by Julie Cohen
Tom shrugs. ‘Makes them work quicker?’
‘I used to hide my knife,’ says Yvonne. She’s been quiet up till now. ‘Not all the knives. Just the special one I cut myself with. I liked to know it was there, all ready for me if I needed it.’
We all know about Yvonne’s unhappy past, and she’s promised us all that she’s left it behind her now, but we fall silent in sympathy. Naomi puts a hand on her arm.
‘That’s what I’m worried about,’ I say. ‘I’m worried that it’s an emergency suicide kit.’
‘Ask him,’ says Naomi. ‘If he’s feeling like that, he’ll need the support of his friends.’
‘If he really wants to do it, he’ll do it anyway,’ says Andrew.
‘I didn’t have the nerve to ask him,’ I say. ‘He was avoiding all of my other questions. But I do know that he’s lost his job. And that he’s given away some of his belongings. And he seems sad.’
‘Maybe alert his family, or some of his other friends?’
‘I don’t know if he has any.’
Naomi is gazing at me. ‘Are you worried about him right now?’
‘Well, yes.’ And more so, since I’ve said my thoughts out loud.
‘Do you want to ring him?’
‘I don’t think he’d tell me anything over the phone.’
‘I can drive you to his house, if you like. I have the car.’
I feel a wave of gratitude for my kind friends, along with guilt that I’ve hidden my own problems from them.
‘He’s not far,’ I tell her. ‘That would be great.’
In the car, though, I start to feel foolish. It’s nearly eleven o’clock, and I’m about to barge in on Ewan without invitation for the second time today, all because he happens to keep alcohol and medication in the same kitchen cupboard. But then I remember how bad-tempered he’s been, how erratic. How eager to get rid of me. How sad. And then what was that fatalistic thing he said in Greenwich? Something about how days went on whether you were there to see them or not, and how it didn’t make much difference either way?
‘Quinn and I have separated for a little while,’ I tell Naomi as we’re driving.
‘Oh. I’m sorry. Can I help?’
That’s Naomi – offering help without asking for details. ‘It’s ongoing. I’m not ready to talk about it yet.’
‘It’s easier to help other people,’ she agrees, and I wonder if that’s what I’m doing: focusing on Ewan because I don’t want to think about Quinn, or about the strange things going on in my head.
I wonder if Naomi focuses on other people because she has things she doesn’t want to think about.
Naomi’s sat nav takes us to Ewan’s street, and I direct her to his building. She parks opposite and we look up to his third-storey windows, which are dark.
‘He’s probably asleep,’ I say.
‘Hopefully.’
‘What will I do if he doesn’t answer the door?’
‘Call 999. Do you want me to come with you?’
‘No, stay in the car. I’ll come back if I need to call the police.’ I sigh. ‘I’m going to feel a right berk if I ring the police and he’s only been at the pub.’
‘Sometimes friendship means feeling like a berk,’ says Naomi. She turns up Radio 4 and settles more comfortably into her seat. I let myself into Ewan’s building and knock on his door. He doesn’t answer right away, so I knock again.
He answers wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. I step back and reach for the wall to steady myself, though I didn’t finish my third margarita and haven’t felt drunk up till now.
‘Flick,’ he says. ‘Been at the tequila? You reek.’
‘I need to come in,’ I say.
‘You’re the strangest girl I’ve ever met,’ he says, but he steps aside so I can come in. His eyes are tired but not unfocused; he doesn’t look like a man who’s downed a bottle of whisky and a load of tablets. I inhale as I pass him and he doesn’t smell of whisky, either; in fact, I happen to know that he’s never smelled of whisky any of the times I’ve seen him, except for in that horrible pub when he actually was drinking whisky, because I keep on trying to smell frangipani on him and not smelling that either.
I go straight through his darkened sitting room to the kitchen and open the cupboard. The bottle and the packets are still there. He’s followed me; I turn around and face him.
‘Is this your suicide kit?’ I ask him.
