Close Your Eyes and I'll Kiss You

Chapter 1

The morning was bitterly cold. A fog hung over the city's streets as I picked my way across the frozen snow. Today was to be my first at school in Liverpool and to be honest I wasn't really looking forward to it. I started to hum a tuneless ditty in a futile attempt to distract myself from the churning feeling of dread in my stomach.
It wasn't a long walk from my house to school, only about 10 minutes or so and as I buried my face further into my scarf I was feeling very grateful for that at least.

I soon got close enough to the school for my short sighted eyes to focus on it. Before me was a tall, imposing Victorian building. Built of crumbling red brick, the school had grey iron railings all around. A sign attached to the open gate read:
"Woolton Academy School".

"Hello?" I rang the bell on the receptionists desk in front of me. "Hello?" I called out a little less timidly than before.
I stood awkwardly in front of the desk for a few minutes before a secretary appeared. She looked as though she was in her early 20s, she wore a black pencil skirt and a lilac blouse. Her lips were coloured with red lipstick and her hair was a light blonde.
"Are you Edie Harling?" she asked sweetly.
"Y-yes," I stammered, taken aback by how suddenly she had appeared.
"Well you were supposed to be here nearly 15 minutes ago. You'd think you'd turn up on time on your first day at least." She had lost the harsh edge to her voice. Now she sounded slightly worried for me and a northern tone hung in the background of her voice.
"Mr Hardgrave is waiting for you in his office. Follow me."
I shadowed the receptionist through the staff part of the school. Eventually she knocked on a wooden door displaying a plaque which read "Head teacher".
"Enter." came the reply from inside the office.
"Miss Harling to see you, sir." said the receptionist, peeking round the door.

I found my self sat in a wooden chair on the opposite side of the the head masters desk. Thinking it worrying that I'd been here less than 5 minutes and was already in the headmaster's office.
"Well Miss Harling, first of all welcome to Woolton Academy School," Mr Hardgrave had a posh accent and had a very strict demeanour. He wore a grey suit with a grey shirt that may once have been white and a grey tie that looked as though it had originally been black. He looked as though he was made up entirely of angles and elbows and wore a sharp expression upon his face. As he ranted on with warnings against swearing and fighting and talking in lessons and defacing school property and blaspheming and failure to return homework and other such trivial rules and their accompanying punishments, I gained the impression that Mr Hardgrave was not the kind of man that I would like to cross.

After my official warning against every wrong doing that could possibly be thought of, I was escorted by Mr Hardgrave's secretary to my form room. Her name was Olivia; I found out that she was 18 years old, just 3 years older than me, and that this was her first job out of school. As we arrived outside my classroom she nodded at me by way of wishing me good luck.

I followed Emma Briggs into my first lesson of the day, double English. Emma was a haughty, popular girl that my form tutor had told me to follow round because she was in all of my classes. I had no intention of making friends with her though, this was backed up when she told me in no uncertain terms that she would ruin any reputation I had entirely if I so much as tried to sit with her at lunch. Therefore it came as no surprise to me that at lunchtime, I found my self sat at the end of a long table by myself in the canteen. At the opposite end of the table was a small group if giggly first years that I found mildly irritating.

In the afternoon I had Physics and Maths. Both were dismally dull subjects and by far my least favourite. In Physics I had ended up sat next to a puny, pale boy that looked as though his hair was yet to encounter some shampoo and his skin had never seen the light of day. He was very rude and seemed to take delight in pointing out every answer that I managed to get wrong.

Despite it being an equally dull subject, Maths was so much better. In this class the teacher actually decided to assign seats to people so I didn't end up sat on my own again.
"Ain't seen you 'round before," stated the boy that I had been sat next to at the back of the classroom.
"No, I'm new. It's my first day," I said.
"Well, I'm Paul. Paul McCartney,"
"Edie Harling," I replied.
"Your from down south then," he stated, obviously picking up on my accent.
"Yeah," I replied, "I moved up from Lincolnshire over Christmas,"
"Lincolnshire," Paul repeated to himself as if trying to remember where abouts in the country it was. After a few seconds he seemed to have given up. "So how come you moved up here then?" he asked me.
"Dads job," I answered. Paul nodded, encouraging me to go on, "He's a train driver, got transferred up here because they got rid of the route he used to drive."
"Ah, I see," said Paul, "Where d'ya live now then?"
"Forthlin Road,"
"Snap!" he said, "So do I. I live at number 20. What number are you at?"
"23," I replied.
"Well, your living right opposite my house then. I guess I'll walk home with you, unless of course you don't want me to?"
"No, I'd like that," I said. Thankful that I'd managed to find one person that liked me in this god-forsaken school.

At the end of the day I walked my way back home over the frozen snow. Only this time it didn't seem quite as cold and I didn't have an anxious feeling in my stomach. Instead I was laughing with Paul as he told stupid jokes and I slipped and slid around on the ice. Too soon we had reached our houses and were forced to go our own separate ways.
"I'll knock for you in the morning," called Paul as he shuffled over the icy road.
"See you then," I called back as I retreated into the warmth of my house.

