Chapter 5
The Twins suggest, ‘We could always go back to ours?’
The Twins’ house is a great idea. The Twins have a ginormous trampoline and a lovely calm supportive grandma dog. The Twins have alcohol, always. Which their mum buys for them because she’s safe like that and what’s better, they never drink it, so essentially their mum buys alcohol for everyone. The Twins have a bounty of supplies. Cookies, bagels, endless toast and multipacks of crisps. That bad ham in the shape of a bear’s face. Sky TV with, like, five remotes. And a house phone that you can use to your heart’s desire and a plug for everything and spare batteries and internet and no mention of a bedtime. The Twins have bags of unused untouched still fresh-in-its-packet make-up, wet-wipes, a selection of perfumes like a counter in a department store. Quality sanitary towels, tampons in all sizes. They have clean folded t-shirts in not-overly-stuffed drawers to change into that smell like washing powder, that you don’t even have to give back if you don’t feel like it.
‘Hey,’ one of the boys says on the walk, ‘that’s Sam’s house.’ Who’s Sam? ‘Let’s see if he’s in.’
OK, let’s. We all begin to chant, ‘SAM! SAM! SAM! … ’
Sam is quite a fit name actually. Sam sounds fit. Underplayed. Underrated. Subtle. You can’t go wrong with a Sam.
Ella 4 Sam 4 EVA.
And before we know it, we are standing at this Sam’s door knocking for him.
We all peer inside the small peach-coloured house, where everything seems incy wincy and matching and adorable like a mouse-house in a shoebox. The central heating blasts out.
‘SAMUEL!’ his mum shouts up the stairs. ‘DOOR!’
We await our destiny on the doorstep, us damp kids, nervously breathing in the body heat of each other. Come on, Samuel. Please be medium-to-quite-fit, not too-intimidating fit. Be just right. Maybe Sam will be the love of my life? Then this can be my in-laws’ house. Maybe Sam will be the one who reverses the evil spell cast against my poor fanny, who makes me realize that I do in fact have a pulse down there?
We await his reveal like a blind date.
Sam appears and a grin washes over his face like he’s about to bust up laughing at the state of us. He looks young. Small. Sweet. With big frenzied scatter eyes that are untrusting. He descends the stairs, but he’s not The One; I don’t get the burn I was looking for. But he isn’t alone.
There’s another boy too. He’s wearing jeans, a hoodie. And a cap.
They both take a seat on the stairs, the new new boys. Sam and this other one, they ask us where we’ve come from, why we’re roaming the streets soaking wet and as one of the boys fills them in, I watch this other boy taking the story in, this quiet thing, nodding along at the right beats. I look at him, zooming in close now, my eyes are microscopes, closer and closer …
And it’s almost like I can’t believe what I’m seeing.
This guy.
Sorry, who is this beautiful stranger? OMFG, this lovely face – plump lips, cupid’s bow, swollen and red like he’s just eaten a reaper pepper whole. Chubby cheeks. Smiling eyes. He’s delicious. My God. I go inside myself, through the willow trees of my childhood. And that’s when the world around me drowns out and all I hear are the rising power chords of Lenny Kravitz’s ‘Fly Away’ …
And the boy better run for his life. I am ON.
With just a look, I fall through the ground where I split, come undone like a seed and burst from my shell. His eyes trigger a network of roots and shoots that tangle and connect with a force strong enough to light up a city with full power. PING. PING. PING! My walls, with a wrecking ball of a look from him, pound down to grit and I am lost in the thunderous dust, inhaling only this new person. This starburst galaxy. This rip tide. This hurricane. And yet as sweet and delicious as crisp cherryade.
HE. IS. SO. FIT.
Everybody around me is talking but I’m in my head because see, he is there now, waiting, chill as hell, like he was there all along with an ice-box of snacks and beer, camping out in the canyons of my mind. Him and those browny-green confident eyes that swirl like my mood ring, carving promises, sparkling like fool’s gold, glinting to make a deal, twirling hypnotic, like the tip of a spinning rainbow umbrella and I follow him down to the meadows of his eyes.
