by Anna Martin
“Stan needs me right now. I know you guys do too, and you’re my brothers, seriously, and I love you. But he’s….”
“I know.” Tone threw his arm around Ben’s shoulders and squeezed him hard. “Let’s do this gig tonight, fucking rock the place, then tomorrow we get to figure out what happens next. Okay?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
The tension between them still dominated the sound check—Ben could feel Summer’s eyes burning into his back as he rolled out the antique rug that always denoted his playing area on the left side of the stage. It was a tradition now. He liked the way it felt under his feet, rather than the hard wooden boards. And it looked cool.
Sound check through the first half of the set was a chore, as it always was in a new venue as they worked out levels and what worked with the acoustics of the room. A moment, about ten minutes in, with roadies and noise boys and techs running around was when it clicked for Ben. This was about being a musician. Being a professional, rather than a guy who played a couple of songs in the back room of a pub with his mates.
The people at the venue—those techs and roadies—were doing their job to make him look good, make the whole lot of them sound good. They’d got back from what was supposed to be a short tour supporting a more famous band, and come out of it with the biggest gig of their lives. This was the time for working.
If his heart was elsewhere, then, well, Tone was right. Stan was okay for now. He was where he needed to be.
By the time they were working through the second half of the set, Ben felt a strange combination of stress and comfort zinging through his veins. He knew this. Sound checking had been a regular thing setting up for the gig for each night of the tour. Normally their slot was after the headline act had had their chance to set up, so Ares was left with a few scrambled minutes in which to make sure the levels were right before they got booted offstage.
Now they were running the entire set, and people were taking them seriously, as artists, not just a bunch of mates pissing about. They had time to play through each song, to make sure it sounded good in the echoing space of the Academy.
“Do we have time to run ‘Out of Here’ again?” Summer asked as they finally finished up the last number in the set.
Ben groaned and ran his hands over his face, then pulled his guitar off and handed it to one of the sound-tech guys.
“You lot can if you want,” he muttered. “I’ve got a headache. I’m going to go have a smoke and sleep before tonight.”
Summer went to protest, but Tone said something under his breath that Ben didn’t catch as he walked off the stage, out of the glare of the lights.
Technically, they weren’t supposed to smoke backstage, but the dressing room smelled like weed, and Ben guessed he wasn’t the first one to light up back here. He could hear the others arguing, the sound tinny over the relay, and he decided to ignore them. The gig would be fine, and they could spend hours rehearsing songs they could all play with their eyes shut and one hand tied behind their backs.
A battered sofa slumped in one corner of the dressing room under a large window. The glass was pebbled, like the windows sometimes used in bathrooms. Ben pushed open the window, then dug into his backpack for the weed he’d got off Tone earlier in the day.
He skinned up quickly, and as the first drag on the joint hit his lungs, Ben felt himself starting to relax, just a little bit.
The others were still bitching on stage, so he guessed he wasn’t going to be interrupted. There was something to be said for being home, even if he was actually pretty desperate to rewind the clock a few weeks and be back in Manchester, when things were amazing, so he could beg Stan to stay with them on tour and not go back to London on his own.
This city was home now, more than Auckland, definitely more than Oxford. This little corner of the world was his, where he fit in, with people who looked like he did and liked the same music and whose thoughts ran in similar directions.
Ben exhaled heavily, knowing the weed was making him philosophical. His headache had eased a little, but he was still bone-tired, unable to rest, the knots of tension coiled around his spine not allowing anything more than a few minutes sleep at a time.
The sofa stank, when Ben put his head down on the arm, so he pulled his hoodie off and balled it into a pillow, trusting that Tone would come and get him when it was time to move. It was fucking uncomfortable, being curled up like this, and he wouldn’t rest. Not really. Not while so much was still up in the air.
Still.
Ben bounced a few times on the balls of his feet, shaking his hands as the lights on stage went down and the noise from the crowd rose into a roar. The tickets for the show had only been a couple of quid on the door, and it seemed the London audiences had caught the buzz from social media and turned up in numbers big enough to pack the venue.
This was undoubtedly the biggest crowd they’d played to yet, and it was their gig. Not a support act this time. He didn’t have anywhere to hide.
Someone passed Ben a mic, and he nodded his thanks, waited from the signal from the tech that the mic was live before growling into it.
“Ladies and gentlemen… put your fucking hands together and give this bunch of wankers one hell of a welcome home…. It’s Ares.”
Tone led the way onto the stage, sprinting onto the riser that held his drum kit and smashing at it a few times as the audience screamed. The others all fell into position, and Jez picked up a low reverb on his guitar while Summer plinked a few random keys.
They had this down now, the opening to the show where Ben swaggered out, picked up his guitar, and threw the strap over his shoulder before Tone tapped out the four-four rhythm and they launched into the first song.
This was one they’d written while on the road out of sheer boredom. It had been one of those strange situations where everything seemed to collide at the right moment—the beat and the bass led the song through the first verse, but the melody of the chorus made it good. Better than good. Ben had been humming a note progression for days, and it had come to a head when they were on the bus travelling between Manchester and Glasgow.
