Unless you were me, of course, with your fate already decided.

  Alex met me in town beforehand, and we played it cool by rocking up a couple of minutes past the hour. Phil was already there with Alison, doing the decent boyfriend thing. From the hysterical wailing and hopeless manner in which she sagged into Phil’s manly chest, I concluded she’d spent too much time shagging and not enough revising. Behind her back, Phil rolled his eyes then gave me the thumbs up and mouthed his own grades at me. The jammy bastard. Not only had he bedded most of the female student population of St George’s over the last couple of years, but he was also now set for a career as an estate agent too. I flicked him the middle finger.

  “Come on, Matt, my mother will kill me if I don’t contact them before half-past. Her and my dad will be sitting by the phone, waiting.”

  I’d hung back, letting the rush die down, fascinated by the alternating tears or cheers going on around me. Lounging on a low brick wall, I gestured to him to go ahead. I even managed to conjure up a trademark Matt Leeson cheeky dimpled grin.

  “You go, I’ll wait here and admire your arse from behind.”

  He strode off, head held high, facing whatever the board revealed with characteristic bravura. On tiptoes, he craned his head, scanning the lists for his name. A couple of girls squeezed out from their position in front of him, one with tears running down her cheeks, the other just fucking bewildered. Alex tracked his finger along the names in the bottom right of the board, towards the end of the alphabet. With his hand poised next to his name, he stood frozen for a few seconds before stepping back and turning his attention to the middle of the board and the middle of the alphabet, where ordinary, unmemorable surnames like mine resided. Again, his finger paused, then he tapped twice against my grades before slowly turning around.

  He tried hard, he tried so damned hard to keep a straight face as he thrust his hands into his pockets and strolled back to me. A graceful athletic roll of his hips, a hint of sway. Like a model on a catwalk; I could watch it for the rest of my fucking life.

  I never foresaw what happened next. I’d never forget it either. Cool as you like, Alex Valentine, the star of the school rugby team, all-round nice guy, and Mr Masculinity, bent down, wrapped his arms under my arse and picked me up. He fucking picked me up then swung me around. In public. “Yes!!!” he roared swinging me around again, just in case everybody didn’t clock it the first time.

  I squealed, a mix of shock, panic, and delight, clinging on to him so that I wouldn’t fall back and crack my head on the tarmac. Big fat tears of joy rolled down his cheeks. “What are you doing, you crazy loon?” I wriggled in his grasp. “Put me down! Let me go!”

  “Never,” he replied, grinning wildly. “Never, ever, ever.” Burying his face into the crease of my neck, he added in a whisper, “I fucking love you, Matt.”

  I’d have made a fortune if I could have bottled and sold the wonderfully giddy smile plastered across his handsome face. Every fucking perfect white tooth on display. If I’d owned a camera, I’d have photographed it, carried the snapshot around in my wallet, as a constant reminder of how perfect life could be, if only I’d been born someone else.

  Eventually, he placed me back on the ground, my head swimming with relief, with joy, with love, with bitterness, with anger. In summary, a maelstrom of fucked-up teenage boy.

  “We did it, Matt!” He repeated it over and again, for all the world looking set to pick me up and swing me around again. “We bloody did it!”

  I took a step back, needing the space, petrified of a repeat performance. In amongst all the mourning or triumphant (delete as appropriate) shrieks and cuddles going on around us, we got away with it the first time. I didn’t fancy our chances twice. I stared at him, willing myself to say the magic words back to him. To tell him the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, which began and ended with a simple ‘I love you, too’ yet hijacked with all the shitty stuff I’d hidden from him in between.

  I retreated another step, widening the gap between us. A familiar prickling sensation built up behind my eyes again as Alex stared at me, his delirious expression faltering as he realised mine didn’t mirror it. He gave me a loose punch.

  “Matt, hey, Matt! You clever bastard, you did even better than me! And without doing any bloody work, too!”

  A third step back. “I’m not going.” My throat had dried up, each word a painful croak. I attempted a second time. “I’m not going.”

  He laughed. “What, to the pub with this lot? Nah, me neither. I thought we might celebrate in a quiet spot on a blanket somewhere, you know, over the common.”

