Telling Tales

Still, I take the hallway past the staircase – the one that still has the stepping stones set into the glossy floor – and make my way to my favourite room. Wade will be in the study if I do actually know anything about him at all, and I’m building up to it.

First, the boathouse room. The one that has nothing in it – not even a carpet – except for the one round window with the glass like melting butter, and the light coming in to fill it up in a way that no other place in the house does. Everything is dark here, everything is heavy and plush and like burying your face in crushed velvet.

But not this room. This room is like suddenly being on a boat in the middle of a golden ocean, and when I press my face to the heavy glass it’s just the same. I can see almost nothing and imagine it’s almost anything, out there. A whole world of high seas that I get to explore.

Though more typically it was Hamin-Ra I got to, through this portal to another world. I wrote about it a thousand times – me lifting the latch, and pushing against the glass, and then the golden beauty of my sand-strewn land would spread before me and –

‘Allie?’

My heart hits my mouth. It chokes me – and weirdly it’s not because I know it’s Wade. It isn’t Wade, and my heart wants to kill me anyway. Apparently, all four of my once-were-friends have the same effect on me, which is to say they make me want to run and hide.

Maybe by pushing through a portal to another world.

I brace myself and turn, and sure enough it’s Cameron. Of course I knew anyway – that voice – but it’s still a kind of electric shock to see him so close after all these years. He doesn’t even look any different, either! God, how I must seem to him, with this cardigan on that I shouldn’t have worn and my hair all massive and curly like this and the glasses, oh no the glasses, oh no I totally forgot how much of a dork Cameron makes me feel, with his bigness and his jockish hair and his smooth, perfect face.

And then I remember that he’s a complete nerd – one who fumbles over his words on a daily basis – and it’s OK. It’s OK.

‘Hey,’ I say, only it has about four extra syllables. And I can feel my face cracking, like it’s made of clay and he’s just set a hairdryer on it.

It’s just Cameron, it’s just Cameron, I think, over and over, but my brain can’t remember him being this…immense. Was he this big before? I think I kind of knew he was, but with him filling the doorway like that it’s a different matter. He looks like a giant. He looks like he killed the beast that ate Jack, then devoured the beanstalk too.

And he looks a lot more jockish than I remember too – though maybe that’s just because I’m seeing him fresh. He hasn’t spoken yet, or spent hours not speaking, or bored some girl to death at a party he didn’t want to go to. I vividly recall putting a baseball cap on him before we went to the Christmas blow-out over at Missy Taylor’s, when he’d asked me how he could at least seem cool and approachable.

Smile more, I’d told him, because he’d always appeared to find it a strain. His parents had been very don’t-smile-old-money-be-composed sorts of people, and though I always knew he didn’t want them to, those qualities had rubbed off on him.

They’re all over him now as he stands in the doorway, obviously wanting to hug me or something like it, but completely unable to. I can see the hint of a smile peeking through too, but it’s only because of those neat little incisors of his.

‘Can I give you a hug?’ I ask, and it’s weird how easy it comes. By God, I’d never ask Wade. I’d never ask Wade anything. Pass the peas seems like too much, with him, but with Cameron it’s suddenly and oddly easy.

I try to think back – were we close, Cameron and I? So close that I didn’t mind being the one who suggested, asked, persuaded? I don’t think we were, and yet I can picture a lot of me putting hats on his head or shaking his big body back and forth to loosen him up or asking him if I could read stories he’d hidden somewhere.

Usually he rolled them up and stuffed them down the back of his trousers. I have no clue why. Why bother to bring them to class or to the house if you were just going to pretend they weren’t there?

Until I found them, of course. I always winkled him out.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Yeah, yeah – sure.’

And I guess maybe then I know why it’s easier with Cameron. Because although he’s probably better looking than Wade – he’s so good looking that it’s blinding, for a moment – I somehow have this weird little inkling…this little feeling that he won’t say no. Like maybe he understands that I don’t ever expect anything to happen between us, so he can be open with me. Or maybe he just…maybe he’s just like that. He just wants to be hugged, probably.

Even though I’m sure I’ve seen him bend away from a pat on the shoulder, before today.

