Drifting
Emmanuel pulled his mask back over his nose and mouth, having briefly lowered it to take a sip of the bitter filter coffee, its smell acrid and affronting in the recycled train carriage air. He’d never got past the mask thing. Not getting sick somehow only made him worse. The healthier he became, the more fastidious he was. I know he considered me slovenly, not just by comparison, but in general. I could feel him roll his eyes behind me whenever I didn’t wash my hands for long enough, or if I touched a cashpoint.
“What do you need cash for anyway?”
“It feels more real.”
He checked the time on his phone. Our train had stopped in the hills, the announcement said there were ponies on the track, something that filled me with a childlike joy, and Emmanuel a pedant’s panic. Before the train set off again, we saw a man in a tweed flat cap ushering three horses up the hill to our right. “That’s one for your journal,” I said, and he looked at me, expression neutral, but his extended gaze made it a glare.
“We’re going to be late.”
I was disappointed too. I’d gone against my nature and planned this journey to the second. It was five trains in all. I scoured Twitter to find the truth about the interchanges - could you really make it from platform 1 to 10 in less than a minute? Were stairs involved? Would tourists or commuters slow us down?
“Normal adults would hire a car,” he said.
“When were we ever normal?”
The service was at 1pm. The idea of being late had seeded in my head and was making me itchy. I could feel Ms Robbins trying to bring out my better qualities, punctuality was one of the things she had tried to impress upon me.
I’d learned she’d passed in a Facebook group for Coombes School leavers. The school had long since closed, any straggling students matriculated to other schools around the borough. There’d been a campaign, a sort of half-hearted protest outside the town hall towards the end. I’d asked Emmanuel if we should go and do our bit. “If we were doing our bit we’d burn the place down.”
He hadn’t wanted to come along today, either. I’d begged him. It was undignified, but dignity was more his thing than mine. “She was good to us Emmanuel. Nothing else matters.”
On the odd occasion I did catch up with the others from our year, they never asked about Emmanuel. I always brought him up as soon as possible, that we lived together, before anyone could gossip about what happened to him. People would go quiet or get confused. “I didn’t know you were friends,” or “nice to have someone familiar nearby when you’re not close to home.”
When we moved I learned that people mourn you when you die, but if you leave the city, people just go about their lives like you were never in them. Giving precious weekends to go over the border, paying for hotels because our house was too small for guests, it was all more effort than a simple, effective silence. That’s why Facebook was so important to me, It gave people an avenue to passively love me.
We hadn’t moved so far away on purpose, once we left it became easier to edge a few more miles every so often, chasing a better-paid job or quieter village, avoiding neighbours with something to say who wouldn’t say it to our faces.
Finally, Emmanuel suggested that we buy a house. For most people, the first house cemented growing up, for me, it showed me that he wanted things to stay the same as much as I did. He did all the paperwork, occasionally asking me for a signature, some ID, and my bank statements. I paid my half of the deposit, and then we were stable, stuck. I wanted a bit of ceremony, to smash a bottle of champagne against the front wall perhaps, but Emmanuel said I was being ridiculous.
We pulled into Euston at around 12. Enough time to make it to the church, but not enough to go to the hotel to change. We crammed ourselves and our suitcase into the accessible toilet in the station and hung the suit carriers on the low hook on the back of the door, the bottom of the plastic brushing against the stained floor.
“You look handsome,” I said, looking at his reflection in the scratched-up mirror, his face partly obscured by an artless graffiti tag, his hands clasped around his tie knot, adjusting it a few millimetres to the right, then to the left.
“I look like I’m going to court.”
We paid to store our luggage at the station. We navigated the journey to the church through muscle memory - years of attending hymns on a Friday morning. She wouldn’t’ve wanted to rest there, but the choices people make about your death are always about what makes them feel better, not what you would have wanted.
We touched out at the barriers and took the escalator to the exit, the same one where we’d met when Emmanuel was first released. I'd tried not to stare at how he’d changed. He was longer, leaner, his face drawn. But despite all of it, he didn’t look any older. If anything, he looked more like the little boy I’d sat next to when I was 7, a yellow hue to his skin, who was scared to talk to anyone and once wet himself in a school assembly because he was too shy to raise his hand whilst the headmaster was speaking.
