Chapter 4
GUY
Completely Over the Fucking Wedding Fayre
I take a packet of cigarettes from my backpack and wiggle them at Dave, who’s mid-conversation with one of the endless stream of clients contracting his entertainment company for their wedding parties.
I’m pleased he’s making a success of things.
I always felt bad for how The Hand Me Downs left his management.
Add it to the long list of things I feel justly guilty about.
Dave nods and I assume I’m dismissed. I must have sung thirty songs already – songs my subconscious seemed to know the tune of, though I kept having to check the lyrics. I don’t sing any more and I can feel it in my unexercised throat.
Maybe I should have applied for a job as a bin man because this performance business is not coming easily at all.
Now, Dave has plastered my name all over his banners, which he promised me he wouldn’t do, upped his prices and booked me in for weddings two years from now.
All I want to do is scream for everyone to hear, I’m Not That Man Any More!
That man would never have been seen dead singing Bublé in a fucking suit.
For the record, I own two suits. One doesn’t fit any more, since it’s from my end-of-school dance back in 2008, which begs the question, why haven’t I binned it?
The other, which I’m wearing and wishing I wasn’t, is another torturous reminder that I watched my brother be buried three years ago.
Honestly, I’d refund every single booking Dave has made this morning if I could, but I can’t, because my money is tied up. It isn’t mine. Right now, my options are limited.
So, I’m standing outside this posh castle, shades on and a fag between my lips, thankfully, with no way of lighting it.
I keep a packet of cigarettes on me all the time – both as a reminder that I could smoke but I chose to give it up, and because it’s a nifty get-out-of-jail when I need to take a breather.
Hands in the pockets of my funeral trousers, I walk out to an old oak tree to look out across the estate’s park land, coming to rest a shoulder on the solid trunk, thinking… This. Is. Not. My. Life.
The truth is, I arrived here on time this morning.
I wanted to be on time, for Dave’s sake, to let him know that I am grateful for this lifeline he’s thrown me.
But at nine twenty-five, sitting in my pink car in the staff car park, I just…
couldn’t. My legs forgot how to move. My arms couldn’t remember how to bend.
My lungs couldn’t draw their next breath. I just… froze.
It hasn’t happened for a while but I guess something about the hen party last night triggered me. Isn’t that the buzz word of the 2020s? Aren’t I on trend if I’m triggered and spiralling?
At least I have being fashionable going for me, because when I woke in the night, lying in sheets so wet they could have been wrung out like a sponge from a bath, I felt like shit.
I dreamed of That Night. Not the one when I got the phone call I’ll never forget. The one where it all started. The one where I was so preoccupied with myself – with chasing after a girl, then wallowing when I couldn’t find her – that I took my eyes off my kid brother.
Now, I’m minding my own business, intermittently checking my watch to make sure I don’t take the piss out of Dave’s generosity, when there’s a deep exhalation somewhere near me. Then suddenly, a woman standing in front of the oak tree, staring at the same view as me.
She doesn’t realise I’m here.
Her long hair falls down her back in a loose plait, the kind my kid sister would have worn in secondary school. Bex is the youngest of the three of us – her, Scott and me. Seven years younger than me, a year younger than Scott.
Despite living back on their doorsteps, I haven’t seen Bex, or my mam, for three years. Not since Scott’s funeral. By the time that day ended, we all knew where we stood. My stepdad had made his views abundantly clear to me. His hate.
He was the one who voiced what everyone else was thinking. What happened to Scott was on my shoulders.
If I could swap places, bring him back, build a fucking time machine and undo all the shit that went wrong, I would, I’d undo it all.
I’d go back and make sure he never joined The Hand Me Downs.
I’d make damn sure that I’d never taken my eyes off him on That Night, too focused on pining after a girl to notice his first time taking hard drugs.
The girl with the plait shakes her head, as if she’s having a conversation in her mind.
She takes her hands from the pockets of her long beige cardigan and folds them around her middle, across her summery, yellow dress.
As I watch her, she strikes me as familiar, and when she shifts her stance, I do recognise her profile.
Despite standing still, the surprise makes me lose my balance. My foot shifts, snapping a twig on the grass.
The girl from last night – that kiss – gasps as she turns to see me. ‘Guy!’
My cigarette falls from my lips onto damp grass. Damn it, that’s been a pack of twenty for probably eighteen months, since I slipped and smoked my previous packet.
Lyra. Her name doesn’t make it out of my mouth.
Maybe because, as we stare at each other, a sense of knowing, like a Sliding Doors or Groundhog Day moment is happening.
I feel like I’m supposed to know this woman.
It’s the same feeling I got when I first saw her in the lift last night.
A sense of desire that drove me to get lost in her kiss.
I feel like I’m missing something. Honestly, it could just be due to the number of times I replayed that kiss in my mind last night, the girl I’ll never get out of my head for many reasons, including that she called me a gigolo.
But when she kissed me, when I kissed her back, it felt as if something shifted in me.
I’ll be damned if I know what. All I know is, it left me angry, or wired, or fucking afraid. Possibly all three.
‘Have we met before?’ I ask.
I mean before last night but I realise too late, as I watch her swallow deeply, then cast her gaze to the ground, she’s taken my question the wrong way.
