Chapter 4
Three hours later and I’m showered and dressed in a black loose-fit shirt with my beard neatly groomed and spritzed with a squirt of Spice Bomb, my signature fragrance.
My green puffer jacket is zipped to the top and my grey Timberland scarf, a gift from Soumia, is wrapped tightly around my neck to keep out the howling northern wind.
The city centre’s packed with people trying to take advantage of the last week of the January sales.
The bars and restaurants are busy with frugal shoppers, enticed in with promises of buy one get one free on main course meals.
CallumSUB:
I’m here
I’m going to be five minutes x
19:35
I wonder if the revellers weighed down with their shopping bags can sense that I’m on a first date.
I wiggle my fingers to make sure they don’t seize up in the wind then cup my right hand over my mouth to check my breath.
The mint I had on the tram into town is still present.
Happy with the minty freshness, in anticipation of finally getting that first kiss, I lower my arm and wipe away the condensation on my palm against my coat.
A young family walks by with a little girl wearing angel wings and waving a magic wand.
I’m hoping she’s casting a love spell. I shift my weight between each foot, both to keep moving to stay warm, and to channel my nerves.
I read my horoscope on the way here: Mercury is moving through Uranus, a man in blue provides an intimate encounter.
I’ve already bet myself that Olly’s going to appear from around the corner like a knight in blue cotton, ready to rescue me from the jaws of Grindr.
The bouncer outside the overpriced cocktail bar gives me a friendly smile and a look to say, ‘you must be mad stood out in this wind’.
Spinningfields is the ideal meeting place, the bars and restaurants so tightly squeezed that their doors spit out revellers into the streets.
Neo-gothic buildings haunt one side of the street whilst angelic glass structures with their clean lines confront them from the opposite side of the cobbled walkway.
Revellers in need of a nicotine rush, or a break from their families, huddle beneath them, protected from the wind, they fill their lungs with vapes and make private calls.
We’ve agreed to meet here then walk 15-minutes across town to Olly’s favourite restaurant, The Richmond Tea Rooms, for a reservation at eight.
I flick my wrist to light up my watch: 19:40.
I look up and down the street searching for Olly’s face amongst the umbrellas, which have just started to open in quick succession like popcorn exploding in a microwave.
An anonymous glazed building covers me as the heavens open.
Olly4U:
I’m so sorry, I promise I’m on my way
19:46
Olly4U:
Nearly there
19:49
Olly’s messages pings through to my smart watch.
My side stepping quickens as does the frequency of my glances over the heads of passers-by.
The bouncer catches my eye again and gives me a smile.
I think I see pity in his eyes. I’m praying there’s isn’t a gang of teenagers hiding behind a corner filming me being stood up for their social media content.
CallumSUB:
It’s cold out here. Are you definitely coming?
19:51
Olly4U:
100%. The traffic’s bad
19:53
It’s been twenty minutes since he told me he was five minutes away.
The idea of teenagers stood around recording me with a phone fades away.
In its place a memory of Liam returns to torment me.
I’d been waiting in a cold car for two hours to pick him up from his work’s do.
He turned his phone off as soon as I texted him to say I’d arrived.
He staggered out with the help of a colleague who kissed him goodnight on the lips, lingering for far longer than necessary or appropriate for ‘just a friend’.
He climbed into the car, laughed in my face, then told me to drive.
‘Watch it mate.’ I’ve stepped back into the path of a man carrying a blue sports bag that whacks me on my shoulder.
I’m trying to slow the rise and fall of my chest whilst keeping a vague smile on my face in case Olly walks around the corner.
‘Sorry, sorry. My fault.’
I’m watching the clock on the building opposite.
Its minute hand seems to have slowed to a stop, the time dragging on the longer I’m stood in the cold.
I check again up the street, down the street, to the left, then to the right.
I’ve lost the false smile from my face and feel myself losing the battle with my breathing. One last look.
CallumSUB:
I give up, I’m leaving
19:59
My fingers struggle to tap the buttons in the correct order. I select aeroplane mode to silence any more lies, then put my phone and my hands into my pocket. Lowering my head to my chin, I march against the wind to the queue of black cabs at the top of the street to take me home.
Thirty-five minutes later I open my bedroom cupboard door, vodka bottle in hand, and step into its darkness. My throat burns from the neat poison I’ve gulped on the way up the stairs.
I don’t know how I turned bad. How I turned selfish.
How I never got things quite right. I was too old for Thomas the Tank Engine but too young for Byker Grove when I first climbed into a cupboard.
My bedroom was scarcely furnished, just a bed and a wardrobe that was near empty, my toys pawned and bet on the three fifteen at Aintree.
The solid oak doors soundproofed the shouts from downstairs, turning screams into a whisper.
My dad had lost his wages and the Royal Crown Derby plates, a gift to my mum on her wedding day from her parents, on a horse so bad at jumping fences that it would have been a better investment to smash the plates and set fire to his wallet.
The muffled sounds lasted longer than usual this time, doors slammed, footsteps went up and down the stairs until my mum opened the cupboard door. Her eyes red, top ripped, and her hair looked like she’d been electrocuted on one side.
She kneeled in front of me. ‘Mummy loves you.’
I didn’t respond. I wanted to kiss the black circles surrounding her eyes and make them better, the way she always did to my knees.
‘You’re a good boy, Callum, the best.’ She held onto my shoulders and pulled me in.
If I knew then that I wouldn’t see her for another fifteen years, I wouldn’t have let her go.
Mum lifted up my chin with her finger. ‘You keep on being good. Promise me.’
I nodded my head. I tried every day to keep that promise.
