Somewhere Close to Happy: The heart-warming, laugh-out-loud debut of the year

by Lia Louis

  ‘But, Priscilla—’

  ‘Hubble died because he had a massive heart attack that the doctors said could’ve happened at any moment. Picking up a heavy box, putting out the washing …’

  ‘But it wasn’t any of those things, was it?’ I say. ‘Roman was the reason. Him, spending time with Ethan, helping him, despite everything, despite you, he put himself in danger for Ethan, stood next to him on seedy little deals with god only knows who. Drugs, Priscilla. He promised me he—’ The words lodge in my throat. I can’t speak.

  Priscilla sighs sadly, then looks down to the Crunchie in my hand. She bends and bites another lump off. I do the same. Between us, we finish it, then push the duvet from our heads and sit up, beside one another, leaning against the large, grey quilted square of headboard.

  ‘I know this is probably not what you want to hear, because it is shit … it is,’ says Priscilla, ‘but I think this is all bittersweet in a way. Because you and Roman … you two and Hubble, you were all sort of meant to be. You all saved each other, if you think about it.’

  Brushing Crunchie crumbs from my lips, I look at her.

  Priscilla draws in a deep breath. ‘I know it was hard when he left. But a part of me was … glad. Selfishly, I was glad – for you. Because he was worse, Lizzie, worse than you could see. And you were getting on. You were so much better. And I was getting you back. My girl. My mate Lizzie.’

  Priscilla holds my gaze, pink lips pressed together, chest rising and falling. The heater on the wall clicks and rumbles. Seagulls squawk their seaside cries outside. The weatherman on the small hotel TV gestures to the sun drifting across the map, all hands, raised eyebrows, and smiles.

  ‘You need to go back. Talk to him.’

  My heartbeat whooshes in my ears like crashing waves, and for what feels like ages, I don’t take my eyes off the telly, my eyes glazing over, blurring the screen. ‘I just feel like everything’s a mess,’ I say, bringing the duvet over my legs. Priscilla pulls it across to her and shuffles closer to me. She rests her head on my shoulder.

  ‘Was a mess,’ she says. ‘Was. But it’s done.’

  We sit up in bed, beside one another, for what feels like ages – just like we did for years, as kids when we’d pass Maltesers and crisps between us, figuring out the world while watching Hollyoaks and Girls in Love in our pyjamas.

  ‘I feel stupid, that I didn’t know how bad he was. The drugs, the circles he was in. He was so ‘together’ around me, P.’

  Priscilla shrugs. ‘Sometimes people give the best version of themselves to other people. Because it’s easier; it’s easier to rescue someone else. It’s so much harder to do it for yourself.’ Priscilla sits up. ‘And I don’t know a lot, but I know that he loved you. The kid loved you and did everything he could to help you get better. Probably still loves you. I knew it, we all knew it.’

  ‘Hubble knew it,’ I croak.

  ‘And he died helping him,’ sniffs Priscilla. ‘Roman didn’t ask for that. It was Hubble who took it upon himself to help, because that’s who he was. OK, it was bad luck, bad timing. And think about what might have happened if he hadn’t intervened. Ethan was trouble. Everyone he knew was trouble. Well. Almost everyone.’

  I look up at her and see her lovely face – her lovely warm Priscilla face, with huge brown eyes that she dries now, with the cuffs of her jumper. Then she reaches forward and catches my tears on her fingertips.

  ‘What time’s our flight again?’

  ‘Eleven. We’ll have to leave about half six, seven latest.’

  ‘Can I take the car?’ I ask. ‘To sort this out, go and see him.’

  Priscilla nods, eyes brightening. ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Go. Go and have your goodbye.’

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  4th April 2001

  Hubble sits the cyclamen plant next to Mimi’s stone. He stands back and dusts down his jeans, then moves to stand beside me. The sun beats down, and we both hold our hands up to our faces as shades. We stand and look at where Mimi has lain for a year now.

  ‘Do you know what the meaning behind the cyclamen is?’

  I shake my head, my eyes settling on the white buds, and its tiger-print-like, cabbagey green leaves.

  ‘It’s a symbol of departure,’ says Hubble, placing his hand on my shoulder. ‘That all things must end someday. A symbol of goodbye.’

  I bring my shoulders to my ears. ‘Well, that’s depressing.’

