Someday Find Me

‘Sorry, guys,’ Dave said, hitching up Al’s head where it was dangling over his elbow. ‘Ally was sick in your sink. Better get her home.’

‘No worries.’ We both nodded. ‘See you, guys.’

They bobbled off up the steps and their chit-chatter faded into the dark as they walked away.

‘Oh, well,’ Saf said. ‘More for me and you, baby.’

Her nails were painted dark dark inky-pen-blue and they drew beautiful patterns all over my arms and round my cheeks and down my neck. ‘I love you,’ she said, right into the middle of my ear, and the words swirled all round my brain and made everything inside me glowing and bright.

The next day while I was clinking all the empty bottles about in a binbag, I listened to the radio where everyone was still talking about Fate Jones. It had been longer than a week by then and all kinds of characters were sneaking out of the woodwork to talk about her and how sad it was. So far I’d heard from her primary-school teacher, the bloke who drove the bus she got to work, the old girl who lived three doors down from her mum and dad, and the busker who sang Beatles songs outside her university library. It wasn’t exactly stirring stuff. Simon Cowell had apparently said that all the Top Idol contestants would wear Fate Jones T-shirts on that night’s show. Which was nice. Even though it was really bad that she was gone, it kind of made you feel a bit warm in the heart, seeing how everybody wanted to help. Made you feel a bit happier about people, in a funny way, because even though there were baddies who might or mightn’t have done something to this blonde clever girl who volunteered at an animal shelter in her spare time and taught little kids ballet, there were a million other people in the world who were good and would look out for her. It somehow made the odds seem a bit fairer.

Once all the bottles were picked up, I put the bag outside the front door and wandered back in. I stood in the doorway to the lounge and looked about for a bit with my hands on my hips like I was about to do something important but I didn’t know what it was yet. The radio had started playing music again and it was a bit lonely without all the sad and worried voices chatting out of it, but it was quite dancy music so on the plus side it did make you feel like doing something. Saffy was out at uni in the library and I knew she would be for ages. She was really near the end of her course and so she had loads of work to do that she needed a lot of space for. And that’s what made me think.

I went over to the corner where the telly was, and I stood there for a bit with my hands on my hips again. I pulled the telly over to the middle of the wall and scuffed away the dented square on the dodgy carpet. I rolled Quin’s duvet up a bit and moved it more behind the sofa. I knew he’d understand, he was just that type of bloke. He hadn’t ever complained about having to kip on the floor or about people dancing around him half the time when he was trying to get an early night. He hadn’t been about that much of late and I knew Saffy was probably missing him. He’d been there for her through things I didn’t really understand, things she’d never told me about, about her illness and the place they’d sent her. For ages and ages it had seemed like it was nothing, just something she occasionally accidentally got close to mentioning and then speedily steered off in another direction so I figured it was just all in the past and didn’t matter any more. It had been Quin who sat me down once, when Saf was out at work, and said to me, ‘William,’ cos he always called me William, just him and my mum really, ‘I think you should probably know a bit about Saffy’s illness even though she probably won’t ever tell you,’ and I’d said okay, not sure what to expect, and he’d made me a cup of tea and explained how bad it had got when she was younger and about the place her parents had sent her and how that was why it was really important that we took care of her and kept her out of that dark space she’d been swallowed by before. And I’d nodded and agreed and we never mentioned to her that we’d had the little chat and after a few more months of everything being fine had passed I started forgetting myself because I knew Saffy couldn’t go back there now, not when she had me and this little flat of love and light to live in. Regardless, even though that was all in the past and we didn’t need to talk about it, having Quin around was important. I knew that and I made a note to myself to organise a night in, just the three of us, when Quin wasn’t out at one of his parties or on a date or logged on to Grindr.

