Page 18 of What It's Like in Words
Ruth, if you don’t like him, just say you don’t like him.
It doesn’t matter what I think.
It matters to me.
I stepped back and folded my arms. He made me laugh at myself. He took me out of my head. He made everything exciting. My blood was pumping for the first time in years. How could she not see that?
Ruth reached for my arm. I’m sorry, she said. I like him as long as he makes you happy, but if he hurts you, I will kill him. If anyone deserves happiness, Enola…
I told her that I was happy, and she said that she was happy too, then. Both of us were slurring our words. I told her to text when she was home, and she said that she was meeting a date. I told her to be careful. She told me not to worry. Claire is a primary school teacher who cross-stitches. I told her that those were the ones to watch out for.
They’re not, actually, Laa.
I closed the door wishing that Ruth knew me just a little bit less.
IN THE LIVING ROOM, I surveyed the detritus: leftover cake, torn streamers, and half-drunk drinks. The balcony doors opened and closed, and he was in my arms, crisp and cold.
Did you like Ruth?
Yeah, he said. She seems cool.
I wanted more details, but he handed me a badly wrapped present from the inside pocket of his denim jacket. Happy birthday. I looked down at the gift and then up at him. I told him that he had already made me a cake and that this was too much. I wanted to cry, I managed not to, but still, noticing my sincerity, he told me not to be dramatic.
Besides, Steph helped with the cake.
Steph was a name I heard as much as he heard Ruth’s. Patrick—Pat—and Steph were his closest friends. Steph was an actor, and Patrick was an illustrator.
Steph could have come tonight, you know.
She had plans.
Okay, but shecouldhave, if you wanted her to. I’m just saying that I’d love to meet your friends, if you—
Just open the present, Enola.
I hated that Ruth was getting in my head. We hadn’t even been dating a month. I would meet his friends when he was ready.
I tore open the cheap paper to find a CD that he had made. In the sleeve was a piece of lined paper on which he had written a list of the songs. The last song on the list was by Kate Bush and he had quoted:
Keep us close to your heart, so if the skies turn dark, we may live on in comets and stars.
It was the most beautiful, thoughtful gift, and I told him that I would make him one in return. He said that if he wanted to listen to theDawson’s Creeksoundtrack, he would buy it. Then he went to the kitchen, got a bin bag from the second drawer, and began clearing the rubbish.
His affection was there in scrawled black Biro, in a homemade cake, in the fact that he knew where my bin bags were kept. I imagined the party where he and Ruth met and loved each other. That version was so close to this one that it didn’t matter. And it didn’t matter that I didn’t know his exact feelings yet, because mine were weaving over the hole in my chest. I wanted to tell him how much I adored him, but I didn’t; I went to the kitchen and interlaced my fingers with his so that they dangled down by his crotch. He dropped the bin bag and kissed me. The perfect punctuation mark of a kiss, a beat lingering like someone had pressed the sustain peddle on a piano. Then he pulled back and shook his head. Well, this is going pretty well, isn’t it?
CHAPTER 5
His foot nudged mine from the other side of my sofa. How’s it going? I tucked my feet under myself and groaned. Not well. He smiled as if he had expected me to react like that.
We had been spending regular nights like this at mine, with our laptops and a bottle of wine. We didn’t go out much anymore, but it was nice, I reasoned; we had skipped to the part where we were a proper couple at home. Only, as Ruth pointed out, we still hadn’t defined the relationship and we didn’t live together.
He typed rapidly, with reading glasses and deep concentration lines, but I couldn’t write with him—not that I could write without him, but having him here dominated my thoughts. I was always on high alert, like I was afraid to concentrate on something that wasn’t him. Last week, I had read him a section of my novel, and he had listened and nodded and told me to just keep writing.You can’t call yourself a writer when all you do is stare at a blank page, Enola.I joked that the blank page was my favorite, and he had said that made me a fantasist, not a writer.
When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
After I readCatch-22, he answered without thinking.
He didn’t ask for my answer, but when I was seven, Dad bought me a book of ghost stories. One story was about a girl who found her room full of dust. She cleaned, but the next morning it returned, thicker. This happened again and again until, finally, she left. The first morning that she wasn’t there, a truck plowed through the walland smashed where she would have been sleeping to pieces. The dust had been a warning. I asked Dad who put the dust there, and he shrugged and said:The writer?That was the part of the answer I wouldn’t have shared. The fact that it was about control. The school therapist had encouraged me to write whenever I felt powerless. If she had suggested I pick up the bassoon, maybe I’d still be pursuing that.
