Heartstream

by Tom Pollock

  He leans back against a concrete pillar. The clock on his phone screen says 02:43. I imagine the thousands of fans in thousands of bedrooms around the world after he posts this, poring over images from Google Maps and Yelp and Land Registry, cross-referencing it with the band’s tour schedule and confirmed sightings, trying to find this exact stairwell in a car park behind an Asda in Streatham where this nineteen-year-old demigod once chose to manifest. I wouldn’t put it past them. Seriously, all MI5 needs to do is recruit the Everlasting fandom and buy in a warehouse full of Red Bull and no terrorist would ever be safe again.

  It’s why Ryan and I never come to the same place twice.

  “It was just a bit of fun!” he protests. “Besides, whose idea was it to take a picture of this” – he pushes his sleeve up to show the infinity loop – “and tell them it was a padlock?”

  I flush. “That’s different. It was an emergency.”

  “Oh, really? What was emerging?”

  “Evie was mad at me.”

  “She was?” The perfect mouth gapes in mock horror. “And you didn’t call the police? Or the army? Or the pope?” He flicks his fringe out of his eyes with a dramatic jerk of the head and continues in his forties film star voice. “You crazy, courageous, beautiful fool, Canczuk. Don’t you dare take your life in your hands like that again: don’t you know I love you?”

  My stomach tingles. Don’t you know I love you? He’s always doing that, saying serious things in a jokey voice or jokey things in a serious voice or sexy things in a sexy voice, wrong-footing me, making me blush. In fact, in the three months I’ve known him, he has become remarkably adept at manipulating the Catherine Canczuk colour chart. Right now, judging by the heat in my face, I’m way past Pardon Me Pink and into Spontaneous Human Combustion Crimson.

  “You don’t understand. Evie can be … intense. Still, I didn’t expect it to get as much traction as it did.”

  “So there were a lot of tweets, were there?” he surmises. “About Padlockgate?”

  I avoid his gaze. “How did you know we called it that?”

  “I love our fans, and God knows they’re phenomenally creative in many ways, but naming things is not one of them.”

  They’re, I note, not you’re.

  “But were there?” he presses. “Tweets, posts, theories, videos, all that?” His smile is eager; he finds this stuff fascinating. I feel a twinge of guilt, treating Rickers like zoo animals, but I can’t refuse that smile, and to be fair, if they were here, none of them could either.

  “Thousands,” I admit. “Evie’s got a big audience.”

  He shakes his head. “Crazy. The whole thing’s crazy.” Then he must see my expression, because he steps towards me, rests one hand on the small of my back and pulls me into a kiss that stops my heart.

  “Hey, it’s OK,” he says, putting his forehead to mine. “It’s like you said: this whole thing’s not really about Nick and me, right? We’re just an excuse for you all to come together, make friends. You’re a community, a tribe.”

  I nod. I may have held forth at embarrassing length on this last night while sprawled across his chest.

  “Well then, you’ve done them a favour. Gotta add kindling to the campfire now and then. Can’t have the stories the tribe tell getting cold. Speaking of which…”

  He leans over the banister, and I follow suit. The bare concrete of the stairwell dwindles into the darkness below like a throat.

  “I really don’t think this is a good idea,” I say.

  “Will you just relax? I know what I’m doing.”

  “Really? You’ve done this before?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ry?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Ry!”

  “Well, OK, no. But I’ve watched this parkour vid on YouTube, like, six hundred times.”

  I laugh, but my palms are sweating as they grip his phone. “Seriously, if you’re going to break your neck in a dumb stunt over a stupid bet, does it have to be me, aiding and abetting?” I try to pass him his phone back, but he closes his hand around mine.

  “It absolutely does.”

  I try to protest, but he holds up a hand. “For two reasons. One – everyone else I know who could film me doing this has a significant financial stake in me not breaking my neck over a stupid bet.”

  I have an I-love-you stake in you not breaking your neck over a stupid bet is what I just about manage to avoid saying out loud, because unlike him, I don’t have a funny voice that can make those three words after just three months not sound like the words of a crazy stalker. This dream universe I’ve somehow found myself in feels as fragile as a wine glass, like the wrong word in the wrong tone could shatter it.

