About Lucy

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It took Lucy five driving tests before she passed. ‘The intelligent ones always need longer,’ the instructor said to my parents. ‘They think too much.’

Lucy may have been a genius. Or she might have just been unlucky. Unlucky people often turn out to be geniuses. Misfortune stuck to Lucy like dog shit in the cracks of a heel. She never really minded or noticed it much. There was a purity, almost an absence about her. She was a fictional character in real life, resigned to her fate. ‘Your cousin is a saint,’ Mum would say.

After the terrible thing happened to her mum, my aunty, Lucy came to live with us. Having that thing happen to anyone you know is life changing. Especially when you’re sixteen. I had hardly known my aunty when she was alive but, dead, I was drawn to her. For at least a few weeks, I was sad, depressed even. But enough about me. This is Lucy’s story.

It was a hot summer of GCSEs when Lucy moved into our house. I had a job at the newsagent’s and Lucy whispered to my mother over the steam of Earl Grey. Nobody had to tell me to lend her my Coldplay CDs or introduce her to my friends. When so many bad things have happened to someone, they are automatically a good person. You have to be nice to them. Their misfortune creates a magnetic field of deflection. I could feel no jealousy, no hate, no spite towards Lucy. She would always have it worse. I should be grateful that I was not her. Our mothers were sisters. With just a small rewiring of genetics, that thing might have happened to her aunty, my mother.

Within weeks of her staying with us, Lucy’s anxiety was triggered to the tune of Spies. ‘It’s the lyrics,’ Mum murmured after they’d been to the doctor. Nobody spoke with loud voices anymore. ‘She thinks they’re written for her. Just don’t give her anything else like that.’

It was a warning. Lucy needed protecting, especially from herself. It wasn’t possible to be neutral around her. She was fragile like glass. That made me heavy, that made me robust. Lucy was one of those girls who forgot to eat because their mind was elsewhere. I was on a diet and still fat. Next to Lucy, I was normal. Average. Dependable. I became the other child in the house who did not need whispering about.

I apologized for having lent the CD and admitted that I had never listened to the lyrics so intently. Privately, I mourned. I loved Chris Martin, but had not understood him as Lucy had. His lyrics – How do you live, as a fugitive? or They’re gonna catch us where we sleep – had not induced a mental crisis. I could sleep. I didn’t feel I was on the run. One hundred thoughts about his songs did not make me step out in front of a red traffic light.

Despite swinging in and out of hospital, Lucy came top in exams and again with her A-Levels two years later. She was sure she had blown her Oxford interview. She got in. She went.

That summer at the end of first year, we were home together. We sat in my parents’ terracotta kitchen and I nodded through her accounts of extreme studying and partying. I kept the stories of snakebite, toasties and midnight teas to myself.

With one card we snapped; we had both lost our virginity. For most of my deflowering I had stared at a Star Wars alarm clock, lying on a damp duvet wondering how drunk I really was. It was worth a sigh of reflection, a flick of cigarette ash, nothing more. But Lucy had blossomed, not fucked, in the way that any heroine might. In the Bodleian, she had bent over rare books while he had whispered medieval poetry against her neck. It was fate. Both were rereading The Great Gatsby, her favourite novel. Fate always happened to Lucy.

There was the small detail of the boy already being together with another girl in Lucy’s college. But it wasn’t anything serious. The girl was jealous and had problems. Lucy felt sorry for her and when she told me this, I believed how sad she was not for what she had done but for who the girl was. Lucy was empathetic like that.

‘It’s so good to see things finally turning around for her,’ Mum said. ‘She really deserves this break.’

It would have been heartless to disagree. And yet, I know I had a way of playing Lucy. I tried to call her out. I tried to make her see herself in a different light. I tried to make her see what I saw.

The girlfriend of Lucy’s lover had called her a self-absorbed bitch. ‘Do you think I’m self-absorbed?’ Lucy asked me.

‘I don’t want to talk about being self-absorbed,’ I said.

At that time, Lucy wrote poetry. For hours, she would stare into space picking the right words, whispering the sounds to herself. She needed to write, she said. It kept her stable.

‘It’s not easy,’ she said, ‘being me.’ She had wanted me to answer no, I didn’t think her self-absorbed. I said nothing and worried over newspaper articles about pesticides harming the genitals of banana farmers I’d never meet. I only started writing after Lucy had left my life.

One morning, just before we were meant to return to university, I asked Lucy for a lift to the station. I was going to Bristol for the day to meet a friend. Lucy had sat up all night to finish an essay. Half-drunk cups of coffee and hand-written notes littered her desk. Lucy would often write on the backs of used envelopes. That’s how vital her thoughts were. As I shrugged on my coat, I saw she had crossed out most of her words. Her brain was no longer working in a linear way. I went to collect my parent’s car keys.

