Chapter 11 Mabel #2
I’d been wondering as I walked where I’d be most likely to find Blake on a Saturday, but I’d got no further than the college or the vaulted nave of a church.
Part of me couldn’t imagine him existing outside the places where we’d already met.
As if I’d made him up. That would at least be an acceptable excuse for why I kept thinking about him: because he was at home in my head.
Forcing the thought aside, I went upstairs and rang the bell. A few seconds passed before I heard footsteps on the other side of the door. A moment later it opened, and there he stood.
Something was different. His dark hair was wet, combed back from his forehead as if he’d just showered.
Yet it also seemed thicker than I’d ever seen it before.
His cheeks were unusually rosy, the dark circles under his eyes less pronounced.
And even in the rich brown of his irises, I thought I saw a subtle sheen, as if he’d slept properly for the first night in weeks.
His eyes widened slightly when he saw me.
‘You look different. Sort of … healthier.’
At the sound of my voice, he blinked. Almost like it had suddenly dawned on him that I was really there. For a split second I wondered whether he, too, thought I might be a figment of the imagination.
‘How do you know where I live?’
I grinned. ‘You said it yourself. I have a knack for showing up where I’m not wanted.’
He frowned, opening the door a little wider as if to let me in. But when he realised what he was doing he pulled it back again, so that I couldn’t see anything of the flat behind him. ‘What do you want?’
‘To ask you if you have time for a walk with me. And these.’ I held up a cardboard tray with two cups and a bag.
Davie had tried persuading me to wait until the next time I was invited to one of their parties.
But every minute I sat around doing nothing felt dangerously negligent.
I had to speak to someone now. And Blake seemed like the safest choice.
It was just unfortunate that my heart kept beating faster and more wildly the longer he looked at me.
‘Come on.’ I tapped the brim of my black cap, which had belonged to my mother. ‘I’ll leave this on so that no one will recognise me. That way you don’t have to feel ashamed to be seen with me.’
The teasing tone couldn’t hide the crack in my voice.
As comfortable as I felt at the university, I knew I didn’t really fit in.
I studied too much and partied too little, I took things too seriously and didn’t bother pretending to find things funny when they weren’t.
I wore my ladder-ridden tights like armour, yet I couldn’t lie to myself: there were times when people’s pointed words cut straight through them.
I didn’t mind being an outsider, not with most people.
But Blake… I hated to admit it, but with him, I evidently did mind.
He shook his head, drops of water pattering onto the collar of his russet jumper. ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of.’
I felt myself grow hot, and bit my cheek trying not to smile.
‘Tell that to your face. You don’t look too keen.
’ My gaze slid to the neckline of his jumper, but he moved his hand to cover the bare skin below his collarbone.
Yet trying to hide it only served to make the presence of the tattoo more obvious, bringing me back into the moment. To the reason why I was here.
Blake leant against the doorframe. ‘I thought we’d established that this wasn’t a good idea.’
‘Because you’re not a good person, yeah, I recall. So that’s a no?’
He hesitated, then his face sealed itself again into a smooth, cool mask. ‘It is.’
‘Fine.’ Tucking the bag under my arm, I reached into my coat pocket. ‘Then could you tell me where to find Ashton? I need to thank him.’
‘What…’
He trailed off as I drew out my hand. I was holding a two-inch black feather, which I twirled in the air before his face.
‘Pretty, isn’t it? I’m fairly sure it’s from a starling.
Impressive birds, honestly. They’re more mysterious than you’d think at first glance.
’ I gave a guileless smile, but I knew he could hear the provocative note in my voice.
For a few seconds, I was sure he was about to slam the door in my face, but he simply shut his eyes for a moment. Then, in one fluid movement, he grabbed his jacket and scarf from a peg by the door and stepped outside. ‘Let’s go, Pica.’
* * *
As we left the town centre behind us, we drank our lukewarm coffee in silence.
The November light was growing softer and brighter as the day went on, its silvery shimmer washing over us with ever-greater intensity.