  The prickling behind my eyes became harder to ignore and harder to fight. God knows what I looked like; fists clenched, breathing hard and blinking back tears, in what should have been one of my short life’s happiest moments. A fucking gay mess, probably. With the telepathy that comes from living in each other’s pockets for eighteen years, Phil appeared at my shoulder. Brenner joined him, I’d no idea where he’d materialised from.

  “Y’all right mate?” Phil’s voice was low, and his gaze flicked between Alex and me. I felt my knees buckle.

  “Yeah.” I nodded, trying to control the lump in my throat and the fucking wetness threatening to seep out of my eyes. “I’ve just explained to Alex here that I’m not going. To uni. That I never applied.”

  “What? You’re going to Sheffield! What do you mean you never applied? What the fuck, Matt?” Alex’s voice; loud, confused, angry. Swearing—God, I’d turned him into a heathen.

  “You heard him,” Phil growled, this time with a hint of a threat. We took care of our own on our estate, always had done. Always would. Mates before dates. I rocked on my feet a little, I really should have stayed sitting down. Folding his arms, standing taller, Phil squared up to Alex.

  “You’ve got the wrong end of the stick, mate. Matt’s not going to university. He never was. He can’t.”

  “You coming, Matt?” Brenner butted in. “We’re going down to the Kings Arms, a load of us.”

  “No, he’s not going to the pub.” Alex’s hand landed at my wrist, tugging forcefully, and almost shouting at Brenner. “Look at me, Matt. What the hell’s going on?”

  I think Phil guessed it then. Brenner too, although he’d always been a little slower to put two and two together. Something in Alex’s touch perhaps, the possessive, familiar hold he had on me and how I didn’t pull away. The way he stood closer than a mate would, so close I could have raised my face to his and kissed him.

  “I’m going with Alex,” I said, in a daze. As if an invisible hand was pulling my strings from high above.

  We didn’t speak on the walk to his car. Nor when he turned on the engine. The radio stayed silent.

  “I’ve made a present for you,” I volunteered at last, wiping my face dry on my sleeve. “For getting into med school. But I left it at home because I thought bringing it would be bad luck.”

  “Shall we go and fetch it?”

  I didn’t answer straight away, although reflexively I almost said no. But then, as Alex tucked the Polo in behind the bus trundling around the ring road, it occurred to me that everything had unravelled now anyway, so one more uncovering of the truth wouldn’t matter.

  “Sure. I’d like that.” I nodded. “It’s a right turn at the hospital, then left after the bend.”

  “I know where it is.”

  “You don’t, actually.”

  I ordered him to wait in the car. As I opened the passenger door, he peered up at the grimy grey cladding of my block.

  “That’s our place, with the yellow curtains.” I pointed to two ground floor windows.

  The thin curtains were closed, despite it being the middle of a sunny afternoon. My mum didn’t get up every day, and even on days she did, she didn’t always bother opening the curtains. I let myself in, ignoring the door leading to the lounge and kitchen on the right, and headed straight to the end, to the bedroom I shared with Simon. I couldn’t hear the telly, meaning my mum had either gone out or died. I didn’t especially care either way. Reaching up to the top bunk, I fumbled around for the mixtape I’d painstakingly wrapped then hidden under my mattress.

  Of course, when I turned back, Alex Valentine, the fucker, stood staring at me from the doorway.

  I watched dully as he performed a slow three-sixty, absorbing the cramped few feet of space my brother and I tussled over, and the ugly damp stain, spreading like the fucking shroud of Turin across almost the entire ceiling. The piles of dirty laundry, the scratchy woodchip wallpaper, the bare light bulb. At least he managed to resist putting a hand over his nose, but I wouldn’t have blamed him if he did. I hardly noticed our flat’s aroma of old sweat, dirt, fags, and booze, but it seeped from the walls and the council-issue brown carpet like pus from an open gangrenous sore.

  Pissed off would be a gross understatement of my mood. “I told you to stay in the bloody car.”

