Chapter 11
Every weekend Lowe and I are together somewhere at something. Mum asks, ‘Why don’t you do a lil’ party here, Elliebellie?’ But she says party like PAR-TAY so that’s why. The house is embarrassing and I don’t need Mum making conversation, getting my friends to lift bags of concrete and soil, taxing for weed and dropping words like ‘bodacious’. I really don’t need my parents fighting like Punch and Judy IN FRONT of an audience. No, thanks.
So other people’s houses have become our restaurants, bars, cinemas, cafés, nightclubs, where we spread out like sixth formers in a common room and take the piss. Any room in any house where an adult is out or doesn’t care will do; just give us an address and we’ll be there. One of these parties happens to be one of the very best days of my life as Dean tells Bianca that she ‘could be a model’ and they kiss. Well, I’m so happy you’d think Dean was my forty-five-year-old bachelor son who just secured an engagement.
When we’re together Lowe and I sit on sofas close, on our own ‘whole new world’ magic carpet ride, tempering the sting between us like we’re under a spell, giving off charge and heat. In my head there’s always a force field around us, a bulb of golden light, and we are the filament inside of it, sparking. Sometimes our fingers touch and we leave them there, skin melting, the hairs on our arms standing to attention. We are magnetic. Sometimes our knees brush past each other, deliberately, and we don’t move one bit. I want his fingerprints on my clothes, my books, my CDs. Once, we share from the same carton of Mango Rubicon, and that feels like an open wide-awake kiss that’s passable, allowed in public. His taste in my mouth. I want to not know where I end and Lowe begins. I want him to know what my house keys look like. What book I’m reading that week. My earrings. My pen. I want him to be able to pick up my jumper and know it’s mine by the smell of my perfume. I want him to know what I’d order from a café. I want him to see something and think to himself, Ella would like that. I want him to look at my shit phone and think, Who does she text before she falls asleep? Who does she talk to on the phone at night?
He points out funny things; he admires the view. He stops to pet street cats and swerves his bike to not alarm passing dogs. He occasionally spits on the ground – only when he’s out of breath – but never litters. He throws his sandwich crusts and crisps to the birds. He halts the traffic once with his bike to let a senior man cross the road. People comment on his smile, say he has an aura, a good energy. He has perfect manners. He listens. Is a nice guy.
We know all the rap bits to songs. Guitar breakdowns. We laugh at the same bits of TV programmes. At just a glance we know the same people annoy us. We can’t believe how similarly our brains work, how alike we are. We’re like twins. Geminis. We come as a pair. Knife and fork. Pepper and salt. A set of gloves. But nothing happens between us. EVER. Maybe it would if we saw how the night played out past midnight but Lowe is not a late-night kid. He’s a summer day, excitable, energetic and playful, far more suited to flying down the road on his bike in just a t-shirt. He’s sunshine and mint toothpaste. Alive with the birds. Unashamedly eager to get home in the evenings. And I like that about him. It’s attractive that he likes his home. That he’s secure. And although he’s quiet, once he’s gone home, he is missed. There’s a space in the room where he should be. People always leave pretty soon after him. He’s one of those luminous, upbeat people who can turn any old day into an event just by sticking around.
We write our way through autumn, snowballing towards winter. When the trees strip and the wind blows. Shorter days mean it’s dark by 5 p.m. Writing letters to Lowe is like delightful homework, the only extracurricular hobby I’ll take forward with me into my future – the writing more elaborate, detailed. We flex our creative muscles, let our guards down.
But winter comes for us and 251 Palace Road hard. Count Olaf’s is subsiding. Cracks ladder their way up the walls. The rooms tilt like a sinking ship. Dad gets a hernia and Mum can’t stand him moaning about it. (I mean TBF I’ve been cursed with an in-growing toenail and I don’t go on about it.) Mum smokes weed. Dad puffs on his inhaler more than ever. The two of them are like Thomas the bloody Tank Engine. Mum decides she wants the attic room as her bedroom so we swap rooms. Could she want to sleep any further away from Dad in his ground floor bunker? It’s fine, except my new room is opposite the railway line and I STILL don’t have a curtain because I don’t want to use the second-hand moth-eaten dirt rag that Mum’s supplied me with so I have to duck to put my scrubby bra on. There are no shelves so Mum builds me a shelf from a plank of wood and some bricks from the garden. Whenever I need more shelves, I just take planks and bricks and continue to stack them up like some dangerous escape route someone might have built in secret to flee a dungeon. Traumatized disorientated woodlice scuttle into my wardrobe, burrow into my clothes. My bedroom rumbles when a train gushes past. Items wobble off my brick shelving unit. A love-heart snow globe filled with a cut-out from a magazine of the killer boyfriend in the movie Scream (that I somehow think my friends are gullible enough to believe is a real life legit photo of my ex-fiancé) smashes. An omen of my love life going bad to worse.
