‘And what area are you currently involved in?’ She laughed. ‘Are you sure you’re interested?’
‘Yes, I am. Very.’
‘Pharmacogenomics, the bit of pharmacology that deals with genetics and drug efficacy.’
Will watched her run her fingers through her hair then lightly touch the corner of her shirt collar. He turned away and looked across the lawn. Luke’s presence was impossible to ignore, impossible to laugh away, and with it came a rush of self-loathing and shame, as familiar as old toys found in an attic after decades of gathering dust. It didn’t matter how well Luke looked, it didn’t matter how in control of his life he seemed, how undamaged, Will couldn’t control the sudden twinges of shame and guilt.
‘We’re looking at the use of gene type to optimise the potency of a drug while minimising its side-effects.’
‘Personalised medicine?’
‘Exactly.’
A bird screeched above them. Will looked up. It was a circling crow, cawing high in the sky. It wheeled then flew over the house, its wings flapping strongly, with purpose. As it disappeared out of sight he heard his mother’s voice warning him about a single black crow flying overhead. She loved her superstitions and had an impressive catalogue of ominous rhymes for almost everything she encountered. He searched his memory for the one about a lone crow but couldn’t recall it.
‘… what you do sounds incredibly interesting,’ Luke was saying to Harmony.
‘It is. And, sadly, very poorly paid,’ she laughed. ‘But you can’t have everything, can you?’
‘Unless you’re Will, it seems,’ he said.
Will saw her lower her eyes as a slight smile passed over her lips.
‘Yes, I’m very lucky,’ Will said.
Luke and Will locked eyes then, like dogs assessing each other, uncertain and wary. Will gently stroked his thumb over the scar that crossed his palm. He had a vivid image of his blood falling unchecked onto the sun-speckled grass, felt again the tingle of exhilaration as Luke dragged the blade across his hand, remembered the pale skin parting, his blood flowing. A tremor shot through him as he recalled them pressing their hands together, blood and pain combining, wide eyes bolted on to each other, their hold tight.
‘We’re blood brothers now,’ Luke had said to Will with a trembling voice. ‘That means we’re joined. By blood. Like real brothers.’
‘You watch my back. I’ll watch yours,’ Will replied. ‘That’s what it means. We’ll be there for each other, forever.’
And then they smiled and tightened their grip as their mingled blood ran down their wrists and fell like tears on the earth.
C H A P T E R F I V E
By five o’clock the terrace had fallen into shade and a chill had descended.
‘I think we should head off,’ Will said. ‘If we leave now we might miss the worst of the traffic.’
‘Yes,’ said Luke. ‘I should also go.You’re right, the Sunday traffic into London is dreadful.’
They walked through the living room and into the hallway. Luke picked up his car keys from the circular table in the centre. The spectacular red and orange flowers from the party still held pride of place despite their fading beauty, a handful of petals fallen like the first leaves of autumn.
At the front door Harmony kissed Emma and Ian goodbye and then looked at Luke. She offered her hand. He shook it and she felt herself blush.
Stop it, she thought. You’re behaving like a teenage girl. ‘It was good to meet you again, Luke,’ she said. ‘And amazing that you and Will were at school together.’
He smiled. ‘Well, I hope now Will and I have made contact we’ll be able to stay in touch.’
Harmony nodded. ‘That would be nice.’
Ian clapped Luke on the back. ‘Thanks for the game. Shame you played so damn well. I’ll give you more of a run for your money next time.’
Luke shook Ian’s hand then turned to Emma and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Lunch was delicious. Your children are charming, and you’re right, they certainly have a passion for Pavlova.’
Emma laughed. ‘They do.’ She paused and smiled at them all.
‘Perhaps we should do this again soon.’
Luke looked directly at Harmony. ‘I’d like that.’
She reached for Will’s hand and took hold of it before nodding.
‘We would too.’
The three of them walked out of the house and across the driveway towards the cars, their feet crunching over the silence. They paused beside Luke’s dark grey convertible Audi, its alloy wheels shining like polished silver medals. He pointed his key at the car and it flashed its lights in greeting.
