‘Hmm, I don’t think so. Maybe you’re undecided – like a floating voter. Do you think this stuff is going to happen because you think, Please God?’
‘Not really, no. I guess that means I don’t believe in Him, doesn’t it?’
‘You know, it could be a Her.’
He laughed. ‘You mean, this being you don’t believe exists could be female?’
‘Yes. Just because I don’t believe in God, that’s no excuse for sexism.’
‘Right, sorry.’ He put his hands up contritely. ‘I guess I don’t believe in God really, but sometimes … I kind of wish I did, you know?’
‘Yeah, I know what you mean. It must be nice to think everything makes sense. And the idea that there’s someone watching over you all the time. It’s kind of comforting.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So, what religion would you like to be true, if you could pick one?’
‘Um … I don’t know. Definitely not Catholicism – heaven and hell and purgatory and all that.’
‘Ugh, no. I’d like one that had reincarnation. But only if I could come back as someone much cooler. I wouldn’t want to come back as a snail or something.’
‘You’d be fine. I’d say you’ve got great karma.’
‘Thank you! That’s a lovely thing to say.’ She sighed, drawing patterns on the bed with a finger. ‘I like this world. I wouldn’t mind if there wasn’t an afterlife – I’d just like more of this one.’
‘This life can be great, if you’re one of the lucky ones. But I see a lot of people who—’ He broke off abruptly. ‘I can’t say that.’
‘Something personal?’
‘Yeah – I was going to say something to do with my work.’ They both fell silent. ‘Okay, that’s religion sorted,’ Darth said finally. ‘What’s next?’
Romy thought. ‘We could tell each other our deepest, darkest secrets,’ she said.
‘You’ve already discovered my deepest, darkest secret.’
‘That you tried to kill your son? Not a secret, dude. George Lucas put it in a movie.’
‘Bastard!’
She laughed. ‘Seriously – you and Katie is your deepest, darkest secret?’
‘That’s the best I can do,’ he shrugged. ‘I think it’s pretty heinous, don’t you? How about you? Do you have a terrible secret?’
‘Yes. I do.’
‘Really? You don’t seem like the secretive type to me.’
‘I’m not … usually. But I’ve never told anyone this.’
‘Is it bad?’
‘Yes. Very.’
‘Worse than mine?’
She nodded. ‘Much worse than yours, I think.’
‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’
‘I do want to.’
‘Okay. I’m listening.’
Once she started speaking, she couldn’t stop, and she marvelled at how easy it was. There was something very liberating about not knowing who he was or what he looked like – like the dark anonymity of the confessional. She didn’t know if it was the drink that had loosened her tongue or the fact that they were both wearing masks, but she found herself able to tell this stranger what she hadn’t been able to speak of to anyone, even those closest to her. She wasn’t even rushing through it. Her words were slow and measured. She told him that she hadn’t been herself lately. She told him her father had died and it had left her feeling shaky, like there was nothing to hold on to – like nothing you did in life mattered in the end because it would all turn to ash in the blink of an eye. As she spoke, he took one of her hands in his and held it, his thumb stroking soothingly over her fingers – and the more he touched her, the more she relaxed and the more she said. She told him about her father’s long degenerative illness. And, at last, she told him about the night her father died, and what she had done. He didn’t interrupt. He just listened in silence as the words spilled out of her like blood, leaving her feeling drained, but also strangely cleansed.
She jumped when she heard people in the corridor outside and gripped his hand in panic. She didn’t want to break the spell he had cast with his stroking fingers and his silent, masked presence. She wanted to stay here with him and him alone. She had purged and she felt weak and small now that it was all out, and she wanted him to lie down on this bed with her and wrap her up in his thick dark cloak and hold her to the heat of his body. She wanted him to make her feel safe and cared for and protected, and … forgiven. She had told him the worst thing she had ever done, and now she wanted absolution.
