Chapter 39
Ialways pictured the launch of my first novel in one of those quaint little bookshops in Portobello, next to the bricked houses the same colour as the Love Heart sweets, an upgrade from the pub function room where we had the launch for my poetry book. One with a ladder on a runner and brown paper bags and an old cat sleeping by the window. Proper champagne, red wine, pistachio macarons and a hunk of cheese, which everyone nibbles at.
But, of course, it’s my book launch, so I have to beg Colin and Tamika at the local bookshop up the road to let me read out loud in a corner in front of my publishers and friends, have a few margherita pizzas and bottles of room-temperature cheap white wine in plastic cups. I’m being harsh. It’s actually very beautiful. And I hate the sound of stinky shared cheese anyway.
I’m wearing a down-to-the-floor green dress covered in golden embroideries of the sun, moon and stars. It has big billowy shoulders and tight crimped sleeves. I look like Princess Fiona from Shrek when she’s an ogre – the exact look I was going for. And the best bit about it? The dress belonged to my mum when she was younger (hence why it’s so long).
My whole family is here. Violet’s made a chocolate cake, decorated with the cover of my book – not quite big enough to spell out the entire title but I appreciate the gesture. Mum and Adam are here, Sonny and his new girlfriend, Dad and Lovely Naomi. Aoife, Bianca, Mia. There’s Ronks and gorgeous Avanna. Shreya – who I haven’t seen in years – who I never expected to say yes but has the night off from the kids so she’s up for a party. Dom and her new fiancée, Soph, The Twins. Even Nile, who has his own theatre in Devon now. He followed me on Instagram and I extended the invitation, never thinking he’d show up but here he is, standing at the back with his girlfriend, looking proud. ‘I’ve always loved your weird work,’ he says. ‘Write a play for us one day? But not Bad Wolf.’ There are stylists from the hairdressers, my one friend from uni, from college and some writer friends. The room is full of my loved ones, sharing seats and stools, sitting on the counter, leaning on the walls, more full than I could have ever imagined.
My phone pings; it’s Jackson: Smash it. Proud of you, Ella x
I will cherish that.
And I write back: thank you proud of you too x
After my editor says a few words, I climb up onto a wonky wooden stool to read. I open up my book, feeling the weight of it in my hands and my mouth is so dry, but I take a breath and say:
‘Maybe you’ve never been in love with someone who you’re sure is the one for you? So sure that birdsong sounds like their name in the street. Like déjà vu. Like recognizing a face from the past. The way you know your parent is your parent. The way you know you’re about to be ill. Or that milk is off. It’s that voice that says you can rest, that says you’re here, I’ve got you. It’s in that rising tide of happiness that happens for no reason when you’re listening to a song that you can’t put into words but up go the hairs on your arms.
‘That person is hidden in those spaces, between being awake and dreaming. They’re there. Always. And time can stretch on for miles, years, without contact – life drifts on, does its thing and you’re almost able to forget that you love that person and the fact that they belong by your side because you’re doing OK without them. You’re doing quite well actually.’
The room laughs at this. I feel able to look up and take a breath. I see my family shedding tears, my friends filming on their phones – CRINGE. I compose myself and try some more:
‘And then something happens. And you’re sprung back to it all, like an elastic band that tricked you into thinking you had already broken from its grasp ages ago but no, you’ve snapped right back to where you started, to that very moment and all the beautiful, terrible, wonderful, terrifying feelings that come with loving somebody, with being in love with them still, and wondering if they ever loved you back. This book is for everyone who’s ever felt like that.’
The room applauds, probably happy that they can go back to drinking and chatting now the formal bit is over but still I’m rushing from the fear, surprise and overwhelm, relief. I sign books (only by the very last do I feel like I’ve mastered any sort of professional autograph) and take photos with my friends. I look around the room, thinking that of course Lowe will push through the door and appear any moment, that of course he wouldn’t miss my book launch – it’s my fucking book launch! I’m eyeing the twee bell above the door, waiting for it to tinkle open with his arrival but it doesn’t. It’s just Bookshop-owner-Colin taking out the clanging recycling bins, full of empty wine bottles. I hear him mutter, ‘They’re worse than a hen party, this lot!’ Dropping major hints for us to leave. Bookshop-owner-Tamika’s complaining that someone’s spilt red wine on the carpet and it won’t clean itself. The carpet is red; it’s very hard to see where the stain is. Aoife lays down kitchen roll. That’ll do it.
When we’ve successfully sold out of books and my party have drunk our booze supply dry and overstayed our welcome, Mum shouts, ‘Everybody back at ours for the afters!’ Sonny and Violet groan weakly at Mum’s attempt to be cool. Bianca pulls the one copy of my first poetry book from the shelf and – away from the owners’ stare – slides it in the window display. I wink at her like, thanks mate, appreciate it.
