by Alice Oseman
I start running.
There’s a moment, and then everyone is shouting after me. Someone starts running too, I don’t know who, but I’m already out of the backstage area and down the corridor and past the dressing rooms and at the conference rooms and through the door, thank God it’s open, and it’s empty, crushed bottles and tickets and a couple of posters littering the floor, and I’m pulling the door to the disabled bathroom open and dropping to the floor, but there’s nothing, it’s empty, there’s nothing there.
It’s gone.
‘Jimmy,’ Rowan heaves out, coming to a halt in the doorway. ‘What the fuck are you doing? We’re on in, like, thirty seconds!’
I turn to him and say, ‘It’s gone.’
‘What’s gone?’ He looks around the bathroom. ‘Wait, is this … is this where you were?’
Don’t cry. God, please, don’t let me cry. I don’t want to cry again.
‘It’s … she must have it,’ I say. Yes, Angel must have taken it; she was the only one in here. She must have taken it as a memento. The day she met Jimmy Kaga-Ricci and he had a meltdown.
Rowan holds out a hand. ‘Jimmy, we haven’t got time for this.’
I take his hand and stand up.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
‘What have you lost?’ he asks.
Everything, I want to say.
They rise out of the stage like they’re here to guide us into Paradise.
They are immediately everything. The centre point of the world. They dispel air and light and the fans flock to it, reaching out, pleading.
The Ark are here.
Jimmy and Rowan jump down from their platform, leaving Lister alone on there, where he clambers onto his drum stool and holds both of his drumsticks in the air, pointing upwards. I look up, but nothing is there. The lights turn bright white, and then orange, illuminating the dry ice and shrouding the trio in a glowing mist. One long, low electronic bass note vibrates around the arena.
Jowan walk up and down the front of the stage. Jimmy skips and smiles, but now that I’ve seen the other Jimmy it doesn’t seem real any more. Rowan wanders, nodding, staring down the crowd. He knows they are the kings of the world.
The bass note continues.
Jimmy’s black wing feathers are sewn across his hoodie. Rowan’s got a small but visible plaster on his forehead, but he still looks exceptional. He’s wearing a dress. I love him, I love him. Lister stands on his drum stool, very still, watching, waiting. The light illuminates his hair. A halo.
They climb back up to the top platform where all their instruments are. Lister picks Jimmy up by his thighs, holding him up to the light, and Jimmy stretches out his wings. Fans around me are crying, screeching, begging.
I’m weighed down by what I know.
How can they just carry on after what happened today?
Which is the real Ark? This one or the one I met in the bathroom?
I want to believe in this one, but I think it might be a lie.
The stage doubles up as an LED screen. An image of Joan of Arc wielding her sword flashes on and off, like a strobe.
‘London,’ says Lister, then, in his low voice, and it echoes around. London screams back at him but it doesn’t have the same magic.
The bass continues and then comes the voice that always begins their show.
I am not afraid, said Noah
The flashing lights and spotlights that have been moving around the crowd all stop at once. One of them stops directly on me. I hold my hand up, blocking the light from my eyes.
I was born for this
The Ark have taken up their positions by their instruments, staying very still, dreamlike through the orange mist. I strain to see Jimmy’s expression, but he’s just a winged smudge in the light.
Born to survive the storm
Born to survive the flood
I get the urge to cry again.
Why do I feel like he’s died when he’s right there in front of me?
Believe in me
Said Noah to the animals
Though they’re near-invisible now, it’s impossible to miss Rowan raise a hand and pat Jimmy on the shoulder. Jimmy doesn’t move. They love each other. At least that belief of mine is real … right? Please, God, please, I want to believe. I want it to be real more than I want to be alive.
Somehow, I expect that most of my beliefs were fantasies.
And two-by-two, they ascended
Onto the ark
I turn round and look back at the arena. Phones are dotted lights in the darkness like stars. I can’t see any faces.
