The Manifesto on How to be Interesting (23 page)

She nodded. “That sounds…perfect.”

And it did.

She saw in his face that her answer had prompted the same moral battle and she watched as it raged within him. But his brain obviously came to the same conclusion because he gave her a beaming smile.

“Shall we meet at the train station? Say, ten o'clock? I'll call in sick.”

“Yes.”

He let go of her and sat back. “It goes without saying, I guess, but you shouldn't tell anyone about this.”

Bree smiled for the first time all day.

“Sir?” She was afraid to ask the question, but she needed to. “Why are you doing this?”

He scratched his head, pushing his hair back from his forehead. His entire face looked soft, like a velour teddy bear.

“Because sometimes it's just your turn to be there for someone, Bree. And I don't think you'll let anyone other than me be there for you right now.”

Dangerous words. Dangerous, true words.

“Thank you.”

“I'll see you tomorrow.”

Just as she felt able to breathe again, just as she felt safe again…she bumped into Hugo in the corridor. Literally bumped. Like bumper cars. When she saw who it was, all the suffocating black matter rushed back.

“Well, well, well, look who it is.”

He did a full body scan. She resisted every urge to shudder and run. The collar of his polo shirt was thick with mud – rugby practice. She'd been stupid to think she was safe after school.

“Hello, Hugo.”

He held his hands up. “Ooooo, so formal, Bree. That hardly seems appropriate, does it?”

Sick. Sick feeling in her stomach.

“Shh. Are you completely stupid?”

He ran his tongue along his top teeth. “I'm completely up for a repeat performance.”

So much sickness and yet she couldn't tell him to slam his penis in a fridge door. He was too dangerous.

She lowered her voice to a hiss. “Aren't you supposed to lose interest now you've got what you wanted? Isn't that how you work?”

He laughed. A proper throw-your-head-back laugh.

“Aren't you supposed to become all clingy now and ask me to dump Jassmine and marry you?”

“Keep your voice down. Someone will hear.”

He looked around. “So?”

“So? Do you want to piss on Jassmine's heart?”

“Mmmm. Kinky. I didn't know you were into water sports, Bree.”

She couldn't bear to be near him. “You're disgusting.” She turned on her heel to leave but he grabbed her wrist. Hard.

“Where are you going?”

His face was angry suddenly. Aggressive. Fear replaced the nausea.

“Away. Before you say something stupid. Loudly. And screw everything up.”

“I hope this doesn't mean the end of our time together?”

“Jassmine is my friend.” Bree stuck out her jaw. Maybe reasoning with his soul would work? He must have one somewhere, buried inside all that testosterone.

Hugo let go. “Funny…you weren't acting like her friend the other night.”

“And you weren't acting like her boyfriend.”

“Touché.” He smiled. “And this is why we're so good together.”

Bree mustered all the strength left in her drained body, grabbed his hand, and placed it on his own crotch.

“No. You and your hand are what's good together. And I really don't want to come between such a special relationship.”

She stalked off down the corridor, leaving him laughing behind her.

The moment she got back into her empty home she got into bed. Her mum must've been out shopping, or yoga-ing, or wondering why her new perfect daughter had turned back into her old crappy daughter. Bree pulled the duvet over her face and allowed all the emotion she'd repressed since seeing Hugo to seep out of her. She bit her fist until tiny specks of blood emerged and she could taste the iron in her mouth. This brought back the nausea. She dragged her bin to her bedside and dry retched into it, spitting and gurgling up nothingness onto the top of a celeb magazine Jass had brought round. After that pleasantness passed, she stared at the ceiling, counting to a hundred and back again, trying not to think about the sharp objects in the en suite.

Hugo was dangerous. She'd known that from the start and that this part of her plan wouldn't be easy. What she hadn't counted on was a) growing more of a conscience and b) a sexual experience so awful that she couldn't bear even entertaining the thought of doing it again. This threw an oversized spanner into everything.

