You to the End Read online

  Table of Contents

  Part One

  Present Day – January 2007

  April 1989 – 10 years old

  Present Day – 11.05 am

  May 1999 - 18 years old

  New Year 1999 – almost the year 2000!

  Present Day – 12.02pm

  May 2000 – Meeting the ‘In-laws’

  Present Day - 1.00pm

  January 2002 – In my room at university

  December 2001 – The Party

  January 2002 – Still in my room at university

  Present Day – 1.30pm

  January 2005

  Present Day – 1.42pm

  January 2005 – A random pub, at some time in the afternoon

  Present Day – 2.03pm

  June 2003 – Moving in Day!

  Present Day – 2.37pm

  April 2006

  10th July 2006

  Still present day – an hour after the pact had been made…

  Part Two

  March 2007

  The First Date SD (since Danny)

  Still in New York

  At the Airport

  Back home

  Lola and Toby

  After Toby’s visit

  Five days later, at the hospital

  The next evening…

  March 30th 2007

  April 3rd

  2nd June 2007 – Lola’s wedding

  10th July 2007

  22nd August 2007 – Three days before my wedding

  2nd September 2007

  18th September 2007

  August 2008

  Part One

  Present Day – January 2007

  As I walked to the shops, I couldn’t help but think of the letters I had received that morning. The first letter was nothing new; a rejection letter yet again. I had received quite a few of these now so this new rejection hadn’t hurt me as much as the first one. Once again, my book of poetry was deemed not good enough to publish and I was finally realising that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t.

  It was the second letter that had physically winded me. A Christmas card to be precise. Sent from old university friends who couldn’t possibly have known that their card, would wound me so deeply.

  I walked through the automatic doors and walked straight to what I needed. Alcohol and bread. Most people would need alcohol and chocolate – or even just the alcohol! I needed carbs and usually lots of them.

  ‘Sharn? Is that you?’ I heard an astonished voice say. I looked at the voice, my heart sinking. Yep. It was my uncle. Just when I really didn’t want to see anyone I knew, out popped a member of the family. They were everywhere! It wasn’t enough that several members lived down the road from me, meaning therefore that I would bump into them all the time. No, they also phoned, texted, emailed and invited themselves round at any time that suited them. Now, don’t get me wrong, I loved my family dearly! But at times, I just needed space. Today was one of those days but it looked as though I wasn’t going to get any

  ‘Oh yes, hi’, I answered back unenthusiastically.

  ‘Well, what you doing ere eh?’ He asked, looking around me suspiciously, like I was a naughty schoolgirl, not at school. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work? And what’s with you? Why you look so rough?’

  I sighed. Nothing like a true West Indian to use words that cut you like glass.

  ‘No, I wasn’t feeling very well so I took the day off. You?’

  ‘Ah, me needed some fresh air. Can’t be sitting in an office for hours on end!’ he laughed loudly.

  ‘Ha ha’, I weakly joined in. It was 10am. And I wasn’t sure why I was laughing as it really wasn’t funny.

  ‘So how are you doing hmm?’ He accompanied the familiar words with a pitying pat on the arm.

  ‘Fine Uncle. Just fine’, I grinned as hard as I could, desperate for the conversation to end.

  ‘We all so sorry to hear of da sad news. We all loved D-.’

  ‘Ok Uncle, I need to go now! Bye!’ and flinging down my tiger loaf, I raced out of the shop.

  As I returned home, I tried what I could to calm down. I started reading a book in but the words just wouldn’t sit in my head. I flung the book against the wall and stormed down the steep, carpeted stairs. Walking across the soft white rugs in the front room, I stood in front of the wooden mirror that hung on the wall. Looking in the mirror, I could see the disappointment and sadness etched across my face. My long black curls hung limply down my back, greasy from not having been washed for several days. My light brown skin looked sallow and spotty. The last few days had been tough and my usual careful routines to keep my skin soft and clean, had gone out of the window. I groaned at my image in disgust.