He doesn’t bend away from a pat this time, however. I put my arms around his middle – just like that, easy as anything – and I feel his huge hands spanning my back, so warm and good after all this time. He even smells the same, like that airy aftershave he always used to wear, and then all I can think is how odd it is that I can remember Cameron’s scent.

‘It’s so good to see you, Allie,’ he says, almost directly into the top of my head. Mainly because he’s six-five and I barely graze the PEMBROKE on his old and very worn university hoodie – but then it’s not his height I’m thinking about.

Instead I’m flooding with heat, remembering when I last heard him say something like that. On my answering machine, as I…did stuff. With my legs all over the place and my hand inside my knickers and ohhhh, there it is. There’s discomfort and embarrassment, my old friends!

I pull away from him too quickly and he looks…startled? I’m not sure. Sometimes it’s hard to read the expressions on his immense face, and it gets even harder when he says things like this: ‘You look really…great. Just very…pleasant.’

Because I remember how often he used to search for words, as though the real, normal, sane ones eluded him. As though his brain constantly wanted to put weird things in there instead, like You look really pumpkin. Just very bicycle.

Odd, that it only makes me want to leap in there with all the casual conversation I don’t usually have, and that he resolutely cannot provide.

‘So do you – I think you’ve gotten even better looking, somehow.’

Which is absolutely true. His mouth looks even plumper, and softer – Jesus, that lower lip like something out of Hot Blowjobs Monthly. And he’s cut his copper-hinted dark hair so that it kind of swirls all over his head and swoops over his forehead and looks much lazier than he is and oh God, why is he staring at me like that? Am I staring too long at him?

It had seemed easier to do, at first, but now it’s getting harder.

‘I think the others might be here,’ he says and then I definitely know I stared too long. He’s going to think I’m hot for him or some other nonsense thing, which is completely not the case. Even if my face feels like it’s burning and there’s this funny, tingly ache between my legs as though really? I’m horny again?

Usually it’s once a month and even then I’m pushing it. So what’s going on here, exactly? Is the thought of Wade really such an aphrodisiac?

It must be, because little weird sparks prickle the length of my spine when Cameron puts a hand on my shoulder. Like he wants to steady me as we make our way back down the hallway, like maybe he knows that my heart is hammering and my legs don’t want to keep walking – even though that’s impossible.

Cameron never knew anything about me, least of all this.

He doesn’t know that I can hardly bear to look Wade in the face, not even when we come to the entranceway and Kitty’s giggling her ass off, camera in hand as usual, snapping away like there’s no tomorrow. And then there’s Wade, my Wade, just standing there with his back half turned as though this is nothing at all, really.

‘Allie!’ Kitty screams, and I see how easy this is for her too. I see her in slow motion, tiny arms out, charging toward me – oh, she was always the one who never let me forget she loved me, with postcards from far-flung places and ridiculous emails about swimsuits made of ham – but it’s Wade I can’t stop watching, Wade who turns in that said same slow motion while my heart tries to eat itself.

He looks older. And then my brain kick-starts and yells at me that of course he looks older, people with masses of handsome stubble generally look older. At which point I have to process that he has masses of handsome stubble and, dear God, I can’t let it slide. I just can’t! It’s all over-styled and too practised and he’s gonna get it, now. He has to.

‘Did something grow on your face?’ I ask, and oh I’m so grateful for the great chunk of incredulity in my words. I’m so grateful that it all floods back into me – the way we used to talk, like nothing could ever be serious. Nothing could ever hurt.

And he grins that shit-eating grin of his through the great mess of hair all over his chin, as though to tell me I’m right.

He’s still him and I’m still me. I haven’t lost him forever, my best friend in all the world.

‘There’s something on my face?’ he says, with a real and perfect slice of panic in his electric eyes, and then he just throws his arms around me. Just like that. Nothing to it. Cameron’s hand slides right off my shoulder and I’m hugging Wade as though no time has passed at all.

Makes me wonder what I was worried about, really.

It takes three boring conversations about jobs we all do now – Kitty models, of course, Wade mysteriously works in real estate and Cameron now does something to do with software I’ve never heard of – and around two bottles of the terrible wine Kitty found in the back of the fridge – Cameron drinks more than I remember, Wade drinks less – before we get around to stories.

