by Ali Harris
‘No! No, I didn’t have sex with him – what do you take me for?’
I couldn’t answer the final question. Not truthfully anyway.
Then he’d flopped back, exhausted from the interrogation he’d just administered. His face was blank. It occurred to me that I once knew every pixel of this gorgeous face and now his expression was reduced to a faded polaroid. He didn’t look at me. Not once.
‘Ryan? Say something . . . please?’
I say it again now, to try and move this situation on. We’ve sat here for nearly two hours and we haven’t talked, not properly. I tried to go over to him, but he wouldn’t let me near him. For the first time it was him who couldn’t cope with the physical contact. I never realized how isolating it can make you feel. I come from a family that doesn’t ‘do’ hugging or general acts of demonstrativeness. I thought I was used to it. Apart from Casey, who for some reason was the exception to the rule, I’ve always bristled when girlfriends or colleagues try to link arms with me. And don’t get me started on the ‘media air kiss’. I find it hard to kiss the people I love, let alone people I barely know. When I met Ryan, it was difficult to get used to his family’s unrestrained affection. I’ve got better over the years, but it’s made me realize again the kind of girlfriend I am with my intimacy issues, my inability to naturally lavish affection like he does. But now I can see Ryan is ready to talk.
‘Look,’ he says, his eyes unfamiliarly steely. ‘I still don’t understand why you did what you did, Molly, but, well, you know, . . . maybe you’ve done us a favour. I suppose we haven’t been happy for a while.’ He drops his head, takes a deep breath and then looks up at me with a sad smile. ‘I guess we were just too young for all this.’ He sweeps his arm around our little flat, now our broken home.
‘Maybe you and I are just too different,’ I say slowly. ‘We’re not like your brother and Lydia. I mean, everyone saw them as a couple straight away. They got together at the same time and now they’re engaged and we’re . . . ’ I look up at him questioningly.
‘Carl said he knew they fitted instantly,’ he says, looking out the window. I glance out and notice it is snowing. The flakes are softly collecting on the windowpane, settling for just long enough on the glass before being swept away on the wind. Their frailty feels like an ominous sign. ‘I thought we did too.’ He looks up at me sadly. ‘But you need to explore the world, find whatever it is that makes you happy and I . . . ’ He stumbles, his breath catches in his throat. I get up and take his hand, feeling the need to say one last thing, to explain.
‘I wish we’d met five years later, Ry, I wish I . . . I wish I was different. I wish I’d been ready for this, for you. I’m scared that I’ll never have anything like this again, that I’ve thrown away the one big love of my life.’
And Ryan takes my head in his hands and he gently strokes my face, wiping away my tears as his are still falling.
‘I’ll always be here for you, Molly, always. I’ll love you forever, even if we’re not together.’
And then he pulls my face to his and our heads meet, like magnets pulled by a force stronger than we can resist. His forehead feels furnace-hot and I feel his breath warm my face, igniting my skin and forcing my lips to lift towards his, like a sunflower, and then he kisses me softly, but it’s different to the hundreds, the thousands that have gone before. Because it’s the kiss goodbye.
The Squandered Kiss
The sunlight claps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?
Percy Bysse Shelley
How many kisses do we waste, brush away, throw away, and then, when they are no longer there, how many times do we wish that we could relive them all a hundredfold? That haunts me sometimes, when I am at my lowest, wondering what Ryan is thinking, what he’s doing. I remember when the thought of Ryan kissing someone else was the worst thing that could happen. Now I know that it’s not.
FF>> 31/12/04>
‘Come ON!’ Casey says, heaving me to my feet.
‘Noooo,’ I grasp at Casey’s Hello Kitty duvet desperately, like a baby for its blanky. Outside of work, it’s been my constant companion for the past two weeks. I’m sure my body is now imprinted on it like the Turin Shroud. They could reprint it as a design and market it ‘Hello Pity’.
‘I don’t care what you say, Moll, we’re going out tonight whether you like it or not! It’s New Year’s Eve! It’s been two weeks since you moved in here and when you’re not at work all you’ve done is mope around the place. You’re cramping my style. Look!’ She points up at the ceiling. ‘That glitter ball is reflecting your miserable face around the room and I can’t bear it a minute longer! It’s time we wave away the old year – and old men – and welcome in the new! Get your glad rags on, we’re going now!’
