Darkly, Deeply, Beautifully

by Megan Tayte

  ‘Well, that was illuminating.’

  ‘Mind melt. Total mind melt.’

  ‘Er, yeah, I’m getting that. But in a good way? I mean, it seems Gabe’s lot aren’t so bad after all?’

  I eyed him over a cocktail umbrella. Luke smiled encouragingly. I opened my mouth. Closed it again. I just didn’t know where to start.

  Luke turned to Jude. ‘What did you make of it? Do you think it was all true?’

  Jude picked up his drink and took several long gulps. Then he put his glass down carefully on a beer mat and said, ‘Yes. I think that was the truth.’

  ‘So… has it changed your view? I know you were brought up to think of them as, well, fallen from grace – bad.’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. It’s all so different to Cerulea.’

  ‘Because you guys only heal?’

  Jude gave a short, mirthless laugh. ‘Because we only heal, yes. Because we tiptoe around the power. Because there are so few of us and we think we’re rare, precious. Because we hide away on the island and at the school. Because we’ve developed a totally messed up way to create next generations – women locked away; men celibate and alone, or paired off like breeding cattle – when there is no duty to procreate. There are others of us. There are others!’

  I’d never seen Jude like this. Veins were standing out in his neck and he was breathing like he’d run a race (and looking like he’d lost it).

  ‘They’re so organised. I pictured them shambolic, a motley lot. Screw loose. Without direction. But it’s a whole setup, isn’t it? Just like at home – a society within a society. One of many societies! And a Council, a world of us. Collaboration. Universal laws even. What am I meant to think – me, who grew up on that island, in that school? All the limits. All the rules. No choice. Partner with Sienna, Jude. Partner with Scarlett, Jude. Do your duty. Save the world. But don’t save it too much – just a little.’

  Another gulp of beer. This time, the glass was slammed down.

  ‘They were kind to us, all of them. Welcoming. None of us – no Cerulean I know – is so unguarded with a newcomer. And they know so much; they know it all. Not like us. We don’t question; we follow. Did you see the way they looked at me? They pity me. For the way I live.’

  ‘Are they right to?’ said Luke.

  ‘Yes. God help me, yes, I think so.’ Jude drained the dregs in his glass.

  ‘Another?’ Luke offered.

  ‘Definitely,’ Jude said.

  ‘Scarlett?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Drink?’ Luke nodded at my glass, which I now realised was empty.

  ‘Oh. Right. Okay.’

  He dropped a kiss on the top of my head as he stood, and then he weaved his way through a group of noisy people clustered at the bar. Among them, a short man in a pink-striped shirt was chatting up an owlish girl with a bragging account of his days as a Cambridge University coxswain. I wondered what the girl would say if I whispered in her ear that the most athletic thing about Mr Pink Shirt was his athlete’s foot; his itchy discomfort was screaming at me.

  ‘Not contemplating healing that, are you?’ said Jude.

  ‘Hell no.’

  I looked back at Jude. Attempted a smile.

  ‘You okay?’

  I shrugged. ‘Should be used to it by now, I guess. Truth will out, but will do so in a vomit-like splurge that’ll leave you reeling.’

  It was meant to be a joke, but Jude nodded seriously.

  ‘You okay?’ I asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not your fault.’

  ‘Still sucks, though.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I looked over to the bar. Tall as he was, I could see Luke’s head above the crowd. I was glad he was here, close by.

  When I turned back to Jude, he was shredding his beer mat into small squares. I didn’t want to upset him further, but there was a question begging to be asked.

  ‘Jude, does Evangeline know?’

  ‘About?’

  ‘All of it. Any of it.’

  ‘You mean has she wilfully kept the Ceruleans cut off and living as we do? Wilfully demonised “the Fallen”?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I don’t know why she would have. But she’s hardly open, is she?’

  ‘Will you challenge her?’

