I’ve never been one to get ready for any kind of date or appointment hours in advance, preferring instead to lounge in front of the television until the last possible minute before getting washed, dressed and out of the front door in ten minutes flat, but that evening I was all revved up with nowhere to go by eight. I paced around the house like a nutcase, smiling at myself and striking a pose every time I passed a mirror, angling my teeth towards the light in a ridiculous attempt to produce a debonair gleam, complete with the obligatory ‘ting’ sound effect. I practised lighting cigarettes in a variety of cool ways. I rehearsed a ‘please tell me more’ look, complete with alternately rising eyebrows and intent non-blinking eyes. It wasn’t long before I had pulled up a chair and started amusing myself by playing the ‘pulling silly faces and talking to yourself in a variety of strange voices in front of a mirror when you’re all alone with time to kill’ game.
I contemplated turning up slightly late in order to appear nonchalant, but then scrapped the idea almost immediately, just in case Rachael got fed up of waiting and left. Not that she would. But just in case.
I left the house at exactly nine o’ clock. Da Quiri’s was only a fifteen minute drive away, but you could never be too safe. There might be traffic.
***
The complete absence of any traffic on the roads resulted in my pulling into Da Quiri’s car-park at exactly eleven minutes past nine. The car-park was relatively empty, mostly due to the fact that most of the St John Party Crowd preferred to save their energy for Friday nights, which enabled them to spend the morning after nursing their hangovers in bed rather than at work. Having no desire to be found waiting alone in an empty nightclub like the last wrinkled cocktail sausage at a buffet, I lit a cigarette in the car, wound down the window, and turned up the radio. Britney Spears was singing ‘Oops – I Did It Again’. I agreed with her – she shouldn’t have. The first time around had been bad enough.
I smoked the cigarette down to the filter, got out of the car and headed in Da Quiri’s. Despite the club being half empty, the air inside was already smoky – a combination of cigarettes and the over-enthusiastic DJ’s use of the dry-ice machine. A handful of diehards were ‘shaking their funky thang’ on the dance-floor in time to a Rave beat, unless it was Techno, or perhaps Garage, or even Jungle – I had lost all understanding of this kind of music since the death of Acid House and Smileys way back in the early nineties. Whatever it was, it wasn’t what I would label under ‘music’ – the vocalist’s lyrical abilities were apparently limited to screaming ‘I gots me a brand new ho!’ every five seconds over the din of what sounded like two excited skeletons having it off on a corrugated tin roof in the midst of a nuclear war.
I headed over to the bar and ordered a pint of beer at the top of my voice. The barman, a young acne-ridden guy with spiky hair and a nose-ring, his ears fine-tuned to picking out drink orders from the surrounding wall of noise, nodded acknowledgement and ducked down behind the bar to a hidden fridge. I watched as he reappeared with the beer, grabbed a pint glass and proceeded to fling it over his shoulder, slide it down his back, catch it with the other hand and flip it back up from between his legs. I tried to look politely impressed, all the while groaning inwardly. What had happened to all the normal barmen who simply poured drinks from the bottle to the glass? If he wanted to do this kind of thing, why hadn’t he joined the circus? All I wanted was a beer, not a bloody juggling act. I applauded my decision to go for something simple and not some sort of elaborate cocktail – I would have died of dehydration before Bonzo had finished his Tom Cruise routine.
I swiveled the stool around so that I could keep an eye on the door. Directly across from me, suspended over the dance floor at a forty-five degree angle, were an army of monitors all set to show one big picture, which made the rapper on the screen, currently grabbing his testicles in one hand while giving the unseen cameraman the finger with the other, look as if he were being filmed from behind an extreme close-up of a tennis racket. I sighed, and wondered if I was getting old before my time. A few years ago I would probably have been this rapper’s number one fan.
A tap on my shoulder told me that my beer was finally ‘done’. Spinning around again, I gave the barman a weak smile and paid him with a note so that he couldn’t juggle it. He winked at me, gave me a thumbs-up, and boogied over to the cash register at the far end of the bar. I watched his forehead crease in concentration as he tried to deduct one fifty from two. Seconds later he was back, skilfully flicking my change into the only puddle on the bar. He must have practised in his spare time.
I realised that I was getting myself into one of my ratty moods, where every little thing annoyed or irritated me. I found myself longing nostalgically for the familiarity of The Rack, with old Rackliffe and his droopy face still behind the bar, the welcoming creak of the criss-cross door as you opened it, and the fireplace emanating a warm cosy glow from the far wall. I had often wondered why The Rack had closed down. The old saying goes ‘All good things come to an end’, but I wasn’t content with that – what I wanted to know was ‘why the hell should they?’ Moodily, I sipped at my beer and lit up another cigarette.
