All About Us Read online

  ‘So what do you want to do with them?’ I ask her.

  She laughs, and wriggles back against the headboard, trying to get comfy. ‘I just want to … be happy, I suppose. Enjoy life. Have good friends. Be a good friend. Do something for a living that I love.’ She pauses for another sip of tea. ‘First up, though, I want to go travelling. Bit clichéd, I know, but when you grow up in a tiny village where you know everyone, the idea of visiting the other side of the world seems quite appealing.’ She shrugs. ‘That’s the plan, anyway. But I bet I never get round to it.’

  ‘I bet you will,’ I say. Because I know she will. She and Jamila will spend five months backpacking around South East Asia and Australia straight after uni, while I work night shifts in a pub in Ealing, missing her like mad.

  It’s crazy to think about that period now. We’d been going out for two and a half years at that point, but it still felt fresh and new and exciting. I was still so caught up in her; so hopelessly head-over-heels. I couldn’t believe that this funny, sexy, incredible girl was actually with me. It’s a feeling that’s starting to sink back in again right now – it has been ever since that kiss in the maze.

  What’s happened to that feeling in 2020? When did it get lost along the way? How did we turn into this bitter, sniping couple, constantly at each other’s throats?

  We sit in silence for a few seconds, at opposite ends of my single bed, just smiling and looking into each other’s eyes. And suddenly it’s like I really am nineteen again, my brain fizzing with the excitement of having met someone this brilliant. Someone I feel an instant, inexplicable connection with.

  Daff yawns and stretches her arms behind her head. The urge to lean forward and kiss her grips me tightly again, but I content myself with another large slurp of tea.

  ‘What are you doing for Christmas, then?’ I ask.

  ‘I’ll just be at home,’ she says. ‘The usual stuff: stockings, presents, turkey. My mum’s not actually that big on Christmas, though. We tend to do all the proper, extended-family stuff on January the first.’

  I nod. ‘Greeks are all about the new year, right?’

  She freezes with the mug halfway to her lips. ‘How did you know my mum’s Greek?’

  Oh God. This is a minefield.

  ‘Erm … just another guess,’ I stammer. ‘You kind of … look Greek?’

  Which is true, to be fair. She narrows her eyes at me. ‘Are you sure you haven’t been stalking me on Myspace, Not-Naked Ben?’

  The mention of Myspace makes me laugh out loud. If I ever doubted that I am genuinely in 2005, here is the conclusive proof.

  ‘So, what about you?’ she asks. ‘What are you up to for Christmas? At home with your mum and dad?’

  ‘Well, I …’ I have to stop suddenly, because the thought of Mum almost makes me choke up. But I take a deep breath and manage to keep it together. ‘My mum goes mad for Christmas, so it’ll be the full whack – turkey, all the trimmings, tinsel everywhere …’

  ‘What about your dad? Is he into it too?’

  I shrug. ‘He’s not really in the picture, actually.’

  She looks down at the duvet. ‘Oh. Right. Sorry.’

  I shake my head. ‘No, don’t be. I mean … hopefully, some day, that might change.’

  She looks at me fondly, and then yawns again. As she stretches, a few more curls escape and tumble gently around her shoulders.

  God, she looks amazing.

  ‘I feel knackered suddenly,’ she says quietly.

  And this time I can’t stop myself. I move in to kiss her again. She leans forward to meet me, and we’re locked into each other once more, kissing hungrily, her hands on the back of my neck, my hands tangled in her long black curls.

  And then she breaks away.

  ‘Ben, I don’t know if I want to … you know?’ she says. ‘We’ve only just met …’

  ‘Yeah, no, of course! Of course not. I mean, if you want to head back …’

  She shakes her head. ‘I don’t want to go.’

