Chapter Text
Ellie’s invitation comes on an unremarkable Tuesday evening that suddenly shoots itself into the orbit of extraordinary.
Between patches of signal as she lurches through the belly of the city she calls home, the Whatsapp notification suddenly defaces her lockscreen like graffiti, and she fights her uneasy feeling and unsteady heart rate as she waits for a wifi connection, confined to the prison of the first sentence Veronica has typed out.
By the time her phone springs back to life with functions beyond its most basic, she is left staring at the chat in a numb purgatory even as people around her pass by and leave the train. The group chat in question has thrown itself to the top of the list, crawled up from the depths from which it had plunged. If it were a book it would be well-thumbed but covered in dust. A new message suddenly flickers like a match in front of her eyes too-late as she taps on the chat; she would have braced herself more if she’d registered it.
Briefly continuing to pretend as though the latest message hasn’t been seen, she scrolls up to find the original- one from Veronica, peppered with exclamation marks and heart emojis. It’s an invite to her and Tia’s engagement party in roughly two months, the date put in bold to make for easy skim-reading and an offer extended for them all to stay over on the night. In spite of herself, Ellie finds herself smiling and indulgently scrolling up- the reveal of their earth-shifting life event just over a month ago had been the last time the chat had been used, and they had all been united in joy and excitement and awe of the diamond-encrusted emerald that Veronica had sent them a picture of.
They had all been on the same side for the first time in about a year.
And the person who had a hand in that makes her presence known with the message posted underneath Veronica’s invitation. A reaction image from an old Celebrity Big Brother season, a joke, an enthusiastic acceptance of the offer.
Even if it didn’t have her name on it, she’d know it was from Lawrence.
Ellie’s stomach twists as the messages from the others fly in and she slips her phone into her pocket, finally creaking to life like the Tin Man and leaving the train. She makes her way to the barriers and kicks herself for her thoughtless decision as she retrieves her phone again for her train ticket, presents it to the machine and slides herself through the turnstile. Head buzzing with thoughts, she’s about halfway to the exit before she turns on her heel so sharply she almost collides with a young Mum with a pushchair in her haste to change course in the direction of M&S. She buys a packet of those serrano ham and manchego roll-ups everyone’s raving about on TikTok, a bag of crisps the size of her head, and a bottle of whatever white wine comes in below the seven pound price bracket.
Home nestles in the heart of the city, where the skyscrapers pile high around her like prison cells or labyrinth walls. It’s not a far walk from the station, and it goes even quicker when she’s picking up memories that’ve fallen out of the neatly compartmentalised filing cabinets she keeps in the recesses of her mind. She shoves them back into place haphazardly only to knock out three more: a drive along the coast in the sun, a walk back from a fancy restaurant in the dark beneath streetlight spotlights, a night between white sheets where kisses crashed against collarbones and nails dug into porcelain skin. So it goes until she pushes the entry code into the front door of her block and soars in the elevator up to her floor, situated in a sort of purgatory between the buildings and the clouds.
Crossing the threshold between corridor and flat, Ellie steps out of her heels and thuds her bag against the countertop of her breakfast bar, then fishes into it and pulls out the charcuterie joints. She harshly rips back the plastic and shoves one in her mouth, disregarding any notions of savouring it or drawing out the sampling process. Concluding they’re decidedly not worth the hype, she proceeds to devour two more.
She scrapes out a wine glass from the kitchen cupboard and not so much pours but fires the wine into it with all the force of a firefighter’s hose. As she’s doing this, her phone lights up and her heart plunges into her heels before she sees A’whora’s name. From what she can see from the distance across the countertop it’s some form of message saying she’s missing her and asking her if she’s going to Veronica and Tia’s. Ellie watches her phone consume the notification in darkness and concludes that she’ll open the message, form a reply in her head that doesn’t even make it to the keyboard, then in a fortnight finally send her something with a lame excuse about just seeing this! attached, because apparently that’s the kind of person she is now.
She carries her spoils over from her kitchen to her living room area, even though they’re both just one room that she pays well over the odds for. Thudding herself down against her sofa, she stares steadfastly at the view she once swore she’d never be sick of and takes an almighty gulp of wine. She’s almost routinely been having this thought that it’s all just bricks and mortar and glass of varying shapes and sizes and, equally as routinely, she forcibly shoves it out of her head.
Letting her eyes glaze over, she turns over the thoughts crowding her head, trying to ignore the involuntary way she likens it to turning over a big rock in a garden and seeing all the bugs fly out from under it. She weighs up various excuses in her mind and almost wants to laugh at how shit they seem even to her. Tia and Veronica will understand, will go along with it and say they’ll miss her and that they’re gutted she can’t make it even though the obvious reason looms heavy over their heads like a fucking Looney Tunes-style anvil. Job done.
