Prologue

In a small seaside town, autumn is winnowing into winter and two women – strangers – are as yet unaware their lives are about to collide.

This town is a sentence of buildings scribbled along the deckled edge of an estuary, where the ribcages of old boats jut from the mud at low tide.

It’s not on the way to anywhere else. It is the final stop on the railway line; a place of last years and lost souls.

People come here because they’ve run out of time or money, imagination or hope.

Some come here because they’re running away. Others have lived in this town so long they can’t imagine home meaning any place but this one.

People come here to see the edges and endings of things.

Here, hours pass sluggishly. The short days feel long; drowsed out in boredom, frustration and comfort. Rain mutters against windows and lamps are lit long before the evening news begins.

Here, cold leaches into every corner and bone.

Steel sea and cement sky meet in a bleak, flat Rothko. Gulls skid across its face, shrieks like sleet.

Turnstones and sanderlings hunch on the groynes, muffle into their plumpness, waiting for the sea to recede as squalls shove oily waves towards the perfunctory beach. Cans and carrier bags, sweet wrappers and nylon rope compact into the shingle. Litter collects on the steps up to the wide promenade, where pound shops, pubs and shabby attractions punctuate strips of empty units, creating a half- shut, hardscrabble atmosphere.

Beyond the beach, streets lined with terraces and bungalows crouch behind Victorian buildings with mid- century interiors; carved up into bedsits and B&Bs, their pastel facades crumble like stale cake after a party.

At one end of town, there are docks where cranes lift containers off ships the size of islands. Lorries whisk them away to huge distribution centres that hulk facelessly among flat fields inland.

On the quayside, stern- faced herring gulls rove, scavenging through mounds of trawler net with lethal yellow beaks. Ducks paddle aimlessly between boxy fishing vessels in the harbour.

Industrial noise and fishy smells leak from black huts and metal- sided buildings. People wearing wellingtons and rubber aprons heft polystyrene cases packed with ice and seafood onto trucks.

At the other end of town is a pier. It looks like a creature in its death throes; wounded and skeletal.

Seabirds roost in the helter-skelter, crusting the sides with stalactites of guano.

The plastic Astroglide is streaky and cracked. At the foot of its buckled stairs, coconut mats are littered like junk mail in an empty house.

The building at the entrance still contains a flashing, deafening arcade, a rowdy bar and snooker hall. The decades have slowly turned its name sarcastic.

The Palace.

Once, it was the place to go: three floors of dining and entertainment, grandly decorated and luxuriously carpeted.

Once, people dressed up in their Sunday best to eat Steak Diane by candlelight, foxtrot to live music in the ballroom, applaud magic shows and comedians in the theatre.

Now the carpet is sticky and threadbare, traipsed by people in leisurewear on their way to neck pints and feed coins into fruit machines. They stumble out hours later with light pockets, looking seasick.

Over the last few decades, cheap foreign holidays have demoted this resort to a day- trip destination.

For half the year, the beach is populated by plovers and curlews mooching the tideline, but from late April to early October, people do visit.

On bank holidays and sunny Saturdays, visitors stream from the station carrying bags of swimwear and sandwiches. They meander through sweet shops and amusements, potter and paddle on the beach, before boarding the last train home with sunburnt shoulders and stomachs full of chips.

Coaches bring dwindling groups of pensioners to holiday in hotels where the food remains unacquainted with garlic or spices and a glass of fruit juice can still be ordered as a starter.

Then, after autumn half- term, bitter gales deport the summer scent of hot fat and sugar, leaving brine and chill in their wake.

Hotels empty. Behind darkened dining- room windows, fanned napkins sit in wineglasses, gathering dust.

Snack bars and bucket shops shut. Each spring, fewer re- open.

Over at Funland, the fairground, colourful lights are extinguished, the rides are tarpaulined and the shutter is pulled down over the entrance, revealing a large graffitied penis, mid- ejaculation. Last week, somebody daubed on an even bigger swastika.

