As he took his jacket off and folded it under his arm, I noticed there were scratches on either side of his neck, as if someone had grabbed him there.
“Let’s finish that script at lunch, shall we?” Joel said. “What did we decide to call it in the end?”
“The Regulars,” I replied, distracted. Joel must have seen me looking at the scratch marks because he put his jacket back on.
“That was it,” he said breezily. “Oh, just realized I can’t do lunchtime. Got the dentist. Some other day soon, though.”
I watched Joel wandering off. I stood there for a long time in the middle of the corridor, people passing around me like fish avoiding a weed poking up from the riverbank, and felt like my friend was slipping away. Things just hadn’t been right between us since that day he’d forbidden me to ever ask him again if he was okay. I’d hoped that as the weeks went by we would end up back where we used to be—“the little double act.” But if anything it felt like the distance had grown between us, and I was sure episodes like this, where I’d panicked about something that was supposed to be a bit of fun, were all part of the problem. The party seemed to take on a new significance now; maybe the answer was to show Joel that I could be fun and not so uptight. Perhaps that was the way to get things back on track.
It was that hope that left me full of nerves on the day itself—that and the little bit of subterfuge I’d had to use with Mum and Dad. They were going to the theater that evening and asked me to “babysit” Alice, much to her indignation. She must have said “But I’m thirteen!” at least fourteen times. In the end I took her aside and told her we’d pretend I was going to stay home and look after her. I waited until Dad’s car had turned the corner at the end of the drive before legging it upstairs to get ready for the party. Then I grabbed some cans of cider from the fridge, slung them in a plastic bag and went to find Alice, who was hunched over her drawing pad as usual.
“Right, then,” I said. “Remind me, if Mum and Dad come back early and I’m not here, what are you going to tell them?”
Without looking up, Alice said, “That you’re doing drugs with the Gallaghers at Little Somerford owl sanctuary.”
“Alice.”
She sighed and looked up. “Oh my god. Theo! What have you done to your hair?”
“Never mind about that,” I said. Then: “Why? Is it really bad?”
Alice was laughing like I’d never seen her laugh before.
“You look like the lion from The Wizard of Oz!” she wheezed.
I darted over to the hall mirror. The rushed dye job I’d just done on my hair had looked okay upstairs, but now, with its burned orange tips set against the sickly yellow of the rest of it, I could see how disastrous it was.
“Shut your gob,” I said. “Remember, if Mum and Dad are home before I am, then tell them I’ve just had to run over to Joel’s to give him that textbook I borrowed.”
“Very believable,” Alice said, wiping her eyes.
I harrumphed and headed for the front door. And with one final dash of Davidoff Cool Water, I was out into the balmy summer evening, butterflies flickering in my stomach.
When I arrived at Chrissy’s house, the only sign of life was next door, where a pensioner was watching Countdown. It didn’t exactly scream “party.”
I knocked, but no one answered, so I let myself in and made my way down the hall, feeling self-conscious when I passed someone I didn’t recognize, not sure whether I should say hello. I passed a doorway and someone grabbed me by the arm and yanked me into the room.
“Fucking hell, Theo, what have you done to your hair?” It was Joel.
He already seemed quite drunk—certainly drunker than the nine other people in the room. Everyone was standing in a square, backs hugging the walls, as if there should have been a focal point in the middle.
It took a while—precisely the time it took for me to drink two weak ciders—for things to warm up, but the gradual shift toward an evening that constituted a party reached terminal velocity when Tom Pritchard, our weed dealer, downed a small bottle of vodka in one go before promptly expelling it in several spectacular heaves out of the living room window. His older brother, Mark, arrived shortly afterward in an appropriately vomit-yellow car, but rather than taking Tom home, he just made him splash water on his face and sent him to buy more vodka.
More people began to stream in, the music was cranked up and someone lit a joint in the bathroom. Joel had seemed morose when I first got there, but his mood had begun to brighten. The ciders flowed, and before long I had forgotten about my terrible lion hair and my stupid, gangly awkwardness altogether as Joel and I danced around to some terrible local band’s EP which was now blasting from the speakers. As we jumped up and down, arms around each other’s shoulders, everything felt all right again—back to normal. Me and Joel versus the world. I was gripped with an overwhelming desire for him to know how much he meant to me. But the more I tried to articulate this—shouting over the music—the less sense I made.
“What?” Joel kept shouting. After about the tenth time, I could tell he was starting to lose patience. He seemed distracted too, looking around for someone to appear. He was basically downing drinks now. When he stumbled away out of the living room, I tried to follow him, calling after him to wait.
“Mate, I’m going for a piss, okay?”
“But this is important!” I slurred.
“What, then? What do you need to tell me that can’t wait for three minutes?”
I felt embarrassed at him chiding me like that. It made it even harder to say what I wanted to.
“I just . . . I just . . .”
“What?”
