“But how would they know what to do differently? If they didn’t know what was going to hit them?”
“No, they wouldn’t know. But supposing they’d offered themselves up, like a sacrifice. Supposing they’d tossed a coin that morning and asked it a question: Should I leave the house five minutes earlier today? Should I cross the road at the first lights or the second? Should I get a pizza at lunch or take a home-made sandwich? When I go to Northseas High, should I walk down that corridor or that one? Then everything might have been different. So they could have changed their lives, if they’d done a tiny thing differently. Like Buddy Holly’s band member, Tommy Allsup. You know about that?”
“No, but I’m guessing you’re going to tell me.”
“Tommy Allsup was supposed to be in the plane that crashed and killed Buddy Holly, but somebody else wanted to go. Tommy agreed to toss a coin for the seat and he lost. The other guy died. If he hadn’t agreed to toss the coin, Tommy would have died.”
“Wow.”
He passes her one of the glasses with the clear liquid in. “It’s OK – I’ll just have water,” she says. She doesn’t know why. It just seems to be what she wants to say, and yet she sort of doesn’t. The words just come out of her mouth. Of course, she is the one who instructed her brain but she doesn’t really know why or even when or whether.
“Sure? It’s elderflower cordial.”
“Oh, right! Yes, please, then.”
“You thought it was vodka!”
“Well, yes, but…”
“So you don’t drink then?”
“Yes, of course I do. But…” But what? Jess doesn’t know. Is it an issue? It’s like chocolate. She eats chocolate but she might easily have said no to chocolate. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t eat chocolate. Chocolate isn’t an issue.
Jack gets up and goes to a cupboard. Removes an unopened bottle of vodka. “You sure? Just one?”
Now she’s said no, she wants to stay saying no. Or she would feel manipulated. “No, thanks. It’s OK.”
Jack places it on the table. Picks up the coin, does that showing off spinny thing again, looks at the coin where it lands. With a blank expression, he picks up the bottle and puts it back in the cupboard. “Me neither.” He sits back down next to her. “That bottle has been there since my eighteenth birthday. Someone gave it to me.”
“So, you don’t drink?”
“Actually, no, I don’t, mostly. Except sometimes, a bit, when I want to. It’s a control thing. Alcohol removes free will. Sorry, being pretentious again. I get like that.” And Jack looks down at the floor and fiddles with a piece of thread from the edge of a rug and then looks up at Jess and she melts. There is something about him. There is a lot about him and half of it is strange but all of it is exciting.
She picks up the coin and tries to flick it into the air. It twists once and then drops like lead to the ground, where it performs a pathetic totter before rolling under a table.
He retrieves it. He takes her hand, and her heart tumbles as he manipulates the fingers into the right position. He balances the coin on the edge of her middle finger and places her thumb lightly beneath it. “Gently,” he says. “Flick.” She feels his breath on her face. She flicks, and the coin spins a couple of times. He catches it, spins it again and brings it down on the back of her hand, which he has taken in his left. He covers it with his right hand, looks at her and asks, “Heads or tails? Concentrate. Imagine the answer’s important.”
She tries to think. It’s not easy when he’s holding her hand, but she tries. In her mind heads and tails vie for position. She could say either. Which will she say? Heads? Tails? Heads? Tails? How can she decide? Her mouth has to say one or the other – it would be ridiculous not to be able to decide. But what will make her say heads? Or tails? Heads? Tails? Come on, just say one!
“Tails.” It is tails. “Yes!” She is ridiculously pleased.
“Chance?” he asks.
“Luck,” she replies.
“Exactly! So do you want to play the game for real? After all, bad luck could strike you on your way home. Or later. And maybe by making a sacrifice to luck now, you will avoid that.”
“Well, I’d better do it, then, hadn’t I? Wouldn’t want a tortoise dropping on my head.”
“Exactly. So, here’s what we do. We ask a really important question and we have to promise to go with the answer. You have to put yourself in the hands of luck and then luck will look after you. Sometimes. So you see, if we get the answer we don’t want, it’s OK because it makes good luck more likely to follow. Probably. It’s a kind of win–win situation.”
He looks at her, sips his drink that is not vodka. “Ready?”
She nods.
“OK, here’s the question.” He pauses. The coin is rippling through his fingers again. His lips part and then he asks, “Will you kiss me?”
Heart flips. Looks down, as though shy. Well, she feels shy. She can’t meet his eyes. Her skin holds its breath. The universe has two parts: there is the bubble of airlessnesss that holds her body, and there is the world outside it.
He is talking again. “That’s the question. Are you prepared to go with the answer? It could be yes or no. Fifty–fifty chance. In theory. Heads is yes, by the way.”
She takes a drink too. She wishes it was vodka. “Yes.” Sweat is on her palms. There are footsteps downstairs, the sound of a toilet flushing, a door closing. She breathes, but only just.
He flicks the coin with his thumb, high into the air. They both watch it spin and fall into his hand, where he grabs it and slaps his palm onto the back of his other hand but does not reveal the coin. He has not seen it either. And now Jess knows how much she wants the coin to land the right way up.
