GOD AND OTHER MEN
a short story by Maya Hamdy
Windless heat stills the hours. Stevie laughs at Sony with her mouth full of drink, cheeks round and dripping. Sony finishes undressing and dives from the lip of the pier, crying out when her sun-chapped body breaks the sea. She swims out, her spine a white seam known only to the two of them, her dark hair sucked close to her neck. Stevie watches. Sony takes in a mouthful of saltwater and spits it through her teeth, and with this mouth—warm and tart—calls her friend into the water. Stevie shakes her head and leans back on her elbows. Her arms are sunburnt, but beneath her shirt sleeve she is as pale as she was this morning, before Sony knocked. This evening, Stevie will shed her skin. Bowed over the sink, she will peel the sunburn from her neck with her thumb. Underneath, there will be someone else—warm like the sweat behind her knees when she crouches, naked-pink like birth, sore and tender. A Stevie without Sony.
In this skin, she will begin again as if they were strangers.
Sony swims up to her ankles and looks up with dark eyes and a boyish smile. Her fingers, bloodless and determined, tighten around Stevie as she drags her into the water—a cold, burning pressure against the arch of her foot. Stevie’s clothes sink her quickly; the jeans inherited from her brother sag at her hips. Sony helps her to the surface, laughing uneasily.
“You’re wicked—my mum’s gonna kill me!” Stevie shakes Sony’s hand from her shoulder and clears the water from her ears. She swims back to the pier and holds herself afloat with one hand, the other pinching her stinging nose.
“She’ll side with me. You should’ve stripped down and swum!” Sony splashes her for good measure.
Stevie’s shirt is a second skin, plastered to her chest. Sony helps her lift it over her head. Stevie is embarrassed that her vest is not the mature, dark lace Sony had worn and that the cotton has soaked through to her breasts. She sinks until her chin meets the surface and removes the vest as well. Sony throws the weighted clothes onto the pier; they land with the thud of a body—bones and all the rest. Stevie follows her further out, her nakedness disguised by frantic ripples and clumsy, open hands. Sony takes a breath and disappears, the white pads of her feet flashing beneath the sea-top. Stevie treads water crucifix-wide, dark hair blooming at her side as Sony rises. The water between them hums, sensitive as a strung wire under a harpist’s fingers. Stevie feels Sony’s current coil around her waist as the dark-haired girl surfaces behind her. When Stevie turns, she finds them much too close. Sony kicks to stay afloat, her knee knocking Stevie’s thigh.
“Your brother told me he swam out to that buoy.”
“My brother’s a liar.”
“You reckon we could be the first, then?”
Sony shields her eyes as they watch the buoy heave in the distance. It lurches forward like a drunk with a temper, heavy-footed as the water swells beneath it.
“I wouldn’t risk it,” Stevie decides.
Sony squints, agreeing.
“Does that watch of yours keep time even in the water?”
“Oh, fuck.”
Sony’s watch was the boast of the half-term—its silver band, its coy, moonish face. Her wrist was rubbed red by snatching fingers pulling the timepiece to eye level. Senior girls stopped her in the corridor, pretending to find the younger year’s fascination childish, though they asked to see it all the same. Sony wore her jumper sleeves over her knuckles, sweating through her blouse, until the watch was forgotten. Her mother named her Alison and abides by it, except on days the daughter earns “Ally”—sweet and sticky-handed like ice-cream after a doctor’s appointment or a passed French oral. It was Sony who invented herself as such, crawling from the word-of-mouth womb a girl with tree-climbing knees and a foul mouth. She wears her mother’s gifted watch, but even Stevie doesn’t dare ask why. Why tether herself to Alison—and to her mother—with this silver-link umbilical tie?
Stevie watches her haul herself back onto the walkway, shaking her wrist and flicking the watch-face as if her heartbeat is kept behind its glass and, without it, her chest would echo empty. Sony unbuckles the watch and lays it atop her shirt, running her thumb over its body.
“It’s stuck at five past four.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “Mum won’t notice, as long as I keep wearing it.” She lies flat on her back, and Stevie loses sight of her.
“I should’ve noticed sooner,” Stevie offers. Sony reappears, hanging her head over the pier edge.
“Not your fault.” She spits to keep her hair from sticking to her lips. “We should head back. Could be half seven for all we know.”
