The Devil's Trill Sonata

by Matthew J. Metzger

  Jayden hummed and nodded, tapping out a Facebook message in the hopes of reaching Darren there. Maybe he was just having phone issues? It wouldn’t be the first time; he had really shitty luck with phones. Call me soon? Or tell me when you’re free this weekend and I’ll call you. Love you x

  “So what’re you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Jayden admitted. “I mean, I’m texting him more and everything, but I don’t have time to really call him for a long time and wring it out of him, and I can’t actually visit with exams on top of us, and…”

  “Make time,” Leah said.

  “I’m trying,” Jayden said.

  She frowned, looking startlingly like Ella for a moment, but Tim—who Jayden was learning was a kind of hippie pacifist unless you advocated fox-hunting—jumped in before she could say anything else, with a huff and, “Yeah, it’s hard juggling everything, right?”

  “Mm.”

  “But I mean, if he’s depressed and shit, maybe you should tell someone near him he seems a bit weird?” Tim suggested. “His brother or someone?”

  “His brother is the last person you should tell anything,” Jayden said fervently. Scott had outed Darren to their extended family, including an apparently scandalised aunt, with a Christmas Eve photo of Jayden catching him under hand-held mistletoe. Jayden had just wanted to kiss his boyfriend. Within about five minutes, his boyfriend had been more preoccupied with trying to kill his older brother.

  “A housemate, then? A colleague?”

  Jayden chewed on his lip. “He’s really private, I don’t know if anyone else in Southampton knows he has depression.”

  “You don’t have to say he does,” Leah pointed out. “Just text his housemate asking her to check on him because you’ve not heard from him in a while. Easy.”

  Jayden flicked over onto Rachel’s Facebook. She had a picture of Darren on a night out in some random pub that he particularly hated because there was some short, blonde girl (tagged as Jodie Luckygal Dawkins) with a big chest pressed up against his arm and looking like she really wanted to get closer. He opened a new message to Rachel, obscuring Jodie’s beaming face, and hesitated.

  “What do I say?” he asked.

  “Just that,” Leah said. “Darren’s being weirdly quiet, can you just check on him for me? No need to mention anything. Could be totally innocent, could be asking if his phone is lost or he’s doing overtime or whatever.”

  Jayden typed out her message laboriously. It felt a little weird, because he’d never met Rachel and he had the urge to introduce himself, even though surely Darren had talked about him with her, and anyway, she would go on his Facebook page and see their relationship status, right? She’d know his name if nothing else.

  He clicked send, and tapped out of Facebook again, sending another little text to Darren on the way past his inbox. Leah shook her head. “I thought you fussed about him a bit,” she said.

  “Seems like a good thing, fussing about your partner,” Tim protested mildly.

  “Shagging doesn’t count,” Leah put in, and Tim went pink. “Yeah, guess who has a conviction for public indecency, by the way?”

  Jayden grimaced. His phone pinged, and he kept an ear on the conversation while unlocking it. Rachel.

  No prob :) I’ll go kick him for you when I get home :D

  * * * *

  Jayden’s phone rang at half seven. He was mid-way through an essay, but when Darren’s name started flashing on the screen, he abandoned it and locked the door to prevent this call, at least, being interrupted. This one was important.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “You set Rachel on me?”

  “You weren’t answering me!” Jayden protested, bouncing down onto his bed.

  “She walked into my flat and kicked me.”

  “…Okay, I didn’t think she’d actually kick you,” Jayden apologised. “Are you okay? I mean, apart from being kicked and everything?”

  “Mm.”

  Jayden bit his lip. “What does that mean?”

  “It’s like a shrug?”

  “…Darren.”

  “I’m okay,” Darren said finally. “I’ve been better, but I am okay.”

  Jayden curled his toes into the duvet. “Are you sure?” he whispered.

  “Yeah.”

  “…You’re really okay?”

  “Yes.”

