Page 47 of Days You Were Mine

Hannah serves the pie, a gorgeous yellowy mess studded with prawns and chunks of salmon. We’ve eaten it several times before and it’s become our favourite.

‘God, that’s good,’ she says. ‘We are so lucky with Alice.’

We have a variant of this conversation most nights and I usually agree, but now I allow a little of my bleakness out.

‘Lucky in one way, I guess. But in another way this whole thing is starting to do my head in. I don’t feel I’m getting to know her at all.’

Hannah looks up at me in surprise, mid-mouthful, fork frozen in the air. She puts it back down untouched.

‘How do you mean? I thought you liked her. I thought we felt the same.’

‘Of course I like her. But I don’t know her. And wasn’t that the whole point? Mother and son being reunited. Spending time together. Forming some kind of bond. The only bond being formed here is between Alice and Samuel.’

I take a big drink of wine. I’ve said more than I meant to. But Hannah is looking at me with concern. She gets up from her side of the table and comes around to mine.

‘Budge up.’ She squeezes in next to me on the bench. ‘Poor baby,’ she says, reaching up to kiss the side of my face. ‘This is harder on you than we realised, isn’t it?’

I can’t rely on my voice just yet, so I have another swig of wine and allow Hannah to do the talking.

‘You do know, don’t you, that this is ridiculous. Butcompletely understandable.’ Firm emphasis on the words. ‘The thing is, Alice has to form a bond with Samuel just by the fact of being his carer. If she didn’t, we would be bloody worried. In fact, we’d have to sack her.’

She pauses, expecting me to laugh, but I can’t.

‘Luke, it’s going to take time for you and Alice to have the kind of relationship you want. In a way, I think there’s too much hurt on both sides. Yours at the fact that she gave you up, hers at the fact that she had to and she still feels guilty about it. And when you feel guilty, you get defensive, you put up barriers. It’s going to take time to break those barriers down, but that’s all right. Time is something we have. You’re young and so is Alice; she’s not even fifty. You’ve got years and years to get to know each other.’

‘You know me. Always wanting to rush things.’

‘The thing is, you’re actually quite lucky. So few people get the chance to form a relationship with their parents as an adult; they have all the baggage of childhood, all those disappointments and rows that get in the way. You and Alice have a clean slate.’

And, for the first time ever, I think: Hannah doesn’t get it. The baggage is what I want. The history is what I crave. I’d like to pick up that clean slate and dash it to the ground, little fragments of black scattered across our immaculate, Alice-swept, Alice-washed oak floor.

Then

Alice

In August, the heat becomes unbearable. The little basement studio where the band are recording is anvil-hot, tolerable only in the coolness of night. Jake declares a week’s holiday.

Tom and Eddie are content to lie around the pool deepening their suntans, playing cards and drinking vats of cheap red wine at night. But after just one day of this, Jake takes the bus into Florence and comes back driving a tiny lemon-yellow bubble car. All three of us, Eddie, Tom and I, gather around to watch him unfolding his long, thin body from the confines of the car; at six foot two, it’s a miracle he managed to get inside it in the first place.

‘We’re going on a road trip,’ he says. ‘Just you and me.’

‘In Noddy’s car?’

‘This magnificent machine is a Cinquecento. We couldn’t possibly travel in anything else.’

Cars, cappuccinos – authenticity is Jacob’s drug.

The Cinquecento has a top speed of around eighty kilometres per hour, so we decide upon a few nights in Siena, just a short drive up the road. The euphoria of those first hours, the two of us alone at last, puttering through a backdrop of Tuscan hills now burnt bronze from the weeks of scorching sun. It looks as I’d imagine Africa to look, beautiful but parched, bleached,bleak from the lack of green. Jake turns on the radio and the opening bars of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ start up, and he says, ‘Fuck.’ We listen in silence, volume right up, and afterwards he tells me about seeing Jimi play in a tiny little Soho pub called The Toucan.

‘You knew he was different right away, even before the mental guitar solos. He had it like no one else, not Jagger, not Bowie, certainly not The Beatles. That was the moment I knew nothing else mattered apart from music. I came back from that gig and I began playing guitar obsessively, all the way through the night. Sleep felt like a waste of time. I wanted to be just like him. I taught myself to play bass and rhythm guitar, I felt like I needed to be able to do everything better than anyone else.’

He holds my hand and we’re quiet again and I know he’s thinking about Jimi, his death, a drug overdose that could have been prevented, people said, if only his girlfriend had reacted sooner. I remember her name, it’s scorched into my memory: Monika Dannemann. If she had dialled 999 half an hour earlier, he would probably still be alive.

‘But he might have been brain-dead,’ Jake says, as if we’ve been having this conversation out loud instead of in our heads.

‘What must it be like to be Monika?’

‘Hard to see how she’ll ever get over it.’

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