Unstable Orbits: first chapter

Here’s the full, unedited text of the first chapter.

For more, see the book page for Unstable Orbits for all the links.

1. Inertia

Number one: the Big Bang, obviously.

Numbers two to I’m going to say seven? Mergers of supermassive black holes, sending gravity waves rippling across the universe.

Number eight: our A-levels, first time around.

Luke and I both had short fuses. We were Nate and Luke, and we were Nuke. And also sometimes Late. In that first final term of school our fuses never received enough oxygen and sunlight to regrow or whatever, trapped in the suffocating darkness of revision and pressure and mocks and pressure and think-about-uni and pressure and parents and pressure and exams and exams and don’t-go-down-the-pub and exams and exams and—

Things turned fiery. Explosive, repeatedly. A cluster of hydrogen bombs dropped and exam season became a nuclear winter, a radioactive shitshow, with the effects localised to my house and his house and the streets between. And the school gym and car park. And maybe a couple of other places.

Neither of us had a moment to calm down, to breathe. We pinballed from exam to argument to exam to argument. We broke up not in a snap but in a crumble, smeared across four hectic endless weeks. Three-hour exams taken in a volcanic mist or drowning in tears or in a black, airless tomb where I could barely scrawl my name at the top of the paper.

And afterwards, when we got back together, there were secondary explosions. “Look,” I’d said to my parents, “we patched up our differences like in a real relationship,” and for some reason a plate smashed against a wall. For days after that Dad barely talked to me. Mum didn’t talk, she shouted. Luke’s mum turned old-lady polite and I sniffed her biscuits for arsenic.

The emotional weather drifted away, a cold front from the arctic nudging the poisonous air south. But the particles lingered in the fields, the places, the glances. We couldn’t go back. We couldn’t try again.

Unless we could.

The last day of August: the Saturday before Year 13 redux. My final shift in the Ebeham Bookshop before school resumed. I wasn’t thinking about it. (I was.)

The rest of my year group had spent the summer farting around on their last adventures before uni. Not an option for me, thanks to— everything. My parents didn’t even let me choose where I worked.

Best job ever, it turned out.

I perched on the stool behind the till as usual, a book in my hand, while zero customers browsed the maze of tables and stacks that led into dark recesses and corners and somewhere, allegedly, graphic novels. My main task in this important role, it had emerged, was to look pretty in one of my many magnificent, colourful blazers while the owner Roscoe nipped down the pub. Fine by me: I had tea, a book, and a till that beeped — bliss. And Roscoe paid me. He paid me.

Not nearly enough to live on. Not actual living. Actual living would have to wait another year, if my A-levels worked out second time around. It was enough to window-shop by.

And I was technically an item in the bookshop window myself, inside the dappled glass frontage magnified by a grid of twenty-by-seven short-sighted squares. But I wasn’t for sale: I still belonged to Luke. And even if I were single, I was more than slightly used. If anyone inspected too closely, sniffed between my covers, they’d have found me scuffed, scarred, ripped, broken.

My nose was deep into Nineteen Eighty-Four, finding the Two Minutes Hate disturbingly relatable, when the shop door rattled and tinkled aggressively and someone entered. I kept reading — Roscoe said to leave customers alone, to let them order from Amazon on their own time.

A minute later, the tinkler’s shuffling feet turned into a quiet cough in front of me, and a soft, velvety, awkward: “Sorry, do you have anything by… uh… Enid Blyton?”

I lifted my head, ready to disappoint a porcelain-and-pink-cheeked farm child with a fancy for waxy jackets and tangerine Americans. Instead I found a don’t-say-cute boy with darker, grey-brown skin, looking furiously past my ear.

He glanced at me for the Planck time, the smallest amount of time permitted by physics. “It’s for my cousin.” Synapses fired and sparked a match: a boy from the year below. My year, now. A shorter guy, raised an inch with thick, shiny hair so black it shimmered blue under the unflattering strip lights, swept back except for a stubborn don’t-say-adorable cowlick. His dark brown eyes were hooded under full, confused brows, probably because I wasn’t answering his question and I very much was staring.

