When he got home he felt dreadful. A nausea akin to seasickness. He looked in the mirror. As a rule he was white as a sheet. He’d got used to that. He thought of it as the colour of the disease – TB was white. Now he was reddish, purple where he was coming up in bruises from Valerie’s fists. It was a good job she had beaten him. If she had not, Onions surely would have and he would be a damn sight the worse for it.
He made tea and stretched out on the chaise longue, hoping the world would go away. Sipped tea, tasted blood. With his second cup he felt the need of music. He hadn’t played a record in ages. There was one already sitting at the bottom of the pit in the gramophone. He pulled it off the spindle and looked at the label. It was the record Foxx had given him; the one Clover seemed to play at any opportunity; the one she had played every day of that long weekend at Uphill. ‘Please, Please Me’ by the Beatles. She must have been playing it on the last night of her short life, while he was out with Fitz. And it had sat there ever since.
He read through the song titles, his brain making idle connections and refusing in its present condition to see them as idle. It seemed to him in his madness that they represented coded chapters in the messy saga in which he was now embroiled. He had seen her standing there – and of course she was just seventeen – he had gone to Anna, who had asked him to please, please her, then bound him in chains, caused his misery, and packed him off to the place, then the weeks of secrets, then his brief taste of honey and the final PS I Love You . . . Where was the song about the complete fucking idiot he’d been?
He slipped the record back into its sleeve and stuck it in the rack. It had punctuated the spring and summer. He could not yet conceive of the circumstances which would induce him to listen to it again.