by Julia Gray
‘Lucky old Ben!’ Rebecca said, decanting the cakes into large Tupperware boxes. ‘You’re a really thoughtful friend, Hobie.’
I licked a stray smear of icing from my wrist. I couldn’t imagine being away from home on my birthday. The festivities begin in the morning with celebratory Skype chats with my aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents. I get to eat and wear and do whatever I want all day if it’s the weekend, and if I have school then I bring in loads of Hummingbird cupcakes or something made by Clothilde and make sure that I do no work at all. And I can choose where we go for dinner and maybe we’ll go to a play or a musical if it isn’t something really tedious. And I get loads and loads of presents. The only crap part is writing thank-you notes on headed paper, which need to be sent off within, like, five minutes of me opening all my loot.
‘Do you think Ben’s parents don’t love him?’ asked Zara, her eyes all big like an owl’s. She was thinking, like I was, that the phone hadn’t rung yet. And no cards arrived in the post yesterday or anything like that.
‘Of course they do!’ said Rebecca cheerfully. ‘Now, my love,’ she said to Zara, ‘I’d like you to have a bowl of porridge for breakfast. Why don’t I come and sit with you and we can read Anne of Green Gables at the same time?’
Jason and I both looked after them rather mournfully as they crossed the courtyard and went back into the house.
When Ben came downstairs Mum and Dad made a huge fuss of him and gave him a dark grey cashmere jumper from Paul Smith and a Collected Works of Shakespeare. The tag said From Ike and Elsie and Zara and Hobie xxx but actually I hadn’t chosen any of it, although I suppose some Shakespeare is all right.
‘Happy birthday,’ I said. He ate half a muffin, looking like his birthday meant absolutely nothing to him. Maybe they don’t celebrate them in the Otherlife. Then I gave him the Amazon tube (I hadn’t wrapped it or anything gay like that) and when he pulled out the poster and unrolled it he must’ve been pleased, because he went purple and muttered that it was a really good choice.
‘Why is that man wearing such weird clothes?’ asked Zara suspiciously. ‘And why does it say RIP at the bottom?’
‘Because he died in 1986,’ Ben explained. ‘Cliff Burton was the original bassist in Metallica. He was a classically trained musician. You can really hear his influence, especially on the second and third Metallica albums.’
It was the longest speech anyone (apart from me) had heard from Ben. We all sat in respectful silence, eating our breakfasts.
Later on, we were sitting through the first segment of the day’s planned timetable (a rather monotonous review of Shape, Space and Area) when we heard the familiar sound of car wheels grinding on the gravel. I thought it was probably a delivery van with a sculpture from some Italian workshop or yet another Ocado order. We turned our heads as footsteps crunch-crunched over towards us, and just before she knocked on the dining room window we saw who it was.
Ben’s mother.
‘Did you know she was coming, brúðr?’ I hissed as Ben slid out of his chair. He slipped out of the room, not even bothering to put his shoes back on.
Jason drew a neat line through the session on his timetable and said he hoped we’d be able to stay on task for the rest of the day, as there was still a lot to get through.
*NB I was quite pleased that I managed to remember the Norse for brother. Unfortunately, when I looked it up later on, I realised that I’d confused the correct word – bróðir – with the word for bride. But at least I tried.
BEN
I only have three pills left. Nine corners in all. I will splinter them into cut-glass shards, roll them under my tongue. And it won’t be enough. It will never, never be enough. I know I promised Solly – that I’m going to stop, that I won’t start again, that I won’t take them, if I find them lying around the house – but I can’t believe I’ve only brought three.
But at least I’m at Download.
This morning I woke up in the White Campsite, unzipped the flap of our tent and peered outside. The festival was sleeping. Low snores carried on the chill wind. A few stragglers were staggering back from the giant toilet huts. Beer cans rolled on trampled grass.
Freedom.