  Shouldering past him, clutching the mixtape, I marched towards the front door then down the path. He hurried to catch up; I heard the front door slam behind us and we eyed each other across the roof of the Polo.

  “Satisfied?” I barked roughly. “Do you get it now? I’m not going to Sheffield fucking University to study fucking history. I never was, and I never will.”

  My eyes dropped down to my feet, and I bit on my lip until I tasted blood. No more fucking tears. I blinked them away before turning back to him. “I’m fucking sorry, all right? I should have told you.” Possibly the angriest, most unapologetic apology ever.

  Neither of us spoke. Me because I had nothing left to say, and I guessed Alex was too busy figuring out how to disentangle himself and escape back to his fluffy version of normality. How to let me down gently, as he was a good guy. It would be for the best, we weren’t meant for each other, not really. He thought he loved me now, but he’d soon enough realise he loved the clever, mischievous Matt Leeson I’d created for him, not the scrawny, lost kid standing three feet away, due to start work in the MB factory at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.

  “Matt?” His soft, warm voice broke through my misery. I wished I’d recorded his voice, perhaps without him knowing. In the months to come, I’d play it alone in bed, and lose myself in his clear, confident tones, his easy pleasure in the smallest of things. In me.

  “Yeah?”

  “Get in the car, you bloody idiot. This changes nothing.”

  UNFINISHED SYMPATHY

  (MASSIVE ATTACK)

  It did, of course. It changed everything. But not immediately.

  We spent most of that afternoon and half of the night entwined on a blanket under the stars. If that sounded stupidly romantic then yes, it was. We kissed as if we needed each other’s mouths to fuel our hearts. I received my first ever blow job, and Alex received his first ever mouthful of spunk. Afterwards, as we lay wrapped around each other, he made foolish promises he tricked himself into believing he’d be able to keep, and I pretended to believe he would.

  On Tuesday morning, bleary-eyed, I joined Brenner on the MB production line. By Tuesday evening, I’d fallen out with the floor supervisor, been put on probation, and earned the wrath of Phil’s dad, one of the nicest blokes on the planet, who had finagled me the job in the first place. On Wednesday and Thursday, I toed the line, and by Friday I’d turned into a zombie, packing ball bearings into cardboard boxes as if I’d never done anything else.

  Alex and I deliberately avoided a big goodbye. He insisted we didn’t need one and became all poncy, saying it was more au revoir, as I was heading up to visit him in Nottingham two weeks later anyhow. The Saturday he left, Brenner and I bought a bottle of Captain Morgan and we drank ourselves into a stupor. On the Sunday, I introduced some variety into my alcoholic repertoire by nicking a bottle of Jack Daniels from the Co-op, and we drank that instead.

  “Your new mates are a bunch of tossers.”

  Not the most tactful way of expressing my disdain for Alex’s university friends, but after an entire evening listening to an overprivileged bunch of posh wankers comparing gap year adventures, it kind of slipped out. Whatever a kibbutz was, I’d never join one. Nor get my hair braided, have a henna tattoo, or wear tie-dye.

  The weekend hadn’t started out badly. In fact, it had started out amazingly. My little gay heart had soared as the train chugged into Nottingham station, because Alex Valentine was pacing the platform, bouncing on the balls of his feet and craning his neck to peer through the carriage windows. In a devilish move, he’d swapped his polo shirt for a soft-looking beige sweater, and it suited him. I wanted nothing more than to step down from the carriage and into his arms, to latch my mouth onto his and show him how much I’d missed him. I think he felt the same way, but until we reached his digs and locked the door, a brotherly hug had to suffice.

  “Christ, Matt, I’ve needed this.” Two weeks of pent-up hormones spilled out—literally—the second my back hit the privacy of his room. Nobody would ever describe our lovemaking as sophisticated, there was zero finesse to our frantic dropping of trousers and rubbing of cocks. But it was still lovemaking, however rapid and sloppy. The sweet slipperiness of his cock and tongue, the muffled scream bitten into my shoulder as his release mixed with mine, was as heartfelt as any Shakespearian sonnet.