I feebly allow her to drag me into her bedroom, feeling like it’s the least I can do for what I’ve put her through these past couple of weeks. When Casey offered me her sofa to sleep on I jumped at the chance. I wanted to get away from London, from the girl that the city had turned me into. We’d agreed that Ryan would stay in our flat until we sold it because he has to get in to work earlier than me, and often has to stay late to run various after-school sports clubs, but I also knew he’d be spending every weekend at his parents. And I needed to feel near him, even if I couldn’t be with him.
So I packed my bags and moved in here with Casey, at her new girlie pad. Which was weird in itself. She’s always been the one languishing on my sofa. I didn’t know how we’d handle the new dynamic in our relationship.
And Casey was so excited, she seemed to conveniently forget that I probably wouldn’t be sparkling company. Or necessarily deal well with meeting her one-night stands at 7 a.m. in the queue for the bathroom. And worse, on New Year’s Eve too (a.k.a the single most depressing night for singles after Valentine’s Day). At least on Valentine’s Day you’re not forced to stay until the bitter end. But Casey is the happiest I’ve seen her in ages, so I suppose at least something good is coming out of it.
She seems to have used this as a chance to turn back time and is revelling in the delights of having her best friend back. But equally I think she’s been disappointed by my reaction to the break-up.
She’s expected me to be a sobbing stereotype, lying on her couch in my pyjamas inhaling confectionery, wailing about how I’ll never be loved again. But I haven’t done that. I won’t. I know I’ve got to get on with it, and I have. Well, except when I’m alone, under the Hello Kitty duvet on her pull-out sofa bed. That’s when the tears really come. But other than that, I’ve thrown myself into work. I even offered to go in between Christmas and New Year – mainly because I couldn’t bear spending any more time at home with my parents. Luckily I knew he wouldn’t be there. He who shall not be named. He’s not at Viva anymore, he’s been promoted to a new role at Brooks Publishers so he’s no longer in our office.
The truth is, I know I’m strong enough to work through this on my own but Casey craves the tears and the drama. I know it’s not easy to understand if you’re not like me, so I try and give her a bit of what she wants just to get some peace and quiet.
We leave Casey’s flat and people are walking past with party hats and blowers and stupid, wacky 2005 glasses. How dare they have fun when I’m feeling like this? I’m standing, shivering at the entrance of Players, the club Casey works at, as she chats to the doormen and waves at the people in the queue, all of whom seem to know her – some of the men pretty well, judging by the way she drapes herself over them in greeting. She confirms this by whispering their ‘scores’ to me when she comes back over. Casey has been a hit with men for way more years now than she was a misfit teen. I remember the exact moment when it all changed. When, aged seventeen, her boobs grew out, her body grew up and her hair grew down, all at the same time.
She can get a guy these days, she just hasn’t got the knack of keeping them. She p
retends that this is fine but I know she’d give anything for someone to love her like Ryan loves – I mean loved – me.
I gulp as an image of him pops into my brain and I valiantly try to swallow the tears back. I can’t cry here. Not on New Year’s Eve. I’m here to have ‘fun’, to let my hair down, like Casey says, to do all the things that single girls are meant to do: dance, drink and flirt. All the things I thought I was missing out on when I was with Ryan and that I can’t bear to do now that I’m not. My mum was right. Molly Molly Quite Contrary, that’s me.
As tears sting the back of my eyes I wonder where he is now, probably down the pub with all his mates. I can see them as clearly as I can see Casey’s nipples through her slinky silk top. I did try and tell her to put a strapless bra on, but she wasn’t having any of it. And to be honest, she looks amazing. I realize I have no idea how to dress for clubbing anyway. Casey insisted on lending me some of her clothes. So now I look like something out of Footballers Wives in an orange, slashed-to-the-navel-dress with sparkly heels that are completely ridiculous, and totally not myself. But that’s probably the point.
