The Arena of the Unwell E-Book

Liam Konemann

• Herausgeber: 404 Ink
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 438

Beschreibung

Noah spends his nights drifting between North London pubs and music venues, and his days sleeping off hangovers in the stock room of the floundering record shop where he works. He tries not to think about what will happen when his NHS-allocated therapy hours run out and he's left alone with his mind again. After years away, his favourite band Smiling Politely announce a last-minute set in a nearby venue and everything starts to shift. When the crowd turns violent, Noah runs into the street and meets Dylan, the charming local barman he's never had the courage to approach. Pulled into a toxic and co-dependent relationship with Dylan and his brooding, enigmatic friend Fraser, Noah bounces distractedly between sweaty gigs and clubs, swapping beds and friends along the way. The upcoming Smiling Politely album is a beacon of hope for Noah who craves the connection he finds in their music yet lacks elsewhere, but he has to ask himself what he's willing to lose – friendships, dignity, even his sense of self – to just feel like he belongs. "A sweaty, sticky mosh pit of a novel" - i-D

Leseprobe

Praise for The Arena of the Unwell

‘A sweaty, sticky mosh pit of a novel.’ – i-D

‘An exhilarating reflection on abuse, the NHS, and queerness in the music industry, this is a debut that will surely make waves.’ – Dazed

‘The Arena of the Unwell already feels like it belongs to a bygone era of indie sleaze, and is all the better for it. This is the classic coming of age, queered, from a writer who’s one to watch.’

– The Skinny

‘A vivid, absorbing coming-of-age tale.’ – The Bookseller

Praise for The Appendix

Chosen as a Book of 2021 by Gay’s the Word

Chosen as a Book of 2021 by What Page areYou On? Podcast

‘I don’t think I’ve ever said “everyone should read this book” before but I’m going to say it: everyone should read this book. Exploring the UK’s shameful transphobia, it’s interlaced with moments of trans joy and euphoria’ – Alice Slater, author of Death of a Bookseller

‘Beautifully written, fascinating, joyful and sad. It left me reeling’ – Carrie Marshall, author of Carrie Kills A Man

‘Joyful, honest, and stunningly written’

– Andrés N. Ordorica, author of At Least This I Know

Also by Liam Konemann

The Appendix: Transmasculine Joy in a Transphobic Culture

The Arena of the Unwell

The Arena of the Unwell

Liam Konemann

For Hannah and Raquel

Content Note

The Arena of the Unwell contains depictions of self harm, depression, and suicidal ideation.

1

Am I paranoid, or are they really after me? I feel like we’re being hunted in here. This song has the staticky hum of violence at its edges.

Mairead and I are held together by the centrifugal force of the crowd. People swirl around us, long-haired boys and short-haired girls, in vintage t-shirts and high-waisted jeans, all bouncing off each other in time to the beat.

Me and Mairead bounce off each other too, only slightly less in time. She is flushed red and my hair is stuck to my face with sweat. I need to quit smoking some time soon because the breath is burning in my lungs, but it hardly matters. Mairead tries to yell something in my ear, but I don’t catch it. I just grin back.

The tang of sweat and beer fills my sinuses. The stage shifts in and out of view as the people in front of me surge forwards and backwards, and I move with them, shut my eyes and open them again and throw my hands in the air. The bassline thrums in the cavern of my body. The guitar riff spikes and spins out and we all get pulled along with it.

Something mutates in the sound. The pressure in the air builds into a tinnitus hiss in my inner ear. Crowds like this – the 10pm surprise set kind, the type who have been drinking all night before they get here – are easily unhinged, and Smiling Politely have been away too long. Nobody’s let the dogs out to have a run while they’ve been gone.

This is just the coke talking. I clench my jaw to stop the buzz in my teeth and focus on the trailing end of the middle eight. Onstage, Ryan sweeps the monitor with his hair as he plays, folded in half at the waist and hammering the headstock of his guitar on the floor. Even after all this time, he’s still the man I most want to be. The blueprint in a beaten-up leather jacket. I’ve missed him so badly.

Over the top of Ryan’s maelstrom, Claire sings her verse right into the microphone, practically swallowing it, and thrums out a frayed and frantic bass riff. Nobody plays the bass like Claire Shelby. If Ryan is a demi-god then Claire is a deity, a scrap of my own religion pinned inside a person.

The crowd churns, carrying Mairead away from me. She hardly even notices, but I reach for her and miss. I can’t shake the feeling that something in the atmosphere is off. The anxiety claws at me, a flailing robot in my head screaming,Danger! I have to jettison it before it ruins my night. Everything’s fine.

Then something is thrown from the crowd. I don’t see what it is, but I hear the impact, the clack of teeth knocking together, and Claire choking around the end of a lyric. She stops playing. There’s a weird mix of noise and hush around me as some people realise what’s happened and others don’t.

It wasn’t paranoia, and it wasn’t just the coke.

It feels like I’ve gone temporarily deaf in one ear. Someone in front of me moves their head and through the gap I see the stage again. Blood drips over Claire’s jaw and down her neck. It coats her teeth, sick and red like a monster in a movie. She’s ripped a hole in her bottom lip, but instead of pressing her hands to the pain she just stands there bleeding, bottle-blonde hair in her eyes and fingers still resting on the fretboard. She looks up.