Of course, we all know it’s coming. I can feel every tale I ever told right on the tip of my tongue, and when Wade congratulates me on staying true to my dreams I can’t stop myself. I have to start us down this path – the one none of us have actually taken.

‘It’s not real writing, what I do. I just…’ I start, but Wade cuts in. Of course he does. I can see he’s been raring to go ever since that stubble crack in the entranceway. He looks so bristling and spark-eyed, with all his hair slicked back and his new, gorgeous man’s face.

‘So it’s fake, then. You write on air with a magical unicorn hoof.’

‘I don’t –’

‘They print your articles in Non-Existent Monthly.’

Gah, him and his stupid fake magazines. I make them up myself, but it’s only because of him.

‘No, it’s not fake. It’s just…not what I always wanted to write.’

He raises his glass to me.

‘Hey, it’s still more than any of us managed, kid.’

I kind of hate him, for saying that. But then Kitty stretches out on the couch beside me, and curls an arm around my scrunched-up legs, and puts her head in my lap. She’s already half-cut, I know she is, but I also know why she then says: ‘We could all still manage, if we wanted to. People don’t ever run out of stories.’

I expect Wade to interject then – with something about rejection, probably, or losing the will to or any of the things I’ve felt myself a thousand times – but it’s Cameron who gets there first. I’d almost forgotten he was there even though he’s just to my right, in Professor Warren’s old wingback. Sitting at the head of the room like a tombstone, still and quiet and far more comfortable than he’d looked two hours ago.

I guess maybe he’s a little cut too.

‘Apart from me. I think I ran out before I ever even began.’

And then everyone laughs, of course they do. Funny, that I don’t really feel like it.

‘I always loved your spaceship story,’ I tell him, because that’s the truth. I did. It’s not a pity party I’m throwing here.

But he looks at me as though maybe I am.

‘Ohhhh no you didn’t. I stopped writing years ago anyway,’ he says, and then he runs on before I can push at him again. ‘But I did always want to hear the end of “Hamin-Ra”. Did you ever finish that one, Allie?’

I think I go a little cold then. Not because I couldn’t remember ever reading it out to them – after a moment, I vaguely recall reading the tame, vanilla beginnings of it – but because it’s so fresh in my mind. I think about the answering machine and the lurid list of bizarre scenarios, prancing through my head. I think about the window in the boat room, just waiting to open and let me through to another world of joy and pleasure and beauty.

Not like this world of leather and drinking and designer stubble.

‘Yeah,’ Kitty mumbles from my lap. ‘I want to know if the Queen ever found her heart.’

And now I feel slightly less disconcerted. It’s better when it’s not just Cameron remembering this one weird story I wrote, as though it had some special meaning or even worse…as though he somehow heard me through a fucking answering machine.

But it’s still odd. I can’t even recall writing that part of it, about the heart or whatever it is Kitty’s blathering over. The whole and original thing is in one of my bags, but I’d stuffed it in there without looking, while the majority of me pretended I wasn’t doing it at all. After all, it isn’t as though this month is really going to be about ancient writing we did three hundred years ago. We aren’t really going to share stories just like before, and God knows I’m not going to share ‘Hamin-Ra’ even if we decide to do just that.

I only brought it because…I brought it because I brought other stories too. I brought it because I grabbed a bunch and shoved it all in, and there’s nothing more to it, really. Just as there was nothing more to Cameron shoving rolls of stories into the back of his trousers as though yeah, none of us were ever going to find them. None of us were ever going to say come on, come on, where’s your tale, Cam?

‘Probably,’ I say, but Wade laughs, then, and says, ‘Oh, she knows. She knows for sure, she’s got it with her!’

And I hate him for that too. Now they’re after me to read it and no, no, no, I can’t, I can’t, and then I have to tell them why and it’s mortifying somehow. It’s like pulling a tooth. Out of my vagina.

‘The ending’s smutty, OK? No no no.’

It’s more than smutty – it’s downright pornographic. But I don’t say that and I’m glad, because even something as tame as the actual word I used has made Wade touch his tongue up to one pointed incisor, and I can see Cameron sitting up even straighter, on the periphery of my vision.

