“I happen to like black-and-white films, thank you.” Maybe a text message would get through? I start tapping one out to Sam – it’s worth a try.
“You do?” He’s stopped turning.
“Look, Aidan. I’m kind of busy trying to get us out of here, so can you maybe leave taking the piss until I’ve sorted that, please?”
“What made you think I was going to take the piss?”
I’m about to remind him of the first time we met when I realize he’s serious, standing there watching me with his head tilted to one side and his thumbs tucked in the back pockets of his jeans. He blinks at me through his glasses. He suddenly seems surprisingly calm about our situation. I point this out to him and all he does is shrug.
“I didn’t have anywhere else to be tonight – did you? Might as well make the best of it.”
I picture the shower in my hotel room. The pile of notes from college that need to be turned into something I can actually hand in. “That’s not really the point…”
“You just need to look at this the other way around,” he says with a wink.
“We’re locked in the convention complex, with no way of telling anyone we’re here – and probably no way of getting out until the morning. Please tell me what the other way of looking at this is,” I snap. I check my phone again – my text didn’t send. Bollocks.
“We’re not locked in. They’re all locked out.” He spreads his arms and spins around once more.
“Who’s they?”
“Everyone.”
“Or, to put it another way, I’m locked in here with you.”
“Yes! It’s an adventure.” He pokes at a display of carved wooden wands on the stall closest to him, shooting a quick look over his shoulder at me.
“But it’s…weird.”
“You think I’m weird, is what you’re saying. I’m weird and you don’t want to be stuck in a big room with me.”
“Noooo…”
“You read my book, didn’t you?”
“Well, yes…”
“Then you know me. And you know that I am definitely not weird.” He picks up one of the wands and waves it around, muttering something that sounds suspiciously like “Swish and flick”.
“Put that down. What happens if you break it?” I pull the wand out of his hand and set it back on the velvet cushion on the stall.
“Then I’ll pay for it,” he says. “I’m not as much of a prick as you think I am, I promise.”
“Who says I think you’re a prick?”
“Sam.”
“What?” When did he talk to Sam about me? More to the point, is there anyone Sam hasn’t spoken to lately?
“That first time we met – when you threw me out of the green room. Remember?”
“Vaguely.” Like I could forget…
“You stormed off.”
“I did not storm off!”
“And she stayed at the party, and she told me exactly what you thought of me. Believe me, she didn’t hold back.”
I try to hide my smirk. “She usually doesn’t.” I relieve him of the imitation elvish dagger he’s picked up. “Besides, you were a prick.”
“My writer brain notes the use of past tense there.”
“Don’t push it.” I shake my head.
“All right. But you said I was being a prick – how so?”
“You took the piss out of me. About my clipboard.”
His laugh bubbles up and out of him and echoes around the empty hall. But it doesn’t feel like he’s laughing at me, somehow – even though he is.
“You’re joking. You have to be joking. That’s it?”
“What do you mean, ‘That’s it’?”
“Come on, Lexi. I was embarrassed, and I was trying to make you laugh. It wasn’t supposed to mortally offend you!”
“You what?” He was embarrassed?
“You looked so fed up.”
Did I? Maybe I did; after all, that was the time we were all running round after that little dog, wasn’t it?
“It was because of the dog,” I say, and he opens his mouth to ask what I mean. I cut him off. “I don’t want to talk about it. Besides, who says I wanted someone to make me laugh? You’re like one of those van drivers who roll down their windows and shout ‘Cheer up, love!’”
“Have you finished?”
“No. Yes. Shut up.” I turn away from him, hoping that’s enough of a sign I am actually finished.
There’s a rustling sound from behind me, and when I turn back around he’s wearing a long blonde plaited wig from the next stall along. It looks ridiculous. And – despite being locked in, despite having no walkie and no working phone and not being able to have my shower, despite the fact my dad’s not spoken to me all day but I’ve seen him outside on the hotel steps talking to Bea on his mobile every time I’ve walked through the lobby – I can’t stop my sudden giggle-snort, any more than I can stop it turning into something bigger, something that cuts off my breath and wraps its arms around me and won’t let me go until I’m actually crying with laughter.
“How do I look?” he asks, twirling one of the plaits – which catches on the frame of his glasses.
I press my lips together, hard. I try to breathe through my nose and just end up making a sort of spluttering snort.
“Mmm. You’d have thought there’d be a mirror here somewhere,” he mutters, peering over the back of the stall to look for one. He’s actually holding the plaits back so they don’t catch on anything on the table.
“Aidan. Here.” My voice comes out in a squeak as I get control over my body. I point my phone at him and take a photo, turning it round so he can see the screen. He beams as he examines my shot.
“Oh, yes. Sod the glowing magic balls – here’s my next cover shoot, right here.”
He takes the wig off, slipping it back over the stand it came from with surprising care. I watch his fingers smooth down the plaits, and all of a sudden it feels like someone has sucked all the oxygen out of the room. Because that’s what’s happened, isn’t it? The air feels thin and flat and as though it’ll never be enough to fill up my lungs no matter how much of it I breathe in, and my head is spinning and spinning and spinning.
