Finding Lucas

It was 11.15pm when I felt the front door shake the house. I’d been sat in the dark for some time but now I leant over to a tall lamp and clicked it on. I grabbed my pack of cigarettes and quickly lit one while fluffing my hair with a free hand. The twinkle of keys became louder and the door opened.

“Holy shit!” Alex shouted and immediately narrowed her eyes.

“Hi.” I said, exhaling a large mass of smoke.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she hurried across the wooden floors to the couch, grabbed the makeshift ashtray out of my hand – a Star Wars Han Solo mug – and swiped the ash out of it.

“That’s fucking expensive. Collectors!”

“You used it all the time,” I said. Alex was still wiping the mug, inspecting it for filth and blew into it. It was all very theatrical.

“How did you get in?” she dropped her bag and sat on the bed. I felt bad, I guess. Who wants to find me in their room at this time of night?

“Phil let me in. He hugged me, actually.”

“I’m surprised he remembers you,” she said, shaking her head. She pulled out a crumpled roll up and began patting her pockets.

“Here.” I threw a lighter and smiled. Alex tried to smile but her face looked like a banshee drinking a concoction of sour milk and Tangfastics. She lit up, grabbed a book and began scribbling furiously on a blank page. I laughed.

“You’re still seeing the therapist? Julian?” I asked.

“Julian, yes. We’ve had nothing to talk about for the past month so your return will at least bring something positive.”

I winced and she looked up. I felt terrible about how I left. More importantly, Alex was still pissed about the jam I never picked up for her. I didn’t want to make eye contact with the banshee so I picked the skin around my nails, a habit acquired from my anxiety riddled teens. The scribbling stopped.

“Where have you been?” Alex said. I could tell by her voice a lump had formed in her throat. I swallowed my own lump too, a knot to betray my emotions.

“Oh, you know. Near, far. Wherever,” I said thickly and bit my skin, “Everywhere and nowhere.” A dull object hit the side of my head. I picked the book off the floor and settled it onto the table.

“Thanks for that.”

“You’re so full of shit, Lucas!” she curled up in her blankets and started to shake.

Soon I was holding her frame and crying too. I cried for my friend, the pain I’d caused her. But, I cried because nothing had changed; you can never outrun your mind.

One day I went to Tesco and never came back. It wasn’t planned but I found myself in the frozen aisle, deciding between straight chips or crinkle chips, and I had a sudden realisation. An epiphany, a eureka moment. Why can’t there be a mix bag of chips? Straight AND crinkle? God knows they taste the same. Perhaps I wanted a little variety with my beans, a crinkle-straight situation to break the mould. But we live in an EITHER/OR world. Strawberry or chocolate. Male or female. Crinkle chip or straight chip. I dropped my basket of shopping which included a pot of jam for Alex and walked. I walked past the checkouts, out the glass doors and into the road. A van almost hit me but my walk turned into a jog and I was at a bus stop.

Honestly, it wasn’t planned and I’m a planner. I’d left my seven-week meal plan back in the basket a long with a note saying: NO IMPULSIVE PURCHASES. I should’ve followed that with NO IMPULSIVE VAN HITTING or NO IMPULSIVE BUS JOURNEYS. Maybe I’m not a planner after all.

I met Alex at a knitting group. I’d love to say I’m comfortable enough with my sexuality to confess to knitting but I’m not and I don’t. It’s basically two sticks moving in unison to create something woolly and I don’t like wool due to its itchy nature. I discovered this when my girlfriend at the time, Viv, knitted me a hat for Christmas. It was a strange brown colour and reminded me of an exhibition I’d seen where an artist knitted a scarf with wool from her vagina, menstruation blood and all. Regardless of this image etched into my long-term memory, I wore that damn period hat everywhere I went. She beamed whenever I put it on and I would’ve beamed back if it hadn’t have felt like a thousand warrior ants were scratching my scalp with their little ant swords.

One Wednesday, Viv begged me to attend her knitting group. If I had the funds to hire a small aircraft, I would have attached a banner saying HELL NO and asked the pilot to follow Viv around for the day. But I was a nice boyfriend and nice boyfriends do nice things. The event was held in a cold church hall with plastic cups of warm orange squash and bourbon biscuits and was attended by the university’s utmost hipsters. I didn’t understand the point of sitting in a circle and silently knitting or talking about crochet and purl and sticks so I just went along for the bourbons.

I walked through the blue doors and immediately thought I’d entered an Edinburgh Woollen Mill crossed with Wonka’s chocolate factory but the cold air hit me and I remembered where I was. I had only met one of Viv’s knit friends: a girl named Loelle who seemed as pretentious as her name. We didn’t really get on and she glared out of her heavy black fringe from one of the grey chairs. Viv sounded a loud whoop and ran to sit next to her. I awkwardly skipped to the chair beside her but Loelle informed me it was reserved for their friend Sophie, the only girl in the place with a normal name. Viv smiled a sorry, turned back to her friend and began whispering in a hurried fashion. On reflection, she was likely discussing the penis she had recently had in her mouth that wasn’t mine. I swivelled to find the nearest chair and hurried over to a girl pleading with her friend to stay past the bourbon entrees.

