Authors: Non Pratt
“Use mine.” He hands it to me and waits. Of the three people whose numbers I know, it seems there’s only one left I can call.
I’m beyond grateful when he answers and agrees to meet me at his camp. It isn’t far from my hedge. The camp is dark and silent when I get there, right down to the figure standing by one of the tents. He doesn’t move until I step into the circle.
“Ruby?” It is the voice Stu uses when there are no more games to be played.
“I have nowhere else to go.” I’m shivering and he steps closer, but not close enough to hold me.
“What’s wrong? Have you had a fight with Kaz or something?”
I nod. A fight with silence instead of words.
“Lee?”
My body does a violent judder at the mention of my brother and Stu steps forward then, his hands clamping round the tops of my arms to hold me steady. I wish he would pull me closer.
“You can’t just ring me on a stranger’s phone, tell me you need me and expect me to come running.”
Even though I nod, I’m thinking that this is exactly what he has done. “I’m sorry. I’ll go.”
But when I twist away, he holds me fast.
“Why did you come here, then?” This time he’s impatient. “Why did I leave Goz and Travis having fun on the other side of the campsite if you were just going to fuck off the second I arrived?”
“I don’t know. You didn’t have to.”
Stu ducks his head until he’s in my line of sight. “Look at me, Ruby. You called, I came. Enough of the bullshit. I know you – I know you so much better than you want me to. I know this isn’t a game. I know something’s really wrong. Just tell me.”
I open my mouth to tell him, but I don’t know where to start. With Kaz? With Adam Wexler? With Lee? And as all of the thoughts and feelings clamour to come out first, I say what it is that I really want.
“Can you just hug me? Please?”
Without a second’s hesitation, Stu wraps his arms tight around my body and I’m sobbing into his chest as he kisses the top of my head and tells me that it’s OK, everything will be all right, that he’s sorry and he loves me and he’s here for me.
Owen was right – you don’t get to choose who loves you.
Here and now, when I most need holding, I believe that Stu means what he says.
My eyes feel gritty and my face is dry from the salt of too many tears. As I breathe in, the smell is one I have dreamed about too many times for it to feel true now. I stay where I am, wrapped in Stu’s arms, his body curved round mine, spooning me. We’re both clothed – although I had to take my vest off because it kept catching on everything. String vests are more hassle than they’re worth.
When I open my eyes, the temptation to kiss his new tattoo is overwhelming, but I resist it the same way I resisted every fibre of wanting as I lay in his sleeping bag, his arms around me, and told him everything, about Kaz and Lauren, about Lee. Stu has always been easy to talk to – although I still couldn’t tell him about the other thing. The further away it gets the more disgusted I feel about it. I just want to fold up the memory and hide it away, pretend it never happened.
I distract myself by kissing Stu’s arm. Big mistake. Now I want to kiss all of him.
Stu mumbles something. He shuffles about in his sleep, making it easy for me to wriggle my way out of the sleeping bag. I can’t be near him now I’m no longer asleep. At least when I’m unconscious, I’m incapable of acting on all the things I want to do.
I find his phone – he hasn’t changed his pin since we split and I open up a new note.
Thank you for being there when I needed someone to hold me. Maybe me and you can be all right mates instead of trying to hurt each other? That would be happy-making
.
I put the phone with the note open on the pillow next to his face, then I find my vest. My boots are outside… Time to go. Kissing my fingers, I press them lightly on his lips.
His eyes open as if he’s been waiting for the right time to wake. Or the wrong time. Leaving him sleeping is easier than leaving him awake. I can’t think what I’d have done without him last night, but today I need to find the strength to hold myself together – it feels too good to have Stu do it.
“Oh, you are so not just leaving me a note, Rubes.”
“Um…”
Stu props himself up on one elbow and reads what I’ve written. “Come here.”
“I’ve got to go.”
“No, you don’t.” He’s right in one way: I doubt Kaz is expecting me back at seven in the morning. And he’s so very wrong in another: I’ve got to go because I can’t be near him much longer.
“Please, just come here a second,” he says. I shuffle back to the sleeping bag. “Closer, please.” I get so close that my knees brush against his stomach. “Closer.”
