When Niall left, the silence of my flat felt like a funeral. I went into the kitchen to water the sole surviving plant, my attention drifting untethered between the grey-misted, grey-gravelled street below and the grey stream falling from my grey tap.
I closed my eyes. I was going to crash, wasn’t I?
And now I was drowning the sole surviving plant.
I stuck it on the rack to dry out. The water droplets clinging to the leaves glittered like tears. They thudded onto the draining board, heavy as a heartbeat.
It was barely evening, but I crawled into bed. Depression-stupefied, weary and hopeless, I should have slept.
But I was strangely restless. Slightly tearful. And troubled by wayward thoughts.
Depression was thoughtless, tearless, an animal’s uncomprehending pain.
Some hours later, I realised.
I wasn’t depressed. I was sad.
This little piece of hurt was all my own.
I lay there, in the dark, rolling the idea across my mind like a pearl.
I would wake in the middle of the night, or pause arrested in my day, because my skin would shiver with the memory of a touch.
As though it wanted to tell me something.
The ideas unfurled across my whiteboard and, slowly at first, I wrote them down, letter by letter until I had sentences, paragraphs, chapters.
Amy said it felt different from the others. More about people than puzzles.
She said she liked it.
And I liked writing it, my every word a piece of broken mirror, showing me a glimpse of Darian.
One day, after meeting Max for coffee, I stumbled down a back alley in Soho to get away from the crowds, having formed the erroneous impression that this would constitute a shortcut rather than a descent into hell. Somewhere between Eros Movie Rental, the French Pussy “Private Dancing” café, and a sex shop called The Whack Shack, I found myself staring at a small red door. It was edged in flaking gold and opened onto a narrow staircase leading who knew where. The reason I’d stopped at all was because the sign above the door read “Alice in Inkland.”
I was not in the habit of wandering, at random, into mysterious buildings in Soho, and years spent trying to rationalise the ever-spinning fairground ride of my depression had left me with a deep wariness of impulsive behaviour. Impetuous to insane was too narrow a line, too easy a step. My first thought, as I hesitated (curious and curiouser) on the threshold of that odd little door, was that perhaps it didn’t exist. There weren’t any passersby so there was no way to subtly re-orientate myself by the road markers of other people’s behaviour. But I did have my phone, and a cursory Google search confirmed that there was, indeed, a newly opened tattoo parlour in Soho called Alice in Inkland.
Which at least meant that I wasn’t slipping heedlessly into mania.
I couldn’t have explained why, but I went inside. At the top of the staircase was a tiny, red-painted room, the walls liberally plastered with posters, photographs, flyers, and glass-fronted frames containing what I presumed had to be tattoo . . . art? There was a counter against the far wall, carved with the words “Then fill up the glasses with treacle and ink.” There was also nobody there.
Thank fuck.
I turned to leave.
“Can I help you?”
I turned, like a thief caught in the act. From a door I hadn’t noticed, a woman I presumed to be the owner had emerged. She was, frankly, enormous. With hair as red as a poinsettia plant. She was wearing a sleeveless top that showed the tattoos that swirled, bright and savage, up her arms and across her shoulders.
I blinked, stammered, and gestured ineffectually with my hands.
“Riiiight. See, this is why I don’t do walk-ins. Same reason I won’t shag you if you’re drunk.”
“Um. Pardon? I’m not drunk. Not that I want to shag you. No offence. I’m just not into. Women. Um. Pardon?”
“I’m not something you regret in the morning.”
“I’ll be going.” I indicated the door.
But her voice called me back. “What did you want, anyway?”
Darian. World peace. Actually, fuck world peace. Darian. “I think I . . . wanted a tattoo.”
“I got that much. From you walking into a tattoo parlour.”
“Oh, right.”
She folded her arms. “What did you have in mind, bozo?”
I felt heat surge to my cheeks. This was exactly why I didn’t do impulsive. “I sort of wanted a name.”
Her eyes made a lazily appraising journey from mine to my toes, and then back up again. “That sounds like a story.”
“It’s not a story. It’s an epilogue.”
“I’m an artist, not a stonemason.” She made an illustrative gesture in my direction. “And that’s a body, not a tombstone.”
“All the same.”
“Again: art, not therapy.”
I arched a brow at her. “Art is therapy.”
She was silent a moment. “What’s your name?”
“A.A. Winters.”
“What, the novelist?”