It doesn’t.
CHAPTER 8
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
JACK has walked Jess home. They do not kiss because the game has not allowed them to. But he catches her hand as she opens the gate and something snatches her throat.
“See you tomorrow,” he says. It is dark but she can see his eyes in the streetlight. It should probably be moonlight but it isn’t.
She says something ordinary. Maybe she says Yes or See you or Thanks for walking me home or something. It doesn’t matter because it wouldn’t make any difference to anything. They are now linked anyway and they both know it. Nothing needs to be said.
Of course, either of them could choose to say something that would stop this relationship dead. “Free will” should allow them to let any words out of their mouths. Like, Sorry, I think we’re making a mistake. I don’t want to see you again. Or I am only interested in you for what you can bring to the band, by the way. But it’s not going to happen. Because although they technically could say that, the words that come from their mouths have to come from something that already exists inside them. Everything has a reason, purpose or cause. One thing leads to another and for now everything leads them to feel desire.
The coin landing the wrong way has only increased that. So, maybe it did make a difference.
Jack watches as she goes up the path and turns her key in the door. He sees her walk inside, turn the light on and wave to him. He waves back, stands a moment longer and then walks home. He reaches home safely. Although many things could happen, they usually don’t. And for everything that happens, there are billions and billions more that don’t.
On that short journey, he walks slowly, though he doesn’t particularly mean to. Time has clunked into a new groove and there is more in the world to be sensed now. There are more star patterns than he thought and space is deeper and there is energy in every cell of him and the nearby chippy smells mouth-watering. Around him, the night is warm and close and treacly. He lifts his hand – the one that touched Jess’s – to his face and then punches the air and all his excitement comes out in one word: “Yesss!”
Lucky Jack. He has a girl for his band. Not just any girl, not just the sort of girl you’d get if you measured the probability, or
if chance was really random, or if dreams were in any way realistic, but this girl. A girl with wide brown eyes and caramel skin and a voice smooth and rich as chocolate.
Jess, meanwhile, walks into the kitchen and gets herself a drink of water, which she carries slowly up to bed. She feels alive. As though before she has merely been sleepwalking and now she is fully awake. In the bathroom mirror, before she removes her make-up, she stares and tries to see what Jack must see. She knows she must be the same as this morning, and yet it feels as though everything has changed, as if she’s on the edge of something huge and invisible.
Soon, she is in her bed, childhood toys staring down from the top of a wardrobe. They are probably thick with dust because she has not touched them for a long time but she still knows they are there. One day they will no longer exist; it is not possible to imagine the moments when each will be thrown away, but for each toy that moment will happen.
Sleep is nowhere near. She gets out of bed again, sensing the carpet between her toes and her pyjama straps on her shoulders as she walks towards the window. The night is hot and thick and windless.
Something important has happened to her that ordinary day and she had not been expecting anything like it at all.
She thinks back to the luck that meant that Jack had heard her sing. And when she tries to take in the factors that had to be right for it to happen, when she tries to contemplate how easily it might not have, her mind is boggled and overwhelmed. It is best not to think, to take it in one’s stride and just let things happen. Jack thinks he can manipulate luck. But she is not so sure. She wants to believe, but he could be wrong.
She’s quite happy to go along with it though. After all, it’s just a game. Won’t make any difference. It’s even kind of interesting.
As she’s lying in bed later, not really trying to sleep, just enjoying thinking about the evening and all the feelings of it, she hears her mum come back. There’s a crash of something being dropped, the door shutting too noisily, her mum cursing as she knocks against something. It’s the sound of a drunk person trying to be quiet. Just one person – it doesn’t seem as though Julia has come back with her. Which is lucky, since then there’d be double the noise and a load of laughing and in the morning Jess would have to look at Julia’s large middle-aged body spilling out of the skimpy clothes she’d been wearing the night before and would have to remind her that no, she can’t smoke in the house because that’s the house rule. Julia would roll her eyes and look scathingly at Jess and Sylvia would say something vaguely irritating to both of them. And the house would smell of stale cigarettes and dregs of wine and residual sweaty perfume.
Soon, the house is silent again. Her mum has gone to bed. Jess wonders if she ought to go and check that she’s OK. No, her mum should look after herself.
A few minutes later, there’s a hurried stumbling of feet across the landing, a groan and the sound of her mother vomiting in the toilet.
Jess turns on her side, pulls the duvet over her head, and eventually blocks her mother out.
CHAPTER 9
THE COLOUR OF LOSS
IT is the following day, a head-rushing hot Saturday. It will soon be evening, when darkness will bring something perilous to Jack or Jess. But for now it is day and the sky is clear. Some things will happen that are not dangerous at all. Although perhaps all those things, too, are part of the whole jumble and you just can’t untangle it: small things having huge and unpredictable effects, like butterfly wings in New York causing hurricanes in Indonesia. Or whatever it is.
In the morning, Jess had fed Spike and was leaving the kitchen, toast in mouth, tea cooling in mug, when Sylvia groaned down the stairs, gripping the banister with one hand, one finger and thumb of the other pressing tightly into her forehead as though she could squeeze out the pain if she pressed hard enough.
