This is Not a Love Story (9 page)

She nods. And for an instant, I can see she’s scared for me.

T
HE
NEXT
two days are the coldest of the season so far. Frost spreads like fractured glass across the pavements, even though the sun glares down like an icy fire. The nights are full of stars. I don’t move from that room except to use the bathroom, and I don’t get up except to occasionally stare out the window. Phillippe no longer talks to me, but he continues to stay. I doubt it’s for me.

Cassey even sends Cricket and Roxy through to see me when Phillippe is helping with the tables, but I just stare into space and won’t talk to them. My mind is paused, stuck in that moment I realized Julian was no longer with me. I want to search the whole of London, but I can’t move.

After three days I stop eating the food she brings us, and I start to draw. Obsessively, I search my mind for details.

There’s one thing, one thought that’s been forming in the cold of my mind, growing like frost across a windowpane. One thing I have become convinced I have to do, even if it’s too late, even if I never manage to do anything else.

It started with what Joel said as he cried in my arms, what Joel said about the police….

I
T
’
S
MY
mother’s distrust of authority that I feel as I stand in front of the ugly square building. My mother’s distrust of the police. But the thing about not eating for a few days and then not sleeping all night and then getting up at dawn and walking miles and miles is, it makes everything disconnected, and I am dislocated from reality. If I don’t really feel like I’m doing this, it makes it so much easier.

At 7:30 a.m. the police station is still pretty quiet.

“Can I help you?” a deep male voice sternly asks before I can even work out where I’m headed to in the reception. I look at him blankly. I fantasize that he’s one of the officers that took our tarpaulin away, and it’s there hidden under his desk, keeping his feet dry. The look on his face tells me he doesn’t really want to help me.

I hand over my prepared speech. I wrote it yesterday while I wasn’t feeling so strange. He skims the words and stares at me.

“Is this some sort of joke?”

A joke? I reel backward, floored.

A joke?

It’s my fucking life.

I give up.
Fuck it
, I think,
I tried
.

But at that exact moment, a pretty young woman with long dark hair and sparkling eyes like Julian’s breezes through the double-lock doors into the waiting area where I’m standing. She has on a long coat, and there is a heavy black leather bag in her hand, and she looks like she’s leaving, but for some reason she stops, and she looks at me, really looks. And her eyes are so like his eyes I can’t look away. Somehow it’s too intimate looking at someone else so deeply like this.

“Is everything alright?” she asks, frowning kindly, still scrutinizing me.

“I’ve got it, Annie, you get off,” the deep-voiced fucker calls to her.

But she shakes her head, ignoring him.

“You look like you could do with a hot drink,” she says quietly, almost to herself, still looking at me closely. “Come and sit down through here.”

And she leads me through to a small square room just about filled with a metal desk and two chairs.

“I’ll be back in just a tick,” she says, resting her large bag on the desk and leaving me alone in the room with it.

I look around, feeling I’m undergoing some sort of test. Does she want to see if I’m going to open the bag? Are there cameras filming me? What’s in the bag? I blink up at the corners where the walls meet the ceiling. I feel very strange.

Bizarrely, I’m working my way around the sides of the room looking for secret compartments when the woman comes back with a steaming mug and a plate of food, my prepared speech tucked under her arm.

She doesn’t bat an eye at my weird behavior or even look to see if her bag has moved. I don’t know whether she is just trusting or stupid.

“Here,” she says, placing the food and the mug on the table. “I thought you looked hungry, and this was going spare upstairs.”

Cautiously, I walk back over to the table.

“Romeo, right?” She waves my speech by way of explanation. “I’m Annie. I’m a forensic medical examiner, police doctor.”

I stare at the food. I don’t think I can eat anything. But my hand picks up the fork, and before I know it, I’m eating. Ravenously.

“This is what you handed in to Sergeant Moore out there, isn’t it?” she asks, showing me my writing again.

I nod.

“Do you mind if I call in a colleague of mine? She’s a detective, and I think she’d be really interested in what you’ve written here.”

Feeling slightly more grounded after choking down a few mouthfuls of food, I pull out my pad.
I’ve done some drawings of Vidal and Malik, and there is one of Julian too.

