"I'm just glad I don't have to do any more exams this year. Or," she added, her face lighting up, "ever. This is it, Siany. Our last year. No more college!"
She gave a small squeal and clutched Sian's arm, hard.
"So do you know what you're doing yet?" Tilly asked as they sat down at a table and waited for their milkshakes to arrive. "Uni-wise, I mean."
Sian shook her head. She didn't want to think about it. She'd applied to a bunch of universities and had put her first and second choices as the closest to home. Now, she wasn't so sure she even wanted to go to university. All she really wanted to do was draw and sew.
"So I saw Alisha the other day," Tilly said, cutting through the silence that had fallen around them. She kept her tone light and cautious.
"Can't we just have fun today?" Sian pleaded. "I don't want to talk about her."
"Don't you want to know how she is?" Tilly asked, cocking her head in that way that meant she wasn't going to let Sian wriggle out of this one.
"Fine." She sighed, and really, she did want to know, she just didn't want to want to know. "How is she?"
"Good," Tilly said.
Sian frowned, feeling almost disappointed. So Alisha was fine, then, while Sian felt like rubbish every single day.
"I'm lying." Tilly sighed. "I didn't speak to her properly, but she's like... I don't know. Mac says she's grumpy all the time, and it's affecting her music. She misses you."
Now Sian felt even worse. She didn't want Alisha to hurt because of her; she'd never wanted that. But what choice did she have?
"You should talk to her. You could work it out."
"I can't," she said sullenly. "My parents—"
"Oh, sod your fucking parents. No offence, Sian, but they're arseholes. You don't have to listen to them. You make your own choices in life. That's all there is to it. If you want to be with her, they can't stop you, and if they try, then you don't owe them shit, okay?"
Their milkshake arrived, but suddenly Sian wasn't in the mood. She pushed it away and just stared at it until Tilly had finished them both.
*~*~*
"Oh, God." Hugo groaned, clamping his hands over his ears. "Make it stop!"
Johnny was jabbing at every key he could find, mashing them together to create an awful cacophony that drove straight through Alisha's skull.
"Johnny," she snapped, cracking open her third beer of the day. "I swear if you don't stop that, I'm going to bottle you."
"I'll stop when Hugo forgives me," he said, grinning wickedly.
"Fine, fine! I forgive you. Anything, just make it stop!"
The noise stopped, a last note quivering and fading into nothing.
"I don't see why you to have to punish the rest of us just because Hugo's a dick."
Hugo glared at her. "He was the one who lost my drum stick."
Johnny raised an eyebrow, his hands hovering over the keyboard. "Yeah, but you forgave me."
"Didn't say I'd forget about it, though, did I?" Hugo grumbled.
"Oh, God, just stop." Alisha groaned, holding her head in her hands.
"Can we, like, actually play some music soon?" Mac interjected, leaning back against the shelving unit, which creaked under the added pressure.
They were practicing in Johnny's garage, a wide, open space with enough soundproofing that the neighbours wouldn't complain about the noise. There were a couple of beanbags and a small sofa pushed against the wall furthest from the door, and a few boxes were shoved into the corners of the room. A crate of beer rested on the wide arm of the sofa, and an old, rusting BMX leaned against the wall behind Hugo's drum set.
To one side, where Mac stood, was a wooden shelving unit, crammed full of an assortment of household and DIY objects: tins of paint, tool boxes, more alcohol, a few books, a couple of broken lamps and an old toaster.
Alisha was sitting in one of the beanbags, two empty bottles beside her. They'd been practicing for most of the day, and she was tired, thirsty, and hungry.
"I vote for a break extension," she suggested.
Hugo rolled his eyes at her. "Lazy fuck," he muttered.
"That's pretty rich coming from Mr. I'm-too-tired-to-practice."
"I'm not sure that'll work as a nickname." Mac pointed out. "Too wordy. How about Mr. Hangover?"
"Yeah, so I'm hungover. Shoot me."
"Gladly." Johnny grinned.
"I'm not sure we're too confident on Witch's Rose," Mac suggested. "We should go over that one next."
