The guy with the van
Smudge pulls his van into the pick-up zone of East Midlands airport, turns off the engine, leaves the radio on.
They’ve stopped the music because the Queen has died, so he sits for a while listening to presenters talk in sombre tones.
Then he turns off the radio and sits in silence.
The rain is a fine and constant mist, and Smudge doesn’t spot Seb until he’s opening the door.
‘Long time, no see,’ Seb says.
It has been. The last time Smudge saw Seb was four years ago, when he helped him move his stuff out of the flat he’d shared with Clara.
The band had got themselves back together for the day, each wanting to help in their own manner.
Ryan, with his neat haircut and his neatly trimmed moustache, sticking labels on boxes and making plans for the best way of loading up a vehicle that they once used to fill with their instruments.
Nimesh, running his fingers through his long hair as he observed the last thing left on the wall, a hand-drawn illustration of a young man and his dog sitting beneath a statue.
‘Leave it,’ Seb had said. And so they’d left.
Seb isn’t online. Smudge hasn’t seen a picture of him in all the time he’s been gone.
He’s shaved his head, his close-cropped hair still dark against his skull.
His beard is longer, fuller. Lines are worn into his deeply tanned skin, the tattoos on the backs of his hands blurred by the sun.
His eyes crease as he takes Smudge in, seeming to process the time gone by.
‘Fuck, man,’ Smudge says. ‘You look old.’
They laugh, and they throw Seb’s big leather bags in the back, and Smudge worries that, by contrast, he has stayed exactly the same.
They used to be tight, he and Seb. They used to smoke together, and Smudge remembers a red-eyed Seb talking about the transcendental experience of being in a mosh pit, of allowing fists and elbows to hit you in the face and force you to feel something.
Smudge knows the feeling, of not wanting to feel.
He’s thirty-eight years old, and yet he still spends his weeks working on people’s driveways until his back seizes and his hands are scuffed bloody, his weekends shuffling until his ankles hurt, dropping bombs of mandy until he’s ten miles high.
He’s too old for this shit, but he doesn’t know what else to do.
They set off from the airport, sitting in those same seats in which they used to recreate the air drums from the music video to Arctic Monkeys’ ‘R U Mine’, and they talk like no time has passed at all.
‘How long are you back for?’ Smudge asks.
‘Six months or so,’ Seb replies. ‘Get my affairs in order.’
Smudge indicates as they approach an exit. He doesn’t ask what affairs, in what order. ‘And then?’
Seb stares out of the window. ‘And then…’ He trails off.
As the city forms around them, they pass a few of the pubs they used to play at. One of them has been rebranded, sold to a chain. The other has been turned into flats.
‘I don’t think I realised how much I loved all that,’ Smudge says.
‘They were good years.’ Seb nods.
Ryan was always promising that the band would go stratospheric.
Seb and Nimesh wanted to move to Sri Lanka and rescue dogs.
The day Leicester won the league, everyone came flooding back.
They were all suddenly so proud to be from here.
But it’s Smudge who has always been here, Smudge who never leaves.
Now Seb is home. Ryan is talking about coming back, making the move into local politics, sorting out a place he’s barely seen in the last two decades.
Nimesh has a one-year-old, runs his own practice outside the city.
Smudge barely sees any of his old bandmates any more.
He used to think he’d be a half-decent DJ, but that never came to anything.
He once invited the other boys to V Festival, but all of them were busy.
He tells everyone he owns a business, but really, he just owns a van.
They pull up outside Seb’s dad’s restaurant, and Seb looks at Smudge for a while. What comes next? Seb was never easy to read.
‘It’s good to have you back,’ Smudge says, eventually.
Seb smiles a sad smile that seems a bit like an apology. ‘Do you think I’d miss this?’