Flawless (56 page)

With Danny cutting himself off from everyone, including his well-meaning parents, the only outlet Minty had for her fears and concerns was Jake, who was starting to feel like the world’s worst-paid Dear Abby. Thank God he’d never told his mother
about him and Scarlett. He didn’t think he could have stood the daily calls from home, postmorteming his love life. As it was he was already regretting the schoolboy error he’d made last week, when he accidentally mentioned the name of a Jewish girl, Ruth, whom he’d been casually dating since he and Scar called it quits.

“What’s her family like? Have you been over for Shabbat yet? She’s not one of those scrawny little things you go for, is she, Jacob? It’s not good for a woman’s fertility to get too thin. No, don’t sigh. You need to think about those things at your age.”

Oh my God, it was incessant. She’d be booking the fucking Rabbi next.

Groaning, he shoved the phone under the couch cushion so he wouldn’t hear it ring and stumbled into the bathroom. Yet again he’d had far too much to drink last night and made a cock of himself in front of some girl. Dealing with the pain of losing Scarlett the only way he knew how—by shagging for England and drinking like an Irishman at a funeral—he was finding the workdays tougher and tougher to get through.

Catching sight of his green, unshaven face in the mirror, he winced. The ad men at Alka-Seltzer had a fucking nerve.
“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a relief it is” my ass.
It hadn’t felt like much of a relief at seven this morning, slumped in front of the porcelain goddess for an hour straight when he woke up, spewing his guts out. Afterward he’d crawled back to bed and slept for another couple of hours, only to be wrenched back to consciousness by the insistent, shrill ringing of the telephone at nine thirty. He felt like a barnacle being chiseled off the bottom of a trawler. Except that in this case the chisel was Minty’s strident, motherly voice, aimed directly at the point in Jake’s cranium that acted as the nerve center for a headache so throbbingly violent he half expected it to interfere with the local phone network.

After a hot shower, two more Alka-Seltzer, and an aggressive encounter with some cinnamon mouthwash, he began to feel vaguely human again. Grabbing his dressing gown, he wandered
into the kitchen and had just finished putting on a pot of coffee when the door buzzer rang.

“Go the fuck away,” he muttered, before picking up the entry phone. “Yes?”

“It’s Scarlett. Can I come in?”

“Of course. Shit, yes, of course. Always,” he babbled, buzzing her up. What the fuck was wrong with him? His heart was beating like a hundred-meter sprinter’s just at the sound of her voice. What was he, twelve?

But all thoughts about his lack of cool evaporated the moment he saw her. She looked whiter than he did and stood in the doorway of his apartment shaking like a leaf.

“Sit down,” he said, shoving her into an armchair in the living room and returning moments later with a tumbler of Scotch. “Drink this.”

“It’s eleven thirty in the morning,” said Scarlett, fingering the glass.

“Stop arguing. Drink.”

Still passive with shock, she threw the honey-colored liquid down her throat. It burned like battery acid, but it did have the desired effect of sharpening her senses.

“Thanks,” she said, once she’d finished coughing. “I think I needed that.”

“So?” Jake eased himself back down onto the couch facing her and tried not to think about how much he wanted to rip her skintight jeans off and make love to her, preferably for the next hundred years or so. “What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

For the first time since Che Che had called and told her, Scarlett found herself starting to cry.

“Andy Gordon,” she sobbed. “The guy I was doing the radio show with.”

“I remember,” said Jake. How could he forget? Their constant squabbling about Andy’s NPR program had been the straw that
broke the camel’s back of their already fragile relationship. It wasn’t a name that brought back happy memories.

“He’s been murdered,” said Scarlett.

“Fuck,” said Jake. He hadn’t expected that.

“Shot dead in Moscow in the middle of the day.” Scarlett started shaking again. “Oh God, Jake, you were right, you were right. We should have left Brogan alone!”

“Hey, hey,” he said gently. Getting up, he took her hand and led her over to the couch. “You couldn’t have foreseen this. You mustn’t blame yourself.”

