Where Love Lies

by Julie Cohen

  ‘Where do you go?’ he asks me, his grey eyes boring into mine. ‘Where do you go in your head, when you leave me, Felicity?’

  He knows that, too?

  ‘I think,’ I say, short of breath, knowing that I have to say it now, before he starts asking more, before I tell him the whole truth and hurt him even more deeply, ‘I need a little time.’

  ‘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.

  Quinn

  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.

  Part Two

  Tell me where is fancy bred.

  Or in the heart, or in the head?

  The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare

  Ewan

  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 L
ondon 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.

  Someone stood there, her hand poised in the air to knock. Her mouth widened into an O, and though she was the last person on his mind, her eyes were the exact shade of green that he remembered.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he demanded of Felicity Bloom.

  Ewan

  ‘I—’ SHE BEGAN, and even in that one word her voice sounded the same, as if they’d been interrupted mid-conversation ten years before and they were picking it up again.

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘No, never mind. Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Just go away. Get out of here.’ He backed into the flat. ‘Now,’ he added, and slammed the door so hard the floor shook.

  Even with the door closed, he could feel her out there. She wasn’t leaving. How long had she been standing outside, while he was talking to himself and trying to screw up the courage to do himself in?

  ‘Fuck,’ he said.

  Felicity Bloom. Appearing like a ghost from the past, a reminder of another possible life that he had thrown away.

  She knocked on the door. By itself, Ewan’s hand reached for the knob, but he pulled it back sharply. He didn’t need any more distractions. If he started thinking about why Felicity had appeared, he’d start thinking about other things. He’d get interested and he’d get sidetracked and he’d get caught up in the complicated dreary business of living again, of carrying on exactly as flawed as he was now.

  But there was still the letter in his hand, without a stamp. He had to post it, and he couldn’t leave the flat if Felicity was standing there.

  He could give her the letter to post. No, that was a bad idea. She’d try to talk to him. She’d draw him in.

  What was she doing h
ere?

  Ewan leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. He had not thought of her in years, but now he remembered the first time he’d seen her, in that drawing class when she’d come in late, dropping everything on the floor.

  There had been no shortage of girls in London that summer. Tight clothes, short skirts, high heels, offering him fags after the gig, their eyes on his hands and his crotch. Plenty of the type he’d liked then, with big boobs and long legs, pierced tongues, eyeliner, the ones who looked like Alana did when he’d met her. It was only a matter of time before he broke his promise to Alana; they’d both known it when he left, they both knew him too well. But he promised to be faithful anyway and Alana pretended to believe him.

  It was supposed to be with one of those girls, in the dressing room after a gig or back in his bedroom in the flat he shared with Gavin and Dougie. He’d held out for weeks but it was going to happen, awaiting only the combination of too much booze and a new girl with the best kind of smart mouth.

  It wasn’t supposed to be with someone like Felicity Bloom.

  She was nervous and wore mismatched clothes that were too big for her and she had dreams in her face and he’d wanted to touch her. It wasn’t even a sexual thing at first. He just wanted to draw his fingertips across her cheek or put his hand on her narrow shoulder. He’d been young and stupid and he wanted to connect himself to her because she seemed to be made of pure feeling.

  Outside, Felicity stopped knocking on the door.

  ‘Why do you want to see me?’ he muttered. ‘What would be the point?’

  The silence was very loud and very long.

  He’d been young and stupid but Felicity Bloom, if only for a few weeks, was possibly one of the only good decisions he’d ever made.

  Ewan swore again and yanked the door open. She was gone.

  He went down the stairs two at a time, the sound of his boot heels echoing in the stairwell. He emerged into the sunlight and had to blink several times before he could see properly. She was thirty metres or so away, walking down the pavement. She wore a blue spotted dress and a red cardigan and there was some sort of silk flower in her hair. He ran up to her and seized her by her shoulder.