The Missing O

“…And then we have that meeting with Laura Ashley, and then another with that guy. The one with the mole. What was his name?”

“Julio Santos,” I informed Britt, scooping some chocolate mice into the paper bag. It all smelled the same, of sweet coca and fruity sugar. It took me back to my childhood, of trips to the sea side and to the movies.

“Yeah, him. He’s a right pain too, keeps changing his mind or wanting to add more. If he doesn’t sort his shit out, we’re never going to finish. Anyway, we’re pretty booked up for the next month. I don’t know if I can take all this work,” Britt sighed, dropping a liquorice lace into his own bag with as much angst as he could mock. I snickered.

“I know how you feel,” I agreed, more seriously. “I don’t think I remember the last time I had a night off.”

“You still working over time?” He smiled sympathetically at me, feeling my pain. Nobody worked harder in the office than he did, so if anything we were working at the same strength. Britt got a lot of the big work, harder more intricate stuff with bigger clients. I got to do touch ups and make cups of tea, a coffee or hot chocolate on a good day.

“Best believe it.”

Despite my protests, he took my goodies from me and paid the old woman at the counter for our purchases. A few days earlier he’d told me about an old sweet shop he’d found, and we’d made a pact to go one day after work. Neither of us brought up the fact that we’d both made New Years resolutions to stop eating junk food.

Britt had also vowed that he’d stop smoking, drink less, get his half-sleeve finished - he was a wimp and hadn’t dared go back for the final sitting - and save up enough money to buy the Lambretta he’d spotted a while back. Oh - and become Prime Minister, of course.

Me. So far I’d agreed to accompany him in his battle to cut down on sugar, and told Charlie that I’d keep a diary, but other than that, I hadn’t promised anything else.

“I take Charlie hasn’t found a job yet?” He asked when we’d ducked out of the tiny shop and out onto the high street.

Of course, he knew about the home situation. Charlie had had enough of me nagging at her, simply claiming she was looking. With nobody else to vent to, other than Tom who I didn’t want to burden with any of my other shallow worries, Britt was all I had. Plus, he was fun to hang out with.

“Nope,” I gnawed happily on my sweets, a sudden immaturity willing to take over. Nothing brought back your youth like tooth-rotting goodies.

“You think she ever will?”

I stopped gnawing, feeling like an adult once more. “I’m not sure. I keep giving her the benefit of the doubt, but it’s been three months now. I can’t keep working like this, and she can’t keep taking hand outs from Matt.”

“Her and Matt still going strong, eh?” He asked, seeming only politely interested as we passed a music shop. I rolled my eyes and dragged him inside.

“Obviously. It’d take surgery to tare those two apart. You’d think they’d been together for years, not months. She’s on the phone to him constantly, and ‘cause he’s away she’s always in a bad mood.”

I flipped through a rack of Cds, the clacking of the plastic cases as they hit against one another only slightly venting my frustration. Realising that such a sound could help the anger that had relatively began to boil in my blood, I sifted through the selection of music faster, the noise like sudden hit of nicotine to an ex-addict.

“Morgan, you’re going to break those,” Britt slapped my hand away from the Cds, rolling his eyes playfully. He rearranged his brown trilby with one hand and glanced over the back of a 7inch. The subject soon turned, and not for the better. “You spoken to Oli yet?”

Why did I tell Britt everything?

“No,” I groaned - it seemed like everyone was on Oliver’s side in this whole thing. “How can I? He could be on the other side of the world by now.”

“In this day and age, that’s a poor excuse,” he tutted. “You could text him, email him, tweet him- ”

“Don’t have his email address, and he’s not into the whole social networking thing. I could text him,” I agreed. “But I’m not going to.”

Putting the copy of the Clash record he’d been browsing down, he turned to face me straight on and looked sternly through his thick glasses. His eyes were blue - nowhere near as shocking or breathtaking as Tom’s. They started off deep, almost brown around the outside, then melted into a warm, summer sea colour.

