If it hadn’t been for Hanson, I would have fallen onto the train tracks that Thursday morning. The crowd at platform three of the station had become impatient; services were delayed due to debris on the tracks after a storm the previous night. People shoved and jostled and glared at their phones and when someone pushed, the whole buzzing crowd pushed, moving as one angry wasps nest.
I can’t give a sensible explanation for why I liked to stand on the very edge of the platform, looking down at my shoes as I waited for the incoming rumble of the train. Force of habit, perhaps. Commuters have their idiosyncrasies. The way they order coffee. The way they drink coffee. The way they read newspapers, check timetables, yell into phones, mumble through rehearsals of work presentations.
There’s no hierarchy when waiting for a train. No special treatment for being small or having bags or being a woman. The pretence of politeness of course, but when push comes to shove, everybody shoves. I got more bruises from commuting for a week than I did the time I fell down a flight of stairs.
But that Thursday would have eclipsed all the elbowed ribs and coffee spillages, if fate hadn’t intervened. I stood there, looking down at my neatly painted nails in new Stuart Weitzman sandals. I found myself wishing I’d worn something less showy. But Gigi Hadid looked nice in them so why shouldn’t I? They’d cost too much to languish at the back of my wardrobe and besides, summer had begun to whisper warm, breezy promises. Sandals were in. Even ridiculously expensive sandals with fur trims and dangerously high stiletto heels.
I stood there, frowning down at my midnight blue nail polish and telling myself not to frown so as to avoid frown lines but unable to stop frowning at the thought of frown lines when the wasp nest surged and someone’s elbow hit the small of my back and all of a sudden I began to fall. The tracks blurred in front of me and that feeling of helplessness began to sweep as one stupid sandal tipped. Even then I found myself not praying to be saved, but for the heel of my sandal not to break. But Hanson caught me. I felt his hand around my upper arm, fingers digging in hard and hauling me back so I stumbled to safety.
Nobody else had even noticed. I stood dazed for a minute, made sure nothing (my footwear) was broken and let out a breath I didn’t even know I’d been holding.
“Thank you,” I said, too embarrassed to look at my saviour properly. “I – I shouldn’t have been standing so close to the edge. I’m such an idiot.”
“Hey, it’s fine.” Unflustered, the man gulped from his Costa cup. “Just – take care. Okay?”
I looked up at him then and blinked, unexpectedly recognising him. The details came to me fast, as though they’d been waiting to be unlocked. Hanson Blackburn. He looked the same, even ten years on from high school. The same stayed-up-too-late face. Tired eyes. Dark hair that had been pushed back enough times to understand its place.
Hanson from Art class. The guy who used up all the black paint and still managed to make his work look like it emitted light. Hanson who would have been expelled if his daddy hadn’t funded the extension to the science block. The same Hanson who threw the parties that still got raved about at reunions he never attended.
Memories that weren’t quite memories because I couldn’t always tell if what I thought had happened had actually happened. Even the softest edge of drunkenness blurs reality the next morning. The images and flashbacks – or fantasies of flashbacks – were grainy, sepia, sometimes black and white.
Hanson lived on Airedale Road, out of the city in the sprawling suburbs where the houses were detached and palatial with white porch columns. His parents went away a lot. And the parties came out whenever they were gone. Crazy parties. Strangers dancing with strangers. Girls making out in their underwear. Bottles and glasses clinking, contents swirling and splashing, sparkling somewhere between heat and ice.
Broken glass under broken high heels. Potato chips scrunched into the plush carpet. Cigarette ash. Smoke. So much smoke. Every kind of smoke. You could get high just from being in the room. Everyone seemed to have some form of cigarette between their lips or fingers, dangling in that almost professional way as rings of smoke blew up and hovered warily around the chandeliers.
“Hey!” I said, back on the overcrowded platform at the train station. “It’s been so long since we saw each other.”
I flushed even as I said it because the last time I’d seen him had been rather graphic, involving nudity, two girls and fleetingly embarrassed eye contact. But it didn’t matter because Hanson didn’t say anything. He blinked a couple of times and I felt even more embarrassed. He didn’t recognise me.
“Alessia,” I said. “From William Barden Academy? Class of – what – ’07? We were in Mr Jones’ art class?”
He blinked again and frowned at me.
“Alessia. I knew. Alessia Willow. I remember,” He switched his cardboard cup to his left hand and pulled me in for a hug. He smelled like smoke and coffee. “How the hell are you anyway? Aside from almost killing yourself, I mean.”
“Ah. Not bad.” I pulled away with some effort. “You?”
“Terrible,” he said but he smiled all the same. “Hey,” He frowned again. “Didn’t your hair used to be blonde?”
“Oh. Yeah. Long time ago.”
He smiled and my train eased into the station. A swarm of people began to make their way off.
“I have to go,” I said.
He caught my wrist.
“Hey, actually, I’m having a little – get-together tomorrow night. Why don’t you come by?”
It was my turn to blink.
“You’re still throwing mad parties?”
He shrugged.
“Not so mad anymore. But yeah. Hey,” He delved into his pocket and emerged with a marker pen. “Give me your number and -” He flicked the pen lid off and held out his forearm in invitation. “I’ll text you the details.”
I would have protested but people had started boarding the train and there was no time. I hastily wrote my number on his arm and handed the pen back to him.
“Sorry – I really have to go.” I started moving through the flurry of commuters.
