She Must Be Mad Read online

  she must be mad

  Charly Cox

  A mental coming-of-age documented through poetry and prose written by someone who’s still in the thick of it

  copyright

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  First published in Great Britain by HQ 2018

  Copyright © Charly Cox 2018

  Charly Cox asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  The names, characters and incidents portrayed in this work are of the author’s imagination. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events or localitites is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook edition © July 2018 ISBN 9780008291679

  Version: 2018-09-17

  contents

  title page

  copyright

  For the men who broke my heart...

  she must be in love

  love part 1

  to you

  she moves in her own way

  mourning routine

  mesh of kisses

  anatomical astrologist

  otters

  weight of you

  lipstick

  lovebites

  with his assistants

  doubletree by hilton

  porn

  evolution

  snapple lid facts

  kaleidoscope

  rosie cheeks

  app cheats

  first west service

  you sit with your tongue...

  the first time

  love part 2

  she must be mad

  mind part 1

  ‘she must be mad’

  @saintrecords

  doctor, doctor, don’t help me

  selective feeling

  I wish I’d not spent so long crying in bed

  rapid cycling

  funny

  I prescribe you this

  I know that truth is always beautiful

  all I wanted was some toast

  a voice I know

  wonder of worry

  amber meal

  unidentified businessman

  mind part 2

  inner gold

  resilience

  dysthymia

  wrong spaces

  kindness

  your mind is biased

  she must be fat

  body part 1

  stuff

  shoreditch house

  kale

  kale reprised

  wrigley’s extra

  trump

  filters

  london pervs

  women’s tea

  imposter

  hunger

  gift for a man

  sobriety

  cellulite (sells you heavy)

  fat

  body part 2

  bodies

  sexy

  she must be an adult

  age

  goldman sachs

  I’ll be home in the morning

  too young

  say you’re sorry

  they came out and I stayed in

  E1W 3SS/Billy

  pint-sized

  whatsapp

  roots of them/sorry, jacob

  kids

  forever

  baby ella

  adult

  seaweed – for grandad

  expectations

  yellow cabs

  hospital visits

  you will choose...

  acknowledgements

  about the author

  about the publisher

  For the men who broke my heart, for the beta-blockers that slowed it, and a chunk of what is left to the sisterhood with a gift tag wrapped around it reading: let’s try and figure this all out together.

  I owe this all to my madness and those who have suffered it. I never thought I’d be a poet. I never knew one day I’d slap a title on a cover that encased sometimes lonely and sometimes excited thoughts and say, ‘Here it is! A book of poems! By me, Charly … The Poet!’ But life shocks you and here we all are. In that never tense, I didn’t know a thing – I just knew how to feel. I took to feeling like a sport and I exercised every one of those achy heartstrings that had festered in cliché drivel until they snapped and aortic wells poured and shouted, ‘For god’s sake woman, can you just write these feelings down so we can have a break?’ And so I did. For years in silence and secrecy. I wrote these poems and letters to my past self and in every sort of melodramatic, romantic, ridiculous way, these are what saved me. Saved me from an intensity I was afraid to share until I morphed them into something to share with you now. Some of these were written at sixteen, others at twenty-two; they were all written growing and lost and sad sunk, but they were also all written with eventual hope. A hope that I clung to in the most intense way that only a girl desperate to take a peek at womanhood, battling a wealthy portfolio of mental health issues nervously, could. Finding strength in the contention of such frustrated confusion, in odd and debilitating sadness, in jubilant first kisses and clangs of clarity – in the words of our lord saviour Britney Spears, ‘I’m not a girl – not yet a woman’. And there is something truly quite almighty in that in-between … either that or, I must truly just be mad.

  she must be in love

  love part 1

  Nobody ever tells you that there’ll be comedians and poets, actors and academics, college students and forty-year-old men to fall in love with.

  That you will fall in love with them all.

  Their charm and their poise, their anecdotes and foreign phrases, even the stray scratchy hairs on their cheeks and chins that will tickle like an acrylic yarn against your youth.

  They first come soft. Soft and slow and ethereal, these perfumed clouds of promise that smell new but hang old, and then before a single tendril has had time to make itself at home on your collar, they exit loud and angry and too early.

  They will always exit too early.

  Little-to-no explanation, a hole so deep you lose your feet to the black and bleak of self-assumed guilt, he flings the door on its hinges for another man to oil and mend.

