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‘Familiar as in famous?’
‘No – I mean familiar like I’ve met him before.’
‘I think your face blindness is getting worse.’ He was probably right. She regularly failed to recognise people she knew and thought she recognised people she’d never met.
There were maybe a dozen people gathered, a murmuring crowd shifting between the gum tree and the barrier, passing through beams of dusty sunlight into shade. Young backpackers stepped aside to make space for older fans, displaying a touching deference towards the ones who’d evidently been there and bought the T-shirt. Someone in the distance was whistling a tune, so that it faded out as he walked away .?.?. ‘Riders on the Storm’.
‘It’s weird here, isn’t it?’
Itwasweird. Everything about Morrison’s grave was out of place, wrong like Wilde’s was wrong, but in different ways. Jim Morrison’s gravestone was jammed incongruously between two much older tombs, as if a plot had been squeezed in where none was intended.
‘It seems too short,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t it look as if his legs must be folded up under him?’
‘Or stretched out beneath the path.’
She looked down to the ground beneath her feet, stepped sideways a little.
Ronan wandered off to look at the chewing-gum tree. He struck up a conversation with the American couple. It sounded as if he was giving them advice on the best place to get lunch.
Claire leaned on the crush barrier and allowed herself to wallow in nostalgic memory of the almighty crush she’d had, at fifteen, on Fergal O’Connor. She still felt the tiniest tuck in her breathing at the thought of him, a wannabe bad boy, too smart and too pretty to pull it off. She hadn’t known much about him, only that he knew a lot about car engines and was evangelical about The Doors. She had hardly even spoken to him, just stared at the back of his neck in class, watched the muscles in his arm twitch as he twirled a pen between his fingers. Once, in PE, when they’d been put on the same basketball team, he’d complimented her. Or rather – she corrected her memory – he’d complimented the shot she’d taken.
‘Nice one,’ he’d said, with his hand, for a split second, resting on her shoulder.
Later the same day, as she sat on a bench in the yard eating a cheese sandwich, she’d looked up fromThe Amber Spyglassand seen him sitting on the school wall a few feet away. He was running the blade of a penknife up his forearm. He must have sensed her staring at him and, looking up, caught her eye.
‘Any good?’ He nodded towards her book.
‘It is.’ Her mind went blank. The blade was held, paused, at the crease of his elbow. More out of desperation to continue their conversation than any intent to save him, she spoke. ‘Why are you doing that?’
He closed his eyes, longer than a blink, then opened them and looked at her. ‘To make myselfknowthat I’m alive.’
‘Seems a kinda dangerous way to do it.’
‘It would be more dangerous not to do it.’
He was the first person who had ever expressed it: that feeling she recognised, of doubting everything, right down to her own existence.
‘There must be a better way.’
‘Ya think?’
She had tried to decide whether he was being sarcastic or looking for an actual answer. Hedging her bets, she nodded her head.
He flicked the knife closed and slipped it into his pocket. Then he smiled, a smile that made her feel he could see inside her head. He swung his canvas bag over his shoulder, the one that hadTHE DOORSwritten on it in fat black capitals.
‘See ya,’ he said, and sauntered away.
She’d heard a rumour that he got arrested for drug dealing and another that he’d become a mechanic’s apprentice. Either way, she never saw him again. She bought a couple of CDs and listened toStrange DaysandMorrison Hotelevery night for a month.
* * *
‘Boo.’
She jumped, then pushed Ronan sideways.
He recovered, laughing, and put his arm around her. ‘Does it say in there what the inscription means?’
‘I think’ – she looked down at the guidebook – ‘it was chosen by his father. It translates asby his own daemon –as in, he did it his own way.’
