This is Not a Love Story (6 page)

T
HE
ESTATE
doesn’t look any better in the daylight. All desolate and empty. Each bleak space lined with limp, spindly trees stripped of bark. The only sparks of green come from dandelions forcing their way through the cracks in the concrete. It’s as decayed as the Eastern Bloc where my mother grew up. She had few photographs, but the black-eyed girl, so small against those towers of concrete, haunts my thoughts whenever she can.

I press against Julian as we walk along, and he presses back, glancing to see if I’m okay.

And I am. For now.

G
RAY
LIGHT
fills the white sky and does nothing to lift our mood. Since we left the estate, we’ve given up pretending today is going to be a good day. Maybe it will be better than yesterday, but that’s not saying much. At least we’ve had breakfast. Even if we are wearing each other’s cold wet clothes, even if we’d rather be warm than anything, at least we’re not so hungry.

Phillippe chatters constantly, endlessly, nervously. Talking about everything and nothing. Carelessly throwing anecdotes of his childhood in a small dust-bound village in with stories of assaults he’s witnessed or been subjected to on the street. Julian can’t cope. He disappears inside himself when he’s anxious, and right now I know he’s as anxious as I am—anxious of the street, the day, the next few hours. I know so many things he thinks I don’t.

I step between them to give him some space.

I think Phillippe has worked out I can’t speak, so he just smiles at me, bright and wide. I haven’t the heart to tell him I’m not deaf too.

We turn the corner onto a shabby little street, full of Middle Eastern greengrocers and seedy one-room restaurants. It’s as typical and struggling as every other run-down street in this part of London.

At the end of the street is a short row of tall white houses, nothing at all like the terrace in the photograph.

Phillippe stops in front of a house, which he says is actually two houses knocked through into one, though they both have separate front doors. Dirty white curtains hang limply at the windows, and the white paint is peeling off the walls, but it is more like what I expected than the tower block.

Julian squeezes my fingers before standing in front of me, blocking my way up the steps to the front door. It doesn’t take a genius to work out what he’s going to say.

I shake my head before he even starts.
I’m going in with you
, I sign.

“Remee, please…,” he whispers pleadingly as he places warm hands on my shoulders.

I hate the look he’s giving me. It cuts me in half.

I can fucking do this. If you’re going to do it, I’m doing it with you. It’s just my fucking body. We’re all naked under our clothes. Whatever they do in there, they can’t reach inside me. The only person I’ll ever allow to reach inside me is you!
I try to convey all that with my eyes.

I don’t think it works, but I brush past him anyway and march up the steps after Phillippe.

Julian is right behind me as the black door opens wide and the gloom inside swallows us.

At the back of my mind I had been wondering how this whole deal worked—staying at the squat, the same boys coming back to this house day after day for the same pictures to be taken. It didn’t make sense. But now I see as we’re led into a dingy hallway that that’s not what this is at all.

There are two front doors for a reason: one is for the punters who pay to take the pictures and one is for us.

Damp pervades the air. The smell reminds me of those almost-derelict old houses I stayed in as a kid, walls caving in around us from rot and neglect.

We follow Phillippe down the hall, but before he pushes open the door at the end, a guy with slicked black hair steps out of the shadows and grasps Julian’s arm. No one notices his cringing reaction to this but me.

“Who are you?”

Julian looks at him but doesn’t say anything. I stand beside him, running my hands nervously across the cold bumpy wall behind me.

“Okay,” the man drawls. His accent is similar to Malik’s but lighter. “I’m Vidal. Malik sent you, yes?”

Julian makes the barest movement of his head it’s possible to perceive in this murky darkness. The light is so dim Vidal appears indistinct and nebulous, a bizarre mix of shadows. I can’t work out his features at all, and I don’t think he can even see me.

“You come to earn your keep, or you come to earn some money?” he asks and smirks at Julian’s nonchalant shrug.

“Julian?” Phillippe whines from the doorway.

But Julian ignores him.

And then, purely by chance, Vidal sees me.

With the same predatory look Malik had yesterday, he creeps closer and studies my face with his hand until Julian pushes me backward with his body harder than he means to, and I crash against the carpet.

Vidal laughs and shoves Julian carelessly aside. His shadow is much more solid than either of ours. He pulls me to my feet, touches my skin again, my cheek, my throat.

“Want to earn some money, kid?”

I hear Julian’s muffled shout, but I can no longer see him. I don’t want them to hurt him, so I do what Vidal wants me to do and nod my head.

Nothing feels real as I’m taken upstairs. I think I switched off when Vidal’s cold hand brushed my face. The wind whips through a broken skylight above us. The sound makes me think of rain hammering against tarpaulin, a warm body curled next to mine. And at least it’s not dark up here.

I’m led through a maze of small corridors into a cold, bare room. A double bed is pushed under the eaves. On it lies a naked boy.

It could be me.

I am no longer sure.

I
T
FEELS
like hours later when I walk back down the stairs and out the front door. Julian and Phillippe are sat on the curb sharing a cigarette. Julian looks around when the door behind me bangs shut. He has a black eye, and his top lip is swollen and cut.

No more squat, then
, I think apathetically.

But that’s where we head, the three of us, in silence.

I’m so scared Julian is disappointed in me. He’s barely even looked at me since I came out of the house. But before we get to the squat, he mouths something to Phillippe and pulls me into a shady passage between the buildings. The hug he gives me there is so fiercely tender I can hardly breathe. He touches my face, my neck, my hair almost desperately, and it takes all of my willpower not to graze my fingers against his sore lip.

“Fuck,” he says over and over again until it sounds like a sob.

I pull out my pad.

I’m okay
, I write.
Nobody hurt me or even touched me.

