Experienced

Chapter Fourteen

The train to Devon took ninety minutes of her afternoon and more than a decade off her age. Not in the good way that a hyaluronic acid face mask and a nine-hour sleep did, but in a way that made her feel like a teenager again: petulant and moody, angry with the world, wanting to put headphones in her ears, pull a hood down over her eyes and ignore everyone. A visit home was all too rare, though; she wasn’t going to be able to pull off anything but resigned politeness. Despite how close Bristol was to Exmouth, she hadn’t been “home” all year. She had seen her parents when visiting her nonna, but even that had been less often since Mei. The guilt sat heavily in her. Other people managed to make time for their families. But it had been too easy to make excuses, to blame a work event or weekend plans with Ash, or with Mei.

Inevitably, eventually, there was a weekend that was unavoidable. Her brother’s birthday fell in the middle of September, and her mother had been adamant about a family lunch. They’d even booked the tickets for her, a bright-orange open return arriving in the post with an ominous note that read For the 17th. See you then.

Bette’s mother collected her at Exeter station; navy dress starched and pressed, glasses settled atop her head, skin smooth and unlined, arms toned and tanned. Bette could have picked up a connection, but the timings were awkward, and her mother insisted it was easier to come and collect her. What she really wanted, of course, was time when Bette was a captive audience, where she couldn’t wander off to make tea, when there was only half a meter of space and half an hour of time in the car between them. Sure enough, ten minutes in busy traffic allowed her mother to touch on her favorite topics: Bette’s hair: such a shame to see that color over your lovely brown; her career: it should be illegal for them to pay you so little; and her home life: soon Ash is going to move in with that lovely boyfriend of hers, and where will you be then? At least she didn’t ask about Mei. Before the break her mother’s silence on the subject would have rankled her, but it was a relief not to have to pretend. Bette hummed in vague confirmation that she had received the information, and then turned her attention out of the window toward the approaching sea.

It was a shame, really, that she came home so infrequently. Not in terms of being picked and prodded at, of the relentless judgment. But in terms of the coast. She missed the pressure of hot stones underfoot, the feel of salt drying powdery on her shoulders, the taste of ice cream when caught by a warm breeze before it reached her mouth. It was whispering to her, calling her over; she just had to get through a hello with her father and then she could spend the afternoon on a towel.

But her mother was talking about lunch: your brother wants lamb for tomorrow, Elisabetta, her voice forceful on Bette’s name, as if she knew Bette was only half listening. “And you can help me with the cake this afternoon, yes?”

“I was thinking I might go down—”

“You’re not home since Christmas and then you go out this afternoon?” her mother cut her off. “No. No, you’re helping today. If you want time out there you can wake up before everyone else tomorrow.”

They just couldn’t comprehend her love of it. They were the only people she had grown up around who hated the English beach. Who, a generation after their families had moved from Puglia to Bedford, had relocated in search of a coastline. And who had chosen to remain despite their deep resentment of what they considered to be an inferior bit of sea.

“We’re so glad to have you home,” her mother said, reaching over to put her hand on Bette’s knee. Bette felt a rush of guilt. It wasn’t her mother’s fault they didn’t have anything in common, she thought.

“Sure, Mum,” she replied. “We’ll make cake. It’ll be lovely.”

Her mother’s smile was painful to watch, so grateful and pleased. It was impossible for Bette to make up for her perpetual absence in the course of a single weekend. But she could bake a cake.

Three hours later, they had drunk a pot of coffee down to the dregs and the cake sat cooling on the rack. It was her mother’s favorite, an Anna del Conte orange and almond one. The kitchen smelled like Christmas, of the citrus fruit they’d boiled, of memories of making the cake for New Year’s Eve when she was young. At home, cooking wasn’t something she did with any confidence or enthusiasm, but being back in the kitchen with her mother (fetching ingredients out of cupboards, washing up and doing precisely as she was told) felt like muscle memory.

After popping his head in for a cup of coffee and a warm pat on the shoulder, her father had retreated to the shed, a thousand Saturday tasks that needing tending to. Tasks that couldn’t wait for a weekend she wasn’t visiting. It was all fine, really, better than she’d prepared herself for. Until her brother’s key turned in the lock.

“Fede!” her mother called, voice easy, “we’re in the kitchen!”

Her brother’s tall frame filled the door to the kitchen. A pair of glasses were newly present on the bridge of his crooked nose; he’d been wearing contacts since their teenage years. But otherwise he was as he always had been, his hair in tight curls, his skin golden brown from the sun. He enveloped their mother in a hug.