We got a lift with Jake and Ally on Thursday night after all, because we realised we needed them. Ally, specifically, because he’s eighteen. Solly and I wouldn’t have been able to get in on our own. Jake drove wildly fast up the M1 to a soundtrack of Pantera, Rollins Band, Deftones. Deaf, said Solly, was very much the operative word. Every hour or so he drip-dropped a trickle of Rescue Remedy onto his tongue. He doled out water bottles and M&S sandwiches from the ‘food bag’, transferring wadded-up wrappers and spent cigarette boxes to the ‘rubbish bag’. Wiped the condensation off the windows. I wondered, all the way, why he was coming. He paid for everything for me, too: cereal bars, apples. Kept nudging me to eat.
It was easier than I thought to lie to Mum: I told her I was staying with Solly, whose parents have a house in Gloucestershire. I used the magic word (revision) and gave her a landline number with a missing digit. I rang up Dad and said I was sorry for missing one of his weekends, and he said, a little too quickly perhaps, that it didn’t matter. I texted Zara, to say I was sorry that I upset her. But I didn’t hear anything back.
It took an hour to park the car and a further hour to crawl along in the queue towards the entrance gates. It made me think of soldiers with standard-issue gas masks, waiting for something big: a boat, a war. Thousands and thousands of us, sorted into lines, awaiting entry. I’d never seen so many people all dressed in black. Only the tattoos were different, and the hair, spangly and backcombed and many-coloured. At festivals, people communicate by the slogans on their T-shirts: Crowbar, Sepultura, Fear Factory. Apart from Solly, who is top to toe in Abercrombie & Fitch, down to his three-ply welly socks. He’s in a tribe all of his own.
It’s not freezing, but it’s cold. The sky is a wet-looking off-white. Metal and rain: they go well together.
‘That’s the law of festivals,’ said Ally when we arrived. ‘It’s always shit weather.’ He had two bottles of rum in his rucksack, for adding to hot chocolate: a good way to ward off the cold, he said. Solly looked doubtfully at the mud, already building to a slow wave on the footpaths, and said it wasn’t too late to check into a hotel. But I could tell that he was kind of intrigued. Camping would be a novelty. Like owning a caravan, doing your own washing or visiting a car-boot sale. He wants to know what all the fuss is about.
‘Good morning, good yawning,’ he says groggily from the humid interior of the tent. ‘I must brush my teeth.’
‘Sol, can I have a bit of your Rescue Remedy?’ I say.
He eyes me as he hands it over. All his toiletries are arranged in pouches along the side of the tent. He’s brought four bottles of hand sanitizer, some cashmere fingerless gloves, an eye mask, earplugs, a memory-foam neck pillow and twelve spirulina protein bars on which to subsist until Sunday.
The drops of Rescue Remedy go straight to my head. The whole of Download stretches out for miles, as far as I can see. Fields of tents, as bright as Zara’s patchwork quilt. The big blocks of the stage, the funfair rides, the rows of food vans parked in semi-organised lines. Jake and Ally have been eating huge burgers that drip with grease and shredded lettuce. Baguettes stuffed with roast pork. Crisps and chocolate bars, washed down with booze. I take an apple from the food bag.
‘Ben, you need to wash that,’ admonishes Solly.
‘You’re such an old woman, Sol.’
‘Least I’ll live to be old.’
The ground in front of our tent is crystallised with dew. I unfold one of Solly’s picnic blankets and stretch out, staring up at the sky, imagining watching myself from a great height. Again and again, I try to remember more about that week at Duvalle Hall. Zara’s dolls. A bonfire. A maze … and Zara at the centre of it, screaming … Cupcakes with wolves on them … yes: for my birthday, Hobie made me cupcakes.
Could Jason have been allergic to something in the wolf cakes? Or was that on a different day?
‘Oh, look, the mutants are crawling out of their cave,’ says Solly, picking his way over the guy ropes and plastic bags, puffy with assorted trash. The thing about camping is it’s hard to stay asleep in the morning: the tent roofs let the heat and the light in and you’re warmed up like a microwavable meal. Sure enough, a furry blondish head is emerging from Jake and Ally’s tent. Ray-Bans. Stubble and unwashed skin.
