Loving Danny

by Hilary Freeman

  Telling each other these things is very important – you never know when the knowledge might come in handy.

  ‘I’ll remember never to order rabbit, then, when we go out to eat,’ said Danny, with a dark grin.

  ‘And I won’t mention porridge. Ever,’ I said, giggling.

  I told Danny about Debbie and Holly and Natasha, and how much I missed them. I said I was certain he’d like them too and that he must meet them when they came home. He agreed, but, looking back, he didn’t seem all that interested. He didn’t ask many questions about my friends – not like I did when we discussed his – he just nodded and ‘uh-huhed’ in all the right places. I put it down to his being a ‘bloke’, but, if I’m honest, I was feeling a little hurt. My friends were important to me; I wanted them to be important to Danny too.

  At the start of the day I’d made Danny promise that he would drop me home by four in the afternoon, so I could shower and change before Mum got back. I’d already decided I would pretend I had been to work and had simply left early. So, at three-fifteen, while Danny was showing me around his studio, trying (and failing) to impress me by twiddling various knobs and pressing odd buttons, I said, ‘Danny, I think I’d better go home now.’

  ‘Oh, Omi,’ he said. ‘Stay a bit longer. Can’t you?’

  ‘No.’ I was insistent. If Dad found out I had skipped work I would never hear the end of it. I didn’t want to tell Danny my reasons – he might have thought me childish.

  ‘Go on,’ teased Danny, tickling me under my chin. ‘Just a few minutes.’

  I giggled and squirmed. ‘No, please, Danny. Now. Anyway, you’ve got to go and pick up the picnic basket from the park. If it’s still there, which I doubt.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, with the exaggerated pout of a petulant little boy. ‘I’ll go and get my jacket and keys and your stuff. Wait for me in the hall by the front door.’

  Danny took ages. I paced up and down the hall, stopping to admire the paintings on the wall (all originals) and the vases and other ornaments displayed on the sideboard. In my house we had vases from IKEA and Habitat, but the ones in Danny’s house looked like museum pieces. I was carefully turning one around, so I could admire the ornate decoration on its handle, when I thought I heard the front door creak open behind me.

  ‘Hello,’ said a woman, with a deep, throaty and rather posh voice. ‘And who might you be?’ I jumped and turned simultaneously, almost knocking over the vase. The woman was extremely tall and elegant, with blond, sculpted hair. She was wearing an expensive-looking navy trouser suit and her make-up was perfectly applied, from her brown, pencilled-in brows to her blood-red talons.

  ‘I’m Naomi,’ I said, only too conscious of my own dismal appearance. I was wearing yesterday’s muddy combats and I’d finger-combed my hair and applied new make-up over the remnants of the old. ‘Hello.’

  I moved forward to shake her hand, but she ignored me. Then she looked at me with disgust, as if I were a creature who had just stepped out of a swamp.

  ‘Naomi who?’

  ‘Naomi Waterman.’ As soon as I said it I realised she hadn’t wanted my surname. ‘Er, Danny’s Naomi.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, smirking. ‘Well, I’m Danny’s mother, Caroline Evans. I take it Danny is with you, or have you just wandered into my house on your own?’

  Now I was upset. Why was this woman being so horrible to me? My mother would never have treated my friends or a boyfriend like this. She wouldn’t have treated anyone like this.

  ‘Of course not. Danny’s gone to get his jacket so he can take me home. Sorry, I guess you didn’t know I was here.’

  She smirked again. ‘Danny doesn’t tend to talk to me about his girlfriends.’ Perhaps I was being oversensitive, but I was sure she emphasised the ‘s’. ‘Or,’ she continued, ‘very much at all, these days. I think it’s easier for both of us that way.’

  She walked towards me, and, for a second, I thought she was going to touch me, but then it became apparent that she was making for the stairs. ‘Goodbye, Naomi,’ she said as she went past. ‘I trust you enjoyed your visit to my home.’

  I must have looked shell-shocked, because when Danny appeared a minute or so later, the first thing he said was, ‘What’s the matter, Naomi? Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I just met your mother.’

  He nodded. ‘That explains it. Did she give you a hard time?’

