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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... Down in the Dirt magazine (v103) (the February 2012 Issue) You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5" issue as an ISSN# paperback book:

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Facing Space

Ellie Stewart

    When I was 16 years old The Buzzcocks were all I listened to, my favourite colour was aquamarine, I gained ten A stars at GCSE and my mother died one January evening.
    I was told it wasn’t a shock, as she’d been sick for two years. My father decided that two days off was the appropriate grieving time, and sent me back to school with a note in my hand for the teacher who said she was sorry and allowed me to sit in a room on my own for one hour to cry, which was kind.
    My mother’s death registered with my school on the same seismic scale as the flaked paint by the art block and the puddles in the road. I cried, once, in front of others at school. But it made them all feel awkward, and the teachers were worrying about girls with divorced parents and girls with eating disorders and girls with pot habits. And everyone else was worrying about my father, who was surrounded by understanding work colleagues and women with ready hanker-chiefs, so I dried my eyes, and that was that.
    But something sudden happened soon after in my head or my heart, I’m not sure which. I felt it very strongly but was able to hide, rather easily, from a painting of people who said things to my father that sounded like the droning platitudes of by-gone housewives: ‘You’ll know when something’s wrong.’ Or the school nurse who asked me if I was ‘interested in boys’ during a routine chat three months after my mother had died. And so I was taught what was important and what people wanted to know, and when to say something and when to say little, and when to say nothing at all.
    But the ache was still there, and it was hard because it almost hurt to walk and talk, every day.
    And I’d never believed in God, and that had never been a stark problem. I’d wondered and thought, and considered, and read The Bible, and gone to a Christian primary school and been surrounded by believers and read and wondered and thought some more and no, He was not there.
    And that didn’t seem a problem until she died. But after that life became rather difficult and it seemed impossible to just ‘get on with things’ as the English mantra goes.
    I felt the absence of God with a sharp, terrible pain. I felt the loss of Him in the vast expanse of the sky, and the terrifying emptiness of the space that waits beyond it. The whole world seemed hollowed out. It started at the centre of me, like an aching hunger, a hunger that made me feel so empty I could faint and this feeling grew and expanded like a stomach inflating with air, and it gasped out of me and blew and blew, wider and wider, a great empty, hollow, wide, silent space moving the world out into the darkness beyond the atmosphere and into all that Nothing that lies beyond it.
    And I sat in my room with my math homework and tried to forget it.
    But of course, it was just too much.

    I had a friend, Jack, who believed in God.
    He was 19 years old, steady and self-assured. We’d argued about Christianity dozens of times, and I’d always stood firm and told him the reasons and the logic and couldn’t understand how easily he believed in something that he said he needed no proof for, and that no arguments would refute. This had only been a scratching frustration between us until now, and now mother was dead and there was a huge, gaping hole and I just couldn’t bear it any longer.

    ‘Your life has more meaning than mine, doesn’t it?’ I said. ‘I want to believe, so much.’
    Jack was confused by this sudden turn.
    ‘Do you feel you’re beginning to believe in God now?’
    ‘No,’ I said, ‘not at all,’ and my hand started to shake, and the darkness squatted at the edges of my eyes like black toads with wide mouths. ‘But I will. I want to. Please, will you go to church with me?’
    Jack didn’t go to church often. He frowned. He thought. There was a church at the end of my road and he said he’d meet me at my house that Sunday and we’d walk together. I thanked him, and as I headed home, I decided that I would hold his hand on the way there. That thought made me breathe out slowly and feel, for a moment, quite calm.