So clichéd. So obvious. I can’t. And for the first time ever I am the chosen girl in the lift for the Soothers advert who gets kissed on the neck. A love bite. My blind spot. I’ve been bitten. Ouch. Can nobody see this blatant crime? Is everyone just going to sit back and let me get hijacked like this? Does nobody care that I’m clearly on fire?
‘This is Lowe,’ Sam says like it’s nothing, elbows on the stairs behind him. Knowing that’s the coolest name he’s ever said out loud before and he’s definitely the only ‘Lowe’ we’ve ever met. Jammy git. We don’t know how to respond to a name like this.
‘And what’s Lowe short for?’ Bianca barks, tossing her devil-red hair to the side. Oh no, she twists her nose-stud like stirring sugar into tea. Shit, she’s suddenly a tigress. She likes him.
‘It’s just Lowe,’ Lowe says.
Oh, IS IT now? THE FIT AUDACITY.
Lowe.Like ‘low.’ Like ‘low’ down. I find myself muttering it under my breath. Feeling my tongue press my teeth.
Lowe.
On cue, soft cheeks blushing, Lowe stares down at his bobbly socks, and just when he’s about to overboil, he catches himself, he looks up at me with those huge eyes and I fucking die.
Blood thumps, clangourous, somewhere new and deep. I look away. He’s just a boy, for fuck’s sake. But what a fucking lovely face. He’s got vampire teeth, but then they are too kind to be inside the mouth of a vampire; they are here in this mouth. How dare he?
‘Right, we’d better get going.’
I cut the chat short. Can’t be doing with any of this love stuff, so bye bye now, thank you so much. I lead the way, disciplining myself like some martyr, a mean old spinster Sister running a convent. I won’t allow myself the joy, the privilege, the luxury of liking somebody, especially not a subject like this guy. It’s like throwing a blanket over a parrot cage; I shut out the light and plunge into the darkness. SHUT UP, brAIN. SHUT UP, HEART. YOU TOO, FANNY. How dare I fancy somebody? Oh this is a nightmare.
WHY IS MY BODY BETRAYING ME LIKE THIS?
‘OK, we’ll just grab our shoes,’ Sam says and Lowe is already grinning again, reaching for his Etnies trainers (a fit boy MUST) like he knows he’s got me, just like that. Eyes flash, up and down, down and up. He hoists up his loose-fitting jeans.
‘Hey?’ I say with a question mark like can I help you? and find myself saying, ‘I’m Ella,’ even though no one asked. To which he nods. Like he’s letting it sink in.
I’ve just handed over my name and he says nothing in return.
This Lowe begins pushing out the front door his red BMX that’s been standing up by the radiator, leaning, equally as cool, as if it’s another friend that’s coming too. I mean, even if the bike became my boyfriend I’d be chuffed; it’s covered in stickers of all those Extreme Sports brands we look for that signpost us to hot boys. I can’t stop looking at him: the geometry of his hands, obsessing over his raw knuckles clamped around the handlebars, split and rough, his nails short and smooth with a slug of just the right amount of doing-stuff-grub, the way the ragged sleeves of his hoodie bunch around his elbows, his veined arms … I was not prepared for this.
And so, I do what I know best.
I mark up the friend-zone borders immediately, scoring the line through the air quicker than I’ve ever drawn it. And I place myself firmly inside.
Locked in. Where I’m safe.
Where nobody can call me sad or weird or annoying or fat or ugly or embarrassing or strange.
Where nobody can say No. Or I don’t feel the same. Or Sorry, no. Or Just friends.
Where I can’t get hurt.