Alisha sighed, pushed her beer to one side, and got to her feet. She slung her guitar back over her shoulder and tested a few chords. Meanwhile, the others were doing the same, Mac plucking the strings of his bass and Johnny testing the keys—they all knew they were working fine and in tune, but it was just habit to check them after a break.
"Witch's Rose, then?" Alisha confirmed and waited as Johnny adjusted himself for the intro.
There was a lot of stopping and starting—Johnny messed up the intro twice, Hugo came in at the wrong beat, and Alisha forgot a couple of the lines. But eventually they had it and managed to do two whole run-throughs without fault. Hugo celebrated with a drumroll and a clash of symbols. Alisha reacquainted herself with her abandoned beer, and Johnny, in a sudden burst of energy, grabbed Mac by the shoulders and pushed him into a strange, pseudo-waltz. Mac laughed, then yelled as Johnny trod down hard on his toes and the dance became a childish wrestling match.
"Hey, watch the set!" Hugo yelled as they almost crashed into his drums.
Alisha drew her feet up as they neared her and relaxed as they staggered away from her.
With an effort, Johnny pushed Mac off—straight into the shelving unit. Mac hit the unit with a loud thud, grabbing the shelf for support. The shelf snapped, and Mac went down, bringing half the unit down on top of him. There was a loud crashing and thudding, a harsh crunch. The lid from a paint tin rolled across the floor, spinning and clattering to the ground. Green paint pooled slowly outwards.
Alisha was on her feet. "Mac? Mac, are you all right?"
Hugo was already pulling out his phone and dialling for an ambulance.
Alisha could see Mac's feet and legs poking from beneath the debris of the unit and one green hand curling out from underneath a plank of wood. There was a guttural groan, a cough and a splutter. One of Mac's legs twitched.
The paint kept spreading outwards, reaching the sofa and pooling around the legs. Alisha's Converse trainers squelched as she splashed through it.
"Mac?" she said again.
"Mac, talk to us," Johnny said, sounding close to tears, but when Alisha glanced his way, his face was bone dry, if pale.
"'M okay." Mac groaned, although he sounded anything but. Alisha thought some of the paint nearest Mac's head looked faintly streaked with red.
"Hugo? Think we need that ambulance," she said.
"They'll be here soon," he told her. "They said don't touch him, don't move anything."
"'M okay," Mac muttered again, but he sounded even more muffled and distant than before.
"You'd bloody better be," Johnny said, coming to himself a little. "Who's going to fix the mess you've made if you're not?"
There was a weak cough, and the paint tin rolled as Mac shifted slightly. Some of the wood heaved up, falling away, and the toaster clattered to the stone floor as Mac sat up, swaying slightly. There was blood and paint covering almost the whole of his face and shirt, and his hair was matted with it. He looked like Frankenstein's monster.
"Think we gotta call practice off," he slurred, sounding drunk although he hadn't touched a drop of alcohol all day.
In the background, Alisha was dimly aware of Hugo pushing the garage door up. Sunlight flooded into the room.
Mac pulled one hand up to shield his face and dropped it instantly with a cry of pain. The cry turned into a harsh laugh. "That hurt," he said, grinning hideously.
It was another twenty minutes before the ambulance reached them. The paramedic checked his arm, declar
ed it 'probably broken' along with one or two ribs, and told them he almost certainly had a concussion and would have to be taken to the hospital for more checks.
Alisha hopped into the passenger seat of Hugo's van and they drove behind Johnny and Mac in the ambulance.
As they neared the hospital, Alisha pulled out her phone. She didn't have Tilly's number, but she should know about this. So Alisha did the next best thing to calling her. She called Sian.
Eleven
The warm red painted doors of the vintage shop swung shut behind them, the jangling of the bell above them settling as they walked down the street. Sian was quiet, lost in thought, barely listening to whatever Tilly was saying.
Her father had seemed better lately, but they'd been working at keeping his life stress-free, her mother opening all the bills herself and even throwing away another absence letter from the college unopened. Sian had been helping out around the house more, doing the hoovering and the dusting and the washing up, bending to her father's every whim, whether it was a glass of orange juice or a new book that meant her walking into town to get it.