Suddenly, it’s the lead up to Christmas; the buzz, the ride, the waiting, the constant glow. Like I know that something is going to happen. We even speak on Christmas day – much to Violet’s disapproval in the way of passive aggressive deep sighing and oven door slamming. We continue to roll out this way, speaking in those in-between nothing days that follow after Christmas. He’s away visiting family but is the first to text on New Year’s Eve and I’m so happy that the world didn’t end so I get to see him again in 2001. There’s no new year, new me going on here; no, I just want this break to be over as quickly as possible so I can jump back into our routine. And now that Bianca and Dean are hanging out, I’m free to feel like I have a boyfriend even though I don’t. I’m secretly falling in love. I pretend I’m same old, same old when meanwhile I’m running around like Bj?rk in the ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’ video.
We don’t tell anybody about the amount we talk but it couldn’t be possible to know somebody so well, to have achieved as much groundwork as we have in such a short space of time. We refer to our phone conversations and letter exchanges and our friends are gormless, out of the loop. They just think we’ve hit it off. That we really are just friends. But we operate on a whole other level. We have long, thick, strong magic roots – a deeply complex jungled network of flowing information in the undercurrent of our nuanced understanding.
We send more music, getting more confident with our song choices, saying that bit more as our feelings flourish. Every weekend, whenever, wherever we are, I say, ‘Bye,’ and Lowe says, ‘See you soon,’ and we hug, just like everyone else, knowing full well we will be speaking the entire week like Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. Lizzie wrote 573 love letters to Bob, and no, you don’t run out of things to say. There are always more mix tapes to send. Funny things we find. Sweets. Balloons. Photos. Old postcards. Stickers. Anything light and postable.
‘I feel like I’ve known you my whole life,’ he says. ‘You’re not like anybody else I’ve ever met.’
‘Yeah, I am,’ I say. ‘I’m like you.’
I could definitely write the inside of a Clintons Valentine’s Day card, or an episode of Hollyoaks at the very least.
Once, after Aoife, Bianca, Ronks, Shreya and I have invited ourselves down to the skate park (conveniently located slap bang next to Lowe’s work at the bike shop) to do nothing except fancy people and pretend we’re not freezing, Lowe glides over on his bike, sweat beads on his forehead. ‘I was thinking, we should make a handshake – a secret handshake.’
I can’t help but look behind me to be sure he’s actually talking to me. ‘YES!’ I say excitedly. God, chill. ‘I’ve never had a secret handshake – it’s one of those things I’ve always wanted.’ We slide our hands together and his skin is AMAZING. Even the rough callouses from gripping the handlebars of his bike are sexy and lovely to feel. In. Out. We find a rhythm. Link, grip, grab. Our eyes meet as we start with a thumbs up and lock, twist, press, clutch our fingers, twirl our hands into a fan – my idea. ‘Nice,’ he says, the condensation curling from his breath; it’s smooth, eye-to-eye. This feels more intimate and romantic than any kiss – this is touch – synchronized. We rehearse over and over until it, like us, becomes muscle memory: clap, clasp, twist, link, thumb to thumb, spiral, spud, punch, hug.
Something only we can do, that our drunk friends try to copy. Even if mastered fluently, they’d never have the chemistry required to make it zap like us.
It is always us.
But protecting my feelings towards Lowe is constant maintenance. I have to guard him from the snooping prey of other girls but also not squish him to death with possessiveness. He is not mine.
‘You like him!’ the girls say but I deny it. Why? Because I’m scared. Of getting it wrong. Of looking a fool. Of rejection.
