A Certain Love

A Certain Love

At the other end of the house a young boy hears a door open. The noise it makes is unmistakeable to him; it sounds just like a fridge door opening, the rubber insulation reluctantly being separated from its counterpart except, unlike a fridge door, there is no light that comes on with the opening of the front door. The boy’s mother follows his older brother through the door, dragging a black suitcase with a tattered backpack slung over a tired shoulder. The backpack slips off of her shoulder just as she arrives to rest the suitcase down next to the shoe rack that organises the entrance to the house.
 “Tommy”, she shouts through the house with a mixture of frustration and relief, “Tommy come and say hello to your brother”. Tommy uses one of his chips to clean up the rest of his dinner before leaving his seat to go and greet his brother. He himself has never been on a school trip beyond the local nature reserve so he is actually very excited to hear about his brother’s trip to Normandy, but he’d never let on. He has begged his mum never to tell his brother about the scrap book he’s been keeping of all the photos they had been sent of Alex on his trip and she has, after sufficient teasing, agreed.
“How was it?”, they don’t hug or anything, but they do exchange a brief smile, “Yeah, it was good.” Tommy can tell that Alex has enjoyed himself but doesn’t know how much he can dig to find out more. They’re two years apart and don’t have a lot in common. Alex is a typical older brother, he never bullies Tommy, but often upsets him. When they get into fights Alex always wins but quickly tries to hush up his younger brother if it ends in tears for fear that their mum will hear and then they’d both be in trouble. They mostly fight over trivial things. Each morning they fight about what music to listen to in their mum’s car on their way into school, Alex loves the copy of Mika’s “Life In Cartoon Motion” that their mum keeps in the glove box but Tommy has a soft spot for The Monkees compilation album that sits on top of it. The argument is usually resolved by the time their mum rushes out the front door.
Tommy usually enjoys spending time with Alex. Last Christmas they got a Nintendo Wii as a joint present. It hasn’t yet caused too many arguments, but their mum has had to hide the controllers away once or twice following disputes usually started by Tommy claiming Alex is cheating. Their favourite game is tennis, Tommy isn’t really sporty at all, but he likes the funny sound the controller makes whenever the ball is hit hard enough. It usually makes Tommy laugh and often when Tommy laughs Alex does too.
Tommy enjoys watching and learning from his brother. He often feels like he is cutting corners in life by doing so. Finding out things he feels people his own age probably shouldn’t know yet; from swear words to arithmetic. He prefers being with his brother than being alone anyway. His bedroom often seems too big to him. Particularly at night-time. His imagination is too vivid for his own good and it reflects in his nightmares. A few years ago his mum bought him a dream catcher that offered him some peace and seemed to keep the nightmares away until it became insufficient and she had to buy him a bigger one, as if the one before had become worn down from all the work it was doing. By this point he has a dream catcher about the size of a tennis racket- it has all sorts of plastic gems and jewels dangling from its delicately framed web that Tommy enjoys looking at but tries not to spend too much time studying because he’s not sure he wants to fully understand how the contraption works.
“Alex got you a gift Tommy”, his mum says with a hint of surprise in her tone; the words light an uncontrollable excitement in Tommy’s gut. He swells with joy and love towards his brother. They don’t usually exchange gifts, but Tommy has always loved receiving them. In the few seconds between his mum speaking and his brother reaching into his pocket Tommy has already explored every possibility of what the gift might be and set himself up for disappointment. Alex pulls out of his pocket a small brown paper bag and passes it to his younger brother. Tommy lifts the pathetic flap standing between him and his reward and takes out a black piece of string with a silver coloured dragon pendant attached to it. He is instantly fascinated.
Dragon’s themselves have very little significance to Tommy. However, like most young children he is easily excited by them. They carry little for him beyond this except the fact that he was born in the year of the dragon but having no Chinese heritage this is an irrelevance. Due to a lack of confidence in himself Tommy didn’t put the necklace on straight away, he was a chubby kid with a terrible bowl cut, far from being cool enough to wear a necklace, let alone anything as exciting as a fire breathing dragon. But by the time he got to secondary school, settled in and made a few friends he one day decided that maybe he could wear it. 
