Tessa in Love (8 page)

S
o I became quite famous at school for a couple of v weeks. First, for the Cadeby Wood piece, which some people laughed at me for, what with the references to fairies and stuff. Matty wasn’t best pleased, because she’d been dragged into it – I’d mentioned her in my article. She said it wasn’t good for her image, or mine. The second reason I was famous was because Wolfie and I were an item, and my friends were amazed.

‘He is good-looking,’ Becca said, ‘under all that long hair. I can see what you see in him. I like a more clean-cut type of boy, though. Can’t you make him cut it?’

‘I love his hair,’ I said.

‘Does he smoke like tons of dope?’ Charlotte asked.

‘Nope,’ I said.

‘I thought he was going out with that Lara girl,’ Sam said.

‘Apparently not,’ I said.

‘So what’s he really like?’ said Charlotte.

He wasn’t like you’d expect. He sometimes seemed quite earnest and serious, but he was goofy and funny with me. He held my hand. He made lots of jokes. For our twenty–five–day anniversary, (‘Silver Day’, he called it), Wolfie took me to the seaside at Bridlington. It was overcast and grey, but that only seemed to make the town more romantic – there was none of the tackiness of the seaside when it’s hot, no wet kids screaming and prodding you with gooey sticks of rock – just moody grey clouds and an amazing steely sea. We walked around the harbour -which smelled strongly of fish – and I leaned back on him and our gaze sailed over the waves out to the horizon. Wolfie had brought his camera, and he took some photographs.

‘I love the sea,’ I said. ‘I wish I could always live somewhere close enough to walk to see it.’

‘I love it too,’ Wolfie said, squeezing my shoulder. ‘It makes you think that no matter what we do to the earth, the earth still has the power to win.’

‘Well, sort of,’ I said. ‘We’re doing our best to poison the sea as well, pumping it full of chemicals.’

He kissed the top of my head. ‘Just look at it, though. It’s so
vast.
Can you believe that years before anyone had any idea what was out there, they set out in boats, sticking fast to one direction. They believed they’d find something and they were willing to die trying.’

‘You’d have done that, I think,’ I said, feeling slightly sad. I’d always been quite afraid of travel and leaving home, and I knew he wanted adventures. I hoped I’d be brave enough to go along with him.

‘You love your family so much,’ Wolfie said. ‘It’s very easy for you to want to stay close to them, because you know how much you’ll miss them. I’ve always wanted to travel, because I’ve always been looking for something I haven’t had. You’re very lucky’

Wolfie never really talked about his mum, and why she didn’t live with them. I knew his parents were divorced, but I didn’t know how often he saw her. Sometimes when he mentioned her it sounded as if he loved her very much, but other times it sounded as if he was very angry with her. On our Silver Day, I knew we knew each other well enough for him not to mind me asking.

‘Where is she?’ I said. ‘Where does your mum live?’

‘Scotland,’ he said. ‘Glasgow, actually.’

‘How often do you see her?’

‘About ten times as often as she wants to see me,’ Wolfie said. ‘I last saw her a couple of years ago, although we’ve spoken on the phone since then.’

‘So ... do you not get on?’

‘I make my mum sad,’ Wolfie said. ‘She feels bad

about not being there when I was growing up and still not . . . being there.’

‘When did your parents divorce? Sorry, am I asking too many questions?’

He kissed my head again. ‘They were never married,’ he said. ‘You remember you said you were expecting my house to be really hippieish?’

‘Yeah.’

‘My mum was like a real flower child, except born too late. She was a rich girl and she rebelled against her posh school by getting pregnant at sixteen to a student, and then leaving school to live with him. But when I was born she couldn’t hack it. You know, she was your age and it was too much for her. She said she needed to feel free again.’

‘Maybe you get your sense of adventure from her,’ I said. ‘What did she do?’

‘She left me with my dad when I wasn’t even a year old. He had to drop out of college and get a job so he could pay for babysitters.’

‘I thought you said she was rich. Did she never send you stuff?’

