I switched off my torch and waited there, in the cottage, while Ned sloshed through the grass and found his way back to his studmobile and Panzered off towards civilization, the throb of the SUV tiny and meaningless against the huge night hillsides. Then I sat down against the wall of the outer room and felt my heart beat where hers had finished beating. The air was soft and warm as cream; my arse went to sleep; tiny moths whirled around me like petals. There were things growing beside me out of the earth where she had bled, a pale clump of bluebells, a tiny sapling that looked like hawthorn: things made of her.
Even if Frank hadn’t caught the live show, he would hear that conversation in just a few hours, as soon as he got into work the next morning. I should have been on the phone to him or Sam or both, working out the best ways to use this, but I felt like if I moved or tried to talk or breathed too hard my mind would spill over, soak away into the long grass.
I had been so sure. Can you blame me? This girl like a wildcat gnawing off her own limbs sooner than be trapped; I had been positive that
forever
was the one word she would never say. I tried to tell myself she might have been planning to give the baby up for adoption, ditch the hospital as soon as she could walk and vanish from the parking lot to the next promised land, but I knew: those numbers she had been throwing around with Ned weren’t for any hospital, no matter how fancy. They were for a life; for two lives.
Just like she had let the others sculpt her delicately, unconsciously, into the little sister to round out their strange family, just like she had let Ned shape her into the clichés that were all he understood, she had let me make her into what I was longing to see. A master key to open every slamming door, a neverending freeway to a million clean starts. There’s no such thing. Even this girl who left lives behind like rest stops had found her exit, in the end, and had been ready to take it.
I sat in the cottage for a long time, with my fingers wrapped around the sapling—gently, it was so new, I didn’t want to bruise it. I’m not sure how long it was before I managed to make myself stand up; I barely remember walking home. A part of me was actually hoping John Naylor would leap out of a hedge, blazing with his cause and looking for a screaming match or an all-out brawl, just to give me something I could fight.
* * *
The house was lit up like a Christmas tree, every window blazing, silhouettes flitting and a babble of voices pouring out, and for a moment I couldn’t take it in: had something terrible happened, was someone dying, had the house tilted and sideslipped and tossed up some gay long-gone party, if I stepped onto the lawn would I tumble straight into 1910? Then the gate clanged shut behind me and Abby threw the French doors open, calling, “Lexie!” and came running down the grass, long white skirt streaming.
“I was keeping an eye out for you,” she said. She was breathless and flushed, eyes sparkling and her hair starting to come loose from its clips; she had obviously been drinking. “We’re being decadent. Rafe and Justin made this punch stuff with cognac and rum and I don’t know what else is in it but it’s
lethal,
and nobody has tutorials or anything tomorrow so fuck it, we’re not going into college, we’re staying up drinking and making eejits of ourselves till we all fall over. Sound good?”
“Sounds brilliant,” I said. My voice came out strange, dislocated—it was taking me a while to pull myself together and catch up—but Abby didn’t seem to notice.
“You think? See, at first I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. But Rafe and Justin were already making the punch—Rafe set some kind of booze on
fire,
on purpose, like—and they yelled at me for always worrying about everything. And, I mean, at least for once they’re not bitching at each other, right? So I figured what the hell, we need it. After the last few days—God, after the last few
weeks.
We’ve all been turning into crazy people, did you realize that? That thing the other night, with the rock and the fight and . . . Jesus.”
Something crossed her face, a dark flicker, but before I could place it, it had vanished and the reckless, tipsy gaiety was back. “So I figure, if we go completely nuts for tonight and get everything out of our systems, then maybe we can all chill out and go back to normal. What do you think?”
Being this drunk made her seem much younger. Somewhere in Frank’s bomber-paced war-game mind she and her three best friends were being lined up and inspected, one by one, inch by inch; he was evaluating them, cool as a surgeon or a torturer, deciding where to make the first test cut, where to insert the first delicate probe. “I would love that,” I said. “God, I’d love that.”
“We started without you,” Abby said, rearing back on her heels to inspect me anxiously. “You don’t mind, do you? That we didn’t wait for you?”
“Course not,” I said. “As long as there’s some left.” Far behind her, shadows crisscrossed on the living-room wall; Rafe bent with a glass in one hand and his hair gold as a mirage against the dark curtains, and Josephine Baker poured out through the open windows, sweet and scratchy and beckoning:
“Mon rÄ™ve c’était vous . . .”
