Why Does it Taste so Sweet? (5 page)

He had a way of stealing her voice away from her. Making it hard even to swallow. The things he did, the things he said.

“Listen. I’ve got to go. There are people here and Rake’s still in the studio. I just wanted you to know that. I just wanted you to know I love you. Okay? Good.”

The line went dead before she could even try to work moisture into her throat so she could say something that might in some way approach being a fitting response to that.

She was doing this too much today: being the woman who sat in the window seat with tears rolling down her cheeks. She would have to work out how to stop. She would have to work out how to breathe and how to stand and walk, how to get back to the apartment before she made a complete and utter fool of herself.

Why did it have to be like this?

Why did there always have to be something that took a beautiful thing and gave it a twist so that it became another bitter knife in her heart?

Back at the apartment, she was buzzing. The song was lodged in her head, and in her mind she kept seeing that simple video: Ray with his guitar in the bleached-out, sunlight-flooded white room. She’d only ever seen it on the small screen of her phone, and then partway through the afternoon it occurred to her that Marcia could get all kinds of digital content on her big, widescreen TV. That would be so much more dramatic than seeing it on her phone, or even on her iPad.

She found the remote and navigated her way through the menus to YouTube, then searched for Ray. There were thousands of results, so she narrowed it down to ‘Let’s Make This Thing Happen’, and the video came top. More than 50,000 views in the last few days. That must be pretty good, she supposed.

She moved to select it, then paused.

Second in the list of results was ‘Ray Sandler - Let’s Make This Thing Happen live at the Phoenix’. The thumbnail was almost a negative image of the one for the official video: dark backdrop, Ray sitting on a stool with a guitar resting on his thigh, picked out by a harsh spotlight.

She pressed Play and immediately that jazzy chord struck out and he held it for a moment longer than comfortable before hitting the opening line. It was a flawless rendition of the song, the words identical, the fingering of those chords exactly the same as when he’d played it for the first time at the Roxette.

And the date below the video said it had been filmed live at the Phoenix nearly two months ago. Long before Ray had first set eyes on Emily in the crowd at the Roxette. Long before the opening verse of the song had ‘just come to him’ as he walked off stage that night.

So... the song he claimed to have written for her –
not
my
song.
Our
song. Okay?
– was one he’d already written, and performed...

She scrolled down through the comments. Mostly positive. Typical fan stuff. One or two complaints that it was ‘too arty’ and ‘nothin like the old days’. And one from someone who’d seen it live:

I was there!! Luv the Phoenix. Luv these pub gigs. Luvin it!!!

So it had been a small venue, trying out the new material at somewhere intimate a few weeks before the official try-out at the Roxette.

The bastard. That night, that beautiful moment when he’d said he’d seen her and a song had formed... he’d just been working a line. Probably a line he’d used on a hundred groupies over the years.
Darling, I wrote this song for you
.

No wonder they’d been able to push it out as a single so quickly: it had been recorded and ready to go for weeks.

Bastard.

§

“So it’d be a wine night, then, would it?”

It must have been the smudged make-up, mussed up hair and look of vengeful fury all over her face that had been the giveaway.

Continuing from the kitchen, glasses clinking as she took them from the cupboard, Marcia said, “So what’s he done now? And which ‘he’ is it this time? Thom? Ray? Hamilton?”

When Marcia came back through, Emily had the song up on YouTube. The Phoenix recording. All she had to do was point at the date and Marcia got it. She knew the story behind the song, and she saw straight away that the date made Ray’s story a lie.

“So a man bullshitted you to get you into bed,” she said. “Now there’s a world first.” She poured – the big balloon glasses that took half a bottle each, and it was barely even six o’clock.

Emily just looked at her. “He lied to me,” she said.

A raised eyebrow in response. Then Marcia picked up both glasses, handed one to Emily, raised hers and said, “To bastards everywhere.”

Reluctantly, Emily raised her own glass and took a sip. The red was rich and fruity and the words of another of Ray’s songs came to her then, a lesser known track from the first Angry Cans album:
Why does it taste so sweet? When all that you give me is poison?

