‘Wow. That’s…’ I realise I don’t know anything about this woman’s relationship with Travis, so I probably shouldn’t start mouthing off about her. ‘Wow,’ I repeat.
‘Right? And then she says it’s not just because of the job, and accused him of being shut off. Which, I guess, if I had to defend anything I’d probably agree with to an extent. But only because of the way shit ended with Franko… wait, you know about this, right? Franko?’
‘Yeah, little bits,’ I say.
‘Okay, interesting that you know about that but not… anyway.’ He shakes his head, as if clearing his thoughts. ‘So we all knew he’d been sucking it up for ages. Since right after the first album. Dad started putting a ton of pressure on us and he found it hard to cope. He never felt heard, like, he’d try and confide in our mom, and she’d make these empty promises. I think she tried but, well, Dad’s a bit of a character, and the whole thing was his dream from the very beginning. And in the end it all just got too much. So Jesse quit, and that ended the band. Dad wanted to find someone else but Mom put her foot down, said no. Anyway, since then he’s not been one to open up easily. He’s just super afraid of getting hurt again I think.’
‘Oh my god. He’s not said anything. About the girlfriend, I mean.’
‘Hmm well, keep this on the down low then. I’m sure that conversation is coming.’
‘I don’t want to make things tricky for him. I just want to make him happy.’
‘No, I get that,’ he says, quickly. ‘But I think, with Nic especially, the relationship was almost at the point where he was thinking things were going places. If she’d just stuck around…’
The comment stings though I don’t think he means for it to. My stomach twists. He looks out to sea again. He’s unreadable. It’s like he’s covered in a protective layer of lead and I’m an x-ray machine. It’s frustrating. I look down at my half empty bottle of beer and try to peel off the label with my nails. It tears in shreds, which I ball up and stuff between the slats of the table.
Jesse’s coming back out now, and it’s fair to say he’s struggling a little.
‘Let me get that,’ I say. ‘I’d have helped, you know? At any point.’
‘It’s cool,’ he says, but I take a bowl of nachos and the salsa and Travis grabs the new beers. When I look now, I see an extra layer of him. A thin film of vulnerability. And all I want to do is keep him safe, and protect him from everything that isn’t wonderful in the world.
* * *
Before Travis goes home, we take our nightly walk up the beach with a final drink. ‘One for the road,’ he says, but he’s driving so his one for the road is a bottle of tamarind flavour soda, and ours are measures of bourbon in glass tumblers. We walk along the sand, cool under my bare feet now, and Jesse keeps me tucked in close to him the whole time.
‘So, I’m going to get Brandon and Lainey down here at the weekend,’ Travis says. ‘I feel like this needs marking.’ He waves his hand about in circles in our general direction.
‘She’s not some sort of exhibit, Trav,’ Jesse says. ‘You can’t just invite people over to look at her.’
‘You know Lainey,’ he says, rolling his eyes. ‘She’ll want in on this. Conversation’s already been had, dude. She’s bringing lasagna.’
Jesse sighs.
‘Don’t be like that,’ Travis continues. ‘People care how you’re doing. You being this happy is nice to see.’
‘I don’t know, Trav. What if we had plans?’
‘Well, change ’em,’ he says, shrugging.
‘We don’t have plans, and it’s fine,’ I say, cutting in.
‘So then, Saturday,’ Travis says, and he’s beaming. His phone rings, and he answers it and wanders a little way ahead of us.
‘We don’t have to see everyone on Saturday,’ Jesse says.
‘Yeah we do,’ I say.
He kisses my forehead.
‘It’s nice here,’ I say. I’m looking out at the sunset, at the salmon-pink sky and the sun rays shining down on the sea. The beach is calming. The way the sea sucks at the sand. It’s constant. Whatever happens, it never stops. I want to be here to see it more than just this week, but the future all seems so uncertain, especially after what Travis said, and I can’t think about it for too long. Until today we hadn’t talked about what happens after I leave. I wouldn’t expect to under normal circumstances, not this early on, but this isn’t a normal circumstance. Whilst our situation is as it is, we’ll only have snippets of time together. We don’t have the luxury of seeing how things pan out. Every phone call, every visit, will need to be meticulously planned.
