Chapter 4 Adam “Don’t You Want Me” #3
Driving one-handed, with no seat belt on, and with the minibus’s tires squealing in protest, Dad reverses out onto the road, expertly missing the low garden wall by mere inches before revving off down the street, leaving a belch of black smoke in our wake.
But even though him and Adam are grinning at each other as they continue their duet, another part of me feels sick.
Like I should warn him that this is his bloody coffin.
He’s got no idea that this is the same minibus that him and Mum will die in on their way back from dropping us off at the airport.
Only this isn’t real. None of this is, because it can’t be, right?
The journey into town passes in a blur, with Dad calling in at Ladbrokes to stick a couple of quick bets on the Kempton horse meet—“just a little flutter”—and with me freaking out inside of Young Adam, goggling at all the brand-new Audi Quattros and Ford Sierras on the road, along with the crazily sexist billboard ads for Polaroid cameras and Reebok ERS shoes and Drakkar Noir aftershave.
All the while with Adam’s thoughts burbling away in the background: homework he needs doing, ideas for a game he’s been working on with Darius, but mostly thoughts of Juliet, her eyes, her hair, and that one time he once really, nearly actually made her laugh…
Then those butterflies he’s feeling, I start feeling them too. Like my whole body’s made up of them, like it might fly away. What will it be like to see Jules young again? Even if this isn’t real.
Dad parks down the bottom of Regency Square, overlooking the churning sea.
Only look, there, where the i360 observation tower should be stabbing up into the bright blue sky, there’s nothing.
Like the view’s been Photoshopped. Even weirder, the West Pier, which I watched burn down in 2003 until only a skeletal shell of it remained, is still jutting out into the sea in all its former Victorian glory.
Grabbing their painting gear from the back of the van, Adam and Dad head into the Peregrine through the basement tradesman’s entrance. Straight away, Adam offers to pop up to the kitchen to see if he can whip them up a cup of tea, but really because he knows it’s where she’ll be working today.
The shock of seeing her hits me like a bucket of iced water.
His Juliet. There through the kitchen doorway.
Aged seventeen, dressed in waitress black and whites, with her long blonde hair tied up.
She’s clearing away dirty plates in the dining room.
Still so young, so ridiculously young. Still just a kid. Like him.
Catching sight of him, she turns, looking radiant in the morning light, and smiles. And Jesus, the feeling he gets. Like he’s hearing a chorus of angels in his head. With a full cinematic orchestra. In Dolby Stereo. On speed.
So, say hello, I’m thinking. Right, just like you practiced in front of the mirror.
The last couple of B&B guests have just finished their breakfast and are heading for the door, while the owner, Rose O’Grady, is still nowhere to be seen. This is his chance, and he knows it.
It’s just the two of them. It’s fate.
But all that Hey, Juliet. How’s your week been? flops right out of his head. Instead, he just stares. Or, more accurately, ogles. At her legs. Then her bum. Then…well, everything. I mean, Jesus, isn’t it so obvious that he’s going to get caught?
“Do you need something, Adam?” she asks, her bright blue eyes suddenly fixed on his.
“Er, I was just looking for Mrs. O’Grady,” he lies.
Right, sure, that’s all you were looking at, you little perv…
“Dad was hoping we could get a cup of tea,” he hurries on.
“Oh, I can sort that,” she says, walking over to a table with a stainless-steel tea urn on it.
Then finally courage erupts, welling up inside Adam, right alongside his near-total fear that she’s about to tell him to go sling his hook.
“Um, I got you something,” he says. And I can feel it. His hand in his pocket on the tape. “You know, because you said you lost a lot of your music when you and your mum moved flats.”
“I did?”
These two little words send Adam’s anxiety spiraling. In case he got it wrong. In case he misheard. In case he’s making a fool of himself. Shit, he thinks, what the hell am I meant to do now? Because he’s already pulled the tape out and she’s seen it in his hand.
“You know, like the Human League, I think you said,” he finally splutters.
“Oh, yeah. Now I remember. And, yeah, I bloody love them,” she says.
Relief surges through him. “Well, here. It’s, er, a compilation of all that sort of thing, and some more modern stuff from this year too…”
All those songs he’s so carefully selected and ordered while thinking of her, all the ones I remember recording myself…
“Oh, wow. Thanks, Adam. That’s really…sweet?” she says.