They start playing the opening bars of ‘Joan of Arc’. I feel nothing. I just turn back and stare up at them, waiting, praying for something good to happen, something good to make me feel okay again, just as it always has until today.
But I don’t feel anything.
I thought something would be different but the show is normal and I can smile fine and of course, of course, nothing changes. I don’t forget any lyrics or chords or anything. Lister doesn’t even forget the set-list order. That’s just how it is, isn’t it? Everything carries on as normal.
We’re midway through ‘Joan of Arc’ when I spot her.
Angel.
I’ve dropped down to the lowest platform on the stage. The closest I can get to the fans. Smudgy blobs become real faces of real people, some of them smiling, some of them crying, some of them singing along with me. For a second I forget everything again and smile with them.
Then I see her.
A glint of light on a shiny headscarf.
She is not singing. She is not singing or crying or even smiling.
I almost stop singing. Almost.
I could go for it right now. I could jump into the audience and grab her by the arms and beg her to give me my knife back, tell her I’m sorry, I’m sorry she had to see who I really am. I could call out to her right now in front of twenty thousand people.
I watch Angel. She watches me back. I feel suddenly like she understands me more than any person I have ever met.
She knows now. She knows that the smiles, the romance, the sparkly boy band dream – it’s all just fantasy. Fantasy and lies.
But I can’t do anything.
A hand on my shoulder steadies me. Rowan, playing his guitar without even having to think about it, has joined me on the lower platform. He widens his eyes at me, barely visible through the light reflected from his glasses, silently asking Are you okay?
I smile at him.
It makes the audience scream.
I open my mouth to start the final chorus.
‘it is true i wished to escape; and so i wish still; is not this lawful for all prisoners?’
– Joan of Arc
I expect Juliet to be there when I wake up, but she isn’t. She slept in the other spare room last night. I don’t even know whether Mac is here.
Maybe he escaped, back into his other life.
I don’t feel bad for him.
I think about Bliss and wonder where she is. Has she escaped to her other life too? Gone back to Rowan? Crossed the dimensional void into celebrity land?
I feel like I’ve wandered into the void – the empty no-man’s land between the fans and the celebrities – and now I don’t know how to get out.
I check my phone. It’s nearly half seven in the morning. Missed Fajr prayer and I don’t even want to get up so I can pray. That’s how I know I’m in a bad mood. I barely remember getting back here after the concert. I left before they came back on for the encore. Didn’t want to watch any more. It was just making me feel numb.
Like I was watching a puppet show where you can clearly see the hands.
I don’t know.
I’m just being dramatic probably.
Maybe by tomorrow I’ll feel a bit more normal about all this.
Maybe by the end of the week.
‘I’m sensing you’re not in such a good mood today, Angel.’
Juliet’s nan
wanders into the kitchen, dressed and ready for the day. How do old people always seem to be on top of things? Always up early, always doing chores and phoning people and generally living productive and positive lives. Maybe it just takes seventy years to get the hang of being alive.
I’m sitting at the table with a cup of tea in front of me, staring blankly at the fridge door. I smile weakly up at her. ‘Oh, no. Sorry.’
Dorothy sits down opposite me. ‘How was the concert, then? Did you all have a good time?’
I barely know what to say.
I force out a squeaky sort of ‘Yes’ and hope it sounds convincing.
‘When I was your age,’ says Dorothy, ‘I was big into the Beatles. They were huge in the sixties. Girls used to queue up for hours just to meet them, send them love letters in the post, threw their pants at them on stage, screaming like banshees at their concerts. Beatlemania they called it.’ She rests her arms on the table. ‘I’ll never forget what dear old John Lennon said: We’re more popular than Jesus now. They attacked him for that, I’ll tell you. But he was right. It was a religion.’
I listen on in silence.