In all my life I had seldom wanted anything as wildly as I wanted to be in there, get this gun and this phone off me, drink and dance until a fuse blew in my brain and there was nothing left in the world except the music and the blaze of lights and the four of them surrounding me, laughing, dazzling, untouchable.
“Well, of course there’s some left. What do you think we are?” She caught my wrist and headed back towards the house, pulling me behind her, twisting her skirt up off the grass with her free hand. “You have to help me with Daniel. He’s got this big glass, but he’s
sipping
it. Tonight isn’t about sipping. He’s supposed to be
swigging.
I mean, I know he’s getting enough into him to do some good, because he went off into this whole long speech about the labyrinth and the Minotaur and something with Bottom in
Midsummer Night’s Dream
, so he’s not
sober.
But still.”
“Well, come on, then,” I said, laughing—I couldn’t wait to see Daniel really hammered—“what are we waiting for?” and we raced up the lawn together and swept into the kitchen hand in hand.
Justin was at the kitchen table, with a ladle in one hand and a glass in the other, bending over a big fruit bowl full of something red and dangerous-looking. “God, you’re gorgeous,” he told us. “You’re like a pair of little wood nymphs, so you are.”
“They are lovely,” Daniel said, smiling at us from the doorway. “Give them some punch, so they’ll think we’re lovely too.”
“We always think you’re lovely,” Abby told him, grabbing a glass from the table. “But we need punch anyway. Lexie needs
lots
of punch, so she can catch up.”
“I’m lovely too!” Rafe shouted from the sitting room, over Josephine. “Come in here and tell me I’m lovely!”
“You’re lovely!” Abby and I yelled at the top of our lungs, and Justin pushed a glass into my hand and we all headed into the sitting room, kicking off our shoes in the hall and licking off the punch that splashed onto our wrists and laughing.
* * *
Daniel stretched out in one of the armchairs and Justin lay on the sofa, and Rafe and Abby and I ended up sprawled on the floor because chairs felt too complicated. Abby had been right, the punch was lethal: lovely, tricky stuff that went down easy as fresh orange juice and then turned into a sweet wild lightness spreading like helium through every limb. I knew it would be a whole different story if I tried to do anything stupid, like stand up. I could hear Frank somewhere in the back of my head nagging about control, like one of the nuns from school droning on about the demon drink, but I was so bloody sick of Frank and his smart-arsed little sound bites and of being in control all the time. “More,” I demanded, nudging Justin with my foot and waving my glass at him.
I don’t remember big patches of that evening, not in detail. The second glass or maybe the third turned the whole night soft-edged and enchanted, something out of a dream. Somewhere in there I made some excuse to go up to my room and lock away my undercover paraphernalia—gun, phone, girdle—under the bed; someone turned off most of the lights, all that was left was one lamp and candles scattered around like stars. I remember an in-depth argument over who was the best James Bond, leading into an equally intense one over which of the three guys would make the best James Bond; a deeply crap attempt at some drinking game called “Fuzzy Duck” that Rafe had learned in boarding school and that ended when Justin snorted punch down his nose and had to rush out and sneeze booze into the sink; laughing so hard that my stomach hurt and I had to stick my fingers in my ears till I could get my breath back; Rafe’s arm flung out under Abby’s neck, my feet propped on Justin’s ankles, Abby reaching up a hand to take Daniel’s. It was as if none of the jagged edges had ever existed; it was close and warm and shining as that first week again, only better, a hundred times better, because this time I wasn’t on the alert and fighting to get my bearings and stay in place. This time I knew them all by heart, their rhythms, their quirks, their inflections, I knew how to fit in with every one; this time I belonged.
What I remember most is a conversation—just a tangent, off something else, I don’t know what—about Henry V. It didn’t seem important at the time, but afterwards, after everything was over, it came back to me.
“The man was a raving psycho,” Rafe said. He and I and Abby were lying on our backs on the floor again; he had his arm linked through mine. “All that heroic Shakespeare stuff was pure propaganda. Today Henry would be running a banana republic with serious border issues and a dodgy nuclear-weapons program.”
“I like Henry,” Daniel said through a cigarette. “A king like that is exactly what we need.”
“Monarchist warmonger,” said Abby, to the ceiling. “Come the revolution, you’re up against the wall.”