When he looks up at me, his eyes lock onto mine and don’t let go. “Can we start again?”
“Start what again?”
“Everything. Us.”
“Us? Yeah, no. You mean you…and me.” I turn my back, pretending I’m suddenly very, very interested in a stage make-up kit – when really I just can’t quite tell what my face is doing and I’m not sure I want him to find out before I do.
“You know what I mean.”
“Nope.” I had no idea you could get special kits just to cover tattoos. I wonder whether that girl from the signing would really have got his signature tattooed on… What makes me so very different from her, when you think about it?
What makes you different, says a small voice somewhere between my ears, is that everyone else has it backwards. They’ve only met Haydn. That’s who they get to see – they don’t even know Aidan exists. He’s a secret; something private and quiet, a figure standing behind the curtain.
And right now, I’m talking to Aidan. Blonde plaits and all.
Because however much I try and talk myself out of it, I know it’s true. I do know him. I know him because I read his book, and I know who really wrote it. I saw him threaded through every line of it and I can see him even now. I could hear his voice there, I could feel it; I could feel him. And it’s the same voice that seems to be lodged in my head, playing back on loop when I least expect it. Aidan’s voice, echoing in an empty corridor. Aidan’s voice, raised over the sound of a band and their crowd. Aidan’s voice that follows me around.
I’m not with someone I barely know, I’m with someone I want to know better.
I look back towards him just as he pulls his glasses off and wipes them with the hem of his T-shirt – I glance away again, but I’m too slow to miss the flash of
skin beneath his shirt. “So we’re seriously stuck in here till morning then?” he asks, pushing his glasses back up his nose.
“There’s…”
Something makes me stop. I was about to say that, actually, there is a fire exit – right at the back of the space, and most likely alarmed so that opening it will end up triggering the system for everything on this side of the building. But it opens onto an alley at the back of the hotel, so we could definitely use it to get out…
But Aidan doesn’t know that.
This is my chance. Maybe my only chance; my chance to see if I’m right. To find the fault line between Aidan Green and Haydn Swift once and for all.
“There’s what?”
“Hmm?”
“You were saying something?”
His eyes through the lenses of his glasses. A tempest reflected in water.
His hair an unruly dark cloud.
He makes my skin prickle, like an oncoming storm; one I want to walk right into.
“You said ‘There’s’ and then you stopped.”
There’s a door, there’s a way out, there’s an exit…
It’d probably cause a massive problem anyway. Fire brigade out, people standing around on the pavement in their pyjamas, all that. And they’ll probably pass the cost on to the convention (and Dad)…
“There’s not much we can do. That’s what I was about to say.” Can he hear the lie? I don’t know. Would he tell me if he could? Would he be angry? He doesn’t exactly seem upset, trying on wigs and swishing wands around – but how would I know?
“Right then.” He tilts his face up to the ceiling, staring at the glass roof high above us. The sky outside is dark but clear, and the glass reflects us standing below it: two tiny strangers, staring at ourselves. It gives me an idea.
“Aidan?”
“Mmm?”
“You said I was looking at this wrong. You said it should be an adventure.”
“I did.”
“All right then. You want an adventure? Follow me.”
“This was not what I was expecting,” he says, peering over the edge of the roof. We might not have been able to get out without setting off a load of alarms, but the roof access is always open. Just a shame it doesn’t go anywhere but here, really. Although, maybe it’s not all bad…
If I look behind us, I can see the spot where we were standing five minutes ago – far down through the glass skylight. But up here, all around us is the night. Ahead is the darkness of the sea, edged with the lights of the coast like amber jewels sewn onto black cloth; an occasional lighthouse sparkles in the distance. To the left of us, the wild neon and swirling rides of the funfair blaze at the end of the pier. The occasional scream drifts over from one of the rides: a giant arm that swings out over the sea, turning riders upside down and right way round (and probably inside out). Even up here, the air smells of chip fat and doughnuts – and sea salt and waves.
Or maybe that’s just him. (The smell of the sea, I mean. I don’t think he smells like chip fat.)
“It’s not so hot up here – must be the breeze off the sea. I didn’t think I was ever going to feel cool again.” Suddenly, he points at the horizon out past the stem of the i360, and his voice changes, urgent now. “Look!”
“What?” All I can see is the night. Dark water, dark sky, a handful of stars slowly disappearing behind a veil of cloud.
“There. Right out there. Did you see it that time?”
I can’t see anything. Just darkness. “Nope?”
“You’re not looking in the right place. Come stand here.” He closes his fingers around my wrist and gently, so gently, pulls me towards him, stepping back and standing me in his place. “Now, look. Right there.” He raises his hand again, and his fingers are so long, so slender. Writer’s fingers.
I stare at the space just beyond the end of his fingernail so long and so hard that I start seeing spots – and I don’t think that’s what I’m supposed to be seeing. Although as he steps closer again – right behind me so I can feel his body pressing lightly against my back, feel his chin brushing against the edge of my jaw as he tucks his face close in to mine so he can see what I’m seeing – the spots get brighter.
