“No. But stop beating yourself up because you failed to see how a seven-year-old kid might respond to your ordinary act of teenage rebellion in 1984. Stop burying yourself alive at Le Croc of Shit. Your penance isn’t helping Jacko. Of course his disappearance has changed your life — how could it not? — but why does that make it right to squander your talents and the bloom of your youth serving cocktails to the likes of Chetwynd-Pitt and for the enrichment of the likes of Günter the employee-shagging drug dealer?”
Holly snaps back, “What am I s’posed to do, then?”
“I don’t know, do I? I haven’t had to survive what you’ve had to survive. Though, since you ask, there are countless other Jackos in London you could help. Runaways, homeless teenagers, victims of God only knows what. You’ve told me a lot today, Holly, and I’m honored, even if you think I’m betraying your trust by talking to you like this. But I haven’t heard one thing that forfeits your right to a useful and, yeah, even a content life.”
Holly stands up, looking angry and hurt and puffy-eyed. “Half of me wants to hit you with something metal.” She sounds serious. “So does the other half. So I’ll go to sleep. You’d better leave in the morning. Switch off the light when you go to bed.”
WHEN I’M WOKEN by the wedge of dim light, my head’s in a fog and my body’s gripped in a tangled sleeping bag. Tiny room, more of a walk-in cupboard; silhouetted girl in a man’s rugby shirt, long, loopy hair … Holly: good. Holly, whom I ordered out of a six-year period of mourning for a missing little brother — presumably dead and skillfully buried — come now to turf me out without breakfast into a very uncertain future … pretty bad. But the little window’s black as night still. My eyes are still gouged with tiredness. My dry, cigarette-and-pinot-blanc-caked mouth croaks, “Is it morning already?”
“No,” says Holly.
THE GIRL’S BREATHING deepens as she drifts off. Her futon’s our raft and sleep is the river. I sift through all the scents. “I’m out of practice,” she told me, in a blur of hair, clothing, and skin. I told her I was out of practice too, and she said, “Bullshit, Poshboy.” A long-dead violinist plays a Bach partita on the clock radio. The crappy speaker buzzes on the upper notes, but I wouldn’t trade this hour for a private concert with Sir Yehudi Menuhin playing his Stradivarius. Neither would I want to travel back to my and the Humberites’ very undergrad discourse on the nature of love at Le Croc the other night, but if I did I’d tell Fitzsimmons et al. that love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death. Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you to Holly, who breathes like the sea. This time I whisper it, at about the violin’s volume: “I love you.” No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.
STILL DARK. THE Alpine hush is miles deep. The skylight over Holly’s bed is covered with snow, but now that the blizzard’s stopped I’m guessing the stars are out. I’d like to buy her a telescope. Could I send her one? From where? My body’s aching and floaty but my mind’s flicking through the last night and day, like a record collector flicking through files of LPs. On the clock radio, a ghostly presenter named Antoine Tanguay is working through Nocturne Hour from three till four A.M. Like all the best DJs, Antoine Tanguay says almost nothing. I kiss Holly’s hair, but to my surprise she’s awake: “When did the wind die down?”
“An hour ago. Like someone unplugged it.”
“You’ve been awake a whole hour?”
“My arm’s dead, but I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“Idiot.” She lifts her body to tell me to slide it out.
I loop a long strand of her hair around my thumb and rub it on my lip. “I spoke out of turn last night. About your brother. Sorry.”
“You’re forgiven.” She twangs my boxer shorts’ elastic. “Obviously. Maybe I needed to hear it.”
I kiss her wound-up hair bundle, then uncoil it. “You wouldn’t have any ciggies left, perchance?”
In the velvet dark, I see her smile: A blade of happiness slips between my ribs. “What?”
“Use a word like ‘perchance’ in Gravesend, you’d get crucified on the Ebbsfleet roundabout for being a suspected Conservative voter. No cigarettes left, I’m ’fraid. I went out to buy some yesterday, but found a semiattractive stalker, who’d cleverly made himself homeless forty minutes before a whiteout, so I had to come back without any.”
I trace her cheekbones. “Semiattractive? Cheeky moo.”
She yawns an octave. “Hope we can dig a way out tomorrow.”
“I hope we can’t. I like being snowed in with you.”
“Yeah well, some of us have these job things. Günter’s expecting a full house. Flirty-flirty tourists want to party-party-party.”
I bury my head in the crook of her bare shoulder. “No.”
Her hand explores my shoulder blade. “No what?”
“No, you can’t go to Le Croc tomorrow. Sorry. First, because now I’m your man, I forbid it.”
Her sss-sss is a sort of laugh. “Second?”
“Second, if you went, I’d have to gun down every male between twelve and ninety who dared speak to you, plus any lesbians too. That’s seventy-five percent of Le Croc’s clientele. Tomorrow’s headlines would all be BLOODBATH IN THE ALPS and LAMB THE SLAUGHTERER, and as a vegetarian-pacifist type, I know you wouldn’t want any role in a massacre so you’d better shack up”—I kiss her nose, forehead, and temple—“with me all day.”
She presses her ear to my ribs. “Have you heard your heart? It’s like Keith Moon in there. Seriously. Have I got off with a mutant?”
The blanket’s slipped off her shoulder: I pull it back. We say nothing for a while. Antoine whispers in his radio studio, wherever it is, and plays John Cage’s In a Landscape. It unscrolls, meanderingly. “If time had a pause button,” I tell Holly Sykes, “I’d press it. Right”—I press a spot between her eyebrows and up a bit—“there. Now.”
“But if you did that, the whole universe’d be frozen, even you, so you couldn’t press play to start time again. We’d be stuck forever.”
I kiss her on the mouth and blood’s rushing everywhere.
She murmurs, “You only value something if you know it’ll end.”
NEXT TIME I wake, Holly’s room is gray, like underneath a hole in pack ice. Whispering Antoine is long gone; the radio’s buzzing with French-Algerian rap and the clock says 08:15. She’s showering. Today’s the day I either change my life or I don’t. I locate my clothes, straighten the twisted duvet, and deposit the tissues in a small wicker bin. Then I notice a big round silver pendant, looped over a postcard Blu-Tacked to the wall above the box that serves as a bedside table. The pendant is a labyrinth of grooves and ridges. It’s hand-made, with great care, though it’d be too heavy to wear for long and it’s too big not to attract constant attention. I try to solve it by eye, but get lost once, twice, a third time. Only by holding it in my palm and using my little fingernail to trace a path do I get to the middle. If the maze was real and you were stuck in it, you’d need time and luck. When the moment’s right, I’ll ask Holly about it.
And the postcard? It could be one of a hundred suspension bridges anywhere in the world. Holly’s still in her shower, so I pull the postcard off the wall and turn it over …