Chapter Fifty

Jane settled into the armchair with a large mug of cocoa. They had spent the morning shovelling snow, but there was nothing more to be done until the evening when they were having dinner with some of her work colleagues. Sorcha let herself flop onto the end of the chaise longue, and watched the fire glowing and flickering in the grate while Jane leafed through the TV listings.

“I hate the way they do it now. You have to wait until four o’clock for It’s a Wonderful Life.”

“You watched it yesterday. You can’t possibly need to see it again today.”

Jane had been having to resist the temptation to jolly Sorcha along for weeks.

“But it’s meant to be on all the time over Christmas. It always used to be, until somebody did something about the copyright.” She closed the magazine and put it on the table next to the chair, and then put the cocoa mug down on top of it, “I’m going to have to get it on DVD, although that feels like cheating.”

Sorcha was talking with her eyes closed.

“This is something I never thought I would say, but hurrah for the copyright guys. Remind me not to buy it for you.”

“But you can’t have Christmas without It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s like a Christmas without Santa or carols or mulled wine.”

“Yes you can. It’s stupid sentimental nonsense, and anyone with half a brain should run a mile the moment it the angels start fiddling around talking about getting dressed.”

It also represented a nostalgia for a past which was Jane’s and not hers, but that would be giving too much away. Sorcha had always thought that she liked white Christmases. She only remembered two or three from her childhood: a couple of inches of snow on the back lawn made the day feel like an event, and meant that they got to build a snowman rather than being dragged out on some long, damp, pointless walk. But that had been nothing like this. The house was set down from the road, and the snow that morning had been up over the window sills. It made her feel claustrophobic. Digging, with watery sunshine somewhere overhead, had come as a release. She had been worried about whether her shoulder would hold up: it was about a month since she’d had surgery to tidy up the scarring, and she was still nervous about it. She had felt it pulling for the first half hour or so, but it was literally only skin-deep and the rhythm and the movement had then taken over. The feeling of utter exhaustion which had set in, once they had dug a way through to the road, was strangely comfortable.

“There’s nothing wrong with angels.”

Sorcha opened her eyes, and propped herself up on her elbows.

“Maybe not. Maybe it’s just me, Pet.” She stretched one leg out in front of her, “You know, for a while I thought the problem was that I should have failed more when I was younger, but the more I think about it the more I think I’ve been failing for years and just not noticing it. I’ve always been particularly crap at Christmas.”

Jane was tempted to agree with her. For the previous twenty years Sorcha had almost always ended up calling her twice on Christmas day: once to wish her a happy Christmas, and then again later in some kind of towering fury which needed to be defused. The causes had varied from presents which had been given to her sister and being forced to eat sprouts, to the discovery that John had been lying to her about his political ambitions.

“Last Christmas wasn’t so bad.”

They had spent five days with Pippa staying in Sorcha’s old flat, and wandered around London pretending to be tourists. Jane cherished the memory of Sorcha being completely unable to stand up on the ice at Somerset House: she and Pippa had taken it in turns to prop her up. Sorcha was deliberately not remembering it at all, and said nothing.

“They let me speak to Pip yesterday. She said hello.”

She’d actually said sorry, at least a dozen times, but Jane didn’t want to go there. Sorcha knew what she was trying to do, and wished that she would stop it.

“I have nothing to say to her. I just can’t imagine even trying to have a conversation with her. Ever.”

“I didn’t speak to her for long. She was slurring a bit, and kept saying she couldn’t concentrate.” Jane seemed to stop and stare at the fire, “I had a much longer chat with her Mum: she says it’s because of the drugs, but I doubt that helps much. I get the impression she’s finding it all hard to cope with, still.”

“I’m not fucking surprised.” Sorcha picked up a glass which was on the floor in front of her, and stood up to go to the kitchen. “Every time I think about Pip, I feel sick. And it’s not so much what she did, even. It’s more that I’m scared about what it means about me. And she was only my friend, not my daughter.”

Jane felt a huge sense of sadness about Pip, but whenever she tried to talk to Sorcha about it she was stonewalled. The ways in which they had been hurt by it were just too different.

“What are you afraid of?”

Jane asked the question tentatively, knowing she was heading into uncharted territory, but Sorcha did at least stay in the room. She perched on the arm of the other chair.

“Fuck knows.” She saw a spot of pancake mixture on her jeans, and started picking at it. Jane sat and watched the sparks in the grate, “For a while I thought it was just having got caught up in the fight, and then the shooting, but it’s not that. It’s like I totally lost track of reality too. Not just Pip, although she was a part of it. Jake too. It’s as if I totally took leave of my senses, and I’ve no idea how to stop it happening again.”

“You’re not being fair on yourself. It was a crazy situation, and I still don’t really know what to think about Pip. And you know damned well that Jake was real.”

“You mean if I cut him I know damned well that he bleeds?” Jane winced slightly, “I just should never have gone anywhere near him in the first place. That’s where I went wrong on that one.”

“Why?”

Sorcha was rightly suspicious of the question.

“What do you mean “why”?” Jane didn’t seem to be about to explain herself. “As you very perceptively pointed out yourself before I’d properly got myself into this mess, the idea of me having anything to do with a scrawny brainless pop singer was always patently ridiculous.”

It was a conversation Jane had often wished she could go back and erase.

“When I said that, I had no idea that you would go and jump into bed with him.” She looked at Sorcha, who looked sadder than she sounded. “He didn’t really seem like that at all, anyway. You know that.”

