Page 22 of I Love You, I Love You, I Love You

Rapid, we move from texting to speaking on the house phone and the hours rush by like seconds. I am floating in space. He has a cordless phone; he moves around on it loads, like even into the garden. I wish we had a cordless phone. We have two phones for one landline, both with their own issues. The upstairs one is bright yellow and more reliable and better because I can phone Lowe in private, but it’s annoying too because it’s harder to tell when Violet and Sonny pick up the phone and listen in on my conversations. I could be midway through opening up about how much I wish I didn’t have red bobbles on my arms to Aoife, only to hear my sister honk down the line, ‘What you gonna do about the red bobbles on your bum?’ The other phone is in the living room where everyone can hear you.

On the landline we talk about music. He talks about his dreams of being in a band. I tell him about the books I’m reading. I read him poems and he actually listens.

Bianca calls me up and guilt casts its ugly shadow once again. She wants to know why Lowe isn’t asking her to be his girlfriend. What’s wrong with him? (She never considers that it’s something she could do herself, or that it’s anything to do with her.) ‘He’s such a dickhead,’ she says. ‘Why’s he being so slow for? I could have anyone.’ And then she says, ‘Can you talk to him for me?’

I want to be a good friend. I don’t want to be sneaky or two-faced.

‘So … ’ I begin, dutifully, ‘how do you feel about Bianca?’

‘Errrm.’ I can tell he’s blushing. He speaks close into the mouthpiece; his voice makes my hairs stand on end and my body do a wobbly, like when someone’s treading over your grave.

‘What?’ I giggle. My teeth are dry from smiling so hard, like I’ve dissolved a powdery calcium vitamin on my tongue. The wire between us is alive. We hold on so tight. I push the phone to my ear so hard it gets all hot and my wrist cramps but it’s worth it. I don’t want to miss anything he has to say.

‘What yourself.’ He laughs back, so warm like hot fudge sauce, sliding down the walls of my house. ‘I do like her. It’s just … I dunno … ’ He hesitates, looming. ‘What do you think?’

What do I think?

This could be my chance. Surely he’s passing the ball over to me? He’s giving me an opportunity here to say something. To take it all back. To start again and say how I feel. Or simply be a manipulative bitch and fuck it all up by backstabbing Bianca. But I can’t. She’s my mate. And also. I just can’t. I’m too afraid.

Dad picks up the downstairs phone suddenly, acting like it’s not one tiny bit weird that I’m now having an INTIMATE three-way call with him and the love of my life. Not even to call anybody but to just talk to me. ‘Do you know what time your mum’s back?’

‘DAD! I’m on the phone!’

‘You’re always on the phone, Ella. It’s the only place I can speak to you! Now get OFF it so I can find your bloody mum!’

And he slams the phone back down in its cradle.

‘Um. Sorry about that.’ I am BURNING. ‘I better go … but about you and Bianca.’ I stagger, ‘I think you’re both great,’ which is true. I leave out the bit where I say: Just not together. Because that kills me.

‘K,’ he says. ‘That’s not really what I … but K.’

‘K.’

‘K.’

Chapter 11

Every weekend Lowe and I are together somewhere at something. Mum asks, ‘Why don’t you do a lil’ party here, Elliebellie?’ But she says party like PAR-TAY so that’s why. The house is embarrassing and I don’t need Mum making conversation, getting my friends to lift bags of concrete and soil, taxing for weed and dropping words like ‘bodacious’. I really don’t need my parents fighting like Punch and Judy IN FRONT of an audience. No, thanks.

So other people’s houses have become our restaurants, bars, cinemas, cafés, nightclubs, where we spread out like sixth formers in a common room and take the piss. Any room in any house where an adult is out or doesn’t care will do; just give us an address and we’ll be there. One of these parties happens to be one of the very best days of my life as Dean tells Bianca that she ‘could be a model’ and they kiss. Well, I’m so happy you’d think Dean was my forty-five-year-old bachelor son who just secured an engagement.

When we’re together Lowe and I sit on sofas close, on our own ‘whole new world’ magic carpet ride, tempering the sting between us like we’re under a spell, giving off charge and heat. In my head there’s always a force field around us, a bulb of golden light, and we are the filament inside of it, sparking. Sometimes our fingers touch and we leave them there, skin melting, the hairs on our arms standing to attention. We are magnetic. Sometimes our knees brush past each other, deliberately, and we don’t move one bit. I want his fingerprints on my clothes, my books, my CDs. Once, we share from the same carton of Mango Rubicon, and that feels like an open wide-awake kiss that’s passable, allowed in public. His taste in my mouth. I want to not know where I end and Lowe begins. I want him to know what my house keys look like. What book I’m reading that week. My earrings. My pen. I want him to be able to pick up my jumper and know it’s mine by the smell of my perfume. I want him to know what I’d order from a café. I want him to see something and think to himself, Ella would like that. I want him to look at my shit phone and think, Who does she text before she falls asleep? Who does she talk to on the phone at night?