For a few years it had lived in a small wooden bowl that sat on Tommy’s windowsill. Occasionally he picked it out and played with it at night when he was struggling to sleep. It always seemed cold to him and the edges were sharp yet soft depending on the angle at which he stroked them. It had an oriental appearance and a strange fragility that Tommy liked. When he finally gained the confidence to wear it, the string to which it was original attached had become too short to fit around his neck, so he decided to wrap it around his wrist. It wrapped around a couple times comfortably enough. It was mostly hidden by the long white sleeve of his school shirt which provided him with a few days to become comfortable wearing it before his friends noticed it and started to tease him. He didn’t mind the teasing though because he thought it was cool and it connected him to his brother. 
Alex went to the same school but during these years the two brothers only really saw each other on the journeys to and from school. Alex would drive them in his second-hand Peugeot, often leaving Tommy in charge of the music. By this time they didn’t argue as much over the music as their tastes had grown to become very similar. Both the brothers enjoyed their journeys together and would often spend them singing along to what they were listening to. One morning they were getting very into Take That’s “Shine”, so much so that they had a very close shave with a lorry going around a roundabout. The rest of the journey was much quieter after they both agreed never to tell their mum.
Tommy enjoyed school more than Alex did. He managed to make a nice group of friends and soon found that he made friends with girls almost as easily as he did with boys. There was one girl in particular that he enjoyed spending time with. Rosie sat two rows behind Tommy in English classes. She was quieter and much harder working than him but whenever he got the chance to talk to her he would exploit it. He would do his best to make her laugh so that he’d get to see her smile. He thought she was incredible. Often when he talked to her he was asking her what the homework was because that was about as far as his imagination could take him when it came to being able to interact with her. He asked her out on dates more than once, but she always said she preferred it if they remained as friends. He was pretty flattered that she considered him a friend anyway, so he didn’t see it as too much of a loss.
The two remained close friends and shared mutual friends for many years but grew apart for a while as they entered the middle of their adolescence. By the time they came to reunite Tommy was capable of growing stubble and now wore the dragon pendant on a thin silver chain around his neck. She appeared so sure of herself and so capable that Tommy found himself almost intimidated by her. She had grown into a woman. He had always looked up to her as someone to aspire to, but the new imbalance came as a bit of a shock to him. Tommy had of course grown too but was yet to make as much sense of the world. In the summer before college Tommy and Rosie attended a party. Tommy appeared very quiet and didn’t speak to many people, let alone Rosie. So when it came to their first English lesson at college together, Rosie was under the impression that Tommy had grown away from her. 
But after a few months of trying to figure each other out in college the two found themselves in the same club on a Saturday night. Rosie was wearing this sparkling blue top and these enchanted velvet leggings. She didn’t often wear make-up but that night she was wearing a beautiful purple eye shadow. It elevated her. She must also have put some glitter on her face because that night she was shimmering. Tommy was drunk. Otherwise he never would’ve had the confidence to approach her. Before either of them knew it, their lips were passionately embracing each other. It took him about two weeks to tell Rosie that he loved her. She said it back and it changed him. Two weeks on from that he proudly introduced her to his mum who fell in love with her almost as much as he had.
Unsurprisingly she clicked with all of his family. His younger cousins loved her too. They came over for a barbeque on his eighteenth birthday and she played giant Jenga in the garden with them. Rosie didn’t mind rebuilding the tower after either Tommy knocked it over to make his cousins laugh or one of the dogs did by accident. The next day Tommy took her to the beach, and they lay their listening to Ben Howard and eating a picnic that his mum had put together, mainly consisting of leftovers from the barbeque. Rosie had shared quite a lot of Pinot Grigio with his mum the night before and was very tired so fell asleep soon after they lay down on their towels. She was wearing a blue and white chequered bikini that Tommy had bought for her birthday after she had hinted at how her dad had bought her the wrong one for Christmas. He was lying on his side facing her, just letting his eyes pour over her. 
