“Also it’s not quite that harsh the way I think we could do it,” Steve says. Taking a seat in his chair, he explains there will be three possible outcomes that the winner will have to draw from a hat. One of the outcomes is that the loser is banned from the farmhouse. With it simply being in there the stakes are high, but the chances were it wouldn’t happen. The second option is that the winner gets final veto on the films they watch from Steve’s dad’s collection, while the third option is that nothing at all happens. Nothing. Everything stays the same.
“Well, I’m definitely not going to lose, so I’m in,” Will says.
“Fighting talk,” Jen says. “Well, I don’t see how we can kick anyone out, really. So, yeah, I’ll say yes just to get on with my life.”
“You know, you have to hold us to it, Steve,” Will says. “No sympathy. Otherwise it’s pointless. If I lose and get banned, out is out. Banned is banned.”
Rupesh still looks like he’s agonising, like he really believes there will be a scenario where he, not anyone else, will get kicked out of the group. “I don’t have a choice, do I?” he says. “It’ll end in tears.”
“Brilliant,” Steve says, getting to his feet. “So, let’s all vote. Anyone that doesn’t want to do The Dedication, raise your hand?”
No one holds up their hand.
Content with the result, Steve brings out a bottle of his dad’s whisky.
“Now we’re talking,” Will says, and reaches up to get the bottle from Steve when he’s close enough.
“No,” Steve says. “Chopsticks first.” The hardness in Steve’s voice makes Will scowl.
Adeline holds out her hand, and as each person takes their chopstick they have a sip of the whisky. On this occasion, everyone partakes. When Rupesh removes the second-from-last piece, and it appears to be the shortest, he looks like he might start complaining. Only then Adeline draws hers, a shorter, stubbier thing, barely an inch long. Seeing it, Rupesh throws up his arms and starts singing “We Are the Champions.”
It’s dark outside, and they are all a bit drunk and deep into Ghostbusters.
From nothing Rupesh says: “Why’s it called The Dedication?”
It’s a good question, one Will’s not even considered—just another of those big words Steve and Adeline liked to chuck around to show off to each other. Funny word, too, Dedication. Brings to his mind a church full of people all singing hymns. Or marathon-types, legging it around even though no one is chasing them.
“To show your dedication to the group,” Steve says.
Makes sense. Total sense. The least “dedicated” is the one that loses. Actually, that is a point, another one he hasn’t considered. If the loser gets banned from Steve’s, then how—
“What about you then, Steve?” Will says. “You going to ban yourself if you lose?”
Jen and Rupesh both emit a little “oh” because, yeah, it is a good point. Steve just offers a laugh, fake and full of itself. “I’m not going lose.”
And it seems everyone is just fine with that. Just in case, Steve adds: “But if I do I’ll think of something.”
Will isn’t fine with it, and he’s surprised Rupesh hasn’t immediately started firing at this easy target. Nothing Steve could think of could match the punishment of losing the farmhouse. Pretty funny Steve’s nearly managed to get away with that one.
He’s about to say something else when Steve says to him: “So I’ve seen you and Strachan chatting a few times.”
Will’s not sure what this has to do with his point. But now he’s noticed Jen, lying with her head on Rupesh’s lap. He doesn’t know where to look, or on what to focus.
“You and him best mates now?” Steve says, not letting it drop. He sounds a bit annoyed. Probably because he hadn’t planned on anyone picking holes in his big summer plan.
“Nah,” Will says. “He asked where I was going the other day, and so I told him it was none of his business. Probably wanted to paedo me.”
“Will,” Jen says, disapproving. Adeline laughs and so does Steve.
“Just be careful round him,” Steve says. “I’m serious. He might be out to get us for last year.”
“I don’t think he cares any more,” Will says.
“No, he does,” Steve says. “Honestly, he does.”
Winter, 2015
Once we pushed our way downstairs, me in the grip of a dread drowning in wine, it became clear we couldn’t get much further than the entrance without a fight. Almost a hundred people were rammed into a room designed for half that number.
