Junk - Melvin Burgess [7]
Gemma was wild about it. She gets so excited by things – that’s one of the things I like about her. She was excited by the fire, by meeting us for the first time, by the sound of the sea in the dark, by the night…
Minely’s the most awful dump. No one’s got any time for the locals. You wander round in your own town feeling like an outsider and then… you find this bunch of people your own age sitting half a mile out of town by this magic fire drinking and smoking and doing their own thing. I remember when I discovered the beach life. It’s great.
She was beautiful but she was going on and on, rattling away about how wonderful this was, and how wonderful that was. She was getting drunk and stoned, and I thought, Doesn’t she ever get tired of her own voice?
But I stayed and she stayed and in the end there were only about five or six of us left.
That’s the time I usually went home. The later it got, the more people got paired off until in the end, if you were sitting there on your own, you turned into a gooseberry. I usually tried to leave before that happened, but that night, I was there and Gemma was there and all the others were paired off, and I thought, Oh, no…
Because in that situation I always feel as though I ought to try and make a move but I didn’t dare. And I didn’t want to just go and leave because everyone would know I was scared to talk to her. You’d have to be a lot more sure of yourself than I am to pull a girl like her.
She came and sat next to me and started talking…
There were these long silences. I was anxious she’d be fed up but she didn’t seem to mind. Then she started asking me about myself… and I told her about home and Mum and Dad. I felt like… stupid, you know? Because everyone knows about my problems and here I was talking about them to this beautiful girl. I thought she must just be dead bored by it. But she kept asking me about things in a quiet voice, not like the voice she used when she was hooting and yelling earlier. I told her everything. Everything – too much. I kept looking at her, thinking, Why are you asking all these questions? What have you got to do with me?
Then she started talking to someone else and I thought, Oh well… and the next thing I knew I could feel her fingers tickling my hand. I couldn’t believe it, I thought it was some mistake. We held hands. Then I picked up all my courage and I put my arm round her waist and she leaned into me. And I just smiled. I was so pleased. I couldn’t kiss her, I was smiling so much.
‘Ow!’ she said, when I banged her mouth with my teeth.
I told her, ‘I’m so happy.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Good.’
When I rang her up that Tuesday after I left home and she told me she was coming to see me, my face went like it did that first night. I was grinning like an idiot. People were smiling at me as I walked away from the telephone box. It was great.
I’d been feeling pretty down – being away from home, being on my own. Now I felt great. I wanted to make that moment last as long as I could. Like in a film – you know how they play a song or some music and a particular feeling stretches out – like that. I should have been in a boat floating down the river or in a hot-air balloon with someone playing a guitar, but there I was in the middle of this tatty old Bristol street and I knew that any second something’d happen and I’d be feeling dreadful again. I had to do something.
Then I thought, I’ll go for a walk in the park… Yeah. There’d be toddlers on the roundabouts, people walking their dogs. It was late spring. The daffodils were still out, there were trees in bloom. People would be feeding the ducks and the pigeons. I could have an ice cream. I had my Walkman with me so I could even have some music if I wanted.
I could feel that moment lifting up, ready to jump into the air…
I put my hand in my pocket. I don’t know why. I had a quid. And I thought, Shit! because I’d already left it