The Devil's Trill Sonata (16 page)

“Well, if I was trying to win over a hot guy who tragically had a boyfriend, I’d think about a thinly-veiled invite to come to the city of romance with me too.”

“You’re jealous?”

“A bit,” Darren admitted. “He likes you. On the other hand, Paris really isn’t as romantic as everyone makes it out to be, so…”

“You’re ridiculous,” Jayden informed him, turning back onto his front. He felt pleasantly buzzed, but the room was chilly and he suddenly wanted one of Darren’s overheated hugs. “And he doesn’t like me.”

“Yeah, he does.”

“No, he doesn’t, we’re just friends.”

“Being ‘just friends’ doesn’t mean one doesn’t like the other, it just means nothing happened yet.”

“Oh, look, you and Ella agree on something,” Jayden sighed.

“I hate to say it, but she’s sharp,” Darren said. “If she thinks he fancies you, she’s probably right. And I concur, he
does
.”

“Oh, shut up,” Jayden said, poking the pillow like it was Darren’s face. “Will you take me to Paris one day?”

“If I must.”

“I think you should.”

“Why?”

“Because you love me.”

“If the definition of loving you is taking you to Paris, then this relationship is already in trouble.”

“
Nooooo
,” Jayden said slowly, thinking about it. “Maybe Rome.”

“Rome’s all right.”

“So you’ll take me to Rome someday?”

“Jesus, how much have you
had
?” Darren muttered, then chuckled, low and dark. “Maybe one day I’ll take you to Rome. Scandalise some Catholics and snog you in the Sistine Chapel.”

Jayden laughed, curling his toes and flexing his ankles. Slowly, he lowered his feet and turning onto his side, cradling the phone between his cheek and the pillow. “I wish you could come too,” he murmured lowly. “It’ll just be Ella and Jonathon and me.”

“Poor Ella,” Darren said unexpectedly. “Third wheel for two gay guys.”

“Oh, shut up,” Jayden said fondly, picking at the pillowcase. “I want to go, but it’ll be weird, going to Paris without you. Without my
boyfriend
.”

“You’re definitely drunk if you’re breaking out the b-word and it’s not the end of the world,” Darren said agreeably.

Jayden scowled. “Why am I with you?”

“Because you love me,” Darren said, but there was the faint edge of mocking to it.

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“All right, all right,” Darren chuckled. The noise of the film in the background was suddenly muted. “When are you going to come and see me, then, if you’re buggering off to Paris?”

“I don’t know,” Jayden said mournfully. “I miss you.”

“Yes, you said that,” Darren said, laughing quietly. “Look, go to bloody bed. And on Saturday when you’re not studying or out with Ella or whatever, and I have my next day off, we can arrange you coming here for a visit nearer Easter. Just a weekend or something. But I’ll be done with the first-stage training by then, so I’ll be on shifts and have to book the time off.”

“Okay,” Jayden murmured. “I want to come for your birthday but I can’t. S’exam season. I don’t think mine will be over by then.”

“I’ll forgive you this time,” Darren bargained. “Maybe.”

“I’ll check.” Jayden decided. “I mean, I might be lucky, some exams are after Easter and I don’t think maybe mine will be so if we break for Easter before your birthday, I might be able to come down and…”

“You’re rambling,” Darren said lowly. “Go to bed. We’ll talk about it some other time.”

Jayden huffed, pinching the pillowcase one last time before whispering, “Okay. Miss you.”

“Love you too, you pisshead,” Darren said fondly and hung up.

Jayden sat with the dial tone for a long time and trying to imagine Darren’s smile in Rome.

* * * *

“What happened to you?”

“Shut up,” Jayden said, and Leah slid into the seat opposite, grinning broadly. His head was pounding and he’d woken up feeling more like he’d died than slept.

“Hung over?”

“Mm.”

“Well, you were hitting the wine pretty hard last night, the lot of you. We went for drinks after our hockey practice and your Ella was just about arse over tit flirting with the barman. Poor guy.”

Jayden grimaced. He’d retired to a lonely corner of the junior common room, taking advantage of some January sales trip half the college had decided to chip in for, and the subsequent
quiet
. He would have been happy to shoot himself to shut up the Jamaican steel band playing between his ears.

