The Weight of Silk

Chapter two

The first thing Vivian remembered was the clothes. Not a particular outfit, but the sheer weight of them.
Why did she have so many clothes? she thought, as she packed up the cramped single room she had occupied since September.
The second year at university had been spent in an eight bedroom purpose built flat on Parr Street, right in the intoxicating centre of Liverpool. She had chosen this over a house share in the suburbs with a gaggle of mad Northern Irish girls, whose energy exhausted her even from a distance.

At twenty, Viv was a full time student two years into a four year degree, on the maximum student loan, plus a grant for being an estranged child. It was money she barely trusted, so she spent it recklessly mostly on clothes from Topshop, a place she’d once learned how to steal from.

Back then, growing up poor, shoplifting had felt less like crime and more like a working class hobby. A rite of passage. Her way of rebelling that noone was was saving up for her education.

She still worked part time jobs at uni, not out of necessity, but because work still felt like a cheat. Like the time she claimed to be eighteen so she could work in a local boozer at sixteen.

She wasn’t in the habit of emotional “check-ins” at the time. But now, twenty years later, perfumed by the vapour of her jasmine tea, sipped from a hotel balcony, she found she held so much compassion for her younger self, a young woman with barely contained rage, odds stacked against her, entering the alien world of higher education.

The anger had manifested in strange ways. Petty, mean spirited, unnecessary.

Like the girl from Chorley, who lived at the end of the hallway next to Tina, her Austrian classmate. Viv ate the girl’s food, used her conditioner, made no effort to hide her snarls of contempt. The reasons for the cruelty were murky: a perceived slight, an argument over a razor, or maybe just the unbearable fact that the girl seemed loved by her family.

Once, knowing the girl was away, Viv kicked down her door and raided her room, stealing trivial things she was certain would be missed just enough to infuriate. She made no attempt to cover her tracks. Viv knew she wouldn’t be confronted. And if she was, confrontation was familiar terrain. That kind of chaos didn’t scare her it steadied her.

In the grand scheme of things, Viv barely cared about repercussions. The petty violence served as an outlet for emotions too painful to understand.
Her mother had been lost in an alcoholic fog all her life, violence and misplaced anger languishing on the sofa. Viv grew up poor because her mother chose to raise children without the support of a working father, without a second parent to balance out the negativity, to call out bad behaviour, or to shame her mother.

Viv thought about the two winter holidays she spent on the slopes with her new university friends learning to ski. Tina had become a constant presence in her life during those years.

The drinking had become steady and weight gain crept in, Viv was tall but felt fat was hiding in all pockets. With rising dysmorphia, she bought new clothes almost weekly in a futile attempt to compensate, to hide, to fix what felt unfixable. The clothes were her currency. Like the Shekel, you needed a stack of them to be worth anything.

As the semester ended, she cancelled the final rent payment and dragged her belongings into Tina’s room. Tina had flown home to Achenkirch to spend time with her family in anticipation of the move to China where they were to spend their third year.
After two years of studying ab initio Chinese, her class could barely string a sentence together in Mandarin. There were twenty students in that Chinese class some studying Chinese and Spanish, some just Chinese, and then there was Vivian, enrolled on an International Business programme. A joint honours course whose meaning she still struggled to grasp twenty years later as she smiled over her cooling tiny teacup.

No one was expecting Viv back home over that summer. No mother’s voice was calling her, she hadn’t lived with her mother since she was eleven.
Home was a borrowed word, like this borrowed room, with its twin single beds and perfect borrowed light. She even put up a picture and a plant on the windowsill. Her audacity sometimes even surprised her.

She listened to the management company rattle her old door, looking for her unpaid rent. She knew they wouldn’t check Tina’s room.

Summer in the student flat meant silence, bare countertops, and vending machine tomato soup. The kitchen, once chaotic, was now sterile. Beige orange cupboards and flimsy MDF worktops stood witness to what mattered at the time but was fading fast like the steam of her ever cooling tea.