There was a downpour just before the boat pulled into the jetty. The tide was low so I had to alight at a neighbouring bay. I clambered over the slippery rocks thinking that I should have called Lizzie to get her permission to use the beach-house for the weekend. What if she turned up? Or worse, what if she was there already? I didn’t want any witnesses. All morning I had been in a kind of a daze, pretending to myself that I wouldn’t obey the instruction on the piece of paper. Pretending to cook breakfast. Pretending to clean the apartment. But I kept returning to the rubbish tin, retrieving the scrap and smoothing it out on the table, running my fingers over the words until they were almost illegible. Expecting a message in braille to erupt between the lines. Half an hour before the ferry was due to leave I emptied the contents of the fridge in to a plastic bag, hurled it and a few clothes into a back-pack and myself into a taxi.
On the way up the track to the house I found it hard to breathe, it was as though the rain had leached the oxygen from the air. Everything was wet and slick. The curved leaves of the agapanthus glistened, beaded with green blood. The erect knives of flax were thrusting up out of the earth, straining at their roots. There was a smell of soil and shit and things washed up out of the sea. I could see the corner of the beach-house, smothered in dripping tree-ferns. In the window, suspended above the lit bush, guttered a candle in a saucer on the sill.
Sykes stood silhouetted at the end of the room. The lights of the city were a faint orange mist on the horizon. His hair was gone; he had shaved his head. His scalp gleamed dully in the failing light. He was smoking a cigarette. I watched its red tip ascend to his mouth, blossom and fall. He didn’t say anything. I put the bag on the table. As I looked up the cigarette rose and I saw the tears coming down his face. I wanted to run to him and tell him everything would be all right, to take his face in my hands and lick it dry. I wanted to enact all of the embraces that I had rehearsed during the interminable boat-trip to the island. But I couldn’t make it across those six feet. Twelve floorboards and an insurmountable wall of words. He stubbed out the cigarette and as we stood facing each other it was as though he was slowly disappearing, vaporizing. I had to strain to see his outline as the gathering darkness came up behind him.
‘I couldn’t find the switch. I couldn’t remember where the switch was.’ I recoiled at the sound of his voice. Jumped as though I had been slapped. After a moment I went outside, struck a match and turned on the main switch at the meter-box. The house was suddenly flooded with light. Sykes was sitting blinking when I came back inside. He was wearing a black sweater with the sleeves pushed up and his hands lay, one clasping the other, on the table in front of him. He was looking at them as though he had never seen them before. His skin was as white as milk and his blue eyes looked faded, drained of their intensity. He was very thin and his shaven head made him look attenuated, as delicate and girlish as a saint.
‘So, you’ve still got my key it seems,’ I said. Sykes reached into his sweater and pulled it out, tied to a piece of string around his neck.
‘My lifeline,’ he said, with a glimmer of that old sheepish half-smile.
‘Where have you been? Why didn’t you come back sooner?’
‘Oh, I’ve been lying low. Keeping out of the way.’ He got up and walked about the room. His double paced behind him, reflected in the black window. Something landed on the tin roof and the fridge spluttered. ‘I suppose you know they’re all after me.’
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘The cops. The twins. Everybody.’
‘The twins are locked up,’ I said.
‘Doesn’t make any difference,’ he said. ‘They’re still out to get me.’
‘What about Rose? What happened to Rose?’
‘Did you bring anything to drink?’ said Sykes. ‘I’m starving for a drink.’ I took the bottle from the bag and went into the kitchen. Sykes followed me, leant against the bench watching me pour. I could see the pulse beating in his throat as I handed him the glass.
‘To us,’ he said, raising his glass. ‘Us against the world.’ What us? I thought. There’s no us. Just wreckage. I didn’t say anything. He walked back to the table. His feet were bare. I feared for his fragile skin on the rough boards.
‘He wouldn’t leave me alone. I kept throwing him out and he kept coming back for more. If I locked him out he broke in. He brought me presents of drugs. Whatever I wanted. I could do anything to him. Anything. He would just lie there and take it. He was off the air half the time. It was like fucking a corpse. I was suffocating. In the end I just had to get rid of him.’
‘So you torched the house with him in it.’