Too late now. “Yes.”
“I dig your books. I enjoy a good mystery. But I don’t know why you keep murdering everybody your detective likes.”
“It’s so I don’t have to bother with character development. Are you going to do this, or not?”
She snorted like a particularly peeved Minotaur. “So you can laser me off when you have a change of heart?”
“I don’t think my heart is changing any time soon.”
“Hmm.”
“Just out of curiosity,” I said at last, “how do you make any money at this? For a tattoo artist, you seem pretty reluctant to do any tattooing.”
“For a man claiming he wants a tattoo, you seem pretty reluctant to get a tattoo.”
“Touché. But actually,” I said, surprising myself, “I’m not.” And it was true. I nearly laughed. At least there would be something on my arms that was the consequence of a rational choice. If whatever I felt for Darian could in any way be described as rational.
“Have you given any thought to a style? A look? Placement?”
“I honestly don’t care.” I was giddy with my own power. “Just don’t put it in a big red heart and we’re good.”
She gave me a vicious glare, stomped round to her counter, pulled out a book, and slammed it down. “Look at my portfolio, mister. Look at it.”
I looked.
“Do you see anything in there resembling a big red heart?”
“No.”
I turned the pages. Her work was rather striking.
“Do you actually know anything about this at all?” she asked suddenly.
“No.”
She flapped an impatient hand at me. “Did the internet pass you by? Oh, wait, I know, you’re a time traveller. You’re dressed like one.”
“Yes, yes, I’m a Time Lord. Now, can I have a tattoo?”
“You should research shit before you jump right in. I could be any sort of unsanitary incompetent.”
“I suspect—” I closed her book and passed it back across the counter. “—if you were an unsanitary incompetent, you’d be gleefully branding me right now.”
There was a long silence.
I stooped to base manipulation. “Look, if you don’t, I’ll find an unsanitary incompetent.”
She stared at me through narrowed eyes. “Okay. Come on through.”
I followed her into the second room. In contrast to the first, I felt like I’d turned up unexpectedly at the dentist. Everything was very neat and precisely laid out. In one corner there was a sink area and an autoclave, in the other a bench laid with inks and equipment. I took the big padded chair in the middle. It reminded me weirdly of getting ECT.
“What’s your name?” I heard myself ask.
“I go by Alice.”
I suppose I should have guessed.
When she was done at the sink, she came and sat down next to me. “Not your arse then?” She lifted her brows wickedly.
“Forearm will do, thank you very much.”
I peeled off my jacket, rolled up my sleeve, and turned my hand palm up.
“Want me to cover this up for you?” She tapped my scar.
In case of emergency, break skin?
“So I can look like someone who not only failed to kill himself, but then tried to hide failing to kill himself under a tattoo?”
“It could have been a really hardcore cat for all I care.” She shrugged, her fingers assessing my skin for the inadequate canvas it was.
“Well, it wasn’t.”
We talked a little about colour, positioning, and size, and then she said, “You still haven’t told me the name.”
“Oh, right. It’s . . .” Why was it so difficult to say aloud? “Darian.”
“And how are you spelling that? Don’t want a ‘beautiful tradgedy’ going on.”
“With two a’s. D-A-R-I-A-N.”
“What’s he like?” she asked.
“He made me happy.”
“Wow, I feel like I know the guy. I can tell you’re a writer. It was like seeing a word picture materialise before my very eyes.” There was a pause. “Do you maybe want to try that again?”
It took me a long time, but, on this occasion, she didn’t press me.
“He . . . he . . . he’s a kind, ridiculous, beautiful glitter pirate. I don’t know what else I can tell you. He makes me laugh. He makes me hopeful.”
It was only after I’d spoken that I realised: present tense.
“I can work with that. I’ll freehand for a bit, and if you like it, we’ll go from there.”
“All right.”
She picked up a pen, put it to my arm, and a ribbon of ink unfurled across my skin.
“By the way,” she said, “you didn’t ask the question.”
“What question?”
“The question everyone asks. Will it hurt.”
“I don’t care if it hurts.”
Across the moon-pale scar that marred my forearm, Darian danced in dark ink, the gracefully curving edges of his name unravelling into a spill of colour as joyful and haphazard as the promise of stars.