  I’d have been happy to stay in his pokey little room, or more specifically, stretched out underneath him in his narrow bed for the next twenty-four hours, but Alex had other ideas, eager to show me the campus, the med school, and his bloody mates. Caroline—sorry, Callie, irritated me the most, as she flirted non-stop with my man, although she faced stiff competition. She was a tall, leggy brunette, dressed in an oversized fucking cashmere grey sweater, artfully ripped jeans, and a pair of shiny black Doc Martens straight out of the wrapper, as if she’d swallowed Cosmopolitan’s cut-out-and-keep guide to how to dress like an emo, even down to her professionally manicured black fingernails. Denise’s acidic tongue would have crucified her. Thrilled to inform me that she’d secured front row tickets to see the Backstreet Boys in concert confirmed everything I never needed to know about her.

  And how could I overlook floppy-haired Rupert, whose parents had decamped to Switzerland, for tax reasons, and who was studying psychology, because y’ know, he wanted to really understand people, y’ know? Like, deep stuff, y’ know? His accent veered from Manc to Cockney, as if he couldn’t make up his mind between Blur or Oasis, until he spoke to his parents on the phone, when he forgot both and reverted to expensively educated posh.

  Not forgetting Cassandra—sorry, Cassie, who also flirted outrageously with my man, despite having a face like the back end of one of the horses she never stopped drivelling on about. Her room next to Alex’s was the source of the endless, headache-inducing George Michael loop. Had these fangirls never seen that Top of the Pops video with him prancing around in denim micro shorts? I swear one day that bloke would break the news he was as bent as a three-pound note. The sooner the better, in my opinion.

  Yet who was I to throw stones at George Michael from my position of hiding in the darkest recesses of the closet? And I’d bet my entire collection of Stone Roses singles that Alex hadn’t divulged the true nature of our relationship to his exciting new buddies. Evident from Callie’s incessant fucking pawing of him. Hands off bitch, he’s mine! I wanted to shout, as she cosied up to him in the pub.

  “What’s got you in such a bad mood?” Alex joined me outside for a fag. He didn’t tab it, obviously, and he wrinkled his nose pointedly as I wafted a plume of smoke in his direction.

  “I dunno, I just…I just thought it might be you and me.”

  Horribly whiny and pathetic; I’d not endeared myself to him or his new friends by sneering at their music, their fake authentic clothing, and pretty much everything else about them. Despite knowing how much of a dick I’d sounded, I hadn’t been able to stop myself, and chilled, patient Alex had reached his limit.

  “For god’s sake, Matt! I was so looking forwards to you coming here this weekend and you’re spoiling it!”

  “You’re the one spoiling it!” I retorted childishly. “Or rather Callie is, with her grubby mitts all over you.”

  Was it possible to behave in a more immature fashion? To be even more of a dick? Hell, yeah. I affected my most la-di-da voice.

  “Just listen to yourself, Alex! My friend Callie says this, and my mate Rupes says that. Cassie wants me to go riding. And we all know the horse she wants you to fucking ride is her. Oh, and—just checking—is having a name beginning with ‘C’ a prerequisite for the girls in your new set? Because if so, I can think of another name beginning with ‘C’ that suits the lot of them perfectly.”

  Did I feel better getting that lot off my chest? As I told Alex when he asked me, in a hurt, quiet voice, the answer was no. I truly didn’t. I felt jealous, bitter, and unreasonable. But mostly petrified. Two weeks in, and the one precious person who made life worth getting out of bed in the mornings was slipping through my fingers. Like one long crack then another, spreading across a sheet of ice, my heart was shattering. And all I could do was watch.

  It wouldn’t be unreasonable to sum up my trip to Nottingham as a total disaster. After our little tiff, I’d stropped off into the dark night, only to realise after I’d marched about fifteen paces and around a corner that I didn’t have a fucking clue where I was, or Alex’s address. So I slunk back, and sure enough, he’d waited for me, a look of something I was too adolescent to fathom on his face. If pressed to hazard a guess, I’d say he felt scared too. Through gritted teeth, I offered him a fucking atrocious apology, because saying sorry had never been part of my skill set. Alex forgave me anyhow, and we shared a furtive kiss and a cuddle behind a parked van.