Chapter Eighteen

“You came here to ask me a question?”

They were in the sitting room: Sorcha would have felt happier sitting across a table, but she had been using the dining room table as a dumping ground for the previous ten days, and clearing it would have taken far longer than she felt able to ask him to wait. Now that he was here, and she was listening, Jake suddenly seemed less sure about asking her anything at all. She wished that he would just get on with it, and then she could go and lie back down.

“You were out last night, right?”

If this had anything at all to do with last night and Norman, she was sunk. She wasn’t even in any position to defend herself, as her memory seemed to only hold peculiar and disjointed fragments of things that she might have been doing. And she really, really needed to get this over with quickly, because her head was throbbing in a slightly arrhythmic way that was reminding her unpleasantly of hospitals and CAT scans.

“Yes, I was out and I drank too much. What’s that got to do with why you’re here?”

Jake still didn’t seem to know where to begin.

“Oh no, no. It’s nothing about what you did last night. I was just thinking that if you were out all night,” he half paused, as if expecting some kind of yes or no, but had to carry on again when she didn’t react, “well, if you were out all night, you might not know what had happened.”

Sorcha carried on sitting deliberately still, and tried to make her brain work. Marty again? Something to do with Stephen whatsisface? Something else to do with the band? Nothing that she could think of seemed to have anything at all to do with her. She realised that he was still waiting for her to say something.

“If whatever it is happened after about seven o’clock last night, I’m not going to have a clue about it, hun. I’m sorry.”

Jake paused again. His pauses were seeming longer that they actually were because of the way her head was behaving, but from where she was sitting he seemed to have found a way of stretching time out for so long that it started twanging painfully between her ears. For a moment he seemed to want to do something with the TV; before sighing and finally getting somewhere vaguely close to the point.

“My Dad’s gone. Disappeared, I mean. They think someone’s taken him.”

It took a moment or two for the words to sink in, and for Sorcha to realise that she needed to find a way of getting her act together, fast. Jake had suggested coffee, but she couldn’t stand the smell of it any more, so she was having to do her best with a large glass of water. Thankfully adrenaline, or something like it, seemed to be kicking in.

“Oh God. I’m so, so sorry hun. That’s awful. What on earth happened?”

“He was meant to be meeting me at the studio yesterday lunchtime but he never arrived. He was going on holiday you see, and was flying from Heathrow, so we thought we’d meet up for a bit. We sometimes meet up just for a chat and stuff, you see. But they found his car, unlocked, at a service station on the motorway near Northampton.”

It was a relatively bare statement of fact, which sounded as if it might already have been repeated a number of times, but still Jake was having to work hard to keep his emotions in check. Sorcha wondered how much more she would have found out from a TV news bulletin, and rather wished that he had turned the TV on after all, but the situation as a whole clearly wasn’t good.

“Christ. You really haven’t been having much luck lately, have you sweets?” She looked across at him, and could see that he probably hadn’t slept. He was obviously hurting, and she felt sorry for him, but she still had no idea why he was there. “Shouldn’t you be talking to the police about it, love?”

“Done that. Did that almost all night, and most of the morning, too. They kept asking the same questions over and over again. It was like they didn’t want to believe what we were saying.”

“Did they say what they thought had happened?”

“They seemed to think that it might have something to do with me, or even something to do with Marty disappearing off again. But I reckon they’d think that anyway: Dad can sometimes annoy people a bit, if people don’t know him and stuff, but not such as anyone would want to hurt him. I mean, everyone can be a bit annoying at times. But the band is different. That gets a bit out of control, sometimes.”

However hard he was trying to keep control, his voice was wavering. Sorcha remembered seeing something about a stalker, although she couldn’t remember which one of them it was who had been being stalked, and pictures of their houses being besieged by screaming fans. That had all been first time around, but there were clearly still odd streaks of that in what had happened since they had got back together. And there was presumably money around, too.

“I really don’t know what to say, sweets, apart from that I hope they find him soon and that he’s OK. Was the question you wanted to ask me to do with your Dad?”

She looked across at him briefly, and he seemed to be wishing that he was somewhere else.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come. I partly wanted to get away from the others for a bit, you see. And I thought that if it did have something to do with Marty, I might be able to figure it out if I could get into his flat. It felt like it was better than doing nothing.”