He was back at work now, but still they tiptoed around him at home, making sure everything was just as he liked it. Frankly, Sian thought he was milking it a bit, but she didn't really mind. Despite everything that had happened between them, Sian loved her father.
She wanted to hate him. She wanted to shout and yell and show him how unhappy he'd made her. But she couldn't. She'd see him half-lying on the sofa, looking frail and tired and eating his salad with a pained look on his face, and she just couldn't hate him, no matter how much she tried.
The worst thing was not having anyone to talk to. She had Tilly, of course, who even came round to help out on occasion, but Tilly wasn't the person she really wanted to talk to. She had tried to shove Alisha to the back of her mind, but it hadn't worked. She was the last thing Sian thought about as she went to sleep at night—the smoky, warm scent of her, her eyes, her laugh.
Of course, she had properly ruined things with Alisha. She couldn't hope to be forgiven for walking away. And that was probably for the best, because who knew how a rekindling of their relationship would affect her father? There could be another heart attack, and this time it could be fatal.
They were passing over a zebra crossing when her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out as she and Tilly reached the pavement, and stopped short. On the screen was Alisha's name. Cautiously, she answered it. Maybe Alisha was calling her by mistake, a pocket dial or something.
"Hello?" she asked, ignoring Tilly's impatient tutting as she waited.
"Sian? Hi, uhm..." Alisha paused, and then the phone line crackled as though she'd blown air into the receiver. "Mac's kinda hurt. I was hoping you had Tilly's number. She'll want to know, I think."
Sian glanced at Tilly, who was rolling her eyes and motioning that they should get moving. They were already missing the trailers for the film Tilly wanted to see. She tapped her watch. Sian pulled the phone away from her ear and closed the distance between herself and Tilly. "It's Mac," she said softly. "Alisha says something's happened to him. Do you want—"
Tilly snatched the phone from her hand, her whole expression changing. Now there was a kind of grim resolution in her eyes, in the set of her jaw, and worried tears that she refused to shed welling up as she talked into the phone.
Eventually, she hung up and looked over at Sian. "He's okay," she said, letting out a shaky breath. "He's been taken to A&E, so I think we should head over there now."
They jumped on the next bus heading in the direction of the hospital, got off around the corner and hurried down the road and across the car park. Tilly barely bothered to look where she was going, and Sian had to pull her back from the path of an oncoming car more than once. The doors to the hospital slid open in front of them, and they ran through linoleum floored hallways that all looked the same, narrowly knocking over a man hobbling past on crutches, his leg cast in blue plaster. They were directed to several different places, sent off in a new direction each time they reached a reception desk, but eventually they found the Accident and Emergency unit.
They were told to wait.
The last time Sian had been there was for her father's heart attack. The details seemed fuzzy now, like her mind had deliberately tried to forget most of it, but the room was unnervingly familiar. That day she'd almost lost her father, had waited in this same room not knowing if he would make it or not.
The plastic seats were hard and uncomfortable, and Tilly kept jiggling her foot, crossed over one knee. When Sian placed a hand over her ankle to make her stop, she began bouncing her knee up and down instead.
"We should have brought reading material," Sian mused aloud, eyeing the few tattered magazines on the coffee table. "Or a deck of cards."
Tilly glared at her and went back to bouncing her knee. After a while, Sian started biting her fingernails, the blue polish flaking and peeling as millimetres were pulled away from her nails under her teeth, the slow crack and snap of it soothing.
Behind them, a boy waited with his leg on a trolley, covered in blood. An old woman with bruising all up one arm and a black eye sat across from them. A young woman with a nasty gash across her forehead, a man holding his hand awkwardly, a little girl with her foot up on her mother's lap, crying loudly.
"This is ridiculous," Tilly muttered. They'd been waiting almost an hour and no one had come to tell them anything. "Where's Mac? Where's Alisha and the others?"
It was just as she was speaking that a man Sian recognised rounded the corner, heading for the coffee machine, his black hair pulled back in a scruffy ponytail.
"Hugo!" Tilly yelled out, causing several people nearby to glare at her. The little girl stopped crying, sniffed, and began again.
Hugo turned to them as they approached. "Hey. You want anything from the machine?"
