Noughties (24 page)

“SHOTS!” shout Sanjay and Abi, off-loading a cluster of tequilas onto the table, the others gathering round, seemingly out of nowhere. Christ, we’ve been ambushed. Everyone is grinning, except for me and Ella. There’s a pile of sliced lemons and a cracked saltshaker in front of us. Words are unnecessary. It’s like clockwork. I absentmindedly lick the fleshy hinge between thumb and forefinger and hold it out for Sanjay to sprinkle on the salt. He seasons me to good effect. Ella prepares herself resignedly, watching me the while.

“Salute,” we shout, clinking our glasses in a merry round.

The salt makes me gag and the whiff of the tequila has me heaving before it’s even past my lips. I glug it back though and chomp on the lemon, my eyes watering: they’re furious with me. We all do that breathing-through-clenched-teeth jag and shake our heads farcically. I shudder. Ella jumps up and rushes to the toilet.

“Lightweight?” declares Abi.

My chin and hands are real sticky and I brush the excess salt against my soggy jeans. I think I’m going to retch but I find a way of swallowing it down. Megan looks disastrously white and I reckon I might have gone a psychedelic shade of green. That’ll soon pass though. Our time in this joint is drawing to a close. Soon we’ll be
club
: Filth. Maybe it’s the change we all need.

Why are things turning out so much more complicated than I had anticipated? And why is it
Lucy
I can’t escape from? She’s still on my mind, despite everything else. Any kind of ordeal and my thoughts instantly turn to her. She’s like a security blanket to which I’ve always felt I could go back. But after what she’s told me tonight—my phone is
still off, biding me time—I’m not sure I even have that anymore …

Maybe I should admit that this kind of nostalgic return has never worked. You can only run and hide for so long. I remember one occasion, visiting home for a couple of nights … if I could just get near to her again it might help me to forget …

“It’s lovely to see you,” said Mum, fixing me a cuppa. Dad had picked me up from the bus station, laden with dirty washing and books that weren’t going to get read. I needed to get away from Oxford—those nightmare spires, all that clamoring ambition, and knowledge of real loss. I needed out. I didn’t tell my parents about what happened with Ella. Never have. I doubt they were suspicious of anything, my home self typically being a moody fuck anyway.

“Hmmph.” An affirmative grunt from me, but affirmative all the same.

“Very unexpected. That’s always the best though! I do like a surprise.” Mum settled on the opposite side of the kitchen table, hugging her mug with both hands. She smiled and shrugged her shoulders in an intimation of coziness.

“Have you got any plans?” asked Dad, hanging his car keys on the purposely fitted hook over by the pantry (where he has an individual hook for each key: car key, house key, Mum’s car key, Mum’s house key, a vacant one for my house key, the garage key, and the window key). His domestic pedantry grated on me, embroiled as I was in my internal melodrama of vertiginous grays and blues, languishing in thick, treacly angst.

“Hmmph.”

“Huh?”

“I said yes, okay? For god’s sake.”

“Well, that’s nice then.”

“Yeah, that sounds lovely,” said Mum. Dad continued to rummage about the kitchen, filling his special trough-sized cup (the holy chalice; won’t take his tea from anything else) with the dregs of the teapot. “So what exactly are your plans?”

“Look, I’m feeling a bit jaded,” I said, getting up from the table.
Jaded?
Dad was thinking. I could tell from his chevron-flexed brow:
jaded?
… that’s got to be a twenty-first-century thing … kids didn’t feel
jaded
when I was growing up … probably an American import. “I think I’ll just go to my room if that’s alright.” As I passed through the kitchen door I turned and added, “Oh, Lucy might be coming over tonight.” I had found myself dropping her a text on the bus home. The message’s themes were complex and unclear (friendship? melancholy? hope? homesickness?), its structure haphazard, the imagery muddled, the tone inconsistent, the delivery unreliable. But she said she would try to pop over.

“Lucy?” I heard Dad saying as I made my way through the living room to the stairs. “Are they courting again?”

“People don’t
court
anymore,” I hollered from the bottom of the staircase. “This isn’t Renaissance fucking England,” I added, beginning my stomping ascent.

“
What
England?” I could hear at a murmur. “Well, we courted, didn’t we?”

“Yes love, we did.”

