Chapter Thirty-Two

 

 

AS SOON AS WE CROSS the threshold of my house, I kick off my shoes in the hallway and ask Sam, “Hard or soft drink? You decide.”

“Liquor, immediately. Just gonna take a slash. Been drinking water like a fish tonight. Definitely not good for me.”

I laugh heartily as he enters the downstairs loo, situated just beneath the staircase.

I can’t remember what we’ve actually got in. When I check the drinks cupboard, I discover there’s tiny bit of navy rum left and a little brandy from last Christmas. I have a couple of bottles of red wine on the sideboard that Hetty and Joe left here, so I start opening one of those.

“Here, let me,” he says, sneaking up behind me.

I move to the glassware cabinet and take out two red wine glasses.

“You took your rings off,” he states, while he’s still grappling with the cork. An actual cork. Not a screwcap. I guess Het and Joe like decent wine.

“It was time.”

“Nothing to do with meeting my friends tonight?”

“Might have been.” He turns and pours wine into the glasses, focusing on what he’s doing. I stare at his profile while he pours, wondering if that’s why he became so upset earlier on tonight. “There’s no liquor of interest in the cupboard. I drank the gin and Gage left nothing decent in there. I guess that proves his level of drinking. I nearly always kept a bottle of scotch for when people come round and want a nip at the end of an evening.”

Something passes over Sam’s face. I don’t know what it is, but I let it go. It’s either annoyance or impatience, one of the two.

“Was that Marvin Sinclair we saw tonight?” he asks.

“Gage’s best mate, yeah.”

“Ah, his best mate.”

I search his eyes. “Why do you say it like that? Best mate,” I mimic him, because it sounds like he believes Marvin isn’t as decent as he would have us all believe. “Marvin is the only decent friend Gage ever had.”

“Well, I believe that,” he says, before taking a seat at the kitchen table.

I raid my kitchen drawer for candles and set some out around the room. It’s more my junk drawer actually and while I’m rummaging around, I also find an old draughts set.

I plonk myself opposite him at the table and set up the draughts. I reach behind me to dim the lights and we’ve got ourselves the perfect dim-set scene for a post-mortem on what transpired tonight.

Gathering my hair over one shoulder, I pull my legs underneath me at the table and warn, “I’m very competitive.”

“Really?”

“You’ve been warned.”

As the game gets underway – me with my white counters, him with his black – he continues his earlier pondering…

“Was Marvin at the funeral?”

“I don’t know…” I try to focus on the counters, but I end up just playing any moves. “I can’t remember anything of that day… except arguing with my mother and feeling an enormous sense of fatigue and loneliness. Why do you ask?”

“I feel like he may have had something to do with Gage’s demise.”

My head jerks upwards and I pin my eyes on his. “What?”

“Just a feeling, baby. Don’t take it literally… I feel he may not have been as good a friend as you perhaps perceive.”

“You’ve concluded this from just one brief meeting tonight? And don’t think I didn’t notice. You two didn’t shake hands.” I avoid his eyes when I say this, and I also make another ill-judged move on the draughts board in front of me.

Sam collects six of my counters in one fell swoop, trying not to smile as he considers a comeback.

“I think best friends keep each other’s secrets, that’s what I think. I also saw the worry in his eyes when he spotted us together.”

“Worry, or sadness?” I challenge, collecting four of his draughts – but still losing.

“Worry.”

“Marvin is a salt-of-the-earth type, trust me,” I insist passionately. “In fact, if it wasn’t for him, I don’t know if Gage would’ve got on the team. He probably would’ve become a bricklayer if it wasn’t for Marvin.”

Sam wins the game, of course, but I set out the counters for another match. Sam pours more wine and I catch his eye across the table. He looks happy to be at the table, surrounded by candlelight, just hashing this out.

I can tell the tide’s turning even before he says, “So, what did you think of everyone?”

I take a sip of wine and make my first move on the board. “Your friends, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Can I just ask… are they your only friends?”

“Erm, no.”

“But they are your sort of local go-to social circle?”

“I have other friends. Yes. They are my local crew, I suppose.”

“You’ll have to forgive me, but it seemed like they’re not your… best friends?”

Sam purses his lips and makes a bad move. I feel a win is on the cards this time, now the tables have turned.

“No.”

“Ah.”

“What did you think of Hugo?” he asks.

“I liked him. And Grace. I think they’ll make a good pair. They both seem sort of dark humoured, which I like. I didn’t get chance to talk to Si and Alan much. They seemed ensconced in one another.”

“Yeah.” He makes another move, but it gives me the opportunity to leap over a number of his pieces and take them. Sam continues, “It was quite sweet with those two for a while. Will they, won’t they type of thing. Now they’re inseparable, when they’re together anyway.”

“That’s nice, don’t you think?”

“They’re lucky; they live for one another,” he gushes.

“It’s good. They seem like nice people.”

“Yeah.”

