Page 20 of I Love You, I Love You, I Love You

I don’t say … Maybe I love you.

Whilst the others are picked up in The Twins’ mum’s bloody coach, Aoife and I have to waddle Bianca back to Aoife’s in the pitch black because she’s too pissed for their spotless interiors. After a couple of minutes, Bianca gives up to dry-heave on the banks of grass, then slops her body down on a creepy backstreet, groaning, ‘Let me sleep.’

I begin to panic that someone might attack us like we’re wounded deer. ‘Get up, Bianca, please … ’ I plead.

Up again, her drunk arms around Aoife and my shoulders, her trainers twisted, tripping up on the ragged shreds of her scuffed jeans. She’s so tall, a drugged giraffe, towering and tumbling, demanding more alcohol, a kebab, chips in pitta and a cigarette – which she scrounges off a stranger, putting it into her mouth filter-first – going on and on about Lowe and how much she loves him and she didn’t even get to say goodbye and do I think he loves her back? Yes, I say, I’m sure he does, thinking of my address spelt out on his forearm.

Anything to get her to walk home quicker.

We wouldn’t normally stay at Bianca’s – her dad is stricter than any of our parents, and she’s so drunk – but her house is closest. We beg for a taxi we can’t afford at the cab office, all of our gold and silver coins on the booth counter. The operator is considering it as it’s quiet and only a short journey until Bianca decides this is the moment to allow her eyes to roll completely back into the depths of her skull. Classic. The drivers clearly don’t want to transit a drunk teenager.

‘Come on, you … ’ I say to Bianca. ‘Let’s get you home.’

Inside, we skulk about so as not to wake up Bianca’s dad. We have to act sober. We sit by the toaster and eat nearly a whole loaf of bread between us – even the back ends get destroyed; any piece of carbohydrate we can find gets shoved in that toaster. We make tea after tea and Bianca dreamily scoops teaspoons of salty sweet peanut butter onto her tongue straight from the jar and tells us once again how in love she is until she instructs us that ‘she’s tired’ and orders us up to bed.

Bianca stumbles up the stairs, aggressively shhhhhhhhing us past her dad’s room, and we giggle as she flashes us an angry look, comical with her smudged make-up and the sick stains on her t-shirt, to only then make the most amount of racket you’ve ever heard in your life by accidentally rolling down the ladder to the loft, which thunders towards us like some robotic Jack-in-a-Box guillotine, taking us all out in one swipe.

We lie on the futon bed in her room, all three of us on two pillows, and I gaze out of the window into the London night, like I’m shooting a new video for Savage Garden’s ‘To the Moon & Back’, wondering what it was like for Bianca, kissing Lowe, and how I can’t ask her, because it would suggest I liked him but, also, there’s no point, because she was probably too drunk to remember.

What a waste.

Chapter 9

It’s sometime in the week, just as I am trying to revitalize a few bits of stale baguette into lunch of some kind for my siblings and me, when the letterbox flaps.

And there it is. Lowe’s letter, on the hallway floor of 251 Palace Road.

It’s a regular envelope, one of those plain ones and it’s an outsider – too clean to be in our house – a feather from a dove that has found itself in a circle of fresh cowpat. My name heavily drawn in pencil lead, all in capital letters, at a slant, scrawled with a certain flare that suggests Lowe would maybe quite like to spray his tag on a railway bridge.

I know what’s inside by its rectangle edges and the way it rattles: the tape.

And so much promise.

This is what Sugababes meant by overload, isn’t it?

My stomach lurches as I hold the letter close to my chest. My beaded bracelets tremble.

I forget about food for maybe the first time in my life and hurtle up the stairs to my messy attic bedroom and close the door behind us. Us being Lowe’s letter and me. My first thought is OH LORD. My second thought is Bianca. This is wrong. I shouldn’t be receiving a letter – OK, let’s go ahead and call it a love letter – from Lowe. It would make me a really awful friend. But so far everything has been very ‘above board’; the lines are clear. I just have to make sure I stay firmly in the friend lane and not get carried away with the idea of it evolving into anything more. I’m pretty sure I can rely on my own insecurities to make sure that happens anyway. And my last thought is my mum would be so mad if she knew. Not because I’m talking to a boy but that I’m allowing myself to get caught up in the romance of it all. Writing to a guy who called me the pretty one. And then laughed. Who called me cute. Who sang to me. And sent me a mix tape. Pathetic, she’d think. Shallow, beneath me. Who wants to be called pretty? That’s not a compliment. Boys that age only want one thing.’

I see him buying the stamp, licking the envelope down with the dots on his wet pink tongue, walking to the post box and pushing my letter inside with all the bills and birthday cards. The thought of him taking the time out of his day for me flips my stomach over a thousand times.

The tape isn’t in a box. It tumbles out onto my lap. I leap back like it’s scorching hot.

I stare at the greying plastic case, the shiny ribbon and spirals. I feel absolutely sick. I’ve never seen an object so beautiful.

‘ELLA!’ Violet shouts up. ‘What the hell are we doing with this bread then?’

‘I’M COMING, JUST WAIT!’ I roar.

‘WE’RE STARVING!’

After barging down the stairs, storming into the kitchen, slamming the stiff loaf onto the table with a tub of butter and a block of stale cheese that has cracks like Dad’s heel after football and blue bits that also don’t look that dissimilar to Dad’s feet after football, I say ‘There!’

I charge out again towards heaven …

‘GAWD, ALRIGHT … ’ Violet digs, ‘Has this got anything to do with why you’re playing Jennifer Lopez on repeat?’

‘GRRR! SHUT UP! And I DON’T listen to J.LO! AS IF!’ I definitely, definitely do.

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