Fiddles and Violins | Chapter Five | Part Two

Back to Chapter Five | Part One

It was ten minutes later that the doorbell rang again, making me jump. I was sitting at the kitchen table (again) and drinking a strong cup of coffee (again). It seemed as if I had spent most of my life sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee. I was still trying to get over the shock of seeing Mrs Moore transform from puppy to werewolf before my eyes, still trying to deal with her personal attack and attempting to convince myself that I had misheard her. It was not an easy task – I could still feel the expectorated hiss of her words in my ear. When the doorbell pealed out, breaking the silence like a howl in the night, my already shaking hands jerked hot coffee over the front of my dressing gown, scalding my chest.

I approached the door cautiously, as if expecting it to fly into splinters as a rabid Mrs Moore came bursting through, foaming at the mouth and baying for my blood.

I hesitated by the door and frowned. This was becoming ridiculous. I took a deep breath and scowled defiantly. If it was Mrs Moore again, I’d let loose with a string of obscenities that would leave her shell-shocked, and then I’d slam the door in her face, hopefully connecting with her colossal nose in the process. If Mr Moore was with her, he’d get some too. In fact, the mood I was working myself into, even if it were the Archbishop himself on the other side of the door, come to bless the house, he was liable to get an earful of profanity and a boot up the backside.

I wrenched the door wide open exactly as the bell rang out again.

“What?” I snarled, thrusting my face forward like a Jack-in-the-box from hell.

Rachael, the object of my affection and desire, took a startled jump backwards, a shocked look on her face. Unfortunately, she was wearing roller-blades. After a few frantic seconds of scrambling for balance and windmilling her arms wildly, she landed flat on her arse with a drawn-out ‘o-oh s-h-i-i-t!’ and a bone-shattering thud. A beach towel flew out of her hand and landed in the gutter.

I gaped down at her in amazement. She stared back up at me.

“Um...” she started, as a blush slowly worked its way up her neck and over her face. I followed her gaze down and realised, to my horror, that not only was she looking right up my dressing gown, but also that a rogue breeze had blown it open, and that my privates were flapping around for all to see. I squealed like a girl and hastily pulled the dressing gown closed.

“I uh... I tried calling first”, Rachael said in a small voice as she struggled to her feet, “but the phone was engaged”.

“I was on the ‘Net”, I told her dumbly, clutching at my dressing gown, horribly aware that I had just given the woman of my dreams a worm’s-eye-view of my bollocks. Things couldn’t have been worse had I then turned around and let one off in her face.

‘Do something, moron’, said the alien in my head, ‘or say something. Anything’ll do. Just stop standing there with your mouth hanging open like a gormless prat’.

“Shit, I’m sorry, Ray”, I said, suddenly coming to life. I hurried forward and retrieved her beach towel from the gutter. “I didn’t think it would be you”.

“Who were you expecting?” she asked dryly as I handed her the towel. “Satan Incarnate?”

“Something like that”, I muttered, gesturing her into the house.

She glided into the kitchen ahead of me and lowered herself carefully into my recently vacated chair, stretching her legs out in front of her. She was wearing very short denim cut-offs and a peach-coloured top that stopped short of her belly-button. White bikini straps were knotted around her neck. It was all I could do to stop myself from drooling.

“Is this a bad time?” she asked cautiously. “Only when you yanked the door off its hinges you looked ready to go ballistic”.

“Just had a nasty little visit from Claire’s parents”, I told her. “Coffee?”

“Something cool, if you’ve got it. What do you mean Claire’s parents? What the hell do they want from you?”

“Amy”.

Rachael looked around, as if expecting Amy to jump out from under the sofa. “She was here?”

“Nope. Is blackcurrant squash okay, or d’you prefer water?”

“Blackcurrant is great”, Rachael said, frowning. “I don’t get it. Why would Claire’s parents come for Amy if she wasn’t here?”

I told her what had happened as I poured out her drink.

“She didn’t!” she exclaimed, when I quoted Mrs Moore’s parting shot.

“She bloody well did”.

