This is Not a Love Story (14 page)

“These are the only beds available right now.”

“He needs me with him! He’s sick, and he can’t fucking call out for help if he needs it! Do you understand sign? No?”

I don’t want to listen, but I can’t help it.

“If he’s sick, he can’t stay here.”

“The hospital sent us here!”

“I have to think of the other residents. I’ll have to call the hospital.”

Quietly the guard makes the call while Julian paces. He stops at the end of the corridor and catches my eyes. He blinks slowly, once. My heart swells with the meaning—our secret language.

I close my eyes and blink back, slower. Because I love him more than he can ever know.

“Okay, it’s fine. The hospital confirmed it’s okay. But it will be the beds you’ve been offered.”

“Don’t you understand anything I’m trying to tell you? He’s mute, he’s… he shouldn’t be on his own. Look, I’ve been in shelters before. I know what goes on. You can’t put him on a floor on his own.”

“He wouldn’t
be
on his own. There are CCTV cameras in every room for all residents’ safety and—”

“And it’s too late by the time you catch anything on fucking camera.”

“We’ve never had a prob—”

“You haven’t got a clue. Fuck you,” Julian hisses.

He’s going to get himself kicked out. He knows he is. I hear him walk away and suck in one deep breath after another.

“I can sleep on the floor next to his bed,” he says quietly after a while.

But I don’t hear the reply as I cough uncontrollably into my sleeve. My throat now so raw I can taste the blood.

A
FTER
WE
have signed ourselves in and accounted for our possessions—the exact details of my medicines are recorded in a little blue book hung on the wall with string—we are shown to the first-floor communal bathroom.

Posters display the benefits of keeping clean and the malignant harm of not. I try not to look at them. The pictures are horrible: grotesque malformations of skin, weeping sores. Things that happen after you’ve been on the street for years. Things I don’t want to think about.

We drift in and out of the bright empty spaces, following the guard. I stare up at the maze of pipework that runs overhead—tracing a map through toilet cubicles, urinals, changing areas. I imagine I hear them creaking icily as the water expands and contracts, moving through them in tidal ebbs like a sea.

The huge echoey shower room is freezing but clean, and I can’t wait to stand under the showerhead, the warm water blissfully washing away my thoughts, letting them drain away into that dark oblivion beneath the streets.

The night guard watches us as we awkwardly look around, and Julian slips his arm around me as I try to stifle my cough. He wants the guard to see that we’re together. It’s almost like a challenge. The guard either ignores it, or he doesn’t notice.

“You can take a shower here, and there is a common room on this floor at the end of the corridor you can use. But you can’t go into the communal sleeping areas until after ten o’clock this morning.”

I wonder absently if it would be against the rules to stay in the shower until then.

Finally, the night guard leaves us alone, and Julian lets his head rest against mine.

“Fuck.”

We don’t have to stay
, I sign without turning around, knowing somehow that he is watching me.
We could go back to Cassey’s.

“No. She’s done too much for us already.”

I wonder at which point you begin to lose your pride. At which point you will beg for any help you can get. At which point you will lie down in the street and hope that someone will stop instead of step over you. It’s a place I can’t imagine Julian ever reaching. That he would rather die in a silence greater than the one I exist in, that he would step into the void with his head held high, only intensifies my love. And maybe that is a mistake.

There are clean towels in a huge gray plastic cabinet next to the showers. We search through the piles to find the ones that aren’t so thin and worn—there aren’t many.

Julian strips off his clothes and leaves them in a messy heap on the floor. He inclines his head shyly toward the shower room.

“Before everyone else gets up.”

I’ve been breathing in so shallowly, trying not to cough, that I feel a little light-headed as I bend down to strip off my trousers. Cool fingers trace along the length of my spine, making me shiver, and my movements falter. We’re still so new to each other that every small exposure of skin draws us closer, just wanting to touch one another. Affection more than arousal, devotion more than desire.

He leads me nakedly, my hand in his, and pushes me under the steady stream of lukewarm water (it doesn’t get any warmer) until my back is pressed against the gaspingly cold tiles.

“If the water was hotter, the steam would help your chest,” he mumbles, his mouth open against my shoulder as the water runs over our faces and spills down our entwined bodies.

We stand there just holding on to one another, just needing to be close. Somehow scared we won’t have this chance again.

F
OR
TWO
days we just exist—not leaving the confines of the shelter for any reason—wandering from one room to another, from one floor to the next, avoiding everyone but each other. We are entitled to a meal a day in the common room, to free soup and tea and water. Every few hours I take the medicines and stare listlessly into space as I feel their drowsy effects. My cough becomes better, then worse, then better again.

The inertia is suffocating.

I can’t even see a clear impression of the sky through the shelter’s floor-to-ceiling windows. The days just trail from black to gray to white to gray to black again.

A
FTER
OUR
one meal on the third day, we organize the chairs in a far corner of the common room and sit facing one other. Julian runs the back of his left hand meditatively up and down the dark fabric covering the armchair, and I lose myself sketching the hunched shadow of a man, an almost formless black against the brightness of the window.

“Do you know him?” Julian says in a low voice, inclining his head, not at the figure I’m sketching, but to the left, behind me.

We are being watched.

I pull out the paper we’ve been using to write on and scrawl,
Five beds down from me
.

We don’t sign. Not here. And although the guard knows I’m mute, we don’t want anyone else to know. People have taken advantage of my silence before, taken advantage of the fact I can’t scream or cry out for help.

Julian’s fingers touch mine as he takes the pencil, and I close my eyes briefly at the contact.

Does he watch you
? he writes.

How can I lie? They
all
watch me.

I nod.