    We walked into church that Sunday and everyone there was old. They all shuffled slowly in shades of grey and beige, with bent backs and walking sticks, and each of them concentrated on the next step with a pained look on their faces. I clung tighter to Jack’s arm and concentrated my eyes on the great wooden door, and then, as we entered, the high ceiling, gaping upwards, reaching, reaching, with those white-washed walls and modest stained glass pictures: Jesus, handing out loaves and fishes.
    We sat at the back and it was all so cold and hollow and hard. I wished it had been some extravagant Catholic cathedral, bright with the Virgin in blue and thick and full with deep red and dazzling gold. In this place, you could hear the loud echo of the old folk’s sticks as they shambled in. They took forever.
    And when the priest spoke, I tried to take in his words. I wanted them to resonate, to rumble with the solemn ghosts of ages past, of Moses in the desert, of the struggle of Man, of God’s punishments and his promises to us all. I wanted to take it in like truth, not sentiment.
    But it was all dry ponderings on loving thy neighbour, as Jesus did, and the priest said he’d learned his lesson only the other day when some yobbo had lobbed a KFC bucket into his front garden and he’d taken it away and thanked God for giving him his very own trespasser to forgive, and some people in the congregation chuckled, or coughed, I couldn’t tell which. The sounds of dry throats contracting and hacking and wheezing filled the stone walls for the whole hour, and the only way I could find a way to steady myself was to press one ear against Jack’s shoulder so that half of me only heard the muffled fabric of his clothes.
    It was what I had expected, but not what I wanted, not what I longed for. I said to Jack we should go for lunch, and we had drinks with our roast dinners at the pub (which I ate little of) and he asked, with a smile, if I thought it made sense and I said ‘oh, yes!’. I went to the bathroom a little later and nearly threw up, but it was all dry heaves. And when I came back it was evening, and dark, and I asked him did he want to come back to mine?, and he did.
    The alcohol filled the silence with a muffled buzz, and made me cling to him less but want him more. And he’d loved me for years and I thought: it’s my fault I don’t believe, and I’ve got to fill this gap that makes me strange, I’ve got to fill it with something, with someone. And so I let him have sex with me and he was surprised, but pleased, and for half an hour there was blood beating in my head and enough warmth and discomfort and struggle for me to forget all about space and God and death and afterwards, we both sunk into thick, noiseless sleep.
    In the morning the light was bright and the room echoed and it was terrible again.
    Still, I told myself, it must be my fault. And I haven’t done enough. Everyone around me smiled vapidly and talked about shopping and laughed and painted their nails and I thought: What is that? Why don’t I have that?

    And the next Sunday, I rang Jack in the morning.
    ‘So, are you coming with me?’ I said, watching the sunrays outside.
    ‘What? To where?’
    ‘To church.’ I said, feeling a tremble in my throat.
    ‘Oh... Oh, no, I can’t. I can’t this morning. I said I’d go to lunch with my parents.’
    All of a sudden, the ground wasn’t there. The air was moving away.
    ‘But.... But last weekend. You said we could go... Jack, you said, you said that this was important.... I thought-’
    ‘Well I can’t go today. Sorry.’
    I began to shake and my voice rose up high. ‘But I slept with you!’
    I knew, even before I’d said it, that this was the wrong thing to say.
    His voice darkened.
    ‘Well I can’t be the one to look after you. I’m sorry. You can go on your own. You’ll be fine. It’ll be good for you.’
    ‘No... I can’t! Please. I can’t go on my own.’
    ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Bye,’ he said.
    He put down the phone. And I did wail, high and desperately, and I did start to cry. And I felt there wasn’t any ground anymore and I thought it was impossible to go on my own.
    I felt weak and terrible and worthy to be spat at, and ashamed at my weakness and I thought how pathetic I was for being afraid of the silence.
    So I went on my own.
    And I was shaking all the way, and had to stand in line as the elderly shuffled in. They seemed even slower than last time and even older, and I had to dig my nails into my palms and bite my bottom lip hard to stop from shaking and and crying out loud. They all had grey hair- the women perms- and naff brown clothes from charity shops and I wondered why old people made themselves look so much older than they needed to look.
    Their coughing was even louder this time and I felt dizzy in my seat. I felt so much younger and taller than everyone else. My straight back pressed into the air, the wooden pew dug into my calves. God knows what the priest was talking about this time because the air was spinning in my eyes and my ears and I just wanted Jesus to come down out of that stained glass and hug me and let me cry and not have to sit there clawing at my wrists and trying to make the world still and safe in this great, huge, echoing whitewashed place.
    And I thought of trying to talk to him, to the priest, after it ended.
    But I thought he would have seen the desperate look in my eyes and the old women were all chattering about biscuits and knitting anyway, as they shuffled up to him. And so I took a great gasp and stood and flung myself back out there, into the wide outside air. And the sky was colourless and endless and when I got home there was nobody there.

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