Hello Now Page 8

  I’m not a particularly good swimmer. I’m never going to win prizes for my diving, and that O was small and impressively far below. But I was calm. I felt good. Everything was going to be fine. Better than fine. Novo leaned into the void, then dropped like a hammer into the water—immaculate, almost splashless. I took a breath. I didn’t think about it. Same as the first time I saw him, he went and I just followed.

  The sea when I hit it was the earsplitting cold of feedback and sheet ice and sharp metal, shocking my skin and peeling open my eyes as I drilled down. My heart stopped, my chest locked, and my brain seized, and I thought, I am a body that’s forgotten how to breathe. Ahead of me, arms by his sides, Novo swam, sleek as a tern diving for fish. Dancing fingers of sunlight lit up his suit where they cut through the water, and he swam farther down still, and out of their reach. I couldn’t feel the cold anymore. The water was no different than the air, and I didn’t think about breathing or not breathing, I was just there, following Novo effortlessly down into the dark. He turned and pointed for me to look up, and above us, the refracted shapes of cloud and bird flock and cliff face loomed and swayed on the other side of the water. And all around us, the fish flashed their silver bellies when they sensed us, and flickered out of sight.

  I almost lost sight of him too, in the glowering dark, and then there was new light ahead of us, getting closer, this wavering space of lit blue. Novo’s body curved upward and his head and shoulders broke the surface and then so did mine. We were breathing air instead of water, and I thought, Did I just breathe water? That’s impossible, and still I knew that it was also most definitely true.

  Inside the cave, the sea echoed and popped and the sound of it bounced up high against the walls and ceiling, each drop-sound grown large, the flat hand of it slapping against the smooth stone like a rifle crack. Light flooded in stern lines through the gaps between rocks, geometric, like church light, or forest light, the sky above us the same perfect O as the circle of water where we’d dived. Novo climbed out onto a ledge and pulled me up after him into a patch of warmth, and I was cold suddenly, and my teeth began to chatter. The sea sucked and pulled itself in and down beneath us, then swelled and pressed up toward the ledge, but it was dry and warmer there and Novo put his heavy arms around me. My shivering stopped at once and I leaned into him and we were still.

  “Thank you,” I said, and he kissed the top of my head, breathed into my hair, rested his cheek there.

  “What did I do before I met you?” I said, and he kissed me again and said, “Same as you’ll do when I’m gone,” and I said, “Never,” and he said, “Jude. That’s a terrible word.”

  We took off our wetsuits, and naked we were soft as velvet and so was the rock and I’m not telling you any more about it, because some of this must be mine to keep, surely, even while none of it is. So keep out, no trespassing, nobody’s business.

  Afterward, I had no idea how long, we both lay there, our bodies the warp and weft of each other, still holding, lullabied by the breathe-in, breathe-out music of the sea.

  When I woke up the tight circle of sky above us was darker than the rock and we should have been cold, we really should have been freezing to death, but I didn’t feel it. Our suits had dried and we put them back on and slipped wordlessly into the graphite-black water. Novo took my hand and he didn’t let go while we swam through that blackness, and I had that feeling again, that I couldn’t tell where the sky ended and the sea began, because all around us was just littered with stars.

  EIGHTEEN

  For a while, from the moment I saw him, there was nobody but Novo. I can’t be sure how long the while lasted, but I guess that doesn’t matter, because real time didn’t apply to me and him. We were past that, way beyond it, astronauts circling the home planet, watching the sun rise sixteen times in a day. My absence might be nothing more than a glazing over in the kitchen while my mum talked. That’s what Novo said. Time didn’t stop moving without me, everything else carried on, but whole days for me and Novo wouldn’t have lasted longer than it took for someone else to catch me staring off into space, for Mum to ask if she was boring me, or if I’d zoned out.

  “What about Henry?” I said. “Henry will notice, won’t he?”