The first band, a post-rock outfit named All Lay Down Before Me You Extraordinary Apes, finished playing to lukewarm applause. The house sound hadn’t reached the end of the first song when an amplified voice filled the room:
“Hello, we’re The Geppetwo, three, four—” The band started to play.
They didn’t sound too bad, a bit thrashy and shouty and, well, snotty really—not a style I associated with Will Oswald. Monks had been right. I gestured for Steve to lean down, which he did, and I yelled, “Can you see him?”
He stood on his tiptoes and shook his head.
“I’m going in.” I managed to apologise my way through the dense crowd to the front of the stage. On my way, someone pushed by in the opposite direction, knocking me off balance. When I’d steadied myself, I spun around to reprimand him, but glimpsed only the back of the man’s chequered shirt and the side of his face before someone stepped into the space he’d left behind. For a moment I was convinced I’d seen Will rather than just some tall guy in a beanie, and my heartbeat quickened. I was relieved when I scanned the room and saw plenty of other Wills staring towards the stage—the place where the real Will would be.
This is rebel heeeeeeeeeell! This is rebel heeeeeeeeeell!
The tide of the crowd brought me out near the outward-facing PA speaker on the left of the stage, and the singer’s snarls jabbed at my eardrums.
This is rebel heeeeeeeeeell!
All three Geppettos wore rubber masks. The front man and guitarist, in skinny jeans and a bright orange vest, wore a Pinocchio mask and had the microphone jammed up beneath it, the cord trailing out of the neck hole. The bassist, the nearest Geppetto, bounced around pulling Nicky Wire shapes in a Goofy mask.
The drummer was a Cheshire Cat. It was impossible to tell if it was Will under there. My version of him was based only on the picture I’d built over the last few days: a composite of his younger self, a few glanced-at photos on social media from years before, and my imagination. This drummer could be Will—a Will with tattoos and thick arms and a forceful stage presence. I wouldn’t know unless the mask came off.
So I stayed at the front for the next twenty minutes until The Geppettos ended their final song, a two-minute blur introduced as “Your Last Friends.” The crowd applauded and called for more, but the guitarists left the stage—bloody masks still on. The drummer soaked up the adulation by coming to the front of the stage and pumping his fists. My gaze was drawn to his feet. Red Converse All Stars, a Will Oswald trademark.
The drummer threw his sticks in the crowd and walked off, vanishing behind a black stage divider.
The throng began to dissipate as the next band, another outfit requiring copious stage changes, provided a bar break. I turned to find Steve and couldn’t see him. When I looked back a bright rectangle had appeared in the darkness to the right of the stage into which the band had vanished. Someone had opened a fire door onto a patio, lit up by an outside wall light. Two band members I recognised as the bass player and the front man, now without masks, were carrying out their gear.
And the drummer? Perhaps he had opened the door in the first place, and now he was getting away.
I climbed up onto the stage and was almost at the fire door when I came to a stop. The drummer was sitting on the edge of the stage to my left, hidden behind the stage divider, Cheshire Cat mask still on.
“Will?”
The Cheshire Cat just stared, watching my approach. It had to be him.
I smiled, reached forward, then hesitated. There was going to be another Cheshire Cat under there. And another one under that. This was a dream. I was going to be in bed in London, the reunion yet to happen.
I grabbed the Cheshire Cat’s right ear and pulled. The mask came off without any resistance.
“My name’s not Will,” the drummer said.
He wasn’t Will either, nor was he another Cheshire Cat. A grey-haired man of about fifty looked back at me, old acne scars on his cheeks where unblemished skin should have been.
“But you can call me what you like,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said. “I thought you were a different person.”
“I am a different person,” he said.
I gave him a weak smile and went back to the fire door. Not wanting to be rude, I turned back and said, “You were good,” but the drummer had gone. I really was in fucking Wonderland.
