Page 56 of I Love You, I Love You, I Love You

‘Nice hair,’ Lowe says. The wind traps in the station are not being too cruel to me and letting it sit still.

‘You’ve shaved all yours off!’

He rubs his skinhead, as if embarrassed like I’m his grandma. ‘Shall we go back to mine so we can drop off your stuff?’ He eyes my giant bag. He probably just has his phone, card, key and tobacco all in his jacket pocket. ‘Do you want me to carry it for you?’

‘No thanks, I’m good. I’ll panic I’ve forgotten it.’ When really, I need the heavy bag to ground me; I’m so happy to see him my feet could lift off the ground like a helium balloon.

Lowe shares what is meant to be a four-bedroomed family house, which has become a many-bedroomed party house with definitely more than three guys. But it seems any guy who isn’t him kind of blurs into one and multiplies. It’s a sad forgotten place – too sad for a family – where there is never any toilet paper in the cold and musty bathroom. Where every cupboard handle is sticky. Dirty plates with congealed ketchup, ominous wet stains on the floor. The only glasses are dirty, stolen from pubs with beer brands on them, cigarettes floating inside, bloated out like strange new species of marine life. And stolen traffic cones because hahaha, random. The housemates can’t get their heads around Lowe and me, our radical platonic relationship. It’s blowing their schoolboy minds.

Ryan, who has actual man beard stubble and looks like a scarecrow, puts his fingers to his temples and dramatically says to Lowe as though I’m not there, ‘Lemme get this straight: a girl that’s not having sex with you is going to sleep in your bed? Alright, whatever, mate. I know when I smell a rat.’

Yeah. Me too.

‘Sorry about him,’ Lowe says, embarrassed, quickly shutting the scarecrow out. ‘He’s showing off because you’re here. I don’t know why he said that; girls aren’t ever in any of our beds.’

Lowe’s room is downstairs by the kitchen, brown and all very much on the floor. I look for signs of Rachel but find no left behind earrings or shoes, no love letters or photographs – just a bed, CDs and records stacked, guitars and laundry bags filled with clothes.

And to me, it is heaven.

I can see living away from home has already taken its toll, that Lowe looks not great, that his clothes are hanging off him. He’s not eating or sleeping properly, smoking too much and not getting outside. His inhalers are empty and he’s not bothered to chase up the prescription. The rings around his eyes are darker. I don’t think the shaved head has helped matters. But sometimes, at certain angles, truly, the lack of hair just enhances his lovely face. A face so stupendous that if anything, hair only interrupted it. But the band are thriving in that underground unsigned way – there’s momentous tension, pressure and buzz about their every move. Everyone wants to know.

‘We’re waiting for the right label and the right offer,’ he shares. ‘Until then, though, I’ve got about three pounds in my bank account.’ He laughs in that way you probably can do when you’re pretty certain you’re going to be rich soon, picking a vintage Levi’s denim jacket up off the floor, sliding it over a hoody and still managing to look like James Dean.

‘So come on, let’s go for a night out on the town.’ He pops out his elbow theatrically like Dick Van Dyke and I link his arm in Poppins flamboyance, triumphant and jolly, ready to hit the town with our three pounds. And when the roads get narrower and we hit the lanes, he swaps the arm link for a hand-hold and I melt.

The weekend in Brighton is busier than when we met earlier and we can’t even get from his place to the pub without being spotted a thousand times, without somebody wanting a photo or to stop and chat. Strangers want to be his mate, want him to be their boyfriend. They look me up and down like oh so you’re his girlfriend, you’re the one he chose. But I’m not. And Lowe, being Lowe, just keeps his hood up and muddles along, taking the time out to talk to every friend, every fan, every passer-by with a giant kind smile and interested eyes, smoking rollie after rollie, nodding along, not fazed. He signs an autograph with his left hand. His right hand is in mine.

We sit on the pier, the water licking the slats. We watch a tired caterpillar rollercoaster take screaming children through the bite of an apple, and mess about and talk, and those sad eyes of his truly go on forever, go to that other place I have only read about in books or seen in films or heard in lyrics that I’ve never understood. Trauma to me is watching Moulin Rouge, falling out with a friend, running out of milk. But he has witnessed the darkness of grief and returned, as if rescued, his eyes holding everything inside the tie-dye sprawl of their infinite wonder. The colour of smudge. Where the sea meets the sky in a storm. Concentrated oil paint. Drenched in it all. Like a song.

I ask, when I am just about ready to hear the answer, because I feel obligated, ‘How are things going with Rachel?’

‘Alright.’

He tokes on his roll-up cigarette so hard I hear the nicotine travel to his lungs, his frown pinching at the top of his head.

‘Rach’s still in London and I’m here.’ He shrugs and relights it with one of those cheap plastic lighters, blowing the end to keep it alight. ‘She kind of annoys me, I dunno … ’

Sometimes I feel like I’m a competition winner fangirl meeting him; other times I feel like a volunteer, giving him an hour to relieve his loneliness. I flit between the two sad states. It’s for me. It’s for him. Then, there are these times when I trick myself that we are a couple. That this is us. That it always has been, always will be. That might be the worst state of all.

‘The band are my main focus anyway.’ He nods, looking out to the water.

But I can see ‘they’ are on his mind. She doesn’t call or text him the whole time I am there.

It’s a few days later and I’m back in London, when I get a text from Lowe:

Rach has gone to California. We broke up. I’m OK. R u about? x

Chapter 24

Now

The blindfold is makeshift, made from one of those towelled tennis headbands. It’s our anniversary. Five years.

‘Almost there, Ells.’ He shuffles me gently but pinching my elbow with a definite grip of excitement. The kind of touch a person only gives you if they want to let you know they would like to have sex with you tonight. But it isn’t really foreplay; I have the spatial awareness of a clumsy, happy dog but we’ve been really trying for the last month, Jackson and I. Running. Talking. Taking the time to prioritize one another. We are getting our mojo back, and are better – than we’ve been in a long while – for it.

Through the autumnal Halloween park, I pretend I can’t see a thing under the blindfold, but I can make out the grainy Blair Witch half-light of the brown-bread sky in the gaps between the blindfold and my chubby cheeks. The trees stand like an army of knives in a knife block.

‘Just a little bit further … ’

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