Chapter 21
Well, Rachel may look like (a very much prettier version of) me, but it turns out she is nothing like me. The girl is seventeen and acts like a woman, clopping up and down Clapham High Street in a heel, getting blow-dries and takeout coffees in Chelsea like a divorcee. Rachel can drive. She and Lowe have actual sit-down meals at expensive restaurants like Café Rouge. I hear Rachel’s tantrums are award winning. That she says , ‘Oh, fuck you,’ and then speeds off in her car. That her dramatic ultimatums are the stuff we only see in movies like Ten Things I Hate About You. That she has plans to move to California and work in fashion. The closest I’ve come to going to California is drinking a family bottle of Sunny-D by myself.
I know better than to compare myself but I can’t help but think this is it for Lowe and me. It’s over. For good. He’s moved on. I can too.
And so, I kiss Nile.
We kiss at the bottom of the stairs at Sam’s house. We kiss on The Twins’ trampoline in the rain, raindrops on our faces. We kiss at Dean’s party. On the common, under the willow tree. We don’t need to make a handshake because we kiss. We kiss in the overgrown garden, our feet with the rotten apples and the weeds. He rides me home in the dark and kisses me goodnight.
I kiss Nile for every missed opportunity with Lowe.
Rapture.
‘So … do you wanna be my girl then?’
I silently count down five, four, three, two, one, before managing a ‘Yeah!’
I have secured myself my first proper boyfriend.
We do all that stuff I dreamt of doing with a boyfriend. Way cooler stuff than Lowe and Rachel do. Who needs a car like Rachel when we can miss the night bus and follow the route by foot so we don’t get lost, many, many, many times? Who needs Café Rouge’s unctuous onion soup and chive flecked cheesy crouton, when you can Eat As Much As You Like at Big Tums for ￡5.99 and get a twenty-four-hour bellyache because you ate yourself into a coma? We go on train journeys and fall asleep on each other’s shoulders. We go to gigs. He makes me fruit salad and each piece of fruit is cut in such a perfect dice shape that if his acting dreams don’t materialize he could get a job at a hotel breakfast buffet in a heartbeat. We take photos kissing in the train station photobooth. Although I find myself waiting at the mouth of the booth’s printer, imagining that by some inexplicable twist of fate, it’s actually Lowe’s face developing in there on the four little photo squares … but it’s Nile. We buy a whole loaf of tiger bread and scoop out the inside, tearing it off into little squidgy doughballs. But when we listen to music, every song reminds me of Lowe. I reckon I’ll need that memory eraser like in Men in Black to ever forget him.
Nile lives with his Aunt Linda – for cheap rent, paid by Nile’s parents. He has a cousin called Kirsty-Lee who hates us but apparently, ‘it’s not targeted.’ Nile’s bedroom is attached to the house like an after-thought, not too dissimilar to how he has been welcomed into Aunt Linda’s home. Nile’s two favourite charity-shop shirts hang on the back door. The carpet is the colour of sand. His single bedsheets are the colour of Blu-tack. The walls are covered in ticket stubs and band posters ripped from NME, stuck on with actual Blu-tack. And for the first time I am saying the words I love you out loud to a guy, and his name is not Lowe Archer and it’s OK.
Even though it isn’t love love. He doesn’t hear the silent caveat: ‘I love you as much as I possibly can love someone who isn’t the person I actually love but they don’t love me back in the same way I love them, so with all that in mind – I suppose I love you.’
And I feel happy that some kind of romantic feeling can exist outside of Lowe, at least in all the time and space that he isn’t around. I can be OK. I can be content.
That’s all fine until I hear Rachel takes the pill. That conversation we had before college still haunts me, the agreement we made. It wasn’t a contract in blood and yet it seemed to have gone up in flames. I’ve not seen Lowe in months. What did I expect? Was he meant to ask permission? Check it was OK with little old me? Why am I going on like some cruel wicked virginity-stealing witch? He’s not made a promise with a fairy-tale weasel. Maleficent. Rumpelstiltskin. Ursula rolling out the impossible-to-meet conditions with her tentacles: ‘If you do not lose your virginity by the time you are eighteen it is MINE ALLLLLL MINE MUUUHHAHAHAHA!’
