The Shape of Us: A hilarious and emotional page turner about love, life and laughter

by Drew Davies

  ‘Yes, good luck with that,’ says JoJo, still licking her ice cream.

  The woman appears confused for a moment, and then laughs, slightly manically.

  ‘Wave, Anabelle! Wave!’ she cries to the unresponsive child.

  JoJo closes her eyes again, wiggling her toes and luxuriating in the eventual blissful silence.

  Dylan inserts a fresh piece of paper into the typewriter. He’s only just getting the hang of typing, and still makes plenty of mistakes, but even the errors seemed charming and olde worlde (to a point). On closer inspection, the ‘@’ and the ‘#’ keys had confused him. What was their use before email and social media? Was writing ‘at’ so common in the old days, they needed to abbreviate it with a symbol? And did people send hashtags in telegrams?

  He could go online, of course, and find all the answers in a few clicks, but ever since he’d been grounded over Christmas, and his computer privileges taken away, Dylan has spent considerably less time on the Internet. He was shocked at how much he enjoyed living an ‘analogue’ life. He read more books, took Otis on longer walks, and had even learnt to cook (properly – the other day he’d made an apple strudel from scratch). Dylan also discovered the world became slightly more mysterious when you didn’t have an instant answer for any minor question your brain randomly generated.

  Spending less time on the Internet did make choosing the next film for Janelle’s movie nights more difficult, but Dylan had visited the local library and found a couple of useful books on French cinema instead. Referencing a book (rather than a blog post or an online article) also had the added benefit of making you sound much smarter, he’d discovered. Now Janelle was starting chemo again, Dylan also wanted to make sure the movies weren’t especially sad – although it had to be said that most French films were a little bit miserable, even the supposed comedies. He also tried to avoid any ones with accidents, deaths, extended scenes in hospitals or anything else unnecessarily bleak – so that ruled out most. Dylan’s dad had been wary about his son’s burgeoning relationship – especially the movie nights at Janelle’s flat (she was too unwell to travel to Croydon) – but he’d relented because, at the end of the day, Dylan was an adult, visiting Janelle seemed to be helping him get better, and it was almost impossible to go against the wishes of someone struggling with cancer. Therefore, calls to Janelle and trips to see her were excluded from the terms of the grounding.

  With fingers poised above the keypad, Dylan starts to type his address. From one of the bedrooms, Otis responds to the click-clack of the typewriter by barking his head off.

  ‘Every time!’ yells Dylan. ‘It’s not going to hurt you!’

  He stops typing, and the barking ceases, but there’s a charged quality to the silence – Otis is waiting for his encore. Sure enough, as soon as Dylan commences typing, so too does the barking.

  Ignoring the noise, Dylan finishes his address, adds the date and presses the return key.

  He stares at the paper.

  A warm breeze ruffles the curtains at the open window.

  It was much harder to procrastinate on a typewriter. You couldn’t just open up another browser window. He needed to get this finished soon. Dave and Shelly, friends from school, would be here in twenty minutes – they were spending their sunny Saturday afternoon revising for a test on Monday because life was unfair, blah blah… but secretly, Dylan didn’t mind too much. Purpose is happiness, Janelle had told him. And now he was no longer the youngest (or skinniest) kid in class, school was almost bearable.

  He wonders what Chris is doing now. Dylan was surprised to find how much he missed him. A postcard had arrived only today, a picture of a giraffe wearing a comically long tie – classic Chris. It read: ‘Meet my neighbour.’

  Come on, Dylan thinks, focus.

  He starts to type ‘Dear’ (Otis starts up his chorus again), but misspells it ‘Deat’. Don’t stop, he thinks. You can change it with some correction fluid afterwards.

  But what if the stress of writing the letter caused him to get sick again? Dylan hasn’t had an attack in months, but the shadow of his illness still hung in the air. Didn’t something always, though? he thinks. Illness, exams, injury, death…? Janelle caged in her flat, smoking cigarettes. Chris in a pool of blood…

  ‘Deat Mum,’ Dylan continues, ‘Sorry I haven’t written before…’ – the sound of typing eventually masking the cacophony of barking, until Otis finally gives in, defeated.

