Growing Up Twice Read Online Free PDF

life to the city limits. It was a time when Selin was studying, Rosie was seeing some guy and I was drifting between second- and third-generation friends and a series of half-hearted boyfriends. I often had the dizzy feeling that gravity only just had a hold on me and that any moment I could slip away into a cloud of stars, lost from the real world for ever.
    I was looking for love, I suppose, but more than that I was looking for something solid and strong to hold me down to earth, the kind of firm dependability I felt I’d lacked since my dad had walked out of my life over fifteen years before. Although I had a romantic idea about self-destruction by vodka and kisses, a notion that stopped me going mad from boredom between five in the evening and nine in the morning almost every day of the week, I was really waiting to be rescued.
    Owen is eight years older than me. He lives in a rooftop flat in Clerkenwell, which he moved to before it became so trendy, when it was still an eclectic mix of fishmongers and second-hand bookshops, before the five-star restaurants and the hottest clubs sprang up on every street along with another branch of Starbucks. His walls are lined with shelves heavy with all kinds of books. He doesn’t own a TV, only a battered old radio that is always tuned to Radio Four. He has the look of a dissolute Leonardo Di Caprio, twenty years older and after several crates of Irish whiskey, with dirty-blond hair and slanted green eyes.
    When we met he was strong and paternal, I thought he’d give me some kind of guidance. He was besotted with me and passionate. He made me feel as if there was no other woman in the world. He persuaded me that I was beautiful and clever, that I had depths that only he could reach. He wanted to possess every last fibre of my being, he said and, happily, I let him.
    It was after about three months that I came bounding into his flat one evening to find him in a quiet and unresponsive mood. Hurt and confused, I badgered him for an explanation for his coldness until he eventually exploded in anger, hurling the book he was reading at my head. He told me I bored him, that he needed more excitement from life, that there was someone else, a French girl who had asked him for directions just outside the British Museum. She was vivacious and interesting, he said. Not stuck in some dead-end job going nowhere, without a meaningful thought in her head, like I was. He told me to get out of his flat. When I refused, when I cried and begged and pleaded with him to change his mind, he threw me out, leaving bruises on my wrists that took a long time to fade.
    If he hadn’t come back to me it would have been fine really, in the long term. I would have been down for a while, back on my night-time odyssey of bars and clubs, but in time I would have lurched on to the next thing, maybe
the
thing.
    Only he did come back. It was less than two months later when he called me at work and asked to meet me. I was holding my breath when I saw him; I used to think that he was so beautiful. We sat over coffee and talked for hours about our relationship, how he missed me, his hang-ups and problems. How he needed me and needed me to understand him. He said, ‘I think that I love you too much to even admit it to myself. I think that’s why I behave the way I do. But God, I
do
love you. There has
never
been anyone like you, you
have
to come back to me.’ He took me home and when we made love that night I felt as if I
was
drifting out of control in that cloud of stars.
    It was six months after that that the next girl came along and our cycle began again. For three years I really believed that the pain and the abuse was all worth it, just for those first few weeks when we were back together again and life was as wonderful as I had ever known it could be.
    When Rosie showed up at my front door the night I found the Post-it note, I got that star-crossed feeling again. Somehow her being there with news of Chris brought