He points out funny things; he admires the view. He stops to pet street cats and swerves his bike to not alarm passing dogs. He occasionally spits on the ground – only when he’s out of breath – but never litters. He throws his sandwich crusts and crisps to the birds. He halts the traffic once with his bike to let a senior man cross the road. People comment on his smile, say he has an aura, a good energy. He has perfect manners. He listens. Is a nice guy.

We know all the rap bits to songs. Guitar breakdowns. We laugh at the same bits of TV programmes. At just a glance we know the same people annoy us. We can’t believe how similarly our brains work, how alike we are. We’re like twins. Geminis. We come as a pair. Knife and fork. Pepper and salt. A set of gloves. But nothing happens between us. EVER. Maybe it would if we saw how the night played out past midnight but Lowe is not a late-night kid. He’s a summer day, excitable, energetic and playful, far more suited to flying down the road on his bike in just a t-shirt. He’s sunshine and mint toothpaste. Alive with the birds. Unashamedly eager to get home in the evenings. And I like that about him. It’s attractive that he likes his home. That he’s secure. And although he’s quiet, once he’s gone home, he is missed. There’s a space in the room where he should be. People always leave pretty soon after him. He’s one of those luminous, upbeat people who can turn any old day into an event just by sticking around.

We write our way through autumn, snowballing towards winter. When the trees strip and the wind blows. Shorter days mean it’s dark by 5 p.m. Writing letters to Lowe is like delightful homework, the only extracurricular hobby I’ll take forward with me into my future – the writing more elaborate, detailed. We flex our creative muscles, let our guards down.

But winter comes for us and 251 Palace Road hard. Count Olaf’s is subsiding. Cracks ladder their way up the walls. The rooms tilt like a sinking ship. Dad gets a hernia and Mum can’t stand him moaning about it. (I mean TBF I’ve been cursed with an in-growing toenail and I don’t go on about it.) Mum smokes weed. Dad puffs on his inhaler more than ever. The two of them are like Thomas the bloody Tank Engine. Mum decides she wants the attic room as her bedroom so we swap rooms. Could she want to sleep any further away from Dad in his ground floor bunker? It’s fine, except my new room is opposite the railway line and I STILL don’t have a curtain because I don’t want to use the second-hand moth-eaten dirt rag that Mum’s supplied me with so I have to duck to put my scrubby bra on. There are no shelves so Mum builds me a shelf from a plank of wood and some bricks from the garden. Whenever I need more shelves, I just take planks and bricks and continue to stack them up like some dangerous escape route someone might have built in secret to flee a dungeon. Traumatized disorientated woodlice scuttle into my wardrobe, burrow into my clothes. My bedroom rumbles when a train gushes past. Items wobble off my brick shelving unit. A love-heart snow globe filled with a cut-out from a magazine of the killer boyfriend in the movie Scream (that I somehow think my friends are gullible enough to believe is a real life legit photo of my ex-fiancé) smashes. An omen of my love life going bad to worse.

Suddenly, it’s the lead up to Christmas; the buzz, the ride, the waiting, the constant glow. Like I know that something is going to happen. We even speak on Christmas day – much to Violet’s disapproval in the way of passive aggressive deep sighing and oven door slamming. We continue to roll out this way, speaking in those in-between nothing days that follow after Christmas. He’s away visiting family but is the first to text on New Year’s Eve and I’m so happy that the world didn’t end so I get to see him again in 2001. There’s no new year, new me going on here; no, I just want this break to be over as quickly as possible so I can jump back into our routine. And now that Bianca and Dean are hanging out, I’m free to feel like I have a boyfriend even though I don’t. I’m secretly falling in love. I pretend I’m same old, same old when meanwhile I’m running around like Björk in the ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’ video.

We don’t tell anybody about the amount we talk but it couldn’t be possible to know somebody so well, to have achieved as much groundwork as we have in such a short space of time. We refer to our phone conversations and letter exchanges and our friends are gormless, out of the loop. They just think we’ve hit it off. That we really are just friends. But we operate on a whole other level. We have long, thick, strong magic roots – a deeply complex jungled network of flowing information in the undercurrent of our nuanced understanding.

We send more music, getting more confident with our song choices, saying that bit more as our feelings flourish. Every weekend, whenever, wherever we are, I say, ‘Bye,’ and Lowe says, ‘See you soon,’ and we hug, just like everyone else, knowing full well we will be speaking the entire week like Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. Lizzie wrote 573 love letters to Bob, and no, you don’t run out of things to say. There are always more mix tapes to send. Funny things we find. Sweets. Balloons. Photos. Old postcards. Stickers. Anything light and postable.

‘I feel like I’ve known you my whole life,’ he says. ‘You’re not like anybody else I’ve ever met.’

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