  Instead I sigh, and ask, “What’s the second reason?”

  He leans forward and kisses me again. Again, my heart stops. I need defibrillation; seriously, being with this boy is bad for my health.

  “I won’t break my neck. You’re here. You’re my guardian angel.”

  I first met Ryan Richards in the waking, non-fictional flesh ninety-four days ago. I’d run out of the house in the middle of the night, my throat raw from shouting. I’d had yet another argument with Mum over whether seventeen was old enough to try and find my dad. Come to think of it, I actually used the word Dad to refer to him, which was why Mum was crying. Christ, Cat. You know better than that.

  I slung my leg over my bike and just pedalled, street lights strobing over me, pushing my muscles until the burn eclipsed everything and the wind in my face chilled my tears to the point where I could pretend they were just sweat and not tears at all.

  I was heading to the Dance Hall. If, now I’ve said Dance Hall, you’re picturing some kind of sweatbox full of lithe bodies and backflips where I could forget the strictures of my uptight uptown upbringing in the lubricated embrace of a south London Patrick Swayze … I wish, but forget it.

  For one thing, my upbringing was not so much uptown as down-suburb; for another, my signature move at discos is the sit-in-the-corner-and-hope-no-one-looks-at-me; and for a third, no one has pulled on their dance shoes in anger in the Dance Hall for a long, long time.

  It was built as a ballroom in the thirties and got a German bomb through the roof in the forties. In the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties, they tried to turn it into a bingo hall, a cinema and a block of luxury flats. But they failed, and so it remains the Dance Hall.

  Inside, the walls are covered in fifty-foot murals of gentlemen in Fred Astaire tails and ladies in elegant gowns, their faces blasted by time and Luftwaffe shrapnel. Sometimes I talk to them. Bit pathetic, I know, but it is what it is. It’s been sealed off by developer-branded hoardings the whole time I’ve known it, but work never starts. It’s my own place, frozen in time. My secret city.

  Except that night, as I pulled my bike to a screeching halt by the fried chicken shop over the road, a man was squeezing his way out from between the hoardings. I felt momentarily scandalized, then absurdly jealous. I wondered how many other people were praying in this private chapel of mine.

  If anyone in the community ever heard this story (please God never let that happen), they’d make me turn in my RickResource credentials for not recognizing him, but it was dark. I only saw him from the back, he had his hood up, and I couldn’t see any of his face. He set off at a diagonal across the street, towards a junction about fifty metres away.

  Just then, a rumble roar filled my ears. I looked round in time to see an eighteen-wheel lorry swinging onto the road behind us.

  “Hey!” I called after him. “HEY!” But he didn’t look back, didn’t show any sign of getting out of the way of the twenty tonnes of clattering articulated death rolling towards him. His head was nodding gently. Oh shit, I remember thinking. He’s got earphones in.

  And so I started to pedal. I cursed myself for riding there so fast, so angry, for burning my legs out. Come on, Cat; come on, Cat; come on, Cat. MOVE!

  Panting and swearing, I managed to dred
ge up a bit of hypothetical pre-emptive anger at myself at the prospect of failing to reach him in time. The roar of the wind mingled in my ears with the roar of the lorry as I sped up, and now I hear the screech of brakes but it’s too close, too loud and he’ll never stop in time and my entire world is basically the back of a hoodie stretched over a pair of shoulders which, while nice, are probably not quite hot enough to die for, but oh well, too late to pull out now, and then oof!

  The world shuddered. We collapsed in a tangle of limbs and spokes and heaving lungs as the wheels rumbled past, inches away.

  “Holy … whoa! Thanks.”

  I knew the voice instantly. I stayed face down on the pavement. I was hallucinating; I had to be. I didn’t dare look up, even when he gently pulled me to my feet. Gaze directly at the sun and you’ll go blind.

  “You saved my life,” said the disembodied voice of Ryan Richards.

  My heart lodged in the bottom of my throat like some massive cork. I scrambled for something cool to say, something likeable and diffident. A hero? Oh, I wouldn’t say hero. You would, would you? Well then, who am I to argue?

  But what I actually said, as near as I can remember, was “Fneeeeeeep?”

