Tessa in Love (13 page)

And what if he walked straight out again?

The first I heard about Peru was from Chunk, who was joke-flirting with Jane and asking if she’d wait for him. She played along, but I thought maybe, underneath it all, he wished she wasn’t joking.

I said, ‘What’s this about?’ and, when he told me, it became obvious that he’d talked about it to Wolfie before then. This was the plan: Chunk and Wolfie had kept in touch with someone called Adam, who used to work at Chunk’s dad’s paper. Adam had left the paper, gone to work

down south and was now a freelance foreign correspondent for national newspapers. He wasn’t much older than Chunk and Wolfie; he’d left school at sixteen and hadn’t gone to university. He was involved with a bunch of independent charily workers who had been working in South America. He was so
good,
but as far as I was concerned he was a bad influence. Chunk and Wolfie loved him – they thought he was the coolest. I met him a few times: he was quite sophisticated and dry and patronising, and he’d lost his northern accent. He was going to leave for Peru in the summer and stay a few months there, writing about and working with people in an area that had been hit by natural disasters – there had been flooding and mudslides that had devastated communities. He suggested to Chunk and Wolfie that they could go with him. They’d be spending time helping people who were trying to rebuild their destroyed villages with actual physical labour, and at the same time he’d said Wolfie would be able to get invaluable photojournalism experience, if he was really interested in doing something like that. And of course Adam had the contacts.

‘The whole summer?’ I asked Wolfie later, hoping it would just be a couple of weeks. My heart sank: this summer might be all I had left with him. If he went to uni at the end of September, I’d barely spend any time with

him from now until Christmas, and by then everything could be different.

‘I need to find out more about it,’ Wolfie said. ‘But I was thinking, maybe it might turn out to be a good thing for you and me if I did go.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Chunk’s been thinking of deferring going to uni and I think I should do the same. It might be possible for us to stay on longer with Adam, which would make it a real reason to take time out before university. I could make it a proper gap and take the whole year out – stay in town, get a job, and hang around annoying you all year.’

‘But I’ll lose you now!’

‘Yeah. That’s the thing,’ Wolfie said, and rested his head on my shoulder. I started to cry and hoped he couldn’t tell. It wasn’t just the thought of the immediate future; it was about everything that made me worry so much, about us changing. With the pressure of the exams higher than it had ever been, this was all too much for me. I stayed silent, because I didn’t want my voice to crack.

‘How are you feeling?’ Wolfie said. ‘Talk to me.’

T don’t like not knowing what’s going to happen. I wish we could just go on the way we are now.’

‘Me too,’ Wolfie said. ‘If I could take a year off just to follow you around, I’d have the time of my life.’ He

scraped his hand back from his forehead, flattening his hair. ‘But I have to think about what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.’

‘What
are
you going to do?’

‘I don’t
know.
I’ve always wanted to be a photo-journalist, but I didn’t think people like me got to do stuff like that. But if I had A-levels already and a ... like a portfolio, and I turned out to be any good at it, maybe I could apply next year for something like that. I never had any idea what I’d do with a politics degree.’

‘Your dad’s never going to let you go, though, is he?’ I said, hoping this might be the barrier I secretly wanted.

‘Maybe,’ Wolfie said. ‘Probably. You know my family – they’re a lot more hands-off than yours.’

The idea was there and it was all I could think about, although Wolfie had told me to try to get back into revision, and not worry too much. He forced me to work an extra hour every time I was ready to give in and snog him and he was really sweet to Matty, taking time to get to know her, and apologising to me for having underestimated her.

‘She’s fantastic,’ he said. ‘Like you. She knows everything about music and films – I feel quite stupid when I talk to her. She has, in fact, taught me that people from that, you know, “super-cool” crowd can be actually cool.’

‘Well, she’s in my crowd. Did you used to think she was shallow or something?’ I said, narrowing my eyes, but inside I was smiling all over. They were the two most important people in my life, and I’d always wanted them to really get each other, and had always worried that they wouldn’t.

‘Oh, she’s incredibly
shallow,’
he joked, ‘but she’s a good egg. She’d cancel a hair appointment if you needed her. She’d give you her last Prada lip balm.’

I hit him playfully. ‘But she would!’

‘I know,’ Wolfie said. ‘I mean it. And I don’t really think she’s shallow – I think she’s really funny. Intentionally and unintentionally funny. You and she are going to have a fantastic summer.’

I knew he hadn’t meant to say it, but I knew that it meant he’d decided. He saw my face and understood.

‘It’ll go like that,’ Wolfie said desperately, snapping his fingers. ‘We’ll be in touch the whole time. But I’ll miss you like I’d miss breathing.’

I looked deep into his brown eyes, and he frowned and smiled at the same time. And I suddenly got it: I knew why he wanted to go, and I knew how proud I’d be when he came back.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you have this chance and I want you to take it.’

‘I love you,’ Wolfie said. ‘Love like this lasts.’

W
e had two mid-week days off together halfway through our exams and Wolfie said we needed to take a full day’s break to clear our heads. I thought my mum would just say no, but to my amazement she agreed.

‘You’ve been doing the work,’ she said. ‘A day off may help it to settle in your head. And you can revise tomorrow. But by now you need to take it a little easier, he’s right. You want to be making sure you’re healthy, mentally healthy, not cramming more in.’