  ‘Is it?’ Hubble asks, straightening and turning his face to the sun. ‘I don’t think so.’ Hubble pauses then squeezes my shoulder gently. ‘We don’t always get to say goodbye. Sometimes you’ll be holding the balloon, and it’s pulled from you. Or you drop it, without realising until it’s too late. And it’s gone. That’s it. You can’t get it back.’ Hubble bends and pulls a stray weed from the ground. He tosses it behind us and straightens again. ‘But if you’re the one that lets it go, then you should count yourself lucky. You get to prepare, you get to say goodbye. You get to close the book.’

  A plane bumbles across the sky, high above, and Hubble and I follow its path, hands still shading our foreheads. When it disappears, we look back down at Mimi. The flecks in the marble of her headstone glitter, just like her earrings used to in the sunshine as she painted, or picked vegetables to sketch in late summer.

  ‘Goodbyes are a privilege,’ says Hubble, putting his arm around me. ‘They are one of life’s gifts, not punishments.’

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  It’s a beautiful day at the end of the world. The sky is one clear sheet of endless blue, peppered with tufts of skittery cloud, and the air is pure and crisp. Gulls screech overhead, and the day is so clear, I can make out distant rocks jutting out from the sea, like the backs of resting whales. The sea is calm today – it whooshes and fizzes, instead of roars.

  I find Roman, lounging back, leg bent on his porch with a book, Barney at his side. He stands as soon as he sees me, the book hanging at his side in his hand, his index finger slotted between pages. I’m still, at the foot of the path. We stand, eyes fixed on each other. He’s searching my face – he wants to know what he’s up against.

  ‘You should put socks on,’ I say, eyeing his bare feet.

  Roman’s face floods with relief. He looks to the ground. ‘Why?’ he asks. ‘Because I’ll catch a cold or because you hate feet? The things we were born with that allow us to actually move.’

  ‘Both,’ I say. ‘But yes. Mostly because I still hate them.’

  Roman smiles weakly, as if despite himself. ‘I didn’t think you’d come back.’

  ‘I didn’t think I’d come back either.’

  We smile, neither of us saying anything, as we slowly close the gap between us. We stand opposite each other. A breeze blows around us, crunchy auburn leaves circle our feet.

  ‘I shouldn’t have left,’ I say.

  ‘Isn’t that what I’m supposed to say?’ Roman’s face doesn’t flinch – his eyes are serious and shining with sadness.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says.

  I shake my head. ‘Don’t,’ I tell him. ‘Just tell me. Tell me what happened.’

  ‘OK,’ Roman says. ‘But come and sit with me. Just for a moment.’

  And on the porch we dreamed up all those years ago, we sit, looking out to sea, and he tells me. He tells me that after he left my house, he met Ethan in the park, but when they got there, there was a gang of older guys waiting for them. There was a fight. All Roman remembers is Hubble shouting saying he’d called the police, as he pulled Roman off the ground. Everyone scarpered, Ethan too, and Hubble told Roman to come inside, but he kept stopping, holding his chest. That was it – the moment everything changed. He fell against Roman, who held him, and lowered him to the ground, just metres from Hubble’s back garden gate. He called the ambulance. They stayed on the phone with him.

  ‘I talked to him all the time, Lizzie. He couldn’t speak, but … I stayed with him. I talked to him, about everything, about anything. I d
idn’t leave him. Not once.’

  Roman said he melted down in the ambulance and had to be restrained and calmed down. He told them it was all his fault. He told them he’d got into a fight. He told them to call the police on him.

  When they got to the hospital, Roman told them they had to call Charlie – that everyone they needed to notify was at the scout hut, where Auntie Shall and Uncle Pete were having their vow ceremony party. Dad arrived through the doors first, then Pete and Shall. Dad flew at Roman – shook him, screamed at him, held his fist inches from his face. Roman says he expected it. He took it. Wanted it even, because he deserved it. Shall squawked and screeched at him, she told him he would ‘go down for this’. Pete said nothing.

  ‘They asked me to leave, the doctors,’ says Roman. ‘But they told us that it was nobody’s fault, and that he was stable. The next I knew, was you banging on the door the next day, telling me he’d died.’

  And that was the moment. The moment he knew he’d betrayed me. That he’d ruined my life. He wanted to die, because he blamed himself.