More people are catching on now. The rows ahead of me have stopped dancing, and those of us who can see stare up at the stage, more disturbed by Claire’s stillness than the blood. Kristen, the drummer, stops playing, but Ryan carries on, backed by no-one. Claire reaches up to touch the damage, testing, then scoops her fringe out of her face with the same bloodied hand. Her eyes sweep across the crowd. Everyone around me has stopped moving now. She leans into the microphone.

‘Who was that?’ she asks.

Her voice is hard against the squalling backdrop of Ryan’s guitar. It snaps him out of his haze and he straightens up, turns to look at his wife and sees the blood. He stops playing. The sudden lack of sound leaves my ears ringing.

‘Who the fuck was that?’ Claire demands again.

Nobody points. People start whispering around me. Did anybody see? What was it? What happened? It sounded fucking bad, man.The pit crackles with unspent energy. Claire shoves her microphone aside and it topples over, a hollow clunk echoing through the speakers as it bounces off her monitor. Ryan takes off his guitar and moves towards her. Before he’s even halfway across Claire jumps into the crowd, bass guitar still slung around her neck. People recoil and the shifting currents push everyone else closer together as she tracks blood through the first few rows. Over the sound of the speaker feedback, I can sense the hum of violence building into one clear note. I need to find Mairead and get out. I turn, looking for her head in the chaos, but there’s nowhere to go.

The tension pulls taut, and snaps.

It happens fast. Claire finds the culprit, or someone that’s close enough. The sound of twisted strings reverberates through the amp towers as the guitar gets trapped between them, and then the cord is yanked out and all that’s left is the absence. Everyone around them gets sucked in within seconds. I can see the fight spreading through the crowd, more people getting pulled into it as their mates become collateral damage. I smell blood, the metallic taste of it heavy in the hot air. Those of us trying to get out of the way trip over one another in our haste. I have to fight to stay upright so that I don’t get trampled. Without the speaker feedback, the meat-packing thud of boots and bodies is stark and brutal. It’s like being in a film without a score. Nobody is on the stage anymore.

The house lights come up. I catch a shoulder in the face, pain radiating outwards from my nose and across my cheekbones. A girl sobs somewhere behind me. My face feels hot, heart pounding as I squeeze my way towards the edge of the room where the crowd begins to thin. In a minute, it will be just as bad over here as it is in the middle.

Venue security pour into the crowd and the mess gets bigger, spilling out everywhere. The fighters are pushing out towards the edges of the room and my blood rushes in my ears and I am hot, too hot, my skin shrinking tight against my muscles. I have to get out. Everyone around me is having the same idea. There’s too many of us moving, and none of us are going anywhere. I push nearer to the wall, press myself up against it and try to be invisible. I have to think. If I can just stay out of the way until the crowd thins out down here at the front, I can run back towards the bar and out the front door. In the crush I see faces I recognise, other fans I’ve hung out with, customers from the record store and people that I drink with in the Cloak and Dagger, but I can’t reach any of them. We’re all together and all alone. 

I can’t breathe here, and I can’t fight, and I’m going to pass out. I feel a gust of wind rush in to my right, and as the air hits me a shrieking alarm rings out. Someone has opened the fire exit. I edge along the wall and through the push of people out into the alley. A few groups are clumped together out here, some looking shell-shocked and panicked but others already rolling cigarettes, shaking their heads and talking about their next move. Another band, a cab into town. I still can’t breathe. The wailing in my head won’t stop. 

I run back towards the main road, the way Mairead and I came charging up less than half an hour ago. I need to get far enough away to find somewhere safe to stand, and then I can find my friends. More people than I expected have made their way out into the street in front of the venue. At the edge of the crowd, when I can’t catch my breath and my vision is starting to narrow, I sit down in the fag-end gutter and put my head between my legs. I focus on my breathing like the doctor said to try. Things slow.

Here are my aching feet in the gutter, here is the pain in my side. 

‘Y’alright?’

The accent is broad, nasal – Australian, or New Zealand maybe – and sort of familiar. I try to lift my head up to see, but it makes everything spin. I squeeze my eyes shut and lean forward again.

‘Oh hey, it’s you,’ the voice says.

He crouches down beside me and braces a hand on each of my shoulders. I open my eyes again, look through the gap between my knees at a pair of legs and the bottom half of a denim-jacket torso. They help me place the voice. For months I’ve been trying to think of something devastatingly clever and charming to say to this guy who sometimes pulls pints in the Cloak and Dagger – Dylan, I think someone told me – and now here he is in the real world and I’m curled up amongst the leaf-litter in the street. 

‘Noah,’ I say.

A memory of introducing myself at the bar while ordering my fifth pint last Saturday bobs to the surface of my mind. It was him who told me his name is Dylan. I look up at him. My head has stopped spinning, but my chest is still tight, and it feels a little bit like my throat might be closing up. I swallow hard.

‘I mean, I’m Noah. Again. Or still,’ I say.

Dylan grins. ‘I know who you are, Noah Again. Are you okay?’

I wish people always said my name the way he does. The second syllable stretches his mouth into a lazy smile that stays there when he’s finished talking. As soon as my lungs stop trying to climb up out of my mouth, I’m going to ask him what his favourite Smiling Politely song is and I’m going to figure out how to get his phone number. Then if I pull that off, I’ll figure out what it is people do after that. It’d be a crime not to at least try.

