This is a Love Story

by Thompson, Jessica

  Tom stood there holding an empty plastic cup with a lot less water in it than there had been a few seconds earlier. He had a look of pure joy on his face, a smile of shock, pleasure and fear all at the same time. Like he couldn’t quite believe he had done it. It was a little like the first time you stood up to the school bully, although the first time I did that I got socked in the mouth in the changing room before I had the chance to smile. You had to hand it to the boy. He’d put up with a lot of my wind-ups for quite a long time. It was a good job Ant was out at a meeting though, since as unprofessional as he can be, I doubt this would have thrilled him.

  A small crowd had assembled outside my office door; there was a lot of nervous giggling. ‘Nice comeback there, Tom.’ I rose to my feet and shook his hand. He looked decidedly nervous. Then I picked up my bin and slammed it on his head, sheets of paper fluttering onto the floor and a banana skin hanging over his nose. Ah, that was better . . .

  Sienna

  ‘Right then, are you sure you’re ready?’

  Pete stood opposite me, his hands on both my shoulders. The hair on his chin was growing thick and fast. His bottom lip was cut from where he had tried to bite open the plastic casing on a padlock he’d been given for his backpack. He looked like he had been in a fight.

  ‘Yes I am. Ready as ever. I have a two-hour lunch today, so no pressure.’ I started to walk, pulling his arm until it was linked with mine.

  We’d had a very hot summer this year, which I hoped had made things a bit easier. He told me he spent most of his nights on his favourite common in Balham, under the biggest tree, with his most cherished books by Dan Brown and Bill Bryson. While I would still rather have my double bed, it was a great comfort to know he was relatively happy, under the circumstances.

  We walked quickly, side by side. I was wearing a pair of dark skinny jeans, with high-heeled sandals from Topshop and a black, skinny-fit shirt. He was in his usual get- up of faded T-shirt and brown combat trousers. There was a huge hole in the right knee.

  ‘Aren’t you embarrassed to walk with me like this?’ Pete asked me. I could feel his arm tense up as I gripped it close to my ribs.

  ‘No. Of course not. Why on earth would I be?’ I pretended not to know what he meant. I really wanted his time with me to be good. He hadn’t had much of that lately. I didn’t want him to feel like an outcast – I wanted him to belong.

  ‘Well, because I’m homeless and I look awful. And it’s just a bit unusual, really. People like you, well, they don’t tend to hang out with people like me, that’s all,’ he said quietly.

  ‘But here’s the thing. People like me and people like you are the same,’ I replied, smiling at him as the sun beamed down on our heads.

  Pete chuckled and smiled back. ‘I don’t know about that, Si. Not any more. But thank you,’ he finished, throwing a lump of gum into a bin as we walked past.

  ‘So what are you going to show me, then?’ I asked. I had no idea what on earth it could be. Some might call me a lunatic for going somewhere alone with a homeless man I barely knew. But I had a good feeling about him.

  ‘I can’t say yet. But I promise, it’s just a ten-minute walk from here.’ He looked so excited, traces of what looked like youth creeping into the grey skin on his face. For the first time ever, there was a rosy glow to his cheeks.

  They had given him quite a few new outfits at the centre he goes to on a Thursday, but his T-shirt was still pretty tired and for some reason he was wearing these ripped trousers when I knew there were much nicer ones in his backpack. On the other hand, he was also wearing the almost new pair of Merrells I’d found at the charity shop, which looked much smarter than the boots he used to wear.

  ‘OK, I’ll take your word for it . . . I got something for you earlier,’ I said, digging my hand into my bag. Now this was good food.

  ‘What is it?’

  I wasn’t going to keep him waiting for this; it wouldn’t hold up too well in the heat. I handed him the foil-wrapped lunch, which he opened with his usual hungry enthusiasm.

  ‘Oh, Sienna, salmon and cream cheese bagels . . . I love these!’ He pulled my arm tightly into his bony side and grinned. One half of a bagel was soon stuffed into his mouth; white flecks of cream cheese stuck to his stubble.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said as he always did, but he didn’t need to.

