I looked over at him, his smiling face and the look of satisfaction in his eyes. He was perfect. Everything that just happened had been perfect.
I didn’t want to push him. He’d promised me that he would tell me everything and I had to trust that he would.
‘You know you can tell me anything, don’t you?’ I asked, leaning over and kissing his shoulder. ‘Anything, even if you think it will change how I feel about you. You can tell me.’ I felt his hot breath dancing on my neck and a moment later a kiss was planted where that breath had danced.
‘Of course I do,’ he replied as his face came parallel and his lips fell back to mine.
I tore the end from my croissant and bit into it with hungry teeth. My stomach groaned as the first bit of flaky pastry landed inside it.
Theo sat beside me with his head bowed over a tall mug of coffee – decaf, black. The steam curled from the dark liquid and rose up towards his face. His eyes stared down into the depths of his drink like it was a Magic 8-Ball.
‘You all right?’ I asked, placing my hand on his knee beneath the table.
He inhaled sharply through his nose and turned to me as if I’d woken him from a particularly deep daydream. ‘Fine. Just tired after our mountaineering and … other exertions.’ He twisted a smile and I felt the smile catch onto my own lips.
‘Why are you drinking decaf then?’ I asked topping up my own mug from the cafetière that buzzed with caffeine.
‘Normal coffee makes me jittery,’ he replied.
Rhys wandered in from the kitchen, his hair standing at all angles and a bowl of Shreddies in his hand. He slumped down opposite and nodded us both a hello before tipping the cafetière and swigging at his mug as if it held some sort of antidote. A minute or two later he was his usual self, the caffeine rebooting him to full working order.
‘What’s the plan for today then?’ Rhys asked as Tessa came in from the garden wearing a pair of colourful patchwork dungarees. There was terracotta clay smeared along her cheek and in the pale blonde hair just beside it. She sneered at what her father was eating, wandered into the kitchen and returned with a bowl of fruit, which she swapped for his bowl of cereal.
He grimaced and begrudgingly ate his new meal.
‘We have a gig later on today, in Chester,’ Theo said, sipping his coffee slowly. ‘But I thought I might show Effie around before we go.’
It didn’t seem like there was much to do around here, but maybe there was a hidden treasure that would surprise me.
‘Oh yeah,’ Tessa said with sarcastic enthusiasm, ‘you could show her the world-famous bench outside the Nisa or if you’re lucky there might be a craft exhibition on at the church hall.’
Theo feigned a laugh and sipped his coffee again. He winced and pushed the mug away.
We walked out of the gates at the end of the driveway and Theo took me on a whistle-stop tour of his history. I saw the nursery he’d attended for a few months before he moved to England, the tree where he’d kissed Carys Evans in the summer of 2005 and the shop where he’d stolen a Mars bar when he was twelve. He then went on to tell me how, crippled with guilt, he had returned the Mars bar twenty-four hours later, melted and misshapen from the pocket it had sat in on his bike ride there.
My legs were beginning to work properly again as we reached the final stop on our tour, the muscles regaining their movement after yesterday’s climb.
Theo turned right through a metal gate and I stopped walking. I felt my chest tighten as I saw the curve-topped stones scattered around the field. A graveyard.
‘Don’t say I never take you anywhere,’ he said holding out his hand, I took it in mine and let him lead me through the gate. The graves sat in varying stages of disrepair, some tended beautifully with fresh, unwilted flowers, whereas the majority were nothing but overgrown forgotten plots.
We passed a squat little church where a woman pottered around in the flower beds by the doors. She glanced over at us, greeted us in Welsh and then returned to tending the beds. On the outer wall of the building was a small war memorial showing the fewer than twenty names of the men from this tiny town who had left it to fight for their country and never come home. My eyes lingered on the name that sat four from the bottom, carved into the stone and burnished in gold, Bryn Morgan.
‘A relation of yours?’ I asked, running my fingers over the letters.
Theo nodded, but said nothing as we continued to the back right-hand corner.
