I don’t meet you again until a month later. At a student party, back in the city without a river. One of those unwieldy gatherings that usually ends in a drunken brawl. I find you on the balcony, looking as though you’re waiting for no one. This time, I think, I’ll say something memorable.
‘Where were you while we were getting high?’
For a moment you look confused, then you smile.
‘I came back with another joint … and you were gone.’
‘It was cold … I was sleepy.’
I light a cigarette and lean on the railing.
‘Did you have a good time … that night?’
I nod, remembering, in a flash, the blonde girl. ‘Would’ve been better if you were there …’
‘I’m here now.’
‘For how long?’
You glance at your almost empty plastic cup. ‘As long as the alcohol lasts.’
‘So that’s ten more minutes, then.’
When you laugh, I want to kiss you.
It turns out you too are from my small town in the east of the country. But from a different, posher, neighbourhood. Also, you’ve lived here for quite a few years now. ‘And maybe at some point, elsewhere,’ you add. I have a feeling you might be more of a drifter than I am. For even though I want to get away, I know my roots. I drop you back to your flat that night on my motorbike. I drive slowly, because I want to reassure you that I’m a safe driver. Also, I want the ride to last. Your hands gripping my sides, the feel of your chest on my back.
When we arrive, I ask, ‘I’ll see you soon?’
You nod. Then, with a wave, you’re gone.
I’m amazed by how we begin with so little, or no, conflict.
It’s not what I have known.
I’m only twenty-two but life has been long.
I started out studying something my parents thought useful. Two semesters in biotechnology though, and I’d failed every exam, spent all the money I’d been given for the year, and switched courses. To the fury of my physician father, of course. But my mother, the gentler of the two, persuaded him to let me be. If it was visual studies I wanted to pursue, so be it.
I never told them that all I really wanted was to be a musician.
‘You play well,’ you tell me.
We are at a house party, sitting in the living room where I’ve found a guitar. ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I taught myself.’
I don’t tell you yet that my parents only sent my younger sister for piano lessons. That they thought, being a boy, I wouldn’t – no, shouldn’t – be interested in such frivolities.
You move closer. You’re wearing a long woollen skirt, a frayed leather jacket, and a polo neck. Your hair is tied up, loosening around the edges.
‘What would you like me to play?’
‘Ooh, he’s taking requests,’ someone shouts from the other end of the room.
‘Not from you, Bongo,’ I shout back.
Since you say ‘anything’, I play the songs I know best. Some Marley and Led Zep, some Dylan and Clapton. You sing in snatches, in a soft, pleasant voice.
‘Something by the Beatles?’
Suddenly, I feel like I have only one chance to pick the right song. That it will make all the difference. I run through the ones I know in my head. ‘Come Together’. ‘Penny Lane’. ‘Yellow Submarine’. ‘Eleanor Rigby’. They all somehow seem inappropriate, until I remember the one about a blackbird and broken wings. Sweetly complex melody, and sweetly simple lyrics. Turns out you know all the words. Verse after verse. The room falls silent, with only the guitar and your voice filling the air. I know, no matter what, that when I drop you home that night, we will kiss.
You live in a flat you share with two other girls. It’s a nicer neighbourhood than the one I live in, with trees and wide roads. Your room, when I get to see it, has multicoloured curtains drawn over the windows, a low bed, a ragged carpet, and photographs pasted on the cupboard. You’ve twirled a scarf over a tall paper lamp. I like it better than the place I share with three boys, littered with used plates, discarded footwear and empty bottles. We are quite lucky, you say, when I first stay over, that the landlord doesn’t live in the building, and so can’t express his disapproval over these ‘indiscretions’.
I’m taller than you but we fit on the bed, oddly sized between single and double, if I press my back against the wall. And if we don’t move much.
We don’t move much, but we talk. I like you because when I say, late one night, in the dark, that I want to start a band, you don’t laugh.
Bolder, I make you listen to a song I recorded, secretly, in my room in my hometown. It’s stark and sad, about a man who drinks in parking lots. I don’t think it’s very good now, but you listen intently, and say you think I’ve done well.
‘But I can do better.’ With you, I want to add, I feel I can always do better.
You, though, rarely talk about yourself. Only once you tell me about your parents, and how they always lived away from you because of your father’s job.
‘I’d tell people they were dead. That they died in a car crash.’
‘Why?’ I ask, bewildered. ‘Why would you do that?’
Your voice is soft in the darkness. ‘Because I was angry. They kept promising they’d come back for good, but they never did.’
Another night, after we’ve had more than a few beers each, you tell me that once, when your parents left after their yearly visit, you were so upset you fell ill with a fever that lingered for weeks.
‘I was eleven … twelve … I couldn’t understand why I was always left behind …’
Silently, I promise I’ll never leave you.
But it’s a promise I eventually find impossible to keep.
When summer comes around, we turn nocturnal.
We return from university to darkened houses, the sound of other people’s power generators studding the air like quiet gunfire. It is impossible to sleep. The heat seeps out of floors and walls, out of every surface we touch. We throw down buckets of water, we soak the sheets, but the heat is insidious. So we drive out on my motorbike and head to the centre of the city, where the roads are wide and all the filthy rich sleep in their beds under the cool purr of air conditioners that never trip or turn off.
‘Bastards,’ we yell as we cross their gates, my motorbike roar shattering the silence. Then we stop at some patch of grass, with all the poor others who’ve found their way there in those restless, insomniac nights. Sometimes, we buy orange ice lollies from the man with the ice cream cart, and while I bite into mine whole, you suck at the juice until the ice turns white.
‘You’re a vampire.’
And you pretend to bite my neck, and I pin you to the grass, and I want to lift your dress.
We are wild children.
Once the summer cools, and the rains lighten in the north, we head to the hills. Our first trip away together. It is also the first time we have a terrible fight. The first of many.