So books were banned, as was listing history dates and physics formulas. It was hard to get my head to stop at that point. I was dreaming English quotations. Equations rolled in front of my eyes as I was falling asleep. Wolfie turned up at nine a.m. and chatted to my brother while I got my things together. He’d been trying to get Jack into one of the bands he liked, and Jack was asking him about their latest album.

‘Where are we going?’ I shouted, wondering whether I should wear sandals or trainers.

I heard them laughing at me.

‘Hurry up!’ Wolfie shouted.

‘Well, will there be walking involved?’

‘No, I planned to pull you everywhere on a skateboard,’ Wolfie shouted again. ‘What do you think?’

‘But what
sort
of walking?’ I called again.

Wolfie came upstairs, and shut my bedroom door behind him. He folded his arms and stared hard at me.

‘You don’t understand,’ I said, turning back to my wardrobe. ‘Girls don’t just have one pair of shoes. We have shoes that look good but hurt. We have shoes that don’t hurt but don’t look good …’ He didn’t say anything, and I looked at him again. ‘What?’

He lowered his chin and looked up at me. ‘Hi, you,’ he said.

I smiled. ‘What?’

He took a step towards me.

‘Yes?’ I said, mock-innocent. ‘What do you want?’

He slid his hand around the small of my back. We kissed. We kissed a lot.

As we walked together towards the bus stop, I asked Wolfie what he wanted to do today.

‘Well, you’ve got a few choices,’ he said. ‘We could get a train to York, and go wandering around the little streets there – the Shambles. It’s very cute and olde worlde. Nice tea shops. We could see a film. There’s a photography exhibition in …’

‘You know what?’ I said, looking up at him. ‘Can we do nothing? We’re both studied stupid. How about we just walk and talk rubbish and hold on to each other? I don’t have you here for very much longer.’

‘Good plan,’ he said.

And we
really
talked. We’d both been under so much pressure that we hadn’t just let ourselves go for such a long time – both of us had been too worried about upsetting the other or making things hard. Even more, we were both worried about making our last weeks together sad. Neither of us wanted that – we were both desperately trying to make sure we had a good time during every minute. But, in trying so hard, we’d started to kind of lose sight of enjoying ourselves. Wolfie and Chunk had been trying to organise their time around revision, research, contacting universities to ask about deferral, and talking to Adam about how they’d get to Peru and where they’d stay. Wolfie’s mum had agreed to pay Wolfie’s air fare.

‘How did that go?’ I asked him. He smiled a bit too bravely.

‘Really good,’ he said, nodding. Then he sighed. ‘Ah, you know, me and my mum, we never quite match up. I don’t think she really thinks of me as hers. And I sort of worry that every time we let a year go by without seeing each other, like we just have, that it makes it easier for her to let go. One day I’m going to be thirty and she’s going to have missed, you know, my whole life. And it’s not a bad life. There are some bits of it I’m sort of proud of. Everything that’s happened this year ...’

‘If she didn’t care, she wouldn’t be helping you,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t have to, you know.’

‘Yeah …’ Wolfie said thoughtfully. ‘I want you to meet her, sometime.’ He squeezed my sides. ‘Not to … I mean, just so you know where I’m from. The thing is, I think you would like her.’

‘When you get back, maybe,’ I said.

‘Do you know how much I’m going to miss you?’ Wolfie said. ‘I’m going to stay up late every night talking to Chunk about you, and wish he was you.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ I said, forcing my mouth into a smile. I didn’t want him to see me upset about this today.

We bought lollies from an ice cream van, that turned our tongues bright pink. We read the jokes on the sticks to each other. We made up stories about people who walked past. We played guessing games with film and music clues. We found a little bench in the garden of a churchyard, and I rested my head on his shoulder, and we sat quietly for ages until the sky started to turn pink. And, on this day of doing nothing, I thought I’d never felt so old and so young before. In some ways, I didn’t feel ready for everything that was happening around me, but at the same time I wanted desperately to move on to the next level, where – it seemed to me – I’d have some space to relax. What I mean by this is, where I was now it felt like everyone else was making all my decisions for me, and for the first time in my life I felt ready to make those choices myself.

As he walked me back home, we went down a street I never usually walked down, and I told him a story about when I was really little and I followed a marching band or street procession or something, I didn’t really remember who they were, only that they were going past my house, and I got lost and knocked on someone’s door to ask them if I could call my mum, and a horrible old man answered, and just stared at me for a minute and then shouted, ‘BOO!’ and I ran all the way home in tears, somehow finding the right way back. But, ever since then, I’d been scared of that door, although I was only half sure it was the same one.

‘This door? Do you want me to tell the old man off for you?’ Wolfie said.

‘No! You can’t go bullying old men!’ I said.

‘Yeah, sure …’ he teased. ‘He made you cry. I’ll sort him out.’ He mimed going to knock on the door, and I pulled him back by the arm, balancing on my heels and giggling hysterically. At last he stopped, and we carried on going home, leaning on each other.

‘I suppose he might be dead by now,’ I said, feeling sad – sometimes when I felt most happy I felt sad at the same time. ‘I never told my mum, because I knew she’d go mad if she found out I’d knocked on a stranger’s door. But I used to pull her away when she tried to take me down here.’

‘I love it when you tell me things you haven’t told anyone else,’ Wolfie said.

‘Really?’ I said.

‘Yeah. It’s like you’ve let me know the real you,’ Wolfie said. ‘You know, it’s kind of really special… that you trust me, that you feel you can tell me anything or talk about anything – you’re not holding part of yourself back.’

‘Tell me something you’ve never told anyone else.’

‘I love you.’