We stopped before a dark marble stone that sat beneath a tall oak tree, its branches all but bare. Her name was carved in silver. Her life reduced to five lines of text.
Sitting beside the stone was a sculpture, one of Tessa’s I presumed, a bird perched on a branch that had been pushed into the ground to make it look as if it had grown there. The bird and the branch were white and the bird held its wings up as if about to take off. It was one of the most beautifully sad things I’d ever seen. At the base of the stone sat several shards of what looked like an old vinyl record, marked and dulled by years under rain and wind.
‘Hey, Ma.’ He crouched down and brushed the rotting leaves from the grave before sitting down and placing his hand on the grass.
I felt like I was intruding. I hadn’t known her. This was a private moment between mother and son. I wasn’t meant to be here.
‘This is Effie.’ He pointed a thumb at me over his shoulder. ‘I’m pretty sure you would have got on. She’s a writer too and she’s clumsy. Trust me to pick someone who’s just like my mother. Didn’t Freud have a theory about that? I’m sure you would have known it.’
I knelt down beside him and lay my head on his shoulder. His heart was beating so loudly, so quickly. ‘I think you would have liked Mum too,’ he said, looking back at me with reddening eyes. He wore the sadness on his face in the form of half-mast eyelids and tightened lips.
‘If she was anything like you, then I’d have had no choice,’ I said, kissing the side of his face and trying not to cry.
I’d asked him to share something, to open up and let me in, and if taking me to his mother’s grave wasn’t doing that then I didn’t know what was. He surreptitiously ran his thumb over his eyes and wiped them dry. I don’t know why he tried to hide it – I’d cried in front of him more times than I could count. We were quiet for a long while, the sadness weighing in the air around us as we both looked at the marker of his mother’s life. I curled myself around him, my chin nestling into the curve of his neck, my arms around his shoulders.
‘What are those shards?’ I asked, nodding my head in the direction of the unplayable vinyl.
He took a deep breath. I could almost feel the pain of a memory ripple through him.
‘We were sorting through her old record collection one Sunday. She was going to throw them out but I said that I’d have a few and so the whole living room was covered in them. She must have had hundreds, maybe more. There was barely room to sit down,’ he said through a sad laugh. ‘Tessa and Dad went out to get us an Indian takeaway while Mum and I carried on listening. She put on a Kim Carnes album and “Bette Davis Eyes” came on. It was her favourite song and so she took my hand and danced with me, knocking piles of records over as we twirled around the room. She realised that she’d left her glass of wine in the kitchen and so I went to get it for her. I was gone less than a minute, but when I came back, I found her lying on the floor.’
I felt his jaw clench against mine, his shoulders tensing as he relived it.
‘She was lying so awkwardly, her body arching over the piles of records like she’d broken her back. I dropped the wine and ran to her but no matter how I tried to wake her, she just kept on staring at the ceiling. I shouted her name until my throat was hoarse, but … nothing. I remember that one of her eyes was slightly off-centre, like they were both looking in different directions.’
I felt my stomach churn at that small, vivid detail.
‘The song carried on playing, the same song that we had been dancing to while the blood
clot travelled around her body, before we knew that anything was wrong. I called an ambulance and then I called Dad, but there was never any phone signal in town and so I waited, alone.’ His voice hitched as he spoke, dangerously close to tears. ‘I held her hand while I waited for someone to arrive, but by the time the ambulance got there her hand was cold.’
I pressed my cheek to the shoulder of his shirt and let my tears sink into the fabric. I remembered back to when that very song had come on in the treehouse and how he had quickly skipped it. It had annoyed me back then, when I had thought his mother alive and well, but now I knew that the song would never be the same. Not for me, not for him.
‘The next morning, I took the record from the player and smashed it to pieces, but it was her favourite song, so I brought the pieces here.’
