Love Lives Read online

  The shelves on the wall above his bed gave the room a sense of order, stacked as they were with Jimmy’s precious film magazines, all of them lined up in chronological order.

  Alongside them, every bit as neat, were the boxed video diaries which Jimmy had shot using the camcorder he’d borrowed from Clive down at the Youth Centre. Their labels faced outwards, some of them dumb, liked Ain’t Life a Beach? and Stoned and 2 Stoned: The Sequel; but some of them were serious, like An On-Off Season and Fisherman Blue, the latter of which – ‘A short film about the end of a traditional way of life’ – Jimmy had sent off along with his film college application forms the month before. He was ambitious. He wanted to make something of himself. He wanted to come back here in ten years’ time and for all the people who wrote him off now to see him and stop and point and whisper and stare.

  He took the three small paces needed to cross the room and grabbed his Marlboro Reds and Zippo lighter from where he’d left them on the windowsill, behind the curtain out of the disapproving Rachel’s sight. He reached across the square wooden desk that housed his cranky typewriter. The machine whirred in protest as he pulled the final page of his English Macbeth essay off it. It was a sound Jimmy liked, because it was a sound that meant something was finished and something else would soon begin.

  It was icebox-cold on the cast-iron balcony outside Jimmy’s flat. Last night’s storm had been a bad one and the wind was still up. It howled in from the great grey slab of sea to the east and hissed in Jimmy’s ears, slapping like something solid against his face as he knelt down to unchain his scratched-up BMX from the rust-freckled railings. He pulled his baseball cap from his pocket and tugged it down tight on his head.

  From up here on the ninth floor of Carlton Court – the hulk of crumbling Sixties concrete Jimmy had called home for all but one of his seventeen years – he could see clear across North Beach’s half-mile curve of platinum-blonde sand to the harbour and the town of Shoresby itself.

  Aside from the gulls and the waves, and a lone walker visible down on North Beach, little stirred in the town. The windows of the pastel-shaded seafront town houses, hotels and B&Bs were grey and unlit, as if someone had forgotten to colour them in. It would all change soon, of course, once everyone was awake. But for now, only the shops on the High Street – whose striped awnings rippled in the wind above their brightly illuminated doorways – signalled that the town was inhabited at all.

  Jimmy took his bike down in the lift and out through the shoddily decorated reception. And then he was out of there, off along the Croft, the road that followed the curve of North Beach, running fifty feet above it, before terminating in the High Street.

  Fast as he could pedal, with the wind in his face, he forced his way past the swinging hanging baskets and ‘Vacancy’ signs of the guest houses, and on past the shutdown burger bars and Mr Whippy Head ice cream parlour, before cutting through the empty Pay & Display car park where he’d spent most of this summer’s evenings practising skateboarding, before he’d got yawned-out by the whole damned thing and had flogged his board to Tristan for a bunch of CDs and the bronze Zippo lighter that now jiggled in his pocket.

  It wasn’t till he reached the High Street that he stopped and dismounted. He leant his bike up against a Victorian lamp-post, ducked into Wilson’s the newsagent and picked up the November issue of Total Film from the rack and a bottle of Diet Coke from the fridge.

  ‘How’s your gran?’ Bob Wilson enquired as he ran Jimmy’s stuff through the cash register. ‘You still visiting her?’

  ‘Every Wednesday and Friday,’ Jimmy confirmed.

  Bob nodded his head in empathy. It was cancer that had taken his Elaine from him five years ago, the same as it was cancer that had got Jimmy’s mum less than a year after Jimmy had been born.

  ‘You give her these from me,’ Bob said, reaching above his head and selecting a box of Milk Tray from the shelves behind him without even looking. He slipped it into a brown paper bag and handed it over to Jimmy. ‘But don’t let the nurses see, mind,’ he warned, ‘or you’ll get me in trouble.’

  Jimmy didn’t have the heart to tell Mr Wilson that his gran was too far gone these days to care much about chocolates one way or the other. ‘Thanks,’ he said, tucking the box into his black-and-white Adidas gym bag.