We were in school together from as early as I can remember, right up until it happened. We weren’t close then, though sometimes when he looks at me, I wonder if we’re close now, or just the strange equivalent of a marriage of convenience.
I heard a change in his breathing, he started doing it consciously, like I’d taught him to help with the panic attacks. In for 7, out for 11, in for 7, out for 11, in for 7, I grabbed his hand, out for 11, he squeezed mine and let it go.
We sat near the back of the church. Not much had changed since we were last here, near 20 years ago. We squeezed into the wooden pew, sitting and standing at the appropriate times, mouthing the words we sang together as boys, how great thou art, how great thou art, not needing to consult the lyrics in the unprofessionally printed pamphlet with an out-of-date picture of Ms Robbins gracing the front. The pastor spoke;
“I had a great deal of time to get to know Sally over the years. She kept to herself but gave selflessly to the church. Though she had no family of her own, she was a child of God who will find her kin in heaven.”
Emmanuel snorted, not loud, but loud enough for one or two people to turn and look at us. I bowed my head, embarrassment dressed as prayer, and Emmanuel covered his eyes with the heel of his hand, drumming his fingers on the front of his hairline.
“We have to go,” he said, as people lined up at the casket. “I don’t want to see her.”
“ I do, we’ve come all this way!”
“You’d better get your money’s worth then,” said Emmanuel, turning towards the light emitting from the semi-circular wooden doors.
Emmanuel was waiting outside when I came out, leaning against the back of the church wall standing in a patch of uncut grass, dew drops pooling on his meticulously polished leather shoes. If I ever lost him, I just headed to the quietest corner. He was never gone, but always hiding.
“How was the corpse?” he asked.
“Don’t call her that!” I protested, stifling a laugh, something about the trauma bringing out the worst in us. “I don’t suppose we’ll go to the wake then,” I half asked, half answered.
“Not on your fucking life,” Emmanuel said quietly, pushing off the wall with his shoulders, righting himself and heading out towards the black gates.
We found a table at the back of an empty pub that smelled like furniture polish and spilt pints. Drinking whiskey seemed the grown-up thing to do, so I got us two cans of Red Stripe. I looked Emmanuel in the eye and raised my can in a toast, “To Mrs Robbins, she finally got out of this shithole.” Emmanuel humoured me, touched his can against mine, honouring her with more of a slosh than a clink.
When I returned from the toilet, Emmanuel was crying noiselessly at the table, he made no effort to hide it. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, and then cleansed it with an antibacterial wipe, as though he was allergic to his own tears.
“She was good to us, you know?”
“I know.”
When Emmanuel got out, she collected him. I’d promised in my letters that he could stay with me. I had a big room in a run-down HMO where nobody cared who came and went. I’d spent money on a blow-up bed, but once I got it inflated, it seemed immature, impermanent, so I took it back. I found a single divan bed frame in an alleyway, slightly damp from the rain, and put £5 on the electric so I could dry it with my housemate's blowdryer. I got a second-hand mattress from the Salvation Army, dressed it with a set of sheets I got from a jumble sale and cleaned at the laundrette at the top of the road. I split the room into zones like I’d seen Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen do on Changing Rooms, differentiating his side from mine using a bathmat as an area rug.
We all knew that Emmanuel hadn’t done anything, let alone what they accused him of. We’d all been told “you fit the description,” at one time or another, walking home from school or getting off the tube. The ones of us that were called to the police station told the police that it couldn’t have been him, at least we told each other that we’d told the police that. Ms Robbins spent hours in and out of interview rooms with him - he was too young to be alone.
When he first went away, I asked her about him often - unsure if it was concern or morbid fascination. One day, after class, she said to me, “He’d appreciate hearing from you.”
She mailed the letters for me every week, and when the replies came we sat inside at break time and read them together.
I was afraid to go and visit him, she never encouraged me, and he didn’t ask. I think we all agreed that it was enough for one of us to see the inside of a prison.
