Tessa in Love (16 page)

Congratulations again on your brilliant brain. I’m now worried that you’re mentally correcting the grammar in my e-mails.

Yes, my GCSE Spanish is helping me out. I can understand a lot of what people say, but I’m very slow at speaking to them. Luckily they’re very patient.

Lots of volunteers are Peruvian themselves — there’s a culture of selflessness, which is surprising and really makes you think. But the kids here are often in real need of a bit of love. We took some into Lima — with permission — and to an ice cream parlour. Excellent ice cream. I showed them a picture of you — they said you were beautiful.

Sending you photos of kids with ice cream

smeared on their faces. I wish you were here to see it and hear them giggle.

From:
[email protected]

TO:
[email protected]

Subject:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

i love you.

I hadn’t had a boyfriend before. I’d been happy before. Why, then, was it so difficult being so far from Wolfie, when he sent me e-mails, talked to me on the phone at least once a week, and I knew he was coming back? For one thing, the way I’d lived before, staying in watching telly, surfing websites, eating vast quantities of Jaffa cakes, now seemed totally boring. But it was more than that. Scarier. I had more to worry about and more to lose. I was afraid that the separation might change him. He was really living now – going out and doing important and amazing things, meeting new people. While I was excited for him and loved hearing about it, how was I going to compete with that kind of excitement, and what was going to keep him in our dull, tiny town for the rest of the year? If I was the only thing keeping him here, would I be enough?

But it was summer, so it was impossible to be sad every day when the weather was so gorgeous. One day, Matty and I were lying in my back garden enjoying the sun. Matty said, ‘Remember when I told you love was the last thing we wanted, and then we both went straight out and got it.’

‘I know – it’s nuts. Have you changed your mind?’

‘Well, Jim’s in our year, so I’ve put off one of the problems for a couple of years.’

‘I think now that you’ve found Jim, you’ve put off all of the problems.’

Matty turned on to her stomach, and looked at me. ‘I think I was a bit addicted to worrying,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit unnerving, all this happiness. Jim never strops, he never tells me off, he never whines about me not giving him enough attention. Where’s the catch? He just makes everything easy, and I can’t see a time when he won’t.’

‘Wolfie makes everything hard, I think,’ I said. ‘He tells me he loves me, then he tells me he won’t spend the summer with me. But I’m only unhappy because I’m happy, you know? If I didn’t get so much out of going out with him, if thinking about him didn’t make me smile every single time, then it wouldn’t make me so sad to not have him around. So it’s not real unhappiness, is it? It’s just noticing that there are other... emotions ... than being in love.’

‘Yeah,’ Matty said, ‘I’ve heard there are. But what’s the point of them?

I
could see Wolfie even though he was only talking to me on the phone. See him clearly. Almost touch him. I could see the light stubble on his cheeks and chin, the softness of his mouth. He was wearing the army-green T-shirt I loved and the cords he’d worn the first time we kissed, and he was holding the phone and talking to me, like I was watching a film of him, but for some reason I couldn’t answer him back – I couldn’t speak. He was saying, ‘Tess, I can’t live without you any longer. This whole summer’s pointless without you; Peru is beautiful, but I miss you too much. I’m going to get a boat back in the morning and we can be together. We never have to be apart again and I’m not going anywhere without you again.’ I was still trying to answer, and couldn’t. I could only hold the receiver more tightly and look at him, my eyes pleading with him, but that seemed to be enough. He was saying, ‘Me too. I’m
always
going to be in love with you,’ then, almost shouting, ‘I’m always going to love you, Tessa,’ and getting further away, his voice getting quieter and the image of him fading and shrinking, and he was kissing his fingertips and blowing gently on them, while his brown eyes searched for me and found me.

It was a dream; I was dreaming. My bedroom was drenched with sunshine – the curtains were rubbish at keeping the light out. It was only 6.20 a.m. and I didn’t have to get up or go anywhere. Wolfie had been gone for sixty-four days, and would be in Peru for another sixty-five. He’d e-mailed to say he’d bought a new phone card and would be calling tonight to use it all, to mark the halfway point.

It had been days since the last time he’d phoned me, and not hearing from him was hard. But when he called it was hard too, because, when it was over, or after I’d read the e-mails he sent over an Internet session, I knew there would be nothing else until at least the next day. The dream was bitter-sweet, because I missed him so much it almost felt like
something,
but I’d woken too soon and couldn’t catch it back.

I got up anyway, tiptoeing downstairs to make myself a cup of tea and listen to the birdsong. It was strange being the only person up when the house was light. I read yesterday’s newspaper at the kitchen table, picking the cold icing off a cake I’d found in the fridge. Today Matty and I were going to sort out her mum’s garden.

Matty wasn’t really up by the time I got round to hers.

She was still wearing her pyjamas and watching MTV.

‘Come and look at this,’ she said, turning the volume up on a video she liked.

‘Aren’t you two going to do something useful, today?’ Matty’s mum said, walking past the door. ‘You go back to school the day after tomorrow and you haven’t done anything with your summer, and, Matilda, you’re not at all prepared for going back – you haven’t started organising anything. You shouldn’t waste your free time. It’s precious, you know.’

Matty rolled her eyes. We ended up watching music videos for the next hour, without Matty making much of a move to get up. She was telling me about how Jim was turning out to be the best boyfriend she’d ever had; he was so romantic and cute.

‘When you started going out with Wolfie,’ Matty said, ‘I realised there was probably something wrong with me and Lee. That was probably why I was suspicious of Wolfie – he sounded too good to be true. I know relationships are always easier at the start, and you start taking each other for granted a bit, but Lee was never . . . you know. Jim doesn’t just get me – he
cares
about me. I don’t think I’ve had a boy like that before.’