“How was coming here going to get you into his flat?”

Jake seemed to be losing conviction with every syllable that passed, and becoming ever more dejected. Sorcha’s hangover meant that she couldn’t bear to watch him that closely, and as a result didn’t notice the way in which he was watching her.

“I reckoned I could get in over the front of the terrace, from your terrace you see, and then see if I could get in through one of the windows.”

Sorcha walked over to the window. Pippa had threatened to clamber up on the terrace of the flat above when they had had a step ladder out and been fiddling around with hanging baskets the previous year: it was clearly possible to do it, not least because the railings at the front of the terraces would actually give a reasonably foothold. But if that was why he was there, he clearly hadn’t given the first thought to who she was and the things that mattered to her. Her sympathy for him started to evaporate, fast.

“You know I can’t let you do that.”

He asked why not, in a way that gave no indication at all of whether he already knew the answer to his own question.

“You know damned well that I’m a lawyer. If I start aiding and abetting you in breaking and entering into someone else’s property, I would be committing a criminal act. That could get me disbarred, which would mean that I could never work again.”

Jake was getting quieter as Sorcha was getting angry. It was as if he was trying to distance himself from the conversation without actually going away.

“I wasn’t going to break anything. Marty hated being shut up in things, like. He always had to go round opening windows and stuff. He used to leave a window open the whole time. It sounds a bit silly, like, but it had to be the one on the right hand side, if it would open. Otherwise he would get in a real state about things.”

“You seriously think that there will still be a window open, even though he hasn’t been there for over a year and the place has since been turned over by the police? And that there won’t be alarms and stuff? Come off it, Einstein.” Sorcha was annoyed because she couldn’t remember what offence he would have been committing if he hadn’t broken anything. It was years since she had looked at anything to do with trespass, or criminal law, and there had been a heap of new stuff, too, which had never really registered on her radar screen. Not knowing lost her a part of the moral high ground. She wanted to be able to go and check the point, and then come back and have the conversation over again. “And it still doesn’t make it OK, and you know it.”

He joined her by the window, unsure whether to look at her, or to just look at the floor and hope she would understand that he meant what he was saying.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come.”

“If that was why you came, then no, you shouldn’t have.” Her guard was up, and he was standing too close to her, but she caught herself in time, “But I really do hope that they find your Dad, and that he’s OK. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah. I know. Thank you. Look, I’m sorry that I came and it won’t happen again, I promise. Just promise me that you’ll look after yourself, and make sure you get properly better, won’t you?”

She pulled back, so that she could see his face without having to squint up at a funny angle, and tried to look cheerful.

“I’m fine, hun. I really, am. I just drank enough last night to knock out an elephant, and then fell over a flower pot on my way home.”

He held eye contact, and put his hand on her arm.

“That’s not what I meant. I meant your shoulder and neck, from where… well, you know.”

“That? Oh, that’s all OK now, thank God. It’s taken long enough.”

He still wasn’t happy, and wasn’t letting go.

“It’s still not right, though, is it? I can see that you’re not standing straight.” Sorcha pulled herself up, as if she had just been told off, which made Jake smile. “Not like that, silly. Your right shoulder is quite a bit higher than your left one, which means that your neck must be tied in knots the whole time. And I reckon you’re probably getting pretty bad headaches, too...” He paused, looking worried and as if he had done something wrong. “… except I suppose you might have headaches because you hit your head, too...”

His sentence ran out of steam rather than properly ending. The sun had long since gone round to the front of the building, so Sorcha could just see an outline of her reflection in the window. She could see what he meant, even if she didn’t want to acknowledge it. She had ended up getting very stroppy with a shop assistant when she had gone to buy some new work clothes a couple of weeks earlier, too, because the jackets wouldn’t hang right: that wasn’t a helpful thing to remember, either.

“I really am fine, apart from the hangover which is admittedly pretty grim. If my shoulder’s a bit wonky, I’m sure it’ll sort itself out with time.”

“You need to get it checked out, otherwise that kind of thing can cause all kinds of problems. Please.” He locked eye contact again, and she wanted to escape. “And this looks as if it still needs sorting out, too.”