“I don’t think—” But there’s no arguing with the look he’s giving me and soon the only thing separating us is my refusal to give in to what I want the most.
“I need to tell you something, Ruby.” When I look at him my heart aches. His eyes are darker than ever in the orange glow cast through the canvas and when he talks, his imperfect teeth are barely discernible from the tone of his skin. Stu should not be attractive: his nose is crooked beneath wild eyebrows and his skin’s scarred from acne.
I could look at him for ever.
“It’s all been a lie. The girls everyone’s seen me with…You know none of it’s true?”
“Even the one on my phone?” I mutter. “
Stella
. Girls have names, you know. They’re not just walking vaginas.”
But Stu’s looking at me like he knows I’m trying to be difficult. “Stella was a spin-the-bottle kiss that I caught on camera because I was pissed at you for running off. You always do that. Push me away. You’re doing it now.” I swallow, I have nothing to say. I’ve been pushing him away from the second I pulled him. “There hasn’t been anyone since you, Ruby. I’m fucking with your head because I can’t fuck with your body.” So romantic. “You’re the only one I want to be with.”
I shouldn’t believe him. Stu is capable of saying he loves me whilst he’s shaft-deep in someone else.
Isn’t he?
“I can’t do this, Stu. Not now.”
“OK.” He looks at me some more, then leans in and kisses me on the nose, tilting his forehead to rest on mine. “I know none of this changes what happened. I’m sorry. It was the biggest mistake of my life.”
The words stab into my guts. Guess I know more about making mistakes now than I did at the start of the summer. It’s easier to sleep with the wrong person than I thought. And
so
much harder.
“I really do have to go,” I say.
We stare at each other, drinking in everything about this time, when it is just him and me, and what we could have been if either of us were capable of having a relationship. If I hadn’t spent all my time testing his limits – if his limits hadn’t failed my tests.
Stu nods and stands, holding a hand to help me up. But as I rise, I see him watching me with sadness.
“Stu, I—”
He shakes his head and simply lifts my arm away from my body, reaching out with his other hand to brush the backs of his fingers softly, slowly, sadly down my ribcage.
“If I can’t take care of you, please will you take care of yourself?”
And I nod before stepping away and looking at Stu one last time as if he’s the thing I need to nourish me.
For the first time since we arrived, I take something out of our food store. The excitement with which I planned our meals seems like a lifetime ago. The beans we’d bought, Ruby sneaking ones with hot dogs into the basket when she thought I wasn’t looking, remain untouched. Just like the beef jerky that Ruby insisted “goes with everything” and has been eaten with nothing. Although when I look for it, I realize that’s gone, like the person who bought it.
All I have to go on is a message she sent me late last night:
Staying with a friend. R
As if I no longer qualify. I’m assuming that friend must be Stu, since that’s the number from which the message was sent. I called back, but no one answered. Just as I’m free from Tom, Ruby’s lost to Stu. The irony is painful.
Tipping my cornflakes into what I think is a camping bowl, I go through ten tiny cartons of UHT that Ruby stole from the coffee station at The Rock Shop before I get bored and eat the cereal mostly dry, sitting in the doorway of the tent, my toes in the cool grass. Above, the sky is lank and grey, suffocating us with stillness. The bunting that Owen put up is now flattened on the floor next to something that I pray is a dropped curry, but is more likely to be an unsavoury substance hurled from the pit of someone’s stomach.
Someone unzips the tent opposite and Owen emerges.
There’s no sign of Lee in the tent behind him.
“I’m going to get a coffee. Want anything?” he asks.
“A coffee as big as you can buy it. Milk no sugar.”
“No sign of Ruby?”
I shake my head. Last night I texted him that I’d had a message from her and he’d replied saying that Dongle and Parvati had seen her and she’d looked tired but fine.
I swallow a particularly sharp mouthful of cornflakes. “What about Lee?”
“You can ask him yourself when he wakes up.” Owen points at the girls’ tent and there’s a pause in which I acknowledge that this is not the time to ask. “Turned up looking for Ruby not long after you went to bed. I passed on the message.”
This strikes me as odd. When Ruby can’t find me, she has always turned to Lee.
What happened last night?