  And at Heathrow Airport, Terminal Five, almost seven weeks since Chris left from the very same terminal, Daisy’s fellow passengers are already starting to line up at the gate. It’s ticketed seating, she thinks exasperatedly, why not wait comfortably in our seats until we’re called, guys? But no, there’s a rush to join a queue to get on the plane and be first to… sit down again. Oh well, she thinks, standing and picking up her things, people are fucking idiots.

  Daisy joins the queue, and checks she has her boarding pass for the umpteenth time. It’s her first ever trip to New York and she’s nervous. Her friend Bryony, the one who helped Daisy get into fashion in the first place, moved there three years ago and was constantly inviting her to go over for a holiday – Daisy definitely needed one, but what if it was too overwhelming? What if someone tried to make her buy a pretzel and she didn’t want a pretzel, but they were so American and insistent about everything that she bought them all? What would she do with so many pretzels? Or worse, what if she liked New York so much that she never wanted to leave again, and realised she’d been living in the wrong city all this time?

  Her rational mind knows she’s over-analysing everything, but Daisy can’t help it. Enduring one of the world’s slowest-burn break-ups will do that…

  Oh, Chris.

  For someone with so many injuries, Chris managed to heal at a remarkable rate (like a wolverine, he kept saying, although Daisy couldn’t recall why wolverines were so especially fast-healing). By day two, he was sitting up by himself, and on the fifth day, he was hobbling around the hospital with a walker, racing a kid in a wheelchair down the corridor and getting them both in trouble with the nurses. Daisy knew he was in a lot of pain – Chris self-administered so much morphine it made him chronically constipated – but he never complained and systematically charmed everyone in a half-mile radius, whether they liked it or not.

  After a fortnight, Chris was discharged from hospital, and spent a month convalescing at his parents’ house, Daisy travelling up each Friday to stay the weekend. It was an intensely emotional time – often they’d spend hours just holding each other, like soppy characters in a Nicholas Sparks novel. One afternoon, Daisy found herself standing by the kitchen sink with a full glass of water, and no idea how she’d got there, her brain was so wistfully ticking over. Would Chris still leave? Should she end things pre-emptively? But then Daisy would return to the bedroom to find Chris grinning up at her, a halo of empty chocolate wrappers around his head, and all those thoughts would dissolve…

  It was on his return to London that life began to accelerate. At first, Chris wanted to share his findings with Daisy – the programmes he liked, facts about Maasai or Mombasa, pictures of poor malnourished children and potbellied babies – but it was all too painful, and she begged him to stop. Better to be in the dark, she’d thought, naively. And it might never happen? Daisy’s own covert research revealed most of the volunteer programmes wanted skilled workers – teachers, doctors, builders – and competition was fierce. She’d taken comfort in the fact that Chris turned down an offer from his father to introduce him to a diplomat who could pull some strings – surely that meant he wasn’t serious? And anyway, it would be hot, unglamorous, physically punishing work – not exactly Chris’s forte. Daisy had to admit though, there was something steely about him now, a focus and tenacity missing before – it had made her nervous.

  A male flight attendant makes an announcement over the intercom: business class and families with small children first, and the queue starts to bunch forward impatiently. Da
isy digs through the contents of her bag – she’s misplaced her boarding pass already – but finds the unopened envelope from Chris instead. She takes it out gingerly, as if it contains uranium or something explosive. The edges of the envelope are dog-eared and grubby. He had delivered it in person, moments before she had to leave for a last-minute shoot in Paris – their goodbye dinner cancelled. Standing at her front door, they’d kissed, but the farewell had felt rushed and unsatisfying. The taxi driver was watching. She was late for the Eurostar. She’d worried about morning breath. Things went unsaid. Ever since, Daisy has been carrying the envelope around – for weeks now – without finding the courage to open it, and who could blame her? Those final few months with Chris had been… fraught. One moment, Daisy wanted to chain herself to his ankle; the next, she just wanted him to leave already. Even now, she still felt a gnawing fear that this whole ‘going to Africa for a minimum of two years’ thing was only an excuse to break up. That Chris had never really cared for her.