Plus Kitty starts giggling like an idiot into my lap, spilling wine from the glass she should no longer be holding, while she’s sprawled all over me.

‘Great. Great, guys. Laugh it up.’

But Kitty goes one better than that.

‘I always knew you wanted to write porn,’ she says, in-between hilarious, hilarious laughter. ‘All those stories about ghosts that wanted to have sex with people but couldn’t.’

Oh, Lord.

‘I didn’t really want to write about porn, OK?’ I say, but then Wade has a go too.

‘I think you kind of did.’

And then even worse: ‘I do remember a lot of sex-ghosts.’ Everyone turns to look at Cameron immediately. Mainly because he just used the words sex-ghosts as a term, and he didn’t even have to spend a lot of time searching for it. He just blurts it out and then, when we all stare at him in amazement, he takes a massive swallow from his wine glass.

Definitely half-cut.

‘See. Even Harvard over there thinks so,’ Wade says, and of course Cameron rolls his eyes in reply. Sometimes Wade would call him Yale or Dartmouth, but the result was usually the same.

‘We went to the same university!’

‘Yeah. Yalevard.’

‘There’s no such place.’

‘Harvale, then.’

‘That’s even less existent than the other one you mentioned.’

Ah, it’s like no time has passed at all. They can go like this for hours, every word hinging on Wade’s ability to be intentionally ridiculous for long periods of time, and Cameron’s almost death-like insistence on the literalness of things.

Though he has grown a slight hint of sardonicism, right at the back of his words. It’s very faint but I can hear it, and there’s something about the gaze he lays on Wade that seems…cold, almost.

It makes all the hairs on the back of my neck prickle, at the very least.

‘But anyway. Back to the sex-ghosts,’ Wade says abruptly, as though maybe he spotted the glittering cool beneath Cameron’s steady stare too.

Sadly, this only puts me in the spotlight again. I feel like a Vegas stripper, only without the feathers. Or spangly nipple-covers. Or skin.

‘I really have absolutely no idea what you guys are talking about.’

‘Your stories were always like that, Allie,’ Kitty says, because she’s a goddamned traitor. ‘But it’s OK, ’cause mine were too.’

OK, maybe not a traitor, exactly. Maybe more like a really evil partner in crime who drags you down with her, into disaster. In all my many dreams of how this reunion would end up going – minor explosions, someone killing someone else, nervous breakdowns – none of this ever featured in even the tiniest, remotest sense. I didn’t even imagine myself ending up in bed with Wade, really, because whenever I let myself want something it almost never happens.

Did I do the opposite of wanting this chat about sex stories?

‘Yeah, also guilty,’ Wade says, and I rack my brain trying to think of where they crammed all this boiling lust into tales about being a pig who could fly (Kitty) and a cyborg from the future (Wade).

Maybe the pigs and the cyborgs had a lot of sex I just don’t know about.

‘It’s OK, Cam, you don’t have to put your hand up for this one,’ Wade adds, and my brain automatically makes an odd little dinging noise. As though it’s decided to tally up all the little digs Wade’s going to get in about Cameron, for no apparent reason. ‘Everyone knows that you’re not a part of our dirty perverts club.’

Seriously. Were they like this before? Because that last part seems even meaner than the first bit, as though Wade would like nothing better than to slice Cameron right out of our group forever, for some end I can’t quite see.

I can’t see it so much that I’m compelled to say something in too big and too funny a voice, as though I can just smooth everything over by being ridiculous.

‘Hey, how do you know he’s not a dirty pervert? You seem really perverted to me, Cam, I swear.’

By being really ridiculous. Because in truth, there isn’t a person on Earth who seems less sexual than Cameron. I’m sure Mother Teresa was more adventurous with her lovers than Cameron is with his. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it…I’m not even sure I’ve ever seen him with someone I could loosely term a ‘lover’.

He probably has constant, epic sex with the robot girl he’s built.

Annnnddd…now I feel mean. Especially when he then says: ‘Thank you, Allie. Your faith in my perverted-ness is very…welcomed.’

