Promise

They painted the room together. They painted amateurly and ruined the old clothes they wore. When his parents moved, Tomas was naturally assigned this room, the smaller of two bedrooms. The walls were apricot. It must have been a girl’s room, his father reasoned. That wouldn’t do. Dana sort of liked it. She suggested keeping it, with mock sarcasm. But it simply wouldn’t do. Tomas and Dana painted the room, supervised by his father who would now and then comment on their messy strokes and remind them to paint in the same direction. It was now a safe cream colour. Tomas was pleased with it, and Dana was pleased that he was pleased. 

They did a pretty sloppy job, admittedly. It has since begun to fade in certain corners, discoloration like weeping sores reveals the old sweet colour. The room also looks smaller. They haven’t tidied it in a while. There is an embarrassing amount of clutter, strewn clothes and an incoherent mass of things under the bed. Cardboard packaging, ready meal trays, and empty Diet Coke cans decorate the scant furniture there is. There is a shelf with a few books, playing cards, a neglected deck of Uno, board games they are always meaning to play but have yet to open. Mildew traces collect around the window frame. Through the open blue curtains the strip of deterrent spikes is visible on the outer sill. Dana has always hated them, those fucking things, she calls them. But the window could do with opening. There is a stuffiness and general body odour inside. Half-eaten orange slices sit on a plate atop the chest-of-drawers.

Tomas was a boy one year above her. They went to the same school but never talked, she only saw him play football on the field at lunch, or sat at the cafeteria tables in a large group. The kids would always gather in the nearby park after school. He was there semi-often enough that she was bound to run into him eventually. 

Autumn. The gold and brown leaves burned, sunlight broke over the trees, gradually diminishing. He sat with his friends, popular boys and girls she had never spoken to before, but they were all at the park now drinking cheap beer and smoking cigarettes stolen from their parents. Tomas looked so cool, sat there smoking in the rec. It was her friend Poppy who went over first, wanting to talk to another boy there, a guy called David. He had a girlfriend but that never stopped Poppy. For once Dana didn’t at all resent her confidence. Thankfully the only obvious place for Dana to sit was next to Tomas. She was quiet and looked awkward, so Tomas made an effort to include her in the conversation. He offered her a drag of his cigarette. She’d never tried one. It tasted awful but she didn’t care how bad it tasted or how it burned her throat. He patted her back when she coughed. She asked to try it again. 

Tomas lays on the bed reading this year’s Booker winner or something like that. He glances up at her, says hi and returns to the page. The TV sounds in the background. 

“Good book?”

He answers with an unhelpful noise. Dana joins him on the bed, back sinking into the stacked cushions, head on his shoulder. He looks up from his book, pecks her on the lips and goes back to reading. The TV plays a film they have watched so many times before. It’s one of his favourites, and so she has made it one of hers. He isn’t even watching right now. That’s alright. It must be a pretty good book. Dana loves more than anything the silence without awkwardness between two people who understand each other. On the screen, the beautiful people look at Los Angeles at dusk and nearly kiss.

The first time Tomas and Dana kissed was in the park beneath the rec shelter. Everyone had gone. They talked. He talked about himself and seemed so impossibly interesting, had such a clear idea of who he was and what he wanted to be, which Dana had never had. She almost blurted out the words I love you then and there. All the better he kissed her before she could get them out. 

She waits for something to happen now but it doesn’t. She gets up and says she’s going to take a shower. 

“Alright.” 

The bathroom fills with steam. The bathroom is also in need of cleaning. Black spots burgeon between the glossy white tiles. On others the paint seems to melt rather than simply peel and various clashing browns bleed through. For all the good it does, she pulls the frayed cord of the extractor unit and it coughs awake and makes that awful whirring noise, still audible over the water loudly hitting the basin. Shampoo smelling generously of coconut bubbles on her scalp. She washes it off and applies conditioner, twisting brown ringlets with her finger. Tomas always complimented her hair. Apparently she looks just like Anne Hathaway in that one film where she has wavy hair. Dana didn’t particularly want to look like anyone else, but Anne Hathaway looked so beautiful in that film. He thought she was beautiful.

Dana returns to the room, exactly how it was, only the curtains are now drawn and the lamp is on. Tomas reads his book and the film drags on as she dries her body and hair. She walks around naked as she prolongs re-dressing, pretends to look for something on the bedside table, inches away from his head. Tomas reads his book. Dana leaves the damp towel dangling between the footboard spindles, half-dresses and lays on the bed making attempts at conversation that go nowhere. Did he hear back after that interview? Has he seen David lately? No, no. But she doesn’t really care about any of that, she just wants him to speak, to say something and look excited or frustrated or anything. 

“Is something going on, Tom? You’ve been, I don’t know, acting weird.”

He looks up, confused. “No, nothing. Nothing’s going on.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Nothing goes on in the room. Nothing has been going on at all lately, she doesn’t remember the last time they went out or met up with anyone or even had a proper, lengthy conversation. Dana sits up on the bed carefully rolling a cigarette, trying not to let any crumbs fall on the carpet. She holds the sleek white thing with her lips, throws a pair of jeans on, then makes for the landing. 

