Introducing: HOW TO LOSE THE BATTLE - Elif Deniz Çelikcan

Illustration by Rachel Turner // www.instagram.com/doublewhoop

Start in the courtroom.

Wear something proper. Take the ladybird patch off your white shirt and put it in your pocket. Put your hair in two pigtails, just in case. Don’t think about how you’ve never had much innocence on your cheeks to go with it, not enough to make it believable. Put off the thoughts, any of them, of Susie, or your mother, how she’d mock the crease on your trousers, how she didn’t pick up when you called her. Kiss a pigeon on the head before you walk in and beg for good fortune. It might tell you,

Only dish out what you can take, or;

Your lips smell like stale bread. In that case, shake the crumbs off your lips in front of the pigeon for a light breakfast. Hope that’s enough for it to shit on your lapels. Pray for it. Pray like how you were taught on a Sunday when you were little because children’s prayers are always louder.

Now you got this. Wipe the bird shit off in the bathroom giggling. You have the weirdest little chuckle. You got the winning shit dripping down your sides. You got the ladybird in your pocket. You got the uneven pigtails and a missing button. As much as you have ever been, you are ready for devastation.

*

You are all sitting by the fire, and the two of them, Susie and Raj, kindly underline that this isn’t an intervention. “We’re just–” they say in unison, then look at each other and smile, the lovesick fools, the kind-hearted, meddling idiots, they look at each other and smile, and you have never felt more alone on a Thursday night. Then, Susie continues in her gentle voice. “Chaining yourself to that tree was a bit much, love, wasn’t it?”

She tilts her head a little and her lip quivers as she speaks, something between a smile and a grimace. She might as well lightly swat you on the back with the end of a rolled newspaper, but then again, she looks at you with her big-loving-home eyes, all wide and sweet, and if she told you to spin or jump or sit, you would. Instead, you tell her, “I don’t think you understand.” You could have said she wouldn’t, or something else entirely, like,

That blue jumper really makes your eyes seem brighter, or;

These days I have a strange fear inside of me.

For reasons unknown to you, you settle on saying I don’t think you understand. Neither do you. Not entirely, anyway, but you leave it up to her to deduce such, and perhaps she deserves at least the bare-bones, use-your-big-girl-words explanation as the one who posted bail, but you’ve never been great with all this.

If Susie’s upset at your words, like you would be if she said them to you, it doesn’t show in the roundness of her eyes. Inevitably you think about her eyes again, as you do so very often, like how these days the way they shutter when she laughs resembles Raj. They laugh in unison. Now, they are scared on your behalf in unison, together in their agitation, and you can be vicious too. You are capable. You can say, you wouldn’t understand. You couldn’t understand, not anymore. Not with the fireplace and the antique furniture and that pure cashmere jumper. Not with him sitting next to you. Not in your togetherness.

Then her eyes catch yours, and you’re hit with the proverbial newspaper in the back. You wonder if it would sting less if the paper was material. You get flustered and pink on the cheeks like a schoolgirl, ashamed to ever have considered such callousness, ever to have uttered that you can be anything but known to her.

You try to explain without much conviction. “They were going to cut it.” Your bitten nails keep digging into the soft skin next to your thumb, peeling it into thin strips.

“You don’t even care about nature,” Raj says, and he is more amused than anything, as he often is when you are the subject of such things. You know better than to feel humiliated. Raj smiles softly when you crash your bike and call him, when you throw up in his mother’s bone china plant pot or when you knock on their door and kick him out of his bed after a nightmare so Susie can braid your hair. That’s Raj, with a strange twinkle in his eyes. He’s sitting crisscross on the green velvet armchair, cutting apples for the two of you in his quarter-zip.

“We are worried,” Susie repeats and her voice quivers. You look up at her again, because it’s worth it despite the embarrassment. She simply has the biggest eyes, she must have, by the way they see you. There isn’t a smudge of mascara around them, not a crust, not a single line except for little notches on the side, now all smooth.

You look down again. You press on the nearly decapitated piece of thumb beneath your fingernail when you feel the first drop of blood from under the mauled skin. The olive-green velvet of the couch seems brighter than it has ever been. “I don’t know why,” you tell them lamely, “I’m doing fine.”

You have a double bed in a four-bedroom house-share up in Haringey. You have a second-hand bike with rust on the pedals that gives you a stress rash every time you have to drive it in rush hour traffic. There are four containers full of beans and rice in your fridge.