Tilly shook her head, answering for the both of them.
"We just want to see Mac," she said.
"Oh, yeah, cool. Just let me..." They waited while he filled up three cardboard cups from the machine, two with black coffee, one with a very milky tea. "You mind helping?" he asked, already handing one of the cups to Sian. "Mac's okay," he said as they walked down the corridor. "They say maybe a concussion, a couple of broken bones, but okay. They're still doing X-rays, but..." He shrugged. "It's hardly life or death."
They rounded a corner and came to another waiting area. A tall, blond guy Sian recognised as the keyboard player, Johnny, was leaning against the wall. In the seat beside him sat Alisha, her head bowed, dark hair covering her face. It was longer than it had been when Sian had seen it last, and the blue tips had faded out. Her legs were spread wide apart, her arms dangling between them like a bored schoolkid waiting for the headmaster to call them into his office.
"He's having some x-rays," Johnny explained as he saw Tilly striding towards him, followed by Hugo and, a couple of paces behind, Sian. "He'll be out in a couple of minutes, I expect."
Tilly nodded and took the seat opposite Alisha.
As she sat, Alisha glanced up, her face giving nothing away as she saw Sian. There were dark shadows under her eyes, as if she hadn't been sleeping much lately. There was a cigarette tucked behind her ear and a hole in the knee of her jeans.
As Sian took a seat, the only acknowledgement of her presence Alisha gave was a small nod before ducking her head back down again. Sian smiled at her, but she wasn't sure Alisha caught it.
A few minutes later, a set of doors opened and a nurse came out, pushing Mac, who had taken up temporary residence in a hospital wheelchair. Tilly jumped to her feet and stifled a gasp, one that was mirrored by Sian as the nurse steered the wheelchair towards them, revealing Mac's inexplicably bright green face. As he neared, Sian could tell it was paint. There was blood too, all down the collar of his shirt, and a nasty gash on his forehead that had been swabbed clear of paint but that still had a faintly green tinge to it.
Tilly leaned down, han
ds braced on the arms of the wheelchair, and kissed Mac. He looked slightly dazed as he looked up at her, and grinned. "Hi, darlin'," he drawled, a little drunkenly. "Don't worry, I'm fine."
"Yeah, you look it," Tilly said. "What happened?"
Hugo told the story, blaming most of it on Johnny, who had, apparently, hurled Mac across the room into an old shelving unit. The way Sian imagined it, Johnny had hulked out and picked Mac up effortlessly before spinning him around and throwing him like a basketball.
As the others crowded around the wheelchair, Sian watched Alisha. She was leaning back in her chair now, watching the others. After a moment, she turned to Sian. "So," she said.
Sian gave a weak smile. "So," she echoed, unsure of how to proceed.
"Hey," Hugo yelled over to them. "We've got to go back to the other waiting area, you know, the one by the doctor's office bit, not the front reception."
Sian was confused, but Alisha nodded, and the others didn't wait for them as they headed down the hallway, Hugo pushing Mac's wheelchair far too fast to be safe.
"How've you been?" Sian asked tentatively.
"Same old, really," Alisha said, looking at her with a kind of sharp perceptiveness in her gaze. It made Sian a little uncomfortable. "How've you been?"
"I..." She was about to say, 'I've been good,' but she caught the lie before it left her lips and let it fall away. "…don't know," she finished.
"No, I don't suppose you do," Alisha said with a sigh. Sian didn't bother asking what that was supposed to mean.
"I've missed you," she bit out, surprised at how difficult those words were to say. She thought she saw the ghost of a smile pass across Alisha's face, but before she could even blink, it had gone.
"Yeah," Alisha said. "Me too." Her voice was hard as she said it, her jaw and shoulders tense.
"I'm sorry, you know," Sian said. "I didn't want what happened to happen, I just..."
"I get it. Your family said jump, right?"
Sian shook her head. "It wasn't like that. My dad was really ill. I should have said at the time, but I don't think I was really with it then... But we argued... about us... and he had a heart attack. So I had to. I couldn't put any more stress on him. I meant it when I said it'd kill him."
Keeping it Together Page 8