“Hullo there!”
I hadn’t seen her come in. Suddenly she was just there, as if by magic, standing in front of me and looking more beautiful than ever – the one real person in this den of maniacs and morons. She was wearing a short navy A-shaped skirt and a light, white, tight, woollen V-neck. Her hair was in its usual disarray, still looking slightly wet as if she had just washed it. A small black handbag hung from her shoulder. Forgotten were my choice of rehearsed greetings and welcoming smiles. I just sat there and stared, beer in one hand, cigarette burning away in the other, forcing myself not to reach out and touch her.
“Wow”, I eventually managed to say, “you look… lovely”.
‘Wow – you look lovely?’ echoed the little alien voice in my head in apparent disgust.
Rachael grinned, and said loudly, “Why thank you, dear. You don’t look too shabby yourself”. She leaned over and placed a wet little kiss on my cheek. I caught the whiff of subtle perfume as she straightened up again. Then she reached out and suddenly her thumb was gently rubbing at my cheek. I blinked. Was this one of my more obscure fantasies coming true?
“Lipstick”, she shouted, smiling.
“Oh”.
What the hell was happening to me? I was acting like a fifteen-year-old school-kid who had just discovered girls. This was Rachael, for Christ’s sake! Pulling myself together, I said:
“D’you want to grab a drink and head for one of the tables over there? We’re directly under the speakers here!”
“What?” she yelled.
I repeated the question louder, simultaneously miming a drink and pointing to the speakers and the tables.
Rachael ordered a Salty Dog, the rim of the glass sparkling with salt crystals in the neon light, and we circled the dance floor to a vacant table, me walking behind her with my eyes glued to her gorgeous legs. In my opinion, Rachael didn’t wear skirts often enough. Probably because of drooling perverts like me checking out her legs.
All too soon we reached a low table surrounded by four huge man-swallowing armchairs, which were covered in a blue fabric with Italian pink lightning bolts zigzagging across it – an epileptic fit just waiting to happen. We sat down facing each other, the table between us.
Rachael leaned forward and placed her drink on the table. I took a sip of my beer and did likewise.
I had always found it easy to talk to Rachael. She spoke, I listened, I spoke, she listened. Sometimes neither of us spoke, and the gap left by lack of conversation was a comfortable, companionable one. Sometimes we both laughed at the same thing at the same time, and that made us laugh even more. That’s how it had always been – a relaxing rise and fall as natural and as synchronised as breathing. A verbal dance where both performers forgot the performance and forgot the audience; where the spotlight was the world and the dancers were the only two people allowed in.
That’s how it had always been. But not tonight.
Tonight the conversation was a game of circles. Every time Rachael spoke, I found myself interrupting with banal comments, trying to steer her words towards an opening that I could naturally slip into with my proclamation of love. I filled silences, I filled pauses for breath, I laughed at nothing in particular and listened only to my frantic inner thoughts as they piled up like snowdrift against a barn door, trying to get in all at once. If this was a dance, I was out of rhythm and stepping on toes.
The strange thing was that Rachael seemed to be out of synch too.
And then, just as the snow was melting into slush…
“So, Joey, tell me…” said Rachael, reaching for her drink, “… where exactly did you go?”
“Huh?”
“I said, where did…”, her eyes looked directly into mine for the first time that night, then she lowered them and, taking a quick, nervous sip of her drink, grimaced. “Urgh. He’s slipped on the grapefruit”. She made a big show of swallowing, and continued, a little too nonchalantly, “where did you go?”
Her eyes darted back up and rested unblinkingly on my face.
“What d’you mean?” A game of circles.
“What have you been up to lately?”
“Oh, um… nothing much. Work. Looking after Amy. Lots of telly”. I was feeling slightly uncomfortable under her scrutinising gaze. It was as if she were trying to peel back my skull and look directly into my mind. I made a big show of patting my pockets for my cigarettes in order to look away from her. “You know…” I finished lamely, “…stuff”.
“Stuff?”
“Uh-huh”, I nodded. I finally found my cigarettes where I knew they had been all along, and offered her the open packet. She took one, and I leaned forward and lit it for her. Then I lit my own.
Rachael took a deep drag and tilted her head upwards to blow out a long stream of smoke. When she looked at me again, her eyes held a contemplative look.
