This Is Yr Life

Chapter Seven

This was the longest Kyle had talked to a girl in his life.

He had stayed at the graveyard with the stranger for ten more minutes and then, when it was time to go back to work, he decided not to.

Instead, Kyle and the stranger walked around the back street along the wall behind Chloe’s grave towards a cafe. The girl told him her name was Jessica.

In the cafe, they sat outside in the sun. Jessica offered to pay and she bought a carrot cake with cinnamon frosting. She offered Kyle some but he was hesitant and declined. This was a decision he later regretted.

‘Actually,’ he started to say.

‘You want some of the cake,’ Jessica said. It was almost a question. She finished her sentence, her statement, with an inflexion that implied a question, but she had already cut a piece off with her fork.

‘Here,’ she said. She placed it on his napkin that was next to his still steaming mug of coffee. He had ordered the same thing as her. Kyle didn’t drink much coffee. His parents had drunk a lot of it and they struggled with sleep. Each night they smoked a joint on the patio to help them doze off.

Sometimes, the neighbours complained even though m*******a was all-but legal now. Sometimes, they invited him out to sit with them and when he was old enough, in their eyes, they offered him a toke.

They told him about when they were younger and how, when they first started dating when they were twenty-five, four years before his mother gave birth to Kyle, they used to hide in their back garden under an apple tree, out of view of the neighbours. They told him that they got caught a couple of times by the next door nosiness, but they always denied it. They said the smell was unmistakable back then, though.

They said that eventually their neighbours had enough and threatened to call the police if they smelt it one more time. After that, they decided to take walks and instead of hiding under apple trees in the back garden, they would walk down dark alleyways passing the joint back and forth. Sometimes they would get caught doing this, too, but they never took identification with them, and anyone who called them out about it would be met with silence as they carried on walking.

Kyle heard these stories a lot. They enjoyed telling them, as far as he could tell at the time. But as Kyle got older and saw more of his friends or people he was half-acquainted with get high, he realised that they probably just forgot they had told him.

Sometimes, his sister would call them out when they came inside, before she moved out.

But at this cafe, a place that had a hand painted logo in French, he thought, above the window and had a coffee related pun on a sign along the path to entice customers as they walked past, as it had done for Kyle and Jessica, but mostly Jessica; at this cafe, Kyle drank coffee. A simple black coffee, the cheapest thing on the menu, and she paid, tapping her bank card on the machine before they went to sit outside and watch the people walk by and talk. But when he came to drink the coffee it was too hot, and so he waited for it to cool down while he and Jessica watched men and women in suits rushing back to work from their lunch break. Kyle thought that maybe he should have gone back, also. He looked at his phone at intermittent periods over half an hour but no chasing up ever came. He wondered if anyone even realised he was gone.

When the coffee had cooled down enough to drink, Kyle nearly spat it back out. He was neither familiar nor accustomed to the bitterness. He hoped Jessica hadn’t noticed.

‘You’re not used to coffee are you?’ she said, taking a sip of her own. She placed the mug back down and wiped coffee from her bottom lip and licked her finger. ‘People don’t really drink a lot of coffee anymore, I find. Bad for the health. But everything is, apparently.’

‘No, I don’t really. I just never got into it.’

‘I know a lot of people who used hate it too, in fact, they were those people who thought they were too good for coffee; acting like they didn’t need it.’

Kyle was quiet. He stared into the deep dark pit of his mug.

‘You should try it with milk and sugar,’ Jessica said, peering past him and pointing at a table with a jug and small baskets of paper packets.

‘Well, it’s not sugar anymore, because, you know, that’s bad for you too. Some substitute. You know what it’s like with health nuts and hysteria.’

She lit a cigarette. Kyle had not seen anyone light a cigarette since he was at school, stumbling upon kids in the years above him hiding out behind the bike sheds. Sometimes they would tell him to f**k off Other times, they would put their fingers to their lips and he would nod and move on.

‘Do you want some milk and sugar?’ she asked, making quotation marks with her hands, rolling her eyes and hanging her tongue out at the end of the sentence. She smiled after doing this and placed both her hands on the table that, Kyle just noticed, was unstable, one of the legs that crossed on either side too short. The table was made of wood, painted or varnished but chipped along the flat and their coffees in their mugs with rings stained around from the rim and down, darkening, wobbled and jingled and looked to spill but instead, the coffee just crashed against the side of the mug and then waved back across before settling.

