Linda

By Lily Gutierrez

I was 18 and had been looking after myself for years. I had a sweet, inquisitive nature that varnished the reality that a quiet tragedy was firing inside me. My cells often felt more kinetic than choir song but I’d trained myself to seem still.

I was living with my boyfriend and attending art college. I worked in a bakery and a bar to make rent and cooked domesticated dinners when home. It was the most optimistic I’d felt since I was a young child.

My best friend, Paula, was older than me. She was a successful comedy writer and actress, who had become exhausted after crashing through a succession of devastating events. She’d left London for the sleepy seaside town of Hastings to take a break from it all. I discovered her when we both found ourselves selling baked goods.

She told jokes that made me snap in half with laughter. Later, once I got to know her more, it took less, a single look from Paula could make me fall on to the floor, bubbling with hysterics, still clutching a customer's loaf of bread.

Most customers didn't mind me crying happily as I passed them their change; some customers found our school girl giggles endearing or contagious. Our jokes weren't private- we shared our humour- but someone complained and Paula and I were split up. The manager meticulously planned shifts to make sure Paula and I missed each other entirely. 

Shifts felt endless without the release of laughter. Paula and I worked on our separate days, knowing the manager was watching us via security cameras from the comfort of the office. We were both one laugh away from losing our shitty jobs.

Without Paula to keep me company I made new friends. One even became a slight obsession. Her name was Linda. 

Linda was in her late fifties but she acted pre-pubescent, a corpse-like lolita. She was rail thin and frail, with white hair that she wore in child-like braids.
Her mascara was applied so thick that her eyes appeared as two long-legged tarantulas. 

Linda laughed a lot. Her response to any question was to break into a quiet, girlish giggle. The reason Linda was allowed to laugh was not favouritism, it was because her head was host to a cocktails of mental illnesses so sprawling and complex that management seemed to fear her. But I didn't fear her, I was fascinated.

I became an anthropologist studying Linda's every move. Sometimes she would stand still in the middle of the bakery for what felt like hours, dumbly holding a price gun and staring ahead with glassy eyes. Other times I'd try to interview Linda. Whatever the question her answer was the same: a blush and a giggle, sometimes coyly covering her mouth, other times flapping her heavy black eyelashes and grinning, madly and mute. 

Linda was painfully skinny, she never ate and seemed oblivious to the food surrounding her, even as I stuffed my face with iced buns, pasties and pies while talking to her.

I started sketching Linda and she soon became the primary subject of all of my work at art college. At lunch Linda would gallop to the pub and drink as much hard alcohol as she could in an hour. Eventually management told her that when she returned from "lunch" reeking of liquor it was a problem. The following day, after her usual liquid lunch, Linda chewed up whole cloves of garlic to mask the smell. Her laughter smelled of garlic. I documented this in a comic strip.

My other friend at the bakery was named Reet. Reet worked in the back of the bakery making cakes. She was terribly old and ever so wise. She'd let me stick my grimy hands into the bowls of cake mix and lick my fingers as she told me stories or gave me advice.

I had other friends, too. A small group of beautiful girls my own age that bounced around adding youth to the funny old establishment. They all worked part time with other "real" jobs: one was a bass player, another an artist. 

A strange coincidence was that each of our mums had died of cancer when we were children. We would stand together and cry on Mother's day, hugging each other between begrudgingly selling cakes with pink icing letters that read "MUM" to healthy looking girls, linked by arms to their beaming mothers.

While I busied myself with my study of Linda, the musings of Reet, and the Half-orphans, I failed to realize that Paula had had enough of the job. Having had the humour sucked out of her she found it impossible to return to the bakery and quit. When I found out, I didn't last much longer.

The following year, I quit all the shitty jobs, dumped my boyfriend and moved to London. I had graduated college and won an award for the children's book I had written and illustrated about Linda. The story showed Linda living in a crooked castle with flags and turrets, surrounded by pet rats and looking for love. I stayed true to her character and mannerisms, which may have seemed odd in real life but translated as perfectly friendly or endearing for a children's book character. I painted her wide eyes and long smile, her strange gait and her fluffy hair, she was nothing short of lovable.

Within no time I was thriving in London. I was brand manager of a fashion label. I had a hair cut and a chihauhau, a rich lover, and some kind of eating disorder that made me thinner than Linda. In the eyes of everyone I looked up to, this is regarded as the one and only year of my life that I was a success. But I know the truth, that London was lonely. That the dog was more like a rat and so, in fact, was the lover. 

In London I had allowed myself to become desperately depressed and paranoid. My darkness was no longer easy to hide and I become quite ill. One day I looked around at my life: at my rats and my body and my loneliness, and It occurred to me that through studying Linda so closely, I had started to become her.