Walking with Amy to a signing, we passed a trendy clothing chain, the sort of place that sold about twelve different types of jeans, and there was Darian. He’d been poured into one of the twelve types of jeans and was tugging playfully at a long, multicoloured scarf. Like most of his work, it was a careful piece of self-composition, but there was enough of my Darian, in the smile and in the eyes, that I had to look away.
“I banged a model,” I said. “Check me.”
But, somehow, the words didn’t come out right and I just sounded sad.
I was sitting by the bar, reading 100% Essex: Doing It the Essex Way on my Kindle (for research), essentially on-call for the latest of Niall’s inevitably disastrous dates. He was over by the window and had already run his hand through his hair three times—which either meant he was flirting or it was the signal for “Help, get me out of here.” In retrospect, it had been a bad choice of signal. Next time I would suggest quacking like a duck if he wanted the date to end, which would send a clear message and come with the added benefit of not requiring my involvement.
“C-can I maybe buy you a drink?”
Without looking up, I quirked a finger in the direction of my Coke (full fat, not diet, with ice, and lime not lemon). “I’ve already got one.”
“Oh. Yes.” A nervous laugh. “I didn’t really think that through.”
Relenting, I put down my Kindle. “It’s quite a context-dependent line.”
“What would you suggest?” asked the Adonis at my side.
Dear God. Those eyes. That mouth. That body. Oh, that body. And he seemed to be talking to me. I waited for my libido to notice, but it lay there like a dead cat in a basket, and all the prodding in the world wouldn’t rouse it.
This was officially fucking ridiculous.
And I couldn’t keep staring at him, waiting for my cock to get with the programme.
“How about . . .” I held out my sleeve, running a thumb lightly over the fabric. “What do you call this?”
“Um. A jacket? A sleeve? A really nice suit?”
“Steady on, we’re not playing charades with auntie. The material.”
“Oh, right. I’d say . . .” He touched it delicately with a forefinger. “Super 120 wool.”
“I like a man who knows his fabric, but the correct answer was . . . boyfriend material.”
There was a not-quite-awkward silence.
“I think you ruined my delivery,” I said. “Normally I’m beating them off with sticks after that one.”
“I believe it,” he replied, with just enough irony to almost make me smile. “David,” added the divine creature, holding out a hand for me to shake.
“A.A. Win— Actually, call me Ash.”
“What do you do, Ash?”
“I’m a writer, I supply terrible pickup lines to strange men in bars, and I’m a bipolar depressive.”
“I’m a freelance web designer, and, err, I have OCD actually.”
“What a relief we can’t breed together.”
He gave a startled laugh. “It’s not so bad. It’s not crippling or anything. Just really annoying for whoever I’m dating.”
“I’m not looking for a relationship, David.”
Well, that was blunt. I winced. The man had barely said hello.
But he was, if anything, even more embarrassed than I was. He slapped a hand over his mouth. “Oh, shit. That sounded like I was coming on way too strong.” He gave a lopsided smile, far too sheepish for a man who looked like a walking wet dream. One of his front teeth was slightly crooked. Before I’d met Darian, I would never have noticed. “Bunny-boiling comments aside,” he said, “I’m not necessarily looking for a relationship either.”
His eyes lingered on my mine, his smile curving suggestively.
I re-checked my libido for signs of life. There was nothing. I thought about going with him anyway.
But I didn’t want to.
Fuck. Did this mean I’d grown as a person?
“I’m probably going to regret this for the rest of my life,” I said, “because you are seriously the most gorgeous man who has ever failed to pull me, but . . . I don’t think I’m looking for that either.”
To his credit, he didn’t drop me like a plastic carrier bag. “Just out of something?”
“I wasn’t even in it.”
“Oh, those are the worst kind.” He slipped gracefully onto the barstool next to me, moved the menu into alignment with the beer mats, and then hastily dis-arranged them again.
“I can’t even bring myself to rebound,” I said, pretending I hadn’t noticed. “I’m just sort of stuck.”
“What happened?”
“Bloody hell, I’ve turned into one of those wounded men who sit around in bars and whinge on about their broken hearts to hotties they should be fucking.”
“It’s fine. Really. I think one chat-up per night, maybe per year, is about my limit.”
So I told him. Or, at least, I started. But then Niall flopped down onto the other free seat and interrupted by yelling at me. “What the hell was that? Where was my rescue? He could have been psycho.”
“Was he?”
“No, just another closeted stockbroker with submission fantasies.”
“I thought you liked him.” I shrugged. “You usually flick your hair about when you fancy someone.”
