Chapter Sixteen
Jake
‘Ahhh … I LOVED this place,’ Belle squeals next to me, jazz hands waggling by her face.
I have zero idea where we are but it’s a small box room and it’s pink.
Overwhelmingly pink. I twitch my nose as a strong scent wafts over – spiced apple?
Cinnamon? It smells like a bakery. Except there’s a bed tucked into the corner, covered in throws, and patches of black mould speckle the ceiling above it.
Someone’s hammered a nail into the wall and hung a trailing ivy plant from it. The rumbling sound of a double-decker bus flies past outside and the room shakes, and I’m concerned as the nail seems to wobble at the movement.
I do a slow turn. Flat-pack-style desk under the window.
Laptop, notebook, a pen pot that’s mostly biros with their lids missing and a rogue, dirty makeup brush.
I pick a pen up, test it on my palm. Dead.
Try another. Also dead. A red one works, just about.
I pocket it. And beside it, a framed photograph.
I lean in. Belle’s and Jules’s faces squashed side by side, both laughing at something off camera.
Juliet is wearing what appears to be a Christmas jumper lit up with actual fairy lights. Classic.
I straighten up. It’s a small thing, the photo, but it gnaws at me.
I sometimes thought of Juliet as my own grandma …
Sunday lunches, her insistence on bringing me shortbreads on every visit because I once said I liked them.
Her telling me I was handsome and … if ‘she were my age’, in a way that sounded vaguely threatening.
I look around again, focus in on the mould, the ivy, the peeling walls.
Belle built a whole life in this room, and this is the first I get to see of it.
I look down to Belle as another bus rattles past, sending the nail swaying.
‘Your bedroom in Bethnal Green?’
‘Ugh … I have such great memories here with my girls – Daniela and Molly. Rachael was living with her boyfriend at the time but was practically our third housemate, as we were all inseparable. We lived here for two years but in 2019 the landlord priced us out and we had to leave, dragging our feet.’
She continues, getting increasingly more animated, almost bouncing on the spot. ‘Oh my God, I just remembered our first night in this apartment! Daniela slapped a neon pink dildo – you know, with a suction cup at its base—’
‘No, I don’t know!’ I say, more prudishly than I would have liked.
Belle has her hand to her chest now, cackling as she finishes telling the story. ‘… But I couldn’t hear anything over my laughing.’
I smile at her as she waffles on. A hint of the woman I fell in love with.
Rambling on, a zest for life, not overly serious about anything.
I’d forgotten the way she sometimes did this.
How she was able to build a whole world out of a single memory, dragging you through every detail until you felt you were right there with her.
Towards the end of our relationship, I’d found it exhausting, but right now, it feels harder to name.
This is the girl I knew – the one next to me now, who laughs at her own story while she’s still trying to tell it, hands massaging her cheeks to stop them cramping. Not the Whitby version I’ve met this evening, with her fancy drinks, who irons her feelings as well as her clothes.
As she talks about her friends with the sort of warmth reserved only for the people who helped shape you, I try to do the maths in my head.
If she was here for two years, we must be at some point in 2019.
I’ve been dead for three years. She’d moved to London, built a career, explored her sexuality, and filled a flat with women who knew each other so well, they spoke openly about sex toys.
She’d been fine. Better than fine. And I’d missed it all.
She’s telling me now about the note they’d left for the next tenants.
How they’d written their recommendations for the neighbourhood – the best date spots, the best kebab in the area after a night out, and I catch something under the nostalgia: her voice slightly catches when she curses the landlord again, betraying she’s still annoyed about it, even now.
She loved this flat, this tiny box room with its mould.
I don’t entirely understand the whole London thing. How people are so loyal and protective of their neighbourhoods, how being priced out sits like a real loss. Back home, no one grieved a postcode.
‘I had some of the best years of my life living here. London on our doorstep, arm in arm with the friends I’d been craving my entire life.’
‘Sounds fun.’ I smile, not able to match her energy.
I’m still about three anecdotes behind her, which she doesn’t notice because she’s already moved on and I can’t keep up, and I know why.
I keep snagging on the same thing: all of this, everything she’s been describing, it all happened for her because she left.
She’d wanted this when we were together.
I knew she did. And I’d tried to talk her out of it.
‘You’d have loved Daniela – she’s the life and soul of the party … The banter you two would have had. She would have drunk you under the—’ She stops, abruptly.
I go still and there’s a moment I think she’s clocked it.
