The Sick Rose (17 page)

‘And when’s all this supposed to happen?’

‘This is the thing. Me and Troy are going next month.’

Not ‘we’ but ‘me and Troy’.

‘And where am I supposed to go?’ said Paul.

‘I saw Carl Scatlock yesterday. Him and Daniel would love to have you for a few months.’ Now Paul’s silence was stunned. Being friends and working with Daniel was one thing, but living with him? There was no
way
he could keep Emily away from him if they were living together. He put his head in his hands.

‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ she said. ‘You virtually live there anyway.’

‘Why can’t you wait until the end of term? I’ll be finished in a couple of months.’

‘I haven’t got a couple of months, love,’ said his mum, as though she were a terminal cancer patient. ‘I’m forty-one on my next birthday. It’s the cut-off age. We won’t be in Troy’s mum’s house for long, the council will rehouse us as soon as I’m pregnant and there’ll be room for you there. Paul, please. You know how important all this is to me.’

Of course he knew, but he would never begin to understand it. For an only child, he was getting pretty sick of all these brothers and sisters coming between him and his mother. If the ones that were never born were this intrusive, what would the real thing be like? She put her hand over his. She was still wearing her wedding ring. Something in Paul dissolved. ‘You know that you only have to say the word if it’s not OK.’ But how could he deprive her of the thing she wanted so much? He knew before he had let go of her hand that he would do what she wanted.

‘Did you tell Carl
where
you were going?’ asked Paul. Since Daniel’s loose threat to his mother, he was determined to protect her.

‘I don’t believe I did,’ she said. ‘I think I just said we were going to the south coast.’

‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ said Paul. ‘Keep it to yourself.’

‘Why?’ said Mum.

‘You know what people round here are like,’ said Paul. ‘What if someone reports you? Like they do with benefit fraud? Maybe they’ll take it away from you.’

‘Carl Scatlock is the last person who’d report anyone for benefit fraud.’

‘Not just Carl,’ argued Paul. ‘People in general. If no one knows, no one can tell.’

She brightened. ‘Are you saying you’ll stay, then? I’ll miss you, but it’ll all be worth it when you get your little brother or sister.’

She seemed so convinced that it would work this time. He couldn’t bear to think what might happen if it didn’t.

Chapter 21

The floor plan of the Scatlocks’ house was the same as Paul’s, two big bedrooms and a box room with the bathroom on the ground floor. He had never been upstairs in their house before, but assumed that they would have made up the tiny third bedroom – the one that his mother had set aside for a nursery – for him. He was dismayed to find the room full of broken appliances, dismantled bicycles and one neat stack of identical microwave ovens still in their boxes. You couldn’t even shut the door, let alone get a bed in there. He was expected to sleep in Daniel’s room. The mattress they had provided was brand new – it still had the plastic on the day he moved in – but it was a double, too big for the floor space available, and it tipped to one side so that three or four times a night he would find that he had rolled off into the unlovely space underneath Daniel’s bed. The only comfort to be gained was that sometimes in the night Diesel would creep into bed with him. Paul loved the solid warm body of the dog beside him.

They were together more than ever. Carl was juggling construction work with nightclub security and was often away for days on end. When he was away, Paul wondered why Daniel didn’t sleep in his dad’s bed but Daniel said that he couldn’t be arsed to change the sheets. If Daniel pulled, he took the girl downstairs on the sofa while Paul was sent to their room like a ten-year-old. They never discussed what the arrangement would be if Paul ever got to bring Emily home; he had stopped mentioning her, and Daniel seemed to presume that it would never happen.

He saw her two evenings a week, pretending that he was having driving lessons. (He was actually learning to drive, but these were early-morning sessions, his instructor picking him up at first light while Daniel was still asleep and teaching him until it was time for college.)

‘You don’t need to pass your test to drive, it’s a waste of money,’ said Daniel. ‘I can teach you for nothing. You’re addicted to exams. It’s not normal.’

