Where Love Lies (21 page)

I met Andrew and Tom, Naomi and Yvonne and Bindu and Yann at a lunch arranged by a children’s illustrators’ society. At first I was shocked by how frankly they talked about the fact that they got paid for their
work. Then I realized that I found it rather refreshing. These people had passion, but they were practical, too – much more practical than I’ve ever been.

I’ve told them that I’m down in London on my own working on the latest Igor book. Bindu, who has three children all under the age of six, went into raptures of envy. ‘You must be getting so much done without any interruptions.’

‘I am.’ The
flat is covered with sheets of paper, abandoned sketches, things torn up. After leaving Ewan’s flat earlier today, in the nick of time, I spent the afternoon drawing, and failing. ‘I wish I could say any of it was good. I can’t seem to concentrate.’

‘Too quiet. You can borrow my kids if you like.’

‘It’ll come,’ Naomi tells me over the rim of her virgin mojito. ‘You have to work through the bad
stuff before you get to the good stuff.’

‘Like life, unfortunately,’ sighs Yvonne, who also does theatre design and is the most self-consciously artistic of anyone around the table. She always wears black and has stopped straightening her hair, so it stands up in gorgeous curls all over her head.

‘How’s that scrumptious husband of yours, Fifi?’ Tom calls to me across the table.

‘Tom has a crush,’
explains Andrew, though it isn’t necessary because Tom has a crush on everyone.

‘I’d drop you in a minute for him,’ says Tom.

‘Oh, I wish you would.’

‘Quinn is fine.’ I turn to Yvonne. ‘What bad stuff are you going through?’

‘Aside from that hair,’ Tom calls.

‘Plumbers,’ says Yvonne, and launches into her unfortunate domestic story.

I’m on my third margarita before I get up the courage to
ask my friends about what’s been on my mind since earlier. ‘Imagine you’re at someone’s house and you’re looking through the kitchen cupboards. Mostly they’re empty, except for one of them which has a bottle of whisky in it. A big bottle, a litre and a half. And several packets of sleeping tablets. And an empty glass. What would you think was going on?’

My friends are creative. They love problems
like this.

‘Self-medication,’ says Andrew immediately. ‘Person has trouble sleeping.’

‘Except the bottle hasn’t been opened, and practically none of the tablets have been taken, either.’

‘They’ve just got new supplies in?’

‘They’re an alcoholic,’ says Naomi, who doesn’t drink, and doesn’t tell us why not.

‘They could be an alcoholic,’ I conceded. ‘I didn’t find any empty bottles, though.
Just this one that was untouched. And he hasn’t seemed drunk when I’ve spoken with him.’

‘Could be concealing it well, though. People do.’

‘Any kids?’ asks Bindu. ‘They could be hiding the party stuff.’

‘No one takes sleeping tablets to party,’ says Tom. ‘Are you sure they weren’t Es?’

‘They were prescription, all in his name.’

‘I hide my prescription medicine in the kitchen cabinet,’ says
Bindu. ‘Up out of reach. I keep the Pimm’s there too.’

‘Is that all you keep there?’ I ask.

‘No, there’s a bunch of stuff there that I don’t want my kids to get their hands on. Matches, glue, the good chocolate.’

‘Was it good whisky?’ asks Tom. I shake my head. ‘He’s a drunk, then. A drunk who’s recently done the recycling.’

‘Who does he live with?’ asks Bindu.

‘No one, I don’t think. Although
he said his cleaning lady had been in. So maybe he was hiding them from her.’

‘Or she’d tidied them away.’

‘He actually said he’d done the tidying before she came over. So he chose to put all of them away together in the same place. Maybe they weren’t supposed to be together. But why was there a glass there too? The glasses were all in another cupboard.’

‘Probably wants to have a glass handy
in case he needs to take a sleeping tablet in the middle of the night.’

‘Chased down with whisky?’

Tom shrugs. ‘Makes them work quicker?’

‘I used to hide my knife,’ says Yvonne. She’s been quiet up till now. ‘Not all the knives. Just the special one I cut myself with. I liked to know it was there, all ready for me if I needed it.’

We all know about Yvonne’s unhappy past, and she’s promised
us all that she’s left it behind her now, but we fall silent in sympathy. Naomi puts a hand on her arm.

‘That’s what I’m worried about,’ I say. ‘I’m worried that it’s an emergency suicide kit.’

‘Ask him,’ says Naomi. ‘If he’s feeling like that, he’ll need the support of his friends.’