‘No I didn’t. Don’t say that. I wouldn’t do that. Fabulina left that house to me, you know. I loved that house. I was happy in that house.’ Sykes studied his hands. ‘I swapped some of the shit he was using for some uncut stuff. I waited till he got it up his arm and then I took off. Left him to it. He must have realized and panicked. Knocked something over. You know what that place was like. It would have gone up in a second. It was an accident, that’s all.’ Sykes was gripping the edge of the table. His knuckles were blue.
I threw together something to eat from the contents of my bag but Sykes wasn’t hungry. He picked at a few olives and pulled the bone out of a chicken leg. He kept going back to the kitchen to refill his glass.
‘So, what am I doing here?’ I said, finally. ‘Why do you want me here?’
‘Because there’s nobody else,’ Sykes said. And then after a while. ‘Because you love me.’ He looked at me out of his blue eyes and I felt irradiated, as though my blood had changed colour.
We sat without speaking for a long time, stranded at that table in the middle of that bright room, listening to the bones of the house relax, the crepitation of the bush. Then Sykes got up and went into the kitchen. I could hear him unscrewing and pouring and then his voice said: ‘And there’s something else. There’s something else I have to tell you. There’s something I want you to see. And this is the only place. It had to be here.’ He came back into the room. He put his drink down on the table and pulled the sweater over his head. His chest was covered with small indentations, little craters, ghost-scars from dozens of cigarette burns. He raised his arm and the skin moved over his ribs.
‘Look. Here.’ He pointed to a raised purple spot in his armpit. ‘And here.’ He turned. There was a larger patch on his back. ‘And here. And here. And here.’
I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. I felt full of air. As light as air. And I couldn’t take my eyes off the constellation of purple lesions splattered over his body and I couldn’t stop thinking how beautiful it was.
‘I thought I was immune,’ he was saying. ‘I thought I wouldn’t have enough substance for it to take hold. For it to get a grip. I thought somehow I would be able to sidestep it, give it the slip. Just like I gave Fabulina the slip. Just like I gave you the slip. Now it looks like I’ve given myself the slip. Which is pretty hilarious now I come to think about it. All those pricks. Hundreds of pricks. Up my arm. Up my arse. And the twins and Rose. All that means nothing now. Zero. But you know what’s the worst thing? The really awful thing is I wasted my whole life living someone else’s life. The life of a total stranger. Fighting myself because you know why? I was afraid. Terrified.’ And the tears fell down onto his hands. I was crying too now but still the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. All those words that were jammed in my chest, pressing hard against my heart.
‘And you know, the only time I’ve been allowed to be real is with Fabulina. And you.’ He looked up at me with a wry, apologetic smile and reached across for my hand.
‘Don’t cry, he said. ‘I don’t want to see you cry. Come here.’
We lay on the bed in the dark for a long time. Sykes held me in his arms, stroking my hair. Then he undressed me and pulled up the covers. I could hear him walking about on the creaking boards. The strike of a match. A serpent of smoke in the black air. Then I heard his clothes fall to the floor. He climbed into the bed and gathered me in. His smoky breath was hot on my cheek. His hands were very cold.
‘Hold me tight.’ I said.
‘Tighter,’ I said and then I fell asleep.
I woke in the middle of the night. Sykes’s imprint was still warm in the bed. The light was on in the kitchen and it fell in a fan across the floor. Sykes was dressed, sitting in a chair, lacing his shoes. There was a full glass on the table and a cigarette burned in the ashtray.
‘Go back to sleep,’ he said. ‘I won’t be long. I’m just going down to look at the water.’ A rush of cold air came in as he opened the door and closed it. I reached over in the bed to touch the warm sheet, smelling his smell, thinking about Sykes. Thinking about myself. Thinking about us. I must have drifted off because when I woke again the sheet was cold. I got up, pulled a blanket over my shoulders and went to the window. It was almost dawn. There was a pink blush seeping up over the edge of the sea. I could just make him out. He was walking from the jetty to the beach. He was picking something up and walking back to the end of the jetty to drop it into the water. I could hear the splash. Then he stood for a long time staring down into the black water. Then he went to the beach for another rock, a bigger one, and dropped that in and stood there staring. I got dressed and hurried down through the dew drenched flax and agapanthus. Daylight was fast approaching, suffusing the sea with pink and gold. Sykes heard me crunching over the gravel. He turned and the light dawned across his face. He looked utterly bereft.
‘It’s gone,’ he said.