“Be honest with me, Joey”, she finally said slowly, “where did you go?”
I squirmed uncomfortably in the armchair.
“What d’you…” I started again, but was cut off when Rachael let out an exasperated sigh.
“Oh, come on, Joey! You know damn well what I mean! We’ve been inseparable for practically a lifetime, and you’re trying to tell me that things have been perfectly normal between us lately?”
I was horrified – no, terrified – to see her eyes sparkling, to hear her voice breaking, as if on the verge of tears. Rachael very rarely cried, and whenever she had in the past, I had always been there to make jokes, cheer her up, be silly until a sniff and a smile told me that everything was okay again. But this was different. This time, I was the person making her cry.
And I didn’t know what to do.
I leaned forward and reached for her hand. I was surprised to find that it was trembling.
“Hey. Don’t be upset”, I said gently.
If there was ever a time in my life that I had said the wrong thing at the wrong moment, then this was most definitely it. Her eyes blazed with anger as she yanked her hand from under mine, and she snapped back so fiercely that it felt like she had hit me.
“I’m not upset! I’m fucking pissed off!”
I froze, shocked into immobility, as the world indifferently spun on its axis as if this kind of thing happened everyday. Then, I slowly retreated back into the safety of the armchair, dazed. Rachael had never spoken to me like that before, not once in the twenty-two years that I had known her. Some unseen hand must have flicked a switch from ‘Normality’ to ‘What The Hell?’ while my back was turned.
“I…” I mumbled pathetically, when I eventually found the strength to speak. “Look, I don’t know…”
Rachael groaned. She stabbed her cigarette out in the ashtray on the table as if she wished it was my head that she was pounding into the white pock-marked plastic, roughly brushed the back of her hand across her eyes, and glared at me angrily. She opened her mouth to speak, then paused, and took a deep breath. I winced, expecting another outburst. When she spoke, however, her voice was calm and controlled once more.
“I’m sorry”, she said. “That was uncalled for. I just thought that we were best friends and…”
“Rachael…”
She held up her hand as if it were a volume control device, cutting off my protests before I could voice them.
“…and best friends should be able to talk to each other, because that’s what best friends are for. But I know something’s up with you, and I know you’re shutting me out. That’s fine, I guess – you’re entitled to your privacy. Maybe you just need time. But you’ve had time. And you’re st… still avoiding me. Me. And… and it h… hurts”.
She swallowed, then reached for her drink and took the tiniest of sips. She seemed to be going through a hundred emotions a minute and I was screaming at myself to just shut up, say nothing and let her finish. It wasn’t easy. I couldn’t look at her, she wouldn’t look at me.
My eyes strayed to a monitor that was embedded in the wall behind her and I stared unseeingly as Tom, brandishing an axe ran frantically and silently across the screen in pursuit of Jerry. Ash fell from my forgotten cigarette onto my trouser leg, and I brushed it away automatically, barely aware that I was doing so. In the same surreal state of mind, I dropped the dog-end into the ashtray, where it came to rest side by side with Rachael’s. I stared blankly at them until she spoke again.
“The stupid thing is that I know exactly what you’re going through…”
I raised my head and read her lips and heard her voice say:
“… because I feel the same way”.
I gaped at her as my heart stopped, then made up for lost time by beating at three times the normal rate, as if trying to burst out through my ribcage and land right into her hands. I got a funny hot and cold feeling shivering through me as hope shone over the horizon like a beacon.
‘For fuck’s sake, say something!’ said the alien, finally finding its voice.
I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry.
“You do?” I said.
Rachael sighed.
“Of course I do. Charlie was my friend too. I worry about him, I want to know where he is, I want to know that he’s okay... he didn’t just walk out on you, he walked out on all of us”.
My mouth dropped open. Needless to say, this was not what I had been expecting. The beacon of hope was extinguished as Fate indifferently pissed on it.
“And then Claire. It affected me too, I really needed someone to talk to. I needed you, but you weren’t there”. She blinked then, eyes looking above and beyond me, and a lone tear made it’s way slowly down her cheek. I watched its passage with dismay.
“I know you’re not the kind of person who likes to show his feelings too much, Joey. You never have been. But I was sort of… sort of c… counting on us leaning on each other. You know?”
I nodded dumbly.
Rachael was crying silently now, tears leaving a trail down her face, and suddenly she was four years old again. She made no attempt to wipe them away. I stared at her, feeling bloody awful.