Last week, you chained yourself to a tree after seeing a banner for an environmental group’s demonstration on Facebook. You are doing better than you have in most of the last ten years. “Maybe it’s time to get it together,” Susie tells you. While those words mean practically nothing to you, if she wanted she could lean forward and hold your left ear in between two slender fingers, red on the tips with gel varnish, and pull until you squirmed in your seat and promised to be better. Though she won’t, you would let her. She has the hands for it. She has the tough-love eyes for it. Instead, she grabs the crescent apple slice from the tip of Raj’s blade and holds it to your mouth. You take a bite, and you smile, and you all smile as your lips caress her slender tough-love red-nailed fingers.

“I can give your CV to human resources,” Raj offers. He peels the pink skin off the next apple with care before handing it to you. You refrain from telling him you’d rather shoot yourself in the head. You nod, hiding the nausea on your features behind the fruit.

Just about then a stray drop of blood trickles down your finger, but Susie catches it before it lands on the cushion. She holds your hand between hers like a magpie, like something soft and fleeting. She pulls a cotton napkin with scalloped edges from the side table. She wraps it around your finger before you tell her not to ruin the white. Ever so gentle.

She looks up, all sweet and knowing.

You don’t know why you chained yourself to that tree. Not really, but you would do it again. It was a little ugly and your clothes were smudged with sticky sap. You hated all the people around you, shouting and screaming about that stupid goddamn tree. You had to throw away the faded black leggings after three rounds of laundry failed to remove all of the stickiness. Yet you held the trunk in between your fingers, with all its ugliness and all its cracks, for some reason, and you couldn’t leave, and you held it like something soft and fleeting, and you couldn’t leave. You couldn’t.

Susie ties the edges of the napkin in a knot. “All good,” she tells you with a kiss on your fingertip. A smile on her lips. You smile too.

She smiles, holding your hands between hers and you knew, you knew she would understand, even if you couldn’t.

*

Enter the courtroom, but first prepare yourself. You tend to crack under pressure, like the year 3 dance recital. Three rounds of box-breathing outside the doors seem to do nothing when you chortle at the sight of the room, though vulgarity is still acceptable when considering the frozen look of horror on your face. Anything that leaves you appears to be rotting these days.

Realise that the most they will do, they, the people around you, the jury and the attorney and the prosecutor, is to stare at you with pity, an ever-expanding, encrusting sort. Remember the vast ocean of things that can be attributed to grief, including a choked giggle at the sight of legal authorities, including half-wiped bird shit on a brown tweed jacket.

Remember that for a little while, for a lot longer, in any room you enter you are simply a thing that’s surrendered.

Wish you could go out and smoke one with the pigeon whose shit is on your neck. The little fellow looked like it’d be a good smoking buddy. It’d look better with your tweed jacket, that’s for certain. Wish you were him, the pigeon, wish you were a little migratory bird to shit on people for good fortune. Wish you were him so you could fly, and only know to fly. Wish that with the spring breeze you could soar to Spain, or get too tired over the Channel and let yourself down on the water, staying close to your brethren who smoke tougher than you and shit on people’s hair just for the fun of it. Wish you hadn’t smoked all the duty-free Camel Whites Raj brought for you from their honeymoon.

Don’t ever, not for a single second think of what he would have done if he was in your place. He isn’t.

*

“Godmother or aunt,” Susie tells you, “it’s up to you.”

She has always flapped her hands and got a little rash on the side of her neck when she got too happy. When she was 21 she could drink two pints from a water bottle in a single breath, then go red all over the chest with giddiness when her spectators cheered. Now, her whole too-red body trembles with the way her hands move.

“I can’t believe this is finally happening,” she tells you. Her eyes blink and blink, her breaths short and shallow and sweet, her hands catching gulps of air before they catch yours. “I– I can’t believe–”

Neither can you.

You have been preparing for doomsday for years now, ever since she introduced you to Raj half a decade ago. You imagined the home in her eyes crumbling down, that her face would be more composed as it often is these days, that she would first call her mother-in-law. You imagined her taking down the pictures in the guestroom and replacing them with beige wooden toys, and how you’d only know after you ran into a hand-made picture frame with pink dry macaronis on the side spelling SUZE + ME in a charity shop, and you would call her and say, I thought I’d have you forever but it’d go to voicemail.

