‘You’re going to leave now?’ I ask in disbelief.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and, without looking at me, walks out of my door.
I sit there stunned. I have no idea what the hell has just happened. Has he just fucking broken up with me?
Bang, bang, my baby shot me down!
TWENTY
I stand at the window in a daze and listen to his car come to life with such an explosive sound that it makes me jump. I don’t go back to bed after he speeds off. Maybe because I cannot believe that he will not come back.
We were going so good. It seems incredible that he would raze the city and salt the earth just like that. Over nothing. Nothing earth-shattering has happened. I stepped onto the road without looking, but it wasn’t like I was in any real danger. It would be a stretch of the imagination to even think so.
It doesn’t make sense. Nothing makes sense.
Unless it is in some way connected to that terrible grief that lives deep inside him. The one I accidentally glimpsed when I went back into the restaurant for Rob’s umbrella that first day. When I found him so curled up with pain that he reminded me of a wounded beast. The kind of suffering that is so blind and raw that approach is dangerous and any attempt to help would be suicidal.
I pace the flat incessantly, stopping only to throw a double vodka down my throat. I find myself back at the window looking down at the deserted street, as if in disbelief. We’ve never spent a night apart ever since the first night I spent at his house. After two hours of waiting, I finally admit to myself that he’s not coming back. Not tonight, anyway.
I go and sit dry-eyed in front of the television. I recognize that I’m watching a movie, but beyond that I don’t register anything. All I can see before my eyes is the moment he ripped my chest open with a knife by saying, ‘I just can’t do this anymore.’
Do what? I haven’t pushed or tried to get from him anything that he didn’t want to give. I switch off the TV and put on my CD player. Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ comes on. It grates on my nerves. I switch it off with a grunt. The flat becomes horribly silent.
I rush to fill it with sound. I pick Vangelis. It’s Dom’s favorite. Beautiful, dramatic music fills the air, but for some reason the only thing I want to listen to is ‘Stairway to Heaven’. The wistful longing and mysterious lyrics suit my mood. I listen to Heart’s rendition of the song.
In my condition it seems to me that the arrangement of music is in timeless layers that open up like a flower to reveal a yearning, fragile soul calling for something almost forgotten.
When Heart’s version ends, I move on to Dolly Parton’s. As soon as I’ve listened to her, I put on Led Zepplin’s original version. Then I go back to Heart’s version. Obsessively, I open my laptop and look at street performers singing the song. Again and again I return to Heart’s version. I listen and I listen. As if the solution to my problem is hidden in the song.
But there is no solution.
I am the woman who thought that everything that glitters is gold. The one who was building a stairway to heaven, but, as Dom once told me, my stairway is whispering in the wind.
When dawn breaks in the sky I am still listening to music.
Dom doesn’t call even in the morning.
I go to work, a wreck. I open the door to my office and look at my desk with dread. I hate this temporary job I took last week where I have to field on-line complaints all day about packages that have not arrived, are delayed, lost, or damaged. My job is to calmly absorb their frustration and send them on the relevant department.
The dreary drudgery of it has to be seen to be believed. At least when I was at HMRC I felt I was doing something good. There was always that feeling that I counted for something.
Here, I’m a cog in the wheel.
I truly count for nothing. Perhaps I should have listened to Dom. Perhaps I should have taken his offer of money and waited until I found a better job. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that. I was too proud. And now I think, Thank God I didn’t take his money.
No matter how bad this job is, at least it pays my bills.
I sit at my desk and jump every time my phone rings. Sometimes I stare at it as if I can metaphysically make him call me. I wait and wait. Until lunchtime, until I can bear it no more. I pick up my phone and call Jake.
‘Hey, Ella,’ he says. His tone is surprised and cautious.
‘Hello, Jake. I … uh … Can I talk to you … um … alone?’
‘Of course,’ he says immediately, and his tone tells me what I suspected. He knows exactly what’s wrong with Dom.
‘Thank you, Jake.’
‘No problem. We’re in the country tonight. Want to come over for dinner? I can send a car.’
