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Now, none of this should have surprised me. Wigilia was a major family tradition in Poland, so obviously Mum—moved, as ever, by the spirit of overcompensation—was going to invite everyone she even vaguely knew. But Edwin? The man I’d left, and everything I’d left with him.3
To be fair, he looked no more thrilled to see me than I was to see him. The only difference was, he had a fucking choice to be here tonight, and I fucking didn’t because they weremyfucking family. And so there I was, standing in my parents’ living room, surrounded by people showering each other in good wishes for the year to come, and the air a multicoloured haze from the fairy lights, everything melting away because I could still remember those dark eyes gazing at me with nothing but love in them.
There was still love in them, maybe. Except it was lost love, stale love, the love ofoncebut not always. My fault, of course. Edwin would have loved me til death did us part. He was the type. And what type was I, to turn away from something so rare?4
He started to say something, a woeful tangle of syllables that I thought was supposed to be wszystkiego najlepszego, but he had no chance of getting through it. It was only because I knew him so well—had known him so long—that I recognised the frustration in the tightening of his jaw, the way he bit the inside of his cheekwhen he gave up. Except then the ginger lout nudged his shoulder, the barest graze, and Edwin’s whole face went soft again. In a gesture so comfortable I didn’t think he even realised he’d done it, he took the other man’s hand in his.
Fixing me once again with those beautiful eyes—eyes I’d sketched and painted so many times, trying to capture their light-entrancing depths—he offered a patently inadequate, “I’m s-sorry.” Followed by, “I d-didn’t know how to say no.”
“Well,” I told him, “you should have fucking figured it out.”5
I’d just meant he should have come up with an excuse. But it carried different implications with bitterness in my voice and Edwin’s stammer worse than I’d heard it in a while.
I didn’t want to be someone his words fled from.
“W-w…” Edwin was drowning, theWrough waves that buffeted him to and fro. His boyfriend’s eyes were on me, brown and steady, and I wish they’d been angry. He had no right to be disappointed with me. “W-we’ll leave.”
“Oh don’t bother.”
And I was gone before anyone could stop me. Not that anyone tried. On account of being used to my comings and goings and bullshit—not because they didn’t care. Of course, I still slightly resented not having been expected at all. But honestly, I wouldn’t have expected me either.
A bright, cold Oxford night was waiting for me. The sky was as black as a blanket, its stars all smothered by the golden shadows cast against the horizon by the colleges, churches, and spires. Maybe if I hadn’t grown up here, I’d have learned to love it better.Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe loving things as they deserved to be loved just wasn’t my forte.
I should have been kinder to Edwin. I honestly didn’t know why I hadn’t been, apart from feeling ill-inclined towards kindness in general these days.
The world had acquired a thick crust of frost. It crackled as I walked, built Gothic cathedrals upon car roofs and along the tops of walls, made armies of glass soldiers from the neatly kept lawns. I’d barely got to the end of the road and my clothes were already proving inadequate for the weather—weather I could have easily predicted given it was the middle of winter. Except I couldn’t have predicted leaving my parents’ house on Christmas Eve less than five minutes after arriving. Or could I? Edwin had probably just been the nearest convenient excuse.
Turning up the fur (fake fur) collar of my jacket, I kept walking.
I was happy for him. I was. I’d wanted him to move on. Except it felt less like absolution than I might have hoped. Mostly it was a reminder that Edwin—for all his hesitancies—had always known exactly what he wanted. And I was further away from that than ever.
A partially iced-over puddle broke into flower-petal fractals beneath my heel and sent me skidding across the pavement. I saved myself with an ungainly flail, my heart flip-flopping with an intensity disproportional to the danger. It should have made me take more care, but I quickened my pace instead.