‘We tried to work out your love score and the percentage was literally so high, it actually broke the test,’ Shreya enlightens me. ‘Even The Twins were confused by it.’ And The Twins love maths.
‘It’s true,’ one of The Twins admits, ashamed they’d been sneakily doing my love sums behind my back. ‘You guys scored like four hundred and one per cent!’
‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ adds the other.
Lowe and I throw the tired theories of love out of the window. Our love is shaming the textbooks. Making a fool out of science. This is love in real-life. Love in 3-D.
I laugh it off but, really, 401%? WOW. Our love broke maths. Even though I’m pretty sure if you add up the four and the one it would make 50%. 50% is a terrible love score. Possibly the worst.
‘Try it again. Did you use our middle names? You lot didn’t add it up the right way anyway; which version of the love calculator are you even using?’ I interrogate. Trying to conceal my desperation.
Shrey and The Twins whip out their fluffy pads and do the alternative version of the love calculator and the score is even worse – 18%. This can’t be.
‘I’m willing to bet every penny in my bank account that you two end up getting married one day!’ Shrey says.
I blush, knowing full well that Shreya, like all of us, doesn’t even have a bank account to bet with. ‘Guys!’ I roll my eyes. ‘You’re so immature. I honestly don’t like Lowe like that.’
I lie again. I lie so hard that I begin to lie to myself. Like the way I say that ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ isn’t a good song. I find different people to fancy, substitutes and distractions. Guys I don’t pay any attention to who pay me none back. Guys who don’t even know I exist, to ensure there would never, ever possibly be a way of us getting together, but enough to stop the allegations and prevent the rumours and suspicions of me liking Lowe. It’s especially hard to dodge when Lowe calls the house phone when the girls are at my house, and their stupid eyes bulge out of their brains like wait, Lowe’s phoning YOU? At home, on a Thursday, like it’s no biggie. (Yeah, and our last call was two hours forty-eight minutes long about ABSOLUTELY nothing.)
And I’m like, ‘Yeah, we’re best friends, remember?’
Even though they look at me like whatever you say. Even though Aoife’s standing there twiddling our friendship bracelets like I thought I was your best friend? As I try and steady my excitable face to take Lowe’s call.
I lie in my own diary. I actually write how ‘fed up’ I am of my friends accusing me of fancying Lowe. That I don’t see him like that, ew, it would be like fancying my own brother. Why can’t they see that we’re just friends? Best friends. Have a boy and girl never been best friends before? Can’t a boy and a girl just be best friends, for crying out loud?
This constant lying cannot be good for the soul. I reckon if I don’t grow a Pinocchio nose, I’ll get a hunched back from the guilt instead. A cyst of some kind from carrying all that built up denial and deceit.
One time, after the trillionth interrogation, Aoife jumps to my defence and says, ‘Look guys, I’ve known Ella Cole since I was three years old; she’s a lot of things’ – alright, Aoife, like what? – ‘but she’s not a liar, just leave her alone, OK? And if Elbow does fancy him—’
‘Which I don’t.’
‘Which she doesn’t,’ Aoife acknowledges and repeats, ‘don’t you think something would have happened between them by now?’
Aoife’s right. Lowe and I are both single. Nothing is stopping us. Does he lie to all his friends in the same way I do? Is he also too proud and trying to save face like me? Or maybe he just doesn’t feel the same. Maybe he doesn’t like me back? Maybe he has nothing to lie about.
And looking around, after Aoife’s supportive line, it kills me seeing my friends’ convinced faces like, maybe they are just friends after all? They feel bad.
One lunchtime, we’re smoking in the woods behind school – well, I’m keeping Bianca company whilst she smokes – I’m just pretending to with the condensation of my hot breath on the cold air. We’re both sitting on the stump of a dead tree, shivering, in our bright green lab coats over our school uniforms, to mask the smell on our jumpers and coats – plus it’s FREEZING. Even Bianca manages to be humble.
‘Ella, I’m – like – really sorry. If I had known you had feelings for Lowe – in any way – I would never have pulled him.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Bianca.’ I hit back with a lie before I can even think. ‘We’re just friends. I don’t even really remember you pulling him, to be honest.’ Which is another lie because it’s all she spoke about and every time she did, it felt like I’d had my organs looted.
