And when I told her, she looked at me with pity in her eyes, but it was just so hard to tell who that pity was for.
‘Jesus, Jason, what’s wrong?’
I hadn’t known where to go so I’d come here
.
‘In, come in,’ she says, and I push past her in the narrow, dim doorway of the flat on Blackstock Road it’d taken so long to find in the dark
.
‘Where’s your flatmate?’ I say, noticing the Vietnamese for one, the single wine glass, the TV tuned to the news at ten
.
‘I don’t have one?’ she says, like a question, and for some reason I’m impressed, like she’s grown up without me noticing, but we’re both in our thirties and this is really the least we can expect by now
.
‘Do you want wine?’ she says, as I lean away from her, suddenly paranoid she’ll smell the liquor on my breath. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
My eyes are glassy, maybe from the booze or the cold or the crying and I’m shaking slightly from the injustice of it all, the anger, and the sleet
.
‘You’re freezing,’ she says. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I think I’m breaking down,’ I say, as honestly as I can, my smile a fake and my eyes welling up, and this has been a day of honesty all round. ‘I think I’m breaking down and I don’t know how to cope.’
And then it all comes out, and I can tell there are heavy, jagged, heaving sobs just below the surface, and she can tell too because she treats me with kid gloves and asks me if I want a baked potato or something, and this small kindness so innocently put near brings me to my knees
.
I want the world back to where it was, before all this kicked off, before all the gin and whatever the opposite of a tonic is, but also I want to be treated like this, like she’s treating me, not told I have to grow up or get past it or sort my life out
.
Because that wasn’t fair. I didn’t ask for this to happen, I don’t know why it’s affected me the way it has, but it has, and why am I the only one who gets it?
But I’m not, am I? Because she gets it. Maybe because it’s new, maybe because she doesn’t have to deal with it day in and day out, but finally I feel I’m talking to someone who cares, someone who can see a different future for me, away from St John’s and Dylan and despair
.
You cared, Sarah, but why did that have to stop so suddenly? Who turned that tap off? Who’s ever been told they have to grow up and get on with their life and not felt patronised and misunderstood?
And I grab a tumbler and pour myself a giant glass of wine and she turns the heating up just for me, which again breaks my heart it’s so nice, and I tell all, and she gets it, and soon it’s past midnight and she finds the whisky she forgot to give her dad for Christmas, and this is all so warming, so nourishing, so nurturing, and then my hand finds that it’s nearer her leg than it should be and quietly I realise what a beautiful person she’s always been, what a great friend, how right this all seems
.
I leaned against the kitchen counter and immediately jolted away. I thought I’d just crushed a fly under the palm of my hand but it was only one of Dev’s Sugar Puffs.
I laid it on the side of the sink, knowing he’d probably come looking for it later.
It had been a long night, and as the kettle clicked off and I reached for the teabags I thought about it some more.
It had been good to talk. She was a good listener.
And then I realised
I
was a
terrible
listener, as I’d forgotten whether she wanted sugar or not.
‘No, ta!’ she called out, from the bedroom, and perhaps a fifth of a nanosecond later Dev’s door shot open and his head popped out, like a meerkat who might just have heard a lion.
‘What was that?’ he mouthed.
‘That was Abbey,’ I mouthed back, and once the shock had dissipated he padded over to me in his pants.
‘That is terrific news,’ he said quietly. ‘Well done.’
‘Nothing happened,’ I said, and he made he face which implied he wished I hadn’t told him that.
And nothing
had
happened. There had been no kiss. I got the feeling lots of boys hadn’t kissed Abbey.
‘We going out for breakfast, your treat?’ he said. ‘Because I’ve got something to tell you if we are.’
In the bedroom, my pillow folded and folded again behind her, and wearing a T-shirt she’d found on my floor, Abbey tapped about on the laptop.
‘Your Facebook was still open,’ she said, sympathetically, pointing at the screen. ‘Do you want to know?’
‘Know what?’ I said, laying her tea down on the floor.
‘“Sarah is …’” she said, willing me to finish the status update myself. I shrugged.
‘“… trying on dresses”.’