I lowered my gaze to the floor. “I just wanted to say that, erm . . . I never had a friend, really, until you came along. I was just such a fucking loser, really, and I know I still am—I know all the comedy stuff is nerdy and embarrassing—but having you as a mate just means I’m not such a freak anymore. When we write stuff together, even just mucking around with it, it’s just the best, and I never really thought I’d have that, and . . .” The words were all tumbling out in the wrong order.
I looked up at Joel nervously, hoping that he’d have a smile on his face or, even better, that he might say something meaningful back. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at someone over my shoulder. I turned around to see Amber Crossley standing at the top of the stairs. I knew Amber from my English class—she was sent out every lesson without exception for being on her phone—but she was always the best person in the class at reading scenes from whatever book or play we were studying.
Amber began to walk down the stairs. When she got to the bottom, she looked self-consciously between us and said, “Well, here we all are.”
“Hey,” Joel said, smoothing his hair back in a way I’d never seen him do before. “You know Theo, yeah. Theo, this is Amber.”
“Hello, Amber,” I said, though I hiccupped halfway through her name: “Am-ic-ber.”
“No, no, it’s Amber,” she said, as if I’d heard it wrong. It might have felt like she was making fun of me if she hadn’t smiled at me afterward. And it was quite the smile.
“Come on, you two,” she said. “Shall we go for a smoke outside?”
I had never concentrated so hard in my life at simply standing upright. Joel was rolling the last of the weed Amber had brought, and when the joint came to me, I took the smallest pull I could. We were standing in the garden, ignoring a bunch of the others bouncing up and down on a trampoline in the corner. I was slurring my words even worse now and Amber was nodding politely at me, like she was talking to an elderly relative in a nursing home. The next thing I knew, she was prodding me awake. Apparently I had fallen asleep against the shed door with my hands in my pockets. Amber’s face was up close to mine.
“You okay there?” she said. It took me a second to answer. I don’t think I�
�d ever stood this close to a girl before. Certainly not one as pretty as Amber.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I managed to say, adding a yawn for good measure, as if the only reason I’d gone to sleep was my growing weariness at this gathering of the Kemble bourgeoisie.
“Right you are,” she said.
“Where’s Joel gone?” I asked.
“He’s . . . I’m not sure, but listen, do you fancy going on a weed mission? We’re all out. Joel said you might have some back at yours?”
“Oh, right, yeah,” I said.
When I didn’t move, Amber raised her eyebrows.
“So . . . I’ll go get it now, then?” I said.
Amber beamed and squeezed my hand.
“Excellent work, soldier,” she replied, and I saluted.
I stumbled back through the house into the road and picked my bike up from the front lawn. I felt pleased to be on this mission. It felt very important that I got it right, that I impressed Amber and Joel as much as I could. It was only when I swung my legs onto the bike that I remembered I’d already packed my stash of weed in my sock, just in case Alice decided to go rooting around through my stuff while I was out. I grinned to myself at how happy Joel and Amber were going to be with me. I had visions of them lifting me into the air and carrying me around on their shoulders.
As I turned back to the house, a girl rushed past me to throw up into a hedge just as an Alsatian started barking relentlessly from the neighbor’s garden. I chucked my bike down next to Mark Pritchard’s car and steered my way past the heaving bodies crammed into the hallway, which stank of sweat and spilled beer. A group of boys were wrestling on the utility room floor. I had to jump over them to get to the back door, until finally I was back in the garden. That was when I saw Joel. He was prone on the trampoline, and he wasn’t alone. Because in his arms was Amber.
And then everything came into focus. So that’s why they’d sent me away. That’s why Joel had been busy all those lunchtimes, why he’d been so secretive about everything. How had it taken me this long to realize it was all just because of a girl?
I was suddenly desperate to be as far away from Joel as I could. I was vaguely aware of some commotion behind me. I thought I heard Joel calling my name, but I barged my way through the house, determined not to look back. I hauled my bike off the front lawn and set off up the road. My legs were pumping so hard the lactic acid burned, but I kept on going. My front light was picking up moths and other bugs flitting across the road. The white painted markers on the road were flashing by, the same image over and over again, like I was cycling through a frame of film on an endless loop. I swerved and nearly lost control, regaining it just as I heard a car coming up behind me, beeping its horn. But I wasn’t going to pull over to let them past. They could just fucking wait.
As I came around the final corner before my house, a muntjac deer skipped across the road just in front of me, eyes bulging with fright. Instinctively, I jerked the handlebars left and my front light caught the face of Alice, ghostly white, cycling toward me in the other direction. I just had time to see a faint look of surprise cross her face before I heard the car behind me slam on its brakes, and then there was an awful, grinding crunch.
I stumbled off my bike, legs shaking, blood pounding in my ears. I fell to my knees next to Alice, who was lying on her back, eyes closed, looking as peaceful as if she were sleeping. Her helmet had come off her head. It had a huge crack in it. I heard the car doors open. Looking around, I shielded my eyes from the blinding headlights. I caught a glimpse of a yellow door and realized it was Tom’s brother’s car. Standing in front of it, silhouetted against the bonnet, were Amber and Joel.
