She was supposed to make pizzas with Stella, meet Felix at the church, hang out with Sail and the Forevers at the beach.
Instead Mae found herself sitting opposite Luke Manton as he tried damn hard to drink himself into the afterlife.
The bottles towered.
She saw through to the immaculate kitchen, to Lydia Manton’s part of the home.
She wouldn’t tell Luke that his daughter had been pregnant.
There was a chance he knew, but loyalty ran deep, it was all Mae could offer to her friend now.
‘I’ve almost made it, Mae.’
His beard was long, his hair greasy and wild. In his eyes she saw nothing but a vodka fog.
She had more pieces of Abi’s story, but they were scattered so far she couldn’t bring the picture into any kind of focus.
‘It’s been a long month.’ He slumped back, drank some more, slurred his words. He was done crying, there were no tears left, no life left to hold onto.
Morales was muted on the large flat screen.
‘I need him to fail. But if he doesn’t, then on July the twenty-first I’ll follow my little girl over the cliff. You think there’s something noble about suicide?’
There was no answer she could give that would lessen his pain, or make more of Abi’s death, so she went with the truth. ‘Yes.’
He raised the bottle to the screen. ‘Ten years I’ve listened to this guy. Ten years he’s tried and failed. We hear the names, see the lab coats, the giant metal rockets and the probes and bombs and goddam paint. I try to be a man, but my fate’s decided by people more powerful than me.’
He sat among hundreds of photos of his daughter, then looked up at the arched ceiling, through the panes of glass that opened to the dark sea. ‘Ocean Drive,’ he said. ‘I used to ride down this road on my bike when I was a kid. We aspire. We push and drive and hope to make it, then when we do we take a look around and wonder exactly what it is.’ He sniffed, then reached for another bottle, broke the cap and peered into the clear liquid. ‘I thought the people here were better, because they had more. Their lives were … more.’
Mae watched as he sloshed the bottle and vodka spilled over his jeans.
‘But you know what, Mae? Mortals and gods. The Greeks told it, The Iliad. Trojan War. The gods have no morals. They see something they want and they take it. And it ruins lives, but they don’t care.’
He drank. ‘Walk down this road, look in every house and what you see is nothing more than an act. To seduce you into believing you’re worth less. They maintain power by diminishing your worth. True equality, that would be the real anarchy.’
Mae thought of his neighbours, of Abi and the lure of fitting in. The man she was seeing. It hit her suddenly, hard, so cold she shivered.
‘Jon Prince,’ she said, out loud. It clicked then, Luke attacking him in the street. Hugo talking about his father taking what he wanted.
Luke Manton closed his eyes, like the name alone was painful to hear.
‘You knew,’ Mae said.
He nodded, eyes still closed. ‘She said she loved him.’