It's About Love Page 6

  I cross out Nineteen and write Marc. 20 yrs old.

  You shouldn’t be writing this.

  But I don’t listen. I just carry on.

  Marc showers. He dries himself and walks back to his cell. He gets dressed. We can hear shouts and the occasional clank of metal on metal. He folds his towel up and lays it over the back of the chair, watching himself in the small shaving mirror stuck on to the wall above the sink. His dark hair is cut close, light stubble on his top lip and chin, cheeks smooth and fresh. Chiselled.

  He stares at his reflection, lowering his chin until it’s almost touching the grey of his sweater, his shoulders rise and fall as he breathes.

  Then he speaks. “I’m coming home.”

  I’m staring out of the window in comms.

  From where we are on the second floor I can just make out the dimpled curve of the Bullring. The teacher lady’s leading a class discussion on immigration and it feels like I’m sitting in the audience on Question Time. An annoying girl with an anime face, dressed fully in American Apparel, has been talking about how disgusting nationalism is and how tabloid newspapers are to blame for most of the lesson. She’s really enjoying having centre stage and I’ve been trying to picture her and Tommy on a date. Him looking confused by the menu as they sit in some posh restaurant, her regurgitating snippets of popular opinion that she’s stolen from blogs.

  The girl scans the classroom checking everyone’s paying attention to her and I remember Dad saying that people with the freedom to talk mostly do only that.

  “It’s all just fear mongering,” she says, and I imagine Tommy in blue overalls in front of an open furnace, hammering a piece of metal that’s shaped into the word FEAR.

  “They use our insecurities about money to whip up hatred,” she goes on.

  I look down into my open bag at my notepad and think about how it’s film after lunch.

  “What about you, Luke?”

  The teacher’s talking to me. Louise. She looks like she might’ve been the lead singer in a band a long time ago. Her hair sprouting out of her head, like blonde fire with dark roots.

  “Where do you stand on this?” And a room full of eyes are burning me. My feet are digging into the carpet as I try to look like I have an opinion.

  “Where are you from?”

  What the hell’s that supposed to mean?

  “Birmingham,” I say, and a few people laugh. I can feel the cords in my neck.

  Louise smiles and says, “No, I mean your family, originally?”

  I look round the room. There’s a handful of other kids who aren’t white, so she’s not singling me out, but my back is still up.

  Why is she asking me? What do I say?

  Dad’s mum came from Jamaica and married an Irish man she met five minutes from where we live now, and Mum’s dad was French and married an English woman he met when she put a plaster cast on his broken arm. Where do I stand on this? To be honest it’s not something I ever really think about. We don’t talk about it at home. I know that I’ve never felt English, but I’ve never really felt Jamaican or French or Irish either. We’re from Birmingham. The one time we went abroad as a family, to Corfu, a girl from Belgium asked Marc where he was from and that’s what he said. The girl asked what country and Marc just smiled and said Birmingham was enough.

  Louise changes her approach. “Question is,” she says, “should there be one rule for people born in a country and one for those who’ve come from somewhere else?” and the eyes on me are getting hotter.

  What the hell is her problem?

  I don’t know, Miss. Probably not. I don’t care. Ask someone else. Everybody’s shit stinks. I try not to hear it. Say it. My teeth grind together.

  Louise shrugs. “Well?”

  I shake my head. Say it, you chicken.

  “No.” I cough out the word.

  She stares. “And why not?”

  Say it.

  “Everybody’s shit stinks.” And Louise’s face drops as the whole class breathes in, and the words are just there, on the table in front of me like a puddle of invisible puke.

  I wipe my mouth. My legs are twitching. Louise nods. “OK, thank you, Luke. Interesting angle, if perhaps a little coarse.”

  And I can feel people fighting the urge to whisper and giggle, but it’s different somehow. It’s all right. The bell goes and as I stand up, I catch the eyes of the ginger skater kid, who was with Simeon, across the room. He’s wearing a grey Supreme hoodie. He nods at me, his bottom lip sticking out, like he’s agreeing.

