So Wild

by Eve Dangerfield

  “But not Galahad.”

  “No,” Sam admitted. “Not Galahad.”

  Nicole took her hand. “I think it’s worth taking a chance to trust a man like that. Maybe you should just go and see him? I know you want to.”

  The mere idea instantly turned her stomach into a mass of winged insects. “Okay, so maybe, I want to. And maybe I’ll head over to his after work.”

  “Brilliant! But first we need to look up the Fadeout announcements and see if you’ve made it through the ballot.”

  Sam’s internal butterflies instantly fell still. “Fine, but I bet I didn’t get it. Someone would have called or emailed.”

  “Maybe, but we’re going to look it up together right now. Get it over and done with, okay?”

  Sam knew her sister wasn’t going to budge so she picked up her iPad and searched the Fadeout twitter feed, knowing it would have been announced there before—

  “Holy shit,” she whispered. There it was, posted twenty-three seconds ago, the news that she was the wild card pick for the Fadeout lineup. Nicole let out a piecing scream that Sam couldn’t help but reciprocate. They hugged each other, jumping around in a semi-circle. “We need to post it on Instagram. Maybe we can get a picture of you like reclining in the red leather chair like a queen, holding a tattoo machine with a glass of champagne?”

  “Uh sure, but…”

  “What? Why are you not beside yourself with excitement?”

  “I am, I just…I want to tell Scott. He believed in me, at Ink the Night, he said I was going to get into the competition.”

  “And?”

  “And if he didn’t take our underwear and I could possibly like and trust him, I need to say that I’m sorry for being a dick.”

  “And?”

  “And I maybe want to…” Sam struggled with the tail end of the sentence.

  “Yes?”

  “…have sex with him.”

  Nicole looked up at the ceiling as though imploring it to give her strength. “Again, it’s a start. How are you going to apologise?”

  The mere word set Sam’s teeth on edge. “The only way I ever could, I guess.”

  Because Nicole was her twin, she knew exactly what Sam meant. “I used all the pie ingredients for the bribery breakfast. There’s no caster sugar, or cream, or butter. I don’t think we even have self-raising flour.”

  “It’s okay,” Sam said. “I’ll head to the shops on my break. It’ll give me a chance to think about what the hell I’m going to say when I see him.”

  Chapter 17

  As a teenager, whenever Scott sat behind his kit and pounded away, a ragged place inside him smoothed over. It was cathartic to hit things with sticks, but it was more than that. When he played, he didn’t stutter—sound came out of him loud and clear. To Scott, they were the perfect instrument—important but not exposed, loud, but without any pressure to talk. Most people forgot about the drums, couldn’t name more than one or two famous drummers, but without them the music couldn’t go.

  His dad hated the drums, he wanted Scott to play the piano—as if people didn’t already think he was a Nancy boy. Scott had refused and for once, his mum had backed him up. “Let him have a drum kit, Greg. He’ll only play when you’re at work.”

  From the age of fourteen onward, he could play every day. Twice a day if he got up as soon as his dad left. Dreams of rock star fame took over his life—stepping up as a last-minute drummer for Franz Ferdinand or The New Pornographers and being unilaterally accepted into the band. Samantha DaSilva was the cornerstone of those inane fantasies, standing in the crowd in shorts or a tight flowery dress, her mouth dropping open when she saw how insanely talented he was. She would come backstage after the show and do to him what girls did to musicians they liked—the things girls did to Anthony Kiedis in Scar Tissue.

  They were all stupid fantasies. No one except his closest mates knew he played the drums and no one was much impressed by it. At least once a week his mum would come into the front room and plead for him to put a shirt on. “You look like an animal, Scotty, darling.”

  She persisted in calling him Scotty, despite him telling her about the song Scotty Doesn’t Know. A song that was a significant thorn in his side throughout high school. He’d mostly stayed a virgin waiting for Samantha, but his reluctance to get a girlfriend was at least ten percent Lustra’s fault.