  ‘I knew you liked those, you said a few weeks ago.’

  We had some quiet moments as he scoffed his lunch en route. People were staring a bit but I ignored them and thankfully Pete seemed oblivious. The sun was casting its midday glow on everything. It made people look more attractive, and it made the trees look tall and proud. Fruit stalls that looked dark and dismal in the winter were now bright and promising. Everything was colourful, my eyes could barely take it all in.

  We navigated the streets of south-west London, a most unusual twosome. The total contrast of his lace-up hiking trainers and my high-heeled sandals. On some parts of our walk the pavements were thick with people going about their daily errands; at other times it was just a dog and its elderly owner making their daily trip to the park.

  We walked past rows of tall houses. Beautiful ones that would require me to sell my organs on eBay to even dream of owning one. I could probably afford a cat flap on one of these houses and that would be about it. They stood proud against the blue sky, which had been turned into latticework by aeroplane vapour trails.

  Some of the houses had four floors, with one down at basement level. They were the kind of houses I would start decorating in my head when I walked past. Cushions. Lots of cushions. I would have a big four-poster bed with the most stunning throw, and maybe a little white window seat with even more cushions on it. And if I was really lucky I would have one of those marble kitchens with the spring-loaded drawers that don’t slam when you close them. Dad could have his own floor with a wet room, and everything would be perfect. We might even have a big American fridge with an ice dispenser. An ice dispenser is always a sign that you’ve made it in life . . .

  ‘Nearly there, Si,’ said Pete, who was walking even faster now. He snapped me out of my daydream, which was probably for the best. A dream was all it was.

  ‘Easy, soldier,’ I said, struggling to keep up in my heels. I tried to work out where this walk was heading.

  Then, suddenly, Pete drew to a halt at the end of the road. Ridley Way meets North Avenue. His face crumpled into an odd expression and I could see that he wasn’t very happy any more.

  ‘What?’ I questioned him, holding on to his hand because I quickly realised he was struggling with something.

  ‘Now this, Sienna . . . This is going to be hard, but I had to bring you here. It’s the first time I’ve been back, you see, the first time in a long time . . .’ He looked down at the cracks in the pavement.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, but whatever it is, Pete, I’m here. OK?’

  He charged forward, pulling me along with him. His breath started to quicken and I could feel his rough hand trembling a little. What on earth was going on? He was walking faster and faster now, his head pointed forward like a charging bull’s. The trees and the bins and the cats and the dogs were starting to speed past us like we were on a train. I had to trot alongside him to keep up.

  Then we stopped outside a slightly smaller house and he turned to face it. I followed suit. He looked up and took a deep, deep breath. I turned round too and saw a quaint little house with a small, pretty garden full of colourful flowers and Mediterranean pots. The brickwork and the sunshine gave it a warm, inviting glow. There were white Danish-style decorations underneath the windows. It was lovely.

  ‘What’s this, Pete?’

  He took another breath, his eyes filling with tears. He put both his hands together as though he was praying and held them to his mouth, clearing his throat. ‘This was my home, Sienna. This was where Jenny and I lived before . . . You know, before.’

  I took his hand again, winding my fingers between
his and squeezing tight.

  This was a huge revelation. For him to bring me here was deeply touching, and, I knew, very important for him too.

  A red Ford Fiesta was parked in the driveway and I wondered if the new people were home. I wondered what they were like.

  ‘I’m sorry to drag you all the way here to see this, Si, but I wanted to show you my life before. How great it was, and how much love I had,’ he said, a tear running down his cheek.

  I wiped it away. ‘Thank you so much for showing me,’ I said, letting the sound of the cars and the birds take over for a bit.

  He rubbed his face with a clenched-up fist and sniffed hard, not taking his eyes off the house, even for a split second.

  ‘Tell me more about it, Pete. Tell me about each room and what it was like to be here,’ I probed, hoping this would be cathartic for him.

