Blue Love

by Celine Saintclare

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​    The radio played their song all summer. It was called ‘Blue Love’ and the singer was an Indie artist with a low, raspy kind of voice that sounded like she’d just woken up, turned over to look at her still-sleeping lover and started singing to him. Like a lullaby but sadder. And somehow this song had wormed its way into the charts amid the pop-diva love ballads and moody-sexy declarations of post-break-up independence.
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        Whenever it came on it was kind of surprising, until it wasn’t, and then it was surprising when it didn’t and Rosie missed it. It was easier to miss the song than it was to miss Jack. She liked to leave it where it was, as part of the summer past. She worried about what hearing it now might do to her, what feelings - long buried - it might inspire. Its phrases indistinguishable from the feeling of his hand on her thigh as they drove around together, she in a white tunic-style sundress with a lace overlay, plastic flipflops that rubbed the skin between her toes, and he in dark jeans and washing-machine softened linen shirts unbuttoned low. They were all in blues, light, dark, royal, and Rosie imagined the look of them all pinned to the line in an oceanic waft, her fingers unfastening the buttons as they lay together in the park, her hand against the warm press of his skin, or when it had started raining and he gave her his shirt to cover her hair with and it smelled like Vetiver and ash. Blue love for you and I, blue like the evening gloom, like a night with no stars, blue is the bud before the bloom, the deep, sunken sea, you can drink your day, your life away, you’ll never find a love like ours, you’ll never find another me. The rainwater had leaked through and her hair had frizzed but she didn’t care. She’d laid down on the backseat of his car, the leather against her bare back and whenever they’d had sex ‘Blue Love’ always seemed to be playing, or maybe it hadn’t, maybe she’d embellished that on later.

    It always had to be Jack’s car or a hotel because he was married. He’d never been that type of guy until he was. It all started when his best friend had died in a car crash, he’d told her, and he realised life was like a snake that ties itself up in knots and dies that way. Rosie wasn’t old enough to know what kind of girl she was but she knew the feelings she had for Jack were pure and real and couldn’t really be bad. Jack had a house, a car, a wife and a kid, so if he told her it wasn’t all that then she had to believe him. He was supposed to know better than she did. He was older, he’d walked all the way down the pathway and out again the other side. She wanted to press her eyeball up against his and see what he had seen. He held his hand out in the dark, his palm a soft dish, a place to curl up. It had been only a few years since the trouble and she’d been looking for a place to land. She’d been like a bird, flying back and forth, he was a driftwood raft bobbing the sea.

    She’d never known a passion like this, it had sparked like a struck match at first glance when he came into the hardware store where she’d been working and asked her for the grout cleaner. Rosie had been wearing a bottle green polo shirt with her hair in a claw-clip and no makeup because she never woke up early enough before a shift. Jack wore an old grey t-shirt splattered with paint and a gold wedding ring on his ring finger. She was twenty-three, he’d just turned forty. When they talked Rosie noticed a few tiny dots of paint spray on his throat. She looked at the paint and she felt something strange. It felt like being a schoolgirl with scabby knees in a neon one-piece at the local leisure centre, preparing for a dive. Standing at the very edge of the swimming pool with her toes curled over the edge before she prepared to jump in. She watched the lines on the bottom of the pool ripple and distort beneath the water. Her heart squeezed tight, all her organs drawn together and the breath zipped out of her lungs as she propelled herself through the air.

​    It started with a drink in the park when the sun was going down and it had happened so quickly, the closing of the space between them. Her hands were in his hair and his finger hooked through her belt buckle before they’d reached the end of the first can of gin. She remembered the greyish blue of his eyes, so close, blurring into one. And there were coupled swans wafting together, necks bent into hearts as they passed by on the river. Sweat and melting cola ice pops, Jack’s mouth tasted like Haribo, Rosie pressed her feet into the grass and put her face up to the sun. And the warmth grew and grew while ‘Blue Love’ played out from someone’s tinny portable speaker, against the shrieking babies in prams, the laughter, the birds and the dogs. The sunlight made her vision red, even behind her closed eyelids. The warmth had swallowed her whole and he’d been with her, unbuttoning his blue linen shirt. It had gripped them both like a terrible disease that made reality dry up and fall away.

    She twisted up the corner of the bedsheet, the fabric into a little spear that she held tightly between her thumb and forefinger. She did the same with the other hand. Her fingernails painted baby blue, a pastel shade.