Ellie switches something ITV2 and mind-numbing on because the canned laughter fills the flat with artificial life and makes her feel less alone. Not that she does feel alone. She is enjoying life, and this move has been a good decision, one she would never regret. She has a beautiful flat with a beautiful view and a job with a pay that keeps her walking a tightrope between comfortable and floundering, which is a thrilling and fun aspect to add to her life. It’s one she never experienced back in Glasgow anyway. And isn’t change always a good thing, and what’s-for-you-won’t-go-by-you , and you-are-exactly-where-you-need-to-be-right-now? She’s got friends that aren’t so much friends as people she can hang out after work with, but it’s okay because she has fun once she’s there and they all go to places where they can drink and dance, and even if Ellie looks at her smudged reflection through tears in her bathroom mirror at the end of the night then that’s only because she’s drunk too much tequila.
She’s started seeing this guy, although it’s been about a month now so she supposes he’s her boyfriend. She doesn’t know and she has no desire to clarify with him which they are. She fires him a message asking how his day was, not because she cares but because it’s the done thing. His reply comes back almost instantly- “ good, urs? ”- and Ellie doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the disappointed “ugh” she lets out in response.
With no other conversation forthcoming she dispassionately initiates some dirty texting. He will probably implode with excitement and the whole thing will cement her as the textbook cool girl. It will become a story he tells down the pub with the lads who will proclaim her wife material off the back of a few lines of text on a screen. Anything to make sure that he is the one that needs her , because the opposite would be sad and pathetic and it’s far too tangible for Ellie’s liking. Hence why she does shit like this.
Sure enough, the reply is eager and offputting. Ellie shoves her hand under the waistband of her trousers, tries to will herself to feel any sort of enthusiasm for this interaction before abandoning it as a lost cause and resigning herself to the fact that all this is going to be for his benefit. She types something out about touching herself and wonders if there’s some sort of annual prize for the thinnest a truth has ever been stretched.
While she waits on his reply she taps on her group chat again, ostensibly to re-read Veronica’s invite but soon finding herself deep in the throes of nostalgia as she digs up old messages like buried treasure. She can hardly believe it’s all them - the excitable texts, the retelling of stories, the plans of nights out and long weekends that have since evolved into memories and photos and receipts for nineteen espresso martinis, four vodka cokes and a margerita. The time Tia put a pizza in the oven when she'd stumbled in from a night out and sent them all a picture of the charred remains and a voicenote of the smoke detector noise the next morning. The day after they’d all ordered from that dodgy-looking chicken shop on JustEat and were all going through what Tayce had dubbed “shartageddon”, while Bimini ended themself laughing in response. The night they’d all gone out for A’whora’s birthday and had all got lost around London, texting each other in broken, incoherent syntax and howling at it all looking back the next day through a haze of ibuprofen and Kool n’ Soothe patches. And no matter how she tries to deny it, Lawrence is tied to each of these memories like an anchor and Ellie feels herself being dragged down with her, back to thoughts of what could have been.
By the time she’s journeyed through years of old conversations, she’s quite forgotten to finish what she’d started and there’s messages piling up from that boy in her inbox, the digital equivalent of a letterbox stuffed full of flyers. She lets out a snort and leaves him on read, happy that she’s done exactly what she’d set out to do and flushing away the slightest tinge of guilt and self-loathing with another swig of wine. She pours the rest of the bottle she’s been ploughing her way through over the course of the evening into her glass, childishly turning it completely on its end even after she knows it’s empty and watches the last droplets plunge into the glass.
Through white rioja clouds she allows herself to wonder how things would pan out if she actually did go to the engagement party. Perhaps for one night they could let bygones be bygones and go back to the way things were, as if nothing had ever happened and the past year was simply a blip. They would banter like they always used to and laugh and catch up and when Lawrence would lean in at the end of the night after one too many rum and cokes Ellie would gently place a hand on her chest and push her back, delighting in the way she’d be able to remind her that she has a boyfriend, and they ended things, and it’s better to stay friends.
Ellie’s mind hardens and her thoughts become sharp and jagged, tearing at her brain. There’s no way in hell.
Because it had been easiest for her to be the bitch Lawrence needed her to be and for Lawrence to be the same for her. That was the black and white of it all, a child’s version of a breakup with nuance a nonexistent entity. Because to hold its complexities up in the light of day revealed it for the heartbreaking reality that it was; two people that so deeply loved each other trapped in a stubborn nature that stuck to them like cling film, where compromise seemed far too little for the big decision that loomed over them. Lawrence sticking it all on black and Ellie sticking it all on red and neither one of them emerging as a winner.
Well, maybe Lawrence had. She wouldn’t know, they don’t talk. She’s probably doing fine. Fuck it, Ellie’s doing fine. She’s doing better than fine. And she won’t admit that she’s struggling- she’s not struggling- in the same way that a child who runs away from home because they were served broccoli with dinner gets to the end of their street with a suitcase full of toys and has no idea what to do next other than trudge back home.
But she can’t do that. She doesn’t want to do that, anyway. She doesn’t miss her friends, she doesn’t miss Lawrence.
As she lets her eyes flicker from the TV to the skyline, she can see the sun has completely set and the city is enveloped in darkness. She could easily be anywhere. She’s hundreds of metres above the ground in a glass box like David fucking Blaine, and it’s never felt less like home.
Her phone lights up. She’s been tagged in the chat.
Tia: @ Ellie are you a yes?? Would be so good to see you my love!
She lets the wine do the talking as she types a response.