Ever Fallen in Love

by Zoe Strachan

  Hang on, I said. When you say sportswear do you mean like a shellsuit or something?

  I’m trying to tell you a fucking story and all you can worry about is whether I wore a shellsuit?

  You have to admit, it is a crucial detail.

  I was seventeen years old, okay? I wore Fils tracksuit bottoms. Is that acceptable?

  No, not really.

  Christ. The point is that no-one’d talked to me about art before. I’d lived in that city my entire fucking life and never crossed the threshold of these places.

  Eventually, what do you know, one thing led to another and the young protégé ended up spending weekends in Dan’s cosy commuter belt cottage.

  What about your mum? I asked.

  None of her business, Luke said.

  But she must have worried.

  I guess she was used to me going AWOL.

  Luke could read what he wanted, drink what he wanted, sleep until whatever time he wanted, just so long as he acted his part. Especially when Dan’s friends came for Sunday lunch – yes, divine, isn’t it, apparently they bring it direct from the family farm in Umbria – and marvelled over this incontrovertible proof that a little nurture could kick the arse out of a whole lot of nature. Freedom and responsibility were discussed at length in the garden, chilled Pouilly Fumé splashing seductively, Ollie from the opera watching over Dan’s shoulder as Luke took a can of Coke from the fridge (friendly chuckles: I know, but I just can’t wean him off it). And Luke ignoring them steadfastly as he chose a spot in the sun, peeling off his t-shirt before lounging on the grass to read his Gide, that pretty parted lip expression of his utterly uncontrived; or was that my imagination, my own embellishment of the story?

  It wasn’t sexual, he explained.

  Sure, I said, thinking: strictly a philanthropist then, our man Dan, wouldn’t dream of demanding anything untoward of his pick-ups.

  Not directly, Luke added. Not at first.

  Dan’s friends were male, with the exception of a few faghags, all cackling innuendo and greasy red lipstick. One of them caught Luke in the upstairs bathroom with the broken lock, tried it on.

  I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d led her on to begin with, I said.

  He grinned. Maybe I had.

  So what did you do?

  I said no thanks.

  My expression must have mirrored my thoughts because he said, Pots and kettles, Richard. It’s not like you were a paragon when you were that age.

  I flushed. That was … an aberration.

  Luke had confided in Dan later, perhaps allowing a light tremble of his eyelashes as he tried to spare his host’s embarrassment at poor Minty’s behaviour. And guess whose side Dan was on? Despite his feminist pretensions, and a token lesbian at his soirees, he didn’t like women very much at all. Minty was a drunk and a nymphomaniac, and Dan couldn’t apologise enough.

  How could you stand it, I said. Trapped in the haute homosexualité.

  But I could picture it clearly, that warm summer in a secluded garden, bees buzzing, flowers blooming. Nice things to eat, crisp linen sheets. Not much of a trial, not really.

  I was playing, I suppose – Luke smiled at me, as though he’d been totally immersed in the memory – playing at another life.

  Well, didn’t you get tired of the game?

  Hmm. You can always change the rules.

  Striking through the malt one evening, Luke bored with Scrabble and Sibelius, not so choosy as long as he kept his eyes closed and pretended it was somebody else. Dan might not have been a feminist, but his other liberal principles were rock solid. Solid enough to act as a fixed point from which he could extrapolate with aplomb; well yes, when it comes down to it, of course my respect for you does necessitate that I consider you able to make adult decisions.

  What did he look like, I wanted to ask, but somehow this seemed too dangerous a question. I didn’t understand where or why a line had been drawn, only sensed that despite Luke’s inebriated insouciance, crossing it would snap him shut like a clam.

  A week or so later, holier than thou Dan was the one getting restless. Playing with his new pet was all very well, but he wanted a little bit more. Luke hadn’t tired of country life, and a promised clothes shopping trip had not yet materialised.

  I guess I had to rethink my boundaries, he said, running his thumb along the rim of his glass to catch a drip.

  Do you want another, I asked.

  Yes please, he said. A half and a half, maybe.

  Sure.

