Almost Adults Read online

  Ali Pantony

  * * *

  ALMOST ADULTS

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE: Natasha

  CHAPTER TWO: Edele

  CHAPTER THREE: Alex

  CHAPTER FOUR: Mackie

  CHAPTER FIVE: Natasha

  CHAPTER SIX: Edele

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Alex

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Mackie

  CHAPTER NINE: Natasha

  CHAPTER TEN: Edele

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Alex

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Mackie

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Natasha

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Edele

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Alex

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Mackie

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Natasha

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Edele

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: Alex

  CHAPTER TWENTY: Mackie

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Natasha

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Ali Pantony is a freelance writer and editor. Her writing has appeared in Glamour, Grazia, BBC Three, Refinery29, Vice, Red and Evening Standard. Almost Adults is her debut novel.

  Ali was born in Maidstone, Kent, and lives in North London. You can follow Ali on Twitter and Instagram @alipantony

  Love is like the wild rose-briar,

  Friendship like the holly-tree –

  The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms

  But which will bloom most constantly?

  The wild rose-briar is sweeting in spring,

  Its summer blossoms scent the air;

  Yet wait till winter comes again

  And who will call the wild-briar fair?

  Then scorn the silly rose-wreath now

  And deck thee with the holly’s sheen,

  That when December blights thy brow

  He still may leave thy garland green.

  Emily Brontë, Love and Friendship

  CHAPTER ONE

  Natasha

  ‘Nat, come in, it’s fucking January and you’re only wearing a T-shirt,’ came his voice from inside the flat.

  The swearing took me back. I was the ‘swearer’ – Matt only swore when he was angry, or when he was watching Question Time. How dare he be angry right now. What gave him the right?

  I was sitting on the roof, shivering in the cold and burning my throat with Johnnie Walker. The whisky was hot – hot on my lips, my mouth, my throat, and hot trickling down into my stomach – but my body was ice, the bitter seaside air whipping my hair back and biting at my skin. I remember liking the contrast. I remember everything about that night.

  An hour earlier, I’d been panicking because I couldn’t get hold of Matt, and that hardly ever happened, even after seven years together. He’d been at the pub with his friends and wasn’t answering my WhatsApps asking when he was coming home, and if he could bring us a pizza from the Italian opposite the pub.

  I didn’t think much of it – probably had one too many ciders to check his phone, I thought. Besides, I wanted to binge-watch The End of the F*cking World on Netflix with a glass of wine and zero interruptions.

  I heard his key turn in the lock – a sound I loved – and dashed to the hall. ‘You didn’t message me, I was worried about you!’ I said with a relieved smile. Until suddenly, I clocked the look on his face, and I wasn’t smiling any more.

  Matt’s expression, usually gentle and calm, was solemn, shell-shocked, etched with fear and panic and, for the first time in our seven years together, I felt like I didn’t recognise him. He stood in the door to our home, tall, beautiful and broken, limply holding a cardboard pizza box, and said, ‘Nat, we need to talk.’

  I always used to laugh at those words in films – ‘How clichéd, who actually says that?’ I’d say – until I heard them. My chest turned tight and something thick stuck in my throat so I could hardly speak.

  ‘What about?’ I managed to mutter.

  ‘I can’t do this any more. I don’t feel the same.’

  You’d think the natural reaction to this would be instant tears, angrily demanding answers, maybe even throwing an IKEA plate or two. But not for me. To me, it felt so unbelievable, so unreal, that my body relaxed a little, calmed by the thought that this was just too farcical to actually be happening.

  ‘You’re just drunk, right?’ I tried to reason, nearly laughing. ‘But don’t say things like that, we can just talk in the morning. Come to bed, it’s almost one thirty.’

  ‘No, Nat, you don’t understa—’

  ‘Of course I do! I get emotional when I’m drunk, too!’

  Then suddenly his face turned stern, frown lines spreading across his forehead.

