Page 39 of The Man Who Didn't Call
The boiling weather had finally broken and a storm was rampaging across the countryside, flashing and bellowing, hammering on the roof of Eddie’s barn. We were lying on his bed under a skylight, which he said he used mostly for stargazing and weather-watching. Lying top to toe, Eddie massaging my foot absent-mindedly as he stared up at the wild sky.
‘I wonder what Lucy the sheep thinks of all this,’ he said. I laughed, imagining Lucy standing under a tree, baaing disconsolately.
‘The storms we get in LA are crazy,’ I said. ‘Like Armageddon.’
After a pause he said, ‘How do you feel about going back there?’
‘Uncertain.’
‘Why?’
I propped my head up so I could see him properly. ‘Why do you think?’
Pleased, he tucked my foot under his head and said, ‘Well,you see, that’s the thing. I’m not sure I’m willing to let you go back.’
And I smiled back at him and thought,If you told me to stay, if you told me we could start a life together here, I’d stay. Even though I’ve known you only a few days, even though I swore I’d never come back. For you, I’d stay.
It was nearly four by the time I packed up to leave. I switched my phone on, although by now I had no expectations. But there was a text message, from a number I didn’t know.
stay away from eddie, it said.
No punctuation, no greeting, no capitals. Just,stay away.
I sat back down. Read it a few more times. It had been sent at exactly three o’clock.
After a few minutes I decided to call Jo.
‘Come to mine,’ she said immediately. ‘Come straight to mine, babe. Rudi’s at his granddad’s. I’m going to give you a glass of wine and then we’re going to call this person, this freak, and find out what’s going on. OK?’
The rain had closed in again. It raged at the Thames like a grey tantrum, pelting, hammering, screaming, just like the storm Eddie and I had watched from his bed. I waited for a few minutes before giving up and walking out, coatless, in the direction of Waterloo.
Chapter Nineteen
Dear Eddie,
You started writing to me earlier. What were you going to say? Why did you change your mind? Can you really not find it within yourself to talk to me?
I’ll pick up where I left off.
A few months after turning seventeen, I was in a terrible car accident on the Cirencester Road. I lost my sister, that day, and I lost my life – or at least the life that I’d always known. Because after a few weeks I realized I couldn’t live there anymore. Frampton Mansell. Gloucestershire. England, even. It was a very dark time.
I was broken. I called Tommy. He’d been in LA for two years. He said, ‘Get on the first plane you can,’ and I did. Quite literally: I flew the next day. Mum and Dad were so good about it. So extraordinarily unselfish, letting me go at a time like that. Would they have been so generous if they’d known what it would do to our family? I don’t know. But regardless, they put my needs first, and the next morning I was at Heathrow.
Tommy’s family lived on a residential street called South Bedford Drive that was as wide as the M4. Tommy’s house was a strange taupe-coloured affair that looked as if a Spanish bungalow had mated with a Georgian mansion. I stood in front of it on my first day, sick and dizzy with heat and jet lag, and wondered if I’d landed on the moon.
In fact, it turned out that I’d landed in Beverly Hills. ‘Theycan’t afford to live here,’ Tommy said grimly, when he showed me round. There was a pool! A swimming pool! With a deck with chairs and tables and vines and roses and tropical flowers hanging in pink clouds.
‘The rent is crazy. I can’t imagine how they’ll keep it up, but Mum loves telling people back home that Saks is her corner shop.’
Even though Tommy’s mother had become barely recognizable, and even more preoccupied with things like clothes and treatments and lunches where she surely couldn’t be eating anything, she was kind enough to see that I needed a break. She told me I could stay as long as I wanted, and told me where to get the exotic-sounding frozen yoghurt Tommy had written about in his letters. ‘But don’t eat too much,’ she said. ‘I can’t have you get fat.’
Beyond the neatly mowed squares of their high-fenced garden stretched a city that stunned me. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a road lined with palm trees reaching up into the sky; giant street names hanging off traffic lights; mile upon mile of squat little buildings, chequered with flowers, engineered for earthquakes. The never-ending whine of planes, the nail bars and rugged mountains and valet parking and clothes shops full of stunningly expensive and beautiful clothes. It amazed me. I spent weeks just staring. At the people, the festoons of fairy lights, the huge expanse of pale gold sand and the Pacific, crashing away at Santa Monica every day. It was a miracle. It was Mars. And for that reason it was perfect.
I realized soon after arriving that Tommy’s invitation for me to stay hadn’t been purely philanthropic. He was lonely. True, he’d escaped the relentless savagery of his classmates, but nothing about his family, his relationship with himself or his trust in humanity appeared to have changed for the better. Those early signs of body consciousness he’d had when he left England seemed now to have blossomed into something a lot darker. He ate nothing or everything, he exercised sometimestwo or three times a day, and his bedroom was full of clothes from which he’d not even removed the labels. He looked embarrassed when I went in there, as if a part of him remembered who he’d been before all of this.
I asked him outright one day if he was actually gay. We were at the farmers’ market, queuing for tacos, and Tommy was already beginning to mumble some falsehood about not being hungry. I remember standing there, fanning my face with our parking-lot ticket, and the question just kind of tumbling out of me.
Neither of us was expecting it. He stared at me for a few seconds and then said, ‘No, Harrington. I am not gay. And what the hell does that have to do with tacos?’
