Falling For You (28 page)

‘
Rose
, be careful
.
’

Ignoring him, I scramble, breathless, striking out blindly till I come to hide behind one of the old castle walls on the west side where the snow’s nowhere near so deep. It only takes a few minutes to bend down and build up some ammunition, prepare for his onslaught. It’s gone all quiet now around the corner but I know he’s got to be coming after me, he won’t let me get away so easily and all the time I’m nearly choking with laughter remembering the surprise on his face when I aimed that first snowball, remembering how close he just came to my lips - how
he nearly kissed me
- and my heart is thudding
boom, boom, boom
, with the thrill of the chase.

While I wait, I allow my mind to roll back to the sweetness of the moment we just shared. He’d made fun of me because of the noise I heard, but he’d been gallant enough to come out and wait for me, anyway. I like that in Lawrence; his protective instincts. I like that he was prepared to humour me. I recall the sound of his voice;

‘
I win?’
he’d said, standing so still and so close to me that I’d hardly dared to move, I hadn’t wanted to move when he’d demanded that I concede the game. I’d done so willingly, I remember now, happy enough for him to win and take his prize. I’d
wanted
him to kiss me, I realise with a trickle of disappointment, I thought he’d wanted it too; just then, just at that moment, he could have done. But he hadn’t.  

I wait.

It’s all gone very quiet. Where is he?

I can’t hear him coming. There is no noise at all coming from round the corner. He
will
be coming, though. And I am ready for him. This is a game, right? A game of cat and mouse. We’re waiting to see who moves first. I stifle the laughter that bubbles up in my throat at the thought of him waiting there, poised with a snowball to get me. I’m not going to be the one to come looking first. As I wait, my breath slows down though I can still feel my heart thudding. The snow flakes, which had stopped, have started coming down again. They come straight down, falling in perfect geometric lines as I stand there. There is no wind, no movement in the air. The sky is so white and the light so dull I can barely see a thing when I stop to look behind me. I wait for the slow crunch of his feet, the faintest sound that tells me he must be on his way but there is nothing. Nothing, and after a while my excitement starts to fade to disappointment.

Maybe even a little bit of worry?

Is this really all part of the game? A test of patience, as I thought? He wants me to come round the corner so he can deck me with the mother of all snowballs, right? Or is that not it? After six or seven minutes have gone by, I begin to wonder if maybe he’s gone back inside? Maybe he isn’t coming after all?

‘Lawrence?’ I call out his name and my voice feels chopped up into little cold pieces by the snowflakes. ‘
Lawrence?’
M
y disappointment sinks to the ground like little chunks of ice.

Are you there? Too much time has gone by now, I realise.  Only minutes, I know, but in these temperatures even minutes feel like time spent in a freezer.

Why isn’t he coming? I clap my hands together, forcing the frozen blood round my veins and the truth of the situation dawns slowly and painfully. I’ve been deluding myself here, haven’t I? The real reason he hasn’t come tearing round that corner after me is because he doesn’t want to come playing chase with me. He’s … he’s a professional who happens to have got stuck up here by pure chance at the same time as me. He’s a guy who already leads an exciting and useful life in the world out there - somewhere far away from here - and no matter what he said to me before about not going back there I think I know that he will. He won’t stay here, in any event. Not even for me. Why should I have allowed myself to imagine that he would?

The skin on my face has got so cold I can’t even feel the snow falling on it anymore. This is just me, isn’t it? Me being naïve and inexperienced and just … plain stupid and desperate … who’s been reading all his signals wrong. I feel a pang in my chest, letting myself remember his voice when he spoke my name just now. How it had sounded to me so intimate and low, the way you would pronounce a cherished name, the name of someone who mattered. Someone you meant to draw towards you. But was all that just me hoping too hard, my imagination, that I thought it was so? I let myself hear so many things in that one word, my name; an unexpressed longing, a desire, a wish that in time we would come to know each other better.

Did you not mean for me to hear any of those things, Lawrence? I’m aware of a heaviness and a pain in my chest, now, though whether it is the cold or the weight of an unexpected sadness settling on me I cannot tell. Sadness that he did not come looking for me; that he didn’t want to; ‘
Don’t ask, you don’t want to know about me, Rose,’
he told me before. Sadness that I could have read his signals all so badly wrong.

When am I ever going to learn? My hands inside my knitted gloves are feeling numb now, the ice ball in my palms leaking through the knitted fingers and onto my skin and I remember; sometimes the longer you wait for something, the more you just know that when it finally arrives it won’t be the thing you were after. It’ll either be too late, you don’t want it, or it won’t be what you expected
.

I guess maybe I put too much expectation into my thirteenth birthday. It was a useful distraction. It stopped me having to worry about Mum or let myself be reminded of the painful truth of what was happening to her. What else could I do? Sink into a deep depression and despair over my mother’s complete and utter refusal to take a stand for her own life? I couldn’t understand it and I couldn’t bear it so I did the only thing I could do; I packaged it. I didn’t think about it. I turned my mind to other things
...