Instead, she stands there looking at you with all her teeth on display and a little piece of spinach stuck in between the two front ones. She stands between piles of your mouldy cutlery and scattered clothing, and there she is, smiling at you like she did when you were fourteen. You take her hands in yours, and finally, you remember warmth and finally, you remember what a hand should feel like, and you could kiss her, you really could, just for the sake of it like when you were kids, because there she is, right there, all life could offer in the palm of your hand, like the sticky and cracked tree trunk, like a baby bird taking its first breath. There she is.

“I’ll be anything,” you promise. “Anything you need.”

*

The Baby lives for thirteen hours longer than either of her parents.

“You should let her hold it,” you plead to the nurse. Susie should get to hold the Baby at least once.

“Sweetheart, I don’t think she can hold anything,” the nurse tells you. Her eyebrows are dangerously close together and she looks like she’s about to vomit on your behalf. Only days later do you finally recognize this strange, unfamiliar commiseration; a pity so strong that for a while you become synonymous with it.

*

Stand in the courtroom. Stand straight. Not too straight. Make sure it doesn’t make you look too resilient. It’s always good to play to their conscience. So, stand straight but a little resigned around the shoulder. Make sure every smile is at least a little pathetic, like the way you smiled at Susie when she asked you why you chained yourself to that ugly rotting tree. A little sheepish. Too tired.

Try not to look at your court-appointed solicitor and feel discouraged. Do not think about how she looks like the kind of person who would chain themselves to a tree but for the right reasons. Do not think about the striped socks, neither about how you’d like to know where she got them nor about how this is exactly what the Wikihow page warned you not to wear to a court hearing. Do not look at her and think how much the subtle bafflement, the disturbed doe eyes resemble yours.

Or perhaps do.

Sooner or later, you will have to accept it. You don’t have the winning look in your eyes, the winning white marble countertops and the farmer’s market contemporary hand-made ceramic espresso glasses. Neither does she. But you have Grief, with the capital letter, to form into little paper balls to throw at the jury. You have an image in front of your eyes, of an empty hospital bed, of an empty crib with fresh organic cotton sheets with little bees on them, the ones you pulled multiple night shifts at the airport WHSmith to afford because Raj is a bit anal about what should touch their baby.

You have bird poop on your jacket, the solicitor might tell you. She might then drag you to where you’re supposed to sit and stare at the stain. Let her.

Tell her with pride when she can’t tear her eyes away, I know. I called in a little favour.

*

Raj’s sister is the one to tell you because she is family, unlike you.

The hospital told her first, the sister who couldn’t even tell you the fucker’s favourite colour or what they were planning to call the Baby, because she is blood, unlike you. So when you are finally given the news when the sister’s plane lands in London, when you finally take an Uber to the hospital at six in the morning with mismatched socks and pyjama bottoms with a hole in the left buttock, Susie’s bed is already deserted. You are surprised they discharged her so quickly.

You ask the nurse if she’s seen the Baby. You ask about Raj and Susie, and she sits you down, the nurse who must be barely older than you if that, with blonde highlights and matte pink lipstick and a bright yellow lanyard, the type of girl who’d call you a crook in high school, pats you gently on the knee and tells you she’s so very sorry.

It’s not that you don’t believe her. You do. In fact, she almost seems too sorry, like she is about to lose her poise and convulse with pain on your behalf, like if you let her she will pull you in her arms and call you baby, and you know deep in your heart that no one alive has ever felt this type of fury. You need to get your hands on her, and you swear to god you’ll wipe that grimace right off her face.

You raise your fist to punch her and try to get up at the same second. She only moves a tiny bit to the left to dodge the blow. Your feet stumble over each other with the strength of your fist flailing in the air, swinging your body to the ground. Well. You missed. Your cheek is plastered on the dirty linoleum, air caressing your skin from the rip on your pyjama bottoms. A child skips over your head and the blondie keeps patting your back with two fingers as you writhe on the ground like a sheep with its throat cut, and you swear if whoever just stabbed you through the heart removes that blade you will get up and fight her to death.

For a long while, every time she tells you she’s so very sorry, you try to kick her in the stomach. Somehow, she dodges all of it.

