It's Not You It's Me (4 page)

Jas stood up. ‘Wish I could explain it to you, but I can’t.’

‘What’s there to explain?’ I was acting like an idiot and I knew it, but I felt that if I stopped fighting, even for a moment, I’d just break down and cry—and I couldn’t,
wouldn’t
, do that. Not here, anyway.

I got up off the bed and snorted inelegantly. ‘I guess I’m just not blonde enough for you.’ Jas had started to say something, but I held my hand out to stop him. ‘Don’t say it. Just don’t talk to me. I don’t want to hear it.’ My voice was getting louder and louder by the minute. I turned and left the room, slamming the door behind me.

I
don’t think I slept at all that night.

It didn’t seem to matter what I tried to think about, that one moment in time kept running itself through my head again and again. The awful moment when I knew it had all gone wrong. The moment when the, um…tower crumbled and fell, for want of a better way of putting it.

What I didn’t understand, though, was that I’d been sure he was interested. At the start, that is. After all, he was the one who’d pulled in—he’d
kept
kissing me. So why pull away later instead of as soon as he’d got a chance? It just didn’t make any sense. And the more I thought about it, the more convoluted the whole thing got. So convoluted that it gave me a headache, and at five a.m. I had to get up and take some paracetamol. Which must have worked, because the headache was gone when I woke up again at eleven-thirty.

I lay there for fifteen minutes or so, just listening, to see if I could hear Jas in the apartment, hoping that he wouldn’t be around so I could get up and go down the hall safely to
the bathroom. I didn’t hear anything. And when my bladder couldn’t stand the stress one minute longer I got up. As I went down the hallway I had a quick scan around. He wasn’t there.

But things had changed.

After my trip to the bathroom I took a closer look. Most of Jas’s stuff that had been packed away earlier in the week was gone. I went down the hallway to his bedroom and opened the door. All that was left was his bed and some clothes. I closed the door smartly—the last thing in the world I wanted to see right now was that bed—and made my way to the living room.

There was a note beside the phone.

I don’t want this to be the end of us. I re-read it, holding the note in my right hand.

Ha! Us!

What ‘us’? There was no ‘us’. There was only me, lusting after Jas, and Jas who wasn’t returning the favour. Unrequited love. There’s nothing
quite
so embarrassing. I did the cringing thing again, thinking about it.

And what made me feel even worse was that I’d seen a friend go through it once. Unrequited love, that is. I’d watched her make a fool of herself for months on end over
some guy. Seeing everyone else watch the proceedings like a spectator sport had been equally as bad as the point when the guy had finally turned her down and she was heartbroken.

Exactly how Jas must have been feeling about me. Utterly embarrassed for me. Udderly, I thought, as I remembered the lovesick cow once more.

I checked the clock on the wall. Just past midday. I had to get out of the apartment. And fast.

I had the quickest shower of my life, dressed in anything I could find and ran to the bus stop. I didn’t care where I went, didn’t care what I did, just so long as I wasn’t there when Jas came back. I didn’t want to be around to see that embarrassment of his when he came through the front door.

I went to the movies and saw something. I can’t remember what it was, just that it was bad and something I never would have seen if I’d had any real choice about it—which I didn’t. The fact was, it was on, it was a two-hour time-filler, and that was all I cared about. After that I bought a shirt I didn’t like nor want, and definitely couldn’t afford, then picked up some groceries that I didn’t need. At five p.m. the shops closed, and as I couldn’t bear to see another film I wasn’t remotely interested in I caught the bus home.

Jas wasn’t there, and everything—every last possession that was his—was gone.

I went into his room and just stood there. I couldn’t even smell him. It was as if he’d never been there at all. As if he’d never existed. I walked around the room slowly, running one hand against the wall, taking everything in. I stopped when I came to something rough.

Oh, nice.

The bed-head. Jas’s metal bed-head had made a mark on
the wall. No prizes for guessing how that had happened. And who it
hadn’t
been with.