  As I stood at the bar waiting to be served, I imagined the sitting room of the cottage, the cosy yet chic décor. Glancing along the optics, catching my own reflection, wide-eyed in the mirror behind the gantry, I pictured a lazy hand job; coincidentally followed by the gift of new trainers and that jacket I admired. As I placed Luke’s drinks on the scuffed bar table in front of him and turned to retrieve my own, my imagination soared then dived right down. Had he let Dan push his cock between those chapped lips, had he sucked and swallowed just as I had? Except he’d have been kneeling on eiderdown where I was on grubby wet tiles.

  But Dan only had Luke’s best interests at heart. He scanned prospectuses and phoned admissions officers, negotiated special considerations and unusual circumstances, obtained glowing character references from friends in the arts. A few days making coffee and answering the phone for the owner of the fizzy wine gallery became a summer internship as a PA, during which he’d displayed a formidable capacity to learn as well as excellent teamworking skills. There is a thing called clearing, we’ll see what we can do.

  And here you are, I said.

  Yes, Luke agreed. Here I am.

  May I? I indicated his cigarettes.

  ‘Course.

  He flipped open the packet and pushed it across the table towards me. I took out a cigarette, tapped it as I’d seen him do, lit it and inhaled properly for a change. I felt the burn of the smoke, and was pleased I hadn’t coughed.

  Do you still see him, I was going to ask, but instead I said: Are you still in touch?

  Luke shrugged. Not really. Met for coffee once. Twice, actually. I saw him in Edinburgh. He gave me fifty quid for books for this term.

  Did you buy books?

  He smiled and tapped the side of his nose.

  So that’s it, I said, rotating my cigarette in the ashtray so that the tip became a sharp red point.

  Yeah, that’s it. It wasn’t really my thing, Luke concluded, tilting his glass and letting the whisky roll round the edges.

  The violence of my feelings startled me, the urge I had to force him, to push him back against that wooden choir stall and make it his thing. Because oh god, it was mine. Yes, my own dreams had been of boys my own age, a little older, but to be so offhand about receiving a proper invert’s education; a generous, liberal, middle-class shafting.

  22

  Richard’s phone vibrated with an incoming text message. He was coasting in the slow lane avoiding the juggernauts and if he’d been alone he might have slipped it out of his pocket and risked a peek. As it was he didn’t want to hand the phone over to Stephie in case the message was from Luke. He was taking a chance, he realised; when had Luke ever been reliable? He might be away for the week, or busy. There was no point in thinking ahead, in nurturing enough hope (though hope of what Richard wasn’t sure) to invite disappointment. Stephie was relaxed and enthusiastic, her legs stretched out in the passenger seat, singing along to the radio and topping up her lipgloss in the sunshield mirror. Every so often Richard smelled the sugary fruit scent of whatever she used. He wanted to ask her if she was really okay, to draw her out somehow, reassure himself as much as anything else. He’d found it hard to settle since he’d returned from Dundee. Somme was going well, better than he’d anticipated after all of Rupe’s niggles, but still Richard felt a sense of rising pressure. They needed to get through the beta test and marketing had to finalise a title and give it one last push before Lars gave it the green light. Games could fall apa
rt at this stage, turn from team efforts full of hope and promise to lonely failures.

  ‘This girl that drowned,’ Stephie said suddenly. ‘There would need to have been an inquest or something, wouldn’t there?’

  Richard flicked on his indicator and pulled out to overtake a caravan in front of them.

  ‘There was an inquiry,’ he said, curving back into the slow lane. ‘Her parents pushed the procurator fiscal for it.’

  ‘And what did they find?’

  ‘Accidental death.’

  ‘That could mean anything.’

  Don’t you think I know that, Richard wanted to shout, but there was a car with a trailer in front and he had to concentrate on overtaking. He and Luke had taken the bus to the neighbouring town, ended up slipping out of the court before it was over and getting straight on the next bus back. He’d thought he was going to be sick; Luke had said something about lynching. And then they’d done what they did so well. Got drunk, steadily and bitterly, in a pub as far from the university and the pier as they could manage, ignoring the locals and their sly, accusatory gaze. They just think we’re above ourselves, Luke had said, that’s all it is. And then, later, his accent not so dissimilar to theirs: what the fuck d’you think you’re looking at?

