The Devil's Trill Sonata (2 page)

And then he was gone, and his boots were loud on the ancient stairs, and when Jayden managed to unlatch the rusty window and ease it open, he was just in time to lean out and wave to the car, and he thought he saw Darren’s smile as it pulled away.

Jayden's chest hurt, and he missed him already.

* * * *

Darren believed in love.

He’d never admit it, not even to Jayden. It didn’t fit with what everyone thought about him, and it definitely wasn’t immune to his bad days, but he believed in it all the same. He just didn’t believe most people were in love when they said they were, and that was the problem with other people’s scepticism. They thought he was eighteen and in lust.

And yeah, he was; he’d seen what Jayden hid in those skinny jeans. The lust was definitely still kicking about, and quite healthily, thanks. But he was also in love. And Darren Peace believed in love.

His parents weren’t in love. They were in a business relationship, and it had begun to buckle in the last year. Mother had divorced Scott’s father when she’d learned that Jeffrey Peace had a bigger salary and a nicer car; she was bound to do the same the moment she found someone to replace him, too. Darren was only surprised it had taken eighteen years for the cracks to show.

Scott wasn’t in love. He went through girls like a hot poker through butter. Butter that hadn’t even been left in the fridge. If there was such a thing as being one hundred percent straight, Scott was it, but he never loved. He fucked, he fumbled, he fucked it
up
, and then he fled. In the morning, he’d start over. And so his ‘relationships’ lasted all of a week. He’d never loved.

Jayden’s parents were in love. It was kind of weird because they were like forty or something, but it was a fact. (A fact Darren liked, because it meant every Saturday night for three years, he and Jayden had had a house to themselves.) Mr. Phillips was like ten years older and a whole lot uglier than his wife, and with her red hair and heart-shaped face she could have anyone on the block, but they still went out on dates and put their savings in a jar in one of the kitchen cupboards towards a holiday in Majorca. It was a lot less glamorous than Mother and Father. It was a lot poorer and a lot more tacky furniture that you had to assemble yourself, but they were still there, and the atmosphere in Jayden’s house was just that much warmer for it. They were in love.

They’d been in love almost as long as Jayden—or Darren—had been alive, and that was the kind of love Darren believed in.

It was the kind of love
he
had.

He’d fallen in love at fifteen. He knew it sounded stupid, and he would probably scoff at the idea himself if someone else told him they’d done it—only he had. And it hadn’t been right away. Even after he’d gone and done it, he’d spent a long time convincing himself he was just then-sixteen and being stupid and once his shoulder recovered and Jayden switched schools, they’d begin to crack up and drift apart. Only they hadn’t. Jayden had gone to physio with him, watched him get rid of that bloody violin, been there the first time he’d played the piano, eight months after the park, and Jayden had hugged him without a word when he’d teared up in the middle of the music. He’d been there for the bad days, every one of them, and he hadn’t so much as twitched when the physiotherapist had turned around when Darren was seventeen and said that this was as good as it was going to get.

That phrase didn’t just apply to his shoulder.

Against all his doubts, they’d weathered the depression and the attack and the ongoing refusal of his parents to even entertain the idea of Jayden existing or Darren being ‘one of those homosexual types’ (Father did have some interesting turns of phrase), and the teasing at St. John’s that Jayden had been understandably twitchy about, just
waiting
for it to turn into the outright bullying that it had been at Woodbourne. But they’d weathered the storm.

It had been three years, and Darren believed in love. Believed in a love that had him driving nearly a hundred miles home on his own, pretending he was as cheerful as the music on the radio, pretending this separation wasn’t going to be just as difficult for him as it was for Jayden. If not worse. Darren had forgotten how to cope on his own, and part of him knew—just
knew—
that the next bad day was going to be more than bad, and weathering the next depression storm was going to be hard on his own, when they’d always weathered the storms together. And yet he did it anyway, because he loved Jayden, and he believed in that love.

Believed in
them
, in him and Jayden, no matter the distance.

They would weather this, too.

Jayden spent the rest of the afternoon unpacking.

