What Was & What Is by Kathryn Sharpe

Read by Katy Darby (click to listen) What Was & What Is MP3

You’re in the office; a small room decorated with dead plants in a building with other businesses trying to make it. The windows seal the sound of the street below.  Moorgate is busy in the week again. It’s a rare visit from you. Since you left London for love you’re not here often.

Leanna is sitting opposite on a patchy leather sofa that drips with drool from the dogs that come in. Bringing in pandemic puppies who have become adults with behavioral issues is a work benefit listed first on the careers page, above the pensions that no one can afford to contribute to and the ‘inclusive culture’ that is not really followed.

You’ve heard it's an attempt to ‘recalibrate office attendance’, that pets please people. Your own recalibration looks like these monthly trips you take from Berlin under the guise of team time. Your team is far from your mind when you plan them.

She’s cut her hair short since the last time you saw her. It no longer covers the tattoo on the base of her neck; three interlinking waves that crash onto her upper vertebrae. Leanna’s wearing a jumper that looks easy to take off, although you’ve never seen her without a jumper that’s easy to take off. Her breasts are small, more waymarkers of the muscle that lies underneath. When you’ve touched her there before it feels like touching the sinew of a soul.

She’s talking about hiring. She runs the people team; her role means your trips are always approved. You watch her tapping her fingers absentmindedly. Her wedding ring is dull. You know that it doesn’t signify what it traditionally does. You’ve felt the metal of that band before on your back, as her palms move to the places they only can in private spaces. She’s arranged a company social for tonight, advertised it as an opportunity to celebrate the Series B funding round.  You believe she did this as a cover for you meeting again sooner.

Your therapist reminds you that creating these narratives is your downfall.

People are beginning to hover. No one wants to initiate leaving the office.

‘Let’s head to the drinks!’ you call out to break the indecision.

You hear her make a point to finish her meeting; you hope it’s because of you. There’s a performative clatter as people pack things away hurriedly. You glance over at her again. She won’t meet your gaze. People drift purposefully into their lift cliques. Everyone has a preference for who they want to ride six floors with. You know who yours is, know too that you’re not her choice in public.

You attempt small talk with the stragglers on the walk over. You confirm that the badge on your backpack is a reference to coding, answer when asked that yes, it’s often still a male environment. You have much more you could say on gendered expectations, but you stay silent. You feel uncomfortable, then resentful. The microaggressions feel more macro these days. 

The bar in Broadgate Circle is busy when you arrive. Velvet curtains shut out the last of the light. The music hasn’t yet been turned to a volume to push people together conspiratorially, to hear conversations. You wish it had. A table at the back in a dim corner has been reserved for your group; on it are more bottles than the bodies attending. You’re surprised, momentarily, that this type of start-up culture has stayed.

You sit and watch her from afar, try to stay in conversations that you don’t want to be part of. You wonder idly if she remembers how much you struggle with the singularity of expression of your bisexuality in your own marriage these days, how much you rail against outwardly being defined by a man. She trails her thin fingers through the air to give shape to the story she’s telling to someone else. She turns, and in that small and big moment, your eyes meet. Your chest burns. There’s a commotion that pulls you back to the room; someone is being sick. You glance back – but she’s already turned away.

You hear a warning of last call coming. As you wonder whether you should message her to meet at your hotel, a new joiner sits next to you and interrupts your thoughts. 

‘I’ve heard so much about you,’ he begins.

 ‘Aaron’, he continues, and offers a pasty hand. You don’t want to take it.

You look at him. He looks like every man along Broadway Market on a Saturday morning; his uniform of silver rings and a beanie not related to the weather, and socks just past the ankle, was once original and now is not. You’ve never noticed him before, and the company is small enough to do so if you’d chosen to. You make small talk, notice as you do how the bar has almost thinned out.

You see Leanna making her way over. You feel the burning rise in your chest again.

‘Hi,’ she announces.

You realise it’s the first time you’ve spoken directly all day.

‘Hey,’ you acknowledge quietly.  

There’s a pause. It would be silent but the music helpfully fills the gaps for you. Aaron does not leave. A waiter comes and aggressively stacks the empty glasses on the table.

‘The bar’s shutting,’ he reminds you.

‘We’ll leave,’ and you look at her, briefly. She knows the hotel you’re staying in; has stayed there before in your shared secrecy until sunrise.

‘Which way are you headed?’ Aaron asks, and you shrug.

‘Hackney Road,’ Leanna answers. Where your hotel is. You take a breath; her response feels confessional. It wouldn’t take long to discover she lives with her wife in Deptford, that until you, she didn’t know where Hackney Road was. You used to tease her about it until you left, and realised you were fighting for her to recognise a place you were already abandoning. You wish again you hadn’t. (left)

‘I’ll go that way with you, if that’s okay. I’m near. Ish.’

‘Sure,’ Leanna agrees.