  “Trust me,” he said. “You’ll be there and you won’t be. It’s covered,” and when I said, “Can you do that?” he laughed. “You know already. There’s nothing I can’t do.”

  “Oh yeah? Really?”

  “And there’s nothing you can’t do when you’re with me either. In fact, you have way more power than you think.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  We took a yacht and it sailed itself out, tiller slicing through the current, sails adjusting to the wind seamlessly while we jumped off to swim, dropping anchor when we climbed ashore to lie on every tiny bay we could find. You could do that trip a hundred times and see nothing, but with him it was different. Gray seals on the black rocks, dozens of them, pumped up and buoyant with fat, lolled in the middle of the estuary mouth, lifted their sleek heads and switched their feathered whiskers to look straight at us with their lacquer eyes. A pod of bottle-nosed dolphins slicked their backs in and out of the water and followed us, talking incessantly and opening up their laughing mouths. Novo knew the birds: cormorants, fulmars, gannets, guillemot, and razorbills. Skua, shearwater, petrel, kittiwake. Tern and falcon and raven. They flocked to him when he called them in their own voices, gathered on scraps and outcrops of rock, fussing and flapping for his attention like kids at a playground.

  We walked back along the road, our shorts heavy with water and sticking to our legs like wet plaster, the cars going past us so fast I could feel the hard smack of pushed air against our bodies. Three, four inches to the right and we’d have felt the full impact of metal and engine and glass. So close, that devastation. And then the soft, quiet spaces between them, no engine, no throttle, just the air in the long grass and our feet on the tarmac, and him whistling.

  We walked for days. Up on the cliffs, the narrow crumbling edges. Another fault line, another border—the land sliced and dropping straight into sea. Novo was comfortable there, at the margins of things, at the place where things change. We climbed until my lungs and my legs burned, but he wouldn’t let me stop when I wanted to, would never let me stop because he could always see another place ahead, something different. Farther. Better. More.

  We walked at night too, diffuse with the low, secondhand light of the moon, and we lay on our backs in the silvered grass to map stars. Novo gave me a meteor shower, because I’d never seen one. “Every time someone says they see a shooting star,” I told him, “I’m blinking, or looking down, for that split second. It’s not even funny.” And before I’d even finished talking, the night was filled with dropping lights, and it stunned me into silence, the total quiet of all that movement, the utter vastness of the sky. I slept, and in the very early morning, wild ponies cut fast across the moor to meet us, to meet him, and we gave them grass and the cores of our apples, and Novo pressed his forehead against theirs and spoke words and they shivered with pleasure and their heads swung up when he let them go.

  I remember how many stars there were out on the moor, how the wild ponies edged closer to us in the dark until we could hear their breathing and the rip of the grass they pulled out of the ground with their piano-key teeth and soft mouths. I remember how cold it got while I was sleeping, how wet everything was in the morning, like the sky had turned to liquid overnight, our quilt and blankets, my clothes soaked through and sticking to my skin.

  When I said, “Thank you,” he said, “For what?” like it was all nothing, all this magic, and I guess that’s how we did it, how we acknowledged and overlooked at the same time how special this was, how unexpected and temporary, the solid and the unthinkable, the ordinary and the impossible-to-know. I don’t think either of us knew then how long it would last. I accepted and denied his otherness, our otherness. The
way you do when you’re falling in love against all logic, wildly fascinating and hopelessly unrealistic, and you say, This is not happening, no way, no thanks, not to me.

  How do I remember him right, this life-changing boy? I will never be able to do him justice, but I will never stop trying. Like the solitary soul I’d seen at the water’s edge that first day at the beach, Novo was deep-down sad, the definition of lonely, and yet he laughed more than anyone I have met. He loved to be wrapped up, under a blanket, doing nothing but thinking, and he loved being outside too, moving and searching. He was tireless. Curious about everything. I realized later that I never actually saw him sleep. No detail was too small or too dull to deserve the gift of his full attention. He drank it all in, and all life came to him somehow, the way those seals and dolphins came to the mouth of the sea when he was near it, and the birds clamored and the ponies galloped to meet him. His thoughts showed on his face, when he forgot to stop them. He wrote the world down with his eyes, read situations quickly, and remembered everything he saw. Agile and daring, reckless with himself. And so careful with me. Because he was indestructible, in his own way, I guess, if I ever understood that right. And I am breakable.

