Chapter 4 Adam “Don’t You Want Me”
Adam
“Don’t You Want Me”
I stand there for a second, gawping at the door my wife of nearly a quarter of a century has just slammed in my face.
I want to scream. At Jules. But not just Jules. At myself. I shouldn’t have done it, hurled Mum and Dad at her like a bloody hand grenade. I shouldn’t have told her how I feel—how I’ve always felt. That it was our fault that they died.
Only I can still hear it. Auntie Megan’s voice on the phone, just after we’d landed at Hong Kong on that first leg of our journey to Australia.
Telling me how Mum and Dad had been killed in a car crash less than twenty minutes after they’d dropped us off at Gatwick Airport.
A journey they’d never have taken if it wasn’t for us deciding to emigrate, to give Australia a go.
But to pass that hurt on to Jules? It’s not right.
Quickly, I dig into my pocket for my door keys.
To say sorry. But then I stop. Because what about her?
What about all that nasty shit she just said?
All that vitriol she’s clearly got no intention of apologizing for.
About me chickening out of the deal with Darius, and how everything we’ve built might add up to a big fat zero once the kids have left home.
Yeah, stuck. That’s the word Furiosa just used. Like I’m some kind of barnacled human anchor that’s held her back from sailing life’s great glittering sea. Well, sod her. Wherever we are now, we got here together. We’re a partnership. Or at least we were.
“And screw you too, Groucho Barx,” I hiss, glaring at the little canine quisling, peeping out through the living room curtains.
It’s too late for puppy-dog eyes now. After growling at me, backing her up.
You’ve made your flea-bitten bed and you can bloody well lie in it. No more Pringles. No more Skips.
Stumbling into the shed, I click on the flickering lights and slam the door. Grabbing a half-drunk bottle of whiskey left over from Christmas, I start necking it. One gulp, two gulps, three. Then I catch sight of myself in the mirror.
Jesus. I look just like my dad. Am probably around the same age he started doing this too.
Drinking like a fish. First because of Mum getting ill, then because of his gambling debts.
Debts he saddled me with when he died. Along with a giant mortgage we’re still struggling to pay off.
That’s why I turned down Australia and then San Francisco.
To protect us. To avoid gambling away our futures myself.
How the hell was I to know that Totally Sirius would turn out to be a winner?
How the hell was I to know that this was a decision I’d regret for the rest of my life?
Another gulp.
Lurching toward the Totally Sirius logo on the corkboard, I rip it down, then up. My ring finger starts stinging, bleeding. Shit. I must have caught it on the nail the logo was hooked on.
Furiously, impotently, I twist my wedding ring off, then…throw it, watch it ping off the dusty screen of an old Atari monitor before ricocheting off Luke Skywalker’s half-melted plastic boot and out of sight.
Like even the Force is getting involved now.
Right away, I regret it. My finger feels wrong. Too light. The circular groove worn in my flesh over the last twenty-five years is already starting to itch.
Quickly turning on my phone’s flashlight, I get down on my knees and start scanning the dusty floor. Nothing. I start to panic. Only then I see it. Inside that box of tapes and CDs Jules told me to throw out. Sitting perfectly balanced on top.
Thank God.
Snatching it up, I slip it quickly back onto my finger. Then I spot the For Juliet tape again. The one from ’89. The year I met Jules.
And right here next to it I now notice my dusty old Sony boom box, complete with its auto-reverse double tape deck. Rummaging around, I plug in an extension lead, careful not to put my foot through the floorboards, which look riddled with wormholes.
I’m not expecting the Sony to still work, but miraculously it does, clicking on with a faint hum and a flutter of red and green equalizer bulbs. Sliding the TDK D60 tape out from its case, I slot it in.
Then dum-dum-de-dum-dum-dum-dum-de-dum.
On come the first throbbing synth chords of “Don’t You Want Me” by the Human League. An ’81 hit but recorded on here as the opening track because it was having a total revival in the Brighton sixth form indie discos in ’89.
Right away, I can feel the bass radiating out from the dusty old speakers, churning up this mad mix of emotions, leaving me feeling anxious and happy and nostalgic all at once—and suddenly so bloody young again, it makes me want to weep.
Because we had it all back then, didn’t we? Jules and me. We had everything ahead of us. We hadn’t screwed anything up.
It’s like I can feel the music pumping right through me now, like it’s somehow charging my very soul, as tears of loss and something like homesickness stream down my cheeks.