‘No, no. No need for that, I’ll borrow a friend’s car. And I won’t disturb you at dinnertime. I’ll come just before that.’
‘All right, see you about six thirty.’
‘That’ll be great. Thank you.’
‘You know how to get to mine, right?’
‘Yes. I’ll see you then.’
‘See you later.’
‘Jake?’
‘Yeah?’
‘I really appreciate this.’
I hear him draw in a sharp breath. ‘That’s OK, Ella. I’m always happy to help.’
I park Anna’s company car next to Lily’s Mercedes-Benz and walk up to the front door. Smoothing down my hair, I ring on the doorbell. Lily opens the door with a smile.
‘Hello,’ she greets.
‘Hey,’ I say awkwardly.
She opens the door wider. ‘Come on in,’ she invites.
I step into her home. Lily is one of those women who have it all. Happiness, beauty, love, wealth.
She’s wearing a long, halter-neck dress that comes to her ankles. It’s one of those dresses that you know cost an arm and a leg. Once, a dress like that would have sent me to my computer to see if her husband’s tax records matched that level of expenditure, but those days are gone. It feels as if the notion that I was a tax officer at Her Majesty’s Revenue Customs was another life, or just a dream of mine.
I smile at her. ‘Congratulations. I heard you’re pregnant.’
She rubs her belly and smiles contentedly. ‘Yes, thank you, Ella. And how have you been keeping?’
‘Good,’ I say.
‘Jake’s expecting you. He’s in his den. Do you want to come through and have a drink before you see him?’
‘No. No, thank you,’ I refuse politely.
Liliana runs in from one of the reception rooms, screaming, ‘Aunty Ella, Aunty Ella.’
She is wearing a pink skirt and a T-shirt that states in bold letters ‘My Mother Thinks She’s The Boss’. I go down on my haunches. ‘My, my, look how much you’ve grown since I last saw you.’
‘That was yesterday,’ she says scornfully.
‘Dear me. Yes, that was yesterday.’
‘My poo was blue today,’ she declares suddenly.
‘Oh,’ I exclaim.
‘Lil,’ her mother reprimands, ‘what did I tell you about telling the whole world about the color of your poo?’
‘Aunty Ella is not the whole world,’ Liliana argues with impeccable logic. She turns her adorable face toward me. ‘My poo was made of icing.’
I straighten and look at Lily.
‘She went to a birthday party yesterday and ate too much blue icing from a Thomas the Tank Engine cake,’ Lily explains
Even though I was distraught, it made me giggle. How utterly sweet.
‘Where’s Uncle Dom?’ Liliana demands.
The laughter dies in my throat. ‘I … I have no idea.’ Voicing the thought saddens me greatly. Far more than I would have expected.
‘Lil, Aunty Ella has come to see Daddy. Say bye-bye now.’ She looks at me with an encouraging smile. ‘Go on, Ella. It’s just at the end of the corridor.’
‘See you later, Liliana,’ I call as I start walking down it.
&nb
sp; ‘Can I go and sit with Daddy and Aunty Ella?’ I hear Liliana ask her mother plaintively.
‘No, you can’t.’
‘Why not?’ the minx demands.
I don’t hear Lily’s answer because I’m already too far away, or they’ve moved into one of the other rooms. It hits me then: I’m not part of this family, and it looks like I never will be. I stand for a moment outside the door at the end of the corridor. Taking a deep breath, I knock.
It is opened almost immediately.
‘Come in,’ Jake invites cordially.
He is wearing a black T-shirt and gray jeans, and I must admit, just being in his presence makes me nervous. He is as big and intimidating as Dom, but there are absolutely no buttons to push. No weakness. No secret sadness to exploit. He is one of those smoothly impenetrable and guarded people. It was always clear to me that he is the boss of his family. He guards them as ferociously as a mother lion guards her newborn babies.
Woe betide anyone who tries to hurt them.