  She pulls me gently towards her, and we both lean back slowly until our heads are resting on my squashy foam pillow. For a while, we just lie there, fully clothed, on top of the duvet in my tiny single bed, looking into each other’s eyes and smiling. And then I shift round and wrap my arm around her, so that her head is resting on my chest. Her hand finds mine and our fingers interlock. She lets out a tired, contented sigh. And despite all the madness and chaos that this day has brought, I feel totally at peace. Calm and happy and in control. Like I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.

  ‘Almost midnight,’ Daff mumbles.

  I glance up at the clock above the door. It’s not far off the time that’s frozen on my watch. I think suddenly of that piss-take sales line the old man gave me: How else will you know when the clock strikes midnight? A flicker of that strange feeling I felt in the pub passes through me, but I’m too tired to properly examine it.

  Daff nuzzles further into my neck. ‘This should feel weird,’ she says, sleepily. ‘I mean, I hardly know you. But it doesn’t.’

  I feel my eyelids starting to droop. ‘Yeah,’ I murmur. ‘The fact that it isn’t weird is, in itself, weird.’

  We both laugh softly. I pull her even closer and gently kiss her forehead.

  And before I know it, I’m asleep.

  Chapter Twelve

  I must have been dreaming about that kiss in the maze, because now, as I stir suddenly awake, it’s like I can still hear the rustle of the leaves around me. I can almost taste Daphne’s lips on mine.

  For some reason, I feel dizzy and slightly winded, like I’ve just been flung from an out-of-control merry-go-round. I didn’t even feel that drunk last night, but I guess those pints of snakebite were stronger than I thought.

  With my eyes still closed, I groan softly into the pillow and flip it over to the cold side. I lie groggily under the duvet, still half asleep, feeling a weird combination of things: warm and fuzzy and happy after what happened last night, but also – somewhere in the pit of my stomach – fraught and scared and anxious. Because as right as it felt – as perfect as we seemed for each other – I know exactly how things will pan out. How sour our relationship will eventually become.

  I nuzzle my face further into the cold pillow, wishing I could get my head around what’s happening. I half open my eyes, remembering that at any moment now, Harv will be pounding my door down, demanding one final bacon-heavy fry-up before we head home for the Christmas holidays.

  I reach across instinctively for Daphne. But she’s not there.

  I open my eyes fully and squint at the daylight streaming in through the curtains. The first thing I focus on, propped up against the lamp on the bedside table, is an advent calendar. Nearly every window is already open on the front of it, but rather than revealing badly drawn images of the infant Christ, they contain cut-out magazine pictures of an actress I used to have a major crush on: Larisa Oleynik.

  For the second time in as many days, I shoot bolt upright in bed, suddenly wide awake and breathing heavily. I stare wildly around the room, which is much more instantly familiar than my university dorm, but feels far less comforting to be waking up in right now.

  Clothes are strewn haphazardly across the frayed carpet, a PlayStation 2 is buried under a molehill of games in the corner, and the walls are decorated with ragged Blu-Tacked posters: a mixture of scowling New York rappers and gurning mid-air skateboarders.

  Daphne is gone, and I’m in my bedroom at home. Home home. The home I grew up in.

  I have jumped forward this time, instead of backward, and thanks to the single unopened window on the advent calendar, I know exactly which date I’ve landed on.

  This must be December 24th, 2006.

  I squeeze the bridge of my nose tightly, and a shard of sunlight bounces off my watch. I’m still wearing it. I am now naked except for a pair of boxer shorts I don’t recognise, and yet I am still wearing this watch. The hands are stuck in the exact same place – one min
ute to midnight.

  The watch-seller’s weirdly cryptic line about the clock striking midnight flashes into my head again. I looked at the watch last night, just before Daff and I fell asleep. That must have been when it happened: last night, when the real time matched up with the time on my watch … that must have been when I ‘jumped’ again! I guess I was already asleep by then, because I definitely don’t remember it.

  I feel a momentary burst of pride at having potentially figured out the logistics of this time-hopping madness – although it’s quickly buried under a fresh heap of confusion as I remember I have no idea how this is happening, or why.