We link arms, out into the warm evening. We bundle drunkenly onto the bus. Even Dad and Naomi and my publishers come, folding into taxis, any way to get back home to Mum’s. This is where the celebrating will really happen, in a house I’m no longer embarrassed of.
We’re loud, singing and talking over each other. Drinking and dancing. Until the music is snuffed and Mum chinks a glass with a fork, like she’s about to go and give a speech. Oh, she’s about to go and give a speech.
‘Oh no, please,’ says Sonny,
‘Does she have to?’ Vi mutters, covering her face with her hands.
‘YES ANTONIA!’ Ronke screams (Avanna been collected by her dad so now Ronks is ON it!). Stepdad Adam looks at Mum in awe like that’s my girl. Dad excuses himself to ‘find more beer’.
‘Since you were a child I knew you lived inside your head.’ Mum directs her words only to me, as though she’s forgotten seventy-five of our loved ones are also here. ‘I used to ask myself, what on earth is that child thinking about? And well, now I know.’ She holds up the book and laughs. ‘I mean, what an overthinking, highly sensitive anxiety-riddled little shit you are—’
The room applauds and laughs. Aoife hangs around my neck crying with laughter.
Violet whispers, ‘Do you want me to make her stop?’
I say, ‘No. She’s good.’
‘But you are also fearless and brave and full of so much love. My word, am I proud of you?’ Her tears make me cry, and everyone awwwws at our mother/daughter bond, which now I think about it, is probably the real greatest love of my life. ‘And if anyone wants to know where she gets it from … ?’ Oh, here we go – she looks like she’s about to point at herself, loving the attention. ‘ … I have no fucking idea. I wish I could say it was me.’
And my dad re-enters to hear this bit, and blows me a kiss.
I, through tears, hug Mum as the room claps. There’s so much commotion – laughter, talking, crying, music – that I don’t hear the knock on the door. It’s Violet who leaves the room to answer it.
‘ME NEXT!’ Bianca screams and everyone protests as she takes a half-full bottle of prosecco off the table, holding it like a microphone. ‘I was actually Ella’s first commission. Sorry about me, she used to write my love letters for me back in the day to help me catch boyfriends … ’
Violet taps me on the shoulder, whispers in my ear; she says, ‘Ella, that was Lowe.’
I say, ‘What was?’ I think she’s referring to a song that was being played (when it was definitely Elvis Costello) but I can see by the look on her face she doesn’t mean that.
‘At the door.’
‘Now?’
She nods.
FUCK! I squeeze past Mum’s annoying friends loitering in the hallway sharing a spliff – the friends she HAD to go and invite to the ‘afters’ even though I told her not to – with Mum’s dress hitched up to my knees in a bundle, so I don’t trip; the thing is like a bloody wedding dress with a train of its own. Out of the wide-open front door, the gate on the latch and onto the street. I’m buzzy and warm from the feeling of the night, the love and now this. I look up and down the empty road, the streetlamps breathing their honey-and-lemon-lozenge luminescence, see Lowe climbing into his same old dad-car. Oh. My. Days. There he is.
‘Ella.’ His voice seems to echo. ‘I didn’t know you were having a party. Sorry, I knew your book came out today. I just wanted to say congratulations and give you this’ – he holds up a carton of strawberry Ribena – ‘but I appreciate that looks not that great a present now … ’ The straw in its plastic casing limply falls off onto the road. He picks it up, awkwardly, scrunching it in his hand.
‘It’s good to see you.’ Really good but maybe a bit sad. I feel bad he wasn’t at the launch, that he didn’t feel he could come.
‘No, no, thanks, it’s your night. I do have something else for you though, and it’s not flowers because I know that’s … whatever.’
He looks even sweeter when he’s shy. He pulls out a pizza-boy bag and goes to open it but Bianca storms outside – uh-oh, here goes.
She demands, ‘What the fuck is going on? What are YOU doing here?’
And then Violet. Aoife. Ronke. All of my parade, piling out onto the street.
‘Lowe! Come in, have a drink!’ Mum drags him towards the front door and he looks back at me over his shoulder like Is that alright?
Even though I know it’s virtually impossible to say no to Mum I say, ‘Can hardly say no now, can I?’ whilst secretly screaming YES YES YES! But I’m not giving him that.
My friends follow Mum inside, dutifully. She is the boss, of course.
We pile back into the kitchen. The guy is OUT. OF. HIS. DEPTH. All eyes on him as he skulks through our house.
He’s so nervous his hands are shaking. Mum pours him a drink, and he tries to find the furthest place in the back of the kitchen, so he can wallflower himself and become invisible which, if your name is Lowe Archer, is pretty impossible.
‘Poor thing,’ says Dom, ‘he’s been thrown in at the deep end, hasn’t he?’ And she goes over to keep him company.
