This is Not a Love Story (4 page)

Julian shakes his head. He’s looking at the boot. His experience of police is worse than mine.

Cricket and Roxy hang off to the side, watching.

The smallest jerk of the lot crouches down and holds a hand out as if he wants to run it across the smooth shorn cut of my hair. Involuntarily, I shiver. Julian closes his eyes before shoving the boot off his stomach and pulling me up, close to him.

They fold away our tarpaulin.

“Confiscated.”

Julian drags a hand through his wet hair. “It’s fucking raining,” he pleads.

“Maybe it will convince you to get off the streets and into a shelter, then.”

A shelter? What a fucking joke. So much violence and dealing go on in shelters, we’d have no chance. But there is no point in arguing this out. Julian glances over at Cricket, and we walk away.

The police talk amongst themselves, their waterproof clothing rustling as they move off to dump our tarpaulin somewhere we won’t find it.

C
ASSEY
OPENS
the cafe at seven every day. It can’t be much earlier now as black-coated commuters are beginning to fill the gray streets in the hundreds. The idea of going there after Lloyd cornered me just outside fills me with dread, but we’ve got nowhere else to go.

We walk side by side, heads bowed to the wind. Julian steals a sideways glance at me.

“Are you still mad at me?” he asks quietly.

I wait until he turns to face me, and then I shake my head vigorously. No fucking way.

I’m sorry
, I sign, because it’s easy to say now.
I was upset.

I wish I could have told him this last night.

Before we get to Cassey’s, I tell him about Lloyd and his threat, the fact that he is coming for Julian. With a sickening sense of urgency, I realize we’re going to have to find somewhere else to go, somewhere far away, across the river maybe, or maybe just north, up toward the big parks.

He watches me carefully, intently, as I sign. I love having his complete attention like this. When I’ve finished, he grips my fingers now cold from the rain.

“Okay,” he says. “We get warm first, though.”

We pay for our tea, but Cassey feeds us a sandwich each for free. She doesn’t mention her broken window. If she did, I might die of guilt, especially if Julian then actually offered her his money.

“What happened to your pad, love?” she asks me halfway through the morning, passing me her order book to write on.

I draw all the time. I guess she noticed I wasn’t.

I push the book away and look at Julian. He tells her some kids nicked it.

“All your beautiful drawings!” she exclaims.

All gone
, I sign before I can stop myself.

I wipe my hand across my eyes and get up to walk around for a bit. Cassey feels sorry enough for me as it is. But Julian grabs my hand and digs around in his pocket. He pulls out a small clear plastic bag. He hands it to me, unwilling to meet my eyes.

Cassey drifts away for a second to deal with another customer, so I sit back down and open the bag curiously. I unfold the paper within and see it’s a drawing, my drawing, of two boys kissing on a bus. I drew it when I first ran away, before I met Robyn, even. The boys had been sat in front of me, so the drawing is of the tilted backs of their heads, their mouths.

I had been so amazed that they had done that on a bus, for the whole world to see. They were beautiful.

I thought the drawing had been tucked into the front cover of my pad. Obviously not.

I lay it out on the counter and smooth out the creases. Julian stares at his hands wrapped around his mug of tea. I want to fling my arms around him, but he’s retreated inside himself, and I’m too shy to intrude.

“Is that one of yours?” Cassey gently spins the drawing around to look. “It’s beautiful,” she says thoughtfully.

Carefully, I fold it back up and hand it back to Julian.

“It’s yours,” he says gently, shaking his head, light catching the gold of it. He is so beautiful.

With a sudden burst of inspiration, I pick the drawing up and hold it out to Cassey. I point up at the near bare walls around the cafe. She smiles, shaking her head.

“It’s all you have left,” she says softly.

I grab her order book.
I can draw more,
I write determinedly.

It seems so pointless to hide things away like I was, pictures no one will ever see now. If she truly likes it, I want her to have it.

Smiling, she asks me to sign it, promising to frame it and put it up on the cafe wall.

