Chapter 2 Adam “Strangers”
Adam
“Strangers”
I gaze across the posters and old vinyl covers taped to every available inch of wall in Liam’s bedroom, with that phrase “re-create them all on Spotify” still ringing in my ears, but then I force myself to focus back in on Liam again.
He’s glaring up at me malevolently from his bed and I feel that same sense of dread over how far we’ve drifted apart.
I was good at it to begin with. The whole dadding thing.
Sure, I couldn’t actually grow the kids inside me or give birth to them or breastfeed them like Jules.
But after that, I loved doing my bit to raise my own little flesh-and-blood Tamagotchis and do it right.
To change the Huggies during the red-eye Saturday-morning Teletubbies shifts.
To Nutribullet the broccoli and choo-choo-train it in.
I kept on being good at it too. Right through the Perler bead, Bop It, Heelys, Minecraft, Beyblade, Micro scooting, PTA camping, Pokémon, and pirate-party years.
The older the kids got, the more I thought I’d just keep leveling up, like in a computer game.
Acquiring new skills and avatar gear. Until I was like Superdad.
And not just me, us. The Holes. I thought we’d be like the Incredibles.
Or the Guardians of the Galaxy. That, no matter what, we’d always stick together and triumph in the end.
“Why can’t you just leave me the fuck alone?” Liam growls, back in his bed in his blinds-drawn, lava lamp–lit sweat pit of a bedroom, like this is his plan for the rest of the day.
As an affronted adult, part of me wants to snap right back at him.
As his dad, to ground him, or tell him there’ll be no more Xbox, ever.
But he’s twenty-one. Too old for me to be here pestering him to type up his resume so I can give it to my banker mate Zack, who’ll be at Darius’s party later, and who might—just might—give Liam some work experience before he goes back to uni to re-sit his accountancy exams at the end of the year.
“There’s no need to swear,” I tell him instead. Pathetic—and hypocritical, because God knows I swear enough myself—but going in too hard will only lead to another fight.
“Isn’t there?” he demands, gripping his pillow behind his head like he’s considering hurling it at me. “Because sometimes that’s the only way you ever listen to what I’ve got to say.”
I bite down on my lip and take a deep breath as I stare across the mess of what I like to refer to as his “walk-on wardrobe.” “Which is?” I ask.
“That I just want to be left alone.”
Great. He means to do nothing. Except maybe go out and get hammered again tonight, just like he did last night, and get into even more debt. “I don’t want to play the bad guy,” I say.
“So don’t.”
“But you can’t just spend all day in bed, and all night out.”
“I wasn’t out. I was at Max’s.”
Like there’s a difference. Max and him used to be such great little buddies growing up, but now Max has dropped out of college too, and the two of them just seem to be dragging each other down.
“Doing what?”
“Oh, you know, mainly heroin and crack.”
“Not funny.”
“Why? Because you’re worried it might be true?”
“No,” I say through gritted teeth. Even though I do worry, not so much about Liam experimenting with hard drugs, more about him getting mixed up in the same full-on clubbing lifestyle he got caught up in at uni, leading the pastoral team there to flag up to us that he’d stopped going to his lectures, and then Liam himself admitted he’d burned through his entire year’s money in under ten weeks.
“We were just playing,” he says.
“Dragon Age?” My attempt at a joke, at peacemaking, because old-school Dungeons & Dragons–style games were what we used to play together when he was a kid, before he got into Fortnite and Call of Duty and even more hardcore shooters like the ones my best mate, Darius, makes now.
“No. Bass,” he says.
For a second, I think I’ve misheard. My eyes even flick to the corner of his bedroom, to where he used to keep his one electric and two acoustic guitars, before he smashed them into a tangle of splinters and wires when he was eleven, about a week after he got discharged from the hospital.
“I’ve been playing Max’s old one,” he says, as though reading my mind.
“Well, I suppose it’s good to have a hobby.”
“It’s what I want to do again.” His eyes flash defiance.
Again? He can’t be serious. As in what he was “destined” to do? The exact word we both once used, without irony, about him playing. A dumb King Arthur word, but Liam was so goddamned gifted, it felt true.
“But I don’t understand,” I say, trying not to look at his left hand.
“Me and Max, we’re setting up a band,” he tells me. “Me on bass and him on lead.”
No. The word detonates inside me. Because as well as suffering major motor nerve damage, Liam lost two fingers in his accident. Meaning whatever he’s planning now, it’ll only lead to more heartache, and God knows he’s already had enough of that.
