“So try drinking something you actually like next time you’re in the bar?” she suggested.
“Drop it.”
“Or stand up to them,” she said and slammed her textbook, dragging all her papers back into the pile and hefting it into her arms. “Try standing up to the right people, Jayden. Jesus Christ.”
As she stormed out, Jayden massaged his hangover, and thought that as she turned the corner and disappeared into the narrow corridor, she’d lost a bit of weight.
Chapter 15
“Is this true?”
It was the Sunday morning after he’d come back from the Phillips’, and Darren was feeling something akin to withdrawal symptoms: he felt tense, lethargic, bored, and muggy, almost. Like there was a fog in his head.
Thankfully, he was still in training and so, generally speaking, still had weekends off. Which meant sitting in Rachel’s flat with her whilst she marked spelling tests with star stickers in various colours, and he paid his bills. It was mindless work, but the company was nice.
“Is what true?”
“This.”
“What’s this?” he mumbled, not looking up.
“Your Facebook.”
“Probably not, then.”
“I’m going through your pictures, and there’s one of you at some music camp thingy.”
“When?”
“Um…” she paused, scrolling, then said: “About five years ago? Six? You’re definitely still a teenager.”
“I’m still a teenager,” he pointed out.
“You know what I mean. All gangly and short and spotty.”
“I wasn’t that spotty,” he said. “I got random bursts of facial hair.”
She eyed him over her laptop. “You still have those.”
Darren rubbed a hand across his jaw and grunted. He’d shave in the morning. There was something hedonistic about letting the routine slide at the weekends, especially now someone in the senior ranks had decided that unshaven officers looked scruffy and were no longer allowed.
“Anyway, did you go to music camp?”
“Once or twice.”
“What’d you play?”
“Piano and violin,” he said. “Sometimes the trombone if I figured they weren’t going to tell Father. He hated brass instruments for some reason.”
“Is he a musician?”
“Barrister,” Darren said flatly. “Now how did Father put it?” he murmured half to himself. “He pursued a more profitable career option.”
“I smell a rat.”
“A stupid rat,” Darren agreed. “He flunked out of music college and ended up re-training. He’s a good barrister, don’t get me wrong, and the odd time he’s played the piano at home, he’s good, but music college isn’t for good.”
“It’s for kick-ass, ridiculously awesome?”
“Yes.”
“Were you?”
“Awesome?”
“Yeah.”
“No,” Darren said. “I was good. Better than Father. I could probably have survived a music school, but I wasn’t ever going to be the next Chopin or anything like that.”
“You don’t play now, though. There’s no violin in that there flat,” she said suspiciously.
Darren pointed at his shoulder and she ‘aah’-ed. She’d seen the scars and heard the story. He’d just obviously left out the musical part of it all. He’d…kind of assumed Rachel knew. It was bizarre to remember that there were people who didn’t know.
“But the piano?”
“Out of the habit,” he said. “I do the odd ditty on the one in the hall downstairs now and then but I don’t play properly anymore.”
“Did you like it?”
“The piano? Yes.”
“Not the violin?”
“Nope.”
“Why?”
“Boring,” he said, stuffing the credit card cheque and paying-in slip into an envelope. “I only learned classical stuff. Bored me to tears.” Well, that was the simpler version. “Ever listened to Vivaldi?”
“Not really,” she said. “I like classical music but I’m a musical idiot, really.”
“I know, I’ve heard you singing.”
“Shut up!”
“Well, all of Vivaldi’s work is the same. Same concerto, a thousand different ways of arranging the notes. One round is bad enough, but my orchestra master loved the bastard and wouldn’t stop signing us up for Vivaldi-themed performances.”
Rachel wrinkled her nose. “Fun.”
“Yep.”
“Want to come to a concert with me, then?”
Darren eyed her warily. “I knew that was going somewhere.”
“It’ll be fun!” she promised. “The music teacher at work, Tony…” Darren watched with interest as she went a little pink, “…said that he was given tickets by his sister-in-law to take his girlfriend to see the London Philharmonic Orchestra, but then he split up with his girlfriend before the Christmas break…” Rachel went even pinker, and Darren smirked, “…and now he can’t go because he’s going on the school trip to Cornwall, so would I like them? So I thought maybe you’d come with me.”
“Your boyfriend Tony?”
“The music teacher,” she repeated, still pink, and resolutely marking the spelling tests with impressive dedication.
“So much for I’m never going to love anybody ever,” Darren mocked.
“So do you want to come or not?” Rachel insisted.
“When?”
“Last Friday in February. I figured we could get the first train into London after work, and then we could stay overnight in a Premier Inn or something rather than journey all the way back out. Make a little weekend of it, maybe?”
“Yeah, all right,” Darren said. It wasn’t like he’d have anything better to do, or anyone to see. His anyone wouldn’t be anywhere near him until Easter at the earliest anyway, and that would be if Darren could prise him away from Ella and Jonathon. “Is it just the orchestra?”
“No, there’s a whole raft of them. I have a leaflet somewhere…” Rachel said, bending over the arm of the sofa to rummage in her handbag. “There’s a bunch of string solos, I thought you’d like them.”
