Chapter 16 #3
Gaz leans across the front desk that looks like a counter from a corner shop and shakes Dave’s hand. ‘Just paying for a session, are ya, mate?’
While they deal with the cash and spend another five minutes procrastinating, on Dave’s part, I warm up on the treadmill.
Finally, with space to myself, it hits me.
Lyra. That kiss. What I would have liked to have done with her if we hadn’t been interrupted.
That pull she has that’s making me want more, even if I can’t put my finger on why.
Whatever it is, she made me pick up my Martin last night, as if I needed to play through it.
It’s how it all started for me. I took to guitar in school as easily as breathing and I needed it like air. It was the only reason I went to school. One of the only teachers I’d listen to was my music teacher. I’d sit in that classroom for hours, strumming, picking, hiding.
I hadn’t missed it until last night.
‘Penny for ’em?’ Dave asks. He got onto the treadmill next to mine without me noticing. He’s walking on a barely there incline and he’s as red as a cooked lobster, panting between guzzles of water.
I smirk. ‘Kylie’s right, you need this.’
‘Not you an’ all.’ He sets down his water bottle in the machine’s holster. ‘So, did ya really fall asleep with the old girl last night? Ya didn’t pay Lyra a visit?’
I could tell him but I haven’t worked out what I was doing there myself yet, so I stick with, ‘I was tired.’
He nods, gathering enough puff to ask, ‘And the guitar? You taking it back up?’
I’m going to give him some smart-alec quip but something, someone, stops me in my tracks when he walks through the gym door. I watch him move in the wall of mirrors in front of me and the way he looks our way tells me he knew Dave and I would be here.
‘What’s he doing here?’ I grind out.
Dave meets my eyes through our reflections. ‘Who?’
‘Don’t give me who. Trev.’
‘Trev’s here?’ Dave looks across one shoulder then the other, when all he’d have to do is look in the mirror at Gaz on the desk, who’s taking a fiver from my old bandmate.
I hit the emergency stop on the treadmill and by the time I roll off the machine with the slowing belt, Trev is warily making his way over.
What kind of game is Dave playing?
It’s a good thing it’s Trev and not Jay because I don’t immediately want to punch Trev in the face. But I’m still blindsided by his being here. I don’t know how I feel about it but I do know that I’m pissed off with Dave for setting me up.
I fold my arms across my chest, rooted to the spot.
The last time I saw Trev was Scott’s wake.
I was a mess, he was a mess, and we ended up sitting on a wall outside the pub, away from everyone else, both of us finding solace in the bottom of a beer bottle.
The tears we’d been fending off in front of others fell silently between us as we smoked and drank.
He was my oldest friend. The only person I thought had even a small insight into how cut-up I was inside. I couldn’t bear to see him again after that day.
I can’t bear to see him now, because with every step closer he takes, it’s all coming back to me. Like bullets, memories are striking me one by one, making me bleed.
The funeral, the police turning up to my apartment in the early hours of the morning, Trev standing behind me as we both, drunk, tried to comprehend what the officer was saying.
Scott was dead.
Trev reaches me, uncertain too, I think.
I’m waiting for the chips to fall, for maybe anger to land, but surprisingly, all I feel is sadness.
As if I lost more than my brother in the midst of everything that passed.
Trev was my best friend and looking at him now, I think I could miss him, if I let myself.
Equally, I am mad; I’m mad at Dave. ‘You planned this,’ I say, stating the obvious.
Dave holds up a hand from where he’s folded forwarded, the other hand on his knee as he tries to catch his breath. ‘Mate, I can’t breathe.’
‘That’s a cop out,’ I gripe.
‘How’re ya doing?’ Trev asks, ignoring our old band manager and his borderline cardiac arrest.
I don’t know if I can do this, pretend like nothing happened, as if the world didn’t fall down around me, the earth being pulled from under my feet.
But, unexpectedly, I want to try.
Trev was only as complicit as me; less so, because it wasn’t his brother we failed. Jay, that would be a different story entirely.
‘I’ve been better,’ I tell him. ‘Been worse.’
He nods, as if he gets exactly what I’m saying, and I think I believe him when he tells me, ‘Me, too.’
I’m grateful for the distraction of the gym. Given it’s something I do to get my head straight, it’s helpful to be exercising when I’m being paid a visit from Ghosts of Rock Bands Past.
Dave is taking a fake call outside, which Trev and I know to be fake since Dave is blowing out of his arse so badly, he wouldn’t be able to hold a conversation.
His absence leaves Trev and me alone, switching in for each other as we do reps on the lat pull down machine.
‘Kylie’s on his back,’ I tell Trev, nodding in the direction of outside and Dave. ‘She’s told him he’s gonna either have a coronary or give himself diabetes if he doesn’t cut back.’
Trev chuckles as he comes to rest on the machine, me standing by, waiting to switch in for a turn. ‘Gotta love Kylie,’ he says, wiping his forehead with his arm. ‘No holds barred.’
‘She’s brutal but she calls it how she sees it.’ Only as I speak does it occur to me that Trev still sees them. I don’t know why he wouldn’t, since he’s back living in the north east these days, but it feels too close for comfort somehow, as if the past is sitting on my shoulder.
Dave and Kylie have been together since they were kids, getting on for thirty years. I knew her first, when she used to babysit me. In the early, fun days of the band, Kylie was a permanent fixture at our practices and pub gigs.
‘How about you, Trev? Are you with anyone? Married?’
He stands from the machine and I replace him.
‘Not married, yet. I’m with someone, though. Natalie Judd. Ya remember her?’
‘Tally?’ I ask, surprised. ‘Kiss, cuddle or torture behind the bike sheds Tally?’
He chuckles. ‘She’ll laugh at that. Aye, ten months now, and we’ve got a baby on the way.’
I drop the weights, hearing them clatter and holding up a hand in apology to Gaz.
‘You’re gonna be a dad?’ I’m astonished. Not at Trev being a dad as much as the acknowledgement that we aren’t boys ourselves any more. I stand and fold him into a sweaty hug. ‘Congratulations, man.’
He thumps my back, unspeaking, and I mirror the gesture. Somewhere in the hold, it stops being about congratulations but something more.
‘I’ve missed you, mate,’ Trev says, and our patting arms still, until we’re having a hug that’s as camp as the car I drive. So camp, it’s making my eyes sting, forcing me to put an end to it before things get really humiliating.
‘A dad,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘You excited?’
‘Nah, I’m nervous as hell.’ We laugh together, despite the truth in his words. ‘I just don’t want to make a mess of it, ya know?’
I nod. I do get it, or I can imagine how he feels, but I’m not the man to ask. I felt paternal over my brother and look how that panned out.
‘How about you?’ Trev asks. ‘Are ya with anyone?’
As I’m saying no, I think of the one girl who has truly turned my head since the girl at the gig That Night.
I tell Trev I’m not seeing anyone and it’s true, but I can’t stop thinking about that girl.
That woman. Who kisses me like I’ve never been kissed, who gets my blood pumping just knowing I’m going to be in the same room as her.
A woman who is so far out of my league, it’d be like Sunderland playing football against Manchester City.
‘Not seeing that old bird from the video that’s going viral, then?’
‘Nanna Winnie?’
‘You rolled out your best husky tones and sang “Step on My Old Size Nines”; you had to be trying to get into her bloomers, weren’t you?’
I laugh so hard that when Dave finally returns, I’m folded forwards, Trev bent over next to me, and I think it’s a cathartic release.