Page 21 of Electric Boy

She’d fallen so hopelessly in love with him that, in hindsight, she had been a complete fool. It had been, if she was being perfectly honest with herself, pathetic. She’d followed him everywhere with puppy dog enthusiasm and round, awestruck eyes. Most of the others at uni found him to be too odd of a duck and shunned him -- and, by extension, her. She lost most of the friends she’d made in her short time at Saint Martins, unable to reconcile her friend group with the man whose side she refused to leave. For his part, he seemed utterly unaware of her devotion and only mildly aware of her presence. That isn’t to say he ignored her, but she did think that he would have been just as happy chatting away to her as he would have been the local kebab vendor or the brass Tiffany-style lamp in the library. He seemed less interested in her low-cut tops and daringly short skirts than he did in her sparkly bangles and brightly coloured jumpers. He’d once asked her where she’d bought her pink cowboy boots and the very next day he arrived at class wearing the same pair, only a few sizes larger. If it hadn’t been for the lewd drawings of preposterously breasted women she’d espied in his notebook, she would’ve begun to suspect him uninterested in the female species as a whole. She would have been more content had he in fact been gay because soon her warm adoration soured to a bitter, one-sided obsession that left her feeling insecure and unworthy.

After a full year of yearning, she began to distance herself from Julian. It was starting to hurt too much. She realised that Julian was like a sunbeam: it was beautiful and warm when you were in its path, but it was substanceless and fleeting, shining its light on the grass and birds and worms without discrimination or feeling. Outside of the lessons they shared, she ceased seeking him out. It was an experiment at first, to see if he would notice she was gone. Then it was out of resentment when he failed to come looking for her or even mention her sudden absence when they did see each other in class. The next term, she waited for him to choose his classes first and then chose the ones he wouldn’t be in.

It was painful at first, but then the colour slowly started to come back into her life. University seemed full of possibilities again. She made new friends and picked back up some of the old ones. She went out dancing with the girls and was chatted up by a handsome lad, so she gave him her phone number and he rang her, like a proper man would. They began dating and fucking and Aisling could bring him out with her friends and they wouldn’t give her distressed side-eyes or confused scowls. She felt appreciated and well-liked and began to feel really quite happy. Until Julian showed back up.

Or, rather, showed up for the first time. He’d never been bothered to come looking for her before. She returned home to her student flat to find Julian sat on the steps of the building, looking small and pitiful. He was quite drunk. Despite all the time she’d been away from him, seeing him again snatched the breath from her lungs and wrung out her heart like a flannel. She was just as in love with him as she had been a year ago, and it didn’t hurt any less. Like a fool, she’d invited him in and put the kettle on.

He’d blubbered about how he’d missed her and couldn’t understand why she’d left. He thought he must’ve done something wrong. When she’d started pulling away, he thought it must’ve been because she was finally fed up with him, and with good reason, he had nothing to offer. He was stupid and ugly and poor and she was beautiful and lovely and elegant. He didn’t deserve her. He didn’t even know what he was doing there. He’d then buried his face in his arms and gone very quiet.

The tea went cold. Aisling was as warm as if she were in the direct, beaming glow of the sun. She’d never been so happy in all her life. She pinched Julian hard on the arm until he looked up, pouting, his red-rimmed eyes full of betrayal. Then she’d kissed him. It had been a sloppy affair, with too much wetness and too many teeth, but it had been the best kiss of her life. Because she loved him so, so terribly much. And he loved her. And she’d been a right twit, thinking he cared for her about as much as the kebab man. They made love that night and that too was a rather sloppy affair, as it became clear fairly early on that Julian was quite inexperienced. But he was very open about it and didn’t seem at all embarrassed. If anything, he was eager to learn and let Aisling show him precisely everything she liked. As inelegant and clumsy and messy as it was, it too was the best she’d ever had. Because it was Julian. Because he wanted her as badly as she wanted him. Because it was finally happening and she had it all.

After that night, they were an official item and were once again inseparable, this time in a decidedly more mutual manner. Any friends she’d made who couldn’t accept Julian’s marvellous eccentricities were chucked in short order, and the bloke she’d been faffing about with was just as ruthlessly disposed of. Julian matriculated a year later and, uninspired by her studies and finding little to keep her there, Aisling dropped out. She moved back in with her parents who lived not far from the flat Julian got himself in Hoxton close to his nan’s old record shop. She almost asked to move in with him, but then she’d seen his flat, a dingy basement affair with only a sink and hot plate to call a kitchen and a bathroom no larger than a wardrobe. So she instead waited in the hopes that one day, when they were both better off financially, they would find a flat together. A nice above-ground flat, in a neighbourhood not overrun by tramps or gangs or dubious curry vendors, with fresh white walls and large, modern windows. Yes. They’d move in together one day, she had thought. They would get married one day, too.

They had been blissfully happy… for all of three months until Julian’s childhood best friend, Rahul Chaand, moved back down from up North. It might be unfair to blame Rahul for all of their relationship problems, but they had been perfectly fine together until that big lout showed up and suddenly they were fighting and breaking up, making up, breaking up, making up, breaking up. Aisling was no scientist, but she knew cause and effect when she saw it.

Now here she was. Having broken into her boyfriend’s flat and torn it apart looking for evidence of his indiscretions. She didn’t recognize the person she had become any more than she recognized the woman she saw in the mirror. What did she think she was doing? What did she think she was going to accomplish here? Was this really how far she had fallen? Was this the natural conclusion of the unhealthy, schoolgirl obsession she had developed with Julian all those years ago? How had she gone from not seeing a single flaw in him to being unable to see anything but? What was she doing? What was she doing?