I babbled. “OK, yes, right, Enid Blyton. So is your cousin living in like 1967 or is he just a hideous racist?” They were someone else’s words, Luke’s words, and I choked trying to unsay them, my face burning. “Sorry. That was—”

“He has also asked for a tankard.” The boy grinned.

“Oh.” I let my lips curl up. “Bad luck.”

“The family’s so proud.” His eyes flashed and the grin broadened, and my smile grew with it. He looked away. “No, it’s for a thing.”

“A— racist thing?”

“No,” he laughed. Giggled?

I wasn’t used to giggling. I wasn’t used to smiling. It took me a second to adjust. “Sorry, I had to ask. It’s— it’s—” THINK, NATE. “It’s a bookshop thing.”

This thing thing was in danger of tiptoeing into heavily mined flirting territory. Flirting was banned under the War Memorial Protocol agreed between me and Luke when we gravitated back together over the summer. I could argue it was customer service, though. Sort of like flirting with money involved, but also absolutely not like that.

I improvised a bookmark with a leaflet about the historic town of Ebeham, glossy gush for day trippers, then ran my hand back through my hair, conscious my centre parting had grown too Oscar Wilde and floppy over the long, hateful summer. “Um, so, I’m not totally sure we’ve got Enid Blyton, and— well, prices might be in like groats or something. But the shelf’s through there on the right.” I pointed to a shadowy corridor between two tall stacks behind him.

“Shelf?”

“Roscoe — he’s the owner — he’s not a fan of kid’s books. Or kids. Or people, really, if I’m honest.”

The boy stared at the corridor for a second. His mouth quivered. “He’s not back there, is he? Not that I— I mean, if I need help and that.”

“He’s in the pub. It’s just me in the shop right now, all by myself.” I swivelled on my chair, a full spin. “If you want me — want help — shout.” I came to a stop and raised a finger. “Meanwhile, watch out for talking rabbits. Mysterious wardrobes. Shrivelled little weirdos telling riddles about rings.” Shut up, Nate. “Trees. Those sorts of things.”

He thanked me with a you-nutter smile and turned away, and I tried not to think about the fact that his ears had shaded— browner?— and meanwhile my customer-service-definitely-not-flirting brain blurted out, “Don’t eat the poisoned apple.”

Hand on a stack, he turned slowly to me, his lips quirked. “What happens if I do that?”

You fall asleep and can only be awoken by your true love. My brain stalled. My mouth dried. I opened it anyway, made it speak. “You get the shits I expect.”

He went between the stacks, his laugh echoing back.

I may have overdone the customer service.

I certainly didn’t obsess over it for the next five minutes/years.

Roscoe presented the shop as a Chaucer and Nigella establishment, not a cash-and-carry Walliams. He stocked only a rudimentary selection for children, denying it was to entice the dilfs. No picture books. No non-fiction. Some of the stock was simultaneously New and Classic. I knew for a fact there was no Enid Blyton.

The boy from school was taking too long to figure this out (I told myself). I exited my cave behind the counter and orbited the display tables until a gravity assist slingshotted me into the back half of the shop. I found him kneeling, head like a confused puppy, scanning the children’s shelf, running a finger along the spines.

I cleared my throat and leaned down, hands on my knees, casual af. “How are you doing?”

“I don’t remember any of these.”

“How about this one?” I leaned over him, getting a hit of coconut from his hair. I pulled out a thin hardback with a purple-brown cover, some fancy gold lettering, and a line-drawing illustration of a child taunting a cat. “It’s about mustard gas in the trenches.”

“Nice.”

“And living next to the corpses of your best mates.”

“OK.”

I waggled the book. “There are illustrations.” Not sure I was selling it.

“Why the cat?”

“The cat’s a metaphor.”

“What for?”

“Metaphor.”

“I know what a metaphor is, blazer boy.” Blazer boy. His eyes stayed laser-focused on the book. “What’s it a metaphor for?”

Blazer boy. “I’m not sure. But it’s World War I, so probably homosexuality. Forbidden lust between two privates, shot at dawn if they’re discovered.”

I don’t know why I said that. My face flushed scarlet as I shelved the book and straightened up. (I do know why I said that.)

