It’ll go away, she says, not so much to me as to herself. Just another reaction, a thing to be dismissed, like the bleeding, like the way she sometimes sleepwalks to the bathroom and holds her head under the water, having first filled the bath to a point just shy of overflowing. She doesn’t know that the first time I noticed the change in her skin, I was so alarmed that I called 111 and hung on the line for thirty minutes, only for someone to finally come on and ask if I’d ever heard of impetigo.
“You don’t need to look at me like that,” she says now, still moving her fingers along the skin of her arm. “I can feel your look,” she adds when I open my mouth to say something. “But you don’t need to. It’s OK.”
“I’m not looking at you in any special way,” I say, in a voice that aims for a joke and misses. She gives me a sideways look, starts to smile and then doesn’t entirely.
“OK,” she says. “So you’re not looking at me. My mistake.”
The conversation, brief as it is, is a welcome break in the silence, though the silence resettles shortly afterward, somehow heavier than before. I have found myself trying to escape this new lack between us, grown conscientious about my running, lingering hours in the supermarket, pointlessly deliberating over brands of detergent, scrutinizing tubs of yogurt and butter and butter substitute. Occasionally, I will tell Leah I’m leaving the flat to complete a specific activity and instead simply walk to some fixed point and stand there until I get bored enough to return. I don’t think I’m even particularly clever about this. You said you were going to the gym, she’ll say to me sometimes, but you didn’t take any kit with you. I’ll tell her she misheard me and she will accept it, going back to staring at a point on her inner arm or to running the taps in the kitchen until the sink fills up.
In the supermarket, then. Carmen squints at cans of chopped tomatoes, raises and lowers packets of differently shaped pasta. She has left her glasses in the office and can’t see the number of fingers I’m holding up if I stand more than a foot away.
“What’s this?” she asks, holding up a parcel of orecchiette. “Is this the one that looks like ears?”
We’ve been friends since university but her eyesight only really started to deteriorate over the past year or so. It went downhill so suddenly that she went to the doctor about it, make-believing brain tumors, gray shadows on X-ray printouts of her skull. This has always been the chief point over which our friendship has endured—the hypochondriac back and forth of two women with too much time on their hands. We’ve talked each other down from any number of ledges—from Carmen’s meningitis panic to my generalized fears around cancer and Alzheimer’s and diseases I’m concerned I might catch or inherit—though when Carmen’s eyesight started failing I was too busy to help her as much as I should have, and I feel that between us a little now.
“So how’s it going?” she asks later, the two of us folded over coffees, our hair identically greased by the rain and fizzing out around our temples. The café is one we visit often, and familiarity has become a key concern for Carmen, just lately. I watch her fumble her way to the counter and back, her long hands running over the Perspex cake cabinet, twin smears that will need to be wiped away.
“It’s fine,” I say, carving my initials through latte foam with a teaspoon handle. “It’s strange, you know, but it’s fine.”
“I guess it must be weird,” she says—the sweet plum of her voice, the way her vowels seem to take up more space than the shape of her mouth allows—“living with someone again after such a long absence. I guess it must be weird,” she says, “having to share your space.”
I look at her, open my mouth to tell her that’s not what I meant at all. Living with someone again, I want to say, isn’t what it feels like.
“When I moved in with Tom,” she carries on, unable, I suppose, to read the fact of my open mouth, “it was so weird for so long—like it felt such an invasion, you know? Like you love someone but that doesn’t mean you want to be with them all the time, you know? Like sometimes I’d lock myself in the bathroom and just lie in the bath for half an hour—not with the water running, I mean, just in the empty bath—just because it was the only way I could get some space. And I loved him, you know? So I really do get the disconnect.”
Carmen’s ex-boyfriend Tom was a social worker and weekend DJ who eventually left her for reasons I never quite managed to grasp. Carmen typically speaks about him the way one might refer to a degree: a three-year period one has to endure in order to talk with overbearing authority on exactly one subject. She is the world’s living expert on loving and losing thirty-year-old men named Tom.