But before she can get to him, it’s Mum who shoots Lowe right between the eyes. ‘Perfect timing, Lowe. We were just giving speeches. Is there anything you’d like to say to Ella?’
Heads swoop round to face him.
The silence is deafening. Lowe flushes luminous with horror.
‘Mum!’ I say, defending him. ‘He just got here!’ I look at Lowe. ‘You don’t have to say anything.’
He’s already making his excuses anyway: ‘No, no, thank you, I honestly just wanted to say congratulations to Ella. I won’t stay—’
But he’s met with my colosseum, the loyal pillars of my family and friends staring back at him, unimpressed. Lowe, the speechless showman in the room, famous for wowing crowds (and stomping all over my heart), is now flustered, in the spotlight at his toughest gig yet. He clears his throat, sweetly with his fist, and goes to speak—
But Bianca gets in there first, pointing: ‘Excuse me, you can’t just come in here, Lowe, and take over Ella’s night. I know you think you’re some hot-shot celeb these days but this isn’t about you, mate. Ella – tell him?’
Lowe looks at me apologetically.
I fold my arms and grin. ‘It depends what he’s going to say, doesn’t it?’
Lowe’s face falls as the jury of my loved ones await his words.
‘Ummm. OK. Let me just think … ’ Lowe puts his left hand on his chest and rubs it over his hammering heart. The room quietens. Then he says, faintly, ‘If you know Ella, you know she’s a storyteller, always exaggerating, embellishing and making everything around her a poem or fairy tale. What she doesn’t realize is that she is a poem. She is the fairy tale and we are just characters in the story of her.’
GULP.
‘GORGEOUS!’ heckles Mum. And the room claps.
Lowe then puts his arm up, to stop the clapping; he’s not finished. ‘I’m sorry, sorry … I … err, maybe I have to say what I actually came here to say tonight … I just didn’t expect to do it in front of so many people.’ He doesn’t take his eyes off me. ‘Ella, I thought that you’d be home after your launch, alone, so I could tell you that … ’ He takes a deep breath like it might be his last and says:
‘ … I love you, Ella.’ He speaks, loud and clear, firm, like his life hangs on these very words. ‘I’ve always loved you—’
Mum gasps. (CRINGE.)
I grip onto the fireplace to hold myself up, not even caring that my fingers are definitely touching some old jar filled with something rancid.
He reaches for his bag.
‘He’s pulling out a bag – oh no, what is that bag?’ Ronks whispers.
And inside is everything I’d ever want to see. Proof. Evidence. Like the photo of ‘Jase’ I found in the unwanted roadside drawers as a kid but for real this time. He holds the items up one by one. All the letters I ever sent him. The mixtapes too. A scrap of leather from my shoe. And a lace. A bottle top. A travel card with my lipstick marks on it. My hat. Even my dad’s hoodie that I assumed he’d lost. His old wallet, in front of the worn travel cards, a passport photograph of me aged nineteen.
‘I’ve been holding this stuff at my studio for years,’ he says. ‘You were sitting on top of it!’
The trunk!
‘Oh God.’ Aoife bursts into tears.
‘That’s done it. I’m absolutely finished,’ says Bianca, pulling a stained tea towel off the oven to stop her make-up from running.
Lowe clenches his jaw, straight into my eyes like it’s the most real anyone’s ever looked at me and says, ‘Ella, I think about you every time I play guitar, every song I hear – I think about you when I’m awake, and when I’m asleep I dream of you. Every time an aeroplane flies over my head it’s you I think about. When I eat. When I’m with my friends, I’m thinking about you. I think about you when I’m driving. Even when I was on stage – I was thinking about what you were up to. When I had to go to the dentist and had an injection in my gum, I thought about you. I think about you when I ride my bike. And when I’m not thinking about you, although I’ll admit these moments seem to be less and less these days, I’m wondering why I’m not thinking about you and go back to thinking about you again … I love you, Ella. Everything about you. I just … love you. I’m completely ready if you are.’
And … he moves in for a kiss; I move in for a kiss; he moves in, I move in, heads tilted, eyes closed. … Is this EVER going to EVER happen? WILL YOU JUST KISS ME FOR GOODNESS SAKE and … he does. He kisses me.
‘Fly Away’ plays and the volume of the world drowns out. And the universe has done something right for once. And that star will grin. And the kid versions of us are caught in the rain, hugging. And holding. And laughing. And jumping up and down on some trampoline somewhere in the past, celebrating like they’ve pulled off the greatest of stunts: We did it! We did it! Look what we made happen!
I like you. I like you too.
But the kiss is kind of in front of everyone – including both my parents – so it’s weird and awkward. I laugh and say out loud, ‘Why does this feel like a wedding?’