Rachel's Holiday
Page 106

‘Right then,’ Josephine said. ‘Next question: “How did drugs affect Rachel’s behaviour?” And Luke has answered “It’s hard to say because as far as I know she was always off her head when she was with me. Sometimes she was affectionate and cute. But a lot of the time she was confused and made arrangements and then forgot about them. Often we had conversations that she didn’t remember when I mentioned them afterwards. I reckon her vagueness was Valium-related. She was different when she took coke. An embarrassing pain. Loud and rude and she thought she was gorgeous. The part I found roughest was that she became an over-the-top flirt when she was in that state. If there was any man there who looked her version of cool…” ‘Josephine paused, swallowed, then continued ‘ “… she threw herself at him.” ’
I was appalled, hurt, ashamed, furious. ‘How dare you?’ I screeched at him. ‘You were lucky I ever had anything to do with you. How dare you insult me like this!’
‘How would you like me to insult you?’ he drawled icily.
My heart nearly stopped beating in fear. Luke never used to be nasty to me. Who was this big, grim, angry, cruel man? I didn’t know him. But he seemed to know me.
‘You did throw yourself at them,’ Luke insisted, tight-lipped, grown-up and intimidating. I didn’t know how I could ever have thought he was a joke figure.
‘Come on, Rachel,’ he sneered. ‘What about the time I took you to François’s exhibition opening. And you went off, went home, with that art dealer dude.’
My face burned with shame. I might have known he’d bring that up. I’d never heard the end of it then.
‘I didn’t sleep with him,’ I mumbled.
‘And, anyway,’ I added belligerently, ‘it was only because we’d had a row.’
‘A row that you manufactured after you clapped eyes on the guy,’ Luke coolly threw back at me. I was horrified. I’d thought I’d successfully pulled the wool over his eyes. It was catastrophic to realize that he’d known exactly what I’d been up to.
‘Which brings us neatly to our next question,’ Josephine interjected. ‘Which is “In what aberrant ways did Rachel behave as a result of her drug-taking?” And Luke has written: “Her behaviour got more and more weird. She almost never ate. And she got badly paranoid. Accused me of fancying her friends and looking at them like I wanted to sleep with them. She took a lot of sickies from work. Except she wasn’t sick, she just stayed home to get wrecked off her head. She hardly ever went out, except to score drugs. She borrowed cash from everyone which she never paid back. When people wouldn’t loan her any more she stole it…” ’
Did I? I wondered.
It wasn’t stealing, I thought dismissively. They could afford it and anyway, it was their fault for not lending it to me in the first place.
A short while later, Josephine paused. ‘OK, that’s the questionnaire read. Now, as Brigit is feeling too upset to answer any further questions today, perhaps you wouldn’t mind, Luke?’
‘OK,’ he nodded.
‘As Rachel… er… put to you earlier, what were you doing with her?’
‘What was I doing with her?’ Luke almost laughed. ‘I was crazy about her.’
Thank you, God, thank you, God, thank you, God. I exhaled with massive relief. He had come to his senses. About time! Now he’d take back all those awful lies he’d told about me. Maybe… maybe we might even make up with each other.
‘Why were you crazy about her?’
Luke paused. It was a while before he spoke.
‘In lots of ways, Rachel was great.’
Past tense, I noticed. Wasn’t so keen on that.
‘She had a great way of looking at the world,’ he said. ‘She was a blast and really made me laugh.
‘Except sometimes,’ he added doubtfully. ‘Especially when she was out of it, she tried too hard and wasn’t funny anymore, and that wrecked my buzz.’
I wanted to violently remind him that we were looking at my good points.
‘I never really bought that sophisticated girl-about-town act she put on,’ Luke confided.
That alarmed me. If he’d seen through me, who else had?
‘Because when she was just herself,’ he sounded as if he’d just discovered the secret of the universe, ‘then she was, like, amazing.’
Good, we were back on track.
Josephine nodded encouragingly.
‘We could talk about anything,’ he said. ‘On a good day there wasn’t enough time in the world for all the things we wanted to talk about.’
That was true, I thought, yearning for the past, for Luke.
‘She wasn’t like any of the other girls I knew, she was far smarter. She was the only woman I knew who could quote from Fear and Loathing in has Vegas.’
‘And she called it, Fear and Clothing in Las Vegas,’ he added.
‘What point are you making?’ Josephine asked in confusion.
‘That she’s funny.’ He smiled. ‘Sometimes we were so close I felt like we were each other,’ he said, wistfully. He looked up and for a moment our eyes were locked together. Briefly, I saw the Luke I used to know. It was excruciatingly sad.
‘OK, that’s fine,’ Josephine interrupted, impatiently cutting into Luke’s dreamy introspection. ‘I presume you tried to help Rachel when you found out how bad her drug addiction was.’
‘Of course,’ Luke said. ‘But first she hid it from me, then she lied about it. She wouldn’t admit what she took, or how much, even though I knew and I told her I knew. It did my head in. I tried to get her to talk about things. Then I tried to get her to go to a trick cyclist but she told me to fuck off.’
He blushed. ‘Scuse my language, Sister.’
She accepted his apology with a gracious nod of her head. ‘And then what happened?’
‘She took her overdose and left New York.’
‘Were you sorry when the relationship ended?’ Josephine asked him.
‘By then it wasn’t much of a relationship,’ he said.
My heart sank. It didn’t sound like he wanted to get back with me. ‘It was as good as over,’ he went on.
My heart sank further. He kept talking about me in the past tense.
‘I don’t know why she bothered with me because nothing I did made her happy,’ he said. ‘She wanted to change everything, my clothes, my mates, where I lived, what I spent my money on. Even the music I listened to.’