Page 94 of So Wild

“And?”

“And I maybe want to…” Sam struggled with the tail end of the sentence.

“Yes?”

“…have sex with him.”

Nicole looked up at the ceiling as though imploring it to give her strength. “Again, it’s a start. How are you going to apologise?”

The mere word set Sam’s teeth on edge. “The only way I ever could, I guess.”

Because Nicole was her twin, she knew exactly what Sam meant. “I used all the pie ingredients for the bribery breakfast. There’s no caster sugar, or cream, or butter. I don’t think we even have self-raising flour.”

“It’s okay,” Sam said. “I’ll head to the shops on my break. It’ll give me a chance to think about what the hell I’m going to say when I see him.”

Chapter 17

As a teenager,whenever Scott sat behind his kit and pounded away, a ragged place inside him smoothed over. Itwascathartic to hit things with sticks, but it was more than that. When he played, he didn’t stutter—sound came out of him loud and clear. To Scott, they were the perfect instrument—important but not exposed, loud, but without any pressure to talk. Most people forgot about the drums, couldn’t name more than one or two famous drummers, but without them the music couldn’t go.

His dadhatedthe drums, he wanted Scott to play the piano—as if people didn’t already think he was a Nancy boy. Scott had refused and for once, his mum had backed him up. “Let him have a drum kit, Greg. He’ll only play when you’re at work.”

From the age of fourteen onward, he could play every day. Twice a day if he got up as soon as his dad left. Dreams of rock star fame took over his life—stepping up as a last-minute drummer for Franz Ferdinand or The New Pornographers and being unilaterally accepted into the band. Samantha DaSilva was the cornerstone of those inane fantasies, standing in the crowd in shorts or a tight flowery dress, her mouth dropping open when she saw how insanely talented he was. She would come backstage after the show and do to him what girls did to musicians they liked—the things girls did to Anthony Kiedis in Scar Tissue.

They were all stupid fantasies. No one except his closest mates knew he played the drums and no one was much impressed by it. At least once a week his mum would come into the front room and plead for him to put a shirt on. “You look like an animal, Scotty, darling.”

She persisted in calling him Scotty, despite him telling her about the song Scotty Doesn’t Know. A song that was a significant thorn in his side throughout high school. He’d mostly stayed a virgin waiting for Samantha, but his reluctance to get a girlfriend was at least ten percent Lustra’s fault.

When he was seventeen, he had the idea of going on one of those rock-swap websites and finding a band to play with once exams were over. Seeing if a more realistic version of the rockstar wasn’t possible. Then his mum died and he flew to London and that was the end of the dream. He never asked his dad what happened to the cherry-red drum kit but he imagined it was bashed into splinters. He didn’t play at university and once he’d graduated and gotten his own place, he still didn’t buy a kit. His rockstar fantasies belonged in the mental box where he kept his mother and Samantha DaSilva. A box labelled ‘the past.’

Then there was the music store.

Why there was a music store a single block away from his new house, no one could tell him—it wasn’t a hipster area, it was a yuppie area, and yuppies in his experience were always too busy performing fun to master instruments. Yet there it was, the music shop, and the first time he walked past it he’d seen a smoke and steel version of his teenage kit. He stopped still, energy vibrating down his arms as though he’d just spent an afternoon bashing out Make Somebody Love Me.

Just go inside, Scotty.

He’d gone inside feeling incredibly self-conscious in his suit. The friendly kid behind the counter asked him what he was looking for and Scott pointed at the drums. “I’m kind of old, though. And I’m not in a band.”

The kid looked at him like he was crazy. “You don’t need to be in a band to play. Just play because you want to play.”

He bought the kit then and there. It was delivered to his house the same day, but it had taken him twelve hours to pick up the sticks. He’d done it just before he was supposed to leave for work—a built-in excuse to stop if he was humiliatingly bad.

He wasn’t bad. He wasn’t slow. He wasn’t uncomfortable. He was good, as good as though he’d stopped playing yesterday. The only words he could fine to describe how it felt to play again were silly—magic, homecoming, destiny,whole. He still knew all the chord progressions for The Man Who Sold the World and Everlong, but he would have been just as happy bashing out some inarticulate rhythm. The music store kid was right, it didn’t matter that he wasn’t in a band, he just had to play because he wanted to play.

Since climbing through Samantha’s window, Scott had spent almost all of the following day playing. Between her and his dad, he had a world of troubles, and drumming made time vanish in a way he’d never experienced before. Even gaming and drinking didn’t compare. He wasn’t numbing himself, he was still aware of the pain, but drumming helped him breathe. It reminded him of what Edgar DaSilva had said about finding a way to get the bad out and the good in.

After finishing a few sets, Scott took a short break, wiping away his sweat and draining his bottle of Furphy. He checked his phone and found no messages or missed calls from Samantha or his father. The former was par for course, but the latter… Scott pressed the cool glass of the beer bottle to his forehead.

After he climbed out of Samantha’s window, he’d discovered twelve missed calls from his father. His dad had left a voicemail after each one and as Scott sat in the dark listening to them, his armpits were damp with sweat.

“My own son, selling me down the river! Going behind my back to help those sluts next door.”

“Do you know how pissed off I was when I called up and the heritage pricks said I forged your fucking signature? I never forged your fucking signature! You’re a little fucking liar, Scotty.”

“You’re lucky your mother’s not around, she’d be mortified to hear you’d gone against your own family.”

“F-f-fucking hell,” Scott whispered, too overwhelmed to be embarrassed by his stutter. The palpable fury in his father’s voice, the way he kept repeating phrases and rambling over the same things again and again was unnerving. His dad had always been domineering, Sam and her sisters could attest to that, but Scott had never heard him so…unhinged. He’d bitten the bullet and called him back, but his father didn’t pick up. Scott had hesitated, checked the time and decided to drive to his old man’s place in Brighton.

He’d found the house locked up with the blinds drawn. None of the lights were on. Scott had only been there once, when he’d come home to attend his father’s wedding, but he was shocked by how much the place had changed. The neat gardens were overgrown, the lawn had gone to seed and there were strange marks and smudges all over the house’s off-white rendering. There were no cars in the driveway but Scott had parked and knocked anyway in case his stepmother, Marina was home.

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