  He laughed, and it was that laugh that gave me permission to look up. I realized I’d never heard a sound like it before. All the interviews of him I’d watched, and I’d never heard him laugh like that, so deeply, genuinely delighted.

  “I’d buy you a drink to say thank you, but I don’t think anywhere’ll be open at this time of night. Wanna come back to the flat?”

  I shook my head, not in refusal, obviously, but in reflexive disbelief. He offered me his hand, and I felt my blood fizz as he turned my forearm gently over.

  “Ouch.” He winced. A bloody graze covered half of it, like a giant’s thumbprint. I hadn’t even felt it. “Come on,” he said. “Back to mine at least so we can get this cleaned up. Else you’ll be waiting for hours at A & E.”

  “Mnnehhh?” I managed. Maybe I actually was concussed. I didn’t remember hitting my head, but I reckon the presence of a pop star is equivalent to four solid blows to the cranium.

  “I was being oblivious. You saved my life. Can’t let your reward be you getting hurt while I’m fine and dandy, can we? I couldn’t live with myself.”

  He took me back to the aeroplane-hangar-sized duplex the band were renting while they were in London. Where, I need to be clear, we did not make out and have wild, fic-worthy sex. Not then, because that first night I still would have sworn blind that Ryan Richards’s boxer shorts were a sacred ark whose contents were for Nick Lamb and Nick Lamb alone.

  A conviction that lasted right up until the point when a ravishing blonde girl who I’m fairly sure I last saw in the video for “Rainin’ You” came out of Nick’s bedroom in a T-shirt that barely skimmed her bum.

  Her name was Nikki de Venn. She was lovely, sat with me in a kitchen that looked like a cross between a spaceship and a piece of Danish abstract sculpture while Ryan fetched first aid supplies.

  “So Ry brought you here?” She said it so casually, mixing herself a Martini in a silver shaker. (I say it was a Martini like I know what supermodels drink. Look, it was clear and she put olives in it. It could have been engine descaler for all I know.)

  “Um … yeah, I guess. You?”

  “Nick. We’re trying to keep it quiet.” She leaned over the bench conspiratorially. “There are these fans the guys have got. They’re convinced Nick and Ry are boning each other and every girlfriend either of them gets is a management plant.”

  “Ha ha ha,” I laughed weakly. A pair of embarrassment-fuelled fireballs ignited behind my cheeks, but she didn’t seem to notice. Maybe her engine-cleaning cocktail affected her observation skills.

  “One girl, Anna? They found out her address and sent a pair of clippers to her house, because she was a beard, get it? I bet they didn’t stop laughing for a month, but she was terrified; she had to move.”

  I felt like I’d been punched. I felt like my heart had fallen out of its place in my chest and was rattling around in my abdomen with all my other organs. I remembered Anna Carpenter and the clipper gambit. I’d sat in Evie’s bedroom fielding identifying info from the WhatsApp group, while Evie used it to comb through the data from the LinkedIn hack for her address.

  “Want a bit of friendly advice?” Nikki asked.

  “Um … sure?”

  “Keep a low profile. I know you shouldn’t have to and it seems like caving, but trust me, you don’t need the aggro.”

  “Oh…” I said. “Ryan and I aren’t … together like that; we just, I just… He brought me back here to patch my arm up.”

  Nikki winked at me, her outrageously long lashes meshing and demeshing. “Yeah,” she said. “Just like that.”

  “Where’s the patient?” Ryan boomed from the doorway, holding up a length of gauze and a bottle of TCP. “Dr Richards’s clinic is open.”

  Nikki disappeared back into Nick’s room with her drink. Ryan started to clean and bandage my arm. I winced at the sting of the antiseptic. He winced at my wince.

  “So,” I said, when the silence got too heavy. “What were you doing at the Dance Hall?”

  And what do you know? Ryan Richards is a London nerd. He’d heard about the Dance Hall on Londinium, a Tumblr I followed before my dash filled up with all things Rick and nothing else. He made a point of going there whenever band business brought him to town; we’d just never overlapped before now.

