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The inside of Peter's wrist reads Katherine.
It was odd, the doctors had said, offhandedly, when Peter was a kid, kicking his feet in the clinic during his bi-annual name checkup - odd for a name that long to be completed so quickly. The -ine had filled in the day before his fifth birthday. Odd, but not uncommon. A bit like Peter himself.
Peter pays it no mind at first, though he does, secretly, grow to put a lot of stock in Katherine when the other kids start playing kiss chase. Constant upheaval and change severs meaningful relationships quite efficiently, anyway - Belfast to Wildenrath to Bournemouth to Larnaca to Bedworth and back again, departure inevitable and even the most sincere friends fleeting.
His faith in Katherine, as a result, flies and falls: there are Katherines
- Kates, Katys and Katies, Kats and Kits and Kittys, Katarinas, Kathys, Kathryns and a few Katarzynas -
strewn all across Europe, with equally coy smiles and bright eyes when he shyly, but dutifully, reveals his wrist. The sheer volume of them might cheapen the scribble, but he courts them all, would be a hypocrite otherwise. None of them are Katherine though.
He's lonely but he's not - can't be in a world that has promised him a permanent home, be it in books or Katherine.
✃
Carl never had a soulmate, and never will.
Carl's twin died a few months after he was born, and Carl will tell him later, shaking in the corner of a bedsit by the river, that his mum hadn't been expecting twins. That Carl had been the surprise.
Peter can't seem to separate one fact from the other, and the queerness of the idea - no soulmate, no Katherine, not even a Kit or a Kathy - leaves his skin tingling and his toes curling in Carl's presence.
Society never says that those without names on their wrists are freaks, and Peter never thinks it: but the idea that someone as glorious as Carl could be tethered to the world by absolutely nothing - well, it scares Peter as much as it thrills him.
He has to get over it eventually - has to, of course, because Carl may be glorious, but he's mostly a snarling, volatile creature. But it returns, it always does, every time he accidentally finds his eyes snagged on the pale, bare skin inside Carl's right wrist. Blue veins lay there clearly, betraying life running through Carl's veins, but they both know Carl's not really living, because Fate has promised him no future.
The odds of not having a name on your wrist are 1:50,000. This does not comfort Carl.
In later years, Carl takes to tying a Union Jack around his wrist, denying fans or hacks the chance to pry. Peter will enjoy the symbolism, Carl letting the motherland lick his wounds. In the days when they used to share a mattress, however, the nakedness of Carl's wrist was unavoidable.
Not just naked - empty.
Carl is without a soulmate or a twin, and the sheer loneliness lurking behind his eyes curls around Peter's heart in a way he doesn't think Fate or Katherine would like, like nothing ever before.
✃
When they first met - actually met, in Carl and Amy-Jo's cramped flat, not just admired from afar - Amy-Jo had not prepared him for the fact. He'd heard all about Carl, had been so excited to meet him. He doesn't think, upon reflection, that that had conveyed when Carl had stumbled out of the bathroom in a towel. He'd been - well, he'd been a bit tactless.
The ends of Carl's fingers had been burnt - his fingers yellowing, so early. His hooded eyes had been all pupil - and so regularly that Peter hadn't discovered Carl had pleasingly baby blues for about a week. His speech had nearly always been slurred, and the alcohol content of his latest drink could be deduced from the smell of his cuffs. That morning, with Carl glowering in his towel - there had been scratches on his stomach. Peter had felt sick.
But even thoroughly fucked up and mindless -
exactly when, that perverse part of Peter's mind had whispered, exactly when had Carl lost his mind?
was he born -
did it vanish -
does he even have the capacity to -
- Carl could throw a nasty right-hook.
✃
He's back in Ireland, of all places, when he discovers that the Katherine on his wrist - Katherine who slants her i's and whose long letters are prone to spikiness - Katherine he's pledged reams of poetry, tomes of lyrics and melodies to - is - dead.
Peter always read that Fate is cruel. Carl, and his rare, sad, sober smile, should have been enough to warn him of the fact.
Was Fate kind, giving him Carl, only to take Katherine away from him, not years later?
It comes like Carl's now-infamous right-hook, but the battering won't stop, and Peter's still shaking apart two months after the bartender had spied his hitched sleeve and stumbled, recognising the spiky K and slanted i from long ago.
Katherine and Peter Bailey had lived, breathed, spawned and died unobtrusively in Galway, had turned their eyes politely away from his handwriting. The bartender doesn't have enough of anything for Peter to succeed in drowning himself, never mind his sorrows.
Fate makes no promises about your capacity to find your soulmate, let alone sharing your life with them - worse still, she makes no promises about your capacity to love them at all. As a teenager, Peter had poured himself over Tennessee Williams' written fury at the tiny, looping Anita that curled around his ulnar styloid, had been entranced, amazed, but ultimately, perversely amused at the hatred. Katherine had been so sacred.
They say you shouldn't let your soulmate dictate your life, because not all are compatible and perfect unions are far between - and Katherine Bailey had certainly listened. But Peter -
for Peter, Katherine had arrived fully formed, a friend in the lonely wasteland of an army brat's childhood. Peter doesn't see his heart whole on the horizon - it'd be asking him to re-align the universe. Whilst it may hold true that a soulmate exists for nearly everyone, Fate is not without her amusements. One for all -
even if their meeting is restricted to the last few seconds of a life, a young man crying uncontrollably at the foot of a hospital bed - or to the very first seconds, a nurse running, ashamed, from the delivery room.
Or, for the likes of Peter and Carl, never at all.
