Tessa in Love (15 page)

‘Oh God, this is it,’ Wolfie said, when there was no time left. ‘Are you going to be OK?’

‘You’re the one I’m worried about,’ I said. Each second felt like the last second; everything I said felt like the last thing I’d be able to say before he went.

He squeezed me again. ‘I’m going to miss you so much.’

‘Yes,’ I said. It was all I could manage because I knew my voice would break.

‘Please don’t go off me,’ he said.

‘I won’t,’ I said, my voice tiny.

‘Or forget me.’

‘I won’t.’

‘I love you,’ Wolfie said.

‘I love you.’

‘I don’t want to stop holding you.’

‘Don’t stop,’ I said.

When he went through the final gate, I was praying he’d look back at me one more time, that he wouldn’t just keep on walking away. He turned, half smiled and then he was gone.

Out of the windows, I could see planes taking off -they looked so small and fragile, darting into the clouds and disappearing. One of them would be taking Wolfie all the way to the other side of the world. I pressed the heels of my freezing cold hands into my teary face to try to push the tears back in and tidy myself up a bit before I found Chunk’s parents, who were waiting to take me back home. They said nice things and made jokes about the two boys doing some real work for a change, but we were all sad, and I thought Chunk’s mum looked as if she wanted to cry as well. She asked me if I was hungry and offered me a Kit-Kat, but I felt sick and couldn’t imagine ever wanting to eat again. We’d started out very early that morning, and the tiredness and hungriness and teariness together made me feel cold and drained and paper-thin. After about twenty minutes, Chunk’s dad turned the radio on and we drove most of the rest of the way without speaking. My mind flashed images of Wolfie’s face, like a photograph album of his smiles. He’s gone, I thought.

I was feeling quite numb when I got home and my mum gave me a hug and asked if I was OK.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I think it hasn’t really sunk in yet.’ But that night I took a bath and cried, because he’d been able to leave me when we’d only just found each other, and I wondered how many things we’d let life put between us. I also cried happy tears, because I’d never felt so safe and loved before and, even though we wouldn’t be together for months, I would feel that way again. I checked my e-mail, where there was usually some romantic, goofy note from Wolfie on it by the time I went to bed, but there was only a note from Matty, saying she hoped I was OK and that I should call her if I wanted to talk. I knew I’d feel better hearing her voice, but it was easier to just crawl into bed and sleep away the sadness – and I fell asleep surprisingly quickly.

My family were brilliant over the next few days, because I was being sort of ridiculous. I moped, I watched nonstop reality TV and played all the songs that had meant things to Wolfie and me, and tried to sing them meaningfully when I was alone. After my initial lost appetite, I found I was perfectly able to eat whole packets of Jaffa cakes in one sitting. I was bored and lonely, and I sometimes lay on my bed staring at the ceiling thinking, I was happy before I met Wolfie, too – what did I do, then? What did I do with my days? I had to quickly learn to stop thinking about how I was going to fit every day around Wolfie, and remember not to waste what I’d previously thought of as the best time of the year. There was no pressure from work and the weather was great. I was, actually, sort of embarrassed about admitting to how sad I was without him. I thought everyone might think I was down for no real reason, and that they’d assure me the time would pass quickly, while secretly thinking I was being a bit wimpy.

What actually happened was that my family were sensitive and took my unhappiness seriously. They all seemed to be looking out for me and trying to cheer me up. My brother started forcing me to come and watch him and his mates playing in football matches, and my mum took me shopping and tried to buy me nice things, and my dad called me Tessie, the way he had when I was tiny, and took me to the pictures. I ended up growing closer to all of them that summer than I had been in years. I felt I was undergoing a real transformation, growing up.