I struggled out of my chair and I’m not sure how I got there but in the next instant I was kneeling down in front of her and she was in my arms with her head on my shoulder. I caressed her hair as the bottled-up hurt came tumbling out.
“I felt my whole world falling to p… pieces. Charlie was gone, and Claire was g… gone… and you weren’t around, and I really needed someone to t…talk to, and Colin was trying but he didn’t know them like we d…did, and he couldn’t understand and, and I could tell he was getting f…frustrated, you know? Be… because he felt helpless. I needed you, Joey. I needed you…”
I felt like a complete bastard. By now, people from other tables were giving us curious and bemused glances. I ignored them. To hell with them. What did they know?
“I’m sorry”, I mumbled, “I’m really sorry, Rachael. I really am very, truly sorry”.
She looked at me then, her beautiful eyes wet and shiny. I never remembered her looking as lovely as she did at that moment. As I let go of her, she lifted her hand and brushed her fingers gently down my cheek. Then she swallowed, and said:
“I know”.
I had never felt as close to her as I did in that instant.
“I love you”, I told her simply.
‘Not now’, warned the alien.
“I love you too”, she said, attempting a small smile.
I paused, and took a deep breath…
‘Not now!’ said the alien again. I ignored it. I looked down at where my hands were resting on her lap and carried on relentlessly.
“No, Rachael. I mean… I love you. I’m in love with you. Head over heels in love…”
She stiffened suddenly.
“Oh…” she breathed quietly.
“Yeah, I know… Rachael, I…” I looked up at her face. I needed to see her expression before I could carry on, I needed to know how she was taking this.
She wasn’t even looking at me. Her eyes were focused on a point above and behind me. Her face was as pale as moonlight.
“Oh”, she repeated, more forcefully this time. “Joey. Look!”
It dawned on me then that she hadn’t heard a word I had said. I thought I heard Fate sniggering. I didn’t know whether to feel despair or relief.
“What is it?” I asked, hoping she couldn’t hear the confusion in my voice. Standing up awkwardly, I turned my head and followed her shaky finger as she pointed to something behind me.
On the wall behind my seat was another monitor, similar to the one behind Rachael. Only this one wasn’t showing Tom and Jerry.
We both watched in stunned silence as, on the screen, Charlie’s car - slashed tyres, no bonnet, engine destroyed - looking as if it had been parked in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped, was dragged out from the dark grey murk of a reservoir.
“Oh”, I whispered.
***
“Are you going to be okay?” Rachael asked as we pulled up outside her place. She was looking at me with a worried expression. The drive from Da Quiri’s had been a silent one as I tried to get my thoughts in order, and this was the first time either one of us had spoken since getting into the car.
“I don’t know”, I told her. “Probably”.
“If you need to talk…”
I looked at her.
“I do, Rachael. I really do. But not now… I’m sorry. It’s just…”
“I know, Joey. It’s okay”.
I licked my lips, searching for the right words. When they came, they came in a rush.
“I just need to get my head sorted. Too much is happening too fast and my mind is reeling. I need to figure things out. I need to find out about Charlie… what happened, and if he’s… if he’s dead… or alive… I just don’t know…” I stopped suddenly as I heard my voice break. I was damned if I was going to end this bloody awful evening with more tears. I swallowed hard, struggling for control.
Rachael reached across to where my hand was clutching the steering wheel, the knuckles white in the dim light, and held it tightly.
“Whenever you’re ready”.
I nodded.
“How about you?” I asked. “Will you be alright?”
“I’ll live”, she said. She gave my hand a final squeeze, then turned in her seat and lifted the door lever. The door swung open as if an invisible valet had been waiting for the right moment. A smell of baking bread wafted lazily into the car – Rachael lived above an all-night bakery.
“You will call me?” she asked as she adjusted the strap of her handbag on her shoulder.
“I promise”.
She smiled, and then she was out of the car and making her way to her front door, one hand fumbling in her bag for the door-key. I found myself hoping that she wouldn’t find it – hoping that she had accidentally locked herself out and would have to get back in the car – but she hadn’t. I watched as she unlocked the door and let herself in. From within came the sudden sound of a telephone ringing. She paused on the doorstep, turned and waved. Then the door closed behind her, and she was gone. A few seconds later, the sound of the telephone died.
I don’t ever remember feeling as alone as I did at that moment. The car door – in reality a couple of inches thick – suddenly seemed a hundred miles wide, completely cutting me off from the outside world and trapping me in isolation. All of a sudden, I didn’t want to go home. Home was dark and empty – echoing halls and dusty rooms. Home was where Charlie had lived, but didn’t anymore. Home was a house with no one in it. I needed to be where there were people, any people… I needed life, and crowds, and loud music, and alcohol… plenty of alcohol… I needed to forget… I needed to remember… I needed to think, not to think, to do something, or nothing.
