A VERY BLUE THING - Chapters 1 & 2!

Hello!

Today marks 99 days until my third novel, A VERY BLUE THING, is published - August 27th, 2019. It's my longest novel to date (about 83,000 words) and follows two teenage characters, Damon Hope and Cruz Aconi. They end up living next door to each other in a coastal town, and subsequently fall in love. But they have a complex relationship, with lots of family drama thrown their way. The novel explores topics such as social class and sexuality, death and self-harm, betrayal and love. I'm so incredibly proud of this strange, deep, book. I throughly hope you enjoy the first two chapters, exclusively here today...

CHAPTER 1 — DAMON

“Damon?” I hear my mum call. “Could you just grab one more box?”

I roll my eyes, but agree. I cannot wait until all this moving mess is over.

Rolling up my sleeves, I walk back into the house and up the old stairs, greeting you as soon as you set foot through the front door. It’s an old house, but it’s home and it’s ours and I love it — my childhood home, the only place I’ve ever lived.

But now my parents want to move…

They say they want a more quiet life, by the ocean, in a peaceful neighbourhood, but for an eighteen year old guy — well, which eighteen year old in their right mind would agree to it? Giving up a busy life in a city, in the capital of England, surrounded by other city-dwellers – for a basically semi-retired life surrounded by dozens of old people?

The answer? Not me.

So, I shake my head as I reach the landing on the second floor of our London townhouse, and begrudgingly yank a large cardboard box from a stack pressed up against the wall.

“Hey! Be careful jerking that about like that,” Mum hollers, appearing from thin air. “They’re your grandmother’s old trophies.”

“Trophies?” I repeat, scrunching up my face. “Trophies for what?”

“For darts,” Mum says, casually as though this is the obvious answer to a stupid question.

Frowning, I turn back around and make my way downstairs, having to guess where the steps are because I’ve had my vision impaired by all the cardboard. I swear Gran has never mentioned playing darts to me before — but then I suppose she’s “played” that many different things it’s not really a surprise that this slipped her mind. I imagine she’s lost track of everything she may have won trophies for over the years.

The thing with Gran is, she’ll find something new to do, get obsessed with it, become amazing at it, then never do it again. It used to be in sports, such as tennis or golf — and apparently darts — but now she’s older the obsessions come in more random varieties, such as collecting mugs or fruit bowls, and then we’ll have hundreds of them being delivered every week that she’s ordered through the magazines she reads. As you’ve probably gathered, Gran lives with us. She has done for about four years now. We converted our basement into a small flat for her, and she loves it. Dad often likes to joke with people by telling them that his wife’s locked her mother-in-law in the basement. Mum hates his jokes.

Dad, however, thinks they’re hilarious. He’s a banker. He’ll still be commuting into London to work, but he’s hoping to cut his hours gradually and slowly wind down. Mum is about a decade or so younger than Dad, and has been a stay-at-home mum since the day I was born, but now I like to refer to her as a “real housewife of London”. She rolls her eyes every time I say it, but I know she secretly kind of loves it — and that’s because she knows it’s also kind of true.

She has a group of friends who, I say, have too much spare time on their hands. They argue about random things which don’t really matter, and usually these arguments take place over house parties or dinners out, and they gossip about it the next day at yoga or whilst on exercise bikes. Dad finds all the drama funny, but as long as Mum is happy, Dad is happy, which I guess is sweet. Gran laughs at Mum and reminds her that her socialising, when she was Mum’s age, was done over the garden fence, or at the laundrette. Mum likes to remind her back that this isn’t the olden days anymore, which always earns some cheeky remark back from Gran.

As you can tell, life is good really. In fact, I actually quite like it, which is why I really, really do not want to move. I don’t want to leave my childhood home.

My friends.

Everything I know.

“Get a move on, Damon.”

I turn around and realise I’ve come to a stop in the middle of the stairs. Dad has about four boxes stacked up and so his low voice is rather muffled.

“Sorry,” I mumble.

“God, never become a removal man, will you?”

I laugh and make my way back out of the house and up to a large white van parked on the street. I slide the box of random trophies into the back of it, then help Dad with his four.

“Excited?” he says, as we take a step back.

“Not really,” I say, but I give him a small smile.

He tilts his head to the side, then rests a hand on my shoulder. “You’re a good lad, you know. It’ll all turn out okay. And you can still come back to London as much as you like. We’ll help you out with the money if you need it.”

“I know, I know,” I reply. “It… it just won’t be the same, that’s all.”

“Life would be boring if it was always the same, Damon,” Dad smiles back, annoyingly. “Sometimes you need a bit of a change to spice things up.”

With this he ruffles his hand through my hair, which I hate but I laugh at anyway because I know he knows I hate it, and he vanishes back into the house.