‘Money on my birthday and at Christmas. You know, quite a lot, although she didn’t always remember, because she was getting on with her own life.’

I hadn’t turned around, because I didn’t want to embarrass him by looking straight at him, but his voice had become lost and quiet, and I turned and met his eyes, which were shiny, and buried my face in his chest, hugging him.

‘So why is she in Scotland?’ I asked.

‘She’s got a new family, now, three kids, and I don’t think she’s interested in making me a part of it. Well, I know she’s not. I mean, her new husband knows about me, I’m not some guilty secret, but I think I am a source of guilt for her. So she writes back if I write to her, and talks to me if I call her, but she doesn’t ask me any questions, and she doesn’t ask me to go and see her. So I don’t write or call so much. Am I freaking you out, Tess? I don’t think you bargained for the whole sob story.’

My eyes were full of tears, which I didn’t let him see.

‘Of course you’re not freaking me out,’ I said. ‘I wish I could make you feel better, that’s all.’

‘Are you kidding?’ Wolfie said. ‘You make me feel amazing.’

‘Oh, come on,’ I said.

‘Aren’t you having fun?’ he said. ‘I mean, before I started depressing you we were . . .’

‘I love it here,’ I said. ‘You’re not depressing me. I’m really touched that you’d open up to me.’

‘I love you,’ Wolfie said. I didn’t say anything, just looked at him and kept holding back my tears.

When it started to rain we went to the Sixties Coffee Bar for lunch. It was this half-cool, half-touristy retro cafe with pinball machines and old posters and displays. Wolfie had the veggie special, of course, the ‘Hippie Feast’. I thought to myself how amazing he was, when his mum had hurt him so badly, to not reject her – he didn’t try to suppress the aspects of his personality that were like hers. I was slightly self-conscious about eating meat in front of him, although he never said anything, or looked at me, or acted appalled, when I did. I didn’t want to test him, but I wanted to know he’d still like me if I wasn’t super-perfect, and that he’d still choose me if he knew the real me. I couldn’t stop thinking about him saying he loved me, and me not saying anything back, even though I loved him too, and how weird that must have seemed to him and whether he regretted it, or meant it, and whether I should say something now. Anyway, I chose the ‘Mod Revival’, which was chicken and bacon and, when it came, it was just, you know, a sandwich. Sometimes I overthought things. The Coffee Bar played nothing but 1960s records, and we knew tons of them, and Wolfie sang along to a song called ‘Concrete and Clay’. He said it was one of his favourites.

After lunch, he took me to this mad place called the Beside the Seaside museum, where we got to sit in a Victorian train carriage, and then go into a 1950s boarding house. There were really freaky dummies all over the place which talked: some of them were funny and some of them scared the crap out of me. I liked Joe and Connie’s Beach Bungalow, where the dummies were fat and frumpy and wore knotted hankies and funny swimming costumes and gossiped, but Grumpy Len in the boarding house was just plain creepy. Wolfie made me jump by seeming to wander away until I was spellbound by the dummies, and then suddenly coming up behind me, grabbing me and talking like Grumpy Len in my ear: I screamed. Some old ladies looked at us, a couple of them frowning, but one of them smiled. My favourite thing was the old slot machines, because there was a fortune-teller, which
also
scared me – why were old-fashioned seaside attractions so creepy? I mean, Punch and Judy? A squeaky little wife-beating puppet? So, anyway, I asked the fortune-teller machine what would happen with me and Wolfie, and I was genuinely freaked out while it buzzed and lit up and then it fed me a paper fortune that said, ‘Your love will last’. This was especially weird because she was answering my actual question, and I could have asked anything.Wolfie wasn’t watching me, he’d taken out his camera again and was wandering around taking photographs of everything. I put the fortune in my purse.