“I do not!” He tried to lean casually past me so he could see David. Subtle, Niall, subtle. “So, what were you two talking about?”
I tried to sound casual. “Oh, nothing much.”
“Nothing much? I know what that means. Can you please stop moping about Darian?”
I hung my head. “I can’t help it, I’m sorry.”
“For God’s sake, why don’t you just apologise?”
“Because . . . because . . . I can’t. Because then it’ll be over.”
Niall pulled over my Coke and took a gulp. “It’s already over. You’re not with him, are you? And look at it this way: if he feels about you even a little bit of the way you feel about him, he’ll understand. And if he doesn’t, you owe the poor bastard an apology anyway. Because you were a shitbag.”
“What did you do?” asked David, wide-eyed.
Before I could explain, Niall jumped in. “You know that bit in the Bible when they’re all like, ‘Yo Peter, do you know this Jesus bloke?’ and he’s like, ‘Hell, no.’ It was like that, but even worse.”
“My word.”
Niall abandoned even a pretence of subtlety, put his elbows on the bar, and peered around me. David gave him a little wave, and Niall sat back with a stunned expression on his face. He ran a hand through his hair.
“Shut up, both of you.” It was hard to look stern in two different directions, but I think I managed it. “I make one slightly hyperbolic comparison and I never hear the end of it. By the way, Niall, David, David, Niall.” Hmm. Payback time. “David’s a web designer. Niall works for a charitable trust. He particularly enjoys blonds and people with issues, so . . .” I made a you two should totally shag gesture. And grinned as Niall went bright red.
“I can’t believe you said that,” he muttered. “You are just the worst friend ever.”
David laughed. “We should probably get married. It’ll make a great story to tell the grandkids.”
“What? It was all going really well until my arse of a mate decided to throw me to the wolves and that stole your heart away?”
“Come on,” I protested, “it was funny.” But they weren’t paying much attention to me.
“So, what kind of charity do you work for?”
“We’re an independent educational equality think tank. We could, ah, do with a new website actually.” Niall fiddled with the straw in my Coke glass. “Perhaps you could come and . . . maybe . . . do some consulting for us. We could discuss it, um, over dinner?”
I felt almost sorry for him. He’d gone the ashen colour of a man stuck in the middle of a dreadful line but unable to get out without finishing it.
“I’d love to take a look at your website.” Perhaps David found ineptitude endearing. “And I’d love to go for dinner.”
Niall grinned sappily. “Then it’s a date.”
“I thought you said it was a consultation.”
“It’s a date. For a consultation.” He paused. “Oh fuck it. Fine. It’s a date, all right? Come on a date with me. Save me from myself. I clearly need help.” Belatedly, Niall seemed to remember I still existed. “Err, we’re going to get some food. Do you want to come?”
“Do I want to be the third wheel on your consultative date consultation date? Now let me think about it. No.” I gave Niall’s arm a quick squeeze. “And, anyway, I’m washing my hair.”
I left them to it.
Sleepless, staring at the ill-shapen lump of the glardigan hanging from the top of my wardrobe door, Niall’s words echoing incessantly in my mind, Darian’s camera-caught smile burning behind my eyes.
What was he doing? Did he ever think of me? Had he waited in Cambridge? Or longer than that? For the apology I was too ashamed to give. And then what? Had time and memory diminished me for him, taken the sting from my cruelty, the edge from my passion, until I was no longer a lover or a villain but some incidental character who had played a minor role in a life that told itself elsewhere? Was I nothing but the posh nutter who’d slept with him and then been pointlessly rude about it?
If that was true, why would he not fade for me? Was this to be my punishment? He would move on, forget me, and be happy, and I would live like this, trapped within my wasted days, while the world cast at my feet the bright reflections of his image like shells from the receding tide.
His still-unframed photograph was propped on my bookshelf, as it had been from the day he’d given it to me. I had tried to throw it away and, when that had failed, to put it away. But there it was.
Every day, I told myself it was better this way. I’d as good as saved him, and probably myself. Whatever we’d had, it’d been a thing with no future, because I have no future, merely a dreary present that Darian Taylor had briefly made brighter.