And my heart…my heart…
“There. You had to see it that time!”
“Maybe?” I saw something. Something blurry and white, far off the coast.
“Look.”
I don’t know what I’m looking for. I can feel his arm pressing against mine; feel his breath on my cheek.
A white flash, way out in the darkness. Barely more than a flicker, and it’s gone.
“A ship?” I ask.
“Lightning. It’s a thunderstorm coming in.”
There’s another flash – and maybe it’s my imagination but I’m almost sure I hear thunder rolling somewhere far off. Or maybe it’s just my heartbeat in my ears.
I wrap my hands around the metal safety railing running at waist height around the edge of the parapet; all of a sudden, I need somewhere to put them, and there seems as good a place as any.
Aidan’s still staring out at the horizon – I can feel the rise and fall of his chest against my shoulder as he breathes. “If it was daytime, we’d be able to see it coming. Everything behind the rain would disappear and the world would get smaller and smaller the closer it got.”
I’m used to small worlds. For six or seven weekends of the year – every year as far back as I can remember – my world has been the walls of a hotel, and the only people in it have been the people attending a convention. And even when there isn’t a convention to run, there’s one to plan. We’re always running towards a future we’ve already left behind, thinking about the next thing and the next thing and the next thing after that. Being a part of this small world does something to you. When you make friends, they become your best friends because everything about it is so intense. Everything is busier, more urgent, more exhausting; time stretches and compresses and somehow, by making the outside world less, what you’re left with becomes more – becomes all there is – and only the people who’ve lived that understand it. It’s why Sam’s been my best friend for so long, even though I only see her for those seven weekends a year. It’s why Nadiya’s deadpan jokes always work – because we know each other so well. Because we were made in conventions. The first time Bede’s parents brought him along and I saw him sitting on the floor in the hotel lobby, reading, I knew. The first time I met Nadiya – who’d dragged her uncle to an event because there was a big panel for one of her favourite television shows but she was too young to come by herself – I knew… And now her family – just like Bede’s, just like Sam’s – is part of ours. Dad’s and mine. Just like everybody else who comes to these things, because coming to a convention feels a little like coming home.
Reading Piecekeepers felt like that. It felt like coming home, like hearing someone telling me a story they had made up just for me. It felt like meeting a friend I’d never realized I had.
Haydn.
Aidan.
I’m looking at the horizon – at the flashes of lightning, at the storm coming our way – and all I can see and feel and hear is him. And it’s like he was made for me.
“Should we go back inside?” I don’t fancy spending the night in sopping wet clothes if we get caught in the rain up here.
“Nah. We’ve got plenty of time – and that’s if the rain even makes it this far. It might move back out to sea, or along the coast, or anywhere.”
Over on the pier, the rides are still spinning, the riders still screaming. On the promenade below, the pavement between the hotel and the beach, a hen party heading in one direction meets a stag party going the other way and there are shrieks and cheers and laughter. Everything is carrying on exactly the way I’d expect it to outside the walls of the convention…and yet something in the world has shifted, somewhere deep inside the earth. Deep inside me.
He is the oncoming storm…and the lightning flashes and the clouds par
t, and I walk right on in.
Having paced around the entire roof – leaning way too far out over the railing for me to be happy about it, and crouching so close to the glass skylight that I genuinely expected to have to lunge forward and save him from plummeting to a messy death surrounded by trading cards and LARP equipment – Aidan finally stops on the side overlooking the city. From here, the streets and buildings spread out below and before us, unfurling in every direction; climbing the steep hills to the suburbs and sprawling out along the beaches and cliffs to either side. “It all looks different from up here, doesn’t it?”
Maybe things do when you get a different perspective on them. Places, events…even people. All of them look like something else when you see them from another angle. Bigger, smaller, softer, sharper; you never know until you see it – and once you have, you can never unsee it.
A train winds its way out of the station, high enough up one of Brighton’s hills that each carriage window is a light disappearing into the unknown.
“Wonder where they’re going?” Aidan murmurs next to me – right as the breeze catches my hair, blowing it into his face. So much for that particular moment. It’s hard to be magical and make deep, meaningful comments about life, the universe and everything with a mouthful of someone else’s sweaty, dusty, convention-scented hair. He recovers pretty well though, considering, and leans back against the railings. “Shame the cloud’s come in so fast. I bet the stars are brilliant over the sea.”
I shake my head. “You don’t need stars. Look over there.” I point at the side of the next hill along from the station. “There’s a kangaroo.”
“A kangaroo?” He hasn’t figured it out yet – but I don’t think it’ll take him long. I hope it won’t; partly because I suppose I’m testing him, and partly because if I have to explain it I’ll sound like a lunatic.
A lunatic he’s stuck with on a deserted rooftop.
Hmm.
I try again, picking out a spot further west. “And there’s a cat. See it?”
“A cat? What the hell are you looking…?”
“And right next to it, there’s an umbrella – it’s open,” I add after a second’s thought.
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