Undertow (15 page)

He’s so controlled, so clear, that I don’t say anything, just let him take my hands. And on the count of three, he pulls me down.

I thought it would be silent down there. That I would be wrapped in some kind of cocoon, my senses blocked. But I can hear the swirl of water rippling in and out of my ears, the muffled splash of Finn diving, then Danny’s voice, a strange alien sound.

I can’t work out what he’s saying. I open my eyes automatically to lip-read but the chlorine stings and I squeeze them shut again. Should have worn goggles but I was too vain.

My throat is tight. I’m not used to holding my breath like this. I need to surface. But then I feel something against my mouth. Something soft. But alive. It is a kiss. Danny is kissing me.

I don’t open my eyes. I don’t move. I just let him push his lips onto mine. Let him release a hand so he can touch my face. And it’s not how I imagined. Because believe me, I have imagined this now for days: the way he would feel, taste, move; what he would say before and after. It’s nothing like any of the pictures I drew in my head. And my lungs are burning because I really need air. But that’s not how it feels. It feels right. It feels perfect.

Then he pulls me up, his mouth on mine until the last second. And my feet are on the bottom. And I can breathe.

“What were you doing?” Finn has appeared next to us.

Danny says, “Nothing.” But as he holds my gaze, I know it’s a lie. It wasn’t nothing. It was something. Everything.

ELEANOR

FOUR YEARS
ago Eleanor thought he had died. Hoped he had, she remembers with only slight shame. But it was a false alarm. Instead he was retired early on medical grounds, and then it was the two of them. Every day she feeds him, washes him. Reads to him. She remembers Het and Will as babies. Their helplessness. And her responsibility. The day-in-day-out of it all. Is this what we become? she thinks to herself. Babies again?

Every day for four years she nurses him until one morning she takes him a glass of water and he is gone, his face as pale as the sheets he is lying on, the skin already cold. And her heart soars. And when she cries it is not for the loss of him, but for what he has taken from her. She cries for an hour. Then she blows her nose, stands, and calmly calls the hospital
.

He is buried a week later. The cemetery chapel is packed. Colleagues cram the pews with their suits and their staidness and their sympathy
.

“Whatever will you do without him?” sobs Carol Lister into her monogrammed handkerchief
.

Eleanor has an idea
.

She wears black for seven days. Then on the eighth, she puts on a yellow sundress, dabs Chanel on her collarbone, and walks down Camborne Hill to the gallery
.

BILLIE

“YOU CAN
come in.”

Finn is looking up at Danny expectantly while my hand hovers with the key half in, half out of the lock.

“You don’t have to,” I say quickly. Don’t want to spoil things. Don’t want him to see Mum and run. God knows what she’s doing now. Or wearing. It could be anything.

But then the door swings open, disappears from under my fingers, and Mum is standing there. And I can see she’s not in a summer dress or her underwear. She’s in jeans, red lipstick, and a Cheshire Cat smile. She stares at him for a second, as if she’s forgotten who I was with. Then she comes to. “You must be Danny,” she says. “Come in.”

She sounds normal. Looks normal. But I can tell she’s just wearing it. And it doesn’t quite fit. It pinches. And I’m scared she’ll burst out of it, or take it off.

“No,” I say.

But Mum’s not taking no for an answer and before I even get inside she’s grabbed his hand and virtually yanked him down the hallway, firing questions at him, scatter-gun style.

“So where do you live? How old are you? Would you like cream soda? Or Coke? I have both.”

Danny looks back at me, but there’s nothing I can do except shrug and follow them in.

Mum makes us Coke floats, the vanilla clouding the syrupy black until it turns to coffee-colour slush. I say nothing. Can’t get a word in anyway. Mum is talking nineteen to the dozen. Danny nods, like he knows what she’s saying. But he doesn’t. Even she doesn’t know. And I want to interrupt, to take him upstairs, away from this, from her. But I can’t do it now. Because he’s made some comment about the piano. About how it’s a nice one, and Mum’s telling him how she nearly sold it but changed her mind, because every house should have a piano.

And I’m thinking, That’s rich, remembering Call-Me-Ken saying we’d have to pay him to take it away, when Danny says, “I play.”