The room was impersonal and bare. The first thing he did was stick his poster of the Alps above his bed, the one Darren had brought him back last year from Austria, and the second thing was to rummage in his bags for the picture of him and Darren that Ethan had taken on a day trip to the coast the summer before last. It was Jayden’s favourite picture of the two of them, even if it had been windy and miserable, because they were standing by a roaring surf, chest-to-chest and arms around each other, and smiling. He’d persuaded Darren to actually smile, for more than two seconds, and the result was the best picture Jayden had, even if it was messy and wonky because Ethan sucked with a camera and the trip actually hadn’t been that great in the end. It was a picture of
them
, and he loved it even if they both looked kind of awful, and he set it on the side table in pride of place.

He had a lot of pictures—not just him and Darren, but of Mum and Dad, and Paul and Ethan (even though he wouldn’t tell them he had them, or he’d put them on display)—and he stuck them with Blu-Tac around the window frame in lieu of curtains. The blinds looked to be broken, so he hitched them halfway down and stuck pictures onto the slats too. The colours were better than the white blinds and black window frame, and the room instantly felt less lonely with them there.

For most of the afternoon, he sorted his things into the wardrobe and the desk drawers, to the background tune of other people moving into the rooms along the same landing and his phone buzzing every now and then when Darren texted him back with even worse English than usual. Jayden convinced himself he was taking
loads
of rest stops on the way home, even as he told him off for texting while driving (Darren was a terrible driver; Jayden had no idea how he’d passed his test) and set up his laptop to play some of their old study playlists while he tried to find his formal clothes in the bottom of his big case. Dinner had to be eaten in
suits
here.

“Knock, knock.”

He jumped and flushed. He had forgotten that Darren had left the door open when he’d left, and now a couple lounged in it: a girl so thin that ‘willowy’ would have been describing too much body fat, and a tall, blue-eyed boy with reddish-blond hair in a side parting twenty years older than he was. Good-looking, Jayden supposed, in a preppy sort of way.

“Hi.” The girl unfolded a long, skeletal arm for a handshake. “Ella Mays-Wright.”

Ella was a very thin, very beautiful girl (in that typical
Vogue
model kind of way) with long, blonde hair and eyes like an exaggerated doll: large, round, and very blue. Maybe it was the hair, or the black pencil skirt, or the no-frills blouse, or the folded arms, or the way she leaned, but she couldn’t have been a foot wide, and her long face was even more angular than Darren’s. Her smile was a little plastic—maybe the way it didn’t crease her skin, or the glossy colour of her lipstick—and her pose a little too considered against the doorframe, but she seemed harmless enough.

“Um, Jayden. Jayden Phillips,” he said and shook her hand.

“Jonathon Birch,” the boy said. He was tall, with a firm handshake that smacked of regular moisturiser. Up close, one eyebrow had a gap like an empty piercing. His hair was smoothly parted, and his face so clean-shaven that Jayden suspected he didn’t need to bother often. He had a strong jaw and wide mouth, but there was a kind softness around his eyes, and a gentle twist up at one side of his mouth. He seemed a little friendlier, a little less intimidating than Ella, and dressed more casually than her, in tight, fitted jeans and an obscure indie band T-shirt. “I’m reading economics, what about you?”

“English.”

“Wonderful,” Ella said and smiled a smile that didn’t so much as approach her eyes. “I’m reading law. I’m going into corporate law; my father works for Merrill Lynch.”

Jayden had no idea who that was; Jonathon rolled his eyes and offered a smile. “I’m just here for the escapism from my parents,” he confessed. “They’re both scientists, but I find it so
dull
.”

“Okay,” Jayden said. “Um…” Their parents were scientists and lawyers? Dad was a
customer service provider in the meat products department
, but that was just a fancy way of saying a butcher. And Mum was a shop girl. He suddenly wished he could lie and use Darren’s parents instead, but he’d never be able to keep up that facade for long.

“Are you nearly done?” Ella interrupted. “We’re going to explore and find some people before dinner. It’ll be less daunting if we can walk down all together, you know?”

“Um, well, I guess I can pick this up later, um…”

“Great!”

He barely had time to grab his phone and keys before Ella hauled him out into the narrow hall after her by the wrist, strong for such a skinny girl, and Jonathon trailed in their wake. Still, Jayden reflected even as he freed himself, if he let Ella do the hard social work, he could just get to know people like this, right? It’d be less daunting, anyway.