“Bastards,” she whispered, and took another sip.

“So what are you going to do? What does it change now that you know he was prepared to bullshit you to get you into bed?”

Sometimes Marcia’s tough love was exactly what Emily needed. Other times, when she wasn’t quite ready, it just made her want to cry. She wasn’t sure which kind of time this was yet.

“It damages the trust,” she said, after a while. “I believed him.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing. Every relationship needs a healthy dose of mistrust and doubt. It keeps us on our toes.”

“You have such a cynical view of relationships.”

“While you still believe in lurve.”

And somewhere in between the two was where the healthy balance really lay, Emily knew. Somewhere between realism and magic. “Can’t we have a bit of both?”

Marcia gave her that
duh
look again. This was exactly what Marcia had been trying to show her.

“Sometimes life sucks,” said Marcia, “and sometimes people do dumb things for reasons that range from stupid to sweet with a whole lot of clumsy in between. I don’t know if he was spinning you a line so he could manipulate you, or if he was just caught out in a lie to someone who turned out to be far more. And neither do you, honey. You listen to your Auntie Marcia, and stop trying to second-guess every little detail. It’s not healthy.”

§

Calling him later was a mistake. She should have known that.

“I didn’t know about the show at the Phoenix.”

“Hnh?” He sounded very far away. The other side of the world, not just the other side of the Channel.

“The show you did a couple of months ago. Trying out new material. Trying out our song before you even knew me.”

Silence. She thought she must have stopped him in his tracks. She could picture the look on his face as his brain raced to catch up and to work out how he could possibly get out of this one. Then: “Hnh?”

There were voices in the background. Music and laughter. Traffic. He must be out somewhere. Maybe sitting outside a bar, tables on a French terrace, a busy road nearby. She could picture it so clearly.

“So... what’s that you say?”

His words were slurred. Tired. Drunk. Stoned.

“The song,” she said. “You told me you wrote it for me, but you didn’t. You’d already written it. I saw it online. I saw the dates.”

Another silence, and then he spoke a little more clearly. “No,” he said. “That’s not right, babe. Dates are wrong. That’s
our
song. Mo does all that shit. The uploads and everything. He must have got the dates wrong, that’s all.”

For a moment she thought she could make herself believe him, but no. Not just the date on the video, but all the comments that had followed, the one who’d been at the gig. It had happened weeks ago.

“You can’t keep blaming Mo for everything,” she said. “You did that for the leaked news stories, too, and the press always knowing where you’d be so they could doorstep you. I know you now, Ray. I know how much you like to control things. You can’t pretend you don’t know what’s going on.”

“So what are you saying, babe? You getting pissed off over the date on a video?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“Then why...?”

“You’re drunk, Ray. I’m sorry. This was a mistake. I don’t want to fight over the phone.” She didn’t know what the next move was. She didn’t know what she wanted it to be. But this call... she should have known it was a mistake.

“Good night, Ray. Have fun with your friends.”
I love you
. In that instant, she knew that much, at least, was true: she’d never known anything like the time she’d spent with Ray. Never known anything like this was even possible. And she loved him.

“G’night, babe.”

§

That bitter knife in the heart thing. Sometimes it got worse than that. Sometimes someone just came along, took the handle, and gave it an almighty twist.

I know I shdn’t send this but

From Marcia, mid-morning the next day. The ‘but’ was followed by a link.

Emily stared at it. She didn’t want to thumb the link, didn’t want to see what it might open up.

It was a video clip from one of the gossip sites that were becoming way too familiar to Emily.

Róisín stood in the sun, the backdrop a row of buildings that had that indefinable something that made them clearly foreign, European. French. It was a waist-up shot, and she looked like she’d just stepped out of a fashion shoot in a pearl-gray top that wrapped delicately around her skinny frame. One arm covered, the other arm and shoulder bare, the skin flawless as if she was Photoshopped everywhere she went. Her cropped brunette hair was immaculate, only the fringe a little longer and swept perfectly to one side above wide, hazel eyes.

“Oh, we’ve had our moments,” she said in that lazy Dublin drawl. “Hasn’t everyone? But we always end up back together again.”