Bianca looks at me, confused. Like she knows me better than I ever could. Testament to our albeit obscurely competitive/twisted/fucked up but actually quite comforting sisterly teenage friendship. ‘I’m still sorry anyway.’
And I squeeze her arm as if to say, Thank you.
Thank you for saying sorry. Thank you for being there. Thank you for maybe secretly seeing I’m lying – badly – all day long, and thank you for not calling me out for it. Thank you for being my friend.
In all honesty, it is such a burden liking Lowe the way I do, I’m battling with it. I don’t want to any more. And I really have no idea how he truly feels about me – he’s so hard to read. How I see it, if he liked me like that, he’d say so? And I don’t want to be the one to make a move in case I get rejected or spoil what we have. Even if we managed to become friends again I’d always be that friend who was a little bit in love with him. Gross. But maybe he’s doing the exact same thing as I am and we’ll just go on forever like that, saying nothing. Maybe he did once-upon-a-time fancy me and my feigned lack of interest fancying him back just put him right off. He felt rejected. Maybe over time he’s begun to truly genuinely appreciate and value me as a friend and doesn’t want to ruin anything. Oh God, I’ve dug myself into a right old hole. And I dig myself deeper and deeper. Cornering and trapping myself into the friendship zone forever. When really, I don’t just like Lowe, I don’t like him at all – I one hundred per cent madly truly deeply purely absolutely wholly love him.
I am in love with him.
True love.
January and February seem to never end. The sparkle of Christmas is now just reduced to the odd bit of leftover glitter in Dad’s eyebrow. A pine needle in the floorboard. Mum has to work, but Dad can’t care for us with the pain from his hernia. The NHS waiting list is so long that Dad has to go privately for his operation, which bites a hole out of our last chunk of money, sliding us into even more debt, and then the unworking git of a boiler has the absolute nerve to blow up. Dad has to buy some electric heaters, which are a MASSIVE investment. Violet, Sonny and I sleep in the same bed to keep warm. I tell myself that I actually got chubby on purpose, deliberately, because I’m smart, like how a walrus needs its blubber to insulate itself against the cold harsh arctic winds. Well, I needed an extra layer or two to warm me up in Streatham. We fight over the heaters from each other’s bedrooms, unplug them out of spite, yank them out of the power sockets mid-argument and primitively slam doors with a kick, all whilst hugging a boiling hot convector heater. It’s a health and safety nightmare.
And I am so, so homesick in my own home. For when we used to be happy. I’m a mess of pain, transition and contradiction. A teenager acting like a child, sick of trying to be a woman, in a training bra, listening to the Backstreet Boys, sleeping on a mattress on the floor that somebody has given us to be closer to the heater, shivering, under the naked lightbulb, into brittle adolescence. My parents continue to slam doors and chase each other up and down staircases with raised voices and every other word is ‘fuck!’ And Dad doesn’t get to recover on the sofa after his operation like he needs to because Mum says he’s lazy and that makes him resent her on top of her already resenting him. And Mum goes out more and doesn’t come home and when Dad tries to call her, she picks up the phone only to hang up immediately and Dad, so primal and bear-like and simple, doesn’t get the mind games, can’t stand them. ‘Bloody Nora!’ he yells to nobody, and my gut clutches, as she works him into a frenzy. He picks the yellow phone up in his hand, and smashes it into his forehead with Homer Simpson rage – over and over – showing his teeth. I see my dad is broken.
And now the phone is too.
Its guts, all wires, on the floor.
My heart strings yelp as my major lifeline to Lowe is severed and now we’ll have to rely on texts until my parents scrounge enough together to replace it.
I take my brother and sister upstairs; we put on the TV and laugh like nothing has happened and very quickly forget. It’s wonderful being a kid like that. You think trauma is just sliding off your skin, when really it is the opposite; it’s sinking in deep, like the most painful tattoo ink of a word or picture that you absolutely hate, directly into your nervous system, that nobody else will ever see unless you one day are loved or desperate enough to show it.
I sit at the top of the stairs, with one of Dad’s oversized t-shirt on like a nightie, listening to the nightly rows with a here we go again. The house. The bills. The kids. I pull the shirt down over my whole body. ‘Pssst, Violet,’ I say, pointing at my knees, ‘boobs.’