  With my heart still thudding, I reach over to pick up the advent calendar. I remember it so well, though I have no idea where it is back in 2020. It’s a cheapo supermarket thing with a ruddy-cheeked Santa Claus grinning maniacally on the front. But Daphne customised it especially for me; ripped the cardboard back panel off and replaced it with a whole new collage of photos. A few months into our relationship, we’d been watching the stone-cold classic Nineties romcom Ten Things I Hate About You, and I’d confessed to spending my post-puberty years obsessing over the film’s star.

  And so, just before the first term of second year ended, Daff presented me with this calendar, full of hidden pictures of Larisa.

  ‘Now you can take your one true love home for Christmas,’ she deadpanned as she handed it over.

  I pick open the final window, which is much bigger than the others, and it reveals a surprisingly realistic composite of Ms Oleynik and myself standing next to each other, smiling. It has to be said, we actually make a pretty good couple.

  I drop the calendar back onto the table. It takes me a couple of seconds to figure out the significance of this date. If my maths is right, then Daff and I have now been going out for just over a year, and today – Christmas Eve 2006 – is the first time she ever came to my house. In fact, it’s the first time she ever met my …

  I hear spoons tinkling and cups clinking downstairs, and my stomach instantly turns in on itself. My chest knots so tightly that for a second I think I might pass out, and there’s a sudden hard, hot pressure thundering behind my eyeballs.

  ‘Benjamin!’ Mum yells up the stairs. ‘Will you please – please – get your backside out of bed and come and help your poor mother?’

  And the next thing I know, I am crying so hard I can barely breathe.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Mum died on November 26th, 2018.

  It was a Monday – a grey, drizzly, nothingy Monday – and I was coming back from work when I got the text.

  I was temping at a travel agency at the time, spending forty hours a week knocking out press releases about Pacific cruises for the over-sixties. It was around 7 p.m., the end of yet another mindless, monotonous day, and I felt my phone buzz in my pocket as I stepped off the Tube. I remember staring down at the name on the screen. My uncle Simon, Mum’s brother. That’s weird, I thought. I don’t think Simon’s ever messaged me before.

  All it said was: Are you at home?

  I texted back: In about 20 mins – why? But there was no reply.

  As soon as I got in the front door, I called Mum to see if she knew what was up with him. It went straight to voicemail, her cheery voice ringing out in my ear: ‘So sorry, but I can’t come to the phone right now …’ Even then, I didn’t make the connection. It didn’t even cross my mind. Why would it?

  When Simon knocked on the door a few minutes later, my first thought was that he’d had an accident. His shoulders were hunched, his eyes red raw and his face twisted like he was in agony.

  I asked him what was wrong, but he walked past me and said, ‘Let’s go in and sit down.’ And when we were sitting at the kitchen table, he just came out with it: ‘Ben. I’ve come from the hospital. I’m so sorry, but something terrible’s happened. Your mum’s died.’

  And that was it. Just like that, the world ended.

  Simon told me later – months later – that the nurse had instructed him to say it that way. Direct and to the point. No beating around the bush. Like pulling off a plaster.

  I didn’t believe him at first. I thought it was a joke. Some weird, dark, sick joke. But then his voice broke as he said it again. And as he started to cry – these horrible, heavy, jagged sobs – the truth ripped through me like a blade.

  I remember just sitting there, gasping like I was drowning. The shock was so severe – so insanely violent – that it took the wind right out of me.

  The only thought in my head was that I would do anything – anything – for this not to be true.

  I sat, paralysed, as I listened to Simon explain what had happened. An aneurysm. A weak blood vessel in her brain. No warning, nothing anyone could have done. She’d been on her way back from the shops, and she’d fallen right there in the street. Dead at fifty-eight. Gone forever.

  There’s a blank space after that, where my memories should be. The last thing I remember is hearing Daphne’s key in the door, and the scrape of Simon’s chair as he stood up. Crazy how your brain just slams the shutters on things it can’t cope with.