  ‘I’m not drunk, Nat. Please, listen. I’m sorry, but I don’t love you any more.’

  The calm was suddenly snatched away. Then panic. Blind panic. The kind of panic that strikes your feet like a bolt of lightning and shoots up through your body, ripping through your insides as it goes, and eventually settles in your brain like a parasite. My body turned cold and I started to shake uncontrollably. I couldn’t understand it – this wasn’t happening. This didn’t happen to people like us. This didn’t happen to happy people. We were happy. Weren’t we?

  I ran to the bathroom to throw up. I sat with my head down the toilet for what felt like a lifetime, retching and shaking. The six most difficult words you can ever hear were rattling around my brain on loop, torturing me over and over. ‘I don’t love you any more’; ‘I don’t love you any more’; ‘I don’t love you any more’. He didn’t love me any more. The man I loved unconditionally didn’t love me any more.

  Eventually – I don’t know how much later – I pulled myself to my feet and walked back into the hall. Matt was through the door to my left, on the sofa in the living room, crying with his head in his hands. ‘Why the hell is he the one crying?’ I thought, but still, seeing him cry made something swell within me, an ocean rising up in my chest, the instinctive urge to take his pain away. He still had his black coat on; the one I’d bought him two Christmases ago. He’d worn that coat so much that the lining in one of the pockets had gone and his backpack had worn away some of the fabric at the back.

  I stood, frozen. I knew I had to ask it – the question I really didn’t want to ask. I turned away from him, trying to breathe deeply and restore some calm, just for a second.

  ‘Is there someone else?’ I demanded with a surprising amount of strength, desperate not to show him how much he was destroying me.

  He looked up, his dark glossy eyes stained with tears and fear and guilt.

  ‘Of course not,’ he whimpered. ‘We’re just not the same any more. I’m different, you’re different.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ I hissed instantly, anger joining the panic and shock and disbelief. ‘You might feel like someone else, but I’m still right here. I never left you for one minute.’

  I didn’t want to hear his response. I couldn’t. I walked through to the kitchen, grabbed the whisky, pulled up the window and stepped out onto the roof.

  I was shaking still as my body turned to ice in the winter air. I could hear the crashing of the sea’s waves on the beach as memories of my life with Matt replayed through my mind, as if fast-forwarding through some sort of tortuous home video.

  We’d met at university at nineteen and hit it off straight away. We were studying English and instantly bonded over our love of Brave New World, the smell of old books and Stephen King’s short stories. We both loved terrible horror films and old-fashioned pubs. We became inseparable, our friends constantly rolling their eyes when we said the same thing at the same time. We both tried to ignore our connection for a few months, not wanting to ruin our friendship. Until one evening, after watching the (very terrible) Malibu Shark Attack in his tiny student room, he lent across
the bed to kiss me.

  ‘I love you, Nat’, he’d said softly, his hand resting on my shoulder as the outtakes of a Tara Reid lookalike being massacred by a CGI shark rolled romantically in the background. ‘I can’t pretend I don’t any more.’

  And as they say towards the end of teenage romance novels: that was that. Just as the beginning of fresh, new love should be, our relationship was easy. We soon moved into our top-floor flat in Hackton-on-Sea, the town where I’d grown up, and we’d been blissfully happy ever since – or so I thought.

  Our home had its faults. The old lady in the flat below was a very keen smoker (she reminded us of Dot Cotton from EastEnders, without the religious values), so you always felt like you were walking through the smoking area of a grotty nightclub when you entered our flat. The white paint was chipping away from the edges of the large sash windows, and the farmhouse-style wooden doors were water-stained where the previous tenants had used them to hang their washing. But we didn’t care. It was the very first thing that was ours, and we adored every inch of it. How could he leave all of that behind? Will he stay here while he works out where to live? Will that make him change his mind?

  On the roof, my body frozen but for the burning whisky, my world was spinning around me. ‘How did I end up here, when just over seven years ago, Matt was declaring his undying love for me?’ I thought. ‘How could this have happened?’