  When he was seventeen, he had the idea of going on one of those rock-swap websites and finding a band to play with once exams were over. Seeing if a more realistic version of the rockstar wasn’t possible. Then his mum died and he flew to London and that was the end of the dream. He never asked his dad what happened to the cherry-red drum kit but he imagined it was bashed into splinters. He didn’t play at university and once he’d graduated and gotten his own place, he still didn’t buy a kit. His rockstar fantasies belonged in the mental box where he kept his mother and Samantha DaSilva. A box labelled ‘the past.’

  Then there was the music store.

  Why there was a music store a single block away from his new house, no one could tell him—it wasn’t a hipster area, it was a yuppie area, and yuppies in his experience were always too busy performing fun to master instruments. Yet there it was, the music shop, and the first time he walked past it he’d seen a smoke and steel version of his teenage kit. He stopped still, energy vibrating down his arms as though he’d just spent an afternoon bashing out Make Somebody Love Me.

  Just go inside, Scotty.

  He’d gone inside feeling incredibly self-conscious in his suit. The friendly kid behind the counter asked him what he was looking for and Scott pointed at the drums. “I’m kind of old, though. And I’m not in a band.”

  The kid looked at him like he was crazy. “You don’t need to be in a band to play. Just play because you want to play.”

  He bought the kit then and there. It was delivered to his house the same day, but it had taken him twelve hours to pick up the sticks. He’d done it just before he was supposed to leave for work—a built-in excuse to stop if he was humiliatingly bad.

  He wasn’t bad. He wasn’t slow. He wasn’t uncomfortable. He was good, as good as though he’d stopped playing yesterday. The only words he could fine to describe how it felt to play again were silly—magic, homecoming, destiny, whole. He still knew all the chord progressions for The Man Who Sold the World and Everlong, but he would have been just as happy bashing out some inarticulate rhythm. The music store kid was right, it didn’t matter that he wasn’t in a band, he just had to play because he wanted to play.

  Since climbing through Samantha’s window, Scott had spent almost all of the following day playing. Between her and his dad, he had a world of troubles, and drumming made time vanish in a way he’d never experienced before. Even gaming and drinking didn’t compare. He wasn’t numbing himself, he was still aware of the pain, but drumming helped him breathe. It reminded him of what Edgar DaSilva had said about finding a way to get the bad out and the good in.

  After finishing a few sets, Scott took a short break, wiping away his sweat and draining his bottle of Furphy. He checked his phone and found no messages or missed calls from Samantha or his father. The former was par for course, but the latter… Scott pressed the cool glass of the beer bottle to his forehead.

  After he climbed out of Samantha’s window, he’d discovered twelve missed calls from his father. His dad had left a voicemail after each one and as Scott sat in the dark listening to them, his armpits were damp with sweat.

  “My own son, selling me down the river! Going behind my back to help those sluts next door.”

  “Do you know how pissed off I was when I called up and the heritage pricks said I forged your fucking signature? I never forged your fucking signature! You’re a little fucking liar, Scotty.”

  “You’re lucky your mother’s not around, she’d be mortified to hear you’d gone against your own family.”

  “F-f-fucking hell,” Scott whispered, too overwhelmed to be embarrassed by
his stutter. The palpable fury in his father’s voice, the way he kept repeating phrases and rambling over the same things again and again was unnerving. His dad had always been domineering, Sam and her sisters could attest to that, but Scott had never heard him so…unhinged. He’d bitten the bullet and called him back, but his father didn’t pick up. Scott had hesitated, checked the time and decided to drive to his old man’s place in Brighton.

  He’d found the house locked up with the blinds drawn. None of the lights were on. Scott had only been there once, when he’d come home to attend his father’s wedding, but he was shocked by how much the place had changed. The neat gardens were overgrown, the lawn had gone to seed and there were strange marks and smudges all over the house’s off-white rendering. There were no cars in the driveway but Scott had parked and knocked anyway in case his stepmother, Marina was home.

