by Alice Oseman
‘Are you still angry with me?’
‘I was never angry, my darling. Only scared.’
‘Why … were you scared?’
There’s a pause.
‘Because I felt that I suddenly didn’t know you,’ she says. Her voice is so quiet, or maybe the line is dodgy due to the rain. ‘Hearing you so angry, so determined to see this band … and not caring about your own achievements. I wondered whether you were growing up to be a girl who valued nothing about herself. Only a boy band.’
I realise then that I’m crying.
I’m just standing in the rain, sobbing.
‘I met The Ark,’ I say to her, choking on my own breath.
‘The band? Your band?’
‘Y-yeah …’
‘Was it … not good?’
The whoosh of the rain makes it hard to hear her.
‘It wasn’t … w-what I expected … I thought … it would make me happy to see them and meet them … but I just realised … that … there’s nothing happy or good in the world … nothing that is truly good or truly happy …’
I can’t speak any more after that because I’m just sobbing. I’m not even making any sense. I crouch down on the pavement.
‘I-I can’t– I don’t know wh-who I am without them.’ My free hand curls into a fist and I bring it up to my face. I want to punch myself. ‘My whole life is … is The Ark … b-but … I can’t believe in it any more … and now I have n-nothing good in the world …’
‘My girl …’ Mum whispers, and God I wish she were here, I wish she could hold me, cuddle me like she used to do when I tripped over as a toddler and scraped my knee.
‘Do you think it’s stupid?’ I say, my voice hoarse. ‘Do you think I’m a stupid teenage girl?’
She does. She must do.
‘No, Fereshteh,’ says Mum. ‘No. I think you are the girl with the deepest heart.’
I put my hand over my eyes.
‘I don’t have anything left to believe in,’ I say.
‘Allah is with you,’ she says, ‘and I am with you.’
And I want to explain that while both of those are true, or at least I hope they are, it’s not the same, and they can’t fill the hole that The Ark has left endless and vacant.
‘And you have yourself,’ she says. ‘Fereshteh. My—’
The call suddenly ends. I whip my phone from my ear and look at the screen, only to find that the signal bars have gone.
‘Hey, Angel.’
A voice makes me look up from the ground.
Metres away from me is none other than Bliss Lai. She’s wearing the same jeans as she was in on Wednesday, her sleek hair kept mostly dry by a huge umbrella.
‘Having a meltdown in the rain?’ she says, and grins at me. ‘How very relatable.’
‘How … why … what …’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I have that effect on people.’
She sits down on the pavement next to me, holding the umbrella over both of our heads.
‘So what’s up with you?’ she asks.
‘Having a crisis,’ I say.
‘Same,’ she says.
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘At home. Hadn’t been outside since Wednesday. The paparazzi have been loitering around my house.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘Thought it was time to come out of hiding,’ she says. ‘And sort out the mess that is my fucking life. Rowan messaged me saying you’d all be here.’ She chuckles. ‘Not that I replied to his message.’
‘Oh.’
‘And why are you here? Bit random. You’re not stalking Jimmy, are you? Because that would be weird and I thought you were cool.’
I open my mouth to try to explain, but close it again. Impossible. I just shake my head at her.
‘Cool,’ says Bliss, and we sit there, under the umbrella, while I get out the rest of my tears.
Grandad puts a property show on the TV as if watching a middle-aged man talk about house prices is going to calm anyone down. None of us are calm at all. Lister is pacing around the room, staring hard at the floor. Rowan has seated himself firmly in an armchair and has folded his arms. I sit down on the sofa and start fiddling with my collar.
How am I going to explain anything I’m thinking?
‘Now,’ says Grandad, ‘I’m going to go and make everyone a cup of tea. And you’re not allowed to start talking about anything that has happened until I get back. All right? I think the three of you just need a few minutes to sit and think.’
Rowan starts to protest but Grandad leaves before he can say a full sentence, so he just slumps back into the chair and taps his foot.
