She had to go to Daniel. She needed him.
‘Peter,’ she said then. ‘I have to leave for a while, as long as you promise me you’ll be here when I come back.’ He closed his eyes and nodded. Tears coursed down his face, but she had no strength for his unhappiness just now. She stooped to rest her palm on his head though, leaving it there for a few moments in place of all the words she didn’t have, then she stood up and left the room, shutting the door and resting her head briefly against it.
‘Alison,’ Catherine shouted from the bathroom, petulant, demanding. ‘Alison, come here!’
But she descended the stairs, put the mains switch back on, picked up her satchel from the floor, and left the house. The clock said two forty-five, although she felt she’d suffered for days and days on Peter’s account. There was a bus leaving Shortridge Street in five minutes. In under an hour, she’d be at Daniel’s house, where the world was a safer place to inhabit.
17
EDINBURGH,
17 JANUARY 2013
Katelin had hoped she’d hate the book, but Tell the Story, Sing the Song was brilliant: intelligent, accessible, lyrical, colourful, all the things the reviews had said, but more so, annoyingly so, and she hadn’t been able to stop herself from loving it. She hadn’t been able to stop talking about it, either; it’d sparked a sort of intellectual thirst for Australia and, as a result, a country she’d never given a moment’s thought to was suddenly front and centre in her mind. She was reading Bruce Chatwin now, The Songlines, and kept on to Dan about the dreamings and the ancient tracks criss-crossing the land; about the songs, the ancestors, the sacred totems. Dan had no idea what she was going on about, and it was true Katelin hadn’t totally grasped the essence either, but it was a slippery concept, to be fair, difficult to articulate. Didn’t stop her trying. Didn’t stop the interrogations either. Her interest in Ali Connor was a natural and unfortunate consequence of all this, and Dan was fed up to the back teeth of pretending he couldn’t remember much about her, playing her down, denying her significance. Claire hadn’t helped, with the ‘practically moved in’ line. Dan had had to fudge the issue, and make out Alison was more of a friend than a girlfriend, really. He had no intention of telling the truth; it would benefit Katelin not a jot. She had a jealous heart, and a possessive soul, and if he’d said to her now or at any point in their history that there once was a girl called Alison who almost destroyed him, shattered his faith in love for a few years, and nigh on broke his dad’s heart too, it would never, ever have gone away. But by the time he met Katelin, who’d always been thirsty for information about his past, he’d been able to regale her with enough stories – enough cheerful tales of one-night stands and insignificant significant others – to protect himself from having to relive the trauma, while still providing Katelin with the details she seemed to crave. Old girlfriends were like scabbed-over wounds to her, and she couldn’t help picking at them to make them bleed. Dan couldn’t understand this, couldn’t see why she might be needled by his relationships with girls he’d known before he met her. Himself, he couldn’t care less which boys she’d snogged behind the bike sheds. It was irrelevant. But Katelin, God! Dog with a bone.
‘She must’ve been clever,’ she’d said this morning, standing at the bedroom mirror, dabbing concealing make-up on to the bluish shadows under her eyes. He knew immediately, of course, who was meant by ‘she’ and he groaned inwardly. He was lying in bed, wishing to be asleep, not answering her questions, rebutting her statements. ‘I mean, to write that book?’ she said. Yes, this sounded innocuous enough, but oh no. No, no, no. They had wandered into dangerous territory.
‘She was good at English,’ Dan said, then added a precautionary, ‘I think.’
‘Yeah, well, Claire said that much at Christmas. But she must’ve been a cut above, at school?’
‘No,’ Dan said. ‘Well, maybe. We were at different schools, so I can’t really say.’
Silence. Then, ‘So, how did you meet, again?’
He sighed, and pushed himself up so he could see the back of Katelin’s head. He was dead beat, hadn’t come to bed until 2 a.m. because he’d had a rambling, indulgent live chat on air with a New York radio station where an old friend of his from the NME years peddled classic British rock on a weekly show. He glanced at the time on his phone. Ten past seven. Jesus! He should’ve gone to sleep in Alex’s empty bed – foolish to crawl in here expecting to be left alone. Katelin eyed him briefly, then looked at herself in the mirror again, waiting.
