The night before Mark died.
It was going to be a normal Friday. As usual, Julie, Charlotte and Mark were planning to hang out in Luke’s bedroom, watching videos late into the night. Fridays were never for going out; always for staying in. There used to be good TV on Friday nights. Charlotte, Mark and Luke would pig out on music shows, sitcoms and offensive animation, waiting for Julie to come back from work with the pizzas and videos, which in those days they actually had to pay for because Leanne still worked at Homebase. Julie thinks about how different it was then, and she remembers that Leanne wouldn’t have given them free videos then anyway even if she had worked in Blockbuster. She never exactly approved of their little group.
Charlotte lived at 14 Windy Close for about two years. Like the older, badder supporting-role girl in coming-of-age films, her few scenes were intense – never just there, she was totally, enormously there. And when she left, it was like a power cut, or when someone turns off the radio when your favourite song comes on.
First of all, Charlotte was beautiful. Secondly, Charlotte was impossible to ignore. It wasn’t just Julie; no one could stop looking at Charlotte. And it wasn’t because of her beauty, because a lot of the time Charlotte did nothing at all with her natural looks, preferring to go around with unwashed hair, chipped nail-polish, cheap sunglasses and charity-shop clothes that would look shit on anybody else. Charlotte just had something, and Julie spent a lot of time trying to work out what it was. Before they were even introduced, Julie would watch for hours from her front window as this girl lay there in the sun toasting her tits in the front garden, reading angsty books in the sunshine, playing dumb while people got offended.
‘You’ve got a crush on her,’ Luke said, on that particular Friday, just before Julie left for work. ‘I’ve been wondering what it is, and that’s it. You’re obsessed with her.’
‘What? With Charlotte?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Luke, I’m so not. God. Fucking hell.’
‘You’ve read all her favourite books.’
‘So have you.’
Charlotte’s arrival had, among other things, been a bit like a travelling library pulling into the street and then staying for a couple of years. Luke and Julie were able to discover authors like Douglas Coupland, Haruki Murakami and young London-based writers whose work wasn’t even available on Amazon. Charlotte was a walking twentysomething crisis with all the books to match and her crisis was so compelling that everyone wanted a part of it. And since she never talked about it, whatever it was, the books were the only way in.
Julie’d never read an actual life-changing book before but after Generation X she added supermarkets to a long list of places she wouldn’t ever go. After reading Generation X, Julie knew that if she walked into a supermarket the world would end. Girlfriend in a Coma, which still reminds Julie of the first full summer Charlotte spent at Windy Close, made the supermarket problem a lot worse.
‘Maybe you’re the one who’s obsessed,’ Julie continued. ‘Maybe . . .’
Luke interrupts: ‘Julie, look at yourself. Look at your hair, your make-up, your clothes. You’re becoming her. You even speak more like her now – all those likes and sos and totallys.’
‘And I couldn’t have got that from you? That’s not my obsession with Charlotte, that’s your obsession with American TV shows – no – programmes.’
Is there anything more embarrassing than being caught imitating someone you really admire, by someone who knows you really well? Apart from being caught taking a shit in public, maybe not. Taking a shit. That was one of Charlotte’s favourite phrases as well.
Julie fumed all the way to The Edge. How could she be trying to be Charlotte? How could Luke think that? Julie was herself, not some Charlotte-a-like, and she liked herself. That was the other thing, Julie didn’t want to be someone else. There was nothing wrong with her. All she was doing, if anything, was trying to inject a little tiny bit of Charlotte into herself, to take the parts of Charlotte that were compelling and add them to her mix so that she’d still be Julie but an enhanced, souped-up, better-than-new Julie. Julie + x, where x is that bit of magic that Charlotte has and Julie doesn’t. It’s like when you take a gene from one plant and add it to another. The second plant doesn’t become the first plant, it just takes the properties that are useful to it. All Julie was doing – and she wasn’t even doing it consciously – was a bit of harmless genetic modification, and, regardless of what people actually thought of GM in practice, as a metaphor there was really nothing wrong with it.
So she had a suntan for the first time in her life? Big deal. That wasn’t so much from wanting to be Charlotte as from wanting to be with Charlotte, since Charlotte sat in the sun the whole time. OK, so maybe Julie could have been a bit subtler with her make-up experiments. Maybe she shouldn’t have tried doll-style pink blusher just because Charlotte somehow got away with it, and maybe she shouldn’t have stopped washing her hair because it suited Charlotte in that weird way, and maybe the asymmetric blobs of Michael Stipe blue eye-shadow on an otherwise unmade-up and unwashed face was a mistake too, but all girls make mistakes with cosmetics, and it wasn’t like Julie had even had a proper female friend before. Maybe she was just catching up on stuff she should have done when she was, like, ten, or something.
Thing was, whatever Julie had done, whatever the germ of Charlotte-ness had given her, it was working. People didn’t ignore her so much at The Edge. The other waitresses asked Julie to join their Lottery syndicate, and sometimes they invited her to go out with them – not that she ever went, because she was always too busy with Luke and Mark and Charlotte. Maybe it was just the extra confidence Julie had from having a friend but something about knowing Charlotte put Julie in the world again. Something about knowing Charlotte made Julie realise that it’s OK to be a bit weird, thoughtful and quiet – you can, somehow, be cool too. How could Luke hope to understand all of that? It wasn’t like he’d ever been in the world himself, having to take his identity out and show it to people, waiting for them to judge him.