‘Yes,’ he says.
I have to steady myself again, with a hand on the kitchen worktop. He looks exactly the same as the man who opened the door to me, except now he’s admitted he wants to die.
‘Why – why haven’t you used it?’
‘Because of you.’
He gazes steadily into my face. My phone rings in my pocket. Without breaking eye-contact I take it out.
‘Is he all right?’ asks Naomi.
‘We’re going to talk,’ I tell her. ‘He’s okay right now. Thank you so much for the lift. I’ll get a cab home.’
‘Let me know how it turns out.’
I slip the phone back into my pocket and it’s only me and Ewan.
‘Because of me?’ I ask. He nods.
I’ve felt this before. It was the time we were in the café and I was trembling because I’d been honest with him and he’d been honest with me. Because it was so close to stripping off our skin, letting each other see the raw vulnerable insides.
‘You turned up at my door when I was about to do it,’ he says. ‘I had to get a stamp for my suicide note, and there you were.’
‘You posted your suicide note? Isn’t that a little stupid? What if it got lost?’ I am asking irrelevant questions because I am shaking.
‘You posted it,’ he says. ‘And then I had to intercept it before it was delivered. I spent two mornings outside my tour manager’s house and the postie nearly called the cops.’
‘And you – and you asked me to meet you because …’
‘Because it gave me an excuse not to go ahead and kill myself anyway. If I’d arranged to meet you.’
‘You can’t have really wanted to die if you put it off to meet me at the Meridian Line.’
‘Oh, I did,’ he says. ‘But I wanted to see you more.’
I stare at him, a person who wanted to die but didn’t because of me. Another person.
‘If you wanted to see me so much, why weren’t you nicer?’
‘Well, to be fair, I did kiss you.’
‘We agreed that was a bad idea and we weren’t going to talk about it any more.’ I’m still shaking.
The corner of his mouth quirks up and for the first time, he moves. He runs his hand through his hair, dishevelling it more. ‘I don’t know if I really wanted to die,’ he says. ‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Maybe I didn’t want to kill myself. God knows, I was dithering enough that day. Maybe I was looking for an excuse to live and you gave it to me. Maybe I haven’t lost the habit of living yet, even though I don’t have anything to live for.’
‘You have things to live for.’ Though as soon as I say it, I realize I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t know him well enough.
‘If I really wanted to die I could have found a gun. Or stepped in front of a train. Or jumped off a building. Booze and pills aren’t a sure thing.’
‘It’s sure enough for me,’ I say. ‘In fact …’ I take the packets of tablets out of the cabinet and begin popping them out of their blister packs and flushing them down the kitchen sink. ‘How did you get so many sleeping tablets?’
‘I don’t sleep.’
He doesn’t sleep. He’s depressed. This is why he’s been acting so strangely, being so aggressive and angry and erratic. He needs professional help, but right now, he’s got me in his kitchen.
The tablets are white. Some of them drop down the plughole and some of them fall onto the stainless steel of the sink, making small taps. I finish one pack and start on the second.
‘You could just put them in the bin,�
�� Ewan says behind me.
‘I’m not taking any chances.’ Pop, pop, pop. He wanted to die but he didn’t really want to die. He’s still alive maybe because of me.
Did Mum have a kit, when she discovered what was happening to her? Somewhere that I never looked? Did she flush it down the drain because of me?
By the time I’ve finished emptying the blister packs the tablets have backed up a bit in the plughole, so I take down the bottle of whisky, crack it open, and wash the tablets down the drain with it. The smell is overwhelming: a cheap pub.
‘I could get some more,’ Ewan says.
‘You could. But first you’re going to tell me what happened so that you got them in the first place.’ I put down the empty bottle by the side of the sink, and turn to face Ewan again. He’s quite close, still wearing only a pair of boxers.
‘We’re going to need coffee,’ he says. ‘I’d offer you something stronger but you just poured it down the plughole.’
‘I’ll make it. I think you should get dressed.’