  ‘Well, you see that room up there?’ He pointed towards the top right room at the front of the house. I could just about make out the back of a television through the thick net curtains. ‘That was our room. On Sunday mornings I would pop to the shop and buy a carton of orange juice and two chocolate pastries and take her breakfast in bed. She liked tea with one sugar, and bits in her orange juice.’ He sniffed loudly again.

  ‘That’s lovely, Pete. You’re a catch!’ I said, feeling a huge lump in my throat, dense and hard like a chunk of bread. I had an awful feeling I was going to start crying too, but I couldn’t. I had to be really strong.

  ‘Jenny looked gorgeous in the morning,’ he continued. ‘She had this really funny habit of not being able to sleep without socks on, but she said I had to take mine off because she thought that men looked like barn owls in socks and pants.’

  I giggled, relating to her logic. ‘Tell me more,’ I asked in a whisper.

  ‘Well, that room at the bottom – that was our living room. We had a pet rabbit, because she wanted children but I was a silly bastard who didn’t feel like I was enough of an adult myself, so one day she came back with a rabbit. It stayed in the garden most of the time, but in the evenings she would sit with it on the sofa and stroke its ears.’ More fat tears rolled down his face. ‘And now I would give anything to have her back with me, even with that silly rabbit. Derek, she called it.’ He smiled and laughed a little through his grief.

  I quickly wiped one of my own tears from the corner of my eye. Come on, Sienna.

  Be strong.

  ‘I would have kids with her now, Si. God I would, dozens of them. If I could just turn back time, I would give her everything.’ His sobs became louder. A postman gave me a look as he walked past; I gestured that we were OK and he carried on with his round.

  ‘What about that room there?’ I asked, pointing towards another window, which now had a black cat sitting in it, staring at the strange pair on the pavement outside.

  ‘That was the kitchen. She would do her evening work on the table for hours. She was such a hard worker, was Jenny. And while she was doing that I made her the best dinners I could. I got all the nicest stuff for her, from the posh section at the supermarket.’ He paused. ‘While I was cooking I would come round to her and give her a little taste on a wooden spoon, then kiss the top of her head.’

  I could imagine it all now. Standing in front of this house I had never seen before, I could vividly see Pete and Jenny in every room, being so madly in love it brought a whole new meaning to the phrase. I scanned the other houses around it and wondered what the stories were, what the walls had seen. How many tears had fallen into the carpet. How much blood had been spilled. How much love had been made.

  ‘And what about the back garden, do you think we can see?’ I started to walk round the side of the driveway, pulling him with me.

  ‘I don’t know if we can do that, Sienna.’ He pulled back, his weight on one leg.

  ‘Come on, Pete. If someone comes out, I’ll deal with it,’ I said and he followed me reluctantly.

  We stood on tiptoe and pushed our heads over a dark brown fence, which smelled like it had had a recent lick of creosote. A squirrel ran across the top of the wood like a tightrope walker on speed, using its big bushy tail for balance, its eyes bulging out of its head.

  The grass ran wild, and weeds were thick and tangled like a mane of unkempt hair. A burst football was fading in the sun. It was then that Pete really started weeping.

  I rubbed my hand on his back and held the weight of him up against me like a prop. I waited and waited. This was going to take as long as it needed to take.

  ‘What happened here, Pete?’

  He composed himself. ‘This was where I asked her to be my wife.’ I noticed that he had the laminated picture of Jenny gripped tightly in his palm. ‘And she said yes, again and again, and for the first time in my life I felt like a king. And I’m an idiot because when she died I drank and drank, and smoked stupid things, and popped pills, and walked away from everyone who could help me, and now I’ve lost everything.’

  We stood for a few minutes, just looking at the garden. When he was ready we walked away from the house. We walked down the road in complete silence, away from the postmen and the dogs and the bins and the trees.

  ‘Thank you so much, Sienna. I’m sorry I cried like that.’ He looked embarrassed.

  ‘Pete, don’t be silly. I’m so grateful that you let me see your old house. It’s beautiful – and you know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ll have a house like that again one day. I just know it.’

