Brick

Heavy. That’s what I want to say to her. It feels heavy. When Taylor Morris pushed me down the stairs last week. When Ross McKenzie threw a milkshake in my face. When, every day, people look me straight in the face and tell me I should kill myself, it feels heavy.

     At the bottom of the stairs, I lay on the marble floor, and people stepped over me without even looking. Part of me stayed there because I was waiting to see where on my body it would start to hurt, but more than that it was because I just couldn’t move. Throw a bag of bricks down the stairs and the same thing will happen. When Taylor leaned over me, I thought he was going to spit on me. The relief I felt when all he did was call me a cunt was marginal at best.

     Miss Jex sits behind her desk now and peers at me over the top of her glasses. She’s pretty, which only makes it harder to have to come here and sit across from her twice a week.

     ‘You look like you’re losing weight,’ she says to me. ‘Have you been eating?’

     ‘Yeah.’

     ‘How are things with you and your mum?’

     ‘Fine.’

     When I don’t go on, she holds me still with a gaze that I know is trying to see through into my head, rummage around in there. I’m not sure what it is that she thinks she’s going to find. She’s nice to me, but it’s her job to be nice to me – see me as a victim in all this. If she wasn’t a counsellor, she’d probably look at me the same way everyone else does.

     ‘Do you still feel like people blame you?’ she asks.

     ‘They do blame me.’

     ‘Do you blame yourself?’

     I don’t know what to say.

     At five to three, she lets me out of her office early so I can leave school without any trouble.

     Needless to say, I walk home alone. No one from school lives around us anyway. Our house stands at the end of a long cul-de-sac, separated from our nearest neighbours by a good fifty feet of unkempt grass. It’s supposed to be Gothic, with its roof at tight angles and its windows long and thin, but it’s more of an eyesore than anything. The weird silver-flecked bricks that make up its dark grey facade shimmer in daylight. Dad imported them from abroad. There aren’t any others like them anywhere near here. I watch them sparkle as I make my way up the path to the door.

     When I cross the threshold into the hall, a familiar coldness settles itself over me. Shutting the door behind me is like killing the sun.

     ‘Hello?’ I call out. Sometimes Mum gets off work early.

     Not today.

     Hanging my jacket up, I pull off my trainers and trudge up the stairs, my footsteps booming beneath me. Up on the first floor, I keep my eyes fixed on the deep red carpet as I drag myself along the hallway. I don’t need to look at the photos in their frames, all along the walls, to know that they’re watching me. The hairs on the back of my neck rise up under their gaze. If I linger too long, they start to whisper. So many secrets I don’t want to know. A house giving birth to dark histories.

     In my room, I crash back onto my bed, draped in a silence that feels thick like fabric. I’ve got homework I could do, music I could listen to, shows on Netflix to watch, but as I lie there, sunk into the mattress, it just feels impossible to move. Miss Jex said I’ve lost weight, but all I am is weight. My body is so much heavier than it seems like flesh and blood could possibly be.

     I close my eyes and try to focus on it – the weight. I imagine it breaking apart, cracking as its parts get smaller and smaller until eventually it’s fine as dust. I picture it diffusing through my arms and legs, seeping out from my skin to rise as vapour into the air, up through the ceiling, off into the sky. I want to be light again. I want to be air.

     Instead, I let myself sink further.

     When I open my eyes, I don’t know how much time has passed. I check my phone, relieved not to have any messages now that I’ve deleted all my social media. It’s six o’clock.

     Groaning, I push myself up.

     In the hallway, I feel the photos watching me again – my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my dad, me. None of them should be up there. I don’t know why Mum doesn’t take them down, now that it doesn’t matter what Dad would want. When I make my way back down the stairs, I find her in the kitchen, still in her work clothes, frizzy hair sticking out of her messy bun. She forces a smile at me as she sticks a wooden spoon into the big metal pot on the stove. Something clatters around inside.

     ‘Hello, Darling.’