I feel Casey prodding me. I ignore her, wanting to keep Ryan in my head. I’m pretty sure she’s just pointing out another guy she ‘knows’. Suddenly, I feel myself being pulled into the club, straight through the VIP entrance and into an area cordoned off with red rope. There are big, lush jewel-coloured sofas and crushed-velvet chaises longues. A smattering of beautiful people are already draped over them, their fake tans and white teeth glowing under the UV lights.
Casey looks wired. She is waving manically and sends me over to a seat right in the corner. ‘Sit there, babe!’ she says brightly, in a high-pitched voice. ‘I’ll um, I’ll just get us some drinks!’ And she disappears, leaving me to sit on my own. A guy immediately swaggers over, in a try-hard outfit of a fitted white designer T-shirt, with Gucci sunglasses hung over the V-neck. The T-shirt is pulled taut and tucked into his tight faded jeans to enhance his gym-honed body and to reveal his ostentatiously displayed Hermes belt, presumably. None of this hides the vacant expression he’s wearing as his main accessory.
‘Hey girrrrl, you’re too pretty to be alone,’ Hermes Guy drawls, looking back at his mates and giving a thumbs-up sign.
I raise an eyebrow: ‘And you’re too stupid to realize that I want to be.’ He looks startled, but undeterred.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Effoff.’ I smile, through gritted teeth.
‘That’s pretty! Effoff! I ain’t heard that before. Is it Swedish?’
I snort in derision and wave my hands to dismiss him. He slopes off back to his mates, looking more than a little bit confused.
Just then Casey arrives with a bottle of champagne. ‘Here we go! I thought we’d start with something bubbly to get the party going!’ Her eyes hover around and then return to me. ‘Here’s to being young, free and single . . . and to, er, meeting new men!’ She pours me a glass and I down the lot. I’m going to need it tonight.
An hour later, I’ve consumed pretty much an entire bottle and I’m on the dance floor working some moves out to ‘Crazy in Love’. And I’m doing a pretty darned good job of it too! In my head and with a bottle of champagne inside me and in this dress, I reckon I can basically pass as Beyonce herself. I’m now re-enacting the video, with Hermes Guy who’s happily taken the role of Jay-Z. I was a bit harsh on him earlier. He’s actually really, really nice and I am looking well hot, so why does Casey keep trying to pull me off the dance floor? Now I can see why she gets pissed off when I try and stop her from having fun. I thought I was being protective; I realize now it’s just annoying.
‘Hey!’ I say, as she tries to steer me back to the VIP room. ‘What are you doing? I’m having a lovely time, dancing with whatshisface over there. Did you see me?’
I do a version of the booty dance but add the leg and arm waggle Mia and I created at uni for good measure. ‘Uh oh!’ I sing tunelessly as I edge back onto the dance floor. ‘This is fuuuuun, Case! Look at me, I’m having fuun!!!’ And for some reason, known only to me, I start doing the Robot.
Casey shakes her head and beckons me back over. ‘Come on, Moll,’ she pleads. ‘Let’s go and sit back down. I’ve bought us another bottle!’
‘YAY!’ I squeal. ‘But I’m going to finish dancing first, OK? Because I’m good at it! Look!’ And then I start flailing my arms around feeling as free and uninhibited as I’ve felt for ages. It’s 11 p.m., it’s New Year’s Eve and I’m young, free and single!
‘Please,’ Casey begs, trying to drag me away. ‘Molly, please come with me before you see . . . ’
‘Before I see wha— Uh . . . oh.’ I’ve hooked my hand around my ankle and my hand is behind my head, when I turn around and see him. Ryan. Across the dance floor. Kissing someone. A girl. A tall, blonde, beautiful girl.
A girl that’s not me.
‘I’m sorry,’ Casey says sorrowfully, slipping her arm through mine and trying to lead me away but I am stuck to the floor. ‘I tried to warn you.’
Everything seems to stop then, the music, the people, and I swear it is just him and me in the room.
Oh, and her.
I stare for a moment, I see him look up and over at me. He stops kissing her and pulls away. She says something but he shakes his head. She walks off. Then he raises his hand to his forehead, rubs it and sweeps it over his head like he does when he’s anxious. Then he looks at me, sorrowfully. I can’t move, I want to move but I can’t. I just stand there, on one leg, like a . . . flamingo, staring at him as the song changes and Casey tries to pull me away again.