  Back outside, Jimmy cycled on another twenty yards before pulling up next to a green park bench, which had been set into a gap in the black railings, facing out to sea. He propped his bike up against its wooden slats and looked back across the street.

  There, next to W. H. Smith, was the wide white front of the Grand Hotel. He swallowed, all ideas of calm now forgotten. The Grand was where Verity Driver lived and she’d be coming out of there soon, ready to go to school and sit in the same English class as him at nine thirty, and open the same book at the same page and discuss the same W. B. Yeats poem, which he’d pictured her reading as he’d read it himself over the weekend.

  Jimmy and Verity had been at school together since they’d been five. He’d known her for most of his life. Or rather, he’d known of her. He’d never actually hung out with her, never been invited to one of her birthday parties, or sat next to her on the bus.

  But he knew plenty about her. He knew she liked wearing pink, but looked better in red. He knew she mostly wore her hair down, but sometimes looked great with it tied up. He knew a flash of her green eyes could turn his head from a hundred yards. He knew she always took a packed lunch to school with her and never ate the crusts on her sandwiches. He knew she’d had good-looking boyfriends over the years, but that the latest one, Tim, had stopped walking her home from school, which probably – hopefully – meant they were no longer an item.

  But these were things that anyone who’d grown up near Verity Driver could have known about her. What Jimmy wanted now was more. So why hadn’t he made a move on her sooner? Could it have been because he was shy? Sometimes he thought that was the answer. Sometimes he did feel awkward in front of girls he was attracted to. But he’d had girlfriends before. He wasn’t even a virgin. So it couldn’t really have been that.

  Could it, then, have been because Ryan had always thought that crushes were dumb, and had further stated that he and Jimmy were too young to get fixed on one girl? Could that have been why Jimmy had kept his feelings for Verity hidden over the years, because he hadn’t wanted to appear uncool? Or could it have been that since Ryan’s death – nearly a year ago now – Jimmy had felt too screwed up to risk getting involved with anyone new?

  It could have been. It could have been any of these things. But Jimmy wasn’t going to let any of them stop him any more.

  He felt unsuccessfully for the CD cover through the stiff material of his gym bag. He’d burnt it for her, using one of the computers at school. The tunes on it (mostly chart-friendly garage and R&B) weren’t his kind of thing. But all the girls he knew (with the exception of Tara and Steph) were into it, so chances were Verity would be as well.

  Doubt hit him. Maybe giving her a CD was too over the top? Maybe it was laying his cards on the table too quickly? Where was the mystery, where the intrigue, he now worried, in such a bald statement? Maybe he should forget that idea for the time being. After all, he didn’t want to look desperate. But then again, he had to mark himself somehow, and the CD showed thought, right? A little care? Yeah, he’d give it to her, but just do it with a bit of chat so as to make the gesture less corny. Something like: Hey, Verity. How’s things?

  Good, Jimmy. Yourself?

  Yeah, good, you know. I did this compilation over the weekend and … you should listen to it … here, I’ll tell you what, why not borrow it?

  Thanks, Jimmy. That’s really sweet.

  And then he could ask her out. This Saturday night and – who knew? – they could be sitting right here after the pub, his arm round her shoulders, her eyes staring into his, and him leaning his head towards her, feeling like he was falling into her, and then kissing her so tenderly that he’d feel like he�
��d gone to heaven.

  Then a great certainty swamped him: it wasn’t going to happen. It hit him like a bullet in his guts. Verity Driver walked like a model and was top of her class, and she could sing and she could dance, and she’d only ever looked past him and not at him. And even if she was sometimes quiet, even if she sometimes looked nervous, or – the same as Jimmy – acted awkward, as though she didn’t quite fit into this town … Even then, what did he have to offer her? What could he show her that she hadn’t already seen?

