Louder Than Love (19 page)

He slowly began to undress me. “Nice plaster. Sexy,” he whispered, kissing my knee. I had cut myself earlier while shaving in the shower and had hastily slapped on the closest bandage I could find. I saw now it was one of Abbey’s Hello Kitty Band-Aids.

I pulled his T-shirt over his head. “I wasn’t exactly thinking of how good I looked this morning. More preoccupied with how I was going to bring myself to say good-bye to you . . .” He was kneeling on the bed before me, all those tattoos I had only begun to glimpse in pictures now fully exposed.

A thin, simple dagger ran down the middle of his chest, starting at his clavicle and ending with the point at his navel. “That’s a misericorde—used by knights to deliver the final ‘mercy’ blow to the mortally wounded.” His chest trembled as I kissed my way, openmouthed, down the blade. “Something I would have needed had you actually brought yourself to say good-bye . . .” The sharp tip was bordered by delicate red writing that looked vaguely Nordic.

“What’s this say?”

“Don’t you read Old Icelandic?”

“And you do? Come on . . . Portuguese is one thing . . .”

“If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you,” he deadpanned.

I cocked an eyebrow, and he relented with a smile. “It reads
að blanda blóði saman
—‘to mix blood together.’” He took my finger between two of his and traced around the text. “Rick and I were big fantasy geeks in school, you know . . . Dungeons and Dragons and all that. His father was an art dealer, seventeenth century Swedish art mostly, and so we learned a lot of the Norse mythology from looking at all the paintings. There was a tale of these two blokes who were blood brothers, and we thought that was brilliant so we did the same, with an old flick knife I had, see, right here?” He extended his arm at the elbow to display a faded
X
in the hollow. “We were too young to have tattoos back then, but once we started getting inked, Rick brought up the blood oath thing. We chose identical daggers, and he pulled the quote from one of his dad’s old books. Kept its meaning a secret, even from the rest of the band. Stupid now, I suppose.”

“Not if it meant something to you at the time.”

“Yeah, it did. I wrote a song about it. ‘Blood Oath.’ Based on Orvar-Odd’s saga.”

“Over-what?”

“Orvar-Odd. You’ve never heard of him? Or the love story of Hjalmar and Ingeborg?” I shook my head. He pulled the sheets down and me up to the pillows. We twined our bare limbs under the crisp linen, and Adrian wove his version of the Norwegian warrior Orvar-Odd and Swedish warrior Hjalmar as he gently stroked my hair. “Orvar-Odd was hell-bent on testing his fighting skills against Hjalmar’s, so he sailed to Sweden with five ships and met Hjalmar, who had fifteen ships. Hjalmar wouldn’t accept such an uneven balance of strength and sent away ten of his own ships so the forces would be even. Which was so like Rick and me. His family was well-off and had so much, and I didn’t have much of anything, but we were always equal, you know? We’d take the piss out of each other, but we were best mates. Anyway, the two warriors fought for days with a lot of blood-letting, drama, poetry, blah blah blah. But it was a draw. When they finally realized they were equals, they became blood brothers. Hjalmar confided in Orvar-Odd about this beautiful princess who he was in love with, named Ingeborg. Orvar wanted to help them elope, but Hjalmar dragged his heels until these twelve crazy berserkers came along and one of
them
wanted to marry her. Typical man, yeah? The king let his daughter choose, so of course she chose her true love, Hjalmar, and the berserkers went . . . well, berserk. A big duel ensued, with lots of gore and yuck, and at the end, all the bad guys were dead, but sadly so was Hjalmar. So Orvar-Odd took his blood brother’s body back to Ingeborg, who of course dropped dead at the news. All he had to do was give her Hjalmar’s ring”—Adrian slipped off his Shakespeare ring and placed it on the index finger of my right hand resting on his chest—“and she knew. And that was it.”