Above all this, knife- thin light makes it impossible to discern early morning from late afternoon.

This ashen gloom falls across a statue that squats at the centre of an unloved and unlovely flowerbed. It depicts a smiling, swimsuit- clad woman, sitting astride a beachball, gesturing towards the sea with her raised right arm.

Everyone calls her the ‘Come On In Girl’, this anonymous white- bread bathing belle whose parted thighs and placid smile have become as familiar as McDonald’s golden arches or a stop sign.

She was created to advertise train trips to this town. During the summer of ’53, from station billboards the length of the land, the Come On In Girl waved heedlessly as horns and Hitler moustaches were scrawled all over her face. She continued simpering, though speech bubbles forced obscenities into her mouth and anatomical details of varying accuracy accumulated on top of her modest red one- piece.

All through the autumn of 2004, she beckoned from posters in the London Underground, as thousands of commuters drifted past her emptily encouraging smile, repeated and repeated up the length of the escalators, this time publicising an exhibition about the history of the British seaside.

Since then, she’s been printed on T-shirts, tea towels, tote bags and mugs. From fridge magnets, fascist gifs captioned ‘Fuck Off Out’ and the hand- painted signage of a queer feminist book shop called Come On In, Girl!, she goes on waving and smiling; fiercely wholesome, blandly blonde and unthreateningly pretty.

In 2009, a grimacing, ham- fisted statue of her was erected on the promenade to commemorate the centenary of her male creator’s birth.

For all these years, she has sat in her litter- strewn flowerbed, straddling a beachball, emblazoned now with a Tippex swastika, hair highlighted with streaks of bird shit, bronze breasts rubbed shiny as bomb casings by all the hands that have groped them.

The platonic ideal of a fun girl who never minds or moans, never farts or ages.

Her smile never falters. She never says no.

All she ever does is issue the same invitation, to everyone who passes by: Come. On. In.

Chapter 1

Maybe it started eleven months ago, in the coffee shop, when Henry finally said sorry to Lydia.

Maybe it started years previously, in poky flats and rented rooms where Henry did . . . well, whatever Henry did.

When he inflicted whatever harms his abstruse, equivocating apology invited Lydia to absolve him of.

Lydia still can’t fit a name to them.

Maybe it started almost three decades before, on the day Lydia stood surrounded by pigeons in Leicester Square, hugging her best friend and bandmate Pandora, looking up at a reproduction of their album cover – a mugshot- style photo of them under the words The Lollies Are Legal, wearing nothing but knickers and cheesecake expressions and holding identity placards over their bare breasts – displayed on a billboard the size of a double- decker bus.

Maybe it started the day that photo was taken, when Lydia and Pandora, all of nineteen, overheard the photographer telling the make- up artist to, ‘Get some slap on those eyebags; they’re meant to be jailbait and they look fucking ancient.’ Or when he sighed, lowered his camera, and told them to, ‘Lez it up a bit, look like you’re enjoying yourselves,’ and they did.

Maybe it even started the first time no one said, ‘You don’t have to,’ or ‘It’s not your fault.’

Or maybe, it simply starts the day you’re born and all the becoming begins right then.

Lydia is contemplating this, staring at the statue which always looks to her like a drowning woman trying to catch the attention of a lifeguard, when a restive sparrow lands on the Come On In Girl’s gesturing hand.

Lydia lifts her phone, zooms in, frames; catches the shot just as the tiny bird takes flight.

She looks at the photo and is pleased. The dun fans of the bird’s wings are spread, scratchy wire feet not yet quite tucked, almost drawn into its body like the wheels of an ascending jet, the distance from bird to bronze in perfect golden ratio, a sliver of sky inside the gap.

Look to the beauty: that’s Lydia’s mantra, though it’s becoming harder to heed and sounding hollower and more fragile every day. Increasingly, the world appears to her all shell: a Kinder egg containing no toy. But she knows if only she can force herself to dwell in the minute poetries and pathos of the everyday, then she can better bear the agony she’s been in for almost a year now.