“Depends on the string. I hate the cello.”
“Why?”
“Childhood trauma.”
“Really?”
“Yes. My cousin attempted to play it.”
“…Oh.”
“Yes,” Darren said firmly. “A mangled cello sounds just as bad as a mangled violin. And you can feel it through the floor, so it’s even harder to get away from.”
“Here.” Rachel threw a crumpled leaflet at him. “It’s a bunch of Italian dead people, that’s all I know. The composers, that is, not the players. Though they might be Italian.”
“Doubt they’re dead, though,” Darren said, flicking the leaflet open. It was the standard kind of line-up, seemed to be progressing through the ages of the great Italian violinists. Italian music had hit a pinnacle for a short period in terms of the main string instruments, although Darren had always personally preferred the more northern compositions in general.
The final solo caught his eye, and he nodded. “Yeah,” he said to the room at large, and Rachel grinned. “I might enjoy this.”
The final piece was Tartini’s masterpiece, or his one-hit wonder in modern terminology. And one of the rare violin sonatas that Darren had genuinely liked the first time he’d heard it. The Devil’s Trill Sonata.
* * * *
The end of February was a wet and miserable affair, drearily cold in that in-between fashion: too hot for winter coats, too cold for anything less. The trip to London had been kind of fun, attracting odd looks from Southampton Central (unused to the finery of evening wear amongst the hoodies and Chinese students) and slowly shifting, the farther the train went, until by the time they reached London Waterloo, nobody apparently found them odd at all.
Darren found Rachel odd. Awkward and gangly, she apparently did actually know ho
w to clean up, and had donned a well-cut suit and pale-coloured blouse that hid the odd angles of her shoulders and smoothed out her long limbs until she looked elegant instead of lanky. She looked pretty, even, and slightly fierce in that woman-in-the-boardroom way, quite unlike her usual primary-school-teacher-and-general-bum appearance. (He did, however, value his life more than to tell her this.)
The concert was in actuality the final rehearsal, probably hence this Tony’s sister-in-law had managed to get cheap(ish) tickets. Darren didn’t really care. In his experience, the final rehearsal and the first performance were more-or-less the same. The pressure was on to perform well way before this point. They settled into their seats a moment or two before the curtains went up, Darren having been suckered into buying the first round of drinks at the theatre bar in exchange for a free concert, and then…
And then a single violin began to hum gently in centre-stage, and Darren felt…
He felt young, suddenly, the live music shaving nearly nine years off him until he remembered Father presenting him with the violin and telling him that it was time to grow up. And yet he felt old, in the natural way his ear followed the first arch and plunge of the pitch, the notes appearing in his mind as they leaked from the strings even though he didn’t, at first, recognise the actual sonata. It was strange: he was old, and he was young, wrapped in the strings, and something shifted inside.
He had been to countless concerts since early childhood. Father had known from the very beginning that Darren would be a musician, and had taken him to see the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra when he’d been only four years old. He didn’t remember much of it, and until he was ten the focus had been on piano concerts given by soloists playing slightly more modern compositions, but his teenage years had been here, listening to countless sonatas and concerti, played by musicians he couldn’t hope to name. He had been destined to be one of them.
Jayden had taken him off that path, and in the darkness of the theatre, Darren both loved him and hated him for doing it. The violin had been a curse, his moods bound to the strings and a thousand wheedling and mournful classics. He had been commanded by it, led by the bow, driven by the sound. But it had also been simpler. He had known, then, what was going to happen. He had known what he was supposed to do and who he was supposed to become. He had known how things would play out. He hadn’t…
He had not drifted like he had since September. He had not lived day-to-day, but had had a concrete future. The future now was like a sandcastle before the incoming tide, and if only to himself, Darren could admit that he was afraid of that uncertainty. He was afraid of things ending with Jayden; he was afraid of his training ending and a forty-year career yawning in front of him. He was afraid of time; the music had been timeless. When he had played, it had been all he would ever do, and there’d been a simplicity in that. Being free from the music also meant being limitless, and…
And this was the price of freedom: not knowing what to do with it. Having nothing to steer him. Darren was drifting, and he knew it, because sitting in the dark and listening to the orchestra tidily lift their instruments and open into the dark marches of a thunderous saga, he felt the weight of gravity wrapping itself around him like a blanket, an anchor, a rudder for the ship. He felt the guidance of the music, and he shifted inside, as if turning towards it without moving.
He was bound to this: the swell and chorus of thirty, forty instruments in perfect harmony, and the terrible fall as the pitch plummeted. He was tied to the high, terrible shriek of lonely violins, and the deep boom of a threatening horn, like the tide rushing to claim the crying cliffs. His heart picked up, hammering in time to the crashes and bangs of waves on the shore, and his ear strained towards the low note, almost unheard under all the chaos, that whispered for calm in the eye of the storm. When the music faded away, it was like the colour bled out of the grand theatre after it, trickling out of the world like a leaky sink, and then the light came down on a single violinist, poised in centre-stage, and it was like looking at himself.