For the past two nights, Julian has crept (under the ignorant gaze of the CCTV) into the cold room I sleep in and lain down on the floor next to my bed, leaving again before the traffic starts up outside. But he
knows
he can’t be there all the time, and he doesn’t trust any of them.

I don’t want to ask him if his lack of trust is a formless feeling, a worry just because he loves me, intensified because of the things that have happened recently, or if it’s based on a definite thing, something that has happened to him in one of these places, because I think right now, looking into the amber depths of his eyes, the truth might break me.

Louis
, I write. His name.
He never takes off the black knitted hat he wears. He sleeps in his clothes. He is strange.

I hesitate over writing the last bit, because aren’t we all, a little? And just because he doesn’t speak (like me) doesn’t make him suspicious. Does it? I stare off at the window, into the brightness, my eyes obscure as the glass.

Ten years, twenty years, it could be me. Still on the street or stuck in a soulless shelter, so lonely and silent—so completely lost without my love. Maybe he can see what we have, maybe he had that once. Maybe he just wants to remember.

But instinctively I know that’s not all there
is
to it. I know Louis really is strange. I just can’t put my finger on why.

I put my hand over my mouth and cough agonizingly deeply again before turning back to Julian.

It’s okay. He never comes near me.

I hold out the pad, but Julian doesn’t take it immediately; for a second he just looks haunted. I want more than anything to just crawl onto his lap and take that look away, to pull him into my arms. I want him to say it will be okay, like he always does. I want him to believe it. But something has changed. I don’t know when exactly it happened, though I can guess why. I guess he lost his trust in life a few weeks ago when he was taken from me. When he was kidnapped and thought he was going to die alone and out of sight, and that I wouldn’t know. That’s what he said scared him most—that he would have died and I would never have known, could never have said good-bye. A desperate unfinishing, our love collapsed from the sky like a dead star.

I can’t bear the thought of leaving you every night
, he writes eventually.

I
T
IS
night and I am alone, lying on the lumpy mattress and staring up at the map of shadows the streetlights cast on the ceiling. I won’t sleep until Julian is here beside me. I
can’t
sleep unless I can hear his slow deep breaths, scent his warm skin,
feel
his glow as though he is radiating heat like a sun. I thought he’d be here a while ago, though I’m not sure how much time has passed. It’s just that waiting has started to become painful, and I’ve started to convince myself he’s late—even though he probably isn’t—and the endless unanswerable questions as to why that might be are circling like my own private vultures above me.

Shelters remind me of hospitals and those communal rooming houses I lived in with my mother before she left me. Yeah, they may shelter you from the elements, from the icy wind and rain, but not from other things. Not from the constant noise all around me, the tangled webs of other people living very different lives in close proximity. Not from the constant reminder I am more alone for all of that.

And the men in here don’t care if you hear them masturbating or whispering eerily into the dark all night. They don’t care if they wake you when they stumble drunkenly against your bed. In fact they’d rather wake you, rather fuck up your night’s sleep as much as their own, because being dropped by society makes you grasp every little thing you can for yourself, makes you grip your own thoughts tight as the skin around your bones, because no one else cares about you, so why the fuck should you even
consider
anyone else? Like her. My mother. That was the rationale she used, I’m sure. She didn’t give a fuck about me, her son. She lived so close in her own skin, she was suffocated by it, blind to everything else.

But I don’t want to be like that
, I think desperately. I don’t want to close myself off, shut myself down.

I’d rather be out in that cold Russian winter. I’d rather be dead.

I count to sixty and decide enough is enough; I’m not waiting. Slowly, I push off the heavy blanket and ease myself gently onto my side before rolling off the bed. I hate the way the springs creak noisily with every movement like some sort of antiquated alarm system, and it’s only because I’m trying so hard to be quiet that I end up holding my breath, making the urge to cough overwhelming and impossible to ignore.

Quickly plastering my hands over my mouth, I crouch down and smother the sounds as best I can, coughing into the hard unforgiving floor—and I know now that if I had never coughed, I would never have looked down through the spaces under the beds, and I would never have seen him, lying there. Louis. Eyes open, watching me.

Carefully, I stand up. I convince myself he’s just lying on the floor, asleep with his eyes open, or turned in my direction because I woke him. But he’s not.

His movements are slow as he lifts his heavy body off the floor and stands in the space between his bed and the next, a few meters away, still watching me. The thick, dark clothing he wears makes his body look bulky and misshapen. He never changes them, and I can smell the reek from here.

For a second I feel paralyzed and unreal. I don’t know whether this is a threatening situation or not. I’m scared, but I also think I’m being irrational. There are thirty other bodies sleeping in this room, and there is a CCTV monitor (albeit useless) in the far corner. The rational part of me
knows
he could have come for me anytime he wanted when I was lying on the bed, but the rest of me just wants to run. Awkwardly, I press my arm across my face and cough into the rough cotton of my sleeve.

We stare at one another. Two rabbits? Or a rabbit and fox?

The door isn’t far. I don’t even have to pass him.

Julian, where the fuck are you?

My heart is thudding in my ears, the panic beginning within me.

Not now
, I think.
Please not now!

I look over to the window. He follows my gaze. It gives me an edge—and I run.

T
HE
DOUBLE
doors crash loudly against the wall as I stumble through them and bolt toward the stairs. There is no way Louis would be able to run as fast as me with his body so heavy and slow-looking, but the terror has taken on a sickening momentum, building itself into a frenzied black panic.

Julian is my destination.

But what if he’s not there?
I think in a rush as I careen along the corridor and burst into his dorm room.
What if he’s gone?

The thought is blinding, like a torchlight thrust into a sleeping face. And I know this sort of panic is a hurricane, picking up the debris of my mind, swallowing the tiny rational voice that asks
where would he go? Why would he go?
But I can’t help it.