Page 59 of Days You Were Mine

‘Why don’t you go if you care so much?’

‘I don’t owe her anything.’

‘All right, I’ll think about it. But, believe me, I’m not going to change my mind.’

His voice crescendos on this last line, he slams the phone down and throws himself out of the room without another word.

In the kitchen I find Jake pouring whisky into a wine glass, he fills it to the brim. I see how his hands shake as he puts the glass to his lips and swallows down an inch or two of liquid.

He puts the glass down on the table; he still hasn’t looked at me.

‘What’s happened?’

‘My grandmother died yesterday. My mum wants me to go to the funeral.’

‘Isn’t she going?’

He shakes his head, meets my eye for the first time.

‘She’s not coming back from Canada. The flights home are too expensive.’

‘I’d go with you if you wanted.’

‘I am not going anywhere near that bloody hellhole. Why should I?’

Standing a few feet apart, divided by our little Formica table, I can see that his whole body is shaking, with anger or fear.

I think of his confessions at Christmas, the childhood beatings, being locked out of the house on a freezing winter’s night a bit like this one. I walk around the table and wrap my arms around his waist. He allows me to hold him for a few seconds before he wrenches away and I watch him pacing around the kitchen in tiny restricted circles. He picks up his glass and downs the whisky in three or four gulps.

‘Talk to me, Jake.’

He sits down at the table, body curved away from me, face in hands, a cliché of despair.

‘There’s nothing to say,’ he says and he fills up his glass again, though he lets it rest untouched on the table. ‘Nothing.’

Thoughts and ideas run through my brain but I’m scared to mention them. I am thinking, doesn’t this mean it’s over? Bothgrandparents dead, Jake freed from his childhood. What if he went back to that house as an adult with his lover, with his child soon to be born, and faced the ancient horrors that still haunt his dreams, those quiet unguarded moments of sorrow?

‘Let’s watch the rest of the film.’

He picks up his glass and holds out a hand to me and we return to the sofa, but it isn’t the same. Jake might be watching the screen but I know he sees nothing but his past.

Grimness settles upon Jake like a cloud of dust. He is silent, preoccupied, haunted. The morning after the phone call, he says not one word to me. We shower and dress in silence as if we are flatmates and not lovers and I see that the effort of acknowledging me is more than he can manage.

We leave the flat together and when I walk towards Bar Italia, he says: ‘I’m not going to bother with coffee today. You go.’

He reaches into his pocket and hands me a pound note for my breakfast, but I shake my head.

‘I won’t bother either.’

‘I’ll see you later,’ he says. Then, ‘Sorry.’

I stand in the street watching him walk away, examining the stoop of his shoulders, his laboured gait. I don’t know what to do.

At college, I try talking to Rick about it.

‘He seems so down. One phone call and he’s like a different person. I can’t get any sense out of him.’

‘Maybe it’s brought everything back. He probably just needs space, Al.’

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