Читать книгу The Café in Fir Tree Park - Katey Lovell - Страница 16

Kelly’s blonde hair glimmers in the sun as she enters the café, a worried expression on her face. My stomach lurches. I’m not good at managing awkward conversations at the best of times and this is likely to be one of the most difficult conversations I’ve ever had.

I’d told Kelly the cold hard facts on the phone, and she’d seemed to take it well. At least, she hadn’t broken down in tears or asked me questions I didn’t know the answers to. She’d replied with a quiet ‘okay’ at the end of each sentence and then thanked me for letting her know. Talking in person was going to be much harder than talking over the phone though. There’s something about seeing people’s expressions that makes it harder to control my own emotions.

“I can’t stay long,” she says in a whisper, her eyes flickering around the café. “If Mum sees me here she’ll go crazy. She thinks I’m at home revising. I was revising until I got your phone call. Now I can’t think of anything except Luke.”

Her expression is weary and pained and I can only imagine mine is worse. I had two hours of broken sleep last night, and my body can tell. It wants to curl up and shut down, but I’m not going to let it. I’ve got too much to do.

“I wish I hadn’t had to tell you, and I wish I had better news, but all we can do is wait for him to get over this infection so they can operate.”

“When I saw him on Thursday he was fine,” Kelly hisses through gritted teeth. “He told me the headaches had gone. I thought they were stress-related because he’s been working so hard lately. How wrong was I?”

I shrug.

“I don’t know, Kel. Maybe Thursday was a good day. All I know is that last night he was screaming in pain. I was lying in bed reading one minute and the next Luke was crying out for me to come and help him. The panic in his voice …” I shudder at the memory. “He thought he was going blind, said he couldn’t see anything but black. It was terrifying.”

“I should have been there for him. I’ve known for weeks that he’s not been right. If only I’d taken it more seriously…”

I hold my hand up to stop her mid-flow.

“There’s nothing you could have done, nothing any of us could have done. Luke has a brain tumour. We couldn’t have stopped it happening.”

I appreciate how helpless she feels. I’d had all the same thoughts myself last night, the ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’, and the guilt had eroded my soul until I’d finally snatched a restless sleep leaning on my dad’s bony shoulder.

“I should have said something. Maybe if I’d told him to go to the doctor and get it checked out he’d have listened to me?”

“Kelly, please. Stop beating yourself up over this. If you’d tried to get him to go to the doctor he’d only have thought you were nagging. You know as well as I do that he hates making a fuss.”

“I can’t bear to think of him in hospital.” Kelly looks so unsure, her usual confident persona nowhere to be seen. “Poor Luke. Hospitals are depressing, full of old people waiting to die. He must be so scared. Can I go and see him?”

She’s looking at me with such hope, but I know there’s no way she can come to the hospital. My parents would hit the roof, especially in their current emotional state. “He’s not allowed visitors at the moment, because his immune system’s so low and they really need to get him back to full strength so they can operate.”

I’m not lying, but we both know it’s only half the reason. My dad had walked in on Kelly and Luke kissing at Luke’s eighteenth birthday party back in January. He’d been furious, despite both of them trying to explain that it was a typical drunken snog, the sort most teenagers have after a few too many alcopops.

I guess I’ve not been a typical teenager, holding out for someone who’s way out of my league, so my old-fashioned parents haven’t got experience in knowing what to expect from a hormone-addled adolescent. They’d already made it clear they thought it was outrageous that within Luke’s gang of closest friends there was a girl who identified as bisexual, and rather than being ashamed of her sexuality, openly revelled in it. Finding Luke kissing her was a complete shock for my prudish dad, so when they announced they were dating he took it as a personal insult. In his mind, Luke wasn’t seeing Kelly because he liked her, he was doing it just to wind him up.

Mum had inevitably sided with Dad in a bid to keep the peace, whereas I stood up for Luke. If it had been anyone other than Kelly that Luke had been dating there wouldn’t have been anywhere near as much fuss; that was what got to me more than anything. Sometimes it’s as though Dad’s stuck in the dark ages. He didn’t believe Kelly would be able to ‘give up girls’ as though being monogamous and bi-sexual was as mythical as unicorns or fat-free donuts, rather than a perfectly normal way of life.

It all came to a head last month after a blazing row where Dad forbade Luke to spend any more time with Kelly, and since then they’ve been seeing each other in secret. My parents don’t have a clue that they’re still together. No one does, except me and their closest friends. Even Maggie believes they parted ways. She’s mentioned her fear of Kelly and miserable Mischa getting back in touch numerous times, and although I’ve wanted to reassure her there’s no chance of that happening I haven’t been able to. It’s not my place.

Kelly’s shoulders sink, as though she’s physically deflating. I can tell how much she wants to be able to support Luke, how now more than ever she longs to be able to tell the world that she’s his girlfriend.

“I wish I could see him. I wish I could give him a hug and tell him how much he means to me.”

I fix my eyes on hers.

“You don’t have to tell him anything. You’ve been together for months now, he knows how much you love him.”

Kelly shakes her head. “He doesn’t. He thinks I hate him.”

I can see she’s welling up and for one awful moment I think she might cry. I’ve seen enough tears in the past twenty-four hours to last me a lifetime, I don’t think I can take many more.

“He doesn’t think you hate him. He asked me to let you know what was going on. He wouldn’t have done that if he thought you wouldn’t care. You two have been through so much together already, and for what it’s worth I think you’re the perfect couple.”

“The perfect couple no one knows about,” Kelly replies sadly. “How am I supposed to support him when I’m not even allowed to be near him?”

“Bide your time. For now, I’ll be the messenger for you and I’m taking Luke’s phone to the hospital later too – we were in such a rush yesterday to get him checked out that we didn’t even think to take it. And I’m sure that one day Mum and Dad will get over it. If they saw how much love you two have for each other I know they’d give you both their blessing. They might be old-fashioned but they’re not monsters.”

Kelly looks away, shamefaced, but her words catch me unawares.

“You don’t understand. The last time I saw Luke we had this dreadful argument. He said he couldn’t cope with the secrecy any more and that we should either tell everyone about our relationship or else call it a day. And I got so angry. Not angry at him, more angry at the situation. Angry that my sexuality has caused so many problems for us. Something inside me just snapped, and I took it all out on Luke. Do you know what the last thing I said to him was?”

I shake my head.

“The last words I said to Luke were ‘drop dead’.”

And then the tears do start to fall, both mine and hers.

“Oh Fern, what if he does die? What have I done?”