“You’d better show up!” Hanson yelled after me. “You always were the life and soul of my parties!”
I waved at him, conscious that I’d begun to frown again.
***
Life and soul? Sarcasm, surely? I thought about him for the entire train ride. During the day and the next day too, thoughts of him kept flickering into my mind like a fire that refused to go out. We’d never been particularly close but I felt like we’d had a mutual kind of respect for one another.
He’d invite me to his parties. Not by text message. Instead, during Art class, the only subject we had together, he’d shadow me to the dried up oil paints and make small talk as he watched me try to extract yellow ochre from ancient tubes.
“You’ll come by tonight, won’t you? Everything fun is closed to us anyway. And there’ll be so many skater types. You know what I mean? But they bring decent booze.”
I’d long decided that he only invited me to make up the numbers. After all, the best parties have to have a requisite number of wallflowers and I most definitely fit the bill. When I inevitably turned up, he wouldn’t seem delighted to see me but would point out the good drinks and say something like;
“Enjoy yourself, anyway. Let your hair down, huh?”
He always managed to catch me off-guard that way. An offhand comment. As though my behaviour didn’t fit in with the rest of the house. And honestly, it didn’t. I didn’t make out with anyone. I didn’t smoke anything. I didn’t take off my clothes or get blindly drunk or fight. I felt like an observer. I didn’t really have a place there; I went because he asked me and because my friends went and although I could’ve stayed home and read a book, I’d have been able to hear my mom screwing her latest boyfriend and the sound was enough to put me off even the most enthralling psychological thriller.
So I’d go by the cinema, by the pubs I was too young to drink in and inexorably wind up at his sprawling mansion. I’d hear the party streets away; drawling, thumping music and loud, warm laughter; the kind that felt like an invitation.
It always started out on a high. Whooping and catcalling and hugging strangers and sloshing drinks and skateboarding down the stairs and people lighting cigarettes for each other but as the hours wore on, things would get too high, hit that note that made everything crack and start to come down, falling into arguments and messy fights and mascara tears and screeching tyres as people exited.
***
On Friday evening, I took a cab to the address Hanson had texted to me. 5A Patent Street happened to be a basement flat which didn’t make any sense until Hanson himself explained that the landlord had developed the basement into accommodation after the four floors above. He took my coat, pointed out the good drinks and disappeared.
The living space overflowed with people I’d never seen before. They seemed around my age but far more – hippy? Bohemian? I settled for avant-garde, sipped rum and coke and tried to put the ‘excellent communication skills’ on my CV to use.
Musicians, dancers, models, actors, writers, singers, photographers, artists. Girls with blue hair. Lots of people with tattoos. They didn’t work regular hours. They smoked a lot, raved about amateur theatre productions, new art gallery showings, castings, stage make-up and ‘artistry’. I would have found them pretentious if they hadn’t been so passionate.
The evening flew by in a smoky haze of telephone numbers, animated conversations and sensible drinking. It seemed like Hanson’s parties had matured a lot over ten years. Soon enough he’d be upgrading to champagne and hors d’oeuvres. I didn’t quite fit in but I didn’t feel it. Every time I considered leaving, it seemed rude to abruptly end a conversation and besides, I didn’t know where my coat had gone.
People began drifting out, organising cabs to nightclubs even though it seemed late enough to call it a night. Hanson had begun telling me about the obvious superiority of Costa over all other coffee chains (and over most independent cafes too) and I acted interested, hoping for a lull in his monologue to ask for my coat. There was no lull. He talked and talked. I’d never realised how talkative he was.
He kept talking, pausing only momentarily to exchange goodbyes with people who thanked him for the evening. I lost track when he started going into the details of Fairtrade coffee beans and instead found myself watching him talk in lieu of listening. Teeth. Mouth. He pushed his hair back even though it didn’t fall forward. A button-down shirt, open at the collar. A silver chain around his neck. It disappeared under his shirt so I couldn’t see if a pendant hung from it.
By the time he stopped to refill his drink, the flat had emptied.
“I should really get going,” I said, conscious of the sudden silence.
“Oh. No. Stick around,” He slugged lemonade into a glass and handed it to me before dropping onto the sofa. “It’s been way too long, Alessia. Sit down, huh?”
He had a funny way of saying my name, an almost grandiose exaggeration to the ‘s’ sound but he didn’t seem to do it on purpose. And if he did, it only made it sound prettier. I sat on the edge of the sofa.
“So, what do you do?” I asked.
He tried not to smile.
“I’m an artist.”
It made sense. He’d been an only child, after all. No siblings to follow, precious enough to his parents to make his dreams dwarf their expectations. Or maybe they just hadn’t particularly cared.
I smiled.
“Oh really?”
His mouth lifted reluctantly.
“Yes. Hey, you wanna see a picture I did of you?”
I blinked and swallowed a mouthful of lemonade hurriedly.
“What?”
He set his glass down, reached for a stack of canvases stored under the coffee table and flipped one over to show me. There was a triangle painted on it. Black paint.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
I looked at him and he looked expectantly back at me.
I tried not to frown; tilted my head and tried to see the canvas objectively. The triangle looked perfectly triangular. But it was just a triangle.
“Well?” Hanson asked.
I cleared my throat.
“Uh – so is that like abstract?”
He turned away from me.
“You don’t like it,” His voice snagged.
