Chapter 6
GUY
The Girl in My Dreams
It’s been a long day, from helping Dave set up for the wedding this morning to psyching myself up for the challenge by working out in the gym for hours, until I had to get dressed and head to Earl’s Castle.
I turn the key in my Barbie-pink, long-lashed Fiat to lock it, on account of the battery being dead. Pocketing the key, I loosen my black tie and unbutton the stiff neck of my white shirt, then gently press my increasingly puffy eye. It’s definitely going to bruise.
How in God’s name have I ended up in this situation?
I bypass the entrance to my building and head down the snicket to the beach.
The moon’s light is bright enough for me to see where my feet are landing and I know the feeling when my shiny shoes come to rest on the wet sand.
The wild, grey ocean roars at me, waves crashing ashore, and I close my eyes to let the sound wash over me.
For a moment, I disengage from reality, and for the first time in hours, I feel calm.
I can’t hear people calling for me to sing songs I wrote for my brother to perform, or asking for the autograph of a has-been. There’s no one gunning for me. No women showering me in cream after a bizarrely enticing fake orgasm over a profiterole.
And there’s no beautiful, gentle, kind woman drawing my attention to her for reasons I can’t fathom, because I know she’s not the sort of woman who needs a train wreck like me.
She’s not even the kind of woman who would want a failed, broke musician who’s fallen into selling his body and singing the cheesiest songs known to man.
But there’s something about Lyra that I just can’t seem to resist.
I open my eyes as the sound of something like a metal bin lid clatters behind me in the distance, a sound that reminds me of the city.
When I left London, I used half the equity from the sale of my Highgate apartment to pay off my nan’s, my mam’s and my sister’s mortgages.
With the rest of the money, I bought myself a significantly cheaper but, ironically, larger, apartment overlooking Roker Beach.
When Scott and I were kids, our grandad used to take us to Whitburn on the bus, to watch Sunderland AFC train.
We’d walk from the training ground to the beach, stopping for fish shop chips with lashings of curry sauce, then follow the coast all the way along to Roker.
I didn’t know what I was looking for when I left London, but I knew I had to get out. Away from my old life in the south, away from temptations, easy access to bars and pubs, to a life I didn’t want to be stuck in any more. Rock bottom.
I’m still not sure what it is that I want or how I go about finding it but six months ago, I got off a train in Sunderland with two suitcases, sporting a beard, hat and sunglasses, masking the man I used to be.
I’d thought about showing up on my mam’s doorstep, cap in hand, begging for forgiveness.
But I don’t want to keep disappointing her, hurting her, dredging it all back up.
Instead, I walked, luggage dragging behind me, with no direction or purpose, until I found myself at the coast, looking up at a For Sale sign on a beach-front apartment.
Now, inside my building, the corner of an envelope is poking out of my post box in the airy communal foyer.
Opening it, I see a couple of flyers for takeaway food – one for Indian and the other Chinese.
I roll the ads and pocket them. I’m a single lad who can’t be arsed to cook for one, and who’s used to London prices.
A five-course Thursday special for less than fifteen quid is music to my miserable bachelor ears.
Speaking of money, I recognise the letter that had been poking out of the box as a royalty statement from The Hand Me Downs’ old record label.
I open the statement in the stairwell as I make my way up to the fourth floor of the six-storey building. I’m always surprised by how much the songs I’ve written are still played on a daily basis. To me, they’re done, in the past, dead, like my brother.
And the royalties make no difference to me because I don’t take them. Since Scott died, nearly all my royalties have been directed to a trust I set up for his kid. My four-year-old nephew, Matty.
I refuse to live off the back of songs my brother’s voice made famous. He’s the reason those songs are still loved and streamed.
I let him down. And I’ve destroyed my nephew’s life, because he’ll never know how awesome his dad was.
So the least I can do, the very least, is make sure Matty is taken care of financially.