He’s still waiting for me to respond.

‘I’ll be fine,’ I say.

‘But not just yet?’

‘In a minute or so.’

He squeezes my upper arms.

‘Just focus on me for a bit.’

I’m not sure that will help me keep my grip on reality. I do feel ridiculous though, losing my mind with him sitting all serious and concerned in front of me. I rein myself in. If I want him to like me, I have to maintain the last shreds of my image.

‘I’m okay.’

I still feel like my throat is blocked, but if I pretend it isn’t happening for long enough the feeling will go away. It’s just a case of being stubborn enough to ignore it.

‘Is anyone with you?’ Dylan asks.

He gets up and stretches out the cramp in his legs. I slide my phone out of my pocket to check for a message from Mairead, but the screen is black. I press the button on the top and nothing happens. Dead battery. Dylan reaches down and pulls me up, bracing his hands against my shoulders when I tip too heavily towards him.

‘My friend’s here somewhere.’

Where, though? Things have settled down a bit now, and people are beginning to leave. Mairead was near enough to me that she probably wasn’t hit, and she’s much better at coping with things than I am. But I can’t see her in the crowd. I watch as people filter away, until it becomes pretty clear that she’s not here. Maybe she came out the front and thought I’d left when she couldn’t find me. Sometimes I wander off when things get a bit too much. I always like to know where my exits are.

‘I guess she must have gone,’ I say.

‘You’d better stick with us then,’ he says, and it’s decided.

My pulse isn’t jumping quite so badly now that I’m stood here looking at Dylan, but I still can’t quite catch my breath. He’s got one slightly crooked, pointy tooth in an otherwise perfect mouth, and here under the streetlight I can see that a patch of his short brown hair is tinged pink where he didn’t bother to wash out the dye before shaving it off. Half an eternity later, still leaning a bit towards him, I remember to ask: ‘Us?’

‘Yeah, he should be…here he is.’

This guy all dressed in black and silver comes stalking up to us, long fingers peeling the plastic off a new pack of cigarettes.

‘Hello darling,’ says Dylan.

In all my observations, I’ve never thought of them together. This other one, the black-and-silver one, sometimes sits at the end of the bar in the Cloak and Dagger, but they never touch and barely speak. This other one never smiles. I just thought he was a regular. But of course Dylan would have the most beautiful boyfriend in the world. Or second most, I guess, after himself. These are the kinds of guys who end up together. It’s like a feedback loop of attractiveness.

The other one looks at me.

‘Hello,’ he says.

‘This is Noah Again,’ says Dylan, gesturing at me. ‘He’s coming with us.’

The guy quirks an eyebrow.

‘Fraser,’ he says to me.

He turns and starts to head back towards Camden. We follow.

‘Fraser’s social skills leave much to be desired,’ says Dylan.

He walks on ahead of us, pretending he can’t hear.

‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

I’d figured we’d go to the Cloak and Dagger, but if we are then we’re taking the long way round.

‘Dan the PR said that lot were heading over to O’Leary’s for afters,’ Dylan says. ‘We’re going to see if we can get some free drinks out of him.’

‘Are the chances good?’ I ask.

‘Yeah, great chances. Assuming he turns up after that scene, that is.’

I wonder what damage control looks like in a situation like this. The reviews tomorrow will all use words like ‘chaos’ and ‘shambles’. ‘Brawl’. Claire will be the scapegoat even though they hit her first. They’ll slag her off online, and call Ryan ‘strung out and spiralling’. I can see all of this coming down the pipeline.

Dylan fills the silence without seeming to notice that it’s there. Maybe Fraser just doesn’t talk. 

‘How’d you find out about tonight?’ he asks.

‘I know someone who works at the venue.’

We had been sitting in the back of the Cloak and Dagger like always, feeling pissed and boring, so when the message came through we traded the secret with our mate Isaac for a couple of lines to clear the head, and we ran.

‘You?’ I ask. 

Dylan shrugs like it’s no big deal, and says, ‘I was invited. They wanted some press there, and there’s no way I was gonna miss that.’

‘You write?’

‘It’s been known to happen.’

He takes out a cigarette, lights it and then hands it to me before taking another for himself. I try not to think too hard about the transfer of spit, how it’s sort of intimate to trade like this. It doesn’t have to mean anything. This is just what people do. 

Fraser seems determined to stay ahead of us, clearing a path through the pavement smokers. When he’s forced to drop back thanks to an especially oblivious glut outside The Abbey, I make my move. 

‘How did you guys meet?’ I ask him. 

He glances at Dylan over my shoulder. ‘I worked at the Cloak and Dagger before it was the Cloak and Dagger. He was just always around.’

Dylan smirks. ‘He was a terrible bartender. If you annoyed him even a little bit he’d just ignore you until you left.’

‘I was a great bartender.’

Dylan looks at me. ‘He refused to serve me for three weeks.’

Something like a smile catches in the corner of Fraser’s mouth. 

‘You were very annoying.’

‘I was new! I hadn’t figured out how to tone down the Australian yet.’

By the time we push through the door and into O’Leary’s, I feel normal again. The place is mobbed already. We lost ground pausing for my panic attack.

‘What do you want to drink?’ Dylan asks me. ‘I’m going to find the guy.’

