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Charity leaves the bottle of suddenly unappealing liquid on the table and slumps into the sofa, head lolled over the back, eyes closed. The fuzziness of the alcohol is heavy on her limbs and tongue, but Vanessa’s words have chased a bit of unwelcome sobriety in.
She can feel the tendrils of uninvited feelings winding their way back into her chest, tight and uncomfortable, returning after their brief period of banishment at the hands of this bottle of whiskey. Or brandy. Or whatever it is, Charity can’t quite tell, all that mattered was that it burned on the way down.
The thing is, she knows Vanessa’s right. What good does drunkenness do? How does the brief inability to walk in a straight line or touch your own nose without stabbing an eye out help anyone? It numbs the pain, she thinks. It stops the guilt and the grief and the resentment and the shame and the regret and- it stops it all from hurting so, so unbearably much.
But then there’s that hateful, snarky, familiar voice in her head: you’re solving nothing, you useless excuse for a mother, friend, human. Tomorrow it’s all going to come back and bite you in the behind, and you deserve it because you’re nothing, you’re worth noth-
The answer comes up spitting as immediately and furiously as it ever has, whether in her teens, pouring vodka onto what she believed to be the flickering embers of her life, or in her twenties consoling herself after another trip up to Home Farm, or in her thirties, trying to find answers to what her husband had done at the bottom of a bottle, any bottle: I don’t give a fuck about tomorrow. When has tomorrow ever given a fuck about me?
But if she tunes in, and it’s a lot more difficult to tune out when she’s sober, she can hear a storm of voices. Debbie, Noah, Chas, Zak, Cain, anyone who's ever made her feel like a piece of shit, and the list keeps on growing. (Ryan and Irene are two new, particularly thunderous additions).
We’re just not enough for you, because we’re not some bloke. I know what a lying slapper you are. When Charity’s lonely, we all suffer. You don’t really like anyone, do you? You are not a member of this family anymore. I’m saying you’re lonely. You’re the reason Declan left, and you almost sent Sam to prison, and you took Marlon’s savings. You lie about everything. It’s your fault if your life’s a car crash. All you ever do is think about yourself, you’re nothing more than a desperate old tart. You never speak to me again. That’s ironic when one of us used to sell our bits with no shame at all. What has happened to you, eh? You make me sick.
Surely, surely if anyone had to listen to that all day, drinking would be the only sane option?
Difference is now, she supposes, her feet pressing solidly into the ratty old carpet she’s walked across a thousand times, is that these days there’s Vanessa’s voice in the mix too, calm and steady and something to latch on to. You can do it Charity, you can, I know it. I’m proud of you. You’re amazing. You’re so strong.
“He’s asleep again. And we’ve run out of bog roll.”
Oh, that really is Vanessa’s voice. She opens her eyes slowly, scrunching them as she stares into the bright white of the ceiling. “Right,” she manages.
She hears her stop behind the sofa hands on hips, feels a gaze that almost hurts burning into her skin, and has to close her eyes again, ready for an argument. Her tongue is sharpening in her mouth, a thousand different combinations of words that could make Vanessa crumble clattering through her mind, and it’s almost as therapeutic as the drink.
But instead of more reproach and scolding, there’s a puff of air pushed out of the sofa as Vanessa drops down onto the cushion, and she breathes out wearily.
“I’m sorry for snapping,” she says, her voice heavy and measured, “I didn’t mean to tell you off like a kid, and I never want to tell you what to do.”
There’s a pause as she waits for a response, but it’s taking everything in Charity to keep her lips pressed together against the torrent of verbal knives in her mouth, and she’s scared if she tries to move they’ll all spill out and there’ll be no going back. If she were a bit more sober, she’d be proud of her self control, even if it’s near snapping.
“I just don’t like it when you drink, sometimes. And it’s been a long day, and I’m sad for Chas, and I- miss my job, and he’s being a nightmare sleeping at the moment,” Charity feels, rather than sees, her nod upstairs to her sleeping son, “and it just- it just makes me sad and frustrated when you’d rather drink yourself silly than talk to someone. Especially when you know that there are people who’d listen.” She nudges Charity’s upper arm with her elbow, “people like yours truly.”
Charity’s almost overwhelmingly tempted to indulge that impulse, that track well-trodden, of steeling and raging against the terrifying blossoming of warmth in her chest at words filled with honesty and kindness, of opening her mouth and letting those knives find their home and feeling that momentary relief on seeing her pain written out over someone else’s face.
Maybe if she’d had one more glass of whiskey before she’d left, she would have.
But in all honesty, she’s tired. Treading down that particular track over and over again has sapped her of her energy and hard-won self-respect more times than she cares to remember over the years, and it always seems to lead her back to where she started anyway.
And yes, the hangover’s going to be nasty tomorrow, but, from bitter, bitter experience, it’s not really the pounding headache or nausea that makes the morning after, the week after, so intolerable.
And then of course there’s the rather stubborn little knot of a fact that is that hurting Vanessa would somehow be absolutely worse than hurting anyone else.
She rolls her head to the side and opens her eyes to look at Vanessa.
Her gaze is intent on her hands clasped in her lap. She looks drained. There’s a little furrow of stress between her eyebrows.
A curl of hair has drifted down the nape of her neck. Charity reaches up and twists it gently round a her forefinger. Vanessa’s eyes flutter closed.
“I’m sorry too, Ness,” her voice a whisper. The knives dissolve against a tide of that terrifying, warm, blossomy feeling. “I just-” she falters, suddenly tired of fighting. Maybe she hadn’t needed to talk when she’d sat down with that bottle. Maybe she’d just needed a bit of kindness.