  I remember falling down the hill when we were smashed, laughing till we were nearly sick, and my bruises in the morning, like tropical flowers, blue-green and purple, fading to yellow, and him, unmarked. Novo was horrified when he saw, but I thought they were magnificent. I said they didn’t hurt, even though they did. I said they were worth it. And I was right.

  I remember how tightly he held on to my hand sometimes, when I was touching him and he didn’t want me to stop. I remember the wide fit of his fingers through mine, the lock of our mouths, the bellows-strength of our breathing. It hurts to remember that now, just like the bruises. It’s hard, like I’ve said already. A fist in the chest.

  Because bubbles burst. Heads get pulled out of the sand. Love is magic. But reality is the wall you wake up driving toward, with bad brakes. You can’t avoid it. It’s always coming. I know that much.

  I woke up next to him, sun flooding warm through the skylight above my bed. I woke up and he was smiling and so beautiful. In that moment, he was the sum total of all the things I thought I wanted. Right then, I would have gone anywhere, without a doubt, without a backward glance, with him. And he knew it.

  “Jude,” he said.

  “Novo.”

  I curled in closer to his body, the body I swear I will be able to draw from memory until the day I die. Every mark and crease and curve of muscle. Every bump and scar and stretch of flesh. He breathed out. He rested his chin on the top of my head.

  The knock on the door was sudden. Hard. We both flinched. Both held ourselves dead still.

  “Who is it?” I said.

  Henry’s voice on the other side of the door was thick with panic. The sound brought the rest of the world back with a jolt. I hadn’t thought about him, or my mum, not really, not much. It could have been a year since I had seen either of them. Or a minute.

  “Something’s happened,” he was saying. “I can’t stop it. Quick.”

  I got up and opened the door. Henry was ragged and disheveled. Out of breath.

  “What is it?” Novo said, still lying in my bed. I looked back at him and even then, even in that moment, I thought: Just stay there. Don’t move. Ever.

  “Something snapped,” Henry said. “It’s not working. Jude needs to come home. Now.”

  NINETEEN

  “I am home,” I said. “Look,” and I sat back on my bed next to Novo, grabbed a handful of my sheets, felt the breeze from the window above us on my face, heard the gulls. My room, clean and spacious and sunlit at the top of the house. “I’m so here,” I said.

  “No,” Henry told me. “You think you’re here but you’re not. You’re with him. In between things. Outside them. You know this, don’t you? He told you this is how it works?”

  “Obviously he has,” I said, but of course, I knew I didn’t fully understand it.

  I reached for Novo’s hand. “And what if I want to be outside things?” I said. “What if I’m not ready to leave?”

  Novo said, “If,” and he stretched and smiled and held on to my hips with his hands. “Of course you’re not ready,” and he looked at me, the happiest I’d ever seen him. Our last moment of pure joy maybe, the peak of the climb before downhill began, and then a little light went out in his eyes. Only small, but I saw it flicker. We both witnessed it, that peak, and we moved on, because you can’t go back even if you want to. Not even Novo could go back.

  “Your mother needs you,” Henry said.

  “My mother? Why? What’s up? What’s happened?”

  Henry looked at Novo, not at me. “Did you burn through it?” he said. “Did you use the time up already?”

  “What time?” I said. “What does that mean?”

  Henry looked hard at Novo when he said, “It’s time for answers.”

  “We’re coming,” Novo said. “Go back downstairs. Two minutes. I promise. We’ll be there.”

  When Henry shut the door behind him, I said, “What’s going on?” and Novo kissed me, hungry and fierce. He hid his face in my neck and he stroked my side, almost lazily, with the tips of his fingers, stroked my stomach and thighs. I felt him breathe in and steady himself, about to speak.