I didn’t know what to say, so I just shrugged again.
Wedding dresses? Maternity dresses? Her status updates gave me information I didn’t want and questions I couldn’t answer.
For some reason I thought of Mum. She took our break-up badly. She’d love to have been helping Sarah now, advising on a wedding dress, or helping select maternity dresses, planning for the day she became a mother-in-law and a grandmother again. Stephen had married Amy, and they Skyped when they could, but I knew Mum had had plans for me, too.
I guess parents are the hidden victims of a break-up. They watch their futures cancelled, their wedding speeches disappear, their walks in the parks with the buggy to feed the ducks or have a picnic slide away thanks to one argument, or one misdeed, or one selfish act. And then they’re forced to reset, and hope that in another month or another year or whenever you can, you’ll meet someone and they can start to secretly hope and plan again. In the meantime, they stick by your side, because you’re on their team, but the hope they had is gone, replaced by
Billy Elliot
or awkward dinners for three.
‘Oh, Jason,’ my mum had said, sadly, on the phone, the night I told her. ‘What now? What happens now?’
It was all thanks to that stupid thing, just a stupid thing, but a thing nevertheless. And if I were a smaller man, I would blame it on the kid, a thuggish, bullish, angry kid at school. Racist, of course, but with no idea why, and angry at the world, but essentially nothing more than another mugger-in-waiting. And I sound bitter here, and I sound snobby again, but I ask you, how could I not, when Dylan did what he did? And when he did, I had to get out. I didn’t do this lightly, and no matter what Sarah will tell you, I didn’t take this decision quickly. She didn’t get it. I couldn’t believe it. This girl I’d been with for so long, she just didn’t get it.
One day Dylan decided he wanted to kill a teacher.
I know – it sounds dramatic. But I know this because that’s what the police reports said. He didn’t plan to; he’d never
seemed to want to before; he just
decided
. And so he’d gone home one lunchtime, to the estate opposite St John’s, overlooking the courtyard, and with his mate Spencer Gray he’d loaded up his brother’s air rifle and taken aim at the classroom nearest the front, where I happened to be teaching year nine what a spinning jenny was.
It was just a flash at first. Just a tiny something that caught my eye, and the lightest of cracks. I’d carried on, but there it was again, like a firefly or the smallest, fastest shooting star across the room, in front of the posters about crop rotation and fallow fields.
I glanced at the window, saw the hole – small and round and perfect – and at first I remember thinking someone must’ve had a peashooter, but peas don’t go through glass, and kids haven’t used peashooters since the
Beano
, and then, though I couldn’t quite believe it, I started to realise what was happening.
Forty policemen had turned up in the end. The kids had loved it, their faces pressed up against the glass, checking out the guns and body armour like it was
News 24
they were watching, not real life on a grey north London afternoon. I’d managed to get everyone out, quietly and sensibly, and really, he’d never had any chance of hurting anyone, not with an air rifle that size, but nevertheless it was the intent, the thought, the sadness, the fury and the hate that had the effect on me, and I went home that night and after I’d had my Findus Crispy Pancakes and a bottle of Rioja it hit me. And I cried. And not just cried, but bawled like a baby, until I shook, and spluttered, and couldn’t catch my breath again.
Sarah had been so sympathetic at first, and full of warmth. She’d arranged the rest of the week off work, and I took a few days, too, but the shock ate up the hours before I knew where they’d gone. I became guarded and suspicious and nervous. I
wanted to stay in, safe, soothed by the sounds of
Come Dine with Me
or
Watchdog
or anything that represented normality. After a while, perhaps naturally, Sarah became less sympathetic.
‘For God’s sake, he’s just a kid,’ she’d said one evening, as we prepared to argue for the third or fourth or fifth time that day. ‘He didn’t know what he was doing! It was just some tiny air rifle!’
I can see her frustrations now. I couldn’t at the time. I was so engulfed in myself, in me the victim. And maybe she was just trying to do what her mother was always suggesting: get me to snap out of it. But you can’t just snap out of something like that. I was in charge that day. I was the teacher Dylan had chosen. Yes, only because I happened to be in that room opposite that estate at that time, but it was precisely the randomness that scared me so, and proved the world to be more dangerous than I’d thought.
