‘It’s them, Jess!’ he turned to the girl coming through the door behind him. She was younger and stockier, with punky hair and enormous black boots.
‘Couldn’t be bothered to hang on for the upgrade?’ she said to me with heavy sarcasm. Then, without waiting for a reply, she stomped over to the kettle and filled it up.
The geeky guy stared at us.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m Luke. This is Eve.’
I could feel Eve shrinking away again. I reached out and slid my arm round her waist.
The geek was still staring. Then he smiled. ‘I’m Cal,’ he said.
More voices at the door – and Alejandro and George walked in. Seconds afterwards a bunch of girls appeared, then a few (male) couples whom I avoided looking at. Within minutes the kitchen was full of people. George was clearly in his element. He organised some of the girls to fry bacon and eggs, then pulled a couple of loaves of bread out of the freezer and got one of the guys to make rounds of toast. Soon the kitchen was full of noise and delicious cooking smells.
Cal hovered near us. I could tell he was dying to ask me why I’d thrown my phone into the sea. I eventually suggested to Eve we went up to our room.
Not that I was expecting very much to happen there now. Surrounded by all those people she had reverted to her earlier state of nervous anxiety and was close to tears again.
Upstairs, we cuddled for a bit, then Eve fell asleep.
Several hours later we came back downstairs to find the house virtually empty. I followed the faint music sounds to the living room. The door to the music room beyond was shut. I glanced sideways at Eve, then opened it.
Rock music blasted out at us. George and Cal were playing guitars and Alejandro was drumming. None of them noticed us come in. Jess, the punky girl from the kitchen was the only other person in the room. She was lying on one of two low sofas in the corner of the room, watching them play. She glanced over at us, unsmiling, then turned back to the music.
We stood for a minute in the doorway. George was bent over his bass, strumming out chords. At last he looked up. He smiled and beckoned us over. I took Eve’s hand and dragged her towards the empty sofa. Alejandro grinned at us.
Cal still didn’t seem to have noticed we were there.
I sat, transfixed, watching them play. They appeared to be making up what they were doing as they went along – Alejandro just knocking out a steady beat and Cal meandering aimlessly around some tune.
And then something changed. I couldn’t tell you what, exactly, but the atmosphere became charged somehow. All three of them started playing with more focus. George frowned with concentration, his fingers changing steadily over and over on the frets of his bass. Alejandro upped the tempo, hitting at the drums more urgently, adding more beats, more rolls. I couldn’t separate it out. I couldn’t see how they were all playing together without following any music or saying what they were doing.
The music got harder and faster and more insistent. Alejandro was sweating behind his drums, his arms moving so quickly they were almost a blur. George looked over at Cal. Cal nodded. And I realised that somehow they were all communicating with each other.
I sat forwards, completely transfixed by what they were doing – by how it was working. I knew part of it was how hard they were listening to each other but, even so, how did they know what to do next?
Suddenly Cal’s guitar broke into an incredible run of chords, his fingers everywhere on the instrument, then slashing down, harder and harder over the strings. The concentration on all their faces increased. Cal was playing like he was about to explode. I could see the others were following him, entirely focused on where he was taking the music.
I could hardly breathe. It was a total adrenalin rush, like my whole body was right there, inside the music, part of it. The sensation wasn’t exactly new. Great music was like that, I knew. But this was different because I was so close to it being created. Because I could feel how fragile it was – how easily one wrong note, one wrong beat could bring the whole thing crashing into a tuneless heap. But no one sounded a wrong note or hit an off-beat. At least not as far as I could see.
The music crescendoed furiously. Cal was now clearly oblivious to everything except his guitar. Except I knew he couldn’t be. He had to be listening to the others. I wanted to ask him how he got his guitar to make those sounds. How he could play so fast. But I didn’t want the music to end.
And then, finally, Cal did look up. Or, it wasn’t so much that he looked, as that something shifted in the music and in his body, turning him outwards again. Both George and Alejandro immediately picked up on it – I could hear they were heading to the end.
