Elliot met Lucy between the central bollards of a busy road on the outskirts of London. It happened to be Valentine’s Day. Just another day that began in light splintering off concrete and got their full attention only once become a balaclava of night. Only there, on the very edge of each day, did either feel much was worth doing.
Elliot had no mystery; Lucy, permanently experimenting, had too much. Neither would recognize this until years later, coming across pictures of their youth and seeing the aching truths in them garish as buckets and spades. Right now they were trapped in the middle of a road by traffic, for two long, languid minutes.
Somewhere among them, Elliot noticed her beauty. So clearly a bruised beauty. A sunset curdling on a gnarled urban skyline. One that ought to be cupped in the hands, lifted from that skyline, laid in a softer scene. He so clearly not the one to do that. All the same, he said hello. She smiled knowingly, not having a clue, and swore at cars. Her voice the sort that could curl through keyholes and labyrinth souls and rattle them. He never quite decided if it was affected. She never quite decided to tell him she’d probably missed her train by now. But, like so many things, she did it anyway. And their friendship began.
Something in each other’s company was as eerie as whales calling underwater. She was intrigued by his stately calm and his humour that crackled softly like a low but live, live fire. He was intrigued by the gravitas she brought to her pursuit of feeling nothing. The one-night stands she would verbally scratch out of herself the morning after, from a Battersea phone-box. The drugs that took her to an electrified nowhere then left her exiled from herself with soot under her eyes. The fact she was always in love with the man one before the man she was with. That she wasn’t in love with Elliot, and that this was a soft and idle horror he could live with, intrigued them both. Sometimes they’d catch each other peering out guardedly from somewhere deep in thought and wonder if that was someone else exploring the same derelict question: if not in love, then…?
Twice more the hearts of Valentine’s lined up on life’s gaudy fruit machine. Elliot met someone new; Lucy went on with the same-old new. Still, they met whenever he was in London, and strung up their dreams like fading laundry in all the anonymous places she would always belong to and he would never forget. Once he’d written I GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU on her back with his fingertip, when she was knotted in reverie. She had smiled knowingly, not having a clue. The moment had passed, the way he knew her beauty would always pass on by. The most he could hope for was to clear her way of dog shit and downfall.