Chrissy was oblivious to how I felt. She’d promised that we’d have a nice last night together, watch a film in bed and get an early one, so we could be fresh and ready for the move, but at the last minute she decided to throw a party, a “leaving do” she called it. In the end I’d woken up on the sofa in the flat downstairs, the Nintendo I’d been playing with the girl who lived there still plugged into the telly. The music was still going at ours, the doosh-doosh-doosh beat of it thumping against the ceiling, the sound of furniture scraping and footsteps charging about. I wanted to go up but I’d made that mistake before when Chrissy’d had one of her dos. They’d all been off their heads, white-faced and black-eyed, sweating and gurning and carrying on like they hadn’t realized it wasn’t still the night before.
It was the first time I’d been in the flat downstairs, they’d only moved in a few weeks back. The layout was the same as ours, though. Sitting room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom. Each doorway no more than two or three steps from the next. The girl I’d been playing with was asleep on the bed, a toddler wearing a fat nappy in the cot beside her. I didn’t know their names. Whoever else lived there must have been upstairs.
I found a half-eaten box of Coco Pops in the cupboard and leaned up against the window, eating them straight from the packet. I remember being impressed with that, we never had anything like Coco Pops at ours. An empty cig packet was blowing across the tarmac outside and I watched it for a while, twisting and whirling before coming to a standstill next to a bent-out old bike with a missing front wheel, something translucent and slimy-looking trapped underneath the handlebars. It didn’t seem possible that this could be the last time I would see that view. The car park I’d walked across every day of my life. The playground where I’d swung on the swings, watching the big kids pass tiny packages hidden in handshakes.
After a while, I heard keys jangle in the lock. A woman came in, stumbling onto the sofa with a can still in her hand. She didn’t notice me there, her eyes already half closed as the drink slipped from her fingers, the piss-colored liquid hissing and frothing onto the carpet. I slid past her out of the door and up the cold, hard metal of the stairwell.
Our door upstairs was propped open with Chrissy’s battered old boombox. Someone had had the sense to switch it off at least, but Chrissy’s body still jolted to a beat no one else could hear. She had her back to me, the distance between us littered with the wreckage of the party. I hung back, watching for a moment, and then I went to her, wrapped my arms around her ribcage, pressed her bones against my cheek. She didn’t hug me back, just stood there, then pulled away and cupped my face in her hands, the chemicals still sparkling in her eyes.
It’s today! she said to me, her voice hoarse and scratched but still so giddy that it made me wish I could feel even some of what she did. She didn’t notice that I didn’t, or maybe she didn’t care. She just grinned, spun me round in a circle to the sound of glass splintering under our feet, laughing at the expression on my face, making a gesture with her shoulders that said who cares, who cares about this place, this shithole, we won’t be back here, it’s not our problem anymore. Stop worryin, love, she said, passing me a roll of plastic bin liners. Just pack what yer can’t do wi’out. We won’t need much. He’ll get us whatever we need.
We waited for Barry in the bus shelter outside the flats for what seemed like hours. Chrissy was all right at first, strolling up and down the pavement, easy, languid, like she was only moving to pass the time. But the longer we waited the faster her steps got, until she was almost marching, except more frantic, more urgent than a march. Up and down, up and down, her ankles quivering in her stilettos, the wet tarmac splattering the whites of her bare legs gray. She’d bought those shoes down the market a couple of weeks before, knock-offs of a pair she’d seen in a magazine at the doctor’s. I remember thinking how they didn’t suit her, how daft she looked wearing them first thing in the morning. I never said anything, though.
I was sitting on the wall, my head down but my eyes following her. Occasionally she stopped to take a draw of her cig, stretching up onto the tips of her toes so that her heels slipped out of her shoes, twisting her neck to get a better view of the road. My cheeks burned brighter with every minute that passed, not daring to turn around, convinced I’d see them all peering through the blinds at us, a tower full of eyes, floor upon floor of snarled lives. They’d love this. It’d give them something to talk about for days if Barry didn’t show up, especially after the carry-on Chrissy had made about leaving. The thought made the blood behind my eyes pound so that I had to squeeze them shut, say a prayer to a god I didn’t believe in. Please come, please come, please come, even though it was the last thing I wanted really. Almost the last thing. Anything would be better than hearing that lot gloat.
I tried to make the time go quicker by kicking my feet against the wall, telling myself he’d be there once I reached five hundred, seven hundred, one thousand kicks. The soles of my trainers rubbed against the bin bags at my feet, until in the end one of them ripped and sagged open. Two bags for her, one for me. That was all our lives had added up to.
After a while Chrissy came and sat beside me, picking off the plastic fingernails she’d stuck on the day before, asking me if I thought he’d changed his mind, lighting each new cigarette with the end of her last. I didn’t answer, too busy worrying that the rain was going to ruin my shoes, stain the stiff white leather and the big pink swoosh glittering on each side. Barry had turned up with them the weekend before. He’d seen me sitting on the steps at the back of the flats in bare feet, said he’d been worried about all the smashed glass on the floor.
Danny liked those trainers. It was one of the first things he said to me in fact. He told me, in that throwaway manner he had, that they were cool, and I’d sneered back that they were shit, that I was only wearing them because I felt sorry for Barry, the sad old bastard, wasting his money on crap that I didn’t even like.
Chrissy spotted him first. She jumped up, waving her arms about: he’s here, he’s here! And there he was, in that clapped-out BMW that had seemed so posh to us at the time. Swinging his door open, clambering out, looking all flustered, sweaty, his face a patchwork, a roll of flesh spilling over the top of his trousers. He was apologizing, a stream of half-formed sentences, like he was out of breath even though he’d only been sitting behind the bloody wheel. Something about the delivery from the brewery, a burst barrel, traffic on the A1. Chrissy didn’t notice. She was that relieved to see him that she almost knocked him off his feet, despite the fact she weighed close to nowt wet through. His face lit up then and he wrapped his arms around her gauntness. I looked away, trying to unsee the yellowing stains under his pits, but Barry must have noticed me standing there like a spare part because he let go of Chrissy more quickly than I think he’d have liked to.
Hello, love, he said, reaching out as though to ruffle my hair and then thinking better of it, pausing halfway through the action so that his hand hung suspended in midair between us. He drew it back, resting it awkwardly on his hip. I followed his eyes to the bin bags at my feet, watched him glance around as though he was looking for the rest of our stuff. Chrissy was already in the passenger seat by then. I slid past him, climbed into the back.