Without even giving our surroundings the grace of a final glance good-bye, we decide to head north, away from the river.

I don’t feel so well today, and we walk slowly. It’s still raining.

Last night, Cricket told Julian about a squat in Euston not far from the park. He said he heard the bloke who runs it is always on the lookout for new boys. He likes to take pictures, and the squat is part of the deal. We don’t have an address, just a snapshot of the house on a card taken from a phone booth.

As always, Julian doesn’t say any more and leaves me to fill in the gaps. Pictures means porn, means pictures of Julian, not me. He won’t let me be put in a situation like that. I don’t know how I know this; I just do, but at least he’s not risking his life or sanity in some nightmarish dark archway, dread filling every second that he’s gone. At least it’s not that.

O
XFORD
S
TREET
is some strange masochistic shopping hell. My shoulders are bruised, my feet are bruised, and I just don’t want to carry on being pushed and shoved and stepped on as we walk down the busy pavement.
People just don’t care.
And unless you push and shove back, you’re fucking invisible.

Julian grabs my hand and thankfully pulls me out of the stream of people.

“Close your eyes,” he says with this mysterious smile.

When I do, he carefully maneuvers me around until my back is resting against the smooth glass of what I presume is a shop window.

“Wait here.”

And he’s gone.

The air smells black as tar. At least down by the river the breeze blows the black away. And though the rain has slackened off, I can still feel the occasional drop against my skin.

A few minutes later he returns.

“Hold out your hands…. No, keep your eyes closed.”

He’s smiling. I can tell by his voice.

He places something weighty and wide in my outstretched hands.

“Okay, you can open your eyes now.”

I feel like one of those kids I’ve seen on TV, kids at birthday parties or sat in front of a Christmas tree, eyes wide with wonder at a pile of presents wrapped just for them. But it’s not a pile of presents. It’s just one.

It’s just, I’ve never had one before—well, not that someone
chose
for me, anyway.

Quickly I glance up at the name of the shop, seeing it’s the same as the name on the bag in my hands.

Julian tilts his head and lowers his eyes, making his dark eyelashes seem impossibly long against his faintly blushing cheek.

“Open it,” he says softly.

So I do.

Hesitantly excited, I pull out a sketchpad of beautifully thick paper, hard cover, perfect size for my pocket, and a set of pens, all different thicknesses. He knows I love to draw in pen.

There is also a receipt from the shop, which he whips away before I can see.

This must have cost him all the money he had. I stare at the presents without really seeing them.

Suddenly, I burst into tears.

I’m as shocked as he is by my reaction. And this is not a few gracious tears because I’m grateful to him, oh no—I’m sobbing my heart out uncontrollably, and people are staring.

“Remee?”

Perplexed, he pulls me against his chest and wraps his arms around me tightly.

“Fuck, baby, don’t cry,” he whispers softly against my ear.

He’s never called me baby before. It sounds strange and wonderful. It makes me smile as I cry.

As gently as I can, I push him away. My throat is so choked up it’s hard to swallow. I’m so embarrassed.

Thank you,
I sign, dragging my sleeve across my eyes.
I’m okay now.

Julian looks on, utterly bewildered. It would be the perfect excuse to kiss him, just on the cheek, but I’m such a coward.

T
HE
E
USTON
Road is not so far away, but I’m beginning to feel a little dizzy from hunger, or maybe I’m a bit sicker than I thought, so we stop to rest, and I take the opportunity to sketch. Just some kids in a park, but I’m fascinated by their movement and how to capture it.

“You’re really, really good, you know.”

He’s sitting so close I can feel the warmth emanating off him.

I shrug, smiling. I like him watching me.

We move on before the daylight starts to go. It’s only midafternoon, but already the streetlights are beginning to hum. Sometimes when the darkness comes, it feels like it’s going to be dark forever.

Starting at Great Portland Street tube station, we walk the entire length of the Euston Road. There are lots of houses but no squat. It takes us over an hour.