“No wonder you looked prepared to go nuclear when you opened the door. Are you going to tell Daryl?”

I put her drink on the table in front of her, and sat down in the chair opposite.

“Good question. D’you think I should?”

Rachael pursed her lips and stared ahead of her, pondering the question. Eventually, she said,

“I don’t know. You know how he can fly off the handle at the drop of a hat”.

I nodded. When Daryl got angry he tended to go berserk, and things got out of hand.

“I’ll play it by ear”, I decided after a short silence. “I mean, I don’t think they meant to kidnap her and hide her away forever. They just wanted to take her out for the day. I hate keeping things from Daryl, but I can just picture him roaring round to their house and all hell breaking loose. None of them need that right now”.

“Probably better that way”, Rachael agreed. She raised both arms above her head and, cupping her elbows in her hands in an awkward Indian-goddess position, arched her back and stretched with a satisfied sigh. Watching her, my hormone levels shot through the roof.

“Anyway”, she continued, “the reason I popped in. Colin’s at work for the day, and I’m to the beach to get some colour. I’m way too white for this time of the year, but I hate going to the beach alone. Care to join me?”

“Colin’s at work? On a Sunday?”

Rachael shrugged. “He’s been clocking up overtime like nobody’s business. Working on some breakthrough accounting program, or something. Anyway, you coming or not? Please say yes. Go on. You know you want to. Pleeeaaase. Pretty pretty please”. She looked at me through fluttering eyelashes, and pouted comically.

Me and Rachael together alone on the beach for the day, her in a white bikini to boot?

“Hmm”, I said, pretending to think about it. “Sandy or rocky?”

“Sandy”.

“Whitesands Bay?”

“Sunshine Bay”.

“Fair enough. Paddle boats or sausage ride?”

“Sausage ride”.

“Frisbee or beach ball?”

“Neither”.

“Tsk. Ice lolly or ice cream?”

“Both”.

“Sounds good to me”, I said, rising out of my chair, “I...”

‘Amber at one’, supplied the alien in my head.

Shit!

I scrunched my eyes closed in frustration and, slapping my forehead, fell back into my seat as if an invisible hand had pushed me down.

“Shit! I can’t come!” I groaned, “I’m meeting Amber at Soldi’s in an hour and a half! How could I forget?”

“Huh?” said Rachael, disappointedly. “Talk about anti-climax. Who’s Amber? New girlfriend?”

“No. Charlie’s old girlfriend”.

Rachael arched her eyebrows quizzically.

“Tell you what”, I said suddenly. “Come with me to Soldi’s, and then we’ll go to the beach after”.

Rachael hesitated.

“Oh go on”, I whined. “You know you want to. Pretty pretty please?”

“Okay then”, she replied, after a short pause. “But why are you meeting Charlie’s old girlfriend?”

“I’ll fill you in on the way there”, I told her, bouncing out of my chair. “Just give me ten minutes to dress up”.

I practically danced up the stairs, singing ‘Rachael In A White Bikini’ to the tune of ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ under my breath like a complete loonie, and got into the shower.

A cold shower.

***

Soldi’s was Serenity’s most popular cafe, most famous for its ridiculously large ice creams; mint and chocolate flavour in particular. Rachael and I ordered one to share while we waited for Amber to show up. The waiter, straining under the weight, plonked the huge daffodil-shaped bowl down on the table and sullenly ordered us to ‘enjoy it’. Obviously not too pleased with having to work on this bright Sunday afternoon, and relying on the taste of the ice-cream rather than good service to maintain the popularity of the place.

I kept an eye on the door as we shamelessly slurped our way to the bottom of the bowl, working our way through a diabetic’s nightmare of chocolate chips, hundreds and thousands, wafers, biscuits, sponge fingers and umbrella-shaped chocolates on white candy-cane sticks. The place was packed with tourists and locals pigging out big-time, and I didn’t want Amber to walk in and not see us. I wasn’t even sure that I would recognise her – I had only seen her once before, after all, and that had been seven years ago, and even then I had only caught glimpses of her as she had propelled Charlie’s wardrobe out of the window and into the street on a trail of insults. I guessed that the best thing to do was just look out for someone who seemed to be looking out for someone.