Because that was how he would have been, in a different world. In a world where Jayden had never opened the storage room door; in a world where he had brushed off this curious blond in a Woodbourne uniform…in those worlds, there was a different him. A man who stood centre-stage, with a violin and bow, ready to perform the most difficult of pieces and inevitably fail, and who would careen into disaster and death without a single misstep. Whose moods would destroy him because they fed off the music, and whose music would outlive him because it fed off the moods.
In those worlds, there was a man doomed. Trapped in his seat, Darren half-wondered if the end was the same in every world, but in this one, the means to get there were simply different.
The first demanding note of Tartini’s masterpiece drifted into a silent room.
Tartini was a good musician, a good violinist, but never exceptional—aside from this piece. A sonata for a solo violinist, peppered with trills that were almost impossible to perform perfectly, much less many of them in a single performance. Sharp halts and jolts, easy to slice and maul with a single wrong twitch of the bow arm, and yet jarring and beautiful to hear if performed exactly as prescribed.
The sonata had been born of a dream. Tartini had had a dream, in which the devil appeared to him and played exquisite music on Tartini’s own violin, the most challenging and terrible and wonderful music that he had ever heard. When he’d woken, he’d attempted to replicate the sonata, and he had failed. The result of his attempt was considered by many, including Tartini, to the best work he had ever written—but it was all a sad and substandard mimicry of the devil’s far more skilled hand.
Darren knew the feeling. Damnation wrote the best music. Damnation owned the best music. He had been best when the moods had taken him; his best performance had been when he was just fourteen, and his violin teacher had decided then and there he was fit for music college when he was older.
He had attempted suicide the same night.
And with Tartini’s damned and brilliant work stammering and stamping around the cavernous theatre, Darren felt the darkness settle into his skin like a physical touch, as real as Rachel’s hand on his forearm. He felt the swell of the age-old sickness bulging at the insides of his skull, and slowly, like dying, he felt sensation leeching away from his fingertips and creeping up his arms.
For the first time since he was sixteen, he let the music truly take him.
Chapter 16
Jayden was worried.
Well, not freaking-out-worried, not yet, but…still worried, a bit. Kind of.
Darren had been quiet. Well, quiet quiet, proper quiet, really quiet. Silent, really. He hadn’t been replying to texts very quickly, and when he had it had been short and almost rude, but there hadn’t been the angry vibe to it, exactly. Jayden didn’t think he was pissed off, really, but if he wasn’t, then…
Jayden had taken to trying to make up for his absence. He just couldn’t afford to Skype much, or even squeeze in proper phone calls. The exams were looming, and he hadn’t got through nearly the amount of coursework he needed to, but…still. He took to texting during lectures and seminars, between study groups and meals. In meals, a lot of the time, because Darren was most likely to reply (if he did at all) during breakfast and a late-taken dinner, maybe because of his work patterns.
They were just little texts, little love yous and miss yous between the rest of Jayden’s university life, and occasionally the odd you’re quiet, are you okay? in the hopes of prompting Darren into talking to him. Even a little bit, because he’d gone so quiet, and Jayden couldn’t help feeling a little bit like he was being…being shut out, almost. His latest had been a bit desperate-sounding, but honestly, if Darren didn’t shake it off soon, Jayden would be desperate, because this was all wrong, and the distance warranted a little call me later? I miss you xxx.
“Is there a good reason for him to be quiet?” Leah asked on one of the joint efforts she and Tim had of accosting
Jayden after lectures and putting pints of lager in front of him. Things were a little tense since their argument, but Jayden didn’t have the heart to pursue it, and Tim was a calming, mediating force between the pair of them. “You said he’s in training. Does he have exams or something coming up, like us?”
“I don’t know,” Jayden admitted. “He doesn’t really talk to me much about his job.”
Leah hummed, mouth twisting to the side. “Well, is everything okay with his family?”
“He doesn’t really talk to them much.”
“You mentioned his folks are getting divorced, though,” Tim said.
“Yeah, but he doesn’t like them,” Jayden insisted. “I mean, you know, he thought it was funny and everything.”
“Huh,” Leah said and smirked. “Takes all sorts.”
“Yeah, well, his half-brother is only like four years older than him, so, yeah,” Jayden mumbled, flicking through his phone inbox. Darren hadn’t texted him back in three days. His Facebook account was active, though, he’d left a status last night, so maybe he was just distracted by work. Maybe.
“Nice,” Tim said and grinned.
“Back on track,” Leah said, punching Tim in the arm. “Why are you worried? You obviously are.”
Jayden sighed. “He has depression.” The words sounded hideous and stark, and he wanted to take them back and use one of their euphemisms, but…but it was depression, and he hated it. He hated it.
“…Ah.”
“Yeah, he’s…ever since I met him, you know, he’s had these days, these moods he gets into…”
“So when you say he hasn’t been texting you back…”
“Oh, no, God no, he’s not…no!” Jayden protested immediately. “No, he’s, you know, he’s been talking to people on Facebook and things, and he got tagged at a pub with some of his colleagues the other day, so, um, no, but…”
“Okay, so he’s not in any actual danger right now,” Leah said. “But you think maybe one of these moods has crept up on him?”
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