We sit despondently on the curb near King’s Cross Railway Station, staring at the small picture on the card. It shows a row of tall white houses, expensive houses; not one of them
looks
like a squat.

There’s a telephone number at the bottom.

Reluctantly, Julian pulls out the last of his money. Calling ahead is a last resort. It’s easier for them to turn us away without even seeing us, easier for them to lie and deceive us about all sorts of things. And what sort of squat has a phone line anyway?

But we’re cold, and we’re only going to get colder (and hungrier and more desperate) the longer we stare at the stupid card.

We huddle together inside a phone booth across the road from the station as Julian makes the call. I rest my forehead against his shoulder for solidarity and hold my breath, unable to stand the reek of piss.

All around, the streets are teeming with harassed-looking people going home from work.

I wish we were like them. I wish we were going home. I wish we had one.

It’s pretty dark outside now and every light sparkles against the glass. If I squint, it looks like the world is nothing more than a giant burst of starlight, and we’re burning brightly at its center.

Julian holds the phone out for me to hear. It’s just ringing and ringing. He smiles at me, crooked and tired, a look that doesn’t need words to explain it. And then suddenly someone picks up the other end and says, “Hello… hello?” and he shoves it back against his ear.

T
HE
VOICE
on the end of the phone gives Julian an address and vague directions on how to get there. It’s just five minutes away, apparently. But we’re still walking after twenty. I really don’t feel so good anymore, and I just want to stop and rest. My vision is swimming.

The directions take us off the Euston Road and into a neglected high-rise estate. Some of the dilapidated buildings are over fifteen stories high, with narrow concrete balconies and gaping black holes for windows. I can’t imagine they’re as empty as they look, but the estate is ghostly quiet.

Every so often Julian’s fingers brush against mine, and I tense at each touch, imagining some crackle of electricity darting between us, a small firework of sparks. But I know it’s just me. I know Julian doesn’t feel anything like that at all. He probably doesn’t even realize we’re touching.

We avoid the messy rectangular patches of mud where grass or flowers once grew and keep to the glass-strewn paths, because even though all the lamps are lit along the walkways, it’s still somehow dark.

Above us the night sky yawns blackly, the air frozen and still. A strange slow numbness is starting to seep through all my limbs, and my head is beginning to shake uncontrollably. Julian is hunched over beside me, head bowed as though it’s raining.

“Fuck, Remee, I think we’re lost,” Julian whispers into the silence, breaking his stride for a moment to leap atop a wall and look around.

But we quickly carry on, pretending we know where we’re going… pretending we don’t feel we’re being followed at a distance.

In an attempt to lose any possible shadow, we circle each huge building twice until,
finally
, we come to a block with the same number and name as the address we’ve written on the card.

Vermillion House, Block E, fifth floor.

We take the stairs. So much rubbish lies across the steps I can’t even see the floor. At least on the streets it sometimes gets cleaned away.

One flat after another has barred windows and safety doors, but there are no sounds or signs of life within any of them. In Gem’s block you’re hardly through the entrance before you hear screams or laughter or both.

Without having to check the card, we stop outside Number 49. The door is blue and battered. “Slut” is scrawled across it in bloated red letters. This is not a tall white town house on the Euston Road. This is about as far away from “town house” as you can get and still be in London. We look at one another.

Let’s go
, I sign.
I don’t like it.

Julian sighs heavily. He’s really tired. “I don’t like it either, but where are we going to go?”

I shrug. I have a really, really bad feeling about this place, but he’s right, where
are
we going to go? If we go back on the streets, Julian is going to let himself be screwed until he’s as dead-eyed as Roxy. Maybe he feels like being here is a choice, and we have precious few of those.

I wish I could talk to him about it.

Closing his eyes, he reaches out his hand and rests it cautiously against the door before he knocks. Barely an instant later, a tall Asian guy in loose black pants and no top opens the door a fraction and looks over us. His eyes linger on me, and Julian moves to stand in front.