Chapter 8
It doesn’t take long for Bianca to pull Lowe.
Well, for Bianca to instruct Lowe that this is what is happening.
And it doesn’t last long because Bianca throws up in a frilly silk pillowcase and gets put to sleep in Dean’s mum and dad’s bed.
Under a shrimp sky, a breeze sends crisp leaves crowding under Dean’s family barbecue. The temperature dips with the sun, naturally forcing Lowe to sit up next to me close on the wall outside. We pretend like nothing has happened, like he hasn’t just kissed one of my best mates. It’s actually a good thing, I tell myself. It means we can begin again, start over, as friends. It means I can talk to him without it being anything more than a friendship. To be Lowe’s friend means to be close to him, as close as I can possibly get without ever having to be rejected or forgotten or looked past. Being his friend means that we can have something different, something far more special. Something that never has to end.
‘So, like’ – we have to say like as much as we take oxygen – ‘what are you into?’
‘Music,’ he says. ‘I dunno … riding my bike?’
Fit— STOP IT, ELLA! He’s obviously betrothed to Bianca now, off limits, out of bounds.
‘Do you have a bike?’ he asks me.
‘What, like’ – see, told you – ‘a bicycle?’
‘A bicycle, haha, yeah, do you have a bicycle?’
‘I have a Legoland driving licence? But the older I’m getting, the more the novelty of even an impressive accolade such as that is wearing off.’ We laugh. ‘No, I haven’t been on a bike in years … ’
‘Well, I’m very sorry to hear that,’ he says with a smile, meaning to be funny, but with a hint of that’s a real shame and the real reason why we won’t ever be getting married. ‘Why not?
‘Ummm, because they’re … dangerous.’
‘How is it dangerous? Riding a bike is like … a car but better. It’s like … I dunno … having wings.’
Cheesy.But no, he means it. I see his feathered wings. And then I think of Bianca and that sloppy toffee gunk she basted all over her lips before she kissed him. I look down.
‘It’s true,’ he says. ‘Everyone needs a bike.’ I can see he’s conflicted; he’s shy but he wants to talk more. He’s pushing himself. ‘We have this boy who lives near us who didn’t have a bike and wanted to ride, so me and my friends – we made him one.’
‘You made him a bike?’
‘ … Yeah.’ He bites his lip.
I have to lean in close to hear him.
‘We all donated towards it. Most of us work Saturdays at bike shops and get paid in bolts and brakes, and, well … it’s a bit of a Frankenstein bike, but now he rides with us.’
He’s got layers, boy. I like him so much.
‘In art I actually made my friend Aoife a shell out of clay for her jewellery but when it came out of the kiln it just looked like a Cornish pasty.’
Lowe tries not to but once he sees I’m laughing he can’t not.
‘So what do you like?’ he asks.
YOU YOU YOU!
‘I write?’ I offer apologetically.
‘You’re a writer – that’s cool.’
‘Well, I’m not a real writer,’ I say. ‘You kind of have to be a dead man to be a writer and I’m kind of … an alive girl.’
‘Writing’s cool,’ he nods. ‘You can be like Bob Dylan.’
‘Yeah see, a dead man?’
‘Bob Dylan’s not dead!’
‘Oh. Sorry.’
‘I’d like to learn the guitar, really,’ he confesses. ‘Be like Bob Dylan. That’s what I’d actually like to do.’
‘What? Like on stage? We listen to more punk in our house. I don’t know much Bob Dylan.’
‘Whaaaattttt?’
And then, shy quiet Lowe begins to sing, like he has nothing to prove, his voice so natural and yet perfect in its own way. He can’t help but smile as faint words fall out of his grin, delicate notes, so gentle and sweet. He smiles as though he’s aware that singing at me like this could be an awkward cringing serenade, but surprisingly, it’s unvain, appropriate, instinctive, like a lullaby to soothe a baby. If that is how Bob Dylan sounds then I’m angry at my parents for never showing me him.
‘When you get famous, don’t forget me, yeah?’ I joke out of awkwardness.
‘I think you’re pretty difficult to forget.’
He reaches inside his pocket for his inhaler, the blue one, and shakes the Ventolin.
‘Ooooo my dad has asthma,’ I announce like it’s our common ground. Really cool, Ella.
