It's Not You It's Me

He turned again. ‘Charlie, don’t be stupid.’

‘Stupid? What’s so stupid about it? One minute you’re sleeping with every girl in sight and the next minute you’re throwing me off. What am I supposed to think?’

Jas stood up. ‘Wish I could explain it to you, but I can’t.’

‘What’s there to explain?’ I was acting like an idiot and I knew it, but I felt that if I stopped fighting, even for a moment, I’d just break down and cry—and I couldn’t, wouldn’t, do that. Not here, anyway.

I got up off the bed and snorted inelegantly. ‘I guess I’m just not blonde enough for you.’ Jas had started to say something, but I held my hand out to stop him. ‘Don’t say it. Just don’t talk to me. I don’t want to hear it.’ My voice was getting louder and louder by the minute. I turned and left the room, slamming the door behind me.

Chapter Four

I don’t think I slept at all that night.

It didn’t seem to matter what I tried to think about, that one moment in time kept running itself through my head again and again. The awful moment when I knew it had all gone wrong. The moment when the, um…tower crumbled and fell, for want of a better way of putting it.

What I didn’t understand, though, was that I’d been sure he was interested. At the start, that is. After all, he was the one who’d pulled in—he’d kept kissing me. So why pull away later instead of as soon as he’d got a chance? It just didn’t make any sense. And the more I thought about it, the more convoluted the whole thing got. So convoluted that it gave me a headache, and at five a.m. I had to get up and take some paracetamol. Which must have worked, because the headache was gone when I woke up again at eleven-thirty.

I lay there for fifteen minutes or so, just listening, to see if I could hear Jas in the apartment, hoping that he wouldn’t be around so I could get up and go down the hall safely to the bathroom. I didn’t hear anything. And when my bladder couldn’t stand the stress one minute longer I got up. As I went down the hallway I had a quick scan around. He wasn’t there.

But things had changed.

After my trip to the bathroom I took a closer look. Most of Jas’s stuff that had been packed away earlier in the week was gone. I went down the hallway to his bedroom and opened the door. All that was left was his bed and some clothes. I closed the door smartly—the last thing in the world I wanted to see right now was that bed—and made my way to the living room.

There was a note beside the phone.

Charlie

As you’ve probably already noticed, I’ve moved most of my stuff out. I’ll come back and pick the rest up around one. Not sure if you’ll be there or not, but you know you can always get me on my mobile if you want to talk. Either way, I’ll give you a call at your mum’s in the next few weeks. I don’t want this to be the end of us.

J.

I don’t want this to be the end of us. I re-read it, holding the note in my right hand.

Ha! Us!

What ‘us’? There was no ‘us’. There was only me, lusting after Jas, and Jas who wasn’t returning the favour. Unrequited love. There’s nothing quite so embarrassing. I did the cringing thing again, thinking about it.

And what made me feel even worse was that I’d seen a friend go through it once. Unrequited love, that is. I’d watched her make a fool of herself for months on end over some guy. Seeing everyone else watch the proceedings like a spectator sport had been equally as bad as the point when the guy had finally turned her down and she was heartbroken.

Exactly how Jas must have been feeling about me. Utterly embarrassed for me. Udderly, I thought, as I remembered the lovesick cow once more.

I checked the clock on the wall. Just past midday. I had to get out of the apartment. And fast.

I had the quickest shower of my life, dressed in anything I could find and ran to the bus stop. I didn’t care where I went, didn’t care what I did, just so long as I wasn’t there when Jas came back. I didn’t want to be around to see that embarrassment of his when he came through the front door.

I went to the movies and saw something. I can’t remember what it was, just that it was bad and something I never would have seen if I’d had any real choice about it—which I didn’t. The fact was, it was on, it was a two-hour time-filler, and that was all I cared about. After that I bought a shirt I didn’t like nor want, and definitely couldn’t afford, then picked up some groceries that I didn’t need. At five p.m. the shops closed, and as I couldn’t bear to see another film I wasn’t remotely interested in I caught the bus home.

Jas wasn’t there, and everything—every last possession that was his—was gone.