  Jimmy lit a cigarette to calm his nerves. He took out his phone to see if he had any messages. There was one from Tara, a few minutes old, asking him if he wanted to hook up at the Jackpot Café for a pre-class coffee, but he decided he’d better not reply. She’d only want to know where he was, and once she found out she’d guess straight away what he was doing here. And then she’d be over in a flash to persuade him to do anything but. Because Tara didn’t like Verity. Because Tara thought Verity Driver was stuck-up and prissy.

  The growl of a car engine cut through the noise of the wind. Jimmy saw a sky-blue Land-Rover Discovery twenty yards up the High Street, driving towards him at about one mile an hour. Tourist, Jimmy thought automatically, not only because of the flashiness of the car, but also because he could clearly see an ordnance survey map held up against the dashboard by whoever it was who was sitting in the passenger seat.

  As the car drew parallel with him and came to a halt, the inevitable happened: the passenger window hummed down and the passenger – a woman in her thirties with the kind of styled blonde hair that Tara would have called ‘newsreader’, but Jimmy just thought of as plain fit – leant out. She smiled at Jimmy in the same way that Marianna Andrews, Jimmy’s boss at the video store on South Parade where he worked part-time, always did whenever she was about to ask him to cover an extra shift or run an errand in the rain.

  Jimmy spoke first: ‘Where are you trying to get to?’

  ‘Is it that obvious?’ the woman asked, smiling again, only differently this time, with her whole face instead of just her mouth.

  ‘The map’s kind of a give-away,’ he said, mellowing towards her.

  Flipping open a titanium-cased electronic organiser, she read aloud, ‘Harbour Cottage, Number Four, Quayside Row. Do you know where it is?’

  Jimmy’s gran’s great friend Arnold lived two doors along. Jimmy was surprised at the address, though. Judging by her car and her clothes, he’d had the woman down for one of the pricey apartments built into the old town walls. He peered past her and saw a thickset younger man drumming his fingers on the brown leather steering wheel.

  ‘Well?’ she asked.

  Jimmy toyed briefly with the idea of giving her wrong directions, just for the hell of it. He and Ryan had always been doing that as kids, competing with each other to see just how far from their destinations they could con the tourists into going. But he wasn’t a kid any more and the woman looked like she’d had a long enough start to her day already. He checked his watch. Yeah, he thought. Why not? Chances were he was going to be waiting here at least another half-hour anyway before Verity showed. He could risk it and – who knew? – perhaps it might tip the karma balance that Tara was always on about in his favour. He scuffed out his cigarette on the pavement and clambered on to his BMX. ‘Follow me,’ he said.

  He pedalled a further ten yards along the High Street, before peeling off to the left and freewheeling down the steep cobbled length of Crackwell Street. When he reached the bottom, he glanced back over his shoulder to check the Land-Rover was still with him, before swinging left into the harbour car park. Ten yards more and he skidded to a halt at the top of the path that led down to Quayside Row, the boatyards and the harbour proper.

  The Land-Rover pulled up behind him, and the man who’d been driving got out and stood with his hands on his hips for a moment, surveying the view out to sea. He was two or three inches shorter than Jimmy and was wearing a tired old pair of jeans and a heavy red and black checked jacket with the collar turned up. He grinned out across the water at nothing in particular, just looking happy to be here.

  Jimmy turned back to the car to see the woman striding purposefully over towards him, the wind riffling like invisible fingers through the fur on her coat.

  ‘It’s the one with the rusted cockerel weathervane,’ Jimmy told her, pointing down the path to the terrace of pastel-coloured cottages, ‘and the pale-blue window ledges.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, but there was a note of apprehension in her voice. She glanced between the car and the cottage as if she were mentally gauging the distance. ‘Can’t we get any closer?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ Jimmy told her.

  Her gaze kept moving, sweeping past Jimmy and not stopping until it reached the harbour master’s office over by the car park entrance. Next to this squat red-brick building was a closed barrier and beyond that a variety of vehicles could be clearly seen parked down on the quayside. ‘What about them?’ she asked.

  ‘They belong to the fishermen,’ Jimmy told her. ‘And the sailing school people. But it’s off-limits for tourists. There’s not enough space.’