She nods, smiling as I show her.

“Okay,” she says, before taking out a mobile phone and pressing a few buttons and holding it to her ear. “Are you homeless, Romeo?”

I nod.

“How old are you?”

I shake my head. I can’t tell her. They’ll put me in a home.

“Romeo, I have a duty of care to call social services if I suspect a person under sixteen is at risk. If you’re homeless, you’re at risk.”

I feel the well of panic starting to build, and I wobble to my feet.

“Hey, hey, listen, it’s okay.” She holds my gaze, and her voice is calm and commanding like Peter’s was. “Just wait a few more minutes with me, okay? Speak to my colleague. If you like, I won’t make that call until after she’s spoken with you, okay?”

If you put me in a home, I’ll run,
I write.

“Okay, but you’re too young to be looking after yourself. Social services are there to help and protect you. Did you run away from home?” she asks as she puts down the phone.

I shake my head. I don’t want to tell her but somehow find I’m writing.
I came back to where my mother and I were staying after school one afternoon, and she was gone.

“And that was the last time you saw her? You’ve no idea where she went?” She puts her hand on my arm. It’s warm.

Julian looked after me before they took him away. He looked after me better than she ever did.

I don’t want to trust her. I don’t want to be here anymore.

“Okay, okay,” she says soothingly. “It’s okay.”

She glances at her phone, at the door.

“Okay, I’m going to go upstairs and find my colleague as she’s not answering her phone. The case you’ve outlined here sounds similar to something she is dealing with.”

Before she goes, Annie drops a small white card with her name and number on the table. She holds my gaze. She knows I’m going to run. She’s disappointed, but she knows. She leaves the door ajar on her way out. I take her card, place the drawings I did on her bag, and run.

I’
M
NOT
sorry I left Phillippe behind at Cassey’s. I just want to be on my own. It’s strange, but since that desolate afternoon when I came back to an empty room and realized that the woman I have to identify as my mother had just cleared out and left me behind, I’ve never wanted to be on my own like this.

Never.

Until now.

As I walk down the embankment to the railway arches, I think about what I’ll do if I see Lloyd. I know I wouldn’t fight it. I think it would be a relief. If he found me and wanted to finish what he started all those months ago, I could accept it now; I could welcome the inevitable. I feel like I’m floating in the icy air.

Find me, Lloyd.

I sit for hours in the grassy wasteland just staring up at the tall, dark archways, just listening to the creak and clatter of the passing trains. Sometimes my eyes unfocus, and I find that everything is a blur, like a long never-ending river of gray, like the real river behind me that I would stare at too if I could be bothered to turn my head.

I’m part of the wasteland now, part of the waste. I’m nothing. I’m no one. Without him.

I’ve convinced myself he’s gone. Without even consciously coming to the conclusion, my subconscious has done it for me. I’ve always been somewhat pessimistic.

In the late afternoon darkness, I step incautiously across the rubbish that litters the ground, and I aimlessly cross the road. A car swerves to avoid me. I can hear them swearing at me even as they speed off. More car headlights light up the pavement, casting eerie shadows in the gloom.

A car slows behind me, creeps along at walking pace. Are they scoping me? Do they want to drag me into an archway and fuck? I’d probably let them but only if they promised to leave me there too fucked-up to move. Or they paid me in smack or crack or anything to get me out of my head, over the edge… not that I’d know how.

“Romeo?”

My name? I don’t stop. The car inches on slowly, behind me. Its headlights light up my way, like spotlights across a stage, all the way to the exit.

“Romeo! Please just stop! I need to talk to you…. It’s Julian….” Cassey’s voice is raw with tears.

I
cannot
hear her say it. I cannot hear her tell me for certain that he’s gone. It’s one thing to convince myself, another entirely to find out it’s really true.

“Romeo!”

There are other words, but her voice echoes far behind me as I race across the wasteland. I run so far no lights penetrate the dark, and there are no sounds but the whisper of the city talking to itself.