I didn’t know what the hell I needed.
Sighing, I shifted the car into first gear and drove home.
It was a long long time before I eventually fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
I contemplated turning up slightly late in order to appear nonchalant, but then scrapped the idea almost immediately, just in case Rachael got fed up of waiting and left. Not that she would. But just in case.
I left the house at exactly nine o’ clock. Da Quiri’s was only a fifteen minute drive away, but you could never be too safe. There might be traffic.
***
The complete absence of any traffic on the roads resulted in my pulling into Da Quiri’s car-park at exactly eleven minutes past nine. The car-park was relatively empty, mostly due to the fact that most of the St John Party Crowd preferred to save their energy for Friday nights, which enabled them to spend the morning after nursing their hangovers in bed rather than at work. Having no desire to be found waiting alone in an empty nightclub like the last wrinkled cocktail sausage at a buffet, I lit a cigarette in the car, wound down the window, and turned up the radio. Britney Spears was singing ‘Oops – I Did It Again’. I agreed with her – she shouldn’t have. The first time around had been bad enough.
I smoked the cigarette down to the filter, got out of the car and headed in Da Quiri’s. Despite the club being half empty, the air inside was already smoky – a combination of cigarettes and the over-enthusiastic DJ’s use of the dry-ice machine. A handful of diehards were ‘shaking their funky thang’ on the dance-floor in time to a Rave beat, unless it was Techno, or perhaps Garage, or even Jungle – I had lost all understanding of this kind of music since the death of Acid House and Smileys way back in the early nineties. Whatever it was, it wasn’t what I would label under ‘music’ – the vocalist’s lyrical abilities were apparently limited to screaming ‘I gots me a brand new ho!’ every five seconds over the din of what sounded like two excited skeletons having it off on a corrugated tin roof in the midst of a nuclear war.
I headed over to the bar and ordered a pint of beer at the top of my voice. The barman, a young acne-ridden guy with spiky hair and a nose-ring, his ears fine-tuned to picking out drink orders from the surrounding wall of noise, nodded acknowledgement and ducked down behind the bar to a hidden fridge. I watched as he reappeared with the beer, grabbed a pint glass and proceeded to fling it over his shoulder, slide it down his back, catch it with the other hand and flip it back up from between his legs. I tried to look politely impressed, all the while groaning inwardly. What had happened to all the normal barmen who simply poured drinks from the bottle to the glass? If he wanted to do this kind of thing, why hadn’t he joined the circus? All I wanted was a beer, not a bloody juggling act. I applauded my decision to go for something simple and not some sort of elaborate cocktail – I would have died of dehydration before Bonzo had finished his Tom Cruise routine.
I swiveled the stool around so that I could keep an eye on the door. Directly across from me, suspended over the dance floor at a forty-five degree angle, were an army of monitors all set to show one big picture, which made the rapper on the screen, currently grabbing his testicles in one hand while giving the unseen cameraman the finger with the other, look as if he were being filmed from behind an extreme close-up of a tennis racket. I sighed, and wondered if I was getting old before my time. A few years ago I would probably have been this rapper’s number one fan.
A tap on my shoulder told me that my beer was finally ‘done’. Spinning around again, I gave the barman a weak smile and paid him with a note so that he couldn’t juggle it. He winked at me, gave me a thumbs-up, and boogied over to the cash register at the far end of the bar. I watched his forehead crease in concentration as he tried to deduct one fifty from two. Seconds later he was back, skilfully flicking my change into the only puddle on the bar. He must have practised in his spare time.
I realised that I was getting myself into one of my ratty moods, where every little thing annoyed or irritated me. I found myself longing nostalgically for the familiarity of The Rack, with old Rackliffe and his droopy face still behind the bar, the welcoming creak of the criss-cross door as you opened it, and the fireplace emanating a warm cosy glow from the far wall. I had often wondered why The Rack had closed down. The old saying goes ‘All good things come to an end’, but I wasn’t content with that – what I wanted to know was ‘why the hell should they?’ Moodily, I sipped at my beer and lit up another cigarette.
“Hullo there!”