Her words echoed the ones she’d used when she’d tracked Emily down in her office at Hamilton and Chambers:
He always comes back. Always
.

“Is it true?” asked a woman’s voice from off-camera. “Are the Angry Cans getting back together again?”

“Oh, it’s early days, Megan. For now Raymond’s just concentrating on his new album. He and Rake have been working together on it, so who knows? But now, well, we’d just like a little privacy so we can get on with our lives, you know?”

“And what about Emily Rivers? It’s only days since Ray was all over the papers with her. Wasn’t she supposed to be the new love of his life?”

Róisín gave a little laugh. “Please,” she said. “But no. I’m not going to comment on that. You know what artists are like: there are groupies everywhere they turn. All I’ll say is that Raymond and I are very happy.”

“Thank you, Róisín Flaherty in sunny Paris. This is Megan–”

Emily cut the video.

The song was everywhere.

Let’s Make This Thing Happen
.

On the radio, in shops; when she flipped through the channels on TV it actually came up twice, once on a chat show and then again on one of the music channels.

It was on in the Mexican diner when Emily arrived to meet Marcia for lunch. Of course it would be playing there – Fate would have missed a trick if it hadn’t rubbed her nose in it there, too.

“Emily, honey.” Marcia leapt to her feet and took Emily into her arms. “I’m so sorry. I never should have sent you that link. But you had to know...”

Emily squeezed back, then disentangled herself. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“‘Fine’ is one of those words, isn’t it? Like ‘with all due respect’ and ‘of course I like to go down on a woman’, it rarely means what you think or hope.”

“No, really–”

“And that’s another one.”

“I never really believed,” said Emily. “It’s like being on holiday. It’s only ever going to last for a week or two at best, and then it’s over and all you have are the memories and a few dodgy photos.”

“You have such a poor view of yourself.”

“It’s what she said to me that time she burst into the office. Róisín. She said she and Ray are from a completely different world, and they operate by different rules there. I got a glimpse of that, but I could never compete, could I?”

“You’re worth more than all of them put together.”

Emily said nothing. She had to accept and move on. She didn’t know what else to do. “I’ve had enough to deal with over the past few weeks,” she said. “Now, all I want is to emerge relatively undamaged. And maybe even a little richer for the experience. Because it really was a Hell of an experience.”

She hadn’t expected to be smiling, or to feel in the least bit positive about what had happened.

“You really are fine, aren’t you?”

“Fine-ish.”

“Ish is good.”

§

“Oh. My. God.” Marcia had stopped eating, her burrito suspended in mid-air by her mouth. “He knows us. Will you tell me who your God-like is?”

Emily followed her look and saw Mo hovering in the doorway, peering across at them, as if he was suddenly uncertain whether talking to her now was such a good idea after all.

“And if he’s not spoken for already – Hell, even if he is – would you make a point of telling him how I have a very soft spot for six-foot, smooth-headed black guys and it has his name tattooed on it?”

“That’s Mo,” Emily said. “He’s sweet. Don’t eat him alive, okay?”

Marcia gave her that raised-eyebrow look, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

“Hey, Mo,” Emily said, as he approached. What could he want? It was over. All over. And with that thought, she suddenly felt decidedly
un
-fine again.

He stood, even though she waved at a vacant seat in their booth.

“Hey, friend of Marcia,” he said. “And this must be Marcia.”

Emily smiled, but said nothing.

“So you’ve seen.”

How could he tell just from looking at her? She was handling this well, damn it!

“What’s going on?” she asked.

Mo shook his head. “I really don’t know,” he said.

Mo knew everything. How could he not know what was going on now?

“Has he spoken to you?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I don’t know what he’s doing back with Róisín,” he went on. “That came from nowhere. I knew Rake was working with him, and that had me worried. The two of them... Well, you know what the two of them can be like. I knew they’d get to drinking again. And more. Listen, Ms Rivers: I’ve been with Ray for years, and if I’ve learnt one thing it’s that I can’t get through to him when he and Rake are on a spree. I’m scared for him, you know what I mean?”