“And Zelda? Something tells me that tonight was about getting her off your back.”

He loses the game, dignified in defeat before pouring more wine. “You see right through me.”

“Is she always bugging you? Texts? Emails? Stuff like that.”

He picks up his phone. “Let’s check.”

He searches his apps and then says, “Ah, yeah, here we go…”

Sam passes me his phone and I read what’s on the screen.

Sam, I’m prepared to forgive you for tonight, but I’m awaiting your apology. Zelda.

My eyebrows discover a new angle of expression. “Oh, goodness.”

“I would understand if I had ever given her hope, but I haven’t. I really haven’t.”

“But she’s got Gary?” I exclaim, deadpan.

We both laugh the house down. Bland Gary who said nothing all night but ate double the amount everyone else did and with his mouth open the whole time.

I scroll through his message thread with her. There are numerous one-sided texts, some of them joking about his absence from Friday night drinks (when he was probably comforting me as I was grieving). She states that he must have found a place to put his cock again. That’s a lovely way to speak about a member of your fellow sex.

“You need to delete her and never see her again. It’s unhealthy, Sam. You must do this.”

“Keep scrolling,” he encourages me.

I scroll through mountains of strange, random outbursts of phrases like, you know how good we were together… promise me when you settle down, it’ll be me. Then I arrive at the sad stuff: I want to cut myself again. Please Sam, help. I can’t stop myself. Please. Her texts are accompanied by photos of cuts and bruises along her arms and legs.

“These aren’t her arms and legs, Sam.”

“What? You don’t know that.”

“I have a photographic memory. I noticed tonight she has an unusual amount of moles all over her skin, with her being dark and all. There are no moles in these pictures. She’s taken them off the internet. You must delete her, I insist. Promise me.”

Sam looks shocked, taking the phone off me to look twice at the pictures. “Do people actually do this?”

“Some people will do whatever it takes to get what they want.”

“Why?”

“Because they have no faith.”

“No faith?” he questions, still aghast at all of this – and probably feeling like a bit of a fool.

I take a sip of wine before explaining, “People with no belief in anything spiritual or any sort of higher existence, such as the importance of being somehow integral to a grander scheme of things – they live with no purpose except to achieve the things they want and covet – the material in the here and now. They don’t fear their actions coming back to haunt them because all they fear is not getting what they want. They have no faith that being greater than their own limitations is what matters most of all, and that by living in a companionable, amenable way, you attract everything you need and want without the need for underhanded tactics or controlling behaviour, as exhibited by our Zelda here. I associate her with having no faith in anyone or anything, otherwise why else would she do something like this? All people like Zelda know is what she wants, not what she needs. And in reality, she needs to get rid of Gary and move on.”

He peers at me in that squinty way of his. “Anyone ever said you sound like a bloody writer?”

“Not until just now.” I set out a fresh board again and announce, “Best of three. It’s all still to play for.”

He looks very serious as we get play underway. It’s tense and nerve-wracking. We’re clutching our wine glasses, staring over them at one another.

We play without chatting in between this time, but when we’re down to the last four counters, I still have no idea who’s going to win. It might be him, purely because he moved first.

The pieces move and he takes all of mine, but he looks a little upset with himself that’s he’s beaten me and done the ungentlemanly thing.

“You rotten git,” I fume.

“Hang on.” He holds his hands up. “I know how to make it up to you!”

“Yeah. How?”

“Just come here,” he says.

I take my time leaving my chair, sauntering towards him. He grabs my wrist and pulls me onto his lap, his arms around my waist.

Brushing his fingers along my throat, he whispers, “I was upset earlier.”

Being in such close proximity to him, I can see in his green eyes that he means it. It takes my breath away.

“Because I drank your sperm, or because of how you felt?”

“How I felt,” he admits.

I wrap my arms around his shoulders, stroking my nose along his. “How did you feel?”

“Exposed.”

I gulp. “What do you mean?”

“I can’t continue like this, Liza. I spend every day we’re not together wondering if something is going to come between us. It scares me.”  

“What could come between us? We love one another. Every day we spend time together, I feel even more energised and even more sure of that.”

“Me too, and I feel even more sure of losing you eventually, too. Because of how this feels. It scares me. Doesn’t it you?”

I run my fingers through the hair on the nape of his neck and shake my head. “It used to. It doesn’t anymore. I just love you.”

I can feel his heart pounding through his shirt. I place my hand on his cheek and run my thumb over his cheekbone, then his jaw.

Leaning in, I brush my lips over his, the energy between us instant, my stomach flipping and my heart ticking harder. His arms tighten around me and he lifts me off his lap, then sweeps me up into his arms, carrying me through the house and up the stairs.

On my bed, he leans over me, poised to start kissing and making love to me.

“I’m only yours,” I promise, our fingers entwined.

“I’m only yours,” he reciprocates, and the moment he kisses me, it all falls away and all we’re left with is each other – and I’m okay with that.