  ‘I was a mess. I’ve never felt so desperate in my life as I did that week,’ he says. Then Dad had found him, shivering, sick from no sleep, from the sheer weight of living with what he did, his mum and her boyfriend passed out downstairs. Dad couldn’t turn away. He helped him. He saved him. He gave him a second chance. He set him free.

  ‘A therapist once told me,’ says Roman, now, his hand folded round mine, ‘that I didn’t need your forgiveness. I needed my own. And I think that’s always going to be my problem, J. That’s what I can’t get past. I will never be able to forget that night.’

  I press a tissue to my wet cheeks and squeeze my fingers around Roman’s hand. ‘Well if you feel you need mine,’ I say, ‘you have it.’

  We sit together, watching the calm waves, the distant boats, and soaring birds. We sit there, together, under that endless blue sky until the sun begins to go down. We drink tea, we talk, we laugh, we remember and sing the songs we used to love. We laugh until we hold our stomachs. We sit. Just us. Just us, the sea, and the darkening autumn sky. And I don’t want to move from beside him. I don’t want to let go of his hand.

  ‘I thought I ruined it,’ I say, head against Roman’s chest like a pillow, his chin resting on my head. ‘At first, I thought I was why you left.’

  ‘You?’ asks Roman. ‘How would you have ruined anything?’

  The sun glitters on the ocean turning the waves to jewels. My head rises and falls with Roman’s breathing. ‘That night,’ I say, softly. ‘In the bathroom.’

  Roman tenses. ‘When I kissed you.’

  My cheeks pulse with embarrassment. ‘When I kissed you, you mean.’

  Roman laughs and pulls back, turning so he can see me. ‘There’s no way that could’ve ruined it,’ he smiles, ‘when it’s all I’d wanted to do for, well, what felt like sixteen centuries. Seventeen-year-old boys are hardly subtle, are they?’

  I burst out laughing and bring my hands to my face.

  ‘But we were banned remember?’ says Roman, mockingly. ‘Not allowed to have relationships with one another. As if we weren’t depressed enough already.’

  I nod, still laughing. ‘You called Ramesh a heart-Nazi.’

  Roman bursts out laughing. ‘God, I did, didn’t I? Jeez. Poor Ram.’ He relaxes back on the bench, tightening his arms around me once more. His hand hasn’t let mine go. Not for a second. ‘Some of my happiest memories are of The Grove, though, you know.’

  ‘Mine too.’

  ‘And in Sea Fog,’ says Roman.

  ‘Of course, Sea Fog.’

  A bird screeches across the sky, and Roman leans back ever so slightly, his arms not moving from around me, to get a better look. I can hear his heart now I’ve turned my face. It’s steady. Strong, like a drum. He settles back down.

  ‘I’ve been looking at camper vans, actually.’

  ‘Really?’

  Roman nods, chin skimming the top of my head. ‘About time we commenced the hunt for the perfect fudge, isn’t it?’

  I smile, eyes closing as the wind blows a warm swirl of air from the outdoor heater in our direction. It smells of dust and sea salt.

  ‘And chips. Massive fuck-off, salty ones. In the paper,’ I say, ‘and not served in those offensive polystyrene things.’

  Roman laughs. ‘I will find you a chippy that deals with only paper, J. And you can doodle those little people on the chip forks. Like you used to. Remember you drew the one of Morrissey, then I used him and his face melted off?’

  I laugh, cheeks stinging, stomach juddering under my jumper. ‘Shame,’ I say. ‘Poor Melted Morrissey.’

  ‘He deserved better.’

  ‘Debatable.’

  The sun sits, half-dipped in the sea, like a perfect semicircle now, the way it does in films and on calendars, and I wish I could freeze frame this moment. I don’t want time to move. I don’t want to leave.

  My phone vibrates in my pocket. I sit up to read the message. Roman stretches and sits forward, forearms resting on his knees beside me.

  ‘Priscilla,’ I say.

  Roman nods, his hands knitting together.

  I lock my phone and slide it back in my pocket. When I look up, Roman is looking at me. I see the light catch his eyes, the way sun glints on water, and my heart sags, as if sighing in my chest. A part of me longs to throw my arms around him. A part of me longs to, more than anything, kiss him again, to stay here like this, by the sea, up here, world at our feet, for ever. A part of me wants just to run with him. Drive with him under the stars until we reach somewhere we’d like to explore, for fudge and chips, running for our lives, just a little later than planned.