  I walked over to the sofa and sat down with a thud. I missed him. I missed Danny. I missed the smell of him, his wacky sense of humour, the way he hugged me, the arguments... I missed the whole damn lot. And the devastating realisation was that there was no one to blame apart from ourselves. There was no other man or other woman. We hadn't killed our relationship with monotony and routine. We hadn't even had a huge argument to end all arguments. We had just stopped. Stopped being a couple. Stopped listening to each other. We had forgotten how to love each other and in the end, it just became too much of a hurdle to overcome. So we did the proper thing and broke up. Yet my heart was broken. There was no doubt about that. Danny was the best and brightest spot in my life and I had lost him. What was I to do?

  Shaking my head fiercely, I grabbed the telephone. There was no way I was going to sit here alone and wallow in self-pity. I had done enough pitying for one day – by myself that is. I phoned the only person I knew would come round without giving me a hard time… the only person whom I would call in my time of need…

  ‘Lola? I need you. It’s life or death’. And I put down the phone. Grinning to myself, I wondered how long it would take for Lola to get here.

  The answer wasn’t long in coming. Tyres screeching fifteen minutes later, Lola pulled up in my driveway. She jumped out of her shiny, metallic green mini cooper and raced to the door.

  I loved Lola. She was the one constant person in my life who had always been there for me. Lola was the type of friend who was intensely loyal – but also told it the truth, no matter how brutal. She was the total opposite to me in every way. Lola was tall, skinny and blonde whereas I was short, slightly overweight and had ridiculously fizzy hair. As if I didn’t have enough to cope with! Lola however was always saying how jealous she was of my figure. She said I was curvy and had an hourglass figure. I thought of myself as fat and unattractive – with long curly hair. Lola always scoffed at that; saying I was like a young Whitney Houston – I wish! I never believed her though – she was just trying to be nice. Lola on the other hand looked like Jennifer Aniston. Although she hated Jennifer Aniston so I never said that to her face. But Lola was stunning – and she had a personality to match.

  Lola was straight to the point and talked about her feelings non-stop; whereas I liked to remain in the background, content with Lola taking centre stage. I was generally a positive, happy person – a reflection of my great childhood maybe. Lola on the other hand, well…She had been traumatised by her dad’s numerous divorces and her mum’s numerous affairs. Both of her parents had tried to buy her love with the ton of money they had acquired and that’s how Lola had grown up. She had always been desperate for affection when she was younger, but she never received it. She had been brought up by baby-sitters and strangers and was now completely cynical when it came to love and men. She wasn’t always like that though. I suppose the last few years had really got to her – as they did me. But despite our differences, we had been best friends since primary school – and I loved her deeply.

  ‘Sharn! What’s going on? What’s the emergency? Who’s dying? Is it your brother? I knew the womanising would get him one day! I told him that one day a woman would get the better of him, now it’s finally happened hasn’t it? Come on, tell me, is he in hospital? Has his penis fallen off? What? Tell me!’ Lola gasped for breath, waiting expectantly for an answer.

  I chuckled. ‘Calm down Lol’, I said, patting her back in an attempt to calm her down. ‘Unfortunately for you, Toby is fine. I think. In fact, I have no idea where he is. But that’s not why I called you over. I just wanted a chat’.

  ‘A chat?’ Exclaimed Lola. ‘A chat? You pull me out of work, tell me it’s an emergency – life and death if I recall – and you tell me you just want a chat?’ Lola flopped onto my sofa for added dramatic effect. ‘You want a chat?’ Lola shook her head disbelievingly. ‘A chat’. She tilted her head to one side. A gleam of devilment came into her eyes. ‘So you don’t know where Toby is eh? Bet he’s somewhere dreaming of me!’

  I looked at her in wonderment and gave a sigh. Lola had been in love with my brother since she was ten. He was three years older than us and had been the object of her affections for the last sixteen years. They had even had a fling once. I shuddered in remembrance. Gosh that was a bad time. My brother had done his usual act – slept with her, told her she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen – and ran off to Europe for a year. She was a fool to have fallen for it in my eyes. She knew what he was like – everyone knew what he was like.