I went into our bedroom and I got the little table that was folded up behind the wardrobe and took it back in with me. I set it up and put a folded-up bit of paper under the wobbly leg and gave the dusty top a brush with my sleeve. I’d had this mad idea to set up Saffy a little work station, so she could get all her stuff done properly. She always ended up spread across the floor and never being able to get comfortable and I thought she’d be made up to have her own space. I went back into our room and looked about for her easel, which I eventually found under the bed, which did strike me as a bit odd and I did have to think for quite a long while about when the last time I’d seen her use it was, but I shrugged it off and wandered back out with it and set that up too. Then I went back in to get her work, all the big piles of thick white paper and the sketch books and the giant black folder she carried them around in, which was bigger than her almost.

I didn’t mean to look. I was always good at letting Saf get on with things, cos I knew she’d show me when she was ready. I knew I wouldn’t like it if she sat listening to me when I was trying to put a mix together because I’d get all flustered and fiddle things about in the wrong way and it wouldn’t work. But as I was putting the papers all carefully on the desk, I couldn’t help sneaking a peek. No matter how much I got to know her, I never stopped being totally completely blown away by Saffy and how clever and talented she was without even trying. Seeing things she’d made or done made me feel like I was about to zoom through the roof and into upstairs’s flat with all the pride and amazement I felt. She’d been working on this project for ages and ages, spending whole weekends in the library and carting all kinds of things back and forth with her and going off into the little dazes she did when she was thinking of an idea and so I knew it was going to be good and meant a lot to her. So I peeked. Just one sheet at first, and then another. And then one more. And then I was looking through them all, through the sketchbooks and the big sheets and the little sheets, feeling confused and a bit like my feet were sinking very very slowly through the floor. There was nothing there. Some of them had sketches that had been scrubbed through with fat black pen, some had words and ideas on them that had been scratched out with a biro. Lots of them had half-started things in faint ghosty pencil, but you could tell they’d never get finished with real lines and colours. All the other pages were empty. There was nothing there.

She was at it again, I knew she was. I tried not to look like I was looking at her, sitting there all bunched up in my massive woolly jumper with just her fingers poking out of the sleeves, pulling at the bit of toast I’d made her that just had a midget nibble out of one corner. But she saw me anyway and she got in a huff, jumping off the sofa with her legs unravelling and speeding off like Fred Flintstone’s – you know, when he’s pedalling along in his car or just running somewhere really fast and they go round in a little circle and make that twiddly noise. Quinton looked up from behind Brideshead Revisited, which was all he ever read, he had a million different copies and DVDs of it, and then looked down all hasty and fiddled with his parting.

It seemed like it had all changed just like that with no warning. There was no sign of lovely pottering Saf any more, there was just sulky-secrets Saf huffing about and pulling at bits of toast. There were dry old lines of coke all over the flat on CD cases, basically my whole last two years’ worth of album purchases: Gui Boratto and Bat for Lashes and LCD Soundsystem all sitting there sadly covered with craggy crumbs that had been forgotten about, and the night before I’d caught her about to rack up on a Brideshead DVD and it was a good job I did, Quin would’ve gone flippin’ spare if it’d been him that walked in. I sat there staring at a bag of apples, pink ones, her favourites, but you’d never have known it cos they were untouched, just sat there going brown and soggy, and pink apples didn’t come cheap, much more pricey than red or green ones and they didn’t taste any different to me but then I figured I was no expert. And that had got me a bit wound up because I didn’t like money being wasted. When I was in a better mood than then, I sometimes laughed at how we’d both spent too much of our lives thinking of pounds; at how Saffy had spent her past trying to lose pounds off her body and how I spent our present trying not to lose pounds on the tables. It’s not so funny now, when I think of what happened next.

There’s me looking at these pissing apples and wondering how to turn them and Saf back pink when Quin gets up off his sleeping bag and stands there tweaking at the creases on his trousers and smoothing down his blazer and his parting with his pudgy fingers.

‘Shall I have a word, Fitz?’ he goes, shuffling from one foot to the other.

‘Do what, mate?’ I said, still a bit distracted by the apples.

‘A word,’ he goes again. ‘You know, about eating.’