  “On the beach,” he said. “When you met me, I gave you a choice. Remember?”

  “I do. You did.”

  “And you said yes.”

  “And I would again.”

  His mouth moved against my skin, warm and soft, so I felt the words he spoke as well as heard them.

  “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  We stayed there, quietly breathing, and then he got up and moved away, as decisively, as definitively as the cliff drop, and I reached after him and said, “No, not yet. Come back,” but he shook his head and wouldn’t look at me then.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I really can’t,” and he turned away. I watched the muscles of his shoulders flex and open as he pulled on a shirt. “We’ve got to go.”

  “Tell me what Henry’s talking about. What’s going to happen when we get down there?”

  Novo sighed. “Some things don’t live very long. A mayfly has one day. A bubble breaks in seconds. The Now I kept you in lasted as long as it lasted.”

  “The Now?” I said. “And what? Downstairs time has carried on without me?”

  He nodded, and he didn’t stop watching me.

  “It wasn’t supposed to,” he said. “I didn’t think it would. That’s what Henry meant when he said something snapped. This changes things.”

  “Changes them how? I’m so confused.”

  He walked across the room toward me and we stood close, our fingers touching. I heard Henry’s voice again, two floors below. I heard Mum. There was something in their voices, something coiled and tense, and I pictured it, that drama, waiting for us on the other side of the door like a primed cat, about to pounce.

  “This doesn’t feel right,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” Novo said. “We will fix it. And I’ll be here.”

  “You promise?”

  “On my life,” Novo said. “On my life, I swear to you. I’m not going anywhere.”

  TWENTY

  We came down the steps from the attic quietly, barefoot and half-dressed. Our tread on the stairs was light as anything, almost soundless. We were hardly there. Henry’s windows were wide open, curtains flailing in the wind, and Charlie Parker was all panic-panic, hell-for-leather, in a high, far corner of the room. I heard voices again downstairs, fraught and urgent, and in my head something started ticking, a chattering feeling, like crickets, a percussive, nervous pulse. I stopped at the top of the next flight.

  “I’m not liking this,” I said. “I don’t want to go down there at all.”

 
Novo took my hand and pulled at me gently. “It’s all right,” he said. “We have to. Come on.”

  We got closer and I heard a chair scrape and then Mum said something in a strangled, underwater voice that wasn’t hers, and I said, “Is she crying? Is that even her?”

  My mum doesn’t cry. She sulks and quits eating and chain-smokes in the garden and breaks cups. But she’s not a crier. This had to be something bad. Something big. And knowing that threw me. It really did.

  We stopped outside the kitchen. “What friend?” Mum was saying to Henry in her saltwater voice. “Jude hasn’t got any friends, Henry. We just got here.”

  I put my eye to the crack in the door. Mum was wiping her face with both hands, bleary-eyed and frantic with distress.

  “It’s my fault, isn’t it?” she said, and even though Henry made all the right noises of dissent, she put her hands on her heart. “Something terrible has happened to my child. I can feel it in here. Jude’s gone. I just know it.”

  “Mum,” I said. “I’m right here!” and I pushed on the door, ready to reassure her. But the door didn’t move, and Mum didn’t hear me.

  I looked at Novo. “What’s going on? What’s happened to me?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing, Jude. Look. You’re here.”

  “But Mum thinks I’m not there,” I told him. “What happened? Why can’t she hear me?”

  Henry put a fried egg on toast in front of Mum, and passed her a cup of tea. For a second, she looked down at it like she had no idea what it was. She scratched at a mark on the tabletop. The egg sweated. She pulled at the film of the yolk with her fork. It stretched out like wet elastic, and I felt the bile rise in my throat, felt it closing up small. My mum hates eggs.

  “I called the police,” she said. “Jude doesn’t do this. It’s out of character. I told them already. It’s all wrong.”