“I didn’t jump into bed with him. Not the way you mean.” She enjoyed the look of disbelief which Jane wasn’t even attempting to hide, “I think we were probably going to, but then Pip happened. I’m not sure whether it makes him more or less real, but I keep telling myself that it ought to have made it less complicated.”

“But it doesn’t?”

“I don’t know, do I? That’s the problem.”

It was the most that she had said about Jake since he had walked out of the flat on the Sunday afternoon. Jane had kept a watch on the internet for press comment, but apart from the podcast and a statement issued after his father’s rescue and arrest there had been virtually nothing about him which was more than third-hand rumour. Sorcha had sounded off at great length about what a worthless, brainless slimeball Marty King was, and how she couldn’t believe that he was being allowed to get away with it, but Jake had remained absolutely untouchable.

“I’m sorry, my dear. I really am.” Jane hoped that Sorcha would forgive her for not leaving it at that, “You know, of all the men you’ve ever got tangled up with, I think he’s about the only one who has seemed to want to fight for you rather than against you. He was just so angry when he showed up, that their security guys hadn’t got you out of there with him. I just couldn’t believe that he left like that.”

Sorcha looked across at Jane, and was surprised to see her all compassion and seriousness.

“It was better that he did. Can you imagine what would have happened if I had let him stick around? I would have just headed further off into cloud cuckoo land, and made even more of a fool of myself.”

She went through to the kitchen, to get away from the conversation, and opened the fridge to look for something to drink. It took Jane a couple of minutes to realise what she had said and follow her through, although she still seemed to be struggling to believe what she thought she’d just heard. Sorcha didn’t let her ask whatever question was trying to formulate itself, sensing that Jane was not particularly happy with her.

“What did he say, when he showed up? I never let you tell me.”

Jane wondered how long Sorcha was intending to keep talking with her back to her. She also wanted to ask Sorcha why she’d let her spend several months plotting an unwarranted revenge on an innocent man, but was afraid that the conversation would end messily if she did.

“I can’t really remember, to be honest. I had only just got there, and was still trying to figure out what on earth was going on. He was angry that you’d been left, and upset and angry that you weren’t there. The driver guy who was with him kept telling him to calm down, and had to tell him a couple of times that there was no way that he could go to the police station.” None of it was coming back clearly enough, and she knew that Sorcha would be disappointed, “I think it was the driver who suggested that he go and lay down for a bit. It was kind of funny: like he was talking to a small child. Jake came back out and stood and stared at that tree thing on your sitting room wall for a while, but didn’t say much. Then he just fell asleep. God alone knows how.”

Sorcha shut the fridge and lent against the corner of the table.

“Did you know he claims to be an insomniac? Except for some reason he always seemed to fall asleep when I was around. Half the time I think of him, I think of him asleep.” Jane’s sympathy was too painful, and she wasn’t sure that she wanted it, “I was going to send him that hanging, you know. Then I realised I didn’t have an address: even for the Manchester flat, I just knew that it was flat 41 somewhere high up near a canal. I would have had to send it to their record company. It’s all parcelled up in a tube in my Mum’s attic, with a blank address label on it.”

“You could have called him.”

Sorcha knew that she was about to put the final nails in her own coffin.

“Don’t think I haven’t thought about it, Pet. Even though he’s really, really crap on the phone.” Jane didn’t seem to believe her, “I mean crap to a level which is really quite hard to believe even once you’ve experienced it. But I haven’t got a number for him. All I ever had was a mobile number, and one for one of his bandmates from where he used my phone to make a call. They were both in my Goodmans phone, and I was so sure that he was part of what I needed to get away from that I didn’t take a note of them when I gave it back.”

She thought about telling Jane how often she contemplated calling either Maggie or Caroline, to see if anyone had downloaded the data from the SIM before destroying it, but decided that it was unlikely to help her cause. He would probably have changed his number again, anyway.

“And he hasn’t called you?”

Sorcha shook her head, and forced the edges of a smile.

“That’s not how he works. One of the most frustrating things about him was that if you tell him that you don’t want him around, he tends to believe you. I’m sure he’s probably holed up in some swanky hotel with a load of semi-naked dancers, anyway.” Jane noticed the tangle of tenses, and wanted to protest on his behalf, but knew that she had the barest of first impressions to go on. Sorcha seemed to be building up a picture of him to which she could remain immune, “I guess it’s all for the best, although I’ve spent way too long thinking about it. You know, I realised a couple of weeks ago that if he hadn’t been famous, I would never have even given him the time of day. That’s not exactly a sensible basis for anything, is it?”

Jane wasn’t quite sure whether to hug her or slap her, so kept her hands to herself.

“You’ve done worse, you know. Much worse. Being with someone is like a conversation. I don’t think it matters so much about how the conversation begins, just why you want it to continue.” Sorcha seemed to want her to carry on, but there really wasn’t much else to say. “You might have done better to figure that out before you sent him packing, though.”

It wasn’t helpful to hear it.

“Do you want to tell me that I shouldn’t have sold the flat, and that I should spend more time with my mother while you’re at it?”

Sorcha’s tone had changed: the barricades had shot back up and she was being very carefully and deliberately ironic. Jane backed off, even though she didn’t know how much else there was that she didn’t know.

“No, it’s OK. I’ll save those for later. I really don’t get it why you’ve suddenly got it into your head to go off to New Zealand, though. I know it’s supposed to be very pretty, and all that, but it’s a hell of a long way and you’ll be bored out of your mind. Aren’t there about ten times as many sheep as people?”