Junk - Melvin Burgess [45]
She said, ‘No, no, I couldn’t, not yet. I’ll tell him later on.’
We’d stayed up after Tar went to bed the night before, and Gems was telling us all about it – him and her. How he loved her but she didn’t love him, but she didn’t want to hurt him because she liked him so much, all that stuff.
Basically, Gems was feeling a bit tied down. I could see what she meant. Tar’d had a hard time. He’d had enough surprises for the time being, he wanted to lie low for a while. But Gems – she wanted to take the place by storm. She was fond of him and she didn’t want to let him down – she didn’t know how much she’d miss him…
We stayed up half the night talking about whether she should give him the elbow or not.
And then at some point Lily said, ‘Come and live here…’
Gemma looked at me.
I said, ‘Yeah, why not?’
‘Do you mean that, do you really mean that? I’d love to live here. I’d love to live with you…’ And it felt just right, you know. As soon as the idea was floated we all knew it was right. We started jumping about and we got into this big clinch, bouncing on the sofa and hugging each other.
‘Welcome home, Gems,’ I said. And I rolled an enormous ten-skinner to celebrate.
So, it was sorted. Tar’d go back to Richard and Vonny and the squat, Gems would stay here.
‘He can still come and visit me,’ she said. But the feeling I got was, that was that.
When Tar got up that morning he sat next to Gems on the settee holding his tea between his hands, blowing on it, eyeing us up. I was thinking about all that Titanium Man stuff Lily had been doing, and how good it had made him feel last night, and I thought, Now what?
I liked him, you know? He wasn’t a comfy sort of person; he didn’t just fall into place like Gems did, but I liked him. He just needed to come on a bit slow.
It was all a bit awkward. Lils and Gems were at it right away, rabbiting away. They were soul sisters right from the start. Poor old Tar was sitting there not knowing what was going on, looking really left out. Well, he was left out, wasn’t he? I’m a quiet sort of bloke meself. Sitting there with Lil and Gems once they get into it, bloody Jesus would feel left out. I could see Gems was getting a bit peeved, like he was in the way or something, so I thought, Yeah. And I got my coat.
‘Coming?’ I said.
Tar said, ‘Where to?’ and he glanced at Gems.
Gemma snapped, ‘It’s all right, you can go with him, I’ll still be here when you get back.’
Lily gave me a little glance and I nodded. Business, you know? He got his coat and we headed off down the road.
He was just a little kid. I mean, he felt like that. Like, he was brought up on the riverbank and I’d been brought up in the wild woods.
He started talking about Lily. He said, ‘She’s…’ and then he ground to a halt, which was perfectly reasonable. How do you describe Lily?
‘Yeah, no one’s found the right word for Lils yet,’ I said. He smiled and nodded. ‘But what about Gems?’ I said. ‘You’d think they’d been friends for about a thousand years.’ And I laughed, because maybe they have…
‘Yeah…’ He sounded pretty miserable, which wasn’t surprising because Gems hadn’t glanced at him since she met Lils. I said, ‘They’re a ‘mazing pair of girls, right?’ And I stopped and grinned at him because, you know, we were going out with them. So what did that make us? I thumped him on the back. It made us, like, blood brothers. He smiled back, a bit shy. Yeah, I think he cheered up a little after that.
I had a bit of time. I just wanted to show him what was what. We found a skip and I started digging about for wood. It was coming up for summer; it was warm enough, but maybe we could have a fire in the garden later on if the weather was okay. We were pulling out bits of wood and stuff. Then I found these pictures. It was a couple of plates out of an old book.