Our Song

by Dani Atkins

  I was vaguely aware that several of his friends from the ball were standing nearby. One of them, a guy with some ridiculous, slightly rude-sounding nickname, passed David a pint of lager from the bar.

  ‘And who’s this then?’ he asked. His accent was pure home counties, far posher than David’s deep and melodic voice.

  ‘This is Ally. She’s with me,’ David declared, looking down at me with a confident smile.

  And from that moment on, and for the next ten months, I was.

  Not that I was ready to acknowledge that, at least not right then. I liked him, there was no point in denying that, but I just couldn’t see us as a good fit . . . and he could. He’d held my gloved hand tightly in his as he had walked me home from the bar that first night. He totally disregarded my insistence that I was perfectly capable of walking home alone – I did it without a second thought at least three times a week after music practice sessions.

  ‘There are some pretty strange characters hanging around town at this time of night, when the clubs and bars start to empty,’ he observed darkly, tugging lightly on my hand to bring me a little closer to his side.

  I looked up at him, with the lower part of my face mostly buried beneath a long scarf which I’d wound – Egyptian mummy style – several times around my neck. ‘And are we perfectly sure you’re not one of them?’ I teased.

  He laughed. ‘Nah, you’re safe with me.’ I buried my nose in the folds of wool and considered his words. Physically, I knew he posed me no threat, but emotionally . . . well, I wasn’t so sure.

  Twenty minutes later we arrived at the small, slightly shabby three-bedroom house I was sharing for my second year. It wasn’t much to look at from the outside, but then my expectations had been small, and so had my budget. David studied the unlit house as we stood on the pavement beside the creaky gate with the peeling flakes of paint, both of us shivering in the cold January air.

  ‘Is there anyone else home? Your housemates?’ he asked, and for just a moment I wondered if he was expecting me to invite him in. Because that definitely wasn’t going to happen. But his tone had sounded more concerned than anything else.

  ‘Probably not,’ I replied, my breath wafting up from the enveloping scarf in small billowy clouds. ‘Elena spends most of her time at her boyfriend’s place, and Ling practically lives in the music department.’

  ‘Maybe I should wait until one of them comes back,’ he suggested.

  ‘Maybe you should go home,’ I countered.

  He shrugged, and I was pleased to see he wasn’t going to push it. Very gently he took hold of the two trailing ends of my scarf and tugged me slowly towards him.

  ‘I find myself worrying about you quite a lot, Bugle Girl,’ he said, disarming me totally by how close his face was to mine. So close that the vapour of our exhaled breath met and mingled in a way that struck me as curiously intimate. David’s head lowered slowly; he was giving me plenty of time to pull away or tell him to back off. I did neither. Very gently his hands went to my face, his fingers slipping into the folds of wool, easing down my scarf to allow him access to my lips. His mouth felt chilled, but as my lips parted beneath it his tongue was warm, gently teasing a response from mine. I hadn’t been kissed in over seven months, and it was pleasing to discover I still remembered how to do it.

  I had lain awake for a long time that night. I heard one of my missing housemates return, and charted her progress through the house by the sound trail she left behind. Whistling kettle in the kitchen, creaking stair treads leading to her bedroom, bathroom extractor fan going on and then off, until finally the house was in silence. And still sleep eluded me.

  I had a strange fluttery feeling inside me, as though somewhere within me a small winged emotion was beating on the walls of my resistance. I didn’t want to get involved in a relationship, and certainly not with someone who was so far outside of my comfort zone that I felt like a trespasser in another world. But there was something about David, something that pulled me like a magnet, something that . . .

  A small buzzing noise interrupted my thoughts and my room was lit by a neon green glow as my phone received an incoming text.

  ‘Are you awake?’

  I smiled in the darkness and drew the phone back under the duvet with me.

  ‘Well I am now’ I typed beneath the covers.

  ‘Sorry. Just wanted to check you were OK. I had fun tonight.’