“That’s what Che Che said,” sniffed Scarlett. “But who else should I blame?”

“Well, that’s the next thing I was gonna say,” said Jake, who really didn’t want to hear about fucking Che Che’s opinions. “Do you know for sure it was O’Donnell?”

Scarlett looked at him disbelievingly.

“He hasn’t signed a confession, no. But surely…I mean, don’t you think it was him?”

“Possibly,” said Jake. “I dunno, though. Murder?”

If the circumstances hadn’t been so grim, Scarlett would have laughed. “Is this the same Jake Meyer who screamed blue murder at me for months about how dangerous Brogan was? ‘Vengeful and psychotic’—wasn’t that what you said?”

“I know.” Jake frowned. “I know. But part of that was me trying to scare you off. I mean, I thought he’d do
something
. I thought he’d come after Flawless, or trash you in the press. I know he torched Bijoux and everything, but having a man shot? Organizing that from his bed in the cancer ward? And not just a man, a journalist, a BBC journalist? I don’t know. I can’t see it. It doesn’t ring true.”

Scarlett pressed her cheek against the soft toweling of his dressing gown and closed her eyes. She wanted to believe that what he was saying was true. That he wasn’t just trying to make her feel better. Although the sad truth was that simply being here
with him made her feel better. His body, his presence, the smell of soap and mouthwash and man was more than comforting. It was intoxicating. She’d missed him so much.

“Even so,” he continued, stroking her hair, “you need to get some protection.”

“Che Che said that too,” she whispered.

“Scarlett, I’m not being funny, but I don’t give a monkey’s cock what bloody Che Che thinks, all right?” Jake snapped. “If it weren’t for him you wouldn’t have stirred up all this shit with Andy in the first place.”

Scarlett sat up. “But you just said this wasn’t my fault! That it might not even have
been
Brogan.”

“It’s not your fault,” he said, grabbing her hand and staring at it, too scared to meet her eye. “Look, just ignore me, all right? I’m being a jealous prick.”

Feeling the rough warmth of his palm laid over hers, Scarlett found herself instinctively stroking it with her thumb. It was a tiny movement, barely noticeable. But it sent jolts of electricity through Jake so violent he felt like he’d been scalded.

“Sorry,” she said, feeling him startle.

“It’s fine,” he said, forcing a smile as he stood up. “I’ll make us some tea, and we can talk about what to do.”

Standing in the kitchen a few seconds later, mindlessly filling the kettle with water, he gave himself a stern talking to:

No, you wanker, you should not take her to bed just because you want to, and she probably wants to, and because it might make her feel safe for an hour or so. Nothing’s changed. She needs a decent, honest, steady bloke. That’s not you; it never will be you. You never—

“I think it’s full.”

Scarlett, appearing at his shoulder, pointed to the overflowing spout of the kettle as it spewed wasted water into the sink.

“Oh, yeah, right,” he mumbled, turning off the tap and plonking the kettle awkwardly back on its stand. “Sorry. Miles away.”

“It also works better when you turn it on,” said Scarlett, flicking the switch. “Is everything OK?”

Before he had a chance to answer, her phone rang again.

“You’ve got to change that ringtone,” said Jake, shaking his head as a tinny version of Madonna’s “Lucky Star” echoed around the room.

“I like it,” said Scarlett, flashing him a sweet, defiant smile that made his knees go weak. “Oh, hi, Mum.” The smile evaporated. “Listen, you’ve actually caught me at a rotten time. Could I possibly call you back?”

Jake watched as she held the receiver away from her ear, while Caroline unleashed a hysterical torrent of abuse at Mintyesque decibel levels. What was it with the mothers this morning?

“Hang up,” he mouthed to Scarlett, making slashing motions across his throat with his index finger. “Tell her to piss off.”

But Scarlett waved him away. Slowly piecing together stray words as Caroline shot them out like shrapnel, she began to get a sense of what was happening. Leaning back against the kitchen counter, she forced herself to breathe deeply.