‘No.’ She clears her throat. ‘Never.’
Now I know I haven’t met her before last night because I’m reminded how much like a nice girl she seemed. A quiet, sweet, unsure of herself girl. Right up to the point of throwing herself at me. Giving me a kiss that wasn’t innocent at all.
Easy ones. Angry ones. Filthy ones. Those are the kind of women I know.
I take out another cigarette and I’m about to apologise when she surprises me for a second time, standing taller, rolling her shoulders back, eyes narrowing in temper.
‘You know, I came out here to find you and apologise for my behaviour last night.’ She shakes her head again, clearly biting down on her gums, maybe the words she actually wants to say, too.
‘But since you don’t even remember meeting me…
’ She inhales so deeply, her chest rises. ‘You can bloody well sod off.’
Hold the phone! Where did that come from?
‘I can sod off?’ I call after her as she strides huffily off the grass, back in the direction of the castle. ‘You called me a gigolo. A prostitute!’
She spins to face me. ‘I came to apologise!’ Now she charges back towards me, until she’s only one big stride from pressing her pointed finger into my chest. ‘If you remember, I asked you if you were… you. And you denied it. You lied to me. To my face. Then pretended to be someone else for the entire party. If anyone is at fault here, it certainly isn’t me. ’
I scoff. She’s kind of cute irate. ‘Then why were you coming out here to apologise?’
‘Because.’ She stomps her foot. ‘Because I… I didn’t behave well. Like… myself. I…’
‘Used me to get at your sister? Don’t worry about it. Shit happens. I won’t lose sleep over it.’
Except I did. The kiss. The way she made me feel worthless, the size of a peanut, immediately after it.
By the time I got home, there was a chink, I think, in the armour I wear these days.
In the safety partition I’ve learned to put between me and the rest of the world because no, I don’t want to talk about It, and no, I don’t think I’m fine but no, I don’t think I deserve to feel fine either.
My armour that says, Keep your fucking distance, World.
A chink.
A chink that made me stare at the empty bottle of tequila I’d been drinking water from all night and wish it was full of the kind of stuff that could drown it all out.
And a disturbed night, of nightmares I don’t like to mention, let alone relive.
‘I’m sure you won’t. But if I’d known that you were… you, I never would have presumed I could just…’
‘Kiss me?’ Kiss me like that?
She scowls. ‘Yes.’
‘So it’s okay to kiss random gigolos but not musicians?’
‘Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter, since you don’t remember that happening. I guess that’s the problem when you drink a bottle of tequila.’
I feel my brow furrow. So full of assumptions, no real clue what she’s talking about. If she’d kissed a man who’d drank a bottle of tequila, she’d have known about the smell on his breath, about the stagger in his feet, the clumsiness of his touch.
‘Look, Lyra—’ For a second, I’m about to explain my unfortunate phrasing, that I do remember last night, and that I was actually asking whether we’ve met before then.
But then I think, Who the hell is this woman, shouting in my face, as if my day, my week, my month, the last three fucking years isn’t bad enough without her taking an unjustified tantrum?
Instead, I tell her, ‘I’ve gotta get back inside.’
‘Why are you here, Guy Walker from The Hand Me Downs?’ she asks, her words falling on my back because I just can’t be arsed with more agro in my life. ‘And don’t you know cigarettes kill? Are you the last man on earth still smoking in 2025?’
I can’t believe it, even as I’m making the gesture, but I flip her the bird across my shoulder. Instead of explaining that I don’t smoke, that she’s full of the aspersions of a goody two shoes, I call back to her, ‘I take it your sheltered life’s never taken you to continental Europe.’
‘It has, actually. To Madrid in 2022. And I wasted my only trip out of this country for seven years on seeing you playing in concert. Now I really wish I could refund myself all that money.’
I’ve started heading up the stone steps, back towards the giant wood entrance doors of the castle, but I stop, stilled by her words. Madrid.
I close my eyes as an image of Scott comes to me. Him collapsed across a sofa in our hotel room from a concoction of exhaustion and drugs. It had already started then. His addiction had taken hold.
To the outside world, we were at the top of our game.
Reality felt different.
My chest tightens and I open my eyes, reaching for the wall of the steps. I know all of this, these memories that come to me. What’s the point of my mind showing me again and again? Playing fucking tricks on me. Punishing me for not being enough. For failing our kid.
Pull yourself together, Guy. Get a hold of yourself.
Thankfully, I do. I push the nightmares away and tell the woman who’s to blame for this one. ‘I’d refund you myself if I could but if I could, I wouldn’t be singing fucking Bublé songs at a wedding fayre in County Durham.’
‘Why did you lie to me about who you are?’ she asks, her tone softer now, as if she’s remembered who she is and what she isn’t – a bad girl. I’d recognise one easily.
I turn to look at her and the honest answer is here, on the tip of my tongue: Look at me. I’m a broke, failed musician, a shit brother, son, human. Why would I want to admit to being me? But I go with the easier response, which is, ‘I didn’t. You made an assumption and I chose not to correct you.’
But I’m not Guy Walker of The Hand Me Downs any more. Last night and today are proof of it. There’s hardly a trace left of that lad she flew out to Madrid to see in concert. Barely anything at all. Only a name that reminds people of a man who was someone once.