Luke and Will faced each other and Harmony felt the tension between them return. Luke held out his hand. Will stared at it and for a moment Harmony worried he might not respond. But at last he reached out and took hold of it, their two scarred palms clasped.
‘It’s good to see you, Luke.’ Will seemed to hesitate, then he reached into his jacket pocket for his wallet. ‘Here’s my number,’ he said, handing him one of the shop’s business cards. ‘Why don’t you give me a call? Maybe we could meet for a beer?’
‘Sounds good.’ Luke took the card and smiled.
Will reached for Harmony’s hand as they turned to walk back to their car. She could feel Luke watching them. She glanced backwards and, sure enough, he was sitting in his car, door closed, hands gripping the steering wheel, eyes locked on them. He didn’t move a muscle. There was no embarrassed look away. No smile. No reaction at all. He just sat there, impassive, watching.
Once in the car, Harmony expected Will to say something to her, but he was silent, his eyes distant, driving on autopilot. Every now and then his brow would furrow as if trying to work something out.
‘Seeing him again has thrown you, hasn’t it?’ she said at last, unable to keep quiet any longer.
He glanced at her and then nodded.
‘I spoke to him for quite a long time at Emma’s party. He’s … unusual.’ She paused, waiting for Will to reply. When he didn’t she pressed on. ‘And charismatic. Was he always like that? I mean, when you were friends at school?’
Still Will said nothing.
She turned to look out of her window. It was so frustrating how guarded he was when it came to his past. She loved to discuss things; she was a scientist, she liked answers. Her mother used to laugh at her when she was a young girl, always asking questions, determined to know why trees grew upwards and how clouds floated and why snowflakes looked like miniature paper doilies. Facts made life easier to understand. She’d asked Will so many questions over the years and had so many non-committal, one-word answers and dismissive shrugs in return. As far as he was concerned his past was irrelevant. It didn’t merit discussion; as unimportant, he said, as a lacklustre lover with a forgotten name. All that mattered was the present, was her, their life together. She’d accepted his secrecy because she’d had no choice, but now his past had been revealed like the tip of an ashen finger in the soil and she was desperate to uncover the rest. Especially about Luke. He fascinated her. There was something about him that brought to mind her father. Charismatic. It was a word she’d heard her mother use when describing him. Despite having spent night upon night dredging her memories for any recollection of the man that might be lurking in a corner of her mind, she had none. The image she carried was based entirely on a single photograph she had of him. She’d found it about a month after their mother’s death, when she and her sister finally mustered the courage to sort through her personal effects. They’d wedged a chair beneath the door handle of the new shared bedroom at their nan’s house. They’d put their mother’s beloved Ella Fitzgerald on the tape machine. Then they sat cross-legged on the floor, her sister holding a bottle of vodka and an expression of grim determination, their mother’s precious shoebox between them. They stared at it for a while then in one swift movement her sister tipped the bottle up to her lips, winced, and pulled the lid off the box. There were
hundreds of letters inside. All written to their mother from their father. Harmony was staggered as she read them. They were beautiful; incredible expressions of love – poetic, ethereal, surreal even. They were written in curling handwriting with intricate doodles and motifs decorating the white space around words that struck Harmony as the most romantic ever written. As she picked up one of the letters a photograph fell from its fold.
Harmony gasped. ‘Is that him?’
He was the most handsome man she’d ever seen. He wore a loose white, unbuttoned shirt and stood on a table laden with wine surrounded by a group of people laughing and clapping along as he played a guitar. Her mother was amongst those at the table. She stared up at him with adoring eyes, her face sliced in two by the widest of smiles, love pouring out of every part of her.
‘Fuck him,’ her sister had spat as she snatched the picture off her. Harmony was about to protest but kept quiet when she saw the tears coursing down her sister’s cheeks. ‘I fucking hate him. I hate him.’ She grabbed the vodka and drank some more then scrabbled to collect the letters and shoved them back into the box with the photo.