  He looked past me, and though his gaze was fixed on a blackboard outlining the pizza specials, I knew he was seeing something else, a difficult scene in which he risked hurting his ‘Mother’.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Death is hanging over Evangeline; I don’t think she has long. And already things are changing on Cerulea – your leaving, Estelle’s bolshiness. We can’t stay the same, I guess. And me: I can’t go backwards, forget everything I’ve seen here. But to confront Evangeline, tell the others even… I’m no revolutionary, Scarlett. I’m not like you. Or Sienna.’

  He squeezed his eyes shut tight and pushed his fists into the sockets. A shudder wracked through him. I reached out and touched a hand to his arm, but he flinched, so I let go.

  It was his last word that had sent him over the brink, I thought. Sienna. All he’d learned – did it make a difference? His talk of celibacy, of a lifetime alone – were the foundations shaking? Did he, could he…?

  Luke arrived back with the drinks and took in the scene. He mouthed Is he…? to me and I nodded silently.

  Luke clinked the glasses onto the table and slid onto the seat beside me. ‘Here’s your drink, mate,’ he said in a blokey Let’s pretend you’re not tearful manner.

  Jude dropped his fists. ‘Thanks,’ he said gruffly. He took a gulp and blinked rapidly as his eyes darted around the room. He looked haunted, like a cornered animal.

  ‘Go,’ I said suddenly. ‘Jude, just go. Get away from here. Get some space. You don’t have to stay.’

  ‘I don’t?’

  ‘You don’t,’ Luke said at once. ‘I think we know now it’s safe enough here.’

  ‘Steer clear of the island if you want,’ I suggested. ‘Use the cottage. Or go see Si.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Well, don’t think you’re hanging about another night in my girlfriend’s bedroom,’ said Luke lightly.

  Jude managed a smile. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay.’

  I think, if he could have got away with it, he’d have Travelled there and then. But an exit via the gents’ was less attention-grabbing, so after a quick and somewhat awkward hug for me and a ‘Thanks, see you’ for Luke, Jude headed off to the back of the pub. I watched until he was out of sight.

  ‘Right,’ said Luke. ‘That’s Jude sorted. Now, Ms Blake, what about you? Back to Gabe’s? Off to the hospital? Find Sienna?’

  I thought about it. My head was spinning with all the revelations of the day. The urge to escape, like Jude, was powerful. Twycombe called to me: the cottage, the ocean. But we weren’t done here yet.

  ‘All of the above,’ I said. ‘Eventually. But first, how about a slice of the quiet life?’

  Luke arched an eyebrow and looked pointedly at Mr Pink Shirt, who had edged closer and was guffawing like a donkey at eardrum-shattering volume.

  ‘Not literally,’ I had to concede. ‘But just me and you for a little while.’

  So we ignored the braying City boys. And we ignored the foot-weary drinkers who hovered hopefully by Jude’s empty seat. And we ignored the nineties’ playlist blaring through the sound system, even when the band Space put a call out for ‘Avenging Angels’. For a little while, we were just Luke and Scarlett on a date in London. Easy as pie, and no less comforting.

  Juan slept like a top, or like the dead,

  Who sleep at last, perhaps (God only knows),

  Just for the present; and in his lull’d head

  Not even a vision of his former woes

  Throbb’d in accursed dreams.

  Even now, five years after I’d recited these lines before a class of bored English
Lit students, the words rolled around my mind with ease. Our teacher had told us to pick an extract from Lord Byron’s poem Don Juan and discuss it with regard to the origin of a modern idiom. I could have picked truth is always strange;/Stranger than fiction. That idiom was possible; I knew that now. Instead I’d written an essay on sleeping like the dead. That was also possible; I just wished I didn’t know that now.

  My mother slept like the dead. White. Expressionless. Motionless. Someone had crossed her arms over her chest. She looked like a stone effigy on top of a tomb. I uncrossed her arms and laid them at her sides. Then, with her assuming her usual state, I assumed mine: sitting beside her, holding her hand, willing her to wake up.

  ‘Scarlett?’ Cindy’s head appeared in the doorway. ‘You alone?’ Seeing that I was, she ploughed on: ‘Your mum has a visitor. Odd-looking chap – Michael? He’s at the nurses’ station. Okay to send him in?’

