If You Still Recognise Me Page 3

  “At least here nobody is yelling ching chong ling long at us, though.”

  “Yeah. There is that.”

  I roll over on to my stomach, open up Ada’s fic on my phone and start to read.

  Two hours later, I’m still lying on my bed, phone in hand. I’ve read the fic three times over, but I haven’t managed to leave a comment. I haven’t even messaged Ada to say that I’ve read it.

  I just want to roll off the bed and smush my face down into the carpet and become one with it.

  For Elsie, the Mayumi to my Zaria. That’s the dedication at the beginning.

  And the fic is exquisite. Ada’s writing always is, but this is special because she wrote it specifically for me. From all the comments I’ve left on her fics, from all the conversations we’ve had, she knows exactly what makes my knees weak and my cheeks hot, and she’s woven all these perfect details into the story. Mayumi overhearing the cool and serious Zaria talking to a stray fox in a baby voice, cooing at it. Zaria dozing over an open book and drooling, and Mayumi deftly removing it from under Zaria’s chin before their research is destroyed by Zaria’s drool – but pausing, just for a moment, to watch Zaria’s sleep-softened face. Mayumi fastening the clasp of Zaria’s bracelet round Zaria’s wrist, fingers brushing along skin.

  And Zaria and Mayumi’s kiss. I’ve read iterations of their first kiss a dozen times – most of them in Ada’s previous fics because she’s practically the only Zaria/Mayumi writer in the fandom – but, while I lapped it up every time, I’ve never read one as exhilarating as a real kiss. But this one. Three times I’ve read it in the past two hours, and each time I touched my fingers to my lips, felt my breath, quick and shallow in my throat, a pulse of pleasure fluttering through me like the wingbeat of an enormous bird.

  Ada wrote this for me.

  Ada, the Zaria to my Mayumi.

  Like everyone else in fandom, Ada and I say I love you to each other like it’s punctuation. But lately I’ve been finding it harder to say it to her because I’ve discovered that I mean it more seriously than I thought. Even just typing those three words requires an effort that feels deeply and nauseatingly physical, like reaching into my own ribcage and turning my lungs inside out.

  I still say it to other people in fandom easily. A pretty piece of fanart featuring Mayumi in a tuxedo, an eloquent paragraph or two of analysis about snake symbolism in the comics, and I don’t even think for a second before saying I love you to the stranger responsible. Meanwhile, my closest friend in fandom has written me this unbelievable piece of art, and I’m just lying here, clutching my phone to my chest, paralysed with feelings that I can’t bring myself to articulate.

  For dinner, Mum’s planned chicken wings marinated in soy sauce, a whole steamed fish, pan-fried tofu stuffed with pork mince, and gai lan with oyster sauce. I make a face when I see the gai lan in the vegetable drawer in the fridge. Chinese broccoli is too bitter for my taste but, whenever I complain to Mum about that, she just says, “Be thankful I’m not making you eat bitter melon.”

  I chop garlic while Mum washes the gai lan. Part of me is still living inside that fic Ada wrote for me, the cosy weave of its sentences like a blanket fort, and I nearly slice my own finger open.

  Mum doesn’t notice. She asks me about the exam again absent-mindedly. Then she asks about Ritika.

  “She’s all right. We might go and see a movie tomorrow.”

  Mum looks up, holding a bundle of green under the running tap. “You know you need to stay at home and look after Po Po while your dad and I are at work, right?”

  “Po Po is perfectly capable of looking after herself for a few hours.”

  Mum looks back at the sink and turns off the tap, shaking the leaves energetically. “I brought her here so she wouldn’t have to be by herself.”

  I can’t believe this. All my hopes for The Summer feel like they’re going down the drain along with the green-tinted water. “She knows how to use a phone. She can call any of us if she needs to. This is the time when I’m meant to be having fun with my friends, Mum, and I can’t even go to the cinema?”

  “Weekends.” Mum sets aside the gai lan in a blue plastic colander. “You can go this Saturday or Sunday. You can do anything you want at the weekend. Believe me, I want you to have a good summer with your friends. I didn’t want any of this to happen, but it’s what’s best now.”