  I am the brooding loner. I nod back. And walk off, buzzing inside.

  You’re welcome.

  In the refectory I sit on my own near the wall at the end of a long fold-out table, eating a tuna-melt baguette.

  I can see the ginger kid from comms a couple of tables down sitting with a gang of friends. I script their conversation in my head. He’s telling them about what I said in class and how I don’t give a shit. A couple of them sneak glances and I hold my head up proudly like, yeah, I’m that guy.

  I take out my phone, then Leia walks in. I drink all of her in from bottom to top without blinking. Skinny jeans, oversized black woollen jumper with flecks of white in it hanging past her bum and a bright neon pink scarf. Her hair’s up in a high bun and there’s a pencil speared through it. She looks like an artist. I swallow my mouthful and try not to look up from my phone. Time to go.

  But I don’t move. I think about the idea in my notebook, Marc getting ready to leave prison. How I want to show her. How I think she’ll like it. But I was such a melodramatic knob yesterday. She’s not gonna want to speak to me, and I don’t know what I’d say if she does. I take a massive bite, pushing the rest of my baguette into my mouth, trying to be done, and a flap of hot melted cheese drops on to my chin. I go to wipe it, conscious of Leia, still holding my phone. Then my phone beeps and I drop it. It bounces off the table and smacks on to the floor. Smooth.

  As I pick it up, I glance over at Leia in the queue. She’s not looking. The boys at the other table are though, staring right at me. Mouthful of baguette, cheese goatee. I play it cool and open the message, nonchalantly pushing the cheese into my mouth like an afterthought. There’s a fresh crack that curves from the top middle of the phone screen to the right edge, like a personalised scar in the glass.

  It’s Tommy.

  Yo. Footy at six. I got us a game with my cousin. Zia’s in. I’ll still get you at three yeah?

  I tap: Cool.

  And carry on chewing.

  “Are you on contract?”

  I almost choke as Leia sits down opposite me. I don’t get it.

  She points at my phone. “They’re real idiots about replacements. I dropped mine down the toilet and it took a month to get a new one.”

  She opens the packet of her sandwich. I read the label. Rocket and crayfish. Crayfish? Maybe yesterday didn’t really happen. Yes it did. I look at my phone and don’t tell her that Tommy’s brother Jamie got us all the same knocked off Samsung Galaxy from a guy he knows who works at Argos.

  “It’s just a crack.” I stare over her shoulder at the ginger kid and his friends, then say, “Listen, I—”

  “I dreamt about you last night,” she says, putting her untouched sandwich down.

  “I just … what did you say?”

  “I said I dreamt about you, Skywalker. Well, you and me.”

  She what?

  “We were working on the script, in this big loft apartment in New York or something. It had these wooden floors. Have you seen Big with Tom Hanks?”

  I’m still thrown. “Course.”

  She points at me. “That apartment. That’s where we were.”

  And I picture the apartment from Big, with the bunk beds and all the cool toys and I try to put Leia and me there in my head.

  She dreamt about you?

  And I don’t know where from, but words come tumbling out of my mouth in a rush. “I’ve got a lot on at the minute. Home stuff.”
I look down as I say home, then look up when she doesn’t say anything. “That’s why I was a bit funny, I mean, in class and that.”

  Leia shrugs. “Whatever. You know the only vegetables they do here is cauliflower cheese. Does that even count?”

  “Leia, I’m trying to tell you, to say—”

  “It’s fine.” And her eyes are telling me to shut up, but not in a ‘you should know your place’ kind of way. More like she gets it. Like she can read between my lines.

  She picks up her sandwich and looks straight at me. “I dreamt about us working together. That means something. Doesn’t it?”

  And suddenly I’m a car crash of confusion and excitement.

  She dreams stuff too.

  I reach down into my bag, take out my notebook and drop it on to the table in between us. Leia looks at it, smiling, and lays down her sandwich again.

  “You like dropping things, don’t you?”

