by Kevin Brooks
We were both a bit fumbly at first, not quite sure how to get hold of each other, both of us a little embarrassed … but it was OK. We laughed quietly and smiled about it, and eventually we sorted ourselves out … and then we were just sitting there in each other’s arms, holding each other tightly … and it felt just as wonderful as it had before, when we’d held each other at the party. It felt so right, so absolutely perfect … and, just like before, there was a sense that this was it, this was enough … that I didn’t need anything else at all …
And I didn’t.
But I wanted something else.
‘William?’ I said quietly.
He turned to me, and I kissed him.
His lips were sweet with rain.
‘Is this all right?’ I whispered.
He didn’t say anything, he just smiled and kissed me back …
And then we lay down together in the fading twilight and we went to another world.
29
Afterwards, as we lay there together in the growing darkness, William told me that it was his first time. I didn’t say anything – there was no need to say anything – I just held him closer and rested my head on his shoulder.
I felt complete, content …
Just lying there, at one with each other …
Listening to the rain.
It was perfect.
It was also really cold …
I didn’t want to spoil the moment by bringing us back to reality, and I lay there for as long as I could without saying anything, but eventually I just couldn’t stand it any longer.
‘Maybe we ought to light a fire after all?’ I suggested.
‘Oh, I see,’ William said, smiling at me. ‘So my body heat isn’t enough for you now?’
‘It was more than enough for me, thanks very much … but, in case you hadn’t noticed, we don’t have any clothes on, and it’s getting really cold in here, and it’s pouring with rain again –’
‘OK, I get it –’
‘And we need to dry our clothes as well. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I really don’t feel like putting on soaking wet clothes just now –’
‘Lili?’ William said, sitting up and looking at me.
I smiled at him. ‘What?’
‘The quicker you shut up, the quicker I can get a fire going, OK?’
I raised my eyebrows at him. ‘Are you telling me to shut up?’
‘I am, yes.’
I grinned. ‘OK.’
Half an hour later, all wrapped up in sheets of sacking, we were sitting in the middle of the room in front of a makeshift fire. Our clothes were spread out around the fire, drying slowly in the crackling heat, and I was telling William what happened when I finally got back to the Screen on the Green on Sunday night.
‘I wasn’t that late,’ I told him. ‘It was only about quarter to one, but when I got there the Buzzcocks had just finished their set, so I suppose they must have gone on in place of us around midnight.’
‘Couldn’t you play after them?’
‘That’s what I thought, but apparently the Clash had already set up all their gear, so … you know … that was kind of it, really.’
‘So what did Curtis say?’
‘Well, he was already really pissed off with you for not being there, and then I didn’t get there until about nine o’clock –’
‘Why not?’
‘My mum … well, it’s a long story, but she wasn’t well, so I had to stay with her for a while –’
‘What’s the matter with her?’
I looked at him. ‘It really is a long story, William. I’ll tell you all about it some other time, OK?’
‘All right.’
‘So, anyway …’ I sighed. ‘Curtis was mad at me for being late, and he was doubly mad at you for not being there … and then when I went looking for you, and I didn’t get back until forty-five minutes after we were supposed to be playing …’ I looked at William. ‘Well, you can’t really blame Curtis for blowing his top, can you?’
‘I suppose not …’
‘I mean, it was supposed to be the gig, the one that made us … and that’s all that Curtis has ever wanted. That’s his dream …’
‘Yeah, well,’ William said quietly. ‘You can’t always get what you want, can you?’
‘Well, no … but –’
‘There’s more to life than empty dreams.’
‘Yeah, but music is Curtis’s whole life. That’s all he cares about –’
‘No, it’s not. If music was really all he cared about, he wouldn’t give a shit about getting a record deal and “making it big” and all that kind of crap … he’d just want to play. But just playing isn’t enough for him, is it? What he really wants is all the shit that goes with it – the fame, the celebrity, the adoration …’ William looked at me. ‘What kind of dream is that?’
‘His,’ I said simply.
William didn’t say anything for a moment, he just carried on looking at me … and then, after a while, he nodded slowly and said. ‘Yeah, maybe you’re right … we all have different dreams, I suppose. And who’s to say what’s worth dreaming about and what’s not?’
‘You?’ I said, smiling.
‘Yeah, right,’ he said, laughing. ‘I mean, look at me – squatting on the floor of a derelict chapel, dressed in a dirty old piece of sack … I’ve really got my life sorted out, haven’t I?’
‘It could be a lot worse,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’
‘You could be on your own.’
He smiled. ‘That’s true.’
‘Or even worse … you could be sitting here with you-know-who.’
‘Who?’
‘You know who.’
He grinned. ‘You don’t mean …?’
‘Yeah …’
‘The God-Man?’
‘Yeah, you could be sitting here with the God-Man –’
‘In his waterproofs?’
‘No … without his waterproofs.’
‘No!’
‘Just in his wellies –’
‘No!’
