It was a warm Johannesburg afternoon when the Andrews family moved in to the McDonald's old house next door.
I was sixteen going on seventeen, enjoying my final few weeks of summer holiday before term started, swimming almost hourly in our backyard pool and then sunning myself dry. I heard voices over our fence, a family discussing where to put the barbecue. Various opinions were voiced over what to do about the dilapidated lapa at the bottom of the garden.
One suggested an entertainment area, another a home office. A young female voice wanted it to be her bedroom - the others laughed, teased her gently about spiders and snakes and bats and owls as she squealed and laughed and protested her immunity to all these terrors.
I smiled as I slipped back into the water. They sounded nice. It would be good to have neighbours again - the McDonald twins had gone off to University and the parents had decamped to the coast to enjoy early retirement.
Later that evening, I was drying my hair in my room after my shower, watching a tall blond boy in their back garden as he assembled some sort of gym equipment with the well-intentioned but ultimately counterproductive assistance of an aged Labrador retriever.
He was thin, lithe and muscular, and I leaned against my window, watching him as he climbed onto the equipment's sliding seat and tested its movement back and forth.
A petite brunette woman came outside, and her words floated faintly up to me.
"William? Supper's ready."
"Thanks, mum, I'll be right in. Just testing the ergo."
"Don't be long, your food will get cold."
I watched her lean forward, kiss his head, tousle his unruly blond hair, and noted the broad grin he gave her.
Definitely a nice family.
.:.
School term started, and I got back into my routine. Most mornings Dad would drive me to school, some days Mum - when Mum took me, our timetable seemed to sync up with our neighbours. I'd watch them organising themselves, bundling their school bags and sports equipment into the family's big BMW, secretly amused at how William would herd his chaotic younger sister Sue like a dedicated sheepdog.
Our parents would nod, wave, say hello to one another, and as time went on, make small talk and arrange lunches and dinners. Sometimes William would look at me, smile a shy hello of his own. Sometimes, if I was feeling generous, I'd do the same.
William would spend an hour every evening working out on what I'd since learned was a rowing machine - in the open if the weather was fine, under their lapa if there was thunder.
I took to swimming in the evening during his workouts if the weather was good - I couldn't see him from our pool, but I could hear him, and the rhythm of his set pieces gave me a metronome for my own swim - not that our pool was anywhere long enough for a proper workout, but I did it religiously anyway.
And, besides, he was good company - quiet, disciplined, and reliable.
Summer became Autumn. Lent term ended, Michaelmas started after a short holiday. I made the senior B swimming squad at my school - a good achievement for me, about as far as I could go without dedicating my life to swimming. However, neither I nor my parents were prepared to make that kind of sacrifice. I loved swimming, I didn't live it.
William made the crew list for his school's first Eight. I learned this by eavesdropping on his family as they congratulated him one evening. It gave me another datum on the mental map I was slowly assembling of him. I dropped some passing congratulations one evening, and he thanked me with a genuinely warm smile that left me warm and slightly breathless for days.
My seventeenth birthday rolled around, and to celebrate it I had a small dinner at home with just a couple of my closest friends. I'd never liked socialising much outside of very small groups, and the idea of having a large party (even though my parents had suggested it) did not appeal whatsoever to me. So instead we ate ourselves to standstill on barbecued ribs and chicken prepared by my Dad, who stood outside in a May rainstorm to ensure that I had the birthday I wanted.
And, the next evening when I got home from school, my grinning mother showed me a small bouquet of blue Irises that William had dropped off. Attached was a plain white card, a neat cursive "Dear Tamsin - happy seventeenth. William" written dead centre.
.:.
"William?"
He straightened up out of the car boot and smiled at me. "Tamsin. Hello. How're you?"
"Fine, thanks. I... just wanted to thank you for the flowers."
"You're welcome. I hope you had a nice birthday."
"I did, thanks."
"Wills," his mother called from inside. "I need help, please."
"Gotta go," he said, as he closed and locked the car boot. "Um... see you around."
"See you later," I replied softly. I watched him carry the shopping bags indoors - he gave me one more brief smile before he closed their front door.
I went back inside, ignored my mum's amused look, and glanced again at the flowers I'd placed in a vase on our kitchen counter.
He really was a very good looking boy.
.:.
Bit by bit I learned about him through passing conversations before and after school. He and I shared a love for fantasy novels, though he also loved Sci-Fi. Before long we had a book-exchange going, swapping in and out of our libraries as the weeks and months trundled on. We started to have long rambling chats, perched on ladders leaned against our respective back garden fences.
