Chapter 50

Marcus stared at the bundled sheets of paper before him uncertainly, leafing through them carefully, trying to makes sense of the coded squiggles he saw.

"Ready?" Hope asked, slipping onto the stool behind her keyboard.

"No," Marcus replied, instantly. Shawna shuffled through the papers herself, shaking her head silently at what she found.

"What's up?" Hope asked.

"I don't know what we're playing," he said, and Hope stared for moment.

"That's what the sheet music's for."

"I don't read music."

"Well, how do you learn what to play, then?"

"I listen to it. Then I try and play it."

"You play by ear?"

"I don't... maybe," he shrugged, looking to Shawna for support. "I just play."

"I just sing," she said. "We need to listen to these."

"You must know this, 'Breakfast in America' by Supertramp?"

"Maybe," Marcus said. "Sheet music doesn't mean much to me, and... I don't tend to get lyrics unless someone's singing."

"Fine." Hope cleared her throat and sat up. "Take a look at my girlfriend, she's the only one I got, Not much of a girlfriend, never seem to get a lot... "

"Take a jumbo, cross the water, like to see America, " Shawna joined in, with a slight smile.

"See the girls in California, I'm hoping it's going to come true, But there's not a lot I can do... "

Both of them fell silent, watching Marcus who'd made no effort to pick up his guitar.

"Well?" Hope asked. "Do you know it?"

"Yes."

"Great. Let's go then." She turned back to her keyboard, and Shawna tried not to laugh, knowing what was coming next. Hope started on the introduction, her fingers picking out the notes easily on the keyboard. Then she slowed and fell silent.

"Are you going to join in?" she said, turning to Marcus.

"I can't play this."

"You said you knew it!"

"I do, now you've sung it. I can't play it though."

Hope gritted her teeth for a moment, then sighed a little.

"Alright. Which of these can you play?" She grabbed the sheaf of sheet music from the stand. "'The Boxer'?"

"Nope."

"'Hazard'?"

"Nope."

"'More Than Words'?"

"N... maybe."

"We did that for the end of year concert in fifth form," Shawna said, and Marcus closed his eyes for a moment, picking the tune out in his head.

"Right," he muttered, picked up his guitar, and began to play. Smiling as they finally got to some music, Hope joined in, singing in a gentle, clear soprano. Shawna swung her feet gently, perched on the window-sill, watching until they finished.

"Yep, I can play that one," Marcus said, which drew a smile.

"You don't like that one?" Hope asked Shawna.

"Not my thing," she said, with a shrug. She waved the bundle of sheet music. "I didn't actually like many of these. I took a look in your music book though. Can you play this one?"

Hope took the book from her and quickly looked over the notes, nodding.

"Yes, I think so. I take it Marcus knows this one already?"

"Oh, yes. This is an old favourite of ours."

"'Enter Sandman'?" Marcus asked, drawing a withering look from Shawna.

"I want to sing, not screech," she told him. "Johnny B Goode."

"Oh." He smiled, turned up the amp, and began to play. Hope struggled to keep up in places, but managed it with a growing grin. Marcus was note perfect all the way through, and Shawna seemed to wake up a little to the music. She'd been unenthusiastic and uninvolved until then, but as the tunes moved into her preferred range she began to put more into her performance.

The last notes died. The three of them shared a look, and then jumped in surprise at the round of applause from the doorway where Lorraine, Tony, Elspeth and Brianna were clustered.

"Encore, encore!" Tony called, and they all piled in to become an impromptu audience for the evening's practice turned performance.

Marcus played the tunes he knew, and shrugged helplessly on the ones he didn't, joining the audience. Shawna sat out the tunes she didn't like — which was an increasing number of Hope's selections as the evening went on — and Hope struggled to add what she saw as some technically more complex musical and a little lyrical merit to the selections rather than the simplistic melodies Shawna seemed to favour.

It was almost three hours later that they finally finished. Hope and Shawna had run out of songs they were both willing to try, and they packed away to sit down and just talk. With the instruments out of the way, the tensions seemed to ease. Marcus, slightly drained from the evening's exertions, found himself sitting quietly at the end of the couch where Elspeth had settled her head on his shoulder and fallen asleep.

"Oh, at last," Brianna sighed, returning to her seat with a drink, passing bottles to Shawna and Hope.

"She's annoying you?" Marcus asked.

"No, not annoying. She's been amazing." She reached out to stroke Elspeth's hair gently, pulling it out from across her face. "I think I've been keeping her up at night."