I was glad that Rachael had come too – not only so that I could store every sentence she uttered in my memory bank to replay and pathetically misinterpret as signs of true love later, but also because I wasn’t quite sure of what I was going to say to Amber. All I had told her over the phone was that I was a friend of Charlie’s, and that I needed to talk to her about something important, preferably face-to-face. In retrospect, I suddenly realised how thoughtless I had been – having seen the news footage of Charlie’s car being dragged out of the reservoir, she was probably going to turn up today expecting to be told that Charlie had been found dead and bloated in the depths. She had probably been at her wit’s end all weekend, fighting back tears and stifling heart-wrenching sobs, pacing around her house, anxiously wringing a handkerchief in her nervous little hands. Okay... maybe not wringing a handkerchief, but definitely upset. I needed Rachael there to explain things gently, woman to woman. I was sure that she was better than me at that sort of thing.

“Is that her?” said Rachael suddenly, staring through the glass doors.

I looked up to where she was pointing. Soldi’s had an open-air section, separated from the street by a row of neatly trimmed hedges. The tables were shaded from the burning sun by huge red umbrellas, and a petite blonde girl was standing in their midst, her eyes darting from table to table.

She was wearing a blue T-shirt and a short white skirt, and had a white jumper knotted around her waist. And she was absolutely gorgeous – long, straight hair tied back in a ponytail, from which a few strands had escaped and were wafting playfully in the breeze. A small freckled nose. I couldn’t see her eyes from where I was sitting, but I guessed they were blue. They just had to be.

Oh... and legs to die for.

“Could be her”, I said, rising out of my chair. “Better go and check”.

“Try to stop drooling first”, Rachael teased, licking the last of the ice cream off the back of her spoon and looking up at me with a mischievous glint in her eyes.

I blew her a raspberry and headed towards the door. Amber, if indeed it was Amber, was wearing white canvas shoes and as I approached I spotted a tiny tattoo on her ankle – it looked like a black and yellow stripy star, but I guess that from that distance it could have been anything.

I was no further than two feet from her, my arm already outstretched to gently tap her on the shoulder, when she raised a hand and waved to a young man sitting at a corner table. Confused, I froze in mid-step, a little like Elmer Fudd when it eventually dawns on him that that ‘wascally wabbit’ has, once again, made a fool of him.

Obviously not Amber then.

The girl turned her head and looked at me. I was right – her eyes were blue, but unlike any blue eyes that I had ever seen before. They were the dark blue – almost violet – of a lagoon on a perfect day. The mystical cobalt blue found in the short span of time between sundown and dusk...

I gradually became aware that I was staring at the poor girl like a depraved pervert. Lowering my arm, I blinked and tried frantically to find something remotely intelligent to say.

“Um...”

Today was definitely not going my way. In the short span of three hours I had been insulted by Mrs Moore, flashed Rachael, and was now behaving like a buffoon in front of the most beautiful girl I had ever laid eyes on.

The most beautiful girl I had ever laid eyes on then inclined her head to one side, gave me a dazzling smile combined with a small, playful shrug, and waltzed off to where the young man at the table, obviously the boyfriend, was watching me with a smug smile on his face. He was probably thinking that I had been about to ask his girl out on a date. Come to think of it, she was probably thinking that too. Feeling acutely embarrassed, and uncomfortably aware that people from other tables were watching me in amusement to see what I would do next, I turned abruptly...

... and almost crashed right into someone who had come up behind me. Someone sitting at a table nearby actually clapped. I looked around for a piece of rope with which to hang myself.

The tall, skinny girl I had almost bowled over had raised her hands protectively. Now, lowering them slowly to her sides, she spoke.

“Joey? Joey Bishop?”

I gave her a feeble grin.

“Hello Amber”, I said.