“And why not?” he demanded, folding his arms. He looked quite comical, truthfully.

“Because.”

I swiftly scampered down the isle, towards the back of the shop and the t-shirts. Not really a great hiding place, Britt crept up behind me only moments later.

“Because you’re a scaredy cat,” he teased, attempting to push me into a rack of magazines. Successfully might I add.

The glossies fell to ground from the case, scattering to a feet in a flutter. There was a worker, situated not too far from us, scoping out the shop like a security camera on speed. He glared at us, mouthing very angrily for us to pick them up. My face burned whilst Britt chuckled immaturely.

“Nice one, Brainiac,” I muttered, crouching down to pile up the magazines.

They were all music magazines of course, consisting of things like Metalhammer, Rock Sound and NME. Britt scooped up an issue of Kerrang! and smirked.

“Please speak to me, Morgan,” I looked up, instantly bewildered, the blood that had already bled to my cheeks from the scornful shop assistant returning sevenfold. Oliver, in all his shirtless 2D glory gazed back at me from the cover of the magazine. “I like you, Morgan. Call me! Call me! Call me!”

“Would you shut up!” I snapped, although I had to bite my cheeks to hide the smirk. He looked so ridiculous.

Britt dropped the act and helped me return the shop to it’s original state. I ignored how he left all the copies of Kerrang! for me to re-shelf, trying not to pay too much attention to Oliver’s pretty face. I wasn’t sure whether the ache in my stomach was from anger, or because I missed his puppy-dog brown eyes.

Stop thinking about it.

“At least promise me you’ll consider it,” Britt asked, swinging a thick, half tattooed arm around my back. “He’s a nice lad, Morgan. He’d be good for you. Bring you out of your shell a bit.”

Sinking into his side, we left the shop and began towards the bus station - I couldn’t afford to run my car at all anymore. Britt’s backpack bumped into my side every so often, and every time it did it felt as though he was nudging me.

“Maybe,” I sighed. It was all I could promise - I’d try. I wasn’t up for making anymore New Year’s Resolutions.

“Christ, there’s nothing in,” Charlie grumbled, slamming the refrigerator door shut. I winced at the sound, but ignored it, returning to my calculator. Bills were a bitch. “We need food.”

“No,” I replied. “We need money. Because food costs money, and we have neither.”

“This really sucks.” She twisted the pendant of her necklace - new of course - up until it reached her lips, where she ran the chain over the skin there.

Matt had sent her some things in the post a few days prior - it was only a month or so into the tour, the end of January fast approaching, and yet it felt as though they’d been separated forever. The only thing worse than Charlie and Matt together, was Charlie and Matt apart.

When the parcel had arrived, a chunky brown box with Miss C. Evans stamped on the front, I’d been confused for only a second. Because of course she hadn’t ordered anything, having non of her own cash to account for. It had been from Matt, obviously.

I’d called her name lazily, and she trotted into the room then lunged at me when she realised what it was. Practically tearing through the wrapping as if her life depended on whatever it was inside - perhaps a bomb counting down it’s last seconds, and she knew exactly which wire to cut that would save us all.

There was no bomb, or cure for cancer or anything of that magnitude.

“Ooh, pretty!” she squealed wrapping the silver chain with the wolf charm around her neck straight away. I felt almost jealous of the way it rested against her collar bone so delicately, silver against her milky skin, stretched nearly to tight over the bone.

The differences between Charlie and I seemed frighteningly obvious now, as if our parallels had increased during the minor changes she’d made in herself. Like her now whiter than ever hair - no more damaged ends or dark routes, so edgy unlike my own mop, murky brown and hanging to cover my non existent chest.

Charlie’s curves had always bugged me - not in that I didn’t like them, but in that I could never achieve them. I was gawky, bony and angular, and it took a large deal of layered clothing and clever accessories to make me look like I had any meat on me at all. Naked, in the mirror I’d guess myself as a sufferer of an eating disorder, but that was far from the case.