Every now and then, my eyes darted to Blake: the open coat, the dark brown woollen scarf around his neck, the quiet vigilance in his gaze as it ceaselessly scanned the world around him.
I knew I was under his watch as well, but he didn’t actually look at me until I held out the bag.
He reached in and took out a pastry without hesitation.
I nibbled the edge of a cinnamon roll as I watched him take a cautious bite of his own pastry, then his mouth twisted.
‘Not great?’
‘I don’t like raisins.’
‘Then why did you take the pain aux raisins?’
Blake examined it wistfully. ‘Because I want to like them.’
I couldn’t help laughing. ‘You’re one of a kind, you know that?’
A faint grin flitted across his face, just as mournful as the rest of him. ‘I wish. But I’m afraid appearances can be deceiving.’
I could only stare at him. He was the strangest person I’d ever met, but perhaps because of that … the most intriguing. My gaze wandered down his arm, snagging on his wrist. I had to take a second look to be sure I wasn’t mistaken.
‘Your watch. It’s stopped, hasn’t it?’
Immediately Blake grabbed his sleeve and tugged it down over the dial. ‘Yeah, it stopped working ages ago.’
I wanted to ask why someone with his bank balance didn’t buy a new one or get it repaired, but he was obviously uncomfortable, so I didn’t push. ‘Don’t worry, I wasn’t planning to nick it,’ I teased. ‘You can call me Pica if you want, but I’m not that much of a magpie.’
It hadn’t taken me long to find that pica was the Latin name for the common magpie – and even less to remember that he’d asked me the night we met if I was planning on stealing anything.
Blake said nothing, but I saw a smile of approval creep into the corners of his mouth.
We’d been walking along the Cam for a while, and as we reached a bend, the path led us onto Stourbridge Common, one of Cambridge’s oases, where the noisy city seemed further away than it really was. I moved to let Blake walk nearest the river, while I kept to his right.
‘Why are you afraid of the water?’ Seeing my blank look, he smiled. ‘You’re being careful not to walk right by the bank. Either you’re planning to push me in or you’re scared of falling in yourself.’
I hesitated, but steeled myself. Zoe had already told this part of my story to Ashton anyway.
Plus, if you wanted someone to be honest with you, you generally had to give them something of yourself first. Even if it was the kind of truth you’d prefer to keep under lock and key, the kind of truth that let slip too much.
Talking about what you’d been through always meant revealing who you were.
In the end, a personality was nothing but a pane of glass smudged with the fingerprints of experience – and this particular smudge was the size of a hand, placed directly over my heart.
‘When I was seven years old, my cousin and I were playing hide and seek, and I climbed into a boat. It came unmoored somehow and drifted away from the shore. I was in there for hours before they found me, and by then it was the middle of the night.’
‘Did anything happen to you?’
I shook my head. ‘I was a bit dehydrated, that’s all.
But all those hours by myself, nothing but black, unfathomable water all around me …
it felt like something was looming out of it.
There was no way out, you know? No escape from what was closing in.
There was this sense of … being trapped.
Powerless against the universe. It made me realise it’s impossible to ever fully be in control. ’
‘So that’s why you’re always trying to control everything.’ It didn’t sound like a question, more like an answer to something he’d been wondering for some time.
I wanted to contradict him, but suddenly my therapist’s voice popped into my head.
Emotions can never be fully controlled, and that’s okay, she’d said when I couldn’t stop crying after my mother died.
I cried at the supermarket, on the bus, at school.
In ordinary, everyday moments it would hit me out of nowhere: nothing was ordinary anymore, because the core of my everyday life was gone.
Without it, you lost your balance. I’d lost it – I’d lost myself.
And no matter what my therapist said, it wasn’t okay.
It was awful. It ripped the ground out from beneath my feet and the sky from my mind.
No down, no up: only a terrible nothingness, and I fell and fell.
So I tried to find a new midpoint. A core made up of routine and security, something to brace myself against, something unconditional.