"Oh." Marcus blushed, and Brianna stifled a laugh.

"Not like that. God, all you think about is sex, you men."

"I... it... but you..."

"Relax, Marcus, I'm just pulling your chain." She smiled, but the smile faded slowly as she continued. "I can keep the face up during the day, but it's hard at night, when it's quiet and you're trying to let everything go and get to sleep, you know?"

"No," he admitted, after a moment. "Is there anything I can do?"

"No, I don't think so." She smiled up at him. "Just... look after her, if things go bad." Tears started up, and Marcus found himself pushed aside as the others clustered around offering words of support. He didn't fight it. He let himself drift to the outside, more than aware that he had nothing to offer. He sat there, Elspeth's head on his shoulder as Tony and the girls whispered quietly with Brianna at the other end of the sofa.

Death happens. People die, but life goes on. He knew these as true, but that didn't seem to comfort other people. They didn't comfort him, to be honest, but it wasn't something that could be soothed with a word or a thought. He eased himself out from under Elspeth's head, settled her on the arm of the sofa, and retired to the garden with a knife and some wood. Once there, he settled on the wall to carve quietly until the socializing died down.

The light from the kitchen disappeared about an hour later, and he started to pack up and move back inside.

"I'm heading for bed," Shawna said with a smile, coming out of the kitchen, slightly unsteady.

"How many did you have?" he asked.

"Not too many." Her smile slipped slightly, and she shrugged. "About four, I think."

"Which means probably six or seven," he said, as Hope appeared from her own room in her pyjamas with a DVD.

"I'm sorry. I though you guys were going to bed," she said. "I'll put this away."

"I'm going to bed," Shawna said, "What've you got?"

"Pride and Prejudice." She turned the cover round, with a slightly embarrassed shrug.

"That explains your choice in music," Shawna muttered.

"There's nothing wrong with my choice in music," Hope snapped back.

"For an insomniac. It's got no life to it. Marcus didn't know them. That should tell you something."

"There's more to music than waving your head around and pandering to the lowest common denominator!" Hope said, stepping up and facing Shawna.

"Tell her, Marcus," Shawna said and turned to him. Hope followed, backing him up against the wall.

"Well..." he mumbled, staring at his shoes, stalling for time. He couldn't see a way to pick something that wouldn't upset one of them, probably with him, and none of it was his fault. He decided, he'd just tell the truth and see what came.

"I like a lot of things. I like music with life to it. I can see why a band would want to play something that's going to draw a crowd in and make them happy. But if you're playing for the music itself, then the art's important — the lyrics, the complexity, the meaning."

"I might have known you'd take her side," Shawna told him, but the anger he'd expected wasn't there, and she turned and headed for bed. "Wake me up when you come to bed," she said over her shoulder, and closed the door behind her.

"I wasn't aware we were picking sides," he finally managed, and Hope tossed her DVD onto the sofa.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get you caught up in the middle of that. She's just so frustrating sometimes."

"So are you."

"Really?" Hope seemed surprised.

"Well, to her, I mean. Or she wouldn't get wound up like that."

"What's going on with her? She's been a bit off all week."

"It's a bad anniversary."

She had the good grace not to push. Marcus walked around the chair to perch on the seat, pulling his feet up and resting his chin on his knees as he stared somewhere into the distance.

"What about you?"

"Me?" Hope paused in the act of folding herself up onto the sofa, one foot already tucked beneath her.

"You're not usually that argumentative," he said, still gazing off at nothing.

"I'm... I just miss having someone to talk to, I guess," she said after a moment, settling the rest of the way onto the seat. "My Dad's great if I need something, but I can't really talk to him about most things. His answer to just about anything that's troubling you is 'talk to your priest' or 'pray on it.'"

"What about Bri and Elspeth? Or Lorraine? Or even Corrine?"

"It's not the same," she said. "They'd all lend an ear and sympathise, but... I just want to talk to my Mum, I guess."

"Does everyone want to talk to their parents?"

"I don't know. A lot of them, I suppose. Shawna doesn't, from what I hear. Lorraine hates having to do it. Elspeth and Brianna don't seem to feel particularly strongly about it one or another. Why?"

"I just wondered if it was another weird thing about me, that I still need people to explain what's going on sometimes. It's not so weird if everyone does it."

"We all need that." Hope laughed, gently, but Marcus didn't join in. "What's really troubling you, Marcus. It's not like you to leave Shawna alone like this."

