Cinnamon Twigs (14 page)

             
I thought a lot the next day and knew I had to give her a chance. Obstacles are thrown in the way of relationships. You encounter so many moments where you can stick with the person you love or give up. I wasn’t ready to give up just yet.

             
‘She’s a good girl.’ Michael’s reassurance stuck with me. I’d only told him and my mother about the situation. She’d told me not to do anything rash. Lauren’s honesty was a good sign.

             
I sent Fred a message online, to which I got a bullshit response about how he had no recollection of the night but hoped I’d accept his apology anyway. My message was to the point - curt but not threatening. He wasn’t worth the dust that the rude wind blew in his face.

             
I wondered how things would progress with Lauren after this debacle. The truth is, in a bizarre way, it made us stronger. She seemed to twig how much I really meant to her after coming so close to losing me. And I appreciated her honesty. Sometimes, when I thought about it, a dark cloud would envelop me and I’d feel scared I’d made the wrong decision, set myself up for a fall.

             
‘Don’t let me regret this decision,’ I told her. ‘I don’t want to ever feel this way again. You’ve made me feel so pathetic.’

             
We rarely mentioned what happened in Salisbury after that. Tried to suppress the thought of it. Grew closer. Fell heavier and deeper in love. Dependent on each other’s cuddles, the touch of a finger on the back of a hand, the playful nudge of a sleeve.

             
One day, filled with hungover insecurity, four months after that night when Lauren had gone to Salisbury, I asked about the details. Turns out Fred had lunged at her in the taxi. She’d tried to push him off but kissed back the second time, and the time in the house. But there was no passion. Just drunkenness. Fred had cheated on her when they were together. He’d also got other girls to cheat on their boyfriends. She was angry at him when I told her about the message he’d sent back to me. Seemed sarcastic. He didn’t really give a shit. That talk helped a lot. I learned Fred was scum and Lauren would never have been able to forgive herself if our relationship had ended over him. He’d hurt her in the past and we’d both had to pick up the pieces. Of course, I had to respect that they were once an item, and it’s wrong of me to be so harsh about a guy I’ve never met, but that relationship was in the past - I didn’t want it to impact on our present. I know Lauren was upset by how cold I’d acted towards her. She’d been punished, while Fred would never know how much pain he’d caused us, how those insecurities lasted for months afterwards.

             
I’d miss the little things too much if we’d broken up at the first hurdle. The tiny fragments of the girl I loved to hold, whole and warm. A silly face, top lip raised in a false snarl. A look of sheer sweaty determination when we wrestled and I tried to pin her down and get her to submit. An inflection in her voice. Even her annoying clicking of knuckles. Time had released those chemicals. Testosterone, the excitation sparked by the sight of her running fingers through her hair. Adrenaline, mingled with serotonin and dopamine. Blood filled with cortisol. The oxytocin stage, cuddling in a damp patch, lost in her garden, no longer fearing serpents. And the onset of vasopressin to consolidate how we felt about each other. We moved on from that first hiccup. We were ready for the other inevitable obstacles. They would come, but we’d be strong, having learned so much since we’d talked chemistry on that first date.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I Love You Yeah Yeah Yeah

T
wo weeks had passed since Salisburygate. Lauren and I were cuddling in her bed. On a few occasions she’d said the words, ‘I love you’ jokingly. But I didn’t probe. Wanted the moment to be real. And we’d come so close to breaking up recently that I wasn’t ready to say it. We gazed at each other, her breath warm against my skin. I’d never get used to how amazing her eyes were. I wanted to say those words. Silence. So much needed to be spoken. Acknowledgement. We were closer than ever before. But the moment passed. I didn’t say it. My creative writing tutor at university had often warned me that using the abstract noun should be avoided if possible in poetry. Maybe that’s why I struggled to use it.

             
‘I love you yeah yeah yeah…’ Lauren paraphrased
The Beatles
’ song.              

             
‘That’s a funny way of telling me.’ I grinned and locked my fingers in hers.

             
‘But I
do
love you,’ she said.

             
‘I love you…’ I repeated those words, muffled by her blanket. Sounded like Rocky Balboa. But I knew they were true. I’d loved Lisa once. That was certain. But with Lauren the youthful naivety had gone. Here was a girl with whom I could make things right, maybe even spend the rest of my life with. We’d learned so much about each other. But what excited me most was the vastness of what we had left to come across. More habits to grow accustomed to. More of her idiosyncratic phrases to mimic and unknowingly lodge in my own vocabulary. More nights in with cuddles. Trips away. I knew how fleeting romance could be, so I did my best to enjoy every second with her. I’d check myself when I felt tired or snappy. Nestle into her a tad longer. Hold her with a furtive air of desperation, clutch her close. Let specters pass.

             
Lauren enjoyed seeing Michael and me on stage. She loved Shakespeare, and
Romeo and Juliet
in particular, which she knew off by heart. She often helped me learn my lines.

             
‘I have the perfect boyfriend.’ She flashed me a gorgeous smile as we practiced lines for
Macbeth
. ‘Some nights he’s Romeo, and makes me cry. Other nights he’s the Fool, and he makes me laugh.’

             
‘You laugh at me all the time.’ I smirked. ‘Maybe I’m just the Fool.’

             
‘The Fool is usually the wisest character in the play.’

             
‘Especially when I’m playing him.’

             
‘I don’t know about that!’ She tittered. ‘Now, your line is, “The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day”… Get off me!’