As footsteps thundered towards the door, he grabbed her hand and pulled her across the room and into a large walk-in wardrobe. He was just pulling the door closed behind them as a man and woman burst into the room, shrieking with laughter. It was dark inside the wardrobe, and Romy automatically reached for the light switch, but he grabbed her arm, stopping her. His hand slid down her bare arm as he placed it back by her side, and she shivered. She turned to him and he shook his head, putting a finger to his lips. They stood in silence, listening to the sounds of fumbling in the outer room. Then the door banged and the voices drifted away.
‘They’ve gone,’ he whispered, reaching past her for the door handle, but she stopped him. She didn’t want to go out into the light.
‘I’ve got another secret,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’ he asked, turning back to her.
She took his hands, feeling the firm warmth of his fingers and wanting more of his touch. ‘Earlier, when we were … out there,’ she nodded to the door. ‘I didn’t want you to stop.’
‘You mean—?’
‘I didn’t want you to stop,’ she said, kneading his fingers. She took his hand and held it over one of her breasts. ‘I didn’t want you to stop,’ she whimpered pleadingly. She heard him gasp and she took her hand away, but his stayed where it was, and his thumb started to move, stroking lightly over her nipple. She sighed with relief and instinctively tilted her face up to his. ‘I wish …’ her voice broke and she realised she was crying.
‘Shh,’ he whispered. ‘It’s okay. What do you want?’
‘I wish I could kiss you.’
He took his hand away and she felt bereft, but then he reached behind her and pulled something from one of the rails. He held up a long, silky scarf in front of her, and though she couldn’t see his face, she knew he was asking for permission, and she nodded.
‘Turn around,’ he said. When she had her back to him, he pulled off her mask and tied the scarf gently around her eyes. It was cool and silky, and smelled faintly of perfume.
‘Does it feel okay?’ he asked as he turned her around. She swayed slightly, disoriented by the total darkness, and nodded.
She heard shuffling as he removed his helmet, and then he pulled her into his arms and his lips were on hers. Their kisses started out soft and slow, but quickly became heated, tongues crashing together as their hands groped inside each other’s clothes. Being blindfolded only heightened Romy’s excitement, seeming to intensify the sensations of his cool, wet tongue on her skin, the softness of his hair on her thighs as he did one of Katie’s favourite things to her, the sounds of his panting and groaning, even the sound of ripping foil as he opened a condom, and the hardness of his cock as he pushed inside her. It should have felt sordid, but it didn’t. It just felt kind and comforting and … forgiving. It felt like absolution. Later, they fell asleep on the floor of the wardrobe.
When she woke up, she was alone in the darkness. She pushed open the door to discover that it was morning, the light hurting her eyes. She wandered downstairs as if in a dream. There were just a few stragglers left from the party. A short fat Spider-Man was making out with Snow White on the sofa, and the Grim Reaper was slumped on the floor in the kitchen, sharing a joint with a gorilla. There was no sign of Darth Vader. It was as if she had dreamed the whole thing, as if he had never existed. But she soon had proof that it was very real; and, nine months later, she held the living proof in her arms – all eight
pounds, nine ounces of it. She named the baby Luke.
Chapter Two
Kit Masterson lay on his narrow single bed, his hands behind his head, staring disconsolately at the ceiling as he listened to fireworks and bangers exploding outside the window. How the hell had he ended up back here? Two years ago, he had been a successful trader on Wall Street with a penthouse apartment on Riverside Drive and a beautiful trophy girlfriend at his beck and call. He had spent his summers in rented mansions in the Hamptons and his nights in upscale landmark restaurants and ritzy bars where the cocktails cost fifty dollars apiece. Now, he was in his old bedroom in his parents’ house, jobless and broke, the boxes full of the belongings he had brought with him when he had packed up his life in New York crammed into the tiny space so that there was barely room to move. He hadn’t had the heart to sort them out in the two weeks since he moved home – two weeks that had been spent mostly lying on this bed in a state of numb shock, pondering the crap-heap that was his life. Where had it all gone so wrong?