*

Come on. It’s time. Sit straight. As they announce the charge against you stay composed but do not appear aloof. Try nodding solemnly, perhaps, with eyes bloodshot and empty, your mouth a thin line. Do not play with the loose string of the ladybird patch in your pocket. Try not to smudge the blood from your cuticles on your white-ish shirt. It’s true that under this light it appears grey–you should really start separating your laundry by colour.

They might ask you why.

  Start at the beginning, but not the very beginning, when you had a lisp from braces and Susie had pink streaks in her hair, before you wore matching uniforms for the last time together, before you moved to the opposite ends of the city, before you acquired a chain and she a two-bedroom in Marylebone.

Tell him, Your Honour, you don’t know what that bridge did to me.

He might look at you funny. They all might. He might try and say he’s sorry for your loss. Don’t believe him.

Do not ask, has your baby ever died, Your Honour? Or;

What if Susie had decided to linger on that bridge like a sheer withering spirit, just for a little bit, just as a step before she arrived at Valhalla or Jannah or Elysium or the absolute endless pit of nothing, then I called ghost hunters and they turned up with their little plastic beeping machines and ask Susie things, and what if Susie had answered and said my name or how she missed me or how she’s at peace and Raj had finally told me how to peel an orange in a single strip, and yes, they probably wouldn’t, but what if they did, but you had destroyed the bridge, Your Honour?

After this, your attorney might ask for a recess, or make that ridiculous gesture with her eyebrows, one your mother made a lot whenever you sat with your legs apart in front of your uncle. Do not rise above the commotion to mention how when they were buried they wore three sets of matching pyjamas. They might ask you, miss, why did you chain yourself to the bridge? Tell them with a winning smile. Well, gentlemen, I think the better term would be what’s left of the bridge.

If they laugh, it will sound like boars. That’s how it always goes, isn’t it? Don’t offer the judge a blowjob in the bathroom. You don’t have the tits to flash anyone, really, so just laugh along, lounging on the stand with a cigar in one hand and a martini in the other– extra olives, though you’re not a fan of alcohol when it isn’t overly sweet. You are a fan of lying. Let’s just say, boom over them, I was locked in, if you know what I mean.

Notice how your hair is short below your ears and the shit stain disappeared from your lapels. Your shirt is whiter than it has ever been. Ask the jury if they could excuse you for a second, and watch them all nod gaily. Run outside to where you last saw the pigeon. Remember him, not just any pigeon but him, him on the tree on Susie’s balcony and the bridge, and oh, how you missed him.

When he lands on the bench next to you, he might appear angry. Do not say, We should stop meeting like this, or;

Where have you been?

Do not take it personally when he asks what the fuck are you wearing. Tell him, don’t worry about that, I’m trying to win a case here.

If you are nice enough, he might give you one of his menthol cigarettes. It’s a pity cigarette. It is. You can’t deceive me, he might tell you. You don’t even have the winning look in your eyes. You don’t have the winning shoulders.

Tell him, I have the winning three-piece suit, dipshit.

Well, he might say, the pigeon, don’t shoot the messenger.

Do not ask him why he’s here, muddling your winning mind. Do not ask why in the sun he has blonde nurse Jessica’s pitying eyes. Do not reach forward with two fingers to gently touch him under the chin, full of cigarette ashes and breadcrumbs, softer than anything you’ve ever touched.

He might tell you, because I remember. The matching plaid skirts, the first flat you shared, your last spring. He might hold your hand and take you to the day when you lost it, how he stood on a beam and cried for a distant cousin who he only recognised through a birthmark on the beak, who spent hours under the rubble skewered by bird wire, gawking for help alongside the humans, alongside your Raj and Susie.

Do not listen. I can see how your winning shoulders are drooping. I can see how you are fading around the fingers, brittle in bones and the colour of any wall you stand next to.

*

You asked Sharon from the Facebook group for her chain. This was a job that required reinforcements.

When she asked why, you told her it was personal business, but you winked a little so she would think she was in on the secret. Then, around four in the morning, you wrapped two chains around your body and secured them to the lamppost on the bridge, right next to where the support beam collapsed, taking half of Susie’s red Corolla with it. You put your head on the post and slept like the dead until the excavators woke you up at seven. Best sleep you’d had in weeks. You held the two chains between your fingers, you named them Raj and Susie, and braved your shoulders.

“Lady,” the excavator operator shouted at you. “Get out of here. The bridge is going to collapse soon.”