✃
It makes him sound passive, that description, of him wanting to drown himself in Galway. Peter hadn't been passive at all - they'd been in the city with shining eyes, falling out of the tour van trailing bottles and lovers, and they had been alive.
(Lovers, for Peter, had always been practice, if you want to put it crudely. He could refine his art, before he found her, could make himself the best he could be, because Katherine deserved the best.
Lovers, for Carl, were a different thing. At once, both another form of self-harm and an indulgence. Peter always made sure they didn't stay long though, would kick them out before they did of their own violation, because he knew the former would always dominate the latter. Duties of a best friend.)
Katherine hadn't dropped Peter into the water, per-say - she'd taken a hammer to the lightbulb that had illuminated those shining eyes and his future, and smashed it to dust, stamped it into the dirt and walked away. The Kats and Kits and Kittys had all left Peter in the end, but he'd never - not for a second - thought Katherine would, too.
Carl - for all he is a snarling, volatile creature, taking turns in engaging in fisticuffs with Fate and flirting with madness - was the only one who could take him away, could hold him together, could shove into Peter's chest and cup his hands around Peter's heart and not get burnt by the red-hot discord of heartbreak.
John and Gary - or, he should say, John and Line and Gary and Jude - were as oblivious as Peter had been to Anita. Carl, with all his emptiness, knew the difference between colour and monochrome, a limitless future and none at all.
(No one loves the light like the blind man. The dwarf adores the drum major. The toad always had his eyes fixed on heaven. Why? In order to watch the bird in its flight.
Victor, of course, had penned those lines with Adèle smearing the ink.)
Foremost, Carl thrilled Peter, but he terrified him in equal measure. Just knowing Carl was like standing at the very edge of Bournemouth pier, on the other side of the railings, his world filled with nothing but water, for miles and miles and miles, every sense turned to the ocean and all that it hid.
Yet Peter would never feel closer to anyone than he did with Carl wrapped around him, holding him as he shook and screamed against the tour van floor, like he was in thrall to the worst withdrawal. His visions of Katherine crumbling to memories of the day he met Carl, the past bleeding into the future - high and drunk and hopeless (dead behind the eyes he'd whispered to Amy-Jo, before she smacked him and started crying.)
One dead woman and two comatose boys in Galway. Fate laughing, behind the bar.
✃
The inside of Peter's wrist reads Katherine. It's in a woman's handwriting, of course, with a spiky K and a slanted i. Just above it, the same colour and the same length, his forearm reads Libertine.
It's in Carl's handwriting. The e's are peculiar, the letters rounded and it is, make no doubt, a fuck you to the universe. It's Peter and Carl's self-made future. It's two fingers to Carl's self-destruction and the Bailey family.
(It was them playing God, choosing their own soulmate.)
Carl's got one too, a Libertine across his arm. The thing is that it's also in his own handwriting, because Fate - as Peter always knew - has got in for Carl, won't ever let him win.
Fate was kind to Peter though, in her own way, giving him Carl, to be there before and after Katherine. Would someone tell Peter why, then, he still tried to gouge both words out of his arm?
(I can tell you:
The ends of Carl's fingers had been burnt - his fingers yellowing, so early. His hooded eyes had been all pupil - and so regularly that Peter hadn't discovered Carl had pleasingly baby blues for about a week. His speech had nearly always been slurred, and the alcohol content of his latest drink could be deduced from the smell of his cuffs. The morning they first met, with Carl glowering in his towel - there had been scratches on his stomach. Peter had felt sick.
Not sick enough, however, to stop the past bleeding into the future, or to stop Carl's dealer becoming their dealer, Carl's demons to become their demons.
Peter's heroin always stayed Peter's heroin, though. But that's a story for another day. Because this is PeterandCarl, not PeterandKatherine.)
✃
Those two things are paradoxical, of course - PeterandCarl, PeterandKatherine. One he's promised his soul, the other his future. But which way around?
Peter loves Carl the way he always has: the way Fate so enviously debars, in exactly the same way he loved Katherine. There's a home in Carl's heart, one where he's not vying with an Anita or an Adèle for attention. But Peter isn't in love with the idea of Carl, or any notions of a permanent home -
because Carl isn't Katherine: he's volatile and maybe broken by the world, but he's not going to leave Peter, because he and Peter live in their own world now, and it is never permanent, and always changing. John and Gary may think it monochrome, but it's theirs.
Carl never had a soulmate and lost his twin brother, and Peter slips into the shoes of both so easily - and those scratches on his stomach and on the insides of his thighs fade, his drinking recedes and Peter gets to think, breathlessly, I did that, while the world spins around them, peering at them perversely, gaping gormless.
He and Carl - finally in sync, the way Tennessee had both cursed and lusted after. So in sync Carl could pretend - to strangers - that there was a name written under his Union Jack.
But as the scenery changes, so do the people - and there's always a Katherine.
It's a story he knows you know.
✃
In later years, Carl takes to tying a Union Jack around his wrist, denying fans - who think there's a Peter under there - or hacks - likewise - the chance to pry. No one in music has been so secretive about their wrist since Morrissey. Peter will enjoy the symbolism, Carl letting the motherland lick his wounds.
He's doomed to repeat the past.
Where Katherine Bailey had ignored Peter's barely decipherable handwriting for another, available Peter - Peter lets Kate believe she's the Katherine he mourns when he gets down on one knee, though they both know her writing is softer, like her smile and her will.
He and Carl are both pretenders. Everybody always warned him about fulfilling those dark prophesies on their first album - but Peter can't ever take them seriously, aware that somewhere in the world Carl is laughing himself mad, knowing, as only he does, that those were not prophesies - but heartfelt wishes.