He’s a nice man, my Dad — he’s older and wiser than the majority of my friend’s fathers, with the interests of our little family always at the forefront of his decisions. I do wish I could be as excited about this move as Dad (and Mum, too, for that matter), because I’d love to be able to please him, but no matter how hard I try, I just can’t bring myself to be so.

I look up at our home.

It’s tall and white, with large windows and a black front door, two lush green trees set in marble plant pots, grey slate surrounding their trunks, sat either side of it with steps leading up.

A glamorous house, really.

Luxurious white gargoyles are carved into the stone at the top of the house, near the roof, and a bizarre collection of angels and yet more gargoyles stare back down at me amongst the spirals in the wall, the roof tiles and chimney pots. It’s not until now, I realise, that I’ve never noticed just how intense the stares of those gargoyles are.

They’re actually pretty ugly.

“Right, Damon,” comes the voice of my mother again. “Enjoy the last looks of the house. The removal men are going to do the last little bits for us later this afternoon, so we can go now.”

As she speaks, she helps Gran down the steps from the front door, and toward our waiting car parked behind one of the lorries. Gran smiles a sort of understanding smile in my direction as she passes by.

I smile, albeit faintly, then look back up at the house, and as I do so I tell myself when I’m older, and I’ve got my own money, I’ll buy this house back and move myself back home, back to London.

Somehow, that little thought, even if the logical part of me knows it’s far-fetched, makes everything seem a little better, so I cling onto the thought as Dad emerges through the door and closes it behind him. I nod at him as we turn around together and make our way toward the car.

Mum is in the back with Gran already, and I get into the front with Dad. He turns the key into the ignition of the Range Rover and we wait for the removal van in front of us to pull off so we can follow along behind it, with another van trailing us. It’s like we’re a weird sort of convey. I wonder if this is what it felt like to be Barack Obama, with the protection for the President of the United States surrounding his car.

I frown at that thought and bring myself back to reality just in time to catch a glimpse of our house, of my home, as we start to drive off, around the large park in front of these city townhouses, and to the busy streets of Central London.

I guess then that that is that.

I sigh and slump back into my seat, as Mum busies herself finishing her make-up, Gran falls asleep, and Dad takes it as an opportunity to make a bunch of business calls via his Bluetooth headset, not wanting to miss any time from work despite the move — and a wish for a quitter life with less time spent working.

Typical.

And, in true dramatic fashion, the November day turns from a fresh one to an overcast one, and by the time we hit the motorway it’s torrential rain and I can pretend I’m in a music video, featured within some montage, mourning the loss of my past, and just being overly over-the-top.

But I still feel it’s justified, and so I carry on anyway.

CHAPTER 2 — CRUZ

“Extra sugar? Those things are basically made of sugar!”

A sharp elbow jabs into my ribs and I jolt forward, a small smirk blossoming on my lips.

“Certainly, Sir,” I say, reaching out the trailer to grab a white paper bag. I sprinkle on more sugar — an excessive amount of sugar, to prove a point — then hand it over to the gentleman. The man smiles, then walks away, stuffing his hand into the bag as though the doughnuts would vanish before his eyes if he didn’t get to them quickly enough.

“I don’t know why we have to treat them like they’re customers at some fancy London restaurant. We’re only a van by the sea — ouch!”

“That serves you right!”

“Brenda!”

“Don’t you Brenda me. I’ll have you know, Mr. Cruz Aconi, that my family and I have been running this business for decades, and it’s a damn lot more than ‘only’ a van by the sea to me.”

I smile at Brenda, then turn to look out the van, sliding my hand through my hair to sort it out. The damp of the air makes it go funny and gross. It’ll need re-dying blond on the weekend anyway, I think to myself. Loud waves crash behind the van, but as we’re positioned facing the seafront road, I can only hear but not see it. It’s funny that I spend all this time by the sea, and yet can never watch it, instead having to look out to the closed-down chippy across the way.

Rain starts to fall, a fog begins to roll in. It’s November after all, as I like to remind Brenda, and who comes to the beach in November? Only people who have enough time on their hands to complain that their already-lathered-in-sugar doughnuts don’t have enough sugar on them, evidently…

But as much as I joke about the van and enjoy complaining about it, Brenda knows I’m not being serious. She knows I have a lot of respect for her. She’s a hard worker, Brenda, and she’s taught me a lot.

The truth, though, is that this was never supposed to be a part of the plan. Working in this food van on an empty November day was not something I had ever envisioned happening. I thought I’d be here for a few months over the summer holidays, save up a bit of money, then go off to university like the rest of my friends.

Yet here I am — the first semester nearly over for Christmas and I’m still here, missing out on it, serving food in a box.

I don’t really know how it happened. I decided at the last minute that university life just wasn’t for me — but, at the same time, I didn’t know what else was for me instead. Mum wasn’t too happy — she had been making a point for months, years even, before I had started to think about going to university in the first place, about how I would be the first Aconi in the family to be going off to uni, and that she couldn’t be more proud of me for it.