  A part of me wants this. A part of me loves him, and always will. And that part wants to stay, right here. With him. Never letting go again.

  I get to my feet, and Roman mirrors me, standing slowly. We’re face to face on the porch, clouds swirled with pinks and purples stretched high above us, and the sun, just a hump now, peeping from the waves behind us. Nobody says anything for a while. We just look at each other, as if taking one another in, remembering everything we can, in case life doesn’t grant us a chance again. Because the biggest parts of us know. The biggest parts want to let go. The largest, strongest parts know it’s time.

  ‘Can you not stay another night?’

  I shake my head. ‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘Work.’

  Roman nods once, inhaling deeply, his pink lips pressed together, muscle in his jaw pulsing.

  ‘Plus, I have a wedding next weekend,’ I tell him. ‘I’m bridesmaid. Well … actually, I’m not sure I am anymore, it’s all a bit fraught.’

  ‘Interesting,’ smiles Roman. ‘Not the bride this time, then?’

  ‘Absolutely not. That’d be Olivia.’

  Roman’s eyebrows lift and he rubs his chin. ‘Shit, Olivia? Shame I don’t still have my tux.’

  ‘The black or white?’

  ‘Your choice,’ Roman says. ‘Always.’

  I look up at him and can’t help stepping forward to close the space between us. I bring my hand to his face – his face, that’s still the same, despite the lost years – and I want to say so much – so many things that I could never put into words. I want to thank him. I want to tell him that he meant more to me than any person ever has. I want to tell him he saved me, every day. I want to tell him I’m proud of him, and that a part of me will for ever be for only him. But I don’t. Instead I reach up on tiptoes and kiss his cheek. ‘I’ve missed you,’ I tell him. ‘I have missed you every day.’

  Roman smiles, eyes glistening, and he wraps his strong arms around me. ‘And you were always the best thing in my life,’ he whispers into my ear. ‘Nobody ever loved me like you did.’ And against his chest, tall and unwavering, I close my eyes. I breathe him in. I want to remember this. I want to be able to replay this moment when I feel alone in the world, so I’ll remember I’m not. I want to be able to replay this when I have not got a sin
gle ounce of faith in myself, so I’ll remember that I am brave. I want to be able to close my eyes and be right here, when I’m old, and grey, and my body aches, when years and years have grown between us like oceans, and remember what it was like to love, and let go. I want to remember the butterflies. I want to remember the hope. I want to remember the moment we said goodbye for the rest of my life.

  And there we stand, Roman and me, in our goodbye. Ready to let go, to go back to our other lives – our real lives. Ready to let this one play out, somewhere out there, among the stars, in time and space, with no guarantee we’ll ever find it again.

  The sun is barely a sliver as I leave; just a glow, breaking through the ocean. Roman walks me to the hire car, with Barney ambling along at his side, never more than a few feet away.

  ‘You know where to find me,’ he says as I stand at the car’s open door, him on the other side.

  ‘I do,’ I say. ‘Meet you there someday.’

  ‘It’s where I’ll always be.’

  This PC/D: Lizzie Laptop/Roman/

  Roman signed in on 24/04/05 20:19

  Roman: Tomorrow’s gonna suck without you J.

  Roman: And the next day …

  Roman: And the next day, and the day after that.

  Lizzie: ditto.

  Lizzie: i’ll miss you Ro. it’s been a blast.

  Roman: And a pleasure :)

  Roman: You’ll come meet me after you finish school won’t you?

  Lizzie: course. try and stop me.

  Roman: Good.

  Roman: Now go do great things J. Change the world. Show those fuckers who they’re dealing with :)

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The automatic doors part and I step over the threshold and into the busy reception area. There are walls of posters and art, and twirling stands of brochures and leaflets. A man, around my dad’s age sits behind the reception desk on the phone. Beside him is a woman with hair the colour of white sunshine, who is explaining something to a boy in baggy jeans with a heavy rucksack. Both of them hunch over a form on the counter, the woman circling things with a red pen as he nods. I unzip the bag at my hip, to check I remembered my questionnaire for the career advisor. Yep. There it is. Just beside my sketchbook. The sketchbook, finally out of its black tissue paper, and finally with a few drawings in its fresh, blank pages. I could never start it back then. It was as if I knew I’d never see the end of the course; as if I knew I wasn’t ready. Not like now.