This is Not a Love Story (30 page)

“I’ve got some business to conduct, kid. Go play outside.” His voice is deep and commands attention. His eyes bore into me. I hold my ground. I’m terrified of what he wants with Julian.

“That means
fuck off
.”

Maybe he can see the way the bar is trembling in my hands, but I’m not moving.

All at once he lunges, and I swing, but I’m too late, and I hit the wall, spraying dust and plaster all around us. He laughs coldly, ducking behind me to the other side of the mattress.

“It’s alright, Remee. Put it down,” Julian says, still sounding so far away and wincing as if it hurts to speak.

No.
I shake my head. How can this possibly be all right?

“I don’t have enough,” Julian whispers, but not to me.

The guy leans in close to him, and I can see the glint of a blade taped to the inside of his jacket.

Fuckfuckfuck.
He has a knife. My teeth sink into my lip so hard I can taste blood. I don’t know what’s going on, but the way this is playing out, so sudden and familiar, is terrifying.

“Well, I’m here now… and you owe me and you know I don’t like to leave empty-handed.” The guy shrugs indifferently as he speaks, a hardness to his gestures that scares me almost as much as the knife does.

My hands are sweating so much it’s hard to grip the bar. My heart is beating louder than any other sound—I don’t know how they can’t hear it, how they can just both ignore me. I don’t know what to do.

“I don’t
have
anything to give you, Vic.” Julian seems to deflate even further into the mattress, the words hissing out of him like air out of a punctured tire, like he wants to just disappear.

Vic’s hand reaches out to grab Julian’s shoulder. Maybe he’s just going to shake him, but the leer on his face tells me it’s more than that, and I don’t think about what I’m doing. I just react, shoving the bar into his chest with all my weight behind it and pushing him off. The force knocks the air out of him, and I watch astonished as he flies backward and lies winded among debris underneath the window. I gulp down a lungful of air. I’ve never hit anyone like that before.

Julian blinks at me, his expression as shocked as my own, a fog clearing from his eyes.

“Run,” he gasps.

What?

I can hear Vic scrabbling to get up, but I don’t take my eyes off Julian’s—they used to be lighter, the color so warm and beautiful it was like the autumn sun. But that light has gone. I’ve never seen him look so terrified.

And it becomes clear he knows Vic has a knife. He knows because whatever he owes, for whatever reason, he’s been threatened with it before.

I shake my head and step over him. However this is going to end, it’s not going to be with me running. The past few weeks have been hell, the worst in my life—the fire here, burning my hands, the hospital, finding out about my mother, and above it all, Julian leaving. And today I’ve had enough. Of everything. I’ve just found the one person my heart has torn itself apart for these past few weeks, and I’ve barely gotten over the relief, and now this dick with his ridiculous hair and his fucking sense of being owed thinks he’s going to take that away from me. Anger twists around me like vapor. I’m angry at all of them, at everything. But most of all, I’m angry at this fucking concrete wasteland of a city, at people like Vic standing before me, knife in hand, people who think they can just keep taking and taking and destroying everything because they don’t have the strength to stop falling. I swing the bar in an awkward blur of movement. I can hardly see. Satisfaction fills me when I feel the bar connect with something, someone, but I have no focus. I’m just striking out in any way I can. Pain bites my side, but it hardly matters, neither does the noise—Julian’s near-hysterical voice as I’m being shoved back against the empty mattress, feeling suddenly weak as the rage evaporates and dissolves into the air.

I think he stabbed me.

The thought shocks me back into the moment. I sit up. Julian has the bar in his hands; his shoulders are trembling. Vic is crumpled in a heap at his feet. The knife is on the floor, covered in dust and blood.

I hold my side. There’s not much blood. It just stings a bit.

I pull myself up and on wobbly legs walk over to Julian. I don’t think he can stand up for much longer. His legs look as though they are going to give way beneath him. He drops the bar and holds on to the wall.

Everything is so very quiet.

