Our Song

by Dani Atkins

  He held me uncomfortably close, so tightly that the zipper from his leather jacket actually left indents on my breasts which were crushed up against him. I should have pulled away from him after that first dance. I should have recoiled from the mingled smell of spirits and nicotine on his breath. I didn’t even know his name, and he certainly didn’t bother asking mine. I felt his hand sliding up and down my back, each sweep taking him lower and lower until he was virtually grabbing my bum.

  ‘Skinny little thing, aren’t you?’ he said, which I could only assume was his idea of a chat-up line. ‘Although not everywhere,’ he finished with a leer, peering down the front of my dress.

  Okay, that’s enough now, I thought. But just as I was about to step out of his arms, I glanced to my left and saw David watching me carefully from the edge of the room. I’m not sure where Ally was, which was probably just as well, because there was a look on her boyfriend’s face as he watched me that was blistering enough to reignite their earlier argument.

  I’d like to think it was the alcohol that made me so stupid and reckless. If not, I was going to have to admit to some pretty serious character flaws. Without stopping to think about my actions, I lifted my head towards my rough-around-the-edges dance partner. He didn’t give me any opportunity to rescind the unspoken invitation. His mouth came down on mine as though he was trying to devour me, all hot lips and invading tongue. Are you watching this? cried my dumb alcohol-fuelled brain. Do you see how over you I am?

  Eventually, even my desire to show David that there was nothing at all between him and me, couldn’t keep me with my mouth against this stranger’s for one second longer. I pulled back sharply, only just stopping myself from wiping the unpleasant coating of his saliva from my lips with the back of my hand. I glanced over to where David had been standing, but there was no one there. He probably hadn’t even seen my small childish display.

  ‘Come back here,’ growled the blond guy in the biker jacket, taking a large swig from his beer bottle, clearly in order to lubricate himself for round two. Only there wasn’t going to be one.

  I resisted his pull as he tried to draw me back against him. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said firmly, suddenly feeling all-the-way sober, and more than a little ashamed of the way I was behaving.

  ‘Really?’he slurred, swaying slightly on his feet. ‘Well I say, yes.’ He reached for me, but I side-stepped and he stumbled clumsily before rounding on me. ‘You know what you are,’ he said, spitting angrily into my face. I guess he was determined to share his saliva with me, one way or another. ‘You’re a fucking tease.’

  I didn’t dignify him with a response. I just turned on my heel and wove my way, as fast as I could, through the crowd to the kitchen.

  ‘Everything alright?’ asked Andrew, who had observed the tail end of the nasty little episode.

  I grimaced. ‘Just some jerks from town,’ I replied. ‘I don’t think they were invited.’

  ‘I’ll keep an eye on them,’ he assured.

  I stopped only long enough to grab a can of soft drink from the counter in the kitchen and went straight out into the back garden. It was cold, my dress was as thin as a negligée and apparently an open invitation that I was fair game, but nothing was going to induce me to go back into the house until I’d calmed down.

  I was still sitting on the uncomfortable wooden bench when I heard the tinkling of breaking glass coming from within the house, followed by noisy shouting. I lifted my head like a woodland creature sensing danger. More angry shouts and the sound of something heavy crashing to the ground. I got to my feet, pleased to find that the cold night air had cleared the rest of the alcohol from my head. A shape flew out the back door and it took me a moment or two to realise it was Pete. He ran the short distance across the lawn to where I stood.

  ‘Charlotte, do you know where David is?’

  I came back instantly on the defensive. ‘No. Why ask me? I haven’t spoken to him all evening.’

  Notwithstanding whatever drama was playing out inside the house, Pete still took a beat to regard me curiously. Heavy footsteps thundered up the gravel path, as Mike joined us in the darkness. ‘I can’t find David anywhere,’ Pete reported.

  ‘Don’t bother trying. He and Ally left a while ago. They’ve gone back to her place for the night.’ I felt something I couldn’t properly define clutch me, somewhere in the region of where my heart had once lived.

  ‘Why are you looking for him?’ I asked my two housemates, who were already turning back towards the house.