By the end of her shift, Julie had worked out what she would say to Luke after Mark and Charlotte had gone home that night. She’d point out all the differences between herself and Charlotte, like the way they both felt about the weather. Knowing Charlotte hadn’t exactly made Julie fear the weather less. So, she sat in the sun more – that didn’t mean she wasn’t still terrified of rain, fog and, particularly, storms. Charlotte loved extremes of weather and experiences – Julie was the total opposite. Charlotte liked motorways; Julie would rather die than go on a motorway. Charlotte hated TV; Julie loved it. So they were hardly the same person.
To this day, Julie has never seen Happiness or Pleasantville, because they were the films she’d picked up for that night. When she got to Luke’s everything seemed different, and Charlotte wasn’t there.
‘Charlotte’s not here,’ said Luke, when Julie walked in.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mark said, looking at the floor. ‘Things aren’t, I mean . . .’
‘What’s going on?’ Julie, putting the videos and pizzas down on Luke’s bed.
Luke looked at her in a funny way. ‘Charlotte’s at your house.’
‘Oh.’ Julie glanced at Mark. He seemed sad. She looked at Luke, and he looked back at her, and she knew something wasn’t right between them but she didn’t know what was going on. ‘Why’s she at my house?’
‘She said she’d see you there,’ Luke said.
And even though something in his voice was daring her not to go, she still did.
‘I’m breaking up with Mark,’ Charlotte said simply.
She’d made herself at home on Julie’s bed and was drinking a cup of tea.
Julie sat down at her desk and looked at Charlotte, then, seeing tears in her eyes, looked away. Through her bedroom window she could half-hear and half-see movement in Luke’s room. A few moments later Julie saw Mark leave, cross the street and walk into his house.
‘Does Mark know?’ Julie asked.
Charlotte shook her head. ‘No. He suspects, but he doesn’t know.’
‘Are you leaving?’
‘I guess I’ll have to.’
‘Wow.’
‘This sucks, Jules. I’ve fucked up bad.’
‘Is there someone else?’
‘Maybe.’ Charlotte looked at her in a funny way. ‘I just don’t know . . .’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Things have got pretty stale with me and Mark, you know.’
‘I didn’t know,’ Julie said.
It was never easy to know how Charlotte was feeling. You always told her everything without realising she’d told you nothing. In all the time Julie had known her, Charlotte had never been this open about anything. Sure, their friendship had become deeper lately but they never really spent a lot of time alone together. They were always either at Luke’s, with Mark, or somewhere like a pub where Charlotte would spend most of her time just being Charlotte – making her unique observations on the world, looking out rather than in, never talking with anyone about herself or her perfect relationship. That’s the thing: her relationship seemed perfect. Mark and Charlotte used to go around together barefoot sometimes or wearing matching sunglasses. They liked the same music and he sometimes let her put make-up on him and it seemed like they’d be together forever.
Now Charlotte sighs. ‘Talking’s boring, sex is boring. If it wasn’t for you and Luke, I’d have gone ages ago. You know I only decided to live with Mark because I didn’t have anywhere else to go? I wouldn’t exactly have chosen to live with a guy and his parents under normal circumstances.’
‘So why . . . ?’
‘When I went to university, my parents pretty much told me not to come back. They threw out all my stuff and gave my room to my sister. I met Mark at university and we made it to the second year before we thought we should split. The whole thing was doing our heads in. We were living in this shitty student house with bitchy girls and no hot water, and our course was mind-numbingly boring. We wanted to do something rebellious. It was winter, so we drew out all the grant money we had left and went travelling, trying to find somewhere hot. When we ran out of money and came back to the UK we didn’t really have anywhere to go apart from Mark’s parents’ place.’
‘I never knew that.’
After a minute Charlotte said: ‘Jules?’
The way Charlotte said that made Julie shiver.
‘Yeah?’
‘Can I tell you something really fucked up?’
‘Uh . . . Yeah. Go for it.’
‘You know we have a special connection, right?’
Julie’s stomach flipped. They did have a special connection, or at least, Julie hoped they did but she never thought Charlotte would be the one to point it out. Julie herself had been trying to work out what that connection was long before Luke accused her of having a crush on Charlotte; she just hadn’t been doing it in a particularly conscious part of her brain. At least she had his answer now. No, Luke, it’s not a crush, it’s just this special connection we have.
‘I, uh . . .’
‘We do, right? I mean, I haven’t just imagined it?’
‘No. I mean yes. We do. Of course . . .’
‘I’m so scared you’re not going to like me any more . . .’
‘Why? Charlotte, I won’t ever stop liking you.’
‘The thing is . . .’ Charlotte put her mug of tea down on the floor. ‘I think I might like, you know, uh, like girls.’ She looked at Julie as if to check her reaction and then carried on speaking, a bit faster, as if to cover up what she’d just said. ‘At least, that’s what I’m going to tell Mark. I’m going to tell him that I want to explore this, to see if it’s just some passing obsession, or whether it’s something real.’
‘Wow. I . . . How would that make me stop liking you?’
‘I dunno. Do you . . . do you know why I’m telling you this?’
Julie’s mind raced. She needed to hit the pause button so she could assess what was actually going on here. Just as she was about to answer – and she wasn’t even sure what she was going to say – a light flashed into her room from the house next door. Luke’s special signal.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, automatically.
Charlotte looked hurt. ‘Oh. I’m sorry if I . . .’
‘No – it’s Luke. I have to . . . Can we talk tomorrow?’
‘Sure,’ said Charlotte.
But Julie didn’t get to speak to Charlotte the next day, because when Charlotte woke up at about two in the afternoon, someone was telling her that Mark was dead. Two months later, after refusing to speak to anyone in all that time, Charlotte left Windy Close.
Julie hasn’t actually spoken to Charlotte since the night before Mark died.