Page 24 of Not My Little Drummer Boy
“So that’s what they’re for.” Rachel brandishes a couple.
“Yeah, perfect. Build the frame on the ground, attach the lights, then mount the lot.”
As he talks through each step, I watch Rachel nodding along. Her fingers occasionally brush mine as we sort through the jumble of supplies. The casual contact is enough to convince me this challenge isn’t such a bad way to spend a Sunday after all.
“Right, I’ll leave you to it,” Geordie says. “Text me a picture when you’re done, okay?”
“Okay,” she murmurs. “Thanks Geordie. Love you.”
Those last two words come out quietly, as if she’s trying to hide this glimpse of her soft inner. I have a feeling she doesn’t show it often. I’m realising the vulnerable things she shared with me last night in the library were a rare gift. Not everyone gets to see that part of Rachel MacDonald, and I wonder why she let me in. Maybe I caught her off guard. Or maybe beyond the fact she looks at me like I’m her next meal, she actually likes me.
“You two close?” I ask as I begin laying out the battens in a neat lattice on the ground.
“Yeah,” she replies, tongue between her teeth as she jerks a cable tie into place with a snap. “I guess we are. We learned to stick together as kids. Had each other’s backs. We needed to.” She lets out a bitter laugh.
“Your father?” Her eyes slice around to me. “It’s just you’ve mentioned him a few times.”
“I have?” She shoots me a puzzled look. I nod. “Yeah, I suppose I have,” she concedes.
“Tough on you?” I keep my eyes on the job, not wanting to make her feel too scrutinised. I have a feeling that bastard Pierre might not be the only one to have hurt Rachel.
“That’s putting it mildly. Demanding. Exacting. A bully, really. Geordie copped the worst. I suppose it made us protective of each other.”
She pauses, testing the neat rows of battens connected in front of her with a jiggle, and deflects.
“How about you? Tell me some more, since you diverted our game of twenty questions last night.” She gives me a seductive wink. The playful gesture doesn’t mask the fact she’s the one dodging questions now, but I let it go, grateful she’s given me another snippet about her to file away.
“Not much to tell. You know most of it from Wikipedia anyway, don’t you?” I say, grinning.
On the ride this morning, she let it slip; she knows I went to her uni. She came out with a fancy law degree, first-class honours; I scraped through a BA in not-much-use. I catch myself picturing her there at eighteen—sharp, sorted, already aiming high—while I was nine, feral and barefoot, climbing fences. Yeah, it made me think about the gap. Not because her age bothers me. I’ve had older women throw themselves at me, and I never went there, only because there was no spark. That’s the line for me. With Rachel there’s spark, and then some. So when I heard her tell Haley I’m just ‘a bit of fun’, yeah, that stung. But I’ll own it—I built that reputation. Doesn’t change a thing: I’m not backing off. There’s more to us than chemistry.
She laughs. “Wikipedia doesn’t include the real stuff. Come on, spill Teddy.”
I suck in a breath. She’s been real with me. This is a woman I need to be real with, too. If I want to change the picture she has of me, the fun, short-term option, not someone she can imagine going the distance with her, I have to show her the man the cameras never catch.
“Well, like I said, I’ve got three older sisters. Juniper’s married and tucked away in a small country town, Rowan’s married out in the London suburbs. Pretty standard lives: steady jobs, mortgages, school runs. Four kids between them. Elodie’s the eldest—the one who had cancer.” She smiles, weaving two more battens together, and I go on. “Then there’s Briar. Closest to me, maybe because we’re close in age, definitely because we’re similar.”
“In what way?”
“Lots of ways. Both of us went for careers in music. Briar’s in musical theatre. She’s in a show in the West End right now—Spark and Shadow?”
“Oh yeah, I haven’t seen it yet, but it has great reviews. Oh my god, is she Spark?” Her eyes light up at the possibility.
“Yeah,” I nod. Briar has the lead role, playing an artist trapped in an apartment building during a citywide blackout. She sets the stage alight every night. “The part kind of suits her. She’s definitely the live-wire in our family. But yeah, both of us are in music. And both of us seem to land in the papers too often.” I swallow, hoping Briar’s current man-problem doesn’t get her there again.
“And you said you’re like your dad?” Rachel presses her line of questioning as determinedly as she’s lashing the pieces of wood together.
I wince, letting the string of lights in my hand fall. Damn it. Trust a lawyer to have committed every word out of your mouth to memory, especially those words you shouldn’t have said.
“Same red hair. Same lack of height. Both musicians.” I fob her off with the obvious while trying to decide just how far I’m prepared to go with this baring your soul shit, but Rachel’s in for the kill.
“But there are ways you’d rather not be like him?” She definitely hasn’t forgotten last night.
I swallow hard and decide to drop the truth on her. “My parents have an open relationship.”
I see her eyes widen as she drops the piece of the frame she’s working on. I’ve never actually told anyone this stuff before. It’s kind of awkward seeing her reaction, although it’s not unexpected. Growing up, I knew my family was different to others, but I had no idea just how much until one day when I was thirteen and my mother sat me down and explained why there was a picture of my father, wrapped around a woman that wasn’t her, on the front page of a tabloid. Two days after he’d left us to go on tour.
“And now I’m older, I know the extent to which Dad exploited that arrangement over the years. He loves my mum. Always came back to her. Tried to be a good dad to us kids when he was home. But in between those times, there were other women. Lots of them. Pictures of them on his arm at clubs and lounging on beaches in the Bahamas.”
