The Love Club

Lex Parker worked at the only grocer in her end of Brixton.

The front of the building was glass panels, windows that opened up to the street, which was littered with rubbish and the alley, lined with decaying, tattered flyers for lost pets and upcoming gigs. The state of the store was dingy at best – everything pristinely clean but with outdated, yellowed tiles that, no matter how hard she scrubbed, would never come white again. But it was well-stocked and held good hours, considering, and that kept a regular flow of customers coming through the doors, pressing a single pound coin like a prayer into the pram before filling it with bags of rice and flour.

At 2:45 on a Sunday afternoon, the corner shoebox of a convenience store was dead, dead as Junior Nkwelle, the fifteen-year-old murdered in Loughborough Estate last year. Lex was entirely absent from that store, aside from her body, sat behind the till, piano key fingers resting on the cracking number keys. Lex wasn’t thinking about how the floor could be swept, or about the roseate lights bleeding the night before, not even about Junior Nkwelle’s face in the blue newspaper boxes that day, like the press had framed it all over town. Well, kind of. She was thinking about Lucas.

About Lucas, their little Luca, grimacing up at her from their mother’s arms all those years ago. His hair was long for a baby, Samson like and so blond the strands were hardly visible on his head. Lex could recall the velvet smooth feel of his skin beneath her four-year-old fingers like she was touching it that very moment. He disgusted her, bewildered her, brought amazement upon her, and she could hardly take his eyes of his, hazel just like hers, looking back at her like a mirror. He was perfect. To Lex, he was perfect.

She called him Luca because of the lisp that plagued her lips back then – she was embarrassed, and therefore avoided the letter “s” at all costs. She would later come to find that Luca meant bringer of light, which she supposed was true, too. He was a quiet baby, a still baby, who could sit for hours watching the cogs turn in her grandfather’s grandfather clock. He was endlessly fascinated by the way things worked, by the way that the wheels spun on cars and how the refrigerator hummed.
Luca was smart, Lex could see it in the way he pressed his tiny fingerprints into the Playdoh and examined the rings with his little hazel eyes. But it felt like Lex was the only one who saw the latent brilliance streaming in his veins, even if he wasn’t a sociable baby like she had been, or like Junior Nkwelle had been, or like how most babies had been. Luca wasn’t most babies.

While Lucas watched the clock, Lex watched Lucas. Lex watched for years as he arranged things in lines, perfectly straight or sloped or zig-zagged. If they weren’t perfect, he would have a fit. He was obsessed with the perfection of those lines. His hands, tiny and bewitched, couldn’t stop lining up the crayons one after the other after the other. She tried to help him, but her words were like ghosts to him, passing silently through him without any recognition in return.

“Luca please!” she begged in annoyance. “I just want to play!”

Nothing. His eyes didn’t even flicker to her in acknowledgement, hands never straying from the crayons. If her brother had been someone else, a different little boy with a different demeanor, she might have forced herself in anyway. But she kept her arms folded across her chest. If she touched anything, his whole world would melt red and each time that happened, she worried he would never come back.

Luca’s fits never lasted for more than a few hours, perhaps a day at most. It was like the wheels that ran in his head got spinning, spinning, spinning out of control – there was no stopping him once he got started until he eventually wore himself out. He always did, though. He always came back, amid the shattered lamps and shredded curtains, with those bright hazel eyes that begged for her forgiveness. He never meant to hurt her, or to hurt their mother or their father. He never meant to be born like this, the little genius boy with cogs in his brain that didn’t quite line up right.

Lex knew. Lex knew the secrets that Luca kept hidden in his heart, the wilderness of his soul. His heart was a library of all the words he knew, too fragile to meet the open air; if they did, the oxygen would cause them to yellow and tear. He had to save them for special occasions, for when he really needed them. But they were there. It was all there – the love, the attention, the intelligence. He simply graced them with its flickering presence, disappearing and reappearing like the sun behind the passing clouds. They just had to hold that sunlight close.

“What ya thinkin’ about mate?” a voice came suddenly, bringing her back from her thoughts. She looked up to find Grace standing across the counter from her, a little smirk on her lips. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for Lex to zone out at work, to drift off out of Brixton to their old place in Loughton, to the memories her past life held before things went to shit.

Lex smirked back. “Do you remember when we took Luca to Dover to see the cliffs? When my mum needed a break from work so badly she was about to go mental and I begged for you to come?”

“Of course,” Grace replied gingerly, the jest in her voice receding. That truly had been a different time in their lives. Practically a different era, though it was only two years prior.

“He was just so excited about how white they were,” she hummed. “And the gulls.”

Grace nodded. “And your dad stepped in shit and nearly slipped and broke his ankle. Luca proper enjoyed that one.”

Luca’s laugh was a rare one, and at its mention Lex could hear it ringing in her ears, echoing off the chalk and quartz and resounding to the sea. It was like rainfall. When Luca laughed, she wished to cling to him, to press a jam jar to his lips and ensnare the sound for one of the hard days. A wall in her flat would be lined with jam jars, then, just in case. And it would always be a fine line to walk – whether she would run out from opening them more frequently than she could capture them, or saving them for so long that they would begin to take over every inch of her place.

“Are you visiting him on Friday?” Grace asked.

“It depends,” Lex replied, averting Grace’s gaze, instead picking at the peeling plastic on the till keys. “Not if Mum and Dad will be there.”

They’d surprised Lex last time. She only agreed to visit Luca during times she knew her parents would be busy – when they had engagements with work or the boosters or generally being really shit people. It saved them all a lot of unnecessary awkwardness, in the end. Not that Luca noticed, anyway.