    ‘Boy meets girl,’ she said, wiggling one hand. ‘But boy already loves someone else,’ she said, wiggling the other. ‘And that’s just the way it goes.’

   He grabbed her by the back of the neck and told her he loved her. Rosie remembered the rain on the hotel window, motel would be more accurate. It was a small, worn out room with a threadbare rug covering a stain on the carpet. One of four rooms at the top of a pub called The Needle and Spear. Jack didn’t have much money, the way he talked about it with Rosie was like his wife ate money. Rosie imagined her as this enormous barrel woman with metal jaws for teeth, like the contraption on the back of the rubbish truck that chews the trash. ‘Blue Love’ was playing. No, Rosie thought, it couldn’t have been. There was no radio, no speakers, nothing playing from her phone or his, not that he ever took his phone out in front of her lest she saw something she shouldn’t.

    While he kissed her mouth her eyes roved to the bedside table where it lay, screen down, a kaleidoscope of flashing light just visible between the phone and the wood. Rosie knew that soon things between them would end. She knew this in her bones. She knew it with the rain and the steady temperate downpour that washed over her in the shower where she stood for a long time watching the water collect in her cupped palms. One summer had matured her and know she knew.

    The grip was loosening, everything was cooling. The were playing ‘Blue Love’ less on the radio and they hadn’t seen the sun in days and one day soon she was going to grab his flashing silenced phone and answer the call. And it would all be over. And she wondered why Jack didn’t know, seeing as how he was supposed to know everything. He thought it could carry on as it was. He held her hand, entwined with his, firmly in his jacket pocket. He could have it all, why couldn’t he? Why shouldn’t he? He’d been there. Everyone knew being there was more than half of it. 

    Rosie still worked part-time at the hardware store but she had a friend called Matilda who’d just started making beeswax candles filled with essential oils and gemstones. She’d recently blown up on TikTok after a wellness influencer claimed the Aventurine ‘Material Girl’ candle helped her manifest ten-thousand dollars and now Matilda needed help fulltime to deal with the demand. She’d asked Rosie and Rosie had accepted. She’d help Matilda at pop-up shops and with managing the socials. Matilda was looking for investment for a permanent boutique in Marlow, Rosie could work there if she wanted. She was excited about that. It would be so much more fun than the hardware store, the only people who ever came into that were builders and DIY-ers and Jack. 

    She’d started to resent Jack. Almost. He was older than she was. More tired. She thought he was getting uglier, the indented lines across his forehead were deeper, the circles under his eyes were darker. She’d never noticed his breathlessness before, the way he gasped for breath when they were done having sex. The way he gulped water and sweated a puddle on the bedsheet. She watched him sleep one night and felt that she hated him. She hated that he was oblivious to her discontent. She hated the clipped messages he sent when he was at home with his family:

    Yh
    No
    Can’t speak
    Tomorrow

    She hated that she loved him and her love wasn’t enough to make a difference to any of the things that were. And she hated him more once she began to suspect that this suited him perfectly. It hadn’t been a place to land at all, Rosie had thought, but a cage all along. 

    Rosie went for a walk by the river to try and decide what to do about it all. She knew the time had come but she couldn’t think of the right way to end it. It was colder than she’d imagined and she crossed her arms tightly over her chest in her light summer jacket. The breeze skimmed the water and thrust an icy chill in her direction. Her cheeks prickled with it, she felt it over her scalp. Crows cawed overhead. A leaf blew across her path, just fallen from a nearby Horse chestnut tree. She couldn’t let the seasons move on without her. By the time she walked up the sloping path to the park gate exit, Rosie was resolute.


    Prison wasn’t so bad. It was only a 2-year sentence. Pretty good, they’d told her, for manslaughter. Matilda’s business was thriving and she promised Rosie she’d have her a job waiting when she got out. Rosie spent a lot of time researching crystals, she researched essential oils too but that was no fun, particularly when you couldn’t smell them. Sometimes she lay back on her mattress and looked up at the crisscross supporting wires of the top bunk above her and tried to conjure up the scent of Spikenard or Champaca from the Google AI descriptions.

    Before too long the nightly tears subsided and so too did the fear. There were old women in her prison block, soft women among the hard women, some who had wide quick blinking eyes and kept looking around the room, over and over like they couldn’t believe where they’d found themselves. There was relatively little violence, she was told. She found it easy to float under the radar.

