‘Yeah, I’ve decided to sort myself out,’ she repeated laboriously. ‘And Julian …’ She scrunched up her face nervously, trying to work out what to say. ‘Hmm, how to put this. Well, he …’ I’d already heard enough. I turned to go, but once again she pulled me back. ‘No, Sally, let’s talk. I miss you – you’ve been so busy with Julian and work.’
‘Don’t. Don’t put it all on me,’ I cried. ‘I’ve tried to be there for you. My God, I’ve tried, Fiona. Every day for almost your whole life.’
Fiona’s face crumpled with drunken remorse. ‘You’ve been so lovely,’ she murmured. ‘I love you so much.’ She tried to hug me but I pushed her away. She started crying. ‘Sally, I’m trying,’ she cried. ‘I want to be better – I don’t want to be like this. I don’t want to be such a burden on you. I detest myself for –’ she swept an arm out ‘– for all this. For everything I am.’
I felt exhausted. I had heard this time after time.
The truth was that Fiona couldn’t sort herself out. She was a hopeless case. In England I was going to gather Bea and Barry for an emergency meeting and we were going to Call Frank, or whatever you did these days and find out about rehab. I couldn’t take care of her any more and she couldn’t take care of herself.
‘Please,’ Fiona pleaded. ‘Talk to me.’
‘OK. I want you to change your mind about staying in New York. I want you to fly back to London with us, and get proper help. Rehab,’ I said flatly.
‘What? Oh, Sally, it’s not that bad! I just need to stop buying silly drugs! And stop drinking for a while!’
‘I don’t agree. You need proper help, and I can’t give it to you.’
Fiona looked appalled. ‘Please, Sally!’ she whispered. A fleck of spit landed on my eyebrow. ‘I know I need to stop but … You can’t send me away to some shithole full of drug addicts!’
‘I’ve run out of other options,’ I said dully. ‘You’ve run out of other options, more to the point.’ All I could think about was the packet in Julian’s pocket. What it meant for me, and the rest of my life. A life that could no longer include him.
Fiona, cornered, started to fight. ‘Well, you’re a fine one to talk,’ she said shakily. ‘Your life isn’t exactly perfect.’
Another time, I might have been surprised.
‘I mean, you’ve spent your whole life avoiding anything that scares you,’ she told me. ‘You’ve wasted your singing voice, hiding in that costume job. And you sing in a fucking wardrobe! I mean, hello? It’s not just me that’s fucked up, babe!’
Julian had come back and was standing uneasily behind me. I couldn’t even look at him. He had drugs in his pocket. After all I’d shared with him about my fears for Fiona and … I stopped, shut down. Couldn’t take the pain. It was over.
But Fiona hadn’t finished with me. She was red in the face, frightened, but fighting on. ‘You let your parents treat you like shit and you let every single opportunity pass you by in case it’ll take you out of your comfort zone. Where are your balls?’
‘I have a life,’ I said dully. ‘And I have an amazing job.’
‘Who CARES?’ Fiona was half shouting, half crying. I saw Raúl slide out of the door and off towards the lifts. ‘Yeah, fuck off,’ Fiona shouted in his direction. ‘Scuttle off, you weak fuckwit.’
‘Fiona …’ Julian said. People around us had stopped talking and were listening quite openly.
‘You can fuck off too,’ I hissed, swinging round to him. ‘Leave us alone.’
He didn’t try to defy me: he knew he was done for. ‘OK, guys, let’s give them some privacy,’ he said to the crowd.
‘Sally just told a man to fuck off,’ Bea reported proudly, before being shooed away.
Fiona turned back to me, her face softer. ‘Who cares about working at the opera house when you’ve got a voice that brings traffic to a standstill? Who cares when you sound so beautiful when you sing that I sit outside your bedroom door and cry? You’re wasting your precious gift,’ Fiona sobbed. ‘You’re all locked up in your safe little world, trying to control everything so you never have to face your fears. Look at yourself, Sal!’
‘Hey, Fi,’ Julian said, stepping back in. ‘Come on. I know you care about Sally but that’s not really the point right now.’
Fiona’s face went purple. ‘Oh, so you’re defending her now, are you?’