‘If he really wants to do it, he’ll do it anyway,’ says Andrew.

‘I didn’t have the nerve to ask him,’ I say.
‘He was avoiding all of my other questions. But I do know that he’s lost his job. And that he’s given away some of his belongings. And he seems sad.’

‘Maybe alert his family, or some of his other friends?’

‘I don’t know if he has any.’

Naomi is gazing at me. ‘Are you worried about him right now?’

‘Well, yes.’ And more so, since I’ve said my thoughts out loud.

‘Do you want to ring him?’

‘I don’t think he’d tell me anything over the phone.’

‘I can drive you to his house, if you like. I have the car.’

I feel a wave of gratitude for my kind friends, along with guilt that I’ve hidden my own problems from them.

‘He’s not far,’ I tell her. ‘That would be great.’

In the car, though, I start to feel foolish. It’s nearly eleven o’clock, and I’m about to barge in on Ewan without invitation
for the second time today, all because he happens to keep alcohol and medication in the same kitchen cupboard. But then I remember how bad-tempered he’s been, how erratic. How eager to get rid of me. How sad. And then what was that fatalistic thing he said in Greenwich? Something about how days went on whether you were there to see them or not, and how it didn’t make much difference either
way?

‘Quinn and I have separated for a little while,’ I tell Naomi as we’re driving.

‘Oh. I’m sorry. Can I help?’

That’s Naomi – offering help without asking for details. ‘It’s ongoing. I’m not ready to talk about it yet.’

‘It’s easier to help other people,’ she agrees, and I wonder if that’s what I’m doing: focusing on Ewan because I don’t want to think about Quinn, or about the strange things
going on in my head.

I wonder if Naomi focuses on other people because she has things she doesn’t want to think about.

Naomi’s sat nav takes us to Ewan’s street, and I direct her to his building. She parks opposite and we look up to his third-storey windows, which are dark.

‘He’s probably asleep,’ I say.

‘Hopefully.’

‘What will I do if he doesn’t answer the door?’

‘Call 999. Do you want
me to come with you?’

‘No, stay in the car. I’ll come back if I need to call the police.’ I sigh. ‘I’m going to feel a right berk if I ring the police and he’s only been at the pub.’

‘Sometimes friendship means feeling like a berk,’ says Naomi. She turns up Radio 4 and settles more comfortably into her seat. I let myself into Ewan’s building and knock on his door. He doesn’t answer right away,
so I knock again.

He answers wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. I step back and reach for the wall to steady myself, though I didn’t finish my third margarita and haven’t felt drunk up till now.

‘Flick,’ he says. ‘Been at the tequila? You reek.’

‘I need to come in,’ I say.

‘You’re the strangest girl I’ve ever met,’ he says, but he steps aside so I can come in. His eyes are tired but
not unfocused; he doesn’t look like a man who’s downed a bottle of whisky and a load of tablets. I inhale as I pass him and he doesn’t smell of whisky, either; in fact, I happen to know that he’s never smelled of whisky any of the times I’ve seen him, except for in that horrible pub when he actually was drinking whisky, because I keep on trying to smell frangipani on him and not smelling that either.

I go straight through his darkened sitting room to the kitchen and open the cupboard. The bottle and the packets are still there. He’s followed me; I turn around and face him.

‘Is this your suicide kit?’ I ask him.

‘Yes,’ he says.

I have to steady myself again, with a hand on the kitchen worktop. He looks exactly the same as the man who opened the door to me, except now he’s admitted he wants
to die.

‘Why – why haven’t you used it?’

‘Because of you.’

He gazes steadily into my face. My phone rings in my pocket. Without breaking eye-contact I take it out.

‘Is he all right?’ asks Naomi.

‘We’re going to talk,’ I tell her. ‘He’s okay right now. Thank you so much for the lift. I’ll get a cab home.’

‘Let me know how it turns out.’

I slip the phone back into my pocket and it’s only
me and Ewan.

‘Because of me?’ I ask. He nods.

I’ve felt this before. It was the time we were in the café and I was trembling because I’d been honest with him and he’d been honest with me. Because it was so close to stripping off our skin, letting each other see the raw vulnerable insides.

‘You turned up at my door when I was about to do it,’ he says. ‘I had to get a stamp for my suicide note,
and there you were.’

‘You posted your suicide note? Isn’t that a little stupid? What if it got lost?’ I am asking irrelevant questions because I am shaking.