At this point in Lucy’s story, it’s true that I am responsible for what was about to happen. It’s also true that I am overdoing my own importance. It could also have been the weather. Or Chris Martin. Or the English custom of overgrown hedges on narrow roads. I could describe them more, make them more prominent in the climax. I could omit, excuse or exaggerate some details.

Apart from checking the platform number on my printed ticket, I don’t remember much about how we set off in the battered Golf that morning. I could make up some dialogue, but the fact is my memory, everybody’s memory, isn’t that good. The newest Coldplay album was playing. Lucy had remained loyal while I had not. She gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles whitened. She was focused on something that wasn’t the road. Something I couldn’t see. She didn’t look beautiful or even that sane. It was amazing that somebody so smart could so quickly have their thoughts unravelled. That even with the world at their fingertips, they could lose grip so quickly.

It rained as we weaved through the country lanes. The windscreen looked as if it were melting. The sight of rain blurring glass only occurred to me afterwards when bits of memory came together like papier-mâché. It might have been a snippet from a different morning altogether. Another morning where I had been nervous or happy or a much younger, more innocently generous me.

Lucy screamed. That piercing sound changed everything. She had hit something. Who she was, what had happened to her in life, didn’t matter at that moment. Something was on the ground because of her.

‘What do we do now?’

In her face, I saw how unlucky she was. One day she would write about it. Find answers in a story. Create answers. People would read and she would have witnesses. She would pull them to her side. Writing, for Lucy, was sharing responsibility for who she was. What she did. She used words to sand down her faults.

But right then, before anything was a story, she was vulnerable in an ordinary way. This wasn’t her fate. There was only the body, the rain drumming on the car roof and our used breaths collecting as water on the windows.

‘Let’s drive to the next house,’ I said mostly to myself without really thinking about whether we would stop there. I didn’t want to look beside me and decide where car part stopped and flesh started.

‘Can you?’ The words clicked in her mouth to the manic rhythm of the windscreen wipers. ‘I can’t.’

Neither of us left the car. We climbed over each other, pushing to show neither of us was delicate. I later discovered bruises on my thighs that suggested a harsher collision.

‘This is wrong.’ I’m sure I said that.

‘It was on the ground already. I don’t think it was me.’ It was a typical thing for her to say.

I opened the window and vomited. Hot human waste slid down the metal. I breathed in the countryside air that was damp, not fresh, with decaying vegetation. While driving, I called the police. I wanted judgement. Somebody from outside to shake up the collage of our lives. To take down the facts, the details and say that they had seen this all before. That there was a beginning, middle and an end.

They found a deer. My parents smiled and Lucy cried. It was like the car crash in The Great Gatsby, she said. ‘Does that make me Daisy?’

‘No,’ I said. Too late, I decided to be kind. ‘Daisy was self-absorbed.’

Lucy is a wonderful writer. Her themes are guilt and redemption. She has never finished writing about that day. Her first novel is dedicated to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Perhaps you have read it or some of her other work. Her books are sold with so many editions that they fill most of the space on my parents’ shelves. I am so proud of how creative and prolific she is in the face of personal adversity. She often speaks at events.

That could have been Lucy’s story. Or the deer survived and Lucy didn’t. That brain of hers, never able to stop, cut off mid thought. Pointless fate crunching metal in its fist, smothering a life as it drove glass through a soft windpipe. A scream cut short by something so simple and stupid as an absence of breath. Something like that would have happened to Lucy. Something tragic, unjust, and allegorical. Something worth writing about.

These days, I meet Lucy in a Tarot deck, in a novel, in a song. Without her, I wouldn’t have become an artist. Wouldn’t have become an insomniac. Wouldn’t have become a judgemental voyeur. Wouldn’t have been suffocated by jealousy. Wouldn’t have needed so much. Wouldn’t have seen so much. Wouldn’t have won prizes. Wouldn’t have avoided graveyards. Wouldn’t have felt queasy with my parents. Wouldn’t have missed those last few years of childhood at home. Wouldn’t have had so many lovers. Wouldn’t have hated so obsessively. Wouldn’t have lived and thought of dying. Wouldn’t have had a mirror. Wouldn’t have stared at walls. Wouldn’t have shuddered. Wouldn’t have blinked. Wouldn’t have written.

But that is enough about me. This is about Lucy.

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Emily Waugh is a Munich-based writer and former journalist. Her fiction has appeared in Mslexia and Writer’s Forum. She is currently working on a novel.

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