  ‘We just wanted a bit of extra muscle power, that’s all. There’s a group of gate-crashers who are getting pretty out of hand. I think it’s time we showed them where the door is.’

  The following morning I stood and surveyed the lounge. Two of the dining-table chairs were broken, as was a pane of glass in an internal door. The bucket had been tipped over, and water was puddled across the wooden floor, decorated here and there with trampled Red Delicious apples. There were drink rings on practically every piece of furniture, which might or might not come out with polish, and several cigarette burns on the sofa cushions, which were definitely there to stay.

  ‘There goes our security deposit,’ I said sadly to Pete, who was dragging a large black plastic sack full of bottles towards the wheelie-bin.

  ‘Hell of a party, though,’ he declared. ‘Quite a night.’

  Charlotte

  ‘Yes,’ I said to David, whose eyes had fluttered to a close, showing a worrying network of blue veins on their lids, that I swear hadn’t been visible before. ‘The Hallowe’en party was certainly quite a night,’ I agreed, echoing his own words.

  I leaned towards him and gently kissed his cheek. ‘Why don’t you try and get some sleep now?’ I curled my fingers through his, so that even in his dreams he would know I was still with him. ‘I’ll be right here when you wake up,’ I promised.

  His smile, like everything else about him, looked weak and diluted, but he closed his eyes, as instructed.

  Ally

  I shut the door of the Relatives’ Room firmly behind me, as though I could keep out the memories that had followed me like a band of phantoms down the hospital corridor. I really hadn’t been expecting that gut-wrenching, visceral reaction to seeing David looking so sick. I was shocked that he still had the power to affect me like that, after all this time. And angry. I didn’t want anything to detract from my concern over my own husband’s condition. It was probably totally irrational, but I was afraid that if fate, God, or even the team of hospital doctors, sensed any division in my loyalties, Joe would be the one to pay the price. If only one man could survive this night, it had to be Joe.

  It had become so ingrained to never allow my thoughts to stray back to David and me, that I was really struggling to slam the door on them, now they’d found a crack to creep through. And it wasn’t the bad memories I was afraid of, I could handle those. I could remember all too well our break-up, how everything we’d felt for each other had imploded like a dying star, leaving us with nothing but a gaping black hole where our feelings had once lived. What scared me most, was that it was suddenly getting much harder to remember why I hated David, and a whole lot easier to recall why I’d loved him in the first place.

  I took a deep steadying breath and allowed my mind to go back eight years.

  Ally – Eight Years Earlier

  The Hallowe’en party wasn’t the start of it, although for a long time I believed that it had been the catalyst. But later, I realised all the clues had been there for a great deal longer; I’d just been too blind to see them.

  With hindsight, the things that I’d thought were charming at the time appeared a great deal less so. As the calendar pages took us further into autumn, it became harder to force a smile each time I arrived at David’s, to find Charlotte and the guys immersed in a cut-throat PlayStation game, or watching some bloodthirsty DVD on television. Charlotte had moved from place to place her entire life, and had mastered the art of ble
nding in down to perfection. She was like an exotic chameleon, fitting in with David’s friendship group, in a way I’d never been able to do. But, as much as I marvelled at her ability, at the end of the day, what can you say about a chameleon, except that it’s just an A-List lizard?

  I’m not sure when vague disquiet about her growing closeness to David changed to actual suspicion. It wasn’t any one thing, but a whole load of little ones. Almost from the very beginning I’d found it weirdly uncomfortable seeing her toiletries sitting beside his on the bathroom shelf, as though they rightfully belonged together. Her soap touching his; her bright pink razor resting upon his on the edge of the basin; their toothbrush bristles touching in the glass on the shelf.

  ‘I’m sorry? You’re jealous of Charlotte’s toothbrush?’ Max’s voice was positively dripping sarcasm.

  ‘No. Not really. Not at all . . . well, just that it’s there in the bathroom, I guess.’

  ‘You’d rather she didn’t clean her teeth?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said into my phone, realising my old friend would probably store up every one of my stupid comments, and lob them back at me in years to come.

  ‘Because, that would certainly stop David being interested in her,’ Max declared, warming to his theme. ‘No one fancies a girl with halitosis. Perhaps you should nick her toothbrush, soap and razor? Smelly, hairy, with stinky breath. That ought to do it.’

