About Lucy

A short story by Munich-based writer and former journalist Emily Waugh:

At that time, Lucy wrote poetry. For hours, she would stare into space picking the right words, whispering the sounds to herself. She needed to write, she said. It kept her stable.

‘It’s not easy,’ she said, ‘being me.’ She had wanted me to answer no, I didn’t think her self-absorbed. I said nothing and worried over newspaper articles about pesticides harming the genitals of banana farmers I’d never meet. I only started writing after Lucy had left my life.

One morning, just before we were meant to return to university, I asked Lucy for a lift to the station. I was going to Bristol for the day to meet a friend. Lucy had sat up all night to finish an essay. Half-drunk cups of coffee and hand-written notes littered her desk. Lucy would often write on the backs of used envelopes. That’s how vital her thoughts were. As I shrugged on my coat, I saw she had crossed out most of her words. Her brain was no longer working in a linear way. I went to collect my parent’s car keys.

At this point in Lucy’s story, it’s true that I am responsible for what was about to happen. It’s also true that I am overdoing my own importance. It could also have been the weather. Or Chris Martin. Or the English custom of overgrown hedges on narrow roads. I could describe them more, make them more prominent in the climax. I could omit, excuse or exaggerate some details.

Apart from checking the platform number on my printed ticket, I don’t remember much about how we set off in the battered Golf that morning. I could make up some dialogue, but the fact is my memory, everybody’s memory, isn’t that good. The newest Coldplay album was playing. Lucy had remained loyal while I had not. She gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles whitened. She was focused on something that wasn’t the road. Something I couldn’t see. She didn’t look beautiful or even that sane. It was amazing that somebody so smart could so quickly have their thoughts unravelled. That even with the world at their fingertips, they could lose grip so quickly.

It rained as we weaved through the country lanes. The windscreen looked as if it were melting. The sight of rain blurring glass only occurred to me afterwards when bits of memory came together like papier-mâché. It might have been a snippet from a different morning altogether. Another morning where I had been nervous or happy or a much younger, more innocently generous me.

Lucy screamed. That piercing sound changed everything. She had hit something. Who she was, what had happened to her in life, didn’t matter at that moment. Something was on the ground because of her.

‘What do we do now?’

Read More: The London Magazine

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