‘Yeah, sure. It’s okay,’ he said when she looked like she was going to get up. ‘I’ll get it.’ He stretched his arm back behind him, barely reaching the table with his fingertips. His chair began to tip backwards and Jessica let out a small, almost panicked squeal. Kyle nearly toppled but steadied himself. He was showing off, he realised, but there was no need to break his neck just because a girl who was pretty, he thought, but hadn’t decided for sure yet, was talking to him. He picked up the jug and poured the milk so it ribboned and flushed into the black-brown of the coffee, blending it into a light tan, and then he tore open one, two packets and dropped the small pills in. He stirred and let the whirlpool settle before taking a sip. It was better now, for Kyle, but Jessia preferred it without anything, merely coffee.

‘Have you always liked coffee?’ Kyle asked, taking another sip and letting the steaming mug warm his hands.

‘Yeah,’ Jessica said, and then, ‘I think so. I always drank it, anyway.’ She looked away down the street, towards Kyle, her coffee, up the street.

‘Maybe not, actually,’ she said and laughed, taking a drag on her cigarette. ‘It wasn’t until I went travelling.’ She blew out more smoke and looked at Kyle. ‘Just like your friend, probably.’

And for a second, just a second or perhaps two, at most, Kyle went to say ‘Who?’ He had been listening to Jessica for so long that he had almost forgotten about the reason they were sat opposite one another. Of course, Chloe. She meant Chloe. And Kyle, with his mouth half open, half asking ‘What,’ ‘What do you mean?’, stared at Jessica’s cigarette, like she caught him or he nearly got himself caught.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘She loved that place near the Square, I remember seeing pictures from the inside.’ Kyle looked around, turned to look back into the inside of the cafe. ‘She’d have really liked it here.’

‘How old were you when you last saw her?’ Jessica said, putting her cigarette out on the floor and washing the ash and embers away with her water bottle.

‘About five, or six, maybe seven, I think.’

‘Wow, super young.’ She took a sip of coffee and Kyle mirrored her. ‘That’s so cute.’

‘Yeah.’ He felt like he had to tear up but couldn’t, perhaps he didn’t need to tear up, they had been talking about Chloe already. ‘Yeah, the last time I saw her was the last day of school one year.’

‘Did you at least say goodbye to each other?’

‘We did, but we didn’t know it was the last time.’

Kyle wasn’t lying, exactly.

When he was six or seven he had a friend who he had seen for the last time on the final day of the school year. When they arrived back at school just a few months later, this friend was missing and he asked his mother about it and whatever answer she gave he now doesn’t remember. Sometimes, he thought about that friend, where he went, what he is doing now. If he is happy.

But he doesn’t have to think. Sometimes, years ago but not for a while, not since he moved out, he searched his friend’s social pages. He tried, anyway. He could hardly remember the name and tried variation after variation; names, initials, alternate spellings. And finally, after nearly an hour of tapping profile pictures, sorting by age and schools attended and, maybe, mutual friends he found him.

He looked happy.

Kyle wasn’t entirely sure what he looked like when they were younger. He saw the uniform. The red jumpers that on their too-small frames hung like a sack. He remembered the white collar poking out at all angles.

And the trousers, too, black or grey with shoes that were supposed to be black, too, always black. But some of the boys and the girls wore whatever they liked. Kyle remembered he wore black shoes at first but then after a month, maybe, his parents decided they made him walk strange, and so they put him in his trainers. They were black, too though.

Kyle could hardly remember his hair. He thought maybe sandy, but perhaps it had been too short to really have any colour.

But he looked happy. He had a girlfriend or at least a girl who was in a lot of pictures with him. He had gone to university, wore a lot of face paint, met a lot of people, graduated. He had taken photos with this girl and other girls on beaches and atop mountains. Kyle used to watch his feed for a while every other week, just to catch up.

One time, he considered sending a message, he even wrote the whole thing out. It wasn’t much and he doesn’t remember most of it. Generic his and how you doings and remember whens. But he didn’t send it or he might have, he’s not sure, either way, his friend never responded.

This is what Kyle thought when he was telling Jessica about Chloe. The more he explained how he had moved away without warning, that his parents just helped him pack his stuff, smiling, maybe stoned he throws in at one point, and they moved away. He told Jessica he had moved north-west, where his grandparents lived.

He knew the area well. When he was younger, he and his sister would walk across the fields close to their grandparents’ house. His mother’s parents, before they left for the sun and shore and riches of Monaco.

All the while Jessica listened, took sips of her coffee and nodded. At some parts she made a sad face, her mouth bowing, her eyebrows arching inward. When he was finished, but not finished, he just stopped talking and drank the rest of his coffee, he met Jessica’s gaze across the table. He couldn’t figure out her expression, he was not sure if she believed a word he had told her. He thought to say more, but instead all he said was ‘You never told me, why were you there today?’