One Question

Suddenly you’re there. The train pulls into the station, the doors slide open and suddenly you’re there. I don’t know if I want you to be. It feels like you’ve cheated by turning up unannounced. I’m worried that you’ll be able to tell that I still think about you too much.

I feel blood rushing to my face. I want to know where you’ve been, where you’re going to. I’m suddenly angry that you’re wearing clothes I don’t recognise and I’m struck by the realisation that I don’t know where you live any more. I think you might have moved house. Without telling me. Without letting me know.

I can’t believe that I’m looking straight at you on this platform here and I’m presuming that you’re on your way home from work, but I don’t know where that home or work is anymore. It’s a Friday and I guess that you’ll be heading out again later on. You’ll be going somewhere I want to go, and you’ll know it too. But you’ll play it down and say something like “I’d put you on the guestlist but I don’t have that kind of power”... Only it wouldn’t work now. You can’t say that to someone who you can only meet through chance. It just sounds mean.

I want to know if you’re any happier, if you still drink too much. I want to know who that girl was you were holding hands with in Soho square the other week. The pretty one who was laughing. But I’m not about to ask. And you’re not about to tell me.

We’re both on the crowded platform looking around to see if we could conceivably pretend we didn’t see each other. But we catch each others eyes at the same time and my cheeks grow redder and you lean your chin in towards your chest. I love that gesture, it’s humble and apologetic. And so you fucking should be.

Every time I see you I’m amazed by how strange you look. You’ve got no distinguishing features. You’re a cloud that grew limbs.

You pull a few strands of hair over your face. You’re paranoid about your hair but you’re even more paranoid about your face. You think your eyes are ok. I think they are too. But then again, I’d like anything that you like. I trust you implicitly.

You’re there. And you really are straight in front of me now, with a half-smile on your face and I’m thinking-

I’m not really thinking anything.

I go numb in self defence.

The last contact between us was a text message saying,
“I’ve been obsessed with you for two years”. A text message, for fuck’s sake. I didn’t even dare call you. As soon as I’d sent it I realised that I’d only known you ten months.

I saw you holding hands with someone, sober in broad daylight and it rendered me a crumbling, innumerate wreck. I knew you were never my boyfriend, and I coped with this by imagining you were. At first I used to run away from you, then I passed the baton on and you started running away from me. If I rewind and fast-forward my memory of the time I spent knowing you, we could just chase each other round in circles. Forever. But you’d still never be my boyfriend.

You text your reply promptly and civilly, and it’s so measured and sensible I can tell you don’t care either way.

I bashed my knee against a wall so hard that I couldn’t walk properly for a week. The wall just stayed there unimpressed.

I was drunk constantly and when the tears came it seemed too much effort to try and hide them. “Go home” people would mouth at work. “But it’s just so stupid”, I’d bawl. A guy I work with throws me a bag of Milky Way chocolate stars as he walks past. I ask why. “I don’t like seeing people upset,” he replies. I don’t even like them, but the gesture nearly kills me. I’ve run out of directions I can look off into.

I was disappointed when the bruise faded away. It only took a week or so. My own skin was trivialising my ordeal. I sat and watched my own body mock me, as black turned to purple, turned to pink. I want to be taken seriously. But I couldn’t even do it myself.

We briefly acknowledge the unequal amounts of affection we feel for each other. “Are we not going to speak?” you ask, eyes darting around the other commuters. “I’m sorry. I went a bit weird” I reply, even though it doesn’t match the question. I look down and see that I’m doing an impression of a lobster with my texting thumb. You smile and I hate you for making me smile too. I don’t even know why I’m apologising.

You ask me “how I am” or “what I’m up to” or one of those questions etiquette requires you ask in a situation like this. I tell you I’ve just moved house, which is true, I have. Again, I don’t know if it qualifies as an answer, but I tell you anyway.

Words come out wrong when I’m speaking to you. A great orator reduced to a jabbering mess. I can’t. You know. Do that thing where words go together and make sense. I can’t form sentences. There’s never any logical progression. Phrases chase round other broken phrases. Thoughts don’t flow, they just pile up and fester like cars on a scrap heap. Like I say, a great orator reduced to a jabbering mess.

When I tell you where I live now you pull an expression I’ve never seen before. Not just on you, but on any human. Your mouth becomes a thin upside down horseshoe, and the rest of your face struggles to rearrange itself around it. I don’t see what your problem is. It’s a perfectly acceptable place to live. A bit run down, but it’s cheap for London. It makes sense that I’d live there. I don’t like things to be too nice, too polished. I don’t earn much money.

You ask me if I still live with my friend you met a few times, and you call her by her full name.

“Is the idea of meeting up with me a fate worse than death?” I phoned you up once at two in the morning, furious.
“I’m lost, I’m fucked, I’m near your house.”

And I had got on the bus going the wrong way, and it was a genuine mistake. I’m too high to care if you believe me or not.

