Page 11 of I Love You, I Love You, I Love You

I am thinking of the child in me and the adult in me too and where they both are at this point. And which one of them is in charge here please and who is going to deal with this? I’m thinking of Kurt Cobain and the Slipknot mask and Moe from The Simpsons and the tiger from the stupid cereal box and – whilst we’re at it – the footballer Ian Wright too. I’m thinking of the sound of a trainer squeaking on a school hall in a basketball game, electric guitars fusing, explosion, blowing the fronts off speakers. Lying on the grass. Touching his face. Trying to hide how in love I am with somebody I’ve only just met.

My heart is a harmonica. South London is a valley. World, hear my song.

Chapter 6

Now

It’s 6 a.m. and it’s awful. I lie – a defrosting dead person – in the grave that is my side of the bed and try to sleep, but how can I? When my mind, like a TV, automatically switches on and every channel plays a montage of the worst moments of my life. My thoughts, like a radio, crackle awake, spilling gossip about my biggest fears: abandonment, loneliness, rejection. PS everyone hates you. You’re so shit. My wardrobe doors fly open, a theatre, oh no, the hangers like hands, peel last night’s wine and cigarette smoke-stained bright-pink jumpsuit up from off the floor. How are the hangers doing that? The sight of last night’s outfit makes me want to dry-heave like the return of a meal that was the culprit of food poisoning.

The jumpsuit acts out a puppet show of me from last night. A horror, of course. Mia’s wedding where I play The Fool. Thanks a lot. I can never listen to Gwen Stefani ever again now. The veins of my eyeballs are tangled chicken wire, sockets, screws, the palpitations, blinding, the dry tightening in my tomb of a throat, the dread, the sickness, the way my hairs stand on end. My pounding head is a wrecked junkyard car, begging to be crushed by a demolition monster truck to be put out of its misery. I’m such a terrible person; I get drunk at weddings and make it about me. I’m not a good person. I can’t even take care of house plants. I don’t call my nanna enough. More bad-karma debt racking up.

I look for the horned master of this hell to make a deal with, slam to my knees and beg: I’ll change, I promise; I’ll never drink again. I said it before, I know, but this time is different. I don’t need alcohol to have a nice time. I’m sorry. But NO! bellows the demon king; it’s too late; you had your chance and you blew it, bitch. It’s over. Mia’s spoiling bouquet is on the other side of the room, balanced on the washing basket (where I put anything that doesn’t go in the bin) and yet the weight of them is on my chest – flowers for my grave. I can’t look; I roll over, bury my face into Jackson’s sleeping shoulder blades, cling to his t-shirt to anchor me before I’m dragged to hell.

‘Jackson … ’ I whisper, cuddling into his back. We’ve just bought this little flat, our first place together. It hasn’t been touched since the Nineties; it’s brown, depressing and scary. I’m still not used to it, its new shadows and clanking pipes. ‘Please can you wake up?’ I forgot to put my gumshield in last night and I’ve grinded my teeth to sand. The pain of a clenching jaw shoots up to my temples – the anxiety about why I clench a pain far more severe.

‘Jackson?’

He turns to face me, eyes still closed, brows frowned, clinging to his peaceful slumber where me and my festering Hangxiety aren’t welcome. It’s the weekend; he deserves a lie in and I’ve disturbed him. I’m so selfish. Mean. I’m dirt and he’s so clean. He just went to the pub with his friend last night. They had a burger and a pint and called it a night. He barely drinks. He would have showered, brushed his teeth and watched some documentary on his laptop in bed. He’s an angel. I want to rub his goodness all over me. I burrow under his arm for protection; he smells of his usual ‘aftershave’, Deep Heat. His long arms octopus around me.

I feel an overriding sense of love and gratitude for him. Thank God he’s here. When he gets up, he’ll know what to do. I’ll see his hopeful, optimistic fresh-water eyes, his new-day-A-OK smile and feel better. At thirty-five, the growling silver fox in him is already threatening a thrilling presence. Then, apparently, Jackson will look like, in his own words, ‘a GQ cover’. He’s getting handsomer behind my back. I will start paying more attention.

Before the inevitable diarrhoea, I think about instigating sex, pouncing like the girls said to. But I haven’t trimmed my pubes in so long they look like pickup sticks. A bonfire before it’s lit. An upside-down sleeping fruit bat that would prefer not to be woken. It’s only because I’m hungover and needy that the weight of six-foot Jackson on top of me would feel better than the crushing weight of my own demons. But there’s no point: my legs hurt from all that unnecessary winding in heels and, besides, my mind would stray; I’d just be lying there trying to solve the mystery of the Upside Down in Stranger Things. Thinking about how Fergie spells out the word G-L-A-M-O-R-O-U-S. And you know what I haven’t had for ages? Weetabix. I don’t want to put either of us through that when we’d both rather be eating Weetabix on the sofa than getting pumped.

I replay the conversation from last night. I said out loud that we didn’t have sex. What did I say exactly? It feels deceitful.

‘Am I bad person?’ I ask Jackson, as if he can magically dispel my anxiety when he wasn’t even there, the jury lingering in the air around us.

‘Don’t be daft,’ he grumbles in his comforting, nonchalant Midlands accent, barely moving his lips to considerately mask his fish-tank morning breath.

‘Unstable then?’

We share the same Spotify account; he knows I pendulum from Kate Bush to Busta Rhymes to UK garage within ten minutes. It’s worrying.

‘You’re just hanging.’

He’s right. I know that, but in this nest of paranoia I don’t believe him. I’m due on my period so my anxiety is ramping up. Then I’m a fucking bitch whilst I’m on my period, so basically there are only twenty-six weeks in the year when I’m a nice normal person.

‘How do you know? You might be too close to see the signs?’

‘I just do.’ He sits up, at last – this act alone enough to improve my mood – his shoulders pressing into the headboard of our bed. He takes a sip of water, straps his Apple Watch on and reaches for his phone to look at BBC Sport. Without looking up, he says plainly, ‘You would have just chatted a lot of shit and danced. Dancing is good because it stops the chatting shit.’

My God, is he psychic?

‘It sounded like a normal, fun wedding – even if I wasn’t invited,’ he jokes. Still joking, he says, ‘Mia better not expect an invite to our wedding, that’s all I’m saying.’

He never talks about our wedding. He’s a don’t need a piece of paper to say you love someone type of person. Weddings are a waste of money. A scam. A hullabaloo.

‘I thought you weren’t getting married?’

‘IF.’

IF is new.

I’m too sensitive right now to question him, so I sit up too and brave my phone. We scroll in silence.

I see good old Ronks has taken it upon herself to missile the video of me catching Mia’s bouquet across to our ‘Friendship Never Ends’ WhatsApp group. I don’t want to watch it but the idea of them seeing it and me not cringes me even harder. I turn the volume right down so Jackson can’t hear. The look on my face though: lipstick – smudged. Hair in a high-pony like a Nineties WWE wrestler. Sweating like one too.

This isn’t exactly what I saw for myself at thirty to be honest, but here we are.

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