And I know it’s just polite conversation, that he’s just trying to make her feel at ease, but Mum’s black kohl-rimmed eyes light up and, “Then you must,” she says. “You must play now, for us.”

“I—” he begins.

“Can I?” asks Finn. “I can play ‘Chopsticks’. Dad taught me.”

“Later, bunny,” says Mum. And she’s practically shoving Danny onto the stool.

Please, God, I think to myself. Please let him be at least a little bit good, because I don’t know what she’ll say if
he
just does ‘Chopsticks’ or something. Don’t know what I’ll say.

And Finn’s still begging to have a go and there’s all this noise inside and outside my head when he silences me, silences us all. Because it turns out Danny
can
play.

It was his secret, I think. And I wonder why he never told me. Because he’s not just Grade-8 good, or school-concert good, he’s should-be-going-to-Guildhall-or-the-Royal-Academy good. I listen as the notes pour out of him, watch his fingers tense and relax and tense again, the bones outlined as he spans the keyboard.

And when I look at Mum I can see her eyes are unfocused and a tear is running black Rimmel down her cheek. She’s gone.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says at last. When he’s stopped. When I’ve whispered “Mum?”, pulled at her arm, trying to bring her back from wherever it is she’s been.

“You play beautifully, Danny,” she says. “I was just … lost in it. The music.”

“My turn,” Finn demands.

Danny stands to let Finn take his place.

“Mum, watch me,” he says and begins to hammer out the idiotic up-and-down cheeriness of ‘Chopsticks’.

“Are you watching?” he asks.

“What?” She looks over, sees his concentration, like it’s Beethoven’s Fifth he’s playing, not some nursery Grade 1 practice piece. “Later,” she says. “I’m just a bit tired.”

She reaches out to the door handle, as if to go. But as she clutches the cut crystal, I can see she is shaking, that the handle is the only thing holding her up.

“I think I need to lie down.”

“It was nice to meet you,” Danny says.

She turns to him, dazed and confused. “Yes,” she says.

“Mum?” I try again.

She clicks back into focus. “I’m just tired,” she insists. “I’ll be fine in a bit.”

But I’m not so sure. Because under the streaks of eyeliner, the sticky pink dust of blusher, her face is white. She looks like a ghost. Or as if she’s seen one.

“Who taught you?” I ask.

We’ve left Finn working his way through a bad rendition of some TV theme tune and are sitting on the edge of my bed. Not because I want us to do anything. At least not right now. But because there’s nowhere else to go.

“People,” he says. “I mean, my stepdad got me a keyboard. Then I had lessons here and there, when we could afford it.”

“You have to do something with it.”

“When I have the money, maybe.” He looks up at a crack in the plaster. Then turns back. “Anyway, why can’t I just do this?”

“Because it’s a waste,” I say. And I mean it.

“Why do people always say that? Like I’m breaking some law.”

“Because you are,” I say. “It’s wrong to waste stuff.”

“Is it?”

I nod.

But he doesn’t argue. Instead he kisses me for the second time that day.

This time his lips are warm. And I can taste him now. He is chlorine and Coke and vanilla ice cream. Sweet.

He moves his mouth down the curve of my neck.

“Billie,” he breathes, as a hand traces my spine, the fingers finding their way under the thin jersey of my T-shirt.

I feel my heart quickening. And I shudder with want.

But something’s wrong.

“Wait.” I pull away, breathing hard and fast.

“What is it?”

“Mum. I can’t. Not here.”

He pauses, looking at me, in me. And then he kisses me again, slowly, softly, on the lips.

“Tomorrow,” he says. “Meet me after work.”

And I nod. Let his mouth brush the top of my head before he stands. Then I lie back and listen. Listen to his Converse tread on the stairs, his “Bye” to Finn, the slam of the front door. And to my own heart, singing inside me.

HET

HET LIES
back in the chair and listens. She cannot believe he has never told her, never shown her this before
.

Underneath the music she can hear the soft tap of his fingertips on the ivory as they fly up and down the keyboard, seeking out their targets, true every time. Their touch so far from the thud of her and Will practising scales they will never remember or use
.

“But how…?” she asks when he’s finished
.

“What? Because I’m too poor to own a piano? Too stupid?”

“No… I didn’t mean…”

But he’s laughing. “My dad played. Still does. Only it’s in the back room of the Red Lion now, not the front of the Majestic.”