‘It sure has its moments,’ Jesse says, squinting up at the sky. ‘Right about this time every night.’
Travis has finished his phone call now. He’s bounding back towards us but he looks a little apologetic.
‘Guys, I have to run,’ he says. ‘You stay here, enjoy this. I’ll let myself out. This has been beautiful, truly.’ He finishes up the last of his soda and envelopes me in a hug. ‘Nice to meet you, British Cassie,’ he says.
‘You, too,’ I say.
‘Until Saturday.’ And then he’s gone, scrambling back up towards the peak of the dune.
‘Why do you think he left like that?’ I say when he’s disappeared from view.
‘Holly,’ Jesse says, and shrugs.
It’s a little darker now but we don’t make any moves to go back inside. We sit and I set my glass down in the sand at my feet, twisting it in a little. It makes a satisfying squeaky grinding sound as grain rubs against glass. We stare out to sea for a while, and then I lean my head on his shoulder. He moves in, rubs circles on my back, and I can smell clean clothes and that ferny shower gel.
‘I think he likes you,’ he says, eventually.
‘And what about you?’ I say, still staring out to sea, fuelled by the alcohol. ‘Do you like me?’
He’s silent for a bit. Only a few seconds, and now my heart is in my throat. There are butterflies in my stomach, hammering to get out. He twists some of my hair around his fingers, and finally, he speaks.
‘I… haven’t felt like this about anyone in years. You make me want to go out and do things I haven’t felt like bothering with before. When I’m with you, everything is bright and clear and colorful. This week has been the best week I’ve had in, well, I can’t remember how long. But a long time. A really, really long time.’ He pauses and takes a deep breath and his shoulder rises and falls under my head. The exhalation breath sounds a bit shaky. Then he continues; ‘Isn’t it obvious, Cassie? I absolutely adore you.’
* * *
Rach! Couple of things. I put on my big girl pants and invited him to the wedding and it’s a YES! I was very terrified, and now I’m just very excited, OMG what is my mother going to say? Then, your boy Travis came over (not sure he’d still be your bag to be honest). Do you remember him having an earring? I don’t, but he does now. Anyway, he told me all this stuff, secret squirrel style, about some ex called Nicole who Jesse was apparently serious with, and then she just upped and left for NY. But this was the first I’d heard about her and now I can’t stop thinking about it! I’m like, so totally buggin’! Then he said Jesse isn’t keen on long distance, and let’s face it, you can’t get more long distance than California to London. What would you do? After Travis went home, Jesse and I were sitting on the beach watching the sun go down, and he said he ADORES me. And that is actual verbatim. This is good yeah?
Aww bless your heart! Fortune favours the brave, this all sounds very lovely! What else did you find out about this ex? Any traces of her knocking around? How recent are we talking? She can’t have been that important if he hasn’t said anything… especially if she just upped sticks and moved. Travis definitely did not have an earring back in the day and to be frank, he sounds like a troublemaker now. Try not to worry about it, especially if he’s telling you that sort of stuff on beaches at sunset. It’s very good news, but I suspect you didn’t need me to tel
l you that. I’ll tell your mum to buy a hat, shall I? George had a girlfriend once, called Ariana. I always thought she sounded really exotic and I was convinced for ages he’d go back to her. But she’s an ex for a reason, and that reason was her weird obsession with porcelain statues of pigs in racy poses. Nicole’s old news. Don’t sweat it x
Chapter Thirty-One
Jesse
The morning after Travis came by feels comfortable. More so than before. We sit outside, flicking through magazines and checking our phones and eating, as if it’s a morning rhythm the two of us have kept forever. Gulls hover in the air, people walk their dogs, and amble up and down the pier. Richard’s house is shut up, so it’s peaceful, too.
As we’re finishing up, the elderly couple who live down the street are walking along the path. They’ve been here as long as I have, possibly even decades longer, and I’ve noticed them walk past most days, but I don’t know them particularly. This time they stop at the back of the house and lean against the wall.