  “Wait, what about my holiday with Ritika? You said I could go to Cornwall with her as long as I get a job first.”

  “When did I say that?” Mum’s brow is creased.

  “Um, I don’t know. Before exams?” Before everything else happened. Of course.

  “You know things have changed since then, Elsie.”

  “It’ll only be for, like, a week!”

  “And what about this job?”

  “OK, I haven’t got a job yet… But I’m sure I can work weekends or something.”

  “Maybe, if you ask your dad, he can take a week off work to stay home with Po Po when you go to Cornwall. I’ve used up all my annual leave already. But…” She glances at me. She looks so frail and her small hands, dripping water into the sink, are nearly skeletal. “If you find a weekend job, when will we have time together as a family?”

  “Mum, you just said I can do anything I want at the weekends. Also, we’ll still have every evening together, right?”

  Her lips press together in a flat line. “Hmm. Well. You have to find that job first.”

  “Do you want me to get one or not?”

  “I want you to hurry up with chopping that garlic,” she says.

  When Dad comes home, Mum meets him at the door, and I hear them in the hall talking in low voices while I watch the stove. After a while, they come through to the kitchen, and Dad oohs and aahs over the smell of the food.

  The house feels better now that he’s here. Airier. Dad’s always been really good at lifting the mood.

  Mum tells me to go and wake Po Po up for dinner. I’m still half in shock and half annoyed by the fact that this summer isn’t going to be anything like I dreamed, all because of Po Po being here, so I do this briskly, throwing open the curtains of the guest room and letting the light of the summer evening spill in. Po Po sits up groggily and asks me the time.

  “It’s seven.”

  “In Hong Kong?”

  “No, it’s … two in the morning there, I think? Dinner’s almost ready.”

  “I’m not hungry. I just want to sleep.”

  “Mum’s making soy-sauce chicken wings.”

  “I know,” she says, and I remember that she was with Mum this morning, buying all the groceries. She sighs. “Your mother is trying so hard to make my favourite food for me, and I’m too jet-lagged to even enjoy it.”

  “Didn’t she cook for you while she was in Hong Kong too, the past couple of months?”

  “No, of course not. It’s my house. I make the food.”

  She relents and comes with me, making her way down the stairs slowly with a hand on the banister.

  We have the TV on in the living room, but the volume turned down. As we eat, Po Po keeps asking what’s happening on the show, but she does compliment the food too. Mum looks momentarily less ghostlike when Po Po says she likes the chicken wings.

  Then two men kiss each other on the TV, and everyone at the table turns ghostlike, including me.

  I always freeze when there’s anything gay on television, as though there’s a rainbow searchlight beaming from the screen directly on to my face. I’m used to it being awkward, my parents looking down at their food and saying nothing, and that silence taking on a physical presence, like a clammy fog over our table. But this time, with Po Po here, it’s so much worse.

  The audible pause in chopstick activity rings in my ears.

  This has to be the longest TV kiss I’ve ever witnessed in my life. It’s not even all that passionate – it’s a bit unconvincing, to be honest. If anything, the fakeness of it makes it even more excruciating: here I am, having to endure watching this gay kiss with my family, with my grandmother whom I hadn’t seen in nearly a decade, and it’s not even a good kiss.

  When it finally ends, Dad offers Po Po another chicken wing.

  Mum stands up, her chair scraping against the floor, and walks into the kitchen.

  Po Po frowns. She lets Dad drop the chicken wing into her bowl of half-finished rice without protest and eats it with a focused efficiency, discarding the clean bones in the growing pile on the table.

  Mum emerges from the kitchen with a glass of water. We all carry on with the rest of our meal.

  Probably ten whole minutes later, Po Po says, “It doesn’t seem right for a man to be wearing a floral shirt.”

  The man wearing the floral shirt on TV right now was not involved in the kiss earlier. I’m not sure if he’s another gay character, although it seems highly unlikely to me that there would be so many in a single show.