  And our conversation feels like a script. I rack my brains, trying to come up with a better response than yeah.

  “Yeah.”

  “So?” She unscrews her bottle of water and swigs.

  I suddenly feel like there might still be cheese on my chin and wipe my mouth with the tiny serviette. “So, I had an idea.” I open the notebook to the page I started last night and twist it round so it’s facing the right way for her to read. She presses the pages open with her fingers and I stare at her amber ring as she reads.

  “This is good.” Her eyebrows are raised as she nods.

  I feel my chest rising. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Really good, and it’s giving me another idea.” She leans forward. “Do you want to go somewhere with me, Luke?” The way she says my name is like she owns it.

  “What d’you mean?” And I find myself leaning in too.

  Leia’s biting her bottom lip, and I’m trying not to stare.

  “There’s a place I like to go to, when I’m working on ideas.

  It’s in town.”

  “Town? But we’ve got film in quarter of an hour.” I look at her lips again, full and biteable.

  She sits up straight and rolls her eyes. “What? You never skipped lessons?”

  “Course,” I say, though apart from a couple of sickies over the years, we never fully bunked off. Not because we were scared, it just always felt like sneaking around was more trouble than it was worth.

  “Let’s go then.” She’s already standing up. “One thing though, Skywalker,” she says.

  “What?”

  “No more of the moody boy crap, yeah? I get enough of that at home,” she says, walking off.

  Who is this girl?

  I follow her out of the refectory, staring at the red and black pencil in her hair and neon pink against the skin of her neck and I know it sounds dumb, but as I walk, it’s almost like I can feel myself growing.

  INT. BUS – DAY

  GIRL sits staring out of afternoon bus window. YOUNG MAN sits next to her. Both silent. He watches her faint reflection as the bus heads to town.

  We get tea in little silver pots on brown trays like school dinners. The guy who serves us has the face of someone who just accidentally dropped a winning scratch card down the drain. He stares at my scar as we pay.

  The seating area is flooded with light from the far glass wall. We’re on the sixth floor and I can see the tops of city buildings and déjà vu creeps over me. Nan used to bring me here when I came into town with her as a kid. She’d get a tea and I was allowed a coke in a glass bottle that made me feel American.

  “I haven’t been here in years,” I say. “Mad.”

  A few old people are scattered around in couples, or on their own. None of them are speaking, they just stare, like somebody pressed pause. We sit at a table near a tiny fenced-off children’s area. The whole place smells like coffee and cats.

  What the hell are you doing here?

  Leia pours her tea. “Perfect right?” She smacks a sachet of sugar against the table. “My dad used to bring us here when we were little. We used to sit, watching people, giving them names and making up stories about them. It’s still the same. It’s like a time warp or something.” She scans the scene. “Imagine that? If this little cafe was the only place in the world stuck forever in the same year? I come here on my own. A lot.” Her smile is tinged with embarrassment. I look down and notice that the carpet looks like a massive furry chocolate chip cookie, doughy beige dotted with dark triangles.

  Then I remember Tommy.

  “Shit.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  Leia stands up. “Good. So I’m going to the loo, then we talk ideas. Yeah?”

  I nod and watch her as she walks away.

  In the corner an old man and woman are sitting silently at a small table next to the floor-to-ceiling window. The woman is mixed race. She’s taking tiny sips from her white tea cup, staring out at the city rooftops. The man’s skin is lighter, but not pale. He’s arranging small packets of sugar into a grid on the table. They look like they’ve been there a while, but they both still have their coats on and in my head they’re two retired spies who spend their days daydreaming about old missions.

  Maybe they’re us. Me and Leia from the future. Maybe this place really is a time warp. Don’t start.

  I text Tommy:

  Yo. Don’t need lift after all. Got a college thing

  I feel myself shrugging as I push send. I haven’t even taken a sip before my phone beeps with a reply:

  What about football? We need players yo!!!

  Yeah Luke, what about football?