And then it stopped.
Cal bent over his guitar. George wiped his forehead and grinned at us.
‘Fantastic,’ he said in his posh voice. ‘’Cept when Cal went off on that total wank at the end.’
‘Piss off,’ Cal growled.
‘That was good.’ Alejandro ran his hand through his hair.
I turned to Eve. But she wasn’t there. She must have vanished while I was engrossed in the music. I hadn’t even noticed.
‘You liked that, Luke?’Alejandro smiled.
I nodded, too overawed to speak.
He came over a few minutes later. ‘Is Eva OK?’ he said. ‘I heard you shouting at each other this morning.’
I blushed.
Is there anyone here who didn’t?
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘One minute she’s fine, then she gets all upset again.’
Alejandro grimaced. ‘I will go and talk with her. Is that all right?’
‘Sure.’ I smiled at him.
He walked out. A couple of minutes later George left too, muttering something about checking his emails. Jess got up from her sofa and followed him.
Cal was crouching over the guitars laid out by one of the amps. He watched Jess leave, then went back to the instruments.
He’d hardly said a word since they’d stopped playing. I sensed he could have carried on all day. I got up, thinking he didn’t look like he wanted any company.
‘D’you play?’ he said.
I started. ‘Er . . . no . . .’ I stammered, suddenly nervous. ‘I wish I did, though. That was wicked.’
Cal pointed to his guitar. ‘Come over here. I’ll show you how this thing works.’
I wandered slowly towards him. Why was he showing an interest in me?
He clocked the suspicious look in my eye.
‘That blonde your girlfriend?’ he said.
I nodded.
Cal’s grin deepened. ‘Looks like she’s worth ditching your mobile for,’ he said.
I blushed.
‘How d’you pull her, then?’
Charm. Persistence. A lot of help from Ryan.
‘Luck,’ I said.
‘Well, it’s nice to have someone else straight staying here. I get fed up sometimes with George and his bloody gay army.’
I relaxed a little and reached out for one of the guitars.
‘Not that one.’ Cal pulled the guitar away. ‘That’s my Gibson. I had to work for two years to buy it.’ He looked round the room, at the guitars spread all over the floor. ‘Bloody George has no idea. Gets everything handed to him on a plate. And he’ll always get session work no problem, thanks to his dad. Sometimes I hate him.’
He handed me a red guitar from the stack and plugged it in. He showed me how to hold it. ‘Now put your fingers here.’ He arranged my stiff left-hand fingers across the frets. ‘That’s E major. Go on. Play.’
I strummed the strings like I’d seen him do. The chord leaped out at me from the amp. I grinned. How cool was that?
‘And this is A.’ Cal showed me another chord. ‘Just keep playing them. One then the other,’ Cal said. He tapped his foot slowly on the wooden floor. ‘Keep to that rhythm.’
He started playing his Gibson, the music weaving in and out of my single chords. I concentrated as hard as I could. It wasn’t easy. Ju
st making my hand strum across the strings evenly was difficult enough, let alone forcing my fingers into the right positions on the frets. After a few minutes, it was easy to lose concentration and let the rhythm slip as well.
Cal stopped after five minutes or so. He smiled at me. ‘Not bad,’ he said.
I was sure he was just being polite. I knew what I was doing was about the most basic thing in the world, and I was pretty rubbish at even that. But I badly wanted to be better.
‘Would you teach me?’ I said. ‘If you’re staying here for a bit and you don’t mind.’
Cal nodded. ‘Sure. You like it, then – music?’
I thought of Dad and all the records he’d left me when he died – how he’d wanted to show me we were more like each other than I’d realised.
I shrugged. ‘Everyone likes music, don’t they?’
‘Nah. Some people don’t. Or they like crap stuff. Or they just pretend to like it. Without really getting it.’ He paused. ‘They don’t know what they’re missing. It’s better than sex.’