Jake and Ally don’t really stand out here. There’s so much wild behaviour: people vomiting behind trees, girls walking around in nothing but bikinis and body paint, wild capering to rival me and Hobie on the night we stole a steak from a restaurant. Besides, Jake and Ally haven’t come to kick people in the head, vandalise the school chapel or pick on the Year 9s. They’re here for the same reason I’m here: to listen to metal. More or less.
‘What time is it?’ slurs the blond head.
‘Nine thirty.’
He moans in horror. ‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘It means,’ says Ally, emerging also, ‘that we’re at DOWNLOAD.’
We spend the day hanging out in the campsite, drinking beer and playing cards. Solomon amuses himself by trying to persuade the Stonehills that they’ll be seeing themselves into an early grave if they maintain their current intake of sugar, salt and saturated fats. He’s such a clever orator that I can actually see Jake’s resolve begin to falter. He nearly tries one of the spirulina bars before his robust manliness gets the better of him.
‘Seriously,’ says Solly. ‘You ought to have a pre-diabetes test, at the very least. And don’t get me started on cigarettes and drugs.’
‘Sol,’ I say, ‘I don’t really think this is a great moment to be lecturing people on excess. It’s a festival. People are by nature excessive at festivals.’
He raises an eyebrow. I know what he’s thinking: I’ve become more talkative, more able to speak in sentences. It’s Zara’s influence. Her mind is so unfettered, so razor-bright, it makes me want my own to operate with such clarity and focus. Every hour or so, wherever I am – in a queue for beer, at the water fountains, in some tent or other waiting for a band to begin – I find myself wondering if I will ever see her again.
‘There’s many a tragic accident that’s taken place because people haven’t known better,’ Solomon says. ‘Like mixing beer and fondue. You can die from that.’
‘That is an urban legend,’ says Ally, full of scorn, copying Solly’s italics in his thick-vowelled voice. He lights a cigarette. He’s smoking Lucky Strikes: Hobie’s brand, I think, with another jolt of memory.
‘Or, consider psychedelics. Not only could you do yourself immeasurable damage while on a trip – it makes me feel faint just thinking about it – there have been plenty of well-documented cases in which people have mistaken a poisonous mushroom for one containing psilocybin.’
‘That is not how you pronounce it,’ says Jake. ‘It’s got, like, six syllables.’
‘I think Solomon would know how to pronounce it,’ I say, lying back, mind elsewhere. I know where this little chat is coming from. It’s not actually for the Stonehills’ benefit; it’s directed at me.
Later on today, Solly’s going to make me throw my painkillers away.
At festivals people move in tides. In the big areas – the tents, the open spaces – you get a more random milling about, like gas particles in a box. Near the stages, of course, the crowds congeal, silt up. But in the in-between places, you see these slipstreams making their steady way from one place to the next. If you look from far enough away, it’s like watching cross-currents. We are in one now, threading our way towards the main stage. We need to be in good time for Metallica.
As Jake and Ally forge ahead, barging lesser beings out of the way with their gigantic sportsman shoulders, Solly pulls me back.
‘Ben. I think it’s time.’
‘For what?’
‘You know what.’
And he’s off, cutting across the stageward flow to the row of blue toilet huts that squat along one edge of the central arena. Reluctantly, I follow.
‘You’ve got them, right?’ he calls over his shoulder.
I pretend I don’t know what he means, but eventually I grunt in the affirmative, my hand closing protectively around my last three pills in their clingfilm wrapper.
We are standing in the doorway of the toilet. The stench of chemicals and stomach acid travels to meet us.
‘Horrendous,’ mutters Solly. ‘Makes one want to avoid solid food entirely.’
It’s an actual toilet, with a seat, if not a lid, rather than the hole in a bench I’ve seen at other locations on the site. Still, not exactly the epitome of luxury.
Solomon is wiping his hands with a Sanex tissue.
‘Now, Ben, what you have to do is utterly straightforward. You need to take those last three pills, and throw them in there. God knows you won’t be trying to get them out again.’
I draw the wrapper from my pocket. The pills sit in my palm, their familiar corners almost purple in the reflected blue of the toilet walls.
‘Why are you doing this again?’ I say.