  An old man wearing a grey flat cap shuffles past our table holding a tray and I think of Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s butler.

  Soz man. Can’t do it. Speak tomoz

  I imagine Tommy’s face, screwing up in anger as he reads it. Then I picture the two empty seats at the back of film studies, Simeon staring back at them with the same screwed up face, and I smile.

  My phone rings. It’s Tommy. Leia’s walking back towards me.

  Stare at phone. Look at Leia. Stare at phone. Think of Tommy. Look at Leia.

  Tap deny and put my phone on silent.

  “Not important?” she asks as she sits back down.

  “Nah. It’s nothing,” I say, sliding my flashing phone into my bag.

  We talk for nearly three hours, referencing films we’ve seen and loved and ones we thought were complete crap, as we flesh out the characters for our potential script.

  She loves Wes Anderson, especially The Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore. She thinks Judd Apatow films are ugly. Natalie Portman is her favourite actor and we both agree that the original Japanese Ring is the scariest horror movie we’ve ever seen.

  As we speak, our eyes meet, and look away again, doing the dance of two people both trying not to admit we’ve noticed something.

  Leia’s idea is that our character, Toby, and the one I started writing last night, Marc, are twin brothers. We scrap the time travel thing. Their parents split when they were young and Toby lived with Dad while Marc lived with Mum. Now they’re thrown back together to live with their … “Mum,” says Leia. “I just think it makes more sense.”

  I shake my head. “I reckon Dad. Two boys can be hard work.”

  “Why not both?” she says, and it strikes us at the same time that we never thought of their parents being together as a possibility. Leia says, “OK, cool. Mum and Dad are making another go of it. But it’s tense.”

  “Course it is.”

  She goes to get more tea after an hour or so, and when I check my phone I see fourteen missed calls from Tommy. I know I’m letting him down, but this feels important.

  We split a flapjack and it’s like we’re partners working on some investigation. An investigation into characters we’ve made up.

  I feel a slice of guilt knowing that I’m writing Marc, but talking about him, even indirectly, feels like taking off a chainmail coat.

  I exaggerate detail
s and I’m pretty sure she’s doing the same, with Toby, making him this child genius, but it’s fine. It’s like we both know we’re talking about our own families, without ever admitting that we are, and the whole time we talk, I’m aware that the distance between us is less than an arm’s length. That I could reach out and touch her at any point. That I’m dying to.

  By the time we finish our fourth cup of tea, the light’s fading through the glass and shadows cut across the building tops. The pair of us nod, as we look at our pages of notes and if we really were detectives, this is where we’d high-five. But I want to do more than high-five. She feels it. I mean, I feel like she does, and we’re looking at each other like something should happen to celebrate the moment.

  Then her phone rings, and the moment’s broken. I look around the room as she answers and notice that all of the old people have cleared out. Like they all disappeared at the same time.

  “You’re joking!” Leia’s annoyed.

  I start to tidy up the cups even though there’s no need.

  “And he’s locked the door?” she says, and I’m drawing arrows between sentences in my notebook to seem busy.

  “Because I am pissed off, Dad. I’m kinda busy …”

  I think of Dad kissing my head in the car the other night and wonder if it’s her dad who’s black or her mum.

  Leia mimes an apology, then stands up and walks away as she speaks.

  I think about how long it takes to feel like you know someone.

  How it can happen after one chat. Like when you go on holiday, and you make a friend on the first day who feels like your best mate ever for the whole week you’re there and when it’s time to leave you’re both crying and promising to write to each other and visit, but after you’re home you can’t even remember his name.

  “I’ve got to go,” says Leia, peeling her coat off the chair. “Sorry.” And for the first time all afternoon, I notice frayed edges on her confidence. Her voice pretending to be upbeat.

  “It’s OK, we’ve made a start,” I say, “and it’s really good. Everything all right?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “It’s just my brother. He’s hard work. Long story.” There’s a pause and I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to ask to hear it. Then Leia says, “We should swap numbers, right? So we can talk ideas, I mean?”