Heart-Shaped Bruise (15 page)

I unscrewed the lid and swigged some. It was awful –
cheap
– but just what I needed.

‘Please?’ he said with a laugh as I winced, and when he did, I noticed that he had the same colour eyes as Mike, that impossible
blue
blue. Swimming-pool blue. It didn’t do anything for me, but if Olivia had been there, she would have licked his face. I don’t even know why I thought of her then. I shouldn’t have. Say what
you like about me, but as soon as Dad was arrested she walked away from me without so much as a glance over her shoulder.

Even with my black heart and rotten bones, I could never do that to someone.

I held the bottle to my chest for a moment, then handed it to him. ‘Okay.’

‘So,’ he said, stopping to swallow a mouthful. ‘Why are you hiding up here?’

‘Not hiding.’

‘If you want to be alone, I’ll go,’ he said, making no move to.

‘Do what you like,’ I told him, taking the bottle back.

‘We have sociology together,’ he said, watching me drink.

‘I know.’

‘I really fancy you.’

‘Oh,’ I said with a gasp, almost dropping the bottle. And that’s all I could say. No one has ever just come out and said something like that to me before. It usually takes weeks of hair pulling and flirting to get a boy to admit something like that.

I must have been staring at him, because he laughed. ‘Sorry. I can’t believe I just told you that.’ He stopped to take the bottle from me again. ‘Bloody Rioja.’

He said it wrong again, but it made me giggle. He looked down at me with this soft, loose smile and when I smiled back, he leaned down and pressed his mouth against mine. With hindsight, I should have seen it coming, but at the time, it seemed to come from nowhere so the shock of it made me take a step back.

‘Sorry,’ he breathed, but he didn’t look sorry at all.

‘No. It’s okay. I just—’

‘I know,’ he interrupted with a nod.

‘I wasn’t expecting it.’

‘I didn’t mean to pounce on you.’

‘That’s okay.’ It wasn’t, but I didn’t know what else to say.

I think he took that as my blessing, because he reached for the bottle of wine and put it on top of one of the cardboard boxes. I wanted to take it back because I felt like I needed to do something with my hands, but he stepped closer before I could.

‘I really like you, Rose,’ he said, his voice lower. Warmer.

‘Okay.’

‘Really,
really
like you,’ he said with a wicked grin.

‘Okay.’

I waited for something to happen, for my hands to shake or my heart to flutter in that way it did whenever the sleeve of Sid’s shirt brushed against my bare arm. But there was nothing. Then he pressed a finger to the heart-shaped locket Dad bought me for my thirteenth birthday and it made me shiver. Not in a good way, but it wasn’t bad, either. It was kind of between the two.

When he lifted his hand and tucked my hair behind my ear, I knew what was coming and held my breath as he dipped his head towards mine again. My instinct was to put my hands up, but as soon as I felt the nearness of him – the
heat
of him – I suddenly couldn’t move. My fingers brushed against the cotton of his T-shirt for just a moment and I lifted my eyelashes to look at him as I pressed my palms against his chest. I immediately felt the steady throb of his heart and when his lips touched mine, his
heartbeat got quicker and quicker and quicker. I did that to him, I realised, as I felt his chest heave. I did that to him.

I hadn’t kissed a boy for such a long time and it felt strange. There was no choir of angels, no butterflies in my stomach, and the only movement I felt beneath my feet was the vibrations from the party below. But it was nice. Easy. And after feeling so alone a few minutes before, it was a relief not to be.

So I closed my eyes and kissed him back, not because I fancied him or because what he said was particularly charming, but because I wanted to feel something that wasn’t the loss or pain or anger that had made the edges of my heart hard. The wine hadn’t helped. Finding Juliet hadn’t. For a moment, I thought he might. And even if he couldn’t, it was a relief to feel normal again, to be at a party, dizzy on wine and kissing a boy.

His cheek was rough and when it grazed against mine, his stubble sent little shocks along the line of my jaw. It made my eyelashes flutter and he must have felt it, because he ran his tongue along my bottom lip. I hesitated for a second, but when I opened my mouth, there was a moment when our tongues touched when I almost felt something. Almost. But then I heard someone laughing on the other side of the door and my nerves jumped.