  ‘Er, yes, fine,’ I said.

  Michael was here? I barely had time to process the idea before Cindy showed him in.

  ‘Hello, Scarlett,’ he said. ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you. Only Jude said you were here, and I thought you may like company.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Jude. Right.’

  I would have taken the time to ask where Michael had crossed paths with Jude, but I was a little preoccupied taking in the sight of my friend.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked as he carefully placed a large, brown-paper-wrapped parcel on the floor and then arranged his lanky frame on the seat opposite. ‘You look a little… different.’

  ‘Do I?’ He blinked. ‘Been lost in a project. Painting. I guess I lose touch with reality a bit.’

  That explained it: the chalky skin and the hair that had a multi-coloured electrocuted look about it and the fact that he’d forgotten to put on his glasses and his eyes looked a little, well, mismatched.

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Right.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Silence fell in the room.

  I waited for Michael to speak – to ask how I was, how Mum was. But then I realised I’d be waiting a long time. Michael didn’t quite get social norms. He was a nice guy, with his heart in the right place, but a little awkward. I blamed his childhood. Who’d interact well with others when they’d grown up segregated from other people and routinely left alone?

  I racked my brain for something to say and settled for: ‘Thank you for coming. She’s, er, doing okay.’

  I gestured at Mum, whom he’d not yet looked at – his gaze was roving the room, from flower arrangement to heart monitor to brick-wall view. I felt a little jolt of shock as his eyes finally locked on mine. Really, he should have looked in the mirror before coming out.

  ‘So, how are you?’ I asked. ‘I haven’t seen you since…’

  ‘The fire at the care home,’ said Michael. ‘It was a big fire. People died.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But Grannie Cavendish was okay – thanks to you coming to get me.’

  ‘I did help,’ he said. Then: ‘How have you found Gabriel?’

  I was surprised at first by the question – I hadn’t realised he knew where Jude and I had been. But of course Jude must have told him, or perhaps even Evangeline.

  ‘Er, okay…’ I said noncommittally. A memory surfaced. ‘Oh. You know Gabe? The night of the fire, after he brought Grannie and me out, you warned him to leave.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Michael. ‘Gabriel and I have met a few times in the past year. He’s… of interest to me.’

  He said nothing more, but he didn’t need to. It made perfect sense. The man on the fifteenth floor explaining that a few Vindicos were former Ceruleans. Michael’s enquiring mind, his quiet unwillingness to obediently conform. And it was Michael who’d pointed me in the direction of Gabe’s nightclub in Newquay; he could easily have sought Gabe out himself.

  ‘You’re thinking of joining the Vindicos,’ I said.

  Michael leaned forward. ‘Are you, Scarlett?’ he said softly. ‘Are you a good girl, or a bad girl? A follower, or a maverick?’

  My eyes widened at the last word and flicked to the crimson-flowered geranium on the windowsill. The Maverick Scarlet.

  ‘The plant was from you?’

  But Michael had turned in his seat and was now tearing the brown paper off the parcel he’d brought with all the fervour of a child on Christmas morning. He held up a canvas.

  ‘For the hospital room,’ he said.

  I studied the piece. It was abstract – so abstract the subject was unfathomable. The overall impression was colour, swirls of reds and blues and black. I didn’t know what to make of it. It was certainly going to look odd alongside the other artworks in Mum’s room, benign landscapes in which trees looked exactly like trees and brush strokes were delicate enough to be invisible. But for all I knew (I was no art critic) this was a work of genius, and clearly Michael was making a gesture.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘My mum loved – loves – modern art.’

  ‘She does.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Now he looked at my mother. I watched emotions play across his face: anger, frustration, sadness – everything I felt in this room, where my miraculous power to heal counted for nothing.

  ‘When will she wake up?’ he asked.

  I loved him for that question, for not saying, Will she wake up?

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘The consultant says it could be days, or weeks, or…’ I swallowed. ‘Every day she doesn’t wake up, the prognosis gets worse.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Michael softly. Then: ‘What about you, Scarlett?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Will you go back to your life, to being your own person?’