  You’ll re-imagine hope until he leaves too, tarnishing his very own handiwork.

  Nobody ever tells you of these good-looking silhouettes because they have stood in their cast before. They relished in the same way you will but they cowered in the flood.

  They sunk with weakened limbs until they no longer knew of that initial burst and lay themselves down to surrender. You, however, will not allow yourself to be a casualty to love. You will grow stronger in it, if you try.

  It’s six minutes past midnight, Facebook has updated Messenger, video now available, you have no one to call.

  Soon, it’s twenty-one minutes past twelve and an unfamiliar noise rings through the hard plastic of your first laptop, it starts to screech. You look up and to the side, a rerun of the news now only important to your periphery.

  A boy. It’s a boy.

  A boy you’ve never met but whose life you know the lengths of. Holidays, parties, girlfriends, new friends, birthdays, likes, lunches – all arranged int
o bite-sized books you’ve read and torn pages from time and time again. The boy. The boy from the holidays and the parties, with the girlfriends and the new friends, he’s calling you.

  You answer.

  Spanking new anticipation twirling twines that tie knots in your chest, frayed ends tickling your stomach to stir hot queasy butterfly soup.

  ‘Hello.’ He says, monotone. Northern.

  Eyes thinning to an embarrassed sleepy squint.

  ‘Hey?’ You say, a question. Southern.

  Smile curving to bunch the bags from under your eyes to pillows.

  ‘Just wondered what your voice sounded like.’ He says, he smiles back.

  ‘Same. Now we know.’

  Lights dim in both screens, you dissolve into the silence of each other’s nights, minds reaching out to touch the other, tousle hair, feel skin. Talk. Talk. Laugh. Smile.

  Embarrassment has gone.

  It’s five thirty-six in the morning four years later. Lights still dim, faces still rounded in the glow of the laptop. Girlfriends once stalked are now ex-girlfriends discussed. Holidays, planned as fleeting dreams of train journeys across the country to finally meet. Likes, shared. Sometimes agreed.

  ‘Do we know, or at least think, that if you lived down the road from me we’d be in love?’ He wrote.

  ‘Yes.’ You reply.

  A life starts to lead along a parallel secret line, a life that’s yours and a line of fibre optics. Two years pass. You meet in a newsagent at a train station. He’s smaller than you thought. You’re fatter than he’d seen. Geography offers different greetings. Kiss, hug, release. You share pancakes but struggle to look at each other. You walk across Battersea Bridge, he lights a spliff, you sit facing away from each other and imagine you’re still just on the phone. Better.

  Three years later and it has never happened again. You never found out if he became the poster boy for postmen in Salford. You never got to tell him of the new bosses and the trips to America. You never got to tell him all the things he was right about. You never got to tell him how your heart held out, how it still occasionally chooses to hold out. How in a life lived on a parallel secret line you never unplugged the receiver. But now you do. Now you get to tell him somewhere he might find it and can only hope he does, before he finds someone else.

  to you

  This feels silly to write

  For in doing so

  The sentiment fractures

  And goes back full circle

  But I’ve kissed plenty of boys

  Most of them charming

  I’ve kissed plenty of boys

  And I’ve been on plenty of arms and

  I’ve loved plenty of boys

  And they’ve made me feel soft

  And I’ve seen plenty of boys

  And plenty I’ve lost

  I’ve had plenty of evenings

  In dimly lit bars

  And I’ve had plenty of fumbles

  In the backs of their cars

  I’ve written plenty of letters

  And received plenty of emails

  I’ve kissed plenty of boys

  And one or two females

  I’ve traced plenty of hips

  With eager touch

  And I’ve kissed plenty of lips

  That made me feel too much

  And in the plenty I’ve gathered

  I’ve garnered plenty of words

  But once put all together

  They don’t sound like firsts

  They all sort of sound similar

  As though each man wasn’t new

  Which is why it’s important to say

  Not everything I write is about you.

  she moves in her own way

  It was sticky in your apartment

  I stuck my eyes to every corner

  Where you’d stuck up old postcards

  An entire museum of your life and more a

  Window

  Framed the shrilling stuck-up summer silhouettes in the pub down below

  You stuck a scratched record on

  That played the once smooth staccato

  You poured me a glass of wine

  That slipped sticky to my sides

  That slipped your fingers across my thighs

  I felt stuck

  This time I promised myself I wasn’t giving up

  You said stick around

  And I cleared off the dark sediment red wine muck

  From my lips

  And kissed you in a way

  That begged to reverse ownership

  But instead it sellotaped my wrists

  Together tight around your hips

  Whilst my internal monologue screamed:

  You’re hopeless at this

  You don’t want to do this

  You always do this

  You don’t have to be this

  Person

  You don’t have to quench your thirst on

  Him

  Tell your body its anxiety isn’t a passion to burst on

  Him

  Don’t try and fill the void with empty consumption

  This moment in time that you’ll lie and say was sweet seduction

  Was another episode of you orchestrating a personality reduction

  Into a girl you have no business being

  No pleasing being

  Stop teasing feeling

  From an inner drought

  That only dried to be that way

  Because you gave all your kindness out

  Instead of spending it on yourself.

  I stop as your eyes unstuck from mine

  You swig from the bottle of wine

  And I muster up the courage to say

  I don’t want to be just tonight

  I’ve said it before and let it be denied

  And you laugh with a cocksure sigh

  And hit me with another line like

  Why can’t you just be a girl for a good time?

  And it’s the just that juts

  And ricochets

  And it slaps stuck

  To my ongoing conflict with myself

  I reach for a souvenir placed on your shelf

  Throw it between my palms

  Imagine what false comfort I’d find within your arms

  And put it back

  I give learning from lessons a crack

  I stop myself from telling you that you’re such a twat

  When you text me the next morning

  To say my excuse as a woman is appalling

  For leaving in a rush

  It was sticky in your apartment

  And it was there that I realised

  I was bored of being stuck

  As a girl whose muchness amounted to just

  The night.

  mourning routine

  He is unsmoked cigarettes

  And lukewarm tea

  A morning routine

  (He’s) not consumed by me

  A craving that will fade

  Left unfinished in the sink

  Until my wine-stained lips

  Call the next round of drinks

  I’ll wake up in the morning

  Next to someone new

  But I still fell asleep

  Hoping that someone would be you.

  mesh of kisses

  Find the contented without the contention of giving away half of yourself

  And see that letting go isn’t giving in

  But a spiritual commodity of wealth

  My best teachers were disguised as lovers

  Unmasked when I untangled their mesh of kisses

  And smothered myself instead with the notion that they were knowledgeable near misses

  And Mr Brave

  The future without the listless lustful nights

  Replaced with a silhouette of love

  That was bred from moulding a mistreated wrong into its rightful right.

  anatomical astrologist

  Your body became so fam
iliar

  I touched your skin the same way I’d fumble down the side of the TV in the dark and know the difference between the

  and the

  Each line and freckle a constellation on your torso

  I could read backwards like an anatomical astrologist.

  We intertwine and I sigh softly

  a shared unspoken bedtime language that

  screamed

  to the gods for just

  five

  more

  minutes

  Time stopped to matter and the matter of us across your old mattress pulled apart until your stars dimmed down to flickering filaments and I chose to switch them off.

  otters

  It is what it is until it isn’t

  Quite it anymore

  Makes perfect logical sense, sure

  But in eleven short words I don’t think you swirl the score

  Of what I’m on about

  I could mutter an uttering of offers

  Words that cling to syllables as tightly as otters

  In love

  Did you know they never let go once they’ve found a mate?

  Did you know that my slithering of truth wasn’t yours to emanate

  Dissipate, dissolve upon your lips

  As my truth became a movement and your hands became my hips

  In a haze of a few Sundays

  Of what I thought was it

  But didn’t know that it could be something just one of us could quit

  And that’s quite exactly it

  It was what it wasn’t

  Instead of a smattering of emails that will one day be forgotten

  Instead of a flattering string of inhales that sung kindly until coughed out rotten.

  Again these are all just words

  Silly sold sentiments aren’t that tough

  I could rhyme anything together and it’d still be enough

  For you to know what I’m wittering on about is love

  It is what it is until it isn’t

  Quite it anymore

  It’s tracing your finger on a back

  That will soon traipse out the door

  It’s wine on a Saturday and lies that you learn as foreplay

  It’s lust in its golden hour

  It’s kissing goosebumped in the shower

  It’s handing over innocence to a dastardly power

  Of frightening fragile fragments that someone can stack in their own tower