annashay 
by Aislinn Kelly-Lyth
ON HER WEDDING DAY, Clara is the picture-perfect bride: tiny daisies knotted into her hair, lace winding its way down her arms, light shadows smudged around her eyes. I, like the rest of the bridesmaids, am wearing a pale blue dress that skims my body and brushes my ankles: an outfit I would never choose for myself, but today it’s a uniform, and it’s been selected by her.
She’s asked me to write a speech. I must have written about fifty, scribbling and scrunching and throwing paper into the bin. It’s hard to write about someone you know so well for an audience of people who don’t know her like you do: her great-aunts, his great-aunts. You have to condense your relationship, make it digestible.
In the end, I decided to start with each of our beginnings. Our first day of school, with our rolled-up skirts and our made-up faces, trying to stand out in a sea of blue uniforms; our first day of university, wide-eyed and nervous in our Doc Martens and denim jackets; our first flat in London where Clara her landed her banking job—that poky two-bed where we made porridge together in the mornings and shared wine late into the night.
There are memories in that flat that I can’t capture in my speech: the times when I would rest my head on her lap and she would stroke my hair as we watched TV, the times when it was cold in the winter and we would huddle together under the duvet in her bedroom. Platonic intimacies, permitted only to female friends.
Other nights we would host raucous pre-drinks in the tiny living room, waiting until the noise reached a climax before making everyone decamp onto the tube and into the club. On one such night, pinned against a set of metal railings by a muscular man in a grungy basement, I saw Clara’s face lit up by strobe lights on the other side of the dance floor. The sight of her smile felt like sipping cool water in a desert. She caught my eye, came over, and slipped a hand around my waist. The man kissed her squarely on the mouth before taking both of our hands and leading us out of the club. The three of us took a taxi to his, drunk enough that the silence in the car wasn’t awkward.
Clara wasn’t in the man’s bed the following morning. She must have slipped out before dawn to go home. When I awoke, bleary-eyed and with a pounding headache, it was later—much later—and the light coming through the window had an afternoon slant to it. I sat up in his bed, the sheets pulled up around my naked body, and finished the cup of strong coffee he handed me. Then I went home to our conspicuously empty flat, where I spent an hour floating in the bath with bubbles pillowed around my neck.
*
That little old flat feels a far cry from the luxe hotel we’re in now, where we sit side by side as a host of makeup artists weave around us.
‘You look beautiful,’ I tell her through the mirror.
‘I’m nervous,’ she says, ‘is that stupid?’
‘Of course not,’ I say.
Later, in my speech, I tell Clara and her new husband how welcome I feel in their home, how happy I am for them. Nowadays Clara lives in an actual house in Dulwich; I still live in a flat full of plants and potheads in Peckham. The last time I visited her, we ate linguine in her garden and talked for a couple of hours about the change of government, her new neighbours, the heatwave that was hitting London at the time. I left her house before sunset and came home to find my flatmate lying on our sagging sofa, surrounded by a group of people I had never met. Low-fi beats played in the background, and dense smoke hung in the air. This is it, I had thought then, we’re finally diverging.
And now here we are, at the diversion manifest. How odd, for me to find a wedding so significant. If someone had asked me at twenty what I thought about weddings, I would have chuckled with the indifference of a true progressive.
*
I escape the large function room as soon as I can, onto the pathway which meanders through the gardens and down to a lake. It’s dark, and the way is lit by fairy lights twisted delicately around the trees. I find a bench beside the water and watch the reflected moon call back to the sky, listen to the reeds whispering, the occasional birdcall, the muted disco music. Presently I hear footsteps on the gravel path and turn to see Clara.
‘I was wondering where you’d gone,’ she says, and sits on the bench beside me. We look out together at the swans asleep on the surface.
‘They mate for life, you know,’ I say, ‘swans.’
‘I know,’ she says, ‘we both learned that from Yeats. I always feel slightly mournful when I see swans, just because that poem is so sad.’
She tilts her head slightly and lets it rest on my shoulder.
‘There was that other Yeats poem you loved, too,’ she says, ‘tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’
‘And When You Are Old,’ I add, ‘that was another great one.’
‘All those tragic poems about unrequited love.’
Her soft hair is pressed against my neck, her arm tight against mine, and I let the heat from that point of contact spread slowly out across my body. One of the swans stirs, shakes out its wings, and swims lazily towards its mate, sending slow ripples out across the dark silvery water.
‘True,’ I say, ‘that’s true.’ I swallow and find that the stone is still not gone. A beat passes before I speak again.
‘Clara, I just—you know it’s enough. It was enough. For me.’
I let the words pass my lips and dissipate like mist above us. Everything is still for a long time, and I begin to wonder whether I ever said anything at all. Then Clara lifts her head up and looks at the sky, where the stars flicker behind drifting clouds. I see that her eyes are dewy, almost spilling. She blinks a few times, takes a breath and pauses, teasing the lace on her sleeve. I wonder what she might be thinking, this woman who says so much and reveals so little. Finally, with resolve, she speaks.
‘This kind of friendship is one of the deepest bonds you can have with a person. Don’t you think? That’s what I think, anyway.’ She holds out her pinky finger. ‘Best friends forever?’
I force a smile and loop my own around hers. ‘Best friends forever,’ I agree, just as I had when we were thirteen.
A silence passes between us, and something else.
‘I’d better go back in,’ she says, ‘or there’ll be a search party. Coming with?’
‘I’ll sit here for another moment,’ I say, ‘see you inside.’
She nods and turns, and I watch her climb back up the path, her heavy skirts gathered in her arms. Then all is calm again, the swans still sleeping together on the water, the woodland animals still making their quiet noises. I sit there a little longer, thinking back on those searing moments of longing: of sleepovers, school trips, evenings spent together on the sofa. And finally, painfully, I let them go.
oOo
Aislinn Kelly-Lyth lives and writes in London. Her short fiction has appeared in Rock and a Hard Place Magazine and on pendemic.ie. She has been Highly Commended in the Costa Short Story Award and is currently shortlisted for the Bath Short Story Award. She studied law at university and works as a barrister.