“I… I had no idea.”

“Why should you?” He shrugs
.

She is entranced, overwhelmed by a sudden conviction
.

“You should apply to college,” she says. “To the Royal Academy.”

“I can’t read music.”

“Then learn,” she insists
.

But he’s shaking his head. “What for? So I can end up down the pub too, banging out Beatles tunes every night? Why can’t this be enough?”

“Because it can’t be,” she says. “It just can’t.”

He strikes up again. Softer this time. A tune Het recognizes as the theme to a TV programme, though she knows it’s a classical piece. Bach, maybe, she thinks. Or Brahms
.

She’s absorbed by it and by her new idea. So much so that she doesn’t hear Will and Jonty come into the room. Doesn’t see them until it’s too late. Until Will has crooked a finger behind the lid of the piano and pulled it like a trigger, letting the polished mahogany slam down on Tom’s fingertips
.

“Jesus effing Christ,” Tom gasps. His mouth hanging open, hands held out in pain. Het can see the white bar across his knuckles where the wood has hit, can see it turning redder by the second
.

“Oh, I am sorry,” Will says, his voice dripping with sarcasm. Then he turns to Het. “You know what Father would say though. He’ll ruin it playing like that.”

And he saunters out, grabbing a handful of peanuts from a cut-glass bowl on the way. Jonty follows, his eyes on Het, his crotch pushing into her as he passes
.

“Slumming it,” he whispers
.

“Go to hell,” she says quietly back
.

Tom’s fingers are fine. No lasting damage, the doctor says. But Tom knows it’s a lie. And it’s the last time he plays the piano. For Het. For anyone
.

BILLIE

MUM IS
back to the clattering, a whirl of black-eyed anger around the kitchen. I sit at the table nursing a cup of tea, watching as she smears jam on a cream cracker then throws the sticky knife in the Belfast sink. It misses and hits a half-full glass of red wine, which teeters for a second, then topples, splintering on the hard porcelain, red slopping over the white like a bad scene from
Casualty
.

“Shit,” she laments. And then throws out half the cleaning cupboard looking for a dustpan and brush. I should help her, I think. Should do what I always do, enter stage right, the heroine, and clear it up, make it go away, make it better. But I’m distracted. Caught in my own chaos. My own world.

All I can think about is him. The smell of him, the taste of him. The curve of his jaw, his eyelashes long, too long for a boy, but beautiful all the same. The line of his neck; his fingers, deft, taut, as they flicker across ivory. I sketch him in my head, seeing the light and shadows, then on paper, his hair a dark charcoal, his eyes softer, lighter, while I hum to an invisible piano, the tune stuck on
REPEAT
in my memory.

I am going to show him, I think. He played for me, so I will show him this. My sketchbook. My secret. And so, as I leave for work, I stash the battered pad in my pocket.

But it’s not him I tell first. In the end I blurt it out before. To another man. A stranger.

Alexander Shaw watches me as I spray polish on the mantelpiece, dust around the stacked canvases and cut-out prints that take the place of the endless china dogs and photos of beaming grandchildren that fill every other room, to make up for absences. He is here today. Found. Back from wherever he goes inside himself.

My fingers linger on a reproduction of Botticelli’s
Venus and Mars
, a shrunken postcard version of the original in the National Gallery. I turn it over automatically. “With love,” it reads. “E.”

“Stunning, isn’t it?” he says.

I jump. “Oh, sorry.” I prop it back on the shelf, only succeeding in knocking a Picasso to the floor.

“Sorry,” I repeat.

“No matter,” he says. “Really. I’m glad someone else appreciates them.”

“Were you – are you – a painter?” I correct myself.

“Were. Was.” He corrects me back. “I had a gallery. Camborne Hill.”

“The Blue Gallery?” I say.

“You know it?”

“Yes.” Kind of. I have seen it. Locked up now. A
TO LET
sign hanging in the window instead of oil and watercolour.

And then I get this idea. This need. To show him. Because he’ll understand. He’ll get it, get me. And maybe it’s like talking to someone in a coma, keeping them aware; maybe it will keep him here and now. And so I say, “Wait a minute,” and then run out of the door, his “What for?” following me down the corridor, hanging over the faded lino, unanswered.