‘Like I said, we got the same bus sometimes,’ Dan said. ‘We got chatting.’
‘About what?’
‘Seriously? You do realise how long ago this was, don’t you?’
‘I mean, did you have much in common? Or was it just that you fancied her?’
‘Look,’ Dan said, ‘don’t get fixated.’
She laughed, and turned around to face him. ‘I’m interested,’ she said brightly, ominously. ‘That’s all.’
‘OK, well, she liked the same music as me.’
Katelin nodded slowly. ‘I see, right. Music,’ she said, as if he’d just said stamp collecting, and actually expected her to believe it.
‘Yeah.’ He was not going to lose his cool. ‘We talked about music.’
‘So the fact that she was clearly bloody gorgeous had absolutely nothing to do with it?’
He closed his eyes. He cursed his mother’s guileless purchase. He cursed Katelin’s forensic insecurity. Of course she was on to something, this wasn’t simply her imagination working overtime, but – he repeated to himself – neither was this a Katelin versus Alison scenario, because … well, one of them was here in Edinburgh with him, the other ten thousand miles away. And anyway, what was he supposed to do? Tell Katelin everything? Yeah, right.
‘I bet you’ve googled her,’ she said.
He was silent, but she knew he had, and of course he had. Most days now, for over three months.
‘Well, I certainly have,’ Katelin said. ‘There’s not a single photograph online in which she looks anything but beautiful.’
Agreed, thought Dan. He’d listened to the Woman’s Hour interview too, found it online after Katelin told him about it. Ali’s voice was altered, she sounded Australian, and of course she would after all these years. But there were traces of Alison Connor in those vowels, and he’d thought: Get that woman back to Sheffield and it’ll all come flooding back. Listening to her, hearing her speak: this had caused him pain, as well as pleasure. To this day he had no idea why she’d gone. He knew it was something to do with her fucked-up family, her mother, her brother, but it had been difficult at the time not to feel that he, Daniel, had failed Alison on some fundamental level, and her bailing out on him was his punishment. God, what a punishment. It’d felt like being denied oxygen. For a long time he’d been in purgatory, and it certainly screwed up university for him; he hadn’t dealt with that experience at all well, all those privileged boys and girls on his course and in his hall of residence, popping champagne corks and mixing cocktails, partying to Queen and Abba, navigating their way through life with supreme, unchallenged confidence because all the friends they’d had at private school seemed to be here with them, in Durham. Dan had lasted three terms before packing it in. Even now, when he heard ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, he was right back in college, alone in his room, the dark, brooding northerner with a mighty chip on his shoulder and a default expression of naked disdain on his face. He’d worked hard, though, at forgetting Alison, chasing away her ghost by playing all the music they’d never shared while having lots of sex with edgy girls from Newcastle Poly who were more his type than the university crowd, and, later, even edgier girls in Camden and Kentish Town. He’d worked hard, too, at pleasing them; made sure he was better at sex than he ever had been with Alison Connor. He was serious about it, he concentrated, and in this way, he elevated the activity from ordinary, mindless shagging to a higher plane. It took a year for the pain to feel less than visceral, a
nd another year before he stopped wanting her, and yet another before she rarely crossed his consciousness. But he was young, and wounds heal, and he did, eventually, rub out the memory, or at least diminish it until it was forgotten. And now here she was, back again in this tantalising distant form, apparently still joined to him by what might only be a gossamer thread, but he wasn’t going to let it break, there was to be no forgetting her again. He knew her. She’d helped create him. She was part of his DNA. On the radio, talking to Jenni Murray, she’d been a little spikey at first, a little chippy, and he’d realised then that she hadn’t really altered. She’d gone on to claim she was happy as a clam in Adelaide, but he knew, he just knew, that she was protesting too much, she wasn’t as happy as she made out. Well, nobody ever was.
‘Why didn’t I know about her, Dan?’ Katelin said.
He lay back down with a heavy sigh and stared at the ceiling. ‘Katelin, please, please retreat before we fall out. There’s something so fucking undignified about this.’
She regarded him through the mirror. ‘I do know that,’ she said. ‘I do know you think I’m being juvenile. But I’ve seen that woman’s lovely face on the inside cover of the best book I’ve read in twenty years. Show me a female who wouldn’t feel a stab of jealousy at the arrival of an old flame of this calibre.’
