JOINT RUNNER-UP OF THE 2024 LEWIS EDWARDS MEMORIAL PRIZE
Grace Murray is a third year Literature student at the University of Edinburgh. Grace was awarded Penguin’s ‘WriteNow’ prize in 2023, and ‘An Acre of Stories’ writing award in 2022. Grace regularly writes for rrramble, an online reviewing site, and Edinburgh’s own ‘The Broad Online’.
Weblink: : https://www.rrramble.co.uk/the-review/tags/grace
THE RIGHT VENTILATION
Her mother’s friend had no children, a husband who worked in an office in Boston, and a perma-tan. Katarina found this perplexing; no two women could be more different. She could not imagine, in any world, where the woman would ever be friends with the mother Katarina knew: long dresses in summer; no makeup; thick trousers in winter.
The first time the woman arrived to give her a lift, Katarina was outside the gymnasium. The woman pulled over in her Volvo, and wound down the window. During the drive, she offered Katarina a can of soda, tucked under the car’s compartment. ‘Open it,’ the woman told her. Inside the compartment, the can rolled around, warm and compressed. ‘You can drink it, if you want,’ the woman said.
Katarina watched her in the mirror, pink lips moving in the glass. ‘That’s kind, but I’m okay.’
‘Go on.’
It wasn’t that Katarina had no other options. Once, after gym class, she had kissed one of her classmates, the pair of them waiting for the girls to file out the changing rooms. Neither of them told anyone, which was fine. Katarina resolved herself to looking at the back of the girl’s head, and made several promises: that she would become so beautiful, that the girl couldn’t help but stare, and be a little insulted, a little begrudged; that she would buy a house on Chamberlain Drive, five miles away from her house, and have a wife there. The journey towards these objectives seemed less important than the knowledge that she would do it, that it would be done. She felt her body moving around her whenever she thought about it too much, running away.
Still, Katarina resolved, sitting in the front seat of the woman’s car several weeks later, she had something going for her. Beside her, the woman hummed to herself, moving her head up and down.
‘Do you want to put something on?’ The woman asked. ‘We’ve got twenty minutes left, so we might as well.’
‘Sounds good.’ And then, afraid that the silence she fell into would be interpreted as a kind of ungratefulness, Katarina thanked her. The woman rolled her eyes, and pressed the button for the music.
‘But I mean it, thank you,’ Katarina said. ’You’re saving me the bus. So, yeah.’
The woman shrugged, and looked at the road. ‘It’s on my way back, anyway. And your mother,’ she twisted the steering wheel, moving into another lane, ‘helped me out when I was in a tight spot.’
The woman’s red nails blurred as they went past gas stations and Evangelical Church signs, becoming a smear. ‘Strange people,’ the woman — who now insisted that she should be called ‘proply’, by ‘Lacey’ — said. They passed a billboard advertising television worship, a glitzy, soap-opera version of Jesus plastered to the front, all fake tan and white teeth. Lacey shook her head again. ‘They’re real strange. One of my neighbours — this stuffy woman with kids — goes to the mission there. Says there’s a lot of dancing.’
Katarina moved around in her seat. She had just finished gym class and her old clothes were in a small bag by her feet. She was sure that she smelled bad, stale, and she made subtle attempts to prise the windows down, her fingers on the button.
Lacey looked at her again. ‘You’re a quiet kid. I used to be like that.’ The woman made that humming sound again, off-kilter and to no perceptible tune.
In class, Katarina would think about Lacey, and the mood the woman would be in when she picked her up. She had the energy of what Katarina could only describe as belonging to an addict, women with long hair and wasted faces. There was an untrammelled rawness there which scared her. She saw it in those women, and in Lacey, too, and perhaps in herself: all shades of wrong.
They were ten minutes away from her house. Reaching the end of the street (Lacey never went inside; she did not want to bother Katarina’s mother), the woman placed a hand on Katarina’s back. As the car drove away, Katarina kept her upper body very still, very smooth.
Approaching her graduation, Katarina could count the times she would be with Lacey on one hand. Lacey, in the driver’s seat, was tapping her fingers to an 80s hit. ‘I used to dance to this on weeknights, in the centre on Malone Road,’ she said.
‘That sounds nice.’ Katarina smiled up at her, watching the woman’s obvious joy. They went past the high school building, past the other students and their tiny backpacks, bobbing in the distance, getting smaller. Katarina’s friends all seemed much younger now. She found herself becoming silent opposite them.
‘Did anything interesting happen today?’ The woman asked her.
Lacey typically wanted the highlights: cheating scandals; cat-fights out in the yard; teenage pregnancies. Katarina enjoyed the woman’s shallowness; she wouldn’t pretend, like other adults might, to be interested. Katarina had to be on her game, embodying the stand-up, or the government official, wooing Lacey over.
‘Mr Barratt got fired,’ Katarina said.
‘What was he done for?’.
‘We don’t know.’
Katarina looked over at the woman, who was facing right ahead, at the stretch of road. Uniform houses, and beige fronts, passed them, all in neat rows, and her breathing tightened. ‘But,’ Katarina continued, ‘Daisy from the basketball team is saying that it’s because he was with one of the girls in tenth grade.’
Across from her, Lacey reached a thinning, yellowed finger out, to turn down the music. ‘And was he?’
‘I’m not sure. Maybe. Probably, actually. He had a funny look about him.’