He’d been sitting on his bunk, picking out the tune on his acoustic when Tone had found the rhythm, tapping it out on one of the amps. In the three hour journey, they wrote the whole song, lyrics and all, sound-checked it that afternoon, and debuted the song in Glasgow that night.
It had been reworked and polished a bit since then, but Ben couldn’t help but think Ares had really come together with “Out of Here.”
“Are you ready for this, London?” Ben screamed into the mic before taking the lead on the vocals. “Don’t know where you came from, don’t matter where you been. All I know is, we’re gonna get out of here.”
The next song in the set was “London,” which made perfect sense, even though the two songs had never been intended to sit side by side. “Out of Here” was about escaping from your home town for the bright lights of a city, and “London” was the band’s tribute to the place that had become home, though the story was more about a hooker and a bar.
This crowd was completely on their side, and Ben was still baffled that they had managed to gather some kind of underground following, thanks to a few dodgy recordings of their gigs that had been posted on YouTube and social media. That was pretty much what it all came down to. People talking, someone saying they liked a song, downloading it illegally. Ben didn’t even care. From that buzz alone they’d built up this small knot of fans, a following that was enthusiastic enough to get the Brixton Academy packed out for a homecoming gig. This was nothing like the nights they’d played at the back of the pub, a small thing now, thinking back on it, even though it had been epic at the time. They had changed over the course of the tour, all of them, and Ares too.
Just after eleven the band got off stage, finishing, as always, with their double-time version of “Teenage Kicks.”
“Do you like the Undertones?” Jez asked the crowd, waiting for their resou
nding roar before continuing. “Then you’re going to be really fucking disappointed because we’re about to murder a classic.”
Before their audience had chance to laugh, they launched into the song; this call and response had been perfected in the gigs that had come before. Despite the energy that was always blasted at them from the crowd during this song, for the past few weeks Ben had found it almost impossible to find the energy to go wild, to give it the screaming, raw energy the Undertones deserved. Tonight, though, he drove the song into a new pace, letting every one of his senses take him higher and higher until he was aware of the sweat on his face, the ache in his fingertips, the hoarseness at the back of his throat. The heat, the noise, the soreness in his retinas caused by the bright stage lights. One of his socks was twisted in his boot and it was uncomfortable. All of it.
As soon as he got backstage, Ben crashed.
The others were still buzzing, not that Ben blamed them. It had been the best gig they’d ever played by a long shot, giving their hometown audience something truly special. Who knew when they’d get a gig again, especially one of this size, and they’d done it justice. He’d done it.
Instead of going out with the band to celebrate, Ben went home, to the flat he’d shared with Stan for only a few weeks before it all went to shit. He’d only slept for twenty minutes or so after the sound check before Tone had dragged him out to get food, and Ben had reluctantly admitted he needed to eat.
He walked around while time slipped away from him. The overwhelming feeling of helplessness was only getting stronger, and he had absolutely no idea how to handle that. He ended up in the bathroom, his back to the bath and his face in his hands.
Half a second later, he shuddered as the breath was stolen from his lungs, and he gasped again, his back seizing with the next convulsion.
In the back of his mind, he recognised this as a panic attack, even as black spots danced at the edges of his vision. His heart hammered in his chest, and his fingertips went numb, then surged back to life with throbbing pins and needles.
Ben stuck his head between his knees, not sure if this would do anything but needing to do something. He clutched at the fabric of his jeans. Fought for the next breath, then the next one. Fuck, this hurt.
He looked up and his eyes fixed on a black lipstick case. Stan’s lipstick.
Blinking the tears from his eyes, Ben pushed through the next heaving breath. Then the next one.
His chest still ached, so did his throat, but it was easing. As he finally caught his breath, Ben gave way to the tears he’d been holding back for so long. He finally understood why people said crying was cathartic. All the emotions he wasn’t ready to feel pushed up to the surface, and he was forced to feel them all at once, and the only reasonable way to get rid of them was to cry it out.
After a while, feeling pathetic and sorry for himself, Ben stood and turned the tap on, letting the cold water run over his hands, then washed his face.
Even though all he wanted was to go back to the hospital and sleep in one of the awful visitors’ chairs next to Stan’s bed, he didn’t want Stan to see a broken man in place of his boyfriend. No, to be strong for the person he loved, Ben had to be strong himself, and trying to stand up and be there for Stan meant sleeping, eating, showering.
Ben winced and sniffed his T-shirt. It was rank.
He stripped it off and tossed it into the laundry basket. He brushed his teeth, then went to the bedroom and pulled clean clothes out to sleep in. The bed smelled familiar, another sign of home, and despite the absolute terror still clutching his heart, Ben crawled between the sheets and slipped into sleep as easy as a knife in butter.
The intensive care ward had been a terrifying place. Stan hadn’t been awake for a lot of it, but he could remember that. Something about the lights, the constant noise of machines humming and beeping around him, the stale smell of bodies, the harsh sting of antiseptic made it all so disconcerting. Something about that ward made him feel like he could die at any moment.
That wasn’t necessarily an exaggeration.