  Daisy finds her boarding pass again and hurriedly stashes the envelope back in her bag, as another announcement starts the line moving. When she’s through the gate with her boarding stub, she joins another queue on the gangway of thirty or so people, slowly trudging forward. Taking out her phone, Daisy makes a final sweep of messages, checking texts, her emails, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and PingBubbl. Nothing juicy, and of course nothing from Chris, who is completely off-grid – the nearest telephone over an hour’s drive away. She remembers their pact when they first met: no social media. Pick up the phone. Proper communication. How ironic then that their relationship should end with such a comprehensive media blackout.

  Stop it, she says to herself. You’re on holiday. No more thinking about him. What she wants most is a break from her mind – the churning over every small detail, the waking in the middle of the night with new damning evidence or missed opportunities – but as Daisy turns the corner and sees the entrance to the aircraft for the first time, she’s seized with panic. If I don’t open the envelope before I get on the plane, she thinks frantically, all this sad energy will follow me to New York. I have to do it now, or it’ll be too late!

  Flinging open her bag, Daisy gropes through its contents until she locates the envelope again. She holds it for a second, muscles tense. Why am I so scared? she thinks. Maybe I should throw it away? Or borrow someone’s lighter and burn it? She chides herself for her own melodramatics, and slips a finger under the seal to open it.

  Inside, she finds a card. On the front is a drawing of the Underground logo in red and blue pencil, except the red circle part of the logo is heart-shaped. The blue pencil has been smudged, and next to the smudge, in black ballpoint, there’s an arrow with the word ‘whoops!’ beside it in block letters. Cute.

  Closing her eyes, Daisy takes a deep breath and opens the card. Looking down again, she reads:

  For Daisy

  x Chris

  Daisy stares at the card. That’s it? ‘x Chris’? Not to be ungrateful, it was a lovely card – as cards go – but X BLOODY CHRIS…? After all that?!

  ‘Excuse me,’ a woman with an American accent says behind Daisy, ‘I think you dropped something.’

  Confused, Daisy turns.

  The woman is wearing a carnation pink jumper with a ‘Save our Spaniels’ badge pinned to her chest. ‘I thought it might be your ticket,’ she adds helpfully.

  ‘Er… thank you,’ says Daisy, peering at the mottled eggshell linoleum – but she can’t see anything and she’s still holding her boarding stub in her hand.

  ‘I saw it too,’ pipes up another American woman, obviously a friend or maybe a sister of the first one, wearing a matching sweater in yellow. ‘Seemed to me like a piece of paper, flew all the way down there.’

  She points to a spot on the ground, but when Daisy investigates, she can’t see anything.

  ‘Strange,’ says the first woman. ‘It’s disappeared. Maybe I need to get my eyes checked?’

  ‘No, I definitely saw it,’ the other woman says. ‘It can’t have vanished.’

  Soon, all three are searching the floor. The line ahead of them moves forward a few paces, causing some annoyed grumblings from the passengers behind them, but the American women seem oblivious to the fact that they are transgressing British queue etiquette, asking people to lift up their bags and check under their shoes until it’s a concerted group effort.

  Daisy is about to suggest they give up – it can’t have been anything important, and they’re getting dirty looks – when the first woman gives an excited yelp.

  ‘Found it!’ she cries victoriously, pulling herself up stiffly from the hips and waving a piece of paper above her head. ‘I’m not going crazy.’

  ‘Where was it hiding?’ the other woman asks.

  ‘Over here. It was camouflaged on the floor – practically invisible.’

  And so it is; the folded piece of paper she gives Daisy is the exact same colour as the linoleum – it even has a similar dappled pattern.

  The people behind them are fed up of this nonsense now, and start to barge past. Daisy thanks the two women profusely, and steps to one side, letting the queue swarm by her.

  Carefully, she opens the sheet of paper. Written in Chris’s big loopy handwriting is the following:

  You, held aloft by two muscled men during the breakdown of that ‘Lola’s Theme’ remix, as everyone else in the club whooped and hollered.