  Leaving Lola to her fantasies of Toby coming back and declaring his love for her, I walked to the kitchen to make us some tea. The problem is that actually my brother was a really nice guy. And I could grudgingly see that yes, he was indeed attractive. But he just won’t settle down until he’s found ‘the one’. A proble
m a lot of us had really. This ridiculous ‘I’ll know when I meet them’ notion. I mean, how will you know? Are you suddenly struck down by lightning as a sign? Are you struck dumb by the wonder of ‘the one’ who’s now standing in front of you? Do you stop eating and drinking because you now need no other sustenance? After all, you’re now with ‘the one’ – do you need anything else?

  All I can say is that it wasn’t like that for Danny and me.

  I sighed deeply. Yet again. I should take up yoga with all this breathing.

  Walking back into the room, I gazed at Lola with affection. She was now laying spread eagled on the sofa, humming ‘The Wedding march’ to herself.

  ‘Lola! Stop fantasising! I called you round talk about me, not your crazy loony fantasies about my brother!’

  Lola sat up slowly, obviously just waiting for the daydream to come to a satisfactory conclusion in her head. ‘Right then. What’s all this about? And I would thank you to not call me crazy. I’m not the one who’s talking about life and death for no reason so ha!’

  ‘Ok, ok, fair enough. But it’s a matter of my life – and death. The death of my life to be more exact. I got another rejection letter this morning.’

  Lola quickly went to me and hugged me. ‘Oh Sharn, I’m sorry. But you shouldn’t give up, you need to keep trying’.

  ‘That’s not all though Lol’, I said quietly. Pushing my hair back I told her honestly, ‘I’m just not happy. I know that perhaps one day my book will be published. I even know that one day I’ll feel happy again. But right now, I just feel like crap and I want to know something. Where did all go wrong? When did I stop being young and carefree and become this woman who stays at home, alone, refusing to go out, waiting for life to begin?’

  Lola sighed deeply herself. Perhaps she should take up yoga. I knew what she thinking though. She was thinking that I was feeling like this because of Danny. My Danny. The Danny who left me broken hearted a six months ago. The Danny who everyone said was ‘the one’ for me. Danny.

  ‘You know what Sharn? I’m so sorry’.

  ‘For what?’ I asked miserably. ‘None of this is your fault’.

  ‘Yes it is,’ she nodded seriously. ‘It’s my fault entirely. If only I had let you marry Tom, this may never have happened’.

  I looked at her, stunned. And then started giggling uncontrollably. I had forgotten about Tom…

  April 1989 – 10 years old

  ‘Sharn?’

  ‘Yes Tom?’

  ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘Erm, ok. When?’

  ‘Today at lunchtime. Outside the gazebo.’

  ‘But don’t I need to wear something special? Isn’t that what people do when they get married?’

  Tom thought long and hard about this one.

  ‘I’ve got my t-shirt from my P.E Kit in my bag. How about you wear that?’

  I shuffled my feet. This needed thinking about.

  ‘Ok’.

  That was my first wedding proposal… and I couldn’t wait to tell Lola about the wedding! She would be my bridesmaid of course. But I didn’t want to tell anyone else; Miss Jacobs might find out and try to put a stop to it. She had already stopped Michelle and David from getting married and I didn’t want that from happening to me. I found Lola in the cloakroom, looking at her Kylie Minogue stickers.

  ‘Lola! Guess what?’ I whispered excitedly.

  ‘What?’ asked Lola, disinterestedly.

  ‘I’m getting married today!’

  Lola’s head shot up. ‘Huh?’

  ‘I’m getting married to Tom! He just asked me in the class.’

  Lola slammed her book closed and walked down the corridor.

  ‘Lola?’ I didn’t understand why she didn’t reply to me.

  She still wasn’t talking to me after assembly. I kept trying to find out what was wrong, but she just walked off with Michelle all the time.

  I talked to Michelle just before lunch – and my wedding.

  ‘Michelle, why isn’t Lola talking to me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Michelle, tossing her long red hair over her shoulder. ‘She just said that she didn’t want to be your best friend anymore, and that me and her could now be best friends’.

  ‘What?’ I started crying. ‘She’s breaking friends with me? Because I’m getting married?’

