Chapter 30 #2
This picture.
It was her, all along.
It was always her.
And the sight of it, the thought of it makes me stagger back, stumbling against the wall.
She knew.
All this time, she’s known, and she hasn’t mentioned it. Not once.
We were supposed to meet.
We were about to meet.
Then she ran, and set in train the beginning of the end.
If I hadn’t followed her That Night. If I hadn’t had my head so far up my arse after she left that I didn’t want to stay out and party with the lads…
Scott would never have taken Class A drugs for the first time.
We would have met. Lyra and me.
The world would have been different. Everything could have been different.
She knew.
And she’s hidden it from me for five months.
My vision is blurring, somewhere between subconscious and reality, semi-lucid, and when it comes into focus, I scan the pictures of me from this summer. They start back at the hen party in April and walk through the wedding season at Earl’s Castle like a storyboard.
I move in closer to read the notes clipped next to each picture, and I read the handwritten text. Quotes. Snippets of… an article? The fallen rock star, she’s written. And words like rock bottom and unloved leap out at me from the pegged pages.
This is what she’s wanted all along. She wants to be a documentary photographer and I’m her source and subject.
All the crap she’s told me about wanting me to open up, so that she can love me. It’s all been about this.
Just another person who wants to use me for financial gain.
‘I can explain,’ she says in the dark space with me, her voice quiet across my shoulder. Her presence makes this all more real.
She doesn’t love me.
She used me.
‘It doesn’t matter, Lyra,’ I tell her with as little energy as I feel. ‘None of this matters.’
I leave the room without looking at her, head to the bathroom and pull on my jeans that are now clean and dry on the towel rail, and make to walk back out of her life.
‘I found an old film in one of my university boxes that I’d never developed and it happened to have pictures from a night The Hand Me Downs played in Newcastle seven years ago.’
I turn sharply to face her. ‘And the recent ones?’
Her forehead creases, as if she’s surprised by my asking. ‘You know I take pictures of you, Guy. Of you, of everything I see and do. I take pictures of us.’
‘And the article notes? Do you write those about yourself, too? Are you going to try to document your life story? The fallen rock star, Lyra. That’s what you wrote about me.’
‘Those scribbles mean nothing, Guy. You know that’s what I do. I can show you hundreds of notes and articles I’ve written about people I find interesting.’
I scoff as I pull on my boots. ‘No, Lyra, those notes are different. What’s your end game? Sell the unprecedented first-hand account of my life story? Tell me, did you start writing about me before or after those fucking videos went viral and everything started blowing up again?’
‘Do you hear yourself?’ She’s shouting. Something I haven’t heard on her yet.
Raised voice, a bite in her tone, both to match mine.
‘I didn’t kiss you at Charlotte’s hen party for the right reasons but the attraction between us was real, before I even knew who you were.
I didn’t sleep with you because you used to be a rock star.
I slept with you because of the man you are now, today.
But I don’t see two versions of you, I see one incredible man, who’s been influenced by music all his life.
Who loves music, and has it running through his veins, and who hides away because he feels a guilt he shouldn’t own. ’
I’m not listening to this bullshit. I turn my back on her and twist the key in her front door, needing to get out of here, away from her.
‘You didn’t kill your brother, Guy; drugs did.’
Her words still me, the door partially open and the cool night’s air blowing inside, making me shiver.
‘Despite what you want everyone else to think, you didn’t force Scott to take drugs, either. He did that. Not you.’
‘You weren’t there, Lyra,’ I grind out through my teeth.
‘You don’t get to tell me what is or isn’t true or right.
’ I open the door wider. I’m going. But first, I do a one-eighty to look at her, wishing I hadn’t when I see hunched shoulders, glazed eyes by the light of the moon in the near-black hallway.
‘Scott would never’ve been in a band if it weren’t for me.
He would never’ve been the frontman of The Hand Me Downs.
And if I’d been there for him properly, he never would’ve taken drugs. ’
I walk into the night, down the pathway towards my car, her next words falling on my back.
‘Yes, Guy, he would. With you, without you, he was talented. With or without you, he would have turned to drugs. The setting might have been different, the circumstances changed, but things in life don’t just happen. ’
I want to say, by the same token, I saw you and never met you that night for a reason, and I found you again in a lift going to a hen party that neither one of us wanted to be at, yet you decided not to tell me that it had been you all along.
That didn’t just happen. But it sounds trivial when we’re arguing about Scott’s death.
So I don’t. Instead, I shake the thought from my head, dragging a hand through my hair, fingers gripping so tightly onto the roots, it’s a welcome pain.
‘If there can ever be anything between us, you have to show me all of you, Guy, the broken bits and the best bits. You have to love yourself before you can love me.’
‘And what about you, Lyra? Do you love yourself? Do you love your life? Have you ever fought for something you want? Because as far as I can tell, you’re trapped as the person your parents and sister and the idiots who used to be your friends see you as.
Maybe you need to accept that you are like them, but you don’t have to be a doctor and that’s fucking okay because you have a life of your own to live.
Right now, you’re wasting it hiding away in a place you don’t want to live, writing articles you’ll never even try to publish, denying yourself anything that might make you happy because you want to punish yourself for something that was never your fault.
You’re living in a bubble. Too terrified or na?ve to pop it. ’
‘Are you calling me out or yourself? Because from where I’m standing, if that’s true, I’m looking at my own reflection.’
‘I’m not doing this, Lyra.’ I open my car door. ‘I knew this was a bad idea from the off. It should’ve never started. I’m on my own because I’m better that way. Without all this extra shit.’
She’s walked down the path, halfway between her house and me. ‘Shit like feelings? Is that what you’re hiding from? Is that why you’re driving me away?’
‘Lyra, believe me, I’ve done nothing but fucking feel for years and I’m exhausted. I’ve got nothing left for myself or anyone. Definitely not this.’
‘So you’re walking away over an article, over some pictures? Hurting me just so you can give yourself another reason to leave?’
‘No.’ I make the mistake of looking at her right as she swipes a knuckle under her eyes, and if there was any piece of my heart that hadn’t been broken before, it just broke now. ‘I’m not walking. I’m running.’ Because this is all too much for me to take.
‘Fuck you, Guy,’ she spits. A version of her I haven’t witnessed. A version of her I’ve brought out by hurting her. ‘Race away from me and keep going until you make me just another bottle of something you wanted to drink once. Another cigarette you’ll never smoke.’
She goes back to her house and that’s exactly what I do. I leave thinking I could really use a drink, knowing I won’t let myself have one but really fucking wanting one.
It’s only when I’m halfway home that it dawns on me that her dad’s stroke was That Night. And That Night, she was at my gig. I’d invited her backstage.
The reason she ran, the reason we never met, was because her dad had a stroke.
And I just threw it in her face like the absolute twat I am.
If there’s one good thing I can do by her, it’s to keep driving.