  ‘Not really, but she wasn’t very friendly.’

  ‘Like I told you,’ Danny spat. ‘She’s a cold bitch.’

  The rage behind his words was chilling; I had never felt hate like that, and certainly not for my mother. I thought, She must really have hurt him. What on earth did she do? I was suddenly aware how little I knew about Danny’s past, that he had lived twenty whole years before he met me. It made me feel uneasy.

  I laughed nervously. ‘I’m sure she’s not that bad. Come on, Danny, please take me home now.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, opening the front door. He put his arm around me and kissed me on the top of my head. I saw that he was smiling, but only with his mouth. His eyes were focused somewhere else, somewhere dark and desolate.

  Chapter 8

  The next few months were blissful. Danny and I spent as much time together as we could. He would pick me up from work and take me out for meals (I started to insist on paying half, even though it meant dipping into my university savings), or we’d go to the cinema or to a bar. At weekends we’d go to markets or galleries or tiny festivals in venues I didn’t know existed, to hear performers that he’d read about in some obscure magazine. He opened my eyes to the city I’d lived in all my life, pointing out curiosities I wouldn’t have noticed alone – a piece of ancient Roman wall on a modern street or a bizarre wig shop run by a couple in their eighties. When I was with Danny I saw the world in technicolour; it was like putting on a pair of 3-D glasses.

  Sometimes we’d just stay in at his flat, have a takeaway and talk until the early hours. Whenever we were apart we were constantly on the phone, chatting and texting at every opportunity. I’d wake up to a HELLO message (usually sent in the small hours) and go to sleep reading, SWEET DREAMS, OMI.

  Every minute that I spent with Danny made me fall in love with him a little more. I loved his spontaneity. I loved the way he turned up his nose and pouted when he was confused or deep in thought. I loved his funny little habits – the way he drank his tea, always taking a sip when it was still too hot and then appearing genuinely surprised when, once again, it burned his lips. I loved knowing that he kept all my texts, refusing to delete even the most mundane one until his message box was full. I loved the fact that he didn’t appear to notice my flaws; he’d tell me how beautiful I looked without make-up and that he thought my body was perfect. He even laughed at my feeble jokes and when I mixed up my words; to him they were idiosyncracies, not idiocies.

  There were thoughtful gestures, too. When, for example, I mentioned how much I enjoyed photography, he dug out an old Brownie box camera from his parents’ attic and asked me to show him how to use it. Weeks after a silly conversation about sweets, during which I’d told him how I liked yellow ones best, he presented me with a jam-jar full of miscellaneous yellow sweets: wine gums, fruit gums and fruit pastilles, jellies and boiled sweets. He said he’d collected them from every packet he’d eaten and joked about the huge price he’d soon have to pay in dental bills. I later discovered that he had, in fact, been to his local supermarket, bought sackfuls of every tube and packet available, and carefully removed all the yellow sweets one by one, before discarding the rest.

  He’d sit through Friends with me, even if it was an episode he’d seen at least three times before. He would come with me to watch tacky, romantic films because I had nobody else to see them with and, afterwards, he’d try to think of something good to say about the plot or the actors. He’d cut stories out of newspapers if he thought I’d find them interesting and he’d scout eBay for vintage clothes I might like to check out.
When I had a cold he tucked me up on his sofa and brought me gallons of freshly squeezed orange juice and made me tomato soup and boiled eggs with soldiers because I’d told him that was my favourite comfort food.

  I could go on and on. I could probably fill a whole book with lists of what I liked about Danny. But no amount of examples would sum up why I felt so strongly about him. What makes you love someone has little to do with the number of wonderful qualities they possess. It’s about glimpsing something inside them that nobody else can see and realising you’ve always needed it, even though you didn’t know you were looking. It’s about inventing a reality that is true only for the two of you.

  Meeting Danny on the bus no longer seemed like mere accident. It was fated: I had been meant to catch that particular bus because Danny would get on it. This belief was sealed when Danny told me that he’d seen another bus coming first, but had made a split-second decision not to run for it. It didn’t occur to me that he might have felt too tired or too lazy to run; it was simply meant to be. I credited other coincidences with the same, irrational significance: the fact that we had matching birthmarks on our collarbones, for example, gave us a unique bond. I ignored the probability that thousands of other people probably had a birthmark in the same place.