I can’t help watching his naked back as he leaves the room. Then I run cold water in the sink to wash the smell of whisky away. I make two mugs of coffee, black because there’s no milk, and stir sugar into both of them. When I come back into the living room he’s sitting in a leather armchair, wearing tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt. I take the sofa. The furniture here is big, designed for a man to use.
‘What happened,’ he says, ‘is that my best friend died. Lee – that was his name. It was my birthday, and he died, and it was my fault.’
Chapter Twenty
‘WE WERE ON a tour bus,’ he says. ‘I’ve spent a lot of my life on tour buses.’
He pauses, gazing at the blank brick wall, and seems disinclined to say anything else. But he’s said enough so that now, I need to know.
The Ewan I loved was intense, exciting, and somehow innocent. My mother got it right in her portrait of him, standing among white and yellow flowers. This man is just as intense, and maybe as exciting. But the innocence is gone. There’s a darkness, as well as a sadness. Things have happened to him since the short time I knew him. Two months. An eye-blink in the scheme of things. Such an insignificant time, if it had never been captured in an oil painting and the scent of frangipani.
‘You used to want to travel the world,’ I say. He laughs without humour.
‘I’ve done it. All over the world, every continent. Some of it’s exciting. But most of it’s on tour buses. You get on the bus, and you drive to a hotel that’s the same as any other hotel. Or you go to a gig that’s the same as any other gig. You’re travelling, but you’re standing still. You’re going to the same place again and again. You don’t feel like you’re moving at all.’ His face crumples. For a moment I think he’s going to cry, and I don’t know what I’ll do if he cries. I can’t touch him to comfort him. But I don’t think I could sit here and watch him crying, either.
But he takes a deep breath.
‘I’ve done it myself,’ he says. ‘You wake up and the bus is noisy. You think you’re on the road somewhere between New York and Ohio. Or Paris and Geneva. Or Sydney and Melbourne. The bus is always the same inside, so you could be anywhere. The windows are tinted and the engine is running. You get up, thinking you’re moving, and there’s no one else on it, and you find out that you’re in a car park and everyone else has gone for a shower.’
I know what he’s doing: he’s talking about something else so that he doesn’t have to talk about the painful thing. I do it too. He’s rubbing the tips of his fingers on the arm of his chair, as if he’s trying to get rid of an itch. And he’s lapsed into silence again. But I think he needs to talk about the painful thing, to let it out. It’s weighing him down.
‘Tell me about Lee,’ I say.
‘He was a sound engineer. A bloody good one. We met years ago and kept on recommending each other for jobs so we could work together. He was sick of travelling, though. He wanted to stop and settle down, spend some more time with his wife. That was the last thing we talked about, in fact. He said he should go back to his wife, and I should go and visit my daughter.’ He rubs his fingers harder on the chair, hard enough to leave a dent in the leather. ‘I didn’t want him to stop touring. I wanted him to keep on going. Even though I knew he was right, because touring was going to ruin his marriage as much as it ruined my being a father. Because I knew that if he stopped, if he stayed with Petra, I’d be lonely without him. How pathetic is that?’
‘And what happened?’
‘We were in Texas. I really bloody hate Texas. It goes on forever.’ He closes his eyes, and speaks like that. ‘It was my birthday so Lee and I were drinking rum. It was something like four in the morning, so I suppose it wasn’t my birthday any more, but we were pissed and everyone else on the bus was asleep. We were supposed to be stopping in Amarillo. We had hotel rooms there for the day. So Lee had given me a couple of Cuban cigars as a birthday present and we got off the bus to smoke them.’
His life is so different from mine, I think. Travelling and drinking, smoking cigars. Life on the road, with no connection to any of the places you pass through: is this what walking lightly is like?
‘Except the bus hadn’t stopped,’ says Ewan. ‘It was still going at seventy miles an hour when Lee stepped out.’
He holds out his right hand, the one that he’s been rubbing on the arm of his chair.
