The Devil's Trill Sonata (27 page)

The bottle shook in his hands, and the contents rattled. Stupid, he chastised himself again. Stupid for thinking this was over, stupid for thinking he was
better
, stupid for thinking the dream was ever going to be reality. Stupid for thinking he could just walk away.

Or mad. Wasn’t that the definition of madness? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? And hadn’t that been his course of action? Try to forget, try to push it away, and end up right here again, time after time after time?

Because he was mad. Quite bloody mad, and there wasn’t a cure for madness. Not really. Not a cure that left anything behind, anyway. But what was there of Darren to
be
left behind?

His phone had fallen out of his pocket at some point, and he picked it up off the crumpled sheets. It felt like picking up a dumbbell; his wrist bowed under the pressure, and his shoulder stiffened. It might have hurt, on any other day. He might have cared.

His last text, half-composed in his lunch break at work, when he had realised that the food tasted of sawdust and he couldn’t remember his casework that morning, was still there. He had never sent it, even though it was attached to Jayden’s name and ready to go. He deleted it instead, and dialled a memorised number…and stopped.

He hadn’t called Samaritans in years. Not since Jayden had found the number in his contacts and demanded to know. He hadn’t been able to do it, and he’d never
told
Jayden, obviously, but…but his thumb stuck over the call button, and suddenly he just couldn’t. Couldn’t press down, couldn’t succumb to knowing he’d failed to do this, failed to escape this endless cycle of life and death.

He deleted the number, and keyed out a different one, putting the phone to his ear even as he put the first of the pills in his mouth.

He should have realised. Should have
known
. What sane man kept a bottle of codeine in his desk? What sane man held on to pain medication for an injury from
years
earlier, that barely even twinged these days? What sane man lay fully-clothed in bed, popping pills like sweets, and listening to the ring of his boyfriend’s phone?

The ring.

Not his voice, but the ring. And when it stopped, Jayden’s voicemail never activated; Darren was answered with silence and the bright, empty face of his own phone.

Rejected.

The call had been rejected.

The phone slipped free of Darren’s hand of its own volition, and he took a deep breath that left the bed rattling under him. There was feeling, suddenly: an ache in his chest, like a knife, and he knew what a knife felt like, and it felt like this: thin and powerful, cracking apart his breastbone with no effort. His chest
hurt
, pure and simple, but his brain refused to grasp quite why. The click of the rings cutting off was the only sound in the room; it drowned out the frenzy of the devil’s playing.

The pills came easier now, despite the lump in his throat. Despite the hurt. Perhaps because of the hurt; the hurt consumed everything, until he was barely aware of the number of them, or the way the chalk covering scratched at his throat and tongue as he swallowed. The first of the powerful trills, a trick he had struggled with on the violin, echoed into the room like a demand, like an order, like the inevitable hand of a cruel and domineering fate.

And he obeyed, under the weight of his own limbs and the realisation rattling in his skull like a horrible secret. The dream had died the moment Jayden had gone to Cambridge. Darren had lost him then, and he just hadn’t realised it until now, his foolish optimism clouding everything. Jayden was gone. And without Jayden here, it was all a sad, lonely imitation of a beautiful dream, and nothing he could do could replicate that music. It had just been a dream, and the dream was over.

Soon, the imitation would be over too.

And then maybe, maybe, he could find his namesake. Peace.

* * * *

The tension in the dining hall that evening was so thick it was almost visible. Jonathon kept his head bowed over his plate; Ella loudly held court over the latest topical issue, and shot Jayden half-worried, half-irritated looks, and Jayden was
tired
.