  ‘Nat, come in, it’s fucking January and you’re only wearing a T-shirt.’

  I pulled myself to my feet.

  ‘Why do you care,’ I spat, bending down to climb back through the window, ‘if you don’t love me any more?’

  ‘Of course I care,’ he said softly. ‘I’m just … I’m just so, so sorry. I wish I didn’t feel like this.’

  Without thinking, I reached up and rested my hand at the nape of his neck; that instinctive urge to take his pain away too strong to suppress. It didn’t register that my heart was breaking because of him. But I guess that’s what love is.

  ‘Please don’t,’ he said, screwing his face up in anguish and turning away from my hand. He didn’t look at me, started walking towards the living room.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To sleep on the sofa. It’s late. I don’t think there’s anything left to say tonight.’

  There it was again. That blindsiding punch to the guts. That lightning panic.

  ‘Will you just …’ I trailed off, the burning subsiding, the numbness eating me whole.

  Come on, Nat, the voice in my head piped up. What do you want to say? This is important, don’t screw this up. Remind him why he loves – loved – you.

  Eventually, I said. ‘Will you just sleep next to me, just for tonight? Just for one last night?’

  Ah, yes, desperation, said the voice inside my head. Just what every man wants. That’ll make him love you again.

  ‘Okay,’ Matt replied. ‘It is nearly three, we should try and sleep.’

  Ha! Sleep! If you manage to get twenty minutes’ sleep it’ll be a goddamn miracle.

  We walked back into the hallway and through to the door to the left of the living room into our bedroom – the place we’d spent hundreds of nights sleeping side by side.

  For the love of God, try and be sexy, Nat. Maybe he’ll have pity sex with you.

  But I stopped in my tracks when I caught a glimpse of myself in our bedroom mirror. I was unrecognisable, the colour drained from my face, my eyes red raw and shrouded with puffy skin, my baggy T-shirt littered with holes and whisky stains.

  Grim. Yeah, maybe forget the pity sex.

  I tried to push down the nausea that was creeping its way back into my throat, clinging to the fast-fading feeling that this was all one huge mistake. A misunderstanding. That we’ll go to sleep and everything will be okay in the morning. Everything had to be okay in the morning. It had to be.

  We climbed into bed. It felt awkward, like we were two strangers who had just met on a drunken night out and now weren’t sure we wanted to sleep together any more.

  I lay perfectly straight, my hands resting on my stomach like a corpse in a funeral parlour being prepared for my final outing. Except my whole body was still shaking, reminding me that I was very much alive and that this was really happening.

  Matt always fell asleep before me – he could sleep through anything. I could tell he was asleep because his breathing became heavier and his chest was rising and falling with a deep, steady rhythm that I knew so well. I edged over, lightly resting my head on his chest, nestling into his body, looking up at him.

  ‘Who the fuck comes home, tells their girlfriend they don’t love them any more, then just dozes off into a blissful slumber?’ I thought. ‘But shit, I love that face.’ Hot tears stung my cold, tired eyes. ‘What if this is the last time I ever lie here?’

  With that, I began drinking in everything about him. His thick, sandy-blond, almost-brown hair. The smell of his skin, the faint lines at the corner of his eyes. The curves of his big ears, the hairs at the bottom of his neck that signalled the start of his chest. His broad shoulders, high tower-like cheekbones, strong arms that once had swaddled me. I wanted him to open his eyes so I could look into them and memorise everything about them – dark mahogany brown with tiny, muddy green flecks, and the kindness they held. I wanted him to melt into me, like butter into toast. I wanted our bodies to absorb each other, so that we never had to know what it was to exist apart.

  That night was the longest I’d ever known. It passed in waves, with ten-minute bursts of half-sleep interrupted by endless minutes of silence, with nothing but my own panic to keep me company.

