They cruised down the Autobahn listening to Kraftwerk. They ate sausages and drank black beer in high-altitude Bavarian bars where the air smelt of bread and snow and they wrapped themselves around each other at night and fell asleep.
They crossed the Alps. Harry couldn’t help herself, she burst into tears the first time she saw those mountains rising up into the sky and plunging down at the same time, reflected for ever in the perfect mirror of those Italian lakes.
Leon was back in London, keeping his eye on things. There was an email account that was checked every other day.
Summer began and everything was becoming increasingly intense.
Harry retreated into herself. Started biting her nails. Becky wondered where her life had gone. Itching to dance. The years she’d put into her training. For this? To run away like this?
She began to write a long letter to her mother and in the back of her mind was the thought that if she ever finished it, this one she would send.
The news came in June. They were in an internet café in Montepulciano. Harry’s face went green as glass as she read it.
Pico was out of jail. He had requested that they meet. She felt like all the days that had passed since they left had just been treading water. Her body was a mess of panic. A walking ulcer. She drank constantly the rest of that day and passed out in the hotel lobby. Becky found her at nine in the evening, useless, frowning like a newborn baby, and carried her up in the lift.
Harry was to travel to a hotel in Fribourg the following Tuesday where she would find Leon.
The morning came up bright and warm. Becky spent the day thinking hard. She went walking round the old town, stumbled on a small gallery and she made her decision staring at stained-glass depictions of illuminated saints. She felt peeled. Shuddery and not herself. Harry’s arms were like a vice these days, tightening, squeezing her into an impossible flatness. She stood, staring at these saints, these broken women, in attitudes of servitude and beatification, and they horrified her. She couldn’t see them at all, only the idea of them. She felt like that. Not herself. Just whatever Harry saw. She gazed and saw time passing. Somebody’s legacy. Not the women depicted but the person who had laid the lead and placed them there. Someone had made something beautiful and terrifying and left it for her to see. She walked slowly round the room. Her mouth hung open before vast images of sacrifice and contrition that seemed to chant the word ‘purpose’.
That night Becky lay on top of her love and held her face and kissed her eyes and told her she was going to go back home.
They drove to the Italian coast and said their goodbyes to the roll of the ocean. Drank wine and ate pasta and smoked cigarettes and didn’t speak much about what was going to happen next.
Becky told her it was better that they enjoyed their last night together rather than cry and fight. ‘Let’s just have this time and then let each other go.’
Harry was floundering. Nothing was clear. Her mouth was a trapped animal. And everywhere she looked, Pico stalked the background; his moustache, his bright white teeth. Pico, Pete. Ron and Pico. Pete and Ron and Becky. Leon. Pete. Pico. Becky. Becky. Pico. The eternal carousel within. Her bones felt ground to spice. Don’t leave, she thought. But she said nothing.
They went to bed and didn’t touch.
Becky stares at all the faces in the plastic airport light, all the families and loved ones reunited in the arrivals lounge, and she wipes her face with rough hands and bites back tears. Hard as she ever was. But coming home.
Pete wakes in a sun-bright bed. The broken slats are letting the morning flood the room in uneven waves. Bare floorboards stretch towards an open door, a threadbare red Moroccan rug. There is singing through the walls. The sound of people talking cheerful morning talk and laughter. In the room he lies in is a stuffed bookcase. A table by the window, a wooden chair before it. A framed Kandinsky print. A portrait of Haile Selassie. Ribbons and strips of cloth hang on hooks and are draped across a mirror. The words of the Desiderata are written in fluid lines across the ceiling. There are clothes all over the floor. And sheets of paper. Charcoal drawings. It is freezing. He listens to heavy boots on the stairs pummelling the bones of the rickety building. He is in a grandiose townhouse, falling apart. Recently squatted, inhabited by Spanish anarchists and trainee welders. They’d seemed alright to Pete the night before.
What was her name? He lies still, investigating his belly button.
She’s standing in the doorway, naked beneath a long shirt, two buttons done up. She’s having a conversation with someone Pete can’t see. They’re talking in a language he can’t place. Turkish maybe. Berber. She has geometric patterns tattooed in white ink across her hips and they wind around her legs. She laughs. French reggae is playing from a distant speaker. There is the sound of frying and banging doors and the smell of toast and coffee. Pete hasn’t been around noise like this in a long while.
Smiling, she shuts the door behind her. The noise is muffled now. She stalks the bare floorboards and places a cup of hot coffee on his chest. He wraps his palms around the cup to warm them. ‘Coffee?’ she says. ‘No milk here. Vegan.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘Fine.’
She sits on the bed and crosses her legs and leans so she can see out of the broken blinds. She holds her cup into her body. Pete watches the steam and her naked stomach. He gets up, scans the floor for his boxers. She watches him. He crouches, searches, aware of his body beneath her gaze. He finds his pants at last, pulls them up clumsily and stands tall in the cold room. They judge one another calmly in the milky morning light.
He has found himself flitting between two states recently. The first is his usual state: strung-out, stalking the streets of his youth, skunk-strange, coke-vexed, wanting to staple himself to strangers and push his body through the shuddering windscreens of accelerating buses. But the second state is newer, one that creeps up on him when he least expects it. He will notice himself pacing peacefully, weightless, enjoying the neon through the chicken-shop windows, aware of how pleasantly it illuminates the pallid faces of the lifesick children that patrol the strip. He’s caught somewhere between raging self-pitying blame and a new softness, a sweet and settled feeling. Relief. To be alone at last.
The best thing is how good it is not feeling useless. He likes his friends again.
He’s been getting out more. He’s not afraid of everyone he meets.
Her shadow haunts every corner. She’s in every woman he speaks to. His sister’s hateful face makes him smash things up when he’s drunk.
He misses her. It’s like a rat’s mouth eating him slowly. But he’s starting to realise how funny and good people are. He’s remembering the sound of his laughter.