Bend to Squares (a Love Story)

Alice Brooker, eighteen years old and blonder than nature had intended, was dragging behind her boyfriend on the Oxford Road, only half listening to what he was saying. The pavement was wrapped in a thin grey frost, and the long heels of her boots made it difficult to keep up. She was accustomed now to his quick stride, to the expansive footfalls that propelled his body forward at a pace reserved for the hurried and the tall.

Concert dwellers lined the street on both sides, in factions, in style, the majority bound in the same direction but taking their time about it. And here was her boyfriend: awkward, long and frenzied, lighting an endless string of cigarettes as he weaved in and out of people. His hand trailed behind, unclasped and unnoticed. He only ever got this way about music. Art, literature, politics, even film – these things he appreciated from a distance, but with music he became almost evangelical. He conversed, ranted, argued and soliloquised – and with a fair deal of eloquence.
‘Got no talent for it,’ he had explained one evening, ‘but I know how it works.’

Sarah’s boyfriend, David, played in a band and Alice’s – Alice’s boyfriend consumed bands instead. Entire walls of his Whalley Range flat were layered with stolen posters and crumpled gig tickets; racks of CDs and homemade cassette tapes (many of which she had never even heard of let alone listened to) lined his bedroom floor. Oh, and there, in the corner, stood a dusty, anciently-strung acoustic guitar which nobody played.

‘ – classical music for the twenty-first century,’ he was exclaiming now, to nobody in particular. ‘They’re up there with fucking Beethoven!’

Still she had not taken his hand. Unsteady on the ice, she slowed again. Tomorrow morning would be worse: early, dark, hazy, and she would have to rise especially early to get the 86 bus to University. Friday morning meant a Modernist Movement lecture followed by a Romantic Revolution seminar. Half an academic year down, she had little time for the so-called Romantic Poets: the legendary Byron, the opiated Coleridge, the inane William Wordsworth. They taught her nothing of love.
‘Give me Orwell over this tripe any day,’ she had announced on one occasion. ‘In his darkest moment he knew more about Beauty than Blake.’
Her tutor had laughed sweetly at this but there was a look in his eye, like Alice had insulted a member of his extended family.

Now, all about her reigned the shadows of indignant rock n roll stars: Doherty, Winehouse, Alex Turner… The last of the Rock Romantics. Some legacy the counter-Enlightenment canon had left. Even worse when you thought about all of those eighteen-to-thirty year olds who ran around the place carved in their image. Was her boyfriend any different? Was she being too harsh on them all? Yes, she thought perhaps she was, but that was okay. She knew she wasn’t innocent either, and that was okay too. Better to be a cynic than an over-zealous, celebrity-eyed groupie. She saw those girls everywhere: the hairstyles, the Libertines chic, the blissful middle-class eyes gazing dutifully on as their skinny-jeaned boyfriends took to the acoustic night stage to strum joyless major chords.

He shared the apartment with five other boys - three floors spiralling up to a knackered skylight that let the cold in. The whole place smelt bizarrely of floor polish and cannabis. It was this same sickly mixture of scents that greeted Alice like an old enemy when they finally arrived home. She had mixed feelings about where he lived. It was cold and unwelcoming, and people only washed up when it was absolutely necessary. The cooking process was ruined by having to clean every plate, pot and pan and surface. His bedroom was the only saving grace – otherwise, it resembled a slum.

‘I should shower,’ he said, pulling his shirt up over his head ineloquently.
‘I’ll choose some music,’ she answered.

She picked out a record by Godspeed You Black Emperor!, undressed slowly and climbed into bed. On the floor below, the shower let out a panicky scream. She imagined her boyfriend beneath a heavy flow of lukewarm water, and waited nervously for the whir and whine of the boiler to give way to the sound of rain on tin.
He’d said it already, of course (on the bed, six weeks ago) but he hadn’t said it first. It was Alice who had gone there, maliciously, self-servingly, just to see what the words felt like in her mouth. She wondered now if, without her own perfect delivery of that three word gesture, he ever would have admitted it. She guessed not.