  The pale morning sun was creeping through the gap in the curtains when I woke up. I looked to my left. Matt wasn’t there.

  I put one foot after the other – slowly – onto the cold wooden floor, my mind reeling. I was jaded, felled, hazy; like the morning after a heavy night out.

  In the living room, Matt was already working on packing his belongings into whatever container he could find to carry them in. The lack of planning almost made me laugh: there were Tesco ‘Bags for Life’ strewn over the floor, one small suitcase (the type that’s slightly too big for carry-on – seriously, why do they make those?) and two cardboard boxes with WALKERS on the side.

  ‘They were the only empty boxes the blokes at Tesco had this morning.’ Matt looked up from sorting his books into piles and hesitated. ‘They stink of cheese and onion. I hate cheese and onion.’

  ‘I know you do,’ I replied, the same lump from yesterday still stuck thick in my throat. ‘I know everything about you.’

  Suddenly, the pain crashed over me like an angry tsunami, and I clutched at the shattering in my chest which sent shockwaves through the rest of my body. I fell next to him, sobbing, pleading in shallow breaths, ‘Matt, please don’t do this – it’s happening too fast, we can talk, we need to talk, I don’t understand why you’re doing this.’

  ‘I wish I could tell you something more, but I just don’t feel the same, and it isn’t fair on either of us to carry on like that.’

  ‘No, Matt. I don’t understand. It’s too fast; this is all too fast. How long have you even felt like this?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he muttered, looking down. ‘A few months, maybe.’

  ‘What? So you’ve been planning this?’

  ‘No, not exactly. I tried to ignore how I felt. I hoped it would go away.’

  I tried desperately to fight for us then – ‘No one feels the same after seven years!’, ‘We can try counselling!’, ‘You’ve only been feeling like this for a few months, we can work on it!’ – but it was futile. You can’t fix something if you don’t know where all the tiny shattered pieces were lost along the way. There are no steps to retrace, no trail to follow to pick them up and piece them back together. Something, somewhere along the line, had broken; I’d been too wrapped up in my love to see that his love was dying. And there was nothing that could be done to mend it now.

  Matt wa
s quick at packing up his belongings, which I guess I should have been grateful for. I watched as he shoved piles of dirty underwear, socks and gym kit into old ‘Bags for Life’, and half-full bottles of ridiculous three-in-one shampoo into the stupidly sized suitcase. I even watched as he took the cheese plant we’d lovingly named Frank – ‘You’re taking Frank away from me?!’ – because, as he said, he’s the one who kept it alive all these years. (I mean, there was no arguing with that. I was a neglectful bitch to Frank.)

  Matt made multiple trips to the car: first, the ‘gross underwear in Tesco bags’ trip, then the ‘stupid man toiletries in stupid man suitcase’ trip, followed by the ‘miscellaneous cables in cheese and onion box’ trip. I sat perfectly still as I watched Matt gut the very soul of our home, like a tragic version of David Attenborough observing a rare ecological phenomenon: ‘Here, we can see the human male, desperately attempting to flee his nest, despite his mate’s pathetic protests.’ In the midst of the heartbreak and anguish, I wanted to laugh at the ridiculous scenes playing out in front of me. Sometimes choosing to laugh is the only thing you can do.

  When his car was full, Matt sat down beside me on the sofa. Tears were flowing so relentlessly down my cheeks and into my lap I was worried I was going to die of dehydration.

  Remember to google: ‘Is it possible to die of dehydration from crying?’ later on, said the voice in my head. Your melodramatic sixteen-year-old self would be so proud.

  ‘I’m going to crash at Jack’s for a bit, until we both figure out our living situations,’ Matt said coldly, as if the disorderly man I knew was suddenly concerned with practicalities and being an actual organised adult.

  I snapped out of my of my daze. ‘Our living situations?’ I said. ‘This is my home, Matt. I love this flat and I’m not going to leave it just because you’ve decided you’ve had enough.’