Grace knew better than to push a topic when Lex’s parents made an appearance – there really wasn’t much to say, for what it’s worth, because Lex was dead set in the uncomfortable hatred that now caused the friends to cast their gazes to the ground. Lex felt sorry for always doing this, and for not being able to budge – not even for Luca – but it was all for him, in the end. If he couldn’t protest for himself, she would.

“I still feel quite shit,” Grace began again, running a hand through her ginger curls. Lex shot her a pointed look, curling her eyebrow just so.

“That’s what happens when you spend the night getting drunk of bottle service with Ed Sheeran,” she tutted, leaning forward on her elbows. “Not that he minded much at all.”

Grace emitted a chuckle before hopping up onto the counter, sitting with one leg dangling and the other tucked neatly beneath her. “Nothing happened Lex, promise,” she replied. “You were there the whole time, aside from the beginning. Where were you, anyway?”

Lex hadn’t told Grace about her chance encounter with the man of the hour, golden-boy-gone-rotten Harry Styles. She hadn’t told her about the serendipitous moment where he ordered her a glass of her favorite boozy beverage, she hadn’t told her about how he’d stumbled over his words, she hadn’t told her about how he asked to see her again. They’d stumbled home after a few hours at Ed’s table, ordered a kebab, and fell asleep in Grace’s comparatively close apartment. Lex was up before Grace, greeting the sun with a grimace and going back to Brixton. No time for gossip – but Lex didn’t feel like gossiping about Harry anyway. Not much to tell.

“Wandering,” Lex replied with a shrug. “I think that’s the best bash we’ve been to, yeah? Lots of good people watching.”

Grace nodded. “I reckon most everyone was there, really. Seems odd that Nick would even think to invite us.”

“Luck of the draw,” Lex said, letting a smooth grin spread across her lips. “Can’t complain, anyway, you got to canoodle with a star.”

She flared her hands for added effect, letting her fingers twinkle like fireworks. Grace rolled her eyes, picking at the lotto sticker taped to the counter. Neither of them really cared about fame or fortune then, only about the party and the pursuit of it. At the end of the day, it was about who could have the most fun on the least amount of quid, finding lonely men to buy them liquor in place of the usual – Lex nicking a bottle from the back room before her shit ended. It just so happened that last night, the drinks weren’t on just any men.

“I don’t think I really fancy Ed Sheeran, anyway,” Grace commented lazily. “Good for a laugh, fantastic singer, but not much my type.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Those one-dee boys though,” her best friend hummed with a wriggle of her brow. “They looked pretty fit, all things considered.”

All things considered. Lex’s blood ran cold, wondering if Grace had seen her talking to Harry and wanted answers. Not that it mattered, anyway, but there was something nice about the secrecy of her brush with the brown curls and green eyes, lips wet in the oscillating lights.

“Did you see Harry, then?” she asked Grace tentatively.

Grace shook her head. “Ed said he’d seen him, but he didn’t come up when you were people watching or anything. Figured he would, they seem like pretty close mates. Maybe he left early.”

“Maybe.”

The automated chime sounded from the door and the pair looked up to see Maureen, the harried middle-aged bat, crazy as all hell, who would replace Lex at the till. Finally. Lex sighed and put on a smile, placing her hands firmly on either side of the till to seem as attentive as possible.

“’Lo, Maureen,” they greeted in unison.

“Get off the counter,” she grumbled without even looking in their direction, headed straight to the back room to drop off her pocket purse and red puffer jacket.

Grace immediately slid back onto her feet, smoothing her hands over the fabric of her black-and-white striped shirtdress. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Go get your things, I’ll stand watch until she comes back.”

Lex nodded, knowing that surely no one would come in and need to be rung up in the time it took slow, crabby Maureen to get back to the front. Despite her gruffness, Lex knew there was a soft spot in her associate, there just had to be. Once, she saw her smile while reading an article in the back of the Daily Mail. It had been a long time ago, but it had happened.

Lex collected her bag and coat, reaching into the pocket to retriever her phone. She was surprised to see a text from Nick Grimshaw and a missed call and voicemail from an unknown number.

Soz in advance, Nick had said. This piqued Lex’s interest, but it would have to wait.

She stayed in the back room to listen to the voicemail, worried that perhaps it was someone calling after Luca, that something had gone awry and her assistance was needed. But the voice that came on the line after she pressed play only piqued her interest further.

“Heya Lex, it’s uh, it’s Harry, you know… Harry Styles,” the low, gruff voice came through the line. A weird part of Lex’s heart fluttered – she told herself it was the same way it always did when some semi-special guy took notice of her. She had to admit, the fact that Harry had tracked her down was extremely flattering, no matter what he wanted.

“I told you I’d have my people get in touch with your people, and well, it turns out both our people are pretty rubbish so I decided to just call you myself,” he continued. “I guess I just wanted to let you know I enjoyed talking to you last night and I uh, would like to talk again? If that sounds alright? Sorry, this sounds so stupid. Whatever. Call me when you get a chance, yeah? Anyway, hope you’re having a good day. Yeah, bye.”

She couldn’t wipe the grin off her face as she walked out of the back room, finding Grace leaning against a display of wine gums, the heels of her cut-out boots skewed against each other. Grace, of course, took notice, slipping her own phone back into her pocket and crossing her arms.

“What’s got you all smug, then?” she asked.

Lex shook her head.

As they walked out of the shop, she strung an earbud in her left ear, and the strains of The Pixie’s “Here Comes Your Man” floated into her head.