I wondered if he suffered in my absence, as I suffered in his. It seemed impossible. When my own happiness was a mystery to me, what hope did I have of being instrumental in someone else’s? I had tried to make Niall happy once, but all I’d done was nearly destroy us both. And even if I went to Darian, after all these months, bearing my too-little too-late apology like a cat with a dead sparrow, what else could I give him? Some pieces of truth. My stitched-together self. Once, he had thought he wanted me, and I had barely believed it then. Would he still?
How could I ask him? How could I be enough?
Then I remembered. Essex Fashion Week, my lies coming down around us like hail, and my gentle Darian claiming his right to be with me. Or, at least, the right to try. An unlikely champion, and Niall an unlikely dragon, but Darian had been the only one to ever take to the field for me. And when it had been my turn, I had simply fled like the coward I was.
All I’d had to say was yes.
Yes, he is my boyfriend.
Was it too late, now, to pick up my tattered colours and ride out in my tarnished armour?
It was easier, surely, to live uncertain, than with the shame and surety of rejection. But didn’t I, too, have a right to try?
I could tell him I had spoken out of selfishness and cowardice. I could tell him I was sorry. I could tell him he was the only thing in the world I wanted. I could cast myself at his feet, like the spoils of love and war, and ask nothing in return. And give him, at last, the choice I’d denied him in Cambridge: to have me, worthless as I was, or to reject me.
It was what he deserved, and I would have to find the strength to bear the answer.
Ignorance was a fool’s shield. Living without knowing was almost as miserable as living without Darian.
Tomorrow, then, tomorrow I would go Essex. And find the man who had not turned from the worst of me until I had cast him aside.
I did not go to Essex.
I picked up my graduation photo, the one Darian had thought so unlike me. Looking into the unmoving, unblinking eyes of a boy with everything, and everything to lose, I realised I had become a stranger to myself. I had envied that boy, with all his hopes and dreams, his pride, his self-respect, and his glowing future. I had wanted to be him again and thought myself less than he was. Perhaps I am.
But, though he was admirable and admired, nobody had ever looked at him with wide grey-green-blue eyes and said he was amazin.
I could not be that scarless, fearless boy again. But, for a little while at least, I had been someone I could almost stand. Pieces of a better self, reflected in someone else’s eyes.
The photograph crashed against the wall, shards of glass strewing the floor in malicious, twinkling diamonds.
Sleepless, of course, infinite scenarios scrolling behind my eyes like a cinema of self-destruction.
The problem with admitting the value of anything was the pain that followed its loss.
And I was still lying, the strata of my self-deceptions so deep and intricate, even I sometimes lacked the power to see through them.
The truth then, stark in the bleak hours after midnight. It would have been noble to cast myself at Darian’s feet and ask for nothing in return. But I wanted everything.
Everything. Whether I deserved it or not.
Once, I’d lived a life full of wanting and, like anyone else, I’d taken it for granted. But, in time, depression had flayed it from me, the wanting, the everyday hopes and dreams, and all the little desires. They became too dangerous to keep, too fragile to survive, and my bitter, barren soul could nurture no new ones. I’d kept only compromises, the shadows of old passions, things I just about learned to preserve.
Today is a day in which I will not want to die.
Today is a day in which I will want to get out of bed.
My writing, my few remaining friends, the harsh, meaningless sex I sought with strangers: these were safe to want, and I knew they would not be taken from me.
But a lover? I was so very afraid of Darian—the unsought miracle—and almost relieved to have driven him away. Yet the wanting remained, like the memory of his hands on my skin.
I wanted Darian. With a pure, deep certainty, the first I had known for a very long time.
Through the darkness, came the sharp, sudden quickstepping of my pulse. But it was not fear alone I felt. It was something else, too rare and insubstantial a thing to bear its naming.
When I was young, the world had given me so much and everything had come so easily to me, that I’d hardly needed to try. And if I had ever struggled against my illness—if, that was, it had not already eroded me past the point of recognition—it was in a manner invisible even to myself. Through hospital days, my mother’s voice, ringing sweetly: “Just try a little, darling, can’t you try?” I hadn’t even fought to live. Paramedics had dragged me back from the threshold of death.
But I would fight for Darian.
Sacrifice be damned, selfish or not, hopeless or not, I would fight for Darian.
I had no expectations of success, but I would try anyway, with all my meagre strength.
For Darian and for me, for my right to try, and his right to have me, and because I wanted him. I knew he would reject me and I knew it would hurt, but, even so, that nameless seed was still unfurling, unflinching and full-blossomed in the heart of some long-sealed garden.