‘Ears, Nose, Arse?’ Billy asked.
‘No,Argy-Bargy,’ I told him. ‘I had it on repeat for months.’
‘Not my best,’ Billy said. ‘Ears, Nose, Arsewas way better. My latest stuff, too… Have you kept up?’
I shook my head. ‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘I’d give you a copy,’ Billy said, ‘but they don’t bother to send them any more. No one ever has a CD player these days, so…’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘In my car. And…’ I’d been about to say that Rob had started listening to vinyls again. I couldn’t believe I’d been about to mention him to Billy.
‘And?’ Billy prompted.
‘No, nothing. Anyway, looks like you’ve done really well,’ I said, gesturing at the wall of framed discs.
‘Yeah, it’s been cool,’ Billy said. ‘To be honest it’s mainly “Cherry Lips” that keeps me in cigars and whisky. The airplay stats on that one aresick.’
‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘You must be proud.’
He slid open one of the windows just enough to cast his cigar out and then closed it again. ‘It’s just a song,’ he said. ‘It’s just a shitty catchy song, which, of course, is why everybody liked it.’
As he returned towards me he whacked the top of one of the drums with the flat of one hand, and then slipped behind the drum kit and sat down. He looked momentarily deflated and his shoulders slumped. He stared at the drum kit forlornly and for about ten weirdly long seconds he didn’t make a sound. He actually looked a bit like a robot that had run out of battery power. But then I saw him make the effort to snap himself out of it. He reached behind and lifted an acoustic guitar from the wall. ‘See if you remember this one,’ he said, looking up at me.
Now this is going to sound a bit crazy, but as he started strumming ‘Sunday Evening’, everything shifted. His playing, humming, then singing that old song, made me remember with a jolt who he’d been, who I’d been, and how I’d once felt about him. It provided that sense oflinearitywe’d talked about on the phone, linking the me of here and now to the person I’d once been. I suddenly felt overwhelmed with emotion, as if I was grieving for someone I’d lost long ago, only the person I’d lost track of was me.
‘Do you remember it?’ he asked, interrupting his playing and looking up. ‘I wrote that while I was with you.’
‘Yes,’ I said, my voice all crackly and weird. I slumped back in a tatty armchair in the corner of the room. ‘Yeah, I remember. Carry on.’
Billy played ‘Sunday Evening from beginning to end and, by the time he’d finished, I had tears in my eyes. The song had always been quite a good one, but it turned out to be far better without the drums and keyboards. I’d forgotten how beautiful it was to be sung to, one on one.
Billy sighed and then looked up at me. He saw, I think, my glistening eyes, and smiled. ‘You really do remember,’ he said.
I nodded. Out of the blue, as if the words came from my mouth doing its own thing, rather than from any decision my brain might have made, I asked, ‘Why did you leave like that? Why did you just vanish out of the blue?’
Billy frowned vaguely at me as if he didn’t understand. ‘You mean, Margate to Manchester?’
I nodded.
‘Well, I had to go back to college,’ he said.
‘I know that,’ I murmured, looking down at my feet. ‘But you could have said goodbye. You could have at least warned me. And I never understood why you didn’t. Never.’
‘I didn’t know how to,’ he said. ‘I had a major crush on you but I couldn’t take you with me. I was in halls of residence. Don’t forget how young I was.’
‘I was younger,’ I said, lifting my head to briefly look him in the eye. ‘And pregnant.’
Billy winced and tipped his head to one side. ‘I did offer to send money for that,’ he said.
I laughed sourly. ‘I didn’t need money.’
‘No, I got that when you didn’t reply.’
I realised that he’d misunderstood me and that I probably should have said, ‘It wasn’t money that I needed,’ but the moment seemed to have passed.
I’d been about to tell him that I’d kept Lucy, but the thought that if he cared he might have asked – and hadn’t – made me pause and then change my mind.
‘Play something else,’ I said, more to change the subject than anything else.
