by Dizzy Girl
Sunny ran his hands over his face, as if he was washing it without water, trying to scrub away what he was hearing.
“For a long time I was worried that if I ever told you, that you’d be so angry with me that you wouldn’t want to see me anymore. Maybe that’s why I didn’t try and get back in touch later, when we were older and it might have been possible. Because one day I knew we’d end up having this conversation and I had no idea how you would feel about it. Because I’m sorry that you didn’t know, and I’m sorry that it must hurt you to find out like this, but I can’t be sorry about what I did. It was the only way that I could cope.” I grabbed a tissue and blew my nose.
“I’m sorry that my dad was such a bastard that you had to go through all that alone.” He paused, gathering his thoughts again. “I don’t honestly know how I feel right now, but I’m not angry with you. I thought he’d hurt me for the last time when he sent me away, but the arsehole had one more kick left in him. I just wish I’d known. I don’t know what I could have done, but I’d have been there with you at least.”
He took my hand and held it.
“I’m here now” he said.
“You are, but we’re not 16 anymore. We’re 26, with ten years more life experience, but also ten years more history. I said I’d only ever told three people. Well, one was my best friend, Lucy, and the other person was Patrick. We’d been together for a while and I thought we were going to spend the rest of our lives together. I didn’t want there to be any secrets. He was surprised mostly, I guess I’d always been a bit of a good girl at heart, people don’t expect to hear that I had a termination. One in three women in this country has one at some point, but no one ever talks about it so we’re brought up to think that it should stay this massive secret. He was ok about it back then. Besides, it was my history, not his. And it was the right decision for me back then. I wasn’t prepared for anyone to make me feel bad about myself for making it.”
“So what happened?” Sunny asked. “I mean, I don’t want to be too personal, but why isn’t he here too?”
“We started trying for a family, but nothing happened. I didn’t get pregnant by him. Instead of keeping on trying, he got bitter. It hadn’t even been that long, but he got angry that I’d been pregnant by someone else but couldn’t get pregnant by him. It twisted something inside him”. I shrugged, there wasn’t much more to say. “I couldn’t live with someone who didn’t respect themselves, who didn’t respect me. I got out before I lost my respect for myself, but only just.”
Sunny got up and walked to the window. He lifted the curtains too and stared into the sky. Dropping the net back into place he turned to me and asked “where does that leave us?”
“Hurting, I guess. And confused. It’s a lot to take in, especially finding out that your dad knew. And my break up with Patrick was messy. Hopefully we can still good friends, I need a friend right now and you were the first and the best friend I ever had.” I walked to him, and he wrapped me in his arms. We stood there, holding each other, not letting go. “I always loved you, but we’re so different now to who we were then.”
“Are we?” he asked. “Yes, I’ll admit, I’m more confident now my dad is gone and can’t kick it out of me anymore.”
“I sometimes think I felt more grown up and sure of myself then than I do now. I guess now I’m more aware of how much I don’t know, and that sometimes there are issues that can’t be solved, no matter how hard you try.”
“So what do we do?” he asked. “I can’t pretend you’re not here. And I can’t pretend I don’t have feelings for you.”
“And I can’t swear I’m ready for anything heavy yet, but I can’t bear the thought not seeing you for another ten years.”
“Dinner” Sunny announced. “Just dinner, no pressure and no expectations. Just two friends hanging out.”
“I’d love that” I told him. He held me tight again, brushing his fingers gently across my cheek and lifting my fringe from my eyes.
“I want to hear about you” I told him. “I want to know what it was like for you when you were away?”
“Lonely, mostly” Sunny said. “I missed you, that was a big part of it, but I missed Mark too, and my mum. But in some ways the change was so absolute, it was hard to imagine being with you where I was because it was so different.”
I remembered Sunny going to visit his granddad for a holiday, the year before he left, coming back and tell us how he’d been blown away by how beautiful the countryside around his house was, how unseen and untouched it had remained, but also how hard the lives were of the people around him. Even then the start of the migration was underway, with parents leaving small children behind to go and work in the cities, sending back money but only coming back themselves once a year.
Sunny said that exodus had continued. “I was stuck in a village surrounded by small children and old people. I helped my granddad work on his land for the first year I was there whilst I got fluent in the language again.”
“Was that hard?” I asked.
“Not really, not as hard as I was expecting, I grew up speaking Mandarin with my parents anyway, so mostly I was just rusty. I had a good ear to learn pronunciation and the correct tones. So I picked it up quickly, and after a while even my granddad could see that I needed something more, so he sent me to college in the next town.”
“Was that unusual? Did many kids get to go to college there?”
Sunny thought for a minute before replying. “There is a massive emphasis put on education In China. Most people only have one child so it is important for that child to be educated and to earn enough to support their parents. That is how my dad ended up being able to join his company and eventually moved over here.”
He sat back on the sofa, picked up my wine glass and took a swig before continuing. “The trouble was, I didn’t fit in well when I was here, a quiet boy in a noisy school. I didn’t fit in there either. My dad thought sending me back would keep me out of trouble, maybe he was right. I had as few friends there as I did here.”