  ‘You’re not being at all helpful, Max,’ I said mulishly.

  ‘Er, could that be because you’re not talking much sense here, my lovely?’

  ‘And, F-Y-I, I never said David was interested in her – not in that way. I don’t know where you picked that one up.’

  ‘I think it was probably you, with your impure thoughts about her Bic razor,’ Max said with a chuckle.

  Despite myself I laughed, and then sighed. ‘It’s just she’s . . . she’s . . . she’s everywhere’

  ‘Well, I hate to be the one to break it to you, hon, but she does live there.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘I thought you said one of the other guys in the house was into her, anyway?’

  I gave a small disappointed hum. ‘He is, but she’s never going to go there.’

  ‘And neither will David. He’s crazy about you, remember?’

  ‘I know. It’s just that we’ve been squabbling about such stupid stuff recently.’

  ‘Ally you and David are always squabbling. It’s your thing.’

  Max was right. The frequent verbal sparring had always been there, and win, lose or draw, it had always been resolved in each other’s arms, or better yet, beneath the duvet. Sometimes I thought we were both guilty of instigating the spats, simply because the resolutions were so worth it. But over the last few months I’d noticed a slightly sharper edge to our disagreements. Perhaps much of that was down to me, I owned. I was putting an awful lot of pressure on myself with less than two terms left until Finals. Plus I’d taken on more responsibility with the music society, which was leaving David and me with even less time together than before. And I’d been so damned tired recently.

  ‘And you just know,’ I continued, ‘that good old “Charlie Girl” is going to be the friend waiting in the wings with a sympathetic ear, whenever I’m not around.’

  ‘Well in fairness, Ally, you can hardly object to him having a close mate of the opposite sex. After all, you have me.

  ‘You’re different, Max,’ I said.

  ‘Mortally wounded here. Just because I bat for the other side—’

  ‘Not because of that,’ I interrupted, secretly delighted he was now so comfortably ‘out’ around me that he’d even discussed a few dates he’d been on. ‘The difference is, you and I have history. We’ve known each other for ever. Charlotte has known David for precisely five minutes. How can they possibly claim any sort of connection? They’re practically strangers.’

  But for strangers, I had to admit they certainly appeared to get on very well together. She was clearly much closer to him than any of the other guys in the house. Something David denied – almost a little too ardently – I thought, whenever I’d mentioned it.

  ‘Charlotte’s just one of the blokes. She gets on with everyone in the house,’ David had countered.

  We were lying in his bed on a Saturday morning, and for once we had the house to ourselves. ‘It’s just that she seems to get on especially well with you.’

  David turned from me then, to put his mug of tea back on the bedside table. ‘You’re just being silly. Charlotte doesn’t have many other friends, so it stands to reason that she’s going to hang around with us more than anyone else. And neither of our courses have much contact time, so she and I have been virtually thrown into one another’s company at home.’

  Wisely, I’d held my tongue, and made no further comment, sensing how easily this one could tip over the borderline into an argument. But even as I’d willingly gone into his outstretched arms, and he’d pulled my naked body on top of his, I couldn’t dismiss the small niggling worry that had burrowed like a bur into my subconscious.

  Chapter 7

  Ally

  I was jarred out of the past by the ringing of my phone. I pulled it from my pocket, and saw the word Home on the screen. I put the device to my ear, concern for my child, throwing hospital rules on mobiles right out the window.

  ‘Hello?’

  My neighbour’s friendly voice came instantly back, saying all the right things. ‘We’re all perfectly fine here, Ally. No need to panic.’ How did she do that? How did she know I was so far into disaster-mode, every little thing was now a potential catastrophe-in-the-making? ‘Jake just wanted to talk to you before going to bed.’ Her voice lowered to little more than a whisper. ‘He got a bit upset a while ago, and I think it would help if he could just say goodnight to you.’

  ‘Of course. Can you put him on, Alice?’

  ‘Will do. He’s right here. How are you holding up, Ally? Any change yet at your end?’