I turned and left the room, wondering why I’d gone in there in the first place. It had been a stupid thing to allow myself to do. I had to keep busy, to try and forget about what had happened.

I made my way to the kitchen, stopping by the phone on the way to turn the answering machine off. And then, when I had, I thought better of it and switched it back on again to screen any calls.

In the kitchen, I was surprised to find another note from Jas. Well, not another note. The same note as before, with a sentence or two scribbled onto the bottom. He’d added:

He did call. Several times, in fact. But I didn’t call back. And funnily enough it wasn’t me, but my aunt Kath who saw him next, three months later. We were both staying at my mum’s, looking after her while she was unwell. Watching a rare spot of TV one evening, she suddenly hollered, ‘Charlie—Charlie, come here, quick.’

I rushed into the living room. ‘What?’

She just pointed at the TV ‘Isn’t that, um, what’s-his-face? Your flatmate? The guy you were living with?’

After a good few minutes of wide-eyed staring at the TV my brain kicked back in. I was surprised she’d even spotted him. Because it was Jas, all right. But at the same time it wasn’t Jas. It was someone called…Zamiel. Apparently named after one of the original fallen angels—not to be confused with the original
Charlie’s Angels
, of course.

He was wearing a full black leather bodysuit held to
gether with what looked like safety pins, along with thigh-high boots and a whip. He’d been made-up with a whitened face, lots of kohl eyeliner and blood-red lipstick. His hair, black as black, was doing things that hair simply can’t do by itself, and it was so hideously razored I just
knew
some celebrity hairdresser had been paid a very large wad of money to get the desired effect.

I flinched seeing it. Him. The closest I can come to describing it would be Edward Scissorhands meets Liz Hurley’s famous Versace dress on acid.

I sank slowly down onto the floor and watched the rest of the programme. It was one of those half-hour current affairs shows that like to expose mechanics who are ripping the general public off, banks who are ripping the general public off and, every so often, run another story as well. Naturally, they’d gone to town on this baby.

It seemed that Jas—sorry,
Zamiel
—was the lead singer in some band called Spawn. The presenter seemed to be under the impression that everyone knew about Spawn, so I presumed they’d been in the media for a while now and, being so busy looking after Mum, I just hadn’t heard about them. Apparently the group was promoting some less than desirable things, like devil worship. There was lots of lovely information specifically about Zamiel too. Like
Playboy
, they’d arranged these things into two categories—his likes and dislikes.

Likes: eating live animals, sleeping in his custom-designed coffin, seducing young boys.

Dislikes: organised religion, old people, vegetarians, Britney Spears.

But then they got to the biggie. Zamiel as the new homosexual pin-up boy. And his new boyfriend. A very, very famous actor.

Cue footage of very, very famous actor sticking his tongue down Zamiel’s throat.

Cue presenter saying how disgusting it all was and that society was obviously falling apart at the seams.

End of story.

‘Oh,’ Kath said, and I jumped a bit. I’d been so engrossed in watching the TV I’d forgotten she was even there. ‘Oh,’ she said again. ‘And I thought he was such a nice boy. I guess I’d better go check on your mother.’

And then she left me by myself. But I was never really alone, was I? Not when I had my acute embarrassment to keep me company. It was back again now, in full force. Jas was
gay
. He
was gay
.
He was gay
.

And then, inch by inch, the redness crept its way up my neck and took over my face as I realised what it was I’d done. He was gay. And I, Charlie, had jumped him and then screamed a million things at him to cover up my embarrassment at being rejected. When really what he had been trying to do was tell me something.

He was gay.

Oh, God.

I put my head in my hands then and stared blankly at the TV. There was a sitcom on and I suddenly wished that all my problems could be solved in the final five minutes of every half-hour too. A tall blonde had chosen that precise moment to walk into the kitchen on the show and I was suddenly reminded of something. Those girls. Over that month. In the Magnolia Lodge kitchen. The ones with the smiles. What about them? That was the one piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit.

