Forbidden

His eyes are frantic, his expression stricken. ‘But I was wrong! Why won’t you listen to me? What I said was bullshit – I just lashed out in frustration, this is not what I want!’

‘Well, it’s what I want!’ I shriek. ‘God forbid you should stay with me out of pity! Everything you said is true: we’re sick, we’re twisted, we’re deranged, and we have to end this now! So what the hell are you still doing here? Go home to your normal, socially acceptable life and we’ll pretend nothing ever happened!’

I’ve completely lost it. Hammers pound against my skull and red lights zigzag in the darkness. But I’m afraid that if I don’t keep screaming at him in blind fury, I’m going to collapse in tears. And I don’t want him to see that: the last thing I want is for him to feel sorry for me, to feel he has to pretend to be in love with me, to realize I can’t live without him.

With a desperate cry, he moves towards me, reaching out for me again. I take a step back. ‘I mean it, Lochan! Go home! Don’t touch me or I’ll shout for help!’

He withdraws his outstretched arm and steps back in defeat. Tears fill his eyes. ‘Maya, what the hell d’you want me to do?’

I take an uneven breath. ‘Just go,’ I say softly.

‘But don’t you understand?’ he says in quiet despair. ‘I want to be with you, no matter what. I love you—’

‘But not enough.’

We stare at each other. His hair is ruffled by the wind, his green eyes luminous in the darkness, the zip of his black jacket broken, revealing his grey T-shirt beneath. He shakes his head, his eyes sca

‘You just called our love sick and disgusting, Lochan,’ I remind him quietly.

He claws at the sides of his face. ‘But I didn’t mean it!’ His chin starts to tremble.

A sharp pain rises through me, filling my lungs, my throat, my head – so sharp I think I might collapse. ‘Then why would you say it? You meant it, and now so do I. You’re right, Lochan. You’ve made me see this whole sordid mess for what it is. Just a terrible mistake. We were both just bored, disturbed, lonely, frustrated – whatever. We were never in love—’

‘But we were!’ His voice cracks. He screws up his eyes and presses his fist against his mouth to muffle a sob. ‘We are!’

I look at him, numb. ‘Then how come it’s gone?’

He stares at me, aghast, tears wet on his cheeks. ‘W-what are you talking about?’

I take a steadying breath, bracing myself against an onslaught of tears. ‘I mean, Lochan, how come I don’t love you any more?’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Lochan

Something inside me has broken. There are moments during the day when I just grind to a halt and simply ca

When Maya told me she no longer loved me, I had no choice but to retreat, to retract. At first I told myself it was said in anger, a reaction to my own stupid words – my inane declaration that it had all been a sick mistake – but now I know differently. I play and replay that phrase in my head, wondering where on earth it came from when I never believed it for a single moment. It must have been the anger of the moment, my embarrassment and shame – shame at wanting more than I could ever have – that made me blurt out the most hurtful, hateful thing that came to mind. Instead of coping with my own misery and frustration, I’d turned on Maya, as if by blaming her I could absolve myself . . .

But now, through my own stupidity and selfish cruelty, I have lost everything, degraded everything, even our friendship. Despite the sadness in her eyes, Maya has been very good at going back to normal, pretending everything is fine, being friendly while keeping her distance. No awkwardness that might alarm the others – in fact she is almost cheerful. So cheerful that at times I even wonder whether she is not secretly relieved it’s all over, whether she actually does believe it was all a sick mistake, an aberration, born out of physical need. She has stopped loving me, Maya has stopped loving me . . . And this one thought is slowly eating away at my mind.

Concentrating at school has long become a thing of the past; now, to my horror, teachers notice me, and for all the wrong reasons. I barely manage half a page of trigonometry before realizing I have been sitting immobile, staring into space, for the best part of an hour. They ask me if I’m all right, if I need to see the nurse, what it is I don’t understand. I shake my head and avoid meeting their eyes, but without the counterbalance of top grades my reticence is no longer acceptable, and so they summon me to the front, demanding answers to questions on the board, afraid that I am falling behind, that I am going to let them down by failing to gain an A in their subject this summer. Summoned to the whiteboard in front of the whole class, I fumble my way through easy questions, make stupid mistakes, and watch the bewildered horror spread across the teachers’ faces as I return to my desk amidst jeers and laughter, all too conscious of the sniggers of satisfaction that Weirdo Whitely has finally lost the plot.

In English we are doing Hamlet. I’ve read it a number of times so I don’t feel the need to even pretend to focus. Besides, Miss Azley and I have had a tacit agreement ever since her unfortunate pep talk: she does not pick on me in class so long as I volunteer an answer once in a while, usually to help her out when no one else can come up with even the most asinine response. But today I am not playing ball: the double lesson is well into its second hour and the now familiar ache in my chest has morphed into a stabbing pain. I drop my pen and stare out of the window, watching a length of broken TV cable twist and writhe in the wind.

‘. . . according to Freud, the personal crisis undergone by Hamlet awakens in him repressed incestuous desires.’ Miss Azley waves the book in the air and paces to and fro in front of the class, trying to keep everyone awake. I feel her gaze pause on the back of my head and I snap round from the window.

‘Which brings us to the Oedipus Complex, a term coined by Freud himself at the begi

‘You mean when a guy wants to have sex with his mum?’ someone asks, voice sick with disgust.

Suddenly Miss Azley has their attention. The class is buzzing.

‘But that’s mental! Why would any guy want to fuck his own mum?’

‘Yeah, you hear about it on the news and stuff, though. Mums who fuck their sons, dads who fuck their daughters and their sons. Brothers and sisters who fuck each other—’

‘Language, please!’ Miss Azley protests.

‘That’s bullshit. Who would want to fuck – sorry, screw – their own parents?’