Stevie laughs, insisting they weren’t in long enough, but Sony shrugs and begins to dress, drying her hair with her T-shirt.
Stevie swims to the ladder and pauses with her fist around the first rung. Sony, hearing the water still, glances over her browned shoulder with bored confusion, her mouth open but quiet, idle remarks lingering.
“Turn around, would you?” Stevie asks.
Sony sneers lightly.
“Nothing I haven’t seen before, Stevie.”
“Please?”
Sony shrugs and turns away. What a strange thing it is to share a sex—long, flightless arms and pale buttocks—and still feel so estranged. Stevie can name every bone they share, yet the slip of Sony’s neck into her shoulder is unfamiliar. She thinks she must be some creature sewn into the body of a young girl, a creature that does not recognise Sony as kin. It watches its friend with a probing stare and the tip of a tongue on a bottom lip; its hands clasp and unclasp at its wrist, learning desire like a foreign task.
Sony—tall, supple Sony. Sony with a coin-sized bruise on the back of her calf. Sony with tight-bralette indents laddered across her shoulders. Sony’s freckled back. Sony turning to catch her staring, hair pasted to her wet mouth.
Stevie dresses, her clothes soaked and heavy.
Sunday’s sermon. The church is dry, but the air still tastes of salt. A window lets the wind in until Sony’s mother has it shut. In the first pew sits a family of five, the youngest tucked beneath her mother’s hair. Tourists in matching shirts and pinching plastic sandals. Stevie gives each child a name and a language with invented words.
In this strange town, they are nameless and untethered. Their hotel room will be plain, with no wedding photographs to anchor them—like Stevie’s own. Born in carpeted hallways, with vinyl suitcases and no recollection of how they arrived. Sticky with sunscreen and the sweat from the hot leather car ride. For a week, they will masquerade as someone else: the father a lover, the eldest son a mute.
This is not a dead-end town for them; they have found a way through. They yawn and sweat through polyester, and behind them sits a neighbour breathing down their necks like the wet mouth of hell opening to suck sin from their bones. Stevie shifts closer to her brother, who is reading a paperback in his lap. Sony is at the back with her mother, in a starched pinafore and buckled shoes, the broken watch manacled to her wrist. Stevie turns to stick her tongue out. Sony grins and returns it—the pink flash of her tongue disappearing when her mother catches her. Like a rippled pond, she is still again.
Today she is Alison, her hair braided by her mother while she sat on the bathtub rim. Childish and complicit. Twenty black eyes between the two girls look from Sony to Stevie, to the altar and back. Stevie turns forward but feels them on her neck like beetles hatching, crawling beneath her collar, clicking: we know, we know, we know.
Sony has her over on Wednesday. They loosen their ties, shrug off blazers and their heavy silhouettes. Sony sits on her bed; Stevie lies on the faux-fur rug, running her fingers across its synthetic grain. They talk about boys—routine, polite. Stevie nods: yes, he has grown; no, she doesn’t fancy anyone. Sony smiles. Stevie is proud to be the cause.
The curtains are drawn, the room warm. Sony undoes the first two buttons of her blouse, and that is enough. Her collarbone rises with her breath; a gold pendant has left a green stain on her neck. Stevie watches her blink and tuck her hair behind her ears. She talks about something mundane, and Stevie is invited onto the bed to answer with hums and nods, to comb through her hair with her fingers. Stevie imagines them as women: folding laundry, washing dishes, Sony tightening the apron at Stevie’s back with her knuckles.
In the evening, they hold each other and pretend their thumbs are the buds of their lips; they never married, so they offer this.
“Stevie?” Sony calls, voice distant as it would be through an open window.
“Hm?”
“What are you thinking?”
“Nothing.” Her ears glow pink.
Sony frowns. “Just tired, then?”
“Would you like to kiss me?”
Sony—bold, daring Sony. Her knee misplaced against Stevie’s thigh. Stevie cannot answer; in her kindest fantasies, it was never Sony who asked.
They kiss—only a moment—and Sony laughs against her lips, into her open, waiting mouth. Stevie presses her palm to Sony’s back, pleading for a second. Giving Sony—sweet Sony.