‘It’s very easy to see why it happened. These Beatle boys – they were unthreatening. Their music was good and fun, yes, but they looked kind. They were attractive, but not in a scary, very masculine way that many young girls find intimidating. They had floppy hair and skinny frames, you know, that sort of thing. Which is very fashionable now, but wasn’t really back then. They gave these girls something very safe to love. Something that would never bite them back. In the sixties, everything would bite you back if you were a girl.’
I wonder whether that’s why I love The Ark. Because they’re safe.
But they’re not, are they?
They still managed to bite me back when I got too close.
‘It was absolute mayhem and nobody knew what to do about it. Especially the poor Beatles themselves. Did you know they just stopped touring in 1966? They just completely stopped because it was too much. The fame, the press, the girls. It was all too much.’
Dorothy sighs.
‘But they always blamed the girls. The media, I mean. They said the girls were hysterical because they were failures in other parts of their lives – they were single, childless, jobless. They kept harking on about their screaming. Oh, goodness me, those male media types, they couldn’t stand all the girls screaming.’ Dorothy chuckles. ‘Which is funny, really. They kept trying to put these girls down by saying how pathetic they were, but in reality the girls were more powerful than anybody.’
I don’t feel powerful. I think I’m the saddest and most pathetic person in the world.
‘One of the reasons they stopped touring,’ Dorothy continues, ‘is because the girls were screaming so loud that nobody could hear the band playing or singing. The screaming just drowned it out entirely.’
‘Were you part of Beatlemania?’ I ask her.
She chuckles and looks down at the table.
‘Well, that was a long time ago,’ she says.
I probably would have been able to sleep for a long time – maybe a full eight hours – if I hadn’t had to stay up until 4 a.m. for the post-tour after-party, and then wake up at 8 a.m., because we’re doing a chat show recording this morning.
I’m not at our apartment. I’m in a hotel room by myself. Somewhere close by the O2. I lay there for a full minute, staring up at the unfamiliar ceiling, trying to remember what I’d just been having a nightmare about, before recalling that it had been a dream about losing Grandad’s knife, and in actual fact that had also happened in real life, and I should probably just go back to sleep and never wake up ever again.
My phone buzzes on the bedside table. A text from Cecily telling me to wake up.
Today we sign our new contract.
I’m glad I’m not in my apartment, anyway. Not safe there. Anyone could come in and take a picture of me.
Here isn’t much better, though.
God.
I don’t want to do stuff like this any more.
Please.
I just want to stay in bed.
We never eat breakfast in hotels. Sometimes someone picks us up some food from somewhere, but we can’t eat in public places. Sometimes that means we just don’t eat.
By nine o’clock, we’re all in the car and on the road towards the TV studio, which isn’t technically that far away but driving through London is always a nightmare. Lister has a glass bottle of water in his hand and keeps holding it up to his forehead. Rowan keeps drifting off, his cheek pressed against the window. Outside, it’s raining.
Every time I remember about Grandad’s knife I get the strong urge to grab Lister’s glass bottle and smash it on the floor. Instead, I opt for digging my fingernails into my palm, which turns out to be a very bad idea when I remember that there’s a big cut in the middle of my hand.
Once Lister and Rowan are asleep, I slide up the shutter between our section of the car and the driver’s section. I take out my phone and dial Grandad’s number.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Grandad, it’s Jimmy.’
‘Jim-Bob! I didn’t expect you to call today. How are you doing?’
‘We’re in the car on the way to a TV thing … and then we’re signing our new contract.’
He chuckles. ‘Ah yes, the new contract. Are you excited?’
I wish I was.
‘Yeah,’ I say.
‘Did you have a good birthday yesterday?’ asks Grandad. ‘Did you do anything special? We’re going to have to celebrate the next time you come and visit your old grandad, you know!
‘Yeah …’ Oh yeah. It was my birthday yesterday. ‘Yeah, they … Lister and Rowan got me a cake and … everyone sang “Happy Birthday”.’