I brushed my teeth in the morning before school, and again before going to bed at night.
I always said please and thank you. I never raised my voice, not even when hit.
I made sure my homework was always in on time.
When I got my first salary from my supermarket Saturday job, I gave five pounds to the man selling The Big Issue outside, so I could one day tell her what I’d done.
I put in long hours at the first airline I worked at, and I was one of the youngest people to ever get promoted.
I spent Christmases at the soup kitchen to surround myself with people, but more importantly, to be good. I tried every day. Until I wasn’t.
Fortunately, Liam was kind enough to point out my mistakes.
Though no matter how hard I tried, it was never hard enough.
The birthday gifts weren’t what he wanted.
I spoke too quietly. I spoke too loudly.
I didn’t eat enough. I ate too much. I cleaned the flat too often.
I lived in a pigsty. I was just wrong, rotten to the core.
Cupboards are my sanctuary. I crawled back into this one when Liam left as quickly as he slammed the door shut.
Like a snail carrying its shell to protect it from predators, it’s the only piece of furniture I brought with me when I moved in with Soumia.
I left my dignity outside this cupboard.
It’s smeared into my old front room carpet, into the cushions on the sofa, in my car, in the cereal aisle at the supermarket, in the crew room, on Soumia’s many jumpers – everywhere I cry, where I panic.
Choosing a pot of yoghurt or sat in the briefing room, the feeling is the same.
And now it’s left in Spinningfields, on a street where I was left out in the rain.
That’s the problem with anxiety and heartbreak: it doesn’t matter who you are or where you are – when it’s got you, it squeezes you until you can’t focus on anything else.
It chooses when to release you. I once read that a break-up isn’t a breakdown; whoever wrote that hasn’t met me.
I don’t know how long Soumia has been sitting with her back against the wooden door, but I can feel her presence.
The cotton blanket scrunches as I pull it tighter around me, blocking out the tiny bit of light that insists on brightening the darkness by seeping in through the gap in the wardrobe doors. The air around me is warm and moist.
Soumia sits in silence, waiting patiently.
She doesn’t need to let me know she’s there, she knows I know.
She could open the door, pull me out, tell me to get a grip, give me a slap, pour me a glass of wine, and scream at me to stop fucking doing it.
She doesn’t. She knows the drill by now.
I hear a drawer pull open and some shuffling as Soumia gets herself comfortable.
I don’t know when she put a cushion in one of the empty drawers, but I saw it there last time I searched for my passport; it stared at me, a symbol of Soumia’s patience.
I sit with my knees to my chest in the space where Liam’s travel bag used to live. Soumia is the only person to know I’m here, in this void, this little space, where time stops still for me but continues for everyone else.
I hear Soumia slurping her tea. Semi-skimmed milk, 3 sugars. I know she’ll be holding the mug in two hands, her little fingers pointing east and west.
‘Do you want yours yet?’ She speaks softly through the pine.
‘Yes, please.’
‘Then hand me the vodka.’
I take a big swig, the heat from the liquid makes my face screw up, then put the lid on the bottle.
Soumia opens the door just enough to slide the cup of tea in and for me to pass the vodka out.
Her brews aren’t great, too milky, and I can always taste the sugar that’s left on the spoon from her shovelling it into her cup, but they’re made and served without judgement.
‘I’ll leave the door open a little, just so you can hear me better. Do you want me to count your breathing?’
‘I’m OK,’ I reply.
Soumia has treated my break-up and subsequent trauma like she approaches all incidents.
If you cut your knee, Soumia has a plaster for you.
If you have a leak in the ceiling and water is pissing in, she’s put the bucket down while seamlessly googling for a plumber, a plasterer and notifying the landlord at the same time.
If you’ve done five shots the night before, she has the heartburn relief.
And if your partner has disappeared into thin air and left you, she has the breathing exercises, chick flicks and a never-ending supply of love and patience to listen to me tell the same story for the twentieth time, and she does it all whilst holding my hand.
And now, when I’ve been stood up, she’s got the weak tea to talk it through.
‘He didn’t show,’ I say, my head leaning on the door.
‘Bastard.’
‘What’s wrong with me?’ My eyes start to sting.
‘Nothing, absolutely nothing. This isn’t about some random who hasn’t turned up, is it babe?’
‘I loved Liam so much.’ I bite my lip.
‘Don’t ever think it was you. That’s what he wants, do you hear me?’
‘It is me. Do I make people leave? All the times I moaned at him for not washing the dishes. For not picking his towel up off the floor. For leaving tea bags in the sink. I’m sorry for putting on weight, for not being the person he met.
’ The sting turns into a tear. It slides down the side of my nose and over the groove of my lip. I taste its salt.
‘That’s life stuff, everyone does that. If you can’t moan at your fella what’s the point in having one? And you’re beautiful, babe.’
I hear Soumia shuffling on her cushion and placing her head on the other side of the door, our foreheads separated by thin wood.
‘I was two stone lighter when he met me.’
‘Look at everything you did for him. He’s going to regret it. One day he’ll wake up and wonder what the hell he’s done and come running back.’
‘Do you think it’ll be soon?’ I cross my fingers and look up to heaven.
‘When he does, you turn your back. You’re worth ten of him, do you hear me? He’s had his chance. Christ babe, he’s like a cat with nine lives! You gave him more chances than anyone else would have. You’re worth more. Callum Moore, you’re bloody amazing.’
Soumia puts her hand through the gap in the cupboard door. I reach out, placing my fingers in between hers; her hands are warm from the mug she’s been holding. Locking her fingers around mine, we sit in silence. Her touch tells me everything I need to hear.