The eating disorders ward had some fancy title, named after some guy who had donated a load of money to the hospital, according to Leslie. It didn’t make the place any nicer, but after almost a week in the intensive care ward, he took what he could get.
Leslie had told him Ben had visited and he’d snapped at her that she should have woken him. Then he’d felt bad, and apologised, and decided he didn’t want to see Ben after all. Or, more accurately, he didn’t want Ben to see him.
The door to his room on this ward wasn’t solid; instead it was dominated by a large window. Anyone could walk past and see into his space, which wasn’t exactly helping with Stan’s anxiety. It meant, though, that he could see when Leslie stepped up and knocked lightly on the glass.
He nodded, and she pushed the door open far enough to stick her head around.
“Ben’s here,” she said softly.
“Leslie.” It was a plea. Don’t make me make a decision.
Ben made it for him, gently pushing his way around Leslie and into the room.
“Hey,” Stan said. He ached all over, but seeing Ben made another ache pang deep in his chest. Ben didn’t deserve this. No one did.
“Hi.”
“I’ll come back in about half an hour to do your feed,” Leslie said, then shut the door behind herself as she left.
Ben hovered for a moment, then his shoulders sagged and Stan felt the sickening, hot rush of guilt. He chewed at his lip and blinked back tears, wanting nothing more than to pull Ben into his arms and whisper apologies until everything was right again.
“Are you going to leave me?” Stan asked as Ben hovered close to the door. “If you are, go now. I don’t need an explanation. Just go.”
“I’m not leaving you,” Ben said, his eyes wide, horrified. “Jesus, Stan.”
“You want to stay?” Stan said. His voice was scratchy, his throat sore from the NG tube. “With me like this?”
“I’m not leaving you,” he said again. This seemed to prompt him into action and he grabbed one of the hard plastic chairs next to the bed and slumped into it. After a second, he reached for Stan’s hand.
“You could have called me,” he continued. “Any time, Stan. I would have come home if I knew you needed me.”
Stan shook his head and let Ben thread their fingers together. “Not now, Ben.”
“Huh?”
“Not now.”
Stan tipped his head back, and Ben brushed his lips over his knuckles, and for a while, they sat in silence. Together.
Over the next few days, Ben traded off visiting hours with Kirsty as they took turns to come see him in-between his long periods of sleeping and seemingly infinite meetings with doctors and therapists. Kirsty was a wreck.
“I’m so sorry, Stan,” she said for what felt like the hundredth time.
He didn’t want to be too hard on her; every night this week she’d raced from the office to the hospital to be able to sit with him for an hour. It meant she’d travelled in the wrong direction and it would take her another hour to get home. She looked as wrecked as Ben and had taken to wearing her awful, old-lady, lumpy cardigans again. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. If only he had the strength for that.
“Don’t be.” Her pale green eyes filled with tears again and he gave her a stern look. “Stop it.”
“I should have—“
“Stop it,” he told her again. “I am serious, Kirsty.”
“I’m sorry.”
He let out a breathless laugh. “Distract me,” he told her, stretching his arms up until his IV line pulled and his spine popped. “Tell me all the horrible things people are saying about each other at work.”
He hadn’t ever needed to ask her for that twice. She still hesitated for a moment before launching into a scathing review of what someone had said about someone else’s choice in footwear, and Stan let the familiar rise and fall of her v
oice soothe him.
A black bunny rabbit was sitting on the cabinet next to his bed when Stan returned from his therapy session, and a man hunched in the chair under the window. Tone looked fairly content to wait as Leslie helped Stan out of the wheelchair and hooked him back up to the monitor by his bedside.
“I’ll come back in a bit,” she said, looking over at Tone, then backing out of the room.
“Thank you,” Stan murmured. He wasn’t sure if she heard him or not.
“Alright, Stan?” Tone asked, his voice light.
“Tone,” Stan said and shook his head, the action pulling at the tubes that had been inserted into his nose. “Go home. Please. I do not want you to see me like this.”
He reached out and snagged Hades the bunny, then brought it up to his nose. The toy smelled like Ben, like his cologne and the stuff he put on his hair, and Stan’s heart ached.
“No offense, mate, but you’ve got no chance,” he said in his gentle burr. “I’m a bit pissed off that you didn’t call me before now, to be honest.”
Stan turned away and sniffed.
Tone was quiet for a few minutes as the beeps and whirrs of the machines, and the constant, quiet hum of the hospital filled the space between them. Stan’s fingers twitched and threaded between Tone’s in a quiet gesture of solidarity.
“I want to tell you about Kat,” Tone said.
Stan turned to him and frowned. “You have a cat?”
Tone grinned and rubbed at his beard. “No. Kat was my girlfriend, when I lived in Bristol.”
“Okay.”
“She was… she was something else,” Tone said with a warm smile, leaning back in his chair and releasing Stan’s hand. He rubbed at his scruffy beard, and Stan noticed for the first time the few silvery threads among the darker hairs. Tone’s age was almost completely unguessable—he could be anywhere between twenty-five and forty-five years old. “Gorgeous. She had dark hair but she used to dye it loads of different colours. I liked it best when she went red. It suited her somehow.”