I stand and stare up at the arch for longer than is probably normal. I’m trying to get my thoughts into some sort of order, but every time I think I’ve got it all under control it spirals off again until I want to bang my head against the stone of the arch just to give myself a bit of peace and quiet.
I walk along the park and, at the corner, an old black man calls out to me and gestures at the chessboard in front of him.
‘I don’t know how to play!’ I call back.
‘I can teach ya!’ he shouts. ‘Come on!’
I laugh, shaking my head, and carry on walking. I cross the road and stand at the corner trying to decide which way to go. The road ahead is tree-lined, with brownstones down one side, so I keep walking and after a couple of blocks find a tiny triangular park and another triangular traffic island lined with the plastic boxes for free local magazines. The whole intersection is so New York that I stand there for ages, just trying to breathe. Crossing the road again, I lose myself in the tiny streets of red-brick buildings, trees and fire escapes. I don’t know how long I’ve wandered for, but at the end of one of the most beautiful streets I’ve seen in my life, I find the Magnolia Bakery. Nick talking about ‘fucking cupcakes’ makes me smile and I go in and buy a box of six mixed. I’m hungry and thirsty and tired – we didn’t get much sleep last night – and so I wander some more until I find a little cafe.
While I wait for the soup I’ve ordered to arrive, I turn on my mobile. My stomach flickers with nerves as the phone flickers into life. There’s another message from Adam – he’s missing me and wondering when I’ll ring him – and a voicemail from Chloe. ‘You’ve gone on your own? I could’ve come with you, you know. What are you doing, Cass? Your mum phoned – you didn’t even tell her you were going? Ring me.’ She sounds really pissed off. Even more than usual. I think about ringing her back or texting, but I decide it can wait. It’s three days. A freebie. A break from real life.
My soup arrives and I people watch out of the window as I eat. I wonder about ringing Chloe and telling her exactly what’s going on, telling her I’m here with Nick and listening to all the reasons she thinks that’s a Very Bad Idea, but I could list them myself so I don’t really see the point. Chloe warned me off him from the very beginning. In fact, I didn’t even need to be warned at first, since I thought he was a total wanker. After he pushed in to book the modules, the next time I saw him was in a seminar group. He arrived late again, talked over people and rolled his eyes at something I said. I decided he was a sexist pig and, in the canteen afterwards, Chloe totally agreed with me.
But it was such a cliché. He annoyed the hell out of me – particularly by being so smirky and not even slightly bothered at how annoying I found him – but then I found myself thinking about him a lot. Sometimes about something arrogant or obnoxious he’d said, but more often about the way he looked in his jeans and his stupid big workman’s boots or the way he laughed at something I said or the time he said he preferred the Brontës to Jane Austen because Austen was about passion repressed and the Brontës were about passion unleashed. (That one had made me shuffle in my chair a bit.)
We never really invited him to hang out with us; a few of us in the seminar group just seemed to naturally gravitate together. Soon he was coming to the student union with us after lectures and then we were all having lunch together – either in the canteen or in one of the nearby pubs and then we were all meeting between lectures. It was never discussed, we all just knew that if we had a break or a free period or just wanted to skip a lecture we’d be able to find at least one of the others in the cafe. We even had our own seats – a sort of booth near the big windows overlooking the quad. It was the closest thing I’d ever had to living the way they did in Friends and I loved it.
There was me, Chloe, Nick, a boy named James with the driest sense of humour of anyone I’d ever met (which, ironically, almost made me wet myself laughing on more than one occasion), Rebecca and Joe. For the first few months I had a crush on Joe with his romantic-hero dark hair and eyes and gorgeous bright smile, but then he dropped out to go travelling and it was just the five of us.
By the second year, I was sharing a tiny flat with Chloe, but Nick and James had found a huge place near Rusholme so we all started hanging out there. It was a creaky old Victorian house with plenty of rooms, so Chloe and I got into the habit of sleeping over – it was cheaper than getting a cab back to our flat. Rebecca stayed too sometimes, but I never really felt like she was one of us. She didn’t get our stupid jokes (she was actually annoyed when one of our lecturers read out the line from Mansfield Park ‘Day and night all I think about is Fanny’ and the rest of us got into one of those unstoppable giggling fits) and she was also just a bit too perfect.
But then she started going out with James – which we could never understand because she never got his jokes – and Nick’s friend Adam moved into the house and the dynamic of the group changed again. I knew Adam fancied me right from the start – and I liked him too – but he wasn’t Nick.
I finish my soup, pay and head back out into New York. I feel a bit disorientated – I almost expected to step out into Manchester, maybe even the uni quad – but it’s New York and it’s breathtaking. Literally breathtaking, it’s suddenly so cold that I feel like ice crystals are forming in my lungs.
I walk briskly down Greenwich Avenue, turn onto another main road and keep heading south. I pass playgrounds and parks and basketball courts and think about what it would be like to live here. Could I do it? I don’t know anyone, so it would be a completely new start. Which appeals to me. But then Manchester was supposed to be a completely new start and I totally fucked that up. The thought of living in New York – being alone in New York – is almost equally exciting and terrifying. I keep telling myself that you have to do things that scare you, but maybe it scares me too much? And doing things that scare me haven’t exactly worked out well in the past.
The crush on Nick started slowly. He sat next to me in a lecture one day and the way he flopped down in his seat, the way he smiled at me, the way he leaned in slightly too close as he took his jacket off and hung it on the back of the chair … It made me wonder. Later, in the canteen, it was just me and Chloe and Chloe said, ‘Nick likes you.’
I fiddled with a sugar sachet. ‘He’s just being Nick. He’s just flirting.’
She shook her head. ‘Nope. His flirting is really obvious. It’s different with you. I’ve seen the way he looks at you.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Like how?’
She rested her chin on her fist, narrowed her eyes and stared at me intently. Nick did look at me like that, I’d noticed – how could I not have noticed?
‘That’s what he does when he’s trying to freak me out,’ I said.
‘Trying to freak you out with lurve,’ Chloe said.
‘He’s seeing that girl, isn’t he? The one from the other course?’ Nick was doing a combined English and Media Technology course and had two separate groups of friends. He hadn’t mentioned the girl to any of us, but I rang him one day and he obviously had someone there with him. And he was smoking – I could hear him inhaling as we talked. I was mortified to think I’d called them just after sex. Or maybe I’d interrupted sex. Something about the way he spoke to me made me feel like he was mocking me – with her – and I’d been pissed off with him for a couple of weeks after.
‘They split up,’ Chloe said. ‘James told me.’
‘Oh.’
‘So you’re not interested?’ she asked me.
I shook my head. ‘Too dangerous. He’s such a … man whore.’
Chloe burst out laughing. ‘Oh my God, Cass. That’s exactly the kind of thing you’d crucify him for saying! If he said he wasn’t interested in a girl because –’
‘Yeah, I know,’ I said. ‘See, that’s why I’m not interested. He brings out the worst in me!’