Chapter 34
THIRTY-FOUR
I’ll never forget falling in love with Ade Okojie.
It wasn’t in the very first moment we met – as he worked his way around the rooms in the apartment in our student-hall, charming each and every person there. I actually thought he was arrogant, kind of pretentious, and far too good-looking to take seriously. No, I fell for him a month later.
We were all supposed to be going out… somewhere.
I honestly don’t remember where or what we were going to do.
A gallery opening? A nightclub I didn’t want to go to anyway?
Dawn organised it, and Sasha made sure that we all agreed to go.
I really was planning to until I got sick and couldn’t.
Everyone looked sad and supportive, but I knew they would head off into the London night all the same.
I mean, it was only a cold, so I didn’t expect anything more, to be honest, but after a thrilling montage of the girls getting dolled up and the boys making the minimum possible effort to prepare, Ade went to the corridor to say, “I won’t be going out tonight, sorry. Someone needs to look after Clara.”
I doubt I was the only one who was shocked, but they didn’t try to convince him otherwise.
Not even Sasha worked her persuasive magic – she and Tom hadn’t been together for long, so I suppose she was distracted.
But the real reason that this was so readily accepted was that, even if he never organised our social calendar or rounded up the troops, Ade was our leader.
The music we listened to together was his kind of music.
We all cooked dishes that he’d mentioned – even if he didn’t know the difference between a stick of celery and a balloon whisk.
On Wednesday nights we watched films that we knew he would like, because we wanted him to like us in much the same way; we wanted our names to be the ones he reeled off when asked about his best friends – just as he said Blue Velvet, Days of Heaven and Before Sunrise when listing his favourite movies.
So the others went out, and he brought me hot drinks all night and read me poems. He was so warm and caring.
It was a side of his personality that the wider world rarely got to see, and I felt privileged to catch a glimpse of it.
We fell asleep on my bed, me under the covers and him on top.
And when I woke up in the middle of the night, with a record still spinning on my dad’s old turntable and the glow from my fish tank lighting up the room, I knew that I was in love.
He got sick himself two days later, which only made it sweeter that he’d spent so much time with me. And I admit that I held out hope he might have feelings for me, but I didn’t really imagine we could ever be together.
From the very beginning, Ade made his ambitions clear.
He told us that he wasn’t sure whether he’d actually finish his degree because he expected to be famous before then.
It wasn’t exactly arrogant – I mean, it would have been if anyone else had said it – but Ade knew this to be the case and was neither proud nor embarrassed by his imminent success.
I was just happy to have found my place in the group. I was the quiet one – obviously – the one the others came to when they had a problem. I wasn’t the type to date a burgeoning rock star. So I shouldn’t have hoped for anything more when, in our second term, Ade told me he had a secret.
My cheeks grew hotter. It was the afternoon, and everyone else was in lectures, but I still felt proud that he would confide in me.
I admit that the words “I love you, Clara” were in my head.
I’m sure I was willing him to utter them, but instead he said, “I slept with Sasha when she was annoyed at Tom for going out and getting drunk with his brainless mates.”
That was when I knew he would never accept me as a girlfriend.
And sure, my heart broke just the tiniest bit, and I called myself an idiot for contemplating the possibility he would allow himself to be seen in public with me.
But I was a mackerel who’d fallen in love with a dolphin, and I should never have expected anything more.
It wasn’t until the second year of my course that anything changed – after we left halls and moved into a maisonette together near New Cross.
Perhaps it was because Sasha and Tom and then Bridget and Jake had coupled up.
Ade suddenly started spending more time with me.
He would sit and watch me paint or just read in my room when there was no one else about.
I honestly didn’t think anything of it, other than that I was lucky to look at the prettiest man I’d ever known.
He sang me his new songs, and I pretended that they were about me.
We ate dinner together and listened to audiobooks of long, worthy novels that I would never have got around to reading otherwise.
It was familiar. It was friendly. It was nice.
One night towards the end of the year, after Ade had broken the hearts of countless other girls across the city, we found ourselves alone in the house.
He sang a new song called “Promises”, and hearing it for the first time, it cut through me.
I can’t say whether he knew the effect it would have, but for the rest of the night, I was hypnotised by him.
He talked about the first time we’d stayed at home together, as if it was just as important to him as it was to me, and I felt myself melting.
He was obviously more experienced in love than I was, and he must have known just how much power he had.
Perhaps he was bored and fancied shooting mackerel in a barrel, or perhaps he really did like me.
It’s hard to say at what point things changed for him, but he suddenly seemed nervous.
His hand was shaking as he placed it against my cheek.
I wondered for a moment whether it was an act he put on to get girls to like him, but then he kissed me and I no longer cared.
The rest of that night passed in a blur.
I do know that we woke up to the sound of our flatmates coming home.
I doubt he realised I was awake as he grabbed his clothes and sprinted back to his own room, but I was.
I watched the man I’d loved for so long running away from me, and it was almost as overpowering a sensation as when he’d touched me for the first time.