***


Amber fiddled with a plastic coffee stirrer as Rachael and I explained all we knew about Charlie. When we finished, there was a short silence, during which I lit a cigarette and Rachael drained her coffee cup. Amber skimmed the froth off the top of her cappuccino with the stirrer and sucked it pensively. Tearing open a sachet of sugar, she emptied it into the cup and stirred slowly. We waited expectantly for her to speak. When she finally did, she said, “So what do you think happened to the car?”

She had an incredibly quiet voice, so quiet that we had to strain to hear her over the sound of afternoon chatter and dessert spoons clinking against the rims of ice-cream bowls. As a result, I found myself repeating the last words of her infrequent questions, just to make sure that I had heard her correctly.

“The car? Not sure. I think that maybe it was stolen, then dumped”. I shrugged. “Then again, maybe I’m wrong. I really don’t know for sure, but it’s the only thing I could come up with”.

“So why didn’t he report it missing?”

“How d’you know that he didn’t?” I said, feeling very Sherlock-esque. Or Holmesian.

“It would’ve been mentioned in the news”, replied Amber calmly, carefully placing the stirrer in her saucer. She took a sip of her coffee and daintily patted her mouth with a napkin. To see her, you would never imagine that this was the same girl who, seven years ago, had bombarded Charlie with profanity from a second storey window in a screech worthy of Broom Hilda.

“I mean”, she continued in her soft whisper, “I’m sure the police would have preferred a headline that read ‘Stolen Porsche found in reservoir’ rather than ‘Porsche found in reservoir and we don’t know anything about it”. She smiled a small smile at her joke. I mirrored it, mainly to encourage her to talk on.

She didn’t.

I sighed, and said, “So when did you see him last?”

Amber reached forward for her coffee cup. Lifting it to her lips, she took a long pensive sip, eyes rolled upwards to show that she was thinking about it. She was a sweet enough girl, but at that moment I just wanted to reach out and throttle her. Rachael too was getting impatient.

“We’re really worried about him, you see”, she pressed.

The cup made its way slowly back down to the saucer. Amber serenely reached for the napkin again. I found myself wondering if she was mainlining tranquillisers.

Behind her, the goddess with the blonde hair and the midnight blue eyes walked past, probably on her way to the bathroom. I followed her with my eyes. The tattoo on her ankle wasn’t a star after all, but a tiny angelfish.

“Last Tuesday”, said Amber, finally.

I jerked my eyes back to her face.

“Last Tuesday?”

She nodded.

I glanced at Rachael, who was looking at me with raised eyebrows.

“And...?” I persisted.

Amber reached into her handbag and produced a pack of cigarettes – a foreign brand, the extra long, extra thin kind. Extracting a cigarette and delicately placing it in her mouth, she rummaged in the bag for her lighter. I thrust mine forward roughly, almost setting fire to her eyebrows. She took a deep drag, and exhaled softly.

“And?” I said again. “What did he want? What did he say?”

I could hear the clacking of Rachael’s blades as she tapped her feet impatiently under the table.

The same sullen waiter that had served us our ice cream came over and leaned across the table to retrieve Rachael’s empty cup.

“Would you like anything else?” he asked in a bored monotone.

I violently murdered him in a dark alleyway of my mind as Rachael impatiently, and quite rudely, waved him away as if swatting a mosquito. He gave her a dirty look and retreated.

The Angel Fish girl walked past again, on her way back from the bathroom. She caught me staring at her and gave me a flirty little wave and a grin. Turning bright red, I hurriedly looked away and focused on Amber.

“Well?” I said, as patiently as I could.

Amber placidly tapped her cigarette on the rim of the ashtray.

“Well”, she said, “you can imagine how surprised I was, him showing up on my doorstep after all these years. We hadn’t seen each other since breaking-up, you know?” She looked at me then, and I realised that she was actually waiting for an answer.

“I know”, I told her. “So...”

“So I let him in, of course. We had had a bad break-up... you remember?” She paused.

“Yes. Go on”, I said through clenched teeth.