  I have a half-formed memory of Daphne standing over me in the bathroom later that evening, when Simon had gone, trying to pull my hands away from my face. And I couldn’t understand why until I looked in the mirror and saw the bloody red tracks my fingernails had been leaving.

  But the rest of the night is a blank. Which is strange, because I know I didn’t sleep. The next thing I really remember is the sound of the rain on the window the following morning. By then, the shock and violence had given way to a kind of numb, broken emptiness, and I lay on the sofa, feeling like I was underwater, while Daff called the travel agency to tell them I wouldn’t be coming back in.

  I went round to Mum’s house a couple of days later. The house I grew up in, the house I’m in right now. I don’t know why. I just had to. Daff didn’t want me to go alone, so I lied – told her I was meeting Simon there.

  As soon as I opened the door, I knew it was a mistake. The place smelled of her. How could her smell still be here, when she wasn’t?

  I didn’t get further than the hallway before I broke down. Above the hall table, there was a photo of the two of us. We’re on the beach at Whitley Bay, near Newcastle – one of Mum’s favourite places on earth. I’m fourteen or fifteen, mugging at the camera from beneath an unfortunate Britpoppy fringe. Mum has her arm wrapped tightly around me, and her blonde hair is whipping about wildly in the sea wind. But through it all, you can still see her bright smile and her blue-green eyes, sparkling with laughter and life.

  I pulled the picture off the wall and crumpled onto the floor, my back pressed up against the front door. I don’t know how long I sat there staring at it, crying so hard that my entire body was shaking. Because it hit me then, quite suddenly, that this was real. That this nightmare was actually happening. That my mum was gone, and something inside me was broken and might never be fixed.

  Her phone was still on the hall table – she was always forgetting to take it out with her – and I sat there calling it over and over again, crying harder and harder each time her voicemail kicked in. She sounded so real, so alive. How could she be gone? It didn’t make any sense. It still doesn’t.

  The days after that were a blur. There were forms to fill in – endless fucking forms. There were trips to the funeral director’s office. I would sit there next to Simon in that bleak little room on Ealing High Road and think how absurd it seemed to be discussing things like flowers and food at a time like this. Mum was dead, the ground was cracking beneath me, and here I was talking about whether I preferred lilies or chrysanthemums. What the fuck did it matter? What did anything matter now?

  The funeral itself I remember in random stop-motion snatches. The unreal horror of the coffin behind the podium. The way Uncle Simon’s face seemed to collapse as he stood up to give the eulogy. I was supposed to speak, too. I was meant to read a poem – a Walt Whitman thing, one of Mum’s favou
rites. But a couple of days before, I’d decided I couldn’t do it, for fear of breaking down in front of everyone.

  I’ve always regretted that.

  I remember staring around the church while Simon was speaking, to see if my dad had bothered to show up. I’d been so certain that he would. That he would step back into my life today, when I needed him most.

  But no.

  When the service finished, even through the blinding misery, I felt a violent stab of anger at him for that. Of all the shitty things he’d done to her – to us – that seemed to be the shittiest.

  The weeks and months after that all bled into each other to form one long, airless vacuum. I pushed everything inwards: tried to nail a brave face on and keep moving. I guess I thought that by going through the motions, things would eventually get back to normal. But they didn’t.

  Daff tried to help, to get closer to me, to console me. I lost count of the nights she came home early, or the days she took off work. She’d grip my hand and pull me close, and beg me to talk to her – or talk to someone else: a friend, a therapist, a bereavement counsellor. But every time, I just pushed her away. I didn’t see how talking could change anything. Talking wouldn’t bring Mum back.

  I went back to temping. A different office, but equally dull and monotonous. And every night, after eight hours of typing and smiling and making small talk, I would go into the grotty public toilets by the Tube station near work and cry until my throat was raw.

  Because I think it was only then, in those weeks that followed, that I really started to process it all. Mum had been the one constant in my life. She had always been there, and now, suddenly – inexplicably – she wasn’t. She was my only real family. And she was gone.