‘Don’t do this to yourself,’ she says, taking my head in hers and forcing me to look her in the eye. ‘You were doing so well. Come on, let’s go now, Molly.’
I lower my leg, still staring at him. I wish I hadn’t seen it, but he’s single, he can do what he likes. So I just nod at him and I turn, and as I look back he raises his hand to his lips, as if to blow me a kiss. But instead, he just drops his hand so the kiss falls to the floor and he disappears. I want to run over there and scrabble around on the floor, like I do when I’m looking for a lost contact lens. I want that kiss. I want him. Why did I throw it all away?
I wail into Casey’s armpit in the taxi as she strokes my hair. Part of me thinks at least Casey’s finally got what she wants, a bawling best friend she can look after.
‘I know you don’t want to hear this,’ she says, still stroking my hair, ‘but maybe what just happened is for the best. I mean, now you can finally move on and accept that it really is over between you, can’t you, eh?’
I nod but what I’m actually thinking is I would have preferred to live in ignorant bliss, hoping he was in the same state I am, desperately missing me as much as I miss him.
9.11 a.m.
I press pause on the DVD and push a visibly miffed Harry off my lap, suddenly overcome by the guilt of how much I have to do. What the hell am I doing being distracted by a film? It’s just like when I was a kid and Mum used to militantly make me clear up my room every Saturday morning, and I’d wind up secretly watching Going Live.
I brush the cat hair off my leggings and walk into the kitchen, put my mug in the sink and grab the marker pen I left on the island unit last night. I need to label some of the newly packed boxes from last night with my clear and simple system: Charity Shop, Ship or Storage.
It’s the smell that does it. I close my eyes and inhale the pungent petrol-like smell as I take the lid off the pen. Ryan would often spend evenings sprawled across our lounge floor, drawing up various player formations on big sheets of white paper for upcoming school football matches while I read my photography books.
This scent is, in a way, stronger and more memory-inducing than his Hugo Boss aftershave and for a long time after he left, when I smelt that particular scent I’d find myself turning and following the wearer in case it was Ryan before realizing what I was doing and hastily retreating.
But unlike that, t
his smell brings pleasure as well as pain because it doesn’t just make me think of Ryan. It takes me back to my school days; Casey and I giggling during lessons and then scribbling notes to each other in our exercise books about boys we fancied. And of course, it reminds me of home. My parents. The smell of Sharpies infiltrated our house as they laboured tirelessly over homework books with their red pens.
I look in an unmarked box on the kitchen counter, full of random kitchen gadgets and scrawl ‘Charity Shop’ on the side. It may seem like I’m wiping a lifetime of memories out, just like on a whiteboard, but it’s in order to make way for new ones.
The Worst First Kiss
There are certain givens when it comes to falling in love. Take the first kiss. No one ever wrote about the path of true love starting with a terrible kiss, did they? Would Juliet have been quite so infatuated with Romeo if he’d just stuck his tongue down her throat instead of doing all that balcony stuff? Or if Jack had drunkenly snogged Rose at that below-decks party instead of tenderly kissing her whilst making her fly on the bow of the ship? Would it still have been the biggest grossing film of all time? Maybe Shakespeare and all his romantic writing contemporaries (and James Cameron) thought a bad first kiss was just too obvious a sign that the relationship was doomed from the start. At times, I’ve wondered the same thing.
<
‘Oh GOD, not him,’ I mutter darkly, spotting the familiar figure of Ryan Cooper approaching as I try desperately to hide behind my mum. It’s a cold, bleak Saturday morning and Mum’s dragged me out on a Christmas shopping trip to Southend in a bid to ‘bond’ with me. I’m hating it because generally I do everything to avoid being seen in public with my parents because they’re so embarrassing and so miserable.
They haven’t always been this unhappy but things have recently hit an all-time low and it’s really pissing me off that neither one of them has the guts to just put me out of my misery and leave. But Dad’s the head teacher at Westcliff, where I go, and Mum’s head of English at Thorpe Hall, the local private school where Ryan Cooper goes. They’re both well known in the community.