Of course, he knew where it had gone wrong – where it had gone wrong for so many people. This bloody recession was fucking things up for everyone. He knew it wasn’t just him, but he was taking it personally just the same. He was supposed to be the exception, damn it! Losing was something that happened to other people, not to him. Stocks could go up or down, but he had got used to his stock only rising. His stomach still churned when he thought of that day when he and his co-workers had been lined up to face the firing squad. They had known it was coming, but that hadn’t stopped it being a massive shock when it finally happened. Up until that moment, it hadn’t seemed real. Even then, he had still believed that there would be some loophole that would enable him to avoid what was happening to everyone else, a golden rope that would be pulled aside to let him slip through. But it had rolled through Wall Street like a tsunami, indiscriminately engulfing everyone.
Still, he had been so ludicrously overpaid that he might have been all right – if he hadn’t invested so heavily in a friend’s property business. He had held out for as long as he could in New York, trying to hold the pieces of his life together. He downsized, he retrenched, he cashed in what few assets he had and he tried to find another job. But when the property market went tits-up, it was the beginning of the end. Finally, he had to admit defeat and let go, watching helplessly as the uncontainable tide swept everything out of his reach. And now here he was, sleeping in his old bedroom, surrounded by the remnants of his teenage life, with his mom cooking his dinner and doing his washing, and his dad offering to give him money to go to the pub. He couldn’t live like this, but what the fuck was he going to do? He was thirty-one years old and fit for nothing.
Dealing was all he knew – all he was good at. He had fallen on his feet when, drifting through a series of dead-end jobs, he had stumbled into a lowly office job at a Wall Street brokerage and found himself in an environment that suited his talents exactly. He had never been bright academically, but he was sharp, energetic and driven, and that combined with his street smarts and charm had taken him a long way – all the way to the frenzied dealing room, where he discovered an intuitive feel for reading the market that bordered on the psychic. He became a prince among dealers, a legend in the company he worked for. He had made them a lot of money, and he had been rewarded accordingly. But then it had all melted away almost overnight and he was back to square one. It was as if the intervening years had never happened. Nothing had changed – except him.
He looked around the room, and he didn’t recognise himself in it. It was a time capsule, stuffed with memorabilia and frozen in time somewhere in the late 1990s, and the only connection he felt with the objects in it was a nostalgic one – the movie posters of Clerks and Kids, the pin-ups of Kurt Cobain and Chloë Sevigny, the piles of home-made mixed tapes that he knew would be full of stuff by obscure indie bands, the song titles painstakingly scrawled in his spidery script on the cassette casings. It was like it all belonged to someone else, someone he had known long ago and who he thought of now with a sort of avuncular fondness. But he couldn’t go back to being that person again. He was no longer the boy he had been, and the man he had become couldn’t live here. It was an alien environment to him, a planet with no oxygen.
His parents knew nothing about the life he had lived in New York. They’d only seen the bits of it he’d wanted them to see when they came to visit for a holiday. It had been easy to keep up the pretence short-term, to eradicate the traces of his real life for a week or two. But how could he live with them on a daily basis without them discovering he’d been lying to them for years? It was impossible. He just had to find some way to make enough money to get back to New York as soon as he could.
His self-pity fest was interrupted by a light tap on his door. ‘Come in,’ he called, sitting up and swinging his legs to the floor. His mother pushed open the door.
‘I’m just making a cup of tea, honey. Would you like one?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Okay. Well …’ She continued to hover uncertainly in the doorway, her eyes flitting around the room. ‘You might want to start unpacking those boxes.’
‘I will. I just haven’t got around to it yet.’
‘It’s been almost three weeks,’ she said tentatively.
‘I know.’ He took a deep breath, trying not to feel irritated. He knew she meant well, but she made him feel like a sulky teenager being told to tidy up his room.
‘I could help?’ she said. The question in her voice told him she was afraid of getting her head bitten off, and it made him feel guilty. He knew he’d been sulky and belligerent since he’d moved home, and that he’d generally behaved like an ungrateful sod. It wasn’t fair. After all, it wasn’t her fault that her son was such a loser.
