by James Eddy
He was clever and ballsy and I guess the two of us spent most of our time competing for his attention. Looking back, it's weird to recognise that he'd never even attempted to play us off against each other. He was far too good for that.
He’d looked after both of us. Neal and me grew up together, so I knew how his parents had treated him; successfully showing exactly how vicious people can be. Ripping him apart piece by piece and then kicking him out of the house when he was seventeen. That was when Dan found him and took him in. Somehow, he'd taken me in too and, for a while, we were the kind of family Neal had never really known.
My problem was that I'd always been aware of the big difference between both of them and me. When we were all together, I felt like a tourist. I always knew I could go home. Neal never had that option. When it was just him and me or me and Dan, it was okay. But when the three of us were together I felt like I had something more to prove. I think that's why I'd avoided meeting up with both of them for such a long time. When Dan had died, I knew it could never happen again and I regretted being so stupid.
Spotting Neal through the pouring rain in the graveyard on the morning of the funeral, I could see he looked lost. I slowly walked to him, not understanding that he was unravelling. I could only think he was suffering in the same way I was. The weight of feelings and soaked clothing was holding me down that day. Misery dripped from my face and hair, joining the diamond cascade of rain and tears. Perhaps that was what blinded me, or perhaps the water distorted everything enough to make the rain a shelter from the truth. More likely, it was just that my mind was too fixed on my own need to escape to notice.
By running away from my own history and guilt, I had found myself far away from Alveston and from home. I'd known Neal wouldn't turn me away. In fact, that was one of the few things I felt completely sure about then. I dug his address out from somewhere in the back of my mind and went to his house.
He was alone. And I could finally see how much my oldest friend had changed. Three days had passed since the funeral and he was still dressed in the same clothes. His suit was crumpled although it looked dry, so I’d assumed he'd slept in it. That was until I saw his eyes. The coarse stubble on his face accentuated their sunkenness but could do nothing to hide his exhaustion. Worse than that though was the haunted look I saw there that I couldn't quite understand.
After showing me into his living room, he lay down on the floor to look up at the cracks in the ceiling. His pupils darted with surprising swiftness, back and forth, in search of nothing. It would've been easy to assume he'd been drinking, except I couldn't smell any alcohol on his breath. Somehow I knew the time for assumptions had passed.
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
It was then that he told me about his return from the funeral.
“It was pitch black when I came back,” he said, still looking at the ceiling, “Everything was off in here and Marie was gone.”
I had no idea who he was talking about but he went on:
“I looked for her… In here but I couldn’t think. I don’t know where else she could be.”
I wanted to understand and to help. He was upset, so I asked him to tell me the whole story and see if we could work it out together. He sat up and started talking.
Before he'd even finished telling his story, I'd realised that the most obvious starting point in looking for Marie would be at her father’s bar. But for some reason, Neal wasn't keen on going there. At the time, I couldn't understand why that was. He gave no explanation but I realise now that the truth may have been dawning on him.
I managed to drag him to the tube station. It was the middle of a Thursday afternoon, which isn't the worst time to be heading into Central London. We even managed to find a couple of seats in our carriage. By that point though, it wouldn't have made much difference if it had been busy. Neal looked so terrible that everyone was keeping their distance from us.
It didn't take long to get to Mile End. I pulled my unfortunate friend onto his feet and led him out of the train. We walked out of the station just like he'd described in his story and we found 'Eldorado'.
The whole building was boarded up. There was something wrong and I could already tell it was far worse than I wanted to imagine. The bar looked like it'd been deserted for years.
“Is this really the place?”
I knew there could be no good answer.
“This is it,” he sighed.
“Can you see what I can see?”
“Yes,” he said.
He looked at me and the years rolled away.
“Help me Scotty.”
He was far more broken than either of us could possibly have known.