I went into his room and just stood there. I couldn’t even smell him. It was as if he’d never been there at all. As if he’d never existed. I walked around the room slowly, running one hand against the wall, taking everything in. I stopped when I came to something rough.

Oh, nice.

The bed-head. Jas’s metal bed-head had made a mark on the wall. No prizes for guessing how that had happened. And who it hadn’t been with.

I turned and left the room, wondering why I’d gone in there in the first place. It had been a stupid thing to allow myself to do. I had to keep busy, to try and forget about what had happened.

I made my way to the kitchen, stopping by the phone on the way to turn the answering machine off. And then, when I had, I thought better of it and switched it back on again to screen any calls.

In the kitchen, I was surprised to find another note from Jas. Well, not another note. The same note as before, with a sentence or two scribbled onto the bottom. He’d added:

Hoped you’d be here so we could talk. Will call.

J.

He did call. Several times, in fact. But I didn’t call back. And funnily enough it wasn’t me, but my aunt Kath who saw him next, three months later. We were both staying at my mum’s, looking after her while she was unwell. Watching a rare spot of TV one evening, she suddenly hollered, ‘Charlie—Charlie, come here, quick.’

I rushed into the living room. ‘What?’

She just pointed at the TV ‘Isn’t that, um, what’s-his-face? Your flatmate? The guy you were living with?’

After a good few minutes of wide-eyed staring at the TV my brain kicked back in. I was surprised she’d even spotted him. Because it was Jas, all right. But at the same time it wasn’t Jas. It was someone called…Zamiel. Apparently named after one of the original fallen angels—not to be confused with the original Charlie’s Angels, of course.

He was wearing a full black leather bodysuit held together with what looked like safety pins, along with thigh-high boots and a whip. He’d been made-up with a whitened face, lots of kohl eyeliner and blood-red lipstick. His hair, black as black, was doing things that hair simply can’t do by itself, and it was so hideously razored I just knew some celebrity hairdresser had been paid a very large wad of money to get the desired effect.

I flinched seeing it. Him. The closest I can come to describing it would be Edward Scissorhands meets Liz Hurley’s famous Versace dress on acid.

I sank slowly down onto the floor and watched the rest of the programme. It was one of those half-hour current affairs shows that like to expose mechanics who are ripping the general public off, banks who are ripping the general public off and, every so often, run another story as well. Naturally, they’d gone to town on this baby.

It seemed that Jas—sorry, Zamiel—was the lead singer in some band called Spawn. The presenter seemed to be under the impression that everyone knew about Spawn, so I presumed they’d been in the media for a while now and, being so busy looking after Mum, I just hadn’t heard about them. Apparently the group was promoting some less than desirable things, like devil worship. There was lots of lovely information specifically about Zamiel too. Like Playboy, they’d arranged these things into two categories—his likes and dislikes.

Likes: eating live animals, sleeping in his custom-designed coffin, seducing young boys.

Dislikes: organised religion, old people, vegetarians, Britney Spears.

But then they got to the biggie. Zamiel as the new homosexual pin-up boy. And his new boyfriend. A very, very famous actor.

Cue footage of very, very famous actor sticking his tongue down Zamiel’s throat.

Cue presenter saying how disgusting it all was and that society was obviously falling apart at the seams.

End of story.

‘Oh,’ Kath said, and I jumped a bit. I’d been so engrossed in watching the TV I’d forgotten she was even there. ‘Oh,’ she said again. ‘And I thought he was such a nice boy. I guess I’d better go check on your mother.’

And then she left me by myself. But I was never really alone, was I? Not when I had my acute embarrassment to keep me company. It was back again now, in full force. Jas was gay. He was gay. He was gay.

And then, inch by inch, the redness crept its way up my neck and took over my face as I realised what it was I’d done. He was gay. And I, Charlie, had jumped him and then screamed a million things at him to cover up my embarrassment at being rejected. When really what he had been trying to do was tell me something.

He was gay.

Oh, God.

I put my head in my hands then and stared blankly at the TV. There was a sitcom on and I suddenly wished that all my problems could be solved in the final five minutes of every half-hour too. A tall blonde had chosen that precise moment to walk into the kitchen on the show and I was suddenly reminded of something. Those girls. Over that month. In the Magnolia Lodge kitchen. The ones with the smiles. What about them? That was the one piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit.