How could she keep him placated enough so he would leave her be, without being actually sick? He loved the chase, she knew that. But she could only fight him off for so long before he got frustrated and wanted to play a different game.

The darkness crept back in again. It started in the top corners of the ceiling and she watched as it edged down the walls. She could see an actual shadow creeping down towards her, ready to penetrate through her skin, pour through her veins and head straight to her heart. Making it all numb.

Bree had no will left to fight it.

But then, just as the blackness was about to reach her, she got out of bed and went to her special bookshelf. To let the books rescue her, like they always did.

She took out her copy of Jane Austen's
Persuasion
and flicked through to her favourite quote at the end.

“I am half agony, half hope.”

The book fell open to the page, the quote still decorated with pink biro hearts Bree had intricately drawn all round it when she first read it many years ago. It was a quote about love, written in a letter to the heroine at the end, after a story of patience and longing and things never going as they should.

To Bree, it was a quote about her life.

Half of it was agony, the simple agony of being Bree, of seeing herself as the world saw her. Weird. Pointless. Nasty.

But the other half of her life was hope. Hope that it would all be worthwhile in the end, hope that she'd eventually stop hurting all the time.

Hope that the agony would produce words and sentences as beautiful as that one.

It was also a quote about love.

Mr Fellows…

She had a whole day with him tomorrow.

It was like a match being struck.

And the bad retreated as she fell asleep properly – for the first time in two days – a small smile on her troubled face, and the book clutched in her hand.

Her legs wobbled as she walked to meet him at the station. Her knees, in fact, had grown a will of their own that didn't agree with the other parts of her lower limbs. It was like trying to run a marathon on tranquillizers.

Then, of course, there'd been the issue of what to wear.

Bree knew he wouldn't care. Not really. He'd kissed her in that awful champagne clingy mess at the leavers' ball. He'd seen her vast collection of neon stripy tights. Witnessed every statement hair colour. And…it wasn't even a date, was it?

Plus Bree had a brain. A brain he was interested in. She laughed as she realized it was kind of like her brain was going on a day trip today – like a witness protection person being allowed a restful day by the sea or something. She was allowed to say intellectual things today. She could talk about the books she'd been secretly reading. All this was wonderful, and yet it would be so lovely if she could just look…well, fantastic at the same time.

In the end she'd plumped for dark skinny jeans and a lacy black jumper, with a big faux fur cropped overcoat that made her feel like a glamorous spy. A touch of red lipstick and just a brushing of mascara finished the look off.

Oh – and she'd accidently-on-purpose hidden a Kafka book in her bag which she planned to accidently-on-purpose drop on the floor and say “
Oh, oops, silly me. Have you read this one?”
before looking up at him through her eyelashes, the very face of intellectuality, sexuality and innocence.

Well, that was the plan.

She pressed the button at the pelican crossing and waited for the green man to flash. She was only about twenty metres away from the station entrance and caught sight of Mr Fellows waiting for her. Her heart went into overdrive. He was here! She watched, amused, as he paced back and forth outside the sliding doors. He repeatedly checked his watch, looking troubled.

He hadn't seen Bree yet.

She crossed the road and walked up to meet him, her eyes on him the whole way. He kept turning his head from side to side, jumpy, looking for spies from school or something. And then, finally, he saw her.

She watched a conflicting range of emotions cross his face. Fear. Shock that she'd come, maybe? And then relief. His eyes softened and he couldn't help but smile as she walked up the steps.

There was an awkward moment when they didn't know how to greet each other. They performed some weird hug-kiss-dodge dance, before quickly and silently deciding on a polite British peck on the cheek.

“Bree, you came.”

She grinned. “You sound surprised.”

“No. Yes. Well, I didn't know if you would.” Nervous energy poured out of him. His voice sounded crazed.

“I said I would, didn't I?” she said in a soft voice, trying to calm him.

