By CLARE LONDON (2 page)

Louis Barrington came from a family that had rarely been out of the headlines in one place or another. His mother was a few degrees of separation from European aristocracy but had married into modern money. I remembered how Louis’s dad—a big name in London city finance—had single-handedly sponsored a new games hall at our school. Louis was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps: he certainly had the brains for it and the drive. But there’d been an awkward couple of years in his midteens when he came out to them, and then when they’d become more or less reconciled to that, he announced he wanted a career in entertainment instead. And he stood his ground until they agreed to a drama studies degree in Sussex rather than the anticipated Oxbridge route. He inherited a small income from his grandparents when he turned twenty-one, but as far as I knew, he never called on his parents for anything else. When we were at Uni together, he supplemented his money with dancing gigs and joined one of those agencies for theatrical extras. I didn’t watch much TV, but I was sure I saw his face in more than a couple of crowd scenes.

Louis was no shrinking violet—he’d always stood out from the crowd, and since he got older and bolder, I could see that he reveled in it. He was gorgeous and bloody vain, but he was determined too. If anyone made it to the top in his chosen occupation, Louis would. Jack told me that every weekend, a small core of fans followed Louis from club to club, wherever he could find a dance booking. Compulsion had been closed for a couple of months in the New Year for refurbishment, but Louis had been on the VIP list ever since the reopening, and it looked like he’d work his usual magic here as well.

“He looks good, eh?” I tried not to bawl into Jack’s ear, though I’d forgotten how difficult it was to be heard in places like this. Jack smelled of some exotic cologne Louis had given him for his last birthday. I bet myself he didn’t wear it Monday to Friday at the science lab, but I didn’t tease him about it.

He didn’t turn to look at me, but I saw his smile as he gazed at Louis. “Damn good. If he does well in the guest spot, they’re talking about a regular booking. He’d love that.” His smile broadened. Louis was laughing at something one of his many friends had said to him as they passed. We couldn’t hear him from where we were, but there was no mistaking the happy way he threw his head back, his eyes glistening in the lights. “Damn good,” Jack repeated, his voice too quiet for me to catch more than a whisper.

I smiled too. Jack Wallis had been one of the steadier guys in my group at school, a bit of a geek and always serious. We laughed tolerantly when he told us he’d be a forensic scientist one day; he was fascinated by the crime series on TV and wanted to be one of those who helped the police. Now who was laughing, when he had a good job and was doing exactly what he planned? And one of the youngest consultants at the company too. All we knew then was that he was the complete opposite to the extrovert Louis. I don’t think we were even sure he was gay, or at least we didn’t discuss it with him. Unlike Louis, who was out, proud, and loud, Jack kept that kind of thing to himself. I don’t think any of us saw it coming until we found the two of them wrapped around each other at a friend’s party, tongues virtually fused in each other’s mouths. It was the summer just after we all left school, and they’d been together ever since, all through college. Jack had gone to a Uni in Kent, but he always kept his home base in Brighton, returning every weekend to be with Louis. Eventually they moved into their own flat, and now they were living a grown-up life. Unlike some others I could mention.

I shifted awkwardly in my seat and Jack turned to face me. He stared at me in his direct way. “You know I was only joking earlier, don’t you?”

The vibration from the music deck throbbed through the floor, warming my belly. “Yeah, of course.” I felt uneasy but managed to grin back. By now we were more than halfway to lipreading over the thudding beat. My chair was knocked by a group of people struggling past the tables to get a drink. I wondered whether to do the same myself: I’d only drunk water with the earlier meal.

“I wasn’t lying,” Jack said. “You do look great tonight. I can’t believe you’re not hit on all the time. And you need it. You need something apart from work and our company.”

Many a true word spoken in jest, I thought. I knew he meant well; both of them did. They just didn’t know what I’d been through—and what I wanted to leave behind. They thought everyone wanted to be like them. “A soul mate like yours?”

Jack may have flushed; I couldn’t really tell in the reflected lights from the bar. “If you don’t feel comfortable here, don’t let us keep you—”

“No.” I reached over and gripped his arm. “I didn’t mean that. I’m jealous, I expect, that’s all. Things have come together for you two, whereas I….” I wasn’t sure where that sentence was going, so I let it slip away.

