She didn’t need to know the only place I had to be was in bed with a six-pack of Wotsits but I just didn’t have an answer for her that wasn’t hysterical sobbing and I didn’t think anyone fancied sitting opposite a crazy person on the Tube. Well, not any more than usual.
‘I think you should call him,’ she said. ‘I think you should pick up the phone and say, “enough of this radio silence, you wankpaddle, we need to talk.”’
‘OK, really going now,’ I told her, blocking out all her arguments. ‘I’ll talk to you later. Love you.’
I dropped my phone back in my bag, wincing at a regrettable thunk as it hit my camera.
The camera Charlie had given me.
It was funny to think about it now, but if he hadn’t given me this camera, I might never have gone to Milan. And if I’d never gone to Milan, he and I might be together. Amy would still be in London and none of this would be happening.
It was Amyisms like ‘get on a plane and come to New York’ that made me miss him the most. Before, I would have gone over to his flat and told him all about my day, he would have made fun of Ess, we would both have laughed and then one of us would have made a cup of tea and put the telly on and everything would have been fine. With Amy all the way in New York and Paige so wrapped up in her work and her love life, I’d been feeling so alone. Which was silly, really, when one of my best friends in the whole world only lived half an hour down the road.
I stood in front of the turnstiles of the Central Line, trying not to get in everyone’s way while I thought hard and fast. Everyone was so keen for me to take charge, swing my balls around, show everyone who I was and take what I wanted in life. Maybe they were right. Maybe it was about time I did something I’d been thinking about but too afraid to act on for months. Amy was right.
What harm could come from saying hello?
The rain had stopped by the time I got to Charlie’s flat.
All the way over on the Tube, I’d run over every single scenario of how my first attempt at ball swinging might turn out and each one was worse than the last. What if Charlie was still so angry with me he didn’t even open the door? What if he did open the door but he shouted at me? What if he had a girlfriend and she was there and he had told her what a terrible person I was and she was a Brazilian jujitsu fighter and she killed me with her bare hands? All entirely possible.
I was scared. I hadn’t been this nervous to talk to Charlie since our media studies seminar in the first semester of university. I filled my mind with happy memories, laughing, smiling, cheerful Charlie. Not the face of the miserable, angry man I’d watched ride the train out of Milan. The first man that evening who told me he didn’t want to see me again. Unfortunately, not the last. Really, even by my standards, that was an incredibly poor twenty-four hours for me.
It was almost seven by the time I had forced myself down his street and even if Arsenal had played, he would be home by now. It was the best time to catch him. Unless Arsenal had lost. Oh God, I thought, grabbing hold of the railing beside me, what if they had lost? That was the only possible thing more dangerous to my health than a Brazilian jujitsu-fighting girlfriend. I scrambled in my bag for my phone, pulled up the app that still had a place on my home screen and madly flicked through the fixtures. They didn’t play every Sunday, did they? I hoped against hope that this was one of their weeks off.
‘Tess?’
I looked up and there he was in front of me. Red shirt, striped scarf, copper curly hair that looked just like mine, only considerably shorter, soaked from being out in the rain all afternoon.
‘Did you win?’ I asked, frozen to the spot, phone still in my hand.
‘We drew,’ he said, not moving. ‘One-one.’
I slipped my phone carefully back inside my bag, painfully aware of the four feet of space between us.
‘That’s better than losing,’ I said.
Charlie pulled out his house keys and I stepped aside so he could open the door. He turned to look at me again, blinking as if to make sure I really was there.
‘Yeah,’ he said, holding the door open and nodding me inside. ‘You coming in or are you just going to stand there like a lemon?’
‘I’ll come in,’ I said, skittling through the door and letting a little smile grow on my face.
So far, no violence, so good.
‘Look at you,’ Charlie said, throwing the soggy scarf onto his blue sofa, his keys into the bowl on the bookcase and marching straight into the kitchen to put the kettle on. I immediately picked up the wet scarf and laid it on the radiator. Nothing had changed. His flat was exactly the same as the last time I’d been here.
‘Look at you,’ I echoed, not sure what else to say. The whole way there I’d run over what I would say to him in my head but I couldn’t find the right words. I figured I’d know when I saw him but I was absolutely none the wiser. If anything, now I was inside his flat, all warm and cosy and familiar, I was more confused than ever.
‘No, really.’ He ducked out of the kitchen, all six feet three of him, and smiled. I felt my stomach fall to the floor and smiled back. ‘Look at the state of you.’
My smile didn’t last very long.
‘Are you wearing denim dungarees?’ he asked, trying not to laugh. ‘And what has happened to your hair? It’s massive.’
‘It’s raining,’ I said defensively, pulling my hair back into a cack-handed ponytail and wrapping a hair tie around the split ends. ‘I got caught in it. And yes, I’m wearing dungarees, only we call them overalls now and they’re very trendy.’
‘You look like a giant toddler who’s come round to fix my toilet,’ he replied. ‘Why are you covered in paint?’
‘It’s make-up,’ I muttered, scratching at the multicoloured smears on my clothes and wondering if he had noticed the extra pounds I’d picked up in Italy. Amy said you couldn’t tell, but I could. Why had I come over without sorting myself out first? What a bloody rookie mistake. ‘I was working.’
Charlie cocked an eyebrow. ‘As what?’
‘Photographer’s assistant,’ I replied. ‘We were doing a shoot for a magazine.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Better than a magician’s assistant, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Milk and sugar?’
‘The usual.’ I sat down on the edge of his settee and tried not to read too much into the fact he was asking how I wanted my tea when he’d been making me tea almost every day for the last ten years.
‘Two cows of milk and three sugars it is then,’ he replied, disappearing into the kitchen. Phew. He hadn’t forgotten, he was just being weird. Brilliant. ‘I haven’t got any biscuits so if that’s all you’ve come for, you might as well go now.’
‘How can you not have any biscuits?’ I shouted, still searching his flat for
