I’m on the blog tour for Let Me Be Like Water by S. K. Perry today and have a great extract to share with you.
Let Me Be Like Water is available in ebook and paperback now and you can purchase a copy of both here.
Before I share my extract with you, here is a little bit about the book.
Book Synopsis:
Holly moved to Brighton to escape. But now she’s here, sitting on a bench, listening to the sea sway… what is she supposed to do next? How is she supposed to fill the void Sam left when he died? She had thought she’d want to be on her own. Wrecked. Stranded. But after she meets Frank, the tide begins to shift. Frank, a retired magician who has experienced his own loss but manages to be there for everyone else. Gradually, as he introduces Holly to a circle of new friends, young and old, all with their own stories of love and grief to share, she begins to learn to live again.
Extract:
Autumn
If you were here still,
I’d curl into your ribcage,
my concave lover.
1
I was sitting on a bench staring at the beach when Frank told me I’d dropped my keys. I was watching this little girl playing with a kite. She was quite a long way away, but she gave me something to look at. I can’t give you any details: maybe that her front teeth were missing, or that she had tangled hair. I don’t remember what I was thinking about, although I know I was wearing my red gloves.
I’d decided to get up and go, ready to continue walking. I was cold and sore from sitting, and at that precise moment
I needed something that wasn’t the sea to be in front of me. I was about to stand up when Frank – who I didn’t know was Frank at the time – told me I’d dropped my keys.
He’d been watching the girl too, it turned out.
He pointed at the kite.
‘I have days where I’d like the wind to take me up like that. Some days it’s wanting to escape, I think, but on others, I’d just like to be a kite.’
I smiled. He handed me my keys.
‘Thank you. I didn’t know I’d dropped them.’
‘That’s OK. I dropped mine on a train track once, between the door and the platform. They had to be hooked back up again by the man from the ticket office. It turned out his name was Noel and he lived down my road. Funny world. What about you; would you like to be a kite, or would you pick something else?’
2
I stripped our bed the night before I left and sat on the floor while the washing machine spun. I watched the sheets twisting round. The bulge of the bowl made me think of a belly with a baby growing inside it. It hurt so much I thought there must be bruises. I needed to find something to hold that felt like you, so I pushed my fist into my mouth and bit down and cried into my knuckles.
It took me nine days to pack. When I got lonely I’d sit on the floor of the shower with the water switched on. Sometimes I’d feel tired, and I’d put down the jeans or the pants or whatever it was I was trying to put into a suitcase, and I’d slide into our bed. I’d lie still and think about how much I miss you. Other times I’d just cry, and my body would shake in that small way that starlings do when they fly together and their wings shudder like sadness in the sky.
I lay awake for most of the night and thought about the woman who was moving in in the morning. I put my suitcases into a big van, and it drove them from our little place in Hammersmith to the sea.
3
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’d be a yo-yo.’
‘That’d be good,’ Frank replied. ‘Kites get to fly though; a yo-yo would be more like a permanent bungee jump.’
We laughed.
‘You were about to get going. Are you walking towards the pier?’
‘I thought I’d walk to the sailing club. I like the sound the boats make.’
‘Me too: the clinking,’ Frank said, and he smiled.
4
I’ve always loved London, so when I started to hate it I knew I had to leave. I didn’t want to lose the feeling the river gives me in the morning – even on mizzly days – dispersing the early light on the Southbank as it waits for the sun to get a couple of centimetres higher; or the way the smell of rain gets in between taxis; or how wet, bitter grass springs up outside offices and in parks; or the glow the city gives me at 5 a.m. when I’m dirty from the night before and edging into the day with dry shampoo and muscles still tight from dancing and smoke. But I heard you everywhere: our residue on pavements and the seats of buses, reminding me of a conversation, a look, a half-hour I’d spent waiting for you, or sitting in the office counting down the conversations until I’d step onto the District line to find you. And I walked past grubby doors with newspaper headlines ringing in my mind, hearing the arguments we would have had about them, dissecting the nitty-gritty until you laughed and pushed me up against a street wall, stopping our debate under a pile of bitty kisses.
And without you, the boating lake, and the pub gardens with their wooden benches and fairy lights, and the wind tunnel when a tube pulls away and you tip on the edge of the tracks, and the lines of commuters in walking queues with frowns, clutching coffee in cardboard cups; they all seemed empty.
About The Author:
S. K. Perry was shortlisted for the Mslexia Award and longlisted for London’s Young Poet Laureate in 2013. She was a resident artist at the Roundhouse in Camden and a Cityread Young Writer in Residence 2014. She runs creative writing projects that develop emotional literacy, and explore mental health, memory, and healing from violence. She lives in Brixton, London. Let Me Be Like Water is her debut novel.
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