I hesitated to bring up the subject of his dad again, it had always been a tense subject for Sunny, but as he’d already raised it himself, I asked “did your dad ever visit you?”
“No”, Sunny said. “He rang once in a while, mostly to talk to my granddad, make sure I was behaving, getting good grades. Not to ask if I was happy. I still can’t believe he knew about the pregnancy and didn’t tell me. Did he know about the termination?”
I shrugged. “Not exactly, I mean, he saw me around so he’d have known if I had the baby, but he never stopped to talk to me, so I guess he never knew whether I’d lost the pregnancy or chosen not to go ahead with it.”
Sunny shook his head. “You know, families are so important to Chinese people. I can’t believe he treated you so badly.”
“I can’t believe what he did to you. Did you ever see him again?”
“No. And I don’t think I ever minded, until now, when to be honest I’d quite like to punch him.”
I sat down next to Sunny and rested my head on his shoulder. He continued his story. “When I started college my granddad bought an old computer and modem. I set up a Facebook account and looked for you but I couldn’t find you. I tried Instragram, Twitter. Every social media I could think of.”
“I didn’t set up any accounts until I started university” I said. “Not much point before then really. I saw Mark most days anyway and without you, having one friend online just looked sad.” We both smiled at that. “Don’t feel too sorry for me” I told him, “I have hundreds now.” I elbowed him lightly to show that I was joking.
“So how did you end up joining the police?” I asked him.
“I’d been there five years when out of the blue my granddad got a call saying that my dad had dropped dead of a heart attack. I went upstairs that day and packed my bag. Grandad was sad to see me go, but he understood. He booked me a ticket back. I think he’d enjoyed having me over there, and I’d enjoyed getting to k
now him. But it hadn’t been his idea. No one ever stood up to my dad. That was most of the problem I think. I came home to see my mum and realised how crushed she’d been by living with him and decided I didn’t want anyone else to have to put up with that if I could help it. I started looking into signing up for the police force and never looked back.” He drained the rest of the wine in my glass. I took it from him and walked into the kitchen to refill it, Sunny followed me out the room.
He leant against the doorframe of the kitchen. “How about you? How did you come to end up back here again?”
It was amazing how easily several years of trauma could be summed up with just a few sentences once enough time had passed. I told him briefly what he’d missed. “I messed up my A-levels. I wasn’t surprised but no one else really saw it coming. I’d had such a tough few years I really struggled to concentrate, but that was a turning point. I just scraped onto a Social Policy course and I was out of here. I got to uni and it was a chance to start over. All of a sudden there were loads of people dressed in black and drinking pints of lager rather than Bacardi breezers. For the first time in my life I did fit in. I made friends, got a job with the council after I graduated and stayed around up there, met Patrick and thought I was happy. I don’t know, maybe I was. For a while.” I told him about the break up.
“So even years later, our history came back to bite you” Sunny said. “I’m sorry it caused your break up.”
“I’m not” I said. “I’m really starting to get the feeling I had a lucky escape. If he could get that nasty during then he was never going to be the right person for me after all.”
We both fell silent, and he walked towards and me and pulled me into a hug. He held me softly at first, but as I pressed my face against his chest he held me tighter. I could feel the extra muscles he’d developed over the years. He stroked my hair, and we stayed, stood like that without moving.
I thought he was about to kiss me, and I was pretty sure I wanted him to, when I felt a buzz in his pocket. “Was that your mobile or are you really, really pleased to see me?” I joked.
He grinned, but pulled the phone out of his pocket and held it up. “A drawback of the job I’m afraid. Us reliable adults are never off duty.” He answered the call and pulled away to talk in the corner of the room.
“It’s Mark” he said, after he hung up. “He’s gone. He said he needed some head space, not to worry, but he sounded really off, just distracted. Not his usual self, bit odd that.”
“What should we do?” I asked. “Can you get your colleagues to look for him?”
“Not easily” he said. “He’s an adult, and he said himself he just needed space. Maybe we just need to give him a day or so and see how he is.”
I didn’t like it, Mark always seemed so calm, so laid back, although of course he often had some herbal help with that.
“I’ll tell you what,” Sunny said, “if it sets your mind at ease, let’s give him tonight so he can have a break, I’m not working tomorrow. I’ll meet you at his flat at nine tomorrow morning and we’ll see how he is. If he’s ok we can just come away again and let him unwind in his own time.”
I nodded. He kissed me, just lightly, on the lips, and headed for the door.
Chapter Eight
I woke up to a beautiful blue sky the next morning and felt pretty relaxed, until the memories of the previous evening jolted me wide awake again. Mark’s sudden message to Sunny, and the kiss as he left. I reached over and grabbed my mobile. No messages from either of them. I rolled out of bed, hit the shower, grabbed some coffee and was at Mark’s flat five minutes early. I knocked on the door just as Sunny arrived.