When am I going to get to visit Grandad next? Who knows when I’ll have my next day off? What if he dies before then? What if I’ve already seen him for the last time?
‘Lovely. I knew I could count on those boys to celebrate with you, even if you’re all very busy,’ says Grandad. ‘I’ve got your present all wrapped up on the kitchen table, ready for you to unwrap next time you’re down here.’
If I wasn’t in a car, I would run there right now.
‘I can’t wait,’ I whisper.
‘Everything else okay, boyo? Not feeling as down as you were on Tuesday?’
‘Grandad, I’ve—’
I start the sentence with the intention of telling him about his knife. But I can’t. I can’t admit that to him. Admit what a fucking useless, terrible, pathetic excuse for a grandson I am. I lost the one precious thing he gave me, the one thing I was going to keep for my entire life, just as he kept it for all of his. It was special. Important. And now it’s gone.
‘I’m feeling fine,’ I say, trying not to let my voice waver. ‘I’ve got to go now, though.’
‘Ah, very busy I see! Not to worry, lad. Give me a call at the weekend, won’t you?’
‘I will do. I love you.’
‘I love you too. Bye, now!’
‘Bye.’
I hang up and wipe my cheeks on my sleeve.
I get dressed, pack up my stuff and leave the house without saying goodbye.
Okay, I leave Dorothy a note saying thank you, but I say nothing to Juliet.
It’s not like we live near each other. It’s not like she’s going to talk to me online ever again. No use sticking around and making things awkward.
I’m not a big fan of facing things like this head on.
Would much rather just put it out of my mind and think about something else.
Friends come and go. Right? I’ve been through this already so many times before. Friends are good for a while, but eventually, you have to move on. ‘Best Friends Forever’ is an imaginary concept. No one can be friends forever.
Not with me, anyway.
Doesn’t matter.
It’s all good.
I’ve still got The Ark.
When I get home I
can watch some of the videos people took at the concert.
Yeah.
Good.
I’m excited.
I’m happy.
I’ve got something to look forward to.
I put The Ark on my iPod once I get on the tube. Jimmy’s voice in my ears, singing to me. But the lyrics don’t sound like they used to. They sound like a cry for help.
‘Hello?’
‘Hey, Dad, it’s me.’
‘Fereshteh! Oh good, I was hoping you’d call this morning. Your mother thought you were going to message us last night and obviously you didn’t so she barely slept and woke up so grumpy this morning—’
‘I’m coming home, Dad.’
There’s a pause.
‘Coming home? Really? I thought you were staying until Sunday!’
‘Yeah … I’m not now.’
‘Fereshteh … Did something happen, my girl?’
I sigh. ‘Er … yeah, sort of.’
‘Oh no. What—’
‘It’s fine, Dad. It’s not a big deal. I just want to come home now.’
‘Of course, of course. I’m working from home today so I can pick you up from the station any time.’
‘I don’t know what train I’m getting yet. I’ll call you from the station.’
‘Well, okay, then. Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?’
The way he says it makes me well up a little bit.
‘Not right now,’ I say.
‘Did you enjoy the concert at least?’
God, I didn’t. I didn’t. And it feels like my whole life has gone to waste.
‘Yeah,’ I say.
‘Do you …’ He pauses. ‘Do you want to talk to your mother?’
Mum. Is she still angry? She’s going to be smug when she finds out I had a horrible time this week. I knew it wouldn’t end well, she’ll say. That’ll teach you to care so much about a boy band.
‘Does she want to talk to me?’ I ask.
Dad sighs. ‘Of course she does.’
‘Well, I’ll talk to her when I get home, anyway.’
Dad sighs again. ‘Okay.’
The train doesn’t leave for another half an hour so I have some time to kill. I buy a cup of tea from Starbucks and sit down on a stool, facing out at the rest of the station. I’ve still got The Ark playing through my earphones. Their third album, Joan of Arc. It’s not really my favourite but maybe I just haven’t listened to it enough.