I opened my mouth to tell him that I was sorry. Sorry that she’d died, sorry that he’d had to go through that, alone. But no words could express what I wanted them to. No words would bring her back or heal that broken record. And so, I just held him, tighter than before, as he shed a few silent tears, the muscles of his back tightening and slackening when the pain grew and then subsided.
In the distance a bird sang a high-pitched, mournful song and it sounded like a requiem. We listened to the birdsong until the church bells tolled and Theo stood. The tears were wiped away, the memories put back into their boxes and set aside for another time.
We didn’t speak much as we walked back to the house. Time was getting on and we’d soon have to head out if we wanted to make it to the gig on time, but there was nothing rushed about the way we meandered back along the winding roads.
I didn’t know whether it was the fact that I’d seen Theo vulnerable back there or if it was because I’d found those blister packs this morning, but something about him was worrying me.
I worried every time he raised his hand to his head and then swigged down a painkiller. I worried when I caught him staring off into the distance, his eyes looking straight through the view, and I worried when I noticed the circles that darkened around his eyes.
Was this what life was when you loved someone: endless worrying?
Chapter Eighteen
I had thought that I’d been one of very few British fans of the obscure American band, but as Theo and I joined the queue outside the tatty-looking venue, I realised that I had underestimated their popularity. There was only an hour to go and yet we were miles away from the front of the queue. It was okay for someone like Theo, six foot tall and with shoulders that could barge through a crowd like a charging bull, but for me – all five foot, five inches of me – I tended to get lost in the crowd, surrounded by views of nothing but shoulder blades and chests. Theo was dressed in a denim shirt that put me in mind of the Wild West, beige chinos and a zip-up hoodie that did nothing to stop the cold from creeping in. He juddered and hopped from foot to foot as he tried to generate some warmth.
I hadn’t packed for a night out, so Theo had talked Tessa into letting me borrow something of hers, much to her chagrin. I wore a trendy asymmetric grey jumper that hung down exposing one of my shoulders under a black coat and the jeans that I’d arrived in. My clunky Dr Marten boots had seen better days, with their scuffed brown leather and frayed laces, but all Tessa had to offer were tiny size fours and so there was no hope of me squeezing my giant hobbit feet into a pair of her shoes.
‘How many missions will be left on the list after tonight?’ Theo asked, his voice trembling as dragon’s breath danced from his lips.
‘We’ve done seven, so that means six are left, I think,’ I replied, feeling a sense of accomplishment at what we had achieved together.
‘Six?’ he asked, reeling off the missions in order of completion. ‘Did you do one without me?’
I pressed my lips together and shrugged. ‘Maybe I miscounted.’ I hadn’t. I smiled and all was forgotten. I loved him, of that I was certain, but he didn’t need to know that I’d crossed that one off just yet. ‘Thank you for this.’ I reached out and took his hand. His palm was slick with sweat despite the way his lips were turning blue.
‘There’ll be a lot more gifts coming your way if you react to them like you did last night.’ He pushed his arm around my waist and pulled me against him.
I still wasn’t used to being touched. The most touching I’d had for a long time was from the brief contact of a customer’s palm when giving them their change. It made me feel like everyone was staring and thinking, ‘What is she doing with him?’
I’d been the same when seeing a happy couple, instant venom building inside me as I thought the words that my mother had always mumbled when she saw lovers: ‘Put him down, you don’t know where he’s been.’
The inside of the venue was as poorly maintained as the outside. I looked around with mild disgust at the paint-chipped walls and debris of past music enthusiasts that smattered the floor and the faint smell of urinal cakes and stale urea that exuded from the men’s toilets.
I was here to see the band, not to move in. I’d just be sure not to touch anything I didn’t have to.
Theo led me to the bar and bought me red wine without even checking. I might have been annoyed at that if it wasn’t what I’d have ordered anyway. He got himself a pint of foaming beer and we made our way to an area where we had a good view of the stage, but were out of the general crush of the main crowd.
I watched him sip tentatively at his drink as the room grew louder and louder, slowly filling to capacity.