There was no answer so we so tried ringing his mobile. No joy there either. I didn’t want him to feel chased, he’d said he needed some space, but I still felt unsettled. I was trying to think what to do next when Sunny started lifting rocks and plant pots and looking underneath. “What are you doing?” I asked him.
“Looking for a spare key.”
“Do you really think someone is going to leave a key just lying around outside in East London?” I said, laughing at him, just as he shifted the biggest pot in the garden and lifted up a key in triumph.
“He can be a little… absent minded at times” Sunny said. “I think he got fed up of locking himself out. Of course, as a police officer I will need to have a word with him about home security once we find him”.
He opened the door and went inside, calling as he did just in case Mark was home but had chosen not to let us in.
I followed him in and turned to shut the door, but as I did a woman was walking up the path towards the house. She saw me and called out “wait,” and sped up, running by the time she reached me.
She stopped to catch her breath, and I got a proper look at her face. “Charlie?”
“Amy? Wow, there’s a blast from the past. What are you doing here?”
“We’re looking for Mark.”
“So I am” she said. “He rang me last night and left me a message saying he needed to get his head together, but I only found it just now so I came straight over.”
“I don’t mean to be rude, I only moved back a few weeks ago, I hadn’t realised you guys knew each other so well.”
“We’ve been seeing each other for a few months. We bumped into each other again over at the park when I took Jason, that’s my little boy, over to watch some football. Mark was so sweet with him, explaining everything, having a kick about after.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I just wanted to check he was ok.”
“Us too, then we’d be happy to leave him be for a few days, but I guess we just wanted to see him first. It just seemed a bit sudden, that’s all.”
“Let’s go inside and chat” Charlie said, walking past me and leading me inside. The flat was untidy, and I could see Sunny itching to start tidying. Charlie and I wandered round the room. I wish I could say I was looking for clues, but I had no idea where to start.
Sunny decided to start by picking up dirty cups.
“We’re supposed to be looking for Mark” I reminded him.
“I just want the flat to look nice when he gets back.”
“I don’t think it is Mark who is bothered by it” I replied.
Charlie ignored us and walked into the kitchen. She put the kettle on, opened the cupboard and grabbed some mugs. She’d obviously been here before as she knew where everything was. Clearly there was plenty about his life that Mark hadn’t told us. She seemed very concerned for him though, so maybe there were also some positive developments that he’d kept quiet about. I guessed that she must have been driving the car that picked him up after we’d been to the football.
Having washed the dirty cups and picked up piles of dirty clothes from the sofa, Sunny began scanning around the flat for any signs of where Mark had gone whilst Charlie and I sat at the table and sipped our tea. There were no obvious clues there either, no maps with a big red X marks the spot. I was stumped. “Can you think of anywhere he might head to?” I asked Charlie.
“No, I’m surprised he left at all” she said. “That’s why I came over. He always seemed to have his shit together. Otherwise I’d have left him to have some space, but this just doesn’t seem like him.”
I agreed. “I don’t know his stuff well enough to know if he’s taken any clothes or bags with him” I said.
Sunny shook his head. “Me neither.”
Charlie thought she might, but one look at the bedroom and she changed her mind. “Looks like Jason’s room” she said, “but then, he’s eight, he’s supposed to live in a pigsty.” A small smile crossed her face but quickly disappeared. We all walked back into the living room.
Sunny found Mark’s laptop under the sofa. He opened it, but let out a curse word when the password screen came up. “And now he’s security conscious.”
Sunny tried Mark’s name, then his date of birth. Charlie took over and tried Mark’s mum’s name, and some slang terms for Marijuana. She looked at Sunny as
she typed them. “You never know” she said, but nothing worked.
“My turn” I said, pulling the laptop towards me. I looked around the room, then typed in “Charlie,” and the screen changed to an internet browser page.
Then Charlie really did grin, and so did I. I was happy for Mark that he’d found someone. Sunny though was all business. “Try the browser history” he said, so I looked up the most recent pages Mark had visited.
“A few gaming sites, some vegetarian leather shoes, a music festival. No hotels or anything.”
“When is the music festival?” he asked.
“Next weekend, though I can’t tell if he booked any tickets or not” I said.
Charlie looked relieved, “there’s nothing here to say he’s gone for long” she said, “so maybe we should respect his wishes and give him some space after all.”
I think realising that he used her name for his password had reassured her. “We can always talk again in a few days if we’ve not heard from him. I’d better get back to my mum’s and collect Jason anyway.”
We swapped mobile numbers with her and promised each other we’d call if we heard anything.
Chapter Nine
We left the flat and walked up to the High Street. The cloudless sky was a beautiful blue, and the sun was warm enough to feel good on my bare skin. Sunny suggested stopping for breakfast in a new café, and we continued to talk as we ate our croissants. I took a mouthful of coffee and moaned out loud. It was caffeinated nectar. “Good coffee?” Sunny asked. His hand dropped from his mug and traced a gentle path backwards and forwards on my lower back. I grinned at him, finding my eyes drawn to his mouth. I really wanted to kiss him again. I didn’t though.