     ‘Hey,’ I murmur back.

     ‘How was school?’

     ‘Fine.’

     ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

     I glance at the table – three chairs, two places set.

     ‘What’s for dinner?’ I ask.

     ‘Spaghetti,’ she says, stirring the pot again, but whatever’s inside sounds hard and heavy. It sounds like it’s got sharp corners.

     ‘I’m not hungry,’ I tell her.

     ‘You’ve got to eat.’

     ‘No I don’t.’

     ‘You’re wasting away.’

     ‘Oh well.’

     She just looks at me with her heavy eyes, so tired.

     I turn around and head back into the hallway. After pulling my trainers on at the front door, I shove my arms into my jacket. Then I step out into the coldness of the evening.

     At this time of year, it’s already getting dark. The oncoming blackness of the sky weighs down, but the further away I get from the house, the lighter I feel. My feet are springy, my lungs filling up like balloons. At the end of the street, a man and a woman are walking a big yellow dog. I’ve seen them before. They live down this end. As I pass them by, I feel their eyes on me. They know who I am. They know which house I’ve come from.

     Wrapped up in my jacket, I make my way past houses without end, drifting beneath the orange light of the lampposts. Eventually, I’m crossing the school grounds, both the building and I barely even shapes in the night, and making my way down to the little river over the other side. Here, the wind runs in the same direction as the water. As I kneel, my knees sink into the softness of the grass, and I dip my fingers into the stream. Its breath is gentle like a rabbit’s. In the daylight, you can see fish – slips of silver that split apart in the sun – but not right now. Right now, there isn’t anything.

     I like to be out alone like this. Sometimes I wonder what’d happen if people from school found me, what they might do to me in the dark. If they’d beat the shit out of me. If they’d kill me. It makes my skin rise up on my back, a coldness ripple over me. It’s fear like a sky diver’s fear. The thrill of falling. Everyone says Dad took the easy way out, left all those kids and their parents with no one to punish. They ask me if he did it to me too. They call me what they want to call him. They punish me in his place.

     Tipping forward, I take a breath and plunge my head into the water – freezing cold, lonely like space. The current draws at my hair, gently nudging me, ushering me away. I could stay like this forever if I wanted to, go the rest of my life without breathing. And it would be easier, probably. He never did anything to me. I didn’t know. But that doesn’t matter now.

     Instead I pull back, gasping, and push my wet hair out of my face, flinging cold droplets all over the place.

     I should go home. Mum worries if I’m out too late.

     It takes me longer to walk back than it did to walk away. My body starts to get heavier again the closer I get, my feet dragging like solid lumps of granite at the ends of my legs. As I get nearer, I see an orange dawn breaking, too soon for morning, and feel my brow furrow. I drag myself faster.

     When I turn onto our street, I feel heat. At the end of the cul-de-sac, our house stands a black silhouette, engulfed in twisting flames. Everyone on the street has gathered to watch. I drift closer, my heart in my mouth, and fling my gaze back and forth. I can’t see Mum. There are no fire engines. No one has called for help. As I approach, the crowd turns to me and splits apart, making space for me to get through. They don’t care if I burn. Even down at the bottom of the path, the flames are unbearable. My eyes sting. My eyebrows are singed. And my body feels heavy – heavier than it ever has before. I push forward, and the weight collects in my knees, pulls me down to the ground. I stare at my hands right in front of my face and try to lift them, but I can’t. The heat from the flames grows wilder. My skin starts to peel away. I try to scream and the fire leaps down my throat. Reels of my skin roll up, exposing the underneath, and what’s inside me isn’t pink or red or white. It isn’t flesh and blood at all.

     It’s brick. Dark grey brick, flecked with silver speckles, glinting in the firelight.

Currently living in Aberdeen, Scotland, Marieann Joy is a graduate of the University of Glasgow. Her first two novels, A Million Specks of You and Knife Story, are available to buy on Amazon.