Chapter Ten

Back in her flat, she sat on the sofa with a cushion in the small of her back, willing the world to stop spinning. The world outside the hospital had come as more of a surprise than she had expected it to. It was all too loud, too bright, and it moved too fast; and it transpired that car exhaust fumes were another smell which went straight to her ears. It had only been a short drive, but every jolt and stop had triggered pain of varying degrees, which had seemed to get louder with every minute that had passed. Sorcha had tried to keep quiet about it, but in the end Ed had more or less had to hold her up in the lift up from the underground parking area.

The flat had always been her refuge. The day that she had finally got the keys she had gone up there alone; there had been no furniture except the kitchen cabinets, and no curtains, and she had laid down in the middle of the sitting room floor doing snow-angel arms and felt gloriously safe and free. The walls had been bare and clean, the light had been streaming in through the patio doors, and the relief of finally having a space out of which she could shut the rest of the world if she needed to had been almost overwhelming. Sorcha desperately wanted to get that feeling of release back, but despite focusing hard on her breathing she felt just too raw and disoriented.

It was no longer a bare, blank space, of course, however hard she fought against the clutter. She was aware of Jake looking around, presumably forming a judgement of her as he did so. When she opened her eyes again he was standing with his back to her, perfectly still, looking intently at the wall hanging. It was the skeleton of a tree, onto which lots of tiny, brightly coloured circular leaves had been appliquéd. The colours were mostly reds and corals and oranges, with tiny scraps of lilac and a limey green.

“Do you like it?”

“I like the colours. I saw the colours first, when I saw it. I was just looking at how it had been made.”

“I think the skeleton was screenprinted, and then the leaves sewn on. It must have taken someone forever to do it. I loved the colours as soon as I saw it.”

Jake was moving slightly from side to side, still facing the hanging: Sorcha thought for a split second that he was about to pass out, before realising that the thought was just a projection of her own anxiety. She wanted to get up and join him, so that she felt properly as if she was a part of the same conversation, but still didn’t entirely trust herself.

“What are you looking at?”

He had turn right round to look at her: the surgical collar was back on, although it hadn’t been in evidence on Sunday’s front pages, and he still held himself very stiffly. The result was a kind of formality in his posture which was at odds with his battered old jeans, T-shirt and Converse, but somehow in keeping with him.

“Sorry. I was just looking at how some of the leaves change in the light.”

“They are a mix of cotton and silk fabrics. I think some of the silk ones are shot silk, so they change colour as you move around them.”

Rather than turning back to it, he looked around again.

“This is a really nice place, you know. Really nice.” He seemed to be wanting her to understand that he meant it.

“Thank you. I loved the light and the space the first time I saw it, but I guess now it really is just home. I’m not sure anywhere else has ever really felt like home in the same way.”

“That must be good.” He seemed to know that it was a slightly odd comment as soon as he said it.

“Where’s home for you?”

Jake looked ever so slightly embarrassed, and smiled to himself. It was a look which he wore disgustingly well: Sorcha couldn’t quite put her finger on why, but it was something to do with his cheekbones and his eyelashes. He had very, very long eyelashes. Really, really, preposterously long eyelashes, actually.

“I don’t really have home. I mean, I’ve got my own place and everything. I’ve got several places. One main one here, and one in Manchester. But none of them really feels like home, home.” He blushed deeper, “If I talk about home, I usually still mean my Mam’s, even though I don’t get to go there much now.”

Sorcha was saved from responding to that by Ed, who came in looking as if he had just discovered an axe murderer standing in the corridor. He had quickly checked round the flat when they had first got there, and had then gone down to talk to the concierge; who had clearly told him something that he didn’t like.

“Sorcha, who lives upstairs?”

She suddenly had that rushing, plummetting feeling that she always had when she realised she had made a huge, embarassing, expensive mistake. It was like being catapulted into a bottomless pit, and then just accelerating on down. For a moment or two she stared at him, her left hand over her mouth, before collecting herself enough to answer.

