Dead Romantic (27 page)

He pauses and I don’t say anything. What can I say? I lost Mum and I coped with it by working. How would I have managed if even solace that had been taken away?

“I went a bit crazy maybe,” Rafe continues. His voice is low and filled with sadness. “I even started travelling up to where he died and just sitting there, outside the Tube station, trying to feel close to him. I haunted that place for days. Shit, months even. I was obsessed.”

I don’t know what to say so I sit quietly and attentively, sensing that he wants to talk now. Maybe he’s wanted to talk for a long time but has never found anyone who’ll just listen.

Rafe exhales. “It was pointless. I didn’t get any message from him so I hit the bottle even harder – and the rest, well, the rest you probably know. I’m not proud of it. One stint in rehab followed by a phase of spilling my guts to the press, and the next thing I know my agent’s on the phone saying they want me to be a mentor on one of the big TV talent shows. Cleo, I was in such a state I couldn’t even tell you what one it was or what country it was based in. It could have been
The X Factor
on bloody Mars for all I knew.”

I don’t watch reality TV but even I’ve heard of
The X Factor
. Susie’s normally glued to it; last year she ran up a monstrous phone bill voting for her favourite act. I think she’d have said something if Rafe Thorne had been a mentor on the show though, so I’m presuming he didn’t take the job.

“What happened?”

“I turned it down. I’d lost my brother and I’d lost my gift.” His voice cracks. “What use would I have been? I couldn’t play. I couldn’t write a word. I couldn’t hear a note. I was finished in every way a person could be. Knowing Alex died hating me is unbearable. How could I ever write again knowing that?”

Alex turns to me, urgency etched into his face. “Cleo, please! You have to speak to Rafe,” he begs. “I know this isn’t easy for you but, please, you’ve got to tell him I never once hated him. I thought he was being a total cock and I was furious, but I never hated him.”

I can’t refuse. No matter what it may cost me in terms of looking sane, I know that this message is more important than my own feelings. Gathering up my courage, I take the plunge.

“Your brother didn’t die hating you, Rafe,” I say gently. “I’m sure he’d be upset to think you believed that.”

“Too right,” agrees Alex. He’s standing next to his brother now and Rafe shivers.

“I think somebody just walked over my grave,” Rafe says with a bleak half-smile.

I don’t smile back. “What happened to your brother was an accident. It wasn’t your fault, Rafe. People argue all the time; it was just really bad luck. I’m sure if Alex was in the room with us right now he’d say exactly the same thing.”

“Please listen to her,” Alex insists, so close to his brother that their eyeballs are practically touching.

But Rafe can’t hear him. “Much as I’d love to think you’re right, you weren’t there. We said some pretty ugly things to one another. I told him if he stepped out of the car then he could forget that we were brothers. I said–” His voice breaks. “I said he’d be dead to me.”

What can I add to this? Any comfort I try to offer will just sound like a platitude.

“I couldn’t write, I couldn’t think, I could hardly get out of bed in the morning,” Rafe finishes quietly. “Sometimes I had the bleakest thoughts – so bleak that they scared me. There didn’t seem to be any point in going on. Alex was dead, Nan was dead and I couldn’t write, so why bother?”

I’d felt like this after Mum died. Often I’d lain in my narrow bed in the university accommodation block watching the ceiling fan whirling round and round in endless circles, wondering how I would ever summon the energy to drag myself into a sitting position, let alone get showered and dressed and off to the dig. The traffic would buzz outside the thin walls and the sunlight coming through the blinds would tiger the walls, glancing off the white plaster and making my eyes ache. The lightweight cotton sheet had felt leaden across my legs, and the effort required to move it had seemed too much to contemplate, let alone execute. Only knowing that somewhere out beyond the city, buried deep beneath the shifting desert sands, slumbered secrets that my grandmother had longed to uncover had prompted me to move. If it hadn’t been for my work, who knows what might have happened?

Our eyes meet and there’s a jolt of mutual understanding.

“I’ve been there,” I whisper.

Rafe leans into the leather back of his chair, which creaks in sympathy.