  ‘I know,’ Richard told Stephie, when he was back in lane. ‘I don’t know what people expected, what they wanted.’

  ‘Well it’s better than suicide, I’d imagine.’

  ‘It wasn’t that long after the ecstasy death scares in the papers and there were traces of MDMA in her bloodstream. The sheriff commented. Made quite a big deal of it.’

  ‘If that even had anything to do with it. She might have just slipped and fallen into the water.’

  That seemed worse, almost, in its arbitrariness. Greasy stone underfoot, a sliver of stray seaweed. Dark water and no handhold on the cold stone of the pier.

  ‘Anyhow,’ Stephie went on, ‘aren’t there always drugs in universities? They couldn’t have known where they came from.’

  ‘It was a small town,’ Richard said. ‘And a smaller social circle. It probably did come from Luke. From us.’

  ‘But the inquiry confirmed that it was an accident. What could they say?’

  Neither of them was specifying who ‘they’ were, Richard realised. Lucy’s parents with their glazed expressions, her friends with their tissues and red-rimmed eyes, her tutors blank-faced and serious. The Principal and the Vice-Principal and the Dean, who – nudged forward by the media relations officer – emphasised that it was impossible to underestimate the effect of the tragedy on the university community.

  ‘Luke,’ Richard said. ‘Well, he’d … had a kind of relationship with her.’

  ‘He’d slept with her, you mean.’

  ‘Ye-es.’

  ‘Hang on, what are you saying?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Richard hesitated. ‘Just that they parted on bad terms. That was mentioned, in the hearing at the University Court. You see it was listed in the Acts, Ordinances and Resolutions …’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Yes, I know. That’s what you get at an ancient university. They hold a Court of Discipline if someone has … let’s see if I can remember it … intentionally and recklessly endangered the safety or health of another member of the university.’

  ‘And selling drugs was …’

  ‘Intentional and reckless, yes. Resulting in deprivation of membership of the university or of a degree.’

  Richard noticed a lay-by coming up, a horseshoe off the road where two lorries were parked next to a food van. He pulled off, saying something about needing a coffee to Stephie, although it hadn’t been so long since they’d stopped. While he was waiting for the woman to find a new packet of plastic lids for her polystyrene cups he checked his phone. The message was from Calum, a reply to the one Richard had sent that morning. The presence of Stephie had allowed Richard to insist he’d stay in a B&B rather than with his old roommate, and he disliked himself for hoping that the short notice wouldn’t allow Calum to clear enough time to see him. His luck was in, it seemed: Calum was en route to a conference in Cambridge and would then be staying for the weekend with Verity’s parents. He assumed Verity was Calum’s wife, the mother of Kaylar. Richard remembered Calum’s freckled face and nice nature, being tempted by his early, earnest invitations to the Sci-Fi Society and the Live Action Roleplay Club. If Richard hadn’t already met Luke, he might have accepted.

  ‘There you go pet, there’s your coffees.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Richard said, turning back to the counter of the van. There was no message from Luke.

  ‘That’ll be three pound twenty,’ the woman said. ‘Milk and sugar’s just there.’

  He rummaged in his pocket for change and handed over the money, carefully peeled the lid from Stephie’s cup and topped it up with milk. He was almost back at the car before he noticed that she was standing on the other side of the parking area, by a picnic table that had been inelegantly positioned next to the toilet cabin. As he got closer he saw that she was speaking on her phone and held back. She spotted him and waved, smiling, so he moved forward.

  ‘Yes I’m studying,’ she was saying. ‘I’m just outside to get a mobile signal. No, I don’t know. A bit longer. Of course it’s fine with Richard. No, he’s out at the supermarket just now Mum. D’you want me to get him to phone you? Oh, okay. Well, I’ll tell him. Okay. Bye.’

  She made a face as she tucked her phone back into her handbag. Richard put her coffee down on the picnic table, next to a crude – was there was any other kind, he wondered – depiction of a penis gouged in the surface of the wood.

  ‘How’s Mum?’ he said.

