From The Bleed

The shape at the end of the tunnel instantly catches her eye. Still she hesitates, stares past the crowd outside the station. He looks like a walking cliché. The asphalt reeks of urine and Em almost bumps into a bay of rental bikes as a scattered family shoves her to the side. 

‘Come along now, Bobby,’ the mother shouts with a hoarse smoker’s voice that cuts through Em’s ears.

Em moves towards him through the tunnel since she technically knows that it is him, even with his hunched back and gangly body and ugly, fur-trimmed coat. He is leaning against the blue tunnel walls, fiddling with something in his pocket. The fluorescent lights cast exaggerated shadows from his jaw and chin, burning a closeness into the moment before he has even seen her, as though she can feel his repressed nerves more strongly than her own footsteps as she walks through the tunnel.

She is only a few metres away when he looks up. She feels the same ironic yet naive, bare-faced gaze reflected in her own eyes. As they hug awkwardly she can see their meeting from the outside, just a guy greeting a girl, but her body is vibrating nonetheless. Even her cynical distance becomes a sensory presence.

‘Hey, you,’ he says in an overly friendly tone. It feels weird to hear him speak Swedish, banal yet intimate. Prepared to answer the standard polite questions, the ones she’s been chewing on in the back of her head since she left Arlanda Airport in Stockholm, she goes mute, because he doesn’t ask any of them. He doesn’t ask how the journey went or how she is. He just starts walking with a forced nonchalance, like he wants to demonstrate his contempt for all typical communication. His steps are much breezier than Julie’s, but she steps into the same rhythm right away.

‘Do you live nearby?’ she asks at last, because he hasn’t told her anything. At the last minute he texted her that she should get off at Clapham Junction and switch trains to Vauxhall. She had a big lump in her throat when she landed, unsure if he had changed his mind, ready to spend three days in London walking around by herself, staying at some hotel. 

He nods and stretches an arm out to stop her from walking into the street. A stream of cars rushes by on the wrong side of the road and Em wobbles on the pavement from the body contact. Kim has already taken half a step to the side. But he’s smiling, with his lips slightly ajar in a way that almost makes him look excited. 

They turn onto a street of squat brick houses. The weather feels strange here for the time of year. The trees are cold and lifeless, but the grass has a humid smell and is already, or still, bright green. The sky is hanging so low that she can practically feel the pressure on the bones of her skull. A grey so completely impenetrable, as she looks up she can sense several layers of cloud beyond the lowest ones. She glances at him. Just as she decides to reach for his hand, he stops in his tracks. 

‘Do you wanna grab a beer?’

She laughs. The clock’s only just gone…well, what time is it? She landed just after one. But already it’s some indeterminable time that is slipping away, it might as well be dusk. She barely manages to nod by the time he’s pulled into a pub that seems to have materialised on the street corner.

It’s dark inside at least. And almost full, red-faced men shouting in a muddled English at some match on the TV. Kim raises two fingers to the bartender, who nods at him. Is this his local? They sit down at a rickety high table by the entrance to the bathrooms. A waft of sewer cuts through the stale air of beer and fried food.

Em arduously crosses and uncrosses her legs in the unstable chair. Kim’s face finally starts to relax above the tall pint glass. After a few sips he looks so soft and approachable that she finds the courage to reach out and squeeze his fingers. 

He jolts and makes a face. She lets go. 

‘Oh, sorry.’

‘No, it’s fine. I have a burn there, is all.’

He turns his hand and shows the blackened red and glossy mark on the inside of his index finger.

‘Shit, what did you do?’

‘I was gonna help a friend fix their boiler, but I burnt myself pretty bad. It was nearly a week ago now.’

He sounds unbothered, but his eyes sparkle like in a little boy trying to play tough. Em holds back a condescending grin. Kim moves his hand towards hers, which is holding the pint glass. The backs of their fingers touch. Her throat feels dry. 

‘It’s cool that you’re here. Kind of crazy.’

‘Yeah, we barely know each other.’

‘We don’t know each other at all. It’s always so strange to meet someone larping, or in a reality game or whatever. To try to transfer something there to your regular life. But we’ll see how it goes.’

She nods as though she knows how it is, takes a big sip of her beer. The bittersweet taste flows though her whole body, she didn’t eat any lunch today and already feels a bit dizzy. Kim’s eyes are large and swollen and she feels like she can read them so precisely she ought to look away. 

‘Are you uncomfortable with eye contact?’

‘No,’ she answers and forces herself to keep it. His face is so performatively relaxed, she can see that he is exerting himself, too. That there is something he is holding back. 

‘I had a really hard time with it before, but I trained myself with Sensuous Academy. We’ve had workshops solely dedicated to eye contact. It’s honestly changed my life. To be able to look people in the eyes for as long as I want.’