  I stared at the screen and ran my fingers over his message, my lips suddenly tingling as I remembered his mouth on mine. I had felt a little awkward with his friends, though not because they’d been unwelcoming, but just because they were so different from the orchestra crowd I usually hung around with. They were the BNOCs I acknowledged, the Big Names on Campus, and I was the girl who would happily remain anonymous for her entire university career, as long as she got a good degree at the end of it. Was there any way to straddle both worlds? Could he do it? Could I?

  ‘Can I see you again?’ he messaged. Before I could reply, another text was added to that one. ‘Tomorrow?’

  My fingers took over, even while my head was still trying to work out just how many shades of foolish this whole thing was becoming. ‘OK’. Two letters, blinking up to me in the dark folds of my bed, daring me to take a chance, step out of my safe and secure world and run without caution through a minefield. I took a deep breath and pressed Send. Surprisingly I slept far better that night than I had done in weeks.

  The early days of ‘us’ were a free-fall of emotions. We disagreed about so many things it was a wonder that we had ever got together at all. That was certainly the unspoken question on the faces of David’s friends whenever we went out with them, which admittedly wasn’t that often. Even something as innocuous as supermarket shopping was a cause of dissent. I’d worked for one of the major chains during my gap year, to earn extra money for university. I knew when to shop to grab the best bargains and bag the lowest marked-down prices on fresh produce. David would shop at any hour of the day or night, whenever it occurred to him or he ran out of something. He too had taken a gap year before starting university, but as his had been spent working in Africa with orphaned elephants, it offered less transferrable skills for grocery shopping.

  ‘You’d be far better suited with one of the girls your mother keeps trying to fix you up with whenever you go home,’ I had told him during an afternoon walk through the frosty crisp grass on the campus green. David had been waiting for me outside the lecture hall, leaning nonchalantly against the brick wall, his eyes warm and twinkling as I emerged with a throng of music students. It was almost impossible not to be aware of the sidelong glances of envy darting my way from some of the females around me. I’d never had that before, and I couldn’t decide if I was flattered or irritated.

  ‘I’ve had it with girls like that,’ he had replied, casually throwing an arm around my shoulder and taking my heavy bag from my arm. ‘All they talk about is which ski resort they’re working at next season, or how well their horse did at the local trials. I want a girl who can spell gymkhana, not compete in one,’ he said with surprising vitriol in his voice.

  I was silent for a few moments, my eyes riveted to the frozen blades of grass beneath my boots.

  ‘You’re spelling it, aren’t you?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I admitted.

  He had laughed. ‘And that’s why I love you,’ he had said, before moving on to talk about something else, leaving me spectacularly a hundred miles behind him. Love me? Did he love me? Or had that just been an inconsequential figure of speech? We had certainly never spoken of it – it was far too soon to even be thinking those kind of thoughts. We were too new, still stepping delicately in and out of each other’s lives. Mostly we had figured out a workable balance. I still spent two or three evenings a week rehearsing in the faculty or locked away in one of the music practice rooms, determined to perfect my playing not just for me, but for the lost grandmother who had passed on this baton to me.

  On those nights D
avid mostly hung out with his own crowd of friends. His RAH friends, I teasingly called them.

  ‘You do know what that stands for, don’t you?’ he had asked, kissing me and then gently biting on my lower lip as I went to pull away.

  ‘Hey, if the Burberry cap fits,’ I had mockingly replied.

  It was an argument, or rather a silly squabble, that had surprisingly taken our relationship on to its next level. It was a Saturday evening and we were queuing to buy tickets for the cinema, but even while we were standing in line, we couldn’t agree which film we were going to watch. I had wanted to see something arty with an Oscar-winning soundtrack and David’s choice was something where Bruce Willis was going to save the world. Again. Couples in the queue around us were staring with open curiosity as we eventually got to the counter, intrigued to see which of us would be the one to cave. David pulled a twenty-pound note from his wallet.