After a while she gently lifted her eye lids. Her eyes almost made Tommy want to cry. Maybe she thought it was creepy him watching her like this, but he didn’t get that sense. His worry was brief and quickly extinguished by her smile. He was dependent on her, dependent on her beauty in every way. When he was alone, he often found himself drowning in existentially worry and broad anxieties that would leave him feeling hopelessly lost but when he was with her and when she smiled, he was at once intensely focused on her and at the same time distracted from everything else. She was everything that as a child had saved him from getting lost in his nightmares and as a growing man gave him his health, his hope and his confidence. He blushed every time she broke into a smile.
 As he lay facing her, he tucked her hair behind her ear and rested his hand on the back of her neck before closing his eyes and kissing her top lip. The moment lasted for just the right amount of time. Her lip rested back on top of the other after they had met his and he brought his fingers running across her face, he rested his thumb on her lower lip and pulled it away from her top lip before releasing it. Tommy giggled softly before explaining how the sound it made was exactly the same as the sound made by the tennis game that he and his brother used to play on their Nintendo Wii. He laugh caught her. Her laugh gave her smile even more life. Tommy rolled on to his back and Rosie began to fiddle with the dragon pendant around his neck. The dragon’s head had fallen off a while ago, but he still liked to wear it.
Tommy had lots of jewellery from Rosie too. For their first Christmas together she had bought him a pair of cufflinks with the Penguin Books logo on them. Tommy assumed at first that it was just because they both studied English until she explained to him that she had remembered the time he dressed up as a penguin to their year 10 disco. He was the only one in fancy dress and she thought it was wonderful, that was the Tommy she had always loved. He loved the cufflinks so much, but they fell apart the second time he wore them. He tried fixing them, but it was no use. He refused to throw them away though and kept them on the windowsill by his bed.
The first time Tommy visited Rosie at her home down in Cornwall the six-hour train journey felt like five minutes. Rosie loved Cornwall and often cried when she had to leave it. From a young age her grandparents had cast her under the spell of mystery and legend that comes with the long walks atop poetic clifftops and abandoned beaches that illustrate the area. It is beautiful though. Tommy learnt this pretty quickly, even before he had dismounted his train it seemed like the most suitable place in the world for Rosie to have come from. Rosie’s parents were friendly enough and he tried his best to make a good impression with them, he really did. He was as chatty as he could be and was always offering to help with things like setting up the table or carrying the shopping into the house. It was the first time for all of them being in this situation and it was only a small house, so it was never going to be easy.
On their first evening in Cornwall they went for a drink just the two of them before heading along what was left of the beach now the tide was in. Of course there wasn’t a cloud in the sky so they could see every star there was. They were gushing. She held onto his arm and he couldn’t beat the smile from his face. He hated his smile, but it was dark, so it didn’t matter. Rosie loved it anyway. They came to sit on a rock at the far end of the beach, it was tucked under the peninsula that protected her village from the wider ocean. She turned to him and said, “I bought you a little gift.” His smile was beginning to ache, and his gut began to tickle. Out of her pocket she pulled a bracelet. It was made out of multiple bits of string weaved together- brown, beige and a rich green, his favourite colour. She tied it around his wrist, and he kissed her like it kept him warm. He loved the bracelet and decided he would never take it off. Six months later it fell off when Tommy was at a beach party with a group of old friends.
Tommy became fed up of breaking and losing the jewellery that Rosie bought him. He worried that she was beginning to think he didn’t like it or care about it enough to look after it. She knew that he was just clumsy, so she never bought him anything expensive. He was always desperately trying to show her how much she meant to him, like a dog suffocates its owner with licks and scratches. He used the money he got one birthday to buy a new pendant for his necklace. On it read Rosie’s name in Morse code. He was so happy with his purchase that he took the dragon pendant off and put it in a draw in his desk. He believed the new pendant would keep him safe and knew he wouldn’t break this one because he kept it safely close to his chest, in some ways they kept each other safe.