  When no one came to the door, he called her number and found it disconnected. Confused, he’d called his dad again and this time Greg Sanderson picked up. After shouting at him that he wasn’t home and it was incredibly rude to just ‘show up at other people’s houses’, Scott was informed that Marina had ‘gone.’

  Scott’s insides had gone cold, bare statistics whirring through his brain—one Australian woman is killed by her former or current partner every week. His father had never been physically violent, but in that moment Scott was sure something had gone wrong. The mere fact that his father hadn’t told him anything about this said something had gone wrong. “Dad, where’s Marina gone to?”

  “None of your business.”

  But Scott had refused to drop the subject and after a lot of huffing and puffing his dad said Marina was staying with her sister—she’d left him eight months ago. Or as his dad put it, “I got sick of all her shit. I told her to pick up her act, or get lost.”

  That was all Scott managed to get out of his father before he launched into the subject of the DaSilva house. He ranted about the failed heritage application and Scott’s treachery for over an hour, refusing to say where he was or what he was doing away from home. Finally, he hung up and Scott returned to his car, sick with unease. He checked Facebook and made sure Marina was alive and sat back in his seat, fighting full blown panic.

  He’d known his father had gotten more unpleasant since he’d left for university, but now Scott wondered if he was off his trolley. The evidence was piling up—his wife had left him, he was acting erratically and he was obsessed, properly obsessed with owning the DaSilva house. Still, Scott had no idea what to do about the situation. His dad would sooner die than see a doctor or a psychologist for a mental health assessment, and he wasn’t going to be moving his old man into his apartment. He wasn’t scared of his father, anymore, but there was little love in his heart for Greg Sanderson.

  You’re lucky your mother’s not around, she’d be fucking mortified to hear you’d gone against your own family like that!

  “How dare you talk about mum,” Scott muttered as he backed into the street. “She was a saint, she deserved better than you. I’m glad Marina left. I wish mum had left.”

  But that was a story that would never find a path in reality. His mother had stayed in her cold white home until she died and now there was only him and Greg, alone in the world.

  Scott supposed there was never a good time to find out your dad was crackers, but right after a big move and in the midst of a love crisis only made things worse. Without the drums he’d have done something stupid by now. Called the police on his old man or driven around to Sam’s to propose on bended knee. Instead, he’d re-learned all of the Arctic Monkey’s back-catalogue—a far less destructive outlet. He went to the fridge, grabbed another beer and sat back down behind the drums, contemplating his next song.

  He’d settled on Pumped up Kicks when he heard his doorbell buzz. He rolled his eyes, knowing it was either a salesperson or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. His street seemed a favourite hangout for both. The yuppies around him must be lonely or something.

  Reluctantly, he put down his sticks and walked to the door. He was still sweaty, bare-chested and in shorts but hoped it would motivate his unwelcome guest to leave quicker.

  “Hang on,” he called as the buzzer rang again. “Almost there.”

  He arranged his features into what he hoped was an intimidating neutrality and swung the door open. “I’m not—fucking hell.”

  It wasn’t a salesperson. It wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness, either. No, this was more evidence of a kind and benevolent God than any Jehovah’s Witnesses could hope to inspire in him. Samantha DaSilva was standing on his doormat holding out a red Tupperware container and wearing her old school uniform. The grey dress and knee socks that had haunted his fantasies for years.

  He tore his gaze away from the swells of her breasts with difficulty. “H-h-hello.”

  Fucking stutter.

  “Hey,” she said, smiling softly. “Can I come in?”

  He should have asked if she had an answer for his ultimatum first, but all he could think about was the fact that she was here, not only here but in her old school uniform.

  “Of course, come on in.”

  Scott stepped out of the way and watched her walk through his front door, noting the hem of her skirt was much higher than it had been as a teenager. She had black bow tattoos on the backs of her upper thighs and a thin black line ran down her legs to her calves, giving the illusion she was wearing suspender stockings.