I thought I was dreaming when I heard Lucy’s distant voice floating up the stairs and in through the crack beneath the door like a magical elixir come to show me a hidden order. I had fallen into a deliciously insistent doze,
Rabbit, Run
lying across my chest, fanned and foxed, fully dressed atop crisp, childhood sheets. I awoke, shrugging off my doughy coating with a squirm and a yawn, the noises from
below growing more authentic and convincing. Nostalgia found its perfect embodiment in my curling limbs, yearning as they were for this presence that I could not see, could not taste, feel, or smell. I thought, for a moment, that I was trapped in one of those sticky dreams where the object of your desire is unreachable, held at bay by some inexplicable perversion of physics or biology: you run but you don’t move; you shout but make no sound; you jump and sink; swim and drown. It was her laugh that finally clinched the reality of the scene—so inimitable and singular; irrefutable proof of her positive being. Dad could always procure this from Lucy with one of his terrible jokes, wheezing and shaking himself into a shock of pink like a chameleon, just grateful for a sympathetic audience, so used to eye-rolling son and wife. But it was precisely this that tickled Lucy so much—Dad’s self-satisfaction contrasted by our utter despair—and her kindly responses were more than enough to make him adore her. As I thought, I could now hear Dad’s squeal coming through the floorboards, having probably off-loaded the one about Quasimodo and the prostitute or the hippy penguin in a bar. I reshuffled my pillow-hair in the mirror and made for the stairs.

“Yeah, I think it’s the right decision,” Lucy was saying, standing in front of my doting parents in the center of the living room. Dad put his arm around Mum, inspired by the sense of youthful love that Lucy had come to symbolize for them. “Just have to wait and see, I guess.”

“No, that’s great, Lucy,” said Dad. “Exciting times, eh?”

She saw me appearing on the staircase behind my parents and hesitated for a second. “Hopefully. There’s one that I’ve applied for at the County Council which I’ve got an interview for next week. I’m quite nervous about it actually.”

“Oh, don’t be,” said Mum. “What more could they possibly
want?” Lucy smiled modestly. Mum and Dad looked as though they were having to restrain themselves from showering her with hugs and kisses.

I brought myself further into view. “Hey.”

“Hi,” Lucy replied, calmly.

“I do love your hair, Lucy,” said Mum, pleased to be saying the kinds of things she imagined she would say to a daughter. “Have you changed it since we last saw you?”

“Yeah, I’ve grown it out a bit.”

“Isn’t it lovely, Eliot?” asked Mum.

“So how are you two anyway?” said Lucy, keen to disoblige me of an answer.

“Oh, we’re fine,” said Dad. “Nothing much changes here. This one keeps us on our toes,” he added, nodding toward me. I’m not sure exactly what this meant, but figured that it was nothing more than an automatic response, filed away in his conversational repertoire ever since I had been a little boy. A silence fell over us, awkward for me and Lucy, but not so for Mum and Dad who could happily have stood staring at the two of us for hours.

“Well, I’ll call around in the next couple of weeks and let you know how the job applications are going,” said Lucy. “You can show me those old photos you were telling me about, Haley.” It always came as a surprise to hear Lucy use my parents’ first names, complicating vague notions of age and hierarchy that were vestiges of my eternal adolescence.

“That would be lovely.”

“Do you want a drink or anything?” I asked, attempting to move things along.

“No, I’m okay thanks.”

Sensing the shift in procedure my parents funneled off to the kitchen, leaving the two of us alone. I led Lucy upstairs to the privacy of my room, as I had so many times
before, this time the motives more oblique. She filled its tiny space with her blossomy scent and I burst the luxuriant familiarity against my palate fine. But it was a familiarity that could not be grasped, guarded and bubble-wrapped by less hospitable dynamics. It was an unfamiliar familiarity. She was wearing a blue denim jacket with sleeves rolled back and the collar partly up. She kept the jacket on the entire time. She didn’t even sit down for the first five minutes, just pacing while I sat upright against the headboard of my bed. Was this what it meant to be estranged?

“Shall I put some music on?”

“I don’t mind,” she said, by which she meant no. “Oh, before I forget, I’ve got your book.” From her bag she pulled out the copy of
Under the Net
I had given her that time in the café. “I wasn’t sure if I’d ever have a chance to give this back,” she said, going over to my bookshelf and carefully sliding it in.

“Oh, thanks. I had forgotten all about that … you could’ve kept it. I don’t suppose you got round to reading it?” I added, more as an afterthought than a genuine question.