I’d tried gaining weight, all my life just like how I had tried to somehow wish myself to be a few inches shorter, or my hair be shinier or that bit more tameable. My eyebrows could never be as smooth, equal and as arching as Charlie’s, and my eyes - average, brown and uninspiring - were nothing like my best friends, so blue and beautiful.

We were so opposite, but once I had thought that was what made us so perfect for one another. We balanced each other out. She was loud, bubbly and confident. I was perhaps too prudish, an introvert and would rather sit in the corner with red wine, than be in the heart of the party with a double shot of vodka.

I liked reading, Charlie liked watching movies. Charlie wanted to be married one day, with a house for her and Kaitlyn and this Mr Right who was destined to usher passed at an second. I didn’t even want a dog.

At one time, only months ago in reality, this had worked. Now, we were two forces destined to clash, one’s edges too sharp while the others weak and oh so breakable. It was all a matter of time. I just chose not to acknowledge it.

The necklace looked too expensive for something that had no occasion. It didn’t stop with jewellery though - there had been a t-shirt, Matt’s band name printed over an almost gorey design. She looked less impressed with that, not uttering a word but instead hanging it over her shoulder.

The last gift was a scalf. It was red, and looked like something that I could have knitted myself, but I knew exactly what it was. It had been wrapped around the mannequin that was also wearing the Chanel coat that she’d longed for as a Christmas present.

“Oh my god!” she wailed, the t-shirt falling forgotten on the floor. “It’s the scalf! The scalf, Morgan!”

“It is.”

“Do you know what this means?” I thought she might burst into tears, she was so overwhelmed. “The coat! I bet that’s my surprise. Oh, I can’t wait. Come home, Matt, please!”

Now I thought about that little bundle that he’d sent - the more expensive of the gifts being way more appreciated than the t-shirt that was still hung up on the back of the bathroom door with my fluffy dressing gown. Every time I went in there and saw it just hanging there, so unloved, I felt a little sorry for Matt.

He obviously wanted Charlie to be involved in every aspect of his life, as he was hers. He’d taken both Charlie and Kaitlyn in with open arms - his band was being treat like the extra baggage instead. Charlie, even though the secret was out now, rarely mentioned Bring Me The Horizon, or any of it’s other members of whom I now understood I’d met the night Charlie had gone home with Matt for the first time.

And when she did mention the band, it was never in her greatest favour.

“Oh, I wish he could just have a normal job so he could come back already!”

“I don’t even understand why they’re away for so long. Surely they can’t have that many places to go.”

“Stupid fucking band.”

Just a few of her favourites.

Often I’d find her, Kaitlyn rested on her hip, with the phone pressed to her ear. She’d be talking lowly at first, but then either her or Matt would say something to aggravate the conversation. Nine times out of ten, it was Charlie demanding the impossible presence of her boyfriend.

Trying to put myself in her position, I wondered what I would do with a boyfriend that worked away 90 per cent of the year. Probably go nuts, just like Charlie. But I couldn’t really see myself in that situation at all, because I’d never been the needy type like Charlie had. I liked my space and my solace. Besides, didn’t absence make the heart grow fonder?

The few boyfriends that I’d had and actually counted as real relationships had never lasted very long, and usually due to my distant behaviour. After a month or so I begin to feel crowded, and then I push away. It’s something I’m not conscious of at the time, and only realise it when I’ve found out that said boyfriend had been cheating for weeks. Usually it took Charlie and a bottle of wine to realise my faults.

I didn’t choose to be an unsocial person. I wished I attracted people like my best friend did, and I wished to be able to hold a conversation, even hold eye contact for long enough so that the person was interested enough to come back tomorrow.

