‘Why can’t she just get it?’ Danni pleaded, cutting off a call from her mother as she and Layla were queuing in the chippy one night, after closing time. Her eyes were fixed on the blackboard menu, giving the impression she was talking to herself rather than Layla.
‘Get what?’ Layla shot back, but they were at the counter by then, and either Danni hadn’t heard above the clash of metal and the hiss of hot fat or pretended she hadn’t. Whichever it was, Layla felt she couldn’t ask again. She’d just wished that whatever it was would sort itself out soon. She hated to see Danni so unhappy.
When someone in their year invited them to a pre-finals party, it seemed the perfect way to bust the pressure a bit. Danni said she wasn’t going; she wasn’t in the mood and had far too much work to do.
‘Haven’t we all?’ Layla said.
Excuses. She wasn’t giving in. Danni needed this. They both did.
She waited until the evening of the party, then cornered Danni in her room with a last-ditch throwaway plea.
‘Well, I’m going to this party, with or without you.’
Danni sighed, wriggled out from beneath the laptop, and narrowed her eyes at Layla. ‘Will it be a girls’ night?’
‘Girls’ night. Totally.’
‘Promise?’
‘Scout’s honour.’
‘Gotcha! You weren’t a Scout.’
‘Brownie’s honour then.’
Beyond the window, the sun had slipped lower, reaching between the half-drawn curtains to paint Danni’s face ghostly white and etch deep shadows beneath her eyes. Her forehead gleamed unhealthily with sweat. Forget the party, Layla wanted to say, regretting her strong-arm technique. Catch an early night instead.
But before she could say it, Danni was off the bed, kicking off grubby pink ballerinas, sashaying out of grey trackies, shooting a smile. ‘Fine, you win. Let’s do it.
Raking through the hangers in the wardrobe, she hooked out a black silky slip of a dress, still with the tags on. It had Nathan written all over it. ‘This do?’
The house was in a dilapidated Georgian terrace, in a part of town they didn’t know. It was wide and tall, with high windows and a deep basement topped with railings. Layla rang the bell on the peeling front door, but it had no chance of competing with the bass boom coming from within. Danni shoved the door with her foot. It opened onto a once grand hallway with several doors leading off it. Most of the doors had felt-tipped keep out notices taped to them in language ranging from politely funny to downright filthy.
Following the direction of the music, they squeezed along the teeming passageway and down the stairs to the communal area in the basement. At the kitchen end, a row of mismatched tables formed the bar. Layla unscrewed the top of one of the bottles of wine they’d brought with them. There were no glasses, only plastic tumblers. She half-filled two, but Danni grabbed the bottle, necked a mouthful, then frowned at the label.
‘I don’t fancy this much.’ She stood the bottle down, reached for a litre bottle of vodka – ‘Ah…’ – and tipped a generous measure into a tumbler. ‘Up yours.’
Above the ear-splitting din, Danni’s voice shrilled long-lost-friend greetings to people she’d seen in the last week, if not the last day. Layla watched her blonde head bobbing through the horde with a nervy fascination. It took a while, usually, for Danni to embrace the spirit of a party, become part of the action. Tonight, it was as if she had cast off her persona at the door like a pair of muddy shoes and become somebody else entirely.
Layla danced, laughed, mouthed words at friends, and drank wine. Danni was right, it was rank but it would do the job. It was some time before she realised she’d lost sight of Danni. She scanned the heads, then pressed between hot bodies to search further. The basement was almost pitch black apart from firework flashes from the lights on the sound system and the quivering stars of fairy-lights strung around the walls. Peering through the gloom, she attempted a systematic search. No sign of Danni.
Layla headed for the stairs. Music riffed out of a room off the hallway. She pushed in through the half open door. If anything, it was even darker in here than downstairs, the atmosphere less full-on, more intimate. Stumbling through the crush, she found Danni in the corner, lounging half on a chair and half across the lap of a boy Layla had never seen before.
She grimaced into the darkness as the two of them leaned in for a lengthy snog. ‘Don’t mind me.’