Like the other royalty statements I’ve received since moving in here, I stick this one in a tray on the worktop in my kitchen, then grab a can of sparkling water from my fridge, pull up a stool and sit, staring into my lounge-diner.
I have six guitars hanging along the wall.
Three are my own – a Fender, a Gibson, and my preferred acoustic by Martin.
One was a gift from Noel Grealish when The Hand Me Downs supported his band The Flying Eagles on tour.
Another was an exchange with Sam Fassbender, when we swapped guitars at the end of a UK festival back in 2019.
The sixth guitar is an acoustic. A Gibson. It was Scott’s. His favourite and his last. He rarely played on stage, concentrating on his vocals, but that wasn’t when I most enjoyed hearing him anyway.
As I stare at it now, I don’t picture him holding it in concert.
I see us, him and me, maybe with the other guys from the band, mucking about in the studio, or in my London apartment after a couple of beers.
Plucking, strumming, singing the most ridiculous lyrics.
Challenging each other to be the wittiest, the funniest, sometimes the downright filthiest. Always joking and clarting around.
Even at the end, even when he was addicted to hard drugs, when we were goofing around like that together, it was as if nothing had changed. Nothing ever did change between us. He was my best friend.
Maybe that was the problem. I was too busy being the lad Scott wanted to have a laugh with to be a good big brother.
I’d give anything to go back and rewrite our history. To keep those sessions between us, in a rundown bedroom, in a cheap rented flat, barely making ends meet on market-seller and call-centre wages. No fame. No fortune. No fags, booze, women or drugs.
I trudge through to the ensuite of my master bedroom – there are only two, so it really doesn’t matter which is the master but that’s the one I sleep in because it looks directly out to sea and if I open the window, the sound of the water can knock me into a sleep that often doesn’t come easily.
Switching on the light around the over-sink mirror, I get my first proper look at my eye.
It’s swollen and red on the bone but the groom didn’t cut the skin.
Though he hit the right spot, luckily for me, he’s clearly not a lad accustomed to fighting.
It’ll be colourful for a couple of days but I don’t look like I’ve gone a round with Tyson Fury.
All thanks to that random kiss. A kiss that somehow felt like it was meant to be and yet meant nothing at all.
So why can’t I shake the feeling that I know the girl who rubbed Chantilly cream off my crotch tonight?
The woman who leaves me thinking, truly, if looks could kill, I’d be a goner?
Yet, the very same lass who takes my picture and makes me feel like I’m coming undone as she fixes her attention on me through a camera lens.
The woman who, with everyone else, is all smiles and hope and optimism.
The fact she’s different with me should serve as a warning but for some inexplicable reason, it fascinates me.
‘Your life is complicated enough, fella,’ I tell my bruising reflection.
At best, Lyra thinks I’m selling my body for cash – down and out in every way. At worst, she thinks I’m the man she came to see on stage in Madrid. Neither option is right for a girl whose gingham dress isn’t even the brightest thing about her.
When I eventually slip beneath my freshly laundered sheets, I’m depleted.
Today has been A LOT. Precisely the thing I promised my therapist I would try to prevent when I left London.
In a nutshell, he felt like I’d developed ‘coping mechanisms’ in order ‘to deal with day-to-day life’, not that day-to-day life for me now comes easy. It doesn’t.
I’m drifting to sleep, stuck in the limbo I often get to, between my tired body forcing a system shutdown for a few hours, but a feeling like the world isn’t right keeping me awake.
It’s semi-lucidity. A place where I know I’m in bed, that I’m dreaming even, but I can’t tear myself out of the moment.
It’s 2018 and The Hand Me Downs are playing a gig, one of our last smaller venues, in Newcastle.
We’ve made a pact to enjoy it. The others are all excited about the sudden, relatively unexplainable leap in streams of our music, but I’m apprehensive about moving on from the humble music jaunts we’ve been playing for years.
Now, we’re getting invited to play on the main stage in iconic festivals. Our upcoming tour is a proper one, actually advertised as a tour, around UK arenas, with dates penned for Europe next year. And with that comes pressure.