“Are you going?” Tomas calls from the bed. 

She looks back at him. He isn’t looking at her. 

“Yeah.” 

“Alright.” 

It is dark out. The access deck is lit by the warm sodium orange glow of a streetlamp. Below are the small dark gardens of the ground floor occupants, above which hang washing lines and extend shadowy balconies. Dana walks huddled in her black leather bomber, arms crossed and head down. A neighbour, smoking in his doorway, greets her by name and she answers in an awkward whisper.  

“Hi.”

In the brutal stairwell a loud scent hangs. She holds her breath and exits through the big door. Outside is a tiny carpark, lit by the sunny streetlight, white painted lines appear to gleam as do the cars. A rotten odor carries from the outside enclosure where the bins are kept. All this is gone soon when she takes the backroad, all storage lockers and the backs of fences. Behind her the block disappears along with the adjacent flats and maisonettes, soon replaced with brick and pebble dash houses. 

The old school sits empty. The church sits empty. The paths and roads are unusually quiet as she walks through them, then down a narrow path between the church and a house that somehow has always been for sale. The park is this way. Dana goes to sit on the swings and smoke like a teenager and let out tears she only shares with the wildlife and trees. No one is ever around at this time. The kids don’t go to the rec on holidays. 

This is what she does now in the park, in the playground, where it’s close enough to the road and houses to feel safe. It is the mouth of a broader commons, a brief green landscape bisected by a low lapping river obscured by tall grass. There are few lights. Those that there are line the path that takes you further in. Enormous silhouettes of treetops play against the lilac black, the leaves lazily vibrate, a nocturnal bird hidden there howls. Smoke separates in the air and a gust blows it back into her face, making her wince. Dana wipes her eyes. They are dry. 

Tomas and Dana started dating during his last school year. Everyone had gathered at the other end of the common where they let off the fireworks, they sat on a low wall at the back. He was saying how he’d done a few gigs at the local pub and a few in town, he was going to do music in college and probably in uni, or he’d do some other humanities degree and keep doing gigs on the side. He wasn’t stupid, he said, he didn’t want to be famous, only to do what he enjoyed doing, probably settle down at some point, wanted a family, etc. Dana looked at him silently while he was talking and said while he was mid-sentence, “I love you.” 

They don’t set fireworks off over the common anymore. They can’t afford it. Now you have to go to the city proper and deal with the traffic, which is what they did this time last year. But people still let their own off. From here, you have a pretty good view of them. They have begun already. She hears a loud bang and looks up: ignited saltpeter causing colourful carnage in the sky. 

When she gets back, she notices he has cleaned the room, the rubbish has been taken downstairs and dirty clothes are in the hamper. Tomas is still reading, looking to have maybe ten or twenty pages left. For a moment, she simply stands there not saying anything. Tomas slips a receipt into the book and closes it. 

“You’re back”, he says plainly. She doesn’t say anything but takes her jacket off and collapses onto the bed. Tomas sits up on the bed and leans forward, trying to see her face, but it is too buried in the sheets. “Are you staying?” 

“I don’t know.”

“Were you crying?” 

“No.” 

When she left earlier, she wanted him to say something else, or at least look at her when she left the room. He has the same regard for her as toward furniture, or an ornament, things that are simply there and require no further consideration. They haven’t talked, haven’t properly talked, for a while. He used to be a little more clingy, she thinks. Never quite as much as she could be, but still. Dana is too scared to ask if anything has changed, if this is normal. 

Instead she says, “I love you.” 

Tomas says it too. 

Dana sits up. He’s right next to her now. Close. She smells the aftershave he wears, which she has grown to despise, and the reeking orange she was eating earlier, left out atop the drawers. The air is heavy and love is an unwelcome remittance. Dana looks at Tomas with her big soft bronze eyes, then down, then off at the wall, then back at him. He makes a stupid face and leans in. Kisses kisses kisses. Tomas is an artless kisser. Bad even, the result of trying too hard. His tongue practically hits her tonsils. She gags. He doesn’t notice.

The light is off and the room is all indistinct profiles. Clothes are on the floor again. She is supine, legs up, eyes up, staring into the deep dark. Beneath his big breathing body, a black blur, she lies in quiet resignation. This is how it ends, every argument, every good or bad time. It’s his answer to everything, especially arguments. Maybe it’s because his dad doesn’t think boys should talk about their feelings. Maybe this is a kind of dialogue for him. She has learned to let it happen. But the smell. 

“Wait.” 

“What is it?” 

“I need to throw those away.” 

Nothing resumed under the duvet. Tomas snores softly, Dana is fixed on the ceiling and can still make out sloppy swirls in the paint. All at once she slips out from the covers and gets dressed. Tomas is a heavy sleeper, but when Dana slams a drawer, having gathered all the important things, he wakes up. He asks where she is going at this time of night. She is going home. He asks if she’ll be back later. She takes a moment to answer. 

“I don’t know.” 

“Let me know later then”, he says, then suddenly remembers something. “Oh, by the way, I was thinking, since we didn’t do anything today, remember that beer garden on the wharf?” 

No reply. He sits up and looks around in the hollow dark. She is gone.