“How’d your Christmas go, then?” Leah asked, spreading out her supplies. It looked like an essay to Jayden’s gritty eyes, but then Leah had handwriting worthy of a medical student, so it could have been anything.

“Okay.”

“Spend it with the boyfriend?”

“Mm.”

“Ever get out of bed?”

“Leah!” Jayden hissed and went pink.

“That’s a no,” she said briskly. “You went quiet, that’s for damn sure. Tim wanted us to come down to Cardiff to see a comedy play that was in the city, you know.”

Jayden winced. “Sorry. I don’t really check Facebook enough, you know, and getting to see Darren again…”

“Hey, I get it,” she said and rolled her eyes. “Honestly? Have to say I kind of admire you two. You’re sticking it out pretty good, even with the distance.”

Jayden grimaced again. Yeah, that’s why they’d nearly argued about five times over the break,
and
when Darren had visited, and he hadn’t gotten along with Ella and he seemed to hate Jonathon too, and…

“Oh, never mind then,” she said, flipping pages. “Tim hooked up with some Welsh bird over the break, apparently. Didn’t know he knew what his cock was for, never mind how to use it.”

The vulgarity was startling, and Jayden paused mid-word on his Chaucer translation. (Professor Byrnes called it an analysis, but it was a translation.) It jarred, and he floundered for something to say, eventually settling on a lame, “Oh,” and scribbling a useless line to appear like he was just busy.

Leah eyed him. “You going to join the drama club this term?”

“Um…”

“That’s a no,” she said and folded her arms. “Come on, Jayden, you can’t just go to university and sit in the bar drinking wine every minute you’re not in your room. You’ll turn into one of those ponces. Or an alcoholic.”

“They’re not…”

“They are,” she snorted. “I’m serious, some of the bloody postgrads are more down-to-earth than those two. You need to start hanging out with real people, or you’re going to get locked in the ivory tower, and then what’ll your boyfriend think?”

Jayden scowled. “My life shouldn’t be about what other people think,” he snapped.

“But it is,” she said. “You do everything Ella and Jonathon want you to do. You’re trying to impress
them
.”

“What would you know?” he snapped.

Leah rolled her eyes. “
Please
. I’m a fat scholarship student from a
state
school, Jayden,” she sniped. “I
know
.”

Jayden rubbed at the throbbing pain in the side of his head. “Just drop it, Leah. I’m not trying to impress anyone, I’m just trying to pass.”

“So try drinking something you actually like next time you’re in the bar?” she suggested.

“Drop it.”

“Or stand up to them,” she said and slammed her textbook, dragging all her papers back into the pile and hefting it into her arms. “Try standing up to the
right
people, Jayden. Jesus Christ.”

As she stormed out, Jayden massaged his hangover, and thought that as she turned the corner and disappeared into the narrow corridor, she’d lost a bit of weight.

“Is this true?”

It was the Sunday morning after he’d come back from the Phillips’, and Darren was feeling something akin to withdrawal symptoms: he felt tense, lethargic, bored, and
muggy
, almost. Like there was a fog in his head.

Thankfully, he was still in training and so, generally speaking, still had weekends off. Which meant sitting in Rachel’s flat with her whilst she marked spelling tests with star stickers in various colours, and he paid his bills. It was mindless work, but the company was nice.

“Is what true?”

“This.”

“What’s this?” he mumbled, not looking up.

“Your Facebook.”

“Probably not, then.”

“I’m going through your pictures, and there’s one of you at some music camp thingy.”

“When?”

“Um…” she paused, scrolling, then said: “About five years ago? Six? You’re definitely still a teenager.”

“I’m
still
a teenager,” he pointed out.

“You know what I mean. All gangly and short and spotty.”

“I wasn’t that spotty,” he said. “I got random bursts of facial hair.”

She eyed him over her laptop. “You
still
have those.”

Darren rubbed a hand across his jaw and grunted. He’d shave in the morning. There was something hedonistic about letting the routine slide at the weekends, especially now someone in the senior ranks had decided that unshaven officers looked scruffy and were no longer allowed.

“
Anyway
, did you go to music camp?”

“Once or twice.”

“What’d you play?”

“Piano and violin,” he said. “Sometimes the trombone if I figured they weren’t going to tell Father. He hated brass instruments for some reason.”

