Page 14 of I Love You, I Love You, I Love You

‘Do some writing?’ he says caringly. ‘That makes you happy.’

‘Yeah, maybe?’ I say. Knowing the only one of us that work makes truly happy is Jackson.

The door slams and I’m alone in the granny flat with my laptop. It’s a horrible place here: a chaotic desktop of KTPLT campaigns I don’t believe in and unfinished projects. My inbox now just a squat-den for barking estate agents, newsletters I swear I never signed up for and links to reset all my forgotten passwords. The blank page is so threatening. And there’s my book, waiting for that final tidy and sprinkle of magic. 99,081 words. I can’t open it today; what if I think it’s shit and make irrational edits? I have to protect my work from myself.

Instead, I type into Google: is it OK to be with someone your whole life and not have sex?

Great, that will be Viagra adverts for the rest of my life then.

I type: I love my boyfriend but I’m not sure I’m IN love, advice?

The advice? bit is weak.

Links pop up for therapy and intimacy counselling. A holiday – yeah, no shit, thanks. Role play. Bedroom kinks. Maybe this will reignite our bond? Lead to our path of tantric sex and roly-poly sixty-nines. I begin to slide into a rabbit hole. Does this count as porn? What if I click onto an illegal advert by mistake and see something I can’t unsee? Will the police come? Or will my bank details be suddenly leaked? Or what if a pimp gets ahold of my pictures and puts them on the heads of porn stars and then uses them as collateral and wants 50k to take the pictures down? I don’t have that kind of cash.

I slam my laptop lid shut.

I know. I’ll tidy the flat. Win back some control. Something productive. Fresh start. As of right now. No drinking – I’ll get an app and everything. DAY ZERO. Pledged. Healthy eating. Get a Filofax.

I should probably face Mia’s browning flowers. What am I meant to do with them? Put them in water? Hang them upside down to dry them out or dash them in the bin? Is it unlucky to throw out wedding flowers? Will I get cursed?

The second the stems touch my palm, it happens. I think of him. His name, an apple that falls from the tree in the garden of my thoughts, the heaviest, dustiest book from a shelf in the library of my mind. LOWE.

My heart stops. I swallow the feeling. He does this – occurs to me from time to time. It always makes me feel the same: sad for myself and bad on Jackson for even thinking of another guy. But hold on, did I text him last night? What was I thinking? Oh, God, where is my bloody phone? I throw clothes and towels in the air without strategy. Pins and needles shoot through my hands. Heart rate rises. Found it, right on the drawers where I left it, of course. I check to make sure I didn’t send a message. Please. Please. Please … Nothing. Thank FUCK.

My phone pings in my hand. It’s Dad; his texts read like Post-it notes.

Vi said caught bouquet!? New suit?

Bloody Instagram!

I text back: no, Dad. You don’t need to get a new suit.

Chapter 7

Then

The day after and he’s still there, a dart in my brain. I’m like Peter Parker the morning after he realizes he’s been bitten by a radioactive spider. Infected. And guess what happens to him, guys? He becomes Spider-Man! What is going to happen to me? I find myself doing stupid stuff like blasting Mariah Carey’s ‘Fantasy’ at full volume and saying inside my head, Imagine if Lowe walked into the room right now; what would I do? My pen so badly wants to write down his name in loopy writing, in bubble writing but I’m scared that writing his name down will jinx us. As you can imagine, I’m pretty pissed off about it, but I just can’t help myself: I doodle him from memory, get him down on paper. Capture him in my Groovy Chick notebook; sketch his shoulders, his arms, his eyes. I draw me next to him, us holding hands and—

Ella, did you just draw yourself as a bride?

Every song I listen to I can’t help but see his face, think of his hands, his smile, his voice. I am completely intoxicated and I hate it about myself. I can’t tell anybody about this illness.

OH ME, OH MY, OH HELL.

