On the day Durham ejected me from its student body, shut off my email account and threw me into the world of alumni, I dyed a bottle of wine blue.
The bottle clunked in my tote next to the back-up red as I paced past Sam’s door three times.
On the fourth approach, I knocked. I put my jacket on the peg and pulled the blue bottle out of my bag before we walked into the kitchen. It was only then that I saw the pans and the chopping boards, the meat marinating and some fancy starter bubbling on the stove.
It was June and we were almost graduates. In two months I would be moving to Chicago to begin a Masters degree and Sam would be staying in England to write scripts. We were theatre kids and these outings that we’d jokingly labelled ‘HOT dates’ were no more than play. Sam had already donned a medallion and I spiky heels for a Posh & Becks picnic, and we’d both worn suits and cardboard FBI badges for a Mulder & Scully coffee morning.
With no further word about a lawsuit from Matthew, I’d tentatively begun acting like a normal student. After handing in my final essay, I’d frivolously spent the remainder of my student loan on a trip to Barcelona with a girl in my seminar group. Upon landing in Newcastle on our return, my mum had phoned to tell me Matthew had stopped her in the street to shout red-facedly about how pathetic it was that I couldn’t confront him. She thought it was a sign he was panicked and losing control. I’d sat on the train back to Durham scanning the lines of my book, absorbing nothing – He’s shouting in the street now? Does he want everyone to know? Does he think he has nothing to lose? Might he get violent? – but I’d stepped off at the station and walked straight to Sam’s house to smilingly present him with the (‘extra hot’) chillies I’d brought back from Barcelona, hopefully like any carefree twenty-year-old might gaily give to a friend. Days later, Sam had brought a homemade apple pie to the bar one evening, telling me I was ‘sweet enough to eat’.
But these were joke dates: nothing more than a bit of fun to fill the final weeks of university. They meant nothing and, as Emma pointed out with a mouthful of cinnamon crust, ‘Sam makes cake for everyone.’ This boy was sweet, but I was going to marry a rich American who could get me a green card. Or live a fabulous bohemian life as a lesbian artist.
Still, suddenly self-conscious, I tried to hide my blue wine in the fridge. The shelves, however, were bare, and the clean white glowed against the royal glass. Sam was moving the next day and nothing remained in his house except nude bookcases, the landlord’s flimsy furniture and the muddle of kitchen utensils he was using to cook for me. The sparse surroundings didn’t lend themselves to conversation, and though this was still supposed to be a fake date, I reminded myself how idiotic it would be to begin liking someone at the end of the year.
I’d already sent my things home with my dad and was wearing the only dress I had left. I looked at my toenails, which were painted green inside batik sandals, and wished I were more sophisticated. With relief, I noticed Sam’s pink shoes and smiled.
His last-remaining housemate, John, peeked into the kitchen.
‘Don’t worry, I’m heading out soon. I’ll leave you two love-birds to it.’ He winked with the sickening superiority of a safely coupled friend.
‘Look in the fridge!’ Sam smiled with delight, but my heart sank as John peered at my absurd offering.
‘It’s just the bottle!’ John insisted until I poured a glass. Glancing in turn from the sapphire liquid to my and then Sam’s face, John declared, ‘I give up on you both,’ and flounced out of the room.
I found out later that John had heard every detail of the Posh & Becks picnic and Mulder & Scully coffee morning. Later still, when Sam snatched his phone away from me as I opened a photo album, I bullied him into admitting that he was hiding self-portraits taken before each of our dates to consult John on shirt selection. For now, though, Sam and John were intimidating aspiring playwrights who the drama society referred to as ‘Gilbert and Sullivan’. I’d met them both in the bar after the opening night of my play. They’d said sweet, noncommittal things about what I knew was a far-less-than-impressive production, soothing my embarrassment and massaging my battered ego.
John’s departure left us in silence. Looking sheepish, Sam presented one of those tiny bottles of champagne you find on the ends of aisles in the supermarket, a pink ribbon curled around its neck. Thinking of the blue wine, my odd earrings and cucumber toenails, I squirmed at my lack of elegance and tried to make a joke about the champagne being pink like his shoes. He laughed kindly and I wondered if other people were this socially awkward.
We hovered on the kitchen tiles, staring through the one window at the dull garden wall, sipping pink fizz and making inane conversation about waiting for degree results until there was a clatter in the hall.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’
We hurried to see what had happened and found John at the bottom of the stairs with an empty cardboard box and two smashed espresso cups on the floor. I made inadequate gestures towards helping him clean up while Sam returned to his cooking. John threw the pieces in the bin and grumpily said he’d had enough of packing. Just before he slammed the door, he instructed me with a wink to ‘Have fun!’ and the roof of my mouth dried up.
Sam and I were alone.
This is not a real date, I reminded myself, and wondered why, if that was true, my palms were sweating.
What followed was a cringe-worthy ritual of small talk interspersed with brief moments of relaxed conversation. We ate on a fold-out table in the empty living room, then sat on opposite ends of the sofa. Both the TV and stereo had been packed, so every nervous giggle echoed in the silence.
I could not have known then, in those excruciating pauses between stilted conversation, that within three days we would be holding hands in the street and confirming our relationship via Facebook. Equally, I couldn’t have known we’d drag a mattress into the closet of his new house and fumble away his virginity in our makeshift den. I couldn’t have known Sam would persuade me to follow him to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and we would spend the month of August sharing strawberry crepes and watching bizarre performance art. I couldn’t have known my first night in Chicago would also be my first night without Sam in six weeks and my tears wouldn’t cease all the way from airport security desk to Sears Tower. I couldn’t have known that, against all my expectations, we’d make a long-distance relationship work and share a nothing-short-of-filmic embrace at Heathrow upon my return. Nor could I have known that in eighteen months’ time we’d look to rent our own terraced house in Durham, and on our second anniversary, we’d name a kitten Shakespeare.
On this sultry June evening, neither of us knew anything. But, somehow, after we’d each attempted several hesitant shuffles and the last drops of blue liquid had stained our incisors, we managed to bridge the gap between us and share our first kiss.
In the following weeks, I engraved an umbrella as a birthday present, only to find its recipient had never seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Sam painted me in black and white to look like Audrey Hepburn for mine. We discovered our matching distinctions together and endured the teasing from our friends. There were dinners and breakfasts, and I triumphed in converting him to coffee over tea. We woke together in a single bed every day in August and climbed Arthur’s Seat in flip-flops and canvas shoes.
When the guy behind the desk at the American Embassy informed me, ‘You don’t have the right documentation, mam, I can’t issue you a visa at this time, mam, please don’t get upset, mam,’ I wondered whether to drop out of my overpriced Masters course and stay in England. Meanwhile Sam was calculating the cost of coming to Chicago for Christmas and paying for a year’s worth of calling cards. Sam came home with me to Sussex to help me pack and I sat in the back with him as we drove to the airport. He kissed me goodbye next to the security entrance and, while I was being herded onto British Airways, he was crying on a tube somewhere on the Piccadilly Line.
At some moment amid all of this, after a bottle of regular-coloured wine and another gourmet meal, he whispered to me in the dark, ‘I think I’m falling in love with you.’
And like any normal twenty-year-old with a potentially useless humanities degree and an uncertain future before her would have done, I smiled and mouthed, ‘Me too.’