She laughs and tries to do it herself. We haven’t had an adult hack like this since Violet realized if you hung the Christmas decorations over your ears they make convincing dangly teacher earrings. I shouldn’t really let Violet and Sonny listen to our parents fight like this, but I want them to hear, I want them to know, because I’m scared of going through it alone. This is what siblings are for – to help parent your parents.
I hear Dad threaten to leave. Ha! Good one, Dad. He wouldn’t actually though. It would be like the times I threatened to run away – you never do it and if you do, you always come back. Still, I find myself worrying about all the little things my parents don’t seem to: how bills will be paid, who will pick us up from school, make sure there’s milk? And this makes me anxious. I’m so scared of us falling apart that I hold on, tighter and tighter.
I try to keep a diary but everything seems to go wrong whenever I do. It’s almost as if creating a diary in the first place is an omen to make my family hate each other. Instead, I fill pages with things that make me happy: drawings, poems and stories. I write using the orange glow of the streetlamp outside as a nightlight. I write long letters to Lowe that I will never send, saying how great my life is, how happy I am, spraying the pages with dozens of Biro hearts. Writing our names out and adding up the letters to tally up our ‘love score’ again and again, finding ways to make the number soar. Ronks says, The letter the ring-pull comes off at on a can of drink is the first letter of the name of your future soul mate. So I bend those ring-pulls backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards on every can of Sprite I drink, until the ring-pull snaps (I yank it) off on the letter ‘L’. I find that the word Lowe is one letter away from the word LOVE. His name hidden in the word sunflower which is my favourite flower. I can’t help but think it’s meant to be.
One night, I play architect with a bottomless budget, scribble us a house from a bird’s eye view. All straight lines and boxes. A huge living room with giant sofas and a massive TV. A great big kitchen with a dining table to seat sixteen people. Hot tubs in the bathroom and mirrors with lightbulbs like Hollywood film star dressing rooms. Outside, a heated swimming pool, hammocks, a secret garden and a thriving orchard, with hundreds of fruit trees that you can reach your hand out from any window and pluck peaches and plums and pears from, oh, and fish in a pond, sleeping hedgehogs, leaping rabbits and peacocks. And house phones all over, parked at their own little stations. Even though there’s nobody I would want to call except him.
I give Lowe and me separate bedrooms to not be presumptuous. Maybe over time, when we’re older, once our relationship has developed and grown, one night, after work, when we’re making pesto pasta, he’ll bring out of a bottle of Chardonnay and say …
Ella, I think I’m in love with you.
And then we can knock through a wall and push the beds together.
On the phone one night, I tell Lowe my parents have been fighting a lot.
‘Do your parents fight a lot?’ I ask.
‘No, my parents never fight,’ he says.
‘Do you think your parents are in love?’
‘Yes, they are very much in love.’
Very muchcuts deep.
I haven’t told anybody that I think my parents are breaking up, so used am I to them arguing now. It’s normal not to be in love; no parents are in love love. Aoife’s parents seem to just about stand each other. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Shreya’s parents kiss. The Twins live with their mum. Bianca lives with her dad. Everybody is different. Actually, now I think about it, Ronke’s parents do seem kind of in love. It’s on my mind and it must be beginning to show.
Once, a nice teacher catches up with me before break and asks, ‘How are things at home?’ A girl in my class called Celine who I hardly ever speak to leaves a postcard in my locker – it’s of some lips saying TALK TO ME and she writes, with care and empathy in her unreadable handwriting, about how I can talk to her if I need to. I never do (not out of choice; she gets expelled for starting a witchcraft cult before I get the chance), but I still keep the card.
It’s not that bad though, really. I’m already able to see the buds of pink and white on the naked trees, the spilling daylight shining on my walk home, calling new leaping, friendly shadows to dance with, creating a sky you want to stop and stare at. The clusters of bright yellow daffodils shoot up, the birds sing; they are telling me that it will be OK, that winter is almost over and that spring is coming. That we made it. And soon a field of daisies, as far as the eye can see, will spread like an inviting picnic blanket, outstretched, waiting, for me to dive into glorious idle hours spent, he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me …