Page 4 of Days You Were Mine

‘Surely not another tree?’ he says, arms folded, mouth tight, hovering beside me. ‘What is it with you and trees?’

And something crumples inside me. Instead of standing up to him, as I do every day in my mind, I say, ‘I don’t know. I just like them.’

‘Well, I like ice cream, but I don’t paint it every bloody day. Move on now. We need to see some development. This is sub-A-level standard.’

In the pub, Rick feeds me gin and tonic and holds my hand while I cry.

‘I shouldn’t be on this course, I’m going to drop out.’

We have the same conversation every week, always after Gordon King’s class.

‘What is it with you and trees?’

Rick can mimic Gordon perfectly, his soft Anglicised Scottish voice at odds with his bitter personality.

‘The man’s a bully. And you’re his victim. We have to find a way of changing that.’

He glances at my half-full tumbler of gin.

‘Drink up, tree girl. We have a gig to get to.’

There’s time for another drink before the show starts, but the bar is packed full, three hundred drinkers crammed into a tiny space, most of them smoking, the air a greenish grey. Rick holds my hand and hauls me through the crowd.

‘’Scuse us. Sorry,’ he says as we tread on feet and squeeze in between couples. And then, five feet from the bar, he stops dead and I smack into him.

‘What?’ I ask, but Rick doesn’t answer.

Perhaps it’s his pheromones, some kind of chemical energy anyway, that makes me look where Rick is looking. Jacob Earl is standing at the bar, two elbows leant on it, a pound noteheld in one hand. He’s ordering drinks and there seems to be an invisible force field around him, a whole room full of people who can look but not touch.

He has his back to me, but even that is intriguing, the way his dark, almost black hair curls over the collar of his shirt, the skinniness of his hips in their tight black jeans, his snakeskin boots.

‘Wait till he turns round,’ Rick says, and at that moment, Jacob does.

The face is astonishing, it’s true, a perfect blend of male and female, though not in the Bowie way, for he is even prettier, with his curly hair and big brown eyes, his full lips. Around his neck he wears a flowered choker and several gold chains. His shirt, like in the photo, is open almost to his waist. It’s impossible not to stare.

‘Oi, Jacob!’ Rick calls out unexpectedly, and the singer turns around. ‘Get us a couple of ales while you’re there, would you?’

He does this, Rick, asks for the impossible with an optimistic grin, and people often fall for it.

‘All right,’ Jacob says, and he begins to smile slowly in return. ‘Pints or halves?’

‘Pints. Please.’ Rick passes over a pound note.

‘For your girlfriend too?’

‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ Rick says, too fast, and Jacob laughs.

‘You sure about that?’

‘Positive. This is Alice. I’m Rick. We’re at art school together.’

‘Art school? Whereabouts?’

‘The Slade.’

‘Hey, Eddie. EDDIE.’

Another man in head-to-toe black turns around from the bar and looks at us without interest.

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