I ignore him on the walk up to The Twins’ house in the rain. Over the stones of their front drive, past their spotless seven-seater and twitching security camera. I imagine my gooey-Meerkat-eyed self, lovestruck through the CCTV screen in night-mode, pixilated in black and white, the infection of him showing up in ultraviolet blobs all over my body. I ignore him. Even when we slosh past their granny Labrador and through their brightly lit show-home kitchen. And out into the garden which backs onto the common, with the epic dripping trees hunched over the great fence behind. I still ignore him. Even when we all kick off our shoes into a heap and climb up onto the huge trampoline. Even when Bianca deliberately takes turns to fall onto the boys’ laps and laughs and squeals and then accuses with an ‘OI, DICKHEAD? DID YOU TOUCH MY BUM?’ And this one boy Nas just puts his hands up in the air in surrender and says, ‘Not me!’ Even when everybody laughs as she rolls off, arms and legs everywhere and onto the next set of knees.
I still make no eye contact. I still ignore him.
Even when we all sit on the damp padded spring covering of the trampoline, in a circle, and I can feel the vibrations of everybody in the elastic, and people switch places, shift and swap with a budge up, move over and now I’m next to him; OH SHIT, chemistry – we seem to be static, hyper-charged off the electricity of meeting for the first time. Us with our soaking wet jeans with puddle water up to our knees – we don’t seem to feel the wet, the wind, the cold at all. Only sparks. Against plastic. Against rubber. And skin. There is shock. And I have to get up and do something or I might actually explode …
Music.
I run up to get the girls’ stereo, to The Twins’ lovely clean bedroom with their twin beds and Beanie Babies – I have this moment to myself to stop and breathe.
LOWE. Fuck. Who is HE? Where did he come from? My pulse quickens as I pick up the CD player. They have a good one with a CD and tape deck with speakers on long cables so you can really stretch them out. I grab my sacred fluffy rainbow bible of a CD wallet, which comes everywhere with me, and carry the whole thing under my chin, careful not to drop anything.
I avoid eye contact with The Twins’ mum as I plug everything in; I don’t want her to stop my scheming or be annoyed as I unplug the giant lamp with its fancy cream shade and possibly the goldfish water filter too, but I check for signs of life bubbles and they appear, so Beans and Hashbrown are absolutely fine.
In my mixed CD goes and that’s me thrown out for everyone to see – my taste in downloaded music (which definitely gave my family PC a batrillion viruses) up for judgement.
A few voices whoop, begin to nod along, mouthing the words to Green Day. Bianca takes this as an invitation to dance, thinking she looks sexy like a girl in the video but just no. Do not dance sexy to Green Day.
Out of the twenty new faces, all lit by one brilliant white garden floodlight that makes us look like a football crowd on TV, the sky spitting down, his is the only face I see.
‘Nice,’ he says.
I get this tightness in my throat. My chest heaves with a crushing feeling and I think I might be dying. Or maybe, just maybe, this is love?
Don’t engage, Ella – ignore him.And so I do. Even when cigarettes are handed around and vodka bottles with labels wet from the rain and beers, plastic bottles of cider which go down like lightning, crackle as they hollow out. My eyes gaze over Lowe. Stealing looks when he’s not looking, each micro-detail, hunted. Fingers. Lips. Eyes. Hair. Nails. Skin. Throat. Ears. Watching. Everything this goddam guy does. I see it. I take note. I absorb. Waiting for him to slip up, to do something, to reverse this want, to make a move with somebody else so I can be released from this grip.
And when it comes to the end of the night, when it’s time to say goodbye, when The Twins’ mum is politely waving everyone out the door like she wanted us to eat her out of house and home, Lowe smiles at me. He runs his hand around the rim of his cap and I see his wrists and clench my jaw involuntarily, so hard my teeth crack like almonds. He says, ‘Night, then.’
And I’m smiling so hard I forget to say it back.
I am thinking of the child in me and the adult in me too and where they both are at this point. And which one of them is in charge here please and who is going to deal with this? I’m thinking of Kurt Cobain and the Slipknot mask and Moe from The Simpsons and the tiger from the stupid cereal box and – whilst we’re at it – the footballer Ian Wright too. I’m thinking of the sound of a trainer squeaking on a school hall in a basketball game, electric guitars fusing, explosion, blowing the fronts off speakers. Lying on the grass. Touching his face. Trying to hide how in love I am with somebody I’ve only just met.
My heart is a harmonica. South London is a valley. World, hear my song.