Chapter 4
CHAPTER 4
Beau woke up, blinking, wondering where he was, which wasn’t an unfamiliar sensation for him. He actually loved it. Made him feel alive.
He turned to look at the woman he’d just spent the night with. Flora. Great girl. Really good fun and very beautiful. He loved her tumbling strawberry blonde curls, although he didn’t have a particular type or a preference in hair colour, or any other attributes. What he loved was variety and Flora was a rare bird.
He put his arms behind his head and ran over the events of the previous evening with a great sense of satisfaction. He’d bumped into her in one of his favourite bars, which he’d popped into after finishing his restaurant shift. They’d had a few drinks and laughs, some dancing and then a spectacularly good time back at her place.
Flora really was great. Good to talk to as well as the other stuff. She was a legal translator, working in human rights law. So she had a serious brain as well as a great body. How many times had they hooked up now? With some regret, he calculated that this made it four. Two over his limit. This had to be the last time.
Looking at her pretty freckled face, her lips slightly parted in sleep, he felt familiar stirrings, which made him carefully lift his legs out from under the duvet and stand up. Giving in to what biology was currently suggesting would make things tricky.
He grabbed the bits of his clothing that littered the bedroom floor and tiptoed out to the sitting room where the rest was strewn about. After getting dressed, he looked down at his hands and the profusion of chunky rings on his fingers.
After some consideration, he removed the two that were on his right pinky, selecting one, then he fished in his jacket pocket for a small length of ribbon that he tied round the ring. Printed on it was the word ‘Mojobo’, followed by his Instagram tag.
He crept back into the bedroom and looked down at Flora, feeling an unfamiliar pang. She really was good fun and so smart. And if he was honest with himself, he did really have a bit of a thing for long curly hair...
He weighed the ring in his hand before placing it gently on the pillow next to her head, then turned and walked out as quickly and quietly as he could.
As he strode down the street, the trees thick with leaves, things flowering in front gardens, bright morning sunshine making even this grimy part of East London look pretty, Beau hoped Flora would like his way of saying goodbye and thank you.
But then he hesitated, half turning, wondering if he should go back and wake her up with a cup of tea and a chat instead.
A few friends had teased him recently that he was becoming an urban myth – the Hackney Ring Man – and a couple of women he had met out and about had spotted his rings and asked if he was the man who left one as a calling card.
One of them had said: ‘Are you that ring wanker?’
Both times he had confirmed that, yes, he was the man who left a ring – and told them that he did it out of respect and that he’d never ghost a woman. He left it as a gift, with his ribbon on it so they could contact him via Instagram if they wanted to, and he could explain how much he’d enjoyed spending time with them but that he wasn’t in a position to commit to anything more formal.
The woman who’d called him a wanker had then suggested, rather tartly, that another way of doing that would be to wait for the woman to wake up and tell her to her face. Then she’d walked off, throwing, ‘Arsehole’, over her shoulder. The other woman had just rolled her eyes and turned away from him.
Was he a wanker arsehole? He thought the ring thing was romantic and respectful. People his age met and got it on every night of the week, never to see each other again, so wasn’t it good to make it a more memorable experience in some way? He started walking again. It would have been nice to have a cup of tea with Flora, but it would be just a bit too cosy and he didn’t want to give her the idea he was up for anything more committed. There was no way he was taking that on right now. Not with all the other stuff he had to deal with.
Feeling his mood lowering at the thought of it all, Beau upped his pace, pushing his thick black hair off his forehead and putting a deliberate spring in his step, which came naturally in his father’s cowboy boots.
Seeing a woman blatantly checking him out from the bus stop opposite, he smiled at her and kept walking. It happened all the time. He didn’t go looking for it. Women hit on him every day and, in the right circs, he was happy to respond. Good times for all. He just didn’t want to have a relationship.
He was only twenty-five, making jewellery was his focus, he worked long hours waitering in a trendy restaurant to survive and he didn’t want any other commitments. It wasn’t exactly unusual for a guy his age and he thought his ring routine was nicer than just legging it, which he knew a lot of his friends did – men and women.
He came to a bus stop on a route that would take him to his flat but decided to walk straight to his studio instead, which was in a building next to Regent’s Canal. He never rushed to take a shower after an encounter like the one the night before. He wanted Flora’s scent on his body for as long as possible, it would help him work. He was at his most creative with a bit of a hangover and the hum of a hot night still lingering in his loins. He hammered those feelings and scents into the metal of his rings, every one of them a unique piece.
No wonder so many of his clients were in the music business – or aspired to be. One of his first customers had told him his rings had ‘mojo’ and that had inspired the brand name, Mojobo.
He ran up the concrete stairs to his studio, taking them two at a time. Sam wasn’t in, which he was glad about, because as much as Beau liked him, he was rather too keen on a chat. A long chat, which often segued straight into a long lunch. With beer. Beau had some interesting ideas floating around in his head and didn’t want any distractions. Something that looked floral and deeply sexual at the same time... He wanted to get going on it.
He pulled the last ring he’d been working on out of the old tea tin where he stored his works in progress, popped it over the metal rod used to hold rings while he worked on them and blasted it with his hand torch. That design hadn’t been going anywhere and he always found a bit of destruction at the start of a project fired up his creative juices. And the more ‘rules’ he broke while he was making something, the better the final result seemed to be.
He did always wear his safety goggles, though, and with those on, and his big headphones on over the top, he felt like some kind of mad professor. He put his Rolling Stones playlist on shuffle, always good to get things flowing.
But as the unmistakable first notes of ‘Gimme Shelter’ played out, Beau was hit by a memory so powerful it was like being physically punched in the gut: the last kitchen disco he’d had with his parents, which had happened spontaneously one random night when he’d put that particular track on.
He could so clearly remember Matt’s overjoyed reaction.
‘Oh, my perfect child,’ he’d said, hugging Beau as they all got into the groove, Sophie waving her wooden spoon in the air as she danced. ‘Never have I had greater confirmation that we’ve done a good job bringing you up than your choice of this track.’
Beau realised he was sitting in his studio frozen, holding the ring rod in the air with one hand, the torch in the other. It was lucky it wasn’t turned on. He might have set fire to his bloody hair.
Slumping, he let his forehead rest on the workbench as he sobbed, before sitting up and wiping his eyes on his sleeves. It was five months and twenty-two days since his father had died and the grief still often ambushed him like this. And whenever he had one of these shocks it would set his brain off on the same track, like a video in one of his father’s installations on constant repeat. Him and Matt in the Red Lion. The last drink they’d had there, when he’d said that weird thing.
‘The thing is, Beausie,’ he’d said, ‘I’m not going be around so much in the future.’ For a moment Beau had thought he was going to tell him he had an incurable disease or something, but then he’d said those words Beau so desperately wished he could forget: ‘I’ve met someone.’
Then that same mental loop brought him back to the conversation he’d overheard at the wake between Rey and that woman in his father’s leather jacket. Was she the ‘someone’? Although he dreaded it with all his being, Beau knew he was going to have to find out. He’d been avoiding it all this time, using his grief as an excuse, but that weird thing his dad had said wasn’t going to go away just because he wanted it to.
He had to protect his mother.