“Hi Federico. Happy birthday,” Bette said.

“Beth,” he said, the only one who hadn’t abandoned the childhood nickname that felt as though it belonged to someone else. “It’s good to see you. We weren’t sure you’d make it!”

Bette tried to imagine having not come, after the tickets that had arrived in the post, of the weeks of familiar guilt, of the calls from their mother.

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” she said.

“I’ll go and get your father,” their mother said, swatting at her son’s arm in affection. She stepped out into the garden, leaving Bette alone with her brother. The distance between them, him still at the door, her leaning against the sink, was a gulf.

“No Sara?” Bette asked, grateful for the absence of her sister-in-law.

“She’s at church this afternoon. Choir rehearsals. She’ll be here tomorrow. Notice you’ve not brought anyone, though,” he countered, and Bette’s skin prickled uncomfortably. Of course that was why he had dropped by. “I just wanted to—I wanted to be here. In case…”

“In case I brought my girlfriend?”

“Yes,” he admitted, clearly aware of their limited time, launching straight in. “Yes, in case you brought your girlfriend. Look, we love you. Whatever you do. Of course we do. But Dad hasn’t been well. They’re trying to get his blood pressure down. So I thought I’d just come by. I worried that you might—I don’t know.”

She’d known, vaguely, about their father’s blood pressure. But the idea that she might have an impact on it was new.

“You worried I might hold hands with my girlfriend and give him a heart attack?”

Bette thought about telling him about the break, about the casual sex, about being fucked against a wall in a club, and in a Premier Inn by someone she knew she’d never see again. She tried to picture his response, imagined his golden face draining of color.

“You’re being dramatic,” Federico replied, his voice tinged with frustration. “We’re happy to see you. You should visit more often. They miss you. I just don’t know why you’re so determined to…I mean, Beth, why even tell them? Why did you have to make some big thing about it?”

She knew what came next. They had had the conversation before, of course: explicitly with her brother, implicitly with her parents. Each time she’d been back since coming out. She’d tried to ignore it, tried to see it from their side. Tried to focus on the bit where they made it clear they were trying to love her, in spite of whom she was attracted to. Tried not to let it all bother her so much. People had it far worse than she did. And it wasn’t as though she was going to stop visiting. Certainly not when they might make it harder for her to see her nonna. It was worth just coming back a little bit less and keeping the peace.

“It’s not like you’ve ever even brought anyone back,” Federico was still saying. “It’s all so theoretical. Just…you don’t need to make a big deal of it. They don’t need to hear it. They love you so much, they really do.”

There was something about the word “theoretical” that burned, that she could feel digging in at her side and underneath her ribs. Her parents still weren’t back yet. And so there was a moment left to say it, to dare him to deny it. Fuck trying to ignore it. Fuck keeping the peace.

“Well, sure, but not me. Not the actual me. Just some fictional version of me who takes Communion. One who got married ten years ago and who doesn’t require prayers and apologies and explanations. Who isn’t destined for Hell.”

Their parents arrived back in the kitchen before he could answer. It was just as well, Bette thought, as she boiled the kettle for a pot of tea for all of them, as her brother drained his cup, made his excuses, and went back out of the front door. There was no doubt his response would have made everything worse.

Late that night, Bette lay on her side in bed, the glow of her phone illuminating her childhood bedroom. The bed was still the same single, but the meager floorspace in the room had been given over to her mother’s sewing desk, a folding exercise bike that stood resolutely open, and a pile of what she thought might be Pilates paraphernalia. Bette had been back in her old room enough times to know that there was a thinly veiled message here. They had turned her brother’s room into a proper guest double. They had painted over the navy-blue he’d subjected the walls to at thirteen with a neutral cream and replaced the carpet with a plush gray one. Her brother was married, after all. They couldn’t pretend that he had a sexless, single-bed existence. He had grown up. Bette hadn’t.

It had been an hour since she’d climbed beneath the sheets, and forty-something minutes since she’d given up on sleep as a sure thing. Instead, she was making herself deliberately miserable, picking at a scab that was especially painful after the confrontation with her brother. She hadn’t looked at Mei’s social media in weeks, had deliberately avoided it. But alone in bed, miles from a friend to help distract her, she had exhausted Mei’s Instagram feed instead. The only new content was a couple of work-in-progress shots, but it hadn’t demanded much scrolling to find herself in the months they’d spent together. A shot she’d taken of Mei beside a finished piece. Their shadows side by side on the wharf. Before that were the photos she’d obsessed over when Mei was just a girl in her phone—her art, a couple of selfies, the tattoo on her shoulder that Bette had traced her fingers over. When she’d exhausted the feed, she scrolled back through her message thread with Mei. Her heart jumped at every x, every thinking of you, at a string of messages encouraging her to touch herself, not long before everything had fallen apart. She scrolled, eventually, all the way to the top, through their flirting, through the messages they had sent when she had left Mei’s after their first night together, through their snippets of Italian. She was turned on, and angry, and unhappy. Masochism. That’s what this was.