‘Hey there,’ the man says, and waves.
‘Hiya, good morning,’ Cassie replies. She smiles warmly at them and pulls the t-shirt she’s wearing down her thighs as far as it will stretch. It doesn’t stretch very far.
‘Lovely day,’ says his wife, and we both nod.
‘I’ve seen you around,’ he says, to me.
‘Oh, well yeah, I live here, so –’
‘Haven’t seen you before, though, honey.’
Cassie shifts her chair closer to mine. ‘You won’t have. I’m just visiting.’
The old lady beams.
‘What an accent!’ she says.
The conversation continues for a few minutes. They’ve lived here since they got hitched in the late fifties and take a walk down this path every morning. He isn’t keen on how busy the beach gets, but I’m not sure what he expects from a beach town in Southern California. She seems more tolerant of it all and tells us her favorite thing to do is go over to Catalina Island, and I make a mental note for us to do that because it would be fun and I’ve never been there either. After a while they say goodbye and carry on up the beach, and Cassie sips her drink.
‘Well, they were adorable,’ she says.
‘I think he thought you were pretty adorable,’ I tell her.
‘Is that so?’ she says, leaning over and kissing me. Orange juice and coffee. She pulls away and sighs. ‘Let’s get ready for the day.’
Much later on in the afternoon, we’re tapping through scanned in photos on my laptop, studying them, intently, one by one. Looking back over snapshots of my life. I almost never look at these because of all the discomfort that surrounds how that part of it ended and I’ve certainly never shown them to anyone else. But she’s enjoying it which seems to make it a little bit easier. And it’s nice to look back at photos of Mom with us all around her. Snippets of normality in an adolescence that was anything but. One, I think, was taken on Mothers’ Day. All four of us are hugging her. There’s another where we should have been doing school work, but you can clearly see Travis playing on his Game Boy. Adam is looking at the camera, bored, and I’m chewing on the end of a pen.
‘Do you ever miss this life?’ she asks. It’s an innocuous enough question but it, alongside all the photos of it all, makes me flinch. ‘Would you ever go back?’
‘Sometimes I miss the way it was in the beginning, but no, I don’t think I’d go back.’
‘Is that what stopped you joining another band?’
‘Yeah, I think so, deep down. Because what if it’s always like that? Then I’d have thrown it all away for nothing. I wrecked things with Adam, I can’t revisit that.’
‘Everyone always said you were the quiet one. I think people – your fans – knew something was up.’
‘I don’t think I was very good at hiding it. By the time it all went to shit I didn’t care anymore. I was just constantly looking for a way out. But I don’t want you to think it was all bad. It really wasn’t, in the beginning. It was the dream.’
‘We met once, you know? In the beginning,’ she says. She hovers over a thumbnail image of me and clicks it open and grins. ‘You looked like this.’ I have chin-length hair with some stupid blond highlights a stylist had insisted on. I’m wearing an oversize basketball jersey – Lakers, obviously – baggy shorts and bright white hightop sneakers. Black rubber bracelets, tens of them, on my wrists. And a choker. A fucking choker! What was I thinking? I can’t have dressed myself that day, surely.
‘Yeah, you mentioned you got backstage once. Judas Priest, look at the state of me.’ I click the photo closed and laugh nervously.
‘No, it was before then,’ she says. ‘A different time. Just after “Come and Get it” was released.’
‘Yeah? What happened?’
She puts the laptop down on the table and shifts. Takes my hand, crosses her legs.
‘It was at a TV studio by the Thames. Early on a Saturday morning in February, and I had my Walkman with me. And you clocked my headphones when you signed the inlay card of my CD, and asked me what I was listening to, and instead of just telling you, I gave you one of my earbuds, and we listened for a bit. And it was cold. So cold, and I was wearing a –’
‘Green scarf,’ we both say simultaneously.
‘You remember,’ she whispers.
Something’s clicked and I have a vague memory of this. Because that wasn’t the norm and I was impressed that she wasn’t listening to our album. Every now and then for weeks after, I’d think about it, just for a few seconds. A morning so cold you could see your breath, and all the colors looked muted, apart from her, wrapped up in a green scarf. Wide smile. Wavy blonde hair. Pretty eyes. Green scarf. The photo of a New Year’s Eve on Facebook. She’s wearing it. That scarf.