“Gotta go, Mum. I’m going to Jack’s house – band practice? You look rough.”
“Thanks. What band?”
“Jack’s band, Mum. I told you. Anyway, gotta go. Don’t know when I’ll be back. Sometime this afternoon. Then I’m out tonight.”
Sylvia made a noise sufficient to suggest that she vaguely understood this and had no strength to disagree.
Soon afterwards, wth the curtains of her mum’s bedroom still grimly closed, Jess leaves the house, refusing to think of her mother, though it’s not easy. A brief anger flashes.
The moment when she arrives at Jack’s house is not one she will forget. He has come to meet her at the end of the road and his wide smile as he says hello makes her heart turn over. He grabs her hand and leads her into the garage. Jack’s garage is large and contains no sign of cars. To be fair, there are two garages, and the other one presumably has a car in it, but this one is seriously kitted out for a band practice.
The fractional silence, as the band turns to see this girl that Jack has found, is something loaded. One boy lets out a long, low whistle, then comes to greet her from behind his drums.
“Meet Tommy,” says Jack.
A girl with a nest of streaky blonde hair and black-rimmed eyes smiles at Jess from behind a keyboard and says, “Hi, I’m Ella.”
“That’s Chris,” says Jack, and Chris raises his hand, and then plays an impressive series of chords on his bass guitar. Jack helps her get her mic at the right level and asks if she is OK. She nods, unable to speak. He picks up his guitar. He wears a thick, red sweat band round his forehead, holding his hair off his face. Jess takes in his prominent cheekbones, his angular boniness and firm chin.
They start with the songs Jess and Jack practised the night before. Jess quickly comes to love the sensation of the others around her, all working together without edge. She relaxes into the feeling of singing with a band, and it is as though she has done it before. It is better than being in her bedroom on her own, pretending, or in the school music department singing over a backing track. This is so real it is almost touchable.
She tunes into their wavelength easily. Nearly two hours pass; the songs become familiar. She adds her own flavour to them. Sometimes they argue a little about details. All of them are serious musicians; there is no weak link, no difficult ego.
“What about your song?” asks Ella, at one point.
“What?”
“Jack said when he first heard you, you were singing something and you said it was your own.”
“The Colour of Loss”. She is not ready. She does not have her guitar.
Rubbish, they say. She can use Jack’s. He hands it over. Chris and Ella sit on the ground. Jack steps back into the shadows. She has no choice. She fiddles with the tuning pegs a little. It does not, in fact, need tuning but she is playing for time. Tries out a few chords, shifts into a comfortable position, foot on a stool, leaning over the guitar. Tucks a strand of long hair behind her ear. Closes her eyes and takes herself away and into the song.
At one point, she forgets the words, hesitates, stumbles, but no one moves. The song continues. Although she wrote the lyrics, “loss” is not something she often thinks about. The only things she believes she has lost are her father and a hamster that died when she was five years old, but neither of these losses has seemed to hurt her deeply. Not in any damaging way. There are no scars that she can see. But everyone can imagine loss and grief, and her song taps into that. She is not thinking about the meaning while she sings, only the colour of it, the pearliest blue. For grief can be beautiful, she thinks. It is not always dark.
“I didn’t mean to lose you,
I’d have done it on a different day,
If I had known
If I had known another way
I’d have breathed a longer breath
Walked a twisted path
Danced a slower beat
Laughed a softer laugh
If I had known
We had no other day.
And then again I’d say
I only need a sadder song
And you’d be gone.
For there is no ot
her way.”
* * *
The words on their own, written down, are nothing much. But when the music fills them and her voice gives them life they become stronger than all those things. When she finishes, there is silence. And then sounds of admiration. She smiles, blushes.
“You have to play that,” says Tommy. “Doesn’t she, Jack? At the next gig. On her own?” There is a murmur of agreement.
Jack is still in the shadows. He is bending down to pick something up. There is a long moment when he says nothing. Then, “Definitely. Let’s take a break, shall we? Anyone want tea or anything?” And he leaves the garage with their requests.
Outside, Jack stops. He takes some deep breaths. Jess’s song has corkscrewed its way inside of him. He had not properly heard the lyrics before, being struck only by her voice, and now the words have churned something deep in him but he cannot quite say what.
Jack goes into the house. He is on his way to the kitchen but in the hall he stops. Sunlight is shafting through a circular window halfway up the stairs and dust swirls in its beam. For a few measureless moments, he does not feel his body. He is outside, watching himself stand there alone. He sees everything as though he has never seen it before, although he has lived here for about ten years. It is shiny and beautiful and the house breathes a bright yellow air.
Suddenly, he smells the sea, the salty chill fishiness of it. It waves through him, catching him unawares, and it leaves with a cold ripple across his skin.
A thought comes to Jack then: how would all this be different if his mother – either of them – had not died? And this is what he has lost, not his mothers, who are in some ways still there as part of him. What he has lost is everything that hasn’t happened to him, everything that he is not, but might have been.
Wasted Page 4