             
I threw my script on the floor and tickled her.

             
‘Kiss me, you big fool!’ she exclaimed.             

             
I gazed into her eyes and kissed her lingeringly. Then the electric fizz as our tongues probed fissures, locked for a moment and parted.

             
‘You’re the most wonderful girl I’ve ever met.’

             
‘You’re not too bad a girl yourself.’

             
Such moments, the souvenirs of my youth if you will, they’ll stay with me forever. We could talk for hours and never get bored. She had so many stories to tell and I loved unraveling her. Wished my childhood had mingled with hers, that we’d always known each other.

             
Things were getting better with
Act One
. Michael directed me in one of seven fifteen minute plays showcased on a single performance night. All written by members of the society. I played a greasy Spanish character during the Spanish civil war. I watched footage of Peter Lorre, duplicated his gestures. Learned a Spanish accent and some phrases, grew a beard, worked hard to get a tan so I wasn’t the palest Spaniard in the history of stage performance. Unfortunately, the majority of the audience knew me so, despite being a serious play, they found my performance hilarious. But it had been a great challenge, playing such a different kind of character, dressing up and changing everything about me. Next, I got a great part as Emmanuele Giri in Bertolt Brecht’s
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
. 

             
The play is all about the rise of a Chicagoan mobster called Arturo Ui, who takes over the cauliflower trade. Written in 1941, the text is a satirical allegory of Hitler’s rise to power in Nazi Germany. Ui is Hitler. My character paralleled Hermann Goring. Giri is a clown, a joker, but he’s also a latent psychopath who collects the hats of the many people he murders. I watched Joe Pesci in
Goodfellas
and
Casino
for ideas on how to play him, studied Pesci’s movements and intonations. I also watched footage of Goring, studied the historical figure closely and tried to mimic the way he walked, gave Giri dermatitis, which only plays up when he’s angry. Giri is a fantastic role and I really enjoyed playing him. I think people in
Act One
realized I’d been overlooked in the society during that production. My performance (it helped that I wore white makeup on my face) was likened to Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the Joker by my friends, which was a great compliment as I’d viewed
The Dark Knight
in order to get an idea of how to actively portray a psychopath. It helped that the cast was made up of some of the best actors I’d worked with as an amateur, so I could bounce off them. The play went famously and it’s known as one of the best productions the society has put on to this day. Yes, I’ve still got the DVD. 

             
One May Day holiday Lauren and I traveled to Sully, a village in the Vale of Glamorgan, not far from Cardiff, to enjoy the sweltering heat of that afternoon. We embarked on a little adventure to a tidal island nearby, avoiding squelchy seaweed as we crossed the rocky causeway to inspect a shipwreck. Lauren complained about her footwear, saying she wasn’t prepared for the ramble.

             
‘Indiana Jones wouldn’t complain!’ I said ‘Or Lara Croft. Think of it as an adventure.’

             
‘Well I’m not Indiana Jones am I. Or Lara Croft. Plus they’re not real people, and they certainly don’t wear flat shoes, Dan…’

             
The land around the shipwreck was too sludgy for her to traverse, so she sat on a rock nearby as I inspected the skeleton, which had been on the island for as long as most Sully residents could remember. Although Lauren wanted to head back, I convinced her to cut through a ferny path, which revealed an amazing view of translucent water and sunshiny sky, sailboats bobbling in the distance, their mainsails dazzling as if struck by Archimedes’s mythical heat ray. As we made our way back across the causeway to a nearby restaurant, treading on adder’s-tongue ferns, observing diminutive swarthy-finned fishes darting about in pools of water in the loamy ground, we spoke for the first time about the possibility of one day living together.

             
‘I’ll have to be very patient,’ she said. ‘You can be a bit backwards can’t you!’

             
‘Oi, cheeky!’

             
‘And you’d have to learn not to eat
everything
in the cupboards like you do at home!’   

             
We got sunburnt that day. The back of my neck looked like it’d been repeatedly karate chopped by Mr. Myagi. But the memory stands out as a stunning day and a precursor for Lauren and me.

             
Apart from acting on stage with
Act One
, Michael and I were making films with a cheap camcorder. We made a film involving the cream of the drama society. A contemporary noir movie, filmed in black and white involving a private investigator (Michael) and a crooked cop (yours truly). We then produced a film set during the Second World War, a B movie that was deliberately bad, involving Nazi produced genetically modified flying pigs and zombies. Both films were screened in the theatre in Canton where I’d done
West Side Story
as a fresh-faced teen. Our next film was to be a modern thriller based on Jack the Ripper and the Thames Torso Murders, but set in Wales. We were going to call it
Embankment
. Michael also had big plans for
Act One
on stage for the following year. He intended to direct an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and hinted strongly that he’d like me to play the complex supporting role of Harold Mitchell.   

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Companions

‘You wish you’
d always known her, like you knew Lisa when you were a kid?’ Michael asked.

             
We were sitting in our favorite pub. The ambrosian shade of night crept through the doors as people filed inside the bar, eager for the warm atmosphere and cool drinks. Michael and I breathed in the familiar scents of beer and cigarette smoke.

             
‘Yeah, I suppose.’ I ran my eyes down the menu in search of drink offers.

             
‘I don’t understand, dude.’

             
‘What don’t you understand?’

             
‘If this girl is so perfect for you, and she
clearly
is, then why do you wish you had more history together?’ He seized the menu from me.