Nicci Cloke - Someday Find Me

To Mum, Dad and Dan, with love

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

(ALL BEGINNINGS HAVE AN END)

‘LOSING’

FITZ

SAFFY

FITZ

SAFFY

‘LOST’

FITZ

SAFFY

FITZ

SAFFY

A LITTLE EPILOGUE

THANKS AND LOVE TO

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

The sun always shines on our house. It shines all day every day, even when it’s raining and even when it’s dark. We stay up late at night and soak it up, talking for hours and hours about nothing at all. We like to hold hands when we’re finally falling asleep, because if we do, we’ll be together even in our dreams. When we go out we go to the park and walk in circles with people smiling and the sun shining and the world stretching out around us. We sit in the grass and make chains of flowers and then we lie down and look up at the clouds.

People say we’re made for each other and maybe they’re right. It seems like we’ve known each other for ever and life before seems dusty and faded, like old memories that belong to other people. Like we only really began when we found each other. We tell each other our secrets and our fears and everything that happens to us each day. When we’re at work we’re always thinking of each other. We finish each other’s sentences and speak each other’s thoughts. We’re not great minds but we always think alike.

We love to go out and catch a high and dance. We like to put the music up loud and dance together until the sun comes up. We dance on the furniture and we find each other’s fingers and we hold them tight.

We’ve both been in bad places but we don’t look back. Everything in the past has faded far into the shadows and when we think about everything ahead for us together we laugh and dance and sing. And then we look at each other and we smile and it’s just the two of us sitting in the sunshine looking forward.

There are certain rare moments when it is possible (or so it might seem) to leave your body behind. It might be in a moment of pure joy, with love in your heart or a new life in your arms. Or a moment of desperate sadness, with bad news in your ear or a loss weighing heavy on your soul. A moment of boundless passion, of uncontrollable rage, of icy shock. At these moments in these lives, one thing is true. They are moments when it is suddenly irrevocably clear that things can never be the same again; that a feeling or an action has changed the landscape of everything believed and lived in. It is a window out, but there is no way back in.

I watched myself that day, lying helpless on the bed. I watched them bend and lift me, pulling clothes over my cold body. I watched him watching too, from the corner of the room, a bag of my things in his hand. I watched his eyes meet mine, in a moment that stretched on for ever, in a moment when the light between us flickered and died, and then I watched him turn away, tears falling down his face.

‘I’m sorry,’ was all he could say.

I still remember the first night I met Saffy clear as day, like it was yesterday. It was at some knobhead’s party – someone Alice knew or someone she wanted to shag or someone she had shagged was having a bit of a do and she dragged me along and I said yes even though I really didn’t want to. It’s not like I don’t like parties but I’m not exactly the life and soul and I get a bit weird with new people I don’t know and it takes me a few drinks to warm up and have a giggle so it’s not exactly my idea of fun, going off to some posh git’s Notting Hill pad when I know Al’s gonna sack me off the minute this toff’s waved his cravat at her. But she really wanted to go and I love her to bits, as a mate I should stress, so I said yeah and I went along and to be fair to her she did buy me a little bottle of voddy as a thanks, and you gotta hand it to her, she knew how to get me out of a funk cos I was made up with that and swigged it all on the way there.

So I was a bit happier when we got to the place, feeling a bit more limber and not like I was going to spend the whole night crouched in corners like a total leper. Anyway, when we got in the house I was buzzing a bit and she slipped me a couple of lines in the downstairs bog, and I was thinking how I’d given her a bit of a rough time, poor old Al, and so I had a little dance with her and then I went and got her a drink out the kitchen, but I was right after all cos when I got back to the lounge with two beers making my hands cold she was nowhere to be found. So I drank both the beers and stood at the side and watched people dance for a bit, and then I realised I still had Al’s wrap in my pocket so I did a bit more, knowing she wouldn’t mind, and secretly hoping someone would ask for a bit cos bag is quite useful like that in awkward social situations, and then I wondered what to do with myself and I thought I should probably bite the bullet and have a chat to someone instead of standing there like a right plum.

Yeah, that’s when I saw Saf the first time. I’d just stood up off my perch on the windowsill and was daddylonglegsing around looking for someone to chat to and not getting far, they were really twatty this lot and I’m easygoing me but even I didn’t want to chat to any of them. And there she was, leaning up against a bookcase and sipping at a drink instead of talking, up and down the cup was going to her lips, clink-clink-clink with the ice. And I don’t mean it in a wet way or anything but the room did stand still for real, just me and her looking at each other and that was it. We spent the whole night there leant up against the bookshelves, not really saying much just being together being special, her fiddling with the edge of my T-shirt and me twiddling a bit of her lovely yellow hair between my fingers. She was like a cartoon, Saf, big Bambi eyes and loads of big knotted beddish hair all falling down around her. Behind us the rest of the party were yelling out that they were our friends and that we’d never be alone again, and when I looked down at Saffy in her sequinny sparkly top and her little shorts and her biker boots, I did think, You know what, I reckon they might be right. About that last part anyway.

Those days rushed past in a big fizzy blur. I woke up every morning thinking of her little face and the way she laughed, how her eyes creased up and how she held on to her sides with her arms wrapped around herself in a hug, and anyone around would laugh too, because she was catching, she was like happiness in a lovely little bottle, opened up and spilling out. I’d spend all day long wondering if I should call or text her and the best thing was I felt like maybe she was in a room somewhere else in the city, thinking just the exact same thing, just the two of us sat there with our phones in our hands, like the matching bookends my mum had when I was a kid, but with buildings in between us instead of books, just waiting to be stuck back together. I’d go to bed and the last thing I’d think about would be her, and the way her voice would speed up when she was excited, all the words all squeezed together as they flew past you like lovely silver birds. I’d spend all my time thinking about her, and all the time I was with her staring at her, soaking her up and drinking her in and trying to remember exactly how she looked and how she sounded and what she said and the way she stared back at me, because I knew after she left I’d never believe that last bit was true. But it was. She stared at me with her big eyes and I’d feel like I didn’t want to breathe or move a single muscle in case the spell was broken and she looked away. Sometimes she’d touch me, really gently, when I was in the middle of saying something stupid or trying and usually failing to be funny: she’d reach out and stroke my hand or touch my knee and it would be like all my fingers and all my toes wiggled and all the hairs on my arms jumped up and did a little dance.