  Jayden, frankly, wasn’t totally convinced, but he had called, and he’d sounded mildly offended at being kicked on request, which was better than some moods he’d been in that Jayden had seen, so…

  “So, um…I think I’m going to come and visit,” he said and heard the TV on the other end suddenly silenced. “I miss you, and I get a long Easter break, so I’m thinking maybe I could come and see you the first weekend of the holidays?”

  “Which is?”

  “Twenty-third of April is the Saturday,” Jayden said. “I mean, I don’t know if I have exams on the Friday, and some of my coursework is due after the break, but I could come that weekend and stay a few days, and it’s right near your birthday, so…you know. A weekend just for us.”

  “I’ll have to lock Rachel out and chain the door.”

  “I don’t mind,” Jayden said, finally finding a smile. It felt a little odd, like he wasn’t used to doing it anymore. “She might, but I don’t, and I think your boyfriend trumps your housemate.”

  “I dunno,” Darren said. “I don’t have to live with you being a pissy bitch.” It was a Darren-esque line, and in one way relieving, but it was also lacking in his quiet, warm tone, the one that sounded like humour even though Jayden couldn’t quite define it. Kind of…flat.

  “Are you…?”

  “So how’s Cambridge?” Darren interrupted and sounding uninterested in the answer. Jayden frowned.

  “Stressful,” he admitted. “I’m in over my head with some of this coursework, I think, and it’s hard missing you all the time, because it just adds to it, and I need a break. I need a holiday.”

  “You’ll always have Paris.”

  “Yeah,” Jayden agreed quietly, “and Southampton. And you.”

  Darren hummed again. Jayden chewed his lip.

  “What’s wrong?” he whispered.

  Darren sighed heavily; the phone crackled in the exhale, and Jayden could just picture him rolling his head back into the chair or the bed or wherever he was, and looking to the ceiling like Jayden had either said something really difficult to understand, or phenomenally stupid. He didn’t know which one he preferred right now.

  “Darren?” he prompted.

  “I’m…I’m just a bit stressed,” Darren admitted. “Training is boring and I’m having to keep telling myself it’ll be better once I’m out there doing it instead of sitting in a classroom. I couldn’t do a degree.”

  Jayden mustered up a little smile. He knew that well enough. Darren was clever—as clever as Jayden, really, because you had to be clever to be able to get an A* in A-level maths, in Jayden’s barely-numerical opinion—but he just hated school. He was bored stiff at school; the one class they’d shared, which not coincidentally St. John’s had made mandatory for sixth-formers, Darren had been fidgety, restless, and a complete distraction. His parents—and Jayden’s—had nagged him to pick a degree course and go to university for the entire two years Jayden had been at St. John’s with him, but…

  Well, much as Jayden had wanted him to apply to Cambridge to come here too, deep down he knew it would have been a mistake on Darren’s part. He just didn’t do classroom learning. He could, but he didn’t.

  “And I miss you,” Darren admitted finally, and Jayden’s stomach twisted in a warm way. “I guess I’m sick of not being able to wander round yours after school or work or whatever and bitch about people you don’t know.”

  “Then do that when I come to see you,” Jayden suggested. “I’ll come on Friday night instead of Saturday morning, and you can come and pick me up after your training and tell me all the police crime scene go
ssip on the way home.”

  “I don’t finish until five most days. Sometimes six on a Friday.”

  “That’s fine, I don’t know if I have an exam on that Friday yet,” Jayden bargained. “Do it, let’s do that. I’ll get a train for like six-thirty into Southampton Central…”

  “Portsmouth.”

  “Why?”

  “It’ll be cheaper and quicker for you, and in the after-work traffic it doesn’t add much to my journey time anyway. My flat’s the Portsmouth side of Southampton anyway.”

  “Okay,” Jayden said, warming to the idea—mostly because Darren was warming to it, and his tone was sounding less flat, and he sounded more like himself and less like…less bad. That didn’t make much sense, but it was true anyway. “So I’ll come to Portsmouth for half six, and we can get a crappy takeaway or something.” It was a guilty pleasure. He’d never admit it to Ella and Jonathon, or even Leah (but maybe Tim, he seemed like a crappy takeaway kind of guy) but one thing he’d loved about sixth form was Darren filching money off Scott on Friday mornings and walking round the chippie near Jayden’s house in the evening to get a really crappy, third-quality portion of fish and greasy chips. He missed that. The college was on a big healthy eating kick, and getting to cuddle up on a sofa with Darren and share some really bad food was… “I really want my exams to be over now,” he said. “I bet Portsmouth has some really bad takeaways.”