‘Whatever’s going.’

He looks at Fraser.

‘See if you can find a spot,’ he says.

He disappears into the crowd, leaving Fraser and I standing too close together with nothing to say. I focus my attention on finding a place to stand instead. Half of the people here look like they’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards, and the other, more together half have taken all the tables. It’s a dog eat dog world out here.

‘Here,’ Fraser says, and then he’s gone.

I push through the gap where he was just standing and find him propped up against a ledge littered with empty glasses. We stack them and slide them to one end.

‘Perfect,’ I say.

Fraser takes out his phone and pretends I’m not here. This happens to me a lot. I don’t really know how to engage new people, or how to be the kind of person that other people want to get to know. It seems to me you either are that sort of guy or you aren’t.

I’m trying to be the kind of guy that Dylan would like to get to know, at least. Maybe it’s easier to pull off on a small scale.

With Fraser ignoring me, I people-watch instead. I act like it doesn’t bother me, so that no one will see and be embarrassed on my behalf. I’m good at this game.

Dylan comes back with an actual tray of drinks. It’s a miracle he managed to manoeuvre it through the crush in here. He passes out the pints, then follows up with a Jägerbomb each. So that’s the way this is going to go.

‘The PR says the Jägers are to apologise for the chaos.’

‘Apologise for it, or increase it?’ I say.

He grins at me.

‘Guess we’re leaning in.’

So I lean in. I drop my shot into the Red Bull and knock it back, my stomach churning at the thick, sickly flavour.

My heart starts palpitating. This might not have been the best idea after the coke. It’d be so like me to die of a heart attack in fucking O’Leary’s on a Thursday night because a hot guy handed me a free drink I didn’t even like. I swallow hard against the flip-flopping feeling in my stomach and take a gulp of lager to wash the flavour from my mouth. Opposite me, Fraser makes a face and does the same.

‘Foul,’ he says.

Dylan laughs. ‘You’re no fun.’

‘That is not fun.’

The drinks keep coming. The PR sweeps through and charges round after round to his company card. It’s taking the piss and we all know it, but nobody’s about to save him from himself. He’s going to have a hard time justifying all this to his boss at the end of the month. I’m starting to feel woolly, but Dylan keeps clinking his glass against mine and smiling. He is asking me about myself and I have things to say and I keep drinking.

Just about everybody who walks past is somebody that one of us knows, and they stop to say hello or clap Dylan on the shoulder, give him a hug. He is charming and charmed. Fraser keeps mostly to himself. He nods and raises a hand to anyone who greets him, but otherwise just watches and listens. It’s like he’s cataloguing everything. I say hello to Isaac when he comes past but immediately forget whatever it is we talk about. He’s here and then he’s gone and I don’t remember any of the steps in between. There’s a delay in my vision. Every time I turn my head it takes a second for my eyes to catch up.

‘Smoke?’ Dylan says.

We traipse outside and find a spot on the quieter side of the building, off the main road. My body feels loose, almost too warm. Fraser paces back and forth along the kerb, too close to the street for comfort. I take a long drag on my cigarette. Now that nobody is talking, I realise I’m feeling a bit unsteady on my feet. Vertigo is creeping in. I tip my head back and stare up at the light-pollution dark, trying to focus my mind and make my body still. Dylan follows my gaze.

‘The stars are nice tonight, man.’

‘There are no stars in London,’ I say.

‘‘Course there are. Look.’

He leans back against the wall of the pub, pulling me in beside him. Fraser is still wearing a track in the pavement.

‘Fraser,’ Dylan says.

Fraser huffs, and, after a moment, settles against the wall in the gap on my other side.

‘Okay,’ says Dylan. ‘Look. There’s the North Star.’

He points across us and we turn our heads obediently. We follow his finger tip to a tiny patch of clear sky, a single star framed in the centre. I go to tell Dylan his star is moving, but as I lean in I realise that everything else is moving too. The clouds slide sideways, the buildings tilt on their axes, and then my ears feel like they’ve filled up with water. Dylan and Fraser are warm and solid on either side of me. A bus comes around the corner in front of us, my head spins, and the world blinks out before I can say anything.

The rest comes in snapshots. Cut to me with a tight grip around my bicep, a voice saying, ‘We can’t just leave him, anything could happen’ and ‘If you knew he was this drunk, why didn’t you say anything?’ A Scottish accent parries back, something about responsibility and not, waifs and strays and the Dylan Rivers Bleeding Hearts Club. Then we’re in a taxi and I’m talking when I shouldn’t be, trying too late to stop the words and stuff them back behind the balustrade of my bottom teeth. Then somebody else starts to speak, the taxi turns a corner, and I catch an Absinthe flash of green traffic light. Blackout.

When I come to, I am… somewhere. Floor. Ceiling. Soap-flecked shower glass. I log the evidence.

I’m lying on my back on bathroom tiles. My knees are still bent up around the bowl, and a dull pain nags at my hip – either from the stretch or the fall. A wave of nausea roils in my stomach, but there’s nothing left. I roll over and push myself onto my knees and my head swims. I rest my forehead against the dusty ledge at the base of the shower stall. I am not at home. I was in a taxi. It is or was Thursday night. I was with Dylan from the Cloak and Dagger. I was trying to keep pace with him. This must be his bathroom. His dust I’ve got my forehead resting in.