‘Thanks,’ I say quietly, and step into a large, wood-paneled room. It has soft rugs, a heavy wooden desk at one end of the room, and a nest of expensive leather couches at the other end. There is an air of old world opulence about it all. Here, one can feel safe and cultured. The outside world never intrudes. Here, Jake is King. From here, he controls his empire.
He gestures toward the sofas.
I move over to them. My legs feel like jelly and my skin is tingling with nervous energy. Stop it, I tell myself. You have nothing to fear. I am on the same side as Jake. I don’t want to hurt Dom. I love him. It is perfectly obvious that he is in terrible pain, and I just want to help him.
‘I was just about to have a drink. Would you like to join me?’ he says.
I start to shake my head and then decide that I actually do need something strong to calm me. ‘I’ll have whatever you’re having.’
‘I’m having a whiskey,’ he says, and I nod.
He moves toward a drinks trolley. With his back to me he pours two fingers of whiskey into two glasses and comes toward me. As he crosses the room, he passes the last rays of evening light coming from the window. They hit the side of his face and I am struck by how handsome all the Eden brothers are.
I take the glass and bring it to my lips. The whiskey is strong and hits my empty stomach like liquid fire.
Jake doesn’t say anything, simply watches me with a deliberately bland expression. I know that his first and most natural instinct is to protect his brother. These gypsies stick together. For them, blood will always be thicker than water. He will help me, but only if it means it will also benefit his brother.
Fuck it. I decide to take the bull by the horns.
‘Last night Dom had a nightmare. When I woke him up he thought I was dead. And then he… he … said he couldn’t continue our relationship anymore and walked out of my flat. I haven’t spoken to or seen him since. Can you tell me anything that would help me understand what’s going on, Jake? I … I’m … really … um … in love with your brother.’
An expression of pity crosses his face. He takes a gulp of whiskey and turns his face away from mine. Seconds pass in silence. He appears to be looking into a distant past. At something that saddens him very much.
He turns to me. ‘When Dom was seventeen years old, he fell in love with a girl. She was sixteen. A laughing, wild, rebellious gypsy girl. Her name was Vivien. He thought they were soul mates because they were both so crazy and so alike. They could finish each other’s sentences. He wanted to marry her straightaway, but I forced him to wait until he was eighteen.
‘“You have your whole life ahead of you. What’s the hurry?” I told him. The truth was, I disapproved of her. She was bad for him. Too wild. She took too many risks. She egged him on, dared him to new and dangerous adventures. The kind of things that could land him in prison. Together, they reminded me of Bonnie and Clyde. I hoped, I prayed it would not last.
‘But I was wrong. The love he had for her didn’t die. It just became stronger. They became inseparable. After his eighteenth birthday, very reluctantly, I started to make plans. Everything was ready. In one month they would have been married, but then she did something no one had ever dreamed she would. I don’t know how she did it, but she stowed away on a smugglers’ boat that Dom was on.
‘It was night and the sea was rough. Something happened on that boat. She fell overboard and was swept away.’
TWENTY-ONE
With the swiftness of a gull, Vivien went over. She rushed to her fate, so near to me that I know I could have caught her if only I’d put my hand out.
Her hopeless, terror-stricken, doomed face, I saw for merely a moment, but it would be forever etched in my soul. The wide, laughing mouth had become a dark hole in her white face, and her beautiful, dancing eyes were huge with shock. Legs wheeling. Arms flailing. Desperate …. Oh God! How desperately she had looked for something to hold on to, anything, other than salty, gray air and diagonally flashing rain.
The cast iron rule was:
If you fall overboard that’s your fucking funeral. The boat stops for NOTHING.
One look at Preston and Dallas and I knew: they had absolutely no intention of stopping. Hardly surprising since the pair were certifiable psychopaths. It was the reason Jake wouldn’t have anything to do with them. But me, I had to be the big I AM. I had to work with the most dangerous thugs in Britain to prove what a tough guy I was.