‘We won’t.’ Danni giggled, and kissed the boy again, her arms looped around his neck. ‘This is Art,’ she said, releasing him. ‘Well, not art as such, not like in a painting, obviously. It’s his name. Art. Funny, isn’t it?’
‘Hilarious.’
Danni giggled again, a falsely high-pitched sound. Her eyes were all glittery. Layla caught a whiff of something pungent and saw the glowing end of a spliff pinched between Art’s fingers. He offered it to Layla, holding it high above his head as if it was an Olympic torch.
‘Want some?’
Layla ignored him. ‘Danni, come on. Let’s go back downstairs.’
‘I’m all right here, with Art. Have a puff, go on. Don’t be a wuss.’
Danni took the spliff from Art, drew deeply on it and passed it to Layla. She took it and put it to her lips, avoiding drawing on it properly. Passing it back to Art, she tried to work out her next move. It was useless reminding Danni that this was supposed to be a girls’ night – she doubted she’d even remember the last half hour, let alone anything that had gone before. At some point, though – preferably before dawn – she would have to get her home, unscathed. By the look of her it would be more a case of damage limitation.
Layla began to feel a little bit lonely. She was missing Harvey. Seriously missing him. It was impossible not to, in the face of all this amorous activity. She half wished she’d given in to his puppy-dog appeal and brought him along, but she’d held firm. This was a finals party. Besides, tonight was supposed to be about Danni, to help her loosen up before exams. It was just a pity her friend had interpreted the intention in a different way entirely.
Art was struggling to his feet now, pulling Danni up with him to merge into one shadowy shape swaying roughly in time to the music. Perhaps it wasn’t so bad, Layla thought. If Danni wanted to bring out her wild child, who was she to stop her? She wasn’t her bodyguard, or her mother. She took a last look, averting her gaze from Art’s hand caressing Danni’s white thigh below the hem of her dress which had ridden up to thong height, and left them to it.
It was after one a.m. when Layla gave in to the undertow she’d been kicking against all night and rang Harvey. Bored with dancing and drinking, and watching people beginning to pair off, like Danni and Art, she needed to hear his voice.
Harvey was in bed but he hadn’t been asleep. ‘Jump in a cab and get yourself over here. You know you want to.’
She could see his eyes shining narrowly in the semi-darkness of his room in halls, his naked chest and the perfect curve of muscle in his forearm as he held the phone… She sighed.
‘I do want to, but I can’t. I have to look after Danni, get her home safely.’
But already the riptide pull of Harvey was proving too strong. He sensed her weakness, knew she’d give in. He didn’t even have to try.
‘Layla, Layla, Lay-laa,’ she heard him sing softly into the phone as she stood on the doorstep beneath a navy-blue sky pierced with stars.
‘Okay, you win. I’ll be there.’
In her mind she saw his victorious smile. She felt light, happy, and loved.
Back inside the house, she made her way to the room where she’d last seen Danni. She tapped her on the shoulder, hard, twice, before Danni looked round.
‘Hiya!’ she said, as if it was the first time she’d seen Layla all night.
‘Danni, I’m going now. Will you be all right?’
‘Going?’ Danni stopped dancing, without detaching herself from Art. ‘No, don’t. Stay. Have some fun.’
Layla hesitated, but only
for a moment. There was a taxi rank on the corner. She could be there in five minutes, in Harvey’s arms in fifteen.
Chapter Eight
Morgan was writing at home in the flat, trying to make up for the time he’d lost yesterday. The window was partly open, and the growl of idling engines drifted up as the procession of beach-goers nudged its way towards the jaws of the underground car park. The weather wasn’t even that warm yet. The sea would be freezing, but that wouldn’t stop them wading right in there, pasty bodies peppered in goosebumps. Morgan gave what Kate called his crusty old codger head-shake and typed his next chapter heading.
It didn’t matter that he was working on a Sunday because Kate was working, too, legs up on the sofa, laptop perched on a cushion and a slurry of case notes on the table beside her. She was sucking the end of a biro and typing with one hand. She had to have a pen in her hand at all times while she worked, otherwise she couldn’t think properly, she said. Every so often, Morgan would turn and glance at her and she would look up and smile, a little distractedly, before returning to her work.
