Watching his lips move I wonder how his mouth would feel against mine. I almost lose myself in this thought, but I’m compelled to keep talking.
‘I thought everything was supposed to look more perfect from a distance and only up close do we see the cracks, but I’m beginning to think it’s the opposite. Looking back on it now, I was on edge the whole time with Ru. I could never relax when he was around. But I can’t blame him, it was me. Everything back home has been so draining lately. It was all such hard work.’
He doesn’t answer and for a moment we both stare ahead. I watch a dog race along the shoreline in the distance but inside I’m madly processing how I let all this truth slip out so easily.
He smiles back. ‘Equations should … balance themselves.’ I stare at him, trying to figure out what he’s on about. ‘They should stack up. Like, you get back what you give in.’ He takes a drink. ‘But it sounds like you’ve got a dodgy X or a Y in that formula of yours.’
I’m losing myself in the pools of his pale eyes, concentrating on his words when, for the second time this evening, he takes my hand but he just lifts it to his lips. He sort of holds it there, gently, for a moment and it’s the loveliest thing. The back of his hand moves slowly down the length of my cheek and my heart rushes so violently I have to grip the concrete bench between my fingers until it passes. I look at him and realise for the first time in days, maybe even weeks, I am happy.
‘Well, howrya, Flynn!’ The shout comes from the bottom of the beach steps. I make out three figures way beyond the shelters, the far-off clink of their bottles ringing as they walk.
It’s Kenny and two other guys I recognise from Fiona’s house. ‘All right, Emerald!’ Kenny again, introducing unnecessary syllables to my name as only he sees fit. I feel Liam’s fingers slip away and he slowly releases my hand. It’s difficult not to read rejection in this tiny movement and my heart drops. Patches of Saturday night flare like flames in the blackness: my dancing, stuff I said to those girls, stumbling through the crowd to ask that awful guy for cigarettes. I don’t know what they saw or what they heard. I hardly know half of what I said and right now, despite all the loveliness of earlier, I want to crawl into one of the dark puddles on the ground. I get up and hand the flask back to Liam. ‘I better go.’
His smile fades. ‘Already?’
I try to think of a clever excuse but my brain’s not cooperating and I stand there nodding. The sound of their jingling bags and footsteps gets closer.
It’s like Liam reads my panic. ‘Saturday night. Dinner?’ he says. There’s a mischievous look in his eye. He hasn’t acknowledged the others and they’re almost upon us. ‘I won’t let this go until you say yes,’ he says, tugging at my shirt sleeve. ‘C’mon.’
‘Yes. OK, yes,’ I say, desperate to leave, but also desperate not to.
‘Same place?’ he leans in and whispers.
‘Our wall?’ Oh God, why did I just say it like that? ‘By the stripy kiosk, I mean.’
‘I like that. Our wall it is,’ he says, smiling.
I nod and turn away, the tips of my fingers still tingling where his just touched them.
LIAM
One-at-a-time kinds of eyes
I was feeling pretty good about tonight until I saw her.
‘Seriously!’ she roars, trying to lift my backpack from beside my feet.
She’s wearing some class of a shirt-dress and a pair of sandals with jewels on them. She looks stunning, but my Saturday night dinner invitation clearly got lost in translation. Thinking about it now, who’d blame her? I feel like I’ve dragged her here under false pretences and the night is about to nosedive.
She winches the bag on to her shoulder. ‘What’s in here?’
‘Supplies.’ I can’t bring myself to call it dinner now.
She stares at me and I can see the synapses in her brain fusing. There’s an uncomfortably long pause and then she leans forward, her eyes impossibly wide. ‘Are we … having a picnic?’
The way she says picnic confirms I’ve made a bad call. ‘I just thought –’
‘Brilliant!’ she says, cutting in before I can finish. Next thing I know, she pumps her fist against mine.
‘You’re not disappointed?’
Taking her fancy shoes off, she turns around and gives me this look that’s hard to describe, but I feel better. ‘C’mon,’ she says. ‘You gonna show me where we’re going?’
‘Here, gimme the bag.’ I reach for it, but she ducks and weaves past me, hunching the bag further up her back and stomping off along the beach.