‘Oh, right, yeah,’ I said, tearing my eyes away from the bag. ‘I think so. You know best, Q, but she doesn’t seem right.’

‘Yeah,’ he goes. ‘Look, don’t worry about it. Sometimes she just forgets. When she’s stressed, you know.’

‘Okay, thanks, mate.’ I had a swig at my can of Coke and sat up a bit. ‘You off out tonight?’ I asked, because I really wanted to be nice to him all of a sudden because I couldn’t help thinking again that it was lucky we had him around.

‘Yep,’ he goes, big smile, ‘I’m off to this thing at Hector’s club – it’s champagne baths and a pool party. You’ve met Hector, haven’t you?’

I had met Hector as it goes, and it was hard to forget because the bloke was wearing tweed chaps when I’d made his acquaintance. Nice fella actually, bare arse aside. Well, Quin was off then on some spiel and he was rubbing his hands together and then holding them out wide and chortling away to himself, and I was glad I’d tuned out to be honest because who knows what he was describing the length of, you never could be sure with Quin – one minute he’d be telling you he was nipping down the shop for some of the special clove cigarettes he was always puffing, and the next he was on about a party he’d been to where they’d all snorted ket off the host’s cock. He was that kind of kid. It might seem strange that the sort of guy who plonked his tubby little bod in Bolly every weekend spent the rest of his time kipping on a My Little Pony duvet in our front room and looking out for Saffy, but underneath all his frilly shirts and dirty stories I was just properly learning that he had the biggest heart going.

So he toddled off out and I got up and had a quick look around for Saf, just in case she’d heard that little conversation cos that’d be the end of it if she thought we were talking about her. She was in the bathroom in the shower, and that wasn’t all that surprising cos that was where she always ended up, always in there buffing and scrubbing and rinsing until the cows came home. I even bought her a little shower radio for her birthday the year before, this little blue fish that suckered on there and warbled out tunes right next to your ear. It was like the best present she’d ever had, her eyes went all shiny and she stretched right up on tippytoes and gave me the biggest hug in the world. Shot myself in the foot there really, because there was no getting her out after that, songs tinkling out and pennies trickling away down the drain with the suds and the bubbles and the little grainy things from her scrubby stuff, which incidentally is not suitable for manly bits as I learnt the hard way. But at least it was only pennies not pounds trickling away cos she didn’t like her showers too hot like I did, she had them lukewarm so, you know, that was something I guess, if you liked to look for the bright side like I did.

She wouldn’t be out for ages so I wandered into the bedroom and had a bit of a half-arsed tidy-up, pulling the duvet up and picking up the glasses Saffy seemed to collect like a little magpie, and the big pot of salt that always wound up floating around out of place because she said that drinking saltwater was really good for you. I wandered back and stuck them in the sink and I was gonna wash them up but then there was no hot water cos Her Highness was still in the shower, so I just stood at the sink and looked up through the tiny jailhouse window at the top of the wall at all the feet and ankles trekking past. It was almost time for me to go to work and I was glad if I’m honest. Right about then the flat was feeling like it was shrinking, like I’d been looking at Saf’s mardy face and Quin’s side parting for too long and maybe the outside world had ended and there was nothing except us left in this flat and outside there was just people’s zombie legs wandering around, just stubs that ended at the knee marching around with bloody chips of bone sticking out the top and nowhere to go. I grabbed my work shirt off the radiator where it was steaming away happily next to a row of crispy socks and pants and shoved it on over my T-shirt and grabbed my bag off the side.

‘’Bye, Saf,’ I yelled, as I was opening the front door, and the bathroom door opened and she stuck her little blonde head out rubbing at it with a flannel.

‘Off to work,’ I said at normal volume. ‘See you later.’

‘Okay, lovepuff,’ she sang, and she blew me a kiss with her lovely pink lips. ‘Ooh, Fitz,’ she said, hurrying out after me.

‘Yes, babe,’ I said, turning back with one foot up the steps to the pavement. She was standing on the doorstep in her big beach towel hopping from one foot to the other on the cold concrete. ‘It’s Alice’s party tonight, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Have you forgotten?’

