‘You’ve been out with Charlotte?’ Luke says.
It’s almost ten o’clock and Julie’s only just made it over to Luke’s. He was in the middle of an intense Internet chat when she walked in, so she used his loo, walked around the room for a bit, washed her hands, and then frowned at herself in the wardrobe mirror for five minutes. Now they’re both sitting on the bed. Julie’s drying rain off her hair with a towel, and Luke’s fiddling with his socks.
‘Yeah. And David was there, and Leanne.’
‘I wondered where Leanne was,’ Luke says.
‘Hasn’t she rung you?’
‘No.’ Luke shakes his head. ‘No one’s rung or anything.’
Julie looks sad. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I should have rung you. I just . . . It’s the first time I’ve seen Charlotte since, you know . . . and . . .’
‘Hey,’ Luke says, smiling. ‘You don’t have to explain. I’m not your jealous boyfriend or anything. Anyway, I was connected to the Internet almost all night.’
‘I don’t like thinking of you on your own for ages.’
‘I was OK. I went on some chat room for a while, then that Big Brother follow-up show was on and I’ve just been watching TV since then.’
Julie takes the towel back to the bathroom. ‘I wanted to watch that Big Brother programme,’ she says on the way back.
‘It wasn’t that good. I don’t like thinking of them all out in the world.’
‘Hmmm.’ Julie sits back down on the bed. In the background, the BBC News is on.
‘Why’s the news on now?’ Julie asks.
‘They’ve moved it to ten o’clock, silly.’
‘Oh, yeah. I forgot that was tonight.’
There’s another big report about the floods. Then a short item about some job applicants who went missing last September – they still haven’t been found, so the search has been scaled down.
‘So you haven’t heard from Leanne at all?’ Julie asks.
‘No. I thought she’d come round demanding sex as usual but . . .’ He shrugs. ‘Nothing.’
‘Oh.’
‘So anyway, how’s Charlotte?’
‘The same. Still sort of elusive. We didn’t get to talk in that much depth. First we were in this weird coffee shop that we got chucked out of, then we went to The Rising Sun and immediately bumped into Leanne and David.’
‘I thought Leanne didn’t go to The Rising Sun?’
‘I know. David isn’t exactly part of that crowd either. It was strange.’
‘But she was OK? Charlotte, I mean.’
‘She seemed OK. She was being quite funny about Leanne, actually. I mean funny ha-ha, you know, not weird or anything.’
‘I think it’s hilarious that we’re only back in touch with Charlotte because . . .’
Julie laughs. ‘I know, because Leanne’s so mental. Charlotte thinks so too.’
‘So did she say anything about, you know . . .’
‘About Mark and everything? Not really. Not beyond saying she loved him and she didn’t want him to die – like we didn’t know that anyway.’
‘Poor Charlotte.’
‘I know. She said she couldn’t face us.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, because she said she wanted to leave him and then he died. She said she thought we’d think she wanted it to happen or she’d betrayed him or something. That’s why she left.’
‘God. Poor Charlotte.’
‘I know. She seemed OK in the end, though. I think it’ll be nice to be back in touch with her, don’t you? She was a pretty good laugh when she was around.’
‘Yeah. I’ve really missed her. So is she . . . Is she going out with girls now?’
Luke remembers all those weird, semi-whispered conversations last year when Julie told him, bit by bit, what Charlotte said to her the night before Mark died.
Julie shrugs. ‘I don’t know. She didn’t mention that at all. That last conversation we had – it was like we never had it, you know?’
‘Weird. Um, Jules?’
‘What?’
‘I never asked you . . .’
‘Yeah?’
‘Was anything ever, you know, going on between you and Charlotte?’
‘Going on? No, don’t be silly. Of course not.’
‘OK. Just asking.’
‘I like boys, Luke.’
‘I know, I just . . .’
‘I’m going to make a cup of tea. Do you want one?’
While Julie’s downstairs, Luke checks his e-mail. There’s one from Wei: Don’t fax details – fax broken. Send by e-mail to this address. Then he gives an address, perhaps not realising that he doesn’t need to since it’s the same address he’s sent the e-mail from.