Before he had a chance to reply, Fiona marched over and shoved her hand into Julian’s lovely worn jeans pocket. ‘Fuck you,’ she told him furiously. ‘Fuck you, you traitor. I thought we were in this together! You said we were doing this as a team!’
‘A team?’ I repeated weakly. ‘A coke team?’
The terrace was now silent, save for a repetitive beat popping synthetically from the outdoor speaker, and some insincere attempts at conversation from the crowd over at the other end of the terrace.
‘Yes,’ Fiona said spikily, opening the wrap. She tipped some white powder into a fingernail and inhaled, staring at me with terror and defiance. ‘A coke team,’ she repeated furiously, a tear sliding down her face.
‘Did he sell you the drugs?’ I heard myself ask. My heart was broken anyway.
Fiona looked at Julian and laughed rabidly. ‘Yes! He’s been giving me drugs! How do you feel now? Not so smug any more, eh?’
‘Oh, Fiona! Jesus! Look, let me explain,’ Julian said, seeing me crumple. ‘Sally, I … the thing is …’ He couldn’t continue. He couldn’t lie when the evidence was between us, in Fiona’s hand.
‘Drug peddler!’ Bea said shrilly, from behind me.
Julian put his face into his hands. That precious, lovely, handsome face. Belonging to my beloved warm furry bear. I couldn’t stand it. I literally couldn’t stand it. ‘I think we should go home,’ I said to Fiona, after a long, desperate pause. There was nothing more to be said now. We needed to go back to London to try to sort this out. To salvage what was still salvageable of my little cousin’s life, even if mine was wrecked. ‘Come on.’
Fiona was perking up again, although in a nasty, chemical sort of a way. ‘Fine, fine! But only if you promise to sort your own shit out. And become, like, an opera singer!’
‘OK,’ I agreed wearily. ‘I’ll try some singing, if you get some help. Please, let’s just go.’
Fiona folded her arms across her chest, suddenly righteous. ‘No, Sally, I’m not just talking singing lessons. You’ve got to train to be a professional. A proper singer!’
‘Come on, Freckle,’ Barry murmured, moving in quietly. ‘You heard Sally, she’ll do it.’
Fiona started crying, her face screwed up in an ugly, painful knot. ‘No, you have to PROMISE ME, Sal. I’ve wasted my life and I can’t let you waste yours too. You have to go to college and stuff, you have to become famous …’
I was bewildered. Why did this matter so much?
‘It’s important,’ she said, reading my mind for once. ‘It’s important to me. It’s my fault you’ve always been so scared of singing. My fucking stupid fault. If it wasn’t for me and my stupid mum, your mum wouldn’t have spent her whole life trying to make us all invisible. You could’ve enjoyed your life.’
‘But I have!’
‘No! You’ve been hiding! All because of me and my fucking useless slag of a mother.’
She was howling now. Great wrenching sobs that tore through me.
‘You’ve spent your whole life looking after me, trying to do what your parents wouldn’t do, and you’ve never once thought about you and what you might want to do … Please, Sally, just seize the fucking day,’ Fiona wept. ‘Be brave. Seize the day for me. My life is fucked but you’ve still got a chance. I love you so much …’
I hugged her and we both cried, gulping for air. Of course I’d do this for her, if it meant that much. I’d do anything.
Scene Nineteen
I left the hotel and walked. My arms were folded tightly across my chest as if to protect me from pain and my head was buried deep in the scarf Barry had handed me
as I left. I looked only at the uneven pavement below my feet.
‘Are you going to top yourself?’ Barry had asked suspiciously.
‘No.’
‘Certain?’
‘Yes. I just need some air. Fiona needs to sober up a bit. I’ll put her into a taxi when I get back and we can all go home.’
‘OK, Chicken.’ Barry looked grey. ‘Don’t go too far, now.’
I couldn’t hear anything beyond my own shallow breathing. Cars passed occasionally, picking their way across the uneven cobblestones; strange other worlds on wheels. I skirted central Williamsburg and found myself passing La Superior, where I’d talked so openly with Julian about my secret love affair with singing.
I walked on.