De Quincey was right where she’d left him, on the nightstand, his spine broken, his pages torn. The book - a charity shop steal - opened naturally at page ninety-three. The print was small and dense. She pictured an ancestry of owners, each of whom had played their own tiny part in forcing the book into its present condition. Now here was a Romantic she could stomach: debt-ridden, shadowy, nauseous, addicted… A child of Manchester’s Cross Street. She wondered why people didn’t make more of a fuss of it. Before the laudanum, before the narcotic London rambles, before the Confessions, he had been here.

The boiler yelped and squealed in pain. He spent more time in the shower than anyone she had ever known yet his fingernails remained dirty, and his long shapeless hair stayed sodden with grease. Alice flicked through the book until she found exactly where she’d left off. She was not William Wordsworth. Beauty did not come naturally. Like De Quincey, she needed a catalyst; something to speed up her emotions, her reactions, her abilities. She said things she didn’t mean. Her love, she figured, was an illusion.

The day it happened she had skipped a class, and then, three weeks later, she skipped her period. Stretched out on his bed (on this bed) they exchanged the second in a mini-series of ‘I Love You’s’ and he told her that he didn’t have any condoms. She told him she wanted to anyway and rapturously, carelessly, they joined at the hip. It was a foolish desire she harboured for him. Between the sheets it was Alice that trembled delightfully at their proximity. She knew now what her body was capable of, how it reacted to each precarious, intelligent advance. She had even thought of cheating. The idea thrilled her.

Suddenly he was in the room, a filthy towel hung clinging to his waist, his hair slicked back awfully behind his ears. He lit a cigarette and sat at the end of the bed. Alice made a point of reading a couple of sentences (if interrogated she would remember nothing of what they said) before setting the book down in her lap.
‘Better?’
‘Definitely. I feel fresh again.’ He reached for an ashtray. ‘Are you tired?’
‘Very.’ She wasn’t.

They did this almost every night. Despite the youth of their courtship and the immaturity of their years, they confounded one another with useless conversation. She felt sure this would be the overriding factor in the relationship’s eventual destruction.

‘What a fucking gig,’ he said.
‘Are you coming to bed?’ She asked.

He threw off his towel and lay on top of the duvet. It happened like this always - as if it was the first time, as if etiquette dictated the slowness of his actions. She wanted to sleep with him, and to read some more, and to watch a DVD, and to fall into a cosy, pleasant pre-sleep haze. She wanted everything that wasn’t this. Because this was interminable, and it was impossible to tell him she was –

He turned off the lamp beside the bed and slipped beneath the sheets. A single yellow streetlamp glowed outside the window.

‘I didn’t want to read anymore anyway,’ she said, sardonically, because she wanted to get a rise out of him and because she was too tired to carry on reading anyway.
‘Shit, I’m sorry,’ he returned. The light was already on again.
‘Can you put this on the floor?’ She asked, handing De Quincey over. ‘I don’t want to forget it in the morning.’
‘Sure.’

She turned onto her side. He switched off the light for a second time and forced his body close to hers. He seemed more confident in the dark. Alice figured they were already twice as likely to have sex. Mind games and subtle suggestions, she thought - that’s how people got what they wanted.
When she thought about babies the world turned a little faster than usual. Objects –like books and CD cases and chairs and cigarette packets - appeared a lot brighter, as if they were spinning and she was spinning with them. She pushed herself into his groin and felt the predictable swell of his erection. Now would be the time to tell him, and to figure it all out. The most important decisions in life were made between two people in bed.

She almost came right out and said it then. Her brain formulated the sentence; her mouth framed the first word. But still it did not come. Pointedly, she turned her body further away from him and stared soberly at the wall. He turned with her, and placed a lazy arm around her waist. Perhaps she would tell him on Facebook. Or Twitter.

Alice Brooker is pregnant. (P.S. Rob, you’re the father…)

It would be unexpectedly modern. Indeed, without status updates, how else would she have first heard about her father’s second engagement or the untimely death of an old school friend? The internet could be such a wonderful place.

She pressed her lips together and kept quiet. He need never know. She would go to the clinic alone and he would be none the wiser. Yes, she knew now what her body was capable of.
‘Goodnight,’ he whispered.
She said nothing in return. As far as he would know, she was already asleep.