Your surprise makes your throat feel like it’s closing slightly.

‘Fine.’ You feel you can say nothing else. ‘Let’s go,’ and you lead yourselves into the midnight possibility of the night via Liverpool Street station. The lights are bright inside. You take the travelator to street level, take the opportunity to stand behind Leanna. You dare to rest your hand, fleetingly, on her back. She steps out of your touch, waves to Aaron waiting at the top. It feels abrupt.

You stand together in the main entrance, the entrance that can lead you by foot to Brick Lane, by bus to Kingsland High Street, further even, to Tottenham, where you once lived, where certain people remember only riots and not the privilege and push and power of the police that prevails, still, over and over.

You remember how you stood in this spot once with a girl, a long time ago now; a girl you kissed against the roar of the trains rolling in as if you could forget yourself. Much later you’d brought her to a room you rented on Ridley Road. She wore men’s shoes, three sizes too big, and as you languidly did lines off her legs you knew you’d let her go, that you’d be too fearful to stay.

You look at Leanna, the past in the present.

‘This way.’

You lead again. Someone asks passersby for change and Leanna bends, offers, in order, a cigarette, a lighter, then a crumpled five pound note with the face of a now dead queen that reminds a largely unwilling nation to remember the colonialism and hypocrisy she presided over.

‘You’ve always been decent,’ you tell her.

‘You’re always on my mind when I go back to Berlin,’ you don’t tell her.

You take a left to pass the overground at Shoreditch High Street, a right to wind onto Arnold Circus, one of London’s first council estates, and then one more turn to take you onto Hackney Road. You walk side by side as a three, Aaron in the middle, and the sky is heavy with rain.

You pass the church that’s been converted into unaffordable flats; the greasy spoon you used to come to on Saturday mornings; the corner shop open all night that you’d stumble into high, in your leopard print slippers with the threadbare heels. You remember your flat here. The one you’d slip into after nights at Dalston Superstore. The one you’d cry in after abuse from others on the street when you’d dared to love out loud. The one you’d taken Leanna to, one heatwave day where London shut down and she’d dribbled the inside of a Magnum onto your bare collarbone. The one you eventually left because you mistook longing for love, because you forgot that when the longing ends, nothing is left except the vows that keep you there. 

You pass the turning to Columbia Road, where every Sunday the street is stuffed with scents from the flowers. ‘We have happiness now for a week and half’, you’d once overheard someone say there, and you remember wondering what would happen next, when the allocated meter for happiness ran out.

It’s quiet, eerie almost, now; just a street revealing its ordinariness when the viewers and the pursuers are long gone. The rain falls harder. You feel Aaron pull slightly away from you to move closer to her. You can’t be sure.

You drop slightly behind, letting them walk ahead. A subconscious test. You wonder why she’s here with someone new and someone old. You hear her laughing. In the half light of the street lamp you see her take his hand that was buried deep in a pocket. She had to be searching to find it.

You breathe slowly; there’s a reckoning ahead of you. You wonder what you will do to not lose her. You remember what you have done already.

You watch them. You want to remind her that every time you return to London, and to her, that you remember who you were. Who you are. She’d said she understood when you moved away last year. Perhaps in the end she hadn’t. Their walking potters into a pause and Aaron turns to her. You see her face tilt to his in the same way it has tilted to you before, more times than you can count.

‘Up here on the left!’ and you realise you’re shouting, shouting because you’re passing the brothel you’ve only ever seen closed rather than open, which acts as the landmark for the hotel; shouting because it feels you’re passing into a moment that’s an ending. You're surprised at your shout; it feels too loud for the street. You know what you have isn’t exactly love; know too that it doesn’t need to be.

‘Okay!’ Aaron acknowledges, and he takes his hand out of Leanna’s grasp and they stop.

You fumble for your room card. The cold plastic brushes against your palm. You hear the rain as it patters, then pounds, into the abandoned pizza boxes lining the street. You will her to say good night to him. You look at her, look at the jumper that you still haven’t taken off; the one you were so sure you would. You wait for her. 

‘Let’s go up,’ Leanna tentatively suggests, and you realise she is saying this to you and she is also saying this to Aaron. To each of you, she offers a hand, the same hands that have previously touched your body and made you breakfast and waved in the air as you danced together in every warehouse you could find in the East.

You understand now that having her is sharing her; that, if you’re honest, having you is also sharing you. The duality that has always existed within you rises and quietly engulfs you.

You will have to make a decision.

(c) Kathryn Sharpe, 2024

• Kathryn Sharpe (left) lives in East London and enjoys exploring the psychology of people and places through short stories. 

Katy Darby (pictured above) writes novels & short stories, teaches Creative Writing at City, University of London, runs Liars’ League & won the Ronny Schwartz scholarship to the Oxford School of Drama. She’s appeared in over 40 theatre productions in Oxford, Edinburgh & London.