“God. I never thought. It’s a big place which goes across the whole of the top floor. Nobody lives there. In all the time I’ve been here, there’s hardly ever been anybody there. But I think it’s owned..” She was floundering, and she knew it. For some reason this was actually quite a lot worse than her usual kind of wrong, which was only about money. She had to force herself to slow down, “I think that it is owned by Marty King.”

On hearing it confirmed, Ed took over. He pulled Jake away from the patio doors and took him into her bedroom, which was the only room apart from the bathroom which did not face out onto the terrace. Sorcha had barely had time to realise that she had absolutely no idea what state her bedroom was in – she had deliberately tidied round in the hope that she wouldn’t return alone, but Pip would have been in there when she had collected the clothes to take to the hospital and God alone knew what she had done to it – before Ed was back and telling her to do the same. When she hesitated, he half lifted her up off the sofa, sending multi-coloured shooting pains up through her shoulder and neck: it was all that she could do to stay conscious, so putting up a fight wasn’t really an option, much as she would have liked to.

They were left with strict orders to stay in the bedroom while Ed checked out the upstairs flat. Sorcha’s apologies were cut short by the need to concentrate, yet again, on making the world stay still; but Jake didn’t seem particularly surprised or worried. She wondered how often he found himself shoved into strange places for his own safety: he gave the impression of having trained himself not to react to large parts of his life, and it mostly seemed to work. Pip in her exuberance had left just about every single wardrobe door and drawer wide open, and Jake shut them without fuss or comment, before going over to pull the blinds against the sunlight which was streaming in through the window and making her squint.

Sorcha was leaning on the back of the door for support, wishing that she had thought to have a chair of some kind in the bedroom. Usually if she wanted to sit down, and the bed seemed inappropriate, she opted for the floor, but she wasn’t sure if she would be able to get back up again. She saw Jake wince as he reached up for the blind cords.

“Still struggling?”

“Yeah. Well, the physio had a right go at me this morning. She’s dead nice, but I’m not quite sure what she did. Some of the pains that were in my neck seem to have moved to my shoulder.”

“I saw yesterday’s papers: you weren’t wearing the collar.”

He finished untangling the blind cords while doing his embarrassed-but-amused thing again.

“You noticed that? We all talked it through and just thought it would look better without.”

“Ah vanity, thy name is pop star.”

Wrong audience, but he either didn’t seem to notice or just he wasn’t fazed by it. Instead, he seemed to find her criticism of him funny.

“No… It was all of us decided it, not just me. If I’d gone on like this – well, like this but with my costume on and everything, you know – it would have all have been “poor Jake” this and “poor Jake” that. We didn’t want that: we just wanted it to be about me doing a bit of the show and everything being OK. And I usually take pretty heavy-duty painkillers anyway, for my knee, so it seemed better just to take it off.”

“Your knee?”

He suddenly looked more hesitant.

“Look, this isn’t public knowledge or anything, so please don’t go telling anyone. I have arthritis in my right knee. Have had for a year or two, but it’s got really bad lately. I’ve been getting through the tour on painkillers and cortisone injections.”

It clearly wasn’t something that he was used to talking about, and Sorcha didn’t know enough about him to venture down that path of conversation.

“So you have the classic, pain-ridden body of an ageing dancer?”

“Oy. Leave off. Until…” Until what? Sorcha wondered. Until you allowed yourself to be picked up and recklessly flung at me across a hotel lobby? “… until, well you know… I was fine apart from my knee. My Dad went nuts about me taking the collar off, though. He insisted on having the physio immediately backstage to put it on and off. He was making a right fuss about it again this morning, about tomorrow.”

“Isn’t it a bit odd having your Dad on tour with you?”

“Nah. It’s fine now we’re not sharing a room. He can go and get slopped up with Duncan and spend all night in the bar talking to the fans, and all I have to worry about is the heap of rubbish I have to sign for them all in the morning.”