The tremors run through my hand as I lay it on his shoulder. I feel him tense, and he turns and glances anxiously at my side.

“He stabbed you.”

He looks close to losing it, but at least he’s not so far away and unreachable.

I’m alright. It’s okay.

“No, no, this is so far from okay….” Julian swallows. He looks like he’s going to be sick. Vic isn’t moving. “You’ve got to get out of here.”

I know how much effort it is taking for him to stand here like this. I can hear the strain of it in his voice.

We’ve got to get out of here.

“They found you a family.”

It’s not a question. I wonder if I look different somehow to him now, and I can’t bear the thought if I do.

I shrug. I guess they did, and at the same time, they didn’t.

You are my family,
I sign.

He drops his head, and I know there are tears in his eyes again.

I can’t take it. This is too much.

“
You
need to get out of here, Remee. This is it for me.” He sounds so hollow.

No. Not without you.

He starts to sink helplessly down to the floor, his gaze all over the place, and I wonder when the last time he ate was. Vic coughs thickly, his eyes still closed. There is a bloody gash on the side of his head.

Come outside and call him an ambulance.
I hold out my phone.
Then let me buy you something to eat, please.

He makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. “I’m not hungry anymore, baby.”

There is a certain point you have to stop arguing with people and just get on with moving forward. I scan the room for anything that might possibly still belong to Julian. Unsurprisingly, there is nothing. Then I grab his arm, settle myself under his shoulder to support him and help him stand up, and start walking.

He doesn’t try to stop me. Maybe he can sense the scale of the fight he’d have to put up if he did.

The rain has stopped, and although the air is still sharp with cold, the mist seems to be lifting, the clouds whiter. I pull his weight against me as I dial 999 and hold the phone up to his ear so he can ask for an ambulance. I just want to be close to him.

I have no idea how we are going to get him over this fence. But it turns out I don’t have to—of course there is a door. We step out onto the windy embankment. Julian leans heavily against me, but I want this weight.

“Not Cassey’s sister,” he murmurs.

I know he means the cafe.

Okay,
I sign.

I don’t look back.

F
REEZING
WIND
gusts across the choppy water, making me wish we were anywhere but next to this gray stretch of river right now. The bitter cold it brings is so familiar, it hurts to remember all the times I’ve suffered out here like this. I clutch Julian closer, my arm under his shoulders, holding on to him as much as holding him up. This time is different; it has to be.

Painfully slowly, we cross the bridge and stumble away from the embankment toward Vauxhall.

I don’t want to hear the ambulance arrive. I want to be as far away from that place as possible. I want to forget everything that just happened, but Julian is heavy and my side is hurting more than it was ten minutes ago when I dragged him outside. I need to stop somewhere, somewhere out of this cold.

Stuck between a launderette and a charity shop, there is a tiny cafe that I’ve probably walked past a hundred times but never thought twice about. Not a lot of cafes around here tolerated us—when you’ve got nowhere else to go, most people just don’t want to know. They’d rather you disappeared so they can pretend you don’t exist—Cassey’s was the only one we knew.

But I’m not that homeless kid anymore.

It catches me then like a sucker punch
how
different everything is—how different everything
will be
—cracks are forming all around me. The world I knew is shattering like colored glass.

I head toward the cafe’s brightness.

Blissful warmth envelops us as we step through the door. There are four or five round plastic tables with bright plastic flowers in bright plastic vases. A few workmen sit eating a late breakfast in orange overalls. And although they pay no attention, I know we stand out with our shell-shocked expressions and charcoal-stained clothes, but I don’t care. I help Julian sit down at a free table in the corner by the fogged-up window before I make my way up to the counter to order however much toast and bacon and eggs as I can afford with Crash’s money. He would want to help, I tell myself as I pull two tens out of his wallet—though it hurts to think about why.

One day I am determined to pay him back for all of this. For everything.