And I was angry. I was angry at Dylan, angry at the world, angry at Sarah for her disappointment in me as a man, whether that was true or not. The fact is, my life changed when Dylan cocked that rifle. I guess in some ways, he
did
kill a teacher that day. He certainly killed a relationship.
But no.
No, I’ll take the blame for that one.
‘So,’ said Abbey, interrupting my thoughts, ‘I deleted her.’
‘Hmm?’ I said.
‘I deleted her. It’s not fair of her. She knows you can read this stuff and it must hurt, so I deleted her from your whole social network.’
I smiled, thinking she was joking, because she did those little finger quotes when she said ‘social network’, but she just took a sip of her tea and carried on clicking around.
‘You … sorry, you did what?’
She looked up at me, innocently, and shrugged.
‘It’s for the best. Trust me.’
Trust her? I hardly
knew
her.
‘Abbey, why the hell would you do that?’
I was angry now.
‘You know
nothing
about me, not
really
. How can I trust you on this? You never met Sarah, you don’t know what you’re on about, and now you come round and you delete her? She’ll know! She’ll
see
I’ve deleted her!’
I couldn’t believe this.
‘Do you have any idea how this looks? You can’t just mess about with someone’s life like this. You can’t just come in here and use my computer and make me look like a moron. I was just making things
okay
with her again, and now this.’
I’m a polite man, even when riled, and it’s horrible to make someone feel horrible, but right now Abbey needed to know she was out of line. What, so we have a couple of nice meet-ups, and now she feels she can meddle? Now she feels she can fucking
meddle
?
‘You need to be told, Abbey, and—’
‘Jason. You don’t need this.’
I stopped in my tracks. She stared at me.
You don’t need this
. Four such easy words, for her.
‘You need to let go. You messed it up, but if you don’t let go, you’ll never be able to do anything good again. You’re a catch, in your own way, Jason, but you’re damaged goods. And you can’t let that one thing define you. You can’t have these constant reminders. “Sarah is married, Sarah’s having fun, Sarah doesn’t need you any more.” You need to reset, and recharge, and then you can have her in your life again maybe, but you’ll have changed to what you need to be.’
I don’t know if it was what she was saying, or just the way she was saying it, but she was making sense, and though my eyes revealed nothing, I was calming. Maybe I just needed someone else to make this decision for me. It’s possible sometimes you just do.
And then, the strangest thing: Abbey leaned close to me. So close I felt her breath on my face and could smell her shampoo and feel her hand graze my leg and it was the single sexiest thing in the world, this girl right next to me, in my T-shirt, so close and so lovely and so here.
And she kissed me. Tenderly and quietly, she kissed me.
She leaned back, brushed her fringe away, smiled at the window, then back at me.
‘I just want to be friends,’ she said.
I blinked.
‘Eh?’
‘I’m not what you need.’
‘But you kissed me. Or, we kissed. But you kissed me.’
‘I just wanted to get that out of the way because otherwise we’d both have been thinking about it and it’s not the way ahead for either of us.’
I blinked again.
‘Eh?’
‘It’s muuuch better this way,’ she said, grabbing a pillow and cuddling it, creating a barrier. ‘And anyway, I didn’t actually delete her.’ She smiled.
‘Sorry, what?’
‘I didn’t actually delete her. That’d be mental. You can’t just go round people’s houses deleting stuff for them.’
‘That’s what
I
said!’
‘Well, it’s a bit insulting that you’d think I would. But now
you’ve realised that you
can
, that it’s allowed, that it’s actually possible, well, you
should
.’ I looked at the laptop.
‘So!’ said Dev, at the café down the road. ‘I’ve cracked it!’
We’d taken Abbey out for Saturday morning breakfast. I was still confused. I’d never met someone whose mind could move so quickly from one thing to the other. People I knew dwelt on things. They sat on them and nurtured their thoughts, and thought ‘impulsive’ was a deodorant. But it was invigorating, somehow.