‘Ah, well, see, I’ve actually got a very special type of asthma.’ He puffs on the inhaler twice, holds it up like an asset. ‘So, if we’re gonna start hanging out, you’ll be seeing a lot more of this cool little guy,’ he jokes sarcastically.
But – I’m sorry – hanging out – what does THAT mean?
‘Fine by me,’ I say in probably the most ‘chill’ tone I’ve ever used.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM! says my heart, in a very unchill tone.
‘Hey, I could make you a mix tape, if you want?’
Are you serious?The act of him physically making something for me is too much.
I find a Biro (I’ve never found anything quicker in my life) in the kitchen drawer stuffed with all the takeaway menus in Dean’s house, and write my address on the back of his arm in blue. PRAYING Lowe never takes it upon himself to hand-deliver a letter. He wouldn’t, would he? I don’t even want to imagine him dealing with our rickety gate, walking into our overgrown front garden, stepping over the old bath filled to the brim with a swamp of spawn and algae with his fresh trainers, to reach our front door. Can’t think of him rapping on the bull’s-jaw door knocker, oxidized turquoise; weirded out by the rusted chainsaw that’s been strangled by the poison ivy – like the plants have won – and the Eighties hoover with a puddle of fox wee in the motor; freaked out by the spiders’ webs as big as bedsheets, sweeping from door to window, hosting a buffet of dead flies. The huddle of opinionated, chuckling stone gargoyles that stand about like smoking bouncers.
‘I will send you a tape,’ he warns, watching the letters appear on his skin. ‘I’m not joking – I will.’
And I melt like a gooey chocolate fondue. ‘Good,’ I say. Good.
I don’t say … Maybe I love you.
Whilst the others are picked up in The Twins’ mum’s bloody coach, Aoife and I have to waddle Bianca back to Aoife’s in the pitch black because she’s too pissed for their spotless interiors. After a couple of minutes, Bianca gives up to dry-heave on the banks of grass, then slops her body down on a creepy backstreet, groaning, ‘Let me sleep.’
I begin to panic that someone might attack us like we’re wounded deer. ‘Get up, Bianca, please … ’ I plead.
Up again, her drunk arms around Aoife and my shoulders, her trainers twisted, tripping up on the ragged shreds of her scuffed jeans. She’s so tall, a drugged giraffe, towering and tumbling, demanding more alcohol, a kebab, chips in pitta and a cigarette – which she scrounges off a stranger, putting it into her mouth filter-first – going on and on about Lowe and how much she loves him and she didn’t even get to say goodbye and do I think he loves her back? Yes, I say, I’m sure he does, thinking of my address spelt out on his forearm.
Anything to get her to walk home quicker.
We wouldn’t normally stay at Bianca’s – her dad is stricter than any of our parents, and she’s so drunk – but her house is closest. We beg for a taxi we can’t afford at the cab office, all of our gold and silver coins on the booth counter. The operator is considering it as it’s quiet and only a short journey until Bianca decides this is the moment to allow her eyes to roll completely back into the depths of her skull. Classic. The drivers clearly don’t want to transit a drunk teenager.
‘Come on, you … ’ I say to Bianca. ‘Let’s get you home.’
Inside, we skulk about so as not to wake up Bianca’s dad. We have to act sober. We sit by the toaster and eat nearly a whole loaf of bread between us – even the back ends get destroyed; any piece of carbohydrate we can find gets shoved in that toaster. We make tea after tea and Bianca dreamily scoops teaspoons of salty sweet peanut butter onto her tongue straight from the jar and tells us once again how in love she is until she instructs us that ‘she’s tired’ and orders us up to bed.
Bianca stumbles up the stairs, aggressively shhhhhhhhing us past her dad’s room, and we giggle as she flashes us an angry look, comical with her smudged make-up and the sick stains on her t-shirt, to only then make the most amount of racket you’ve ever heard in your life by accidentally rolling down the ladder to the loft, which thunders towards us like some robotic Jack-in-a-Box guillotine, taking us all out in one swipe.
We lie on the futon bed in her room, all three of us on two pillows, and I gaze out of the window into the London night, like I’m shooting a new video for Savage Garden’s ‘To the Moon Back’, wondering what it was like for Bianca, kissing Lowe, and how I can’t ask her, because it would suggest I liked him but, also, there’s no point, because she was probably too drunk to remember.
What a waste.