HOME

His was a ho me, a broken home. It had a broken dishwasher, a broken-windowed TV set, and a broken fence around its perimeter. When it wasn’t raining, he preferred to sit beneath the trees on the embankment at the edge of the nearby industrial estate. He watched the traffic. He didn’t care about cars, but pondered over the people within them. He’d noticed that roughly a third more cars drove away from the town centre than towards it. Most of the outbound travellers were surely headed only to the nearby city, a little city, a city that was only a city on account of its cathedral, to work or watch the football or go to Tesco or see the latest Hollywood blockbuster. But did some have other purposes? Did people ever set out to blow up the Houses of Parliament or visit strangers at the other end of the country with cool surnames?

When the cars started blurring into each other, he doodled badly in the back of last year’s French exercise book and read the books he took out of the library with his brown cardboard tickets on the rare occasion that it was open. He chose them randomly, because the library held nothing that matched anyone’s interests, and even if it had done, he didn’t have any. He had no desire to learn or lose himself in fiction, but he found a comfort in reading. He did so studiously and carefully, finding more joy in the variability of his literature than its content. Most of it was by Catherine Cookson, but he'd also found "The Mammoth Book Of Vitamin Supplements" to "Homosexuality In 19th Century Vienna". Every now and again, he stopped at the pressure of an important thought, but he could never work out what these were. He could only wait for them to dissolve.

Hers was the home of the shiny-headed shiny-suited manager-man her mother had married ten months ago. In the winter, her darkened bedroom had been a sanctuary in which she could listen to loud music and watch horror films and write in her online journal, but in the summer, the harsh glare on the sun penetrated her lace curtains, reflecting off the monitor, highlighting the dust on her shelves and draining her. She lay on her unmade bed, her clammy feet pressed against the cool of the slanted ceiling, her mouth ill with the aftertaste of too much chocolate, paralysed by loss and betrayal.

She hung out at her drug dealer’s house, but found the lack of ambition in the atmosphere stifling. She rode her bike into the surrounding countryside, but its emptiness dizzied her. But she discovered satisfaction in seeking and photographing decay. She explored the council estate, the sky darkening with every step, where she captured his broken fence, his overgrown garden and the small abusive Adidas-clad boys lingering outside it on battered bikes, long before she found him beneath the trees.

He was wearing the same clothes he always wore, holes with blue jeans in them, holes with a once-white t-shirt in them, and crumbling cheap white trainers. He didn’t notice her until she asked if she could take his picture. He consented. He felt her warmth, though it didn’t sink in. "Should I read, or look at the camera?" he asked, his voice hoarse from lack of use and unsure of the order in which to place the words.

"Read," she said, so he did. She took the picture, then continued to watch him, not knowing what to do. Her cheap digital camera, a guilty gift from her stepfather, was full and she had no use for the results of her endeavours.

A couple of raindrops fell on his current page, so he shut the book. He respected books, though solely as an exercise to see if he could return them to the library in the condition he’d acquired them. He contemplated the sensation of water on his skin, unable to believe it was real, as he wasn’t ready to go home yet.

"Do you want to see my other pictures?" she asked. "On my computer."

He gathered his possessions and got to his feet. She felt nauseated by the easiness of it. She didn’t have friends, yet all she had to do was ask and a man would sleep with her. She hated a lot. She was disgusting and she despised others for not noticing, seeing only her eyeliner and breasts and neediness. She scarred her hands, as much to push people away as to punish herself, but it only attracted them more.

"Are you at the school?" he asked, which struck her as an odd question. She was, she’d be in Year 10 come September, him in Year 11. It was no surprise they’d never met before: it was a big school and neither of them even cared to know their own classmates.

"What are you reading?" she asked. He told her, just books he’d got out of the library.

"Oh," she said. She liked the young adult section, as it contained lots of strange and unrealistic books by authors of whom she’d never heard. She had a theory that they were the only copies of these books in existence, circulating the libraries of Smalltown England. She asked if he’d read any of them, describing their plots, since she never remembered the titles or authors. He hadn’t, but she rambled on and on about how weird they were. He unsettled her, even if he was just like all the others.

"That’s my house," he said, when she showed him the photographs. This seemed a good moment at which to place her warm wet mouth on his dry thin lips.

She had condoms in her bottom desk drawer. It was obvious that this wasn’t her first time. She’d only done it three times before, with a guy in her year, who was ok. She soon recognised her behaviour as sick and addictive. The only way to end it was to blank him. But she'd done it before.

From then on, he came round to her house every day, where they lay beneath her duvet, having sex and watching DVDs. But it was only a temporary arrangement. She couldn’t concentrate, because she was worried about what he thought, and he couldn’t concentrate, because he was worried about her. The more she sweated, the dustier his skin became. The more weight she put gained, the more prominent his ribs grew. The more she talked, the less he said. They enhanced each other, when they wanted to be cancelled out.

On the last day of the summer holidays, exactly five years after her father had left her, he departed earlier than usual, claiming he needed to do a traffic count for his GCSE Geography project. He did, for he only knew how many cars he’d seen, not the number that passed in the course of five minutes.

They attended the same school for the next three years and never saw each other again.