Begin Again | ongoing

nineteen

When Fraser leaves to help young minds grow in his classroom and Ravi leaves to spread the joy of music in the record shop, Sunny leaves to read The Perks of Being a Wallflower. At nine o'clock in the morning, with eight hours until her shift starts, she sneaks past Fenfen's room – the door is open enough that she can see her flatmate's naked body tangled in the covers and a lump beneath the covers that must be her latest fling – to grab a few things and head out for the day. The sun is shining, the pale yellow of a poor yolk, so she heads down to the water with the book in one hand and her Walkman in the other.

Today is a new day. She is refreshed after a night with her boys and instead of hopping on the 19 when it sails towards her, she carries on walking, relishing in the cool sea breeze on her cheeks. The weather is back to being unseasonably warm for April and after the first half mile, she takes off her zip hoodie to tie around her waist, the arms flapping behind her as she speed walks (she's too gay to have any other pace) all the way to the shore. After a bit of digging in her cupboard this morning she found her Ziggy Stardust t-shirt and though they're not the best choice for a long walk, she has her pink jelly shoes on her feet.

The seafront isn't so warm, a bit too breezy to sit outside, so she orders a croissant and a mocha and ducks into a cafe off the promenade, a stone's throw from the ocean. There's one table free, smoke still wafting up from a cigarette butt ground into the ashtray, but Sunny doesn't mind the smell. Although she has never smoked and never plans to, she finds the smell oddly pleasant; it has never bothered her when she's been seated in the smoking area of a restaurant, and she quite likes the atmosphere created by cafe catch ups with coffee and cigarettes. Friends laughing and smoking and tapping ash into the cold remains of their drinks.

It's busy for a Friday morning. There are mothers meeting up after dropping their kids at school, friends grabbing a drink on their way past, singletons like her staking claim to a table with a book in their hand and a mug at their elbow. She sits in an armchair with her legs crossed and watches the people around her, occasionally sipping her drink when she remembers it's there, and when she catches people staring she remembers her vivid purple hair. Black Sands is not the kind of town used to people with unnatural hair.

The book isn't long. Just over two hundred pages. No more than a few hours. Two if she gets absorbed into it; four if she gets distracted by everything going on around her in the cafe. Even longer if she fixates on the waves outside and suddenly half the day has gone. Sunny doesn't always have the strongest grasp on time. It never seems to go at the same pace. Sometimes an hour flashes by in seconds and sometimes it seems to drag on for days so how is she supposed to trust the length of a minute?

Earphones secured to ensure minimal distraction, she hits play on track one of the latest Now That's What I Call Music albums and folds the book in half to hold easily in one hand, and she starts to read.

Before Sunny was born, her parents would read to her. Whatever Martha was reading at the time, she would read out loud, whether it was a cookbook or a romance novel (she kept the steamy scenes to herself) because she wanted her baby to know her voice the moment she was born. When Sunny was a baby, her parents would take it in turns to read children's books to her: before she could sit up by herself, they would plant her in their laps and show her the pictures. By the time she could talk, she would beg to be read to and her mothers were more than happy to acquiesce – they never complained when she begged for just one more story, Mummy because all they'd ever wanted was a child who loved to read. Every weekend they would drive to the charity shop near their house with a one pound note and come home with an arm full of stories. Now, a single book sets Sunny back at least five pounds. She misses being five years old. Life was simpler in 1980.

It wasn't long before she could read to herself. Thanks to Martha and Sylvia, her literacy came on in leaps and bounds and she read herself to sleep every night. There was never any need to hide under the covers with a torch to hide her books from her parents, because why would that ever be a restricted hobby? They would never dream of clamping down on how much she read, even if it meant she stayed up too late and her head drooped at school. When she was eight, her teacher pulled her mother to one side at pick-up and expressed her concern that Sunny showed no interest in the books they read as a class, and she was worried that Sunny's reading comprehension was suffering. Sylvia pointed out that Sunny's reading comprehension was, in fact, sky high – she showed no interest because the books were boring, and she was reading far more engaging stories of her own volition.