No Way to Say Goodbye - Anna McPartlin [58]
“I’m happy for you,” Sam said. “She sounds like she could be the one.”
“I tell you, it’s a wonder I don’t have to visit the Bone Man myself!” Ivan turned onto a long and winding road that seemed too narrow for the car, not to mind the oncoming one, but he was used to it and carried on unconcerned.
Later Sam asked if he had called his wife.
“This morning.”
“And?” Sam asked, curious as to whether Mary’s vague premonition had any merit.
“And,” Ivan said, “she told me I had some ego for an eejit. Apparently I’d be the last person in hell she’d call out for.” He sniffed, wrangling with the glove-box in the quest for tissues. “Feckin’ hay fever.”
“So Mary was wrong?”
“She is not,” Ivan said, blowing his nose.
“You still think your wife wants you?”
“Oh, she doesn’t want me but she might need me because there’s something wrong. I know that much.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Well, I’ll wait until the kids come for Easter and I’m going to ask them,” he said matter-of-factly, and turned into a farmyard. “We’re here.”
Sam couldn’t conceal his concerns when it emerged the Bone Man was in fact a farmer and his surgery was a table in the back of a barn. But Ivan swore by him and Sam was only hours away from submitting to the painkillers prescribed by the GP – or, at the very least, smoking the cannabis Mossy had so generously offered when he had called in to apologize to Mary for being too off his head to help with the dog. Sam knew he couldn’t risk taking any drug, prescribed or not. He couldn’t be any worse off, he’d thought – until he met the Bone Man. He had hands the size of shovels, wild curly hair and a big beard. He reminded Sam of one of the crazy homeless guys in New York. He did as he was told, though, because the guy was six eight and almost as wide. In the end it took only a moment. He heard a loud click, felt an excruciating pain that lasted one second and then relief. The effect was much like heroin.
Sam wasn’t dancing a jig like Tommy the Coat but he was home and back in his own bed that night. Although he was happy to return to isolation he found himself missing Mary. In the absence of the TV he had grown accustomed to, he turned his full attention to the guitar he had previously only tinkered with. It had been odd that he had been so comfortable playing in front of Mary. His ex-girlfriend had begged him to play many times, but he had refused. Then again Mia was a world-renowned recording star and Mary tended a bar so he guessed it was most likely something to do with that. He didn’t have anything to prove to Mary, and even if he’d felt he did, she wouldn’t have given a shit. He’d felt good when she’d stopped to listen to his version of Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me”. To him, it had sounded shoddy but she hadn’t noticed or maybe she just hadn’t cared. It was nice.
When Jerry Letter had knocked on the door with Sam’s prize possession carefully boxed – her emancipation reliant upon a signature – it had been a good day, despite his unfortunate circumstances. Once the front door was closed he had set about freeing her with a ferocity that matched a zealous child’s on Christmas morning. However, he was forced to leave the unveiling to Mary. And, once she was revealed, he had paused to gaze at her as though he was seeing her with new eyes and new appreciation.
“Hello, Glory!” He’d sighed.
“It has a name?” Mary inquired.
He didn’t care if she thought him stupid – a hero of his had named that guitar and that was good enough for him. And now, alone in his own home and fabulously free from pain, he took Glory out and held her on his lap, his right hand sliding up and down her neck, his left cupping her body. Until his time on Mary’s floor he hadn’t played guitar in years – in fact, he’d only ever played this instrument once before on the night it was presented to him by Leland when Sam’s first signing for Seminy Records had gone platinum. He