  Back in the centre of Balham town centre, I took him to my favourite café, where the coffee was strong and the flowers were real. It was bright, airy and lovely and it was just what he needed. ‘One filter coffee, a latte and two of those cakes, please,’ I ordered, leaning back in my chair and pointing towards some of the most luscious-looking cupcakes I’d ever seen in my life.

  Pete looked a little self-conscious, zipping up the cleanest jumper he had so as to cover up his crumpled T-shirt. He ran his hands through his hair in an attempt to flatten it down and prodded at the bags under his eyes in a useless attempt to smooth them away.

  ‘Pete, you look fine, relax.’

  ‘What’s happening with Nick?’

  Oh dear. The dreaded question. ‘Nothing. I told you I’d moved on a while ago,’ I said, casually flicking through a copy of the Sun that had been left on the table in front of me. I would sooner go through the ten-year archives of ‘Dear Deirdre’ and other people’s weird and wonderful problems than talk about Nick.

  ‘Really? You’ve really moved on?’ he asked as the waitress put our coffees in front of us. ‘So if he turned around and said he’d met a girl and fallen in love with her, you’d be OK with that?’ he asked, looking deep into my eyes.

  The image of Chloe flashed before me, shortly followed by several mental stills of Nick looking at her at work. Sneaky, stolen glances. Long legs. Perfect boobs. That hair. She smells divine. She looks angelic. I bet she doesn’t even have cellulite. It really is the biggest kick in the teeth I could have, if I’m being honest. I wish she would go out on a lunch run and get lost down an open manhole somewhere.

  Fuck. It’s official. I am bitter. ‘Yes, I’d be OK with that.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘One hundred per cent?’

  ‘All right, all right – no, no, no. It’s not OK!’ I almost shouted out to everyone in the coffee shop. A pair of gossiping mothers stopped their conversation and stared at me. I ducked my head down and blushed, hoping I could climb between the pages of that newspaper I’d just been mentally slagging off and hide somewhere between the tits and the sport.

  ‘I knew it!’ Pete shouted victoriously. The staring continued. ‘Right, so we’re going to do something about this,’ he declared, sitting up in his chair excitedly.

  ‘We aren’t, Pete, because I think he has met someone. She sodding works at my office now, she’s every
where with her sexy tights all over the photocopier and her lipstick all over the bloody whiteboard, for fuck’s sake.’ I finished my angry little rant and realised that my face was hot and my heart was racing and that sentence had made absolutely no sense.

  ‘I’m sorry – what? Who are you talking about?’

  ‘Chloe. There’s this new girl at work called Chloe and she looks like she just fell out of the pages of Vogue and she smells good and basically rocks his world.’ Wow, jealously was an unattractive trait. But I couldn’t help it. It was literally spilling out of me. Jealousy was reaching into my soul, pulling out all the ugly bits and showcasing them in the Tate. I hadn’t even known I felt like this until now. I chomped into my cupcake, the sweet icing sugaring my bitter mouth a little.

  ‘This isn’t great,’ Pete admitted, a look of sympathy clouding his face.

  ‘It’s fine. I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was this bad until you asked. I’m going to be OK,’ I chirped. I hoped that if I said the words enough they would become real. I. Am. Going. To. Be. OK. All right. Just fine. Super duper.

  ‘I still think you two are going to be together,’ he said positively, biting down on the free shortbread.

  Although I adored Pete, and he was becoming something of a confidant, I thought he was living in a little bit of a dream world. Playing out his lost love through me and Nick.

  The laugh-out-loud, stand-up comedy routine that was me and Nick . . .

  Nick

  ‘Have you ever been in love?’ asked Chloe, nibbling on her straw and raising a cheeky eyebrow. God, she was sexy. This woman was outrageously gorgeous. I reckon she could get a first-class upgrade on a plane ticket with a simple smile.

  This was a difficult one, I thought, pulling on a long thin strand of lettuce that was poking humiliatingly from the corner of my mouth. Why do sandwiches with salad in them always do that? And why do they always do that in front of someone you fancy? ‘Er, yes, I guess so.’ I paused, looking deep into her mesmerising brown eyes.