I can see the questions burning in his eyes. Why did I do this? Why do I want to leave The Ark? Do I hate him and Lister? How could I do this to them? What’s wrong with you? Don’t you enjoy the fame and money? Can’t you just put up with it for a bit longer?
They’re all questions I’ve already asked myself.
‘Can you please stop pacing,’ snaps Rowan in Lister’s direction after a couple of minutes.
Lister doesn’t even argue. He just stops and stands very still.
Then he says, ‘D’you remember Jimmy’s fourteenth birthday party?’
Both Rowan and I turn to look at him.
Lister nods, looking up at the ceiling. ‘It was just us three that year in here. Joan baked us that huge cake and we all had those little bottles of blue WKD, which Joan thought was just some kind of fruit squash. Not that we got drunk. We all pretended we were drunk but we really weren’t.’
Neither Rowan nor I speak.
‘And then,’ Lister continues, ‘we’d been planning to watch the Lord of the Rings films back to back, but instead we spent four hours in the garage coming up with our own electro version of “Happy Birthday”. And Joan and Piero came and watched and clapped.’ He grins suddenly, manically. ‘Oh, man. Jimmy, does Piero still have the old drum kit in the garage?’
He doesn’t wait for an answer from me, he just walks straight out the door and into the kitchen, calling for Grandad. ‘Hey, Piero, d’you still have my old drum kit, by any chance?’
Rowan leaps up, following him, spluttering some sort of protest.
I get up and follow them too, to find Grandad standing in the kitchen, perplexed, holding a teabag in one hand.
‘Oh yes,’ he says, ‘well, I didn’t really know what else to do with it, so it’s still there.’
‘Sick.’ Lister practically bounces down the hallway and swings the door to the garage open, Rowan and I following in silence now, baffled. Lister turns to look at us and gestures towards the garage. ‘Come on, lads. Band reunion tour starts here at Tiny Miscellaneous Village in the north Kent marshes.’
Rowan sighs, but the agitation in his voice has dissipated. ‘Lister … what the fuck are you doing?’
Lister doesn’t answer, so we follow him into the garage. He turns the light on and there it is, our original band set-up, the place we used to write music, rehearse and record all our first YouTube videos. A rusty old drum kit stands at the back, the stool ripped and faded. Two painfully plastic keyboards are propped up to one side, and there’s even our old spare acoustic guitar, complete with My Chemical Romance stickers and an engraving (by Lister) of a hand sticking its middle finger up.
Lister immediately skips over to the drum kit and sits down, rummaging around his feet until he finds the drumsticks. He taps on the drums tentatively, and I feel like I’ve gone back in time. I remember the sound. I’m fourteen again.
‘Come on!’ he says to the two of us. ‘Let’s jam.’
Rowan looks down at the old guitar. Compared to the top-of-the-range bass guitars he usually plays now, this thing looks like it was found in an alleyway. Nevertheless, he picks it up and sits down on a chair, strumming at it. We all wince upon hearing how out of tune it is, and without saying anything, Rowan starts tuning it, humming the correct notes to himself until the strings match him.
‘Jim,’
says Lister, looking at me now. He points at the two keyboards. ‘Plug those in!’
I hesitate for a moment, but then I wander over to the two keyboards. They’re each on their own stand, but one is slightly higher than the other. What I used to do was set each of them to play different sounds, then I’d play both of them during our songs. It created quite a cool effect, and I didn’t really know anything about Launchpads or MIDI controllers or sequencers or any software stuff, really. That came later.
I plug the keyboards in and switch them on. I’m surprised they even still work, being out here in the garage for over five years.
Lister starts playing a simple beat, nodding his head in time. I quickly realise he’s playing the version of ‘Happy Birthday’ we came up with all those years ago. Rowan raises his eyebrows but quickly catches on and starts playing the chords. They don’t sound quite as cool on an acoustic rather than an electric, but still, it’s not too bad.
I turn to the keys. I pick my two old favourite sounds, ‘Soft Electric Guitar’ and ‘Bass Synth’. The notes come to me seemingly out of nowhere. I hadn’t even realised I’d stored this silly song we made up in my brain.