Morgan couldn’t concentrate. He had hoped that seeing Layla again would cast into oblivion that show-stopping moment when he’d first laid eyes on her – a moment that felt like a beginning – and he would see it for what it was, a rush of pure, meaningless sexual attraction that could happen anywhere, at any time, with anyone. In fact, he had fully expected this to be so, until she was there in front of him. And then he’d known with mind-shattering certainty that there had been a lot more to it than that.
The strength of feeling he’d experienced was nothing short of astonishing. Even more astonishing was that she had felt it, too. He had seen it in her eyes, in the way she avoided looking at him directly, and in the set of her shoulders as she’d walked away from him. And then, immediately she was out of sight, he’d begun to worry that he would never see her again, even though the alternative reeked of impossibility.
He had lain awake for most of last night. Then this morning, as the first light seeped into the sky and tentative squawks came from the gulls, he had reached out for Kate, intent on waking her so that he could tell her about the girl he’d met on the boat and how stupid he’d been. He needed her to understand that he was human, with every human failing ever invented, but that he loved her and would never do anything to hurt her. In Morgan’s imagination, Kate would put her finger to his lips and stop his confession in its tracks. She would tell him that no-one could be perfect all the time, and that she knew in her heart that he loved only her, and he would never let her down.
But that wasn’t the reality. He’d managed to pull himself together sufficiently to turn his waking touch into a casual stroke of her bare midriff, and Kate, misinterpreting his movements, had turned round and pulled him on top of her. Afterwards, Morgan had felt doubly guilty and somehow unclean.
‘I’ll make lunch then, shall I?’ he said now, giving up all pretence of adding to his word count.
‘What?’
Kate glanced up from her work, giving the impression that she’d been so deeply engrossed in it she resented the interruption. Morgan saw at once that this wasn’t so, and that her mind had been as far out of the moment as his had been. The realisation gave him a jolt of anxiety.
‘Lunch. Do you want some?’
‘There’s no need to snap.’ Kate sniffed. ‘We’ve not long had breakfast.’
Morgan had been half turned towards her. Now he swivelled back to face the screen and, beyond it, the inky line of the horizon sketched above the rooftops of the seafront. He felt irritated, with himself and with Kate, and he didn’t trust his reactions. He took a composing breath and tried again.
‘Good point,’ he said lightly, tapping at the keyboard. ‘How about we work through and go out later for something to eat?’
‘Yeah, okay.’ Kate sounded placated. Her voice came softly to him across the expanse of the room. It seemed to come from out of the shadows. ‘We could go to our Chinese, if you like.’
This time Morgan turned round properly, and Kate smiled at him in a way that suggested it was costing her some effort.
‘Chinese, yes,’ he said cheerfully. ‘We’ll do that, then.’
But Kate had gone, back to her work. Or to wherever it was she had been.
***
Over the next few days, Morgan hammered away at the keyboard, forgetting to be uninspired by his surroundings as Poodle Chafferty began to hike off along all sorts of interesting plot paths, too many to put into one book. A sequel suggested itself, possibly a whole series of Chafferty books. He decided that this exciting higher level of creativity was his reward for knuckling down and keeping Layla out of his head.
When he finally relented and allowed her to enter his thoughts, he replayed the scene in the boathouse, then rewound it and played it again to make sure he hadn’t imagined the whole thing. And yet nothing had ever felt so real before.
Was she thinking the same? Or did she just think he was weird, with his childish notes and his boathouse den and his soldier biscuit tin, like a throwback from an Enid Blyton story? Was she even thinking about him at all, or had she airbrushed him from her mind the moment she’d gone down those steps carrying that musty old umbrella and walked along the towpath, back to her real life? It suddenly seemed extremely important that he knew the answers to these questions, yet he had no way of finding out.
