One day I might write something not centred around snacks and tea-drinking ... but today is not that day.
[source] // Yelena Bryksenkova |
For context I would probably suggest reading previous LesMisBook snippets, which are available in the I Write page.
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The Nutella Sandwich Day
“Please.”
“No.”
“Pretty please.”
“I said no.”
“Nina, you’re my light, my truth, my happiness, please—”
“I’m not doing it!”
It was helping Jonathan bloody Holcroft learn the monologue he should have been practising for weeks. I knew he’d scrape through without my help, but that wasn’t why I was saying no; my determination to refuse stemmed from my treacherous desire to agree. He’d asked me to go to his house, and I really wanted to, and so I was trying to think of reasons why not.
“I’ll give you snacks,” he said.
“What kind of snacks?”
“Snacks beyond your wildest dreams … I’ll design you a palace and build it out of chocolate—”
“That doesn’t sound very practical.”
“Nina, please, I’m literally begging you! Mrs Moseley’s going to kill me …”
“You should’ve learnt it already! You don’t need me, anyway—”
“Yes I do.” He grinned, a rarely self-deprecating grin that made my insides shiver. “Don’t you know I always need an audience?”
I rolled my eyes, by default, but he must have seen my surrender, because his face lit up. “Éponine!” he sang, “you’re the friend who has brought me here! Thanks to you, I’m at one with the gods and heaven is near!” Before he could finish the phrase I cut him off with a further barrage of sarcasm, but he had won, and that was how I ended up at Jonathan bloody Holcroft’s front door on a Tuesday afternoon.
Inside was a scrabble of barking. “You don’t mind dogs, do you?” he said. I don’t know what he would’ve done if I’d said no, but I didn’t have the chance to say anything, because something small and black was hurling itself at my legs. Claws needled through my tights, accompanied by an incessant, staccato yapping. In the hall two more dogs, these ones massive, ambled forward. Jonathan said, in the jocular tone particular to the owners of badly-behaved dogs, “Don’t worry, they’re friendly!”
“Ow!” I said as the small one lanced a paw down my leg. I half-stumbled, stopping myself just in time from grabbing Jonathan bloody Holcroft’s shoulder.
He laughed and picked the dog up, shoving it under one arm so its legs dangled comically. “This is Nina,” he said.
“I don’t think it speaks English.”
“You’d be surprised. Come on, I’ll make you a Nutella sandwich.” And as if this was the most normal situation in the world he strode through the hall, past the two waist-high dogs. One of them put its cold nose in my palm as I skirted past, making me jump. I was glad Jonathan bloody Holcroft didn’t see. He would definitely have laughed at me. As usual.
Still with a dog under one arm he was filling the kettle. The kitchen was mostly grey, stylish but not unfriendly, magazines on the table, dog bowls in the corner, a fruit bowl with a regal pineapple looking down on the oranges and apples. Jonathan put down the dog, which ran back to me and started assiduously sniffing my shoes, and put tea bags in mugs.
“Aren’t you going to ask if I want coffee?”
“Do you want coffee?”
“No.”
“That’s why I didn’t ask.”
“I resent your choosing my drink for me.”
“Because it represents the oppression of the patriarchy?”
I glared at him and he laughed. “I know you, Nina Seth, and I know that you want tea. Don’t argue.”
“I never argue.” I sat down and took off my shoes, and the dog, with a well-calculated leap, landed on my lap. It turned in a circle three times and lay down.
“There, you see?” said Jonathan, turning to the fridge. “Friendly.” He sloshed milk into each mug. “I’m not using a teapot and I’m not even taking the bags out first. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
“Either of my grandmothers would kill you. Indian and Irish. Giants of the tea-drinking world.”
“Irish?” He couldn’t stop it. The flash of surprise.
“My mum’s family,” I said.
“Right.” He didn’t want to ask the question he wanted me to answer.
I let him struggle for a moment before saying, “Yes, she’s white.”
He nodded. “Well, there you go.”
“Wouldn’t have seen that one coming, would you?”
He grinned and dipped his head. “Admittedly, no.”
I couldn’t help smiling, the disease of smiling that caught me whenever I was with him. “Some people are so shocked to hear I’ve got a white parent, it’s like they want to ask, Are you sure? Thanks,” I said as he put the tea in front of me. “I’ve even had people make jokes, like, Is your mum being quite honest, eh? Is the milkman Asian? Then I tell them it’s my mum who’s white and she’s pretty sure she remembers pushing me out her uterus, and that tends to shut them up.”
Jonathan snorted with laugher. He was putting white sliced bread in the toaster. “I can imagine it only too well.” He reached to get plates from a cupboard, and for a second I was distracted by the hair at the back of his neck, brown curls falling into a slightly irregular V. “Do you have any siblings?” he asked, turning, and I blinked.
“A brother.” My voice sounded strange to me, as if betraying what I’d been thinking seconds before. I cleared my throat. “Dipankar. He’s twenty. He’s at Leeds studying” – I made a face – “dentistry.”
“Gross,” said Jonathan.
“I know.”
“Dipankar’s a good name.”
“My father always said his first son would have an Indian name, and my mother always said her first daughter would have an Irish name, so they both ended up happy. Of course, the gene pool has a great sense of humour, so Dipankar just looks like he’s got a good tan. Sometimes people ask if he’s Hispanic.” I smiled. “Or Australian.”