  “Disgusting,” Darren agreed. “I’ll show you the kebab house round the corner from the local nick. I’m pretty sure it’s ex-police-dog in there.”

  “Darren!” Jayden laughed, but his anxiety was lifting with every poor, dryly-delivered joke. Darren wasn’t having a bad day like he’d feared, he was just having a normal bad day like everybody had. Jayden could cope with that, he could even help with that, because everybody had normal bad days.

  “Well, the other option is cat, and the police don’t have cats.”

  “You’re awful,” Jayden said, turning over to smile at his pillow in lieu of Darren himself. “So Friday the twenty-second, for six-thirty-ish? I’ll book it once the exam timetable comes out and send you an exact time.”

  “All right.”

  “And Darren?”

  “Mm?”

  “Feel better soon?” Jayden coaxed. “I never thought I’d say this, but I miss your text spams.”

  Darren paused, then huffed. “Can I get that in writing?”

  “No. Love you.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Love you too. Loser.”

  Chapter 17

  Darren was a liar.

  He knew he was a liar, and he was mostly okay with it. He’d lied for years: ‘fine’, ‘okay’, and ‘nothing’s up, I’m just tired’ were his particular areas of expertise. He’d lied about music and he’d lied about school and he’d lied about what he wanted to do ever since Father had given him the violin. He’d been lying to Scott since he was about twelve, once or twice to Mother and Father in the intervening period, to Paul and Ethan since they’d met, and to Jayden since…well, since the end of the school, really.

  That was the slightly jarring part, he supposed. He’d never made a habit of lying to Jayden, mostly because Jayden was smarter than that and would catch him out in about half an hour. And it had been…maybe not nice, but anchoring, to have someone who would know he was lying. There was always a certain disappointment when Scott believed him, even though Darren was relieved that he’d never really twigged. (Or at least, if he had, he was as big a liar as Darren himself.) It had been somehow nice to learn that Paul and Ethan had seen through at least some of the ‘I’m fine’-style lies, if not all of them.

  But he’d lied last night on the phone, and it had been depressingly easy. Jayden hadn’t been convinced; Darren wasn’t naive enough to assume he had been, but he hadn’t actually caught on either. In school, if Jayden was convinced Darren wasn’t okay, he did something. (He’d once gotten detention for a week for walking out of a sixth form history class because Darren, home ill, hadn’t replied to a text within fifteen minutes.) And last night, he’d…well. He’d allowed Darren to fob him off, basically.

  Which meant that Darren felt no different upon getting up the next day. Work was a sort of fuzzy have to in his mind, rather than something to look forward to (practical exercises) or loathe (note-taking from one particular instructor with the unfortunately telling last name of Sleeper). The shower, set to scalding, didn’t pierce the haze. He stubbed his toe on the sink column, but only noticed when the nail started to bleed and stained the white linoleum scarlet. He caught himself snapping his fingers as he made lunch, but was unaware of either the noise or the sensation. Turning the car out of the driveway usually created a little twinge in his shoulder with the twist required to check the avenue before pulling out; today, he watched his fingers twitch minutely, but felt nothing.

  He felt nothing.

  This was the worst part. He could cope with the lethargy. He could cope with the idea that there was no real point because, hey, there was very little point to most of what he did anyway. He could cope with the quiet flat when Rachel was out, because until Jayden, he had spent entire days in his room without being disturbed. He could cope with the quiet and undisturbed nature of his life. He could cope with all of that.

  It was the numbness that did him. It was the sensation of no sensation; the lack of feeling. He would take feeling intense sadness, or anger, or anything at all, over the casual wonder in the back of his mind as to whether he would notice if he was decapitated today. Whether he would feel it if he stepped in front of a car, or walked down to the level crossing and just didn’t walk off it again. Whether it would get through the fog if he just didn’t turn the wheel far enough on the final run down to the training centre, and let the car barrel across the road at fifty miles an hour into the ancient oak tree marking the turn?