I decided, like Paula before me, to leave the big city and return to Hastings for a rest. So Paula took me in at the peak of my insanity. She let me live rent free until I get back on my feet, or got my brain back on my side, whichever came first.

I had been ordered by my doctor to take a large pill everyday which was supposed to rid me of everything from my newly diagnosed bi polar, to my older, but just as impressive, "grand mal" epilepsy. The main side effect of the gigantic dosage was a level of sedation that left me child-like and dopey.

I wanted to go to Linda for advise, to hear her high pitched laughter- but sadly Linda had died the year before, having drunkenly fallen down the stairs.  She had been taken to hospital for a broken arm, but once in a hospital bed her body  deteriorated. Maybe her body gave up without its liquid lunch. I don't know. I wish I had told her she was my muse.

I couldn't even consult the fictional Linda because in a blank moment, I had chucked the book out. All copies, and my notes, illustrations, paintings and comics. My whole Linda study was gone.

So now I was living with Paula. She put a giant dictionary on the coffee table and told me I would find most of my answers in there, plus it could only help my atrocious spelling.

Paula called our home "The Black Flat" because we were bound together by some very dark feelings, I with my existential crises and depression, she with her growing anxieties and anthropophobia. I called it "The Show Room" because it was a sublet that was so devoid of personality that it felt as though we were camping out at Ikea. The best part was the balcony which overlooked the crashing ocean and made me feel like king Triton.

Together, Paula and I managed to laugh our way through days and weeks. But my head still felt funny and my heart ached as if it had a hole in it and I was very lost. I looked for answers everywhere. I tried to meditate and failed, I flung myself into the sea, I thought about getting a cat.

My flatmate from London invited me to a small town in Spain to stay with her family for the weekend. The flight on Easy Jet cost the same as a sandwich; I said yes. I put a bikini and my passport in my handbag and was there the next day.

We stayed in a house surrounded by rolling hills and stretches of desert, not too far from the beach. One day I decided to walk back to the house from the beach, instead of taking the car as before. Locals told me to climb the hill, walk straight for about 15 minutes and I would find the house. It sounded simple enough.

I climbed the hill wearing my silver lame swimsuit and black sandals, holding my flip phone in one hand and trekked for a while. I walked as I daydreamed and soon it became clear that I had been walking over 15 minutes. I looked at the time on my flip phone, which had no reception and served only as a clunky watch., I had been walking 40 minutes at a fast pace. I squinted ahead but could see nothing but the same desert land with the odd spiky and dry shrub. I turned, slowly squinting in every direction but found the same at every angle, dry and baron land stretching on endlessly.

I was lost in desert. I had never felt more thirsty. The sun became my tormentor, beating down its scorching rays. I decided to turn back and began running in the direction I'd come from. 

But an hour passed and I found nothing. I zigzagged through the desert with a pounding heart and one broken sandal. I decided to choose one direction and just keep going until I found something. My stupid flip phone counted the hours as they passed, trickling numbers dumbly counting towards my certain death. 

Four hours passed before I reached something, it was a cliff, and although I couldn’t see below, I could hear cars and knew I was saved. I left my phone and my broken sandal and began climbing down. Cutting my limbs as I slipped then caught myself, remaining glued to the cliff edge in one place for minutes at a time, petrified with fear. 

My arms and legs were covered in blood and dirt as I held out my hand to hitch a ride to the house, or anywhere with water and people. I wore only the dumb silver lame swimsuit and one black sandal.

I had faced death but returned to Hastings the next day having learned nothing. The desert bore no sign, or apparitions, no words from a god or goddess, no wisdom in any way. I had found my way out of the desert, but I had not found myself.

Back in Hastings Paula and I held a funeral for all of the sadness in our past. We made a bonfire on the beach and burned letters, diaries and photos in hopes of erasing our mistakes and starting anew. I wore a black dress and cape, Paula cried and I danced around the bonfire. It was working.

I also used the funeral to say goodbye to Linda. I was always sad that I hadn't attended her funeral.
“I wonder who went?” I asked Paula.
“Probably her ex-husband” Paula replied.
Ex husband? It had never occurred to me that Linda had been anyone other than the person I had briefly seen and known.

I had overstayed my welcome staying on my mattress in the black flat and I knew that it was time to move on. I was fuelled by the kind of freedom that comes to someone only when they have nothing to lose. No home, no money, no job, but plenty of fearless optimism. I packed a bag with some floral dresses and used the last of my money to scrape together fare for a flight to New York. A local boy helped me break down my BMX and put it in a travel bike box. I thanked Paula, told her I would write and left for good. 

Sitting on the airplane flying towards nothing but questions marks, I knew in my heart that I was doing exactly the right thing.