“Yes of course. I've got you a Travelcard. Although I couldn't use a Young Persons Railcard to get a discount. Because of course I don't have one, do I? Cos I'm an old bugger. Not like you. So I just got you a regular one. Is that okay? That's okay, isn't it?”

“Sir. It's fine. Do you want some money for it?”

He flinched. “Oh God. You just called me sir. What are we doing, Bree?”

Away from the classroom, Mr Fellows seemed completely different. There was no authoritative desk between the two of them. He wasn't wearing his normal navy-blue suit, but a grey V-necked jumper and jeans, with a beanie hat covering most of his hair. It made everything even odder. Even more wrong. Yet, when Bree thought about how his eyes had looked when he'd seen her, she felt the happiest she had since she'd started this stupid project.

“I don't actually know your real name, Mr Fellows.”

It was the stupidest thing to say. He sighed and put his hands over his face.

“Of course you don't. Oh God, seriously, Bree, what are we doing?”

She reached out and gently removed his hands, forcing him to look at her.

“We're not doing anything wrong.”

“It's illegal.”

“No it's not. I might just be bunking off school because I'm a seventeen-year-old who hates my life. You might be pulling a sickie to go for another job interview. We've bumped into each other at the train station by chance. No one can prove otherwise.”

He stared at her. “But that's not what we're doing, is it, Bree?”

“I'm not sure what we're doing but I know it doesn't feel wrong.”

A smile crossed his face. “Exactly right as always.” His voice was happier now. “Anyway, it's not like we're hugging or kissing or anything, is it?”

“No.” Bree managed to keep the disappointment hidden. “You're just cheering me up, right?”

“Right.”

They grinned at each other.

“So when's the train leaving?” she asked.

Mr Fellows looked through the glass of the sliding doors at the announcement board. “About fifteen minutes.”

“Brilliant. Plenty of time. I'm just going to buy a bottle of water.” She moved to go to the little shop attached to the station but he called something out, making her stop and turn round.

“Logan,” he said.

“What?”

He looked right into her eyes, so intensely that she really couldn't breathe. Only savour…

“My ‘real' name. It's Logan.”

Smiling, she said, “Nice to meet you, Logan.”

He smiled back.

“Nice to meet you too.”

That was the end of the awkwardness for most of the day. Whatever moral hump Logan needed to overcome, it was done. It was a blissful train journey up into London. With rush hour over, half the carriage was empty, leaving plenty of room to devour the broadsheet paper Logan had bought.

It was like being in a couple. The sort of couple Bree had always wanted to be one half of. They rode up in companionable silence – talking only to swap sections or read out bits they thought were good, or funny, or wrong. They occasionally put their papers down and stared vacantly out at fields of green speeding past, which became lines of offices and traffic-clogged roads. Bree made a passing comment about how getting the train into London always reminded her of Larkin's
The Whitsun Weddings
poem and Logan gave her one of those looks that made her feel like she was the most special thing in existence.

She wished the track would spread on infinitely so they could stay in that carriage for ever – that God would build more railway line like Scalextric so she could stay this happy always. But God was obviously too busy pretending to solve world hunger and wars, and so, much too soon, she felt the train slow and grind to a halt in the city at Victoria station.

“Where are we going?” she asked, as they picked up the bits of newspaper they'd inadvertently strewn all over the carriage.

“It's a surprise.”

Bree made a face as she folded up the
Life and Style
section to put in the bin. “I hate surprises.”

“Well, you'll like this one.”

They disposed of their rubbish and navigated their way down to the Underground. The tunnels were warm with leftover body heat from the earlier rush hour. Bree took off her fur coat and fanned herself with her hand while they waited for a tube. One arrived shortly and they hopped on, each holding onto a pole rather than sitting.

“I love the Tube,” Bree said, as they whizzed through the darkness. “It always reminds me of those photos from World War II, crowds of people sleeping down here, using the stations as giant bomb shelters.”