I was someone so afraid of making a choice, I held on nine months for Jason. I waited five years for Thomas, silently. I painted The Wurst and never told Sof I was quitting art. I drift, I don’t decide. I let my hair grow long.
I twist it in a wet rope around my hand. This doesn’t feel like me anymore. I opened the time capsule and jumped before the count of three—that’s someone who gets drunk on peonies and dries her underwear in a tree. I think I might want to write Ms. Adewunmi’s essay.
I want to come out of mourning.
Cutting my hair is suddenly a planetary necessity. I high-paw Umlaut, then jump up and tear out into the rain forest, immediately tripping over a bramble and ripping a chunk out of my ankle. Scheisse! I’m going to take a flamethrower to this mess.
Wet-haired and wild-hearted, I burst into the kitchen, where Jason and Ned are sitting round the table. Ned is playing acoustic guitar, half a hot cross bun dangling from his mouth like a cigarette.
“Rock ’n’ roll,” I say, giving Ned double thumbs. The gesture falters when it comes to Jason. I chose to be over him. He told me we were friends. We’ve never been that, I don’t know how. I turn back to my brother and say, “Hot cross buns are for Easter, it’s July.”
Actually, July’s nearly over. Ned’s party’s in two weeks, and then two weeks after that—a year since Grey died. Term will start and time will slip away. It already is.
“Hangovers yield to no season,” Ned mumbles round the bun, even though it’s seven in the evening. All the joy I felt moments ago is draining away.
“If you’re looking for lover boy, he’s in his room,” says Ned, as though I were rummaging for Thomas in the cutlery drawer. I assume Jason’s staring at the back of my neck while I all-over blush at Ned’s foot-in-mouth comment, or maybe he isn’t and hasn’t noticed and, God, how hard is it to put spoons back in the right place, anyway?
“I’ve commissioned him for the party,” Ned adds. “We’re thinking a giant croquembouche.”
“Hey, Gottie, did you see the Facebook invitation?” Jason calls over as I turn around, drawing me into their circle. “Meg drew this cool—”
I walk out while he’s still talking—I’ve found the scissors, and I’m hacking my way back through the soaked garden to my room, jabbing at random shrubs as I go. I want it all gone. Hair, party, garden, Jason, wormholes, time, diaries, death—especially death, I’ve had a lifetime of it.
My room feels like a coffin.
CHOP.
That’s how I imagine it—one swift, clean slice of the blades and I’ll be able to stuff all my sadness in the trash. Jason’s hands in my hair, his mouth on my neck, the girl I was and am and will be—whoever she is. Gone.
Reality: I ponytail my hair, reach behind me to cut, there’s a crunch—then the scissors stop. Even yanking as hard as I can with both hands … Nothing. They’re stuck.
Patting around the back of my head with my fingers, my pulse fluttering, I can tell I’m only about a third of the way through my hair—but it’s enough that I have to keep going. Except I can’t. Open. The. Scissors.
A chunk of chin-length hair swings loose.
Umlaut turns in circles on the diaries, yowling.
“Not helping,” I sing-song to him.
My face burns even though there’s no one but the cat to witness my embarrassment. There’s no Sof to call like when I shaved my unibrow instead of plucking it—I’ve shut her out. Why did I do that? The scissors hang off my hair, bouncing against my back as I throw myself across the room to my phone and text her back, reply to everything, rapidly, urgently, immediately.
Pick a color, pick a number—meet me at the beach on Sunday. Please?
A world where Sof and I are friends.
Then I grab my nail scissors and start hacking away in tiny blunt snips, not caring about the strands that are falling to the floor, how it’s going to look. I’m so ready to be—
Free. The kitchen scissors hit the floor.
I run my hand over my head–it feels really short. In places. There are also long lengths that I’ve missed. When I was a kid, Grey would cut the food out of my hair instead of washing it. I suspect I’ve accidentally re-created toddler chic.
Umlaut pads over to the mirror with me.
My eyes flick between my reflection and the photograph. Olive-skin-dark-eyes-so-much-nose-out-of-time-eighties-mullet-hair: yes, I do look like Mum. But it’s nice. Because also, for maybe the first time in forever, I look like me.
A mirror ball of light ripples across the room. I look up, catching the end of a screenwipe—and on the other side of it, my ceiling is starred with phosphorescent plastic constellations. Like I used to have when I was little and shared a bedroom with Ned. He always hated them.
Did I stick these up there? Or did Thomas?
Under their fluorescent glow, my phone beeps with an alert for gottie.h.oppenheimer. Thomas’s email has arrived. Even though it’s impossible, even though this is a brand-new address: this is the email he sent a month ago. The timelines are converging.
Thursday 31 July
[Minus three hundred and thirty-three]