I’
VE
NEVER
been up here actually
on
the archway, trains whistling a few feet from my back. It’s fucking terrifying, and exhilarating, and for one tiny second, it makes me feel so fucking alive. I perch on the ropey brickwork at the very edge. It really feels like the very edge—the dark plunge to the pavement below, the fathomless pitchy black in front of me, those fucking trains speeding along every few minutes behind.

I pull out my pad and, balancing it on my knee, draw one last picture. On the fucking edge. From memory. I draw myself.

When I’ve finished—it was only a quick sketch—I throw it away into the dark. It actually feels good seeing it vanish into God knows where, like I’m sending a preview out there into the universe.

It makes me laugh.
God
, I think,
that’s strange. Am I hysterical?

What the fuck am I doing?

Slowly, I get down off the edge and lay down amongst the wood and stones in the center of the bumpy track where the trains rush through.

I can feel the whole archway trembling beneath my body, the earth, everything—it’s all one big trembling, living, moving, changing, constant, inconsistent, fucked-up, glorious thing.

What the fuck am I doing?

Beside me, the rails begin to whine and hum, and I am bathed in the bright, bright light of an oncoming train.

What the
fuck
am I doing?

Oh God.

I want to get up, but there isn’t time. The noise is deafening, the roar upon me.

My body takes over.

I don’t think I’ve made it, I really don’t, as I lie in a panting heap by the very fucking edge, my fingers scrabbling at the grimy fucking bricks, at the oily dirt, needing to feel something, to know I’m still here, still real.

Oh fuck.
Fuck.

Thoughts start flooding my empty brain as though I’ve been brought suddenly back from the dead in fast-forward.

I rub my hands against my uncared-for hair. It used to be so short it didn’t matter. Julian used to shave it for me at Gem’s. He asked me once why I didn’t grow it. I think he wanted to know what I’d look like. I should grow it. For him.

My skin feels disgustingly unwashed. My clothes need to be binned. There is a clothing exchange every Wednesday at a shelter nearby. We used to go there. I’ve no idea what day it is, but I will go. I take out the white card with Annie’s number from my pocket. I’ll ask Cassey to call her for me. I’ll go down, I’ll do it now.

Oh my God
, I think over and over as I clamber down the iron ladder to the ground. My limbs are like jelly. I just lay down on the
fuck
ing train tracks. I’m so glad I’m not dead.

Unsteady and still reeling, I lean against the crumbling brickwork at the bottom of the arches and breathe one deep breath after another.

There is a heavy dawn mist descending, and in the blurred orange glow of the streetlights, I can see another fucking lunatic limping down the middle road a little way off. It must be the night for us. An early-morning ferry sounds its first horn as it reaches the far bank of the river, a sound so familiar I finally realize how cold I am, and I turn to head back to Cassey’s, to deal—

I stop.

A sudden, violent shiver courses through my body, and I almost fall to the ground.

I would recognize that silhouette anywhere. Would know it in a crowd of thousands, never mind alone on a deserted road. And now I’m scared. I look back up at that fucking edge on top of the archway. Now I’m terrified I didn’t make it out of the way of that train.

But still he limps on, listing to one side as though he can’t straighten up.

And then I think he sees me, and he stops.

The wind blasts from every direction all across the road, but still we don’t move.

It feel as though I am resisting a magnetic pull, and I know I am going to give in any second, and he knows it too, but just the pull is what I want right now. These few moments of disbelieving anticipation while my brain makes sense of it all.

Julian looks awful.

Something odd has happened to his beautiful hair and one side of his face is completely red and swollen. In fact, every bare patch of skin I can see is covered in cuts and scratches.

He opens his mouth and closes it, but no words come.

Slowly, I begin to walk forward. If I move too fast, he might disappear. He limps to meet me. It’s just a few steps, but it takes so long, and we look so hard at one another. And suddenly I’m engulfed in his arms in the middle of the road, held so tight I can’t breathe, and I don’t want to. I squeeze my arms around him just as tight, so we might hold on to this moment and never have to exist through what we’ve just existed through, and we’d never be alone again or cold again or needing or longing. I sob so hard my body shakes, and he pulls me backward out of the road as a car hoots to pass. It’s not just me shaking, though. And I pull away to look at his face. To really look.