“It will for you too.” Even over the noise, I could tell Jack was choosing words carefully. Did I really need handling with kid gloves? Not for the first time, I wondered how the hell I appeared to other people. “You’ve had a hard time, but you’re on the right track again, right?”

“Right.” I nodded, more to satisfy him than myself.

But he was relentless tonight. In a very different way from Louis—in a far more assertive way, I must say—and I was caught off guard. “Look, Max, you haven’t been out with anyone since you came back to Brighton. That’s—”

“A couple of months,” I muttered.

“Almost six,” he replied smartly. “But there’s no shortage of guys looking your way, so why not? You’re bright, you’ve got a steady job now and some money. And you look okay.”

“Thanks,” I said drily.

He laughed. “I’m not trying to drag you into the Louis-Jack connubial bliss club. But you always loved attention.”

“You mean sex?”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing. You never thought that way before.” He shook his head, still smiling. “But not just that. You were more lively, more tactile. I mean, you’re still generous with yourself as a friend, but don’t you need something else for yourself?”

“More trouble than it’s worth,” I replied. I wished the music would stop, that Louis would come back to the table. I needed to distract my well-meaning friend, and soon.

“You know you can talk to me if you ever want to, about while you were away….”

I sucked in a breath. He must have caught the expression on my face because he shook his head again, acknowledging my resistance. It wasn’t going to happen. I couldn’t bear them knowing about it all, realizing what a mess I’d made of everything. How I’d disappointed everyone, including myself. No, I never wanted to tell them the whole sordid story.

I dropped out of Uni just before my final exams, much to everyone’s shock and disapproval, and left my digs shortly after. I must have known what a short-sighted decision it was, but my boyfriend at the time had been based back in London and offered to get me a job there. My blind lust colored it a much better opportunity than it ever was. I’d already discovered I was a crappy student, even though I was interested in my Media Studies course. In reality I partied too much, couldn’t settle to writing up assignments, and spent all my money on fast food. The struggle outweighed the benefits, in my opinion. I expected to be chucked out at any time, so I just jumped first. Or that’s what I told myself.

Jack and Louis were the only two of our group who stuck with me. They never gave me a hard time about dumping everything without a word. Jack had just passed his driving test and bought a small car, and on the morning I left Brighton like a humiliated gunslinger on his way out of Dodge, he offered to take me to the station so I didn’t have to drag my case up the hill. It was some hideously early hour of the morning too. It shamed me now to remember how I wouldn’t let him get out of the car to see me off, in case he tried at the last minute to stop me.

After a while, I sent them a mobile contact number. Nothing else, and I made them swear not to give it to anyone. They went on to finish their degrees that year and get jobs and a happy home life, like I could have done. Maybe. They had no idea what I went on to. I told them I’d moved to the bright lights for fame and fortune. They didn’t know my shit of a boyfriend never got me a job at all and very soon afterward was my ex. They didn’t know the stream of casual jobs I chased after, the one-night stands I lost count of, the crappy dives I begged a room to sleep in, the weird friends I started to hang around with purely by virtue of the fact that we were all either homeless or jobless—or both—at the same time. I called Jack and Louis and we talked now and then. But I’d never been very good on the phone, and I never wrote or e-mailed. I didn’t like to tell them exactly where I was or what I was doing. Partly in case they asked whether it had been worth it; partly because, after a while, I was ashamed to talk about it. Our lives became less and less comparable.

Those bright lights tarnished really bloody swiftly.

To give them their due, Jack and Louis never complained about my fitful friendship, and hardly anyone else asked after me. I kept in touch with some of my foster families with Christmas and birthday cards and the rare e-mail, but my placements got shorter in duration as I got older and mouthier and determined to look after myself, so I never expected anyone to follow up on how I was doing. Instead, Jack and Louis chatted to me when I did call, and when that started to be less and less frequent, they told me I could always come to either of them, if and when I needed to.

And then one day I did.

