Detained

The room was cool, so what she felt was a blush, which deepened when he said, “Neither am I.”

She blinked at him. “Let’s start again.”

“From the top?” He licked his lips; he meant from the kiss.

“Will.”

“You didn’t like the kiss?” He leant forward, within stroking distance, his eyes bright. Will’s eyes, like in Pudong, like over that weekend, not the veiled, suspicious, hurt and panicked eyes he’d had the rest of the time.

If she’d only idealised him, then it was perfectly natural to want another kiss, to want to curl up in his arms, but that wasn’t allowed. “No.”

“Then I didn’t do it well enough. A little out of practice.”

He moved so quickly he’d slid his chair against hers and pulled her to him before she had time to protest. As if she’d meant to. This kiss started in a different place. It had no hesitancy. There was no misinterpreting this kiss as anything other than a prelude to something world-colliding and seriously delicious. But he stopped it too soon, sat back. “That better?”

He hardly deserved an answer. “Much.”

He pushed his chair back. “Where were we?” All business again.

“You were going to tell me what happened?”

“Right.” He took a breath. “My memory came back in pieces. Like a jigsaw. A bit of this, a bit of that. No particular order or sequence. Some of it was easy enough to make a whole memory from. Some of it was like knowing the next line of a song but singing the wrong words. And there were big blanks. I remembered Pete as a skinny kid with scabby knees but not that he was my brother. I had no idea why everyone around me but Pete was Chinese. That was a head spin all of its own. I couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying till they worked out I’d lost my Chinese language.

“I remembered feeling pain, I remembered blood and fire, smoke and screaming, and I thought I’d lost something so important to me that it wasn’t worth living.”

“Oh God, Will.”

“The more I tried to fit the pieces together, the angrier I became. I couldn’t spit out more than two words in the right order. I couldn’t sleep unmedicated without nightmares. I couldn’t see straight. I couldn’t think clearly, and pretty much every part of me hurt.

“But it got easier. I started healing. More pieces arrived. I could put them together. I used to record myself speaking in secret and play it back, utter garble. I refused to speak until I could make myself understood clearly and any language would’ve done.

“The worst of it was how I felt inside. Still do some days. Like I’m a kettle about to boil. Like my blood is scalding me. I have trouble controlling it, it makes me,” he cleared his throat, and his eyes flicked away, “hit things. It took a while to work out what I was also feeling was sadness, for everything I’d lost.”

Darcy reached for his hand, lying on the tabletop, he flipped it and they clasped, like they’d done across the interview table in Quingpu before everything turned to red. “Your body healed, you can relearn the languages. You even got Parker back in control. You worked a miracle on yourself. What have you lost you can’t get back?”

A muscle in his jaw twitched. “You.”

She shook her head. “I’m not real.”

“Yet here you are.”

How to explain it to him? She barely understood it herself. It was ‘how do you have your tea’ and ‘what do you want to do with your life?’ It was knowing he was more than The Departed, Miss Fredrick’s sexual favours and the parts in her car made by Parker, but not knowing what that was, without the drama and the intensity of what they’d shared.

They’d had a holiday romance on steroids, turbocharged with fear and urgency, and it changed both their lives profoundly. But they were still strangers.

“I’m one wild weekend and the bit part heroine in the movie script of your life. I’m the face that makes you remember dreadful things. I’m get in my car and drive for thirteen hours on a hunch based on a doodle, your tattoo and the word ‘home’. That’s not real, Will.”

He leaned closer. “I’ll tell you what’s real to me. You are the memory that made me open my eyes, made me fight the pain. You were the screaming. You were the most important thing lost. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t realise the flesh and blood you sat by my bed till later, but once I knew it, I also knew I couldn’t bring you into my angry world. That meant I couldn’t afford to think about you or what happened.”

Darcy’s throat was tight. She reached for her teacup; empty, he’d never poured. She was the screaming. She was the important thing lost.

“When I saw you outside the hotel, when they started firing those questions at me, the wall between memories and the real world got a big hole whacked in it. I had trouble stepping through it. But what I said then I’ll say again. I’d go through hell and back to protect you, real or imaginary. And I love you enough to know I’m no good for you.”

43. Ahoy

“One joy dispels a hundred cares.” — Confucius

Way to blow it, fuckwit. If he wasn’t intimidating her, he was frightening her by cracking up, or delivering confessionals, or both at once.