If You Still Recognise Me, page 17
I start throwing restaurant suggestions at Felix as we head out, but he just shrugs at every single one of them.
“I will make you fall in love with food one day if we’re going to stay friends,” I say.
“You can try,” Felix says, laughing. I shove him, and, in the end, we go for pizza again.
When Ada gets home from camp, we decide to read the July issue of Eden Recoiling together on Skype.
She arrives on my screen with a big grin. “Oh my God, it is so good to be home,” she says. “I am so full right now. Mom made a mountain of jollof rice and pepper stew and all this other food. And look, puff puff!” She shows me her plate, balls of golden fried dough goodness rolling around on it.
“Oh, I want one!”
We talk a bit about her last day of camp – Ada did cry lots. “Some of them made me really cute thank-you cards! Including Joshua! Would you believe it!” She gestures to the cards, all lined up on the windowsill behind her.
After Ada’s told me more stories from camp, we start reading the issue. It turns out that Neff feels guilty – Neff! – that Mayumi’s gone off on her own to search for the apple tree. He heads out after her, and then Zaria finds that Neff and Mayumi are both gone, and she goes too, but she ends up ambushed in this ghost town by some malicious plants – who turn out to be people-plant hybrids.
“Shit, what if Mayumi comes and saves Zaria instead?” Ada says.
“Oh my God. That’s a game-changer.”
We speculate about this at length, until it gets really late for me, and I have to go to bed since I still have work tomorrow.
Before I sign off, Ada says, “Oh man, Elsie, it’s been so good to see your face again.”
And my heart does still swell, just a little, with that habitual hope. Ada didn’t even mention Gracie once. What if I still have a chance?
But I remember how I felt last night, in the car, as Ritika’s mum drove me home. How I was beginning to accept, with warmth, the idea that Ada’s love for me is simply platonic and no less beautiful for that. It’s better to hold on to that clarity than to keep deluding myself.
I really have to let this go.
The bubble-tea shop is quiet on Sunday evening when I pop in with Joan after work. This time, I decide against rose-milk tea. It’s time for a new drink that doesn’t remind me of being sad.
“How does this compare to the stuff in Hong Kong?” I ask, taking a sip of my passion-fruit tea.
Joan has ordered an oolong milk tea. “This isn’t bad,” she says. At the sceptical look on my face, she insists, “No, really. It’s pretty good. You think it’s good too, right? Or you wouldn’t come here?”
“Yeah, I think it’s good but it’s been so long since I’ve been to Hong Kong that I’m, like, maybe I’ve forgotten what it should actually taste like?”
“Well, be reassured that it tastes as it should.”
I laugh. “So. How are you? How was your stepmum?”
“She’s OK. She thinks I should try officially coming out to my dad. Even though he knows. We know he knows. But I’ve never told him in my own words.”
“You think you will?”
“Yeah.” Joan chews on a tapioca pearl. “Yeah. I’ll try it.”
“When?”
“Not sure. I’ll let you know when I do.”
“OK.”
“The good news is, I got my exam results, so my place at Oxford is confirmed, and I can definitely stay here.”
“What?” I half shriek. I can feel the staff staring at me, but I don’t care. I grab Joan’s hand. “Congrats!”
She glances down at our hands. At the weight of her gaze, a strange panic sputters in my chest. Like not realising that something’s burning until you finally smell the smoke. A line of flame suddenly scorches where our hands overlap.
I pull my hand away. Joan looks up at me, her dark eyes oddly intense for a moment, like things left blackened by fire. “Thanks,” she says.
“You should’ve told me earlier,” I say quickly. “I would have paid for your drink!”
She smiles, her eyes quiet, crinkling in that way that makes her whole face as sweet as the tea I’m drinking.
“Now I can extort something more expensive from you,” she says.
It’s the night before Joan and I go up to Birmingham and then Manchester, and Gracie’s asked Ada out on a date.
I can’t reply. I can’t think of what to say. I’m in my room, and the sky is bruise-dark outside. It’s late but not so late that everybody’s asleep. I’ve been trying to be content with Ada’s love just the way it is, but this still sucks.
I’m seized with this hysterical urge to go and talk to my mum about it. I’ve told her about Ada before – “a friend I met online” – but not that I have a crush on her or anything, seeing as I’m not out to my family.
And I’m still not ready for them to know I’m queer just yet.
My bedroom windows are wide open but the room still feels alive with heat, the air like a warm animal curled against my body.
I text Ritika:
I have to put my phone down on my bedside table for a moment. Team Joan? The confusion swims through me. Yes, I care about Joan a lot. And, while I had been worried that because she’d been the one to cut off contact with me all those years ago it might mean that she didn’t care about me, that worry has long since been banished. She does care. Every day she’s there, like a sturdy tree in the garden, something I can lean against, something that can shade me from the melting heat. Quiet and gentle and strong.
But she’s my best friend. I can’t possibly be interested in her romantically.
