Page 24 of I Love You, I Love You, I Love You

Bianca looks at me, confused. Like she knows me better than I ever could. Testament to our albeit obscurely competitive/twisted/fucked up but actually quite comforting sisterly teenage friendship. ‘I’m still sorry anyway.’

And I squeeze her arm as if to say, Thank you.

Thank you for saying sorry. Thank you for being there. Thank you for maybe secretly seeing I’m lying – badly – all day long, and thank you for not calling me out for it. Thank you for being my friend.

In all honesty, it is such a burden liking Lowe the way I do, I’m battling with it. I don’t want to any more. And I really have no idea how he truly feels about me – he’s so hard to read. How I see it, if he liked me like that, he’d say so? And I don’t want to be the one to make a move in case I get rejected or spoil what we have. Even if we managed to become friends again I’d always be that friend who was a little bit in love with him. Gross. But maybe he’s doing the exact same thing as I am and we’ll just go on forever like that, saying nothing. Maybe he did once-upon-a-time fancy me and my feigned lack of interest fancying him back just put him right off. He felt rejected. Maybe over time he’s begun to truly genuinely appreciate and value me as a friend and doesn’t want to ruin anything. Oh God, I’ve dug myself into a right old hole. And I dig myself deeper and deeper. Cornering and trapping myself into the friendship zone forever. When really, I don’t just like Lowe, I don’t like him at all – I one hundred per cent madly truly deeply purely absolutely wholly love him.

I am in love with him.

True love.

January and February seem to never end. The sparkle of Christmas is now just reduced to the odd bit of leftover glitter in Dad’s eyebrow. A pine needle in the floorboard. Mum has to work, but Dad can’t care for us with the pain from his hernia. The NHS waiting list is so long that Dad has to go privately for his operation, which bites a hole out of our last chunk of money, sliding us into even more debt, and then the unworking git of a boiler has the absolute nerve to blow up. Dad has to buy some electric heaters, which are a MASSIVE investment. Violet, Sonny and I sleep in the same bed to keep warm. I tell myself that I actually got chubby on purpose, deliberately, because I’m smart, like how a walrus needs its blubber to insulate itself against the cold harsh arctic winds. Well, I needed an extra layer or two to warm me up in Streatham. We fight over the heaters from each other’s bedrooms, unplug them out of spite, yank them out of the power sockets mid-argument and primitively slam doors with a kick, all whilst hugging a boiling hot convector heater. It’s a health and safety nightmare.

And I am so, so homesick in my own home. For when we used to be happy. I’m a mess of pain, transition and contradiction. A teenager acting like a child, sick of trying to be a woman, in a training bra, listening to the Backstreet Boys, sleeping on a mattress on the floor that somebody has given us to be closer to the heater, shivering, under the naked lightbulb, into brittle adolescence. My parents continue to slam doors and chase each other up and down staircases with raised voices and every other word is ‘fuck!’ And Dad doesn’t get to recover on the sofa after his operation like he needs to because Mum says he’s lazy and that makes him resent her on top of her already resenting him. And Mum goes out more and doesn’t come home and when Dad tries to call her, she picks up the phone only to hang up immediately and Dad, so primal and bear-like and simple, doesn’t get the mind games, can’t stand them. ‘Bloody Nora!’ he yells to nobody, and my gut clutches, as she works him into a frenzy. He picks the yellow phone up in his hand, and smashes it into his forehead with Homer Simpson rage – over and over – showing his teeth. I see my dad is broken.

And now the phone is too.

Its guts, all wires, on the floor.

My heart strings yelp as my major lifeline to Lowe is severed and now we’ll have to rely on texts until my parents scrounge enough together to replace it.

I take my brother and sister upstairs; we put on the TV and laugh like nothing has happened and very quickly forget. It’s wonderful being a kid like that. You think trauma is just sliding off your skin, when really it is the opposite; it’s sinking in deep, like the most painful tattoo ink of a word or picture that you absolutely hate, directly into your nervous system, that nobody else will ever see unless you one day are loved or desperate enough to show it.

I sit at the top of the stairs, with one of Dad’s oversized t-shirt on like a nightie, listening to the nightly rows with a here we go again. The house. The bills. The kids. I pull the shirt down over my whole body. ‘Pssst, Violet,’ I say, pointing at my knees, ‘boobs.’

