"I bet you love this," she commented, grinning over her shoulder at me.
"Not at all," I replied."Just trying to help a poor colonial who can't play snooker properly."
She snort-laughed at that and then I bent down closer, so I could feel her body against mine. Jesus, was I going to get a fucking hard-on in the middle of the pub? Her ass was right there, and every part of me wanted to reach down, grasp her hips and pull her back against me, hard. With some difficulty, I resisted.
"Now, you're trying to get one of the red balls in one of the pockets."
"With the white ball?"
"Yes. Just take your time."
"I don't know how hard to hit it."
"Just hit it as hard as you think it needs. You'll be rubbish at first, you're just trying to get a feel for the table and the balls."
She pulled the cue back and then pushed it gently forward - too gently - sending the white ball into one of the red balls. It ended up about six inches from the pocket. It wasn't bad - in fact it was surprisingly good for a first timer, she just hadn't hit it hard enough.
"I need to hit it harder."
"Yeah. Go again."
"Isn't it your turn?"
"Yes, but this is practice, try again."
That time, when she bent down over the table and I leaned over her to 'check her stance,' she pushed her ass back against me and what had been a comfortable semi rapidly became a lot more.
"Lily..."
She glanced back over her shoulder, smiling innocently. That alone would have been enough, but her round, firm ass against my crotch felt so good I wanted to rip her clothes off right there.
"What? Is something wrong?" She asked, biting her lower lip and looking me right in the eyes.
She knew what she was doing. She pushed back against me even harder. Just before she took the shot I lowered one hand to her hip and then, when she took it, pulled her back to me.
A collective 'oooh' went up from the few people who were standing around waiting their own turn - or, as I suspected, enjoying the view of Lily's ass. She'd nicked the tabletop with the cue. Shit.
"That was your fault!" She said, turning to me.
It took me a few minutes to remember that I now had enough money to pay Paul - the pub owner - for the damaged table. He was going to be fucked off, though, because the table was going to be out of commission for at least the rest of the night. Lily, after looking around and seeing the dismayed looks on the faces of the people watching, realized that the nick on the table was a bigger deal than she'd assumed it was.
"Oh shit, Callum. Did I wreck the table? I'll pay for it. I'm sorry."
"Not your fault. I'll pay for it. We should probably get out of here, though, because we're not going to be popular tonight."
I hustled her out of the pub before Paul had time to find us and have a meltdown. I'd go back the next day and pay him for the damage. Lily was pretty embarrassed, though.
"Oh God, I'm so sorry. I didn't realize those tables were so easily torn or I would have been more careful."
"Nah, I should have warned you about it. And I probably should have kept my hands to myself when you were taking your shot."
Lily shot me a wicked smile. "I don't want you to keep your hands to yourself, Callum."
Oh fuck. I reached down and grabbed one of her hips, digging my fingers in and trying to think of a way to get her back to my place.
"Just tell them I'm Canadian and don't understand how things work outside of my log cabin in the woods."
A log cabin in the middle of the woods with Lily. That didn't sound bad at all.
"Do you actually have a log cabin, then?" I asked."In the middle of the deep, dark woods?"
She grinned. "Of course, all Canadians do. We don't have cities in Canada. Didn't you know? No, for real, I've stayed in log cabins in the forest before - some people use them as weekend homes or go stay for a few weeks during the summer. It can be pretty idyllic, as long as you don't run out of firewood or get eaten by angry bears."
"I'll kill all the angry bears who come after you, Lily Parker."
I'd meant the comment as a joke, but when it came out of my mouth it sounded more serious than I'd intended. Thank God for the dark evening, because if I wasn’t mistaken I may have felt some heat in my cheeks, and the last thing I needed was to be seen blushing like a goddamned schoolgirl. Lily looked up at me, her own face betraying no sign of joking.
"Will you?"
Would I? Would I kill angry bears for Lily?