  ‘Asking for you.’

  He nodded, wondering why they’d never been the kind of family that sent love rather than their best. Or perhaps they had been once, and he just didn’t remember.

  ‘Wondering why I’m still here. Or there, rather. I didn’t tell her we were away.’

  ‘No.’

  Stephie took the lid off her coffee cup and carefully pressed it into the mound of rubbish that was overflowing from the litter bin.

  ‘Mum and Dad, did they come to this hearing thing?’

  Richard leaned against the edge of the table, looking towards the motorway with its fast and constant flow of cars and vans and roaring lorries. ‘I sometimes used to think that it would have been easier on them if we’d been punished properly, both of us, charged and put on remand for possession with intent to supply or something like that.’

  Stephie poured a little of her coffee onto the patchy grass, swilled the rest round in the cup to cool it. ‘You were punished Richard. You were kicked out, all that time was wasted, you had to make a fresh start.’

  ‘But it’s like … it’s like that was another world. It was another world to me, never mind them.’

  ‘Because they were thickos who never went to uni, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘No, of course not. Just that they didn’t … oh, I don’t know.’

  How could he explain it, the look on his mother’s face as she met Dan, the way Dan seemed to be summing up Richard’s father, who looked – wholly inadvertently – slightly at odds with the law himself in his funeral suit. His shoes were the wrong colour, his trousers nestled below his belly and his jacket looked cheap next to Dan’s hand-tailoring and old school tie. It would have been disloyal to try to put it into words for Stephie. Richard hadn’t measured up either, there had been no secret signal, no hint of camaraderie. As though he and Luke had shared nothing. Was it any wonder, how things had worked out? How could his family compete, with his mum’s hesitance and his father’s accent, against the fur-trimmed robes of the Senate and Dan’s splendid endorsements of Luke. Guy’s parents had stated a vested interest too. Their name and title were shining from a brass plaque outside the new History of Art resource centre, and the Chief Constable had attended to urge against any unpleasantness or publicity.

  ‘It wasn’t an ideal
way to come out.’ Richard tried to laugh. ‘It was suggested that Luke and I were … you know. Mum and Dad hoped he’d led me astray, I suppose.’ He remembered trying to tell them that it wasn’t Luke’s fault, the tears he couldn’t quite hide seeming as shameful as anything else.

  ‘What about Luke’s mum, where was she?’

  ‘He wouldn’t let her come.’ Luke had said there was no point, that she’d never find her way there on time. And that he had someone else he’d bring instead, a friend, to act as sponsor. Dan, as it turned out, who deftly tilted the blame towards Richard. He’d taken it like a man, or so he thought at the time, although his legs had been trembling under the table.

  ‘Did you ever meet her?’ Stephie said.

  ‘Once. I chummed him to Edinburgh and we had a drink with her somewhere near the bus station.’ Somewhere with an island bar and seashell-shaped green leather booths, where Richard had bought a round of drinks that cost enough to make him panic as he scrabbled in his pockets for extra change to hand to the barman.

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘Okay. I thought so anyway. Drunk.’

  She’d seemed fun, knocking back her double vodka and coke and laughing with them in a way that he couldn’t imagine from his own mother. But Luke’s mum had been younger, with her ponytail and bright top, her jeans and her Caterpillar boots. Richard couldn’t remember her name.

  ‘Were you drunk?’

  ‘Maybe. But we didn’t show it so much. She did,’ as her laugh grew louder and her words slurred and the barman started to cast glances in their direction. Luke had given her money for the cigarette machine and she’d come back with no change and Marlboro Lights rather than her usual, cheaper brand. ‘And then they had a row. She touched his hair and said it was like his father’s, and he went mental. Shouted at her.’

  There had been something else, some conversation with a man and Luke muttering something under his breath that had shocked Richard. Stupid whore, that might have been it, and then they’d offered to walk her to her bus stop but she’d made excuses about fresh air and so they’d left her outside and gone to get their own bus home. They’d been meant to stay overnight, he recalled, to go clubbing somewhere druggy with banging techno. He’d felt relieved, on the long and dark journey home, to be drinking cans at the back of the Citylink instead.