Monologue 2 - Grief is not a feeling. Grief is a skill.

It took me completely by surprise. Well it would, wouldn’t it? I mean, one minute she’s there, large as life. Larger. And then she’s not. And all that’s there is this massive… this lack of her. This dead space in every single room, wherever I am. Wherever she’s not. 

There was something so solid about Karen, like she filled the space she was in more than other people did. She was tall, for a girl, and big. Everything about her was big. She had thighs that my mother would roll her eyes at. “A woman shouldn’t let herself get like that,’, she whispered at me through her teeth while Karen rumbled up the stairs to use the bathroom. “It’s not… well, it’s not gainly, is it. She’ll do herself a mischief.” Thick thighs and an arse to match, but firm, not just fat. She had substance. And tits like a fucking landscape! Bosoms, my mum would say, but Karen didn’t waste time with words like bosom, or doily, or sorry. Mum never quite got her, even though she was always round at ours. She had queues of men after her, always. She could take her pick. 

And she had a big heart. Massive. Fuck, I hate it when people say that about someone who’s died, because most of them were cunts, really, and it’s just something to say at a funeral. But she did. She really did. She felt things. I mean, if someone was sad, or unhinged or pregnant or whatever, Karen would know it by looking at them and she'd know exactly what to say. Or if Sam was brewing for another episode, it’s like she could smell it on the air before it happened, and she’d be round there swearing at him and taking him custard doughnuts and making him laugh when nobody else could even get him to look them in the eye.  

Me and Karen, we never… I mean, she was like my sister, not a girlfriend. We’ve known each other since our first day in the playground at St Stephen’s. There was a boys’ end and a girls’ end and we were all supposed to line up at the right door at the end of break and there she was, holding my hand in our boys’ end crocodile, grinning. She didn’t look the least bit like a boy, but Mr Greenacre let her in anyway, even though he was super strict. You couldn’t say no to Karen. It’d be like trying to negotiate with a bull. A friendly one, like, and a baby one, but a bull just the same. There'd be no point. You just have to let her do her thing. 

We were best friends all through primary. She’d come round to mine every Tuesday and Sunday and we’d pretend we were getting married and blow sherbert fountain powder in the air like confetti, and then we’d climb a tree or have a fight or something. She’d always win. We were in a gang the year we moved up to the comprehensive, but to be honest it was just me and her really in it, and she made all the decisions. We didn’t bully people or anything, we just hung out on corners looking hard and not doing anything, but wherever she was none of the bullies stayed for long, so we always had a gaggle of the less-than-cool kids somewhere nearby, basking in her safety like skinny little lizards.

Karen was the person I told that I’d kissed Mandy Dobbie on the mouth after the third year Christmas disco and she told me what she’d done with Mark Whitsun and how he’d tried to get pushy and she’d rolled over on top of him and knocked the breath out of him. 

Even when she went to college in Bradford, we’d write, send each other bootlegs of gigs we’d been to and I’d visit every other weekend if she wasn’t coming home. And when she laughed, she snorted. She sounded like some kind of sea mammal having a seizure, wheezing and barking and spluttering. Her ugly laughter was the soundtrack to my youth and the theme music to my whole bloody life. My mum used to try and catch us having sex when we were teenagers. She was sure we were an item and she was convinced I could do better, but she never did catch us because we never thought of each other that way until… not ever. And it's too late anyway now.

I was the one that walked her down the aisle when she married that idiot, and it was my house she stayed at when she walked out on him. She was here three years. There didn’t seem to be any point in her moving out, she just… fit. And then she… 

I mean, she was on a zebra crossing. The one time she used a crossing and didn’t barge her way across the road and expect everything to stop. It was 3 o’clock in the afternoon, just before the schools tipped out. Half an hour later and there’d have been kids everywhere and a lollipop lady for her to ignore. It was a nice day, for March. Sunny. And some guy in a fucking Skoda just… going too fast. Not even texting or … he just didn’t see her. She was fucking massive, but he didn’t see her, and he ran her over, properly ran over her. Made a mess of my Karen with his stupid shiny car. In seconds. He didn't stop. They caught him, but that doesn't make any difference. That doesn't matter.

All that matters to me, right, is that she was here, on her way home to mine, with custard doughnuts in her bag and a bottle of cheap red that we were going to have with fish and chips because it was Wednesday and why the fuck not. And then she wasn’t. She was roadkill, literally. Spread across the street with her head smashed in. She was a headline on page 5 of the Barnsley Chronicle, HIT AND RUN TRAGEDY OF LOCAL WOMAN. And then nothing. Just a few column inches next to LOCAL MAN RAISES FUNDS FOR HOMELESS. Gone.

And we buried her. I buried her. Her family were there but they hadn’t got much to say. My mum was there making comments about the coffin and the pallbearers’ backs because she just can’t help herself, can she, and saying ‘isn’t it sad when someone’s got no one and they die’ and I wanted to shout ‘what do you mean, she’s got no one? She’s got me. She had me. She's always had me.’ Just because we didn’t... doesn’t mean she wasn’t half of me. More than half of me. Doesn’t mean that I ever thought there’d be a time or a place where she wasn’t here.

And there are no instructions, are there, to how to do this. There’s no… she was just my friend. Just. She was – is – the one person that’s been there for as long as I can remember. I can remember meeting her but I can’t remember what things were like before I knew her. 

People say it’s like losing a limb but it’s not. It’s like losing my skin. All of it. It’s like losing my spine. There’s nothing to hold me up any more. She was big and brash and she took up so much space and I don’t know how to be here, now, without her.

Prompt: "Grief is not a feeling. Grief is a skill."  Stephen Jenkinson, via Facebook post) and chunky, primordial babe (thanks Emma Elizabeth)