“But what about going back to finish college?”
Silence.
“You promised me you’d give it another go.”
Still nothing.
“And you know how good that course is,” I tell him, my voice rising, “and how great your employment prospects will be—”
“I never wanted to study accountancy,” he says, jaw clenched, jutting. “That was always just you.”
That whole mess of feelings I got snagged up in after his accident, it starts gnawing into me again now.
“You do know I’m only trying to help?”
“Yeah…”
Only he doesn’t finish his sentence. Doesn’t need to. I can already hear it like he’s screamed it into my face—but you’re not.
—
I find Jules in the kitchen, listening to Ed Harcourt’s “Strangers” as she writes out menu cards for the buffet she’s running for the council event tomorrow.
“That work placement Zack might get Liam, he’s refusing to even apply,” I tell her. “And he’s not going back to uni. He says him and Max are starting a band.”
“I know.” Her bright blue eyes fix on mine. “I could hear you shouting from down here. That’s why I just turned the music up.”
“I was not shouting,” I say, before realizing that she’s got me—because I am now. “I was just trying to get him to listen,” I hiss. “To common sense.”
“Is it really so bad if he tries?”
I can’t believe she’s asking me this. That she’s supporting this insane idea of his.
“Yes, yes, it bloody well is. Because it’s…it’s pointless.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s never going to be as good as he was.” It’s the truth. “And he’ll hate that and people will just…”
“What?” She crosses her arms.
“You know what. You know what people are like. Like with him playing cricket at school. They took the piss constantly.”
“He still made the second team, didn’t he? He proved them wrong.”
“This is different.”
“How?”
“It’s the music industry. It eats its own bloody children alive.” We both know this from the few friends we’ve got who’ve worked in it.
“But it’s always been his dream,” she says.
“Yeah, well, dreams aren’t reality. And anyway, has it? Has it always been his dream?” I ask. “Because as far as I know, he’s not talked about making new music in ten years.”
No, not since I heard Max screaming that day in the garden with Liam. Not since I ran out to find my little boy bloodied and unconscious with his hand trapped and mangled in that zip line’s pulley.
“People are allowed to change their mind,” Jules says.
And there it is. Her jaw’s set. Just like his. Oh yeah, no question, he’s inherited his mule-grade stubbornness from her.
She stares at me like this whole thing’s down to me. Or maybe that is how she sees it, because if it wasn’t for me rigging up that zip line from the old bay tree, our son would never have got hurt in the first place.
Me.
Something I’ve thought about every day since.
Only now, whenever I try to make his life better, he just pushes me away.
“Fine. You deal with it. With him,” I tell her.
Quickly turning, so she won’t see how pissed off I really am, I march down the garden into the supersized shed Dad built as his workshop back in the seventies, pulling on the plink-plinking overhead striplights before slamming the warped wooden door behind me, sealing myself in.
Squeezing past the bulging shelves of gaming manuals and science fiction novels, I knock P.
Bill Howarth’s Game Design & the Pixelated Brain and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five onto the floor.
I stick on Dad’s sixties wooden Bang & Olufsen player, which my tech-savvy pal Doodles refurbed for me, and pump the Who’s “My Generation” up loud.
Almost instantly, I feel better. Insulated. Not just from Liam, but from Jules, because us not clicking, it’s happening more and more. Even our surprise fu—half fuck—this morning wasn’t enough to stop us dive-bombing into another bickerfest.
Whatever happened to reason? To just being nice?
I shut my eyes. Breathing in, breathing out. Feeling my heartbeat slow.
Glancing across at those two boxes I dragged in here earlier instead of taking to the dump, I dig out my ruined Star Wars figurine collection and stand them up in a line on Dad’s old lathe, leaving them looking like some crazy, futuristic bus queue.
I remember every single Christmas and birthday I got each one.
Like they’re etched into my mind. In every memory, Dad’s smiling down.
Reaching into the other box, I grab a couple of the mixtapes.
That same For Juliet tape from ’89 I pulled out before and House Party from ’98.
I can’t believe Jules wanted to chuck these out.
A part of me still swoons at the nostalgia of these tapes, because I love music, like it’s something my core needs to function properly.
And me and Jules, it always used to be our thing too.
It’s how we raised our kids. Like the von Trapps, but with beats.
Until what happened to Liam. Until our whole family sing-along and play-along vibe died out into each of us retreating to our separate devices and our separate rooms.