Where Love Lies by Julie Cohen

Author:Julie Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781448152612
Publisher: Bantam Press

Chapter Twenty

‘WE WERE ON a tour bus,’ he says. ‘I’ve spent a lot of my life on tour buses.’

He pauses, gazing at the blank brick wall, and seems disinclined to say anything else. But he’s said enough so that now, I need to know.

The Ewan I loved was intense, exciting, and somehow innocent. My mother got it right in her portrait of him, standing among white and yellow flowers. This man is just as intense, and maybe as exciting. But the innocence is gone. There’s a darkness, as well as a sadness. Things have happened to him since the short time I knew him. Two months. An eye-blink in the scheme of things. Such an insignificant time, if it had never been captured in an oil painting and the scent of frangipani.

‘You used to want to travel the world,’ I say. He laughs without humour.

‘I’ve done it. All over the world, every continent. Some of it’s exciting. But most of it’s on tour buses. You get on the bus, and you drive to a hotel that’s the same as any other hotel. Or you go to a gig that’s the same as any other gig. You’re travelling, but you’re standing still. You’re going to the same place again and again. You don’t feel like you’re moving at all.’ His face crumples. For a moment I think he’s going to cry, and I don’t know what I’ll do if he cries. I can’t touch him to comfort him. But I don’t think I could sit here and watch him crying, either.

But he takes a deep breath.

‘I’ve done it myself,’ he says. ‘You wake up and the bus is noisy. You think you’re on the road somewhere between New York and Ohio. Or Paris and Geneva. Or Sydney and Melbourne. The bus is always the same inside, so you could be anywhere. The windows are tinted and the engine is running. You get up, thinking you’re moving, and there’s no one else on it, and you find out that you’re in a car park and everyone else has gone for a shower.’

I know what he’s doing: he’s talking about something else so that he doesn’t have to talk about the painful thing. I do it too. He’s rubbing the tips of his fingers on the arm of his chair, as if he’s trying to get rid of an itch. And he’s lapsed into silence again. But I think he needs to talk about the painful thing, to let it out. It’s weighing him down.

‘Tell me about Lee,’ I say.

‘He was a sound engineer. A bloody good one. We met years ago and kept on recommending each other for jobs so we could work together. He was sick of travelling, though. He wanted to stop and settle down, spend some more time with his wife. That was the last thing we talked about, in fact. He said he should go back to his wife, and I should go and visit my daughter.’ He rubs his fingers harder on the chair, hard enough to leave a dent in the leather.

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