We drove out along the coast one afternoon, to a fireworks shop a couple of towns along. It was late in the year, and the light was low and dismal, rain scudding the windscreen. In a couple of days’ time it would be New Year’s Eve, and then our small town would scatter itself to parties held in bars and houses and nightclubs, and out along the harbour. At midnight, there would be an amateur firework display on the roof of the old lido.
In the shop that afternoon, some of the fireworks sat behind a glass-fronted cabinet. They had names like Stinging Bees, Vendetta and Sky Breaker, and beneath each item was a small laminated caption: “One hundred shot roman candle firing high whistling bees,” read one. “Twenty-five secs of time rain salutes. Noisy,” read another.
Afterwards, we headed down to the vast, pebbled beach, watched the last flare of daylight on the horizon. I took a picture of my boyfriend, pale-faced in the drizzle. Then we sat in a chip shop, where in a small tank two fish swam despondently between a lighthouse and a submarine and a burst of plastic foliage.
I do not remember this period of my life in colour. When I look back at photographs from that time I am surprised to see the bright blue plastic chairs of the takeaway, and the soft lemon of the beach light. I recall those days only as ashen and cold and unspoken.
All the way back home we were quiet. It was my car, but my boyfriend drove. And it was his choice of songs we played on the stereo. I sat in the passenger seat and tried to remember how to make conversation. Outside, the night was filled with headlights and darkness and rain. I thought about all of the places I might rather be spending these last days of the year: northern dancefloors and California porches, sitting alone at a bar in Tennessee, perhaps. Somewhere, anywhere, warmer and kinder than here.
I had already stayed far too long in the relationship. It was an old habit. Sticking it out, soldiering on, shaping and reshaping myself a thousand times to make myself into some approximation of what my partner wanted me to be. I would be smaller, I would be quieter, I would shear the edges of my needs to make him happier. I surely did not have to drive my own car or play the songs I wanted; I could spend New Year’s Eve in his town, with his friends, sleep in his cold house beneath his thin sheets. I could bury my feelings 20,000 leagues deep. I could mistake these contortions for love.
New Year started in the early evening – at somebody’s house or in a restaurant or some pub or other. The night felt enormous then; huge and unfathomable and quite terrifying in its possibility. I was tired before it even began. Plans looped and crisscrossed, and folded back on themselves; if we missed one friend, we found another; caught others still as we rolled from venue to venue. And all the while the wind whipped in off the sea, foul-tempered and wild.
The singer Aimee Mann has a line that has always summed up my feelings about fireworks: “When they light up our town I just think / What a waste of gunpowder and sky.” That night I stood on the pavement and watched as they lit up the shore: high-whistling and noisy, trailing their gold and glitter through the wet sky. As the New Year began, I turned my face to the mean wind, just to feel something.
And then the night pressed on, with dancing and drinking and hard, determined revelry. It was the early morning when we reached a party in someone or other’s half-renovated house, and later still when I found myself drinking bad red wine in a spare bedroom, stuck in an endless loop of conversation with someone I barely knew and a coked-up TV producer down from London.
After a while, a thought occurred to me: What if I just left? The TV producer was mid-sentence when I stood up and walked out of the room. And then down the stairs. And past the living room where people were dancing, and the kitchen, where my boyfriend stood laughing with his friends. And then out of the front door, into the cool, sweet morning.
That New Year’s morning, as I walked slowly home through the grey and empty streets, I felt my first surge of quiet liberation; the light of a new thought dawning: you can leave the party, the town, the relationship. You can quit the big night out if it makes you feel small. We do not always have to stay.