  ‘I guess so,’ Michelle said, looking a bit scared now that I was crying. ‘Shut up Sharn, a teacher might see me and think I’ve done something to you’.

  I couldn’t stop crying though and I cried all the way through eating my lunch in the dinner hall. All the dinner ladies were really worried about me and kept asking me what was wrong. I could see Lola looking at me from where she was sat with Michelle, but Michelle kept linking arms with her and pulling her away from me.

  After lunch, I sat outside the gazebo waiting for Tom to arrive. I had stopped crying by then, but I was still looking pretty snotty. Not exactly looking the prettiest on my wedding day. I sat there, picking the grass off the floor.

  ‘I don’t want you and Tom to get married,’ a small voice said from up above.

  Lola was stood there, nervously chewing on her hair.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  Lola sat down next to me. ‘Well, my Mum and Dad got married and now all they do is fight. And Dad said yesterday that he’s moving away and if you get married then you might have to move away as well and I don’t want you to’. She then promptly burst into noisy wet tears.

  ‘Don’t cry Lola, don’t cry!’ I patted her back hard. ‘I promise I won’t marry Tom. I don’t really want to marry him anyway. He wouldn’t give me his Kylie sticker. Let’s hide quickly before he comes!’ And with that, we ran behind the fences and hid. Tom was a little bit angry with me, but when I gave him my crisps, he forgave me…

  Present Day – 11.05 am

  ‘… and you married Tom in Year 6 anyway you cow!’

  Lola held up her hands in surrender and laughed. ‘Yes, I must admit, by that time I had matured a little and realised what a good catch Tom was!’

  ‘But he was mine in the first place!’ I protested. ‘If I had married him, I would have got to go to the cinema with his rich parents! As it was, you got to! It was your plan all along wasn’t it?’

  ‘Ha ha, ha, yes it was, I’m that devious. Besides I was in love with Toby by that point remember? Anyway, perhaps if I had let you marry Tom all those years ago, Danny would have never entered your life.’

  I sighed, the laughter falling gently away. ‘Sometimes I wish I had never met Danny,’ I stated flatly. ‘But I think Danny was always going to enter my life, no matter what.’

  Lola touched my hand. ‘Yes, he was. And remember you had wonderful times with him.’

  ‘Yes I know,’ I said impatiently. ‘I know that. I’m not upset that I was ever with him. I’m upset that I’m not with him now! Or at least I’m upset that everything has seemed to fall apart since he left.’

  ‘No it hasn’t,’ Lola said firmly. ‘I swear you must see the worst in everything and everyone!’ ‘No way’ I objected loudly. ‘That’s not true! I’m generally a positive, happy person. I always look for the best in people’.

  ‘Pah’ Lola snorted. ‘You didn’t even know Danny back in Sixth Form, yet you hated him. You took one look, saw he was good-looking and assumed he was a player!’

  ‘He was a player – he just loved women! He would only talk to the ultra-beautiful girls, even if they had no personality!’ I retaliated.

  ‘He was not!’ Lola replied hotly. ‘You were just too busy judging him. Do you know that the moment he saw you, he tried to talk to you?’

  ‘He did not,’ I dismissed. ‘He didn’t make any attempt to talk to me until months after he arrived at Sixth Form’.

  ‘Nooo!’ cried Lola. ‘Actually that’s not true… he did try to talk to you. Cast your mind back to that very first day of Sixth Form… What do you remember?’

  I laughed. I remembered that first day well. I had been so nervous despite the fact that most of my friends were going to Sixth Form with me. Lola had arrived at my house early. She had really made an effort that day. She was wearing a gorgeous denim skirt with a v-neck red top that emphasised her slim waist. Her blond hair had been teased into soft ringlets that framed her heart-shaped face. She was wearing just a touch of make-up to complete the outfit. Needless to say, I felt like a total frump beside her. I too had tried to make myself look as good as possible. I had my usual dark blue, flared jeans on and had worn my favourite black top that slimmed me down as much as possible. I had put my hair into a mass of curls on top of my head, with long tendrils hanging down around my face. I had worn as much make up as my Mum had let me wear – which wasn’t much! But I had thought I was looking quite good – until I saw Lola!