His cover was blown one day after college when he’d forgotten to tell Daniel he was ‘having a lesson’. Emily had left her car in the street outside and was fishing in her bag for her keys when a nearby car sounded the horn so loudly that every student turned to stare. Daniel was leaning out of the window of Carl’s Land Cruiser. Paul stood between his best friend and Emily, feeling like the rope in a tug-of-war.

‘I’ll see you later,’ said Paul to Daniel, wondering if Emily had any idea of the courage this took him, and how she would repay him if she did. ‘I’m going to get a lift with Emily.’

Emily smiled and began to wave at Daniel but he revved his engine and drove off so quickly and haphazardly that one boy actually had to do a stuntman’s dive out of his path.

‘Who was that?’ said Emily. She looked intrigued without being impressed.

‘My friend, Daniel. He’s a bit intense.’ He caught a glimpse of blue bra cup between the buttons of her dress, felt the inevitable journey towards disappointment begin. She said she was nervous, she said it was a big deal, but sometimes he wondered if she was playing a game with him. All he could do was give her the benefit of the doubt. ‘Let’s not go straight home, let’s go for a walk or something.’

They went to the quarry that had been turned into a nature reserve. From up there you could see the motorway and the chalk pits and if you stood on tiptoe you could see the suspension bridge as well.

‘My dad helped to build that,’ he said to her. He hadn’t said it to gain sympathy or for effect but she kissed him lightly on the cheeks, as though brushing away tears, and then on the lips with promising intensity. Paul wondered briefly about the ethics of exploiting his father’s death to seduce Emily and swiftly concluded that it was what his father would have wanted. Soon they were down in the grass. Beneath him she felt light and weak. For a terrifying second he saw how easy it would be, that he didn’t
need
her permission. He parted her legs with his knee and put his hand in the hot space between them. Months of frustration were ready to burst out of him and he told himself that he was just trying to see how far she would let him go, that he would stop the minute she said—

‘Paul,
no
!’ There was nothing contrived about the panic in her voice. He sprang away from her, flushed and ashamed.

‘When I’m ready, it’ll be you,’ she said. ‘I’m not saying no, I’m just saying not yet.’

He made her pull up a block away from Daniel’s. Her goodbye kisses were always the most passionate. He was harder than the handbrake and desperate for two minutes alone with his right hand but Carl was in the bathroom and anyway Daniel was waiting for him, playing
Assassin’s Creed
in the darkening living room. On the screen, a Crusader in a chain mail tunic emblazoned with a St George’s cross leapt between two buildings in a notional Holy Land. Daniel would have been there anyway but Paul could tell he’d been actively, anxiously waiting for him rather than just sitting there.

‘So that was Emily,’ he said, thumbs working frantically, not taking his eye off his game. ‘She looks like a right snob. And a prick tease.’

‘Leave her alone,’ said Paul, feeling his hands turn into futile fists.

‘Has she let you shag her yet?’ The Moor chasing Daniel’s Crusader fell to his death from a tower. Daniel gave a little smirk of triumph.

‘We’re waiting until she’s ready,’ said Paul, and immediately wished he’d lied.

Daniel’s laughter widened the chasm between their experiences. ‘Good luck with that.’

He had let his guard down only fractionally but another Moor had caught up with the Crusader and knifed him in the back. Daniel shouted, ‘
Fuck
!’ and threw the control at the wall, where it smashed into pieces. He punched the empty chair, hard, four or five times, until it fell on its side. The dog ran into the room and began to growl.

‘It’s OK, boy,’ said Paul, his hand on Diesel’s collar. ‘It’s only us.’

Daniel calmly picked up the other handset and attached it to the box. Paul turned away from the screen so he would not have to see the Crusader bleed to a virtual death, the cross disappearing as the white of his tunic turned scarlet.