He twisted around to a sitting position, leaned against a stub of wall and hitched his knees up. “I’ll pass. I don’t think my cousin’s old enough for subtext and that.” The rebellious lick of hair shuddered.

I met his gaze for a second and then darted away, up a shelf from Ancient Children to the tail end of Local Dull History. Mostly proper books there, plus a spread of spiral-bound ultra-niche rants dropped off by a pensioner. I stuck my forefinger into the shelf and eased out a copy, flicking through its type-spittle. “Talking of old enough. When are you eighteen?”

“January.”

“Try again.” I glanced up from the pamphlet to see his eyebrows bunching at me. “They won’t serve you in the Apocalypse until you’re eighteen, so you need to be eighteen before January if you want to get served before January.”

“If I want to drink. Maybe I don’t drink.”

“Do you drink?”

“Of course I drink. But I can go to a pub and not drink.”

“Eighteen, I said, not eighty.” I filed the drivelogue back into the shelf, where it would remain untouched until the heat death of the universe.

“We had an induction at the start of Year 12 warning us about boys like you.” His eyes snapped to his fingers, tense and curling on top of his knees. “I mean— I don’t mean—”

I’d heard worse. I managed a smile. “The Henton Exhortation, we called it. Luke, my— he called it that. I think cos it sounds like ex-whore, which is wildly misogynistic but, uh, Luke.” I shrugged.

Everyone knew Luke, even those who didn’t want to know him.

The boy nodded, cautiously. “Ms Henton spoke for half an hour about stranger danger. Nothing we hadn’t sat through before. We were hoping for a bit more from her, being Head of Sixth Form and that. Maybe the secrets of the grown-ups, like mortgages and how to ask people out.” People.

The shop was post-apocalyptically empty and the boy showed no signs of standing up, so I joined him on the floor, leaning my back against a shelf unit at ninety degrees to him. I tucked my legs almost up to my chin.

He stared somewhere south of my knees. “What happened in— how did your A-levels go?”

The question took me by surprise and I ramped up some emergency blinking to hold back the tears. He knew, but — didn’t he know? Everyone knew. Everyone knew everything about how much of a—

I shuffled and focused on the grimy ceiling tiles, forcing out an unconvincing chuckle. “My mum wanted me to apologise in writing to the examiners for wasting their time. End result: goodbye Year 13, hello Year 13.”

He nodded, with an upside-down smile I could swear for a microsecond curled back up at the corners.

I hid my face behind my hands. “You probably saw some of the arguments. Or heard them. Or felt them. I think they registered as earthquakes. I’m not— I can’t talk about it, it’s too—” I made a frustrated noise.

“It’s OK,” he said.

A spring coiled inside me. I banged my head back against the stack. “It’s not. It’s really not. I’m rubbish, I’m awful, I’m shit, I’m stupid, I’m useless, I’m broken—”

“I’m sure you’re not, you’re—”

“You don’t know me.” My head snapped to him. How was that customer service going, Nate? “Sorry. I’m in a—” Bad mood, no. Bad place, no. I let the sentence end without an end, trailing off into the multiverse of possible answers.

A moment of silence for my planned future. It was like when you disobeyed the calm, persistent instructions of the satnav and turned right when the little man said turn left. He’d cogitate for a second, sucking up your data allowance and probably telling his cloudy mates how unreliable you were, and then present you a new route. No judgement, no criticism — not to your face, anyway — simply a revised plan, an updated set of directions to the same destination. For me the little man was still figuring those out, and meanwhile my car steamed ever-closer to a complex junction.

The boy waited until he spoke again. “Second chances are good.”

“You sound like Ms Henton.” I held up my hands in massively sarcastic air quotes. “Life is a journey and we should relish every twist and turn.”

“Do you know whose tutor group you’re gonna be in?”

I shrugged. There was a letter at home I was putting off reading.

“Bet it’ll be weird for you. Déjà vu and that.”

“All of the déjàs. At least I’ll have the support of my amazing friends oh no I won’t they’ll all be gone oh great wonderful I can’t wait.” I sighed about four lungfuls.

He let the silence breathe. “You’ll have— Luke.”