But it was tough, right from the beginning. Wolfie e-mailed sooner than I’d expected. The good news was that there were lots of Internet cafes in Lima, but the bad news was that he wouldn’t be staying in Lima. He wouldn’t be too far from there, though, and hoped to be able to make regular-ish contact. Although he and Chunk had spent several weeks with Adam, organising their flights and accommodation, the exam period had been equally fraught and busy. There was a sense that he and Chunk had just trusted Adam to set everything up without really knowing every detail about what they’d be doing and how their days would be filled. He was just beginning to find out in proper detail what would be involved, and he kept me up to date as he did. He called every night for the first few nights to tell me he was excited to be there and missed me. He was using a cheap phone card that meant there was a lot of time-delay and echo on the line. Until we got used to it, we talked over each other all the time, and I repeated a lot of things that I thought he hadn’t heard, only to hear my own voice saying them back twice a couple of seconds later, sounding annoying and high-pitched.

Just under a fortnight after he’d gone, a letter arrived by post. There was something about old-fashioned written letters that made them very special and important, even though he’d already talked to me on the phone about everything he’d written. He mostly e-mailed rather than writing letters because the Internet was so quick, and he made it to web cafes fairly regularly. I knew how much he loved getting my mails, so I sent a lot – there was usually a pile-up of about twenty short notes by the time he got to them, that all said the same sort of thing – that I missed him like mad – or talked about incredibly mundane things like TV programmes – stuff that must have made me sound like an idiot considering how he was spending his summer. His e-mails talked a lot about how sad he was without me, and how little free time he had, and how hard he was finding it to settle in, but at the same time he was genuinely enthusiastic and full of excitement about everything he was doing.

‘I’m blown away by how beautiful it is. Every day. I have to come back and see it properly with my girl,’ he said to me on the phone.

‘That’s me, is it?’ I said, glowing with pleasure.

‘Yeah. You’re my girl,’ and I could hear the smile in his voice.

The out-of-date paper letters kept coming, although they were much less frequent than the e-mails. But he tried to send one a week, and I treasured them. They were longer and more detailed, because he wrote them in bed when he had lots of time and wasn’t on the way to anywhere. One said he wasn’t managing to find many vegetarian options -I knew this was no longer a problem – and talked in great detail about the night he and Chunk had spent in a weird little hotel with no locks on the doors. They’d woken up in the middle of the night to find a strange woman in the room with them, standing at the bottom of their beds, and both screamed, but later laughed at how scared they’d been. They were now staying with a friend of Adam’s in a little village near Manchay, and in the daytime helping repair a children’s home that had been completely destroyed by floods. Neither of them had any building experience, and, as Wolfie reminded me, they’d found it a struggle to put up a tent. The building manager therefore put them in charge of filling wheelbarrows with sand and going to fetch things.

‘Guess what,’ one letter said, ‘I found a place that developed photos, and I got through a reel quickly. In a country with some of the most stunning views in the world, it seems a bit unfair of me to also send you a not-so-great looking one.’

I was expecting something sad: he’d sent me a dozen or so photographs in the folded sheets of paper. But as I looked through them there was nothing bad. There were beautiful views of mountains with a crazy blue sky, others of palm trees and stunning buildings, pyramids of oranges in a street market, a gorgeous, ornamental cathedral. When I saw the last picture I realised what his letter had been referring to and laughed out loud: it was Wolfie in a little hotel room, holding up a hand-written sign that said,
I love you’,
and looking at me with big sad eyes. I knew he sort of meant it as a joke, with his over-the-top mournful expression and sad little sign, but I touched his face with my finger and looked at it for hours and loved it, because I didn’t have many pictures of him.

I showed the photos to Matty. She was making an extra special effort not to leave me out while she and Jim were doing fun coupley things and we still spent a lot of time alone together, the way we always had. I wanted to share some of Wolfie’s messages and stories with her, because somehow, if people knew that the romance was still happening between us, it made him seem more real, more mine, still officially my boyfriend and not just someone I talked to mostly online. Matty and I still watched the same trashy, romantic movies, and did absolutely nothing useful with our holiday, much to her mum’s annoyance. We’d been given book lists for A-level English, for instance, and could have made a start on them. But it was hard to begin new things when we’d been working for so long and so hard on our exams and while we still waited anxiously for the results.