Jonathan laughed. “Australian?”
“I know. And yet he’s the one with the Indian name. Oh the hilarious ironies.”
“I’d love to tell you an exciting story about my name, but I’ve got nothing.” The toast popped and he fished it out with childlike excitement. “I’ve been thinking about this sandwich all afternoon.”
“Is it a true sandwich if it’s toast?”
He frowned. “Please don’t call my life into question.”
“That is an obscene amount of Nutella,” I said, watching him spread it.
“I always make healthy choices, Nina, you know me.”
The door opened and I looked up, expecting a family member, but it was the other dogs, noses twitching towards the food. As Jonathan gave me my sandwich the dog in my lap woke up too.
“I feel watched,” I said.
“Come on, let’s leave the zoo.” The dogs eyed us mournfully. “Sorry,” Jonathan said as he shut the kitchen door on them, a genuine apology.
My pulse was quick as we climbed the stairs, and not just from concentrating on not spilling tea on Jonathan bloody Holcroft’s parents’ carpet. It was the thought of his bedroom, foreign and intimate. You can tell a lot from a bedroom. Seeing his felt like some invisible milestone.
It smelt of him. An observation I felt stupid for making but couldn’t help. It was untidy but not badly, schoolbooks on the floor, a few dirty mugs, the bed not made, but the curtains were open. A guitar leant against the bed. I watched him bend to pick up a pair of jeans and hang them on the chair. He was humming Les Mis under his breath.
There were plants lining the windowsills.
He had two windows in two walls, his desk below one of them, and I went straight to it and put mug and plate down. A fern trailing from a pot, a plant with big white-striped leaves, a purple flower. I stopped, unwilling to touch them, and turned to look at him. He was smiling, and somehow I felt like I’d passed a test, like he was waiting to see what I thought about the plants and, from that, would form his final opinion.
“These are beautiful,” I said.
“They are, aren’t they?” He nodded to the purple flower in its small vase. “That’s my favourite at this time of year. Spotted orchid.”
I looked past them down the residential street, with its terraced houses and cars in driveways. “Where did you get it from?”
“We take the dogs to the country at weekends. I brought that one back from an old quarry. The stem was broken, it would’ve died if I’d left it.”
“You carried it home in the car?”
“Yeah.”
“Like a little birdie with a broken wing?”
“Are you making fun of me?”
I grinned. “I love them. Have you always been into … plants?”
“We used to live in the country. We’ve not been in this place long.”
I looked at the A Level Biology book on the desk. “I always thought bio was a weird choice for you, but …”
“I want to study horticulture.”
He said this with a slightly bashful, endearing grin, as if it was a secret.
I couldn’t stop smiling. “That’s so cool.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Nina Seth thinks something about me is cool. That is an achievement.”
“Only one thing,” I said, “don’t get ahead of yourself,” and sat down at his desk to eat my sandwich, so he wouldn’t detect just how cool I find everything about him.
When we’d eaten the sandwiches – which were second to none – he got Hamlet out and we went through the monologue. Act Four Scene Four, “How all occasions do inform against me / And spur my dull revenge.” Jonathan bloody Holcroft is a good Hamlet, riding the wave between naïve, boyish uncertainty and the desire to be a man. It is my favourite speech in the play, and when he opened to it my heart skipped, as if this were some sign, a connection between us. I told him it was my favourite, and there was a second when he looked at me, lips slightly parted, as if he, too, sensed this quivering string running between us, like two notes slipping into a chord. But he grinned and said, “I wasn’t going to choose to be or not to bloody be, was I?”, and he moment was gone.
We spent hours there in his room, talking, he laughing at me for my earnest discussion of iambic pentameter and hamartia, but in a mildly impressed way, the laughter of one who does, in fact, love Shakespeare, but doesn’t splash it over the front page of their life. I looked at his bookshelf, mostly modern, a lot of horticulture, the Harry Potter series in its bold, brave colours. “But no Les Mis,” I said.
He laughed. “You wish.”
When the monologue was faultless a woman called upstairs, “Dinner!”, and without asking me if I wanted to stay he led me back to the kitchen. I’m normally not a fan of meeting other people’s families – Beth’s dad always tried too hard to be friendly, and her mum used to look at my underbrushed hair and unshaved armpits as if worried I might infect her daughter – but Jonathan bloody Holcroft’s mum was the kind of woman I wanted to go for coffee with.
“Come again!” she said as I eventually left. Come again. I wanted to, more than almost anything. In the hall he hugged me goodbye and as I walked home I could smell his aftershave on my coat. Scenes of what could have happened were running through my head, spiralling in and out of the Les Mis he’d been singing – In my life, there's been no one like him anywhere, anywhere where he is – but I tried to shut them down. I was happier than I’d been since that last time I spoke to Beth, happier than I’d been since Katie’s party, but colouring my happiness was the longing I was trying to ignore. Things had been uncomplicated this afternoon, friendly, and I knew that friendly was the only portent of things to come.
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[source] |
HOW CUTE ARE THEY?! I have zero idea how I've got to this point, though. A fully-fledged romance contemporary?? Written by me?? This is not a thing! But ... apparently it is. Ha. This book was meant to be about Nina's friendship with Verity Locke. Oops ...
Expect another extract before the end of the month, when I link up with Starting Sparks. Until next time, friends.
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