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 evidence of what he had been up to for the last one hundred and thirty-seven days and coming up with nothing but a well-thumbed copy of GQ. Even for a slow reader like Charlie, that hadn’t taken almost five months. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
How could nothing have changed in five months? The same books sat on his coffee table, the same pair of trainers lay at the side of the door and the same dusty red Netflix envelope was wedged between his Blu-ray player and the PlayStation. My entire life had been turned upside down and he hadn’t even sent his DVDs back. How was that possible?
‘Health kick,’ he said, emerging from the kitchen with two mugs in his hands. The same mugs. His mug and my mug. ‘No biscuits, no sweets, no chocolate.’
‘Are you dying?’ I asked, only half joking.
‘Just trying to take better care of myself.’ He held my mug out to me and went to sit down on the sofa. Just before his bum made contact he shot back up and perched himself decidedly on the armchair he never used instead. ‘Can’t live on biscuits forever.’
‘That’s a lie and you know it,’ I said, wrapping my hands around my mug, even though it was far too hot. ‘Biscuits are the staff of life.’
‘Isn’t that bread?’ He pinched his shoulders together and fell silent, the awkwardness of the moment finally winning out over our terribly English desire to drink tea and pretend nothing was wrong.
I stared into my mug and tried to remember the last time I’d been so tongue-tied around Charlie. It hadn’t been this bad since the first week of university when I’d watched him playing a Smiths’ song on his guitar outside our halls of residence. A verse and a chorus of Morrissey’s finest and, just like that, I lost the power of speech.
‘So …’ He broke the silence, pulling off his Converse and kicking them underneath his uncomfortable chair. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Not much,’ I said in a voice much squeakier than I had intended. ‘I’ve been running my toddler plumbing company and Amy’s in New York. She’s working for Al Bennett – you know, the man I was taking photos of in Hawaii? She’s his Vice President of Special Projects, isn’t that amazing?’
‘What kind of projects?’ he asked, puzzled. ‘Is he building a house out of Dairylea Triangles?’