‘I tried to catch him. I had hold of him, or nearly. I could feel his shirt right here, in my fingers, and then I didn’t. He was gone. I still feel it here. It won’t go away. I still feel it.’
He spreads out his fingers in the air. Each one imprinted with memory.
Ewan
‘BUT THAT’S NOT your fault,’ Felicity said. ‘Shouldn’t the bus door have been locked?’
‘He was on the bus because of me. He was drinking because of me. I wanted to go outside for a smoke. It should have been me opening that door, not him.’
He hadn’t told anyone about Lee, hadn’t discussed it with anyone who didn’t already know, and avoided discussing it with people who did, which was pretty much everyone in the business. He had never admitted his guilt out loud, though he knew he wore it on his face like a scar. He had told the doctor that he had bad dreams, but not what they were about.
Not about the wind, the sound. The way he woke up feeling the back of Lee’s shirt on the tips of his fingers, how he felt that every time he tried to play guitar.
Why was he telling Felicity Bloom all this? A random woman from his past, someone he had never thought to meet again?
Because she had saved his life. She had caught the back of his shirt and stopped him from leaping.
‘I can understand why you feel guilty,’ said Felicity. ‘But that’s not the same as actual guilt. Would Lee have blamed you?’
‘He would, if he’d known what I was thinking. How I didn’t want him to go off to be happy with Petra.’
‘It’s not what we think that matters. It’s what we do.’ She ducked her head when she said it, and began playing with the hem of her skirt. ‘What does Petra say? Does she blame you?’
‘I haven’t spoken to her. I didn’t go to the funeral. It was too much.’
‘But you need to speak to her. How can you even start to forgive yourself if you haven’t heard that she forgives you too?’
‘I don’t think I want to forgive myself.’
She looked up then, and met his gaze. She looked at him for what seemed like a very long time. It was so late that there was barely any noise from outside on the street. He found himself remembering what she felt like in his arms, not a few days ago, but ten years ago. When they were lovers, and it had seemed like anything was possible.
‘Okay,’ she said softly. ‘Okay. I understand that, too. But maybe you can do something that will help someone else. Maybe that will make you feel better.’
‘How can I help anyone?’
‘Do what Lee told you to. His final request, if it wa
s what you were talking about just before he died. Go and see your daughter.’
‘That won’t help anyone.’
‘It might help you.’
He tipped his head back on the chair and looked up at the ceiling. ‘I thought I’d forgotten all about that painting. But I’ve been thinking about it since you turned up and told me about Esther. It was full of flowers, wasn’t it?’
‘Frangipani.’ Her voice was even quieter.
‘It’s odd to think about it still being out there in the world, unchanged. I’m still young, those flowers are still alive. You were still there in the room with me and we were lovers. When really, everything that produced that picture is dead.’
The room, nearly silent. Far away, the whisper of a car passing.
‘It’s not all dead,’ Felicity said.
She was still looking at him and when he met her gaze again he could feel an attraction deep in his belly. A cord binding him to her, something he’d nearly forgotten but now, tonight, as fresh as the first time he’d seen her, a bright summer daytime.
Felicity didn’t move from the sofa. He remembered how she’d flung her arms around him in the park in Greenwich, as if no time had passed.
‘Does your husband know you’re here?’ he asked her.
‘No.’
That hadn’t been her husband on the phone, then. This husband of hers seemed to be often missing. But the fact of him stood in the room between them. ‘Don’t you think he should know?’
‘There are a lot of things I can’t tell him. Not yet, anyway.’
‘It’s late,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you a cab.’ But he didn’t get up to fetch his phone.
‘Will you sleep?’ she asked.
‘I doubt it.’
‘I don’t think you should be alone tonight. Not after talking about all of this.’
‘What am I going to do? You’ve poured my suicide kit down the drain.’
‘You’ve already listed several other ways you could kill yourself.’
‘Flick, I’m guilty enough as it is. Go back to your husband.’
She dropped her gaze. ‘I don’t think I can,’ she said to her lap.
