[This is something I've been adding to over the years, but I think I'm more than ready to let go now :) Those of you who've read my other stories may recognise the original version of a scene I later elaborated upon, Katgirl xx]
THE OLDER MAN
I'm learning to be a grown-up. It's harder than I thought and yet the easiest thing in the world essentially, as no one has much choice in the matter. I am in a room decorated sometime during the seventies it seems, all browns and oranges. Patterned wallpaper and swirled carpets, but old, stained and filled with newspapers and magazines and pieces of debris on each surface. I'm drunk. Again. But I'm only sixteen and this is what being a teenager is supposed to mean. There have been other nights like this, oh so many of them lately. Bright nights at bars and clubs I'm not old enough to be in, full of jokes I don't understand and laughter I join in with. It's the first time I've been flirted with and I like it. I feel wanted.
"I love you," says Tim.
I stand there feeling stupid and empty of anything worth saying. I stare at him instead, embedding him in my brain and making a choice: yes or no, something for the sake of it or a long wait for something worth having. My eyes show me the hair I made him cut and the shirt I made him wear, but they can't hide what he really is. Twenty-one, but far too old for his age and, I confess, someone I could never be proud to be with. I admit to myself my own vanity, make my excuses and walk back in to the well-lit pub, leaving him outside in the darkening summer night.
And yet here I am in his house, with two inebriated friends, his older, larger, but similar brother and a pile of alcopops laid out in a line ready for consummation. We talk quietly in the hallway about any last chance of an 'us'.
I can't stand up; the room is swaying in time with my waves of nausea. Nausea from the drink, from his hopes, from what I've done to myself. Later I go upstairs to find him chained to his mother's bed straddled by my best friend, Jeni. I'm disgusted, but laugh and return to the brown velour sofa on which I was attempting to sleep. I feel violated and vulnerable in the nightshirt I borrowed from her that barely covers my thighs. Everyone's asleep now. I check my mobile phone for signs of salvation and find it in the form of a hundred missed calls and messages from my mother wanting to know why I'm not at home in my own bed. I feel like shit: hung over, tired. Guilty.
I pull on my crumpled trousers and shirt as quietly as I can. Both are synthetic and the material sounds like someone screwing up a letter they didn't want to read. I zip up my knee-high boots and walk unsteadily to the bathroom to wash my face. Instead of the cleansing I seek I find remains of someone else's vomit encrusted in the toilet bowl.
A desperate urge to get out, out of this house, out of this pattern, strikes me with the force of a baseball bat to the chest. I suppress my desire to scream and calmly remove my bag from the living room, quietly open the door and walk home in the summer dawn sunshine feeling like dirt in the purity of the light, while my boots rub holes in my heels.
One week Tim stops by my workplace with a bunch of pretty yellow flowers for me. I wonder why he chose yellow. It's such a young, unromantic colour; perhaps he feels that they're safe. He tries to talk, but the conversation's stinted and awkward and I feel very aware that I don't want Greg, who is talking to a customer behind me, to see me as taken. I'm embarrassed by Tim's affection for me. I put the flowers in a makeshift jam jar vase in the back room of the shop and the next time Tim walks by I'll hide behind the counter until Greg tells me it's safe to come out.
*****
THE BEST FRIEND
I'm watching my neighbours as they sit together in the garden. They're a proper family. They even have a golden retriever and it's playing with a red ball. The mother is handing out sandwiches and glasses of lemonade. They're like something from a book set in the fifties. The younger of the two sisters is curled up on her father's lap, even though she's just a year younger than me at fifteen, and doesn't quite fit. The older one throws the ball for the dog without creasing her pretty floral dress.
I lean back into my pillows, studying my ripped jeans and black shirt. I feel so ugly next to their lightness. "God I wish my life were like that," I say, meeting Jon's eye shyly.
"No you don't," he answers, his brown eyes smiling at my frown. "You'd get bored." He's right. I think of my broken family and know that even in all the shit, we're honest. Even if my mother hates me, at least I know, I think to myself wryly.
Somehow he sees me. He always does, even when I can't see through myself. It's been like this since the first day we met, aged thirteen, and everyone's still waiting for us to get married eight years on. There's a comfortable magic with Jon and I. We spent our teenage years watching sci-fi marathons stretched upon his bed and earned ourselves the nicknames of Joey and Dawson. His girlfriends always hate me and my boyfriends are threatened by him. They can't understand that our connection is different, deeper and non-sexual in its intent. We've only tried a double date once and it was a disaster of bruised egos and catty comments that still makes us laugh.
Sitting on the rickety stool in the unlit kitchen, I play with my pigtails and wipe the tears unceremoniously across my cheek with the back of my hand.
"Kate," says Jon gently. "You're worth so much more than he ever saw and you don't want the life he offered." "I know," I answer quietly, trying not to let on that I'm crying. "I want someone exciting, someone who'd just drop everything and go on an adventure with me, not him with his work and money and boredom. But, why didn't he want me?"
I give in to the tears in that moment and Jon patiently waits and puts his own broken heart on hold for me.
A strange twist of fate has us both left alone in the same week by people we pretended to believe would never leave. I talk him out of walking the road of cocaine and meaningless sex. He's better than being swallowed by that life. He tries to make me believe I am not worthless to those who supposedly love me. We finish each other's sentences of hurt and hopes and I realise even through my pain how perfectly we fit together.
