fuck lucky

M4 towards Cardiff, just after a junction, the traffic grinds to a halt. About a mile from the services. The car forces its way in from the outside lane to the hard shoulder, pulls up, stops by the concrete steps below the bridge. You get out into spitting rain and start to scramble up, bogged down with brambles and honking horns because three lanes of trucks can see you, know what you're doing, have precious little else to do but watch. Your boyfriend cheers as you slip on a wet leaf, throw out your hand to break your fall and feel thorns embedded in your palm as you run on.

Out of sight (you hope) you find a sheltered place to squat and remove six, seven spikes from your skin. It's bleeding, you're bleeding.

Back down the steps, you throw your hands up in a victory salute and notice that (after you've just pissed in the bushes) the traffic is miraculously moving again. You're so incensed by this, and trying not to slip, that you somehow don't notice what actually just happened.

*****

She was sitting in a chair, in a bedroom, in a building; she was glassy eyed, staring at her lap. On the desk in front of her was a razor of the expensive sort, with the block of moisturiser and the plastic bed around the blade to make them virtually snag-proof on the skin. It was chosen for this exact reason but past its usage now, lying mangled beside a pair of nail scissors.

What people fail to realise about sharp objects is that they are everywhere. Prison guards, health professionals - trained to search them out in any room - they know. Lighters, badges, safety pins, compasses, broken photo frames. It takes a certain turn of thought to see them. To see that a scissor blade or similar (no matter how blunt) can be taken to an overpriced shaver (no matter how snag-proof) and used, with perseverance, to lever a skinny sliver of steel from the plastic bed, bending it in the process to a corner that will hack much harder at skin than a simple sharp edge.

She was the mistress of her own undoing, beautifully adept at avoiding bread and fruit knives in the washing up, throwing out the craft blades she used to use in art class, buying the safest and bluntest of everything. She knew how to remove the more obvious of temptations, but not all of them. There always had to be something, something vulgar and harmful, in a black cloth pouch that was hidden so as not to be thought of, in a secret corner of the room that her thoughts went back to several times a day.

*****

You know, when you reach Cardiff and find your phone is missing, that this isn't exactly new. In two years you've lost/been robbed of four debit cards, three sets of various house keys, one passport, two NUS cards, one university ID and more miscellaneous items of clothing than you can count. A mobile phone lost (and really lost, as in, somewhere between Wales and England lost) is unusual but not unexpected.

Let's just say you're not too worried.

Ten years old and, after weeks of waiting, breathless trips to Toys'r'us, sold out shelves and nagging and nagging, you finally get your hands on a Tamagotchi. You celebrate by leaving your little pet on top of a vending machine in a service station in Scotland. Your parents are understandably annoyed.

On a whim, on the way back down south, you convince your father to pull back in at the services because maybe, just maybe, it'll still be there. The man in the shop smiles, hands it back to you. They've been playing with it, keeping it alive for two weeks. It's been something of a running joke.

"You're a lucky little girl, you know that?"

*****

Back then, on days when the way it felt was completely separate from the way it should be, when the misery was a tangible, physical force, she chatted shit a lot. For this person and that cause, for general edification and spiritual growth. With the controlled, delicate sincerity of someone who likes the sound of their own voice - she would ask God for stuff.

Sometimes, on her own and not nearly as often, she would actually pray. The kind of gut-spoken prayer that's more like yawning or being sick than actually trying, the cry that bubbles up behind the eyes and hurts.

Please, make it stop.

She couldn't stop asking anymore than she could stop crying and, when that failed, she'd sit up and breathe in and get back some of that calculation that served her so well in church. Hating it, knowing it didn't work that way, she'd strike a deal -

if ever I don't have to feel like this, if this ever, ever goes away, I promise you there will never be a day that I won't get down on my knees and thank you. I will never take it for granted, never stop being grateful, I'll do anything, give up everything, just please, please, make it stop.

God, if ever he saw it as a bargain, was dutiful and kept his part. She threw away the black bag, stopped crying, felt it lifting. She smiled, put on her new life like a new outfit, checked her make-up in the mirror and left the room humming to herself. She forgot all about her side of the deal.

*****

On a whim, two days later, you tell Ben to come off at that junction, go over the bridge and wait while the two of you jump out of the car and clamber over the fence to the hard shoulder. Down the steps, shining torches into the brambles, you find your phone snug in the grass by the steps, soaking wet with two days rain.

You dry it out, switch it on and find it works perfectly. Not a scratch on it. You tell the story of the Tamagotchi and remark how you've always been lucky with things like that. The little things, the eleventh hour, twist of fate, would-you-believe-it anecdotes. As if the fairies were on your side.

The irony hits you like a punch; you stop talking. Fuck lucky. Your sporadic ability to get away with things by the skin of your teeth, your smug, jam-covered approach to life's little complications - you think that's what makes you lucky? You think there's something called luck at all?

*****

That night she got into bed and decided to stop talking about luck, once and for all. She rolled over into him, pushed her face into the gap between his shoulders, listened to him breathing, counted her blessings, one by one. She thought about it, but not for too long, started to whisper in that sincere-little-church-voice and then the prayer bubbled up from somewhere deep and happened, sort of by accident.

Fuck lucky.
Thank you.