I sat and thought about it for ages. I tried to work back through the whole thing. Tried to see it from an impartial point of view, rather than that of the lovesick cow.

Moo.

First there were no girls. There weren’t even any friends. Then, for a short period of time, there were lots of friends and lots of girls. Then there were no friends and no girls again. So most of the time there were no friends and no girls. It just didn’t make sense. But maybe…

Maybe that was the whole point? That it didn’t make sense. Perhaps that was where I was going wrong in trying to sort this all out. After all, he was at uni, he dressed nicely and he’d bought us both tickets to The Sound of Music. Oh, no. That was it. No wonder it didn’t make sense to me. It hadn’t even made sense to him. Because that was what he’d been doing—he’d been working it all out, the sexuality thing. Like you’re supposed to do at uni. And now he’d worked it out. He was gay.

Charlie, my girl, you’re a genius.

Just three months and a very embarrassing incident in Jas’s bedroom too late.

I really couldn’t call Jas back after that, and when he phoned again, around a month later, it was at a bad time. Mum had been really sick for a few days and had finally let Kath and I take her to the hospital. She hated the hospital, so we tried to stay with her for as many hours of the day as the staff would let us. To make matters worse, it was hard for me, being at Mum’s—seeing her sculpture and realising I was getting nothing done. Going nowhere fast. Then there was skipping around the subject of uni every time someone asked when my results were coming out.

I was preoccupied.

And by the time Mum was home again I’d conveniently lost Jas’s number. So I didn’t call him back that time either. Yes, I know it’s a poor excuse, but I had other things on my mind. Mum, taking care of the house, catching up on sleep…plenty of things that seemed far more important at the time.

Life went on without Jas, until eventually it was time for me to move back out of my mum’s and get on with my life. It felt like an eternity since the days of Magnolia Lodge, but in reality it had only been six months. Six months since I’d seen Jas. Well, that’s not entirely true, because since the night that Kath and I had seen him on TV, Zamiel was suddenly everywhere. The media had gone Spawn mad, and I couldn’t turn on the TV or buy a newspaper or magazine without some piece of scandal in it about him.

Packing my bags, I came across Jas’s phone number—in my undies drawer, of all places. I held it in my hand for a few seconds, entertaining the thought of picking up the phone and actually calling him. Having a laugh like the old days. Giving him some well-deserved grief about his long hair and leatherwear. But only for a few seconds. Then I shoved the piece of paper in my jeans pocket—out of sight, out of mind.

I found it again the next day, when I was in the kitchen. Once more I held it in my hand. I think I might have even reached out for the phone this time. But if I did I wrenched my hand back smartly and then busied myself pouring a tall glass of water, because the next thing I remember is taking the glass outside with me to sit in Mum’s sculpture courtyard.

As it happened, I chose to sit on Jas’s favourite piece of hers—a full-size table and four chairs. Some people thought it was weird when they saw it, but what they didn’t know was that it was our kitchen table and our chairs. Mum’s and mine before I’d moved out of home the first time. I’d watched her photograph it from every angle one day when it was at its messiest, complete with the Sunday paper, leftover bits of crusty bread, a tub of butter, a jar of honey, the chairs we’d been sitting in pulled out and left at angles. And that was the sculpture, the scene frozen in time.

I smoothed the phone number out on the table, eyed it until I’d finished my glass of water, and then systematically tore it into the smallest shreds I could. As I tore I went about convincing myself that everything really was different now. Not just between the two of us, because of what had happened at the apartment, but truly everything. The small world we’d built together was no more, just like the apartment block we’d lived in. There was no point in calling him. I wasn’t part of his new life and I didn’t want to look like a desperate groupie, wanting to be remembered now he was famous.

It would be almost another year and a half before I saw Jas in person again.

Chapter Five

‘Flight 624. Flight 624 to London via Singapore is now boarding. At this time we would like to ask that first and business class passengers, and passengers in rows 50 and higher please board first. Other rows will be called shortly.’