  I closed my eyes and instantly an image of Joe in his hospital room hologrammed itself onto my retina. ‘Not yet. But I’m staying hopeful,’ I replied, trying to inject my voice with more confidence than I actually felt.

  ‘Absolutely, sweetheart. It’s all any of us can do. Here’s Jakey now.’

  ‘Hello big man, how are you doing? You’re up awfully late.’

  ‘Hey Mummy, how’s Daddy? Is he there with you? Can I talk to him?’

  Just hearing his young voice was almost my undoing. The love that tied him to us, wound itself like an unbreakable chain around my throat, choking the words off, as I tried to answer him. I swallowed noisily. Jake was seven, but he wasn’t stupid. If he heard me crying, he’d work out how serious things were.

  ‘Daddy’s in his room at the moment, honey. He’s still sleeping.’

  ‘But it’s not his bedtime yet,’ Jake challenged, and then his voice dropped as he shared his secret with me. ‘I don’t think Alice and Stan know about proper bedtimes, Mummy, because they’ve let me stay up much later than you do.’

  I smiled, and I hope that came over in my voice, rather than the silent tears that were running down my face as I spoke to the smallest person in my life, who owned the biggest piece of my heart. ‘Well, just for tonight, it doesn’t matter. But you really should be heading off to bed now.’

  ‘Can you wake Daddy up before I go, so I can tell him goodnight?’

  My hand went to my throat as though to physically stop the sob from ripping its way free. ‘I think Daddy still needs to rest some more, Chicken. I tell you what, as soon as he wakes up, I’ll tell him you called. How about that?’

  ‘Okay,’ he replied, but I could hear the wobble in his voice. A mother knows; even miles apart, down a crackling phone line; she just does.

  ‘What is it, Jakey? What’s wrong?’

  ‘I want Daddy here, and you too. I like Alice and Stan, but they’re doing it all wrong.’

  I felt an overwhelming helplessness, h
earing the urgent need in my child’s voice tugging me towards him, while the other end of that same rope was anchored around my sick husband’s bed. Impossible choices: I needed to be with both of them, and they both needed me.

  ‘Tell me, sweetie.’

  Jake’s voice dropped to an exaggerated stage whisper, which I knew Alice would be able to hear. ‘Stan put the toothpaste on my brush, but after I’d cleaned my teeth . . . he didn’t check them. Not the way Daddy does.’

  It was one of the many tiny rituals Joe and Jake shared. Joe had always taken the lead parent role at bedtime. I didn’t think even I could fill his shoes, and certainly our well-meaning neighbour didn’t stand a chance. My hands were fisted, the nails biting into my palms as I sought to remember Joe’s words.

  ‘Okay, open wide. Let’s see how you’ve done.’ Somewhere in my house I knew my seven-year-old was opening his mouth to the phone. ‘Yep. All good. No cavities in there. Well done, my man.’

  Jake was quiet for a moment. ‘You’re not quite as good as Daddy at that,’ he declared solemnly. ‘And you didn’t high-five me.’

  ‘Sorry, sweetheart. I promise I’ll do it better next time . . . until Daddy can take over again.’

  My answer satisfied him enough to allow him to go to bed and fall asleep, with hopes of a better tomorrow. I really envied him that.

  Too restless to remain in the Relatives’ Room, which was starting to feel more and more like a prison cell, I wandered back down the corridor in the direction of Joe’s room. The glass-walled cubicle was so crowded with doctors, it was virtually impossible to see the bed, much less Joe. I craned my neck, searching for the kindly nurse who had allowed me access earlier. I found her in the far corner of the room, and waited hopefully, my weight shifting from foot to foot, until she caught my eye. She read the question on my face and regretfully shook her head. I couldn’t go in yet.

  I had to admit, Joe seemed to be claiming the lion share of medical attention on the ward tonight. I pushed through the double swing doors that led to the hallway, unable to decide if that was a good or a bad thing. They were impossible-to-fathom equations. Did more doctors equal a sicker patient? Did the ratio of medics multiply the probability of a good outcome? I lowered myself onto the top step of the linoleum-covered stairs, and sighed. You didn’t need to be a mathematician to work out that the odds weren’t good.