I should just clear my diary and cancel all plans for the remainder of half term. This calls for total wipeout because I am otherwise engaged in being completely and utterly obsessed with someone to the point I’m almost begging for school to start again for the distraction. I try and recite my calming mantra, ‘Dance as though no one is watching, love as though – err—’ but I can’t remember the rest. See, he owns my thoughts now; he’s wiping out my brain cells. It’s only matter of time before he’s completely reset the entire thing.

The next day we get the scent of a free house, with a party happening inside it. We’re getting ready at Aoife’s. Her dad doesn’t let her have CDs and the few second-hand ones she did own he’s hung up outside in the garden as ‘entertainment’ for the birds. ‘I’ve got so many brilliant vinyls – why don’t you explore those?’ The brilliant vinyls he’s referring to are the experimental bootleg records he picked up at Brixton Market. We listen to the radio and take turns to bathe in her small tub with the rubber hose and the mango scrub that is 100% enough to make us get called ‘spicy’. With blobs of toothpaste on our spots, we talk about our insecurities out loud, complaining and comparing – ‘Why am I so spotty?’; ‘Your boobs are so much bigger than mine’; ‘Why am I so chubby?’ – and then we reassure each other: ‘It’s good to be chubby; at least it means you have hips and boobs.’ And her little brother Sean shouts up, ‘You’re both BUTTERS!’ And we scream down, ‘WE HATE YOU!’

And we brush it off but it does bruise us. Our brains are soft fruits, peaches and plums, and every knock makes a dent of some kind, no matter how small.

After that, in front of the full-length lightweight mirror – the same mirror we unhook from the wall and take turns to lie down underneath wearing just our knickers, so we can get an idea of the realistic view of our bodies that someone will have in the future when they are having sex with us – we do our make-up. I sit on an orange blow-up armchair; Aoife leans over my head. First things first, we pluck our eyebrows accidentally completely bald. Then, we share our shared collection of Barry M’s dazzle dust – little glass screw-top lids full to the brim in every rainbow colour and shade you can imagine. To us, these little eyeshadow tubs are the most precious things in the world. If we were to lose the tiniest sprinkling of dazzle dust, we would be on the ground scooping it up like it was cocaine, sobbing into the carpet as if someone had tipped over our mother’s ashes. No colour is too much, no look too dramatic, no eyelid too small for a cosmic space scene, an underwater theme – blue, pink, green, purple, glitter, glitter, GLITTER! Sparkle and iridescent shimmer, right up to the eyebrows we go. We take turns dabbing from the tubs, blowing our fingers like the end of a snooker cue, ready for the next hit, puffing through the air like a fairy’s fart.

We drown ourselves in Impulse body spray. We tease our limp hair with coconut dry shampoo and an old nit comb because it gets to the roots. Drag purple hair mascara though the layers. Shower ourselves in sparkly talcum powder. We smell like Disney and popcorn, tropical bubblegum and apricot sour sweets, chemicals and period blood. We snake our hot-pink thongs (99p!) up our hips, making sure the straps are hanging out the top. Aoife’s hip bones jut out like shoulder blades, but my thong digs into my side squidge like the candy-cane-striped string on a joint of beef. We slide on our heavy dirty baggy jeans, so crusty they crack, and wear tight tops which suck in our waists and plunge out our misshapen boobs. Then we add as much jewellery as we can find – mostly ‘shag’ bands which we pray will get snapped by someone fit. (But not actually.)

After Aoife and I have convinced each other that we look just about nice enough to get a boyfriend, that it’s everyone else’s fault we’re single, after we take turns to say I fancy you, no I FANCY you, we trundle downstairs to get judged by Aoife’s opinionated hippy parents. Then, and only then, are we ready to go out.

‘Oh no you don’t … ’ says Aoife’s mum, Elaine. That stops us in our tracks and we have to sit at the dining table surrounded by the Moroccan tea sets from their travels and eat half a freezing cold jacket potato each, with a slab of ice-cold butter and a stalk of raw broccoli, washed down with a pint of tap water. But it’s not all bad. We are allowed as much E-number tomato sauce as we want. That’s the thing about hippies: they’re hypocrites.

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