They wear the room like a suture; Stevie is Sony is Stevie. Stevie keeps her face close, breathing what Sony has given her. She would keep her nose against her friend until her lips went blue and her eyes rolled white. Sony pulls back with Stevie still chasing her mouth like it were the rim of a confiscated liquor bottle—burning, and wanted anyway.
Sony wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, glances at her watch. Stevie understands. She thanks Alison’s mother in the kitchen, smelling of her daughter, and leaves with an aching side.
If a doctor struck her knee with his little hammer, Stevie thinks she would say Sony’s name as reflex. If he asked why she hurt, the same name would be the symptom and the cause of the rot and the phantom limb watching from the bedroom window. He would hold her liver in his palm and ask if this was it.
“No,” she would say. “She was never mine to begin with.”
Sony doesn’t come for a week and a half. They do not talk at school; Stevie is too embarrassed to try. She watches her at her locker, in the schoolyard, among friends. Their eyes catch sometimes, but it is not the hot secret of lovers—it is the sting of a loose thread on a snagged nail.
Sony knocks on Saturday. Stevie’s brother lets her in. There is no conversation, no dramatic apology: an afternoon in Stevie’s room, kissing and watching each other undress only to sit at opposite ends of the twin bed. A routine. They have lost something, and Stevie cannot name it. Saturdays are quiet; no laughter, no ease.
The mechanical shift of bodies replaces arms slung over shoulders and races to the pier. Stevie apologises for ruining it. Sony says nothing.
The family of five is gone by the last week of term. Now Sony and her parents sit in the front pew. Sony does not look back; her posture is careful, her profile still. Stevie crosses and uncrosses her legs, leaning for a better look. Sony is Alison today, holding her mother’s hand. She feels no discomfort balancing her hymn book. When she prays, she closes her eyes.
Sony spends the summer in France; Stevie stays. Sony is in a new-as-birth hotel room, pretending she is anything but Stevie’s. Alison’s mother grows impatient, asking about university. Sony makes expensive phone calls for two weeks; then Stevie learns at the chippie that Sony calls Peter Lauhman in the mornings, so she stops answering.
Peter is tall and half-a-man already. Stevie remembers Sony calling her “Steve” when they were naked and worries this means Sony wished for a stubbled jaw and heavy palms—someone who could bruise her inner thighs and grunt and bite. Peter looks like he works with his hands.
When Sony returns, she has a decided jaw. She calls the house; Stevie’s brother relays the message. They meet at the pier. Stevie sits beside her.
“You’re off to London, then? Mum told me.” It isn’t a question. Stevie says nothing.
“You didn’t call me like you said.”
“What are you doing?” Stevie asks.
“I’m moving in with Peter. He’s working for his dad and said I—”
“Don’t do that.”
Sony frowns and kicks the water. Stevie tries to picture it: Sony—gentle Sony, wicked Sony—waking beside Peter, his breath hot and sour. Peter lurking like mould behind a cabinet. If you do not say its name, maybe it stays hidden.
“Sony, you’ll be miserable.”
“You’d have me stay with you?” She spits; it hits Stevie’s cheek. It tastes like June.
“I’d have you do anything else.” Stevie places her hand over Sony’s, willing her to turn it over. She doesn’t. “You could stay with me. Come to London. People do it—they really do. We could be something.”
“I want to be a mother,” Sony says, like a backhand. “I want a family I can take to my mother. You cannot give me that.”
Somewhere else, Stevie was born a man. He wears his wide shoulders proud, shaves, drives to Sony’s house and makes her mum laugh. His heavy hand rests on Sony’s thigh. Their love is known outside a bedroom. Stevie leaves Alison on the pier and counts all she would give to be that somewhere-else self—tussled hair, deep laugh.
She runs out of fingers.
She will move to London. It will feel less like escape, more like homecoming. She will fall in love twice after Sony. She will make it out.
Stevie does not know that seven years from now, Sony will write. She will enclose a picture of her daughter, signed and dated. She will say she has a room overlooking the water, and that she thinks of Stevie often. She still wears her mother’s watch, stuck at the time Stevie loved her. On loneliest mornings, Sony will open the windows and let the windless heat in.
✶
Maya Hamdy (she/her) is an aspiring author who enjoys strong cups of coffee and long walks along the coast. You can find her on Instagram, @mhinink.