“Yeah, I really enjoyed it,” she said, finally settling down on the far corner of the bed.

“Oh.”

“I liked Jake, the narrator. He was so funny and vain. Kinda reminded me of someone,” she said sassily, entirely without menace. It made me feel more comfortable.

“So what was this about job applications?” I asked, intrigued by the conversation I had interrupted.

“Well, I’ve dropped out of uni. So I guess I’m looking for jobs now.” She didn’t look at me as she said this; we weren’t even facing the same direction.

“What?” I exclaimed, unable to hide my surprise.

“Yeah, I didn’t enroll for my second-term modules.” Lucy’s tone was rueful, but as though she feared my judgments more than actually regretting her decision. “It’s not for me, Eliot. I don’t know, I should never have gone. I think I was worried what you would think if I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine you wanting to be with me if I never went to university. But that’s kind of irrelevant now, I guess.”

“Lucy, that’s so untrue. I wouldn’t have cared. But why didn’t you tell me? That must’ve been ages ago now!”

“Because we’re not together anymore, Eliot!” she said, a sudden injection of exasperation tightening her voice. “Sorry. I have to move on … carry on with my life.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Well, I’ve applied for a load of jobs … I’m staying at Mum and Dad’s while I send my CV out and do interviews and that. I guess I’ll rent with some friends when something comes up.” I wanted to tell her how impressed I was that she had made such a strong decision. In some ways I knew that she was going to overtake me … grow up faster … a job, a place to live … she’d want someone to share it all with. Instead, I began to panic: what was I trying to achieve by having her over?

“How about you? I bet it’s getting hard now, isn’t it?”

“Oh, you know. The usual.” The silences seemed weighty, as though they could have shifted the drawers or splintered the shelves. Ella and the abortion were becoming impossible to forget. I felt a burning need for revelation … to be honest with Lucy, even though it made no sense to. She was fiddling with her car keys, applying extra pressure—a reminder that she might up and leave at any moment. I moved down the bed and sat by her side.

“Hey,” I said (which was ridiculous, considering that we’d already spent ten minutes together).

“Hey,” she echoed. I placed an arm over her shoulder. Was this going back in time? In some ways, but not the ones I had hoped for. I felt infantilized. There we were, surrounded by posters I had Blu-tacked to my wall before my balls had even dropped: Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Aerosmith, Beavis and Butthead. Embarrassing. My oldest teddy bear, which I usually hid when Lucy visited, was flat out on top of the TV like a defeated drinker, arms open, just desperate for a hug. There was the retro Sega Master System, the decaying sports-day medals, the china hippopotamus with all my dusty pennies in its belly. More pressing was the fact that we were sitting on my wanking bench, the bed bolstered up about six inches by all the used Kleenex stuffed underneath. It was like going back to a vivid time of skidmarks and wet dreams, cheap deodorant and youthful saltiness. But it wasn’t a return … more a retrogression. And there was certainly no sense of return with Lucy. She was no longer the girl who’d roll around with me, giggling as I greedily tickled her lithe body … the girl who would list to the minutest detail every single thing she had done with her day. She wasn’t the girl who said things like “You’ve got such a pretty brain” or “You’re so lucky I love you.” And she certainly wasn’t the girl I could kiss at will—

“Eliot … don’t.”

“I’m sorry. You’re right.”

I tried to kiss her again. For a moment, this time, her lips grazed mine back. And then we were apart. Subtle tears meandered down her face like slow-motion shooting stars, each millimeter of their lengthening tails a measurement of lost history. The reminder that there was genuine feeling behind her defensiveness made me reel. I was astir with sudden guilt and self-loathing.

“Eliot, what are you doing?”

I had no answer to give. Why can’t I stop hurting the people I love?

“I should go.”

“Please don’t.”

“I should never have come.”

“So why did you?”

“I don’t know.”

We hugged a hard, icy hug.

“Please …”

Lucy got up to leave, tears still making channels down her cheeks.

My parents were in the living room watching the TV. I didn’t want them to notice Lucy’s emotional display, so I snuck her through as inconspicuously as possible. I walked in front with haste and didn’t say anything as we momentarily blocked their line of vision. They fidgeted, uncertain about what was happening or what to say. Lucy didn’t pause at the front door, just letting herself out and slipping away. I followed a couple of feet behind, all the way to her battered car, parked on the corner. Holding the driver-side door I told her that I loved her and kissed her on the cheek.