A groan snuck out before I could stop it. “Yes. True. I guess there’ll be Luke.”

“Is that— not good?”

I should’ve answered in a heartbeat, should’ve been positive, cheerful, delirious to describe how wonderful it was that we were boyfriends repeating the year together. Every second that ticked quietly by revealed nothing and everything. Finally, I made a noise somewhere between yeah and sure with subtle undertones of oh god no it’s going to be another disaster.

“You— you can always talk to me, if you need someone other than Luke. I’m a good listener.” He batted the back of his hand on my shin. “And you’re eighteen, so you can sneak me booze at the Apocalypse.”

The tension valve squeaked open a fraction, lightening the room. “There we go. Ulterior motive. Knew it.”

He laughed. “Do you really not know anyone in my year?”

“Pfft, you’re all kids.” I let myself grin at him.

“Yeah, thanks daddy.” His ears tinted so chestnut I could’ve roasted them and eaten him up—

I mean—

Not that but—

He was cute and—

Luke—

My head travelled elsewhere, returning in time to see his hand held out towards me. “Preston. Preston Kenner.”

I shook it. “Nathan Ridge. Nate.”

“It’s gonna be the best year ever.”

“God, not again.”

Almost closer to dinner than lunch, Roscoe sauntered tweedily in from the Apocalypse wet-eyed and handsy to take over. I told him about Preston, in passing, in a by-the-way kind of way. Not at all with a smile on my face.

“Honey, listen.” He peered over his glasses — those armless glasses that pretend to stick to your nose, which with his baldy-beardy head made him look like Humpty Dumpty’s guncle. He placed a palm flat on my shoulder, alcohol hazing the air between us. “I hear that little squeak in your voice. I can practically see the movie playing in your pretty head and it’s not the romcom you think it is. Are you Charles, Diana, or Camilla? You sound a bit of a Charlie to me. You know I love having you around, I get long, long lunches. But you’ve got to see the world for real—”

“I will see the world for real.”

He patted my cheek. “So focus on your exams, not your extra-curriculars. Believe me, I know what’s behind those baby blues. Father Nature only has one thing on his mind at your age and he’s a wily old devil with a volcano full of tricks to get his way. And he knows shit about A-levels and university. Don’t get distracted. You’re never gonna wake up horny for oxbow lakes or general relativity.”

He didn’t know me as well as he thought he did. “Young Stalin was triple hot, though.”

“I’m sure that’s all they talked about in the gulag. And you don’t do History.”

“Newton was a looker.”

“Newton died a virgin.”

“I’m not— I mean, I’ll be careful.” I shrugged.

He turned away, climbing onto the stool by the till like he was calculating the physics. “You need to be more than careful. You need to be fair, and honest.” He huffed. “I know you know about empathy because you’ve seen Star Trek Next Generation.” He hooked his shoes noisily behind the circular foot rest, heels clattering on the spokes to the central pillar. “Embrace your inner Troi before you get your grasping little fingers on this new Kardashian.”

“Cardassian. Don’t get your feet stuck again.”

“I know what I mean. I’m done with the lecture. Scoot, skedaddle. Figure it out.”

He meant well. But he was overreacting. I hadn’t done anything. I hadn’t done anything. Some flirting-not-flirting, a macho handshake. It wasn’t even a waste of time for the bookshop as Preston bought a nutcase pamphlet claiming the local councillors were lizards, so Roscoe’s daily takings were up £4.95. Not a sordid encounter or a promise of one but a simple business transaction.

I hadn’t cheated on Luke — I’d made a friend. A cute, maybe-gay friend. Another potential member of the gay posse at school. We’d stride in together, a big gay row of us, heads high, rainbow socks peeking over barely legal footwear, hair swept in slow motion behind us, Taylor Swift all the way up to eleven on Luke’s phone, Year 10 minigays swooning and bitching through their fog of Lynx Africa.

Luke would be fine with it.

(He wouldn’t.)