‘’Course not,’ I said. ‘I’ll come after work but you go ahead with Lilah if you want, hun, cos I might be a bit late if it’s busy.’

‘Okay.’ She smiled, giving me a little curtsy in her beach-scene beach towel. ‘See you there then, sexpants.’

‘You will,’ I said, skipping up the steps two at a time, and I turned near the top to blow her a kiss but the front door was already shutting.

Work was pants but then it was never exactly my highlight of the day. In general it wasn’t all that bad to be truthful – Cadbury, my boss, was pretty decent and it was usually busy enough that the time whizzed by, and even though it was stressful when you were in the thick of it, it was always nice when you suddenly realised your shift was over just like that. Much better than just sitting there watching the clock, which was what I was doing that day, just watching the hands tick tick round slow as you like while the only two lunchers we had were sat there sliding down the plasticky sofas and staring at the last half of the last bottle of wine they’d ordered. The pub next door was heaving but that was because it was a blokey pub and football was on. I just stood there with an order pad and sketched out some set lists. There’s something lovely about set lists – it’s like maths and art all swirled into one because the timings have to fit and you feel dead clever when you work out how to make two songs go together, when you crack the code and slip the two beats together – like the two bits on a zip – whoosh. And when people tell you something was good you feel like it’s a compliment just to you yourself and nothing to do with the songs at all. Not that many people got to hear my mixes, just sometimes at parties if I managed to shuffle my way behind the deck at the late hours when everyone starts to fidget and stare at the ceiling and think about their real lives and get restless and worried and pick at their faces and wonder how they’re going to get home, and nobody’s really listening then anyway. But I did still carry on doing them, and I’d play them to Saf sometimes, in the middle of the night when we were both magically awake, and she’d listen, lying in bed on her front, wiggling her feet with her face propped on her hands, all blue from the glow off the laptop screen and it was in those secret special moments that I thought, Nothing will ever be as brilliant as this, nobody in the world is as brilliant as her.

Cadbury was out the back and he said he was drawing up rotas but he definitely wasn’t, he was snoozing away at his desk with slinky soul playing softly in the background so we couldn’t hear his bear snores from outside the door. The two chefs were sitting outside on the damp step next to the bins smoking away and getting angry about nothing much at all, but they were just working themselves up ready for the dinner shift because the angrier you are the better chef you are or something, seemed like that’s how it worked anyway. Jenny the little waitress was in the kitchen chopping up lots of leaves for the salad garnishes ready for service, and stopping every five seconds to count the number of blue plasters on her fingers, but you couldn’t blame her really after that one time. So it was just me and the two early-peakers in the corner and I was feeling proper restless, and even trying to work out when the optimum point to drop Soulwax’s Krack was and whether putting that and Green Velvet in one set was being too much of a crowd-pleaser couldn’t keep me busy. Staring sadly out the window I watched the blokes spilling out of O’Phalley’s next door for fags and phone calls and so it must’ve been half-time.

Fate Jones was on the telly again. Her parents kept doing these press conferences with the same two fat coppers either side of them, her mum and her dad and her boyfriend, who was all greasy and spotty and tattooed and not anybody you might think would have such a pretty and giggly girlfriend. All the papers reckoned it was him that had done it so when you watched them on telly you knew that everyone was just staring at him and looking for clues, like a drop of sweat on the forehead or a pulsing vein and if you saw one you knew it would be in all the papers the next day. Some of the news channels had started up twenty-four-hour coverage by then, so you could get interactive and press the button for round-the-clock coverage – you know, press red for news, green for sport, yellow for celebrity and blue for Fate Jones, that kind of thing. There wasn’t all that much to report so it was just live round-the-clock coverage of her parents’ front door, which wasn’t much to look at unless the milkman was popping by or the postie but other than that it was a bit pointless. But you still found yourself watching for ages just in case anything happened. Like you wouldn’t want to miss breaking news so you had to watch all the unbroken news just to be sure. The telly was annoying me that day, though, with just the red door staring out at me and not even a pint of milk on the step for a bit of variety, so I turned it off and looked away.