She clicked out of their conversation and opened a dating app instead. There was a niggling worry refreshing it here, in the place she’d grown up. That announcing herself as looking for girls to shag might somehow get back to her parents, to her brother.

It was only once she’d swiped on the ninth woman that Bette realized she might not be going about things in the best way. The local lesbians weren’t sitting at home on the apps on a Saturday night. They were out. By the time they saw her profile, could swipe back, she’d be back in Bristol. Maybe one more. She swiped again. Two more.

She stopped.

It was Stephanie. Steph. From school.

The face in the photo was one she hadn’t seen in over a decade. It hadn’t changed much; Steph’s round face and pink cheeks and straight bob still made her look absurdly young. It was undeniably her. The words under her face read Steph, 30.

Bette hovered, considering, her thumb poised for action, before swiping yes. She didn’t want to sleep with her. It would be too weird, too close to home, too personal, despite the fact that they didn’t know each other anymore.

But she wanted to talk to her.

She stared at the screen, resigned to the fact that Steph was probably asleep. Or out. Or…

It’s a match!

Or looking at her phone at 11 p.m.

Steph:no way!!!

Steph:are you back for a bit?

Bette:just the weekend

Bette:how has the past…decade been?

Steph:lol

Steph:yeah all right

Steph:what are you doing now?

Bette:everyone here went to bed an hour ago

Bette:was thinking about going out

Bette:but no idea where people

go now

Steph:the front

Steph:nothing’s changed

Steph:wanna meet up?

The front wasn’t too far; fifteen minutes’ walk, probably a bit longer in the dark. It wasn’t a bar. It wouldn’t result in a snog. But it was distinctly less pathetic than lying awake in her childhood bedroom, scrolling through Mei’s Instagram.

Bette:I’ll bring a bottle of whatever I can find

Steph:great

Steph:30 mins?

She pushed herself out of bed, pulled on clean knickers and climbed back into the jeans that hung over the back of her old desk chair. Her bra was lace-edged, with a longline band that grazed her ribs and approached the dip of her waist. With higher jeans, or a slightly sluttier attitude, it was practically a top. Wishing she had a slightly sluttier attitude, she tied her buttoned shirt over it, leaving it open from her throat to her boobs. It was, at the very least, a nod toward the slut she wanted to be. The sort of cool Bristol lesbian she wanted Steph to know she had become.

Bette turned the handle of her bedroom door and grimaced at the creak. The whole house was alarmingly noisy to move through. Was there a house in England that didn’t creak or groan at the smallest attempt to exist within it? Perhaps she could—was it ridiculous? To consider climbing out of the window? She crept over and looked out, onto the flat roof of the kitchen, and pictured jumping off it and into the back garden. It was absolute madness. Ridiculous behavior. She was a thirty-year-old woman. She could go out of the front door. Plus, she’d promised booze. And there was no booze in the garden.

And so, socks on and as light-footed as she could manage, she did, swiping a nearly full bottle of Amaretto from the sideboard on her way past.

It was an easy downhill stroll to the front. A walk familiar from countless after-school afternoons and late nights and lazy holiday days. She made her way past the chippie, past the off-license (checking to see that the same dusty boxed bottle of Mo?t was still in the window—it was), past the bus stop where she’d wasted so many hours waiting to head into Exeter. Waiting to be somewhere else.

As Bette made her way toward the sea, “the front” began to feel more and more vague. She was imagining a specific bench, but Steph didn’t know that. And then, just as Bette pulled out her phone to message her, there was Steph. On the bench. She was wearing tracksuit bottoms and a cropped sweater, the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, half her hair in a knot on top of her head. Bette felt overdressed. She wanted to do up a button, but it was too late for that.

“Hey,” Steph greeted her and opened her arms for a hug. It was a little awkward, a little forced, and Bette felt a rush of regret. It was weird, to come out in the middle of the night and meet someone she’d not really known at school. And she’d been the one to swipe. Maybe Steph thought that this was a date thing? A date thing, on the front, like they were sixteen again.