Solomon turns away to take an inbreath of festival air.
‘My sister, and I don’t tell people this often, had an addiction to painkillers in her teens. They had to put her in a clinic in Arizona. I don’t ever want that to happen to you. It’s all been a bit rubbish for you lately, what with you finding out about Jason and everything. And I care about you. I’m sorry if that sounds weird. But I do. Even if your …’
He trails off before he can finish this. Even if your parents don’t. That’s what he meant to say.
‘I’m not …’ I start to say. But I stop myself.
Am I?
Am I addicted to painkillers?
They’re just the things I take to stop my head from hurting; they don’t mean anything. I could stop today, tomorrow, any time.
But if that’s true, why am I still holding onto them?
‘I do understand,’ Solomon says, ‘really. You’re in pain. I would be too, if I were you. But it’s time to say goodbye.’
‘I suppose I’m scared,’ I say, before I can stop myself. I take one of the pills and chuck it into the murk of the toilet.
‘That’s good. Keep going. What are you scared of?’
The second pill joins the first. It flies so lightly, so carelessly into the undertow. I long for it to have more weight, more gravity.
‘I’m scared … about what will happen if I don’t take them.’
‘You’re afraid of the pain, yes? You think you won’t be able to control it. But, Ben, just think about what they’re doing to your brain. You’re stronger than you think you are. You’re one of the strongest people I know.’
I’ve never felt like a strong person. I feel oddly lightheaded as I take the last pill between my finger and thumb, resisting the overpowering urge to press it into my mouth.
‘So, farewell then,’ says Solomon. ‘Let this be end of the painkillers.’
With a heavy arm, I cast the last of my pills away from me. It lands without sound, swallowed up.
Gone.
‘Now let’s go and watch this Metallica of yours,’ says Solomon.
The sounds are too loud, the black too black, the colours too bright. The sky is too wide, the air is too cold. The world has become curved, like a fisheye lens. I am curved too. My spine wobbles. I tell myself: Metallica. The syllables clatter like corrugated tin.
We push and shove and wrestle into the dark heart of the mob. The air is thick with perspiration, a hundred thousand gusts of exhaled CO2. Beer fumes. A man in a wheelchair with a deferential circle of space around him. Two tiny children with bright pink ear defenders. If Zara was here, she’d choose pink too. Giant screens on either side of the stage pulse with moving images.
I watch Ally piss into an Evian bottle and hurl it high, high up over the massed cro
wds. He roars with amusement, raw-throated from drinking and smoking. Solly’s pale, freckled face is creased up in a reluctant grin.
‘Now you’re getting into the spirit of it all,’ Jake tells him.
It feels as if I’ve waited my whole life to see Metallica play live. The crowd is seething with anticipation, like a swarm of millipedes. As the opening bars of the intro music kick in, a howl rises up. Scenes from an old Western movie flicker on the screens.
‘D’you know, I’m rather enjoying this,’ shouts Solly. ‘Cinematic.’ He darts me a look. ‘How are you holding up?’
I grunt.
‘Do you want to go to the medical tent?’
I glance behind us at the thickening mass of people. It’s like another hundred, another thousand people are joining every second, like ants to honey. I try to make a judgement. Not easy. The pain in my head, the bolt of nausea in my middle – they’re bad enough, almost, to make the trip worthwhile. Maybe a couple of Nurofen will ward off the worst of it.
Maybe.
But as I’m thinking about it, James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Rob Trujillo and Kirk Hammett walk onstage and start playing ‘Hit the Lights’, and I know I’m going to stay.
‘Good man,’ says Solly, and hands me a pint of water.
I let the pain come for me. I offer it up to the giant altar of the stage. To Metallica, as they motor into a version of ‘Master of Puppets’ that they must’ve played millions of times in hundreds of countries and still sounds as fresh and savage as the recording from 1985. I let the crowd buffet me. Jake and Ally disappear into twin blurs of frenzied headbanging and air guitar. Elbows elbow me. Feet fight for space on the torn-up ground. All the time, Solly stays close by, his Paul Smith hoodie firmly up to ward off projectiles.