As the last few weeks before the big day kicked in, I told all my friends I’d landed the jackpot of all birthday presents; my parents had finally agreed to allow me to go on the school skiing trip to Austria at Easter.

 Never mind what it cost, and the fact that they really couldn’t afford it because Dad had needed to take so much time off work this year. Never mind that every day Mum was looking greyer and more listless; that every time I hugged her these days I couldn’t be careful enough, she felt as if she were made of paper, made of the dried up wings of the dead butterfly I once tried to help escape off the schoolyard wall, ready to crumble the minute I put my excited fingers around it.

My dad was distracted and distraught and my mum was dying but I could push all that to one side with the beautiful knowledge that at Easter I’d be in Oberlangau, with all my other lucky classmates. I would be doing something normal. Some of them had older siblings who’d been before, who knew what went on. We were longing to learn what apres-ski really meant. Leigh Mallone was planning to smuggle a bottle of sauterne in her luggage inside a hot water bottle. I didn’t know what sauterne was. The fact alone that it must be smuggled in was enough to make it desirable. We went round each other’s houses and stayed till late discussing plans about what we’d do if  there should be any lads from a boys’ school staying at a nearby chalet at the same time as us, and if any of them came over to speak to us, how we’d play it, essential things like that.

The other girls seemed to have a pretty good idea of what they needed to bring. It became obvious, listening to them, that I was going to need a whole new wardrobe to go to Oberlangau with. I hinted as much to Dad, but he just looked at me blankly, as if he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about – all part of the cunning plan to keep the surprise, I thought.

The fact that nobody at home seemed in the remotest bit interested in that side of things didn’t put me off dreaming.

 Nothing would do that. I dreamed big-time, conjuring it up just as Mum always taught me, visualising it just as I wanted it to be. I had to. If I didn’t do that I’d have to let myself see what was happening at home right in front of my nose. I’d have to acknowledge that the time was coming soon when I’d need to say goodbye to her.

 Instead, I had my dreams. Me; sporting the cutest, designer ski-wear that had miraculously been acquired from somewhere (Carlotta, maybe?). Me; gliding effortlessly down a steep mountain slope that had been covered just that morning in the fresh powdering of gleaming white snow. The sky above me would be the deepest cerulean blue. The sun would be so bright I’d get a lovely tan while I was out there skiing and much to everyone’s surprise, I’d be a natural at it. Later on, in the evening, we’d put on music by the ‘charming log fire’ and dance the night away after eating ‘schnitzel and strudels made by Gretel your inspired chalet cook’ and much later, when none of the teachers were about, no doubt, we would drink the smuggled sauterne.

 And all this was going to happen because
M
um had guessed how much it mattered. She wanted me to have something precious and special -‘a wonderful memory to take your first steps into adult life, with’. That was what she’d told me, wasn’t it? She couldn’t mean anything else. There wasn’t anything else.

 The only trouble was, they were leaving it all a bit late to tell me about it. I kn
e
w it was meant to be a surprise, but all my other friends would virtually have their suitcases packed before my birthday came along. I hoped my parents weren’t going to wait until the actual day itself, because there was no way that’d leave me with enough time to get everything together. 

 But I didn’t like to say anything. She was so ill, I didn’t want to ruin the surprise they’d planned for me. So I waited. I waited and I said nothing. All Mrs P had to offer - when I tried to wheedle something out of her - was that ‘Patience is a virtue, and all good things come to those who wait; you’ll get there, Rose.’

 I drop the snowball I have made onto the ground.

 Lawrence isn’t coming, is he? He was never going to kiss me, either. He did that just to tease me because he suspects that I like him. Not to be cruel, but because that’s a boy’s sense of humour. He was getting his own back for a face-full of snow - that was all. I feel the familiar sense of crushing disappointment that I got my hopes up way too high.

He doesn’t fancy me at all.

It all matters to me way too much and things aren’t going to head the way I was hoping, that much is pretty clear. When it comes to all the things I’ve really, desperately wanted in my life, they don’t seem to
.

I move further round the corner and now I can see him. Lawrence is there, glued to his mobile phone after all that. I stare at him. He’s …
he’s on the phone!
I forgot. He was waiting for a call from someone. How could I not have heard it ring? How could I not have guessed? Whatever or whoever’s at the end of that phone is the thing that’s really important to him in his life right now. It isn’t me. It never will be me, he’s been honest about that much. I feel the old familiar mantle of let-down as it settles about my shoulders.

Why, why do I keep on getting my hopes up over impossible things?

I shouldn’t.

Still, he could at least have told me that he was taking a phone call, not kept me waiting like some dummy with a snowball after he pretended he wanted to kiss me and … and instead he seems to have forgotten all about me!  That’s how totally unimportant I am to him. By the time I get back to my own life he’ll have forgotten that he ever met me. What am I even doing, weaving so many fantasies around a bloke who’s gone out of his way to warn me off him? He’s giving mixed signals, yes, but that doesn’t mean I need to get mixed up in my own mind.