The scarring from where the glass had cut into her was still furiously red, and raw-looking, spreading down her right shoulder and across towards her cleavage. Sorcha had quickly learnt to avoid her own reflection where she could, to only look at parts of it when she couldn’t, and to wear high neck lines despite the heat. Most of the time she could more or less pretend that it wasn’t there. But it was a new and still precarious trick, and when she failed she felt repulsive and obscene; a feeling which Norman had abundantly confirmed the previous night. She wasn’t ready for Jake’s hand, pushing her vest strap away as he turned her towards the light so that he could see it properly, and then exploring the scars gently with his fingers. Every cell and sinew in her body tensed; and she felt a wave of panic which was only slightly distorted by the fact that her head was throbbing again. She could barely pull away from him.

“Stop. My God, I’m sorry. Look, I know it hideous. I’m sorry, I should have put a proper shirt on, there just wasn’t one in the bathroom. I didn’t think. I can’t believe I didn’t think.” He was still examining the mess where her skin used to be, with a cool, calm touch, and had put his other hand behind her back to try to reassure her. It wasn’t working. “Please stop, please.”

She eventually managed to pull away, and immediately covered her shoulder with her hands, struggling to keep up a semblance of togetherness. Jake looked both quizzical and concerned.

“It’s really not that bad, you know, except that very middle bit. It looks as if there are still some tiny bits of glass in there.” It would have been easier if he had been wrong, but a few “bits” had been worked their way out of her skin over the past week or two, which Sorcha had regarded as just nasty and disgusting. It had been another good reason to get good at ignoring it. “And the rest of it needs sunlight, and probably vitamin E cream or something like that, if you want it to fade properly.”

Sorcha couldn’t conceal her sense of defeat, and wanted him to leave.

“They talked about doing something to tidy the worst of it up afterwards, but I just wanted to be shot of all things medical. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, eventually.”

“But that’s not looking after yourself, is it?”

She wanted to argue, and to say that it was precisely that; that she had done exactly what she had needed to do in order to keep everything vaguely together, and to get back to some semblance of normality, but something about Jake’s calmness told her it was an argument that she had already lost. He took her silence as permission to carry on.

“And you don’t look like you’re eating properly and stuff, either. Are you?”

Sorcha felt the adrenaline return in a hurry, and wondered if it was possible to make someone disappear just by wishing them away. She thought she could probably muster a very pure, almost Nietzschean kind of will to power, but wasn’t sure even that would do the trick. There was absolutely no point in continuing the conversation, but he just didn’t seem able to take the hint, read the runes, or understand any other form of indirect, non-verbal communication.

“What the hell has that got to do with anything?”

The fact that she was suddenly angry again confused him, and he wasn’t looking for a fight.

“It’s OK, I’m sorry. It’s just that you look like you’ve lost quite a bit of weight, and I figured that it wasn’t going to help you getting better if you weren’t eating properly. That’s all I meant.”

Sorcha suddenly felt as if she was about to explode, and no longer cared if she showed it.
“How dare you? How dare you, you of all people, come here and start telling me what to do and what to eat? Just get out.” She calmed slightly, and carried on at something less than a full-pitched screech “Please, just go.”

Jake looked utterly bewildered, but it had absolutely no effect because Sorcha was staring fiercely out of the window so that she didn’t have to acknowledge that he was still there. He didn’t need to be asked again, though, and walked calmly out of the flat, closing the front door gently behind him. Sorcha was left feeling like a vengeful spring, loaded to breaking point and needing to inflict pain. There was an old crystal vase on the side in the sitting room which had been given to her as a birthday present by an old friend of her grandmother, which she had never quite managed to get rid of. Having briefly calculated that her life would be better without it, she picked it up with both hands and flung it across the room, watching it shatter into satisfyingly small pieces when it hit the floor right in front of the doorway.

The sense of something massive being completely and utterly destroyed provided a glimpse of relief; but only a very, very short one. It was barely a split second after the impact, with glass splinters still skipping across the floor, that Sorcha realised that her feet were bare, and that all she had therefore achieved was to make a huge and rather dangerous mess. She had no idea how she was going to manage to clear it up, or even get out of the room, without ending up with blood all over the place. Again.