Where Love Lies (15 page)

‘Time for what?’

‘Time to think. By myself. I have to sort my head out before I know what I really want.’

‘You can have all the time in the world.’

‘By myself,’ I say again.

He looks at me. ‘What you mean,’ he says, ‘is that you’re leaving me.’

And wasting all that Chinese food
, my errant brain thinks. ‘I need time,’ I repeat.

‘Felicity,’ he says, and now his face is full of pain. He was angry before, and
exasperated, but now it’s hit him. This isn’t a little married spat. This is real.

I want to take it back, but I can’t.

‘I don’t know how long for,’ I go on, trying to make it less awful. ‘Only a little while, maybe. I just need a clear head, Quinn.’

‘Where will you go?’

It’s the same question he asked a few minutes ago, but this version is answerable. ‘Lauren says I can stay with her. In
her flat, I mean. She has to go to Belgium.’

‘You’ve planned this?’

I don’t answer.

Quinn drops my hands. He gets up.

‘I suppose you’ve packed already,’ he says.

‘No.’

‘Then if that’s what you want, I’ll leave you to it.’

‘It’s probably a good idea anyway,’ I blurt out. ‘It will give me time to draw. To work on the book.’

He walks out of the kitchen, out of the cottage. He closes, doesn’t
slam, the door behind him.

And then the house is quiet, as quiet as I could want. And of course, now I have to go.

TWO PINTS IN
the Seven Stars, brooding at the end of the bar, were enough. He wouldn’t have gone there if he didn’t know it was Dad’s night to be at the golf club, but everyone there knew him. Everyone asked, ‘How’s Felicity?’ and he had to lie. And then Eric and Ed wanted to discuss the football, and Rowan was interested in talking about Boscombe House, the day centre for the elderly that
the council wanted to shut, and Miranda the barmaid wanted to ask him confidentially his opinions on placing lonely heart ads, and all the time he knew that Felicity was packing, she was calling a cab, she was going to the station and getting on a train to London to stay in Lauren’s flat.

How had it come to this? How, when he’d tried everything he could?

‘It’s unequal,’ he said to Miranda, and
quickly corrected himself. ‘I mean, it’s unpredictable. You could find love anywhere.’

Even in a crowded train.

And you could lose love anywhere, too.

He didn’t even have a paper with him, and the Seven Stars had stopped carrying the dailies, threaded onto wooden wands, in the 1990s. Finally, he pretended to be absorbed in his phone so he wouldn’t have to speak to anyone. They respected it
– the local-newspaper editor engrossed in Important News.

Felicity didn’t ring, or send a single text.

To himself, he couldn’t pretend that he hadn’t seen it coming. Otherwise, why had he run after her every time she was lost and late for dinner, or when she slipped through a hedge? And not only those times. In the past, he’d changed film tickets, rearranged lunch dates, read the same front
page over and over again while he waited for her to turn up.

She’d never come after him. She’d never chased him or asked him to come with her. And although that didn’t bother him most of the time, had never really bothered him other than the odd niggle, tonight he felt that he deserved, every now and then, to be run after. That he deserved not to be lied to, or to have things hidden from him.
Because he loved Felicity so much – more than he’d ever believed was possible.

Tears pricked his eyes and he dashed them away under cover of a yawn. It wasn’t going to work so he went into the men’s cloakroom and stood in the single closed cubicle, his head bowed, gritting his teeth and letting the tears fall into a tissue. When he came out, face scrubbed with cold water and a paper towel, his
half-full pint still stood at the end of the bar and Miranda was watching him, a frown on her face. He collected his pint with all the smile he could muster and took it to the snug, where he’d be less obvious. No one approached him. He wished he could be certain it was because he looked as if he were working.

Eventually, he finished his second pint and waved goodbye to Miranda and Rowan and Eric
and Ed, the entire pub. It wasn’t quite dark as he walked across the common. A bat swooped by his head.

In Hope Cottage, the lights were on but none of the curtains were drawn. Even from the other side of the gate, it looked empty. He unlocked the kitchen door and it swung open.