“But it was such a long time ago, and the past is the past, so I let him in”. She sighed and brushed her fingers through her short blonde hair. “We chatted for a while. It was strange. It wasn’t Charlie”.

“Huh?” I said, as Rachael demanded, “What d’you mean, it wasn’t Charlie?”

Amber frowned. “Well, you know Charlie. Probably more than I do. You know how quick and alert he is. Always so sure of himself. Always coming back at you with a witty comment, or some strange expression...”

“Charliespeak”, I said.

Amber smiled. “Yeah. That’s a good word for it. Charliespeak. Only that day he seemed... different. Confused”.

“Confused?”

“Like he was having trouble focusing. He asked me three times if I still gave piano lessons, for example. I’ve never taught piano in my life. Can’t even play the piano”.

There was a short silence while we absorbed this strange information. I lit another cigarette, my mind racing. She was right – this didn’t sound lie Charlie at all. I almost asked her if she was sure it had been him after all, then dismissed the idea as ridiculous. Of course it had been him. Even after seven years’ absence you would still recognise someone you had been in a steady relationship with.

Rachael broke the silence.

“So what did he say?” she prompted. “I doubt he showed up after seven years just for a chat. Did he say why he had come?”

Amber nodded. “It was just small talk for half an hour, but then I had to go out. I had a lecture at three – I’m doing my final year of law at Uni, you see – and I told him I had to get ready, and he said, ‘Well, I guess this is goodbye then’. Those were his exact words. Then he hugged me”. She shivered, as if a ghost had walked over her grave.

“That was it?” I asked. “He just left?”

She shook her head, and reached again for her cigarettes.

“No. You don’t understand. The way he said it. It was so... so final. As if I was never going to see him again. And when he hugged me, I hugged back. It was like... it felt as if...” She lit her cigarette. I noticed that the hand that held the lighter was shaking. She took a long, deep drag of the cigarette, and exhaled a cloud of white smoke.

“It was like hugging a skeleton”, she said flatly, her eyes moving slowly from Rachael to me and back again. “I felt that if I had hugged him any tighter, he would have broken”.

“What happened next?” asked Rachael softly. I would have asked myself, but I was momentarily speechless.

Amber swallowed, and rubbed her eyes with the palm of her hands.

“Well, I was pretty shaken. I asked him if he was okay. And he actually grinned. It was like the old Charlie – my Charlie – had suddenly popped up from wherever he’d been hiding. He said he was fine. He said he had just come to say goodbye because he was leaving and didn’t want to leave any loose ends behind. We had broken up because he wasn’t ready to commit, you know? He was restless, wanted to see other girls; I wanted commitment, maybe even marriage. He was scornful of marriage – I don’t blame him – his father wasn’t exactly a perfect role-model for family harmony. I think he was even cheating on me, towards the end...”

She looked at me then, and I kept my face carefully blank. Charlie had told me as much himself, in a cloud of remorse one night at The Eye In The Sky in Capeville.

Amber shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter now anyway. I loved him, or at least I think I did, and I think he loved me too, but I moved on pretty quickly when he moved out. Being in a relationship with Charlie was much like being in a relationship with a poltergeist – you only knew he was there because you woke up to find things moved from where you had left them the night before. We had good times together... of course we did... great times, in fact, but he needed his freedom. I don’t think that a person like Charlie could ever settle down. We were only twenty-one, but I was trying to grow up too fast, and he was like Peter Pan, wanting to be a child forever. So he broke up with me. I was hurt and angry at the time – livid, in fact – but I realised pretty soon after that it was the best thing for both of us. We were both too young, and going nowhere”.

“If it’s any consolation”, I said truthfully, “he spent months agonising over whether he had made the right choice. He used to talk about you a lot”.

Amber smiled. “It’s nice of you to say so. But, as I said, it doesn’t really matter now. The past is the past. I’m in a steady relationship now, have been for a year – and we’re getting married next May”.

“Congratulations”, said Rachael and I automatically.

“Thank you”, she replied, and actually blushed prettily.

“So”, I said, after an appropriate pause, eager for her to resume her story. “He said he was leaving. Did he say where he was going?”