‘A ‘funny look’?’
‘Yes.’
The drive went by quicker than usual, and Katarina felt untouchable, rising above it all. She did not thank Lacey when she got out of the car, and simply smiled at her as the woman stopped at the lights, gesturing at her to get off.
Katarina had a match, just before the summer, and there was nobody to collect her. Katarina’s mother had taken to running a club for children whose parents worked late, leaving her own child (and she was still one, she had to admit, in her room, very late), somewhat dejected. Seeing the note about the game on the fridge, Katarina’s mother knocked on the door. ‘We could ask Lacey,’ she said.
Katarina agreed, and pretended to look appropriately eager. It was difficult.
When the match ended, Katarina took out a spray — cheap vanilla, sweet — and placed it on her wrists, and her neck, as she had seen people in shows do. She put the wrapper in the bin, and walked outside, where Lacey’s car was already parked. Katarina looked at the woman’s frame in the rolled-down window, the lit cigarette poised outside. The woman was just staring out, at the empty pitch, the end blowing hot-red. Katarina felt terribly lonely, looking at her. She made her way over in a half-skip, half-jog, to put another expression on Lacey’s face.
‘Hey, you,’ the woman said, opening the door for her. ‘How did it go? Did you get the fuckers?’
Lacey appeared like an Italian mobster, and Katarina laughed. ‘No, we actually lost, 5-2.’
‘Ah.’ Lacey stubbed the cigarette on the exterior of the car. Katarina watched her do it.
‘Won’t that make a mark?’
‘Probably,’ the woman said. ‘It’s Nathan’s pride and joy, so I don’t really care.’ The grey ash stuck to the car’s ceramic coating. It made a little blackened circle. Lacey looked over at Katarina before starting the car. ‘Do you want to stop somewhere?’ The woman asked.
‘Where?’
‘I can show you where I went to school. The building is gone now, but the whole space is still there.’ Lacey looked very young, and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Or I could drop you back. It’s up to you.’
‘God, no. Let’s see it. I’d like to see it.’
The woman looked pleased; there were red patches of skin on her cheeks. Katarina tried to see herself in the wing-mirror, and did not mind the unsmiling outline of the woman who stared back.
Lacey tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. ‘I could teach you how to smoke, if you’re interested.’ The woman was often saying things in this way, hedged by insecurities: if you want; maybe; whatever; if you’re interested. Katarina found it touching.
‘I’d like that,’ she said.
‘It’s only because I used to spend so long, especially at your age, breathin’ out. I’d take it to my lips, look around, like I was real brave, or something. What a waste.’
Katarina did not know where this old, almost Southern, intonation had emerged from, but it was exciting to hear such a difference, as if the woman had been changed just by the act of remembering.
They stopped the car in the retail store parking lot, where the woman’s high school had once been. There was a grassy bank, the surface of the bank dehydrated and yellow from the sun. Lacey got out. Her heels made tiny, high-pitched sounds on the tarmac. She tottered over, like a doll. Across from them, there was a fast-food chain. Katarina watched the grey workers move around as Lacey sat beside her, as close as possible.
The woman pulled out a pack of cigarettes, unwrapped them, and thew the plastic behind her. ‘Here you go,’ she said, lighting one for her.
Katarina scrambled around in the grass for the wrapper, and shoved it in her pocket before accepting.
‘You breathe in, like this,’ Lacey was saying.
She looked at Lacey: frayed hair, red heels, skinny jeans bunched up at her waist. ‘Why do you do this?’ Katarina asked.
‘What?’
‘Like, all of this,’ Katarina inhaled again.
‘Do I need a reason? Can’t I just be fucking nice?’
‘Okay,’ Katarina said. ‘Thank you, then.’
‘I can be nice. I am nice.’ Lacey blew smoke into Katarina’s eyes. ‘It’s like a muscle. You can forget, so I’m giving it some exercise. Do you see what I mean?’
She nodded, and Lacey reached her arm around Katarina’s. It was so sad, Katarina thought, that Lacey had to get affection in this way: not begging, but the opposite, so sure in Katarina’s acquiescence that there was nothing to it, no risk. Lacey dusted the ash from Katarina’s shirt, just below her collarbone. Then the woman kissed her, and it was sloppy, half saliva and half drugstore lipstick. Katarina did not move away, and kept her eyes on the blurry McDonald’s sign, the cashier through the window. She thought about what the cashier saw, the dirtied dollar notes under his fingers. She smelt it there, on the bank. She really did.
When they returned to the car an hour later, the woman was in high spirits, asking all sorts of questions about Katarina’s plans for next year. She told the woman that this journey would be their last.
Lacey turned to the mirror. ‘Thought so,’ she said.
‘I’ve only got one week left, and mom’s picking me up for them. She says it’ll be good.’
’That’s sweet of her.’
‘Thank you, though, for everything so far. It was super nice of you to even do it.’
Lacey lifted one hand off the wheel, inching towards her trouser pocket, searching for something. The car — black Volvo, ruined front — pulled up, right outside the house, where Katarina’s mother stood at the window of her room, looking out. Katarina turned to Lacey. The woman had wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, little ridges in her face. ‘Best get out,’ she said.
‘Of course.’
Katarina shut the car door. And, even as she moved inside the house, towards her room, she imagined that Lacey was still outside, in the driver’s seat, one corpse-like hand stuck out the window, letting the smoke out.