We’d hoped the lengthy detour indoors would last as long as the rain, but, when we came outside again, it was really chucking it down. Neither of us had an umbrella, so we ran in the rain until we were soaking, looking for shelter. Then we just gave up and held each other around the waist as we walked and laughed hysterically at how wet we were. We walked along the sopping sandy beach, and Wolfie said it was much nicer in the rain, anyway, because the sand was firm and didn’t get into your clothes. He was looking completely beautiful to me, his long hair clinging to his face in dark spikes, his wet T-shirt tight and shiny over his chest. We sat down on the cold, hard sand and looked out at the choppy waves as they swallowed up the rain, and Wolfie said, ‘They keep poisoning the sea, but it keeps renewing itself.’

The rain lashed against my face and I screwed up my eyes. ‘We might as well have gone swimming fully clothed,’ I said.

‘What are you talking about – this is just a light shower,’ he said, and we started laughing again, and he lay back flat on the sand, and pulled me over on to him.

***

On the train on the way back, I was sleepy, and rested my head on Wolfie’s shoulder while he read a newspaper. We were both still wet through and had to hold each other to keep warm.

‘That thing you said earlier,’ I whispered, lifting my head to look him in the eye.

‘Oh, the I love you thing? You don’t have to be afraid of that,’ Wolfie said. ‘I just do. No big deal.’

‘Really, no big deal?’ I said, teasing him. ‘Well, it’s no big deal that I love you too. It’s, like, whatever, so what if I do love you, ho hum.’

‘You don’t have to say . . .’

‘I love you,’ I said again. I put my head back on his shoulder, and he held me more tightly, and picked up his wet newspaper again with his other hand, and I wished the train ride would last forever.

T
he DVD Matty and I had just watched was
The Breakfast Club,
an American high school movie made in the 1980s, having settled back into our Friday-night movie routine again over the last few weeks. We’d seen the film before – so many times, in fact, that we called it ‘Brek’ – but this time it seemed to mean more to me, because the main girl in it ended up going out with the long-haired school rebel, and it was the first time I’d seen it since I’d started going out with Wolfie. Matty was reading the pizza menu while I went through the DVD options – there weren’t really any. All the best films had no extras; it was only the stupidest, geekiest films that came with tons and tons of deleted scenes and commentaries. ‘

‘How about the Meat Feast ?’ Matty said.

I just didn’t feel like meat. I ’d eaten at Wolfie’s – or shared whatever he was eating when we were out – so many times and, while some of his creations were a bit
strange,
others were yum, and I’d started wondering how much I really needed or wanted to eat meat. Bacon excepted – there was really no substitute for a bacon sandwich, especially when you were feeling ill.

‘How about that one ?’ I said, pointing at a spicy, green, peppery one.

‘What, the Hot Green ?’

‘Yeah, what do you think?’

‘Oh God, you haven’t gone veggie as well!’

‘Well, now and then, if I can. I mean, there’s no point throwing meat on something just for the sake of it. And actually, you know, pizzas are absolutely the worst things to eat meat with, because the pizza places just store cooked meat all week in containers and then reheat it, and it can have all kinds of —’

‘Tessa...’

I looked at Matty, because she sounded mad at me, and added quickly, ‘Well, whichever one
you
want, then.’

She didn’t say anything.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Does it occur to you that you’re changing yourself too much, you know, for Wolfie?‘

‘I’m not doing it so he’ll
like
me. I’m not doing it to keep him.
You
know that if you hang out with someone a lot you start picking up a couple of their habits. He’s done the same with me. I’ve changed him too.’

‘Really. How have you done that?’ Matty asked; she still sounded sort of irritated.

‘Is this a joke?’ I said. ‘OK, he agrees with me that some of his records, some of the hip hop, is quite sexist and he didn’t use to worry about that as much.’

‘But that’s just being like
him,’
Matty said. ‘You’re just becoming extra right-on, more than you were before.’

‘I was always like this, Matty,’ I said. ‘Has it occurred to you that I just didn’t talk so much about it, because I wasn’t as confident and everyone always told me it was lame?’

‘Actually, no.’

‘Well, has it occurred to you that you just didn’t pay any attention to what I was talking about, because you always had your own stuff to talk about and it was always more important?’