Kieran.Stories

I’ve told the story before of your mum plying me with bottles of Becks at her birthday party. I might give a little more. I didn’t know anyone there. I was fifteen. My parents were furious when I came home confused and smelling of smoke. The truth is that I have been more drunk since. I suffered worse hangovers when we were at university. But it’s a fun story to tell. 

I was inspecting the green bottle when you told me to roll down my shirtsleeves. We were by the fire exit. Queen Jane was on the stage. This bottle contains mysteries, I thought. It unlocked a part of the adult world. I was catching Becca’s eye. I kept looking at her, emboldened by the Becks. Your sister smiled the first time, then looked away. You were pacing the length of the fire door. 

‘We look stupid,’ you said. 

‘My trousers are wet.’ 

‘Why?’ 

I waved this away. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

You stopped underneath the Fire Exit box, green like my bottle. You put both your hands on my shoulders and we faced each other. I remember laughing then I stopped. I don’t remember what you said. I would only be making something up. 

‘Have you had a haircut?’ 

‘Yeah,’ you said, still holding me opposite you. ‘Come on.’ You went to find your mum. It was nine o’clock, the appointed time. She was in a green velveteen dress, and her hair was high above her head, an elegant bird’s nest. 

‘Everyone,’ she said into the mic. ‘Gather round. Let me introduce to you, Johnny and Finn, our performers extraordinaire, who are going to take you back. Way back.’ 

We were on the stage now, too, waiting for our cue. It hadn’t come. Your mum stayed by the mic, waiting for something else to say. She thanked everyone for coming. 

She got off the stage, stumbling slightly in her heels, and stood very close to the front. Becca was at the back of the hall – she flicked two sets of lights off.

We opened with ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. I was to your left. I was watching you the whole time. Your eyes were closed. My trousers were bone dry by the end of the set. During ‘Hurricane’, I looked out at your family. People had gravitated to the front to be with your mum. I can’t decide if I saw her cry, or if her eyes were watery, or if she looked up at us stoically, as if to say, Proud of you, boys. But all of that is probably false. I said to you, ‘No one seemed to care about the n-word, in the end,’ and you nodded, sagely. 

After our performance, as Becca fixed the lights and put the music back on, and your dad offered around the last of the sausage rolls, your mum invited us outside the hall for a cigarette. 

‘Finn?’ 

‘Cool. Thanks.’ 

‘You don’t have to,’ she said, shaking her head. You lit a cigarette, inhaled, then handed it to me to try. 

‘Next. You need to perform for real people. Strangers. You should do an open mic.’ 

‘Don’t you need a license?’ 

You looked at me.

‘Or something like that.’ 

I coughed furiously and turned away to face the brick wall. Time was elastic. Or it was like fudge. I couldn’t quite decide.  

‘The question that you’ll be thinking now is,’ your mum looked down and shook her head momentarily, ‘Dylan and only Dylan, or introduce more, or write your own stuff. Your own stuff is an obvious endpoint, but if you commit to Dylan, that’s perfectly valid, perhaps more valid. Enough material to generate real magic. These are questions that you need to think about.’ You were nodding. ‘Both of you. You mustn’t give it up, that would be a travesty, honestly.’ 

You repeated most of this later to me the next day, when we met up in the park, hungover but bright. I remember looking at the spire of Holy Trinity and thinking, Fuck off. Nothing was as real as my hangover, and the spire was too objective for me to handle at that moment. We might have been on the swings, early in the morning. 

‘The question is, where? For the open mic.’ 

I waited for you to present me with the answer. I was used to that. 

‘What do you think?’ 

‘I don’t know, I’ve never done one before.’ 

‘Also, do we even want to.’ 

‘I think we should,’ I said, and that, for whatever reason, sealed it. 

At the party, after the conversation with your mum, the shared cigarette and my staring at the brick wall for a bit too long and with too much intensity, the rest of the party felt heavy with possibility. I decided that if I was to tell Becca how I felt – how I would die for her with less than a moment’s notice, how the mere thought of her made me feel a bit sick – then I had to tell her tonight. I camped in one corner of the hall, and waited for her to come near me, and eventually she did, although I was by the toilets. 

‘Becca.’

As if anticipating that I was about to say something mortally embarrassing, she leaned in and said, ‘You were really good,’ then disappeared into the loos.    

I don’t remember much after that, even the above is mostly guesswork. But I know that the performance in the village hall happened. I know that afterwards I was sick inside a shrub outside the hall, and it took me an hour to walk across the village to my house. In the morning: the third degree. I escaped out of the house and texted you. You were up. I got a Coke from Londis and walked to the park, and waited. 

‘My mum’s pissed off with me,’ I said. ‘About last night.’ 

‘Why?’ 

‘I think she just thinks that I don’t really know any of you.’ Perhaps I was still a little drunk, because Mum hadn’t said that at all, although she might have been thinking it. She was pissed because I was drunk, and I had offered up the information that I had smoked my first cigarette. I was proud of myself. After that, she wasn’t so much pissed as bemused. She went back up to bed. Dad was in his office, noodling, which he liked to do from about six in the morning. 

You shrugged. ‘Does that bother you?’ 

‘No. Sometimes I wonder if we’re actually friends, or if you’re just using me for my guitar prowess.’ 

‘Fuck off,’ you said. This seemed to resolve a lot of issues. 

This is a chapter from a story I’m working on at the moment. All very much first draft stuff, but I wanted to share the above to give you a flavour. If anyone is interested in reading more, drop me a line and I’ll gladly send it over when it’s done.