‘No, I’ll do it myself – but thanks,’ he said, making a concerted effort not to snap at her.
‘You know, you can spread your stuff out in the house. You don’t have to put it all in this room. And we can change the decor,’ she said, moving into the room and sitting beside him on the bed. ‘Why don’t we go out at the weekend and you can pick out some things – our treat?’
‘Thanks, Mom, but I don’t want you to go to any expense.’
‘Don’t be a feckin’ eejit,’ she said, bumping her shoulder against his affectionately. He knew she just said it to make him laugh, and it worked. A native of Minnesota, his mother had lived in Ireland for over thirty years but had never lost her accent, and the many Irishisms she had picked up still sounded comically incongruous in her Midwestern twang.
‘Anyway, it doesn’t have to cost much. We can go to Ikea. This room is long overdue a makeover,’ she said looking around. ‘I’ve been meaning to do something with it for ages. Your being here will give me the kick in the butt I need to get on with it.’
‘Really, Mom, don’t do it on my account. It’s just until I sort myself out …’
She sighed. ‘I know you think this is just temporary, honey – and it is,’ she rushed on as he opened his mouth to protest, ‘but maybe it’s not as temporary as you think. It could take you a while to find a job—’
‘I know that. And I’m going to start looking soon, I promise. It’s just taking me a while to get my head around all this.’ At least he had got out of New York before he had burned through all his savings, so he wasn’t dependent on his parents just yet.
‘Hey, I’m not trying to kick you out. I hate that this has happened to you, but I love having you home.’
‘I know. And I like being here with you guys. It’s not that—’
‘I know it’s difficult,’ she said. ‘You’re a grown-up and you’re used to having your own life. It’s hard to go back to living at home. I get that.’
‘It’s nothing personal …’
‘I know. But it’s just for a while, so why not just relax and make the best of it for now? You’ll find your feet in no time, I’m sure. And maybe you’ll change your mind about moving back to New York.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Well, you never know,’ she said brightly. ‘I just want to see you happy.’
‘I was happy in New York.’
‘Were you?’ She looked at him narrowly. She seemed to be asking out of genuine curiosity, and Kit was taken aback by her almost pitying expression.
‘Yes, of course! Why would you think I wasn’t?’
‘I don’t know. You just always seemed a bit … lonely. Like there was something missing.’
‘Lonely? Really? But I had lots of friends there.’
‘I know, but—’
‘And I had Lauren.’ His mother turned her head away a little, but he didn’t miss the slightly exasperated look at the mention of his ex-girlfriend. His mother had done her best to hide it and had never been anything but her warm, friendly self on the few occasions they had met, but she had never been very good at disguising her feelings, and he knew she had never approved of Lauren. It didn’t bother him – he hadn’t particularly approved of her himself. ‘I had a really good life in New York,’ he persisted, rattled by her question. ‘I had a fantastic job, a great social life—’
‘I know, it’s …’ She trailed off, shaking her head. ‘It was just an impression,’ she said with a soothing smile, clearly afraid she had upset him. ‘Maybe it’s just wishful thinking because I hate you being so far away. I wish you could have settled down here.’
‘Well, at least Ethan’s moving back soon.’
‘Yes, thank God!’ A wave of anxiety passed over her face. ‘I’m looking forward to having both my boys home for a while at least. It’ll be nice for you to have Ethan back too.’
Outside a firework whizzed into the air with a shriek and they both turned to the window to watch as it exploded in a shower of green and red sparkles.
‘It’s Hallowe’en,’ his mother said, squeezing his knee. ‘Why don’t you go out and meet up with some of your old friends?’
‘I think I’ll just stay here and chill out.’ Kit loved his mother dearly, but she was treating him like he was six years old. Next, she’d suggest he go trick-or-treating. She was always trying to get him to reconnect with his old friends when he was home. That was how he had ended up at that God-awful party of David Kinsella’s last year. He shuddered at the memory. If his mother only knew what he got up to when he tried to reconnect with old friends, she’d probably lock him in his room and swallow the key.
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