She was gone. He could feel her absence as keenly as he could her presence, even though the kitchen looked the same.
By the door, her red umbrella was missing, and her favourite jacket, the patterned one that was threadbare at the elbows. He went upstairs. Her side of the wardrobe was thinner. The bed was desolate. There was a dent on the bedspread where she had laid her suitcase to pack it.

He knew, then, that not only was she gone, but she was not coming back.

Quinn sat on the bed. The dressing table had
been denuded of make-up and hair clips. He gazed at himself in the mirror, saw himself alone.

The heart was a metaphor. It was muscle, not emotions.

His was breaking.

Tell me where is fancy bred.

Or in the heart, or in the head?

The Merchant of Venice,
Shakespeare

IN THE MURKY
light that pushed around the edges of the drawn blinds, Ewan McKillan sat at his dining table in Shoreditch and regarded the objects in front of him. Funny to think that everything he’d done, every decision he’d made, every road he’d travelled, had led him here to this room and these objects.

The table was wide and scarred. Originally it had been a laboratory bench, but it had
been rescued and restored after the original lab had been refurbished. Ewan hadn’t rescued it; it came with the flat, which he rented furnished. Even though he couldn’t take credit for it, he liked telling people that he ate off a surface that had once been used for mixing chemicals.

Used to like telling people.

The dining table stood at one end of the open-plan living area, where the walls
were plastered and painted a minimalist, modern half-grey; the rest of the room was taken up with squashy, worn leather chairs (they’d come worn, too, had probably been manufactured to look worn) and a low, wide glass coffee table. The far wall had been stripped of plaster and was raw red brick. He’d driven Y-shaped fittings into the brick, but they’d been empty for two days now, ever since he’d thrown
the three guitars they used to hold out of his third-storey window.

He had checked first, to make sure there was no one on the pavement below his window to get hit by the guitars. The electric guitars were pretty heavy, but even a Martin acoustic could cause serious damage when it was travelling at several miles an hour, and he didn’t want to be responsible for anyone else.

The acoustic, as
he’d expected, shattered into pieces of golden wood and string. The Les Paul actually bounced – once, twice – before collapsing on the pavement with a deep crack running through it. The Strat’s neck snapped clean off.

It was too similar to what had happened on that motorway in Texas. Ewan withdrew, shuddering, into the shadows of his flat and was about to draw the blinds when he heard a voice
shouting, ‘Oi!’

It was a teenage boy. He’d picked up the Strat, body in one hand, neck in the other.

‘This a sixties Stratocaster?’ the boy called up. ‘What d’you throw it out of the window for?’

He was a different colour from Ewan, with a North London accent and shapes shaven into the hair at the side of his head, but Ewan saw himself in the boy’s face, in his shoulders, in his hands.

‘Nineteen
sixty-four,’ he said. ‘You can keep it, if you like.’ He closed the window.

That was the last person he’d spoken to. He didn’t know if the boy had taken away the Strat in hopes of repairing it or using it for firewood. He didn’t know what had happened to the other two ruined guitars. Yesterday, it had occurred to him that he should have kept the guitars so that someone could have sold them. Petra
could have done with the money, maybe. Or he could have added it to Rebecca’s bank account.

Pathetic to think that those carcases of guitars that he’d smashed in the street had been the most valuable things he owned after thirty-three years of being alive. The flat was rented; he didn’t own a car. The other guitars and amps that he’d never bothered to retrieve from the lock-up were worth a little
bit of money, and he thought, now, about writing someone a note, something so that it would be understood that whatever money he had should go to Rebecca and to Lee’s wife Petra: half to the life he had created and half to the survivor of the life he had destroyed.

But that was a distraction. If he got up from this table to write a note, he would notice the unanswered messages on his phone, or
he’d pick up a piece of unopened post on the floor, or he’d think about something else that he’d left undone that had better
be
done because otherwise it never would, and that would take up another five minutes. Another ten. Another whole day maybe, of action and inaction.

He’d made his decision. There was only one remedy for the things he’d done and the things he’d left undone. Only one more
thing, now, to do. And so Ewan sat at his table, formerly a lab bench, and gazed at the objects in front of him.