She posts the picture on Twitter and Insta, annotated with some trite but appealing observation about escape and freedom. The comments from her substantial number of followers begin to climb right away:

Love this Lydia *heart emoji* *bird emoji*

Great shot *camera emoji*

Gorgeous, needed this today, thank you x

*Trio of heart- eyed smiley emojis*

Pleasure sparks, falters and fades within seconds, like a cheap light- up novelty with spent batteries. Her photo ceases to symbolise hope, becoming content more than communication. And once again, she’s wondering what the fuck she is doing in this town.

She’s been here nearly two months; an unplanned weekend break that slouched into a permanent state of temporariness. As if that couldn’t be said to describe her entire life up to the late August day when Pandora called out of the blue.

Pandora was the last person Lydia had wanted to talk to, but some animal impulse to survive made her answer the phone. She had recognised it as her only chance.

For days, death had been ranging round her head.

She’d stopped imagining afterwards, stopped caring who might be sorry, wasn’t envisioning the uneasy collision of her parents and friends around her lily- topped coffin, had ceased compiling the soundtrack of exit songs.

Lying by a sealed envelope without a name on it and a litre of vodka, Lydia simply wanted to unhappen and un- be. She imagined only the relief of thinking and feeling nothing after months suffocating in hell’s own Matryoshka of doubt, recursively dismantling and restacking the nested questions Henry had crammed into her head in that coffee shop months ago.

But then the phone rang.

Lydia knows she accepted the call and made a noise. Maybe she tried to say ‘Hi’ or ‘Pan’, but what came out was as much spasm as sound.

She hardly remembers anything else. Just vivid, disjointed flashes: throwing clothes into a bag; the train pulling out of London through the suburbs as a low gold sun unravelled bolts of navy shadow across the pavements; thinking, It’s beginning to be autumn, and maybe I’ll feel the first cold day of it after all.

But she does recall watching the city’s outermost edgelands spool by, the train’s fluorescent interior superimposed on the retail parks and playing fields, each abstracting the other, as an imagined cold elided with a remembered one.

The brumous January morning, creeping towards a year ago, when Lydia walked into a coffee shop near London Bridge to meet Henry and walked out almost two hours later, feeling like a shell of the person who entered.

So much easier to conjure the irrelevant details of the place: the way the seating was unabashedly designed to discourage lingering; the contrived, brittle friendliness of the barista that made Lydia feel more of a nuisance than if he’d been openly rude; the raucous laughter of a stranger – joyous while Lydia was waiting for Henry to arrive, violent as a plate being smashed by the time he’d embarked on his quibbling, self- interested monologue.

Henry took a deep breath, as though knocking back a shot of Dutch courage, and said, ‘So listen, mate, I’ve been thinking and I reckon we need to talk.’

Lydia thought, Shit. Felt the word as a gut clench or the nasty sweaty sparkle preceding a faint.

Everything fatal and slow, the way time extends for the occupants of a crashing car. Lydia had an almost leisurely capacity to observe minute details: pastries arranged on artisanal wooden boards on the counter, a woman fumbling in her bag for her purse and disgorging a wad of sanitary towels instead.

Lydia knew, she just knew, what was about to happen, as soon as Henry – the most assiduously avoidant human she’d ever encountered – said, ‘We need to talk.’

The subject had been everywhere: opinion pieces, hashtags, news reports. Everyone Lydia knew had been discussing men like Henry who had done things to women like her.

In the months prior, no matter how it sickened her, Lydia had felt compelled to guzzle down all the hot- and cold- running horror in the papers, on the internet, and everywhere. And the whole time, she’d wished her only thought was, Great, they’re getting these bastards.

But that had not been Lydia’s only thought.

To her shame, she’d found herself hoping it wouldn’t happen to Henry.

For various reasons, she’d been increasingly sure for years that she’s not the only one he has … done things to.

And yet, she’d prayed it wouldn’t happen to him.