It was certainly…efficient. Ella breezed through the rest of the landing without pausing for breath. Most of the landing were girls, Jayden learned, but the floor below was the other way around. If Ella and Jonathon had come across as instantly more of Darren’s background than his, the rule didn’t hold entirely—one girl on their floor dressed in a faux-punk style that seemed to involve cutting her own hair, and a scrawny Welsh boy downstairs had red dreadlocks down to his arse. Jayden wanted to take a picture and send it to Darren, just to see what he said, but he would still be driving, and Jayden didn’t want to cause any accidents. Darren managed those on his own.

They ended up going down to dinner as a floor, Ella leading the charge in a red dress that took the two pounds of fat she possessed straight off her again. Jayden found himself next to Jonathon and opposite Ella herself, who opened the starter with an argument with the girl next to her (Dahlia? Daisy? Some kind of flower beginning with ‘D’ anyway) about the policies of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In about half a second, Jonathon had waded in on his subject, and Jayden was left toying with his food and trying to remember who the Chancellor of the Exchequer even
was
. (He was fairly sure the man’s name couldn’t really be ‘Misogynistic Xenophobe’, whatever the flower-girl said.)

The other nearby conversations didn’t seem much better. The girl on his left (who was studying
Norse
, which Jayden hadn’t even realised was a real subject) was having a heated argument with a tiny Asian girl about queer theory and its relationship to women’s studies in general, and the boy opposite
her
, whose name Jayden had never caught in the first place, was telling someone all about his gap year in Uganda, which had been about saving orphans. Or elephants. Or maybe orphaned elephants.

He felt suddenly
shy
, as the queer-studies-hater turned on Jonathon and Ella’s conversation, and it dissolved into a huge melee of voices about current education policy. Jayden didn’t know the first thing about education policy, current or otherwise, and escaped back to the food counter to pick over the desserts and surreptitiously text Darren. It was just after six, so he’d be home by now, and sure enough, after a pause, he was told,
don’t complain 2 me, its ur freaky uni ;) xxx

Gee, thanks Darren. Useless son of a…

“You look lost,” said a voice in his ear.

Jayden jumped; the girl smiled sympathetically. She was a squat, fat sort of girl in that overweight-but-solid manner, like an oddly shaped building. She wasn’t at all pretty, with spiky, dark hair that had too much gel in it, and a rubber wristband from a music festival that clashed horribly with her trouser suit, and with the rest of the atmosphere generally. But she was giving him a sympathetic look that seemed genuine, mixed in with a little humour and a little understanding, and Jayden suddenly warmed to her.

“Sorry, nosey,” she said. “I’m Leah.”

“Really?” he asked - without thinking - and pinked.

She grimaced. “Well. Ophelia Rutherford,” she admitted. “But I’ll punch you if you call me that. What’s your name?”

“Jayden.”

“And the lost expression is because…?”

“My table are all taking politics and I have no idea what they’re on about,” Jayden admitted.

“Join mine, then,” Leah said, taking a slab of diabetes-inducing cake and linking her chunky arm into Jayden’s. “Tim’s a drama enthusiast doing English because Mummy said so, so we’ve been basically winding him up for like half an hour. Tim!” she called, dragging Jayden straight to a new table; the redheaded, dreadlocked Welsh guy from downstairs looked up, and grinned crookedly.

“Save me,” he implored.

“Fuck no,” Leah said, dragging Jayden down onto the bench. “Tim’s mother
actually
sewed name labels into his underwear!”

The disjointed bubble burst; Jayden blurted out, “Seriously?!” and the ring of laughter from the table at large soothed his displaced nerves. This was okay. This wasn’t serious stuff. He had time for the serious stuff.

The talk at Leah’s table didn’t ever really transcend into conversation. Pictures were shared over the table on mobiles, and Jayden endured twenty minutes of ribbing for being half-ginger when he shared one of his parents. (Tim, being
actually
ginger, was no help.) This dissolved into rambling about nationality: Leah, it turned out, had a German mother, which resulted in a fair few off-colour jokes, and Jayden shyly offered that his boyfriend was quarter-Iranian, dropping the information tentatively, unsure of the reaction. He had no intention of going back in the closet, but still…