Loveless(103)

It was closed. Of course it was; it was a Saturday morning.

I went to Tesco, like I might just see her browsing cereal options, and I walked around the square like she might just be sitting on a stone bench, scrolling on her phone. I crossed Elvet Bridge and stormed into the Elvet Riverside lecture hall building, not even sure if they opened it at the weekend but not caring, having no idea why she would be here on a Saturday morning but hoping, hoping. Praying. I went up to the Student Union to find it locked, and then I couldn’t run any more because my chest hurt, so I walked to the Bill Bryson Library, went inside, stood on the stairs and just shouted ‘ROONEY!’ once. Everybody turned round to look at me, but I didn’t care.

Rooney wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere.

Were we not enough for her in the end?

Was I not enough?

Or had we just got through to her, only for something terrible to happen to her?

I called her again. And it went to voicemail.

‘Did something happen?’ I asked.

I hung up again. I had no idea what else to say.

Back outside the library, my phone started to ring, but it was only Jason.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘I’m at the theatre and no one else is here except Sunil.’

‘Rooney’s gone.’

‘What do you mean gone?’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll find her.’

‘Georgia –’

I hung up and tried Rooney a third time.

‘Maybe the you from Freshers’ Week would have left us. But not now. Not after everything.’ I felt a tightness in my throat. ‘You wouldn’t have left me.’

When I hung up that time, I realised my phone only had five per cent battery left, because I’d failed to put it on charge last night.

The wind whipped around me on the street.

Should I call the police?

I started walking back towards the town centre, all the ‘what if’s circling around my head. What if she’d gone home? What if she’d fallen in the river and died?

I stopped in the middle of the pavement, a memory suddenly flashing in my mind so hard I felt like I got whiplash.

On that first night out in town, Rooney had put herself on Find My Friends on my phone. I hadn’t used it at all in the end, but … would it work now?

I nearly dropped my phone in my haste to get it out and check, and sure enough, there on the map was a little circle with Rooney’s face in it.

She was, apparently, in a field, by the river, maybe a kilometre away in the countryside.

I didn’t even let myself think why. I just started running again.

I hadn’t thought about what Durham might be like outside the city centre. All I’d known for the past six months was university buildings, cobbled streets and tiny cafés.

But it only took ten minutes for me to find myself in big, endless greenery. Long fields stretched out ahead as I followed the small, worn footpaths and tracked the little Rooney dot on my phone, until my phone screen went black and I couldn’t any more.

By that point, I didn’t need it. The dot had been by the river, next to a bridge. I just needed to get to the bridge.

It took another fifteen minutes. At one point I was scared I was truly lost, with no Google Maps to help me, but I just kept going, following the river, until I saw it. The bridge.

The bridge was empty.

The surrounding footpaths and fields were too.

I just stood there and looked for a moment. Then I walked across the bridge and back, like Rooney might be sleeping down on the riverbank or I might see the back of her head bobbing in the water, but I didn’t.

Instead, when I reached the footpath again, I saw light glint off something on the grass.

It was Rooney’s phone.

I picked it up and turned the screen on. All of my missed calls were on there. Lots from Pip too, and even a couple from Jason.

I sat down on the grass.

And I just cried. From exhaustion, from confusion, from fear. I just sat in a field with Rooney’s phone and cried.

Even after everything, I couldn’t help her.

I couldn’t be a good friend to her.

I couldn’t make her feel like she mattered in my life.

‘GEORGIA.’

A voice. I looked up.

For a moment I thought I might be dreaming. Whether she was a projection from my mind of what I wished was happening right now.

But she was real.

Rooney was running across the bridge to me, a Starbucks in one hand and a bunch of flowers in the other.





‘Oh my God, Georgia, why are you – what’s wrong?’

Rooney collapsed on to her knees in front of me and stared at the tears flowing out of my eyes.

Pip had cried in front of me dozens of times. It didn’t take much to set her off. Often it had been warranted, but sometimes she cried just because she was tired. Or that one time she cried because she made a lasagne and then dropped it on the floor.

Jason had cried in front of me a few times. Only when really bad things happened, like when he realised how horrible Aimee was to him, or we watched really sad movies about old people, like The Notebook and Pixar’s Up.

Rooney had cried in front of me a few times too. When she first told me about her ex. Outside Pip’s door. And when we moved the beds together.

I’d never cried in front of her.