Don’t You Forget About Me(63)

It was a scorching day in the Botanical Gardens, a heavy heat, bees sounded drunk on it. Lucas and I were supposed to be contemplating the character of Edgar Linton: is he sympathetic, and is Cathy using him to torture Heathcliff?

‘That is such a male question,’ I’d said, as a welcome light breeze riffled the ring binder, stuffed with our notes. ‘As if everything Cathy does has to be seen through the prism of Heathcliff’s feelings for her,’ I’d said. ‘That’s why I can’t get on with it. It’s as if she’s the only one with any responsibility for bad decisions. She has to protect their love for both of them.’

‘She does go off, fall for someone else and marry him, even though she knows she loves Heathcliff more. Definite spoke in the wheel for soulmates.’ Lucas was so articulate and opinionated behind the quiet counsel he kept at school, and it was still a lesson to me. I’d always assumed the interesting people were the mouthy ones.

‘But Heathcliff becomes a monster. It’s as if the monstrousness is her fault.’

‘I think he thinks he would never do what she did. His head would never have been turned by someone else like hers was and he can’t forgive her that weakness. It sends him mad. He’s sent mad by the fact he knows she knew it was the wrong thing to do, and she did it anyway. He can’t follow her logic.’

‘Sounds like when my dad was teaching my mum to drive.’

I got a laugh, but it was a lazy joke, and quite rightly the laugh was hollow.

After a good fifteen minutes of discussing the set text’s subtext, we were soon once again exploring just how much fumbling we could get away with, how near fingertips under outer clothing could slide towards key anatomical areas.

When things became too exciting, one or the other of us would pull away and try to discipline a further period of talking. This time it was Lucas. I remember his faded red Converse with grubby laces, his arm round me as I leaned on his shoulder.

How did he taste so right, smell so alluring? It turned out when they talked about ‘chemistry’ it wasn’t only that 1940s screwball film thing where you riffed off one another, it was something primal.

He murmured something into the top of my head and I said: ‘What? I can’t hear you.’

Lucas drew back. ‘I said: you’re so delicate …’

‘Delicate?’

It seemed an unlikely word for an eighteen-year-old male and when I met his eyes, I could tell Lucas felt self-conscious at having used it.

‘It’s like your bones are skinny,’ he said, circling my wrist with his finger and thumb.

I was delighted, and surprised.

‘My mum says I’m tubby,’ I said, and Lucas laughed.

‘… Really? Is she joking?’

‘Oh no, she always says stuff like that.’

‘Tubby is like a word you’d use for a bear. Paddington Bear.’

‘And my nose is too broad at the tip for me to ever be considered a “classical beauty”, apparently.’

I would never have told Lucas this, mere weeks previous, in case he started to think of me as Miss Potato Schnozz. But in the runaway train that was falling in love, I was increasingly confident of his admiration of how I looked, and I wanted him to know everything about me. ‘Being interesting’ won out over the shame of sharing these slights. So I suppose some vanity was still involved.

Lucas frowned and stared at my nose.

‘What a weird thing to say. I mean even if you had a nose the size of a shoe, which you don’t, what a weird, unkind thing to say to your kid.’

I mimicked my mother’s voice.

‘You are pretty, Georgina, but you are not beautiful, so don’t expect it to carry you in life. Be nice to people and plan to work for what you have. Men’s heads are very easily turned by better options.’

‘Woah what the?! That’s horrible,’ Lucas said. I could see him really feeling it, on my behalf, and then I wished I hadn’t told him. She’d been in an exceptionally bad mood that day. There wasn’t much chance of him ever liking her now, I hadn’t considered that. I’d made her sound like Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest.

‘Why would your mum say stuff like that?’

I could see he was genuinely affected. Ours was a big love, I thought. It reminded me of when we studied Othello last year, but with Lucas as Desdemona. ‘She loved me for the dangers I had passed / And I loved her that she did pity them.’ I’d forgotten at that moment that Othello is one of the tragedies.

I drew my knees up to my chest, and said, with slightly affected world weary maturity: ‘It’s her generation, the whole mindset. She was a real “knockout” in her youth and she’s never worked, and got married to my dad at twenty-one. She thinks my prospects in life are based on my appearance, because hers were. It’s all about marrying a well-off man and firing out kids.’

I drew breath. I’d barely said this to anyone, only Jo.

‘… She’s not happy with Dad, but she won’t leave him because she doesn’t want to be a fifty-something divorcee, with a lower standard of lifestyle. She says as much when they fight. It’s not her fault – when she lashes out at me, she thinks she’s warning me, stopping me from ending up like her.’

Lucas and I sat in silence.

‘It is her fault,’ he said, eventually.