Is she super cute? I wouldn’t exactly use the word ‘cute’ to describe her. Joan as a child was cute, with those pigtails. Whereas I was a tomboy. She’s the butch one now, though. She’s … handsome, I guess. Hard to look away from. Everything she wears suits her so perfectly. My eyes are always drawn to her. I think about her sleeves, rolled up. I think about her undercut, the nape of her neck. I think about her dancing on the pier in Padstow. I think about her face during the concert, the way looking at it made the music sound different to me. I think about last Sunday in the bubble-tea shop, my hand on hers, how it felt too warm. Her eyes on me, even warmer.
I snatch up my phone again and type angrily.
I put my phone on charge, switch off the lights and go to bed, thinking about Ritika’s messages.
Thinking about Joan.
In the morning, I check my phone and realise that Ritika’s texts made me completely forget how upset I was about Ada’s date, and I never actually replied to Ada’s message.
I scroll through Tumblr and see that Ada’s posted a predate selfie. She looks amazing. She’s shaved her head again recently, and she’s wearing a pale pink chequered button-down with an emerald-green bow tie and just a little bit of make-up: eyeliner and something that makes her cheeks glow even more than usual.
The selfie was posted just after I went to bed. Now it’s about 3 a.m. in New York; Ada ought to be asleep. Or maybe… Maybe she’s still with Gracie, having fun.
If she and Gracie work out, Ada would have somebody who could be there for her, as present as Joan is for me right now. I want that for her. She’s never dated anyone but she’s a romantic deep down to her core, the writer of the most convincing love stories I’ve ever read. She always talks about how she wants that kind of love for herself, the kind of love she writes about, and how she feels insecure about her writing because how does she know what romance really is? I’ve always told her that she knows it better than anyone, that her vision of love is more earnest and moving than any other I’ve come across in any piece of writing, fan-made or otherwise.
I want someone to sweep her off her feet and all the other clichés. She deserves the love she dreams of, something big and bounding, like a goofy dog chasing a bird across a field, joy and infectious energy in its every leap.
I finally reply to her message:
Another train ride, this time in the rain.
It’s chucking it down. Big droplets of it smashing against the windows of the train. But it isn’t any less hot – it’s muggy now, and the air is like the inside of a leather glove that’s been worn all day.
I’m in the window seat, Joan next to me. I can’t stop thinking about Ritika’s messages.
She’s wearing a short-sleeved grey herringbone button-down shirt and blue denim shorts that come down to her knees. When the train conductor came round to check our tickets, he called her “sir”. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone mistake Joan for a guy. She often looks like she could be a male K-pop idol.
“So, I got up early and called my dad today,” she says.
“Oh my God, you came out to him? What was it like?”
“Not the best,” Joan says. “But, at the same time, not as bad as I was expecting.”
“What were you expecting?”
“He’s definitely not shy about making homophobic comments, so I thought he would make those to my face, but all he said was, ‘This is why you left, isn’t it?’ I said yes. And he said, ‘Do you think you’ll come back?’ And I said, ‘Do you think you’ll change your mind about gay people?’”
“And what did he say?”
“He said he hoped I would change my mind about being gay, and I told him that was not going to happen. He asked if I had a girlfriend. I told him I’d had one but not any more. Then he said he would call me again, and that he wanted to know if I ever got a girlfriend or a boyfriend. I told him that I’m never going to have a boyfriend, and he said, ‘I’ll call you again next month. Good job on your exam results by the way.’”
“Maybe he’s working on changing his mind?”
“Maybe. We’ll see.”
“So you’ll answer his next call?”
“I think so. At least I know I can just hang up if it gets bad.”
“What about your stepmum? Did you tell her you spoke to him?”
“Yeah, we had a quick call. She thinks that it’ll take some time but he’ll come round. There was a pop star who came out recently in Hong Kong, and Dad apparently just pointed out the news and then didn’t make any sort of negative comment about it.”
“I guess that’s a start.”
“Do you have any plans to come out to your family?” Joan asks.
“Not at the moment. I think it’ll be easier once I actually have a girlfriend, maybe. I realised I didn’t even know the Cantonese word for ‘bisexual’. I had to look it up.”
Joan says the word: soeng sing lyun.
“Yeah. That. I could come out to them in English, obviously, but they prefer having serious conversations in Cantonese. It’s all a bit weird, though. Imagining myself saying that out loud to them. If I have a girlfriend, I can just say, look, I have a girlfriend!”
And now my brain is stuck on the whole Team Joan thing again. I can’t look at her when I’m saying the word ‘girlfriend’.
“You don’t have to come out to them if you don’t want to. You know that, right?”
“I know. I do want to come out to them at some point. I just think it’s too difficult right now. But then I feel like I’m a useless coward because it seems like everyone else is out to their family.”
“You’re doing fine,” Joan says.
But Joan is Joan. She’s living exactly the way she wants to, dressing in a way that proclaims her identity to the world, distancing herself from her family because they can’t love her the way she deserves to be loved. There’s so much courage and confidence in everything she does and everything she is. I’m a flickering shadow next to her, shape-shifting with each subtle change in the light.
“What about your friends? Are they out to their families?”
“My ex-girlfriend isn’t. I have other friends who aren’t out, either.”
“But some of them are? How did their families react?”