Owen’s left when there’s a curse as someone narrowly avoids stepping in the curry (vomit) and stumbles into the middle of our camp.
“Hi,” I say when Kaz looks up.
“Hi” is all I get in reply. She’s eating cornflakes with a chip fork out of a pan meant for boiling on the stove.
“How are the cornflakes?” It’s the only thing that springs to mind.
“Cornflakey. Would you like some?”
I wouldn’t, but I suppose I’ve got to eat something and cereal seems like an easy place to start. Kaz sets about prepping a bowl/pan for me and I help by opening the milk and tipping it in. I seriously underestimated how much to bring. Or accurately estimated since we’ve not needed any milk until now.
“I’m sorry about last night,” I say, letting the cereal soften slightly in the hopes I’ll find it easier to eat.
“Me too,” Kaz says. “Lauren had a panic attack in the crowd and we had to take her to the first-aid tent.”
“Oh.” That is not what I thought had happened. “Why didn’t you say?”
“I did. Text. Call. You didn’t answer, Ruby.”
“Sorry. Battery died.” And I was so caught up in the excitement of Wexler that I didn’t even think to check. So sure that Kaz had simply wanted to be with Lauren more than me that I didn’t think I needed to. “Is Lauren OK?”
“I think so.” Kaz stabs her cornflakes a little viciously. “Tom’s with her now, so…” She shrugs.
“Babysitting duties are over.”
“Something like that.”
Kaz looks at me, making me uncomfortably aware that I’m still poking at my cereal instead of eating it. I draw lines across the bowl, mentally dividing it into four manageable chunks and start on the first.
“Ruby. What happened?”
Hands running over bodies. Teeth on skin. Sobs that sounded like pleasure. The smell of sweat and alcohol and something chemical that I can’t quite place.
I feel dirty and used and stupid.
“You look really upset. What did he do?”
I glance up sharply.
How does she know?
“If Stu hurt you…”
I’m confused. “Stu hasn’t done anything.”
“You don’t have to lie to me, Ruby.”
I give up on my breakfast and put it down with relief. Holding it was tiring.
“Look.” Kaz shuffles close enough that I can smell her deodorant, reminding me that I’ve got to get clean. “I know I’ve not been here for you the last couple of days, and I’m so sorry, but I’m here now.”
Ruby isn’t speaking. Even breathing seems hard and she’s drawing in air like she’s about to be sick, but I am not making yesterday’s mistakes today.
When Ruby says nothing, it’s because she doesn’t know how to ask for help – and if she’s about to be sick, she’ll have to hurl on my shoulder.
I reach in for a hug and Ruby flings her arms around me, clinging tight.
I don’t care that Kaz is offering this hug for all the wrong reasons, to comfort me for something she thinks happened with Stu when it happened with someone else. Someone I don’t think I will ever be able to admit to. I no longer want Kaz to make it real. I just want her to make it go away.
There’s a tremor in her chest and I realize that Ruby’s crying.
How do I handle this? Ruby
never
cries. She’s the one who teases me for crying all the time – at
Hollyoaks
, old people holding hands on the seafront, lost-pet posters, war poetry, Naomi deliberately bending the nib of my favourite fountain pen, John Lewis Christmas adverts – the only time she ever cried at school was when she tripped running down to the hockey pitch and slid across the gravel on bare legs, her momentum broken when her face came into contact with Kirsten Turner’s left boot.
“I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you, Ruby. No one should be able to do this to you. You’re worth so much more than this.”
As I say the words they sound like an echo of what my sister said.
Even you can do better
. I hope Ruby pays more attention to what I’m saying than I did to Naomi.
Ruby insists she needs a shower, which sounds like a nice idea until I discover that the ones on-site are communal.
“You can take a leopard to a festival, but you can’t make it wash its spots off in public,” she teases me and I don’t mind one bit because it’s the first time I’ve seen her smile since yesterday. “Any chance you could top my phone up at the charging tent?”
She hands me her phone and glances at mine, which has been buzzing all the way here. I’m well aware who it is. So’s Ruby.
“You should go and see him,” she says so quietly that I’m convinced I’ve misheard. “I’ve been a dick about you and Tom and Lauren and … everything.”