Outside it was drizzling. The patio was part of a beer garden at the side of the pub. The bottom of a steep road finished right outside the garden’s front gate, accounting for the puzzling fact that having descended steps to get into the cellar, I was now back at road level. The singer and the bassist were packing guitar cases and amplifiers into the boot of an old Estate. I approached the singer.
When he noticed me, he flashed a gappy grin.
“I liked your set,” I said. The man’s grin widened. “You’ve not got a CD, do you?”
“Oh no, I’m sorry, we’re not really… We don’t record any more. I was going to say we aren’t a proper band.” He spoke with a soft Irish accent.
“We’re not,” the bassist said, and walked by, presumably to get more equipment.
“What I mean,” the front man said, “is that we used to gig and carry CDs, but now we just do this for fun. And basically all our old stuff’s online. I can give you an address if you want?”
“I actually looked you up before,” I said.
“Really?”
“Well, the thing is, I’m not sure, but my friend and I, who’s inside somewhere, we think we used to be friends with your drummer.”
“Danson?”
“Is he the Cheshire Cat?” I said.
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“No, not Danson. Our friend was a boy, well, a man, called Will. Will Oswald? He had blond hair and—”
“Oh right. Yeah, of course we know Will.” For the first time he stopped smiling.
“We were hoping he still played in the band.”
“Afraid not.”
The bassist emerged from the venue cradling a huge bass amp. He loaded it into the back of the car, slamming down the boot before going back for more.
“What made you think he was still playing with us?”
“Just something we heard from another friend. We’ve been having a little reunion of sorts and couldn’t get in touch with him.”
“Right. Have you not seen him in a while?”
“We haven’t actually.”
“Well, I don’t know if you knew but to be honest with you he wasn’t that well the last time we saw him.” He was avoiding eye contact now, and I could sense his discomfort.
The bassist reappeared with another load of gear, and I saw him shoot the singer a look.
“Sorry, what’s your name?” the singer said.
“Adeline,” I said.
He held out his hand. “I’m Gaz Geppetto. Do you want to stick around and I’ll catch you upstairs? I don’t know how much you want to know…”
“Would that be okay? We’d be grateful for anything you can tell us,” I said. Then added, “What do you drink?”
Steve was already in the upstairs bar waiting. We ordered a round, and sat at a table in the corner where Gaz joined us. He sipped his pint and said, “That’s my favourite bit of the gig. You know, it’s funny you turning up here. I was thinking of Will recently.” He grimaced and became intrigued by the patterns on the table top all of a sudden.
“I actually thought I saw him earlier until I saw how many other identical-looking men there were in the room,” I said.
“I did invite him to come to a show. So maybe. Man of mystery, that one.” He didn’t sound convinced.
“How did you meet him?” Steve asked. “We didn’t even know he played drums.”
“He just auditioned for us when we started up in… 2010. Up in York.”
“That where you still are?” I said.
“Yeah. We were all ex-uni there. He could do the job, you know, bang, bang, bang. And he was really good at coming up with stuff for the band image and that. The Geppettos was his idea. He loved that bloody Disney Pinocchio film, and he came up with the masks idea too. He wanted us all in Pinocchio masks, but Rudo, bass man, and me voted him down and just settled for general Disney masks. He was totally mad.” He took a sip of his beer. “But that was kind of the problem after a bit.”
“What do you mean?” Steve said.
“He was actually, like, mad. It started small and we tried ignoring it, right? Drinking, drugs, general fucking weirdness. Drummers are rare so you sort of find ways to make excuses for them in a way you wouldn’t with normal people. Rudo calls them Drummer Sins. They’re half the weight of a regular sin.”
“How bad was it?” Steve said.
“He was a just a bit obsessive at first. I don’t know. He got into the habit of not being happy with his count-ins. One-two-three, you know. He’d stop us every song, sometimes twenty, thirty times to get it right. The fucking count-in. We ended up doing them ourselves, like The Ramones. Really odd. Sort of killed the fun a bit. He got sick a lot too, always getting flu and ear infections, didn’t look after himself and kept missing practice. And we knew he liked to go wild, but then he starts turning up to practice off his face, forgetting all the bloody things we spent hours learning. In the morning and daytime we’re talking here. I mean, he was playing songs half speed because he was tripping his tits off talking about the drums being fucking marshmallows. And yeah, it was funny sometimes, all things considered, but you know, after a few years it was just out of control. He was talking a lot more bollocks; he was missing stuff all the time.”
