Rising (Blue Phoenix, #4)(85)

I hang outside the Chapel of Rest, watching people I don’t know talking to other strangers; I’m on the fringes as always. The sombrely dressed men and women climb into cars, negotiating who travels in each. A few tried to talk when they noticed me at the back of the chapel, but I deliberately arrived late in order to avoid them. There isn’t a single person here I recognise. When the service finished, I ducked out of the place before anyone else could speak to me and hid around the corner of the building with Dylan and my grief. Do they know who I am? Did she ever tell people about me? Or was I something Mum tried to forget until she couldn’t anymore?

The early December weather freezes the afternoon and the coastal wind smarts my face. The physical numbness helps dull the pain gnawing my insides too. I don’t think I hurt; I don’t know. I’ve hurt so much in the last month I don’t know what feels normal and what feels wrong anymore. I’m terrified because I’m slipping into the lost place in my mind, where a path leads to the old methods of oblivion.

As I watched the coffin leave the Chapel of Rest for cremation today, the pain of the battle to stop the tears split my head; and as the room spun, I realised I was holding my breath against the final goodbye. Dylan’s quiet support helped, he understood my need to be left alone and didn’t touch or attempt to speak to me in the service. Heaving in the breath I’d neglected, I pictured my suffering and memories burning with her. If Mum doesn’t exist anymore, how can they?

But if Mum takes away all that with her death, what am I left with? An emptiness I need to take and fill with something, but what with is my decision.

Dylan steps forward hands in the pockets of his dark suit. “Are we going with them to the wake?” He inclines his head to the funeral goers.

“Nah. Don’t know any of them. I’m done now.”

Dylan places a hand on my arm and I brace myself. I don’t want his comfort. He hugged me fiercely the day I told him Mum had died, rewinding us to who we are and always have been. The twelve year old Jem and Dylan— the boys who forged a bond that loosened, but never broke— are here. Brothers. “You okay, man?”

“No. But come on.”

I wish Ruby was with me, but I couldn’t ask her to come. We haven’t spoken properly since the night she appeared like a scarlet-haired angel and pulled me out of the Hell I was falling back into. Ruby left the day after she helped me. I called a couple of times and we chatted, but Ruby says she’s not ready to see me. I’m proud of my beautiful girl who found the strength finally to believe in herself, to know she deserves love and happiness instead of walking back into my mess. I will fight for her when I’ve finished fighting for myself. Until I’m in the right space, there can’t be anything more.

Will I ever be in the right space?

Today I’m laying to rest my past and I’m not including Ruby as part of today for a bigger reason. I don’t want to lay us to rest.

“What do you want to do?” asks Dylan as we climb into his black Audi.

“Dunno. Go home.”

We return to my house empty of life, tidied and fixed, back to my barren life in just one or two rooms. Dylan stayed with me the last week, refusing to leave because I have nobody else. I once had somebody else. The woman who I reach for in the night and she’s not there; the one who would sit half-naked on my bed with her guitar and play when she knew I needed her to, but never asked why. There was a beautiful, loving girl who held my face, looked me in the eyes, and told me she cared and just as easily told me when I was being an *. And I f-ucking threw her away.

Ruby Riot has a gig tonight and on the drive home through the greying skies, I suggest to Dylan I go there. He launches into a lecture about being around alcohol when I’m in a mess, considering my almost relapse when I heard Mum had died. I explain that’s why I need to be around music, the good that can drown out the thoughts looping in my mind.

No, I can’t wait until I’m in the right space because until I have Ruby, I never will be. A year ago, in this state of mind, all I would’ve wanted was drugs. The only thing I want at this moment in time is Ruby.



****



I’m late to the gig, Ruby Riot’s familiar sound blasts through the open doors as I arrive. There’s a strange irony in Ruby Riot being here tonight; the venue I first saw her in months ago. The last time Ruby Riot played here the crowd was half the size, the band relatively unknown. The few tables are empty as most people are standing and under Ruby’s spell. I slide onto a seat so I can stay in the shadows.

Watching the band achieve what I hoped, the shit of today is wiped from my mind and filled with colour and sound. Dylan offered to come with me and when I got snarly with his undertone that he wanted to keep an eye on me, he backed off. Dylan knows I need to be alone; this is me locking myself into a different space and not slipping. The band gets tighter as they gig more often. As Blue Phoenix’s support act for the next tour; the whole world will get to share them. Accusations they only got the gig because of Jem Jones’s involvement with the lead singer fall away as the music world recognises what I did that first night at this same venue. Talent.

The power Ruby had over me the first night never wanes. The woman on stage, hair tumbling across her face as her powerful voice competes with Jax’s heavy guitar for supremacy and inevitably wins, is a f-ucking goddess. This goes beyond her looks: her strength, her passion, the new self-belief all make up this phenomenal person who reached into herself, grasped the vines of the past strangling her, and tore them out. I saw Ruby grow in front of my eyes and this allowed her to turn away from me when I started to break her apart.