‘You know when you asked me if I had a crush on Charlotte, ages ago?’ Julie says when she comes back upstairs.
‘Yeah – I’m so sorry about that, I just . . .’
‘No, don’t worry.’ Julie puts down her tea. ‘I sort of think I did, a bit.’
‘I never meant it in the way you thought,’ Luke says. ‘I never meant to say you were copying her or anything. I could just tell that there was something . . .’
‘Going on.’
‘Yeah, sort of.’
Julie shrugs. ‘That night, when she was over at my house . . . she said we had a special connection. I never told you that bit.’
‘You did have one, though, didn’t you? Everyone could see it.’
‘Could they?’
‘Yeah, definitely. Um . . . There’s something I never told you as well . . .’
‘What?’
‘That night.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Mark asked me directly. He said, “Is Charlotte fucking Julie?” That was when you were both over at your house. In fact, I think that’s the last thing he ever said to me.’
Julie covers her face with her hands. ‘Fucking hell.’
‘I know. I didn’t want to say because . . .’
She doesn’t move her hands but Luke can see her face is red underneath them.
‘Yeah. I know. Fucking hell. Jesus.’
‘I know.’
‘I feel a bit ill, now.’ Julie finally takes her hands away and puts them on her stomach, as though it hurts.
‘Sorry. I . . .’
‘No. I am glad you told me but . . . I didn’t think two girls could, you know, fuck.’
Luke’s embarrassed. He shouldn’t have said anything. ‘Look, it’s just an expression, isn’t it? I don’t suppose he actually meant like that. He just meant were you having a thing, or whatever. I’m only telling you because it was that obvious to everyone that you had something. There was just something intriguing about you when you were together, like you had a secret you weren’t telling anyone else.’
‘People say that about us,’ Julie says. ‘Me and you, I mean.’
‘Do they?’
‘Yeah.’ Julie thinks for a minute. ‘God, I’m totally freaked out now.’
‘Just forget it.’
‘Yuck. Mark thought that. God.’
‘Forget it, Jules. It doesn’t matter. Mark was a bit of a dick anyway.’
‘Luke!’
‘What?’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Yeah, I know. I still think he was a bit of a dick.’
Julie giggles for a few seconds then stops. ‘I never realised he thought there was something going on between us, though.’ She looks directly at Luke. ‘You do believe me, don’t you? There really wasn’t. We were just friends. And she was only a bit less fucked up and weird with me than she was with everyone else.’
‘Maybe it was just all the stuff she said when you weren’t there.’
‘Like what? What stuff?’
‘Oh, Julie’s so cool, stuff like that. She talked about you a lot.’
Julie raises her eyebrows. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah, totally. I mean, she really, really liked you.’
‘Really?’ She sighs. ‘God, all this stuff is just a bit of a mystery to me . . . I’ve never had a female friend before, so I don’t really know how it’s supposed to be. I thought it was all normal, I mean as normal as it could be with her being weird and me being . . .’
‘Weird,’ Luke finishes. He laughs. ‘You had a lot in common.’
‘We didn’t, though, really, did we? She’s the travelling, outdoors type and I’m obviously . . . well, not. Maybe that’s why I was so drawn to her. Maybe I wanted to be a bit more like her, not in the obvious ways but just, you know, to be less scared of everything.’
Luke looks at Julie. ‘I thought you were happy the way you are.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You’re always going on about how you’re the only one who’s sane and it’s everyone else that’s mad. I thought you said all your fears were logical.’
‘Yeah, they are.’ Julie shrugs. ‘It’s just if I was a different sort of person I wouldn’t use logic to dictate how I lived my life, I’d just, I don’t know, do stuff because it’s fun, or because everyone else does, or whatever. Not choose my activities based on whether or not there’s a hundred per cent chance of survival.’
Luke laughs. ‘I see what you mean.’