I sit up. This is not my finest hour. There’s still vomit cradled in the bottom of the toilet bowl. What if I had choked? I was throwing up and then I passed out on my back. How does my body know the right timing? I pull myself to my feet with the edge of the sink and rinse my mouth out with cold water from the tap, then stick my head under the jet and drink. Better.

I push open the door. The flat is lit only by the chink of gold coming from the bathroom behind me, and the blue glow of a TV in the adjacent room. I step into the pool of light and turn the corner into the living room.

Dylan has draped himself sideways in an armchair across from me, a mug of tea in one hand and the TV remote in the other. He glances up and sees me in the doorway.

He motions me to the couch with the hand holding the mug and says, ‘Have a seat.’

‘I should call a taxi.’

I need to leave before I overstay my welcome. I’ve probably been here too long already. Dylan shakes his head and gestures again to the couch.

‘You’re in no state to go anywhere, and besides that, your phone’s dead. We tried to call someone to let them know where you were.’

My stomach slips. The first chance I have to actually build some kind of relationship with this guy I’ve been swooning over at a distance for weeks, and I’ve already managed to make a scene.

‘I’m really sorry,’ I say, still lurking in the doorway.

He frowns. ‘What for?’

‘Being such a mess.’

He laughs. ‘Trust me mate, it happens to us all. You’re talking to an expert.’

He’s so unfazed. What must it be like to be so fundamentally unembarrassed? I’m going to be replaying everything I said and did tonight over and over in my head for at least the next week, examining it from every possible humiliating angle. The anxiety threatens to overwhelm me. I redirect my mind to focus on the immediate practicalities instead.

‘Do you have a charger I can borrow?’

Dylan nods and pushes himself out of the chair with a groan. He disappears down the hall and comes back a moment later to deposit the phone charger into my hands, gesturing at a tangle of cords and power-boards by the TV.

‘See if you can find a space there.’

I have an image of this plug being the one that overloads the circuit, and me accidentally burning the whole house down just to turn my phone back on and check my messages. I plug it in and it’s a miracle that nothing sparks. After a few seconds, my phone turns on. It starts to vibrate almost straight away, a flurry of pulses heaving it across the carpet. I have a ton of messages and two missed calls from Mairead.

Are you okay? That was insane.

Where are you??

I’m going to the Cloak, meet me there?

Noah

Noah

(One Missed Call)

Where the fuck are you?

(Two Missed Calls)

Isaac says he saw you at O’Leary’s with that guy from the Cloak, are you still with him? He’s hot and I know it’s exciting but don’t let him murder you or w/e.

Honestly why am I still surprised when you get fucked and wander off??

You’re such a liability

Love u pls don’t die

‘Bloody hell,’ I mutter.

I start to type. Yes still with him, yes still alive. Yes hot. No murdering so far. Home at some point in the next 12 hours. Love you too.

I tap back to the home screen, my finger hovering over the button that will order me a cab. Dylan waves again at the couch, the cartoon running back and forth across the TV.

‘If you’re real desperate to go home I won’t stop you, but you’re more than welcome if you wanna stay and watch Scooby Doo with me.’

I put the phone down. I sit. The couch sags a little as I sink into it, the soft cushions soothing the aches of cold tile and awkward angles. In the light of the TV the room has the sticky, gauzy quality of a dream.

‘Why are we watching Scooby Doo?’

‘I’m waiting for the day when it turns out the caretaker didn’t do it.’

‘You’ll be waiting a while,’ I say.

‘So Fraser tells me. But then, Fraser’s often wrong.’

I think of Fraser watching everybody in the pub, and the argument I think I heard between him and Dylan. He wanted to leave me behind.

‘How long have you guys been together?’ I ask.

Dylan sits up to deposit his mug on the table.

‘Oh, we’re not.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Sorry.’

‘S’alright. It’s complicated though.’ A pause. ‘We’re not together, but I can only stay here because of him.’

It’s a weird thing to say, and I know it implies something, but I’m too tired to process. The booze is making my head swim again.

‘Don’t tell him I told you though,’ Dylan says. ‘He worries about getting caught.’

‘I won’t.’

It should be easy enough, considering I don’t quite understand what it actually is Dylan’s told me.

An unpleasant thought floats belly-up to the surface of my mind. I fish it out.

‘Are you straight?’ I ask.

The idea had honestly never occurred to me until just now.

‘I am, yeah.’ He smirks. ‘So far, at least.’

What a waste. The baby boomers love to bang on about ‘all these new genders and sexual orientations’, but it seems to me everyone is turning heterosexual these days. Each to their own and all, but I just don’t understand what it is they do.

‘Fraser’s not though,’ Dylan says.

It’s always the way. We always get the dramatic, brooding ones. I hate to stereotype, but they are bloody accurate sometimes.

I lie back on the couch and pull up the blanket pooled around my feet. On TV, Scooby and the rest of the Mystery Inc. gang chase an abominable snowman through the grounds of a spooky manor. I close my eyes for just a second.

When I wake up in the morning, Dylan is gone.