He’d been fooling himself, of course, thinking of her simply as a friend. And, by default, he had been fooling her, too. The truth was, he had fallen in love with her. Instantly, completely, unconditionally. He had no idea what he was supposed to do about it.
***
On Friday, Morgan drove up to Maybridge, having sounded out Kate on the subject and deducing, with a pang of sadness, that she didn’t seem to care that much. In fact, she’d been acting strangely all week. She’d accepted more than her usual number of extra shifts. When she wasn’t at the hospital, she worked in the flat until late in the evening on some vaguely referred-to backlog of case notes. Then, suddenly, she would stop what she was doing and rush up to him, arms outstretched, as if she were a toddler in need of a cuddle. It was as if she needed him to comfort her without telling him why.
At these moments he would rock her in his arms, his chin resting on top of her head, feeling the tension rising from her like a fish caught on a line while his own guilt pressed down on him like a ton weight. At one of these times, wanting to lighten the mood, he had held her away from him and gathered up her hair into two cartoonish bunches on top of her head, as he used to do in the early days, when they’d play-acted all the time. Perhaps he’d wanted to remind her of the way they were. Or remind himself.
She had twisted out of his grasp and shaken her hair free.
‘Don’t,’ she’d said.
Just that. Don’t.
As he entered the boathouse, he let out a long, deep sigh, as if he’d been holding his breath all week. It was a relief to find that he’d tidied everything away before he left last Saturday. The rug was back in the cupboard, the biscuit tin put away, the mugs washed out. It seemed easiest that way.
Holding his confused thoughts at bay, he settled down to work, letting his writing take over and block out everything else. He didn’t stop until two hours later, when the door swung open and Connor stood there, his hands clasped tightly together in front of him. Ted had taken a fall, Morgan heard. When the old man hadn’t shown up at the yard, Connor had gone to his cottage and found him sitting on the kitchen floor, dazed, but otherwise protesting loudly that he was as right as rain and he’d be down in a brace of shakes, if only Connor would stop flapping about like an old woman and disturbing the dust.
‘It wasn’t just a fall, I’m sure of it,’ Connor said, coming into the boathouse. ‘He must have zonked out for some reason. Bloody old fool wouldn’t let me call the doctor out so I’m going to have to drag him to the surgery later.’
There was no-one to run the riverside kiosk this afternoon. Ma
ureen, who worked all year round, dividing her time between the café and the kiosk, had gone to her granddaughter’s school concert, and no way was Connor going to let Ted anywhere near…
‘No, no, of course not. Leave it to me,’ Morgan said.
By two o’clock, Morgan had sold eighteen tickets for Lady Tabitha’s next trip, several cans of fizzy drink, a fistful of chocolate bars, and by some fluke managed to squeeze half a dozen swirls of ice cream out of the temperamental machine and into cones without getting it all over himself and his customers.
The kiosk was steadily busy all afternoon. At five o’clock, when the shutters came down, he wiped out the drinks fridge and swabbed down the counter tops. He felt tired, but in a nice, fuzzy sort of way. While he waited for Connor to come and collect the takings, he went outside and propped himself against the sun-warmed wooden slats of the little hut, watching the flashes of light breaking the surface of the river. It was at times like this that he almost wished he smoked.
He thought about the boathouse and how, once you were inside, it felt as if you were miles from anywhere and anyone, even though the boatyard was just around the curve in the river. Kate had never been to the boathouse. The realisation hit him with a flash of guilt; guilt because Layla had been there and not Kate. But Kate had never asked to come. Perhaps she’d been waiting for him to invite her. He should redress that, and soon.
He took out his phone to check if she’d sent him a message. Nothing. His old anxiety came flooding back. What was she hiding from him? There was something; he’d seen it in her eyes. He’d tried to ignore the feeling, and been partially successful. Now it came hurtling back, ten times more powerful than before, letting him know that he could no longer delay the inevitable. He must talk to her, tonight, have the conversation he didn’t want and ask her the questions he’d been afraid to ask because he hadn’t wanted to know the answers: Did Kate still love him? Did she still want to be with him?
Never Coming Back: a tale of loss and new beginnings Page 7