Julian was no longer a factor in my life. Julian had sold drugs to Fiona. The agony of this was not something I could go anywhere near yet. Instead I concentrated on Fiona. Fiona was willing to go to rehab. And in return I would be willing to train as a singer.
Would I?
I’d have to be. What I wanted didn’t matter if it could save my beloved Freckle. And, anyway, she’d probably have forgotten about it when she sobered up.
I walked on.
I remembered what Fiona had said about my life. How it was her fault that I’d learned to avoid attention at all costs. Was it true?
I walked on.
After an hour, I started heading north towards our apartment. I texted Barry, asking him to bring Fiona home. The party could survive without me and I didn’t want to be anywhere near Julian.
Except I did. And that was the problem. Julian, liar, drug dealer, scumbag, had helped wreck my Freckle, yet I longed with every cell in my body to find him and curl up with him in a warm bed somewhere far away from all of this.
How? How was I supposed to stop loving him at a moment’s notice? Love was a densely woven cloth. It couldn’t be unpicked just like that.
I trudged on north. I would leave New York tomorrow. I had to get away from him.
A tear passed slowly down my face as I imagined a London that Julian would not visit. A future in which he was not present, as bright as a filament, as precious as gold.
Perhaps I should go and say goodbye. Try to leave things on a civil note.
The thought of one last hug, one last kiss, however wrong, forced me sharp left into 10th Street and back across to the hotel. I had to say goodbye. I had to see him one last time. And then I would take my beautiful, emaciated little Freckle home and get her well.
The street flickered with blue light coming from near the back of the Brooklyn Brewery. As I neared the hotel my heart quickened in my throat and I imagined the feeling of a last hug. A last kiss. A last goodbye.
I looked up from the pavement, dimly aware that something was not quite right. Why was there a flashing light? Why did the air feel so charged?
Instinctively, I speeded up. A sickness was building in my stomach. The blue lights were emergency lights. I couldn’t see the cars but I knew.
As I turned right into Wythe Avenue the world shimmered before me, narrowing into a tunnel. There were maybe a dozen emergency vehicles outside the hotel. One was an ambulance. Maybe two. Somewhere, police tape strained against the brisk wind that was coming in off the river. Walkie-talkies crackled and the air carried sickness and horror.
I was running. Strange noises came from my throat as I sprinted towards the hotel; adrenalin gave me a speed I’d never had.
‘What’s happening? What’s happened?’ I was screaming. Someone in a uniform had taken hold of me, and was joined quickly by another. They held me fast and I screamed. ‘WHAT’S HAPPENING LET GO WHERE’S FIONA WHAT’S HAPPENED?’
‘Ma’am, please step back,’ one of them was saying. I clawed at his arm like an animal. I have to find Fiona. Where is she? Where is Fiona?
‘Sally.’ It was Barry, lurching towards me from the crowd of cars. ‘Sally …’ He was crying, sobbing, creased with pain. He hurled himself at me and I knew the worst.
‘Fiona,’ I screamed desperately. Barry shook his head in my shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry, Chicken, I’m so, so sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. A stupid accident. She wasn’t even that drunk. She’d calmed down, she …’
I heard myself cry. I heard myself scream. I started to black out. And then I saw it. A stretcher on wheels with a body bag. A stretcher on wheels with a body bag.
Bea was being restrained by a police officer. She was howling. A man pushing the trolley looked wretched. And in my ear Barry was trying to tell me something but he could barely speak.
‘She was showing off,’ he cried. ‘She was up there being all silly on the wall and she just disappeared, Chicken, she just went, she just went …’
‘No. No, please, no, Barry, please, no, not my Freckle, not my Freckle, not my Freckle. Oh, God, no, not my Freckle. JULIAN! I want Julian! Where is he, Barry, where is he?’
Barry cried even harder. ‘Did a fucking runner.’ He wept. ‘Oh, God, Chicken, oh, God …’
He clung to me and I clung to him until the noise and lights stopped and in their place came nothing.
ACT FOUR
Scene Nineteen
Bed, Islington
October 2012
My beautiful Freckle
East River State Park
Brooklyn, New York
Hello my darling.
I tried to email you but your account’s been closed down.