Across the faded tarmac road from the bookshop, Ebeham’s smeared equivalent of a town square consisted of a flat-cobbled car park in a long arc that held half a market one day a week. A central area contained — in increasing attractiveness to the town’s teenagers — an estate agent, a Citizens Advice, the Charleston Tea Rooms (part-time work available, no nose piercings, no face tattoos), a bus stop, and a dribbly Victorian fountain surrounded by a low wall that could sit a dozen at a squeeze. On a warm Saturday night the wall stank of sweaty teens and empty cans of cider and desperation.

Late in the evenings, the dark drew out the goths from their caves. Now in the sleepy twilight the fountain reeked with first-at-the-party vibes, and Luke and I cosplayed the parents. Too old to be there — we had the pub, and we should’ve had A-levels, and we should’ve been prepping for uni — and yet still we clung on beyond our time, like the summer as that August sighed into September.

The constant, irregular splosh of the fountain sang to my bladder. I stared at an open, barely sipped can of beer, spinning it slowly between my fingers, as Luke spoke. “Are you even listening to me, babes?”

No. “Yes?”

“What did I just say? What were my exact words?” Luke pushed his thick black-framed specs up his nose with his middle finger and left it there, making eye contact and overacting a glare.

“Don’t do that at school, please. They know what you’re doing.”

“I am simply adjusting my glasses.”

“You are simply being a twat.”

He sucked in a loud breath and placed his palm on his chest. “The impertinence of her.”

“And don’t wear that earring on Monday.”

He fingered it. A plain stud in his left ear, but still against school rules. “What if I forget to take it out?”

“I’ll tell you, and you’ll take it out.” I drank some beer. I regretted drinking some beer.

“You’ll tell me, will you? Me and half the street? Rattling the windows, raising the neighbourhood watch from their graves?” He leaned back, hands on the wall to stop himself dropping into the fountain, and then mimed sitting up in a coffin and twitching a curtain.

“I’ll be calm and relaxed about it.”

“Oh really. Who are you and what did you do with Nate?”

“What were you saying, anyway?”

“So you weren’t listening.”

“Oh my days. Just tell me.”

He gave me the look: the disappointed look I’d had over summer from everyone down to the neighbours’ cat. “Bridget was telling me about some slaggy boy in this year group. Says he’s been ticking off everyone, all genders, one by one. Apparently he is your actual boy-girl-boy-girl seating.” He laughed a look-at-me laugh.

“What would Bridget know?”

He took two long gulps of beer. “She’s got her ear to the ground. Nothing escapes her.”

“She’s not even at school any more. She should be panicking about uni, not still up to her lips in school gossip. Anyway, everyone in the year? He’s probably had one fumble after PE and she’s inflated him to Casanova.”

“Better not pounce on you. I’ll have his eyes out.”

My jaw flexed. The obvious and fatal mistake would’ve been to ask the boy’s name. Luke wouldn’t have told me anyway. We’d danced a similar dance in Year 12, that time about a boy in the year above, and Luke had made it up. He was testing me then — and probably now, too.

And if it was true, and if it was this boy Preston from the bookshop, I didn’t want to know.

I kept my voice as level as I could, despite my heart thumping away hungry for an argument. “Try not to antagonise the whole year group.”

His mouth flapped open and he shook his head in cartoon disbelief, shaggy blond hair exploding. “As if, babes. What about that ginger hobbity boy, the Scottish one gooning for cravats and waistcoats, thinks he’s a big shot but he’s just a big shit. Frodo. Am I allowed to antagonise him?”

My lips thinned. “We’re gonna need friends in this Groundhog Year hellhole.” I was getting too loud. I shut my eyes for a second, listening to the fountain piss. Moderated my voice. “Bridget and the others won’t give one solid shit if we’re moaning on WhatsApp about Canteen Doreen and the Custard Police while they’re having fancy dinner parties blowing their loans on Tesco’s Finest and getting squirrelled on mystery bottles. Face facts. We’re the kids. We’re them now. Nothing we can do about that, unless you want to go to sixth form college like a billion buses away. And anyway, if this boy’s sleeping around, so what. Bridget’s a bit slaggy herself and you’re besties with her.”

“God, I’m only saying I don’t want him to try it on with you.”

“It’s not likely, is it. People know about— us. They know everything about us. Most of them saw us.” More of that terrible beer. Enough to channel a burp back up the pipes.