“Wow. That’s some story. I can see how it could inspire some good songwriting. Death and romance.” I fell silent as I contemplated how the subject matter was something I was sadly versed in. The metal was surprisingly hot against my skin. My finger felt heavy as I used it to trace a thorny tattooed vine snaking around the blade on Adrian’s chest and trailing to a rose that wound around his rib cage. It blossomed at the approximate spot of his heart, and
Natalie
was etched into the tight center of the petals in a spiral pattern. “It’s beautiful,” I whispered, taking it all in. He had a smattering of realistic-looking bullet holes across his breastbone, narrowly missing the rose. They appeared three-dimensional. Beauty, darkness, danger, pain. “You are beautiful . . .”

“Yeah, right.” He gestured to the demon on his other breast. “You can tell Abbey I’m the original boogeyman.” The half-bone, half-flesh corpse had pins sticking out of his head, voodoo doll–style. The skull was dusted greenish blue as if it had been pulled from a swamp somewhere, and the flesh was yellow, oozing red. Its teeth were of varying lengths and in different states of decay. “So can you see why it’s not easy to woo the ladies toting around that one?” His tone was sardonic, his expression sheepish.

“Does he have a name?”

“Corpse Guy? Nah. He appeared on our first album, but then we did away with him and started using this.” He pointed to the Corroded Corpse logo above his appendix, which consisted of two
C
s hooked to each other and linked vertically. Their color, shading, and texture suggested they were made of bone or claw, pitted and ridged, with a bit of gristle for emphasis hanging from where they were seemingly ripped from whatever body they belonged to. “I regret him somewhat . . . especially when fans would come up to me and proudly display their own Corpse Guy tattoo in honor of their love for the band. It’s just such a personal, permanent statement.”

“Well, some of those fans probably lived and breathed your music.”

“True . . . even after I stopped.” He rolled over, stretching and pushing his hair off the back of his neck so that I could inspect more of his body artwork.

On his back was a large, lone tattoo, and judging by the color and crispness, it was relatively younger compared to those on his chest. An intricate compass rose inked in black, robin’s egg blue, and scarlet spanned across his shoulder blades. “Blake’s Four Zoas,” I breathed, tracing the slanted script. Each prominent point identified one of the directions in Blake’s cosmology, rather than the traditional four cardinal directions.

“I was going through a major William Blake phase last year.” He shivered as my lips touched down on his cervical spine and I paraphrased from memory.

“Eternity had
Urthona
, the Imagination, in the north.
Urizen
, or Reason, was its opposite in the south.” I ran my index finger gently down to the small of his back. “
Tharmas
—the senses—lies west, and
Luvah
, Passion, in the east, right?”

“Correct. Blake felt the Zoas resided within each human being, but when the Zoas fell from Eternity into Experience, they each split into two, a male and female counterpart, and they were no longer in harmony.”

“So what does that say about us, male and female?” I wanted to know.

“Good question, luv.” He rolled over and smiled at me. “All I know is you and I are currently”—he kissed my left breast—“together in the eastern quadrant.” His warm and calloused hands played lightly across my shoulders, fingertips exploring my flesh. I reveled in it, enjoying the way he looked at my body, as if quenching his thirst after many desert miles. “And in a proper bed,” he reminded me, his eyes celestial in the dim candlelight.

Purge

“So where are those grapes and that poetry you promised me?” I chided, barely a breath left in me. We loosely held each other, waiting for our hearts to resume their normal rhythm.

He delicately placed hands on both sides of my jawbone and kissed me, as deep and soul-searching in his afterplay as he was in his foreplay. “Consider that the amuse-bouche,
mon amour
,” he breathed.

I ran my fingers past his dewy temples into his hair and gently pulled him close again. “Who am I kidding? I can get by on this sustenance just fine,” I whispered.

“But since you brought poetry up . . . this is what I’ve been pondering over lately.” He reached across me and pulled a red leather-bound book from the nightstand, along with a pair of reading glasses. I settled into the crook of his arm as he arranged the glasses on his nose with his free hand and pushed his thumb in between the pages bookmarked with an old MetroCard.