A Missive Into the Digital Abyss, from Ryan Shelby

Once more unto the breach, dear friends… the noble house of Politely rides again. It’s been a while my loves… Life’s been happening while we were away but domesticity don’t suit us much. Went to LA & got into yoga & smoothies until Claire talked some sense into me so came back to Camden Town of the Damned & had a right old piss up. Johnnie Walker light of my life fire of my loins… tho things did take a turn for the violent there for a bit or two. Something to work on going forward, eh?

All this to say we’ve been in the studio & have a little something for you. What are you doing 9 months from now? Keep an afternoon open for us…

We’ll be seein you.

All my love,

Ry x

2

‘Did you tell him you want to have his babies?’

Mairead’s doing that no-dairy thing again, eating her Cornflakes with almond milk to try to improve her singing voice. She hates almond milk. Every time she buys it she thinks she’s going to like it this time, and then she realises she still doesn’t and it sits in the fridge for weeks until eventually I tip it down the sink. Then she tells me off for pouring her money down the drain. It’s a whole thing.

‘Yes, I did, I told him that right after I asked him to run away with me to Alaska where we could live on a moose farm.’

‘A moose farm?’

‘Seriously Mazzy, I don’t know how many times I have to tell you it’s not like that.’

It can’t be like that, because Dylan is straight. That little smirk, so far, at least, means all is not lost, but the chances are slim. The chances are vanishing into the centre of a black hole.

‘At least once more,’ she says.

‘It’s not like that.’

‘I believe you. I really do.’

‘Oh piss off,’ I say.

‘Do they farm mooses? Meese?’

A beat. She wrinkles her nose at her cereal. ‘This is horrible.’

‘Moosi? I don’t know. What do moose actually do?’

These little inanities save me from swirling around in my own brain with the more troubling questions, like, why is it always the ones I can’t have? This is why I have fallen behind my peers in the world of romance. I never make it easy for myself.

Mairead gets up and dumps the rest of her cereal in the sink, letting the jet from the tap turn the flakes into a claggy lump around the plughole.

‘You’re going to be late,’ she says.

‘Yeah.’

So what else is new?

Work that day is slow, as usual. I lean against the counter and scrawl notes on receipt paper, trying to figure out how to see Dylan again. Every time I go into the Cloak and Dagger these days, he’s not there. This morning I looked up the words ‘Dylan’, ‘Smiling Politely’ and ‘The Assembly’ to find his review from the other night, then took his full name to scan through all of the usual social networks. He doesn’t have a profile anywhere. Not one. How does he even manage that? How does he know about gigs and parties and films, and bombs going off in parts of the world that he’s never seen? How did he find out Lou Reed had died? I write ‘Lou Reed’ on the scrap of receipt roll, then screw it up into a ball and stuff it down the hole in the counter where the electrical cords snake through. Sweet dreams, Lou. But who told Dylan Rivers you were dead?

Jenny tools around on one of the acoustic guitars no one ever buys. They come in for vinyl, mostly, occasionally the odd CD or t-shirt, but no one ever buys the guitars. We do the most business when my boss Cal agrees to sell tickets to shows. I’ve got that written down in my CV as ‘music promoter’.

‘Any news on that guy?’ Jenny asks.

I shake my head. ‘Nothing.’

‘Heavy.’

In a former life Jenny was an emo, and still sometimes talks like a character out of Girl, Interrupted. When she told me about her misspent youth on her first day at the shop, I stupidly said, ‘I didn’t realise emo was a thing in Hong Kong.’

She just gave me this really level look, not giving anything away, and said, ‘What, you think we didn’t have My Chem in Hong Kong? Emily the Strange? You think we didn’t get the Atticus compilations like everybody else?’

I had to admit that I didn’t know what an Atticus compilation was, then.

‘So I guess you didn’t really have emo in England, huh?’

I wanted a cartoon anvil to fall on me. But we moved past it. One time at Friday night drinks we kissed in the photo booth, and I think we were both relieved to discover it didn’t do anything much for either of us.

I’ve got off with girls before, but with Jenny it was like trying to make out with my cousin or something. I’m not supposed to acknowledge that it happened, anyway. She’s with Mairead now.

It’s like a disease, Camden. Sexually transmitted.

‘I don’t know why it even matters,’ I say. ‘It was just one of those nights.’

‘He made you feel special,’ says Jenny.

‘Yes, but why? What’s so special about him that he gets to make me feel special?’

She shrugs. ‘He’s hot, you’re shallow.’

That’s the thing about Jenny. She gets me.

This goes on for weeks, until I’m about ready to jump off a tower block with the monotony of it. This is my real life. The record shop, and Jenny, and coffee at breakfast and films with Mairead at the weekend. Nothing special. Just Camden, and rainy Tuesday afternoons. I stare out of the front window of the shop for half the day, see-sawing between lethargy and irritability until Jenny looks like she wants to smack me over the head with the card reader. I kind of wish she would. Just put me out of my misery.

Mairead is trying to decide whether or not to come in. I can hear her on the other side of the door, bickering with herself. One part of her saying, He’ll come out when he can function again and the other going, It’s been long enough, I’m sick of tiptoeing around him. I don’t want her to tiptoe. I just want to be left alone. I’m quite comfortable in my gloom.

The mattress has started to form a groove around my body, and with the blanket pulled up over my head I can pretend I’ve been buried alive. The heat under here is suffocating. A sheen of dried sweat covers my torso, and my pyjama bottoms stick to the backs of my knees and make my legs itch. But I’m not coming out for air just yet. I’m going to stay here until Mairead gives up and goes away and I don’t feel so much like I’m under observation.

