We lie panting and slick with sweat, limbs spread-eagled as if we’ve been dropped like puppets from space. The tiles are itchy beneath my bare buttocks. I shift onto my hip. I want to tell him that I love him, love him, love him. Instead, I bury my mouth in the hollow of his collarbone, lick the salt from his skin. ‘Think I have carpet burns,’ I murmur.
‘Me too.’ He reaches around and fumbles with our clothes, dragging his sweatshirt and my jacket over us, tucking them around our chests. His fingers brush my stomach, pausing over my scar. ‘What’s this?’
‘I had a ruptured appendix when I was eight,’ I tell him.
‘A ruptured appendix? But … you could have died, couldn’t you?’ He moves his head downwards, and I hold my breath while he kisses the jagged line across my belly.
When we’re settled in each other’s arms, I say, ‘I nearly did. It was touch-and-go. Must have been hard on my parents. They’d already lost their baby son. I don’t remember much.’
He lets out a long sigh. ‘I’m very thankful to the person who saved your life.’ Then he waves his arm above his head, calling loudly, ‘Whoever you are, wherever you are – THANK YOU!’
I shush him, laughing, my hand over his mouth. ‘Crazy. You’ll wake the dead!’
‘Wish I could be a surgeon. Save lives. That’s something, isn’t it?’
‘Music saves lives too,’ I tell him. ‘The right song at the right time. It could make all the difference to someone.’
He squeezes me closer. ‘You never told me who Frank is.’ His voice rumbles through his chest, vibrating in my ear. ‘The name in the inscription?’
‘He was my brother,’ I say quietly. ‘The son my parents lost. I never met him. He died before I was born. But,’ I swallow, ‘he’s in my head all the time. I hear his voice talking to me.’
‘Like … an imaginary friend?’
I nod. ‘I must have invented his voice at some point, ages ago, and then it kind of took on a life of its own. He feels very real to me. Sometimes I wish he’d shut up.’ I peer up at his face. ‘Do you think I’m mad?’
‘No.’ He smiles. ‘You needed him. And you found a way to answer that need.’ He sweeps a strand of hair from my forehead. ‘I think it’s great that you still have Frank with you.’
I put my head back on his chest.
‘Has he … said anything about me?’ Sam asks in a voice laced with slight anxiety.
I smile. ‘That would be telling.’ I poke him between his ribs.
‘I see what you’re doing here,’ he says, tickling me. ‘Two against one. That’s not fair.’
I’m laughing, but tears prick my eyes, and I feel them spill silently onto my cheeks, running along the side of my nose. I don’t know why I’m crying. He’s leaving soon, but it’s not just that. We’ve only had two days together, I tell myself. You can’t love him. But I think I always knew that I did, from the moment I saw him standing on the boardwalk being polite to a couple of tourists.
TEN
Sam, April 1983
The summer holidays let him escape the misery of school for six long weeks. Days opened their wings like butterflies, everything a dazzle of colour and light: spending afternoons with Ben, his friend from the village, poking about in the woods with sticks, building dens and coming home for tea, Mattie and Elle grinning at him from the other side of the table. His father worked up in town during the week, so it was just his mother and sisters at home, the Great Danes slobbering and farting.
Sundays, they had a family pew right at the front of St Mary the Virgin church. He sat with his sisters on a hard bench, his collar rubbing his neck and his shoes laced tight. While the priest droned on from the pulpit, Sam pinched his wrist in an effort not to daydream. Being at boarding school had taught him about power, about the body language of those who had it, and those who didn’t. When their family climbed into the Daimler to go home, the priest raised his hand in a special blessing, and the people in the churchyard dipped their heads as the long black car passed by; all except Ben, who stuck out his tongue.
During lunch, slices of roast beef eaten at a white tablecloth, his father tested him on the contents of the sermon. If Sam got an answer wrong, his father rapped his knuckles with a knife. ‘I’m not spending a fortune on your education for you to be a slacker and a fool,’ he said. ‘An Englishman is a leader.’ The dogs, waiting hopefully on the floor, whimpered. Dropping slivers of bloody gristle into their jaws, his father kept on with his own sermon: ‘A decent man leads a life to be proud of.’
That child – the one in Sam’s memories – is growing fainter, disappearing like a figure seen in brilliant sunshine, edges blurring until he’s swallowed by the light. But his father’s voice will not shut up. Sam can’t waste any more time thinking about him. He only wants to fill his mind with her – Cat – with what they did last night, with the weighted substance of her bones, the flawed beauty of her golden skin, the mole on her right buttock, the crease above her lip when she smiled her gap-toothed smile. He hasn’t felt that connected to another human being since … He runs through the relationships he’s had, and realises that he’s never felt it, not with anyone else. Not even with Lucinda, not even at the beginning, in Oxford.
They were in the same production of Romeo and Juliet at university. He was playing Mercutio; she was producing the show. She was frighteningly efficient even then, all five foot nothing of her. Everyone was in awe. He was flattered at first, when she showed interest in him. Once they started going out, he recognised how her need for perfection hid her fear of not being taken seriously. But when she let her guard down, she could be funny and sweet. He liked being the only one who knew the real Lucinda. Nobody else got close; she was too good at keeping her guard up.
Her face floats before him now, looking at him; her mouth, bright in her trademark Chanel scarlet, turns down, disappointed again. It’s an expression he’s come to know well. When did they become different people? And why didn’t they understand before? It’s been obvious for ages that they’d be better off apart. He feels bad about her, about the timing of things, but he can’t regret meeting Cat. He still hasn’t plucked up the courage to explain about Lucinda, and the longer he leaves it, the more impossible it feels. He’s afraid of ruining the time they have left together.
He counts the days on his fingers, and knows there are not enough.
Levi and the Dutch giants leave for home, poorer for their nights at the casino, but implacably cheerful. Levi clasps Sam’s hand. ‘So, you never got to New Orleans, buddy?’ he says. ‘I heard you singing the other afternoon. That was your own song, right?’ He gives Sam a keen look. ‘I think you’ve fallen for someone?’
‘I have.’ Sam grins.
Levi winks. ‘Good luck to you, man. Come and see me in Friesland some day.’ He turns at the door. ‘By the way, I liked your music.’ He nods, suddenly serious. ‘Yeah, man. Very cool.’
Sam sings with the band every night, with Cat watching from behind the backstage curtain. They return to the funeral parlour to have sex on those floor tiles again, and once on top of the mahogany desk, scattering leaflets, knocking into a vase of lilies so that pollen flies everywhere, making him sneeze. When she’s not working, they walk the watery edges of the city, the beaches and inlets. They sit on her favourite bench, gazing out at the ocean and talking, talking; they have a picnic at Absecon Bay, watching the fishermen catch bluefish, the arc of a bridge spanning the width of river in an elegant hooped line. He comes to appreciate the old painted clapboard houses and wide avenues of the wealthier areas, and to love the tawdry reality of the poorer ones with their laundromats, plus-size shops and barber salons with Lowest Prices in South Jersey plastered across nearly every window.