I had a text on my phone when I had a little sneaky check of it under the bar, and there was still nobody around so I looked at it. It was a picture message from my sister, Hannah. It was of her face cos they’d been having another go at it, I remembered then. It did look a bit better even though it was still all red and tight and scarred and her eye still drooped and gaped in a weird way and it still wouldn’t move with the other, I knew that even though obviously I couldn’t tell just from a photo but they’d told her all along that it would never work properly again and I think she’d just got used to that. Her face probably looked loads better but it was hard to judge when the photo had half the normal side of her face in it, half her nose and half her mouth and half her forehead, all normal pale smooth skin and then the jagged monstery part across her cheek and her eye. You couldn’t see the arm in the picture, just a close-up of her face but that didn’t really matter cos they’d done all they could do with the arm, they’d already told her that, and it didn’t look all that bad when it was in her sleeve; it just wasn’t much good for anything any more, that was all.

It was weird, thinking about how it wasn’t all that long before that all the news had been about the bomb and now it was about Fate Jones. In a weird way I sort of knew how Fate Jones’s family felt, but when it was Han’s face on the screen it was with loads of other people’s pictures too, flashing up as they listed the injuries and even worse the dead, and later as they filmed her and other people attending court to testify and to hear the verdict of the inquest and all the other stuff that dragged on and on long after it was over. Fate Jones was on the screen on her own and that must have been a lot worse. I looked up at her front door again and thought about the people behind it and whether their TV was on and showing the same picture and whether they ever pressed blue for Fate Jones.

Thinking about what it had been like back then and the horrible sadness and worry of it all, I felt terrible thinking Hannah’s face still looked bad and that I hadn’t seen her for a long old time, so I texted her back and said nice things about how good it looked and then I put two kisses instead of my usual one. The lunchers were finally staggering out and they’d have headaches by teatime, I reckoned, but I smiled and waved ’bye and then I went over and started clearing their table.

Well, I was right about being late, that was for sure. Must’ve been after three by the time I finally took the drawer out of the till and shut it in the storeroom and said night to Cadbury. By the time I got to the house I was knackered and I knew I needed to get in the mood quickly or I’d just end up curled in a corner of the sofa all night like a right miserable git. Al was sat on the front step and she looked dead pleased to see me but her whole body was bobbing to the beat and her eyes were like big black marbles and she looked pretty spangled all in all, so I just patted her on the head and carried on up to the front door, leaving her conducting the beat with one finger and smiling at the little moustachioed guy next to her. Inside it was all a bit much for my fragile tired mind. It was just one of those things. I knew if I’d been there from the start I’d have been having a whale of a time cos it was pretty impressive: the whole hall had giant sheets of paper taped up and all of it was covered in doodles and slogans and lyrics and love, and all these different-coloured lights were creeping out from under doors with snatches of bass line and people were milling about looking at each other and the walls happily. But because I was sober and shattered I couldn’t be arsed with it all, really, even though I wanted to be. I felt a bit out of it so I sort of waded through the crowds into the lounge, grabbing a can bobbing in a wastepaper bin on my way past. I caught a glimpse of Delilah stomping about in the corner with a tall brown-haired girl so I headed over, stepping round another girl casually gagging into a plant pot on the way.

‘All right, Lilah,’ I said, tapping her on the shoulder for a bit until she finally turned round.

‘Ooooh, Fitz,’ she goes, all squealy. ‘You’re here! Isn’t it great? Have you met Meg?’

‘Yeah, it’s awesome,’ I said, half waving at Meg. ‘Saf about?’

She looked at me all confused and gurning her chops off and said, ‘Who? OhSafyeahsheiscoursesheissorryforgot! She’supstairsintheotherlounge.’

A little tiny warning bell went off in my head in between the bass of the music. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Yeah,’ she goes. ‘It’s nice up there, allpinkandplinkyplonk-music!’

