-7-
TEN YEARS EARLIER
Xane had been feasting on the sight of the guy for a good ten minutes.There was precious little else to do while he was stuck outside the counselling services office waiting for his cousin to emerge.Grief and loss group session.Forty minutes down, another twenty to go.Ric’s wife had washed up on the beach dead four months back.The assumption was that she’d wound up in the water deliberately.Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t.Xane hadn’t been around at the time.Certainly, Scarlett had her issues, and now Ric had them too.The counselling had been happening for several weeks, but this group thing was a recent addition.Xane wasn’t sure it was doing a lot, but Ric kept turning up, so he kept coming along with him, sitting on the bench in the little green quadrangle opposite and watching the world drift by.
The surrounding buildings were new builds, not very interesting, and largely soulless.The park manicured into submission.Not a weed or wild flower in sight.No songbirds, only pigeons.He’d grown bored of conducting staring contests with them pretty fast.Bastards inevitably won.
Nor had Xane managed to glue onto paper the lyrics that had been tumbling around his head for days.Probably because he knew it was pointless.The band wasn’t really a thing anymore.A singer and a drummer did not a rock band make.Hence his focus on the guy…
Maybe he played.Wouldn’t that be a turn up if he did?They’d be hot property overnight even if the music stank.Girls, guys, they’d all go wild for him.He was the sort of bright spot capable of energising anyone’s day.He was sure as hell enlivening Xane’s.
Tall, kind of lanky.He had white blond hair that was pulled away from his face in a messy bird’s nest of an updo at the back of his skull, and eyes so blue a tropical lagoon would get jealous.Blue enough that Xane knew they were blue from several feet away.
Xane continued watching him another couple of minutes.The guy lingered by the iron railings kicking his heels against the paving, head mostly bowed.
Was he waiting for someone, or just killing time?
It was a moment of madness that took him closer.
“Hey,” he said.“I saw you come out.Do you know if they’re nearly done?The group session?”
Blondie blinked, owl-like at him.Despite the dark circles that hollowed out his face, those baby-blues were something else.Lord God, there was even something entrancing lurking inside them.It was a shadow, a blur, a blip, a splinter that he couldn’t quite put a finger on.Nothing as obvious as sadness, nor so all-consuming as rage, but something…
Curiously, his intense scrutiny of the fella didn’t get him a response.“Never mind.I guess you don’t know.”Xane carried on up the steps, like he meant to ask at reception.Really, he figured he’d take a detour to the facilities and piss.Hey, it passed time.
“They’ll be a while yet.I came out early.”
Fuck me; blondie had a voice.One laced with a little foreign lilt that marked him out as… As what?European.Northern European if the hair colour was to be relied upon.Scandinavia somewhere?
“Are you waiting for someone?”
“Are you here to pick someone up?”
Oh, hey, was that a sliver of innuendo in there?
“My cousin.You?”
“No one.”
The guy rolled his lips together.Xane had never seen anybody look more like they needed a smoke than this guy, who, incidentally, he was certain was a non-smoker.It was just the stance, the attitude, the sunken defensiveness.He needed a barrier, something with which to hold this annoying fucker who was intent on engaging him in conversation, and hell, maybe a whole lot more, at bay.
“I should probably go back in.Not going to fix anything standing on a street corner.”
“Except any cash concerns.”
The guy stomped past him up the steps and back into the building.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
By the time Xane entered, the guy had vanished, and the waiting area was the same sterile pale grey piece of serenity it usually was.A small ceramic pot housing three bamboo shoots and a heap of pebbles stood at one end of the space at a right angle to reception.Xane slumped into the chair beside it and palmed one of the rocks.
“Sir, could you not mess with the arrangement.”
“Right.”He tossed it back into the pot again and stood.“Toilets?”
The receptionist pointed with her pen.
Xane was washing his hands, slowly, really slowly, when blondie came out of the cubicle and stood right by him at the sink.