"She's... I don't know what's going on in her head." His gaze shifted from the far wall to the light fitting for no apparent reason. "She thinks I'm going to run off with someone else, that I'm going to give up on her or something, and I don't know how to convince her it's not going to happen. I've tried talking to her. I've tried not talking about it. I've tried to make an obvious joke about it. I've tried to just be there and hold her, but it isn't going away."

"Does she have a reason?" Hope asked, quietly, suddenly fidgeting with the plastic sheath on the DVD box. "Is there... anyone?"

"No!" That caught his attention and he turned to look at her in the dim light from the kitchen. "I wouldn't do that to anyone, but especially not her."

"That's what I thought." They sat in silence for a while, listening to the quiet sounds of the city around them.

"Do you think I'm normal?" Marcus finally asked, bringing Hope out of her reverie with a start.

"What?"

"Do you think I'm normal?"

"Define normal," she said, after a moment's thought. He knew as well as she did that he wasn't completely normal, which meant he had a particular aspect of normality in mind. "Why?"

"I'm tired." He shifted over to the window, pushing the curtain aside to sit on the window-sill. "I'm tired of going out every day and trying to pretend like I want to be there. Tired of trying to talk to people, trying to understand all there stupid little games and lies. No-one says what they mean. They all hide behind innuendo and veiled references."

"What's it like?" she asked, quietly, picking up the DVD box and turning it over and over in her hands, watching the reflected light play on the surface.

"I don't know," he shrugged. "What's it like being a woman, or having Japanese ancestry?"

"That's easy." She smiled. "Everyone expects you to be quiet and demure, and stare at the floor all the time. Obedient during the day, and dressed like a Catholic schoolgirl at night."

"That's how other people see you. What's it actually like, inside?"

"Inside, Marcus, we're all people, but we don't live inside. We live outside. We're defined by how people see us because we don't need to define ourselves to ourselves."

"See, if you think like that, then if no-one else is there, you don't really have anything. You don't exist."

"Well, of course that's not true literally, but... we're social beasts, Marcus. We exist in societies."

"Yeah," he said, nodding slowly. "Yeah, you are. I'm not. Being Asperger's... have you ever had that discussion where someone says, 'If you had to choose between losing your sight or losing your hearing, which would you choose?'"

"Hearing," Hope said, with a shrug. "It's obvious, you need your eyes for so much."

"But we're social beasts. We communicate primarily with sounds, not signs. There was a deaf kid in our old school, and he used to say it was horrible; he was in his own country, and everyone else spoke a different language, used a whole different system of communication."

"I can... I guess I can see that. People don't just communicate with sound, though, you know that. There's all sorts of body language, there's even elements of smell in there."

"Exactly. That's the thing. See, someone deaf is obviously alien, because all the conscious bits of communication are gone, all the bits you think about have been taken away. Communication with them isn't natural any more.

"They use such a completely different way of thinking about how to convey ideas that you immediately see them as something different, and take account of it."

"I don't see where you're going with this."

"You're confused."

"Obviously."

"It's obvious to you — tone of voice, facial expression..."

"I came right out and said it."

"No, Hope, you didn't." He turned to face her. "You said, 'I don't see where you're going with this.' Your tone of voice and your body language said that you were confused, but your words... if I didn't already have experience with that expression, it would mean exactly what it says. You don't use sound to communicate. You use sound as the basis of communication, but you hang so much more on it as decoration. I'm deaf to that. I don't hear it. I don't see it. It's just words to me..."

"And you have to keep trying to be one step ahead of where the conversation might go to know how to take what people are saying."

"That's why I don't talk to new people. It's so hard to get an angle on what they mean. No-one says what they mean. Everyone just talks and everyone else knows that they mean something else."

"Everyone talks?" Hope asked. "Or Shawna?" Marcus didn't answer, even though she waited. She stopped turning the box over in her hands and put it down gently on the seat beside her. "You think she thinks she's told you all you need to know about why she's scared you leave her, and she hasn't. I'll go have a word with her."

"No need," Shawna said, quietly, and they both turned to look at her. "Come to bed, Marcus? Please?" Marcus heard the words, but Hope heard the tone, frightened.

"Sleep well?" Brianna asked, wrapping an arm round Elspeth's shoulders as they wandered from the street up the long path to the union. The garden away to their left was sparsely populated with small groups of people sitting, talking. A group of boys nearby looked up to track their progress, as they usually did, and Elspeth resolved to ignore them, as she usually did.

"I'm sorry. I can't believe I did that," Elspeth said with a smile, laying her head over to the side. "It's given me a horrible crick in my neck though."