‘We’re burning them all, the whole box of crappy, lying rubbish. He’s nothing, a ne’er-do-well and a wastrel, and I hate him.’
Harmony didn’t know what a ne’er-do-well or a wastrel was and wasn’t sure her sister did either. They were the words their nan used if she ever referred to him, but as the woman spent her spare time dressing Boris, her snappy pug, in miniature human clothes, Harmony had sense enough to know that not everything she said was necessarily the truth. While her sister swigged at the vodka again, Harmony inched her fingers towards the box, removed the photograph of her father and surreptitiously slipped it into her jeans pocket.
‘And I’m changing my name. I’m not having that stupid, hippy name he bloody chose a moment longer. I’m Sophie from now on, okay?’
Sophie was her sister’s middle name, the name their mother wanted to call her. The piercing look of anger in her sister’s eyes made her wonder if she was expected to change her name as well. The thing was she liked Harmony and wasn’t keen on Patricia – her own middle name – at all.
As she followed her sister downstairs, Harmony tried to work out why it was all her father’s fault anyway. Cancer was to blame for taking their mother away from them, not their absent father. He hadn’t been around for years and years. Why was her sister freaking out about him now? It didn’t make sense.
They found their nan sitting on the sofa reading the listings from the Radio Times aloud to the pug, who wore a hand-knitted pink cardigan with big blue buttons.
‘We’d like to burn this and everything in it,’ her sister announced. Her attempt to mask her vodka-slur made it sound as if she was pretending to be the Queen.
‘What’s in the box that you want to burn exactly, Starla?’ their nan asked sternly.
‘Letters from the wastrel.’
Their nan gestured sharply at the fire. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’
‘And I’m not called Starla,’ her sister said, lifting her chin high.
‘I’m Sophie now.’
Their nan nodded and then the three of them watched in silence as the box went up in a rainbow of flames on the log fire.
Harmony pushed the recollection away and looked back at her husband. ‘Will,’ she tried again. ‘Is everything okay?’
‘I’m fine. I wasn’t expecting to see him, that’s all.’
‘Talk to me. Please?’
‘There’s nothing much to say. I knew the guy at school. We lost touch. It was a surprise to see him.’
‘It looked like more than that to me.’
They drove in silence for a while and then Harmony heard him take a deep breath. ‘It’s thrown me,’ he said. ‘I suppose I’d sort of blanked him out of my head, and seeing him like that was … ’ he paused, hesitating, searching for the right words, ‘like seeing a ghost.’ His words rang around them like the echo of a church bell. His brow furrowed and his mouth twitched, as if he was trying to decode his thoughts.
They didn’t speak for the rest of the journey. The car was hot, the early evening sunshine warming the air inside until it was too stuffy to bear. She opened her window and leant her head against the door so the stream of cool air ran over her face. Her mind drifted to Luke, the way he’d looked at her during lunch, that peculiar directness she found so fascinating. She heard his voice, steady and calm, asking her to leave Emma’s party with him. What would have happened if she’d said yes? She closed her eyes and saw herself take his hand. She followed him down the corridor. Into the hallway, past the butler and out of the house. She saw herself climbing into his car. Heard the sound of the car door closing. Saw his hand reach over to rest on her thigh. Harmony opened her eyes and shifted herself in her seat, then glanced at Will, who stared intently at the road ahead.
When they got back to the flat Harmony went to her small study and grabbed a pen and her reading glasses and the pile of papers from her desk. In the living room she sat down on the sofa and put on her glasses.
‘I’ll put the kettle on, would you like a cup of tea?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, keeping her eyes on the notes on her lap.
‘Hey,’ said Will gently. ‘Don’t be like that.’ He sat on the sofa beside her and took her hand. ‘Don’t be cross.’
‘I’m not cross,’ she said, putting her work on the coffee table and looking at him. ‘I just wish you’d talk to me about this, that’s all. I’ve never heard you mention Luke before.’