"Yes. There aren't too many of them in England so I'm not sure how much use my angry-bear-fighting skills will be, but yes, they're on official notice to leave Lily Parker alone or face the consequences."
She laughed and snuggled her head into my arm as we walked along the pavement.
"Where are we going?"
I decided to take her to Streatham Gardens on an impulse. I wasn't even sure why at the time, although looking back I can see it was because I wanted to feel - I wanted to be - closer to her. I knew she knew I was trying to get into her knickers, but I wanted her to know it was more than that, more than me trying to add another notch to my bedpost. Much more.
"We're almost there, you'll see," I told her, eying a couple of teenage boys who looked for a second like they might be thinking of checking her out. They looked away silently before Lily even noticed them.
Within minutes, we were there. Streatham Gardens. A bucolic name so unsuited to its almost post-apocalyptic environs that I'd wondered if it had been a deliberate joke by the planners. Streatham Gardens was a council estate - and not the kind that middle-class people were moving into in order to be closer to central London. It was abandoned in 2011 but I remembered it as it had been during the endless days of my youth - full of people. Noisy, unsupervised children, harried single mums, hard-drinking men, dealers on the streets and junkies in the stairwells. It was still covered in graffiti, some of which had been put there by yours truly.
"What's this?" Lily asked when we got there and she had a chance to look around."Does anyone even live here?"
"Nope. The government moved everyone out in 2011. Failed social experiment. I just wanted to check something."
Lily seemed nervous.
"Don't worry, there's no one here," I reassured her.
"It looks like the kind of place you see on TV shows about serial killers."
She was right. But even if there had been someone there, a random smackhead or homeless person, it wouldn't be anyone I couldn't handle.
"Just come with me, OK? You're not in any danger, I promise."
She turned her face up to me so I could see the streetlight reflected in her dark eyes.
"OK, Callum."
She trusted me to keep her safe. It was a good feeling. It made me never want to do anything to make her think her trust in me had been misguided. I took her hand and led her through the maze of ugly brick tower-blocks until I got to Tower E and a heavy, rusted metal door. It was open.
"Come on, follow me."
She balked slightly. "Callum, what are we doing here? This place is scary. Are we even allowed to be here?"
"Lily, just wait. It's worth it, I promise. Come on, we're almost there."
So she came with me and we walked up thirty-six stories of concrete stairs until we were standing in front of another door, both of us panting and leaning on the walls. I let her catch her breath and then pushed the door open.
We were standing on the roof of the building with London spread out below us on all sides like a blanket of lights.
"Oh, Callum..."
Lily's voice was quiet. I watched her turning around, taking in the view from every angle. She was entranced with her adopted city, and it was one of the reasons I'd wanted her to see the view from the roof of Tower Block E. But I was entranced with her. We stood up there silently for a few minutes while Lily looked out over the city and I looked only at Lily, trying to figure out what to do with everything I was feeling.
/> "Is that Canary Wharf?" She asked, pointing northwards.
I nodded. "Yeah, that's it."
"It's so beautiful, Callum, the whole city. It's so big. It seems to go on forever, doesn't it?"
For some reason, I found myself barely able to speak up there on the roof, at least for the first few minutes. I was still hard, aching to feel her body against mine, to put my hands on her - for any physical contact whatsoever. But it wasn't just that - it would have been a lot easier if it had been.
"Sometimes I think it does go on forever. I've never really travelled much, and I know that makes some people think of me as, I don't know, as limited or stupid. But look - look at it all out there. There's more out there in what we can see right now than we could know or experience in two lifetimes. Ten lifetimes."
"Yeah, you're right," she said quietly."How do you know about this place?"
I stayed where I was, thinking of some way to tell her everything that place - Streatham Gardens - had been to me. "This is my old stomping grounds. Most of my mates lived here when I was still at school. I spent more time here as a kid than I did at home or at school."
She came back to me and looked me in the eyes.
"Did you? Tell me a story about it. Tell me about something you did here."