  ‘One for Screen One and one for Screen Two,’ he said, settling our deadlock in a way I certainly hadn’t been expecting.

  We took our tickets and parted company at the doors with matching looks of childish determination. It was such a silly thing to have disagreed about, and such a waste of a Saturday night. We both knew we’d taken things too far, but neither of us knew how to backtrack. I was about to give in when he had said with a note of resignation, ‘So, I guess I’ll see you out here when the films are over,’ before disappearing into his blackened theatre.

  I made it through the adverts, and the trailers and even the first ten minutes of my film, before I jumped to my feet in the darkened auditorium, earning a sharp hiss of annoyance from the people in the row behind me. Mumbling ‘excuse me’ after ‘excuse me’ I stepped over legs, bags and popcorn containers to exit the aisle and then sped down the dimly lit steps and out of the theatre. What did it matter what the hell we watched? The important thing was being with him, not about who won the debate or who could change the other’s point of view.

  I burst through the double doors, and ran straight into him, on his race through them to join me. The cinema attendant looked up at the sound of our collision, then rapidly averted his gaze as David’s arms tightened around me and his mouth hungrily sought mine. We didn’t speak our apologies, we let our mouths and tongues do that for us. I don’t even remember leaving the cinema foyer. I have a vague recollection of David hailing a taxi, even though my house was only a fifteen-minute walk away. The cab driver shook his head tellingly as David pulled yet another large note from his pocket and didn’t even wait for his change.

  My house was in darkness. Ling had gone home for the weekend and Elena, as usual, was out. David had released his hold on me only long enough to allow me through the front door. Now with it pulled shut behind us, his arms came back around me as we stumbled into the shoe-rack in the hall, tumbling trainers and boots all around us as we attempted to reach the bottom of the stairs without breaking our kiss. Something hit the floor with an almighty crash. Ling’s bike, I thought distractedly, stepping over the spinning wheel and reaching the first tread of the stairs. David took my hand and gently began to lead me up the worn carpeted steps.

  He paused when we reached the dimly lit hall, unsure of which way to go. In the seven weeks we had been together, he had never been across the threshold to my room. And that wasn’t the only boundary he had yet to cross. Despite some fairly intense and passionate make-out sessions, we had never taken that side of things any further. I knew that he’d slept with other girlfriends before me, from things he’d inadvertently let slip, but so far he’d been the one pulling back and keeping our relationship on a slow simmer, even though I was ready to boil. Inexperience silenced the question that burnt my tongue every time he stopped an intimate moment from escalating into something more. Why was he stopping? I’d seen the look in his eyes every time he had pulled away from me. I may be naïve, but I was pretty sure he wanted to carry on.

  It was one of the few times I really regretted that my best friend in the whole world was a boy. Maxi would be no use at all to me for a sounding board, and I didn’t feel comfortable discussing that side of my relationship with David with him.

  ‘That’s my room,’ I said, and my voice was so husky I scarcely recognised it as my own. David’s hand paused on the handle, and he turned back to me, his free hand cradling my cheek.

  ‘Are you sure you’re ready for this? We can stop now. It’s never too late to change your mind.’

  I felt the skin beneath his palm grow warm, but I kept my eyes fixed on the piercing blue intensity of his. ‘I don’t want to stop. But . . . this is all new . . . for me, I mean. I . . . I don’t know what I am doing here . . . exactly.’

  The pad of his thumb lightly caressed the inflamed skin of my face. ‘Don’t worry. I do,’ he said softly, pulling me against him for a kiss that began in the hall, travelled to the bed and kept going even as he gently tugged the clothes from my body.

  I’d heard that the first time isn’t meant to be all that good. I’d heard that girls are often left disappointed, frustrated and completely unfulfilled. I’d heard wrong.