“Hey,” she replied.

“Must have been, what? Five years?”

Bette remembered the last Christmas pub hangout she’d attended, remembered deciding that she didn’t need to do it again. She’d been twenty-one.

“I think that was more like ten.”

“Fuck,” Steph breathed, low and long. “We’re so old.”

Bette laughed and felt herself relax. If this was a date, Steph wouldn’t be in tracksuit bottoms. Surely. This was much lower-key. And it was sort of nice, actually, seeing someone from the past. Someone from the past who was also looking for women on a dating app. She sat down on the bench and twisted the top off the Amaretto.

“You made plans with anyone while you’re back?” Steph asked, as she folded her legs up beneath her and reached over for the bottle.

Bette hesitated, wondering how to respond. Bristol wasn’t that far away. It didn’t speak well of her that she wasn’t in touch with anyone anymore. She could lie, could mention someone. But they might be friends with Steph now. She was setting herself up to fail.

“To be honest, I don’t really—I mean, I’ve been pretty crap at keeping in touch with people. I’ve kind of lost track of who’d be around.”

Steph handed the bottle over and Bette took a long drink, the sweetness instantly reminiscent of school parties, of the weirdness and the loneliness of being sixteen. There was a reason she didn’t drink it anymore.

“Fair enough.”

It was the start, it turned out, of Steph filling her in on the lives of people she hadn’t thought about in years. Someone’s kid, someone’s wedding, someone’s new job, someone’s divorce. Bette nodded in feigned interest so much that she started to feel the onset of a headache. All she really wanted to hear was Steph’s story: When did she come out? Was she seeing anyone? Had it all been all right?

But you couldn’t just ask about someone’s coming-out story. Maybe it was one that Steph didn’t want to tell.

“So how long are you back for?” It was the first sentence in a while that demanded a response.

“Only a night. It’s my brother’s birthday.”

“Oh shit, I didn’t message him.”

“It’s on Monday, actually,” Bette replied, wondering when he and Steph had become close enough for her to have his number. At school her brother had very much had his own crowd. And she’d never heard him mention Steph in the years since. “You haven’t missed it.”

“Oh great. I’ll see him tomorrow. Actually, on that, Fede said something last time I saw him at church.”

Church. Of course it was church.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, think he was angling for me to give you a call and tell you it’s still all right to come and take Communion,” she said, and shrugged. “Like, maybe you thought it wasn’t? Anyway, forgive us our sins and all that. It’s fine. Or, like, he wanted me to tell you it works for me. So this is me telling you. I guess.”

“Oh yeah?” Bette asked, feeling oddly hopeful. She didn’t want to atone, didn’t want to go back to church. But there was something soothing about hearing that someone else from the community was queer, and that it wasn’t some big thing.

“Sure. I mean, I’m going tomorrow morning. And you saw me on a dating app. And I was out at the Vaults last night. It doesn’t have to be that complicated.”

The Vaults was a gay bar in Exeter. Bette had heard about it growing up. She’d never been. Of course she’d never been. She should probably go. It might feel good to go.

“Oh yeah? I’ve never been.”

“It’s fine. Full of dykes though,” Steph said, as she took another swig. The suggestion that this was in some way less than ideal brought Bette up short, and her confusion must have shown on her face. “Oh you know what I mean. You’re not, like— you’re not one of those lesbians. Like, you wear lipstick. I can tell.”

There was a definitiveness about the statement, as though this was an irrefutable fact. The end of the discussion. As if lipstick was somehow solid evidence. Bette stared. Was she one of those lesbians? She didn’t know. No. Probably not. Almost certainly not, actually. But she liked those lesbians. She fancied those lesbians. She wanted to be in a bar being chatted up by those lesbians.

“It’s easy, you know, when you’re not one of them. You don’t have to make some big thing about it.”

Something heavy dropped into her stomach. It was, in many ways, what her brother had been saying. To be gay was fine, just a quiet family matter, so long as you weren’t too obvious about it. To be a lesbian wasn’t technically a problem so long as you were femme. Or so long as you could reasonably pass as straight.

It was the closest they were going to come to Steph’s coming-out story, and Bette realized she didn’t want to stay on the beach. She wanted to go home. She stood up so fast that for a moment she felt drunk.

“I have to—I mean, no one knows where I’ve gone, so I should…”

“Sure. Mind if I?” She took a long drink before Bette could answer, and then handed back the bottle.

“If you could—if you could not…” Bette started.