What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song?

Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price

Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.

Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,

And in the wither’d field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.

Adrian stopped reading. He removed the glasses with a sigh and turned to face me. He lowered his head in a way that was slightly boyish, a chunk of hair falling over one eye. I gently kissed his forehead. “Don’t be sad.”

“Ach, Kat. I’ve been alone with my memories so long. The thought of bringing them to the surface verbally is . . . overwhelming.”

I understood completely; it was as if he had plucked those two sentences from my brain, where they had been stewing for years now.

“I know. It’s one thing to ruminate, but another to enunciate.” My voice trembled. Where that tightly knit gem of wisdom had come from was beyond me.

Adrian gazed at me for a long moment, his eyes smooth as worn sea glass against his weathered face. “Cripes, I hope you don’t think me a selfish prat. Here I’ve been pissing and moaning about the life I’ve lived, when—”

I put my finger to his lips, shaking my head. “God, no. I’m grateful, actually. In time . . . thank you for being patient.”

“No one has ever used that word to describe me. From you, I’m learning patience . . . and fortitude.” He took a deep breath. “That being said . . .”

We spent the next two hours holding each other, Adrian’s fingers kneading his history across my skin. My vertebrae became pinpoints on the time line he lingered upon, as I kissed my questions along his shoulders and neck.

“We were nobodies going nowhere fast. Until Wren found us. When we signed with him, he immediately put us on the road. I remember the tour exactly: London, Kingsbury, Burton-on-Trent, Warrington, Blackpool, Liverpool, Birkenhead, Retford, London, Swindon, Bristol, and back to London for Christmas.” His ticked off each city across my body as if it were a map of the UK, his thumb traveling from London at my pubic bone, up to my navel, circling my entire right breast and across to my left before coming back to my pelvic area, then over to linger on my right hip, and returning back to London with a smile.

“Fun trip?” I asked wickedly.

“The best.” There was a devilish gleam in his eye. “The camaraderie was brilliant. Wren showed us he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. He was our security at the back door as well as the number-crunching maniac who refused to back down when some of those promoters tried to pull fast ones. Like the fifth member of the band by the time we arrived home. Little did we know, he would end up on the other side as soon as the stakes were high enough.”

Each player in turn—from the musicians themselves to the girlfriends, wives, manager, and crew—had a unique role in constructing the beast that was to become one of the most successful new wave of British heavy metal bands. “We were monstrous, unstoppable. But the fame . . . fame was like the mob. It was relentless, tireless. Attacking our personal lives. Drugs, money, excess—those were the pitchforks and torches the mob pursued us with. The monster had to burn and die.”

My eyes traveled to his abdomen.

“Ironically, that happened when professionals were in charge of our pyro. I got too close to the spot on stage where a six-foot flame was programmed to ignite. I realized my error just before it went off and moved away, but not before suffering second-degree burns. My guitar actually shielded most of the blast, and the leather pants helped as well.”

The white sheet was a sharp contrast next to the sunburst of his scar. I tentatively touched the raised purple ridge close to his navel. “It doesn’t scare me,” I said quietly.

He fingered it lightly as well, and then ran his hand over mine. “I probably would have healed better had we not been in the middle of a world tour.”

“No worker’s comp for you?” I joked, lifting both of our hands together and gently kissing his.

“Nope, no rest for the wicked. Skin grafts, compression garments, and a whole lot of morphine got me through that first month. Which is a chapter far from where we are now.” We slipped deeper under the sheet, Adrian winding and unwinding my curls as he progressed and digressed.

Wren vowed if they stuck with him, their albums would soon be on turntables in the bedrooms of every teenager on earth. “How do you say no to that?” He leaned over to blow out the candle, which had burned down to a thick dark pool. “You don’t. You say ‘yes please’ and ‘thank you, sir’ and you sign your name on the dotted line. You make a deal with the devil.”

My eyes followed his gaze, and we both stared at the candle, its orange-hot pinprick pulsating brighter as it gasped for air before finally succumbing.