  I wasn’t sure what he meant. Will you stop waiting here, in London, for a miracle and move on? Or will you be a Cerulean or a Vindico, or your own person?

  ‘What would your mum tell you to do?’ he said.

  I was quiet. It was a sensible question, but a personal one. Michael didn’t know my mother, and I felt protective of her, like I didn’t want to talk about her – who she was, how she felt – with an outsider.

  ‘Well, thanks for coming, Michael,’ I said when the quiet moment extended into an awkward silence. ‘It was kind of you.’

  He didn’t seem bothered by my avoidance of his questions, or my dismissal of him now. One of the benefits of having a friend with scant understanding of social niceties.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I did help.’

  And before I could say another word, he’d faded to blue and then nothingness, and I was alone once more with my mother.

  I sat with her for a little longer. Then, before I left, I tucked Michael’s canvas behind the head of the bed. I couldn’t help thinking of Byron’s vision of former woes that throbb’d in accursed dreams, and I worried that even though Michael’s painting was a nice gesture and probably a goldmine for an art gallery owner, it was a little nightmarish. I figured what Michael didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

  I was tired when I got back to the penthouse. Luke at my side most of the day, the hordes of people at the pub, the hospital visit – I was edging into overload. I had to ask Luke to leave.

  He understood. But he worried about leaving me alone with my father. With Gabe bustling about in the kitchen, Luke and I sat on a sofa at the far end of the room and talked in low voices.

  ‘Are you sure you want to stay up here alone?’ he said. ‘I mean, maybe you need some space right now, like Jude?’

  ‘I’m a big girl,’ I told him. ‘I’ll manage. Besides, I want this done now – I want it all out in the open. So we can go home.’

  ‘You want to go back to Twycombe?’

  ‘More than you can imagine.’

  ‘What about your mum?’

  ‘I sat on a bench outside the hospital for a while before I came home, and I thought about what to do – what Mum would tell me to do.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I think she’d tell me to stop waiting around. I
think she’d tell me to get back to my life.’

  Luke nodded slowly. ‘It’s okay to do that, you know.’

  ‘I know. I’ll still visit, of course. Every day. It’s just…’

  ‘You feel guilty.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But she wouldn’t want you to.’

  ‘No. She’d want me to be my own person.’

  Luke said nothing, but he kissed me and I felt his relief: that I was hauling myself out of the boggy quagmire into which I’d sunk that day at Hollythwaite, that day we’d found Mum.

  He broke off and pulled me into a bear hug. I thought about telling him where this change of heart had come from: Michael, with his thought-provoking probing. But I was too tired to get into it now, and hugging was much nicer than talking. In fact, I could have quite happily nodded off…

  Picking up on his girlfriend slumping like a jack-in-the-box post-pop, Luke whispered, ‘Take care of yourself; I’ll see you in the morning.’ Then he nudged me back onto the sofa cushions, kissed me on the forehead and left. At least I think he left. I wasn’t quite…

  *

  ‘… awake?’

  ‘Huh?’

  I opened my eyes. Gabe was standing in front of the sofa, peering at me.

  ‘Ah, good, you are awake,’ he said. ‘Grub’s up.’ He turned and strode off to the dining table.

  Blearily, I staggered to my feet and followed him. The table was set for two: a steaming plate of creamy pasta each, sliced French bread, salad, orange juice. My stomach grumbled at the sight – when had I last eaten? Breakfast? – and I quickly sat opposite Gabe and dived in.

  ‘Good to see you have an appetite,’ commented Gabe after a minute during which I noticed nothing else but the food in front of me. ‘Your sister picks at her food.’

  ‘Always has,’ I told him. ‘Like Mum – well, she used to anyway.’

  He smiled. ‘I remember. But Elizabeth was a secret eater. I’d make cheesecake – which she refused to eat; too calorific – and leave it in the fridge. Next morning, there’d be a slice missing. She’d blame it on pixies.’

  There was such fondness in how he talked about my mother. He spoke about her easily, as if she was often in his thoughts.