She sat down hard on the cold, tile floor of the grimy bathroom. She sat there for quite some time. How long, she couldn’t say. Long enough for her arse to go numb and legs to prickle with fire ants when she stretched them. After an interminable amount of time that she assumed was hundreds, if not thousands, of years, she tore off a wad of loo roll, blew her snotty nose, and got to her feet. She washed her face with cold water from the tap and scrubbed away the streaky makeup. Feeling much refreshed if not much better, she tipped the Kate Bush records out of their box and went around the flat in a neat, methodical way which belied her earlier pandemonium, rounding up the belongings of hers she had left there. It wasn’t much, incidentally.

She made sure everything was back in order, or at least back in the state of disorder to which Julian was accustomed, before leaving the flat with a final, bone-weary look around, then locking the door behind herself. She slid the key -- her key -- under the weather-worn mat. He probably wouldn’t find it there, but there was something of a ritual in leaving it behind, as if she were freeing herself of him. The word “unshackling” came to mind. She picked up her box of possessions and turned to go up the stairs.

Then she screamed.

Only a little. She had been startled. She hadn’t expected to see a man standing at the top of the stairs.

She almost began to say she was sorry, that very ingrained British response to apologise for existing, but stopped herself. He bloody well ought to be the one to apologise. Who did he think he was creeping up on unsuspecting women? Even if he was quite handsome and tall and blond, with very modern and fashionable glasses.

Instead of apologising, however, the man said in a clipped, posh voice, “What are you doing here?”

Aisling was quite taken aback by the sheer rudeness and took a few moments to gather herself enough to speak. “What am I… What do you mean what am I doing here? Who the hell are you?”

“You don’t live here. You shouldn’t be going through people’s homes when they’re not present.”

“I’ll have you know it’s my boyfriend who lives here, you tosser.” She was growing more irate by the minute. Just who did this wanker think he was? And he’d ignored her questions altogether.

“That entitles you to take things from his home, does it?” He took a single step forward, foot falling interminably down from the pavement to the next step. Within the space of lifting his foot and setting it down, Aisling’s mood swung dizzyingly from outrage to fear.

Like every woman, she had a constant subconscious radar on alert for her bodily safety, especially when in the presence of men. It only rose to the fore of her mind in the form of an adrenaline spike when it pinged in alarm at a man’s leering gaze or an unwanted shift in proximity. It was going off like Christmas now. She was not what one would consider a dainty woman by any means (much to her chagrin), but this man was excessively tall, his dense muscle noticeable even beneath the layers of his black rollneck and heavy woollen overcoat, not to mention his menacing demeanour. Or the fact that he was effectively trapping her in a blind on a street whose residents wouldn’t bat an eye at a woman’s cries for help.

“Who’re you then? The bloody Duke of Hoxton?” she said with a bravado she didn’t feel, knuckles whitening around the cardboard box she held protectively in front of her chest.

“Just someone who knows you aren’t his girlfriend any longer.” Another step downwards. Just the one. It was enough to send her heart into her throat. “And as such, that revokes your privileges to be in Julian’s flat without his presence.”

It was a slight relief -- but only slight -- to hear him say Julian’s name. He knows him. He knows where he lives. They must be mates.

“Yeah, well, I was only leaving, wasn’t I?” she huffed, gathering her courage and starting up the stairs, willing herself to be as solid and unmovable as a boulder. “Came to get my things. Not that it’s any business of yours, your majesty.”

She was just below him now and he wasn’t making any move to get out of the way. She steeled herself and pushed past him, her shoulder knocking painfully into his rock-hard bicep. She was doubly relieved to reach street level. If the feel of his arm was anything to go by, he’d have had no trouble overpowering her.

She was just about to launch into -- if not a run, then at least a very fast walk -- away from this wretched street and this wretched man when she heard him clear his throat meaningfully, the way middle-class people do when they want to get the attention of someone they can’t be bothered to waste words on.

This had a very similar effect to stroking a cat against its fur, and she spun on her heel with nostrils flared and annoyance fully stoked once more.

“I wouldn’t bother trying to get back together with him this time, Aisling,” the man said. The chill that ran up her spine at the sound of her name on his lips was nauseating. “He has someone new in his life.”

He stepped back up to street level, his full height towering over her. There was an extra layer of meaning to what he was saying, one that teased her brain like a riddle whose answer was just on the tip of her tongue. It was in the suggestive slant of his brown eyebrows. It was in the hint of a smirk that dimpled his artfully unshaven cheek. It was in the way he was trying -- and he very clearly was trying -- to intimidate her. The way a jealous new girlfriend might…

The penny didn’t drop so much as pierce her skull at 100 mph like it’d been chucked off the National Westminster Tower. There’d always been something a bit tarty about Julian, a bit girlish and flirtatious. And she had, for a moment back at uni, thought he might be a bit of a bender. But she’d chalked it up to him being a mod, a dandy, girlish in a way that was artfully crafted entirely for the benefit of women. The kind of sideways that only straight men believed to be gay, the kind of gay they told cautionary tales about -- “oh, you watch out for blokes wearing lip gloss. They’re poofters. You’ll see.” But the real gay men in Aisling’s experience were the ones with moustaches and muscles and chest hair who’d chat up other mustached, muscled gentlemen and get each other off in the park at night when no one was looking. It was only girls who fancied a lad who wore mascara and too-tight trousers and had the muscle-definition of a sickly Victorian workhouse orphan. Julian had always been just too obvious to be actually queer. Or so she had always thought.