Page 5 of Days You Were Mine

‘These guys are art students,’ Jacob says. ‘They’re at the Slade.You know the Slade, right? The best art school in the country. Remember what we were talking about earlier?’

‘Oh yeah.’

Whatever it was, Eddie clearly couldn’t give a toss.

‘So maybe we should talk to them? About our idea?’

Eddie shrugs. He looks at his watch.

‘There’s no time. We’re on in ten.’

Jacob nods, reluctantly it seems to me.

‘You’re right, we should go.’

He looks at me with a final heart-shattering smile and I return his gaze, heat flooding to my cheeks.

‘Well, enjoy the show,’ he says. ‘See you for a drink afterwards?’

Waiting for the band to come on, the small, dark room now crammed with bodies and pulsing with the collective energy that accompanies anticipation, I am preoccupied with the beautiful singer. I am physically affected by those brief seconds of interaction, stomach tense, heart banging in my chest, whole body framed in some kind of expectation.

I assume I’m going to like the band, everyone else seems to, but when they finally come out onto the stage, all of them in black, the density of their opening chord – simultaneous drums, guitar and a long-drawn-out vocal – leaves room for nothing else. I am immersed in the music in a way I never have been; my eyes scan each musician – the drummer, the bass guitarist, the backing singers, two girls, one guy – before returning each time, as if magnetically pulled, to Jacob. Never have I seen someone so effortlessly at ease with himself. Singing so close to the mic that his lips almost touch it. Dancing across the stage between vocals, though dancing is not the right word for this strange, hip-swinging side-shuffle. It might look odd onanyone else, but not him, with his pretty-boy thinness and his cool, jerky moves.

But it is the words he sings that tip me head-first over an invisible line to a place where I can no longer remember a time when Jacob wasn’t the headline in my thoughts.

The first song, ‘Sarah’, about breaking up with a girl, is the embodiment of sadness. I want to be Sarah, I want to immerse myself in Sarah’s sorrow.

‘Does he write his own songs?’ I ask Rick without taking my eyes off the stage.

Rick laughs, also without shifting his attention.

‘Of course. He’s a god.’

What to say about the next hour, the two of us rapt in sound and visuals and private fantasy? As a whole – an all-male three-piece consisting of singer/guitarist, bass player and drummer, plus for tonight the trio of backing singers – the band seems to exist in permanent frenzy, explosive riffs, each one longer than the last, extended drum solos that are exhausting in their demand for focus. But it’s the quieter moments I like best, the slow, somnambulant drift into ballad, lyrics that pierce the heart with their compelling sadness. For the final, tortured love song, Jacob sits on the edge of the stage, singing into the microphone with his bluesy Americanised voice – honey flecked with gravel.

He walks from the stage first, one hand raised in salute, guitar slung around his neck – even his casualness is arresting – and then, in turn, the bassist and drummer both take a final solo before following him.

No encore, just the explosive sound of audience rapture.

‘Christ, they’re bloody amazing.’

‘His voice,’ Rick says. ‘David Bowie, but better.’

‘His face. Mick Jagger, but cuter.’

Rick raises his brows and tilts his head to examine me.

‘And finally,’ he says, ‘the girl made of ice begins to thaw.’

Now

Luke

We live in a four-bedroomed Victorian terrace in Clapham, bought with a legacy from my father. None of our friends live in a house like this, but then our friends still have both parents intact; my father died from spleen cancer two years ago, a hard, horrible ending that left my mother and me alone. Ours has always been the tricky relationship, and now we no longer have my father’s childish jokes and penchant for expensive wine to take the edge off. When my mother discovered Hannah was pregnant after only three months of our being together, she begged us not to ‘make this mistake’.

‘Don’t put so much pressure on your relationship when you hardly know each other. I’ll pay for you to go to a private clinic; it’s all so easy these days.’

Recommending abortion to an adopted person – well, the irony is writ pretty large. Don’t make the same mistake your mother made. There’s that. And then the rather devastating underpinning: kill this embryo, scrape away this nucleus, before it has a chance to wreck your life. Don’t get me wrong, choosing to have a child with Hannah was no mercy mission, a debt repaid for the life I was given (I was born in 1973; abortion was front-street and fully available by then). Simply that the prospect of beginning a life with this cloudy-haired girl, withher pink Cornish cheeks and the optimism that precedes her into every room, was an adrenaline shot to the heart. And I wanted a child, this child, in a way I’d never wanted anything before.

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