Luke muttered, “Don’t try to pin it all on me, Natty.”

“I’m not.”

He sank about half a can.

“I’m not.”

Luke fell silent, brooding. Churning. Like last April again, as everything went everywhere. He didn’t engage, didn’t speak. His jaw muscles worked, his lips twitched.

I couldn’t let it affect me. “If anyone tries it on, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Good.” His voice was flat, emotionless, his thumb denting the can in his hand. The metallic crinkle merged with the tumble of the fountain. “Thank you.”

There was a mark on my bedroom ceiling. From the approved sleeping position, as specified in Mr and Mrs Ridge’s Standards for Bedrooms (Ebeham) Act 2010, it was about fifteen centimetres south-west of straight up, and about a metre north of the small, wooden, disapproving beige lampshade. It was a black curl of a mark like a comma, thicker at one end. The thick part was the squashed head of an ex-spider that found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time — bedtime, circa nine years ago, circa half a life ago, circa a life ago.

I’d screamed the house down when I saw that spider. I told everyone I was afraid it would crawl into my mouth in the middle of the night and set up home in my sinuses and by dawn I’d have spider babies streaming out of my nostrils and eating my eyeballs.

Instead I’ve spent all that time staring at its fragmented corpse.

Opposite my bed, a crack in the wall rose from the top of the door frame opposite the hinge almost up to the severe curve of the cornice: like a lightning bolt had flashed between them after a thunderous argument on the threshold. I didn’t remember a time before that crack. It was a universal constant, like the wardrobe with one thin metal handle an irritating centimetre above the other, like the lampshade and its layer of dust, like the proportionality constant describing the strength of gravity, like the poster of Marcus Rashford.

Mum had said I’d deliberately failed my exams to knacker up her plan to give my room a deep clean while I was at uni. I’d accused her of wanting to rent it out on Airbnb, and she’d gone off on one.

We’d lived through a lot together, my room and me. The wonky wardrobe door handle-eyes had watched me grow from bedtime stories to… bedtime stories. I’d hung a towel over them for most of puberty. And then Luke entered my life, and we “did homework” there together until a pointed comment from Dad made Mum insist on open doors and snap inspections.

The doors got slammed more than I did, that’s for sure.

It was good with Luke, when it was good.

The dead spider curl stared down at me as I lay half-in, half-out of the covers in the late summer heat, one arm behind my head, and the curtains barely breathed. It was 2.28 a.m. and it had been 2.28 a.m. for approximately an hour. From the bedroom across the landing came soft snores. I was never sure if they were Mum or Dad.

Maybe Mum was right. What if I had deliberately imploded — not because of Luke, but for fear of change. Because once I left, once I was staring up at strange marks on strange ceilings and a strange wardrobe was silently judging my porn, I couldn’t go back.

Oh, I could physically go back. Spiritually, mentally, I’d be visiting. Staying in a spare room with my name on the door only as a historical relic.

And maybe I was staying with Luke for the same reason. Maybe that’s why I got back with him.

Sometimes I wanted to be a toddler again, bouncing around on fat pegs spraying snot everywhere before collapsing in yawns of rage and being buckled into my pushchair under a tea towel like a budgerigar.

Adulthood seemed like a perpetual state of over-tiredness without a tea towel in sight. You had to keep going, day after year, sucking it up, saying yes when you wanted to scream no, saying no when your whole body crackled yes, being polite to idiots, giving way to Porsches who apparently owned every road, apologising for things you didn’t do and never would and how the hell could you think that I might, every day, dawn to dusk, forever and ever ah men, until you could lie there and stare at a mark on the folds in the lid of your coffin for the whole of eternity.

How the hell was it still 2.28 a.m.?

Would it stay 2.28 a.m. forever?

Could it stay 2.28 a.m. forever?

I closed my eyes. Saw Luke’s disappointed face, and his fighting face back during the exams. Everyone strained and tired and upset and twisted and angry and me at the centre of it all, the source of it all. Or maybe the sink of it all: a black hole.

Tomorrow it would begin again. A second chance, Preston said. A chance to do things differently. My stupid brain showed me his grin.