  Whenever I thought about Danny my heart beat faster and it brought a strange sensation – half pleasure, half nausea – to the pit of my stomach. It made me smile to myself and flush all over. I knew that what I felt for Danny must be love – at least, this was how I’d always imagined love to be – but somehow I could never say it. Even though the things he said and did made me fairly certain he felt the same way, there was a tiny part of me that was afraid he might not say ‘I love you’ back. What if he were to laugh? Or say, ‘Sorry, Naomi, I like you a lot, but I don’t feel like that about you.’ I didn’t want to risk breaking the spell. Sometimes, we’d look at each other for long, silent minutes, and the words would be on the tip of my tongue, but I’d swallow them back down again. I needed to hear them from him first.

  Christmas was an ordeal that year, because it meant four whole days away from Danny. He was spending it with friends and had invited me to join him, but I didn’t even dare ask my parents. Missing our annual family celebration would be considered a crime almost on a par with mugging an old lady – so heinous that I might as well pack my bags and never return. So, as always, Dad drove us up to Nottingham to stay with my uncle’s family. In the past I’d always looked forward to it. I’d enjoyed packing the car with presents to be opened on Christmas morning and I liked spending time with my younger cousins. But that year, every mile on the motorway was another mile further from Danny. I didn’t care what my parents had bought me (even though I got the funky speakers for my iPod that I’d wanted for months), and I couldn’t be bothered to help the little ones put batteries in their new toys. On Christmas Day, all I was interested in was having some time to myself, so I could open Danny’s present.

  I finally unwrapped it late in the afternoon, in the guest bedroom I shared with Emily, while the children were happily playing and my older relatives were dozing on the sofas. I was like a little girl all over again, fumbling at the shiny paper, desperate to see inside. Danny had bought me a gorgeous, sea-green cashmere sweater – the softest, most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, let alone owned. It was almost too nice to wear. For a while, I just hugged it, as if it were a teddy bear, thinking warm thoughts about Danny and giving myself butterflies.

  Emily came into the room while I was trying it on. ‘Wow!’ she exclaimed enviously. ‘It’s lovely, Nay.’ Then she peered at the label – from a posh, designer shop – and raised her eyebrows. ‘How can he afford it?’

  ‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘His gigs, maybe? Or his savings? I think he also got some money when his grandad died.’ But the same thought had crossed my mind. I’d pushed it away, as I always did then. I had no time for such thoughts, for questions without resolution.

  ‘What did you get him?’

  ‘Some CDs and a really nice, leather-bound book for him to write his songs in.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’ I’d spent hours choosing Danny’s presents, but now they seemed inadequate.

  ‘God, Nay, he must really like you.’

  ‘Do you think?’ I asked, smiling. ‘I really miss him. I know it’s only for a few days, but it feels like forever.’

  ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘You’re really smitten.’

  ‘I think he’s the one, Em. He totally gets me, you know? I think he’s my soulmate.’

  Emily was embarrassed. We’d talked about Danny before, of course, but I hadn’t gone this far with her. She wasn’t a romantic like me and she preferred to keep her feelings hidden. ‘I’ve never seen you like this,’ she said, for once, apparently at a loss for words. ‘I’ll leave you alone, so you can call him.’

  It was the first time I had articulated my feelings about Danny. Ever since I was little and had read about princes and princesses in fairy tales, I’d believed that there was someone out there who would complete me, my other half – my soulmate. It had never been clear what I was looking for – there were no criteria to cross off a list – but I was as certain as I could be that I had found him in Danny. I had only my feelings to go on, but what else is there?

  The tedium of work no longer bothered me. I was happy to stand alone in the photocopying room, whiling away the hours daydreaming of Danny. I stopped asking for more interesting tasks and now rarely volunteered to sit in on case meetings as a note-taker. Late nights at Danny’s meant that I often slept in and consequently arrived at work later than I should, and I never worked a minute past five-thirty. If my boss disapproved, I didn’t notice. I had lost all interest in the legal practice; I may as well have been working in a supermarket or on a factory production line.