“Take it easy,” Jack said. He’d leaned close to me over the table while my thoughts were miles away. “I didn’t mean to hit a nerve.”

“You didn’t.” I’m sure he was really thinking, What the hell happened to you, made you so touchy? In the background, the music changed beat as one of the club dancers stepped onto the small stage beside the music desk. There was a ripple of listless applause.

“Was it someone special, Max?”

“What are you talking about?” My thoughts were turning toward escape. It was cowardly, but I started calculating how long it’d take me to reach the taxi rank.

“Whoever you were close to, in London. If it all went wrong, you know Louis and I want to help. No point bottling it up.”

“Leave it, Jack.” I could hear the growl in my voice. My heart rate was increasing. “You don’t know anything about it.”

“Then tell us. Tell me.” There was a determined cast to his dark eyes that made me nervous. He was moving onto dangerous ground—dangerous for me. “It’s eating you up, Max. Maybe you don’t see it, but you’re a shadow of yourself sometimes. At least, of the mate we used to know.”

“I’m fine.”

He bloody well ignored me. “Time to come out of the shell, right? If it was something bad, you’re back with friends. And if it was something good, well then, don’t dump the memories along with everything else. You shouldn’t be afraid to take people to heart. Don’t you think you deserve that?”

Don’t you think…? Did Jack have any idea at all of what I deserved?

“What did he—?”

“There’s no one!” I slammed my hand down on the tabletop, making the beer bottles rattle alarmingly. The heat rose up through my body, raging in me, bringing me almost to my feet. “He’s dead! He’s dead, okay?”

THANK God the music had started up again at its loudest, or security would’ve been on their way over. I’d thrust my head forward, glowering at Jack, and a couple of people at the table next to us swiveled around on their seats, startled by my voice.

There was a shocked, still moment between the pair of us, even amid the throb of dance music and the rise and fall of party voices. I stared at Jack and he stared back, eyes wide. It was obvious we were both startled at how things had slipped out of control.

“Come out to the lobby,” he said. “It’s quieter there. Please, Max.”

I followed him, mainly for the sake of making amends. There were still patrons lined up there, paying for their entrance, but the noise level was much lower. There were also several padded chairs set against the wall, and Jack pulled me over with him to sit in a couple of these.

He leaned forward, his hand on my knee. “Shit, Max, I’m so sorry.”

“Jack, it isn’t what you think, you know?” I could hear the break in my voice even as I fought to control it. “I’m the one who’s sorry. Yelling at you like that, I just….”

“It’s okay.”

I took a deep breath. “It’s not. You’re right. I’m just not ready to talk about it yet. There was someone, but not in the way you mean. Not a lover. He was a friend. Someone I thought a hell of a lot of.”

Jack nodded, his strong hand back on my arm. “I didn’t mean to stir things up. Shit, Louis will….” He shook his head.

“He’ll go ballistic?”

Jack grimaced. “Yeah. He says I’m to leave it alone—to leave you alone. Says we have to let you open up in your own time. Give you time to….” He shrugged. “Whatever.”

Whatever. I didn’t want to talk about this, even though Jack was obviously worried. And me? I sat in a virtually public place as if I were totally alone, trying to shake off a creeping depression. I felt withdrawn from everything around me, inside a bubble of lonely misery, isolated in the middle of the fluorescent-lit lobby of a busy club on a Saturday night.

In my mind, I was scared again. I was on a cold, cracked London pavement around the back of Soho, crouched over a crumpled and bleeding body. The night air was rank with the smell of smoke, weed, and spilled alcohol. Tacky neon lighting gave a sickly cast to the scene, accompanied by the distant bass beat of dance music from a nearby building. I was crying outside a club just like this one. It looked like some cheap, corny set in a movie about the capital’s seedy underground.

But it wasn’t a scene from a film—it was a memory of real life. It was vivid because I’d been there—I’d seen the man’s blood as a dark shadow in the artificial light, the puddle underneath his torso creeping slowly and irresistibly across the concrete, his life leeching away with it. My cheeks were wet with tears of shock and grief, and my hands shook as I grasped the lapels of his coat, trying to keep him with me, trying… to make it not so.