“Well, Michael’s parents basically pretend he never came out. Cordelia’s parents are completely fine with it. Veronica’s dad makes some very strange comments sometimes but he mostly means well.”
“Oh, OK. And how does Michael feel about that situation with his parents?”
“He thinks he’ll wear them down eventually.” Joan looks at her watch, tapping at its face. “Has Ada come out to her family?”
“Only to her brother. She thinks her parents will probably be fine with it but she wants to wait till college, just to have that distance, if she needs it.”
“See, not everyone’s out to their family! How is she, anyway?”
“She’s doing OK.”
“You still haven’t told her that you’re looking for Theresa?” Joan asks.
“No. I… It’s not really just about her any more. She’s… She’s into someone else.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“How are you feeling about that?”
“Not wonderful, to be honest. But I’m happy for Ada, really.”
“But why are you still looking for Theresa then?”
“That feeling of having you back in my life,” I say, watching Joan closely. “I want to give that feeling to someone else, if I can.”
Joan blinks rapidly, and then she ducks her head and looks away at the seats across the aisle, a man asleep and alone, drooling on to an open book in his lap. When she looks back at me, it’s with a half-smile, her eyes only just beginning to crinkle.
There’s a break in the rain when the train pulls into Birmingham. We get a bus from the station to where the Moseley Arts Market is, and we realise after we get off the bus and start looking at the stalls that there’s a farmers’ market here too.
We’re both thirsty, so Joan grabs an iced coffee from a stall while I get a carrot juice. “Iced?” I comment, as she’s handed her drink. “How unlike you.”
I’ve never seen her drink a coffee with ice in. Besides, it’s much cooler since the sky has wrung itself out. A breeze picks up the hem of my dress, and I can feel the goosebumps on my bare calves. I’m regretting not wearing tights.
She smirks. “Good to change things up once in a while. Also, I’m an iced-coffee-in-winter, hot-coffee-in-summer kind of person.”
This is a revelation to me. There’s still so much to learn about Joan. I only know Joan-in-summer. Well, I knew Joan all through the turning of the year when we were children, but back then she definitely didn’t drink coffee. I don’t know what she’s like now, in other seasons. What clothes does she wear in the winter? “It is still summer.”
“Yes, but I wanted to celebrate the relief and joy I feel at the drop in temperature.”
“I thought the hot weather didn’t really bother you. Isn’t it hotter in Hong Kong?”
“We have air conditioning there. My room here has been boiling all summer. That’s why I go to your house so much, to be honest. Because it’s cooler.”
I skip over a large puddle; Joan just splashes right through it in her Timberland boots.
“Not because you want to see me,” I ask, before thinking to add: “and watch dramas with my po po?”
“No, I’m really just there for the powerful fan in your living room,” Joan says, shrugging carelessly, before she grins at me.
I’m absurdly conscious of the impulse to knock my shoulder into hers. If she was anybody else, Ritika or Felix, I would have just shoved her without thinking about it. But with her, in this moment, the impulse seems to ricochet round my body, from my brain down to my arms down to my legs and back up, into my shoulders, and I finally tilt my body towards Joan’s, falling like a bowling pin against her. She grunts as my shoulder collides with hers, and she pushes me away with her hands, laughing.
We look through all the stalls until we find it. Sabina Pandey’s.
I pick up a business card from a stack on the table to confirm that it’s really her.
Sabina herself stands behind the table, her long greying hair pulled back into a bun. Her face is full of life, her cheeks plump and her brown eyes warm with humour. She’s wearing heavy jewellery: a necklace of gleaming black stones, chunky gold rings on both hands and a shimmering bracelet that looks like honey hardened into a solid band round her wrist.
Laid out on the table are paintings of the seaside. They’re all quite small, none of them bigger than an A4 piece of paper. Distant sails on the water; a golden stretch of sand. There’s even one that could be an Instagram photo: an ice-cream cone held out against the blue, blue sea in the background. I think of all the photos I took while I was in Cornwall with Joan and Ritika.
“I love your art, Ms Pandey,” I say.
“Thank you. Please call me Sabina.”
There are some paintings of a white cat too, curled on a step, dozing in the sun, making funny faces. “Is that your cat?” Joan asks.
Sabina nods.
“It’s beautiful,” Joan says.
“She’s a terror. Her name is Tapioca.”
“Um…” I say, not sure how to broach the topic of what I came here for except to just dive right into it. “This is going to sound really weird… But is there any chance you know a person called Theresa Bennett?”
Sabina’s eyes widen. “That is a strange question. Why are you asking?”
“I’m looking for her. My friend’s grandmother knew her once, and I’m just trying to see if I can put them back in touch.”
“And how did you know to come and ask me?”
“We found another of Theresa’s friends. I don’t know if you know her. Her name is Catherine Overfield? She remembered that Theresa moved here and then … met someone called Sabina. We had to do a little digging after that.”
“Wow, that’s some impressive detective work,” Sabina says, clasping her hands together. “I am the Sabina you’re looking for. I painted these in Theresa’s hometown, in fact.” She gestures to the paintings of the sea.