I stop thinking about Jas and Magnolia Lodge and wake up to myself. That’s me. My flight. I check my boarding pass, see that I’m in row 55, and get up hurriedly to board. As I leave I notice my coffee. I haven’t drunk a drop of that second cup.

I wait in line to swipe my boarding pass and collect my headphones, wait my turn for the flight attendant to tell me which side of the plane I’m on, wait for people to stow their bags. Finally I make it to my seat. An aisle seat, just like I’d asked for…but right next to the toilets.

Well, I think, I didn’t see that coming.

And, even better, I’ve been lumped with the oldest plane in the world. No personal TV screen for me, and the nearest communal one is miles away.

When I’m settled in, I check the in-flight magazine to see what movies I’ll be missing out on. Seen it, seen it, seen it and don’t want to see it anyway, so I’m fine. I try not to move on to thinking about the other downsides to flying on the oldest plane in the world—the fact that it might not stay in the sky. I ditch the in-flight magazine then, and memorise the safety card.

When I’m done, I crane my neck, looking out of the window to see if I can spot the viewing lounge, wondering if Kath and her husband Mark and my two favourite people in the world—their newborn twins, Annie and Daisy—have stayed to watch the plane leave. I’d offered to catch a cab out to the airport, but Kath had insisted that they take me—they were hunting for an excuse to go on their first big outing as a family and I was it. I squint, scanning the airport windows. They might still be here. I don’t think they’ll be rushing home after all the effort it had taken to get to the airport in the first place.

In order to see me off they’d had to get up early and practise assembling and disassembling what we’d come to call the mega-stroller of death and destruction. They’d been trying to reach the record time of a five-minute set-up, but so far couldn’t break the seven-minute barrier.

Frankly, crossing the carpeted airport floor, we’d looked as if the five of us were about to make a trek through the Himalayas rather than one of us was flying to London.

I still had to step back in wonder every time I saw that stroller. You couldn’t even call it a stroller, in my opinion. I went shopping with Kath and Mark to buy the thing and quickly became stroller-flabbergasted. First of all, there were whole shops devoted to the things. Just to strollers! Then there was the choice these shops offered. There were strollers for running and strollers for shopping, and even strollers with little flags that you pulled along behind your mountain bike.

The one Kath and Mark finally decided on was the biggest smash-’em-up-derby stroller of them all. Hence the name—the mega-stroller of death and destruction. The mega—for short—was a double seater that, like eighties limos, seemed to go on for ever, with a tray down at the bottom that you could carry things in—like three weeks’ worth of groceries, if you had to—and all kinds of things that flipped in and out. It probably even had indicators and side mirrors that I hadn’t discovered yet.

I bought them a bumper sticker for it—‘This is my other car’.

Still, there obviously wasn’t enough room for everything in that stroller, because as we’d made our way towards Immigration, Mark had had to stop every so often to pick up the bits and pieces he was losing off the contraption as he went. A teddy bear here, a Teletubby there. Annie and Daisy had simply gurgled happily.

‘Here we are,’ Mark had said, pulling up the stroller in front of my stop. I’d given Kath a hug then. And Mark a hug. And Annie and Daisy a kiss. And then another kiss. And then another one.

I was going to miss the twins terribly. I’d prepared myself for it because I knew I’d got all too used to having them around for the last four weeks. The whole four weeks of Annie and Daisy’s lives. Not having them as my sun—the thing my eating and sleeping and just about everything revolved around every day—was going to feel strange. Very strange indeed.

I gave them both one last kiss. ‘I’m going to miss you guys,’ I said, taking one each of their tiny hands.

‘Ring me when I’m up at four a.m. feeding them and I’ll swap places with you,’ Kath groaned.

I looked up at her and laughed. She didn’t mean it. But then I took another glance. Noticed the bags underneath her eyes. OK, so she might mean it a little bit.

‘I’ve got to go,’ I said, giving Kath and Mark one quick, last hug. ‘Thanks so much. For everything…’

‘Stop it,’ Mark said. ‘We should be thanking you. You’ve been a huge help this month.’

‘Go on.’ Kath urged me over to the Immigration queue. ‘Have a good time. Enjoy yourself. And don’t think about…things. Just have fun.