“Is he a musician?”

“Barrister,” Darren said flatly. “Now how did Father put it?” he murmured half to himself. “He
pursued a more profitable career option
.”

“I smell a rat.”

“A stupid rat,” Darren agreed. “He flunked out of music college and ended up re-training. He’s a good barrister, don’t get me wrong, and the odd time he’s played the piano at home, he’s
good
, but music college isn’t for good.”

“It’s for kick-ass, ridiculously awesome?”

“Yes.”

“Were you?”

“Awesome?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” Darren said. “I was good. Better than Father. I could probably have survived a music school, but I wasn’t ever going to be the next Chopin or anything like that.”

“You don’t play now, though. There’s no violin in that there flat,” she said suspiciously.

Darren pointed at his shoulder and she ‘aah’-ed. She’d seen the scars and heard the story. He’d just obviously left out the musical part of it all. He’d…kind of assumed Rachel knew. It was bizarre to remember that there were people who
didn’t
know.

“But the piano?”

“Out of the habit,” he said. “I do the odd ditty on the one in the hall downstairs now and then but I don’t play properly anymore.”

“Did you like it?”

“The piano? Yes.”

“Not the violin?”

“Nope.”

“Why?”

“Boring,” he said, stuffing the credit card cheque and paying-in slip into an envelope. “I only learned classical stuff. Bored me to tears.” Well, that was the simpler version. “Ever listened to Vivaldi?”

“Not really,” she said. “I like classical music but I’m a musical idiot, really.”

“I know, I’ve heard you singing.”

“Shut up!”

“Well, all of Vivaldi’s work is the same. Same concerto, a thousand different ways of arranging the notes. One round is bad enough, but my orchestra master
loved
the bastard and wouldn’t stop signing us up for Vivaldi-themed performances.”

Rachel wrinkled her nose. “
Fun
.”

“Yep.”

“Want to come to a concert with me, then?”

Darren eyed her warily. “I knew that was going somewhere.”

“It’ll be fun!” she promised. “The music teacher at work, Tony…” Darren watched with interest as she went a little pink, “…said that he was given tickets by his sister-in-law to take his girlfriend to see the London Philharmonic Orchestra, but then he split up with his girlfriend before the Christmas break…” Rachel went even pinker, and Darren smirked, “…and now he can’t go because he’s going on the school trip to Cornwall, so would I like them? So I thought maybe you’d come with me.”

“Your boyfriend Tony?”

“The music teacher,” she repeated, still pink, and resolutely marking the spelling tests with impressive dedication.

“So much for I’m never going to love anybody ever,” Darren mocked.

“So do you want to come or not?” Rachel insisted.

“When?”

“Last Friday in February. I figured we could get the first train into London after work, and then we could stay overnight in a Premier Inn or something rather than journey all the way back out. Make a little weekend of it, maybe?”

“Yeah, all right,” Darren said. It wasn’t like he’d have anything better to do, or anyone to see. His anyone wouldn’t be anywhere near him until Easter at the earliest anyway, and that would be if Darren could prise him away from Ella and Jonathon. “Is it just the orchestra?”

“No, there’s a whole raft of them. I have a leaflet somewhere…” Rachel said, bending over the arm of the sofa to rummage in her handbag. “There’s a bunch of string solos, I thought you’d like them.”

“Depends on the string. I hate the cello.”

“Why?”

“Childhood trauma.”

“Really?”

“Yes. My cousin attempted to play it.”

“…Oh.”

“Yes,” Darren said firmly. “A mangled cello sounds just as bad as a mangled violin. And you can feel it through the floor, so it’s even harder to get away from.”

“Here.” Rachel threw a crumpled leaflet at him. “It’s a bunch of Italian dead people, that’s all I know. The composers, that is, not the players. Though they might be Italian.”

“Doubt they’re dead, though,” Darren said, flicking the leaflet open. It was the standard kind of line-up, seemed to be progressing through the ages of the great Italian violinists. Italian music had hit a pinnacle for a short period in terms of the main string instruments, although Darren had always personally preferred the more northern compositions in general.

The final solo caught his eye, and he nodded. “Yeah,” he said to the room at large, and Rachel grinned. “I might enjoy this.”