“I haven’t written a note, haven’t composed a lyric, since Ally died,” he continues quietly. Then, rising to his feet, he fetches a guitar. He hesitates for a moment. His hands stroke the instrument tentatively, before he glances at me, smiles shyly and starts to strum. A flurry of melodies fills the room.

Eventually, the music ceases and he lifts his gaze back to my face.

“Then I meet you again,” Rafe says, “and it’s like something in me has been unlocked. I can’t explain it but suddenly there was this tune in my head, where before there’d been nothing but silence. Almost before I knew what I was doing I was opening up this room and picking up instruments I hadn’t touched for ages.”

He’s smiling as he speaks, but as much as this lights his face it also highlights the exhaustion and strain he’s been under.

“And once you started you found that you couldn’t step away,” I finish, because I understand completely. After all, how many times have I worked into the small hours or been chased out of my office by the morning cleaners?

Rafe nods slowly. “You’ve got it. I
had
to write. I couldn’t
not
write, and I certainly couldn’t stop until I’d nailed the final note and scrawled the last word onto the manuscript.” He looks down at his notes and then back at me, bashfully and through the thick locks of hair that fall across his face. “This probably sounds crazy, but I think it’s been meeting you again that’s been the key.”

“Of course it is!” Alex cries, but I’m not convinced. I met Rafe Thorne a long, long time ago and when we were two very different people. I’m not into music and I can’t really see myself as some kind of muse.

“I’m sure it’s nothing to do with me,” I say.

But Rafe shakes his head. “It has everything to do with meeting you again.”

“It certainly does,” Alex agrees. Turning to me he adds, “See, Cleo? I told you that you were the key to it all.”

I’m totally confused. None of this makes any sense. Actually, nothing’s made any sense since I hurt my head all those weeks ago. If this were one of Susie’s chick-lit books I’d wake up in hospital soon and find that it had all been a dream.

“You’ve made me realise that maybe, just maybe, my brother could forgive me after all,” Rafe says quietly. “I know it’s a cliché, like something from one of those stupid psychic shows, but I think meeting you is a message from Ally.”

“Eureka! Now I know how Archimedes felt!” cries Alex, slapping his forehead and leaping around the studio like a demented creature. Sheaves of notes and manuscript paper flutter to the floor, but Rafe is far too busy studying my face for a reaction to notice the strange breeze that’s come from nowhere.

“You probably think that sounds insane, don’t you?” he asks.

Prior to my accident this is definitely what I would have thought. Today, though, life has a very different complexion.

“This will probably sound absolutely crazy,” Rafe continues, putting the guitar down and sitting back in his chair. “Cleo, you have every right to get up and walk out of here and write me off as a lunatic, but there was an interview a few years ago in
Music Mad
where I was talking about the song I wrote about you.”

“The Christmas one?” My heart does a crazy fluttery thing. It seems I no longer find that song as mournful or as irritating as I once did.

Rafe scoots his chair across the room until he’s facing me. Leaning forward, he takes my hands in his. “That’s the one. I poured my heart and soul into that one, Christmas Girl.”

His hands are cool and strong, and his long musician’s fingers lace with mine. Has the drum machine got a life of its own, or is that my heartbeat thrumming in my ears?

“So what was the interview about?” I ask, desperate to try and sound normal. I fail: I sound like Orville.

“You.” Rafe is still holding my hands in his. “I can’t remember it all exactly, but at the end Alex said something about finding you for me if he could.” He shrugs. “Do you know, I haven’t thought about that interview for years, but that afternoon when you and I had coffee I came home and found that exact issue lying face up in the kitchen. I can’t understand how it came to be there. I didn’t even know I still had it.”

“It took me ages to find,” Alex says with a grimace. “Rafe hoards heaps of shit in this house. You should see it, Cleo. It’d bring your neat-freak self out in hives.”

“Isn’t that weird?” Rafe presses when I don’t reply. “I can’t explain it at all, except that maybe meeting you after all this time is a message from my brother.”

“Couldn’t be any clearer even if I appeared right now and sang it,” laughs Alex – and then, when he sees my face, “Oh lighten up, Cleo! This is a good thing! Look at him; he’s writing again and he hasn’t had a drink in days. This is fantastic.”