I raised my eyes. ‘Maybe you’ve been screwing the wrong people.’
Cal laughed. ‘George would say I’ve been screwing the wrong sex.’Then his face fell. ‘While Jess would point out, very sarcastically, that I haven’t been screwing anyone at all.’
He looked so upset for a moment I didn’t know what to say. Then he seemed to recover. We talked for a bit longer about the music we liked, then he showed me another couple of chords.
I didn’t want to push it, so I left after about half an hour and went off to find Eve.
She seemed more cheerful after her talk with Alejandro. That night, as I fell asleep, I felt as if we’d been staying with George for weeks. Already, the rest of my life – Mum and the baby and Chloe and Ryan, even Jonno – seemed like a dream.
The next few days passed quickly as we settled into the routine of the house. Or, rather, the complete lack of any kind of routine whatsoever. We got up when we felt like it. Ate and drank and slept when we felt like it.
The main shadow over our existence was Jonno. He spent a day calling Alejandro constantly – leaving increasingly irate messages on his voicemail.
Alejandro played me some of them. Jonno sounded insane. Swearing. Threatening us both with everything that occurred to him.
‘Sounds like he can’t decide whether to torture us before he kills us or just get straight to the decapitation,’ I said.
Alejandro sighed. ‘Do you think we should play this to Eva?’
‘Definitely not,’ I said.
Eve was in a terrible state as it was.
She’d wanted to talk to her mum – I think she was hoping to persuade her to stand up to Jonno at last – and had called her from Alejandro’s mobile. We were careful not to use a line with a number that could be traced to Cornwall.
She came off the phone in floods of tears. ‘Mum was so upset,’ she wept in my arms. ‘She doesn’t understand why I couldn’t just stay in Spain for a bit longer. She didn’t listen.’
‘Don’t call her, then,’ I said. ‘You can email her every now and then to let her know you’re OK.’
This was what I’d decided to do with Mum.
The first time I logged on, I found several anxious email messages from her. I think she’d hoped the police would be looking for us and was upset to discover they had better things to do than track down two sixteen-year-olds who were clearly safe and well.
I read all the messages, then sent a short email back:
Please don’t worry. I am fine. We have a place to stay. Just tell Eve’s dad you haven’t heard from us. I have to help her. Please try and understand.
Mum then sent me:
What about school? What about your GCSEs? Come home now.
To which I replied:
This is more important.
This led to a series of far longer emails from Mum detailing why I couldn’t – and shouldn’t – give up on school before I’d even taken my GCSEs, how there was no way Jonno could take Eve back to Spain if she didn’t want to go and that she could go back to her mum’s, that we couldn’t survive without money, that I mustn’t take drugs, that she missed me, that I belonged at home with her and Sam, and – finally – a long, long lecture on not taking risks that could lead to Eve getting pregnant.
Irritated by this last point particularly – for obvious reasons – I shot back:
Don’t you think you’re the last person to lecture anyone about unplanned pregnancies?
Which did not go down well.
After that I only contacted her every few days to let her know I was still alive and OK. I didn’t open any more of her emails and after a week or so she stopped sending them.
It was a weird existence. We never left the house. Cal and Jess were there most of the time and there was a steady stream of other people who dropped in and out. George went out occasionally, coming back very late at night and crashing around the house, waking everyone up.
He was unbelievably generous to us. He ordered on-line food deliveries every few days so there was always masses to eat and he even lent me some of his old clothes. In fact, Eve and I didn’t have to worry about anything. Looking back, I don’t think it occurred to me just how hard it would have been if he hadn’t taken us in like he did. We tried to do things back for him. Eve cooked most evenings, usually with Jess glowering at her from across the kitchen. She and I painted a couple of bedrooms – jobs that were on the long ‘to do’ list George’s parents had left him. And I did some other work round the house too – stuff Dad had shown me how to do a few years ago.
