Perfections (6 page)

There’s music coming from the living room. The new Emilie Autumn album which she bought only a week ago and has barely found time to play, all violins and high-strung harpsichord, higher-strung vocals soaring over the top. Antoinette closes her eyes, opens her senses. She can feel him somehow, can almost visualise him standing by the glass balcony doors, looking out into the night, a glass of red wine in his hand. Like there’s a thread joining the two of them, some unseen umbilicus anchoring him to her. It’s an odd feeling, and not an entirely comfortable one.

Antoinette slips into the study and quickly dresses – her favourite black jeans and an old Cure shirt she bought on eBay, a black sweater she’s had so long it’s almost grey – then notices that the computer is still humming, its monitor in sleep mode. Curious, she taps at the space bar and a website flashes onto the screen. Paul’s blog, the latest entry dated Saturday – yesterday? Yes, the clock confirms, today is still Sunday, at least for another sixteen minutes.

angry, sad and bitter about the waste of too much time, i sit here and stare at the screen in the hope it will give me the answers i need or, failing that, solace. nothing can ever be the same. nothing should ever be the same. sharklike, i swim forward, always forward. otherwise, i remind myself, i will drown.

Quasi-cryptic, lower-case melodrama, typical Paul, and Antoinette stops reading after the first paragraph. Closes the browser and flicks the monitor off at the switch, mildly surprised at the hurt she doesn’t feel.
Sharkboy
. She snorts.

In the living room, she finds him waiting on the couch, still wrapped in her pink dressing gown. Antoinette smiles. ‘Hey.’

‘Hey yourself,’ he says. There are two wine glasses on the coffee table, one of them empty, along with an open bottle of red. ‘Want some?’

‘Okay.’ She sits beside him with her legs crossed beneath her, watching the tendons shift in his hands as he pours the wine and passes over the glass. Their fingers brush as she takes it from him and she’s amazed all over again by how undeniably
real
he is. ‘Why were you looking at Paul’s blog?’

He raises an eyebrow. ‘
Paul’s
blog?’

‘Well.’ Antoinette sips her wine. ‘You know.’

‘It was trippy,’ he says. ‘I remember what’s in it, but I don’t remember writing it – or
living
it, not for real. Everything felt sort of second hand, third hand even. Like someone telling me about what someone else has done, except that someone is also me. Does that make sense?’

‘Not really,’ she says. ‘Sorry.’

‘It’s okay, I can’t explain it properly anyway.’ He stares into his wine, black hair falling over his face like a curtain, the cast of his mouth so despondent, she wants to reach out and hug him. She shifts her position, and his head snaps up again, blue eyes sharp as splinters. ‘What am I, Antoinette?
Who
am I?’

She shakes her head, apologising yet again as she thinks back to the night before, all that manic scribbling, the pressure building in her skull, her chest, her gut, as she wrote, filling page after frantic page, the sensation nothing she can put into words for him now. It feels too intimate, too distant, all at the same time. ‘I never gave you a name,’ she says. ‘I just . . . you were just . . . you just
were
.’

He tilts his head, a half-smile quirking his mouth. ‘I still am.’

A runnel of sweat slides down Jacqueline’s spine. Her hair hangs wet and limp, sticking to her face and the nape of her neck. Ryan is pressed close against her back, his body moving in time with the music. His fist punches the air with every drum beat. There are people in front of her. Behind her. Pushing and pulsing. She feels small and swallowed whole. The water someone pressed into her hand earlier is long gone. She clutches the empty bottle as though it’s a talisman.

She tries to match herself to the rhythm. Tries to move the way the crowd is moving. Loose and fluid. But her foot is trapped beneath someone else’s and she stumbles. Almost falls. Ryan catches her, his hands strong around her arms.

‘You okay, girl?’ he yells into her ear.

She nods, far from okay. ‘I might take a break.’

He grins and tosses his head, unhearing.

Around her, the crowd continues to pulse and sway. There are no gaps to weave herself between. No avenues of escape that won’t involve shoving and squeezing and the sharpness of elbows. On stage, the singer leans into his microphone, his vocals distorted to an electronic screech. Ryan’s hands slide down her arms, coming to rest on her hips. Jacqueline closes her eyes. Tries not to notice the way her head seems to float away from her body.

Loose and fluid. She licks the sweat from her lips. Fluid and loose.

‘Loki?’ Antoinette echoes. ‘That’s really what you want to call yourself?’

‘I like it,’ he says. ‘It’s mythic, and strong.’

‘I already know two guys who go by the name of Loki.’

‘Now you know three.’

Antoinette is doubtful. ‘It’s a bit . . . pretentious, maybe?’