It’s our last gig with Dave as our manager, since the label said they want us to be under their management. I told them to go fuck themselves, so Dave stood down, refused to manage us if we didn’t sign the bigger contract.
He’s standing off to the side of the stage, a familiar comfort.
Where he’s been since the start. Head bobbing to the bassline as we play through one of our crowd pleasers.
Our first UK number one. Ironically, called ‘Addicted’, though I wrote it about being addicted to a girl.
Not that I had anyone in mind at the time – a question the press love to ask me.
One which I ignore because, though the new label has told me how much they hate it, I don’t want to give interviews. I’m not a frontman.
As my fingers find the strings of my Gibson, I sing a backing harmony for my brother, stage lights hot on my skin in the best way.
It’s a feeling I’ve come to know well. Sweating on stage, the sound of my own music coming through my ears as the crowd sing back to Scott, my words.
I’m doing what I love, high on life, up here with our kid, doing our thing side by side. And I know, the best is still to come.
I’m squinting a little, watching the sea of faces.
Then one…
She’s near the front of the stage, her eyes closed, her head dropped back, as if she has all the space in the world and not a care on earth.
Her hair is messed up from dancing, trailing the shoulders of her black leather biker jacket.
She must be roasting. I know she is because she drags a hand back through those dark locks, bringing her head down just enough for me to catch a wide, dazzling smile.
A smile that’s brighter than all the stars in the universe.
Though the lyrics have ended, I’m still playing us through to the end of the song. Me on acoustic, Trev on bass, Jay on drums. But it’s as if everything happening on stage has stopped.
She just looks so… free. Comfortable. Breezy.
She’s beautiful. Strikingly so. And I squint harder, wishing I could get a better fix on her, though that isn’t why I’m mesmerised.
It’s something else. Another reason. A pull deep in my abdomen, a sense of missing out on what she feels, a liberty I’d love, as mine is increasingly pulled from me.
Decisions being taken out of my hands. Obligations owed to more people than I can count.
The lights are switching for the next track and she’s still moving, swaying, as if the music hasn’t paused. I want to go straight into the next song, just to keep watching her like this. But I’ve lost myself, forgotten where we are in the set as I wonder how I get to her.
I want to talk to her. To know her name. To ask her why and how. What’s making her feel like she’s where she’s supposed to be? Because no one can seem so at ease if that’s not how they feel.
I know. It’s why I don’t give interviews. I’m not the kind of man who can fake it, no matter how hard people are screaming for me to be that way.
‘Guy, what’s happening?’ Scott has appeared in front of me, acting casual, like we do sometimes when one of us messes up, misses a cue, head isn’t in the game.
Eyes wide, I switch my focus to my brother. Shit. It’s mine. One of the few songs I predominantly sing because as Scott would say, ‘You wrote that for yourself, man.’
I didn’t. I never do. But he’ll claim every now and then that some songs sound better coming from me.
And so, I play us in and start to sing ‘You and Me,’ eyes finding the girl of my dreams again.
Yeah. It sounds like a bold statement, based on a few minutes of watching someone. But I just… I don’t know what it is about this girl… I don’t know why but I can’t take my eyes off her. And I’m singing the words of my song, that I never wrote with her in mind, as if it was always meant for her.
She stops still on the spot.
She’s looking at me.
I’m looking at her.
And I’m singing, ‘There’s just you and me, forget all these people…’
In my semi-lucid state, lying in my bed in Roker, I know she isn’t real, I know she’s a vague, sort of blurry, twisted and reformed, seven-year-old memory of That Night.
But what I can’t figure out is why the girl in my head looks like the photographer.
Why is the girl in my dreams, who looks free and like no one could ever tell her what to do…? Why is she… pretty dress wearing, plaited hair wearing, Chantilly cream smearing, people pleasing, Lyra?
In the darkness of my room, I force my eyes open.
Because I know how that dream ends.
I know That Night was the beginning of the end.