The summer after college, Tommy went straight into a job. He worked seven to four, five days a week mowing, strimming and trimming people’s gardens. It was hard work and he struggled with the early mornings, but he needed the money. He lost his battle against the routine and submitted to it by the end of the second week. When he got home after work he would submit to his bed and fall asleep only to be awoken again by his hammering alarm. About a month in Rosie decided to come and visit him for the weekend. Tommy decided he would make the most of her visit and came up with an elaborate plan to cook her a meal and serve it to her on the flat part of the roof that stuck out over the kitchen in his mum’s house where he was still living. He spent two days preparing a slow cooked lamb tagine, he bought the most expensive bottle of wine he could afford, prepared a small bouquet of flowers to centre the table and lit candles to border the rooftop. An hour before she arrived, he was making a playlist of Rosie’s favourite songs mixed in with some he wanted her to like.
He hadn’t been feeling well recently but believed Rosie could make him better, she usually did. He put his best shirt on. He double checked everything was in the right place and kept rubbing his hands on anything he could find in an attempt to make them less clammy. He greeted her with a hug that lasted for slightly too long. She was stressed because her train had been heavily delayed, and she was dragging a large suitcase that had caused her havoc on the escalators coming through Clapham Junction. He did his best to make her feel comfortable, but she got annoyed when he asked her if she wanted a shower to freshen up. He struggled to fill in the gaps. When she had relaxed a bit, he convinced her to put on a blindfold and he carefully directed her out of a narrow window onto the small bit of roof where he had prepared his grand gesture. She smiled when he took off her blindfold then took a seat. Tommy was rushing in and out of the window serving her the various courses he had prepared in between her increasing doubts that he had prepared it all himself. She was tired after her first glass of wine and struggled to get through the second. She didn’t finish her main course, so Tommy didn’t take the pudding out the fridge. She was asleep before Tommy had a chance to tell her how much he loved her.
A month on from that meal Tommy found himself on a train down to Cornwall, a journey he was now very used to. Tommy was asking all the questions in the long car journey from the train station to Rosie’s house. He shared a barbeque with her and her family in the evening after which he helped clear up the plates and helped himself to a drink. Rosie’s younger brother sat outside with them after the meal had ended and Tommy answered his continuous questions that were beginning to frustrate Rosie. After he went in it was Rosie who initiated the conversation. It didn’t take long before Tommy was on his knees. He had taken it all for granted and was ignoring that fact that she hadn’t said she loved him for over a month. They spent the whole night swaying between tears and laughter. Tommy had no idea of how to handle himself. He kept thinking about everything that had been between them, everything they had shared and everything they had lost. He desperately wanted to just hold her hand, but she no longer did. He didn’t sleep that night and by the morning Tommy had lost himself. Once the decision was made, a decision neither of them wanted to make, she left the room to go and tell her family. Tommy phoned his mum who spent five minutes trying to calm him and get him to speak. “It’s over.” He managed agonisingly through uncontrollable sniffles and forcibly deep breathes. His forearms were cramping up and his stomach was spraining violently. He couldn’t make sense of anything, he couldn’t even feel the headache anymore, as if that was who he was now, as if the pain was part of who he had become.
That was the day that Tommy really grew up. He fell out of a silly love song into a mature reality. His brother picked him up from the train station as he did his best to hold back his tears, he and Alex hadn’t seen each other cry for over ten years. He broke before he even got to the car. His voice was gone, and his shoulders were weak. He was weak. Alex didn’t say much, neither of them wanted to speak or be spoken to. They sat in the car, the same car their mum used to drive them to primary school in, with the silence broken only by sobbing. After a while Alex reached across into the glovebox and pulled out a CD. He took it out of its tattered box and put it into the CD player. A very brief smile interrupted Tommy’s tears as he heard Mika’s Life in Cartoon Motion for the first time in years. He couldn’t look at his brother and he didn’t want to be seen. Even now, with the person he had grown up with he didn’t know how to handle himself. “You will learn.” Tommy was shocked to hear his brother speak. “It hurts. It is going to hurt. But you will learn. You will be alright.” The words felt like nothing to Tommy, but he knew his brother was trying. Alex revealed the dragon pendant from his pocket and put it in Tommy’s palm. Tommy squeezed it so hard that it nearly cut him. He never loosened his grip.