‘Give us a minute, will you?’ he snapped at the couple who stumbled in.

‘No. It’s alright,’ I told them, wiping my mouth with my fingers.

He said something, but I wasn’t listening as I grabbed the
bottle of wine and slid out of the room. He called after me, but I didn’t stop and almost knocked someone down the stairs as I rushed towards the front door. Jason and Ashley were gone so I ran out, closing the door behind me before staggering down the garden path towards the street. I know my lungs can’t speak, but if they could, at that moment, they would have been gasping, AIR, AIR, AIR.

‘Only you’d find red wine at a party like this,’ I heard someone say.

I turned to find Sid sitting on the low wall outside the house.

‘Hey,’ I said, and it sounded like I’d just run up a flight of stairs. Or down them.

‘Hey,’ he said with a slow smile.

When he looked at me, I felt it, what I’d been waiting to feel in that tiny room. Angels and butterflies and rainbows and fireworks and all those other things that are so clichéd when you write them down, but aren’t clichéd at all when someone actually looks at you like that. But I did write it down and I shouldn’t have, because I’ve ruined it now. Reading it back, it sounds so cheesy. But it wasn’t.

It wasn’t.

Last night I had a dream about Sid. We were here. I was standing outside my room, smoking a cigarette, and he was walking up the stairs. When he saw me, he smiled. Not just any smile, not the smile that makes most girls lose their balance, but the smile that always makes me reach out for something solid because it feels like the earth is about to fall off its axis. A floor-shifting, wall-wobbling, breath-snatching smile.

The way he used to smile at Juliet.

‘Only you,’ he said, nodding at the No Smoking sign over my head.

He took the cigarette from me and when our fingers touched – just the tips, just for a second – I woke up gasping, the sheets sticking to my skin.

You know how, sometimes, something can hurt so bad that
after a while it starts to feel kind of nice? Like pressing a bruise with your finger. This was the opposite; this felt so good it hurt.

It hurt so much I thought I was dying.

I don’t know why I’ve started dreaming about him again. I haven’t dreamt about him since I got here. I guess I was thinking about him, about the party. Something happened, that night, something I haven’t told anyone, but I can’t stop thinking about it.

I have to write it down.

When we got off at Angel, Sid and Juliet offered to walk me back to my flat. They didn’t mean it, of course, they’d been fidgeting with excitement since we’d left the party; she’d had her hand in the back pocket of his jeans as we’d stood on the tube and he couldn’t stop touching her, adjusting her curls and straightening her necklace each time her swallow-shaped pendant got caught in her scarf. They obviously wanted to be alone so I reminded them that I lived in the opposite direction and said I’d be fine to walk by myself.

I shouldn’t have, but halfway down the road, I looked over my shoulder at them just as Sid picked her up. Juliet screamed, her hair everywhere as he spun her. When he put her down again, they laughed – loud and bright – and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alone. I waited for them turn onto Juliet’s road, then I started to cry.

That happened to me a lot then; one moment I’d be fine and the next I’d be sobbing so much I couldn’t breathe. It was another
of those emotions I tried to keep on a leash and couldn’t. So I wandered back to my flat with a cigarette between my fingers, waiting for it to pass. But it didn’t and by the time I got to my front door, I was crying so much I blindly scratched the lock with my key for a few minutes before I managed to open it. As soon as the door closed behind me and I knew no one could see me, I started to cry more. Louder. More desperately. I wandered from room to room peeling off clothes and leaving them behind like a trail of breadcrumbs – my jacket in the hallway, my shoes in the bedroom, my bag on the counter in the kitchen. It was as if I thought I could walk it off, but it was there.

There.

Always there.

When I sat on the sofa, I realised there was no one I could talk to. That’s a terrible thing, to be seventeen and have no one. People say it all the time, don’t they?
I’m lonely
. But they’re not. Not really. They have friends. Family. They don’t want to talk to them, there’s a difference. They’re not lonely, they’re stubborn or embarrassed or scared.

I thought about that for a moment and realised how full of shit I was.

I don’t remember dialling the number – I think I had it saved on my phone – but I remember having to endure several automated menus before I got through to a human being. It was only a call centre – I heard the murmur of voices before the operator said hello – but it was enough, hearing that one voice.