She laughs and tries to do it herself. We haven’t had an adult hack like this since Violet realized if you hung the Christmas decorations over your ears they make convincing dangly teacher earrings. I shouldn’t really let Violet and Sonny listen to our parents fight like this, but I want them to hear, I want them to know, because I’m scared of going through it alone. This is what siblings are for – to help parent your parents.

I hear Dad threaten to leave. Ha! Good one, Dad. He wouldn’t actually though. It would be like the times I threatened to run away – you never do it and if you do, you always come back. Still, I find myself worrying about all the little things my parents don’t seem to: how bills will be paid, who will pick us up from school, make sure there’s milk? And this makes me anxious. I’m so scared of us falling apart that I hold on, tighter and tighter.

I try to keep a diary but everything seems to go wrong whenever I do. It’s almost as if creating a diary in the first place is an omen to make my family hate each other. Instead, I fill pages with things that make me happy: drawings, poems and stories. I write using the orange glow of the streetlamp outside as a nightlight. I write long letters to Lowe that I will never send, saying how great my life is, how happy I am, spraying the pages with dozens of Biro hearts. Writing our names out and adding up the letters to tally up our ‘love score’ again and again, finding ways to make the number soar. Ronks says, The letter the ring-pull comes off at on a can of drink is the first letter of the name of your future soul mate. So I bend those ring-pulls backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards on every can of Sprite I drink, until the ring-pull snaps (I yank it) off on the letter ‘L’. I find that the word Lowe is one letter away from the word LOVE. His name hidden in the word sunflower which is my favourite flower. I can’t help but think it’s meant to be.

One night, I play architect with a bottomless budget, scribble us a house from a bird’s eye view. All straight lines and boxes. A huge living room with giant sofas and a massive TV. A great big kitchen with a dining table to seat sixteen people. Hot tubs in the bathroom and mirrors with lightbulbs like Hollywood film star dressing rooms. Outside, a heated swimming pool, hammocks, a secret garden and a thriving orchard, with hundreds of fruit trees that you can reach your hand out from any window and pluck peaches and plums and pears from, oh, and fish in a pond, sleeping hedgehogs, leaping rabbits and peacocks. And house phones all over, parked at their own little stations. Even though there’s nobody I would want to call except him.

I give Lowe and me separate bedrooms to not be presumptuous. Maybe over time, when we’re older, once our relationship has developed and grown, one night, after work, when we’re making pesto pasta, he’ll bring out of a bottle of Chardonnay and say …

Ella, I think I’m in love with you.

And then we can knock through a wall and push the beds together.

On the phone one night, I tell Lowe my parents have been fighting a lot.

‘Do your parents fight a lot?’ I ask.

‘No, my parents never fight,’ he says.

‘Do you think your parents are in love?’

‘Yes, they are very much in love.’

Very much cuts deep.

I haven’t told anybody that I think my parents are breaking up, so used am I to them arguing now. It’s normal not to be in love; no parents are in love love. Aoife’s parents seem to just about stand each other. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Shreya’s parents kiss. The Twins live with their mum. Bianca lives with her dad. Everybody is different. Actually, now I think about it, Ronke’s parents do seem kind of in love. It’s on my mind and it must be beginning to show.

Once, a nice teacher catches up with me before break and asks, ‘How are things at home?’ A girl in my class called Celine who I hardly ever speak to leaves a postcard in my locker – it’s of some lips saying TALK TO ME and she writes, with care and empathy in her unreadable handwriting, about how I can talk to her if I need to. I never do (not out of choice; she gets expelled for starting a witchcraft cult before I get the chance), but I still keep the card.

It’s not that bad though, really. I’m already able to see the buds of pink and white on the naked trees, the spilling daylight shining on my walk home, calling new leaping, friendly shadows to dance with, creating a sky you want to stop and stare at. The clusters of bright yellow daffodils shoot up, the birds sing; they are telling me that it will be OK, that winter is almost over and that spring is coming. That we made it. And soon a field of daisies, as far as the eye can see, will spread like an inviting picnic blanket, outstretched, waiting, for me to dive into glorious idle hours spent, he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me …

Chapter 12

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