He actually does seem heartened too. When I look at him he’s getting really close to smiling in this strange, almost-definitely-drunk way, and after a couple of long, weird moments have ticked by I find my mind rolling back and back to that word he used.

Welcomed. And the pause he had before it, as though he had a couple of other contenders before he settled on something so mundane. Though for the life of me, I can’t think what other word he could have slotted in there. What replaces welcomed, easily? Pleased? Sweet?

And then my brain throws up arousing like an insane hiccup, and I move along quickly.

‘OK, so, maybe I liked to occasionally write about sex-ghosts,’ I say, but it comes out less funny and more wounded than I intend. And Wade spots it, which is weird because he never used to. He never used to know when I’d taken a mortal hit and was down for the count.

‘Hey, what’s the big deal?’ he says, and there’s this creamy, smooth note of conciliation in his voice that sounds weird. Weird, but not exactly unwelcome. ‘We’re all grown up now. We can be perverts if we want to be.’

‘I didn’t care about being a pervert before, quite frankly,’ Kitty says.

Of course, my mind flicks to her bonking the living daylights out of Martin Carruthers in the bed next to mine, in our tiny dorm room. Though I’ll admit, my mind sometimes goes to her bonking the living daylights out of Martin Carruthers when I’m busy plunging the toilet or waiting for a kettle to boil, so it’s no real commentary on the things we’re talking about now.

‘So where are the stories, Kit? The dirty stories, about something other than magic balloons that get lost?’ Wade asks, and Kitty heys!

Then tries to hurl a cushion at him and fails, miserably.

‘I wrote loads more than kids stories, you doof. I wrote fabulous tales of rip-roaring sexual adventures the likes of which the world has never seen.’

I can well believe her. One of her postcards just had the word ‘five-way’ on it in big letters. Is five-way even a word? I’m not sure and largely felt too afraid to ask.

‘Yeah?’ Wade says.

And then he does something that makes my stomach kind of flip-flop. As though maybe I’d just thought this whole conversation was going down a path to nowhere, and any second we’d start talking about the same cool, literary stories Professor Warren always used to encourage, with everything sexual about them stuffed firmly into the subtext. The subtext that’s now, apparently, cracking under some weird pressure I didn’t even know was there.

It’s not there, is it? I mean, none of us fancied each other, or anything like that. Unless you count me fancying Wade, which is pretty linear and only in a single direction. I mean, it’s not as though you can write a postcard to someone with ‘one-way’ on it in big, fancy glitter letters.

‘Like this story?’ Wade says, which isn’t the thing that makes me flip-flop inside.

No. It’s him leaning over the side of the chair he’s sitting in to the satchel bag resting at its side, to whip out his usual scrunched-up bunch of semi-clipped together pages. Pages that could well have text all over them, and none of it sub.

Kitty squeezes my legs and squeals: ‘Ooooh, he’s a magician!’

Because she’s bonkers. Only Cameron and I are sane, adrift in the sea of weirdness this whole night seems to be sinking into.

‘You’re not seriously going to read a dirty story, are you,’ I hear myself saying, but it’s from very far away and the tiny section of me that’s cool is staring at this very far away person with a sneer on her face.

‘Well, it’s not as though Warren’s here to tell us off for using the word fuck,’ Wade says, and though it’s mean and Cameron interrupts with Hey, man, he just left us a house, he’s got a point. The Professor didn’t even like to hear the L-word in fiction.

And the L-word’s loose. So you know. The craps and the damns didn’t stand a chance.

‘Why do you think he did?’ Kitty asks, and we all sort of freeze in position, then. Not because it’s a little jarring in the middle of a discussion about smut that was starting to get…let’s say…heated – though it is. Jarring, I mean. The weird tension I can feel pushing against the nape of my neck and under my arms doesn’t dissipate, but it does start tapping its foot, waiting for us to go back to whatever Wade’s got us moving toward.

But no, it’s the question itself that makes us freeze. As though we all know we’ve been kind of avoiding it, and maybe we wanted to avoid it a little longer. I can hear Wade shuffling the pages of his probable hellfire and brimstone story around, as though he just wants to get back to this, this is the point of us being here.

Sharing what we never shared before.