‘This is Emily Victoria Koll. I would like to speak to my father.’

The man on the other end should have hung up, but he didn’t. ‘You know I can’t do that, darling.’ His Scottish brogue was so soft that I wanted to curl up and go to sleep in it.

‘Yes, I know,’ I told him. ‘But I need to speak to him. It’s very important.’

‘Is it an emergency?’

‘He’s my father. I have a right to speak to him.’

‘Of course you do, darling, but not at one in the morning.’

‘What’s your name?’ I asked in my best St Jude’s voice.

‘You can call me Bean.’

‘Bean? As in baked?’

He chuckled. ‘Yes, as in baked.’

‘Okay, Bean. I need you to pass on a message to my father. His name is Harry Koll. Do you know him?’ When he said he did, I laughed. ‘Of course you do! Everyone’s knows Dad. There’s the Devil, then Hitler and Dad’s somewhere between cancer and famine.’

I laughed. ‘Anyway, I need you to tell him something from me. I need you to tell him that he ruined my life. Will you go into his cell tomorrow morning and tell him that for me, Bean? Say,
Hey, Harry, your daughter has nothing because of you. She can’t go home, she can’t go back to school, her friends won’t answer the phone to her and she has no idea whether her mother is dead or alive
. Will you tell him that for me, Bean?’

I pointed at the phone even though he couldn’t see me. ‘Go on. Write it down, in case you forget. Write it on a Post-it note and stick it on the bars of his cell.
You ruined your daughter’s life
.
Make sure you use one of those big Post-it notes or it won’t fit.’

The line was quiet for a moment or two and I thought he’d hung up. But then I heard him sigh. ‘I don’t think you should be on your own right now, Emily.’

‘Who else is there?’ I laughed, even though it wasn’t funny.

‘Emily,’ he started to say, but I shook my head.

‘I have to go now, Bean,’ I told him before I started to cry again. ‘You’re a very nice man. If you could pass on my message, that’d be great. Okay. Thanks. Bye.’

I only remember pieces of what happened next. I don’t remember hanging up the phone, just waking up on the sofa. I don’t know how long I was asleep. It didn’t feel long, but I remember being absolutely desperate for a cup of tea, but having no milk.

I guess that’s how I ended up on Upper Street.

Everything was shut, so I headed for the petrol station. It was weird; the lights in the shops were off and the shutters were pulled down to expose graffiti I never knew was there, like secret messages you could only read at night. It was kind of strange, not seeing tables and chairs outside the cafés and walking past shop windows with immaculately dressed mannequins standing stiffly in the dark. It was like being in one of those zombie films, like I’d woken up to find I was the only person left on earth.

I wondered what that would be like as I passed the piles of bin bags and the empty bus stops. What it would be like to survive, rather than be left behind. It made me think of that tree near our
cottage in Brighton, of sitting up there claiming everything I saw. I imagined that something had happened while I was asleep and London was mine. I could live where I wanted, eat where I wanted. I started to claim things as I passed them; the post box at the top of the road, the champagne bottle painted on the wall above the off-licence, the stickers stuck to the lampposts. It was all mine. The shops, the houses, the cars. All of it.

But then a night bus rolled past and I became aware of small signs of life; a dog barking, an empty pint glass left on a wall, the distant call of a police siren. Then I heard a car – slowing, slowing – and I turned my head as it began to drive alongside me.

There are very few moments that I remember with absolute clarity, but I remember that one. I remember the car; silver, dirty, with a string of rosary beads hanging from the rear-view mirror. I remember him, how he opened the window and smiled at me, his eyes black. And I remember the dread deep, deep in my bones as I looked away.

‘Need a lift, sweetheart?’ he asked. I could almost feel the heat in his voice – the
hunger
– and I wanted to be alone again, just me and London.

So I crossed my arms, lifted my chin and kept walking.

‘Pretty girl like you shouldn’t be wandering around by yourself this late,’ he told me when I didn’t respond. There was another half of that sentence, I knew, but when he didn’t finish it, it was worse somehow, because I had to let myself think it. I had to let it in.

‘I’m only going down the road,’ I said, nodding towards to petrol station.

‘I’m going that way. Get in.’