The warning bell quadrupled in size and started ringing cheerily against the back of my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘The other lounge is a ket party – you’ve not left Saf with a ready supply of K, have you?’

She’d stopped listening ages before cos she just nodded and said, ‘IdunnoFitzsorry!’ and then she carried on grunting the beat with grinning Meg, sloshing their mugs of wine about and hugging each other and the people around them loads.

I gave up and wandered off up the stairs, stepping over people sprawling about, mumbling at each other and trying to focus on each other’s faces. I made for the pink glow at the far end of the landing and pushed the door open, feeling weird and nervous and scared about what I was going to see without knowing why.

The room felt empty even though it was full. Nobody was DJing, someone had just stuck an iPod on shuffle, but some bald bloke off his head seemed to think he was, listening dead serious to one of the headphones round his thick neck and grinning round at the room really proud of himself. Everyone else was melting into sofas, giggling and stretching themselves out, a leg or a finger at a time, pawing at each other or the air. In the middle of the room were these two guys, one of them I thought I recognised and he might’ve worked with Al but it was hard to tell because they were lying down with happy looks on their faces – well, the one I thought I recognised was face down but the back of his head looked happy anyway. They obviously couldn’t move and that’s why I didn’t do K – apart from this once in the summer holidays when I was a kid – I’ve got a fear of being still. Spike, Alice’s rescued Staffy, was sniffing about them with a bow of tinsel round his neck and this toy in his mouth that Al had bought him a few weeks back. The dog had chewed one end and when it looked up at you with the toy in its mouth the bit sticking out had on it a big cartoon grin so it looked like the mutt was smiling at you. It would’ve been funny but Spike didn’t like being laughed at so you wouldn’t chance it, you just smiled along politely like he was telling you the joke not like he was the butt of it. There he was, trotting around the two blokes, grinning like the Joker and sniffing around, getting his nose right into some unfortunate places. He casually cocked a leg against one but that was okay, I reasoned, because it didn’t look like the smell’d make much difference to him if I’m honest. But then he was looking round with mischief on his cartoon grinning face and he was sizing up their heads and while I was stood leaning against the door and he knew I was watching, and he was glad, he mounted the poor bloke’s face and began humping it, I mean really going at it, and there were a few squeals from the rest of the room and a few people sat staring at the scene like it was one of those toga fellas being eaten by a lion and nobody was moving, even I couldn’t for a minute, his stubby tail bobbing up and down in and out was hypnotising me and I’d only had half a beer. I stared at the tinsel rustling away on his neck and the bloke’s floppy foot, which was rocking back and forth ever so slightly with the movement, and then at all the people around the room staring all transfixed and it all seemed unreal and slow, like things are in a dream. But when Spike leant onto one paw to get a better angle, the spell was broken and I steamed in and grabbed him by his tinsel collar and yanked him off. He dropped the grin and it rolled next to the skullfuckee’s face like a crazy old lady’s false teeth and he looked up at me sadly and then up at my finger pointing to the door and I said, ‘OUT,’ just to really get the point home, and he did slink out, looking longingly back over his shoulder at his new love.

The room around me went back to melting and pawing and stretching and I finally saw Saffy’s black boots poking out from behind the sofa, so I marched over there and there she was, with her yellow hair sticking out around her face, and it was all short and wrong and I realised someone had cut it as a joke while she was in a state and didn’t know any better and I felt like finding the scissors then and poking whoever it was right in the eyes but there was no time for that. Her fingers were flexing to a beat that wasn’t there any more and her eyes were rolling back in her head. I knelt in front of her and I touched her face gently and said, ‘Saf,’ as quietly as I could, because I didn’t want to scare her, ‘Saf, you idiot, wake up, it’s time to go home.’

And then her green eyes rolled back into view and she looked at me in confusion and wonder. ‘Fitz?’

‘Yeah, it’s me,’ I said, pushing hair out of her eyes, ‘Thought you were hardcore, you numpty.’