  When all my sentences began to start and end with ‘Danny’, my parents realised I must be serious about him and decided it was now time to invite him for Sunday lunch. To my relief, he arrived on time – which was a first – and he was dressed smartly, in a blue cotton sweater and grey trousers. He shook my parents’ hands and called them ‘Mr and Mrs Waterman’ until they insisted they’d prefer David and Martha. He complimented my mother on her cooking and my father on his choice of wine. He even indulged my father by discussing share prices and the implications of the latest European directive. Emily shot me questioning looks and giggled behind her hand. After Danny had left, Dad said what a nice, intelligent young man he was, and Mum declared him ‘charming’.

  I must admit I found it all rather odd. The Danny I knew and loved – the scruffy, affectionate joker – was nowhere to be seen that day. He kissed me on the cheek when he came in, but after that, he didn’t touch me all afternoon, and I could only surmise it was for fear of offending my parents. Even his voice was different, the lazy drawl replaced by clearly pronounced, public-school English. It was like dating Superman and then one day finding myself with Clark Kent instead. I wondered which was the real Danny and which the mask: this perfect gentleman or the edgy rock-and-roll dreamer? Could he really be both people, at the same time?

  When I mentioned it on the phone later that evening, he didn’t understand why I was perturbed.

  ‘I was just being the person they wanted me to be,’ he said, sounding a little annoyed. ‘I’m the same guy and I feel exactly the same way about you as I always have. But I’m not exactly going to snog you in front of your parents, am I?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said, frustrated. I was finding it hard to articulate my feelings, or to figure out why I was so bothered. How could I tell him that I feared I didn’t know or understand him as well as I’d believed? How, when I didn’t even want to admit it to myself? ‘It’s not that. I just wanted them to see what I see.’

  ‘Look, they liked me and that’s what you wanted. Or would you have preferred it if I’d come in half-loaded and ignored them?’

  ‘No. It’s just. . . Oh, it doesn’t m
atter.’

  I dropped the conversation. Perhaps I should have tried harder, but I didn’t want to make a fuss. Somewhere, at the back of my mind, a subconscious feeling was beginning to form: the worry that if I pushed Danny too hard I might push him away. And it was easy enough to convince myself that he was right. Life would be so much simpler if my parents liked him. I decided I could learn to live with the clean-cut version of Danny, so long as he only appeared every couple of Sundays at my parents’ house.

  As Danny had promised, I became a regular at The Wonderfulls’ gigs. They played various pubs and venues around North London and always got good write-ups in the local press. The groupies no longer worried me. As soon as Danny came off stage we’d disappear out of the back door together, leaving his gaggle of girl fans waiting, disappointed, in the bar.

  Danny asked if I would help with The Wonderfulls’ website, which featured photos, lyrics, snatches of songs to download and upcoming gig dates. I enjoyed typing in reviews and adding new pictures. I’d always liked taking photos and I became the group’s unofficial photographer, snapping away at gigs and making everyone pose for portraits and group shots backstage. I kept the best portrait of Danny for myself, framing it and putting it on my bedside table so I could see him as soon as I woke up. Unlike the other pictures, which showed Danny in rock-star guise, pouting and preening for the camera, I felt that this photo captured ‘my’ Danny. In it he was looking away to the side, his eyes focused on a distant point and his lips slightly parted, as if he was about to speak. He said he didn’t like the photo, but he would never explain why.

  I was also invited to rehearsals, which usually took place at Danny’s flat on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. The other band members seemed to like me – or at least tolerate me – and I grew fond of Mike, the keyboard player, who always took the trouble to find out how I was and what I’d been doing. I wasn’t so sure about the others. The drummer, Pete, was withdrawn and hard to talk to; the bass guitarist, Dylan, was a pot-head who didn’t seem capable of intelligent conversation; and Andy, the lead guitarist, had been at school with Danny, and just seemed arrogant. I didn’t like the way he tried to alter Danny’s songs, imprinting them with his own arrangements and ideas, not because it improved them, but just so that he could make his mark.