She’s realised that she’s put me in a sentence with someone I’ll never get to properly meet.
Me and Daniela, swapping banter over a table somewhere, and Belle watching us go; she’s speaking like I would have just slotted into her life if someone had moved a few things around. Like I was just running late.
She pauses and looks up at me, her mouth smiling though her eyes aren’t.
I watch her realise it in real time. It’s a small calibration – first the smile holds, then something underneath it shifts, not dramatically or in a way anyone would catch apart from me, but just a fraction, the way a room changes when a cloud moves over the sun.
She glances down for a second, and I can’t tell whether it’s at the floor or her hands, then back up at me.
I don’t say anything, although it’s on the tip of my tongue that I should, but then it’s gone.
She’s already dealt with it and that’s that.
I clear my throat as the door opens and a young Belle walks in.
There she is.
She’s on the phone, wearing an oversized denim jacket, her natural dark blonde hair in a centre part, tied in a neat ponytail at the nape of her neck. She throws herself on the bed, staring at the ceiling, phone clutched to her ear.
‘I’m just not sure if it’s right for me to come,’ she’s saying, eyes scanning the room, landing on the spot of damp on the wall opposite. I hear who I’m guessing is Emma on the other end.
Belle sighs, twiddling her ponytail with her fingers. ‘I don’t know. Should I even be meeting your family? What is this?’ She sits up and puts Emma on speakerphone as she takes her jacket off and folds it neatly, placing it at the end of her bed.
Emma’s voice fills the room, her tone slow and considered. ‘I just know they’d love you, Belle. And, truthfully, I was excited to share you with them.’
Belle nods, then places her head in her hands. She speaks through her fingers now. ‘I know. I know. It’s just, if I meet them and we don’t work out – like could we even do this, long distance?’
‘I get it. It’s far.’
‘It’s so far.’ Belle sighs, falling back onto the bed. ‘I don’t want to have to travel five hours to see you. I just want you to be near. To be someone I could theoretically turn up on the doorstep of when I need a hug,’ she says, rubbing her forehead.
‘And you haven’t changed your mind about moving here?’
Belle shakes her head, her voice sad but confident. ‘I’m just not ready to leave London yet. Did you have a think too?’
‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I don’t think it’s possible with my work here, the business.’
Belle pauses and lets out a sigh. Silence fills the room as she starts picking the skin around her nails, then she catches herself, stops, sits on her hands instead. Finally, she says, ‘Part of me feels that if we really wanted us to work, we’d make it work, you know?’
Silence again. ‘This is shit,’ Emma says.
‘So shit.’ Belle sits up now, crossing her legs underneath her, holding the phone in the palm of her hands. A car horn beeps outside.
‘I’m not ready to completely let go of you yet, though, Belle.’
Belle’s face looks pained; her frown is deep, her mouth downturned. Her eyes skim the phone, her hands, the bedsheets. I can’t tell if this is what she wants or if she’s been pushed to this.
‘I think, for now …’ She pauses. ‘We need to end this, what we’re doing.’
Something hits me in my chest – not the ending … I’d clocked that was coming, since Emma will not be the one at the altar tomorrow. It’s the bit before it, the way Belle put herself first, without collapsing inward or making it easier for everyone else.
I think about how many times I’d watched her do the opposite with me. Swallowing the thing she actually wanted to say and handing me the version I could handle instead. I thought that was just how it was, but it turns out that was just who she was with me.
Hearing how she was so excited about this time in her life, I’m proud of her for not throwing it away for someone else.
‘I guess so,’ Emma replies.
I stick out my bottom lip and turn to Belle beside me. ‘Very mature.’
She nods, excitedly. ‘It was the right choice. Doesn’t mean I don’t still think about her, though.’
She smiles but then looks away, finding a spot on the wall just past my shoulder.
‘Hey, you okay?’ I reach out and my fingers find her arm.
‘They’re not all like this, you know,’ she says softly, that confidence now gone. She knows what’s coming and she’s trying to warn me … or herself, I can’t tell which.
‘I don’t know, but I’ll find out.’ She tries to smile. ‘I’ll be by your side, Belle.’
‘Well, the next one’s nice, anyway. But after that … Fuck.’ She laughs, a deep exhale. ‘We might need a big drink before that one … and the one after that …’
I squeeze her shoulder before letting go. ‘Shall we have a quickie now?’
One side of her mouth curves up. ‘Let’s do it.’ Her eyes twinkle as she takes my hand.