‘Look, I’m not keeping it from you for any reason. It’s just not important.’ He tucked some of her hair behind her ear and then pulled her into him. ‘I’ve told you before, those years at school, none of it matters now. I’ve put it behind me.’
‘Put what behind you? What happened?’
He didn’t answer immediately. She could tell he was thinking about telling her, weighing it up, but then he shook his head. ‘I really don’t want to talk about it. Stuff happened. Stuff that’s too hard to talk about. It’s best forgotten. And I’m over it. Really, I am.’
‘But today—’
‘It was a surprise,’ he said, interrupting her. ‘Christ, you know better than anyone how little time I spend thinking about school. Seeing Luke like that threw me. Last time I saw him he was a kid. I was expecting a nice lunch in the sun with Emma and Ian and then this blast from the past showed up.’ He sighed heavily. ‘I probably need to work on my acting skills a bit. Perfect the art of hiding shock. That’s the second time in a week I’ve failed with that.’
She shook her head and made a face at him.
‘I’m going to grab a beer,’ he said. ‘You want anything?’
‘No, thanks.’
As he left the living room she leant back against the arm of the sofa, turning her head to breathe in its smell; safe and familiar, it wrapped around her like a warm blanket. She and Will had got it in the sales on the Tottenham Court Road the weekend they moved in together. It was the first piece of furniture they’d bought, and as they left the shop he’d squeezed her hand and whispered, ‘This is it, Harmony. Our start. It all begins here.’
The sofa was delivered two weeks later, and sat in the middle of their living room in their first flat in Vauxhall in front of an upturned packing box that for five months they used as a coffee table. They sat on it all evening, drinking wine and eating Chinese. Later they made love on it, their wine glasses and empty takeaway cartons discarded on the floor beside them, the ancient television, as deep as it was wide, flickering silently in the corner of the darkened room.
Harmony worked for the next few hours. When the words began to swim, her eyes heavy with tiredness, she put the papers down and stood up. She gasped a little at the stiff pain in her lower back and cursed herself for not working at her desk. She saw her mother wagging a finger at her, telling her off for working slouched on the sofa or propped up in bed: Sofas for sitting, beds for sleeping, desks f
or working.
Will appeared at the living room door. ‘I’m going to go to bed,’
he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m shattered. I’ll get a drink and then follow you.’
Harmony filled a glass of water and as she drank it she checked Will had locked the back door. She peered through the glazed panel in the door at the garden which was bathed in the last of the fading light. They should have done some work in the garden this weekend; they’d neglected it and it was looking untidy. The garden was the reason they’d stayed in the flat, which was too small for them really, with just the one bedroom, the box room she used as a study, and a living room they squeezed a dining table into. The garden was beautiful, though, large by London standards, about forty feet by thirty, with a magical feel. It had grey stone walls that were covered in dark unruly ivy and an area of aged paving, some of the slabs cracked with moss growing between. There were two overgrown flower beds that ran along each of the walls, and at the end of the garden was a stone bench with carved legs, gradually being suffocated by weeds. It was a hidden gem in the slice of urban grey between Baron’s Court and West Kensington tube stations. When Harmony found out she was pregnant she knew they would have to move. She’d had to persuade Will, which had been hard, but she explained that they needed somewhere more suitable for a family, somewhere with a proper bedroom for the baby and a utility room, maybe a playroom too. Her resolve to sell it had weakened when she showed the valuing estate agent the garden.
‘Oh, this is very special,’ he’d said, purring with excitement.
‘Yes. Lots of potential here. It’ll fly off our books.’
But when the baby died there was no reason to move, no need to justify the expense – the conveyancing fees alone were enough to make their eyes water – but rather than feel relieved that she could stay in her home, she found herself trapped, resentful of the flat that was now inextricably linked to her miscarriage, symbolic of her childless life.
Will was reading in bed. She went to shut the curtains.
‘Can you leave them open?’ he asked, closing his book and laying it on the bedside table. She hesitated, her hand resting on the edge of the curtain. She didn’t like sleeping with them open; she felt exposed, worried about people being able to see in.
The Judas Scar Page 5