I sat and thought about it for ages. I tried to work back through the whole thing. Tried to see it from an impartial point of view, rather than that of the lovesick cow.

Moo.

First there were no girls. There weren’t even any friends. Then, for a short period of time, there were lots of friends and lots of girls. Then there were no friends and no girls again. So most of the time there were no friends and no girls. It just didn’t make sense. But maybe…

Maybe that was the whole point? That it
didn’t
make sense. Perhaps that was where I was going wrong in trying to sort this all out. After all, he was at uni, he dressed nicely and he’d bought us both tickets to
The Sound of Music
. Oh, no. That was it. No wonder it didn’t make sense to me. It hadn’t even made sense to him. Because that was what he’d been doing—he’d been working it all out, the sexuality thing. Like you’re supposed to do at uni. And now he’d worked it out. He was gay.

Charlie, my girl, you’re a genius.

Just three months and a very embarrassing incident in Jas’s bedroom too late.

I really couldn’t call Jas back after that, and when he phoned again, around a month later, it was at a bad time. Mum had been really sick for a few days and had finally let Kath and I take her to the hospital. She hated the hospital, so we tried to stay with her for as many hours of the day as the staff would let us. To make matters worse, it was hard for me, being at Mum’s—seeing her sculpture and realising I was getting nothing done. Going nowhere fast. Then there was skipping around the subject of uni every time someone asked when my results were coming out.

I was preoccupied.

And by the time Mum was home again I’d conveniently lost Jas’s number. So I didn’t call him back that time either. Yes, I know it’s a poor excuse, but I had other things on my mind. Mum, taking care of the house, catching up on
sleep…plenty of things that seemed far more important at the time.

Life went on without Jas, until eventually it was time for me to move back out of my mum’s and get on with my life. It felt like an eternity since the days of Magnolia Lodge, but in reality it had only been six months. Six months since I’d seen Jas. Well, that’s not entirely true, because since the night that Kath and I had seen him on TV, Zamiel was suddenly everywhere. The media had gone Spawn mad, and I couldn’t turn on the TV or buy a newspaper or magazine without some piece of scandal in it about him.

Packing my bags, I came across Jas’s phone number—in my undies drawer, of all places. I held it in my hand for a few seconds, entertaining the thought of picking up the phone and actually calling him. Having a laugh like the old days. Giving him some well-deserved grief about his long hair and leatherwear. But only for a few seconds. Then I shoved the piece of paper in my jeans pocket—out of sight, out of mind.

I found it again the next day, when I was in the kitchen. Once more I held it in my hand. I think I might have even reached out for the phone this time. But if I did I wrenched my hand back smartly and then busied myself pouring a tall glass of water, because the next thing I remember is taking the glass outside with me to sit in Mum’s sculpture courtyard.

As it happened, I chose to sit on Jas’s favourite piece of hers—a full-size table and four chairs. Some people thought it was weird when they saw it, but what they didn’t know was that it was
our
kitchen table and
our
chairs. Mum’s and mine before I’d moved out of home the first time. I’d watched her photograph it from every angle one day when it was at its messiest, complete with the Sunday paper, left
over bits of crusty bread, a tub of butter, a jar of honey, the chairs we’d been sitting in pulled out and left at angles. And that was the sculpture, the scene frozen in time.

I smoothed the phone number out on the table, eyed it until I’d finished my glass of water, and then systematically tore it into the smallest shreds I could. As I tore I went about convincing myself that everything really was different now. Not just between the two of us, because of what had happened at the apartment, but truly everything. The small world we’d built together was no more, just like the apartment block we’d lived in. There was no point in calling him. I wasn’t part of his new life and I didn’t want to look like a desperate groupie, wanting to be remembered now he was famous.

It would be almost another year and a half before I saw Jas in person again.