“Oh, for…” He looks up with red-rimmed eyes from the carpet where he is lying beside a bottle of whiskey. All the shades are drawn and the room is in semi-darkness. “This is all I fucking need.”
“Sinclair…”
“Come to gloat, have you?” He sits up, lifting the bottle to his lips for another swig. “Sold your sleazy little story to the guttersnipes; hope it’s bought your room in Halls back. Well done. I salute you.” He waves his bottle at me in mock-tribute.
I am unable to form words for a while, my mouth hanging open like a one-hinged gate in the wind. I could hire myself out as a flycatcher.
“You can’t think that! You can’t seriously think I would do that to you? Sinclair, I would never! I would never! I would never!”….OK, I think my internal tape has looped. I just can’t seem to get the words through the tight space they are trapped in. In the absence of coherent speech I rush over to him and kneel down opposite, hoping that my manic eyes will do the talking for you. Oh, pop! Power of speech is back! “I would never do anything to hurt you. Please tell me you don’t really think it was me that sold you out!”
A few of the lines on his face straighten and it seems he is swayed by my assurances. “You didn’t? I just thought…woman scorned…”
“Always lovely to hear misogynistic claptrap in a crisis, Sinclair, but I’m not the only one, am I?” I say sharply.
“No. But Beth. Beth, you have to believe me. You’re the only student. Thass all rubbish about there being lots of students. Just you. Only you.”
Alarmed that he might be on the tip of bursting into drunken song, I try to wrestle the whiskey bottle from his hand. “How much of this have you…Christ, Sinclair, it’s not even ten in the morning!”
“S’funny, you lecturing me,” he says. “Seriously, Beth, just go. Go away, get away from here. Leave me to my failure.”
“I can’t leave you. I want to help you. I love you.”
He looks at me, struggling to focus.
“No,” he says. “You love Sinclair. You don’t love poor old Kev. Kev from dahn the estate.” I blink at how his normally cultured tones have been ousted by a harsh London twang. “Nobody could love that little bleeder. Not even ‘is mum and dad.”
I risk a move closer, regardless of the sour breath wafting over me. “Then they didn’t deserve you, did they? It wasn’t your fault…none of it was your fault, Sinclair. I don’t care where you come from and I don’t care what you’ve done. I love you and I want to be here for you and I want to help you move away from the past for good.”
I put a hand on his face, at which he grimaces as if wounded and tries to turn away, but I keep dogged contact.
“I love you,” I tell him. “Trust me.”
His eyes are swimmy; I have never seen him vulnerable and it tears me into tiny pieces. He pulls me down on to the carpet and squeezes me into him silently, his hand tangling my hair, his unshaven cheek prickling against mine.
“I love you,” he says, his voice cracked and wobbly. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
I wind my hands around his body, spasming with grief and the emotion that has been held so fiercely in check for so long. I hold him until he passes out on the carpet.
*
“Water?” I whisper.
He has woken up and is squinting against the half-light with pink baby-mole eyes. His reply is to reach out a hand and I place the clear pint glass in it.
Having drained it, he reaches out again, for me this time, and I go to sit beside him, propped against the sofa, grabbing some cushions to ease our bones.
“Christ,” he says, inspecting his shaking hands, then, “Christ,” again, then, “Why are you here?”
“I told you why,” I assure him. “I love you.”
“No, I mean after the way I’ve treated you. You should hate me, Beth.”
“Well, I almost did for a while. But I’m beginning to understand now. You’ve…repelled intimacy for so long, I suppose it’s become second nature for you.”
“Yes. That’s true.”
“Was your past really so bad that you would rather be alone forever than have anyone find out about it?”
He looks at me for a long time. “It had ceased to become relevant, that’s all,” he says. “It was no longer anything to do with me. When I became Sinclair, I set myself free from that. I actually mentally dissociated Kevin from Sinclair. It just…wasn’t me. Wasn’t my past.”