“Not mention to your brother that I saw that you’re looking for casual sex on a dating app?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure,” Steph shrugged, easily. “I’ll see you around?”

“Yeah. It was good to see you,” Bette lied, and then lied again. “Maybe I’ll catch you at church sometime.”

It felt so much longer, somehow, going back. The odd thrill of recognition was gone, and the streets seemed endless. Endless, and so so empty.

Her heart raced; it always did a little, when she was walking home alone. It was one thing in Bristol, where there were streetlights and cars and other late-night walkers heading to work, or from work, or home after a night out. Here, she was alone. Everything was dark.

She pulled out her phone, her silly little safety net. Women with friends in their phones didn’t get murdered. She started typing.

Bette:are you awake?

Nothing changed under Ruth’s name, no typing…no online. She had last looked at her phone at half-ten, like a normal human person who hadn’t snuck out of her childhood bedroom to sit on a bench by the sea and drink Amaretto.

And then, suddenly:

Ruth:Having cocktails with Gabe

and Heather!!! Come meet us???

Bette:I wish!

Bette:visiting my parents

Bette:back tomorrow night

Ruth:Well, we wish you were here!

Ruth:Next time??

Ruth:Let’s make a plan!!!

They were drunken exclamation points this time. Bette wished fiercely that she were there too. She stared at the phone, at Ruth’s message, until her eyes were damp and the light issuing from it began to blur.

Lunch was fine. It wasn’t warm or easy, like it was when she visited Ash’s family. There was an awkward distance between her and everyone else at the table. But it was fine. The lamb was good, and no one had yet mentioned the fact that Bette, who had survived her first year of college on baked beans and crumpets, had offered to stay home and supervise the cooking instead of coming to church. Most of the conversation revolved around Sara’s work; her sister-in-law had recently finished training as an optometrist, and it turned out eyes were just begging for something to go wrong. All in all, smiling and nodding every now and then seemed to be all anyone expected of Bette, which suited her just fine.

And then there was a moment when Sara lifted her glass. Bette knew, just before it happened, exactly what was going to come next.

“We wanted,” Sara said, taking hold of Federico’s hand, “to take the opportunity, of all being together, to let you know some very exciting news.” Say it, Bette thought, as Sara looked around the table. Say it. “We’re pregnant.”

Bette felt her mother’s shout of joy before she heard it, her whole body exploding open in excitement. Everyone was out of their chairs, holding onto each other and existing under the pretense that they were a good, happy family. Which, if she took scissors to the picture and cut herself out of it, they probably were.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck. She should be happy. This was unequivocally news to be celebrated. She should suck up her worst instincts and hug her brother. But she sat in her chair, a dead weight. They’d done it again, another step in the textbook perfect life they were building together. Another reason for them to look at her in pity and concern.

She smiled, eventually, hugging the appropriate people and ignoring the “sympathetic” pats her mother kept landing on her arm. Her father suggested a toast, but Sara wasn’t drinking and so it was quickly decided that no one else would either. Bette boiled the kettle for a pot of coffee (Sara had brought decaf for all of them), and stuck half-melted candles from the drawer into the cake. Her mother arrived to light them and carry the glowing cake through, Bette trailing behind with the coffee. They sang, Federico cut the cake into small slices, and they sat eating them in silence.

“We’re going to see Nonna on the way to the station, right?” Bette asked, directing her words toward her mother. Her nonna was in care in Exeter, close to the station, and when Bette visited it was on Sundays. It felt right, seeing her nonna when she would once have gone to church.

“I went yesterday morning,” her mother said, focused intently on her cake. Bette could feel the tension radiating from her. “Before collecting you. Mornings are better for her now. And we couldn’t go this morning.”

“But I—I want to see her. That’s why—I mean, can’t we just go again? You could just drop me off? I could always walk back to the station.”

She’d been depending on a lift, had assumed it was a given. They’d talked about going when she’d first spoken to her mother about the weekend.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to go again. We don’t want to confuse her. She’s often asleep in the afternoon.”

Bette nodded, her teeth grinding and a pain sparking behind her forehead. She knew what “confuse her” meant. As if she would walk in and plant the word lesbian in each sentence. As if they needed to shield her nonna from the reality of her, as if Bette couldn’t be trusted.

“We’ll go next time you come home. They said you’ve been down quite often lately,” her mother continued, moving the last of her cake around her plate.

Oh. It was a punishment then. Punishment because she visited Nonna and didn’t visit them. Bette chewed at the inside of her lip until she tasted blood.

She would be back in Bristol soon. Back on the sofa, back with Ash. Back home.