FOURTEEN

      My friend Ed, with the fancy mum and the house in Primrose Hill, said I’ve always been weird and now I’m getting weirder. He said he’s always liked that I dress like an old man and talk to myself (apparently) and don’t mind all that much what people say about me. But then he said I have to start minding, because the people who are talking about me are girls, pretty ones, and he wants to go out with one of them. Ed wanted me to go for a drink at some bar with these pretty girls, not dressed like an old man, not talking to myself, not being anxious or wanting to be alone, i.e. not being me at all but some perfect friend that Ed wants to pretend I am.

      I was dreading it.

      But I went because Ed is my friend and I don’t actually have many, and even though we’re different I like him.

      I can’t quite remember how I met Ed. He was around in my field of vision for a while before we actually spoke. We were both on our own a lot when he started school and so we ended up being on our own together. Ed started halfway through a term in year nine. He’d been to one exclusive, expensive school after another and got thrown out of every single one. According to Ed, you don’t have to do that much to get asked to leave. His mum is tearing her very blow-dried hair out about him getting such a low-brow education, but Ed says this school is the first one he’s ever liked, so they’ll have to agree to differ. And of course, Ed doesn’t stick out any more like when he first arrived. He fits right in. Everybody likes Ed.

      So we went for that drink, even though it was the last thing I wanted to do. It was a nice Camden evening, the sky was making up for how small it was by going pink and purple and gold all over the Stables Market. I never have a problem in pubs, maybe because of how tall I am, but we went somewhere new and Ed headed straight for the garden, just in case. I had a Guinness, disgusting and delicious at the same time. Ed was drinking trendy beer out of a bottle and biting his nails.

      He said, “They’re late, they’re not coming,” almost as soon as we sat down.

      I’m not sure which one of us was more nervous.

      Ed had already told me what he thought I needed to know, which was that the girls were called Natalie (blonde) and Martha (brown) and they were both seventeen. The blonde one Natalie was on the gym team and had her belly button pierced and was Ed’s, so I was not to try to impress her in any way. I could have Martha apparently, who Ed hadn’t bothered to learn anything about.

      I was just saying it was ironic that Ed was all edgy and nervous (for once) instead of me, and then the girls showed up and it just floored me because while Natalie was very pretty in a nice enough way and I didn’t at all fancy her, Martha was so beautiful I wanted to cry.

      That first night with Martha I did a lot of staring. I didn’t take my eyes off her the whole time and she says she was grateful. She says generally people don’t notice her.

      I don’t know how this is possible.

      When Martha called two days and two and a half hours after we first met, I picked up the phone and she said, “Hello, it’s Martha. Martha Hooper. Natalie’s friend, we met on Friday,” like that, on and on, as if I knew a load of other Marthas or would never remember her. It killed me.

      I don’t remember much about that evening, but I remember everything about Martha.

      Martha is nine months older than me.

      Martha has not got brown hair. Martha’s hair is a thousand different colours, each hair different from the next – black, almost black, chocolate, chestnut, mahogany, amber, blonde.

      Martha’s eyes are not green. They are olive and tree bark and ivy and jade.

      Martha’s skin is pale and soft, palest on the inside of her wrists, softest on her thighs, freckled on her nose and cheeks and shoulders.

      Martha is an only child and her mum and dad are still in love and Martha’s mum has got cancer.

      Martha says her mum has had cancer of one kind or another for over ten years, since Martha was seven.

      She says they have a joke in her house about the number of times her mum wore a wig to her birthday parties when she was growing up.

      Martha says her mum is the funniest woman alive and that she can make you laugh at anything, even dying at forty-four. Her mum says the only way to deal with cancer is to mock it and make it feel small, otherwise it takes over everything you do or say or think and then it’s winning.

      Martha says it usually always wins eventually.

      The second time I saw Martha she took me to St Johns Gardens, a very quiet bit of Regents Park by the rose garden that I didn’t know existed. Hardly anyone goes there. It was sunny and quiet and we sat on a blue bench and Martha kissed me. I put my head on her lap and looked up through the trees at the sky and she stroked my hair.

      She asked me one question, a vague one. “Tell me something about yourself that nobody else knows.”

      This wasn’t hard. I had a lot to choose from. I told her that. I said I didn’t do much talking really and she said, “You can talk to me.”

      So I did. About Dad. About Mum and Bob and Jed and Mercy and Pansy and Norman.

      And about Violet.

      “Violet Park?” she said “The pianist? My dad’s got one of her records. I watched The Final Veil over and over again when I was a kid just to see her hands.”

      “Like little birds,” we said at the same time.

      I wanted to marry her there and then.