  “I love florals. I think they look great on everyone,” I say.

  Po Po glances at me. “Hmm? Do you know any boys who wear floral shirts?”

  I watch as it takes Mum four tries to pick up a piece of tofu with her chopsticks, which is unusual for her. “No, but I wish I did.”

  God, boys at my school wore the most boring things. I’ve always thought more boys should dress like Nefarious Warthorn, or, if they can’t be as bold in their sartorial choices as Neff, a floral shirt should be the least they could do, once in a while.

  Po Po’s response to this is to lift a long strip of white flesh from the steamed fish with her chopsticks and put it in my bowl.

  After dinner, I retreat to my room and message Ada at last.

  It turns out that saying I love you to Ada is so much less horrible than watching two men kiss each other on TV while my family sit round me in silence. Baby steps, I guess.

  Ada’s reply is almost instantaneous.

  I press the video button in the top right corner, and after a couple of seconds Ada’s cute shaved head and big tortoiseshell glasses appear. She waves. She’s wearing a robin-egg-blue bow tie and a grey shirt with a subtle white floral print. Every time I see any of her outfits, I feel a spike of something in my gut. I’m pretty sure most of it is just the fact that she’s so gorgeous, but sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to dress the way she does. The confidence that would take. I don’t think I could do it, and maybe that makes me a little jealous of her. But mostly I’m just in awe of how she looks.

  “Speaking of florals,” I say, “you look great!”

  “Thanks.” She smiles. “You do too. So. How was the rest of your day?”

  “I bought the May issue of ER but I haven’t even read it yet because I just couldn’t stop rereading your fic.”

  Ada hides her face behind her hands. “You’re too sweet! We should be talking about how awesome you are. You finished your exams, and you applied for your first job ever!”

  “I just really hope I get it! But it was so frustrating earlier with my mum. She totally forgot that she said I could go to Cornwall with Ritika as long as I get a job.”

  “So she’s not gonna let you go any more?”

  “No, I think I probably still can. I just need to check with my dad, because he’ll have to take a week off work to stay home and keep my grandma company. Which is what I’m supposed to be doing the rest of this summer.”

  “You know my grandma used to live in Cornwall?”

  “Oh cool! I don’t think you’ve said.”

  I know that Ada’s grandma, Rebecca – her dad’s mum, on the white side of her family – moved to the US from England decades ago, but that’s about it. Ada’s mum’s parents are in Nigeria, and Ada doesn’t know them so well.

  I’ve seen Grandma Rebecca a few times before. She lives with Ada, and she sometimes comes into the room when Ada and I are video-chatting. She always says, “Hello, Elsie!” whenever she sees me on screen. She still has an English accent, mostly.

  “Yeah, I told her you were going to Cornwall, and she started reminiscing about it. I gotta say, it kinda feels like she had a crush on another woman back when she was living there.”

  “What?” That is not what I expected. “You think your grandma is bi?”

  “I don’t know if she would call herself that. It’s not like she explicitly said anything. But she was telling me these stories about her friend Theresa, and she showed me some letters Theresa had written to her. I could feel the sapphic vibes. I’d bet my entire bow-tie collection there’d been something going on.”

  “Wow.”

  I wonder if Ada would be able to feel the sapphic vibes if she could see the things she and I wrote to each other through the eyes of someone who was an outsider to our friendship. There’s a possibility that Ada’s just reading too much into things. There’s a possibility that I’m reading too much into things.

  “Yeah, but G-ma lost touch with Theresa soon after she moved here. They only ever exchanged a few letters, and then Theresa stopped replying. That was years and years ago. G-ma got a bit choked up when she told me she didn’t know what had happened to Theresa.”

  “That must suck.”

  As I say this, it jostles up the memory of Joan again. What it was like to reach out in the dark for a friend and find only a void.

  “Man, I’d love to go to Cornwall with you,” Ada says. “First of all, hanging out with you IRL would be dope, obviously. Second of all, imagine if I found Theresa!” Her eyes widen, and then she laughs.

