By Tara Robinson.
To tell you how I lost her, I need to tell you how I found her.
Roommate Lola. Best friend Lola. Lola in her bedroom, sitting on the ground in front of the mirror, makeup sprawled out in front of her. Lola in the passenger seat, sand still dusting her shoulders. Lola in my bed. Lola at the bar, two drinks in front of her because she couldn’t decide. Lola, Lola, Lola.
A port wine stain, beginning from behind her left ear and reaching midway down her jaw, the mottled, plum-coloured skin covering most of her cheek. I had pieced together brief mentions of her childhood to know that she had been bullied for it during her school years, but this had only made her confidence grow, her heart stronger, her tongue sharper. She was formidable. Magnetic. Electric. She was Lola, and for a fleeting, fever-dream period, she was mine.
She had needed a roommate. Lola had spent months alone in the holiday home her parents owned on the Bay, a small coastal suburb whose population mostly consisted of retirees in sun visors with short-circuit memories. Lola was experiencing the beachy, sunscreen-scented equivalent of cabin fever. Before she met me, she was depressed, but worse; she was bored.
The house itself was a cabinet of curiosities. Sea foam glass windows in different shades of blue – azure, cerulean, periwinkle, cobalt. Carvings of mermaids and shells etched into cherry wood archways. Spiral staircases, art deco furniture, white curtains with dainty lace trim.
I jumped at the chance to move in. The opportunity arose at a time where I couldn’t stand to be home anymore, where the dysfunction of my family oozed through the walls like an infection. I felt like an animal caught in a trap, willing to gnaw off its own leg to escape.
The friendship with Lola started slowly, almost painfully. For the first week, we stuck to our rooms, occasionally bumping into each other in the hallway or the kitchen, muttering pleasantries before returning to our separate lairs.
Until one night, Lola knocked on my bedroom door. I opened it to find her standing there, in a black dress that resembled a second skin, eyelids pearlescent with silver sparkles. She had a bottle of prosecco in her hand, holding it up proudly like a trophy.
‘Wanna go out?’
After that, it was done. Our weekends consisted of gulping cheap wine while we got ready at home, adorning ourselves with jewellery, her’s gold, mine silver. Painting each other’s faces with glitters that made our eyes siren-like, glosses that made our lips look plump and wet while we giggled and told each other to stay still.
We lost hours at the local tavern, entertaining the older men, listening intently to their stories with a longing gaze, slapping them away when they took our attentiveness as an invitation to get handsy. We scaled the tables for the men our age who were visiting the Bay on holiday, their skin bronzed, hair salty from the day’s surf. We flirted, we laughed at their average jokes, we twirled our hair around our fingers, we batted our eyelashes like porcelain dolls, but we never took them home. We always left the tavern the same way; squealing giddily, hair tousled by the sea breeze, arms interlocked while we swayed like buoys on our walk to the taxi rink. A pair of twenty-somethings, in the full flush of our youth.
When we would arrive home in the early hours of the morning, sometimes when the choir of native birds began their morning hymn, we would slip into bed. In the pale blue light, we would whisper our secrets to each other, protected by the womb-like lining of the blanket pulled over our heads. One morning, while Lola was wrapped around my body like a tourniquet, she said something that I still think about often.
‘Do you ever want to be taken care of?’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Like, do you ever want someone to take care of you?’
I thought about it for a few seconds. ‘I don’t think so.’
We had achieved complete and utter symbiosis. We rarely slept in our own beds. We tanned on the grass in the backyard, our backs bare and oiled. We cooked meals together. Our periods were in sync. We watched old soap operas in a true, old-married-couple fashion.
Then, something changed.
I met him on one of our regular weekend visits at the tavern. I don’t know why I gravitated towards him, why I gave him all of my attention that night, why I let him lean over one of the sticky tables to kiss me. I don’t know why I broke Lola and I’s unspoken rule and brought him home with me.
What I do know is that Lola slept in her own bed that night, while we poured heavy-handed glasses of cask wine and had sex in the dark, our hands fumbling haphazardly, foreheads knocking against each other.
He stayed for the next few days. Then weeks. I had never been in love before, but I was infatuated. Before I had even realised it, he had taken Lola’s place and joined his hip to my own, rendering us as inseparable while Lola teetered around the edge of us, discarded.
My feelings towards her had inexplicably flipped on its head. We seldom spoke. I could only handle her in small, planned doses. I couldn’t stand the way she clung to me, the way she pined for my attention, her pleas to spend time with me bordering on whining.
Maybe I was too short with her, or more. Maybe I was apathetic, cruel, even.
It didn’t justify my treatment of Lola, but come to find out, my hormones did play a role in my hostility. Two months after that last visit to the tavern, I found out I was pregnant.
I wasn’t frightened. I wasn’t overjoyed, either. Instead, I felt a strange numbness wash over me, then acceptance. There was no other way to go about it. This is how my life would be. This would happen.
When I told Lola, she was silent. Her silver hair was knotted with sleep, her skin a greyish hue, her birthmark oil-spill black in the shadow of the late-afternoon. She simply looked at my stomach, the bump barely rounded, and slipped her palm under my shirt.
‘I’m happy for you.’ She said, dully, before she slowly crept back to her room.
During our stalemate, she had morphed into something unrecognisable. She spent all of her time in her room, door locked, blinds shut. In the rare occasions when she strayed, she moved through the house like a ghost. I caught a glimpse inside of her room, once, and saw green wax melted in puddles on the wooden floor, a collection of driftwood and plants and shells she must have taken from the beach.
The smell of herbs wafted through the house in clouds of smoke. Sickly sweet vapours of rosemary and nettle that made me even more nauseous.
One day, I found a white mouse on the cobblestone path that led to the front door. It was on its back, tiny mouth agape, neatly sliced open from neck to tail as though it had been flayed.
The night before Lola left me, the baby stirred below my navel, depriving me of sleep. I saw her shadow under my door, waiting, hesitating, before disappearing again.
A fisherman pulled her body from the water early the next morning. The tide had tried to pull her out into the ocean, but a loose rope left by one of the boats on the dock had wrapped around her torso, tethering her to it like an umbilical cord, keeping her there.
I cannot describe what I felt during that time. I’m sorry.
She had folded a piece of paper and slipped it under my door, with three words that I thought I understood, but later realised I didn’t. I had no idea at all.
Please forgive me.
My stomach stretched and swelled, housing a life that rippled inside of me like a wave in low tide. Then, one night, its movements grew into a tidal wave, into a pain so profound I could feel it in my bones.
At the hospital, doctors and nurses poked and prodded and injected and examined me until I was told that I would need to be cut open. I thought of the white mouse on the cobblestone, its puzzle piece organs exposed.
No one expected two to come out of me. The boy, first, who did not cry, but looked at me with a type of longing only I could see.
A symphony of confused yelps, more silver tools disappearing behind the blue curtain. The girl came second, and the nurses purred, what a surprise! Twins!
She howled, a high-pitched, guttural cry that only ceased when she was placed into my arms.
Her skin was ruddy, covered in white muck.
Then I saw the birthmark.
Plum-red, starting from behind her left ear, reaching halfway down her cheek.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Tara Robinson is a 22 year old writer who is enamoured with poetry and short stories. She is currently enrolled in Fine Arts (Creative Writing). You can find her on Instagram @sacrificial.l4mb