I think she’s put me on suicide watch. It’s okay though. I’m not going to kill myself. She doesn’t need to come in and collect up all my belts and shoelaces.

The floorboards creak as she moves into the kitchen. I pull the duvet down off my head and take a breath. The air in here is stale with pot smoke and old cigarettes, and it sits heavy in my lungs. I feel sick.

The knock on my bedroom door makes my stomach lurch. I throw myself down on the bed, burrow back underneath the covers. The door creaks open.

‘I know you aren’t asleep,’ says Mairead.

I close my eyes and curl my fingers tighter into the blanket. Maybe if I just count to thirty and lie here trying not to breathe, she’ll get bored and go away. She gets bored easily, Mairead. I hear the rustle of her clothes and jewellery as she moves closer to the bed, and the clunk of porcelain on the nightstand. A slosh as something spills over it.

‘I brought you some tea,’ she says, begrudgingly.

She sits down on the edge of the mattress and the bed dips towards her, my body rolling out of its comfortable rut.

‘You need to get up.’

No I don’t, I want to say. I am one with the duvet.

‘You have to go out into the world. You have to go back to your job.’

I ignore her and roll away, turning my back to her under the covers.

‘You can be real hard work, you know that?’

Here, at least, is something true.

She sighs and pulls the blanket away from my head. I squint one eye open at her. The amethyst crystal around her neck looks smudged and grubby today, as if it’s tainted just from being in here with all my dirt.

‘I didn’t mean that,’ she says. ‘I take it back.’

Mairead’s not built for hard truths. I close my eye again. Mairead fidgets on the edge of the mattress, jiggling her ankle in that way that she does that makes the whole bed shake. She might be doing it on purpose, trying to get me to snake a hand out from under the covers and put it on her knee to make her be still. She’d consider that progress.

I don’t move. I let her have her tiny earthquake. She huffs. Starts to poke my ribs through the shield of the blanket, then stops.

‘I don’t know how to help you.’

That makes two of us. The problem is, Mairead thinks it’s a personal failing that she can’t fix things for me. You can hear it in her voice.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry,’ she says. ‘Just…maybe it’s time to call the doctor?’

She’s probably right. As usual.

On TV, therapist’s offices are always nice. They’re in someone’s front room – usually a nice older woman with her hair short like Jamie Lee Curtis, so you know she’s eccentric and has seen it all before – and they have dark brown floorboards and nice armchairs. Posh, you know? My one looks like a dentist’s where someone has stuck some leftover primary school carpeting in. Hardy and easy to clean, in case of little accidents.

My therapist does not look like Jamie Lee Curtis. She looks like my year eight English teacher who hated me for a reason I could never quite place. Could’ve been homophobia, but I also could’ve just been a really annoying teenager. Not that I spend a weird amount of time thinking about it or anything.

She’s waiting me out. Anne asked me a solid two minutes ago why I feel that I am fundamentally unlikeable, and all I said: ‘I just do.’ It’s the truth, but now she wants me to elaborate. She might as well ask me why the Earth goes round the sun. It’s just a fact, and there’s definitely somebody out there who can explain it, but it isn’t me.

She hasn’t written anything down in a while. I can’t tell if that’s good or bad. In my first session I saw her write down the word ‘Dad’ and underline it, and all I’d said was that I have one. Sometimes I tell her any irrelevant thought that comes to mind just to see if she’ll make a note of it. That kind of thing is probably counter-productive, but I just don’t know how this is meant to work. I don’t think me and Anne are exactly the right fit for each other, but she’s who I’ve got. It’s not like I have the money to go private. Does anyone?

Anne’s not even a therapist, technically. She’s a ‘Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner’, allocated to me by the good people at Camden Council and the National Health Service. Forced upon me, really. I didn’t get much of a choice.

There was an incident a few weeks ago – I had a bit of a wobble and Mairead made some threats I believed she’d follow through on, so I did what I was told and called for help. I’m still not sure I want it. This episode wasn’t half as bad as the last time and I was fine then, in the end. It seems like such a waste of resources, when there are plenty of people out there who could actually get better with Anne’s help.

Now I feel guilty about the silence. Someone else could be using these NHS minutes. I cave.

‘I guess to be likeable you have to have something in you.’

‘Something like what?’ she asks.

‘Like anything.’

‘Why do you think you keep returning to this idea?’

The emptiness, she means. It’s a recurring theme. I shrug.

‘It feels like the truth.’

Anne always says that what feels true isn’t necessarily the same as the truth. I’m not quite sure what she means by that, but she keeps repeating it every session anyway. I guess maybe she means you can’t trust your own cheating heart sometimes. I certainly don’t trust my mind, though, and I’ve got to keep the faith with some part of me. How else are you meant to keep on living? My mind is gone and I’m not sure about the soul thing, so I have to believe in the bruised little fucker banging on inside my chest. I have to.

This is exactly the kind of thing that Anne is supposed to help me prevent. The overthinking and the misplaced faith.

‘We can talk more about this next time,’ says Anne. ‘And we’ll need to start building a plan for how you’re going to cope when these sessions are over.’

