“We did it, Matt!” He repeated it over and again, for all the world looking set to pick me up and swing me around again. “We bloody did it!”
I took a step back, needing the space, petrified of a repeat performance. In amongst all the mourning or triumphant (delete as appropriate) shrieks and cuddles going on around us, we got away with it the first time. I didn’t fancy our chances twice. I stared at him, willing myself to say the magic words back to him. To tell him the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, which began and ended with a simple ‘I love you, too’ yet hijacked with all the shitty stuff I’d hidden from him in between.
I retreated another step, widening the gap between us. A familiar prickling sensation built up behind my eyes again as Alex stared at me, his delirious expression faltering as he realised mine didn’t mirror it. He gave me a loose punch.
“Matt, hey, Matt! You clever bastard, you did even better than me! And without doing any bloody work, too!”
A third step back. “I’m not going.” My throat had dried up, each word a painful croak. I attempted a second time. “I’m not going.”
He laughed. “What, to the pub with this lot? Nah, me neither. I thought we might celebrate in a quiet spot on a blanket somewhere, you know, over the common.”
The prickling behind my eyes became harder to ignore and harder to fight. God knows what I looked like; fists clenched, breathing hard and blinking back tears, in what should have been one of my short life’s happiest moments. A fucking gay mess, probably. With the telepathy that comes from living in each other’s pockets for eighteen years, Phil appeared at my shoulder. Brenner joined him, I’d no idea where he’d materialised from.
“Y’all right mate?” Phil’s voice was low, and his gaze flicked between Alex and me. I felt my knees buckle.
“Yeah.” I nodded, trying to control the lump in my throat and the fucking wetness threatening to seep out of my eyes. “I’ve just explained to Alex here that I’m not going. To uni. That I never applied.”
“What? You’re going to Sheffield! What do you mean you never applied? What the fuck, Matt?” Alex’s voice; loud, confused, angry. Swearing—God, I’d turned him into a heathen.
“You heard him,” Phil growled, this time with a hint of a threat. We took care of our own on our estate, always had done. Always would. Mates before dates. I rocked on my feet a little, I really should have stayed sitting down. Folding his arms, standing taller, Phil squared up to Alex.
“You’ve got the wrong end of the stick, mate. Matt’s not going to university. He never was. He can’t.”
“You coming, Matt?” Brenner butted in. “We’re going down to the Kings Arms, a load of us.”
“No, he’s not going to the pub.” Alex’s hand landed at my wrist, tugging forcefully, and almost shouting at Brenner. “Look at me, Matt. What the hell’s going on?”
I think Phil guessed it then. Brenner too, although he’d always been a little slower to put two and two together. Something in Alex’s touch perhaps, the possessive, familiar hold he had on me and how I didn’t pull away. The way he stood closer than a mate would, so close I could have raised my face to his and kissed him.
“I’m going with Alex,” I said, in a daze. As if an invisible hand was pulling my strings from high above.
We didn’t speak on the walk to his car. Nor when he turned on the engine. The radio stayed silent.
“I’ve made a present for you,” I volunteered at last, wiping my face dry on my sleeve. “For getting into med school. But I left it at home because I thought bringing it would be bad luck.”
“Shall we go and fetch it?”
I didn’t answer straight away, although reflexively I almost said no. But then, as Alex tucked the Polo in behind the bus trundling around the ring road, it occurred to me that everything had unravelled now anyway, so one more uncovering of the truth wouldn’t matter.
“Sure. I’d like that.” I nodded. “It’s a right turn at the hospital, then left after the bend.”
“I know where it is.”
“You don’t, actually.”
I ordered him to wait in the car. As I opened the passenger door, he peered up at the grimy grey cladding of my block.
“That’s our place, with the yellow curtains.” I pointed to two ground floor windows.
The thin curtains were closed, despite it being the middle of a sunny afternoon. My mum didn’t get up every day, and even on days she did, she didn’t always bother opening the curtains. I let myself in, ignoring the door leading to the lounge and kitchen on the right, and headed straight to the end, to the bedroom I shared with Simon. I couldn’t hear the telly, meaning my mum had either gone out or died. I didn’t especially care either way. Reaching up to the top bunk, I fumbled around for the mixtape I’d painstakingly wrapped then hidden under my mattress.
Of course, when I turned back, Alex Valentine, the fucker, stood staring at me from the doorway.
I watched dully as he performed a slow three-sixty, absorbing the cramped few feet of space my brother and I tussled over, and the ugly damp stain, spreading like the fucking shroud of Turin across almost the entire ceiling. The piles of dirty laundry, the scratchy woodchip wallpaper, the bare light bulb. At least he managed to resist putting a hand over his nose, but I wouldn’t have blamed him if he did. I hardly noticed our flat’s aroma of old sweat, dirt, fags, and booze, but it seeped from the walls and the council-issue brown carpet like pus from an open gangrenous sore.
Pissed off would be a gross understatement of my mood. “I told you to stay in the bloody car.”
Shouldering past him, clutching the mixtape, I marched towards the front door then down the path. He hurried to catch up; I heard the front door slam behind us and we eyed each other across the roof of the Polo.