Things were different after that. I wondered whether he regretted what had happened or worried about how I’d reacted to it. He never sought me out on my own anymore, and I came to realise that he didn’t want to have to spell it out that I was just a one-night stand.
The term ended, and we said goodbye. I didn’t know I was pregnant for ages because it simply never occurred to me that it was a possibility.
I know that sounds ridiculous, and it’s not as if I was unaware that the two things are connected, but I didn’t imagine it happening to a girl like me.
Which makes me sound like a true moron, but I was one of those women who never had the excruciating periods that the health education teacher at school had prepared us for.
It was never at the top of my mind and so, when it finally occurred to me to take a test, I felt as if someone had planted a carving knife in my brain.
I had no clue what to do next. All I knew was that I couldn’t tell anyone. But then I did the most careless thing imaginable and left the evidence there in the bin in my family bathroom for my mother to find.
She rang the university to delay my final year.
She talked about how we would raise the baby, and while she was supportive throughout, I never felt that she was particularly interested in how I felt or what I wanted to do.
I wrote to Ade because she told me it was important, and when all that she had planned for me went out the window, I wrote to him again to let him off the hook.
It’s a strange thing to love and hate a man at the same time.
It leaves you feeling like two separate people.
I knew I couldn’t go back to university when the summer was over, even if there was no baby to stop me.
I doubted whether I would ever finish my degree, and the longer I spent away from London, the worse I felt.
I doubted that I would ever fall in love or have children.
It seemed that my value to the world had already dropped to zero.
Back in my childhood bedroom, my dreams of being an artist felt as immature as the frilly yellow curtains and the framed picture of my first cat that was still on the shelf beside the door.
Whatever depression I had endured on losing my baby and losing touch with my friends was nothing compared to the depths I now descended into. I was lost for years.
I would wake up in the morning and feel as though I’d left an important part of my brain somewhere.
I felt as though I was wandering around an endless forest with no breadcrumbs to guide me home.
My mother really did try to help this time.
She took me to the doctor, and I was offered all the antidepressants that I could ever need.
They made me feel more stable but numb. The bad thoughts were still there in my head, but they no longer had the stinging emotions to go with them.
I spent time in hospital. I went to three different kinds of therapy.
I saw a little crack of light above me and tried to reach it, but it was never easy.
I felt that same sense of disconnection when I crashed beneath the water yesterday. I thought that the best thing for everyone would be if I simply kept sinking lower. Bridget swam out to save me, but I can’t say what pulled me back to the surface all those years ago.
I eventually began to feel like myself once more, so perhaps time really does heal all wounds. It helped that I still had Dawn as a friend. She stayed in touch throughout and treated me exactly as she had when we’d first met. She never really changed, and she made me believe that I hadn’t either.
I started painting again and volunteered at the home where my grandmother lived.
I ran art classes there and sat listening to anyone who needed some company.
Eventually, it turned into a paying job, and that’s pretty much my life up to now.
I stuck to my simple routine because the thought of deviating from it and having to start again was just too much.
When Ade sent me the invitation, I thought it had to be a joke.
For years, every time I turned on my mobile phone, I imagined there being a missed call from him.
Every time I picked up the post from my front door mat, I pictured my name in his handwriting.
And then one day, there it was. It was only ever going to happen once I’d given up entirely.
I couldn’t decide whether to come at first. The thought of him brought back so many emotions, most of which weren’t particularly healthy. But I sat thinking about what to do and, after an hour alone in my room, I wrote the email to confirm my attendance at whatever it was I’d been invited to.
I didn’t care about the first-class tickets or the helicopter.
None of that was why I’d fallen in love with him.
What mattered was the moment on the yacht when we saw one another again for the first time in eleven years.
He went round the group greeting our friends, just as he had when we were moving into halls.
I sometimes imagine what my life would have been like if another flat had been allocated to me, but I have a sneaking suspicion that we would have found one another all the same.
Our stars were crossed, even if we lacked the romance of similarly doomed couples who’d come before us.
I watched as he shook Tom by the hand, kissed Sasha on both cheeks, and hugged Bridget.
Once he’d charmed the rest of them, it was my turn.
He looked me dead in the eyes and I thought I might cry.
It was probably a good thing that he pulled me in for a hug; it gave me time to calm down.
His cologne smelt just as expensive as I imagine it is, and his linen suit was soft against my cheek, just as his hand had once been.
I tried to get reacquainted with everyone, though it didn’t feel the way it used to.
We were too cautious and tentative for that, but it was still special.
I was happy just listening to their conversations.
Sasha and Tom were trying not to bicker.
Jake did his very best not to stare at the girl he loved and probably still does.
Ade monitored everything, just as I did, but he knew how to keep everyone entertained and entranced, even when Tom lost his temper.
It couldn’t last. I fell or jumped or was pushed off the side of the yacht.
Mick the drummer, who had no real connection to this intimate reunion, was found dead in his bathroom.
Sasha disappeared entirely. Ryan was stabbed to death.
Jake came to tell us that he’d found Bridget murdered in her bedroom, and then he left me alone with Tom and Ade as they tried to kill one another.