‘Do you remember what we listened to?’
‘Of course. The Cranberries,’ she says. ‘“Linger”, to be precise,’ and it’s weird, this shared memory we have from 1998. I had no recollection at all of her getting backstage, but this had stood out. And when her friend had wandered over, camera in hand, she’d moved in close and held on to a handful of my jacket tightly in her fist. After the photo, she just stood there, pressed against me and holding on for just a fraction longer than necessary. Her friend said it was time to go, and nodded towards Travis, and I gave her shoulder a quick squeeze through her coat. She’d looked back at me as she was pulled away, and again right after she’d snapped a photo, and one last time before it was time for us to head back inside, and I’d known because I was looking back at her. And now she’s sitting on my couch, holding my hand, and I’m looking at her again. At the same wavy blonde hair, now pulled back off her face, and the same pretty blue-gray eyes.
‘I asked your name but you wouldn’t tell me,’ I say.
‘I said there was no point, you’d never remember it, and now we’ll never know,’ she laughs. ‘But if I’d told you, you might have done, and decided not to get mixed up in all that again, and then we wouldn’t be sitting here now.’
She looks up at the platinum disc on the wall and then glances around the room. ‘I had such an enormous crush on you,’ she whispers. ‘Still do, really.’
‘Do you think we need to talk about… what happens with us? After this week.’
‘Well, you’re coming to visit next month, no? You haven’t had second thoughts, have you?’
‘Of course not. What made you ask that?’
‘I don’t know.’ Her eyes keep darting around, and I notice them flit towards the platinum disc again. That thing’s like a hex. I’m going to put it in the spare room. ‘Just something Travis mentioned,’ she continues.
‘Yeah? What exactly was that?’ I ask, sitting back on the couch.
‘Something about Nicole –’
‘Nicole?’ I interrupt, suddenly panicked. For clear and obvious reasons. I need to know exactly what he told her.
‘Yeah. Nicole. Your girlfriend who moved to New York.’
‘Yeah I know who s
he is. But how did you end up talking to Travis about this?’
She looks at me blankly.
‘He just sort of told me. It wasn’t unpleasant. I think he just looked at us and… his intentions were good.’
‘Right, well, he shouldn’t have said anything.’
‘Well, what can I say? He did. Would you have told me if I hadn’t asked?’
‘Yeah, probably.’
‘He said that, too.’
‘Yeah?’ I say, grouchily. ‘Anything else?’
‘Something about her upping sticks and you being sad. I don’t know. It’s your story. Why are you asking me to tell it?’
‘Nicole made a big decision. And we never sat down and discussed any of it. She just came back from a trip and told me she’d been offered her dream job.’
‘And then what?’
‘She said she was going, and that was sort of that.’
‘Would you have gone if she’d asked you? Travis said you don’t do long distance.’
‘Well, Travis doesn’t know shit. She didn’t want me to, and she ditched me. But I don’t know, to be honest. It’s a big ask.’
‘Okay, but you realise at some point one of us might have to make that decision. Would it be a big ask then, too?’
‘I mean, I guess I just thought –’
‘That it would definitely be me?’
‘Well… yeah.’
‘Do you realise you’ve just done pretty much exactly the same thing?’ she says, incredulously.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Well, you’ve laid it all out for me. Sold me this life out here. I can move, I can get a new job. I can make all the sacrifices whilst you just carry on as normal. All the expectation is on me.’
‘Wow. That’s not at all what I was getting at. I just said we never talked about any of it, and that was never on the cards in the first place. It’s not really the same thing. And this is nice, isn’t it?’
‘This is lovely, but it’s also a holiday and different to if I actually lived here and surely you know that? What would I do for a job? What would it be like when you’re off doing whatever you do? You were so busy after London and there were times when we hardly spoke. How would it be if I lived here? I’m just trying to inject a little bit of realism into this, you know?’
Call Me, Maybe Page 20