  Would he?

  For a brief moment, as said tree loomed in front of him on that final part of the morning commute, he stayed perfectly still. The barest centimetre of tracked rubber inched over the white centre line, the car straying for a mere millisecond into the wrong lane. It would be easy. It would be so easy. The corner was sharp. No one would ever have to know why. It would just be an accident, a stupid accident because he wasn’t being careful enough. Nobody would ever know.

  Then he twisted the wheel, and the car lurched down the hill towards the training centre, the entire world oblivious to the temptation. Including his own body: there’d been no rush, no adrenalin, no instinct kicking in to jerk the wheel sideways and avoid the tree even if it ended up flipping the car at that speed. No reaction to what he’d nearly done, except the vague question of why he hadn’t. There had been nothing to stop him.

  “You did stop,” Darren murmured to himself as he waved his pass at the officer on the gate.

  “Took that corner a bit sharp, didn’t you, mate?” The officer grinned toothily.

  Darren found his face twisted into a smile. “Must’ve zoned out.”

  “Ah, we’ve all been there,” the officer agreed, handing back the pass as the barrier rose. Darren doubted he had been there.

  “All right, Daz!” a figure shouted as he passed the main entrance, and Darren raised a hand vaguely. It would be easy here too. Nobody obeyed the speed limit, nobody would raise an eyebrow at him taking the car to the end at forty and turning it round to get one of the slanted spaces near the door. Everyone did it. All he had to do was just…not brake. Not turn. The end of the building that made up the north wall of the car park was just storage space and computer servers. No one would be hurt.

  He turned and brought the car into one of the slanted spaces. He could see the vague figures of his training group through the smoked glass of the lobby and waved as he hefted his kit bag out of the boot. He pushed it up onto his left shoulder, and though his fingers relaxed at his belt, he still felt nothing.

  “All right, mate?” A beefy hand clapped him on the back, and Darren offered a brief smile for Trev
.

  “Been better,” he admitted.

  “Yeah, think we all have,” Trev grumbled. “You coming down with the bug and all? You’re looking a bit off.”

  “Cheers,” Darren said sourly. “And what bug?”

  “Flu,” Trev said cheerfully, holding the door. “My kids have had it, Amy’s littl’un’s got it now, the missus came down yesterday. I’m feeling a bit croaky myself.”

  “Probably,” Darren hedged, nodding at Amy, who was looking decidedly like Trev was telling the truth: she was holding a tissue over her nose and mouth, and looking like she had no intention of lowering it any time soon. “Wasn’t feeling too well when I got up, anyway.”

  “Ah, you’ll be all right in a week,” Trev said. “You’ll wish you were dead for that week, mind!”

  Darren was saved from trying to answer by the appearance of their instructor for the morning, who took one look at the assembled group and said, “Right. If anyone sneezes or coughs without their fucking hand over their face, they will be the next body for practicals. And trust me, the practical training centre is cold. Got it?”

  Got it, Darren thought, although in reality, he’d have made a very good corpse if practicals had been today.

  * * * *

  “All right, back in this classroom in an hour,” DS Forrester announced, glancing at her watch. She was a tall, busty woman whose engorged bosom was about the only womanly thing about her. “Peace and McKinley, a word.”

  Darren and Stephen McKinley, one of the trainees who said very little to anybody else, stayed seated. Trev clapped Darren on the shoulder, muttered, “I’ll make sure someone mixes up a brew for you, mate.”

  “Cheers.”

  “McKinley, you need to go up to the third floor and fill out a bank details form because you missed last week’s admin crap,” DS Forrester rumbled. (She had an alarmingly deep voice.) “Do it now before the clerks sod off for their own lunch. Bugger all gets done after that.”

  McKinley disappeared, and Darren rose from his seat.

  “You,” DS Forrester pointed a stubby finger at him. “You’re usually quiet. Not feeling well?”