Jake seemed to want to talk more about his father, and Sorcha was more than happy to listen. They both ended up both propped up against the mountain of cushions which Sorcha kept piled up on the bed, talking more at the ceiling than at each other. Jake’s father had missed out on the success of the band the first time around: he had left when Jake was eleven, to be with another woman who Jake barely remembered meeting. He had tried to stay in touch, after a fashion, and had followed the band around in its early days gigging in gay clubs and shopping centres, but once they made it shutting him out was Jake’s revenge. He would see him from time to time in the crowd, and the knowledge that he would never be forced to speak to him again had been liberating. But then after Marty had gone, and the band had split, it just made him feel guilty. The fact that just about everyone he met seemed to also have met his father; and his father had only ever had good things to say about him, hadn’t helped.

He’d actually managed to avoid his father until after the band had reformed: it sounded as if Jake had spent a fair amount of time travelling, although he hadn’t volunteered any details. And then, just before their first awards ceremony the second time around, he had seen his father again in the crowd and knew that he didn’t feel liberated any more. “I made a right mess of it all. We won an award, you see, and when we went up I just started talking about my Dad and saying I was sorry. The others thought I’d gone a bit soft in the head. I went on a bit, too, I think. In the end Jeff stuck his elbow in my ribs. I’m glad I did it, though, it’s all been OK since then.”

Sorcha didn’t have much to offer in response, and was beginning to wonder where Ed had got to. She thought that she had heard footsteps overhead, which was unusual, but decided not to say anything: Jake didn’t seem to notice.

“You said something at the hospital about not really having family, which was why your friend was coming. Is that right?”

He knew he was prying, but thought it was fair. She wished he hadn’t.

“Yes and no. I was never that close to my family. I just never really seemed to fit in. I was happy to go away to university and get away from them, and never really thought much about it. My Dad died about five years ago. Five and a bit years ago. My Mum had a stroke shortly afterwards and my sister looks after her. We never really got on.”

That sounded stupid, and wrong, and she was speeding up, and her voice was getting shaky, but it was the best she could do. It wasn’t even something that she could have told Jane about, but every time a doctor had tried to speak to her over the previous week, at some level she had kept remembering her Dad; or, more specifically, the moment in his final illness when she realised that the person standing in front of her in the white coat and the flowery clogs was just a slightly stupider version of her own trainee; that medicine was just a slightly more complicated version of law or plumbing; and that doctors therefore didn’t have to be right. And the only thing which had meant that it didn’t matter that Miss Flowery Clogs didn’t faintest clue what was wrong with her father and didn’t really care either, was that Sorcha had known in her heart of hearts that it was almost certainly all too late anyway. Suddenly she was struggling to prevent herself just blurting it all out at a complete stranger. She tried to imagine what her father’s reaction would have been had she tried apologising to him for being an all-purpose high-maintenance nightmare on national TV, but the idea was just too impossible and made tears prick at her eyes and throat.

Jake apologised, softly, a couple of times, but didn’t seem particularly bothered by her reaction. His stillness was contagious, and deeply welcome.

They were talking about Jane by the time that Ed returned: having friends who would fly long-haul to dig you out of holes seemed to be the kind of thing that Jake approved of. Ed had been gone for a while because the police were in the process of doing a detailed search of Marty’s flat and the officer in charge was one of the same people that Ed had been liaising with to sort out statements from the band and to ensure that he had all the information he needed to look after Jake. Stephen Warren’s whereabouts were still a mystery; they thought that he had been in the upstairs flat looking for something on the Tuesday afternoon before the party but had no idea what it was that he had been looking for or where he had gone next. And they still didn’t seem to know why he had gone for Jake.

Jake seemed to listen to it all as if it related to someone else. He offered to stay, and to get his Dad to bring his book and some paperwork across, but Sorcha was ready to be alone. Once they had gone, she could feel the peace of being home returning to her although she knew at least a part of that peace was Jake’s. He had fussed a bit about leaving her, but she had not left him with any option. He had clearly decided that her catering arrangements weren’t up to scratch, though. Sorcha was woken from a surprisingly deep sleep early evening by an embarrassed-looking hotel employee bearing a picnic. Included with it was a small plastic bottle of a creamy-looking greenish liquid, with a hand-written label which said “Avocado, Kelp, Nutmeg, Yoghurt”. It was quite possibly the most spectacularly nasty thing she had ever tasted.