“Anyone sat here?” I asked and regretted choosing this seat: the bourbon stealer looked from my wrinkly jeans to the knitted sweater and then back down to my dirty converse shoes. The look was filled with amusement, disdain and pity before she shook her head. This was going to be a long night.

The bus travels through a popular housing estate, entering a once gated pebble-dashed wall that rises high around the public path to keep the residents in. It bears down on the smooth concrete road and I imagine bored housewives looking out of net curtains to scowl at the metal rectangle I’m travelling in. It’s obvious the council won a long and arduous battle to smack a bus route in the middle of this suburban bliss: some Che Guevara type signs are still sticking out of green grass and rose flowerbeds. The juxtaposition would’ve made me laugh but not today: I was right along with the stay-at-home mums on the frontline of their revolution, brandishing my own sign and screaming for a coup d’état. The Arab spring would be long forgotten and buses will be ablaze with a beacon of hope for other rebels. Hastily, I followed a middle-aged woman off the bus when it emerged through the other side. I waited again at an unknown stop, not really knowing what I was doing. My existential crisis had carried out from the polished floors of Tesco and followed me here as I leaned against the wall, chain-smoking. The stones dug through my t-shirt so I opted to stand limply. Waiting.

Alex and I were never a couple. I mean, we did accidentally fool around once during a Lord of the Rings marathon but things abruptly stopped when my mother called. I didn’t pick up on the first ring but after four missed calls, I figured I’d better.

“Lucas? Hello?”

“Hi Mum. What’s up?” I pushed Alex’s hand out of my jeans and fumbled off the bed.

“Oh Lucas. Something awful has happened...”

“What? Is everything okay? Where’s Dad?”

“Oh, your dad’s fine, love. He’s watching the news,” she paused and inhaled, “But the cat isn’t... Oscar’s dead.”

Soon, I was hurtling on a train, weaving through grassy hills to my hometown in Surrey and Alex never touched me like that again.

Captain Sensible, renamed Oscar once I’d left for university, had lived a long and unproductive life. He was delivered to our front door as a kitten by the neighbour in a cardboard box, with a few plush toys and a can of Whiskas food. We had ordered him 6 weeks prior when the news came of an unexpected litter delivery. I was a 10 year old boy with few friends so my parents caved after some weeks of begging and crying. His blue eyes widened as we carried the box in and settled it down in the middle of the front room. He scrambled out and walked into a leg of the coffee table. It became apparent this little ball of black wasn’t a sensible cat so I christened him Captain Sensible to be ironic and also because I had a fascination with Captain America comics. My mother scowled at the name but she couldn’t complain: I spent every hour with him and busied myself training him to use the litter tray before he was allowed out into the wild. He became my best friend. I’d tell him stories of our travels in the Amazon and occasionally attached a tea towel to the back of his collar so he could fall off chairs and walk into furniture in style. He would catch leaves in the autumn instead of mice and pull plastic bags through the cat flap on windy days. As the years passed, the bags and leaves became few and far between. CS’s life carried on, though. He had a constant aroma of death: a mix of over boiled sprouts and rotten chicken. He still slept at the end of my bed and my mother still complained about the smell but he was loved. He was loved by my parents but most of all, he was loved by me.

I step out onto the balcony and find her there, smoking and drinking from a bottle of white. She had already downed Shiraz back at the flat and they always say to never mix the vine. At least I think that’s what they say.

“Classy,” I note, attempting to lighten the mood. Instead the air gets thicker and I breathe deeper.

The apartment view is tragic; a grey building is separated by a narrow service road which has frequent cars travelling up and down. The dull mass is so close that I imagine the workers wave to the residents through the minute windows. To the right, a wall stops a murky canal from washing at the building’s brickwork. The water looks like sewage mixed with watery cement and probably tastes as good. The other bank has prettier looking buildings with vast windows and modern arches. I wish I was there now, looking over this scene instead of being in it. This party Alex sprung on me has been a drag so far with awkward eye contact and whispers. As soon as she stopped crying, she began to get ready and I was left lying on the bed, still pondering.

“I was fine, Lucas.” The confession broke the silence and entered my lungs like the piercing cold in December. I knew what she meant immediately and my heart dropped into the well of my abdomen.

“I was fine, maybe even great. I got past the weeks of thinking you were dead. I rang your mum but you know that. She said you needed personal time or something and didn’t want to talk to me,” Alex took a slug of wine, “I kind of knew then it wasn’t me but that you didn’t care about me either. That was hard.” I wanted to scream, pull her close and shake her until she knew how much I cared. I stayed silent, though, biting my fingers and eyes burning.

“You know, we’ve always been on the edge. The edge of something big and great. But you avoided our something. I conditioned myself to stop then and there. So this didn’t start when you left, Lucas. It had already ended.” She looked at me with a small smile on her face, cheeks bright and wet, “I’ll help you face this shit with a pitchfork and a Molotov cocktail. But as your friend.” Alex pushed off the railings and turned to go. “We’ve fallen off our edge into a pit of snakes and I fucking hate snakes,” she added and rejoined the party.

I sobbed into my sleeve and smoked my way through five cigarettes.