I can’t stop looking at the tape’s twin spindles as they keep on turning, staring back at me like a pair of hypnotic eyes, round and round…and round and round and round…
Then I’m jolted by a thunderous crash, and a blinding flash of lightning obliterates the square of black night sky framed by the shed window—and I feel my whole universe shake…
Next thing—what the hell?!—it’s me turning round and round and round, faster and faster, like I’m going to break. In a hideous whirlwind of colored lights and rushing wind, and all the while with Phil bloody Oakey singing “Don’t you want me?” over and over again…
Until twisting, pulling back, desperately trying and failing to fight against the tide, I’m sucked down screaming into that churning, kaleidoscopic typhoon’s shrinking black eye…
***
Darkness. Silence. Nothing, in fact.
I can’t move, like there’s a ten-ton monster squatting on my back. Shit. Have I been struck by lightning? Am I paralyzed? Have I had some kind of a stroke?
Think. Remember. The shed. I was in the shed. Drunk. Listening to that old tape with its spindles turning round and round and round until—BOOOOM!—thunder roared outside.
I try moving again. Still no dice.
Then noise. A high-pitched beeping. Like an alarm? Or some piece of hospital equipment? Am I in a coma ward?
Oh God, no. Please not that.
Then, suddenly, I can feel something. Yes, here, my fingers by my sides. My toes clenching, unclenching. Only not me doing it somehow. Not me in charge.
But that’s not all I can feel, because this tingling sensation between my legs is unmistakable and going nowhere anytime soon. Good grief. I have a stiffy? How in the name of all that’s holy, with whatever’s actually going on here right now, am I also somehow erect?
But at least this means I’m not paralyzed, right? Then what? Under sedation? Drugged?
Only I don’t feel like that either. Or even hungover. Not like I should after all that pissing whiskey I guzzled down. In fact, clean is more like it. Unsullied. Fresh. Almost kind of brand spanking new.
More movement: my mouth opening. Again, not like I’m doing it, like it’s somehow opening itself.
To yawn, a great big groan of a yawn. Only my voice is all wrong.
Too high, too reedy. Too Justin Bieber or David Beckham-y, when, after smoking until I was thirty, I’m really more Tom Jones or Johnny Cash.
Then, suddenly—in a rush—thoughts are hitting me. Only not my thoughts. Somebody else’s, like a voice I’m hearing in my head, saying, Come on, get up…it’s Saturday…today’s the day…
Yet I’ve still got my own thoughts too. Not competing with these other thoughts. More coexisting, like I can simply hear both.
Then comes big movement. I roll onto my side—or rather my body does, because I’m not in charge of it. Then I’m squeezing and unsqueezing my eyes, before opening them, and bringing bright light rushing in.
I’m not quite sure what I’m expecting to see. The stereo? The shed ceiling? Or, after that insanely intense vision of the roaring hurricane earlier, perhaps the beatific face of God?
What I actually get is a floor full of grubby novelty Garfield and Mario Brothers boxer shorts, and striped and paisley socks, along with Smiths and Go-Betweens T-shirts, and crumpled chinos and army surplus jeans…like—like an entire jumble sale has just exploded all over the room.
Then my body is tipping itself out of bed, before plucking up items in what looks like random order and pulling them on.
Like a scarecrow dressing itself. Then quickly—guiltily, I somehow feel the guilt—grabbing up all the remaining clothes and wedging them into a wardrobe that I somehow just know they were all pulled out of the night before for a trying-on session, to see what looked coolest.
Cleanliness is next to godliness—I feel my eyes flick to these words stitched into a little framed tapestry on the wall.
Right, just like that one Mum made me as a kid. And I can see now that I am indeed in a kid’s bedroom. Nelly’s? Liam’s? No. Neither of them would be seen dead with that Athena poster of the blonde tennis girl scratching her arse taped to the back of that wardrobe door.
What in the name of—
Oh, Christ alive. I suddenly know whose bedroom this is. Mine. But not mine now. Mine then. Back when I was a kid.
Meaning shit, shit, shit. Maybe I am in a coma.
Or have had a nervous breakdown. Or am I hallucinating all this?
But then why does it feel so real? As in, like, I’m not only seeing this, but experiencing it.
Like I can feel the cold gloop of the revolting hair gel whoever’s steering this body is now slicking back through my/our hair.
And I can feel the sudden double blast of ice-cold sickly teen deodorant under my armpits as it deluges the room with its skunky Pepé Le Pew whiff.
Even weirder, I can also tell how some alien part of me—of this—actually thinks this scent is sophisticated and sexy enough that it might one day help them get laid.