I hadn’t seen her come in. Suddenly she was just there, as if by magic, standing in front of me and looking more beautiful than ever – the one real person in this den of maniacs and morons. She was wearing a short navy A-shaped skirt and a light, white, tight, woollen V-neck. Her hair was in its usual disarray, still looking slightly wet as if she had just washed it. A small black handbag hung from her shoulder. Forgotten were my choice of rehearsed greetings and welcoming smiles. I just sat there and stared, beer in one hand, cigarette burning away in the other, forcing myself not to reach out and touch her.
“Wow”, I eventually managed to say, “you look… lovely”.
‘Wow – you look lovely?’ echoed the little alien voice in my head in apparent disgust.
Rachael grinned, and said loudly, “Why thank you, dear. You don’t look too shabby yourself”. She leaned over and placed a wet little kiss on my cheek. I caught the whiff of subtle perfume as she straightened up again. Then she reached out and suddenly her thumb was gently rubbing at my cheek. I blinked. Was this one of my more obscure fantasies coming true?
“Lipstick”, she shouted, smiling.
“Oh”.
What the hell was happening to me? I was acting like a fifteen-year-old school-kid who had just discovered girls. This was Rachael, for Christ’s sake! Pulling myself together, I said:
“D’you want to grab a drink and head for one of the tables over there? We’re directly under the speakers here!”
“What?” she yelled.
I repeated the question louder, simultaneously miming a drink and pointing to the speakers and the tables.
Rachael ordered a Salty Dog, the rim of the glass sparkling with salt crystals in the neon light, and we circled the dance floor to a vacant table, me walking behind her with my eyes glued to her gorgeous legs. In my opinion, Rachael didn’t wear skirts often enough. Probably because of drooling perverts like me checking out her legs.
All too soon we reached a low table surrounded by four huge man-swallowing armchairs, which were covered in a blue fabric with Italian pink lightning bolts zigzagging across it – an epileptic fit just waiting to happen. We sat down facing each other, the table between us.
Rachael leaned forward and placed her drink on the table. I took a sip of my beer and did likewise.
I had always found it easy to talk to Rachael. She spoke, I listened, I spoke, she listened. Sometimes neither of us spoke, and the gap left by lack of conversation was a comfortable, companionable one. Sometimes we both laughed at the same thing at the same time, and that made us laugh even more. That’s how it had always been – a relaxing rise and fall as natural and as synchronised as breathing. A verbal dance where both performers forgot the performance and forgot the audience; where the spotlight was the world and the dancers were the only two people allowed in.
That’s how it had always been. But not tonight.
Tonight the conversation was a game of circles. Every time Rachael spoke, I found myself interrupting with banal comments, trying to steer her words towards an opening that I could naturally slip into with my proclamation of love. I filled silences, I filled pauses for breath, I laughed at nothing in particular and listened only to my frantic inner thoughts as they piled up like snowdrift against a barn door, trying to get in all at once. If this was a dance, I was out of rhythm and stepping on toes.
The strange thing was that Rachael seemed to be out of synch too.
And then, just as the snow was melting into slush…
“So, Joey, tell me…” said Rachael, reaching for her drink, “… where exactly did you go?”
“Huh?”
“I said, where did…”, her eyes looked directly into mine for the first time that night, then she lowered them and, taking a quick, nervous sip of her drink, grimaced. “Urgh. He’s slipped on the grapefruit”. She made a big show of swallowing, and continued, a little too nonchalantly, “where did you go?”
Her eyes darted back up and rested unblinkingly on my face.
“What d’you mean?” A game of circles.
“What have you been up to lately?”
“Oh, um… nothing much. Work. Looking after Amy. Lots of telly”. I was feeling slightly uncomfortable under her scrutinising gaze. It was as if she were trying to peel back my skull and look directly into my mind. I made a big show of patting my pockets for my cigarettes in order to look away from her. “You know…” I finished lamely, “…stuff”.
“Stuff?”
“Uh-huh”, I nodded. I finally found my cigarettes where I knew they had been all along, and offered her the open packet. She took one, and I leaned forward and lit it for her. Then I lit my own.
Rachael took a deep drag and tilted her head upwards to blow out a long stream of smoke. When she looked at me again, her eyes held a contemplative look.
“Be honest with me, Joey”, she finally said slowly, “where did you go?”
I squirmed uncomfortably in the armchair.
“What d’you…” I started again, but was cut off when Rachael let out an exasperated sigh.
“Oh, come on, Joey! You know damn well what I mean! We’ve been inseparable for practically a lifetime, and you’re trying to tell me that things have been perfectly normal between us lately?”