Eventually we reach a deserted spot, high up on the dunes about a mile beyond the golf course. She spins in a circle and collapses on to the sand, bag still on her back like a turtle’s shell. ‘This is perfect!’ she says.
It is perfect: a bunker of velvety sand, scooped into the top of a tall dune, with the sinking sun melting into the navy sea behind. The long grass shields us from the wind that’s been blowing our hair into knots. It’s calm and protected; our very own tower with views from Howth almost as far as Portrane. I take the bag from her back and start unpacking.
She leans in, fishing Mam’s woolly rug out of the bag. ‘Here, sit up a second,’ she says, nudging me as she lays the stripy green blanket beneath us. Slowly smoothing out a corner, she looks up. ‘This feels warm. Like hot?’
‘That’d be the chicken.’ She’s eyeing me now like I might have been dropped from the pram. ‘There’s a new rotisserie machine at work now. Lorcan, my boss, is beside himself!’
She shakes her head, but in a nice way. ‘What else have you got in there?’ she asks, peering inside.
I pull the bag away. ‘Let’s have a drink first.’ I fish out a miniature bottle of white wine and hand it to her before taking another one out for myself. She cracks the lid and quickly lifts the bottle to her lips. ‘Hold up!’ I say, lowering her hand back down.
I pop the red and white striped straw I pinched from the Slush Puppie machine into her bottle. She sucks up a long drink before biting down on the straw. ‘Why, that’s the finest, warm –’ she turns the bottle in her hand and examines the label – ‘Chenin Blanc I’ve ever tasted.’
‘You’re welcome.’ I pop a straw in my own and watch it bob about for a bit before taking a sip. ‘It’s the only Chenin Blanc I’ve ever tasted. Would ya like to hear our special tonight?’
She leans back on her elbows. ‘Go on.’
‘Bird à la baguette,’ I say, sliding the bread from its wrapper and brandishing the two halves; it was a necessary move what with the size of the backpack.
‘Ooh la la!’
Jaysus, I feel like a plank. Her eyes are on me the whole time as I tear off sections of the baguette and hack at the chicken with a little plastic knife that isn’t up to the gig. I should have brought some butter.
She reaches over for the packet of Kettle chips but doesn’t open them. Then she lifts up one of the sandwiches I’ve made, takes a bite and chews delicately. ‘D’you really want to be a musician?’ she asks, out of nowhere.
‘What?’
‘The other night, you said if you could be anything, you’d be a songwriter.’
‘You weren’t supposed to remember that.’
‘Well, I did,’ she says, trawling a net of Babybels out of the bag before rummaging further and lifting out fistfuls of kindling. ‘Er, wait a minute!’ She drops the cheese. ‘No wonder the bag was so heavy!’
I shift my arse to reveal the hunks of firewood I’d removed from the bag then I start to assemble them in a stack.
‘Wow!’ she says, taking her phone from her pocket. ‘A real-life boy scout!’
I chuck a Babybel at her. ‘Shut up!’ I begin flicking the lighter in my hand but it takes loads of goes before I get it to flame. Her phone shutter clicks behind me. I spin around. ‘Oi, don’t post that online or anything.’
I was only messing but she looks serious all of a sudden and drops the phone into her lap. ‘I won’t,’ she say
s. ‘I just wanted a photo of you.’
I stop what I’m doing but I can’t look up. It was such a simple, honest thing to say, it takes a minute for it to sink in. I get back to poking the fire, not wanting to embarrass her. Anyway, I want to smile, privately.
She recovers quickly. ‘So d’you sing?’ she asks.
I roll up the bread wrapper and stick it into the flames. ‘Only to myself.’
‘Oh, come on.’
‘What?’
‘I’d love to hear you.’
‘We’ve nowhere near enough of this …’ I twist the bottle around in the sand to read the label again. ‘Anyway, what about you?’
‘Do I sing?’
‘I meant write, but hey, sing for me if you like.’ I’m beaming at her, but it’s all nerves. The notion of letting my voice out so close to her ears is intoxicating. I can’t think of anything as terrifying as letting her know how much I feel for her now. Every vein in my body is hopping around giddy.