So, he’s having sex. OK. Absolutely swell. I’m chuffed for him.
I realize that I’m going to miss out on so much love if I waste my time on someone who isn’t even considering me. I like Nile, a lot. I have feelings for him and they’re strong. We could have a nice life, me and him. We really could.
So one day after school, when Aunt Linda and Kirsty-Lee are downstairs eating a brick of Viennetta, watching A Place in the Sun with the volume so loud I’m sure they won’t be able to hear the headboard gently shoving against the wall, I decide I’m ready.
Nile brushes my skin with the back of his hand; he takes my hair in his fingers and fondles every strand like it’s angel hair. He holds the small of my back and kisses my neck. ‘You’re beautiful, Ella,’ he says and I believe him. Nile is quite beautiful too. ‘Should I get a … ?’ He means a condom. I nod and I’m not sure if I’m meant to watch this bit – are we meant to do it together? Is rolling on a condom a two-person job – does he need my encouragement or is it in fact a very private moment and I should avert my eyes? I sort of do half and half. The boiler grumbles in the cupboard; the view of the dull grey suburban garden is there until it isn’t as his bedroom window steams up, and I wonder if sliding my hand down like Kate Winslet does in the carriage sex scene in Titanic is a cool idea but I know I can’t pull a move like that off.
He holds me so close afterwards, making sure that every single bit of our bodies is touching. He says I can stay the night or he can stay at mine, or he can even book us a BB for the night! Fancy. But I’d rather be at home. I need to cuddle my teddies and be close to my younger siblings. Just to check that I can still access my childhood, that it isn’t all gone now. But also, even though we used a condom, I’ll HAVE to go to the Clinic ASAP. I’m definitely pregnant with triplets or have chlamydia.
‘Course. Whatever you want.’ He walks me to the bus stop without even asking. He buys me a can of 7-Up and a packet of plain Hula Hoops like I’m recovering from a tummy bug. Sweet. When the bus comes, he jumps on too and rides back with me all the way home, our fingers locked. That’s at least an hour and a half round trip. That’s love.
At home, I know I should feel like a Shania Twain song but I don’t. My phone rings and of all the people, of all the times, in all the world, it has to be him – Lowe. Of course. Why now? It’s like he knows I’ve just broken the pact and now he’s calling me after months of silence. I couldn’t write this, I swear. Don’t tell me, he wants to meet up? I toy with not answering but I can’t not; the idea of his voice sprouts a kernel of both excitement and terror in my stomach but it’s probs just my phantom pregnancy.
‘Ella, hey?’
‘Hey, Lowe, how are you?’
‘I’m good, been ages! How are you?’
‘I’m … really so great.’ After losing my virginity in Aunt Linda’s box room.
He laughs. ‘So … bit of a weird one … ’
OH GOD. ‘Yeah?’ I pick at the wall.
‘But … well … I’m in a band now … did you know or … ?’
‘You are? Oh my GOD, OK, wow.’ He’s really doing it? I didn’t know, no. How could I? This hurts. ‘Congratulations … with who?’
‘Some guys from college – don’t think you know them.’ Alright, sorry about you.
‘What are you called?’
‘True Love.’
True Love? The name takes me by surprise. I suppose it’s more original than the other indie bands who just take any word in the dictionary, add ‘The’ at the front and make plural.
‘That’s a great band name.’
‘Aw, do you like it?’ Does he actually care what I think?
‘Yeah, I really do.’ It’s beautiful.
‘I’m glad.’ He holds a beat. Maybe he does? Maybe he just knows how to work me. ‘So, the reason I’m calling is that we actually have our first proper show.’
‘Oh amazing! Your first show, like, what, ever?’
‘No, not ever, we’ve done a few little things at college’ – I bet Rachel went – ‘a couple of house parties, but not anything proper. I wondered if you fancied coming down? I’ll put your name on the list?’ List sinks my heart.
It’s not that I don’t want to see Lowe play. I just have a resistance, an aversion to standing in a room sardine-canned at the front with every other name on the list looking and listening to him. Now everyone will see what I see. And I get this awful feeling that it is too late, that it’s already out of my control: everybody can already see what I see. And everyone loves it too.