“No. Leaving the island, I guess. He didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask. I just got the impression that, wherever he was going, he wasn’t coming back”.

“And then?”

“He said he was sorry for the way things had ended between us, that it was his fault, and that he hoped I could forgive him. It seemed important to him that I forgive him. Like he wanted to start again with a clean slate. At one point he actually mentioned that he was tying up loose ends before he left”. She paused, and looked at me pensively.

“Do you know if he was in some kind of trouble? With the police, or something? Something that would make him want to leave the island quickly?”

I shook my head slowly.

“I wouldn’t know. But it sounds a bit too ‘Hollywood movie’ to me. You know... the sort of thing that only happens to other people, or on the news. And I don’t think that Charlie was the sort of person to get mixed up in that sort of thing anyway. Do you?”

Amber thought about it.

“Not really. But extraordinary things do happen to ordinary people. Charlie wasn’t the sort of person to just disappear into thin air without saying a word either, was he?”

“True”, I conceded. Charlie was just Charlie, for Christ’s sake. A good friend who walked with a limp and spoke in a funny way. The guy I shared my house with, who enjoyed watching action films and reading stories about The Saint. Not a mysterious, sinister figure with a deeply buried past and a hidden agenda. Not some criminal mastermind on the run, heading for the Mexican border with the law hot on his tail. This was so unreal. I looked around just to remind myself that I was in Soldi’s cafeteria; surrounded by people drinking coffee and eating toasties, with Oasis in the background, begging Sally not to look back in anger; rather than in a smoky, dimly-lit tavern somewhere on a city’s outskirts, with a briefcase full of dollars by my side and a cigar-chomping barman fondling a sawn-off shotgun behind the counter.

“Anyway”, Amber continued. “He just stood there, asking me to forgive him, so I laughed and told him that of course I did, it was seven years ago, for crying out loud. And he said, ‘No, be serious’. So I told him again, without laughing. And he smiled, as if he was relieved. Then he gave me a number, told me to call if I ever needed anything...”

“My number?” I asked.

She nodded.

“I wasn’t going to phone. After seven years...” she tailed off, and shrugged, “... well, Charlie belonged to my past, and I was happy to leave him there. But when I saw his car on the TV, well... I guess I just had to know that he was okay”.

“Why would he give you the number?” Rachael mused. “Do you think he means to come back home?”

“I thought about this all afternoon and way into the night on Friday, after you called”, Amber said, gesturing towards me with her head. Why did he give me the number to a place he had left over a month earlier? And I still don’t have an answer. Maybe he is coming back. Maybe he made a mistake – as I said, he was disorientated, confused. Or maybe he just wanted us to get in contact with each other. I just don’t know”.

“So you forgave him”, said Rachael, getting back to the story. “And then what?”

“Then he left. He asked me to give Rebecca a kiss for him, and left, just like that”.

“Rebecca? Who’s Rebecca?”

Amber took another drag of her cigarette and pounded it out in the ashtray, half unsmoked. She folded her arms, leaned back in her chair, and fixed me with her shiny green eyes.

“I have no idea”, she said.

***

So we didn’t go to the beach after all, and I didn’t get to spend what was left of the afternoon ogling Rachael in her white bikini. My mind was reeling, too full of questions, and I gave myself a splitting headache trying to make sense of the whole story. After saying goodbye to Amber, promising to keep her informed if we found anything out, I dropped Rachael home. She looked exhausted, as if Amber’s story had drained her. I watched her glide gracefully to her front door, roller-blade wheels spinning, and then drove off, hooting the horn as a goodbye as I left. When I got home, I dry-swallowed two Aspirins and lay down on the sofa with my eyes closed, my head throbbing. I stayed that way for a long time.

That night, as I lay awake in bed, I made a promise to myself to find out all the answers. When Charlie came back, I would ask him everything.

When.

Not if.

Because I knew, as sure as I knew that tomorrow would be yet another hot summer day, that Charlie would be coming back, sooner or later.

I was, after all, another loose end.

***