‘I like it,’ he says again. She opens her mouth, wanting to say something about the types of boys who dub themselves
Loki
or
Thorne
or
Vlad
– pick a cliché, any cliché, paint it black and watch it insist it isn’t a
goth
– but he reaches out and touches a finger to her lips. ‘You had the chance to name me. Now it’s my turn.’ His finger slides across her cheekbone, dips down to run along her jaw. ‘I choose Loki.’ Smiling, he cups her chin with his hand, moves a little closer. Beneath them, the couch shifts and creaks.

‘All right,’ Antoinette says,
all right
, as she pulls away from him, wedging herself into the corner with her knees pulled up between them. ‘Whatever, look, just stop doing that, okay? Give me some space.’

He leans back. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Neither do I.’ She pulls a cushion onto her lap, hugs it close.

‘Why am I here? Why did you
bring
me here?’

Antoinette looks away, unable to meet his eyes for the confusion that shines there, teary bright and oh so wounded, so she takes his hand instead. Traces the grooves on his palm, the sweeping curve of his lifeline, bifurcated near the base just like Paul’s was – just like Paul’s
is
, she reminds herself with no small amount of wonder, the seep of past tense startling and unexpected.

‘Antoinette?’ he asks,
Loki
asks. ‘Talk to me.’

She squeezes his hand, their fingers interlacing. His skin is so pale compared to her own, so utterly unblemished –
a stone-smooth pallor which sunlight cannot penetrate
, she recalls writing, though the specifics of much else now elude her. The harder she tries to remember, the quicker the phrases seem to twist away, slippery as shoals of fish, and Antoinette gives up, frustrated and fearful.

‘Have you seen my notebook?’ she asks, scanning the room, trying to think where she might have left it. Because knowing exactly what she wrote, being able to see the precise words that conjured him, this creature who now sits beside her –
her
creature, her
Loki
– suddenly seems of vital importance.

Jacqueline fades in and out. The lights, the music, the texture of the patchy velour couch beneath her cheek, all pull at her from different directions. The girl with hair like shivery, coloured serpents crouches down in front of her, mouth moving –
how you going down there?
– and Jacqueline smiles at her. ‘Ryan?’

The girl shakes her head. Snakes whip about her face.
He’s gone to find you some water. You don’t look so good.

Jacqueline keeps smiling. ‘I’m fine.’

Yeah, right.
The girl presses a cold hand to Jacqueline’s face, a hand that feels like glass.
And I’m the Virgin Mary.

She might be, the way the lights shine around her head. A crimson halo, a corona made from dust and darkspun dreams. Zaney, she remembers, the girl is called Zaney. And something else. ‘You make puzzle boxes,’ Jacqueline says.

The girl rolls her eyes but it doesn’t matter because now Jacqueline can see Ryan Jellicoe over on the other side of the room. He’s holding some boy by the shirt with one hand, pushing him hard up against the wall. His mouth moves and he’s pointing, pointing towards Jacqueline, and the boy is shaking his head, his mouth moving as well. Then Ryan Jellicoe does something, something with his shoulder and his knee, too fast for her to catch and then the boy is on the floor, and now Ryan Jellicoe is stalking in her direction with a face full of thunder and demons.

And. Jacqueline. Fades.

Antoinette flips through the notebook again, cover to lilac cover. It’s definitely the same one she was using last night, inky flowers filling the first page, along with her own name and the lopsided heart and the four little blocks that no longer spell P-A-U-L, but the rest of the pages are blank. Not
new
, though, not
pristine
. Rumpled and worn, like they’ve been written on, then thoroughly, impossibly, erased, and if she tilts the book to the light
just so
, Antoinette can even make out the imprint of curves and strokes, faded little ghosts of words that
must
once have been.

‘It was already like this?’ she asks. ‘You’re sure?’

‘I guess,’ he says. ‘I found it under the table while I was cleaning up but I didn’t even open it. Just put it in here with the rest of your things.’

Antoinette throws him a glance. ‘I still can’t believe you cleaned up. Without the threat of corporal punishment even.’

He blinks. ‘I’m not
him
, you know.’

‘I know. Sorry, it’s just . . .’

‘I’ll
never
be him.’

Antoinette sighs. ‘I don’t want you to be him, believe me. That’s the very last thing I want.’ She closes the notebook, tosses it onto the desk. ‘Bloody useless.’

‘It’s all disappeared, everything you wrote?’

‘Every last word.’

‘How? Where did they go?’

‘I don’t know, Loki! Where did they come from in the first place? Where did
you
come from? You need to stop looking at me like I should have all the answers, because I don’t even know where to start.’