‘It’s Jimmy’s birthday,’ I sing before I realise what I’m doing. I shoot my head up, embarrassed.
Lister is grinning widely. Rowan still has his eyebrows raised, but he’s smiling at me in the corner of his mouth, strumming away the chord sequence.
‘Erm,’ I say. ‘Am I going to have to sing “Happy Birthday” to myself?’
‘No, you are fucking not, Jimmy Kaga-Ricci,’ says Lister, and turns his drum beat into a run, and with a shout of ‘FIVE, SIX, SEVEN, EIGHT,’ we explode into music. We all start singing at once, remembering the stupid variation of ‘Happy Birthday’ we came up with.
‘It’s Jimmy’s birthday
The birthday man
It’s fourteen years
Since his life began’
And soon I’m pretty sure Lister is just making up a load of little drum runs in the middle, things he hadn’t been able to do before, and then he’s pointing at Rowan and Rowan’s making up a guitar solo on the spot, it sounding weird and out of place but somehow so good on the acoustic guitar, and then Lister is pointing at me with one drumstick and I’m just playing the keys, and Lister is shouting at the top of his lungs,
‘Happy birthday, Jim
Happy birthday, my guy
Love from Lister and Ro
Your best pals till we die’
And we all laugh at what a terrible rhythm the lyrics are and I forget everything that’s been happening and we just play together, like kids, in a garage, at a birthday party.
When we step out of the garage, God knows how long later, Grandad is sitting in the lounge, sipping a cup of tea.
Opposite him on the sofa is Angel. She is, for some reason, soaking wet, and has a towel wrapped round her.
And next to Angel is Bliss Lai.
Rowan’s expression drops from a warm smile to shock as he enters the room and sees Bliss.
‘What are you doing here?’ he says, almost choking on his words. ‘I mean, what – Why—’
‘You told me you were here,’ said Bliss, shrugging. ‘So I thought I’d join the party. You might wanna tell Cecily to notify the press that Jimmy’s safe, by the way. They all seem to think he’s having a Britney Spears-style breakdown.’
There’s a horrible silence.
‘Why haven’t you been –’ Rowan stops mid-sentence, swallowing.
Piero sighs. ‘Okay. Kids, why don’t we give Rowan and Bliss a bit of space for a few minutes, eh?’
Lister races out of the room before Piero finishes speaking. Jimmy shuffles nervously from foot to foot, before Rowan gives him a nod, and then he leaves. I glance at Bliss. The friendly, jokey smile I came to know earlier this week is completely absent. Instead, she looks like she’s just rolled up to a funeral.
I stand up and leave the room too.
Everyone apart from Jimmy has gone into the kitchen. He’s just leaning there against the hallway wall, empty-eyed and alone. He glances up at me when I appear.
‘Hey,’ he says.
‘Hey,’ I say.
‘Have you been crying?’ he asks.
‘Who hasn’t?’ I say.
‘Fair.’
‘Mm.’
I lean against the wall opposite him.
‘You know, you can go home any time,’ he says, trying to smile at me. ‘I’m not … I mean … I don’t want you to feel like you have to stay for me.’
He’s right. I should go soon.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I’ll go soon.’
‘Why are you here?’ Rowan’s voice. We can hear them clearly through the thin walls of the cottage and the open door.
‘We needed to talk, didn’t we?’ says Bliss. She sounds resigned.
‘But why now? Why avoid me all week and then turn up now?’
‘I needed some time to think.’
‘Well, thanks for leaving me to deal with it by myself,’ Rowan snaps.
‘I was dealing with it by myself as well.’
‘You didn’t have to. We could have dealt with it together.’
‘No, we couldn’t,’ says Bliss. There’s a pause. ‘No, we couldn’t. We can’t do anything good together any more, Rowan.’
I watch Jimmy’s expression. At Bliss’s words, Jimmy’s eyes widen, and he starts pulling on his collar.
‘You’re right,’ says Rowan after a moment. ‘Ha. You’re actually right. We just snap at each other all the time.’
There’s a longer pause this time.
