Chapter 6
6
God laughs when we tell Him our plans, and He also has a good old chortle when He overhears us saying we know things for sure, like who we know we’re never going to feel feelings for.
(Yeah, my God is a man, I feel more comfortable blaming Him then.)
The four of us got places at university—all up north apart from Susie, who had to be Susie and go to London—and we were excited and anguished at our separation, homesickness, the big wide world.
Due to quirks of the different institutions, Justin and Susie left days before Ed and I did. Those days might as well have been months of desolation and a montage of trudging with pack ponies through blizzards and deserts for how well Ed and I bore it.
“Left behind, they’ll have forgotten us already!” we wailed, having killed a lot of time with coffees, and barrel-scraping action films at the multiplex, and comparing who’d had the most gnomic texts as bulletins from Justin or Susie. (I think Ed won, with Justin’s report that only said: “GRAVY AS PASTA SAUCE!”) Our city was a ghost town without our counterparts; all our contemporaries had vanished to halls of residences around the country. There’s no self-pity like a teenager’s self-pity.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” I asked Ed, before our final day lingering in purgatory. We were eating chips from paper cones, our breath making ghosts, and I thought how grateful I’d been for Ed being around. He was dependable solidity itself.
“Oh, big game with my football team and then we’re going to get drunk at The Trip.”
“What?! What will I do?!” I wailed, and Ed replied: “Come! Come along. The game won’t take that long.”
I’d usually not want to be that superfluous at an occasion, or so openly needy, but the prospect of sitting indoors doing nothing but bickering with my mum and my younger brother, Kieran, was worse.
The game was in a park on a hill, north of the city and near where I now live. The field was on a slope, rolling down to the main road, and I languished at the upper end of it with a copy of Viz while they ran around.
I watched Ed with his five teammates—his good humor, his natural leadership, his powers of concentration. His muscled legs. Seeing someone you know well in a totally different context is always disorientating and vaguely impressive. You realize you have them on loan from the other lives they lead.
Every so often he’d give me a Royal Air Force–style salute and I’d wave back. Separation makes you value something more and I was acutely aware of how fond I was of Ed, and how badly I’d miss him. It had thrown the big light on, in a room inside me.
I realized, at a subconscious level, I’d complacently assumed my future was full of Eds—what if it wasn’t?
Ed changed his T-shirt at the end of the match and I found myself curiously transfixed by upper-body definition I didn’t know he had, and the way he yanked the fresh one over his head. Something stirred. Obviously, I must be in a heightened emotional state to be ogling Ed Cooper’s milk-pale—if unexpectedly sculpted—abdomen. Susie would laugh when I told her.
We went to The Trip to Jerusalem and drank foamy sour things from casks, served in dimpled tankards, and felt brimful of cheer and anxiety and poignancy, at our imminent parting, to futures unknown. At eighteen, you’ve not experienced poignancy before.
Ed’s mum had insisted on picking him up to check he wasn’t too wasted, the night before the drive up to Newcastle. As we walked out of the pub I saw her car pulling in at the bottom of the road. We were too far away for her to see us.
“Sure you don’t want a lift?” Ed said. “It’s quite late to get the bus?”
“Yeah. No bother. I want the fresh air,” I said. The real reason I didn’t want their lift was because I knew I was going to cry and I didn’t want the audience.
“Ack. This is it, then,” Ed said, gazing at me in the twilight, with a sad smile.
I felt the tears rise up and threaten to close my throat, and I said in a thick voice, flapping my hands at my face, as if cooling myself in heat: “Oh God, this is so silly, we’ll be home again in a few weeks!”
Our parting hurt so acutely, I realized, not because we thought the geography was insurmountable or that the Christ mas break was so far away, but because we didn’t know the people we were about to change into.
Maybe we wouldn’t be friends anymore, or not close ones. What if everyone returned, being all “had such a great time” and behaving subtly differently, to make it clear priorities and intimacies had shifted? Acting like things were the same, but there was a new distance around each of us, like castles with moats? Name-dropping strangers with whom we’d forged mysterious, exciting, impenetrable new alliances? Nothing held the same power and mystique that the unknown did.
“Fuck, I am going to miss you so much, Evelyn Rose Harris,” Ed said. His face had fallen, and his flat tone of voice was not one I’d ever heard him use before. Ed was usually Mr. Laidback Sunshine.
Not many people knew my birth certificate name. There was a particular tenderness to him using it at this moment.
“I’m going to miss you,” I said. “Don’t make me cry!”
“Will you? Miss me, I mean.”
“Yes, of course.”
I swallowed and tried to read his intent expression.
Ed cast a glance down at his parents’ car and blew air out of his cheeks. “Give Yorkshire hell, won’t you. I don’t know why I’m saying that, I know you’ll smash it.”
He smiled in a sly way, and my insides twitched. Was he... flirting? He looked lightly sweaty and also great under the music-video disco-orange of the streetlamp. Ed was classically handsome, really, I wasn’t sure why I’d been so keen to neuter and deny that fact.
Uncharacteristically, I was completely lost for words, tucking my hair behind my ears and blushing.
“Fuck. Eve,” Ed said, shaking his head. “I love you, OK. As in, I’m in love with you. I’m not sure what I expect you to do with this information. But, there it is. I feel like I can’t let you go without telling you.”
I was stunned.
“Say something!... Are you disgusted?” Ed said, looking simultaneously hunted, bashful, and yet triumphant at his own courage.
Without even thinking, by way of an answer, I stood on tiptoes and kissed him. Ed kissed me back, with the eagerness of it being something he’d been hoping and waiting to do, springing into action. He wrapped his big arms around me, and I’d never felt so perfectly where I was meant to be in the universe as with our tongues entwined.
Wait: this was what falling for someone, real passion, was supposed to feel like? With Weed Dealer Jez, I hadn’t really fancied him organically. I fancied him on principle. I fancied his persona. I wanted him to fancy me, basically. In a split second with Ed, I understood there was an experience available that was far more instinctive, whole, and multi-sensory.
“Oh my God, I didn’t think you liked me like that,” Ed breathed, when we came up for air, and obviously I didn’t reply, Well, I didn’t know I did until a few hours ago.
“I didn’t know you liked me like that!” I said, which got me out of the trap and had the benefit of being true.
“Oh, me and an army. Loads of us have the ‘mysterious Evelyn Harris’ crush and I’m no different,” he said, which was mind-blowing on two levels. Everyone fancied Susie, surely? There was an Eve Harris constituency? “We don’t dare try as you’re so smart and aloof. The comebacks would be awful.”
I laughed, in amazement at how my world had completely turned on its head in seconds.
BEEP BEEP.
We looked over and his mum was flashing the headlights on and off and trying to peer into the murk over the steering wheel.
“Write to me?” Ed said, urgently, gripping my waist. “You’ve got my address?”
“Yes, and you have mine. Write to me!” I said.
“OK, I will,” he said, eyes shining in the dark. He kissed me again, fast and hard, and raced off to the car. I felt like my heart was going to explode with joy and my groin was going to explode with want.
Woah? What WAS that? I’d decided I was in love with one of my best friends, the night before we both moved to different cities for three years?
That evening, I laughed out loud in the dusk—the timing seemed so comical.
As opposed to what it actually was: catastrophically bad.