‘I’ve never written anything … significant,’ she sighs. ‘I mean, I’ll spend hours on the perfectly crafted Insta comeback, but no stories or anything clever like that. Embarrassing for a wannabe writer, right?’ We both laugh. ‘I guess it’s just a dream for now, but maybe I’ll follow it some day.’ She looks up. ‘You should follow yours too, you know.’ She hands me her phone. ‘Here, check this out.’ It’s the photo of me on my knees beside the tiny fire, the pink evening clouds behind my head and the last remnants of sun sinking underneath the grassy dune.
‘Mmm … not bad,’ I say almost coolly. Of course what I really want to say is, ‘Wow, that’s an amazing photo and I’m thrilled to bits that you took it.’
‘You were right, you know,’ she says. ‘Usually I would upload it, but I’m having a break from all that stuff.’
I lean over to add a little more kindling. ‘What stuff?’
‘Insta, Snapchat … I’m in the dying gasps of WhatsApp but even those seem to be fizzling out. Online me is missing, presumed dead. Not that anyone has noticed.’ She looks down after she says this and sifts the sand through her open fingers.
She looks so earnest I can’t help laughing. ‘I don’t do social media anyway.’ For a minute she stares, like she’s working out whether she heard me right. I turn around.
‘At all, ever?’
‘Never bothered with it.’
I shake my head and her expression changes. ‘That’s like saying you don’t do the internet. In fact, that’s kind of preposterous, Liam,’ she says, like I’ve wronged her somehow.
‘I do “do” the internet.’
‘So you google stuff. Wow.’
‘No, smart-arse. I’m always on YouTube and that, and I have SoundCloud, you know, for my music. Just not all that social stuff.’
She shoots me a look and then throws the end of her baguette towards a seagull, impressively far ahead. ‘That’s almost as pretentious as wanting to be a writer.’
‘OK then, so if Instagram or whatever enhanced your life so much, why d’you come off it?’
She goes to say something and then stops. ‘I’m having a break, that’s all.’
‘Whatever! Laura, my sister –’
‘The Niall fan?’
We both roll our eyes. ‘She’s on Snapchat all day long, like it’s an oxygen tank she carts around. All her mates, slating each other, like proper bitch-offs, and man, the selfies! She compares herself to her friends’ pictures the whole time. I mean she’ll put her phone down and I swear she’s actually depressed. I’ve told Mam she should ban her, but I guess you can’t do that.’
Em sucks up the last of her wine. Her face looks like it’s thinking as she spins on to her front, propping herself up on her elbows. ‘SoundCloud?’
‘Forget it.’
‘Not a chance,’ she says, flinging another Babybel into my chest before standing up. ‘You can’t hide on the internet, Liam Flynn,’ she says, punching at her phone.
‘You won’t find me.’
Her hand drops to her side. ‘C’mon! You put your songs on SoundCloud to be heard. That’s the general idea, right?’
‘Not by people I know. That’s what the alias is for. Anyway, it’s all …’
‘Yeah?’
‘Ah, it’s just sad, heartfelt stuff. Only covers anyway. For now.’
‘What sort of covers?’
‘Songs with a story.’
She leans over on to her right side now, propped up on her elbow. ‘For real?’
‘Low-life poets, I’m a sucker for those.’ I can tell she’s biting her cheeks, like she doesn’t want to laugh. I finish my remaining crust and flick bits of chicken grizzle into the fire before lying back down. I wish I’d brought more wine.
We’re side by side again and I take in her whole face. It’s a face that improves the more you look at it, if that’s even possible. When she looks up my eyes land on hers. I can tell this unnerves her, but she just flicks tiny grains of sand at my chest.
The sun has long gone and the light has faded. I can’t trust all that I’m thinking not to spill out on to the rug between us. She smiles without opening her lips, but she doesn’t look away and we lie there, looking into each other’s eyes. Hers are dark now, like they’ve soaked up the night. I look from her left to her right and back again, but it’s her right that I settle on. It’s too much to take in both; they’re one-at-a-time kinds of eyes.
Then she bites her bottom lip and that’s it. I close my heavy lids, steal a breath and lean in.
EMERALD
Wham, wallop, kapow!
