Page 26 of Rewrite the Stars
‘I’ll be with you as soon as I can, I promise,’ I told him.
‘I love you, Charlie Taylor,’ he said to me, his eyes filling up with tears. ‘I don’t have to go, you know. You could tell me to stay and I would.’
I shook my head and held him close. ‘I love you too, Tom,’ I told him. ‘But I can’t hold you back from this opportunity. Go to London and I’ll be with you someday, I promise.’
And so, he left for London, his heart in pieces and mine the same, not knowing if I’d ever find the space in my mind to let go of my guilt and follow my heart and soul to where I knew it belonged – with him.
The days passed into weeks, the weeks into months and, as Matthew slowly got better, we never talked about what happened that day in Loughisland when he stormed out in the snow. We just focused on his daily progress, teaching him to sit up straight, to eat with a knife and fork, to say words that used to roll off his tongue but which he now couldn’t find. But there were times when I’d catch him staring at me and I’d wonder what was going on in his tortured mind.
Does he hate me for what happened? Does he blame me? Or will he ever be able to let it go and move on as we all have been trying so hard to do? Now he lies in a different ward in a new hospital where he’s learning to pick up the pieces of his splintered life, still unable to walk and neither of us able to discuss the elephant in the room, the man we both were in love with at the same time.
‘We’ve got a name for the band at last,’ Tom told me in his weekly phone call where we try and catch up and keep our precious connection. ‘You’re going to think it’s awful, I know it.’
‘Hit me,’ I said to him, drinking in the sound of his voice and longing for the distance between us to lessen soon.
‘The record company want to call us The Band with No Name,’ he said, then waited for my inevitable reaction. I just burst out laughing and he did the same.
‘What genius came up with that?’ I ask him.
‘I was telling the label all about you,’ he says, his voice glowing with anticipation. ‘I said you could maybe send us some new material when you get a chance? I want this to be an opportunity for you too, Charlie. I can’t wait till you come here. You’ll love it.’
My heart soars when he talks like that and I picture it all in my head. Me and Tom, walking around London, somewhere like Notting Hill or Camden Town, exploring the culture, drinking in the diversity and writing songs that come to us like magic.
But deep down, I don’t know if the guilt I feel over Matthew’s brush with death will ever let that dream I have come true.
‘Miss Taylor, I drew you a picture.’
My daydreaming and reflecting is interrupted as usual by one of my seven-year-old pupils, little Gracie Marshall, who hands me a sheet of paper with a very circular-looking me, complete with my guitar and long, flowing purple gypsy dress. Above me is the most magnificent yellow sun with a smiling face that only a young child can draw.
‘Well now, Gracie, that has just brightened up my day, thank you,’ I say to her, putting the picture up on the wall beside me with my ever-present stash of Blu Tack. She grins from ear to ear and swings from side to side, so I know she has something else on her mind. I wait with a smile, wanting her to know she can ask me anything.
‘What is it, darling? Are you OK?’ I ask her.
She looks around, then up at me from under thick, dark eyelashes.
‘Will you … will you sing us a song, please, Miss Taylor?’ she eventually asks me, her brown eyes wide as saucers as she twiddles with her dark hair. ‘You haven’t sung to us in ages andagesand I love it when you sing your songs.’
I take a deep breath knowing this is very true. I don’t sing at all these days. I just can’t. Every time I lift my guitar and try, either at home or here in school, I feel Tom near me and I want to cry for how sore my heart still is without him.
He wants me to sing again, he told me in his last call. Maybe today, with the joy of spring in the air and an audience of very non-judgemental children, is as good a day as any to give it a go.
‘I’ll try my best, Gracie,’ I say, feeling my lip wobble as she brings me over the guitar from the stand where it’s been gathering dust for weeks and weeks now. ‘What would you like to hear? Any special requests?’
With the familiar cool feeling of the shiny dark wood in my hands, I twist the nuts to tune up, run my fingers down the bumps of the frets and feel the firm strings under my fingers.
A chorus of voices cheer from their desks and I manage to smile from ear to ear in a way I haven’t done in so long. Tears prick my eyes. There’s no doubt about it, music is what I’m meant to do in life, I just know it. Tom is right. It’s in my soul and it makes people happy to hear my songs just as much as it makes me happy to write and sing them.
‘Sing the one about the lucky number,’ says one of the Jackson twins from the second row of the small classroom. Even after teaching them for almost seven months, I still sometimes can’t tell the difference in the two little red-headed boys, which is made more difficult when they constantly swap seats to confuse me.
‘Ah, the lucky number song, of course,’ I say to a rapture of enthusiasm from the other twenty-five faces that stare back at me. ‘OK, I’ll give it a go.’
I quickly recount the words of the ‘lucky number song’ in my head, and to my delight and surprise they come flooding back like I’ve never stopped singing it.
I wrote it over a year ago for the pupils who were in my class and, as I think of life back then, I realize how much things have changed for me and all around me. The words of the song were penned right here at this very desk one evening after marking homework, long before Matthew’s accident, and long before I fell in love once more with Tom and then lost him again.
The song, a simple, gentle lullaby, was written to instil a sense of love and joy in such young innocent minds, based around the idea that we all have a lucky number, a sense of hope and a guardian angel. The words never fail to make me cry as I know it will do now, but in the nicest way, stripping the idea of happiness down to the simplest things in life like a hug, a smile or a kind word to another.
I pluck the dreamy opening notes and my heart fills up when I look down onto the rows of tiny faces in front of me, some leaning their faces in their hands, some swaying along and others even mouthing the lyrics as I sing. When it comes to the chorus they all join in and I give up disguising the tears that flow from my eyes.