‘He’d be sitting right here,’ I went on, ‘all naked and blubbery, and then suddenly –’ I moved my hand round William’s back – ‘suddenly you’d feel one of his Almighty hands on your shoulder …’
William yelped and rolled away from me as I grabbed his shoulder. I laughed and jumped on top of him, holding him down and moving my face towards his.
‘… and then he’d try to kiss you with his Almighty lips …’
‘No!’
‘Yes!’
‘No …’
‘Yes …’
‘… yes …’
‘… you’re not the God-Man any more, are you?’
‘No.’
‘You’re just you.’
‘I’m just me.’
‘Good … because otherwise it might be kind of weird …’
‘I’m just me …’
‘… I mean, I know you like weird … but there’s weird … and then there’s weird, if you know what I mean –’
‘William?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Shut up.’
‘OK …’
The rain kept falling, and the thunderstorm kept drifting away and drifting back again, and William and I just sat round the fire and talked about things. I didn’t tell him that Curtis had accused us of sleeping together, partly because it felt kind of strange now that we actually had, but mostly because there just didn’t seem any point. All William needed to know was that I’d had a big row with Curtis on Sunday night and that the next time I’d seen him he was in bed with Charlie Brown.
‘So what do you think’s going to happen with the band now?’ William asked. ‘Do you think it’s all finished?’
‘I don’t know …’ I shrugged. ‘Probably.’
‘Will you miss it?’
‘Yeah, I suppose … I mean, there’s a lot about it that I won’t miss, you know … all the stupid stuff that goes with it. I never liked any of that. But just being in the band … playing together, being on stage … yeah, I’ll miss that.’ I looked at William. ‘We were good, weren’t we? It was good.’
He nodded. ‘Yeah … and I’m sorry, you know, if it is over, I’m sorry I messed it all up for you.’
‘It’s not your fault –’
‘Yeah, it is. If I’d been there on time on Sunday, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.’
‘Well, yeah … but –’
‘It’s OK,’ he said, smiling at me. ‘I’m not sorry for what I did – it was the right thing to do at the time, and I’d do it again if I had to – I’m just sorry that it messed things up for you, that’s all.’
‘What about Curtis? Do you feel sorry for him too?’
William shrugged. ‘He’s a big boy, he’ll get over it.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said, pretending to be put out. ‘So what does that make me?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You don’t feel sorry for Curtis because he’s a big boy and he’ll get over it, but you feel sorry for a poor little girly like me …?’
‘I didn’t mean –’
‘Poor wittle me,’ I simpered.
‘No, I didn’t mean it like that …’ He looked at me, and suddenly realized that I was joking. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said, shaking his head, but smiling. ‘Very funny, Lili … very amusing.’
I laughed.
He sat there smiling at me for a moment, and then I saw him glance over my shoulder. ‘You know what else is really funny,’ he said, looking back at me.
‘What’s that?’
He grinned. ‘There’s a rat on the floor, right behind you.’
I stared at him, smiling. ‘You think I’m going to fall for that?’
‘Well, it’s up to you,’ he said casually, glancing behind me again. ‘But if there was a rat creeping up behind my bare arse, I think I’d probably want to do something about it.’
‘No …’ I said hesitantly, forcing myself not to turn round and look. ‘No, I don’t believe you …’
He shrugged. ‘Like I said … it’s up to you. But –’
I screamed then, almost jumping out of my skin as I felt something touch my bum, and as I leapt to one side, scrabbling across the floor towards William, I saw a furry dark shape scurrying away through the opening in the wall.
‘Shit!’ I gasped, grabbing hold of William. ‘Did you see the size of that?’
‘It’s all right,’ William said, putting his arm round me. ‘The nasty watty’s gone now … poor wittle you …’
I looked up and saw him smiling at me.
The rain fell …
The firelight flickered …
Time passed …
William told me about his grandparents, how they’d taught him almost everything he knew about music, and how he used to play with them in the pubs and shebeens around Antrim.
‘What’s a shebeen?’ I asked him.
‘It’s a bit like a pub, really … except it’s not licensed. I mean, everyone knows about them, they’re just not …’
‘Legal?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How old were you then?’ I asked. ‘I mean, when you were playing in these places with your grandparents …?’
‘I think I must have been around five or six the first time I joined them –’
‘Five or six?’
‘Well, yeah … I was probably only bashing a drum or something, and I had to wait until I was a little bit older before they let me loose on anything else, but that’s just how it was, you know? Music was just … I don’t know. It was always there. It was a family thing, you know? Family and friends … you’d just get together, work out a few songs, and start playing.’
He told me about his grandmother’s love of books too, and how she used to read to him all the time when he was a little kid …
‘But she was always a great believer in not treating children like idiots, you know … so instead of reading the usual kids’ stories to me, she’d just read me the kind of stuff that she liked to read.’