I thought about him a lot . . . my dad, I mean. Part of me felt angry with him for not being around – I think that was because I felt guilty about leaving Mum on her own. Part of me just wished I could show him all the practical stuff I was doing.
I could remember so clearly being irritated when I was younger and he’d insist on teaching me how to replace a fuse and saw a plank of wood and use a rawlplug to fix a shelf bracket. It was hard, now, to do those same things and not be able to show him that I had been listening after all.
George was particularly impressed when I put up some shelves in the garage.
‘You’re amazing, Luke,’ he said. ‘So many hidden talents.’
I always had the impression that he was flirting with me – which made me feel very uncomfortable.
‘But he’s like that with everyone,’ Eve pointed out.
It was true. George was a total party animal – at the centre of everything that happened in the house, with apparently limitless supplies of money and good humour. I often caught him staring at Eve with a puzzled expression on his face, but he never pushed us about our situation or implied there was a limit to the length of time we could stay with him.
Eve seemed to get stronger as the days passed. She spent most of her time sketching and flatly refused Alejandro’s suggestion she try singing with him and the others. Her dad had made her sing with the nightclub band at his hotel in the summer and Eve had hated it. She loved me playing the guitar, though – said it really suited me – and listened to me every day while I practised.
The only person who was at all difficult about us being in the house was Jess. Ugly, unsmiling and rude – I disliked her intensely and I knew Eve did too. She hardly said a word to us. But then she didn’t speak to anyone really, except for George, whom she followed round like a shadow.
I didn’t understand their relationship. Well. They didn’t have one. That is, Jess was clearly crazy about George. But he didn’t seem to notice.
‘Oh, he knows,’ Alejandro had said, when Eve asked him about it. ‘He is just not interested.’
‘Course not,’ I said when Eve told me. ‘He’s gay and she’s horrible.’
Eve shrugged, then explained to me that Alejandro had also told her Cal was in love with Jess.
‘What?’ I said. ‘Why?’
Neither of us could understand it.
Cal seemed a
s unable to leave Jess as Jess did George. I had no idea what either of their home situations was, and neither of them ever said.
So, with Eve drawing and me learning to play the guitar, we stayed at the house in Cornwall for another two weeks.
And, no, we still hadn’t had sex.
12
More than music
Alejandro had been back in Spain for several days when he called to tell us he’d seen Jonno.
‘He arrived at my gig in Madrid,’ he explained. ‘Mierda. At first I thought he was going to kill me, but the whole band were there so he just shouted. He was so cross about Eva and what you did to his car. I told him that I gave Eva money and left you both at a train station in Somerset. I said I had no idea where you are now. I think he believed me.’
I reported this conversation to Eve.
‘D’you think that means Dad’s given up looking for us?’
‘For now, maybe,’ I said.
But I couldn’t imagine Jonno ever really giving up. The murderous way he’d looked at me when he’d seen me in that hotel car park went too deep for that. I knew that I was different from Alejandro in his eyes. As far as Jonno was concerned I’d done something worse than help Eve run away from him – I’d stopped her being his little girl. I didn’t think he’d ever let that go.
It was ironic, I thought, that Jonno was probably imagining me seducing Eve on a daily basis when, in fact, although we slept in the same bed, Eve was careful never to let things go too far.
She talked about it a lot, reassuring me how much she wanted me, saying over and over how she just needed a little more time – how the fact that we were actually doing less than we had been in the summer was because she knew how easy it would be for her to get carried away.
None of this made any sense to me. She said she wanted me more than she ever had. And I knew she wasn’t lying. Every little thing I did turned her on more – far more – than it used to. So why was she holding back?
‘It’s only until I feel safe,’ she’d say. ‘Not so up and down all the time.’
When I wasn’t with Eve, I spent most of my time with Cal. He gave me daily guitar lessons and got me totally caught up in his music. I loved listening to him – the more I learned about playing the guitar, the more I admired his skill and the way he made what he did look so effortless. Sometimes he even let me play with him and George – though I noticed he always turned my amp right down.
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