I was horrified – no, terrified – to see her eyes sparkling, to hear her voice breaking, as if on the verge of tears. Rachael very rarely cried, and whenever she had in the past, I had always been there to make jokes, cheer her up, be silly until a sniff and a smile told me that everything was okay again. But this was different. This time, I was the person making her cry.
And I didn’t know what to do.
I leaned forward and reached for her hand. I was surprised to find that it was trembling.
“Hey. Don’t be upset”, I said gently.
If there was ever a time in my life that I had said the wrong thing at the wrong moment, then this was most definitely it. Her eyes blazed with anger as she yanked her hand from under mine, and she snapped back so fiercely that it felt like she had hit me.
“I’m not upset! I’m fucking pissed off!”
I froze, shocked into immobility, as the world indifferently spun on its axis as if this kind of thing happened everyday. Then, I slowly retreated back into the safety of the armchair, dazed. Rachael had never spoken to me like that before, not once in the twenty-two years that I had known her. Some unseen hand must have flicked a switch from ‘Normality’ to ‘What The Hell?’ while my back was turned.
“I…” I mumbled pathetically, when I eventually found the strength to speak. “Look, I don’t know…”
Rachael groaned. She stabbed her cigarette out in the ashtray on the table as if she wished it was my head that she was pounding into the white pock-marked plastic, roughly brushed the back of her hand across her eyes, and glared at me angrily. She opened her mouth to speak, then paused, and took a deep breath. I winced, expecting another outburst. When she spoke, however, her voice was calm and controlled once more.
“I’m sorry”, she said. “That was uncalled for. I just thought that we were best friends and…”
“Rachael…”
She held up her hand as if it were a volume control device, cutting off my protests before I could voice them.
“…and best friends should be able to talk to each other, because that’s what best friends are for. But I know something’s up with you, and I know you’re shutting me out. That’s fine, I guess – you’re entitled to your privacy. Maybe you just need time. But you’ve had time. And you’re st… still avoiding me. Me. And… and it h… hurts”.
She swallowed, then reached for her drink and took the tiniest of sips. She seemed to be going through a hundred emotions a minute and I was screaming at myself to just shut up, say nothing and let her finish. It wasn’t easy. I couldn’t look at her, she wouldn’t look at me.
My eyes strayed to a monitor that was embedded in the wall behind her and I stared unseeingly as Tom, brandishing an axe ran frantically and silently across the screen in pursuit of Jerry. Ash fell from my forgotten cigarette onto my trouser leg, and I brushed it away automatically, barely aware that I was doing so. In the same surreal state of mind, I dropped the dog-end into the ashtray, where it came to rest side by side with Rachael’s. I stared blankly at them until she spoke again.
“The stupid thing is that I know exactly what you’re going through…”
I raised my head and read her lips and heard her voice say:
“… because I feel the same way”.
I gaped at her as my heart stopped, then made up for lost time by beating at three times the normal rate, as if trying to burst out through my ribcage and land right into her hands. I got a funny hot and cold feeling shivering through me as hope shone over the horizon like a beacon.
‘For fuck’s sake, say something!’ said the alien, finally finding its voice.
I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry.
“You do?” I said.
Rachael sighed.
“Of course I do. Charlie was my friend too. I worry about him, I want to know where he is, I want to know that he’s okay... he didn’t just walk out on you, he walked out on all of us”.
My mouth dropped open. Needless to say, this was not what I had been expecting. The beacon of hope was extinguished as Fate indifferently pissed on it.
“And then Claire. It affected me too, I really needed someone to talk to. I needed you, but you weren’t there”. She blinked then, eyes looking above and beyond me, and a lone tear made it’s way slowly down her cheek. I watched its passage with dismay.
“I know you’re not the kind of person who likes to show his feelings too much, Joey. You never have been. But I was sort of… sort of c… counting on us leaning on each other. You know?”
I nodded dumbly.
Rachael was crying silently now, tears leaving a trail down her face, and suddenly she was four years old again. She made no attempt to wipe them away. I stared at her, feeling bloody awful.
I struggled out of my chair and I’m not sure how I got there but in the next instant I was kneeling down in front of her and she was in my arms with her head on my shoulder. I caressed her hair as the bottled-up hurt came tumbling out.
“I felt my whole world falling to p… pieces. Charlie was gone, and Claire was g… gone… and you weren’t around, and I really needed someone to t…talk to, and Colin was trying but he didn’t know them like we d…did, and he couldn’t understand and, and I could tell he was getting f…frustrated, you know? Be… because he felt helpless. I needed you, Joey. I needed you…”
I felt like a complete bastard. By now, people from other tables were giving us curious and bemused glances. I ignored them. To hell with them. What did they know?