‘I don’t think other people think about dying as much as I do. I think they just sort of assume they’re not going to die, even if they do go in a plane or bungee jumping or whatever. They focus on the fun and maybe . . . Maybe they think the fun’s worth it, and maybe they sort of don’t really mind if they do die. If that makes sense.’
Luke fluffs up his pillows and gets comfortable lying back on the bed. ‘Sort of. How do you mean?’
‘Well, sometimes, especially when I was a kid, I’d get caught in those moments on a fairground ride or something, and it would be going really fast and it would be totally thrilling, and somehow the thought of doing something dangerous enough to kill you was exciting. It made me feel brave, and cool, and on the edge and . . . I guess all that stuff people say about “living dangerously” and everything. I do understand the attraction of that, but nowadays I just can’t let go enough to get caught in any of those moments. Now I wouldn’t go on a fairground ride because I’d look at it and realise how unsafe it is and just not physically be able to take that risk. Nowadays feeling on the edge just wouldn’t give me a thrill; it would terrify me. I guess because now I know the edge is real.’
‘But you wish you could go back?’
‘Where?’
‘Well, to a time when you didn’t think about all this.’
Julie pauses. ‘I don’t know. I think about all the things I did so easily when I was a kid. I travelled in cars with other people driving – on motorways, even – and I didn’t ever think about crashing. I used to eat fish from the fish and chip shop, and I didn’t think about bones. Of course, when you’re a kid, grown-ups are in charge and they don’t let you do anything that isn’t safe and you sort of trust them. If my dad was driving, or my mum, I’d just think they wouldn’t crash, because they were my parents, and because crashes happened to other people and . . . And I mean, when you’re a kid and your dad tells you to watch out for fish bones, you don’t even listen, because you don’t really believe someone could actually die from eating something. I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t trust grown-ups any more, maybe because I am one, and I know they’re not very trustworthy.’
Luke thinks back to the summer when Julie got her A level results. She was due to fly to Barcelona with her mum; their first holiday together since she and Julie’s dad split up. On the train on the way to meet her mum in London, Julie had just sort of freaked out. She’d rung Luke from Liverpool Street station, crying, saying something about a storm, and the train going too fast and feeling dizzy at the thought of going up in a plane. Nothing Luke said could calm her down and she came straight home – not on the fast train, but on slow, local trains, building up her journey like a spider’s web, slow, safe and time-consuming. Luke thought at the time that Julie was stressed about her exams – she’d been so totally weird through the whole exam period – and then she got her terrible results and the whole thing seemed to get worse.
The more Julie simplified her life, and the more logical and safe it all seemed, the more distance she seemed to put between herself and the rest of the world. Of course, all Julie says is that her life is real, and that commuting a hundred miles a day isn’t real and that she likes her ‘simple’ job and her ‘simple’ life and that if everyone lived like her the world wouldn’t be so messed up.
Julie cuts into Luke’s thoughts. ‘You know the funny thing? When I was a kid, dying – or, you know, almost dying – seemed fun and kind of glamorous. It would mean time off school and a scar maybe, and loads of people asking how you are and bringing you sweets, and life not being so boring. The one thing I remember about being a kid is how structured and monotonous everything was, with grown-ups deciding everything, and having to go to school every day for like thirteen years and just thinking how good it would be for something different to happen for a change.’
‘I feel like that all the time,’ says Luke. ‘I wish something different would happen to me. I wish my life would change.’ He thinks of Wei. Could he be that change? Luke wonders briefly if now is the moment to tell Julie about Wei getting in touch, but he wants to be sure first. He knows what Julie will say anyway, if he just tells her. She’ll say the whole thing’s mad. Maybe it’ll be better if she just speaks to him directly herself tomorrow night, when he rings.
Julie looks at him. ‘You know, if I could do something to change everything for you, I absolutely would. I mean, if someone came along now and said I had to eat, I don’t know, a half-cooked chicken or something, or fly to Australia in a plane, or anything, really, and you’d be cured, I’d do it, just like that. I’d do anything to make you better.’
‘I know, Jules. I’d do the same for you.’
‘But there’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘No . . . Obviously. I just mean I would, if there was.’