they thought, being a boy, I wouldn’t – no, shouldn’t – be interested in such frivolities.
You move closer. You’re wearing a long woollen skirt, a frayed leather jacket, and a polo neck. Your hair is tied up, loosening around the edges.
‘What would you like me to play?’
‘Ooh, he’s taking requests,’ someone shouts from the other end of the room.
‘Not from you, Bongo,’ I shout back.
Since you say ‘anything’, I play the songs I know best. Some Marley and Led Zep, some Dylan and Clapton. You sing in snatches, in a soft, pleasant voice.
‘Something by the Beatles?’
Suddenly, I feel like I have only one chance to pick the right song. That it will make all the difference. I run through the ones I know in my head. ‘Come Together’. ‘Penny Lane’. ‘Yellow Submarine’. ‘Eleanor Rigby’. They all somehow seem inappropriate, until I remember the one about a blackbird and broken wings. Sweetly complex melody, and sweetly simple lyrics. Turns out you know all the words. Verse after verse. The room falls silent, with only the guitar and your voice filling the air. I know, no matter what, that when I drop you home that night, we will kiss.
You live in a flat you share with two other girls. It’s a nicer neighbourhood than the one I live in, with trees and wide roads. Your room, when I get to see it, has multicoloured curtains drawn over the windows, a low bed, a ragged carpet, and photographs pasted on the cupboard. You’ve twirled a scarf over a tall paper lamp. I like it better than the place I share with three boys, littered with used plates, discarded footwear and empty bottles. We are quite lucky, you say, when I first stay over, that the landlord doesn’t live in the building, and so can’t express his disapproval over these ‘indiscretions’.
I’m taller than you but we fit on the bed, oddly sized between single and double, if I press my back against the wall. And if we don’t move much.
We don’t move much, but we talk. I like you because when I say, late one night, in the dark, that I want to start a band, you don’t laugh.
Bolder, I make you listen to a song I recorded, secretly, in my room in my hometown. It’s stark and sad, about a man who drinks in parking lots. I don’t think it’s very good now, but you listen intently, and say you think I’ve done well.
‘But I can do better.’ With you, I want to add, I feel I can always do better.
You, though, rarely talk about yourself. Only once you tell me about your parents, and how they always lived away from you because of your father’s job.
‘I’d tell people they were dead. That they died in a car crash.’
‘Why?’ I ask, bewildered. ‘Why would you do that?’
Your voice is soft in the darkness. ‘Because I was angry. They kept promising they’d come back for good, but they never did.’
Another night, after we’ve had more than a few beers each, you tell me that once, when your parents left after their yearly visit, you were so upset you fell ill with a fever that lingered for weeks.
‘I was eleven … twelve … I couldn’t understand why I was always left behind …’
Silently, I promise I’ll never leave you.
But it’s a promise I eventually find impossible to keep.
When summer comes around, we turn nocturnal.
We return from university to darkened houses, the sound of other people’s power generators studding the air like quiet gunfire. It is impossible to sleep. The heat seeps out of floors and walls, out of every surface we touch. We throw down buckets of water, we soak the sheets, but the heat is insidious. So we drive out on my motorbike and head to the centre of the city, where the roads are wide and all the filthy rich sleep in their beds under the cool purr of air conditioners that never trip or turn off.
‘Bastards,’ we yell as we cross their gates, my motorbike roar shattering the silence. Then we stop at some patch of grass, with all the poor others who’ve found their way there in those restless, insomniac nights. Sometimes, we buy orange ice lollies from the man with the ice cream cart, and while I bite into mine whole, you suck at the juice until the ice turns white.
‘You’re a vampire.’
And you pretend to bite my neck, and I pin you to the grass, and I want to lift your dress.
We are wild children.
Once the summer cools, and the rains lighten in the north, we head to the hills. Our first trip away together. It is also the first time we have a terrible fight. The first of many.
To begin with, we miss our stop. We were meant to disembark at six in the morning, but we were fast asleep, buried in our jackets and shawls on the cold hard seats. By the time we awake, we’ve overshot our destination by three hours and must make our way back on a rumbling local bus.
When we arrive at the town in the mountains, we disagree over where to stay.
‘This is too fancy,’ I hiss into your ear at the hotel that charges five hundred bucks a night.
‘Where do you want to go then?’
‘Somewhere else.’ I don’t add ‘cheaper’.
‘We’ve just spent twenty hours on the road and you want to walk around some more?’
‘This is the first place we’ve looked at.’
And so we do, but everywhere else we look for cheaper, you detest. Too dirty. Too small. Damp walls. And so we end up back at the place where we started.
‘I’ll pay for both of us,’ you declare.
And that annoys me even more. ‘It’s not about the fucking money,’ I say. It is, but it also isn’t, and I know you won’t understand.
That evening, when an unquiet calm has settled, we head into town. Almost immediately, we’re accosted by a sad, red-eyed rat of a peddler who walks next to me asking if I want some hash.
‘Ignore him,’ you say, but it’s too late. I’ve already said, ‘How much?’ I couldn’t help it. It’s instinctive.
He names a price, insane as it is, and then won’t leave us. You don’t say a word but I can feel your anger, hot and silent. When the rat pushes the hash into my jacket pocket and then pretends like I’m the one not paying up, I get really mad. I give him his thousand and then throw the stuff into the nearest dustbin.
‘Okay I’m sorry, all right?’ I offer, but you stay quiet.
We find our way to a rooftop restaurant where backpackers are sitting on cushions around the edges, drinking beer. The walls are graffitied, and lanterns dangle from bamboo poles. Our moods improve after some food. We start making conversation again. You dig your socked feet under my thigh to keep warm. I tuck a strand of hair behind your ear. Night falls thick and fast, and the mountains behind us disappear into darkness. The alcohol warms us. Someone passes us a joint. We sit closer. Then a guitar is brought out from downstairs.
‘Who
