Chapter Six
Eddie
Eddie thought he’d never get rid of them. His parents, that is, yacking away to Calum and Raj: I saw your dad on the beach, Calum. He’s looking well. Oh, and your mum was in the library the other day, Raj! I was saying we do miss you boys being around. Eating us out of house and home, haha! D’you miss my apple crumble? I was thinking the other day, remember that time I took you all out trick or treating? And Raj, you were so polite, taking one of Brenda Murray’s nasty muffins and feeling obliged to eat it. You spat it out into a bush —
Actually, that had been his mum (Eddie’s dad tends to stand there, waiting for her to finish). On and on, she’d gone – for weeks, it felt like. And then, just as she was winding up, Calum had offered them a cup of tea, the traitor! Couldn’t he see that Eddie was desperate for his new life to start? And how long did it take to drink a cup of tea?
Another age, it felt to Eddie as he watched his mum sip- sip-sip. Seasons changed, devices slipped into obsolescence and still she was clutching that chipped red mug, firing questions about Calum’s mum’s poetry writing. At one point she’d stopped and gazed happily around the room. ‘They’re amazingly spacious, aren’t they, these flats?’
Actually no, Eddie thought, clawing at his scalp. This one’s feeling awfully crowded right now with you and Dad in it! Finally his mum seemed to remember that they had a home to go to, and they left.
Dizzy with relief now, Eddie stretches out on the somewhat lumpy mattress in his little room. So this is it. Freedom to do whatever he likes. Admittedly, he was a little taken aback when he saw the single bed; for years he’s been used to a double. Plus, his bedroom window back home had an actual curtain – something he’d taken for granted. But this flat’s still brilliant, Eddie decides.
He is an independent man now and this is the start of a thrilling new chapter in his life. It’s been long overdue. Eddie will never again have to live at Kilmory Cottage, and endure his dad going on about how he’s rebuilding some wrecked old truck at the garage, and have his mum sharing gossip she’s heard at the library about people he doesn’t even know.
Parents! They’re okay, he surmises. And his are good people and of course he loves them. But Eddie’s family has always done his head in a little bit, and he’s never felt as if he’s truly fitted in. There’s his sister Bella who’s so precise about everything, and stuck a line of tape across the carpet to divide the girls’ shared room into two. Ana’s stuff had spilled over it constantly, and there’d been perpetual squabbles until finally Bella flounced off to London and then it had felt weird at home without her.
It felt weirder still when Ana left for art college. Ana, his baby sister, moving into halls! It was embarrassing really. Eddie felt like the spare school dinner languishing in the canteen – that rank slice of broccoli quiche that no one wanted. Maybe he was being hypersensitive but he felt that a kind of sadness settled over the house then, with the girls both gone. He knew his parents were missing his sisters and now his mum’s full focus was on him. Or rather, on the state of his room and how many hours he spent wearing his dressing gown. Eddie didn’t like being the only one left at home. He felt too conspicuous – like he was under constant surveillance. He and his parents are definitely not designed to all live together anymore.
Happily, those days are over as Raj calls Eddie out of his room and hands him a chilled bottle of beer. ‘You’ll need to down it quick,’ his friend says, ‘if we’re gonna have time for the pub.’ Then off they go, with Eddie hoping he’s acting like a normal person as they trot downstairs. Because what he really wants to do is gallop down, three steps at a time, whooping and punching the air.
FREEDOM!!
As the trio step outside he could scream it from the top of his lungs it into the wintry night. Virtually his whole life, he’s lived in Sandybanks – since he was a baby. Thanks, Mum and Dad, he’s often thought, bitterly, for taking me out of Glasgow before I could even voice an opinion and forcing me to grow up in a boring seaside town where nothing ever happens! And by God, he’s been looking forward to having some fun without his mum breathing down his neck, commenting on his persistent low-level cough, asking if he wants a cup of tea (no, he doesn’t want a cup of fucking tea!) and dispensing ‘helpful’ suggestions, like working at the tax office.
He’d literally rather plunge his face into boiling water than do that.
Eddie, Raj and Calum step into the pub. A thrilling Edinburgh pub, with a long, curved wooden bar and hundreds of bottles glowing invitingly on the shelves behind it. Not like The Cross Keys in Sandybanks, with a couple of old men with dogs and Barry-the-barman who’d laughed in Eddie’s face when he’d tried to get served under-age. I’ll tell your mother, mate. Works in the library, doesn’t she?
Here, no one knows him so he can do what he likes. The sense of liberation is as intoxicating as the two vodka shots he’s just necked. ‘Right,’ Raj announces, setting his glass down. ‘There’s this party.’
A party on a Thursday night? ‘Oh, whose party?’ Eddie asks, trying to appear blasé.
‘Just these people,’ Raj replies, declining to elaborate further. And off they go.
Eddie’s been to Edinburgh plenty of times. As kids, he and his sisters were ferried over by their parents for trips to the castle (which he’d loved), and museums and art galleries (he hadn’t loved that at all). That was the Edinburgh Eddie knew: all battlements and cannons and old stuff in glass cases, plus a trip to Winter Wonderland, the Christmas funfair, when Princes Street Gardens were decked out in multicoloured lights. Not taking a bus that seems to crawl along forever, leaving the bustling city centre behind. Here, the quiet street is bordered on both sides by concrete houses. There’s barely a soul around, and Eddie’s chest tightens with unease.