“I’m sorry, Sean. I know it’s late.”
You take a sharp intake of breath and I sense over the line that you’re glad I called.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have called.” I say this anyway.
“No….”
“No?”
“ No. It’s fine. I hate myself,” you say. Your voice is raw, nestling between meek and tender.
“Not as much as I do”
“What?”
“Me, I mean. Me not you. Maybe sometimes you. But always me.”
“Are you ok?”
“I’m fucked. I think I’m near your house.”
“Wait. I’ll come and get you.”
It was the only time you did anything nice for me. It was probably the only time I dared ask you.

I’m not living with that girl anymore and I’m telling you who I do live with, but I’m conscious that I’m still nervous and I’m speaking non-stop.

We used to laugh together at people who spoke too loudly or too much. We used to sit together, drunk on the floor and sneer at the world to divert the attention away from ourselves. It was childish and unconstructive. I loved it. You’re honest and infuriating and not particularly attractive. The second time we went on a date, and it was getting late and we still hadn’t kissed, you started biting your hand and grimacing in mock anger. I think I knew what you meant. I mirrored you because I agreed. After a while I didn’t feel right biting my own hand, so I started biting yours instead. You don’t smoke and it tasted of soap and apples and I was surprised. It was like a child’s hand. Not that I’ve ever tasted a child’s hand- but that’s how I’d imagine it would taste.

If I’d have thought to just kiss you instead, that girl you were holding hands with would probably have been me.

And now I’m saying something about orphans, how the girl I live with was adopted by French people, how she was growing up in an orphanage in South Korea, when-

and your eyes are darting round my face, my body and I’m pretty sure you’re thinking about the one time we had sex. It was good, I think, I wanted more. It materialised later that we both felt like we were raping each other. We both consented to mutual rape. Oh, whatever, we were drunk. I can’t touch people otherwise. Especially not ones I like.

“She’s an orphan who was brought up by French people.” And I signal two fingers, like the peace sign. And I say it out loud “Two”. And you smile and this time I’m grateful for the smile, it’s a natural reaction. “So I guess, in a way, she’s Parisian even though she’s an orphan and she doesn’t know who her parents were”, and I have no idea why I’m telling you this. I’m pretty sure I say it out loud- “I have no idea why I’m telling you this.”

You make it hard for me to breathe.

Another train hurtles past, and I think to myself “Stop saying the word ‘orphan’.”

You’re one of the only people I talked to about the people I’ve lost. Most of the time we were sarcastic and cynical but sometimes we’d talk late at night, slightly drunk, but as honestly as we could, about death. You had a friend that was murdered. Another friend died in a car crash. It was on your seventeenth birthday. He wasn’t on his way to see you, but we both agreed it was bad timing. He liked that song by The Spin Doctors which goes “If you want to buy me flowers, just go ahead now”. That’s pretty much the only thing I remember you saying about him. On your birthday this year you sat surrounded by your friends in the bar where I worked and looked miserable. “Good”, I think, in retrospect. “I love you, you bastard.” I’ve still got that DVD you lent me. The documentary about the band Wilco. The one that’s called I am trying to break your heart.

I’m on my way to Waterloo to catch an overground train to visit my cousin. You laugh and tell me I’ve taken the longest possible route. You know that I get lost easily, and it momentarily feels good to be standing there with you. I have never once been bored by anything you said or did. I know that this is not reciprocated. There’s a voice in my head saying “accept, accept, accept.”

I drag you over to the side of the platform. We find a tube map on the wall and I point at it like an exasperated teacher, “How is this the longest way? This is the closest station to where I live.” You look confused for a minute and then point up towards Camden and show me the route I must have taken.
“Fine.” I say, “but what the hell was I doing in Camden?”
“That’s where you live.”

My face scrunches up with disgust. “I’d never move to Camden. Ever.”
“But you just said-”
“Clapton.” I say, enunciating slowly. “You know? Hackney.”
“Oh.” You say. With no expression.

You won’t be paying me a visit.

The doors are beeping and the passengers are being told to move down the carriage. I jump on. “Well. I guess I’ll see you around,” you comment breezily, as if we were standing in for models in a Hillfiger advert. You look so pathetic and useless and unlike a model that I wonder what I ever saw in you in the first place. I don’t bother forming a response, I just make a noise-
“Unghhh”.

I’ll “unghhh” you to hell. Unghhh, unghhh, unggghhhhhh. I start to think about all the times you bailed out on me. Nine times out of ten you wouldn’t even show up. You’re a coward and an idiot and I’ll make
you sorry that you ever made me like you in the first place. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll unghhhh-

The doors stay open for longer than normal and I’m standing there staring at the floor, my cheeks flushed, concentrating on not looking at you. Half of me wishes that the train is stranded, so I can get off and ask you straight “how you come you fancied me so much before I opened my mouth?” But I don’t think I can handle the answer.
The doors close. And I wonder if you’re going to see your girlfriend. If you have a girlfriend. If you’re happier. I look back through the closed door, but I can only make out the wires hanging loose on the side of the tunnel, and I think about my knee all healed now, not even a mark there, and I realise I didn’t even ask you one question.

I didn’t even ask you how you were.