Emmanuel never answered any of my questions or asked anything about back home. He very rarely asked if we could get something to him - a notepad or a thermal vest, I could tell it pained him to do so.
Dear Emmanuel,
Ms Robbins said you will be out in two weeks. I would like it if you came to stay with me. I live in one of those big houses on Bird Street near where the old warehouses are. There’s enough space for both of us to have a single bed and I’m doing my apprenticeship so I’m not home during the day. You don’t have to pay any rent but if you could chip in for a bag of pasta and some cornflakes now and then it would really help.
We lived in a curious sort of harmony, never talking about the future. I quickly learned that life is more like being carried out by the tide than climbing a mountain. We drifted together for a year, two, then a decade, then two. When we bought our house together, my mum cried. “Don’t you want to get married?” she asked, reaching for my hand across the kitchen table. “Don’t you want to be happy?” I didn’t know how to explain it, I went too dramatic, telling her it wasn’t in my destiny. Emmanuel never mentioned women, or men; never pointed at someone on the TV and said they were attractive. I don’t think he cared for other people enough to be in a relationship. Sometimes I felt like if I disappeared, he wouldn’t react, just keep his routine, spending less time vacuuming the kitchen because I wasn’t there to drop toast crumbs.
We drank three more red stripes each and headed to the hotel. As we rounded the corner I saw a man leering towards us, his steps drunker than ours, his face familiar but not, street lights casting eerie shadows across his face. He blocked our path. “You got a lighter?” he asked. Emmanuel tried to keep walking, I apologised, said we didn’t smoke.
“Wait a minute!” said the man grabbing Emmanuel’s wrist. “Wait. A. Minute!” he said, his watery voice rising with every word. “It’s you isn’t it, it really is you!”
Emmanuel wriggled free, knowing that the volume of alcohol consumed between the three of us could take this conversation somewhere bad, quickly. “Sorry mate,” he said, in a voice that didn’t sound like his own.
He sped up, and I trotted after him. The voice called after us, not following, but finding us anyway.
“Psycho Sullivan, I knew it was you! Can’t believe you’re back after what you did!”
I wanted to defend Emmanuel, to tell this leering stranger that he didn’t do it, and even if he had, that’s no way to treat a person. He’d served his time, and anyway, it was twenty years ago. I felt my shoulders draw up to my ears, my feet fixed to carry me back down the street. I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t,” Emmanuel said.
As we lay in the hotel bed, a pillow’s width between us, I heard Emmanuel breathing, in for 7 out for 11. I turned to say something, but after so long, I still didn’t know how to talk to him about it.
“Thanks,” he said.
“For what?” I asked.
“For all of it,” Emmanuel said, turning towards me. “I don’t say it enough. Or at all.”
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine our future, beyond us boarding the train and going back home. I imagined us drifting, taken by the sea, climbing to the tallest mountain, living there together, only coming down once a year to refill our log store and kill a deer or two for meat, tanning the hides for our clothes. I imagined twenty more years together, thirty, forty, fifty. I imagined taking my last breath with Emmanuel at my bedside, him digging a hole in the garden for me to rest, planting an apple tree on top. I imagined Emmanuel’s face at my makeshift graveside. He was on his knees, smoothing out the dirt. He was crying.
Jade E. Bradford (she/her) is a Black British Caribbean short fiction writer and communications and engagement professional. She holds a Masters Degree in Creative Writing and has had her work published in Wasafiri, featured in Photoworks’ Festival in a Box, and showcased in several online outlets. In 2023, her short story An Embarrassment of Janets was highly commended in the Fab Prize. Jade has been recognised as part of Literature Wales’ Representing Wales cohort (2023), the Black British Book Festival’s Writers on the Rise (2024), and Babes in Development’s Literary Brunch for emerging writers (2024). Jade is passionate about social justice, housing equality, and representing marginalised communities. She is committed to writing literary short fiction for all ages and championing authentic, nuanced portrayals of Black women in her work.
Website: www.jadeemilybradford.co.uk
Instagram: @jadebradforduk