Any past love interests had all seemed like flukes, whereas Charlie’s ability to drag in the men without any effort at all, I knew that if I wanted to at least get a guy to look at me I’d have to work very hard. But it was all so easy to fathom the idea - when it came down to reality, to where I was in the position of being in a room full of people I wasn’t comfortable with, it was always the same ending.

I’d get in there, whether it be a work party, at a club, or even in a supermarket when a friendly faced stranger made small talk. I’d take a breath, tell myself to relax, be confident, nobody wants to hurt me, right? But after I let that breath go, I seemed to lose everything about me, I’d clam up, and instead of trying to refocus I’d concentrate on squeezing my fingernails into the palms of my hands.

* * *

Sometime during the night, Kid had stirred, and at dusk he awoke Marlow. It took longer than usual for her to completely come round - the day previous Kid had drug her through the country side and into Surrey, where they’d spent the most part if the day looking for a man with a jar of reptile scales. For what purpose they possessed, Marlow had no clue, but of course she didn’t even ask anymore. It had been a month of this running and searching, and despite how much Kid had told her, she still did not understand anything.

When she’d been woken, and the sleep had been scrubbed from the corners of her eyes, Kid wasted no time in rapping his fish-tailed suit jacket over her shoulders, and tucked her under his arm.

“Kid, where’re we going?” she whispered, her voice crackling from the weight of fatigue.

Venturing out the back door of the Inn they had been occupying, Kid felt Marlow shiver and so held her closer even still. He didn’t mind the feeling of her small body pressed into his side, but he did worry about the effect it might have on her.

Kid, although often seemingly eccentric and hardly every serious, had recently grown solemn. He knew that the pull between himself and the girl had changed - it had been there for as long as he could remember, before the two had even met - but now that they’d been in each other’s presence for such time, he could feel the chord pulling tighter, bringing them closer.

And although sometimes he relished in the moments he had with her, let himself get lost in her eyes, the smell of her hair, the sound of her light breaths from the next room as she slept each night - despite all this, he could not allow himself to wonder so far from his path.

He had a destiny, as did Marlow. And it almost killed him that theirs did not entwine towards the end.

They would not be together forever, as he wanted. He hoped for such a thing, every day, still knowing that it could never be. So as the girl held his waist, the thieve of any heat that projected from his body, ignoring how frozen his insides felt to him, he dismissed the pounding of his heart and tiny amount of perspiration that settled on his brow.

Kid’s feelings for Marlow were not the only thing she wasn’t aware of tonight. Sweeping around from their position of the small Inn that consisted of a homely pub downstairs, the floor taken with large, chunky hand calved tables and chairs with a fireplace that acted as the centre piece of the room, running straight up through middle of the building, were a small collection of them.

They had never been totally explained to Marlow - they were just a big gloop of black matter to her, that fit the equation without any proof of existence. They were there to fit in the missing gap. They were the people that were trying to wipe out the human race.

Marlow would be surprised to know that they too were not so unalike to herself. They had arms and legs, and skin of all different shades, from deep oak to light, peachy pink. Just like any other person. They had two eyes, one nose and mouth, and ten fingers and toes. Just like any other person. The thing that separated them the most from all natural human beings was age.

They were older than Marlow, in the same way that Kid was older - Kid could look back and remember themalways being there, and he’d even given up counting his birthdays.

The group that was behind all of this had been searching for Kid and Marlow, knowing that the two were conspiring. It had been quite difficult for them to find the two children, considering that they were simply children - or at least Marlow was.

Kid had done a good job of sweeping up his trail behind them, and up until now they’d been invisible to everyone. But that one jar or reptile scales had broken the spell, and from there they had been hot on their trail.

Kid had knew this would only last for so long - being on the run with the luck of not being found. But now that it was crunch time, he could honestly say he was panicking.

“Kid?” Marlow prompted. She hadn’t dare speak sooner, for he was holding his breath and that’s never a good sign. “Kid, I said where are we-”

“Shh!” he hushed. He turned slowly, looking her dead in the eye. “They’re here.”