    Rosie found it was easier to get along once she forbade her parents from visiting, their tragic simpering at the visitor’s table was not at all conducive to the summer-camp feeling she was trying to cultivate. She ran around the yard on bright days, she exercised - push-ups and crunches. She read Matthew McConnaghey’s autobiography; How to Win Friends and Influence People; The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton.

    Rosie didn’t think very often about love. There was plenty of sex on offer if she’d wanted it. She’d woken a few times to her bunk-bed creaking in the night, the crisscross wires over her head, shifting with the weight of two women instead of one. She had no interest in any of that. She wanted to keep her hands clean. Literally, figuratively. Feelings always led to mess. She didn’t want to capture anybody and there was nothing on earth she wanted less than for somebody to capture her. 

    By the time her sentence was nearing its end, Rosie found that she had hardly really thought of Jack in months. She used all her telephone minutes to talk with Matilda, who’d recently shared a story-time about Rosie’s incarceration on her socials and been flooded with interest demanding more, more, more. Rosie had a growing legion of fans waiting on her release. They wrote her letters, dozens of women, men too. Embarrassed, bashful, gushing letters. They demanded titbits about her life. A startling number wanted to know what prison food was like.

    Rosie never responded. She didn’t want to play the part. She didn’t want to be pen pals with the kind of people that wrote fan mail to women in prison. She hadn’t meant to kill him. She couldn’t allow herself to forget it or she might go mad. The prosecution had made such a case that Rosie had almost believed him herself. She wanted to rush over, grab the lawyer by the hand and beg ‘Tell me more, tell me why it happened!’. Since she’d been locked up, Rosie had come to the conclusion that it all started because there was nothing else to do in that town than play with people. And Jack had died because...She’d had a harder time answering that question. 

    Sometimes Rosie went into the prison break room and painted watercolours. Her subjects were Marlow park, the River Thames, the Chiltern Hills. Home. It was automatic, these places and objects scarred onto her brain. Branded. The park gates where they’d met for a final time and she’d told him it was over. The side of the busy main road he’d followed her down, calling her name like a siren, his voice breaking with it. She didn’t think he’d be desperate. Or angry. It frightened her. All the eyes followed them, the streetlamps too as the sun slid back behind the rows of shops and houses. He came so close, he said something, Rosie for all her thinking could not recall exactly what. It was something like, ‘I won’t let you do this to me,’ or ‘who do you think you are,’ it was something like that and nothing like ‘I love you,’. Rosie didn’t understand this because if he’d said ‘I love you,’ then perhaps things might have gone differently. Whatever he’d said had made her so angry that she pushed him and the bus took him right off his feet like some enormous red beast snaring its prey. That’s how she painted it, a giant red dragon, the headlights as glowing demon eyes. She dabbed her paintbrush in the yellow paint and drew spotlight beams. She felt a fraction of it, the way she’d felt then. At the edge of the swimming pool, the paint splatter on his neck. But she kept painting. And then she heard something that made her freeze still. 

    The noise from that ancient radio they were permitted in the break room, it only ever tuned to one and a half channels. The song she hadn’t heard now in over a year. She stayed perfectly still and listened. Blue love for you and I, blue like the evening gloom, like a night with no stars, blue is the bud before the bloom, the deep, sunken sea, you can drink your day, your life away, you’ll never find a love like ours, you’ll never find another me. It was only when it finished and the overly cheerful radio host said something about the memories of that summer that Rosie realised she’d been crying. The tears leached into her headlight beams. She put her finger through the edge of the red bus, smudged it over the page. She was horrified by the evidence of her sadness on the page and reached instinctively for a nearby tube of blue acrylic. She squeezed it thickly over her painting, that stark, acrid blue that covered all of it so completely, blanketed it with a single, final note. It was too much to think of a time when she was innocent to all this. Before she really tasted love, or hate, or fear. She had hope still, a solitary grace she could cling to. Rosie pushed the disintegrating mess to one side and reached for a fresh sheet of paper. She would start again and this time she would not allow herself to become swallowed by the blue.

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Celine Saintclare is a London-based novelist and writer of Caribbean descent. She is the author of SUGAR, BABY and THE FEMININE ART OF REVENGE.


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