But there’s a question mark at the end of the sentence. Like he’s being weird? Is he? he panics. Even that word sweet has got his mind doing somersaults. What kind of sweet does she mean? As in sappy or nice?
“Hey, you know what?” she says. “Rose won’t be back for a bit. So, what the hell, let’s put it on.”
She takes it from him and switches off the crappy Richard Clayderman lift Muzak Mrs. O’Grady is always playing in here, and slots in the tape. When she turns back to Adam she starts beaming, just as the first beats of “Don’t You Want Me” start up.
Then it really is happening, they’re talking, and it’s everything he hoped…
as the League segues into Neneh Cherry, into Young MC, then Transvision Vamp…
and they natter about school, then gossip about mutual friends, then chunter on about where they want to go to college, and all the countries they’d like to visit around the world.
Only then the big red dining room door swings open, and a guy walks in.
I kind of flinch—even though I don’t have a body to flinch with—when I recognize him at the same time Adam does.
Mickey Ratty. He of Jules’s shitty “rattoo.” I mean, just look at the little scrote, in his poxy white puffy nylon-shell suit, like an overgrown baby in Pampers.
And to think I ever thought he was cooler than me, just because he was two years older and drove a black Subaru XT with gold “go faster” stripes emblazoned on its side.
“Nice tune,” he says, mock-dancing to the Bangles’s “Eternal Flame,” like it’s something crap, which it’s not, sashaying across the room between the tables to where Juliet is.
Right, like he’d know a good tune if it kicked him in the ponytail.
He stares down at the tape box.
“Adam made it for me,” she explains. “A compilation.”
“Aw,” he says. “Sweet.”
Right, and this time it’s definitely code for sappy. Adam has no trouble decrypting that.
“Just so long as you’re not sweet on her too, sonny,” Ratty warns him.
“Er, no. Of course not,” Adam says. Okay, stutters. He stutters it.
“Good. Because she’s already taken, aren’t you, babe?” Ratty says, as he turns his broad, muscular back on Adam and kisses Jules smushily on the lips.
He then grabs a congealed rasher of bacon off a dirty plate, wedges it between two cold pieces of toast, and takes a massive bite, like a dog tearing meat off a bone.
“Don’t be gross,” Jules says, but she’s laughing.
“Needs HP Sauce, luv,” he tells her, heading for the kitchen door.
Catching Adam glaring after him, Jules bashfully pushes a stray strand of hair back behind her ear.
“What?” she asks. “Don’t you like him?”
“No, he’s all right,” Adam lies. But then before I can stop myself, I’m imposing myself on him again.
“It’s just he’s got the worst name ever, that’s all,” I make Adam say.
“Mickey Ratty. Like he’s a dirty, ratty Mickey Mouse.
And, I mean, imagine if you carried on going out with him and then got so drunk you had a cartoon rat tattooed on your shoulder for eternity. ”
She laughs. “But why would I? Why would anyone be stupid enough to do that?”
“You’d be surprised.”
They stare at each other for a beat.
“Anyway, it’s not like your name’s much better, is it, A-Hole?” she says, a cheeky glint in her eyes.
Of course, because she’d already worked that one out.
“A-Hole?” Ratty cackles, marching back in, brown sauce dripping from his fleshy lips. “Is that really your name? As in arsehole?” He spells it out, in case anyone else might not have got it.
“Yeah, well, at least my face doesn’t look like one,” I get Adam to tell him.
“What did you say?” Ratty snaps, dropping what’s left of his bacon sarnie down his crisp white front.
“And do you know why that’s called a ponytail?” I make Adam ask, pointing at Ratty’s head. “Because when you lift it up, all you’ll find underneath is an arsehole.”
Now looking like he’s about to explode, Ratty lunges at him.
But even as I try to get Adam to push him back, it’s like I’m fading.
From the corner of my eye—or the corner of Adam’s eye, at least—I catch sight of the clock on the wall. A few seconds to ten. Almost exactly an hour since I first woke up in his body.
The instant the little hand joins the big hand pointing north, I feel that hideous whirlwind of flashing lights enveloping me again…
before hauling me out of Adam’s body…leaving him and Ratty arguing and Jules trying to break them up…
and with all of them completely unaware of this crazy tornado that’s dragging me deeper and deeper inside . . .