Gut Health

By Charlotte Cole

The polyamorous couple upstairs are fighting again.

The wife, Hannah, leads the way. 'You are wilfully not hearing me, Simon.'

Mara can hear them through the thin ceiling directly above her. She is sitting on the kitchen floor editing a video of herself. She looks better on screen. Better light. Better skin. Better. On her other laptop, an episode of The Real Housewives of New York is playing on mute with subtitles. Both laptops have pink stickers over the apple logo. Baby pink. The pink of trying.

She watches herself pour coconut milk over chia seeds. On screen, with the filter at sixty percent, they look like the sort of thing a person with excellent gut bacteria would eat. Mara has excellent gut bacteria, theoretically. She has spent three hundred pounds ensuring this. The gut is the seat of everything, apparently. Every bad mood, every breakout, every foggy morning. All of it starting in the gut.

She deletes two frames. Plays it back. Her hand in the video is steadier now, the pour more deliberate, the micro-moment where she exists as a body with a pulse edited cleanly out. She flicks onto TikTok. A girl appears. Young. Pouting. Framing her chin with her hands.

'Got buccal fat removal for Christmas.'

Mara watches her get prodded by a perma-tanned doctor, drawn on in marker pen, taken into a room. When she comes back she is swollen but smiling. Crying but smiling. Mara opens her own front camera and sucks in her cheeks. Bone. The architecture of her face without the soft animal parts.

Swipe.

'Why your gut health is ruining your skin.'

A girl pointing at her own face. Talking about the gut-skin axis. About how if you fix your gut you fix everything. Your skin. Your mood. Your weight. It all comes back to the gut.

Swipe.

A man with a beard and a microphone is showing photographs of women's faces. Measuring the distance between the eyes. The ratio of nose to lips. Scoring them out of ten.

Swipe.

Hannah's voice, tight as a wire about to snap.

'I'm in pain, Simon. You did this.'

Simon doesn't deserve her.

On the recreational laptop, a muted Housewife screams at another Housewife. Mara laughs, a short, real thing, then goes back to her phone.

Swipe.

Mara has seventy-six thousand followers. She has not spoken to another person today. These two facts sit beside each other in her mind without comment.

She posts twice a day. A morning routine filmed at two in the afternoon because the light is better. Food assembled, photographed, binned. She stays up until two in the morning editing and posting and scrolling and wanting and wanting and wanting.

Swipe.

'Botox alternative: how I stopped using the muscles in my face.'

The woman on screen demonstrates. Face blank. Eyes dead. Mara tries it. Stares at herself in the black mirror of her phone. Goes slack. Relaxes every muscle. Her face empties. She holds it for thirty seconds, a minute, her face aching from the effort of not moving.

Her phone tells her she has been on it for eight hours. It is six in the evening. The light outside is dying. She has not opened the curtains.

Hannah begins to cry again, closer now. They have moved to the communal corridor. Right outside Mara's front door.

'I want you to want me more than you want to be right about polyamory.'

A door slams. Footsteps. The bathroom. A tap running.

She wonders if Hannah is crying into the sink or just staring at herself in the mirror, looking for proof of life.

A silence settles over the building.

Mara sets her phone down, stands, and walks to her front door. She opens it slowly so the latch does not click. The corridor is empty. The overhead light is on, that particular yellow of rented buildings, and the carpet is the flattened municipal grey that has been there longer than anyone who has ever lived here. She steps out in her socks and closes the door behind her without quite letting it shut. She crosses to their door and puts her ear against it.

She presses closer. The door gives slightly, a millimetre, barely anything, just enough that she feels the difference in temperature on the other side, the warm air of their flat reaching her through the gap. She stands there receiving it.

Low voices. She can't make out the words now, just the shape of them. The softness that comes after a fight. Hannah's voice and then Simon's and then a silence and then Hannah's again, smaller. They will be sitting on the bed, side by side. She could curl up at the end of it, hardly noticeable, and listen to the sound of two people finding their way back to each other. She stands there, her cheek against the wood.

A car drives past, its music blaring, sound bending as it goes. Mara becomes aware of herself standing in the corridor in her socks and knickers with her ear pressed to a stranger's door at six in the evening.

She goes inside and sits back down.

She is up to the final sequence. Herself, sitting by the window in matching pyjamas, holding a cup of cold tea. She had made it two hours before filming so the steam would be gone and the shot would be clean. She looks serene. She looks like someone who wakes at six and moves their body and nourishes herself and lives with intention.

Refreshes.

'Omg you're glowing.'

Refreshes.

'Need the skincare routine. Body goals. Living for this.'

Then.

'Fatherless behaviour.'

'She's gonna have an ED in a year calling it now.'

'This is what mental illness looks like.'

The comments keep coming and she reads each one as though it is information about someone she knows. She wants, very suddenly and specifically, to be held, and the wanting is so clean and so useless that she puts the phone face-down on the floor.

She closes her eyes. The Housewives are still going. The neighbours' fight is a low hum. She listens to the white noise of it all, the sound of a building at night, the pipes and the settling and the hum of the fridge. The world carries on without needing her at all, and she lets it, just for a second, before she picks the phone back up.

She stands and walks to the bathroom. She looks at herself in the mirror. Turns to the side. Her ribs show.

She needs more angles. She needs to see herself fully.

She pulls the mirror away from the wall. It is heavier than it looks. The bottom edge scrapes the skirting board with a sound that goes through her teeth. She gets her arms around the frame and walks it forward in small rocking steps, her lower back taking the weight, her hands slipping on the cheap pine. The corner catches the doorframe. She wrenches it through. Her shoulder wrenches with it. A little reminder. A little punishment.

She positions it against the bed, opposite the other mirror, and steps between the two.

The infinite regression of herself. Mara and Mara and Mara stretching back forever.

Front. Back. Side.

All the Maras getting smaller.

Receding.

Shrinking.

She stands there.

And sees nothing at all.

Nothing at all.

Charlotte Cole writes about womanhood, lesbian identity, and domestic space as a site of intimacy and constraint. She was Highly Commended in the 2024 Bridport Prize novel award. Her novel in progress, Fruiting Bodies, follows four women in a shared house in their final year of university, attending to the friction, tenderness and class antagonism between them. She has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths and works at Chisenhale Gallery in East London. She is represented by Northbank Talent Management.

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