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘God, all sorts,’ William said, smiling at the memory. ‘Poetry, novels, history … a lot of it was Irish stuff, of course – Joyce, Pearse, Beckett, Yeats … Seamus Heaney – but she really liked some of the Russian novelists too – Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy – and she loved all the French stuff – Camus, Sartre, Rimbaud, Verlaine …’ He laughed quietly. ‘Sometimes she’d lighten up a bit and read me some Dickens or Wilkie Collins or something … that was her idea of an easy read, you know? A bit of light relief. Granddad, though …’ William laughed again. ‘Well, he used to love Westerns, cowboys and Indians … and when Granny wasn’t around he’d read me all this stuff about gunfighters and outlaws and cattle drives, and it was like our little secret, you know … no one else was allowed to know, especially Gran.’
I smiled at him. ‘So you grew up reading Tolstoy and Westerns?’
‘Yeah …’
The rain fell …
The night grew cold …
We huddled closer together …
‘You still owe me a story,’ William said.
‘Do I?’
He nodded. ‘You promised to tell me all about your family, remember? When we were at the party that night? I said that I’d tell you about my family on the condition that you told me about yours.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘But you never did.’
I looked at him. ‘What do you want to know?’
He smiled. ‘Whatever you want to tell me.’
‘All right,’ I said, snuggling up to him. ‘Well, my mother’s maiden name was Mari Ellen James, and she was born and brought up in a small farming village just outside Bangor in north Wales …’
The rain fell …
The firelight flickered …
I opened up my heart.
I’d never really talked to anyone about my mum and dad before, and when I’d finished telling William all about them – their history, their lives … what they meant, or didn’t mean, to me – I was absolutely exhausted, both physically and emotionally. It was a really strange feeling, a mind-numbing mixture of relief, release, confusion, fear … a whirlpool of emotions that left me feeling ripped open and emptied out, but wonderfully liberated too.
‘Are you OK?’ William whispered, holding me close.
‘Yeah …’ I muttered, sniffing back tears. ‘It’s just kind of hard, you know … I mean, I know that in lots of ways I’ve had it pretty easy, so I shouldn’t really –’
‘It doesn’t sound very easy to me,’ William said. ‘All right, so you’ve never had to worry about money, but everything else … I mean, Christ.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Hasn’t your father ever tried to get in touch with you or anything?’
‘Not that I’m aware of …’
‘What about birthdays, Christmas?’
I shook my head.
William looked at me. ‘Don’t you ever wonder about him?’
‘I don’t know …’ I said. ‘Not really … I mean, he’s never been there for me, and I’ve never known anything else. I suppose it might be different if I’d known him before he left, you know, if I had some memories of him or something … but I don’t.’ I shrugged. ‘So he doesn’t mean anything to me, you know … he isn’t anything to me. He’s just the man who fucked up my mum.’
‘Does she ever talk about him?’
‘She used to tell me stuff about him when I was a little kid, but only really when she was drunk or something … and then she’d either start crying so much that I couldn’t understand what she was saying, or she’d get really angry an
d work herself up into such a state that she’d end up screaming the house down … and then I’d start crying, and then she’d start yelling at me …’ I smiled at William. ‘You’re probably starting to wish you’d never asked me about my family now, aren’t you?’
He shook his head. ‘How do you feel about her?’
‘My mum?’
‘Yeah … I mean, it must be really difficult …’
‘She’s my mum,’ I said simply. ‘She’s … well, you know. She’s what she is.’ I shrugged. ‘She’s my mum.’
The firelight flickered …
My eyes felt heavy …
I rested my head on William’s shoulder.
‘Do you think the rain’s ever going to stop?’ I asked him.
‘I hope not.’
I smiled.
‘Tell me something else,’ he said.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Tell me what you were like as a child.’
I told him stories.
The rain fell …
The time passed …
And sometime in the early hours, we fell asleep in each other’s arms.
30
I’m floating on the ceiling of the workshop, looking down at four men sitting at the table – Flat Cap, Ratty, the God-Man, and Curtis. They’re talking to each other, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. Their faces glow in the flickering light of a small paraffin lamp on the table. There are other things on the table too: papers, maps, files, a bottle of whisky … electrical apparatus, wires and cables, switches, circuit boards … sawn-off sections of tubular piping, bags of nails …
And guns.
The guns are laid out on a sheet of sacking – two pistols, a rifle, and what looks like a machine gun – and as I look down from the ceiling, I see Flat Cap pick up one of the pistols and pass it to Curtis. Curtis takes it from him and examines it, nodding his head. He says something to Flat Cap, and Curtis and the God-Man both laugh. Flat Cap drinks from a glass, lights a cigarette, takes the pistol back from Curtis, then smiles and pats him on the shoulder. Curtis takes a cigarette from a packet on the table, lights it, and sips whisky from a glass. He points at the pile of large plastic sacks and asks Flat Cap something. Flat Cap looks at Ratty. And now Ratty isn’t just a thin young man with long brown ratty hair, he’s a thin young man with the head and face of a rat, a man-sized rat … and he’s nodding his rat-head at Flat Cap … and then he turns and says something to Curtis, and they both look over at something in the corner of the room …