‘You posted it,’ he says. ‘And then I had to intercept it before it was delivered. I spent two mornings outside my tour manager’s house and the postie nearly called the cops.’

‘And you – and you asked me to meet you because …’

‘Because
it gave me an excuse not to go ahead and kill myself anyway. If I’d arranged to meet you.’

‘You can’t have really wanted to die if you put it off to meet me at the Meridian Line.’

‘Oh, I did,’ he says. ‘But I wanted to see you more.’

I stare at him, a person who wanted to die but didn’t because of me. Another person.

‘If you wanted to see me so much, why weren’t you nicer?’

‘Well, to be fair,
I did kiss you.’

‘We agreed that was a bad idea and we weren’t going to talk about it any more.’ I’m still shaking.

The corner of his mouth quirks up and for the first time, he moves. He runs his hand through his hair, dishevelling it more. ‘I don’t know if I really wanted to die,’ he says. ‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Maybe I didn’t want to kill myself. God knows, I was dithering enough
that day. Maybe I was looking for an excuse to live and you gave it to me. Maybe I haven’t lost the habit of living yet, even though I don’t have anything to live for.’

‘You have things to live for.’ Though as soon as I say it, I realize I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t know him well enough.

‘If I really wanted to die I could have found a gun. Or stepped in front of a train. Or jumped off
a building. Booze and pills aren’t a sure thing.’

‘It’s sure enough for me,’ I say. ‘In fact …’ I take the packets of tablets out of the cabinet and begin popping them out of their blister packs and flushing them down the kitchen sink. ‘How did you get so many sleeping tablets?’

‘I don’t sleep.’

He doesn’t sleep. He’s depressed. This is why he’s been acting so strangely, being so aggressive
and angry and erratic. He needs professional help, but right now, he’s got me in his kitchen.

The tablets are white. Some of them drop down the plughole and some of them fall onto the stainless steel of the sink, making small taps. I finish one pack and start on the second.

‘You could just put them in the bin,’ Ewan says behind me.

‘I’m not taking any chances.’ Pop, pop, pop. He wanted to die
but he didn’t really want to die. He’s still alive maybe because of me.

Did Mum have a kit, when she discovered what was happening to her? Somewhere that I never looked? Did she flush it down the drain because of me?

By the time I’ve finished emptying the blister packs the tablets have backed up a bit in the plughole, so I take down the bottle of whisky, crack it open, and wash the tablets down
the drain with it. The smell is overwhelming: a cheap pub.

‘I could get some more,’ Ewan says.

‘You could. But first you’re going to tell me what happened so that you got them in the first place.’ I put down the empty bottle by the side of the sink, and turn to face Ewan again. He’s quite close, still wearing only a pair of boxers.

‘We’re going to need coffee,’ he says. ‘I’d offer you something
stronger but you just poured it down the plughole.’

‘I’ll make it. I think you should get dressed.’

I can’t help watching his naked back as he leaves the room. Then I run cold water in the sink to wash the smell of whisky away. I make two mugs of coffee, black because there’s no milk, and stir sugar into both of them. When I come back into the living room he’s sitting in a leather armchair,
wearing tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt. I take the sofa. The furniture here is big, designed for a man to use.

‘What happened,’ he says, ‘is that my best friend died. Lee – that was his name. It was my birthday, and he died, and it was my fault.’

‘
WE WERE ON
a tour bus,’ he says. ‘I’ve spent a lot of my life on tour buses.’

He pauses, gazing at the blank brick wall, and seems disinclined to say anything else. But he’s said enough so that now, I need to know.

The Ewan I loved was intense, exciting, and somehow innocent. My mother got it right in her portrait of him, standing among white and yellow flowers. This man is just
as intense, and maybe as exciting. But the innocence is gone. There’s a darkness, as well as a sadness. Things have happened to him since the short time I knew him. Two months. An eye-blink in the scheme of things. Such an insignificant time, if it had never been captured in an oil painting and the scent of frangipani.

‘You used to want to travel the world,’ I say. He laughs without humour.

‘I’ve done it. All over the world, every continent. Some of it’s exciting. But most of it’s on tour buses. You get on the bus, and you drive to a hotel that’s the same as any other hotel. Or you go to a gig that’s the same as any other gig. You’re travelling, but you’re standing still. You’re going to the same place again and again. You don’t feel like you’re moving at all.’ His face crumples. For
a moment I think he’s going to cry, and I don’t know what I’ll do if he cries. I can’t touch him to comfort him. But I don’t think I could sit here and watch him crying, either.