When he threateningly drove forward, a part of you wished he was strong enough to do it. You were sure that right after he flattened you, you’d spring right back like a whack-a-mole with Raj and Susie between your fingers. You knew that anguish hung around your skin like a shield. On this bridge with the rusty chain in your hands and the stains your life left on the pavement, you were invincible.

“Bring it on,” you told Excavator Man like this was a cheap movie. You cunt. He cussed you out in Polish for so long that you turned a little pink on the cheeks. Strange. You hadn’t realised you had any couth left in you.

He tried for a little longer but then decided this was above his pay grade, and he didn't necessarily seem to care. In ten minutes, he kindly placed a cigarette between your lips while you waited for the police together. You could tell he was impressed by the way you smoked the entire cigarette without taking it out of your mouth like a chimney in winter. Could this have been the start of your love story? You hadn’t seen a ring on his finger, but he might have taken it out before his shift to save it from these gruesome details. Maybe he had a ring, but he might still leave his wife for you after he saw the absolute urgency of the fate that brought you together.

You imagined what life would be like if you married Excavator Man and died with him on this bridge, hand in lonely hand. He showed you pictures of his exported exotic parrot.

“You should set her free,” you told him, not for any particular reason. You didn’t give a shit about parrots, and it was barely four degrees outside in April.

He scoffed. “Don’t be silly, lady,” he said. “How could she survive in this world?” Then, he looked at you like the blonde nurse and Raj’s sister and the funeral directors and your crook of a lawyer, like this world was made of only you chained to a bridge on a Thursday morning, Raj and Susie cold and lifeless clutched between your fingers. You are wrong, you wanted to tell him. What about the sycamore and the pigeon, about how you put a cigarette in my mouth and lit it? But then again, he would look at you and say, it’s just a stupid fucking parrot. Just a stupid fucking parrot.

*

Around this point the silly attorney might point at you with a rash hand, up and down, at your pigtails and the shit on your fancy tweed, at the sheepish look on your face and the finger clutching the air, dissenting the smoke of a cigar that doesn’t exist. She might insinuate you are unfit to stand trial due to all this grief.

Try not to look too betrayed. Your face appears somewhat evil when it’s scrunched like that, a discomfort that even the winning shit can’t hide. What is one lawyer to step on you after all of this?

They might ask things of you. They might talk about mandatory counselling, the 23-week-long NHS specialist waitlist, or some community service, all in the tone of blonde nurse Jessica’s voice as she said I’m so very sorry. They might say your name and you might want to cry but rather fail terribly, sitting there at the stand as stony as Susie in her worm-ridden grave. And then, suddenly, right there, you might realise that the bird shit is indeed liquid, still running down your neck along with little beads of sweat. Your white shirt is yellow under the armpits and it will take you two showers to realise the smell of shit is ingrained in your hair.

Suddenly, the pigeon is on its way to Spain, but the winds are too strong and it’s too cold, and you try telling him no, that would be suicide, and you don’t even like the coast there, but you can’t stop him. Suddenly. It flies like it knows how, without a second glance at you, without a goodbye or a thank you.

The judge grants the solicitor’s request, looking at you like Excavator Man and the nurse and the pigeon and the lawyer and the sister did. When he announces the dismissal of the case, the crook-attorney claps you on the shoulder with the world’s ugliest pair of turquoise rings, and you don’t even attempt to punch her. “Congratulations,” she tells you. The fight has left you. So suddenly. Then she leaves, so does the judge and the juror and so do you, to never look at their faces again, to never remember a single second of this entire day except for pairs and pairs of eyes staring into you and not a single one a bit like Susie’s, but you are still floating.

Only when you are sitting on the steps of the courtroom hours later with no lawyer or pigeon, when you can’t remember what Susie used to smell like and realise you’ve run out of the clothes she left at your place; when you realise you’ve never learnt how to cut fruit or love someone new, when you want to call Susie the most do you understand you weren’t even given the dignity to be defeated. Look at you. Your knees hurt more than ever, and you’re finally here. With blood on the ladybird, shivering on the cold steps, no pigeon and no cigarettes, no pitying eyes or two-fingered pats on your back, no missed calls from your mother or a friend, on a beautiful afternoon, you lose the battle.

---

Elif Deniz Çelikcan is a recent psychology graduate living and working in Oxford. Originally from Turkey, she reads and writes in two languages about relationships, identity and others. 'How to Lose The Battle' is her first published short story.