There were so many different types of people here. Young, middle-aged, old. Women, men, even a couple of kids. There were goth types and hipsters and one group who looked like they’d come for a work night out from the office. One of the party – a man sporting a bright red turtleneck and a comb-over – looked as if he might burst into tears at any moment; whether that was due to excitement or purely wanting to be elsewhere so much that the only option was to cry, I could only guess.
After a while the lights went down and the crowd cheered. My heart leapt with excitement and I looked around to place my empty plastic wine glass somewhere. I found that I was hemmed in by bodies on all sides and so just let it drop to the floor; everyone else was doing that anyway.
The band entered the stage to a crescendo of flashing lights and dramatic intro music and then the set began. I tapped my foot and sang along to song after song. It was about all I could do in the space I had. I’d loved this band for ten years, never getting tickets in time or missing a tour completely by being out of the loop, but now I was finally seeing them. It didn’t feel real.
The vibration of the music rattled through the floor, zinging up through my legs and making me feel alive. I sang so loudly that my throat began to feel sore but I didn’t care.
No one could see me, hemmed in and hidden, so I danced and sang like no one else was there. I felt totally free.
I looked up at Theo and smiled, my heart hammering in every part of me, but something wasn’t right.
He looked pained, his eyes made hollow by the lights and his cheeks and forehead beaded with sweat. He stood completely still and stared at the stage with blind eyes looking through the music, his lips slightly parted, his jaw clenched tight.
I squeezed his hand and he turned to me. I saw him in slow motion, his vacant expression transitioning as he turned, so that by the time he looked at me his smiling composure was back in place, a mask of lies.
‘You’re not okay, are you?’ I said, the sound lost in the musical chaos. ‘Are you sick?’
He frowned and shook his head. ‘I’m fine.’ I read his lips as he turned back to the stage, his half-finished pint of beer still clenched in his hand. I stared at the amber liquid swilling around in the thin plastic cup, my body still, every sense on edge. As I watched him, I noticed his hands were shaking; it was the same trembling I’d seen last night as he lay in bed.
‘You’re lying,’ I said, with that same feeling of doom. Then everything seemed to switch to half speed. His hand slacken
ed and the beer fell to the ground, soaking the legs of the man in front of him. The man spun around in anger, his arms raised in confrontation, but I wasn’t concerned with his shouts of ruined jeans. I was too busy watching how the colour drained from Theo’s face and how his eyes rolled back inside their sockets. I lunged forward as he fell, my arms wrapping around his torso and stretching to link behind him. I pushed my weight onto my right leg, hoping that it would be enough to keep him upright, but he was too heavy and the momentum of him made me lose my footing. He fell with the dead weight of someone who was completely unconscious as I desperately tried to slow his descent and stop him from injuring himself. The crowd parted, making room for us to fall, our bodies hitting the tacky floor with a thump, rendered inaudible by the music. I cried out as he landed hard on my wrist, a jolt of pain prickling up my arm as I felt something twang.
I called his name and tapped his cheek, but his head just rolled to the side, unresponsive.
My mind jumped back to the conversation Tessa and I had had this morning and the pills I’d found in his room. Was Theo ill? Had he missed a pill or taken something he shouldn’t have? Had a few more to drink without me looking? Or was this all a terribly unfunny practical joke?
The band played on and I recognised the song as one of my favourites, but at that moment I would have given both my eardrums to make it stop. The loud aggression of the guitar scratched at my ears; the bright lights scalded my vision in colourful lines. Claustrophobia began to swell like a dark cloud above me as the knees drew closer. Theo’s fingers crunched beneath the rubber sole of a Converse All Star and a drunk girl stood on my calf, unaware of what had been happening behind her. Theo’s spilt beer was all that I could smell and it made me want to be sick.
I looked up and called for help but no one was looking at us, lying there on the dirty, dark floor. The lights from the stage couldn’t reach us here. I called out again but I couldn’t even hear my own voice as the people around us closed in.
Very Nearly Normal Page 20