Lima is six hours behind Britain, which meant that to do realtime e-mailing I often had to stay up late, because Wolfie was working all day. The work sounded incredibly tough, but I could tell he was loving it.

‘Physical labour is making me so fit,’ he wrote me in one e-mail, ‘You remember how puny I used to be? Weedy veggie? Get this, they let me do some of the brickwork today. You wait till you see me – you’re going to have a boyfriend as good-looking as you. I am
hot.
And if you think
I’m
hot – which you will – wait till you get a load of Chunk. Three weeks off the PlayStation ‘n’ pies regime has turned him into a dude.
Tsssss!’

Even over e-mail, he made me laugh.

While they worked, the children would sit around and watch. They asked Chunk and Wolfie about Britain and what children were like there. Wolfie sent photographs of the ones he’d made friends with. They were absolutely adorable – shiny hair and beautiful, dark eyes. There was one picture I loved with Chunk being practically squashed by a group of small boys, laughing as they bounced on him. In some of the pictures, Peru looked like heaven, with big leafy plants and sunshine everywhere, while others showed the dusty sparseness of the shanty towns, and children with sad smiles and scared faces. Wolfie’s photographs were incredible -sensitive and human and moving.

The A-level results came out first. My friends had all done pretty well, getting the right grades. Wolfie called me that morning, even though it would have been incredibly early for him, to tell me how he’d done. Chunk’s dad had woken them up, and then he’d called his dad, who, he said, had been waiting for a more sociable hour to call him. As far as his university requirements went – they wanted three Cs – he was a grade down in maths (D) but two grades up in history – he got an A – and one grade up in French. But since he was going to defer entry, he said, it probably wouldn’t matter if Liverpool didn’t take him, because he could reapply next year. He said he and Chunk were going out to celebrate. I went out with Jane and Lara a couple of nights later, and they were telling me how excited and nervous they were about leaving home. I felt sad and shivery, and young. No matter how close we’d become, there were some things I couldn’t do along with them and the differences kept us a little distant. And the next morning Wolfie had sent me an e-mail to tell me the two girls had called him and Chunk when they got in, and he realised how much they were missing by being away – how many important moments. He seemed quite sad, and it hurt me that I couldn’t hold him and tell him everything was OK, that everything was great. It would be a lie, but I needed to hear
someone
saying it.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject:
Re: Re: I miss you

Last night Adam brought us back a bottle of Pisco — which is an incredibly strong wine. We drank a couple of shots and got a bit drunk and talked about girls. Chunk said he’d always been in love with Jane. Ad talked about the girl he’d been living with all of last year, who left him two months ago. I didn’t have a sob story. But I’m having a harder time than

both of them, because they don’t have someone they miss and who isn’t with them.

Love, W

I got almost all As in my GCSEs. One A* in English, and a B in Drama. It was better than I’d been expecting, and I was pretty delighted and so were my family. Matty got more A*s, but more Bs, in her science and language subjects. For a long time, I had thought this would be the most important day in my life, but, when it happened, I’d already seen someone I loved getting his A-level results, and I was thinking more about the fact that I’d be able to call him that night and wouldn’t have to tell him any sad news. My mum knew how excited I was and, since I was using a special dial-up number that let me talk for four pence a minute, she let me talk to him practically all evening. One of my friends was having a party, but I knew I’d have spent the whole thing waiting to get home to speak to him, so I didn’t go. Matty tried hard to talk me into it, but I knew what I was doing. Sometimes when you’re sad, or dreading a party, you can get caught up in the spirit of it, and your mood will lift, and you’ll forget everything for a while. But if you go there knowing you’d rather be somewhere else, you’ll keep thinking about that thing. After shouting about how delighted he was with my results, Wolfie told me off, and said I shouldn’t be skipping parties and missing things just to talk to him. But then we just talked and talked and talked, and I knew I’d made the right choice.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject:
exclusive scoop!