I write my order for two full breakfasts and two teas on a napkin and hand it with my money to the girl behind the counter. It feels strange to order so much, to have this money in my hand and not endlessly go over all the possibilities it could buy us, to just pass it over unthinking. It’s as though I have stepped into another life, and it’s too big and doesn’t quite fit me yet.

The girl is young and disinterested. She doesn’t really look at me. She just tells me she’ll bring it over when it’s ready. I nod, but I wish it was Cassey standing there. I wish she were here to worry and fuss over us, but instead it’s just me anxiously wondering what to do to make this right as Julian stares desolately out the window and doesn’t talk to me.

My chair scrapes too loudly across the floor as I pull it out and sit down. Wincing, I draw my icy fingers across my side under my clothes, feeling for the damp stain of blood on my T-shirt and noticing dejectedly how the rip goes right through Crash’s coat. My whole side aches deeply, and even though warm air is all around us, I feel shivery cold now we’ve stopped moving.

“Remee?” Julian says gently.

He looks so drawn and ill, and I know it’s not just hunger. I know it’s more than that, and I want to put my arms around him and somehow show him that we’re going to be all right, but I’m not sure how he’d react to that anymore, and I’m not sure I can throw myself in the path of rejection like a leaf trusting itself to the wind. I need a bit more than that.

“Come here, let me see.”

I’m alright,
I sign, because I don’t want him to feel guilty, and I know he does. His eyes give him away. They always did.

Please,
he signs back, dipping his head.

And I smile a little despite myself—because, though I know he understands me, he has so rarely ever signed anything himself, sometimes I forget he can.

I move my chair around next to him and lift Crash’s coat, sucking in a breath as his cold fingers brush my skin, the weird mix of pleasure and pain making me tremble. I close my eyes to it, not sure if I like the feeling, but not wanting him to stop. His hand cups my side over the wound, the pressure makes me gasp, and he lets up immediately, slipping a napkin against my skin instead. I catch his eye. A few people are staring at us, but he doesn’t move his hand.

“It’s just a nick.”

He looks relieved, though I can see my blood blossoming beneath his fingers, staining the white of the napkin like a slow-moving red tide. And I know I need to clean the cut and dress it properly with something sterile.

I could clean up here—there will be a tiny toilet, these places always have them, but I don’t want to leave him. I’m scared he will be gone when I come out. And I know it’s stupid to think like that. He could leave anytime he wanted, but I can’t bear the thought of him just disappearing out of my life with barely a word like before.

The girl brings over our breakfasts. My phone buzzes as she sets them down on the table, and I think about ignoring it, but how can I after everything? I take it out of my pocket.

Of course it’s from Crash.

I’m here if you need me. I’ll always be here
is all it says.

My throat tightens as I stare at the words, thinking about him. About how much he wants to care. How much he wants to be here. For me. About how I felt when he held me last night, when I thought I’d never see Julian again. I run my hand through my hair.

I don’t know whether I want to reply right now. I don’t know what to say.

“Your family?” Julian asks quietly, shakily picking up his fork and then glancing at his plate of food as though he has no idea what to do with it.

I wish he wouldn’t call them that.

A friend. Crash. He gave me this phone.

“He’s worried about you?”

I shrug.

I wish he’d eat, but right now he looks in more turmoil than I am. I hate the way his hands are trembling.

Eat,
I plead. Though my own stomach is one huge knot of uncertainty, and I couldn’t feel less like eating.

“I can’t,” he whispers hoarsely.

I reach out, I can’t help it, and when he doesn’t push me away, I grip his hand.

All at once, his chest and shoulders start to shake as though he’s coughing. He tries to cover his mouth to stop the sounds, and I realize with anguish that he’s sobbing.

The toilet is through a door next to the counter. It’s tiny and dark and smells of piney disinfectant and damp. There is hardly enough room for us both to stand between the little bowl of a sink and the squat white toilet, but I’m too distraught to care, and I press us both inside, holding him tightly and wishing I could tell him it will be all right, but not knowing how to make him believe it.