It’s true. So there’s this hollow ache in my chest from what I did do; it doesn’t matter. It’s nothing. I know I got off lightly. They were just pictures.

When he looks at me like this, I feel like he’s looking inside me, seeing so deep he
must
know every star-bright feeling, every truth, every lie.

“We’ll stay at the squat tonight, and then we’ll leave.”

I know the thought of being on the street again is killing him.

We can stay. It wasn’t so bad.

And now I do touch his bruised face, because I can’t not.

He shakes his head and lets it rest against mine. His hair falls in my eyes.

“They don’t want me,” he says, so close I can feel his breath against my lips.

What happened?

With slightly shaking hands, he takes my pad and pen and writes in his curvy flowing script,
I couldn’t do what they wanted me to do.

What did they want you to do?

I’m actually surprised the conversation has got this far.

He stares at the paper for ages, pen hovering.

Tell me
, I will him, sensing this is somehow one of those bridges we’ve never crossed, and he must sense it too.

I can’t
—he pauses for so long I think he’s never going to finish the sentence—
get an erection
, he writes eventually.

I almost write
what?
But I manage to control my insensitive hand and write
since when?
instead.

Two/three months.

And what did he start doing two/three months ago? When did he start selling his soul on the streets? It’s not fucking surprising, really.

I wish he’d look at me, but when he doesn’t, I pull him into my arms, and we stand awkwardly like that for a long time.

It starts to rain. Julian rips the page out of my pad and shreds it into tiny pieces before putting them in his pocket.

“Come on,” he whispers softly.

Phillippe is waiting by the doors to the building. I’m not sure what he makes of us, but he smiles like always.

When we knock on the door to the squat, Malik answers, but even though we’re standing in the rain, he won’t let us in until six. Half a day from now.

Sharing the last money we have, we buy chips and eat them in a bus shelter by the park. I think they might be the most perfect thing I have ever tasted.

I take my pad out and sketch Julian’s face. I won’t let him see, though, not ’til it’s done.

It feels like something has changed between us since his revelation, like we’re imperceptibly closer, and my heartbeat speeds up when he looks at me, as though I’m waiting for something to happen.

I
T
’
S
ALREADY
dark, and there are quite a few of us waiting out on the cold rainy walkway for Malik to open the door. Julian slips his arm around me as he talks to some of the others, and I melt into his warmth.

Earlier, we told Phillippe I’m mute. We don’t tell many people, not after what happened with Lloyd. Even Julian doesn’t know the full story. He doesn’t know it was Cricket that told Lloyd I couldn’t make a sound no matter what was done to me. I don’t know why I have never told him. It’s certainly not from any loyalty to Cricket.

So now Phillippe talks to me and tries to get me to teach him sign, which is hard because of his missing hand. Julian wants him to be less obvious and shoots him a warning glance, so Phillippe relaxes against the wet railing behind us and whispers almost inaudibly, “Are you two together?”

I shrug. I don’t know what he means. Of course we’re together; we’re always together. I can’t ever imagine not being together. My life wouldn’t be my life, and, however dire it sounds, I wouldn’t want that life, no matter what.

“I was together with a girl once, back home,” Phillippe carries on in a hushed voice. He looks down at the pools of blackness forming on the grimy walkway. “I ran away the night they came for her family. I tried to get her to run with me. I should have tried harder….”

I reach out my hand to touch his. It’s all I can do without words.

After a while, Phillippe glances up at Julian and mouths almost silently, “He was sweet with me today. They made us get undressed together. Made us touch each other.”

I hate the sudden irrational swell of jealousy I feel rising up inside me, and I fight to swallow it back down. I know he’s not telling me this to make me feel bad. I suspect it’s just the opposite, but fuck, it
hurts
.

“He didn’t want to do any of it, but he said he was doing it for you, to take care of you. They made us stop when he got upset.”

I feel Julian’s arm tighten around me. I know he’s listening. I push back into his embrace, into his slight frame, hardly any bigger than mine, and will him to see that it’s okay because I did what I did to take care of him too.

Malik opens the door, holding back the dog by her collar. Julian waits until everyone is inside and only when Malik takes the dog into the kitchen does he grab my hand and pull me swiftly down the hall.

Food is handed around on disposable plates, mainly bread, with a bitter savory drink that’s barely warm. We all sit on the floor in our loose little groups, shoveling food in our mouths like hungry animals. We don’t talk or taste, we just consume, because
we
know food is not something to be taken for granted. Even if most people in this country wouldn’t have a fucking clue what it’s like to be hungry and not know when you’re going to be able to eat again. This is what we’re reduced to when everything else is taken away.

After I’ve eaten I carry on with my drawing. I never take this long over anything I draw, but I want this to be the best thing I’ve done. For him.

I even draw the bloody cut on his lip, because it’s there, and there is beauty in truth so bright and shining it makes everything clear.

I love him because of his flaws, not despite them.

This is what I’m terrified he’ll see when he looks at the drawing, and at the same time, this is what I long for him to understand.

Phillippe curls on his side away from us. I think he’s trying to give us some privacy.

“Can I see yet?” Julian whispers.

I bite my lip and shake my head.

Hesitantly, he shifts and gently lays his head in my lap, his soft, honey-colored hair falling every which way.

He looks up at me—his face at once so open and vulnerable it makes me want to confess my soul to him, every fucking
thing
—and he lifts his hand as if he’s going to touch my face, but for some reason changes his mind and lays it back down.

Fuck
, I think helplessly, my heartbeat skitter-scattering.

It uses all my self-control to carry on drawing. I’m so fucking confused. If anyone else were looking at me like this, I know what I’d think: I’d think they were going to take my hand any moment now and lead me away somewhere more private so we could relieve some of this unbearable fucking tension.

I’m so crazy about you, Julian.