In fact, Lydia had already decided that what happened between them in the past deserved to remain there, even though it could be news.

It really could be news.

Because one of the ways in which Henry could be considered one of those men is that almost everyone Lydia knows probably knows who Henry is.

He’s famous.

Albeit in an artsy, niche way.

But he is famous.

Lydia clung to her coffee cup, which at that moment felt like the only solid thing in the world, wishing she was thinking, Finally, finally, he is acknowledging that what he did was wrong.

But she wasn’t.

She was thinking shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit . . . freefalling through the sibilants as if her head was a Word document filling with hundreds upon hundreds of italicised shits, watching a brown frill of bubbles shrink from the edge of her undrunk coffee as Henry flourished his tepid semi of contrition like it was a generous gift.

In reality, he was handing her Pandora’s box with the lid half- off and it was inevitable that all the rage and humiliation Lydia had stashed inside herself would come marauding out.

So, months before she entered the coffee shop, and certainly since she left it, Lydia’s been mired in making and remaking the decision not to count Henry as one of those men. Not quite, not really. Or at least believing that even if he had been once, he was not any more.

Even now, guiltily, grudgingly, she admires him for realising on his own, without being told, that he could be thought of as one of those men.

And yet, when she thinks about what Henry said that day about her possible perceptions of his past behaviour, Lydia is still not sure she’s capable of distinguishing realisation from revelation.

She is sure the distinction is important. She thinks, maybe, one’s engaged in, the other inflicted upon, so it matters how reluctantly the participant became willing.

She’s still not sure if she was willing. She only knows that when Henry apologised, she couldn’t tell him there was nothing to apologise for.

Lydia remembers that, as the train finally pulled into the seaside station two months ago, she’d been picturing the hurt, astonished look on Henry’s face when Lydia did not, could not, tell him that he was unlike those other men.

As she stepped onto the platform, she’d performed a dazed, cartoonish head shake to disperse the tormenting mirage, smelling the unmistakable salty briskness of the coast; sharp cold delivering itself to her cheeks, smart as a soap- opera slap.

Only two other people disembarked, both in business wear, faces sallow with fatigue and moving with unmistakable homegoing hurry. Lydia futzed about with Google Maps, watching the pulsing beacon onscreen face the opposite direction from the one she needed to walk in, and turned back.

Under a street lamp’s amber shower, a swirl of wind strewed a crisp confetti of yellow leaves through the light. Lydia reorientated herself, finding her way down a shuttered shopping street towards the promenade, where the warm orange glow of Pandora’s new home had been visible. The freshly built glass box burned like a beacon on top of The Hotel Duchesse Royale – a run- down Victorian building on the seafront that Pan was planning to renovate and relaunch as a chichi boutique destination.

Blundering into the reception, Lydia found Pan perched on an eczematic Chesterfield, scrolling her phone.

Lydia had barely noticed the drabness, the dispiriting atmosphere or damp; she’d simply crumpled into Pan’s arms and begun to sob.

‘Tell me everything,’ Pan had said, with her lips against Lydia’s unwashed hair.

And Lydia hadn’t, because as soon as Henry admitted fault, she understood that confiding could mean what happened would become another smouldering garbage bag on the unchecked trash fire everyone knows about, leaving Lydia holding the match.

Trash fire: she hates that that ugly internet- ism is the phrase she defaults to. Apt enough until she parses it, with its false equivalency between abuser and abused – flames aren’t fussy, consuming Argos catalogues and albums full of family photos just the same. Everything’s indiscernible once it’s ash.

But, that’s how it would be: the conflagration would consume Lydia as well as Henry, and it would burn through Henry’s family and hers, Henry’s friends and hers. And Henry’s fans, who find solace and enjoyment in his work, would have that taken away from them.

Lydia would be doing all those things to all those people if she spoke to the wrong person. Or maybe anyone at all.

Sharing a secret is like coughing on the Tube: once those microbes are out of your mouth, they’re out of your control, infectious and unstoppable, no matter how you might wish you could suck them back in.