  We didn’t talk about the band, not once. Instead we nattered about how the city’s best museum wasn’t the Science or the BM, but the old operating theatre above St Thomas’s Church, and how like time travel it was, walking into Goodwin’s Court, with its gas lamp fittings and its bulbous bay windows bowing like the sails of a glass ship. I felt a dormant part of me wake, a kind of delicious pins and needles of the soul. I couldn’t remember the last time I talked to someone this intently and it not be about the Everlasting.

  What’s more, I don’t think he could either. I’ve spent months racking my brain trying to work out what this imperial prince of pop sees in me, and I still don’t know, but this is the best I’ve got. When he looks me in the eyes he doesn’t see a pop star reflected back, just a nineteen-year-old London nerd. The way we met wasn’t stage-managed and PRd and airbrushed the way he’s used to. It was pure serendipity. I think he found that refreshing.

  Slowly, throughout that conversation, a realization set in. Rick wasn’t real. I hadn’t let it go, not in my bones, not even when Nikki slipped back into the Lamb master bedroom to continue what was almost certainly – judging by both of their ab muscles – really athletically challenging sex, but I let it go then. Because if Ryan Richards could be as invested in my home town as I am, and if I – who knows the name of his childhood hamster and the birthdays of all his roadies off by heart – could have no inkling of that fact, then clearly neither I, nor anyone else on RickResource, knew him at all.

  I felt his fingers sneak in between mine. Warm and strong and certain. Rick wasn’t real, and I didn’t mind in the slightest.

  I looked down. Our interlinked hands were in shadow, but my bandaged forearm was drenched in red. My first thought, addled, but not concerned, was, Huh, my graze is bleeding through. Except the red wasn’t blood; it was the sunrise washing in through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  It was morning.

  “Shit!” I yelped, scrambling up from the bench.

  “What?” Ryan barked, just as alarmed.

  “I’ve been gone for hours. My mum will be freaking out.” I scrambled for my phone. It was on silent. Shit. Thirty-four missed calls. “Shit shit shit shit.”

  “Divide and conquer,” Ryan said. “You call her; I’ll call a cab.”

  Mum started yelling as soon as she heard my key in the lock, but then she saw the bandage and she went all quiet.

  “I fell off my bike,” I explained. Her face was a colour I’d only previously seen on geese and bathro
om tiles. “I went to Evie’s; she patched me up. It’s only a graze, honest.”

  “You don’t go to Evie to patch you up,” Mum said, folding me into a tight hug. “That’s what I’m for.” Her tone turned puzzled. “Did you lose Evie’s phone number or something?”

  “What? Why? I…” I tailed off, looked down. Inked neatly on my bandage was an eleven-digit mobile phone number. There was only one person who could have put it there.

  Two days later, we had our second meeting; a week after that, our first kiss. I couldn’t believe it was happening as our lips met. To tell the truth, I still can’t.

  But now we’re here.

  “You sure you want to do this?”

  “No choice,” Ryan says. The scrape of his trainers on the concrete echoes as he backs away from the stairwell to give himself a run-up. “Do you know how many views Nick got for that lip-sync thing? Eighty-seven million. He’s set the bar pretty high.”

  “So? Surely, after the first couple of million, it’s all just numbers? Kind of a wash?”

  He turns to look at me, the pop star perfection of his face made ghoulish by the car park fluorescents. His expression says, Wow, you don’t understand at all. I think of the Möbius strip tattoo. I never want to be irrelevant. I wonder what he’ll do when the world moves on, and the band drifts apart. He’ll find something. The Everlasting might not live up to their name, but Ryan will, I know it.

  “OK, fine, how high do you want to go, then? How many pairs of eyes can you possibly want on you?”

  He smiles. “You can always add one more.”

  And with that he runs, head-down at full tilt. I swear and just about manage to juggle his phone into position so it’s covering the stairwell, hitting record just as he vaults the banister. To be fair to him, he really does seem to have studied some parkour for this. He zigzags down the first four levels with apparent ease, springing from banister to banister like a squirrel on speed, but on the fifth—

  “Ryan!” I shriek as his fingers miss their grip and he drops the last two storeys like a stone. I plunge down the stairs, sweating and huffing, heart like an alarm clock behind my ribs. Omigodomigodomigodomigod I killed Ryan Richards.