for this train?’ he asks as he zhooshes his messy brown hair.
‘Sure, right after you jump in and get my ring back for me,’ I inform him, staring at him expectantly.
‘What?’
‘My ring. I saw where it landed. That was a real gold one, I threw it by mistake.’
Millsy looks worried sick, the reflex to help his best friend without question doing battle with his aversion to jumping in dirty water and getting his hair wet.
I watch as he appears to reach for his T-shirt, as though he were going to take it off, before I put him out of his misery.
‘Don’t worry, Tom Daley, I’m just kidding. It was a cheap one, from a Primark set. Plenty more at home.’
‘You bitch,’ he laughs. ‘You’re lucky I don’t care enough about you, or I would’ve just jumped in.’
I grab him and hug him.
‘I love you too,’ I laugh. ‘Even though you’re dumb enough to think you can retrieve a tiny ring from a huge river.’
‘They’ll be retrieving you from a river when I strangle you and dump you in the Aire,’ he warns me.
‘And there’s me thinking you weren’t going to give me the same treatment you give all your Matcher birds.’
‘Come on, trouble. Train,’ he insists with a chuckle.
Considering it is October – and we’re up north – it’s not that cold today, perfect for a stroll through my favourite part of Leeds. The Calls area is a mixture of offices, flats and bars/restaurants. Along with Call Lane and Lower Briggate, it makes up the heart of the gay scene in Leeds, so it’s great for peaceful walks during the day, before it comes alive at night.
This is the part of Leeds where I wish I lived, instead of my flat-share hell above a bar on New Briggate, further up the hill. I mean, it’s not awful where I live. It’s in the city centre, and it’s right next to Merion Street which boasts some pretty cool bars, but I want to be down by the river where it’s pretty. Situated midway between where I live and where Millsy lives is the Trinity Centre, full of all my favourite shops as well as a whole host of bars and restaurants, so naturally when we hang out, that’s where we go. Yes, it’s awesome, but it doesn’t hurt that we can both easily crawl home after, it just sucks more for me because I’m headed up the hill, whereas Millsy heads down. When I put this argument to Millsy once to try and blag a rare night on his sofa, he countered it with: ‘at least you’re not at risk of rapists like I am’ – he quickly added that he meant because he walks along the edge of the river in the dark, and not because I’m so grossly undesirable that not even the rapists want me. Neither place is anywhere like where we lived for most of our lives.
4 Finch Avenue, that’s the street Millsy and I grew up on. In cute red-brick detached houses, down a quiet little cul-de-sac in Outwood, a town near Wakefield that no one has heard of.
Millsy didn’t just grow up on the same street as me, he lived in the house next door. Our mothers have been best friends since before we were born and, as a side effect, our dads are best friends too. Except, now that I think about it, I don’t think our dads have ever liked each other all that much. One thing I remember about growing up here was how they were always competing with one another. It was all about who had the neatest lawn or the most impressive tool – I know, that sounds like an extension of something, but in the suburbs having a large strimmer is exactly that. I guess our dads are quite different people, too – opposites, in fact. Millsy’s dad is a big, tall, broad, bald-headed rugby-loving dude whereas my short, skinny, curly-haired dad would much rather watch the football – or “girl’s rugby” as Daddy Mills would put it.
Our mums are both your typical suburban housewives who quit their jobs the second they fell pregnant. They both moved on to the street at the same time, both had two kids – and they even managed to give birth in the same years. Our mothers were already pregnant with their first two kids when they met, but whenever it is mentioned that Millsy and I were conceived around the same time, Millsy’s dad assures us that it wasn’t a keys-in-a-bowl-on-the-table kind of thing – something that had never crossed my mind until he brought it up.
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