The first was a one-and-a-half-litre bottle of blended whisky from Tesco, the kind that would make your mouth furry and your body exhale sour fumes. Good whisky would have been an affront; it wasn’t pleasure he was after.

Beside it stood the packets of pills. These, unlike the whisky,
were the good stuff. His doctor had prescribed them to knock him out at night, on the nights when he couldn’t get to sleep because of the dreams.

Nevertheless, Ewan hadn’t taken any of the tablets so far. He preferred to lie awake, thinking about the dreams he didn’t want to have, forcing himself to get up and walk around when he felt himself nodding off, wondering if that was what death was
like – a final dream that you couldn’t escape.

What the hell? He pushed his hair back from his face. Just because he was intending at any moment to take a fatal overdose of whisky and sleeping tablets, didn’t mean he had to go all Hamlet and think nonsensical shit about what it felt like to be dead. He’d find out soon enough anyway.

The last item was the worst. He picked it up, holding it between
his fingers as if it were hot. HAPPY BIRTHDAY said the card, above a Quentin Blake drawing of a girl on a bicycle. He’d written the address on the envelope, but he hadn’t written anything inside the card. It was too late to send it. Her birthday was today. But that was irrelevant, because he wasn’t going to send it anyway. It would still be sitting here on his table tomorrow, and the next day.
Until—

He sat up in his chair. Until when? Who was going to find him? His cleaner, Julia, came on Wednesdays. Would she be the one to find him? That hardly seemed fair. She wasn’t a great cleaner – in fact, she was pretty rubbish – but she deserved better than to find a dead body, particularly one stinking of the cheapest whisky in Tesco.

Ewan swore and gnawed his lip. He couldn’t phone anyone,
or text anyone, or email anyone, because there was a chance they’d get to him before he’d finished dying. Once upon a time you could phone people’s offices on a Saturday like this, and no one would pick up the messages till Monday. Now, he couldn’t be certain.

Then he rolled his eyes. The answer was in his hand, of course. He put down the card and got up from the table. It took a few minutes’
searching before he found a sheet of paper and an envelope. It was a used envelope, but he crossed out his own address and wrote the address of Ginge, his last tour manager. Ginge was the most practical and unflappable man Ewan had ever met, and Ewan knew this from hard experience.

Mate
, he wrote,
sorry for this. As soon as you get this letter, the exact minute, call the police and ask them to
go to my flat and break in. Don’t go there yourself
, he added.
Really, don’t. Thanks, mate. Ewan
.

As last letters went, it was markedly underwhelming. But if he stopped and tried to make it a heartfelt, profound letter, he’d be delayed again. And he’d delayed long enough already.

He folded it carefully, creasing down the edges.

If you keep finding excuses not to kill yourself, maybe you don’t
really want to do it
.

‘Bullshit,’ he said aloud. ‘I’ve always found excuses not to do what I’m supposed to do. This is no different.’ He stuffed the letter in the envelope. There was some Sellotape to seal it in another kitchen drawer. But no stamps, though he pulled the drawer contents out onto the floor: takeaway menus, corkscrews, chopsticks, single-serving packets of sugar and coffee, old
laminates and, for some reason, a sock.

Right. He’d nip out to the post office for a stamp and to post the letter to Ginge. Then straight back here to drink the whisky and take the tablets. He reckoned it would take a good few hours to die, once he’d drunk and swallowed himself to oblivion. He’d get a second-class stamp, to be certain. If he was going to all the trouble of buying the cheap whisky
and writing what was, more or less, a suicide note, he wasn’t going to have his plans foiled by an unexpectedly efficient postal service.

He thrust the envelope into his back pocket. On the way from the kitchen to the door he passed the table and stopped again, caught by the birthday card.

He could send the card too. What harm would it do? It wouldn’t get there in time, but that would hardly
matter now, would it? He reached out his hand for it, to scrawl his name inside it and then something else. Maybe only
sorry
again.

Maybe
love
.

Ewan turned away, his hand empty.
Sorry
and
love
, what was the difference? It might not do any harm to send the card, but it would definitely do no good. And he’d delayed long enough. He strode across his flat, grabbed his jacket and pulled the front
door open.