hesitated a moment longer and then moved to open it.
Effy couldn't stop herself from craning her neck to catch a glimpse of the girl who stood outside in the corridor - Gina, presumably. She had red hair and an upturned nose. She looked healthy, as if she spent time in the sun, horseriding or pursuing other wholesome activities.
"Is there someone in there with you?" Gina asked sharply.
Effy was almost disappointed at how unruffled Tony's answer sounded. "My sister," he said. "She's visiting. She's tired from the journey, so she's taking a nap."
"Oh," Gina replied, her voice softening instantaneously. In that single syllable, Effy felt herself transform from lover to sister.
"Can I meet her? Later, maybe, when she's not so tired. I'm great with siblings, parents. They all love me. Side product of being a people-pleaser."
"Huh," came Tony's reply. "You've never tried all that hard to please me."
Gina socked him playfully on the arm. "C'mon. Introduce me."
"No. Trust me. She'd hate you." Tony offered the statement cheerfully, as he pulled the door shut behind him.
Effy listened to their footsteps grow fainter as they walked away. She gave herself a moment to adjust to Tony's absence, which she seemed to experience physically, as if someone had wrenched her arm out of its socket. The room seemed too quiet and she realised she didn't even know what time of day it was.
As she rolled over to face the wall, she noticed for the first time a sheet of paper lying on the pillow. Dear Effy, it read. In fact, that's all that was written on one whole side of the paper, over and over and over.
Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy Dear Effy.
Effy realised immediately that Tony had tried to write her a letter. She also realised that he had found no words to describe his feelings. An A-level in English and an outsize vocabulary - all those words and still none were adequate.
She flipped over the piece of paper. On the other side, his frustration erupted from the left-hand corner. The words FUCK FUCK FUCK, capitalised and biroed deep into the soft paper, grew steadily larger, repeated 20 times, with the same compulsion evident on the other side of the page. She could feel the harsh strokes of those expletives as if they were cut into her arms.
Lower, there was a drawing of her asleep, feline, curled almost in a ball. Tony was never an artist, but the drawing was surprisingly deft. She remembered him attending art therapy last year, part of getting his hands to work again. She'd never known he was actually good at it. She rubbed her fingers over the drawing, imagining him drawing her as she slept. Belatedly, she noticed a word hidden among the FUCKs. Nestled between them, very small, was another word.
Love.
*
The time, as it turned out, was 7:30 p.m. She'd left Cook waiting outside for more than seven hours. When she returned to the car, still parked diagonally in the car park, Cook was lounging upside-down in the driver's seat. He tilted his head to the side when he saw her and said, "Alright?"
His face was bright red from the bloodrush, but he looked perfectly at ease. If he was pissed off by her long absence, he didn't show it. If he wondered why she'd entered her brother's halls of residence wearing a short black skirt and green fishnets and exited, hours later, dressed in baggy jeans and a striped polo shirt, he didn't ask her why.
"Alright," she echoed.
She clambered into the passenger side and hooked her legs up over the seat, so that she was hanging upside-down, like Cook. It was a disorientating sensation, but weirdly pleasurable. As the blood pounded in her brain, it became easy to think of nothing at all.
She and Cook hung like that for a while, not saying anything.
"Let's go home," she said at last, casting one last look up at the building's second floor, as she righted herself in the seat.
For the entirety of the drive home, she kept Tony's letter, which she had folded into a small square, clasped securely in the palm of her hand. She could almost feel a heartbeat emanating from it.