The city centre was startling in its silence. St. Giles a river of grey I crossed without even having to look for traffic. There was noreason to feel trapped in such a wide-open space, but somehow, I always had. As a child, as a student, hand in hand with Edwin as we walked home. St. John’s to my left, Blackfriars to my right, giving way to the ionic (fake ionic) façade of the Ashmolean, I had no idea where I was going or why. It was just easier than staying still.6
When I next looked up, I realised I was halfway home. Well. Not home. The house with the green door belonged fully to Edwin now and had for some time. I couldn’t tell if it was nostalgia that had guided my footsteps, sentimentality, or nothing more than habit. It was, however, the last place I wanted to be. Like returning to the scene of a crime. Veering over the road, I turned onto the towpath. The ramp was sheer ice, glittering starkly beneath the streetlamps, the metal guardrail burning a chill through my palms as I descended. Again, I could have taken that for a warning. Again, I didn’t. If anything, it just made me more determined to press onwards. It wasn’t far to Donnington Bridge. And this way I’d be able to cut directly away from Edwin’s house.
Because it had always been Edwin’s house.
We’d pretended otherwise, of course.I’dpretended, wanting to love it the way he did. My favourite times there had been when we’d first moved in and everything was in disarray, our lives in boxes, normality suspended. Our bed had been delayed so we slept in the attic in a nest of pillows and blankets beneath the skylight. Every night I watched the slow dance of the breeze through the branches of the chestnut tree. And every morning the light reached lazily down and woke me.
But then the bed arrived, and Edwin found a farmhouse tablehe thought was perfect for the dining room, and my art went up on the walls, and the house got smaller and smaller until I could barely catch my breath within it.
Set a little way back from the towpath, behind a tangle of bare trees and curled-back briars, was a house where I’d rented a room as an undergraduate. It had since been painted white and—like too many lovely things—turned into a set of luxury flats, but it had been spectacularly decrepit while I’d lived there. I still remembered the curlicues of mould that wound their way across a ceiling pockmarked by the indentations of a long-gone chandelier. I hadn’t owned a bed then either, just my art supplies, too many clothes I’d stuffed into black bin liners for transport, and a table I’d built from old wine crates.
Edwin had made ominous pronouncements about spores and once had been chased naked through the house by an extraordinarily fat brown rat. But he’d found it romantic, at the time, to visit. To wake early with me in order to make love endlessly, languorously, in the pearl-pale morning light, with the mist from the river curling around our bodies as we movedwithandagainstandtogether.
It hadn’t lasted, of course. It turned out I’d been renting the room from a drug dealer who had paid fewer of the utility bills than he had claimed, and we’d all been evicted. Then the house had been sold. And now here it stood, pristine and respectable. There were lights in a couple of the rooms. I imagined stepping up to the door, ringing the bell, disrupting some pristine, respectable Christmas Eve to ask, “Does the ground floor room at the frontstill have chandelier marks on the ceiling?” I wouldn’t, of course. It would freak out the residents. And I didn’t want the answer to be no.
My hand had curled itself around one of the spines of the little iron gate that led to the garden. I thought it might even be the same gate. The metal was smooth, the frost harsh, and some cavernous feeling rolled right through me. Whistled like the wind in empty places. I wished I’d thought to wear a coat, instead of a jacket, fur collar or no.
Turning away from the house, I continued to the footbridge, where I paused for a moment, gazing out across the river. It was too dark for me to be able to see much—the dull pewter gleam that was the Thames, and beyond it the outline of the trees at the edge of Christchurch Meadow, rough-edged, as though sketched in charcoal. To my left, the city streaked the water red and gold, the dazzle of it enough to make my eyes sting. To my right, the towpath sloped into murky shadows. I pulled out my phone, what little heat remained in my fingers spreading condensation across the screen as I scrolled through my contacts.
We hadn’t exactly divided our friends as we did the rest of our possessions, but in the end, Edwin kept them as, in the end, he kept many things. He was, after all, the left. The wronged. The hurt. It was only fair.7
My thumb hovered over a name. And then I was calling. I didn’t know anymore if it had been an accident, but I let it ring. It rang for a while. My breath hung white in the air.
Finally, just as I was about to hang up, “Who’s this?”