Chapter 22

May 1989

Louisa wore the empire line gown in duck-egg blue that Adam said made her look like a Jane Austen heroine, although Elizabeth Bennet or Emma Woodhouse would never have accessorised with a pair of army boots and a tasselled leather jacket with a strawberry blond Jesus spray-painted on the back. Outside it was the kind of hot sticky weather that presages a thunderstorm: inside the venue it was tropically muggy. The Underworld in Camden Town was bigger than the Borderline but it was still a basement. Long before the support act took to the stage beads of condensation had started to form on the ceiling and, by the time Glasslake were scheduled to come on, fat drops of God knew what were splashing at random intervals onto the dance floor.

Louisa resented having to check her jacket into the cloakroom, feeling that she should have been able to leave it in, what, the dressing-room area? Backstage? The van? The rituals and spaces of the warm-up remained alien to her. She had desperately wanted to come and see them sound check but Adam had forbidden it and she had been afraid to press him. He had given her a taste of what would happen if she pushed him too far in the days after the scene in the Roof Gardens; for three days, he had not returned any of her pager messages. She had been pitched and thrown between worry that he had come to harm and anger that he was toying with her. On the fourth day she gave him up for dead, or lost, it was all the same to her, and stopped trying to contact him. He had telephoned her later that afternoon and her relief was so great she found herself stumbling over her words, so urgent was her need to apologise to him.

Ben was the first onstage; he wore a woman’s leopard-print fur coat and eyeliner, and would likely be carted off with heat exhaustion before the end of the show. Angie and Ciaran were in the regulation black. Adam wore only a pair of black leather trousers and a low pendant of an Egyptian ankh. Someone nearby sneered, ‘Christ, another one who wants to be Jim Morrison when he grows up,’ and she was astonished at the surge of violence, an animating force, that rose up within her. But they were silenced when he began to sing. His voice was too big for this space: he was too beautiful for this little band. Ambition rose off his body like steam.

When Angie played the drums, the muscles on her bare arms flexed like a weightlifter’s. Ciaran’s mastery was evident even to someone like Louisa who knew nothing of the technicalities of live music. He controlled a flight deck of synthesisers as calmly as though he were operating a microwave. In the gaps between the songs she indulged in a little self-torture, searching the audience for a skein of auburn hair with no idea what she would do if she saw one.

Afterwards, Adam disappeared again while the rest of the band cleared the equipment, slaves to their emperor. When he materialised he was still in his stage clothes, a jacket thrown over his shoulders. She felt a sharp contraction of pride and possession.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, before she could praise him.

‘What, now?’

‘There are two ways to come down after a gig. One is to drink and smoke until you haven’t got any voice left, and the other is to go to bed with a beautiful woman.’

‘Can’t I meet the others tonight?’

‘I can’t even bear to
look
at them after we’ve come offstage. It’s a completely irrational feeling but totally overpowering: you know, like when you’ve just had sex and you have that overwhelming urge to just get the fuck away.’ Her face must have been stricken, because he said, ‘Not with you, obviously.’ He linked his fingers through hers. His hand felt different, smaller and softer.

‘Where’s your ring?’ she said.

He looked down at his thumb. ‘Oh, that. I’m always losing it,’ he said.

‘But you said . . .’

She didn’t get to finish her sentence. They were swept almost to one side by Ciaran, carrying a synth over his shoulder like a ladder in a Buster Keaton sketch. His lapel was studded with badges like a pearly king’s coat, each bearing a cramped, angry little slogan.
Kick Out the Tories
and
Sinn Fein
shared space with
Red Wedge
,
Socialist Workers Party
,
Workers for Freedom
and
No Trade with South Africa
. Up close, she could see that he was older than she had first thought; even older than thirty, perhaps. The look he gave her was one of hunger swirled with disgust and Louisa recognised it instantly. She’d been on the receiving end of looks like that a million times and always from men like Ciaran, not unattractive but probably inexperienced, usually intelligent and bitter that this alone could not get them the women they wanted. From her new position of understanding, Louisa felt superior and could not resist pressing against Adam to highlight what he was missing and clarify who he was losing out to.