Wills was frequently away over weekends for rowing camps, but was back for his eighteenth birthday - a loud, raucous back-yard party his parents had warned everyone might go on into the early hours. I'd watched the shenanigans with some amusement from my window before I went to bed and piled a pillow onto my head. Everybody loved the Andrews family, nobody minded the late night.
I don't know if anyone else in the street sent him a gift, and if they had, I believed my near-mint hardcover copy of the 'Chronicles of Amber' by Roger Zelazny would probably be one of the better ones.
Inside the cover I wrote a simple "Ex libris Tamsin. Happy Birthday, Wills".
According to him, it trumped everything else by a country mile.
Autumn became winter, winter became spring. I was seventeen going on eighteen, Will was coming to the end of school and starting to think about his matric exams and what he'd do thereafter.
"I think it's University of Cape Town for me," he said one evening, as we leaned on the fence between our houses, having one of our now traditional catch-up chats.
"At least you know where you'll be going."
"Yeah, but I'll miss home."
"UCT's very international, or so I hear. Lots of interesting people at least. My cousin says she loved it there - very outdoor lifestyle, and you'll have the ocean."
"Mm."
"Are you going to keep rowing?"
"For first year, maybe. Depends how hard my coursework gets."
"You're bright, you'll be fine."
He smiled at me, squinting slightly in the sunset reflecting down off my bedroom window. "Thanks, Tim Tam. Coming from you, that's a massive vote of confidence."
"Not like you need my cheerleading," I said with a smile.
"Tammy! Supper!" my dad called.
"Be right in!" I yelled.
"Catch you later," Will said, and I smiled back at him.
.:.
"Boyfriend all right?"
"Oh dad," I said, exasperated.
"Don't tease her," mum berated him. "Or I'll make you eat dinner outside in the cold."
"Yes love," he replied, contrite, and mum winked at me.
"Will's mum says he's thinking of going to UCT," Dad said.
"He was just telling me."
"It's a good University. You should start thinking about your choices, Tammy."
"I've still got a year of freedom," I replied tartly, and my parents chuckled.
.:.
Even under the most extensive torture I will not admit that I cried like a baby on the day that William left for University.
I'd pretended to be totally blasé about it, teasing him about becoming a filthy Southerner, how he'd turn into a lentil-eating hippie. He'd smiled at me and given me a wrapped package, with instructions to only open it once he was gone.
I'd tucked it under my pillow, and when my family had waved his family off on their trip to the airport I'd climbed deliberately upstairs to my room and torn open one of the neat lines of sellotape with a fingernail.
He'd left me his own personal copy of the Lord of the Rings - his name, William Patrick Andrews, written nearly on the inside cover in aged navy ink, a fresher "See you around, Tim Tam. Wills" curling gracefully under it.
And that was the trigger - I'd curled up into a ball on my bed, wrecking it with an extended bout of silent, brutal, muscle-straining sobs.
My parents had left me alone for a diplomatic period of time, and then my mum had quietly let herself into my room. She hadn't said a word, merely put an arm around me as I crawled half onto her lap and letting me find peace in my own time.
Neither mentioned my red eyes or quiet, interstellar distance over the next week, and I pretended very hard that nothing was wrong.
I'm good at lying to myself about important things.
.:.
My final year of school started - a swiftly-passing blur of swimming galas, provincial trials, exams, stress and frequent fretting about the future. Will and I desynced - any time he was home I'd invariably have something on; our few brief conversations felt stilted and artificial and left me depressed and unsatisfied. He'd always be happy to see me, and I'd always sink into a day or two of crippling melancholy when he was gone.
Blue Irises arrived on my eighteenth birthday, with a card reading, simply, "Still not eating Lentils," and I'd spent the rest of the day stuck in a slow grey lethargy that I'd only managed to shake by the next morning.
My parents and his parents had regular dinner dates - his dad joked at one point that they might as well cut a hole in the fence since it would save having to lock the front doors.
And then I matriculated, and went away to University myself, with only my mother around to cry over my departure - kind of melodramatic in hindsight given that I was still living at home. But I guess we're both emotional creatures, my mum and I, and it was childhood's end, in many ways.
First year and second year of university flew by as I dabbled in a commerce degree and experimented with relationships, which I found ultimately to be more trouble than they were worth. I lost the big V sometime in first year to someone who seemed on the face of it to be a relatively nice boy - whom I subsequently caught with a 'friend' a mere two weeks after I'd let him inside me. Disgusted and disillusioned, I retreated into my swimming and my studies, barely registered the coming and going of third year and my degree before I enlisted for honours and, somehow, graduated cum laude.