He feels even more out of place than the one time he’d visited Calum and Raj during their freshers year at university. They’d been in student halls then, a chaotic flat crammed with excitable teenagers going on about semesters and essays, bemoaning their ‘deadlines’ and, it seemed to Eddie, trying to outdo each other with their cleverness. ‘What are you studying?’ a ginger-haired posh boy had asked him.
‘Nothing at the moment,’ he’d replied. ‘What about you?’
‘Economics. So you’re not at uni then?’
‘Not right now, no …’
The boy was starting to look uncomfortable. ‘So you’re on a gap year?’
‘Sort of, yeah.’ Eddie willed his interrogator to fuck off and leave him alone, and couldn’t wait to jump on the train and escape back to Sandybanks. It was the dullest hellhole ever invented, but at least back home it was only his mum who fired questions at him.
‘This is it,’ Raj announces now, checking his phone, and they all hop off the bus. Eddie looks around, trying to appear casual and entirely comfortable with where they’ve landed. They cut across an expanse of flat scrubby grass, heading towards what looks like a vast estate. Then they’re in the estate; all hard-edged grey concrete and some skinny guy yelling at them incoherently and clinging onto a wire fence.
For a moment, Eddie panics for his safety. Kilmory Cottage springs into his mind. His safe, warm home, with his familiar bedroom with the big soft duvet and his favourite dressing gown that he forgot to pack.
The three friends arrive at the entrance to a block of flats. As the entry system is broken, they just walk right in.
‘Sure this is the right place?’ Eddie asks as they ride up in the lift.
‘Yeah, ’course it is,’ Calum says, and Eddie realises how different his friends are now, after finishing their degrees and landing jobs virtually the minute they’d graduated. Edinburgh is their city now. They jump on buses and go to parties in far-flung estates. This is normal to them. It doesn’t faze them one bit. Eddie must stop being sweaty and nervous and wanting his dressing gown!
The lift doors open and they step out of the stinking metal canister with their carrier bag of beers. Then a flat door opens and they’re in the smoky fug of the party, surrounded by people shouting over the pounding music.
Raj and Calum seem to disappear instantly, taking their beers – thanks, guys! Eddie glances around desperately for someone to latch onto and wonders what to do now.
He looks down at himself and is hit by a terrible realisation.
Christ, his clothes. In this crammed and smoke-filled flat, he feels conspicuously small-town and completely out of place. Weirdly, he hadn’t felt small-town when they’d loaded up the car and driven away from Kilmory Cottage early today. They were just his clothes. Clothes that had seemed perfectly fine in Sandybanks, for lying around in his room and having a smoke at the bandstand. But now he realises that even his jeans are wrong. And so is his hair and his trainers and even his face – what the hell has happened to Eddie’s face in the few hours since he left home? With no one to talk to and nothing to drink, Eddie has escaped to the bathroom in this overcrowded hovel that reeks of weed, with an undercurrent of bleach and bins. And now he notes with horror that his skin has erupted.
He rubs at the smeary mirror above the cracked washbasin and leans in closer. These aren’t tiny, insignificant spots. They’re angry boilers, protruding from the lower parts of his cheeks as if he were fourteen years old again and not twenty-two!
Only one thing for it, he decides. For a few years now, Eddie has been able to enjoy a few drinks without making a fool of himself. At parties back in Sandybanks, he was never the one puking on someone’s bathroom floor. He might not have many notable talents – not like Bella, wowing the marketing agency in London and getting a job there at twenty-one. Or Ana sailing right into art school. But what he is good at is pacing himself, when it comes to alcohol. ‘You hold it together, man,’ Raj always says.
Well, stuff that. Never mind pacing himself tonight. He strides out of the bathroom, making straight for the kitchen where he glances around stealthily, picks up a vodka bottle and pours a generous shot into a plastic cup. He gulps it and pours another. No one notices the small-town boy stealing their drink and so he has some more. And as he drinks, Eddie starts to feel less awkward and more like he belongs here. And next time he goes – actually wobbles – to the bathroom, he is amazed to see that the terrible spots have simmered down and are barely noticeable now.
Forget skincare, he decides as he studies his face. The thing to do with a spotty outbreak is to annihilate it with vodka. It’s obvious to him now! He should market it as a miraculous cure and make a fortune! Eddie takes another swig from the cup he’s brought into the tiny bathroom with him, wondering briefly if his vision is blurred, and that’s why his skin seems to have improved. But no matter, because if Eddie is viewing the world all fuzzily now, then so is everyone else. Clinging onto that thought, he bounds out of the bathroom.
And that’s when it happens. Eddie literally crashes into a girl who’s standing there. And not just any girl.
She’s the most beautiful girl Eddie has ever seen in his life.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ he exclaims.
‘It’s okay,’ she says, touching his arm lightly. As she smiles, Eddie feels as if all the bad stuff that’s happened tonight has ceased to matter.
Raj and Calum abandoning him. His clothes and hair suddenly being all wrong, and having no one to talk to and feeling so very lost.
Everything is fine now – no, it’s actually brilliant. Because this beautiful girl, who’s obviously made from sunshine, is smiling at Eddie. The empty plastic cup crumples in his sweaty grip. And his heart seems to stop.
And although he can’t possibly know it yet, at precisely 11.27 on a bitterly cold January night, Eddie Silva has stepped out of his old life forever, and into a new life that nothing could have prepared him for.
And nothing will ever be the same again.