"Good day at school, dear?" called my mother from the kitchen as I entered the house through the side door.
"Not particularly," I replied, dumping my bag in the hall. "Surely it wasn't all that bad?"
"Mum," I sighed, "I had 2 conversations all day. And one of them was with the headmaster's secretary,"
I sloped of to my bedroom to start on my homework.

It was comforting that despite the unfamiliar setting home life went on as usual. Mum was cooking dinner and the house was sparklingly clean. My younger brother Matthew was busy bashing tin soldiers into the legs of the kitchen chairs by way of playing. Later on my father returned from the train station, tired but as usual full of tales of peculiar passengers and the troubles they had caused. Only this time when imitating them he managed to accurately impersonate their Liverpool accents making the stories seem somehow funnier than they would have been otherwise.

•••

At 8 o'clock the next day, as promised, Paul rang the door bell. I was in the bathroom applying makeup so the door was answered by my mum.
After 5 minutes a ran down the stairs in my navy blue uniform to see Paul seated awkwardly on the edge of the sofa in the living room. As he saw me he sprang up.
"Ready to go then?" he asked.
"I guess so," I replied grabbing my satchel and slinging it over one shoulder. "Bye Mum!" I shouted back into the house as I closed the door behind us.

"She gave me a right questioning, your mum did," Paul exclaimed as soon as we'd left the house, "'parently, you didn't mention me at all!" he gave me a mock wounded expression, "Am I a big secret then?"
"Oops!" I said, "I'm sorry... Of course not..." I trailed off and Paul laughed at the incoherentness of my reply. I blushed and in an effort to seem more eloquent than awkward, "You're only a little secret, Paul"
This time he laughed with me, not at me.

•••

That evening on the way home from school Paul and I talked again. I noticed that once Paul had found out all he wanted to know about me (what exactly was the town I'd lived in (Stamford), had I had any boyfriends (none), what was my favourite colour (blue)) he talked an awful lot about music. In particular rock and roll.
"I'm in a band," he announced, "We're called The Quarrymen,"
"Good name for a skiffle group," I said, "What do you play?"
"Guitar," Paul replied shortly, "And I sing as well, but it's John's band really,"
"Oh right," I said not particularly interested in the politics going on within their skiffle group.
We walked in silence for a minute or so, lost in our own thoughts until we reached our houses.
"See you in the morning then"
I said.
"Bye," replied Paul, "Do you want to tell your mum about me this time so she doesn't give me another royal questioning tomorrow?"
"We'll see," I said vanishing into my house.

•••

The rest of the month went on in pretty much the same way. In the week I went to and from school with Paul through the frost, and over those next weeks he seemed to become my one of my best friends. In the evenings I did homework and helped my mother cook dinner. At the weekends I went down to Stamford on the train to visit my old friends, but it seemed that we had less and less to talk about as the weeks went by. On my visits all I seemed to talk about was Paul and how great my new life was in Liverpool which, in retrospect, I think must have alienated a few of my friends.
At school I'd managed to make a few new friends, most of which were already friends of Paul's.

•••

One Friday at the beginning of February Paul knocked on my door as usual at 8 o'clock.
"Morning McCartney," I greeted him as I left the house, "Bye Mum!" I yelled back into the house as I closed the door. When we'd reached the end of the street Paul grinned at me.
"I don't particularly feel like school today," he announced.
"Me neither to be honest," I said, "Never mind though, eh?"
"I think we'd both have much more fun if we simply didn't go,"
He smirked, turned around on the path and started walking in the opposite direction to school. I followed him, unable to argue with a day off school.
After a half hour of walking we found ourselves by the docks with a whole day to kill. We leant on the railings and their white paint pealed off onto our coats as we looked out across the river.
"Nice isn't it," I observed.
"If you like this kind of thing, I guess," said Paul, "Bloody freezing though,"
I couldn't disagree with him on that one, "You're the one who decided to skive off school," I laughed.
"You're the one who followed me," he retorted.
We both laughed at ourselves before looking across the docks in the kind of silence that isn't awkward, it was just a break in the conversation.
"Edie,"
"Yes?"
"Your lips are going blue..."
"Hmm," I replied as I saw Paul's face draw closer to mine and I closed my eyes, waiting for the kiss. But it never came. Instead we were interrupted by a swishing and a squawk as a fat seagull swooped by and grabbed Paul's hat off the top of his head.

"Crap," he exclaimed as the bird swooped out over the Mersey and, as if suddenly realising it wasn't food, dropped Paul's hat into the cold, grey water where it floated for a moment before being sucked under into the current. "My dad's gonna kill me," he muttered, "That hat was new last week."
He looked into my eyes, "Now how about that kiss..."