“And where is he now?” she asked, once she was finally able to get a word in edgewise “At the Maudsley? I see. But you haven’t seen him yourself yet? OK, OK, Mum, calm down. It doesn’t help when you yell. Is Daddy there? Can I speak to him?”

Jake made a pot of PG Tips while this one-sided conversation continued for a few more minutes. When she finally hung up, looking almost as drained as she had when she’d first arrived, he handed her a mug of heavily sweetened tea and waited for her to fill him in.

“It’s my brother,” she told him with forced calmness. “He seems to have suffered some sort of breakdown or…I don’t know what you’d call it exactly. Some poor woman who was driving by found him crawling along a shoulder off the A twenty-five on his hands and knees, babbling about Binky.”

“Binky?”

“A dog we had when we were kids. Cameron didn’t know his own name and couldn’t tell this woman or the police how he got there.”

“I’d call that a breakdown,” said Jake. “So what happened?”

“He’s been committed and taken to a psychiatric facility in South London.” Scarlett put her head in her hands. She was too spent from the news of Andy’s death to even think about crying over Cameron. All she felt in that moment was overwhelming tiredness, offset by a sense of the ridiculous. How had her life turned into a bad soap-opera episode in the space of a few short hours?

“Wow. They chucked him in a loony bin, eh? I guess he’s not faking it then,” said Jake, employing all of his world-famous tact.

“My parents haven’t seen him yet. They want me to fly home and take over. ‘Make some sense of it all,’ as my father put it.”

“How are you supposed to do that?” said Jake, who realized with sudden certainty that he didn’t want her to go home. Even with things as strained and weird as they were between them, he needed to know they were at least in the same city. “If he’s flipped his lid there’s not a lot you can do about it.”

“Probably not,” sighed Scarlett. “But I have to go. He is my brother, after all. Something must have triggered all this.”

“What about Flawless?” said Jake, clutching at straws. “You were gone all last month with Nancy. You can’t just take off again. What about the summer collection?”

“I meant to talk to you about that. And Perry. He needs a pay raise,” said Scarlett, aware as the words came out how pathetically unimportant they were in comparison to Andy’s death, never mind whatever bizarre crisis may have befallen Cameron.

“Exactly,” said Jake. “You’re needed here.”

I need you
, he added in his head.
Please don’t go.

“I’m sorry,” she said, taking a big gulp of the tea he’d made her. “Hopefully I won’t be away for long. If need be I can e-mail you the designs so you know what to order. But I don’t have a choice, Jake. I have to go.”

I
T WAS STRANGE
coming from Los Angeles’s seventy-five-degree sunshine and plunging directly into the bitter, gray chill of a London “spring.” Stranger still was checking into a hotel. This was Scarlett’s home city, but after only two years away she found herself feeling increasingly like a tourist.

The Mitre was an ex-pub in the so-called posh end of Denmark Hill. Caroline had insisted that they stay somewhere very close to the hospital, and this was the best option Scarlett had been able to find online at such short notice. In fairness to the smiley, Jamaican management, some effort had been made to brighten the place up. Scarlett could still smell the glue from beneath the newly laid carpets, and someone had been inspired to paint the reception area downstairs a jaunty Elmo red. But after a long, sleepless flight, during which she saw an agonizingly brief BBC report on Andy’s death before the in-flight entertainment “glitch” proved terminal, it was still a depressing place to unpack. Through the lace curtains on her bedroom window she could see the belching traffic crawling its way through rush hour, past a string of desultory-looking fish-’n’-chip shops, pawnbrokers, and arcades. The double-glazed windows provided some noise insulation, thank God, but nothing could insulate her from the charmless sprawl that was South London on a rainy
Wednesday afternoon. Nor from the knowledge that in less than an hour she was supposed to be at the Maudsley trying to get some sense out of a brother who apparently didn’t know who he was and was highly unlikely to recognize her.