I led her closer to the north side of the roof, the side with the best view, and pulled her down beside me at the edge. The wind was blowing pretty hard, as it always did up there.
"You want a story?"
"Yeah. It doesn't have to be exciting or funny, I just want a normal story of a normal day. Tell me what you did here on a regular day."
She leaned her head against my shoulder and I wrapped an arm around her.
"Alright. A normal story of a normal day. Well, my best mate - Nigel - used to live in this tower."
"Nigel? Ha, that's such a British name."
"Is it?"
"Yeah. Was Nigel very pale and scrawny and interested in model railroads?"
"No," I replied, shaking my head and chuckling, "Nigel was huge and bald at fifteen and he would probably have been more interested in chucking model railroads off the roof than playing with them. Now stop interrupting."
She smiled at my playful admonishment. "Sorry, Callum, I'll stop."
"Well. We didn't used to go to school much. We'd leave in the morning, check in and then leave again ten minutes later to come back here. Nigel used to sell hash so we'd stop by his supplier's house on the way back and pick it up. It was wrapped in tinfoil, like sweets. Then we'd stop at the off-license-"
"How old were you?"
"Twelve, thirteen, around that age I guess. Feral little troublemakers we were."
"And they sold you alcohol?"
"Of course they did. If they didn't we'd trash the place."
Lily examined the expression on my face, trying to determine whether or not I was joking. "Really?"
"Yes, really. I was a total fucking nightmare when I was that age - we both were. Anyway. We'd stop at the offie, get some cheap, strong lager and sneak back here around the back of the tower so his mum wouldn't spot us. Then we'd come up here and get completely fucked. Some of the older people who lived here used to get groceries delivered and we would steal them - the eggs, the fruit and veg, and try to hit the chimneys on that building over there." I pointed to tower block D.
"Goddamn, Callum, you stole groceries from old people?"
"Yeah. You think thirteen year old boys give a shit about anything except amusing themselves? Maybe the nice ones do, but we didn't. We used to get so high we could barely stand up and just spend hours lobbing eggs and tomatoes and pissing over the edge of the building."
"Didn't anyone try to stop you?"
"Oh, they tried. I had my first Anti-Social Behaviour Order by the time I was twelve. I'm not having you on, Lily, I was a right little shit. And it's not like the coppers gave a single fuck. When they could be bothered to come out, which wasn't often, usually the worst that would happen would be a ticking off, at least when I was that young. The ASBO made it more difficult but mostly it just made me a lot more wily about getting caught. We had a police scanner and we'd just take off the minute anyone called them. If they did catch us later we'd flat out deny the whole thing, tell them it must have been other kids. They knew we were full of shit but like I said, they couldn't really be bothered. They didn't have the resources to spend all their time chasing a bunch of little punk kids around the streets of Streatham all day."
"Your poor mother."
"Oh, don't worry about my mum. I do feel bad about worrying her, but she mostly assumed the police had it in for me and I was a 'good boy.'"
"Ah, yes, I forgot you were a big mummy's boy," she teased, nudging me with her elbow.
I shrugged. "Maybe. I'm not going to lie, I'm close to my mum. She raised us alone and it wasn't easy for her. I try to take care of her as much as I can these days. She deserves it, doesn't she, for putting up with me?"
Lily hesitated for a moment before speaking again. "And your dad? He wasn't around?"
"Nope. Don't know much about the man, to be honest."
"I'm sorry," she apologized. "You don't have to talk about this if you don't want to."
"It's no problem, Lily, it's just that I really don't know anything about him. My mother never wanted to talk about him and I respect that. I don't even know if he's still alive. He obviously wasn't much of a man, was he? To leave a woman and children behind? I can't say I've ever wished he was in my life, not after a start like that. My mum really did everything, she's the one who deserves all the credit for bringing up two boys on her own."
I looked down at Lily as she stared out at the city lights below us, her long eyelashes nearly brushing her cheek every time she blinked.