  The time you called me on the phone to say goodnight after our second date. The nervousness in your voice. I could have squeezed you.

  Your fury at the District line. ‘Seriously, it’s the OAP of Tube lines! It might as well be going backwards!’

  Your horror when I asked the cab driver to check that weird-looking mole on my back for me.

  Empirical evidence proved you do like sitting at the front of the cinema (Lawrence of Arabia, the Prince Charles). You don’t get a crick in your neck, your eyes will adjust, and it is more immersive. And better than being stuck behind a tall person. Or your nemesis: hat guy.

  Receiving my first ever telegram (if I’m being completely honest, I thought it was a court summons).

  The way you decline the offer of cream on top, but then always ask for a cheeky squirt at the end (I’m talking about coffee, by the way, in case you were wondering).

  New favourite green spaces you introduced me to – the Phoenix Garden and the Geffrye Museum Gardens. You’re right, Regent’s Park is overrated.

  Your alternating look of terror and polite enthusiasm as Dad showed you his horrible gun collection.

  That Japanese restaurant we could never remember the name of is called Ten Ten Tei (and it’s closed most of Saturday and all Sunday because no one wants sushi on the weekend, right?).

  The way you stopped at every person with a pushchair, any tourist with a suitcase. It didn’t matter what you were carrying, you’d help haul their things up the stairs.

  Your face when I woke up in hospital, those eyes.

  Goodbyes aren’t my strong suit, and I probably made too many stupid jokes at ours. So I wanted you to know this: whichever road you’re on, whatever path, I love you, Daisy. With all my heart. Every ounce of it. I love you.

  xxxx Chris

  * * *

  p.s. Remind me I still have that weird-looking mole I need you to check.

  Daisy folds the letter, wipes her face with her sleeve, and continues down the walkway onto the plane.

  Epilogue

  JoJo is loitering (or was she? Weren’t all universities public spaces?). No, lurking was a better description.

  The buildings of the Imperial College were very different to the ones she remembered – they loomed above her, unnecessarily modern and ugly – and everyone seemed all of fifteen years old, of course. These students appeared hectored too, as if the weight of the world was on their heavy shoulders.

  JoJo had cruised past the building at least twice, trying to figure out her motivation for being there. Was she really w
andering by, after meeting Frank for lunch, simply because she was in nearby South Kensington? Or, had she ensured today’s restaurant would be in close proximity? Either way, JoJo was getting dangerously close to entering the place, and she felt a strong sense of imposter syndrome – a couple more steps and she’d be over the threshold. She rattles the key chain in her pocket as if to summon a protective hex. When Frank moved in with Belinda for good, JoJo had finally taken off the mystery keys from their metal ring and thrown them in the bin. She obviously didn’t need them, or by now, she’d have found what they were for. The lightness of the key chain felt liberating.

  Why was her heart beating? She was inside the building now – her mouth felt dry, maybe they had a water fountain somewh—?

  ‘Can I help you?’

  Rumbled.

  JoJo straightens up and turns to meet a young man who is wearing a style of glasses she remembers from the eighties: blocky, plastic, electric blue.

  ‘I used to go here,’ she announces, surprising herself with her candour. The young man’s manner changes slightly, his expression less interrogatory, more interested. ‘But I’m not a doctor,’ JoJo clarifies quickly. ‘I never finished.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure to meet a former student,’ the young man says – genuinely? JoJo can’t tell. Maybe they wanted more Alumni money; she still received letters from them every year, begging cash for something preposterous – the latest was for ‘sleep pods’ (why don’t they just nod off in the library like we did? she’d thought).

  ‘I’m not sure where you are in your education cycle,’ he continues, ‘but we have quite a few short courses you might be interested in?’

  ‘In case I don’t live through the longer ones?’

  The chap tactfully ducks this question – or maybe he doesn’t hear – and nips behind the desk, taking out a stack of expensively produced-looking, brightly coloured brochures and plopping them on the counter between them.