Page 43 of Days You Were Mine

He takes hold of Alice’s arm.

‘Just the three of us,’ he says. ‘A bit like old times.’

Then

Alice

None of us expected the unlikely alliance between Tom and Rick, a friendship that hovers on the tightrope of something more.

‘Are they lovers?’ Jake asks me one night when we’ve left them drinking alone in the pub.

‘I don’t think Rick has lovers as such, not in the relationship sense. None that he admits to anyway. I think he’s still getting used to the fact that he can be open about being gay.’

Tonight it’s the four of us for Pink Floyd’sThe Dark Side of the Moongig at Earls Court, a show we’ve been talking about for weeks. There has been so much hype around this album; everyone I know has had it on their turntable for the past six months. But to see it performed live in an arena like Earls Court, with a troupe of backing singers and musicians, a backdrop of films and special effects culminating in the sound of an aeroplane crashing onto the stage during ‘On the Run’, well, our minds are collectively blown.

‘Us and Them’ is my favourite song on the album. I love its slow, soothing church-like beginning, the heartbreaking sweetness of Dave Gilmour’s vocal when he sings ‘we’re only ordinary men’. And then the exploding crescendo of the chorus,so dramatic and powerful and shockingly loud that my chest feels tight and I realise I am close to crying.

Most of all I love to watch Jake, who stands motionless, expressionless, as if he is in a trance. I want to grab his hand and tell him, ‘This is going to be you,’ but he is lost to everything but the music.

It feels after the final encore – ‘Eclipse’, two minutes – as if we have witnessed something momentous. When the band finally leave the stage, there’s a fragment of stunned silence before the screaming begins.

Afterwards, we try to find a pub that’s still serving, but everywhere is shut.

‘We can’t just go home after that,’ Jake says. ‘We need to mark tonight. We need an adventure.’

‘Let’s go somewhere,’ Tom says.

‘Like a road trip?’ Rick asks.

‘Exactly. Where shall we go?’

‘My aunt has a place in Southwold, right by the sea,’ Rick says. ‘She says I can use it whenever I want.’

We leave London an hour or so later in Tom’s beaten-up Austin Maxi, a wreck of a thing the colour of French mustard. Tom drives, Rick navigates and Jake and I sit in the back, my head resting on his shoulder, his hand tucked between my thighs. Before we’re even out of town, I’ve fallen asleep, and when I next wake it is as if to a dream, the car parked up beside a row of pastel-coloured beach huts – primrose yellow, mint green, sky blue – and in front of us this vast flat sea, grey with flecks of silver. The sky is beginning its transition – we couldn’t have timed it better – and the four of us jump a few feet down from the car park straight onto the beach. It is perhaps the best sunrise I have ever seen, a sheet of deep purple with flashes of hot pink and orange, the slow backlighting of yellow and gold.I think: I’ll remember this when I’m old. It’s one of those moments so intensely visceral it must be burnt onto my memory.

The house is one street back from the beach, a sloping two-up, two-down terraced house painted pale blue with a bright yellow front door. It is so close to the beach you can hear the waves crashing from every room in the house. Rick opens up an airing cupboard and finds clean sheets for us – Jacob and me in the room with the double bed, Tom in the single room – and Rick says, ‘Oh, don’t worry about me, I can sleep anywhere,’ which tells us to ask no questions.

We go to bed for a few hours and the sex is prolonged and intense. When Jake is on top of me, propped up on his hands but staring down into my eyes with a look I have come to know so well, I am filled with love so fierce and strong that the words spill out.

‘I love you,’ I say. And then again, again. I love you. I love you. Once I start, I cannot stop. And we lie together in the bright morning sunshine, laughing and telling each other the three words that sentiment cannot cheapen.

The way I feel when I’m with him, it’s as if everything is magnified, and I don’t want to miss a single second of it.

‘I never expected to feel this way,’ I say as we drift towards sleep, and Jake reaches for my hand, holds it between both of his.

‘Shit childhoods, low expectations. I think that makes it even better. Don’t you?’

I don’t know much about his early years, though I’ve tried to fill in the gaps. A father who walked out when he was three, his choice cheap, gut-rotting alcohol that killed him off, alone in a bedsit, when he was thirty-nine. A mother who resented the burden of bringing up Jake and farmed him out whenever she could, mostly to her parents, whom he will never talkabout. Once, only once, when we were very drunk, he said, ‘My grandfather was an appalling human being. Him being dead isn’t enough.’

There is no sound from Tom’s room and no sign of Rick when we wake in the early afternoon.

‘Let’s leave them to it,’ Jake says, and we spend the rest of the day alone.

We do all the things you’re meant to do in an old-fashioned seaside town. We eat fish and chips, heavily doused in salt and vinegar, on the seafront. We walk along the pier with its hall of mirrors and its bizarre penny slot machines – like Crankenstein, a behind-bars monster who cranks into life with glowing eyes and a ferocious sneer – and we sit right at the end of it, feet dangling high above the water, salt wind on our cheeks.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt this good in my life,’ Jake says after a long moment of silence, and I understand exactly what he means. There’s a euphoria between us today, partly that shared post-coital glow, but mostly, I think, the acknowledgement of love, which has propelled us into a different place.

He wraps an arm around my shoulders and pulls me close, the water beneath us, a grey, peaked mass.

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