The komakino of Francesca Forrest

Drama class. Francesca is asked to lie on her back and stare ahead; the ceiling her only target. As the teacher addresses the class Francesca realises she will learn nothing today. The exercise is too simple.

“Change your perspective, all of you. Spend the next forty five minutes getting lost someplace then tell me where you went.”

Thirty of them, backs-to-the-floor. Francesca stares ahead. She’d done this once before, actually, in a class at college. Then the ceiling had been fifteen feet away, and the distance caused the room to shift around her. Not in a violent way, not disruptively, but in a slow lurch. She’d become convinced that the world was wrong. The roof became a floor that she simply couldn’t step on. Up was down, gravity a trap keeping them the wrong way.

That had been a good class. Francesca had had enough room to trick herself into thinking she could change the world.

She’d left that room looking at things as if from a great height. Her bag, slung in the corner of the room, felt fifteen feet further from her hands than it ought to be. Scooping it up felt like reeling in a canvas fish from crystal-clear water.

At home that night she’d slumped on her bedroom floor and tried the same trick. But the ceiling was too close. She felt pinned. A butterfly in a frame.

Propped on the wall opposite was a poster from a show she’d caught a few months prior. An album cover that pictured a man staring up at... things. These things cast human shadows on the ground, flying in tandem over a barren earth. She’d recognised that sense of distance and thought herself a body in formation casting an ambiguous shadow.

A few years later, in a bar in Tromsø, she’d seen Roxy Music’s Country Life pinned above the wine list. Two models frozen against greenery, shoulders pinned within the frame. Bodies on display. No other context. Very little clothing. She’d had a click somewhere in the back of her head that left her feeling suspended again, staring down at these strange women, dozy in the hot-sweat-heat of their odd jungle.

She hadn’t been able to escape that sleeve that summer. Back from her trip she’d found a friend advertising a club with a version of his own, the forest replaced with bracken and the women with surlier, hipper-haired girls. She hadn’t gone. It had been too much, too on-the-nose. A club full of butterflies and boys with pins.

Then a boyfriend with it, a favourite album of his. He hadn’t lasted long.

Just a few months ago the perspective had returned. In a record shop on Berwick Street she’d started fixating on the chop-chug-chug guitar smashing through the stereo, a hard voice slicing across it. On the album's cover there sat a pair of bloodied plimsolls. Pristine white shoes, cheap and disposable, spattered across the toe with thick red.

She’d pictured herself that fifteen feet distant, looking down from a height as thumping nose dripped blood.

Under the cover, an inlay; cards featuring photographs of isolated objects, detritus from a shared idea of college that she hadn’t been too, could never go to. More John Hughes than Secondary Modern. Very American – Sweet Valley and Columbine – each item isolated like a target, or an exhibit. A catalogue of a school gone wrong, a class out of control.

A cough. Francesca is no-longer in Tromsø, or a shop, or school. She is back in the room.

Sensing disquiet, the teacher’s voice returns.

“Wherever you’ve been I want you to come back. Try going somewhere else. Somewhere between one and the other is a place I want you to write about next week.”

Francesca wears a frown, now. She wills herself into a cleverer place, peeved at the thought that her perspective needs to mean something.

She thinks of the opposite of flimsy dresses and twee meditations. She pictures a network. She thinks of a cloud suspended in a room but doesn’t pursue the thought. She thinks about perspectives, again, of that fifteen-feet distance and starts to see a map, terrain scrolling slowly by. She sees, at the centre, the shadow of a drone, and decides to stop thinking for a beat.

She thinks about this timetabled attempt to reconnect with strangers, at once necessary and ingenuine.

She thinks about her bag, slung in the corner of this still too-small classroom. She thinks about the things sat inside it. She thinks about Tom. She realises that she doesn’t know Tom’s number in the way she’d had to memorise the numbers of boyfriends before, and she’s slightly sad about that. She thinks, instead, that she can reach him six ways at once now, and she’s just a little sad about that too.

“Okay, everybody, slowly come back. If you felt relaxed enough to sleep, well, so be it, but the rest of you looked like you really went someplace there. Well done.”

Francesca bites just inside her bottom lip, tugging herself together, before fetching her plimsolls.