When I told her I didn’t want to go, she tried to persuade me to defer it for a year, but I knew that even if I took a year out, I still wouldn’t want to go. If anything, a year out of education would make me want to get back into it even less, and besides — I just knew. I just knew deep down that university wasn’t the path I was destined to take.

But now?

Now I’m not really too sure what path my life is even taking.

In fact, I don’t even know if I’m on a path.

I just seem to be going with the flow. Which, as much as I would never say this out-loud in front of Mum, is a pretty stress-free life the majority of the time. I have the money I earn to be able to do what I want, and I pay Mum rent too.

I guess I kind of just have mixed feelings about it sometimes.

“I think we’ll shut up for the day, Cruz,” comes Brenda’s voice, and I turn back round to look at her. She’s shorter than me, with great parrot-hoop ear-rings swinging around her face and black hair tied up in a bun, contrasting with the bright red lipstick slapped on her lips and the fake tan embedded into the wrinkles of her face. “I don’t think we’re gonna get much more business today.”

“No?”

“No. Go on, get yourself home. I’ll shut up.”

“You sure?”

“Sure as I can be. Bus doesn’t come for another eighteen minutes anyway so it’ll give me something to do whilst I wait.”

I nod. “Thanks Brenda,” I say, as she shoves a bag of free doughnuts into my hands then busies herself tidying. I spin and let myself out the small door, bobbing down the steps and slipping my Parka coat on as I go, pulling the hood up around my face so the faux fur conceals me from the world.

Walking down the seafront is cold and horrible, and the wind gives me ear-ache, so clambering onto a busy, noisy, steamed-up with too-many-children-climbing-around bus actually seems somewhat inviting.

I don’t take much notice of anything else on the way home. The bus travels along the coast, into the town, through a few fields, before emerging out onto my street. I live in a nice place round town — I only live with my Mum, not my Dad, as they split up a couple of years ago, but Mum is a manager of her own clothing store, and so she makes a good living. Which, to be honest, whilst it is really good, just makes me feel crappier that I didn’t go to university sometimes. Dad, too, has a good job and gives us a sizeable amount every month as maintenance for me.

The fact that both my Mum and my Dad have well-paying jobs just seems to add salt to the wound that I don’t have a job that either of them approve of, or – as, Mum likes to say – “direction”. I hate that word: “direction”. Like, what does that even mean? It’s not my fault if I don’t know where I’m heading. How can you have any direction if you’re unsure of a destination, I think to myself? Still, Mum keeps insisting that I better find this “direction” sometime soon.

The bus reaches the end of the street, and I press the bell quickly, and it screeches to a halt.

“Be quicker next time, mate,” the bus driver calls back.

I roll my eyes, and step off the bus, the doors sliding open.

As the bus pulls away, I turn my back on it and start walking back up the street. As I do, I find myself taking more notice of my surrondings that usual.

The houses are all detached, with gardens, trees and little driveways. Honestly, they look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book — all a little bit too perfect and a bit over-manicured, as though they can’t be real. Nothing ever changes around here.

Although, as I look further up the road toward my house, I notice something is different. There’s some removal vans and a Range Rover near my front garden, and as I begin to get closer to home, I realise it’s the house next door which is being moved in to. I had almost forgotten it had been up for sale a while.

So that’s great.

New neighbours means new people Mum will become friends with, because she somehow becomes friends with everyone, and I’m sure they’ll be very successful too because the only people who live around here are successful people, and Mum will probably spout the “he’s just working as a temp at a food place, just to save up for a bit of travelling before university”, because she can’t stand to admit the truth her only son isn’t currently doing anything with his life. Honestly, the way Mum acts sometimes about my job and the lies she makes up, you’d think I worked selling my body for sex or as a gang mob master or something ridiculous like that.

As I reach home, I see them for the first time. I pull my hood up further to try and avoid them, as though pulling my hood up will work like Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak.

The last thing I want is a conversation with them.

The man — he looks like a banker — walks out the house and passes the new keys to his wife. An old lady follows up behind.

They’re all smiles at their new future together.

Looks like a pretty standard family to me. Nothing extraordinary, but nothing bad either.

Just a nice couple with a mother-in-law in tow.

Then, everything changes.

A boy steps out from behind the van.

And my eyes are instantly magnetised to him.

He’s carrying a large cardboard box which covers his vision, but he’s in full sight of mine, and whoa is he cute.

But he can’t see me.

I pull my hood further around my face, if that’s even possible, and curse when it’s blown down as I reach my front door, but I make it and — besides — he had a large box in front of his face; there were no way he saw me.

At least, I hope, because once more — whoa.

He.

Is.

Cute.