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Theo
The time I spent in the waiting room in Gloucester Hospital still haunts me. I dream about it regularly, and it’s always the same things that I see: a man having a nosebleed into an upturned cap; a child in pajamas wriggling on the floor as his dad tried to restrain him; a woman wearing a paper party hat smeared with blood. In the dream, they are like animatronic figures, repeating the same actions over and over again, until at last they all wrench their heads around to look at me, and that’s when I jolt awake.
Alice was rushed straight through. Dad went with her. Mum and I stayed in the waiting room, but Mum couldn’t sit still. She kept getting up and pacing, arms folded around herself, sobbing. When she finally settled down next to me, I rested my head on her shoulder, and whatever it was about me doing that meant she stopped crying for a moment, so I stayed like that, trying not to move a muscle.
At first it looked like Alice was going to lose all feeling below her neck. But after a few days she could feel her arms again.
“It’s because of her drawing,” Mum said with a tearful laugh. “She wasn’t going to let anything stop her doing that.”
I spent as much time as they’d let me in Alice’s hospital room that summer as her rehabilitation began. I only saw her cry twice. I always knew that she was far braver than me. But I knew then that she was a superhero. Partly because of her determination to get stronger, but mainly because it was only after six weeks had passed that she brought up Joel.
“Where was he driving to, anyway?” she asked one morning, almost casually.
I’d decided I wasn’t going to tell her the truth—at least, the truth as I understood it, that he was chasing after me to explain or apologize—because that only seemed to make it worse.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just decided to get in Tom’s brother’s car, I suppose. Someone must have egged him on. Not that I’m defending him or anything.”
Alice grimaced as she pushed herself up in her bed.
“Have you seen him since?” she asked.
“No,” I replied. “And I won’t. I promise.”
Alice closed her eyes and rested her head back.
“I don’t mind if you do. It wasn’t deliberate.”
“Well, yeah, but that’s not the point, is it?” I said. “You can’t walk because of that fucking idiot.”
“Thanks for reminding me, bro.”
“I’m sorry.” I reached out and took her hand in mine. A gust of wind got up and the strip blinds clattered against the open window.
“Has he tried to talk to you?” Alice asked.
I hesitated before showing her my phone. There were 128 missed calls. Four were from this morning.
“Yeesh,” she said. “Has he been to the house?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Probably for the best. Mum would probably try and batter him with a saucepan or something.”
I smiled, but not for long, because as Alice shifted position again she winced with pain.
“Aren’t you . . .” I faltered.
“What?”
“Aren’t you angry with him?”
“I was,” Alice said after a moment. “But I’ve chosen not to be now. There’s no point.”
After a moment I stood up and went over to the window. There was something about my thirteen-year-old sister being as calm and stoic as this that I couldn’t stand. Where was the screaming and the tantrums about how unfair it all was? Didn’t she want me to go and kick the shit out of Joel? To get revenge for what he’d done to her?
“You know it’s okay to be angry,” I said, turning back to face her. “In fact, I want you to be.”
Alice frowned. “But why?”
“Because look! Look at what’s done to you!”
Alice took a band from her wrist and started to tie up her hair.
“Thanks for the second reminder. Look, if you’re going to get all upset, then I’d like you to leave, please.”
“But—”
“Otherwise I need a wee.”
“Oh.”
“Give me a hand getting me into the chariot?”
&nb
sp; The chariot was what Alice had christened her wheelchair. It had taken a good deal of practice, but we had a well-choreographed routine now to get her from her bed into the chair.
“All good?” I said, reaching down to pull a stray bit of material away from one of the wheels of her chair once we’d completed the maneuver.
Alice nodded. I was about to get back to my feet when she said: “Of course I’m angry with him, Theo.”
When I looked at her, I saw her eyes were glistening with tears. I’d never noticed what a brilliant blue they were. I took her hand.
“I wish it hadn’t happened,” she said. “I’m spending every moment I’m awake trying not to think about how shit my life is going to be from now on, and my friends are being so weird when they come to visit me because they don’t know how to act, and I can’t stand that. But you’ve got to help me by not getting angry. Because it just reminds me that things aren’t okay. And the more I can keep pretending that everything’s fine, the more everything will be fine in the end. All right?”
I swallowed, hard.
“All right,” I said.
“Good.” She wiped at her eyes with her sleeves and clapped her hands together as if sweeping the moment away, signaling that this would be the last time we’d speak of it.
“Now that’s settled. Onwards, driver. Onwards.”
* * *
The atmosphere of the Turf Tavern, Oxford, was raucous. Students in their college-branded hoodies were sinking pints and shots. A kid wearing corduroy trousers at the bar had ordered a yard of ale and was pouring most of it down his front. As people strained to make their voices heard, the volume seemed to be rising exponentially, on target to blow the roof off the place. In a little nook, surveying the scene in silence, were me and Joel.
An hour ago, I’d looked on helplessly as his mouth opened and closed with no words forthcoming, while beside him the front wheel of the tandem—collapsed on its side—turned slowly around, its spokes catching the sunlight.
When We Were Young Page 15