  I’m thinking about so many things at once.

  “I wish you could come.” I squeeze my pillow, out of frame, so Ada doesn’t see. “Do you have the letters?”

  “Oh yeah, I took pictures. G-ma said I could. I told her it would be a good idea to make digital copies! Paper’s so fragile.”

  We chat for a bit more, and after we end the call Ada pings over her photos of the letters from Theresa. I zoom in to read them, but it’s hard to decipher the messy handwriting. I can tell I’m going to get a headache from this.

  I do at least make out Theresa’s address, though, written at the top of each letter. I recognise the name of the town – Padstow – from the little bit of trip planning I’ve done with Ritika. I remember it was recommended on lots of blog posts we found.

  We could definitely go there. We haven’t firmed anything up yet. I still need to get a job before I can book anything. But, if I do, we could go to Padstow. I look up the address on Google Maps, use Street View to look at the house. White walls and a grey roof. Is Theresa still there?

  I run a search on her, but Theresa Bennett is a pretty common name.

  I’ll send the pictures to the printer in my parents’ room tomorrow, when they’re at work, so they don’t ask me about what I’m doing. Maybe, if I read the letters in full, I’ll find more clues.

  The only person I’ve ever written letters to was Joan. When she moved away, she specifically gave me a letter-writing set. Pretty sheets of paper with floral borders and bright, colourful envelopes. So I wrote her letters but she never replied.

  I sent emails too. Nothing.

  So I understand how Ada’s grandma must feel, not knowing what happened to her friend.

  I want to find Theresa.

  I let myself fantasise about it. An old white woman alone in a seaside cottage, watching the boats from her window every day, welcoming me into her home. Boiling water in a kettle on the stove to make me tea.

  “Rebecca Hobbs?” she’ll ask. “Rebecca still thinks about me?”

  And I’ll tell Ada about what I did, and she’ll fly over with her grandma, and Theresa and Rebecca will have a tearful reunion while Ada and I smile shyly at each other.

  It could happen. It really could. It feels like it’s meant to happen. Ritika and I going to Cornwall, and, that being the birthplace – the beginning – of Rebecca and Theresa’s love story, it could be the beginning of mine and Ada’s too. It would be the perfect way for me to show Ada how I feel about her. No screen between us. I could say something smooth like, “If this was one of your fanfics, we would be kissing right now,” and she’d laugh and take my hand and pull me close—

  I throw a pillow over my face and breathe into it. I’m thinking about the scene in Ada’s fic where Zaria and Mayumi kiss, and I’m thinking about waves lapping at the shore, and I’m thinking about what it would be like to see Ada in front of me, to hug her, to feel her body so warm against mine, the beat of her heart as wild and thrilled as my own.

  I need to think about something else.

  I pick up the May issue of Eden Recoiling.

  I thought Eden Recoiling would distract me from thinking about Ada, but it really doesn’t because, the moment I finish reading it, all I want to do is talk to her about it.

  A vine demon just told Neff about the apple tree. There are no apple trees left in this nearly barren world. But the sentient plants seem to believe in a god they imagine to be in the shape of an apple tree, and there have been hints that one does still exist somewhere in the world. Whisperings about what finding this tree would mean.

  And a vine demon just told Neff that he’s seen the apple tree.

  Turns out that this is what Neff’s been looking for all along. He came to Zaria and Mayumi’s little town of Muse early on in the story, but never revealed why. When he found nothing, he stayed because he preferred Muse to his own home, which he didn’t like to talk about. Neffax shippers have written all sorts of fanfic about how Hax is the reason he’s stayed and come up with many different traumatic backstories for Neff.

  I go on Tumblr to look at the fan reactions to the issue – I’ve been on a Tumblr hiatus ever since exams started and avoided spoilers – and eventually I give up trying to restrain myself from messaging Ada.

  I stay up late exchanging messages with Ada while I make an edit for the fanfic that she wrote me. A fox, a pile of books, a bracelet.

  In the end, I go to bed with my mind still completely full of her.