I’d say it will probably be remarkably similar to how I’ve been coping while we’ve had these sessions, considering they’ve done a fair amount of nothing much. Another day with no breakthrough. But I thank her anyway, of course, because it’s not her fault she can’t help me. The system just isn’t built for neurotic queers.

I get out of Anne’s weird chair, and I go to work.

‘You’re starting to be unbearable.’

It’s Friday, which means two-for-one fish and chips at Wetherspoons and indie disco at the Cloak and Dagger. I can’t be arsed. It’s only going to be matey from Blue Royals DJing anyway, which suggests to me that nobody else was available and nobody will go. Blue Royals are awful. Really, properly dreadful. They are the landfill’s landfill, the layer of decomposing cardboard boxes and rat corpses at the very bottom of the pile.

Whatshisface is the kind of guy who won’t pick any songs by a woman beyond the Amy Winehouse version of ‘Valerie’ – and worse, won’t even realise that he hasn’t. He’ll only play songs a bloke wrote about shagging or wanting to shag and not being able to because the woman he loves doesn’t love him back. In those songs, it’s always because the woman is ‘frosty’ that things don’t work out. It’s never because he’s got about as much personality as a communion wafer.

I’ll probably end up there after we close up here in a few hours anyway. What else am I going to do? Mairead’s decided off the back of this debacle that if this is what we get in terms of DJ quality then she’ll have to take matters into her own hands. She’s going to be there all evening trying to pester the manager-slash-promoter, Simon, into bringing her on-board. Someone has to balance out the shite.

‘Oi,’ says Jenny. ‘Listen to me when I’m judging you.’

She snaps her fingers in my face. That Peace album, In Love, is going round and round on the shop stereo. Nobody has come in for almost two hours. The racks in front of me – New Releases and Alt/Indie A-K, each of them papered with stickers from labels long dead – are practically gathering dust right in front of my eyes.

‘Sorry. What?’

‘I said, you’re starting to be unbearable.’

‘Oh. Just starting?’

She rolls her eyes. ‘Are you still thinking about that guy?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ve moved on with my life.’

They drift in and out of my thoughts all the time. Dylan first, with his smile, and then the other one trailing inevitably behind. They’re a package deal, even in my daydreams. Especially there, maybe.

‘You need to stop obsessing,’ Jenny says. ‘It’s weird.’

‘I can’t help it. It’s driving me mental.’

‘You’re driving me mental,’ she sighs. ‘Anyway, I’m meant to be shooting this gig tonight down at the Borderline, wanna come?’

‘It’s indie disco night,’ I say automatically.

‘Yeah, but it’s only him from Blue Royals. They’re shit. Even their name is shit.’

‘They are shit.’

‘So come to the Borderline.’

The band on at the Borderline – Yatala or Yalata or something, I wasn’t really paying attention – actually turn out to be halfway decent. Promising. Halfway through their set these guys are still taking me with them, their songs tangling into knots and then unspooling again in the same beat. They’re not electric, but they’ve got a spark. When we got here it turned out that the drummer is the guitarist from Afterlife’s brother, which means that Isaac and all that lot are here as well. With Jenny off down the front taking pictures I stay close to them instead, on the fringes of the group but not quite part of it. Story of my life.

When Mairead started knocking about with Isaac when they worked together at the Barfly, I couldn’t be bothered with his band. I told her I liked them as people and all that, but it was a shame that they couldn’t write a decent tune. It was harsh but true. Their early lyrics made me want to go to sleep.

Then it turned out that Isaac’s bi, and I had to go and watch them after that. I didn’t know of any other queer blokes in the quote-unquote indie scene. We are an overwhelmingly straight crowd. Even though I love the tunes, sometimes I want a dominant narrative outside of boy meets girl. I’m not looking to meet a girl. A love song is a love song, but just once it’d be nice to have a bit of guitar music about a boy meeting another boy. A man cannot subsist on Bloc Party and that one Franz Ferdinand song alone.

I guess you’d say me and Isaac are friends. We’ve never actually made plans to hang out, but that’s only because we’re in the same place at the same time far too often for there to be any need to make the effort. We did get off in the toilet at the Good Mixer last year during Camden Rocks though, which complicates things. It was good, in so much as anything can be good while your back is pressed up against that opaque window in the cubicle door and you know that any second someone might want to come in and take a shit. We’ve never done it again, but I don’t think I’m imagining the subtext in all of our interactions since. I think if I were bold enough, I might be able to make it happen again.

I’m feeling a little bit lost in the group. I know Isaac too well to be able to go off on my own without looking like a complete weirdo, but I don’t want to just hang off his elbow and I don’t know any of the others well enough to join their conversations this sober. The band aren’t big enough for me to pretend I need a better view, either. Nobody cares that much about these guys just yet. Except for Jenny, of course, and their drunk mates down the front.

I need a reset. I ditch the group and push my way into the weird, flat-pack style bathroom. I edge through the door and try to sidle past into the one rank cubicle, where I can hide for a minute and get a grip on my mind before it takes off without me. There’s a guy in a beanie hat at the urinal, sort of in the way, and as I make eye contact with his back he mumbles, ‘One sec, mate.’

My stomach gives a little leap. Now that I’ve realised, the back of his head and the way he holds himself is unmistakable. Even the denim jacket. Have I somehow conjured him here with my imagination? I’ve been thinking about him almost constantly. Surely it’s possible.