"Well, let's get in, and I'll see if I can't get rid of that for you. Back rub, too?"

"Hmmm." Elspeth snuggled in a little tighter. "That sounds good."

"What was that?" Brianna snapped, and Elspeth almost fell as her support turned away towards the men along the path.

"What?" she asked, but Brianna was stepping off the path and over towards a cluster of men sat on the low wall that framed off the gardens from the path.

"I said, 'Take it somewhere else, you dyke, '" one of them repeated, speaking deliberately slowly.

"What's your fucking problem?" Brianna demanded, and Elspeth wrapped a hand around her arm, gently, trying to pull her back.

"You," the guy sneered. One of his friends laughed, passing him another can of beer, but the other two just looked embarrassed to be associated with him.

"Not getting any?" Bri challenged, and he laughed, taking a swig.

"What would you know? But then, you've probably had more women than I have, haven't you?"

"Probably," she said, and Elspeth squeaked. Bri patted her hand, gently, reassuringly, but didn't back down. "I figure you've probably had one, and that was your mother."

"You wish." He lurched to his feet, slightly off-balance, and Brianna slipped her arm free of Elspeth's grasp as he faced off against her. "No guessing which of you is the butch."

"No guessing which of you is closet gay who feels he needs to prove something," Brianna said. Elspeth tried to move forward and intercede, but the laughing friend caught her around the waist and pulled her back.

Brianna slapped a reaching hand out of the way with one hand and unwound a left-hook with all her weight behind it that staggered her assailant back and over the low wall.

"Anyone else got a smart comment to make?" she asked. The two guys on the wall shook their heads, one with a broad smile while the other passed another can of beer to their fallen friend. Elspeth wriggled free of the guy holding her, and turned to slap him across the face. It wasn't even close to the power that Brianna generated, but the effect was just as dramatic as he stumbled back a step at the look on Elspeth's face.

"Come on, El."

Brianna, smiling in a way she hadn't for days, took Elspeth's hand and towed her away. Elspeth accepted it until they were out of sight of the four, and then snatched her hand back.

"What the hell was that about?" she demanded.

"You heard what he said," Bri said, looking around at the stares they were getting.

"We hear that three or four times a week." Elspeth's voice went up an octave. "What the fucking hell was that?"

"Do we have to do this here?" Bri asked, nodding her head at the surrounding people. Elspeth looked and then clammed up tight. Brianna stifled a smile, following behind as Elspeth stalked through the entry hall and up to the lifts.

"Oh, yeah. I'm the butch," she muttered to herself, but fell silent when Elspeth glared at her. They were silent in the lift and along the corridor to their room, which Elspeth opened. Brianna slipped inside, and Elspeth slammed the door shut behind her, making her jump.

"Alright, what the fuck are you thinking?" Elspeth screamed, backed up against the door.

"Waiting until we got here was supposed to stop everyone in the city from hearing us," Brianna said.

"Fuck them. They don't matter. They never matter, no matter what they say, no matter what they do." Tears sprang up in her eyes, and she slumped down onto the floor. "What got into you?"

"I was angry and I wanted to vent some of that anger," Brianna said, kneeling in the middle of the floor facing her. "You have to put up with that shit every day we go through there, and you shouldn't have to."

"Why now? Why today? Don't we have enough to deal with?"

"That's better." Brianna smiled, and shuffled a bit closer.

"What?"

"You're talking about it. I'm ill, and we need to talk about it."

"It's been all we've talked about all week!"

"No, it hasn't." Brianna shuffled forward again, reaching out to take her hands gently. "It's been what I've been trying to talk to you about, but you keep changing the subject."

"What is there to say?" Elspeth whispered, pulling her hands back gently, still staring at the floor. "Talking isn't going to change..."

"Change what?" Brianna tried to lift her chin, but Elspeth turned away. Brianna gripped a little more forcefully, pulling Elspeth's eyes around until they met. "Change the fact that I'm going to die?"

Elspeth flinched.

"Yes." She sniffed, a sob catching in her throat. "I've just met you, just found you, and you're going to die, and it's not FUCKING FAIR!" Her cry rose to a scream, and when she ran out of words she just sagged again, letting Brianna get close enough to wrap her arms around her.

"I'm not going to die, El," she whispered, gently. "First, we've got the ultrasound on Wednesday, and there's a fifty-fifty chance that'll show there's nothing to worry about.

"Then, if that does go bad, there's the probability, given my age and general health, that whatever's there will be non-malignant, and there'll be nothing to worry about.