It’s been fifty-nine hours and I’m still smiling inside. This is the third morning in a row I’ve woken up like this, quietly happy. It’s an entirely new experience and I want to lie here and think about Liam before any bad thoughts have a chance to enter my head. It wasn’t only the physical feeling of his soft, warm lips on mine, but the way it made me feel inside. Whenever I’m alone, I close my eyes and relive the touch of his hand, pressed into my back and I retrace in my mind the delicate dent at the side of his bum and how it felt through his cold jeans as I ran my hands along his side. Even the hard skin on the heel of his hands and the fine line of dirt underneath his index fingernail are precious, important details. I’ve memorised the feeling of our fingertips touching as we walked home, hand in hand, along the sand. And how, as we said goodbye outside Grandma’s, those rough fingers found my face and held it up under the street light like a prize.
So far, I’ve found one hundred and forty-three Liams from Dublin on SoundCloud and none of them are him. I’ve now set myself a wider, more forensic task, given this whole alias thing, but it’ll have to wait – I’m meeting him in an hour. He hasn’t told me where we’re going. All he said was he’s lending me his sister’s bike to get there.
Does this even happen? From my experience with Ru, I’d assumed you had to fancy a boy from afar for ages, break down every single one of his physical attributes, psychoanalyse the four words he’s ever grunted at you, try desperately to get him to follow you and then endure some torturous DM rigmarole back and forth for weeks, only to inevitably discover that, surprise surprise, he prefers your better-looking friend.
The phone rings downstairs. I think about getting up to answer it but it stops and my brain slides happily back to Liam. I’ve just worked out he’s only the sixth boy that I’ve kissed – like properly kissed. Hardly a difficult calculation, I know, but our kiss was totally and completely different to the ones with Rupert, or Kitty’s cousin, Tom, or that humourless French guy in Val d’Isère last Christmas. I’m not sure the relentless slobbery pecks that feely-Felix-from-the-village and I shared as twelve-year-olds even count. I’ve decided to edit those from my burgeoning sexual history, thank you.
No, this felt like my first real kiss. I knew how to do it. Every nerve ending fired into life, but still there was no panic. It was easy. It was like we fitted. I keep thinking there must be something wrong. Surely I must have something to feel bad
about? It can’t be this easy. He can’t really just like me. It’s the strangest thing.
I’ve spent my whole life saying what I think people want me to say, hoping that if I just try harder, one day I’ll do, or say, or find the right thing to stop Mum getting drunk, to stop Bryony being a bitch, or whatever. I worried I’d forgotten how to say what I actually think, but talking with Liam on the dunes last Saturday night it hit me like – wham, wallop, kapow! I want to tell him stuff. He makes me want to say the kind of thing I usually only admit in my head. It doesn’t matter how hard I try to lie or say something I don’t believe when I’m with him, because it’s like he sees inside my brain. I’m convinced of that now. There’s no point in covering stuff up. Besides, with him, I don’t even want to.
Grandma is standing by my bedroom door. I’m not sure how long she’s been there. I rub my eyes and try to look like I haven’t been lying here for almost an hour. ‘Morning!’
‘Can I come in, love?’
I’m probably still grinning, but I don’t care. ‘Of course.’
‘That was the hospital,’ she says.
My smile falls away. ‘Is she OK?’
‘Not your mum, love. Twas only Beaumont, about my appointment.’
I sit up and swing my legs out the bed. ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask, reaching for her hand.
‘It’s a routine check, pet. They’re doing a scope. Nothing at all to worry about but I wanted to let you know as I’ll have to stay in overnight next Friday, while they run a few tests.’
I exhale a little. ‘Oh.’
‘Will you be all right? It’ll be less than twenty-four hours, they said. I’ll let your dad know.’
‘Grandma! I’ll be fine. But you, are you OK?’
‘I’m grand. Like I said, it’s routine. I hate leaving you here alone, that’s all.’ She’s up again, walking back across the room.
‘Just routine?’
‘That’s all,’ she calls back from the doorway. ‘I’ll pop down and put the kettle on.’
I snatch my phone from the bedside table and dial Dad. It goes straight to voicemail. ‘Hey, it’s me. Call me back, please.’
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