So that he could escape the world of his youth, Neal had created his own. As a teenager, he used to go to a rubbish dump and sit amongst the rusty, broken shells of cars. In his mind, it had been a magical kingdom. He had ruled over it all and every day he'd gone there and stayed until the darkness of the night took over. That was the only reality he had wanted to believe in until he escaped his parents' toxic influence.
Dan had offered some sort of alternative and he'd embraced it and understood reality for a while. It all came crashing down. The day he'd lost his job was the day he first saw Marie. Her disappearance, after the shock of Dan’s death, had given him a way back to the real world.
I did my best to get him help and he spent a while shut away in a little room. I visited him quite a lot there and he always made a point of thanking me. There wasn't any need. He gave me an audience for my first songs. More than once, he was even good enough to tell me when they were a waste of time.
One song I wrote but never played to him was about Marie and what I decided had happened to her. In it, Salvatore had murdered her and that was why she hadn't been able to get back to Neal. Juan Orellana had taken revenge by killing him, and, in that way, had fulfilled his own destiny. But that wasn't the end for him. He had to settle into a life of increasing sadness. Standing, waiting and diminishing each night at the empty bar; as he waited for some other destiny to be revealed to him. And then, one day Gonzalo walked into 'Eldorado' with two babies in his arms. They were Juan’s grandchildren and were named Marie and Neal. It remains a song that I'll never release. That's mainly because it doesn’t seem right but it's also because it isn’t all that good.
But then, that's not what really matters anyway. Neal seems to be much better now. The last time I saw him was a month or two back. I was walking along, heading to a soundcheck, when I saw him on the other side of the road. He didn't see me because he was about to get into a cab but I thought he looked as happy as I'd ever seen him; holding the hand of a pretty, dark haired woman, whose hair shone in the sun. I saw them both get into the taxi and watched it speed off as I went strolling on.
Heart over Head over Heels
Standing between the bar and the stage, Rebecca felt her stomach turn over on itself. She wasn't sure if it was worry or excitement, although the excitement in the room was certainly hard to ignore. She heard a shrill cheer from the barrier nearest the stage, and, she was bumped by people running for a closer look. Her breathing quickened at this and the sight of the band. At that moment though, she knew it wasn’t only music on her mind. Her eyes found him, appearing from out of the shadows into the spotlight on the left side of the stage. She was about twenty metres away when the light shone down on him. From there, she thought his bedraggled mess of hair looked like a halo.
He looked a lot like she remembered. Five years had hardly aged him and that was a relief and a surprise. There were so many stories about his self-destructive behaviour that she'd sometimes wondered if the man she'd known still existed. She rarely wondered for long though. There was always something in a memory or a lyric that convinced her he was more than he was made out to be. That's why she was at the gig that night. Too much time had passed. She missed him and that was all that mattered.
That was also why her evening wasn't well planned. By following her heart
, she hadn't worked out how she would actually get to meet up with him. All she could do was watch him almost spinning out of control on stage. The music constantly on a knife-edge; like it was about to fall off at any moment but always pulling back just in time. Whispers, sighs and screams sitting next to pretty sounds ripped from a battered black guitar. She found it as heart-stopping as ever.
Rebecca obviously knew he liked a drink but this was different to what she remembered. Even at his lowest, when Scott drank to forget, he always remembered to take some pleasure in it. That wasn't what she saw that night. It looked more like he'd forgotten what pleasure was. She only hoped that wouldn't be permanent.
And then, the music came crashing to a sudden halt and the room went dark. A solitary spotlight shone down onto Scott. He walked to the microphone one last time. He spoke and she listened. Noticing that despite spending half his life trying to hide it, the East Anglia of his childhood was still there in the odd word.
“Thanks very much for coming to see us. I hope I get to see you all again soon.”
There was a half-formed smile that accompanied his words, followed by a turn and return to the shadows. Rebecca knew she had to get backstage.
Her heart won over her head again. No planning. She'd just wing it. After all, she did know him and she'd followed his career