  Scott’s cock thickened against his thigh and he wondered if he’d have the willpower to say one word to her about their future, or if he’d simply beg to be set free from her spell.

  Sam raised the red Tupperware container. “Where can I put this?”

  “The, uh, kitchen is to your l-left,” Scott stammered. “Samantha, what are—”

  “In a minute,” she said. “Just let me put this down.”

  He followed her to the kitchen, trying to adjust himself inside his shorts. The job became much harder when he realised she was wearing the same shoes she’d worn to school, the black leather ones with the little heels. He’d spent his entire adolescence imagining them digging into his shoulder blades while he went down on her. The sight of them was like bare tits or a well-rounded ass in a G-string. Christ, he was going to mumblefuck his way through the entire conversation…

  Samantha slid the container onto the counter and then turned. For someone who’d shown up at his house in a literal schoolgirl outfit, she looked bashful, shy even. “I guess you’re wondering why I’m here dressed like this?”

  Scott didn’t trust himself to talk. He nodded.

  She looked down at her feet. “It’s hard, but I’m just going to blurt it out and hope for the best, okay?”

  “Okay,” Scott managed.

  “It’s been brought to my attention that maybe I’m not the most…open person in the world, and ever since you came back, I’ve been driving myself crazy pretending what I felt for you was just lust or unfinished business.” She glanced up at him quickly and then her gaze dropped back to her shoes. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to talk about everything that happened, but I think we have to. I think that’s what I need to trust you. Or maybe, think about, perhaps, possibly, being able to trust you.”

  Scott couldn’t help smiling at her list of backpedalling words. “I agree. We can talk about whatever you want to talk about. Shall I put the kettle on?”

  “Um, not yet. I just have something I want to say to you and if we move too much, I’m scared I’ll lose my nerve.”

  “Anything.”

  She licked her lips. “The day your mum died. I saw you throw my pie on the grass.”

  Of all the things he’d expected to talk about, he hadn’t counted on that. The memory of that had him shrinking into his kitchen tiles, going down and back to that hateful day.

  “I don’t mind that you did it,” Sam said quickly. “You’d just lost your mum and you must have felt like you were going crazy, I just didn’t know why you did it
. Because…because you didn’t ruin anyone else’s food. Just mine.”

  Scott stared at the woman in front of him, seeing her hurt and confusion clearly for the first time. He screwed his eyes up, searching for the right words. “I was crazy. That’s the only way to describe how I felt. I wanted to tear my fucking hair out. Dad had vanished, and mum’s family had gone to meet with the funeral home. I was by myself and I felt like I was going mad. There was a knock on the door but I didn’t want to answer and when I went out later, I found that fucking pie.”

  Sam flinched at the anger in his voice.

  “Sorry,” he said quickly. “It’s not what you think. My mum loved them. The pies. Toward the end, they were the only thing she’d eat. And when she was gone and I saw it lying there on the porch, I just…”

  “I get it.” Sam looked up at him and he saw her eyes were shining with tears. “You don’t have to explain.”

  Scott took her hand, wrapping his fingers around hers. “I do. I was mad at you when I threw it in the backyard. It’s so unfair, but I think I wanted you to come and talk to me, not send me a fucking pie. I know that’s incredibly selfish, but it was what I wanted.”

  Samantha’s shoulders hunched over, her gaze on the floor between them. “It isn’t selfish. I saw you from my window and I almost climbed the tree to go to you.”

  They stared at each other, and Scott felt his throat grow thick with emotion. She’d wanted to come to him and he’d almost gone to her. How different life would have been if they’d managed it—Samantha at his side at the funeral, no buy­scott­sanderson­aroot.com, losing his virginity to the girl he loved, no move to London, or maybe a London where Samantha sat laughing on his bed as he put up his posters.

  “We fucked up, didn’t we?” Sam whispered. “We completely fucked up.”

  Scott remembered what Edgar had told him in the rain as he stood trying to smoke his first cigarette. ‘She’s stubborn and you’re shy and you’re both young. It’s not the right time.’