SHE MUST BE MAD EB

Charly Cox

• Publisher: HQ
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780008291679
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

'Brave and beautiful.' Stylist Magazine

'Social media's answer to Carol Ann Duffy' Sunday Times STYLE

'Divine.' Cecelia Ahern

She Must be Mad explores coming-of-age: the pain and beauty of love, the relief and the agony of turning from girl to woman, the isolation of an untethered mind and the power and subjugation of the body.

Charly captures the formative experiences of today's young women from the poignant to the prosaic in writing that is at once witty, wry and heartfelt. Wayward nights out that don't go as planned; the righteous anger at those men with no talent or skill or smarts who occupy the most powerful positions in the world; the strange banality of madness and, of course, the hurt and indecision of unrequited love.

For every woman surviving and thriving in today's world, for every girl who feels too much; this is a call for communion, and you are not alone.

she must be in love

love part 1

Nobody ever tells you that there’ll be comedians and poets, actors and academics, college students and forty-year-old men to fall in love with.

That you will fall in love with them all.

Their charm and their poise, their anecdotes and foreign phrases, even the stray scratchy hairs on their cheeks and chins that will tickle like an acrylic yarn against your youth.

They first come soft. Soft and slow and ethereal, these perfumed clouds of promise that smell new but hang old, and then before a single tendril has had time to make itself at home on your collar, they exit loud and angry and too early.

They will always exit too early.

Little-to-no explanation, a hole so deep you lose your feet to the black and bleak of self-assumed guilt, he flings the door on its hinges for another man to oil and mend.

You’ll re-imagine hope until he leaves too, tarnishing his very own handiwork.

Nobody ever tells you of these good-looking silhouettes because they have stood in their cast before. They relished in the same way you will but they cowered in the flood.

They sunk with weakened limbs until they no longer knew of that initial burst and lay themselves down to surrender. You, however, will not allow yourself to be a casualty to love. You will grow stronger in it, if you try.

It’s six minutes past midnight, Facebook has updated Messenger, video now available, you have no one to call.

Soon, it’s twenty-one minutes past twelve and an unfamiliar noise rings through the hard plastic of your first laptop, it starts to screech. You look up and to the side, a rerun of the news now only important to your periphery.

A boy. It’s a boy.

A boy you’ve never met but whose life you know the lengths of. Holidays, parties, girlfriends, new friends, birthdays, likes, lunches – all arranged into bite-sized books you’ve read and torn pages from time and time again. The boy. The boy from the holidays and the parties, with the girlfriends and the new friends, he’s calling you.

You answer.

Spanking new anticipation twirling twines that tie knots in your chest, frayed ends tickling your stomach to stir hot queasy butterfly soup.

‘Hello.’ He says, monotone. Northern.

Eyes thinning to an embarrassed sleepy squint.

‘Hey?’ You say, a question. Southern.

Smile curving to bunch the bags from under your eyes to pillows.

‘Just wondered what your voice sounded like.’ He says, he smiles back.

‘Same. Now we know.’

Lights dim in both screens, you dissolve into the silence of each other’s nights, minds reaching out to touch the other, tousle hair, feel skin. Talk. Talk. Laugh. Smile.

Embarrassment has gone.

It’s five thirty-six in the morning four years later. Lights still dim, faces still rounded in the glow of the laptop. Girlfriends once stalked are now ex-girlfriends discussed. Holidays, planned as fleeting dreams of train journeys across the country to finally meet. Likes, shared. Sometimes agreed.

‘Do we know, or at least think, that if you lived down the road from me we’d be in love?’ He wrote.

‘Yes.’ You reply.

A life starts to lead along a parallel secret line, a life that’s yours and a line of fibre optics. Two years pass. You meet in a newsagent at a train station. He’s smaller than you thought. You’re fatter than he’d seen. Geography offers different greetings. Kiss, hug, release. You share pancakes but struggle to look at each other. You walk across Battersea Bridge, he lights a spliff, you sit facing away from each other and imagine you’re still just on the phone. Better.

Three years later and it has never happened again. You never found out if he became the poster boy for postmen in Salford. You never got to tell him of the new bosses and the trips to America. You never got to tell him all the things he was right about. You never got to tell him how your heart held out, how it still occasionally chooses to hold out. How in a life lived on a parallel secret line you never unplugged the receiver. But now you do. Now you get to tell him somewhere he might find it and can only hope he does, before he finds someone else.

to you

This feels silly to write

For in doing so

The sentiment fractures

And goes back full circle

But I’ve kissed plenty of boys

Most of them charming

I’ve kissed plenty of boys

And I’ve been on plenty of arms and

I’ve loved plenty of boys

And they’ve made me feel soft

And I’ve seen plenty of boys

And plenty I’ve lost

I’ve had plenty of evenings

In dimly lit bars

And I’ve had plenty of fumbles

In the backs of their cars

I’ve written plenty of letters

And received plenty of emails

I’ve kissed plenty of boys

And one or two females

I’ve traced plenty of hips

With eager touch

And I’ve kissed plenty of lips

That made me feel too much

And in the plenty I’ve gathered

I’ve garnered plenty of words

But once put all together

They don’t sound like firsts

They all sort of sound similar

As though each man wasn’t new

Which is why it’s important to say

Not everything I write is about you.

she moves in her own way

It was sticky in your apartment

I stuck my eyes to every corner

Where you’d stuck up old postcards

An entire museum of your life and more a

Window

Framed the shrilling stuck-up summer silhouettes in the pub down below

You stuck a scratched record on

That played the once smooth staccato

You poured me a glass of wine

That slipped sticky to my sides

That slipped your fingers across my thighs

I felt stuck

This time I promised myself ...

Table of contents

• title page
• copyright
• contents
• For the men who broke my heart...
• she must be in love
• she must be mad
• she must be fat
• she must be an adult
• acknowledgements
• about the author
• about the publisher