Originally published in print November 2020.

This story is part of TN2’s ongoing flash fiction series, which aims to give a platform to exciting new writers from Trinity. If you would like your fiction to be considered for publication, simply submit it to literature@tn2magazine.ie along with your name and a one-sentence bio.

 

There were five cameras bordering the green. They were always there, if you snaked around the back curve of Westminster, reporters in private, pinching hives. She wondered what the point was, in having five cameras and five channels to tell the same story. 

She stood tall and fixed her face harsh as she walked, chest squared three-quarters to camera. It would be good to be a walking-woman. If she was abducted, the police would find this footage and release it with a timestamp. They would analyse the video, her hard face, debate whether she was escaping to or from someone. She looked at what was behind her; a mother who was sagging and her baby, also sagging. They would have an alibi. She wondered on how many screens she existed as a backgrounder, cast against trees that would one day be felled, sliced, cocooned as chairs or tables or fire. This would matter, in twenty years: it was inevitable. 

She had watched a documentary on The Falling Man. It did not matter who he was, how he landed, if his spine went through his skull or his shins into his stomach. He was forever a man and he was forever falling. ‘It made him immune from death,’ she had told Eliza in History and Eliza had said ‘I think that it is immune to, not immune from.’ 

She enjoyed being seen. She had learnt to track people’s eyelines up and down her body: you learn that by sixteen. She felt new and she stared at her legs, often, reflected back at her on shiny surfaces. She looked taller than she felt. She was a historical X. This she could not help, framing herself in front of parliament as she had. Every day she walked this way around the green and every day she was on film.

She leaned her left hip into one of those rooted black-street-bins that said LITTER on it in gold, so that you knew what not to do. She was just to the left of one of the reporters’ heads. He had shiny brown hair that puffed itself around his shirt collar. She had a honeyed urge to slide up to him and untuck it. She imagined the watchers in their living rooms sitting up and laughing and she got why people waved to their mothers or flashed their breasts on live broadcasts. 

 

Gabriel appeared opposite. She saw him, on the side of the green that ducked behind the cameras, hoist himself up onto a wall. He fiddled in his bag as she climbed up next to him, extracting a cardboard triangle that was a ham-and-cheese sandwich. He had clean, pink nails. 

She said, “I can’t eat meat anymore, it makes me sick.” 

Gabriel said, “since when?”

“I had an epiphany on the banks of the Ganges.” She was joking, sort of, but she had just got back from Christmas in Delhi, where she had seen a chicken’s neck snapped and its arms plucked and felt sick from the smell. 

“Sure you did, sure.”

“I knew suddenly that it was wrong.”

“I see.” Gabriel had put the sandwich on his lap and little brown crumbs sugared the top of his trousers. “I will inform the press.” He gestured down from the wall and Jane smirked at the idea of all these men severing their pieces-to-camera to look up to the wall. She liked them like this: torn from politics and captivated by two small faces and brown-bread.

“Why thank you, Gabriel, you do that.” 

“No problem, Janey.” 

Gabriel split the sandwich and Jane watched it tear, tissuey. He folded one half of it down into her hand.

“You know that I’m on the news every day.” They were owls, now, perched on the wall, watching. 

“What about when they edit the background in?”

“They don’t. There would be no point in them being out here if they used editing.” Jane stuck her nose into Gabriel’s shoulder. “Would there.”

“I dunno. They do most stuff in post.” Gabriel thought this might be true. Jane squirrelled her hand up the sleeve of his jumper and picked at the mossy hairs on his arm.

“If you had seen me on the TV, you would think I was a Lady or a Mistress or a Politician, wouldn’t you.”

“No, because you’re wearing your school blazer.” 

  “I wasn’t, it was in my bag.” Jane had been wearing it.  

“Well then. In that case.” Gabriel smiled and leaned backwards into the sky.

The reporters were having lunch now. Crisps. They broke off into little burrows of silent eating, shoulders dropped and eyebrows flat. She did not know that reporters ate crisps. The one with the shiny hair had a napkin on his neck like a toddler and was fanning red crisp-dust onto it. He was unshelled. There was a new rhythm to the place, the deep, frenzied munching of farmed pigs. Deadlines, Jane thought, with a twinge of the adult, deadlines. 

Gabriel took out a Ribena and poured her a shot into the lid and she tipped it into her throat. She watched his long, soft fingers scroll up the cap. She stretched her leg down to see where it came to on his, which suddenly seemed the only marker she had ever had of height and length. He put his hand on the small of her back and rubbed it up and down. It was warm when he did this, like she had suddenly been given a back and it was precious. She knitted her hand into his and they sat in bloated moments, like families over a tee-vee dinner, taking in the world. 

She wasn’t with Gabriel but they ate together every day. She was seeing a thirty-two year old with crow’s feet. He was a lecturer at Birkbeck and took her to watch all sorts of classical music – if classical music existed in sorts. Jane wasn’t a connoisseur and often fell asleep but she loved to appear whisked and naïve. The crow’s feet were deep and purple at the sides of his eyes. 

There were so many things that she wasn’t, yet. But she was here, with Gabriel. She took a bite of the sandwich. There were some things you would tell people, she thought, because they are better stories. There are some things you do for the words-of-it and for your children to pass on and there are some things you do just because you are hungry, like eating ham.

Gabriel walked her back to school and they parted ways by the bus-stop outside. No problem, Janey sat still in her ear. It was definite and silver to have her name on his lip, like she had been christened. She went to the sink in the arts building and began to wash her hands and face. She so wanted to be Janey. Jane looked very pale in the mirror. She sucked in her cheeks and pictured what her death mask would be like. She parted her lips and widened her eyes and imagined being in an open casket with a stranger doing her eulogy: a celebration of a Vegetarian Life Well-Lived with Older Lovers. By then she would be all those empty, weighty descriptors. She often imagined eulogies and obituaries, people boiled down into one-liners like bones to stock. You can know someone in a line, sure, but it is a specific sort of knowing. 

She imagined floating above the church, through dough bodies and wooden pews. She saw herself moving through faceless mourners in their deep black coats, lurching for their hats and hands and completely unable to feel them.

Her stomach tripped when she held that feeling of weightlessness. She squeezed her toes against her socks. Her stomach tripped when she invoked that feeling of weightlessness. She squeezed her toes against her sock. She imagined Gabriel’s Janey emerging, sure and angular. She felt it jabbing her floating ghost on the nose and slapping her back, rigid, into the wooden casket.

“He was the first person that I really knew,” is what she thought that she would say about him in twenty years, but even that was false. Descriptions cheapened him. Ella said that she was sleeping with Gabriel but Ella was a fantasist – most people are. Besides, it was she who lunched with him on the wall, Jane thought, looking up from the mirror and drying her hands, and that is what mattered.