I’m afraid, Fi. Your voice has got quieter and quieter when we speak. It’s like you’re taking yourself away from me. Please don’t, my little one. I’m not ready to say goodbye. I did what you said, Freckle. I’m at college, and I’m staying at college, and I will be a singer. But, my darling, you have to stay with me! I can’t do it on my own. I love you, Fiona, I love you so very, very much.
I can’t just let you wander off into Heaven or whatever’s there. We’re a team, Freckle. Carry on talking to me. Please, my love.
It’s just over a year since you went. I’ve been thinking about it constantly. About how dead I felt, and how strong and alive Bea was, getting us on to the plane. I miss her. I know we’re all dealing with it differently but I feel so lost and sad that she’s moved to Glyndebourne and just shut us all out. One minute there were four of us and then there were two.
I’ve been thinking about the inquest and how awful it is that Julian got away with it. He shouldn’t be allowed to just rock up to England and teach singing and have all these people act like he’s God. Can you imagine what the college would do if they found out? I keep wondering if I should say something – you know, tip them off. But I feel paralysed. Like I hate him but a part of me still feels some sort of … I dunno, loyalty, I guess.
I wrote that your address is the East River State Park. It feels right. I see us there sometimes, sitting on that log in the sun. I think about your pale skin breaking out in freckles and you telling me how hopeful you felt about the future.
I’m going back up to Stourbridge today and I can hardly bear the thought of being there, knowing you’re not in the world any more. All of our games in that dead end on the estate. Cola bottles from the Happy Shopper. Dancing with rotters at Millennium’s. Saturday-night takeaways. You and me, always giggling.
If only I’d known. If only I’d seen what was coming. I’d never have let you out of my sight. I still feel like someone’s ripped me in two. I’ve been jammed back together and I walk round as if I’m whole but it’s still there. A split all the way through my life.
Barry says I have to stop talking to you but he doesn’t understand. He’s still a whole person. I’m not.
I miss you so very much, Freckle.
Xxxxxxxx
I’d been getting better and better at pretending Julian Jefferson was just another vocal coach at college, rather than a drug-peddling liar. It helped that he had moronic clothes and that people practically fainted when they walked past him in the corridor, because none of those things bore any relation to my ex-lover Julian Bell,
who looked after a dog called Pam and had fluffy hair and broken glasses.
But this self-deception became harder when Julian turned up at Euston station ready to accompany Jan and me to the school workshop in Stourbridge, with his newly cut-off hair in disarray and now his horrible posh clothes gone. He was wandering around looking for us with a bacon roll and an air of warm absent-mindedness; indistinguishable from the Julian Bell I’d loved so much. He made my heart stop.
I ducked behind Paperchase and stared at him.
It was all there again. That slow, shambolic gentleness. That air of disarray and warmth. That lovely –
What is he doing? Why has he changed his clothes? And why the flaming KNOBS is he wearing my favourite of all his jumpers? With that lovely old dog-eared shirt collar poking out over it? Does he smell like he used to? Does he –
‘Be quiet,’ I told my head furiously. ‘Be quiet and leave me alone. It doesn’t matter. He’s a turd.’ It was only seven fifty-five a.m. but I was already full of anxiety.
And as the day passed it would get much, much worse.
Five minutes later I was cramped around a narrow table with Julian and Jan, heading north out of Euston. I was feeling fairly dreadful anyway, returning to the town where I’d grown up with Freckle. Where resided my parents, who blamed me for her death. Julian’s presence – Julian’s low-key, familiar Julian Bell-like presence – in this mix was not dissimilar to a firebomb for my fragile state of mind.
‘Why are you here?’ Jan asked Julian, in the way that only Jan could. We were speeding through the tangled mess of train tracks at Hendon, sipping weak tea.
Julian, who’d been picking at the cuff of his shirt, grinned at Jan’s bluntness. ‘All new outreach projects need to be supervised by someone from the college. Apparently. So here I am.’
‘But you are vocal coach! You are not in the staff,’ Jan persisted. He’d had three espressos that morning and was already quite mad. His eyes darted excitably from Julian to me. He was blithely unaware of the hornets’ nest he was in.
The Unfinished Symphony of You and Me Page 26