  The short man said in an Australian accent, ‘Don’t sweat it, Ellen. It’s no real distance anyway.’ He turned to Jimmy. ‘We’ve got a few heavy bags in the back here,’ he said. ‘Any chance of you giving us a hand with them?’

  Anxious to get back to his vigil opposite the Grand, Jimmy checked his watch, but he was still all right, he reckoned. ‘So long as we’re quick,’ he said, following the man round to the back of the car.

  Five minutes later and the three of them were standing on the mossy cobbled path outside the cottage, with the heavier of the man’s and woman’s bags on the path beside them.

  ‘Thanks,’ the man said, reaching out his hand to Jimmy, ‘I’m Scott, by the way.’

  ‘Jimmy,’ Jimmy mumbled, shaking Scott’s hand. The wind was stronger here and Jimmy pulled his cap down tighter still on his head. ‘Not very good holiday weather,’ he commented.

  Scott shrugged. ‘We’re not here on holiday.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. We’re shooting a documentary.’

  Jimmy found himself staring at them. He buzzed with excitement. Film … TV … this was his thing. Contacts, that’s what his media teacher had told the class it was all about. And that’s the one thing Jimmy had been missing. But now here they were – two of them – walking into his life. His mind started working on how he could swing this accidental meeting round – maybe shadow them or something – to boost his chances of getting into film school. ‘Yeah?’ he finally asked, trying to sound casual, determined that they wouldn’t perceive him as unworldly and overawed. ‘About what?’

  The woman – Ellen, Scott had called her – was staring at the front door. ‘Lost Soul’s Point,’ she said without turning round.

  Jimmy’s heart dodged a beat. His skin prickled and he could picture the colour draining from his face. Lost Soul’s Point was the tourist trail name for the suicide black spot up on the cliffs overlooking North Beach and the town.

  ‘You heard of it?’ Scott asked.

  Jimmy nodded warily. Who in this town hadn’t? The drop from the cliffs to the rocks below at low tide was nearly two hundred feet. And the drop from the cliffs to the sea at high tide was just as fatal. Since Jimmy had been alive, there’d been maybe ten suicides up there. Most of them had been men and women from up-country, people who’d ditched their cars up on the cliff-side. Most, but not all.

  ‘Then you probably know the story behind it, as well,’ Ellen said.

  Again, Jimmy nodded. Every kid in the town got the legend passed down to them by older kids in the primary school playground: something about some crazy rich girl throwing herself off the cliff a hundred years ago or more; something about her having done it because she’d been ditched by some bloke; something about his ghost walking the cliffs at night, forever damned for what he’d done to her. Something that smelt a whole lot like
bullshit, in other words.

  But Jimmy didn’t give a damn about the legend right now. He just wanted to know that there was where their interest in Lost Soul’s Point ended.

  ‘Well, we’re here to do a history of it,’ Ellen continued, encouraged by his attentive silence. ‘We want to cover the legend and then we want to look at the modern victims as well, to examine the lives of the people who’ve committed suicide up there in the last few years and to ask what drove them to it and to this place in particular …’

  With each word that Ellen spoke, the sparks of excitement inside Jimmy faded and died. Victims … the word reverberated round his skull. Victims … like Ryan … These people were here to investigate Ryan’s death. They were here to find out why Ryan had done what he’d done.

  Ellen picked up on his shift in mood immediately. ‘What?’ she asked.

  Panic was building inside Jimmy. What was he doing even talking to these people? How could he have ended up talking to them about this, the one thing he never wanted to discuss with anyone ever?

  ‘Are you all right, mate?’ Scott asked.

  ‘I –’ But Jimmy couldn’t speak. He looked between Scott and Ellen. Their eyes felt like searchlights on his face. He had nothing to say. Not to them. Not about Ryan. He felt dizzy, breathless, like the air was being sucked from his lungs. ‘I gotta go,’ he said, turning his back on them and hurrying away.

  Chapter II

  ‘WAS IT ME? What did I say?’ Ellen asked Scott, as they both watched the boy cycle away. He’d been so helpful, so why had he gone silent like that?