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Luke Devlin stood behind her looking solid, and steady and smug.
‘If you’ve come here to gloat, go ahead,’ she managed, having lost all sense of decorum in her abject misery. ‘Then you can piss off.’
All she’d wanted to
do tonight was finally lay Matty to rest, the way he’d wanted, the way he’d asked her to. Why couldn’t she even achieve that much without making a tit of herself? But then she seemed particularly adept at making a tit of herself in front of Luke Devlin.
But Devlin wasn’t laughing, she realised, as he tilted his head to one side and studied her. ‘I’m not here to gloat. I’m here to apologise.’
‘What for?’ she asked, because there were about a million and one things she could think of.
Why did he have to be so detached? So unfeeling? So pragmatic? So broad and solid and hot? Okay, scratch that last bit, so not the point.
‘For making this even harder for you than it needs to be,’ he said.
He actually sounded sincere – and just like that her righteous anger deflated like a popped party balloon. Unfortunately, the anger had been keeping all of her misery at bay fairly effectively, which happily rushed in to the fill the vacuum.
‘Apology accepted,’ she said, turning back to the railings and ignoring him. ‘Now you can piss off,’ she added under her breath.
She gripped the railings again with numbed fingers and heaved herself up. She struggled and slipped and cursed and battled with the gate for a further two minutes, which felt like ten years, all the while assuming he’d pissed back off to his hotel and his flight.
But then the dry voice reverberated down her spine. ‘Why don’t you just dump the ashes in the park?’
She slumped against the railing, her forehead connecting with the cold slippery metal, perilously close to tears.
‘Because that’s not what Matty wanted. He specified the Serpentine.’ She pushed her finger through the locked gate at the dark expanse of water beyond. ‘Which is through there.’ She still hadn’t figured out why Matty had asked for this particular ritual to be carried out. But she was too numb and disheartened to care about figuring out the why. Suddenly, all the things she wasn’t going to be able to do for him anymore – like laugh at his rubbish jokes, make the popcorn to his lemon-tinis, or keep The Royale afloat – loomed large around her. This was one thing she refused to fail at, or compromise on.
She glanced through the gathering dusk at the road that ran through the park and the bridge in the distance that stretched over the lake – illuminated in waves by the headlights of passing cars.
‘Perhaps I could scatter them from the bridge?’ she thought aloud.
Getting over this bloody gate was not going to happen. And the thought of having to come back tomorrow with a stepladder felt too overwhelming.
‘Not a good idea,’ said Mr Pragmatic and Emotionless from behind her.
Why hadn’t he buggered off already?
‘There’s a lot more ashes than you think, it takes forever to scatter them. And you’ll be super exposed there.’
She let go of the railings and turned. ‘You’ve done it before?’
‘Sure,’ he said, frowning. ‘I scattered my old man’s ashes.’
‘You scattered Falcone’s ashes?’ she whispered, the thought – that she was standing less than a foot away from a person who had such an intimate connection with her cinematic idol – so shocking and yet epic she completely forgot to be pissed off with him.
‘Yeah. My mom asked me to.’ His shrug was stiff and unyielding and defensive, not unlike the look on his face when he’d sat under the Boy Blue poster in Matty’s flat on Friday night. Yup, there was definitely a story here and it didn’t look particularly Walt Disney. ‘And it took forever.’
She leaned against the railings to study him. Absorbing the strange situation she was in – standing outside the Serpentine in the almost dark, trying and failing to scatter Matty’s ashes with a man who was Rafael Falcone’s son. The son of the icon she had idolised through all of her lonely fatherless teenage years. His face a facsimile of the poster she’d had pinned to the door of her childhood bedroom so she could gaze at it while she fell asleep to the sound of her mum shouting at her latest boyfriend, or banging the bed against the wall in the bedroom next door in rhythmic thumps.
Maybe it was the Prosecco and the heartache talking, but it all suddenly seemed so surreal. ‘This is so bloody weird.’
‘What is?’ he asked, his frown deepening.
‘You sound just like him in all of his movies, you know?’
It was the wrong thing to say. She knew it instantly because his gaze became wary and tense, where before it had been pragmatic.
‘So I’ve been told,’ he said, not sounding remotely impressed with the observation. What was the story? Because she was exhausted and down-hearted enough to wonder about it now – mainly so she didn’t have to wonder about how she was going to scale an eight-foot high gate.