He was just so tired. He didn’t know what to do about Jonathon and his infatuation and the
kiss
, and he didn’t know whether to tell Darren—especially with the mood Darren had been in since Paris—and his Middle English tutor was on at him about the quality of his last two essays, and…

Jayden wanted, desperately, for the term to come to an end. He could go to Mum’s and play with the new baby when it finally arrived, and just forget about this whole sorry first year. He could go to Southampton and camp in Darren’s flat and just escape the bad moods and the
disappointment
of this place. He didn’t have exams this year, because all the essays had counted, and he didn’t even know if he was going to fail a course or not because he was so wrung out, and he didn’t
need
Jonathon and Ella and Darren on top of this, and…

Jonathon had been staring at him since he walked in, biting his lip. The lip that had
kissed
Jayden, and said he’d thought that Jayden might as well just dump his boyfriend because, hey, you’re meant to experiment in university and that’s what Jonathon wanted out of him, and Ella had said they were on the rocks, and…

And he’d never told her that, but maybe he could see where she’d got it from, and Jayden just felt worse. He’d known university would rip them apart, but he hadn’t expected it to hurt so much, and Darren’s
it’s complicated
was
painful
, physically painful, and he wanted him to change it back, but they had to fix things first, and maybe things couldn’t be fixed when they were so far apart, and…

And then his phone rang.

He’d put it on silent, thankfully, so nobody was looking his way as he put down his glass and fumbled it out of his pocket, peering at the screen in his lap.
Darren <3 Mobile
. Oh God.

The vague headache around Jayden’s temples intensified. The last time they’d
talked
, properly, instead of just texting, it had been in Southampton, and Darren had never quite shaken off the angry undertone for the whole trip. He’d still been upset about Paris. And he’d be furious now, if Jayden told him, and Jayden knew himself well enough to know that if he talked to him, it would all come pouring out and then…

“Is that your boyfriend?” Jonathon asked suddenly, very quiet and barely glancing up from his plate. “Because if he wants to hit me, you know, that’s cool. It’s, you know. Fine.”

Jayden hit ‘end call’ and the phone went silent. He swallowed and shoved it back into his pocket before any of the professors could call him out on it. “No,” he said, “he’s fine. I’ll talk to him in the morning.”

The phone didn’t ring again.

Breakfast was a mixture of exhausted and awkward. Ella chattered away obliviously to the table at large, but Jonathon was doing little more than poking at his food, wounded by Jayden’s stony silence yesterday, and Leah had refused to sit at their table at all after hearing the rumours and seeing the dark faces, retreating across the hall to join her hockey player friends, and giving him a sour look as she did.

Jayden felt exhausted, simply put. Yesterday’s stress hadn’t abated in the slightest, and he had slept badly, worried about Jonathon and essays and Darren. At least Darren hadn’t called him back, but
still
. He felt run down and tired and he still had three essays to do
today
, and why did Ella have to
talk
all the time? And he wanted to tell her—and Jonathon, really, but at least Jonathon seemed to get the hint—that it was never going to happen and even if he and Darren split up, he wasn’t going to start going out with Jonathon. He didn’t
like
Jonathon like that. He didn’t even really like him at all, if Jayden was going to pull a Darren and be all brutally honest and everything. He was kind of pretentious and a bit boring and he wasn’t even really good-looking. Jonathon wasn’t even close to Darren, so even if Jayden
did
split up with him, he wouldn’t be going for Jonathon, and
why
, speaking of Darren, did he choose
that moment
to call?

His phone lit up on the wood; one of the professors gave him a cold look as it chimed loudly in the quiet hall, and Jayden cancelled the call, flushing furiously. He felt a little bit bad about not answering last night, truth be told, because Darren didn’t actually
call
often, he was more of a text person, but it was half eight in the morning, for God’s sake. That Darren was even
awake
at half eight in the morning was some kind of miracle. Did he have an early start on Thursdays? Jayden couldn’t remember.

He sighed heavily, a little too loudly, when the phone started ringing again, and snatched it up, leaving his half-eaten breakfast and sweeping out of the hall. He could just promise to call him tonight, maybe, if he got his work done in time, which…okay, which he wouldn’t. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Leah throw down her napkin and get up, and hoped she wasn’t going to take the chance to yell at him
again
. He regretted blowing her off to go to the stupid thing with Ella and Jonathon already, he didn’t need
telling
. Why couldn’t everyone just leave him
alone
?