“What sort of stuff was he saying?” I said.
“Oh, I can’t remember. We had an argument about whether George W. Bush was a fucking lizard once. It was stuff like that, Nessie’s an alien, abductions, conspiracy theories. Pretty relentless.”
Steve looked at me. Gaz took a massive gulp of his pint. I brought my own glass up, then stopped and brought it back to the table. I needed to slow down.
“Anyway, the whole thing came to a head because we had this BBC radio session booked, probably about three… no it can’t have been.” He stopped to do some arithmetic. “No, it was probably only two years ago, now I think about it. Feels like ages. We had a few festivals booked, and we were going down to promote it. Was a big deal for a little band like us. And we turned up in the van to pick him up and he just wasn’t there. We were going mental. Ended up missing the fucking session.
“In the end we got Danson in, a mate of my dad. Will wasn’t answering his phone or replying to emails or nothing. And we had a great time at the festivals with Danson, and he was looking for a new band. So when we finally caught up with Will like a month later we just said it wasn’t working and that we’d moved on.”
“How did he take it?” Steve said.
“It was amicable enough. I think he was expecting it. Thing is, we found out from one of his housemates later that he’d had a sort of episode in a supermarket the morning of that session, attacking people and yelling and all this. He hadn’t shown up because he’d been fucking sectioned.”
“Shit,” I said.
“Yeah. He was in a hospital for a good few weeks, and they knew him there, too. He’d been in and out, and we had no idea. I mean, we were mates for three years, you know, but never close enough to talk about his life or whatever. So we’d just got pissed off with him, which, looking back on it, was shitty of us. We didn
’t realise he was having, like, real mental health problems. Not that I think I could have done anything, all things considered.”
Gaz took a long gulp, which finished off his pint.
“Does Will still live around York, do you know?” Steve said.
“The last time I saw him was randomly in town, and he was living in like some sort of supported housing thing. He looked a bit thinner, a bit knackered. He asked if I wanted to buy his drum kit. Actually, I remember him saying he was thinking of going back to Birmingham.”
“When was this?” I said.
“Year and a half at least.”
“Did he say where in Birmingham?” Steve said.
“No, we only talked a minute. All things considered, I was happy he seemed to have some plans, but maybe I was trying to make myself feel better. Him being not too far away in Birmingham was why I pinged him an invite tonight, but he never got back to me. Was a bit hopeful of me really, it was an old number.”
Gaz went to great lengths to clarify that on the whole Will had been a top bloke, despite everything. I felt bad that we had brought it all back up.
“I don’t suppose you can remember the hospital where Will was placed, can you?” Steve said. By that point Gaz had finished up his pint and was looking ready to go.
“Yeah, it’s the mental health place near the big graveyard,” Gaz said. “Wallgrove, I think it’s called.”
Under the table, Steve bumped his foot against mine.
“Sorry, I’m dancing around what I want to say here,” Gaz said, his voice even softer than before. “The reason I reached out to him with an invite… The thing is, this might be bollocks, and this is real friend-of-friend stuff, but I don’t want to not tell you, just in case, right. Surprised me you asking after him tonight, if I’m honest.”
“What is it?” Steve said.
“Someone, not that long ago, actually. They said… they said Will was dead.”
Part II
Why’s it called The Dedication?
Winter, 2015
I regretted my third glass of wine on the drive home, but it had felt necessary once Gaz left us. Given how difficult it had been to find Will, the idea that he might have fucking died had a dreadful logic to it. The revelation accompanied us in the car, an unwanted passenger. I’d been just about ready to go to the police and tell them Will was a murderer.
The Killer You Know Page 14