The flow between them grows and grows until Kim smirks as if by reflex and Em is forced to look away. No, she isn’t afraid, but it feels dangerous, disintegrating, like they are back in the small fabric-lined room with the chanting music pushing through the floorboards and she’s no longer hearing words, just feeling his voice inside her body. Outside of an arts event, that sort of contact with a total stranger feels almost mad, or at the very least pathetic. When she asks what he does he mumbles something about having applied to drama school, which feels like an explanation. So he is a failed actor, both too vulnerable and too manufactured for reality. 

She doesn’t want him to notice her disdain, so she plays down her own films when he asks. She doesn’t say anything about her degree or the festivals or the prize, and he doesn’t ask any questions. Actually, he would have seemed completely uninterested in getting to know her at all if it weren’t for all that loaded attention. No effort is required for them to reach each other. Rather, they are careful. When she asks how old he is, he flinches as though she had grazed his burn again. 

‘Twenty-eight.’

She stores away his answer, the way he answers, as though it were secret knowledge. She quickly glances at his high forehead, sees the half-moons forming at the hairline. Twenty-eight is not very old, yet he is worried. His face must have been rounder not that long ago, with childish cheeks that would have softened the sharpness of his curved nose: now it sticks out like a beak. She smiles and places a hand on his denim-clad knee beneath the table. 

‘You’re lovely.’

The line feels hard and ugly. He places the back of his hand against hers.

‘Thanks, so are you.’

It’s like they have lost it. She pulls her hand back and takes a sip of her pint. She still has more than half left, meanwhile Kim has almost finished his second. The mood between them and the entire pub is starting to reveal itself as an anguished despair. Em’s gaze climbs over the men’s jutting stomachs, red cheeks and glazed eyes as though they were an extension of Kim, a stream of impressions she is starting to get swept away in, an overwhelming paralysis. He is staring out the dirt-speckled window yet concentrating on her at the same time. She can feel it clearly, as if it were she studying herself through the corner of her eye. It must be an illusion, this experience of their perceptions melting into each other. Between her thighs, the sweat beneath her wool trousers blends with the moisture from her own arousal. The tremors running through her legs feel like hope evaporating. She wants to cry. 

‘Sometimes I’m afraid I’m turning into my dad.’

A line out of a bad script. Of course he’s going to start talking about his dad now. Em has googled him of course, she knows who he is. She needs to hold back the impulse to ask, play ignorant. The likeness breaks through just because he names it, the dark eyebrows, the scrawny shoulders, a sort of melancholy cheerfulness. 

‘Okay. How?’

‘No, but like… charming but flighty.’

A bitter smile sets in in the corners of her mouth before she can stop it. You don’t say ‘charming but flighty’ if that’s something you seriously want to avoid being; you might say ‘unreliable’ or maybe ‘irresponsible’. It’s a classic man thing to say, meant to both pull her in and absolve him of expectations all while he appears to just be thinking out loud. Some soft music would work well here, something that makes the flightiness clear, his theme, how it feels like something is always about to leave his body, an avoidance seeping through his pores and half-opened mouth. Instead, the men start shouting about the wrong team scoring on the TV and their conversation comes to a weird halt. 

‘How do you mean, charming but flighty?’ she asks as soon as the pub quiets down, to keep the conversation going. If she sounds ironic, he doesn’t seem to notice. 

‘I mean, I love my dad. But he’s never really been there. Not just for me, but for everyone in his life. I want to try to be as present as I can. I guess that’s what I’m chasing with the reality games, a heightened presence.’

She nods and thinks that what he is chasing is escapism. And that is precisely what she is seeking in him, what she flew across the sea for, to be thrown into this intense state of unreality again, to see how close she can come to a bleed like him. Contempt sinks into her chest. There is nothing between them, a deafening nothing, a state of emergency that cannot solidify. 

‘Do you ever take drugs?’

‘No. Or, I’ve smoked weed a few times.’

‘Do you want to do speed with me?’

‘What, now?’

‘Yeah.’

Em identifies it as a threshold, but it feels as though she is seeing it from the other side, as though she has just climbed over. She has already sought this out: a divey escape from reality, where things can be tested without any real consequences. She nods. Kim stands up right away. He smiles his big, thoughtless smile that makes his face feel like it is right in front of her even though he is standing two metres away. He turns into the toilet and looks around to make sure she is following him. A few seconds pass before she edges herself off the barstool, as though she hasn’t understood that they need to go and lock themselves in somewhere, in this temporary, fake world where everything ought to be permitted. 

He slides the bolt shut behind them. She leans against the cold tile wall, wobbly. 

‘Just to let you know, I probably can’t handle anything at all.’

‘I’ll make sure you get a small dose to start with.’

Like a choreographed dance he sticks his damp finger in the small Ziplock bag and points it at her. She grabs his wrist and licks his finger, sucking with exaggerated sensuality, because everything and nothing is ridiculous in this living roleplay. When they exchange a kiss with the metallic taste spreading across the inside of their cheeks, it feels overplayed. Em smiles knowingly when she pulls away, like a child playing grown-up. Kim smiles back like he is in on the game. When he sweeps away some powder from her chin, the gesture feels both dizzying and certain, like being touched by oneself and someone else at the same time.