So …
They wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t overpower them—both carried guns. The choice was simple to make. I didn’t think. I didn’t hesitate. Not for one second. In a flash I pulled out a lifejacket from under the canopy and, with it clutched in my hand, I vaulted over the side of the vessel into the roiling sea, as far away from the pull of the boat as possible.
I hit the water, and sank quickly into a pitch-black abyss full of bubbles. Using my arms to counteract the downward pull, I fought and kicked my way back up, and burst onto the surface with a great gasp. I knew when I jumped overboard that the sea was choppy and treacherous, but in the light of a three-quarter moon it looked as if I was in the middle of a mass of boiling black oil.
Fortunately, it was late July and, though the water was cold, it wasn’t paralyzing. At a guess I would say it was just over fifty degrees Fahrenheit. In that temperature a man could survive for a good few hours before hypothermia set in. That is, if he was wearing a lifejacket or had something to hold on to.
I was wearing my GPS tracker, and I knew that either Preston or Dallas would radio Jake to let him know what had happened, and he would come for me. But it could be hours. I could survive, but what about Vivien? She was small, and the shock of falling into the water would have caused her to swallow a lot of salt water. I looked around frantically.
Until you’ve been alone in the middle of an endless stretch of water, you don’t know how truly small and insignificant you are. I was like cork bobbing on an unforgiving, restless landscape that contained absolutely nothing, not one fucking thing. It had swallowed everything.
She was nowhere to be seen.
I screamed for her over the sound of the boat’s engine, but there was no reply. Telling myself that she wasn’t scared of water, she was a good swimmer, and she was young with a robust constitution, I hooked my hand through one of the armholes of the lifejacket and began to swim strongly toward the area where she’d fallen.
But the truth was I was petrified. I’d never been more afraid in my life. My body was pumping with adrenalin. The raw panic surging through me was tempered only by incredulity that this was actually happening to me.
In my head my father was saying, Don’t thrash about, lad. Keep still. Float. And don’t fuckin’ stretch your hand out—it cools the body. Use your legs. Conserve your heat. Conserve your heat. Conserve your heat … But my hands and legs were moving about wildly. There was no thought of conserving heat.
The sound of the boat died away and I stopped swimming. Treading water, I shou
ted out to her, and listened. Nothing. Where the fuck is she? My heart was beating so hard I felt it bang in my ears. I knew if I didn’t get to her soon, she would die.
I turned round and round, scanning the dark, restless water, hoping, praying. And then, with a surge of excitement, I saw her. She had just colored her hair—the most horrendous orange you ever saw—and I hated it, but it was glowing and floating like seaweed in the moonlight.
Jesus!
She was floating face down! Like a doll being tossed about in the waves.
Fuck me, Vivien! You were planning to go down without a word.
Kicking quickly and powerfully, I swam up to her and threw my arm in a bear hug across her lifeless body. It frightened me how totally unaware of me she was. Grabbing her biceps, I spun her around so she was facing upwards. Still holding on to her body, I swam under her and emerged on the other side of her head, so her back was lying on my chest.
Her eyes were closed, her skin was cold and bluish, and her head lolled. I squeezed her with both forearms in the way you would if someone had swallowed something that was blocking their airways. To my horror, I had crushed her so hard I heard a crack. I prayed I had not broken a rib. A broken rib won’t matter if she’s dead, a voice in my head said.
I was suddenly engulfed by the most horrendous fear.
I don’t know how I did it with the waves bashing us on all sides, and the plumes of spray that hit us in the face, but I managed to grab her tight, pinch her nose with my other hand, and blow into her mouth while pressing the heel of my hand on her diaphragm thirty times, twice a second. I kept on doing it until she coughed, vomited a load of salt water out, and started gulping summer air.
I felt a surge of fierce joy. Quickly inflating the lifejacket, I began to massage her shivering body, keeping her skin as close to mine as possible. She came back to life slowly. The first thing she did was fucking apologize.
It made me so angry. ‘Shut up, Vivien. Don’t you dare apologize. We said we’d never say sorry to each other. We’re the wild ones, remember?’
Wounded Beast (Gypsy Heroes Book 2) Page 13