“I’m sorry”, I mumbled, “I’m really sorry, Rachael. I really am very, truly sorry”.
She looked at me then, her beautiful eyes wet and shiny. I never remembered her looking as lovely as she did at that moment. As I let go of her, she lifted her hand and brushed her fingers gently down my cheek. Then she swallowed, and said:
“I know”.
I had never felt as close to her as I did in that instant.
“I love you”, I told her simply.
‘Not now’, warned the alien.
“I love you too”, she said, attempting a small smile.
I paused, and took a deep breath…
‘Not now!’ said the alien again. I ignored it. I looked down at where my hands were resting on her lap and carried on relentlessly.
“No, Rachael. I mean… I love you. I’m in love with you. Head over heels in love…”
She stiffened suddenly.
“Oh…” she breathed quietly.
“Yeah, I know… Rachael, I…” I looked up at her face. I needed to see her expression before I could carry on, I needed to know how she was taking this.
She wasn’t even looking at me. Her eyes were focused on a point above and behind me. Her face was as pale as moonlight.
“Oh”, she repeated, more forcefully this time. “Joey. Look!”
It dawned on me then that she hadn’t heard a word I had said. I thought I heard Fate sniggering. I didn’t know whether to feel despair or relief.
“What is it?” I asked, hoping she couldn’t hear the confusion in my voice. Standing up awkwardly, I turned my head and followed her shaky finger as she pointed to something behind me.
On the wall behind my seat was another monitor, similar to the one behind Rachael. Only this one wasn’t showing Tom and Jerry.
We both watched in stunned silence as, on the screen, Charlie’s car - slashed tyres, no bonnet, engine destroyed - looking as if it had been parked in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped, was dragged out from the dark grey murk of a reservoir.
“Oh”, I whispered.
***
“Are you going to be okay?” Rachael asked as we pulled up outside her place. She was looking at me with a worried expression. The drive from Da Quiri’s had been a silent one as I tried to get my thoughts in order, and this was the first time either one of us had spoken since getting into the car.
“I don’t know”, I told her. “Probably”.
“If you need to talk…”
I looked at her.
“I do, Rachael. I really do. But not now… I’m sorry. It’s just…”
“I know, Joey. It’s okay”.
I licked my lips, searching for the right words. When they came, they came in a rush.
“I just need to get my head sorted. Too much is happening too fast and my mind is reeling. I need to figure things out. I need to find out about Charlie… what happened, and if he’s… if he’s dead… or alive… I just don’t know…” I stopped suddenly as I heard my voice break. I was damned if I was going to end this bloody awful evening with more tears. I swallowed hard, struggling for control.
Rachael reached across to where my hand was clutching the steering wheel, the knuckles white in the dim light, and held it tightly.
“Whenever you’re ready”.
I nodded.
“How about you?” I asked. “Will you be alright?”
“I’ll live”, she said. She gave my hand a final squeeze, then turned in her seat and lifted the door lever. The door swung open as if an invisible valet had been waiting for the right moment. A smell of baking bread wafted lazily into the car – Rachael lived above an all-night bakery.
“You will call me?” she asked as she adjusted the strap of her handbag on her shoulder.
“I promise”.
She smiled, and then she was out of the car and making her way to her front door, one hand fumbling in her bag for the door-key. I found myself hoping that she wouldn’t find it – hoping that she had accidentally locked herself out and would have to get back in the car – but she hadn’t. I watched as she unlocked the door and let herself in. From within came the sudden sound of a telephone ringing. She paused on the doorstep, turned and waved. Then the door closed behind her, and she was gone. A few seconds later, the sound of the telephone died.
I don’t ever remember feeling as alone as I did at that moment. The car door – in reality a couple of inches thick – suddenly seemed a hundred miles wide, completely cutting me off from the outside world and trapping me in isolation. All of a sudden, I didn’t want to go home. Home was dark and empty – echoing halls and dusty rooms. Home was where Charlie had lived, but didn’t anymore. Home was a house with no one in it. I needed to be where there were people, any people… I needed life, and crowds, and loud music, and alcohol… plenty of alcohol… I needed to forget… I needed to remember… I needed to think, not to think, to do something, or nothing.
I didn’t know what the hell I needed.
Sighing, I shifted the car into first gear and drove home.
It was a long long time before I eventually fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
***
Forward to Chapter Four | Part One
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