It is fantastic and I’m thrilled to see the light in Rafe’s eyes. I just wish I could tell him that yes, this is a message from his brother – who’s sitting right opposite me and looking as though he’s about to pop.

“It is strange,” I agree, although strange hardly comes close to describing some of the events in my life lately.

“Once I saw that article again it was as though a jigsaw piece had fallen into place. God knows where it is now, though; I can’t find it for the life of me. Maybe I dreamed it?”

“Or maybe I hid it again just in case you got pissed and lost it?” says Alex. “It took me ages to find it amongst all your crap, bro!”

Rafe’s eyes meet mine. I can’t look away. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter if I saw it or if I dreamed it. Just remembering it was enough.”

“Enough for what?” I don’t understand.

Releasing my hands, Rafe leaps to his feet and turns his full attention to the bank of recording equipment. “Enough for this! Once I’d seen the magazine piece I came in here and I started writing, and once I started I just couldn’t stop. And this is it! This is what I wrote.”

The room fills with the most beautiful guitar chords, simple and in a minor key, yet rich and almost unbearably haunting. Then Rafe’s voice begins to sing, a deep voice as warm and as smooth as melting chocolate, and the hairs on my forearms stir.

The song is about loss and grief and waking up with your cheeks wet with tears, your loved one always a dream away with each sunrise. With each line and each breath he takes, Rafe pours his heartbreak and pain into the notes rippling through the room. Then, several bars in, a piano melody begins, picking out the same notes – now transposed into a major key – chasing the rift over and over and filling the melody with warmth, like splashes of sunlight flickering across the landscape.

Then I saw her

The girl with the sunrise hair

Her smile lets in the light

Drying tears with her laughter

Chasing away the night

The music crescendos and then diminishes. Long after the final notes tremble into stillness the imagery remains with me: grief fades but love never leaves. Instead, love grows and sustains the memories until they soothe rather than sting. I’m thinking of Mum and the love she had for her family, and when I raise my hand I find that my own cheeks are wet.

“I wrote it for you,” says Rafe quietly. “The you of now, not of ten years ago.”

He’s left his chair and sits next to me on the sofa. I feel his energy and it makes me quiver.

“Cleo, you’ve opened the blinds for me and you’ve let the first rays of light back in. I don’t know why and I don’t think I’ll ever understand how you’ve reappeared again, but it’s the truth and I’m so thankful for it.”

“Time I left,” says Alex, but I hardly hear him or even notice him vanish, because Rafe is tenderly wiping my tears away with his thumb. Before I have time to think he’s cupping my face and kissing me so softly that I almost wonder whether I’m dreaming. Afterwards, my fingers rise to my lips and I stare at him. Rafe’s lips on mine have sent a shockwave through me. When he takes my hand and pulls me to my feet I don’t resist. Then he kisses me again, longer and deeper this time, and there’s no chance of any coherent thought. The museum, my job, Simon’s deceptions, paranormal experiences – none of these things seems important.

Right now I’m nineteen again and on a snowy railway platform with a boy who turns my bones to water. To be quite honest, nothing else seems to matter very much anymore.

Chapter 22

“Cleo! What on earth are you doing here?”

Susie couldn’t look more horrified to see me. Although it’s late morning she’s still wearing the bum-skimming Playboy tee shirt that doubles as her nightgown, and she has the remains of last night’s make-up sliding down her face. Her pink dreds are even more dishevelled than normal and right now they’re several shades lighter than her face. I don’t need to see the large pair of trainers discarded in the middle of the sitting-room carpet or the trail of clothes leading to her bedroom to gather that my best friend has been entertaining in my absence.

“I live here, remember?” I point out helpfully, plonking my rucksack down by the door and heading for the kitchen. After my journey back from Taply I’m looking forward to a cup of coffee and maybe even a piece of toast before I head to the museum. I’m not confronting Simon on an empty stomach – and after a very late night with Rafe I need several shots of caffeine to keep my eyes open.

Rafe. Just the thought of him is enough to make my stomach flutter and my lips curl into a smile. Even discovering a young man dressed in nothing but his boxers and sitting at the kitchen table eating Cornflakes out of the packet because the milk has all been used can’t chase away my good mood.