‘You know I love you,’ says Bliss. ‘I care about you a lot.’
‘Yeah,’ says Rowan.
‘But it’s not … a romantic sort of feeling any more.’
‘Oh.’
‘And … I think … you being in The Ark … the fame and the fans and the paparazzi … it’s not the life I want.’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s all I wanted to say.’
There’s a sniffing sound. Someone’s crying. I can’t tell who.
‘You were the only person apart from Jimmy and Lister who saw me as normal,’ says Rowan. Oh. It’s him. ‘I want to make it work.’
‘You know that’s not a good foundation for a relationship. And you know we can’t.’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I know.’ Rowan sniffs again. ‘Sorry. Sorry for everything.’
‘There’s nothing to be sorry about,’ says Bliss. ‘I had a fucking blast, mate.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. Got to hang around with you and your crazy life for all this time, didn’t I? But I can’t do this forever. I want to be more than this. I am more than this.’
‘You are. You always were.’
Little more is said. After a few moments Jimmy nods a little to himself and wanders into the kitchen, leaving me alone in the corridor.
I am about to join him when my phone suddenly rings. I scramble to pick it up, not bothering to look at who’s calling. It must be Mum.
‘Hello?’
‘Angel? It’s Juliet. I’m at Rochester station.’
‘What … why are you here?’ says Angel from the corridor, which strikes me as odd, because who would she be asking that to?
I head back out to see what she’s doing, only to find her on the phone, with a look of mild fear on her face. A parent, maybe? Surely her parents must be wondering where she is by now.
There’s a long pause while the person on the other end speaks.
‘I’m fine, I’m – I’m still with Jimmy,’ Angel stammers.
There’s another long pause.
‘No … no, I don’t think that’s a good idea … there are lots of people here already, everything’s a bit … everything’s a bit messy …’
A short pause. Angel grimaces.
‘No, don’t do that,’ she says.
Who the hell is she talking to? It doesn’t sound like she’s talking to an adult.
<
br /> ‘No, wait, hang on, I—’ Angel swallows. ‘Fine. Fine. I’ll ask the address. I’ll message it to you.’
The person she’s talking to appears to hang up very quickly, because Angel listens for a moment, then removes the phone from her ear and looks at it in confusion.
‘Who was that?’ I ask out of sheer curiosity.
‘Er … that was my friend Juliet,’ says Angel. There’s a pause before she elaborates. ‘I was staying with her in London when … when I came to meet you. She’s come to Rochester to find me.’ Angel looks up at me. ‘Would it be all right if she came here?’
Juliet. I don’t know anything about Juliet. Never even heard of her. Is she a fan of The Ark? If I gave her our address, would she spread it around? Why does she want to come here anyway? Does she just want to meet us? Take pictures?
‘If not,’ continues Angel, nervously, ‘I … I’d better go and meet her at the station. She’s already there. In Rochester.’
I don’t want Angel to leave. Not while things are like this. She’s literally the only one who understands my side of the argument.
‘I swear to you she-she’d never share the address. She won’t be weird. She just wants to see me. She doesn’t even know Rowan and Lister are here.’
The weird thing is, I actually trust Angel.
I trust everything she says.
‘Okay,’ I say, and then tell her the address.
It’s nearing two o’clock by the time Juliet gets here. I wouldn’t have let her come, but she threatened to call the police and accuse Jimmy of kidnapping me. Not sure how that would have stood up in a court of law, but she sounded serious so I gave her the address.
I open the door to her, having been watching and waiting out of the living room window. She puts up her umbrella as she steps out of the taxi, though she already looks relatively dishevelled – her hair is damp, and she’s just wearing a hoodie and jeans.
If she’d come here for Jimmy, she would have dressed up more. Wouldn’t she? I don’t know.
Do I even know Juliet that well?
‘Hi,’ I say.
‘Hi,’ she says, approaching the door, and there’s a slightly awkward moment where I wonder whether we’re going to hug, but she doesn’t offer, and neither do I, so I just step back and let her step inside. She shakes her umbrella before shutting the door behind her. ‘You’re safe, then?’