Then there’s every chance Lydia would have to read about herself being discussed as if she is an argument, an abstract idea, a story and probably a liar, a bandwagon jumper, a publicity seeker and a filthy whore who was asking for it.

So she’d just described her suffering to Pan in terms of loneliness and lostness; some nebulous, middle- aged mental- health crisis reaching terminal velocity that seemed to reflect Pan’s perception of how shitty Lydia’s life was anyway.

‘Tracks,’ Pan had said, with a down- mouthed clown face. ‘That tracks, Lydie, love.’

And Lydia had noticed nothing happened behind Pan’s eyes as she topped up Lydia’s wine glass, just a hollow sort of ‘sucks to be you’.

And that sharky blankness confirmed Lydia’s suspicion that telling her would be setting Pan up to fail and herself up to be failed; it would add to the unspoken between them. The old avoidance of addressing the past, tiptoeing round each other, on the edge of a hole, shying from sharing confidences that might threaten to nudge them in.

Now Lydia’s loneliness is even more pronounced by Pan’s proximity. The terrible friendless feeling follows Lydia everywhere and it seems like she’ll never stop being angry with everyone for not relieving her of a burden she has shared with no one.

Enough, she thinks. Enough.

Enough: the word she wields like scissors, trying to sever the threads that hold her in these sticky webs of rumination. She imagines it as a full stop to her thoughts: ink black, final and freeing. But it always sprouts a comma’s curved tail, and the miserable meditation mithers on.

She stands and gazes disconsolately down the promenade, taking in empty shops and intimidating pubs, the scrawl of rollercoaster track at Funland, the narrow smear of beach.

Litter mooches along the pavement and the sheer nothingness of it all makes Lydia’s heart feel like a dead fist clenched in her chest. She begins to walk back towards the bleak betwixt of The Hotel Duchesse Royale, wishing she’d picked up her headphones so she could at least make this kind of funny by listening to ‘Every Day Is Like Sunday’.

But right now, Lydia feels like she will never find anything funny ever again.

Right now, Lydia feels resentment and hurt blooming inside her like mould.

Right now, she’s convinced she’ll never recover the ability to enjoy a split- second’s unawareness of the fact that she is someone to whom things have happened. To whom things have been done.

Beset by a pain and rage so visceral, dramatic and bodily that she wants to drop onto all fours and howl like a wolf at the moon, Lydia looks back over her shoulder at the Come On In Girl.

The statue grows smaller, further away with each step, still manically waving, grit- toothed grin fixed even as the gull swaggering about on her head releases a long, thick money shot of shit.

How satisfying it would be to bulldoze it over. Flattening her would feel like doing her a favour. Putting the poor bitch out of her misery.

Trauma scrawls itself all over everything, Lydia thinks. And it is loyal as an old dog; humiliation twice as faithful. She understands the kindest thing that can be done for an old dog at the end. Walk into a room with a pet, exit holding a collar.

She’s not sure who the dog is in this metaphor.

Henry?

Herself?

The situation?

All she’s sure of is that months ago, in a coffee shop, Henry strapped Lydia into a suicide vest, condemning her to wear its threatening heft as privately as an undergarment.

Although, Lydia does know where the detonator is.

Finger on the fuck- it button, she grasps the phone in her pocket. Thirty- five thousand followers. One tweet.

Withdrawing her hand, the frost- sharp air bites.

She’s nowhere close to sending the message she’s written and deleted at least ten times a day for months.

Or at least not yet.

Anyway, how could Lydia possibly do that?

In spite of everything, Henry is still her friend.

---

Birding is out today with Corsair Books.

Rose Ruane lives in Glasgow with her ever-expanding collections of twentieth century kitsch and other people’s letters, postcards and photographs. Originally a visual artist working in performance, sculpture, drawing and video, she transitioned to a focus on the written word. Her debut novel This Is Yesterday was published in 2021. Twitter: @RegretteRuane