He understood her, he entirely took her point, and he felt for her, he really did. She was searching for the truth and being met only by disingenuous, weary patience. Yet Dan knew he had nothing at all to gain by full disclosure, only a landslide of further questions that he wouldn’t be able to answer.
‘It’s a strange coincidence, Katelin,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
‘No, I’m sorry, I don’t believe that. It just doesn’t ring true.’
‘OK. Fine.’
‘I think she was important to you.’
‘She was a friend! I had other friends I’ve never mentioned to you either. Do you want a roll call from the class of seventy-nine?’
‘Yeah, a friend, and looking the way she did, and bright as a button, it never entered your eighteen-year-old head to have a crack at her?’
‘She was too good for me,’ Dan said, trying another tack. ‘Out of my league.’
‘Oh, great!’ Katelin’s voice rose with indignation. ‘Marvellous. So you started looking in the second division instead? How fortunate for me.’
Now he finally gave up on sleep. He threw back the covers and swung out of bed.
‘What you doing?’ Katelin said.
He came over to her and ran one hand up her thigh to rest firmly on her backside and the other up through her hair to hold the back of her head, then he pulled her close and Katelin said, ‘You’ve got to be joking! Some of us have a job to go to.’
Six thirty, the same day, and Dan had lost an afternoon to beer and music, a pleasant enough pastime for a Thursday in January. He’d been listening to Nick Drake, choosing a reply to send to Ali, but you can’t make these decisions lightly, especially not after the fourth beer. One song leads to another, then another, then they all demand to be heard again. He compiled a longlist of ten, then a shortlist of five, then, after a tense three-way play-off, he found he couldn’t choose only one, so he sent them all: ‘Northern Sky’, one of the loveliest songs ever written, loaded with feeling; ‘From The Morning’, because he thought she’d like it; and ‘Road’, because it simply blew him away every time he heard it. Three Nick Drake songs, bang, bang, bang. Then he played some Rory Gallagher – genius, genius – and thought about his bedroom in Nether Edge, and how listening to blues guitar with Alison had felt so sophisticated. Man, though, they’d had great taste for a pair of kids, great taste! Daniel and Alison, meant to be. Everybody said so; well, they did after she’d vanished, after she’d evaporated into the July sky without a trace. She’d missed that gig at the Mayflower, the one that was meant to make them all famous. Steve Levitt, fuming all the way to Manchester, then blaming her bitterly after the set for the rest of them being off kilter. Well, there’d been some truth in that. Dan knew he’d screwed up that night because she hadn’t shown up, for sure. Watching the back door during their set as if she might walk in at the last minute. Drinking too much because she didn’t.
He fetched another beer from the kitchen, then decided to send her some Rory along with the other stuff, in fact he couldn’t think why he hadn’t done this already. It had to be ‘I Fall Apart’: perfect, just perfect, spot on. So, four songs. Was that too many? Then, as an afterthought, he sent ‘I’m Not Surprised’, which was a sort of belated kick up the arse from him to her for deserting him. Five songs. Seriously overdoing it, but anyway, they were gone now, miraculously teleported to her screen. Let her be bombarded. He drank his beer and listened to them again, in order, and he was musing on the possibility of a third Rory Gallagher track when a blast of cold air and a bang signalled the opening and closing of the front door and suddenly Katelin was in the house, then in the room. She switched on the light. McCulloch, curled into a tight warm ball on Dan’s lap, raised his head and cut her a baleful stare.
‘God’s sake, what’re you pair doing in the dark?’ she said, shouting over the music, all brisk and professional in her trench coat and suede boots. ‘Dan? Good grief, you’re worse than Alex. I can’t hear myself think!’ She shrugged off her coat, sat on the armchair and peeled off her boots. Dan silenced the Bose and switched off his phone. He was on the floor, with his back to the sofa.
‘Anyway, what are you doing?’ Katelin said, looking between him and the bottles lined up like skittles on the hearth. ‘You’re not drunk, are you? You’re never drinking alone, like an old saddo?’
He patted the floor next to him. ‘Join me,’ he said. ‘For old times’ sake.’