"OK," she said, sensing that I didn't want to talk about my absent father. "Now I want to hear a real story. I mean, a specific story. Tell me what happened to Nigel? Do you still hang out with him?"
Nigel. I ran my fingers along the rough concrete we were sitting on and thought about my ex best mate. I didn't think about Nigel much anymore. When I did, all I could feel was a cold acceptance of his fate. It couldn't have turned out any differently for him, so I generally didn't see any point in rehashing it all in my mind. But Lily wanted to know, and I'd never really talked to anyone about it.
"OK," I said, slowly, "I'll tell you about Nigel. But I'm warning you it's not a pleasant tale. Are you sure you want to hear it?"
Lily nodded her head yes. "I can handle unpleasant tales."
I wondered if she was telling the truth. Because I had a lot of unpleasant tales to tell and part of me was worried she was going to judge me for them. I was used to being judged for everything - for my accent and my clothes, the way I walked and the car I drove. But something in me wanted to tell Lily about the awful stuff. It was all part of me, part of what made me, and mostly, I wanted her to know who I was. Who I really was, not just who I appeared to be on the surface. She slipped her fingers through mine as I sat beside her trying to think of how to tell the story of Nigel, and I knew at that moment that it would be OK. That I could tell her the truth.
"Alright, well, Nigel," I started. "Nigel had issues. When we were really young, his dad used to beat the shit out of him on an almost daily basis. It ended when he was around twelve, because his dad was a little rat of a man and Nigel just got huge all of a sudden. I mean really, truly a gigantic kid. He was the biggest in our year - actually not just in our year but the years above us, too."
I could see my friend at twelve in my mind's eye as I told Lily the story. The dull malevolence in his eyes when he spotted something - or someone - he thought he could wreck. Also, the surprising weakness that would come out when he'd had too much lager and would end up sobbing about what an asshole his dad was, curled in a ball on top of the very tower block where Lily and I were sitting. I kept going.
"He went from being bullied to being the bully in the space of less than six months. I think the p
ower went to his head a little. He had anger issues, too. That combination - a twelve year old brain in a body much bigger than he had any right to be, and the ability to get properly enraged by the tiniest slights- it wasn't a good combination, yeah? I was the only one who wasn't too afraid to spend time with him. I don't know why he never went for me, but he didn't."
"Maybe he respected you?"
"Maybe. I don't know, Lily. I don't think Nigel respected anyone, including himself. He never knew when to draw the line. Like, this one time at school some kid was acting like a prick. Anyone else would have given him a smack and left it there but Nigel almost beat him to death. He was in the hospital for three weeks and Nigel got expelled. Which was bad because he was totally unable to be alone with himself."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean he could never just be...still. I couldn't be still either, but for me it was about fun, doing dumb shit, amusing ourselves. Nigel always seemed to be running away from things - well, from himself. When he was alone he'd just go nuts - screaming, wrecking shit. He was using smack by the time we were fifteen."
Lily's eyes widened. "Smack? You mean heroin? Damn, Callum. That's crazy."
I felt her fingers tighten around mine and she didn't have to say it. She didn't have to say that she was glad the same thing hadn't happened to me, because I could feel it all in that little squeeze.
"Where were his parents? Were they around - or did they care?"
"Oh, his parents didn't care. In fact I think they preferred him on smack because it made him docile - when he was high, anyway. Both his parents were just total alcoholic fuckups. It's not rare. I'd say most of the people who lived here fit that category, actually, and I don't say that with any judgment intended, because this place was a shithole and I totally understand why drinking yourself into oblivion was seen as an option."
I could feel Lily looking at me but I kept my eyes fixed on the horizon, scared that if I looked back she'd see it on my face how much the story, one I'd thought long-buried, was affecting me.
"So what happened?" She asked."To Nigel?"
"What do you think happened?" I replied, clearing my throat quickly."He OD’ed when we were sixteen. In the stairwell of this building actually. Everyone knew it was going to happen - even he knew - and no one seemed to be able to do anything."
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