  David was my first. My first everything. My first proper boyfriend, my first love, my first lover and my first – my only – broken heart. I’m not sure when it all started to go wrong. No. That’s a lie. I could pinpoint the markers like pegs on a map marking a journey which was going to take you somewhere you never wanted to go.

  Charlotte – Six Years Earlier

  I twisted the engagement ring on my finger, as the lights from the shops flashing past our taxi window caught its facets and threw up a starburst of brilliant prisms. David reached across and covered my hand with his own. ‘You’re not nervous, are you?’ he asked, turning in his seat to study me.

  I smiled away the concern on his face. ‘About meeting your mother? No. Not at all,’ I assured him. And I wasn’t lying, I really wasn’t. His mother might have eaten Ally alive all those years earlier, but I wasn’t an easily intimidated university girlfriend, plucked from the baby pool and dropped in at the deep end. I could swim with sharks, if I had to. I came from the same ocean as David. His mother wasn’t the one who was bothering me.

  Still, it was impossible not to remember the conversation I’d had with Ally after her one and only disastrous visit to David’s family home. Of course that was back in the days before everything got ugly, back when Ally and I were still friends.

  ‘You can’t imagine how awful if was,’ Ally had said, her arm working as though powered by a motor, as she vigorously beat four, eggs and sugar in a bowl. Her face was pink from her exertions, speckled with white freckles of four. She said she found baking therapeutic, and from the array of muffins, cakes and pastries, covering just about every kitchen countertop, she must have needed a lot of therapy.

  ‘How bad could it have been?’ I’d asked, picking up a muffin and hopping up to sit on the only clear worktop left in the kitchen.

  ‘How bad?’ she had asked, her voice going up at least one octave. ‘I’ll tell you how bad. I was wearing the same bloody dress as the catering staff. I spent half the night politely telling the party guests that I couldn’t get them another canapé or glass of champagne, and I actually had no idea where the bathroom was!’

  I nibbled on the edge of the muffin, which was really still too warm to eat. ‘But that wasn’t exactly David’s mother’s fault, was it?’ I reasoned.

  Ally stopped her frenetic beating and eyed me meaningfully for a moment as though questioning my loyalties. I felt the guilt burn inside me, like acid indigestion, and had to concentrate on swallowing my bite of muffin. She was right to question me, just not for the reason she thought.

  She blew several wayward strands of hair back from her face and returned to beating the mixture into submission. ‘Perhaps not. But everything else was. It was all done so subtly that David didn’t even see most of it. But everything she said was a put down. She didn’t even try to disguise the fact that she clearly thought I wasn’t good enough for her son. She
might as well have given me a sash with “Gold-digger” on it to wear.’

  I’d said nothing, wondering just how much of the perceived slight had been real and how much had sprung from the tiny chip, well more of a notch than a chip, that Ally unknowingly wore on her shoulder. Not that I was dismissing her claims entirely. I’d met plenty of women like that over the years; most of them were close friends with my mother.

  And she even tried to stop David and I from . . . you know . . .’

  I was extra careful to make sure that my smile stayed in place as I asked, ‘She did? That was a little Victorian of her.’

  ‘She put me in a room over the garage, despite the fact the house has more bedrooms than a small hotel.’

  ‘Oh well. It was only for one night.’ I could hear the tightness in my voice, and hoped Ally was still too irate to notice it. I had enough difficulty appearing nonchalant about their . . . enthusiastic . . . love life. I certainly didn’t need to be discussing it in detail.

  ‘Yeah, it was. But David came to my room in the middle of the night anyway, and unknowingly tripped the burglar alarm. We were kind of in the middle of . . . things . . . when the police turned up.’

  Despite the seam of jealousy that ran like a guilty secret beneath my skin, I burst out laughing. Ally laid down her wooden spoon, and for a moment I thought she was crying at the memory, until I realised she was actually laughing too, so hard that tears were running in small rivulets through her flour-stained cheeks. ‘It was kind of funny,’ she conceded.