‘Old times’ sake? Catch yourself on, cheeky sod.’
He stared into the neck of his beer bottle.
‘Ahhh, you’re pissed. Are you pissed?’
He thought about it. It was possible. Certainly he was comfortably numb.
‘Have you made dinner?’
He hadn’t, of course. Instead, he’d feasted on the superlative guitar skills of Nick Drake and Rory Gallagher. Oh shit, he’d just said that out loud.
Katelin stood up and gave him a pitying stare. She told him to pull himself together and join her in the kitchen in twenty minutes, but he knew better than to take her at her word. He shoved McCulloch off his lap, hauled himself to his feet and followed her.
‘So,’ he said, watching her bustle about, a little dazed by her busyness. ‘What’s happening in the world?’
She pulled a pan from the drawer and ran cold water into it, looking at him pityingly. ‘Have you been holed up here all day?’ she said. He nodded. She put the pan on the hob, switched it on high, then set to work on an onion. Dan leaned against the worktop and studied her profile. This was precisely the angle he’d seen when she first caught his eye in the bar in Bogotá. Back then, he’d immediately liked the look of her, although she wasn’t exactly pretty. ‘Striking’ was what his mother said when he introduced her, a few months later. ‘She’s a striking girl,’ Marion had said, and she’d managed to swallow the ‘but’ that seemed to be about to follow. With Katelin, though, it was the package, the whole shebang, that drew you to her. She was a force to be reckoned with, back then. There weren’t many girls in the mid-eighties who travelled on their own through Colombia; he’d been most impressed at that, at her independence, her confidence. She was so certain of her place on the planet. That’s what made her sexy. She’d been in a drinking contest when he found her, facing six shots of aguardiente, all in a line, some sort of challenge with a gaucho type, and everyone in the bar was shouting for her. Daniel had watched her toss back the liquor and her hair flew out in a wild auburn wave, and her earrings – feathers, if he remembered right: feathers, ribbons and minuscule bells – flashed and twisted and rang.
The onion, peeled and chopped small, was tipped into a pan of hot olive oil, then she smashed a ga
rlic clove under the blade of a knife, and peeled and chopped that too. In it went.
‘Can you make yourself useful and grate some Parmesan or something,’ she said, shoving the onion and garlic around in the pan.
‘What happened to those earrings you wore in Bogotá?’ Dan said.
‘What?’ She looked at him as a teacher might look at a spectacularly dim-witted pupil.
‘The feathers and bells.’
‘What a question.’
He shrugged. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Never mind.’
‘It’s the beer. Too much and it makes you gloomy.’
‘I’m not gloomy!’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘I should think not. There’s not many of us can drink beer and play music all day and call it work.’
He let this pass, got the cheese out of the fridge and the grater from the drawer, and began to make a pile of Parmesan on a board. ‘I was just thinking about that bar in Bogotá, and I liked those earrings.’
‘I think I threw ’em away about twenty years ago. They started to moult.’
‘Do you remember the band?’
‘Was there a band?’
‘Yes, there was a band! Two guys and a girl, playing Spanish guitar, and one of the guys had a trumpet. Fucking awesome, remember?’
‘No, Dan, I don’t remember.’
‘They were just locals, not professionals, but they were incredible.’
She pulled a ‘beats me’ face. ‘Pass me the spaghetti,’ she said, and held out her hand for it.
‘Oh, c’mon!’ Dan said, handing over the packet. ‘We danced to it.’
‘Dan, I don’t remember it.’
‘The dancing?’
‘Oh, I remember larking about, pretending to tango or something, but I honestly couldn’t tell you who was playing or what they were playing or how they were playing it. I’d have said they had a radio on, if anything.’
She pressed the pasta into the boiling water, watching it submit and submerge. Then she chopped a red chilli and added it to the onions, did the same to a couple of stray pork sausages, tipped in a packet of pancetta cubes, and whacked up the heat. When Alex was little he’d named this meal Pasta Everything. They had it whenever there was nothing to eat except odds and ends. A half-punnet of cherry tomatoes went in next, and a few spinach leaves, the end of the bag. Salt. Pepper. Then she turned her back on it and left it to sizzle.
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