‘And call us as soon as you get off the plane,’ she added as an afterthought.

‘OK, I will.’ I turned around and headed off. I didn’t look at the twins again, or I knew, just knew, they’d give me one of their silly googly smiles and I’d end up kissing them for ever. Such a sucker.

But that’s the way aunts are supposed to be, isn’t it? Well, honorary aunts, anyway. I’m really a cousin, but because of my age, and the amount I hang around them, I’ve been promoted to the glorious rank and title of Auntie Charlie. Or Auntie Charlotte, if they’re going to be a picky pair and insist on the name I was lumped with—after my grandmother—which I’m sure they won’t.

Because cool Auntie Charlie will make sure of that.

I’m planning on being the bad auntie, you see. The one who lets them have double ice-cream cones and takes them to get their ears pierced when they’re staying on holiday even though they’re not supposed to get them done till they’re thirteen. The popular auntie.

I did the bag in the X-ray machine thing, then made my way through uneventfully to line up and have my passport stamped. Don’t turn back. Don’t turn back, I told myself.

So of course I turned back. Looked for the four of them. Saw them. Waved. They waved back. I waved a bit more, then turned back again to take a step forward as someone left the queue.

And that was it. When I turned around again I couldn’t see them any more.

Instantly I felt a pang of loss for a family that wasn’t really my own, but who treated me just as if I were.

Like this trip, for instance. A present from Kath and Mark. And, I guess, sort of from my mum. A present that I’d only received last night. They’d sat me down after dinner and given me the envelope.

‘For you.’ Kath had passed it to me without any great aplomb. Almost as if it were just a piece of mail I’d overlooked. ‘You don’t have any plans for the weekend, do you?’ she’d said.

I’d taken the envelope from her. ‘No—why?’

‘Open it and see.’

I’d opened it up…and then I’d almost died.

It was a plane ticket. And an itinerary. For me. For tomorrow.

Mark was standing beside Kath when I looked up again. I opened my mouth to begin to say something to them, but nothing came out. I tried again, opening and shutting it, my tongue suddenly feeling ten times larger than usual. Kath gave me a glass of water and, after drinking it in its entirety, I was able to speak again. Not much, however.

‘But, why?’ was all I could come out with.

So they told me. The trip was just something they thought I deserved. Something they’d heard me talk about—something they’d been thinking would be good for me for a while and were waiting for me to get around to. But I hadn’t. So they had. It wasn’t much—not a big trip, they said, and they’d left the ticket home open, so I could stay on if I felt like it. They added that if I was wise I’d take it and run, as there wasn’t going to be much sleep going on in the house for probably quite some time.

Not much—not a big trip. I couldn’t believe they’d said that. Here they were, just having had not one baby but two, and they were paying large sums of money over to travel agents…for me. I had to come right out and say it. I was going to pay for it. I’d give them the money back. I’d meant to book something myself, but kept putting it off.

And that was when Kath spoke up, cutting me off. ‘It’s, um, from your mum, Charlie,’ she said. ‘She gave me some money for incidentals. Things you might need but that you might not know you need, if that makes any sense.’

The three of us had simply looked at each other, blinking, for a bit. Until, that was, Kath’s eyes slid over to Mark and she sighed. ‘And now it’s probably time for Mark to apologise for the trip he chose.’

Mark had got a very sheepish air about him then. ‘I thought you were meant to be having fun. And this looked like fun. To me, anyway.’

I checked the itinerary more closely. London and an open ticket back. Fantastic—just as I thought I’d read. Oh, but there was a tour attached. Wait…

To Oktoberfest?

Kath shrugged. ‘I’m afraid it’s non-refundable. I hope you like beer. And sauerkraut. And big fat sausages. For five days.’ She poked Mark with one finger as she said each sentence.

Now, I’m what I call a sad vegetarian—as in, the kind of person who lusts after large pieces of steak but can’t eat meat directly after seeing actual live cows, lambs, pigs, chickens et cetera. I’d seen a truck full of chickens whizz past me on the highway not long before this, and a feather had landed on the windscreen. So I knew I was going to be vegetarian for at least a week or so. Or until someone offered me a plate of something that just looked far too good to pass up.