I was so pleased for her. Matty’s looks and confidence had always guaranteed her no shortage of boys, but all too often they’d been the wrong types of boy – some of them, like Lee, were insecure and tried to put her down, so she wouldn’t realise she was too good for them, others had mainly been interested in her because she was so pretty. Jim had always loved her, the real her; the proof was in Cadeby Wood. Matty was showing me the little pretend sleeve-notes he’d written in the case of a CD he’d made her, when her mum came in and said my mum was outside in the car.

I was instantly worried. I knew there was no non-serious reason she’d choose to drive over when I had my phone. I hurried downstairs, trying to work out what could be wrong, and why she’d drive here without just calling and asking me to go back. I was afraid it was something terribly serious, that maybe my brother or my dad were hurt, and my heart started beating out of control.

‘Tessa, I need to talk to you,’ she said when I got to the car. Her voice was horribly low and quiet. Her face was pale and she looked afraid, which really frightened me, because I couldn’t remember ever having seen her like that. I sort of waved to Matty, who stood in her doorway, looking concerned, trying to reassure her that I was fine even though I didn’t have a clue what was wrong. I got in the car and Mum drove a little way around the corner, away from the houses, and parked.

‘Chunk called our house just a little while ago. Wolfie was in a traffic accident. He died yesterday.’

I believed her straight away and it sank in straight away and I started hurting straight away, and my mum leaned over me in the car, hugging me and stroking my hair while I shook. I was shivering all over; my skin was hurting, and I thought I might forget how to breathe. I could hear my voice, high and weird sounding – it didn’t sound like me. It sounded as if I could hear it through speakers, ringing in my ears and making fun of me. I kept asking the same questions: ‘Do they know it’s true? Is it definitely Wolfie? Do they KNOW? Is he definitely dead? Has Chunk seen him?’ But I was just hoping I could find a loophole that would make it not have happened, while in my heart I knew there was no hope. It was almost like I understood all at once why our separation had been so hard – why I’d been afraid for us when he said he had to go – as if I’d somehow known something bad would happen.

He’d been crossing a road in Lima, when a lorry was taking a corner too fast and lost control; it crashed through a shop window after hitting Wolfie. They told me he would have died instantly.

***

Chunk travelled straight back to Britain. He came to visit me the next day, and brought round some of Wolfie’s things – his wallet, his hoodie that I sometimes used to wear, some photographs of Manchay he’d just had developed. There weren’t many of him, they were all of Peruvian children and pretty views and Chunk, and I felt bad as I looked through them, because I was disappointed there weren’t more pictures of Wolfie.

‘He was nuts about you, you know,’ Chunk said, mumbling, because he wasn’t used to being serious. I looked at him: he looked terrible – his eyes were bloodshot and his hair was dirty and sticking up all over. ‘He kept complaining every night before we slept about having to share a bedroom with me. The morning it happened, he woke up and said he’d just been dreaming about seeing you. Sorry, that’s sort of a stupid thing to say, but I remember it.’

‘I just like hearing about him,’ I said.

‘He was missing you a lot,’ Chunk said. ‘He liked the work, but he got quite blue in the evenings. Wouldn’t join in when I was trying to pull local girls. You know, typical man in love.’

I started crying, and Chunk put his arms around me and I let myself fall against him, even though we’d never really touched before. I buried my face in his shoulder, drenching it with tears, gulping with pain. In a moment of quiet, I heard Chunk sniff and realised he was crying too. He’d just lost his best friend. He’d had to fly back alone, knowing that he’d never see him again. Then he’d come straight to me. He was amazingly brave and kind, and I loved him and wished there was something I could do to thank him and make him feel better.

When Chunk went home, I put the hoodie around my shoulders and curled into a ball on my bed, burying my face deep in the sheets so I could cry out loud without anyone hearing me and worrying that I was dying, although it felt as if I might, and I wanted to, at that moment I really wanted to. I felt as though my heart had been ripped straight out of my body, leaving a raw, aching hole in me. This horrible,
physical
pain.

In Wolfie’s wallet, there was a black and white photograph of me laughing that I realised was the one he’d taken when we went to the wood together for the newspaper piece. On the back of it he’d written,
‘Tess, ten minutes before we first kissed’.

When school started again, my mum let me take the first week off; we’d agreed it would just be a week. I’d expected her to make me go, and to tell me it would be good for me to get out and into a new routine, that it would take my mind off things. Instead, she made me jammy toast, and my dad took over all the rest of the cooking, and, when she had time, my mum sat with me and held me, and sometimes she cried too.

Wolfie’s funeral was on the first Friday after school started again and, as I hadn’t been back to school yet, and had hardly stepped outside my house, I found the large group of people made me nervous, and I wanted to hide from them. Wolfie’s mum and dad sat together and spent ages talking to each other, which I found touching. Chunk talked about his best friend in front of everyone. I didn’t. I couldn’t. During the service, Jane held my hand and cried the most. Matty sat on my other side and leaned against me.

Wolfie’s mum came over to talk to me at the wake. She looked a lot like him; she had the same swingy brown hair, the same brown eyes, but hers were sadder, and harder.

‘He wrote to me to tell me he’d fallen in love,’ Wolfie’s mum said. She had asked me to call her by her first name, Chloe. ‘He sounded happier than I’ve ever known him being.’

‘He
was
happy,’ I said. I wanted to tell her how fantastic her son was. But I didn’t really dare, because I was afraid of her. I was afraid that she might suddenly shout at me and tell me off for letting him go to Peru. A small part of me was almost angry with her for having hurt him. I knew that the pain she was going through must have been awful, and she must have felt so much guilt. In the end, though, I realised all I wanted to tell her was that he had been happy.