“Hey, Darren, this isn’t really…” he began and stopped dead when it wasn’t Darren’s voice—or even
close
—that interrupted him.

“Jayden?”

“Who is this?” he snapped, feeling a headache starting. Great, now one of Darren’s stupid bloody mates thought it would be funny to bloody mess with him, and this
really
wasn’t the day for it, and…

“It’s Rachel,” the girl said, and Jayden’s irritation ebbed a little. Rachel was all right; he’d kind of liked Rachel, mostly because she bullied Darren like Scott had and he’d always thought Darren needed a bit of bullying now and then, to keep even and keep him from just being a lazy waste of space.

He flinched when Ella’s choice of words rose up in his mind.

“Why are you…?” he began and paused when she sniffed. The annoyance paused as well, listening intently. “Are you
crying
?”

“Yes, I bloody am!” she snapped, and a wet sort of sob echoed down the crackly line.

“Whoa, what’s…” The anger had gone completely, and in its place, a cold wash of dread was flooding his system. “Rachel, why have you got Darren’s phone?”

“You need to come here,” Rachel said tearfully. “I just…I don’t know, he’s been…he was a bit funny this last week, like quiet, and he was really tired the last couple of days and he got back late from work yesterday and when I stuck my head around his door at seven he was dozing with some music, so I just left him to it, I thought he needed the sleep, but then he didn’t get back up last night, he was just playing the violin all night, and he didn’t go to early shift this morning and…”

Oh no. Oh, no no no
no
.

“Oh, my God,” he breathed. “Oh, my God. Rach, what…what’s happened,
where’s Darren
?”

“He’s in the hospital,” Rachel blurted out and hiccupped wetly. “I checked on him this morning because he’s supposed to go to work for eight on Thursdays but he didn’t go so I went to check on him, and…I think he took an overdose, Jayden, he was just sprawled out in bed in his uniform and I couldn’t wake him up so I called an ambulance and his lips were blue and he’d been sick, and you have to get down here, you have to…”

She was crying, and Jayden felt…oddly detached. The cold panic had frozen his mind, and he was breathing too hard but it didn’t occur to him to correct it; he vaguely noted he was sitting when Leah’s knees appeared level with his head, and Rachel’s panicked crying was
surrounding
him, her words indistinct and foreign now, like she was speaking Swedish, and…

And Darren had taken an overdose.

Darren had tried to kill himself. He’d tried to commit…Darren had felt so ill that he’d tried to kill himself,
and he’d called last night and Jayden hadn’t answered
.

The phone was slid gingerly out of his hand; Leah was crouched beside him, Tim hovering behind her uncertainly, and she shooed him away as she put the phone to her ear and began asking Rachel questions in a surprisingly soft, gentle voice, her hand rubbing circles on Jayden’s knee through the cloth of his trousers. Jayden couldn’t hear the words, and the hand was barely there. His brain was too fixated, stuck on a panicked loop.
He called me and I ignored him and he tried to kill himself. I ignored him and he tried to kill himself. Darren tried to
kill
himself, and I ignored him…

“Okay.” Leah was hoisting him up by the elbow. His phone was silent. The call was over, and he felt like the bottom had dropped out of his entire universe along with it. “Come on, back to your room. Come on, Jayden,
walk
.”

He let her guide him, her hands on his shoulders. He felt cold. He felt icy cold, despite his jumper and heavy jeans, despite the blast of heated air as Leah pulled him up the stairs into the residential area of the college. Everything was
wrong
. It was all wrong! Darren had tried to…
Darren tried to kill himself…

He’d never…not since before they got together, anyway. He’d been
bad
, yes, and he’d self-harmed more than once in sixth form, and he’d needed stitches once, but he hadn’t…he’d called, Jayden thought with a stab of hot, furious guilt. He’d called or come over when he’d been
that
bad, come and tried to escape the feeling with Jayden. He’d once stayed over for four days, he’d been so low. He’d come over, he’d called, he’d reached out somehow, and Jayden had always been there, and, and…