“I think that’s enough purging for one day.” Adrian leaned back against me and closed his eyes, inhaling deeply. “Like a purification . . . watch the smoke.” A black ribbon sifted its way up to the ceiling from the extinguished wick.

I laid my cheek on the top of his head, my hands resting on his rib cage. “Hey, you never explained these.” If I spanned my hand wide enough, I could cover each tattooed bullet hole with a finger, as if I had the ability to staunch the old wounds.

“Bloody hell, I’ve been prattling for hours now and I haven’t even reached these parts of my tale. They tell the story better than I can.” He took my finger between his thumb and pointer, guiding me across them. “This one here is for Wren; for what he eventually did to the band. The next one is when Robyn left. This one, well—I inflicted myself, losing custody of Natalie. This”—he lingered on the bloodiest one—“was Adam. He killed our roadie, Cass.”

I gasped, my fingers instinctively jumping from his chest to my mouth.

“The minute Rick mentioned Adam and a car, I knew the news couldn’t be good. Most days on tour he was over the drink-drive limit simply upon waking. Cass was just trying to get home to Essex for Chrimbo,” he commented softly.

“How horrible.”

“How did Wren put it? Oh—‘At least it wasn’t one of the band.’ Like Cass was somehow less of a loss because he wasn’t lining this guy’s pockets! I was devastated. I had practically grown up with Cass . . . salt of the earth, he was.” He breathed deeply. “That’s when I really began to look at Wren in a different light. Suddenly, everything he said could be taken more than one way. I didn’t like his colleagues, starting with the prat he hired to handle our money. I distrusted him, but felt powerless. I was nursing the loss of Cass, the breakup of my marriage, and the disillusionment I felt toward my mentor and didn’t know where to turn.”

“What about Rick?”

He pointed to the largest and final bullet hole. “This. Was Rick.”

I didn’t know what to say. His recollections had caught me up in their spellbinding details, and yet I felt as if I had been woken prematurely from a dream, or a nightmare. The best and the worst had yet to come, I surmised. He had painted such a vivid picture of his humble beginnings, but there were still years to go to get to the man I saw before me now.

“Want to hear a secret?”

I leaned closer, but he shook his head. “No, really
hear
a secret?” I nodded. “Wait here.”

He yanked on his jeans and disappeared down the hall. I began to wonder how many rooms he had upstairs and how they were filled. More guitars and memories . . . I slipped on his Norton T-shirt and sat up to wait. Adrian returned, guitar in hand. It was his signature Ibanez, recognizable from so many of those posters in my attic. An amp I hadn’t noticed doubling as a nightstand began to buzz warmly as he united guitar and power cord. He began to shred a complicated melody, fingers nimbly attacking the frets, and I could instantly see this was what he really loved, he was so alive. His gaze was concentrated on his playing while mine was zeroed in on his face. The pure rapture was apparent, although there were glimmers of what could only be described as an exorcism. He was simultaneously reaching for something yet trying to rid himself of it at the same time as he ran through a smooth and fast legato. It was as heavy as any Corroded Corpse material I had heard in the past, yet fresh and timeless. I had a feeling it was the first time he had actually played it for ears other than his own. His eyes were on me now, and he was grinning as his fingers changed their direction and their mind, working up a heavy groove that tingled down my spine.

“You should do something with this.” It was the only thing I could think to say as he stood in front of me, his torso slick and heaving with the labor. My own heart was thumping its muted applause.

He unharnessed himself and joined me on the bed once again. “The only person I can see myself playing this with is Rick, and we aren’t exactly on speaking terms anymore.” He ran a hand up my bare leg. “It’s going on sixteen years. I have no idea where he is.” His phone began to ping next to our heads; I had asked him to set the alarm so I could get back home before school dismissed. “Ah, the bell tolls,” he murmured apologetically as I groaned.

“Already?”

“No. I set it a half hour early. I like long good-byes,” he breathed, crossing his legs over mine.