Vanessa turns her head to the side, too, meets the pale green remorse in Charity’s eyes and matches it with a sparkling blue glint of strength despite her weariness, and a tiny, soft smile. “I know,” she says.
And Charity feels seen and understood and whole in all the ways she thought she never could.
Without warning Vanessa leans forwards and grabs something from the table, her voice now brighter as she leans back into the sofa, “look, I bought this toothbrush for you to keep here so you’ll actually let me kiss you in the mornings without you having to sneak my mouthwash, it’s not the start of some slippery slope into a shared room in a retirement home or whatever it was you said this morning,” her eyes crinkle fondly as she taps Charity’s knees with the yellow stick of plastic, “it’s just a toothbrush, Charity. Can I please put it upstairs in the bathroom?”
Charity gazes at her, the warmth in her chest all-encompassing. “Well, as long as it’s just for convenience,” she says, knowing full well that that’s not all that’s on offer, nor is it the only thing thing she really wants.
The golden look that had flashed across Vanessa’s face at Charity’s agreement fades quickly as she looks heavenwards briefly and then nods with each word, “just for convenience.”
Taking the toothbrush and inspecting it as she would the signatures on Noah’s school report, Charity frowns, though her voice is lighter, “I dunno, babe, this seems like a very commitment-y toothbrush, yeah, it almost screams “steady on, lady, shameless farting and matching pyjamas are coming for you…” maybe it’s all a bit risky.”
With a giggle and an elbow jabbed in Charity’s ribs, “you daft mare, you don’t even wear pyjamas.” Her voice is low as she looks her girlfriend’s body up and down, a familiar smile on her face.
With a new vigour, Charity leans forwards, lethargy dissipating in the open space of an opportunity to rib Vanessa a little and maybe get her to reconsider her former offer, “babe, that’s not the point, haven’t you ever heard of lesbian bed death?” Charity takes on a serious tone fit for news-reading, “it’s a genuine issue in the community, women all across the world in tartan PJs, hot chocolate and-” she gestures to Vanessa with the yellow Stick of Commitment, “toothbrushes.”
Placing the toothbrush on the table next to the discarded bottle, Vanessa turns to sit on Charity’s lap, knees either side of her hips, hands twirling in her hair, “I really don’t think that me and you are high risk “lesbian bed death” cases, do you?”
Charity bites her bottom lip against a smirk, runs her hands up Vanessa’s thighs, revels in the fluttering of muscle palpable through her jeans. “Maybe not, babe, but do you really want to risk it?”
Vanessa tugs on Charity’s hair close to the root, pulling her face up to look at her, “I reckon that taking care of our oral hygiene is the opposite of risking it, actually,” she hums, with a tiny kiss on her lips that Charity has to chase.
Charity hums, “fair enough,” against the skin of Vanessa’s jaw, “such sexy talk.”
As her hands wind themselves round Vanessa’s waist, the last dark tendrils round her chest wind themselves back into some dark, temporarily inaccessible place inside.
It strikes her, or rather, it would strike her if she wasn’t slightly distracted by hands working at the shirt tucked into her jeans, that Vanessa was wrong earlier, to lump booze and sex together as equally useless ways to deal with her current situation. Granted, neither were going to get Sarah a new heart or help Chas and Margarita or get Ryan to listen to her, and maybe they’re both just sticking plasters on an emotional black hole. But where booze makes her feel guilty and useless and weak, sex, at least, sex with Vanessa, makes everything seem more bearable, surmountable.
She jumps as Vanessa’s hand, finally having beaten the conundrum of her belt, closes around her breast, “wait, I thought you didn’t want to-,” her voice hitched but soft. I don’t ever want to tell you what to do.
“I always want to,” Vanessa says, simply, eyes wide, and Charity’s stunned: half turned-on, half blown away by her ability to just tell the truth as if it wasn’t an open invitation for people to hurt you.
Vanessa leans back for a second, her thinking face on, “did we just- did we just solve an argument with a toothbrush?”
Charity leans back too, then, tilts her head to one side, considers. “Yeah, I think we did. How terribly grown up.”
“Conflict resolution 101.”
Charity laughs softly, “what a mature and adult way to solve a problem,” her voice faux-bright.
“Well,” Vanessa says, a mischievous twinkle in her eye as she leans towards Charity to brush her nose against hers, hand working its way back up Charity’s belly until she elicits a breathy gasp, “I can think of other mature and adult ways to solve a different problem.”
And Charity’s grin is captured by Vanessa’s greedy lips before it even has a chance to reach her cheeks.
—
She almost shouts in frustration as Vanessa’s head reappears from below her line of vision, chin wet and eyes shot, but lips pursed in genuine thought as if she were a continuing a conversation that had finished ten seconds ago, not ten minutes, and a very eventful ten minutes at that.
“You are aware that you’re now having post delivered to my house, Charity,” Vanessa ignores Charity’s growl of choked off exasperation, “so I think you’ve got a bit more to be worried about on the commitment front than a toothbrush, you know.”
Charity momentarily searches her gut for the clench of worry, waits for the desire to flicker away in the face of security and normality and the shackles of domestic life, but it doesn’t.
And before she has time to really think about what it means that she’s genuinely not completely terrified by the idea of security and normality and the shackles of domestic life, as long as they’re with Vanessa, the tousled blonde head descends again and Charity’s back arches sharply away from the sofa, the air ripping over her breathless moan.
Being with Vanessa like this makes anything feel possible. The universe feels small enough to hold and mould in her hands, the big black hole in her chest a mere pinprick in an infinite tapestry of blue eyes and you can, I know it and a little stick of yellow plastic.