“Neither monarchy nor war has ever been the real problem,” said Daniel. “Every society has always had war, it’s intrinsic to humanity, and we’ve always had rulers—do you really see so much difference between a medieval king and a modern-day president or prime minister, except that the king was marginally more accessible to his subjects? The real problem comes when the two things, monarchy and war, become dislocated from each other. With Henry, there was no disconnect.”
“You’re babbling,” Justin said. He was trying, with difficulty, to drink his punch without sitting up and without spilling it down his front.
“You know what you need?” Abby told him. “A straw. A bendy one.”
“Yes!” said Justin, delighted. “I
do
need a bendy straw. Do we have any?”
“No,” said Abby, surprised, which for some reason sent me and Rafe into helpless, undignified giggles.
“I’m not babbling,” Daniel said. “Look at the old wars, centuries ago: the king led his men into battle. Always. That was what the ruler
was:
both on a practical level and on a mystical one, he was the one who stepped forwards to lead his tribe, put his life at stake for them, become the sacrifice for their safety. If he had refused to do that most crucial thing at that most crucial moment, they would have ripped him apart—and rightly so: he would have shown himself to be an impostor, with no right to the throne. The king
was
the country; how could he possibly expect it to go into battle without him? But now . . . Can you see any modern president or prime minister on the front line, leading his men into the war he’s started? And once that physical and mystical link is broken, once the ruler is no longer willing to be the sacrifice for his people, he becomes not a leader but a leech, forcing others to take his risks while he sits in safety and battens on their losses. War becomes a hideous abstraction, a game for bureaucrats to play on paper; soldiers and civilians become mere pawns, to be sacrificed by the thousand for reasons that have no roots in any reality. As soon as rulers mean nothing, war means nothing; human life means nothing. We’re ruled by venal little usurpers, all of us, and they make meaninglessness everywhere they go.”
“Do you know something?” I told him, managing to lift my head a few inches off the floor. “I only have maybe a quarter of a clue what you’re talking about. How are you this sober?”
“He’s not sober,” said Abby, with satisfaction. “Rants mean he’s drunk. You should know that by now. Daniel is ossified.”
“It’s not a rant,” Daniel said, but he was smiling at her, a mischievous flash of a grin. “It’s a monologue. If Hamlet can have them, why can’t I?”
“At least I
understand
the Hamlet rants,” I said plaintively. “Mostly.”
“What’s he saying, basically,” Rafe informed me, turning his head on the hearth rug so that those gold eyes were inches from mine, “is that politicians are overrated.”
That picnic on the hill, months before, Rafe and me throwing strawberries to shut Daniel up in the middle of another rant. I swear I remembered it: the smell of the sea breeze, the ache of my thighs from climbing. “Everything’s overrated except Elvis and chocolate,” I announced, raising my glass precariously above my head, and heard Daniel’s sudden, irresistible laugh.
Drink suited Daniel. It put a vivid flush on his cheekbones and a spark deep in his eyes, loosened his stiffness into a sure, animal grace. Usually Rafe was the resident eye candy, but that night it was Daniel I couldn’t take my eyes off. Leaning back among the candle flames and the rich colors and the faded brocade of the chair, with the glass glowing red in his hand and dark hair falling across his forehead, he looked like some ancient war leader himself: a high king in his banquet hall, shining and reckless, celebrating between battles.
The sash windows flung open to the night garden; moths whirling at the lights, shadows crisscrossing, soft damp breeze playing in the curtains. “But it’s
summer,
” Justin said suddenly, amazed, shooting up on the sofa. “Feel the wind, it’s warm. It’s summer. Come on, come outside,” and he scrambled up, tugging Abby up by the hand as he went past, and clambered out the window onto the patio.
The garden was dark and scented and alive. I don’t know how long we spent out there, under a huge wild moon. Rafe and me crossing hands and whirling on the lawn till we fell over in a panting giggling heap, Justin tossing a great double handful of hawthorn petals in the air so that they fell like snow onto our hair, Daniel and Abby dancing a slow barefoot waltz under the trees, like ghost lovers from some long-lost ball. I threw flips and cartwheels straight across the grass, fuck my imaginary stitches, fuck whether Lexie had done gymnastics, I couldn’t remember the last time I had been this drunk and I loved it. I wanted to dive deeper into it and never come up for air, open my mouth and take a huge breath and drown on this night.