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Noel breathes in the hot, Smokey air of the bar as he packs away the instruments, the ones that they boys aren’t too precious about, hands the song sheet to a singles girl in the front row. It’s not bad, two fans waiting and screaming even after the lights have gone down, their friends giggling in the corner. Noel thinks about going to join them, wonders if he can get some reflected glory. The girl barely looks at him, jerks away when he lets their fingers touch. Not that then. Its not nothing, but it’s not everything. One day, he tastes the words on his tongue as he rolls them round, the familiar shape of them between his teeth, one day a when he has his own band there will be crowds in the ten thousands, and they will be screaming his name. His.
Often, he can find the band backstage even after he finishes putting everything away. They aren’t bad, those boys, to drink with or dance with or lose an evening together. But Noel and Clint have been fighting, he can’t even remember what about. He doesn’t want to remember what about. And so they are all gone, and Noel finds himself in the dark and the smoke, with no where to go except the dirty flat that he hates, and no one who knows his name.
London at night smells like nowhere else he has ever been. Sure, he can identify the notes—beer, smoke, sewer stench. But there is something else. Something he can never quite put his finger on. It’s like when you can smell the sea, salt and fish and sweat, except this isn’t the sea. This is nothing like. A rat scurries across the alley by his feet, humped and dirty, and he jerks back as a skinny black cat bolts after it. Life carrying on in all corners of the world, messy and violent. He spots the telltale Guinness sign in the window of a pub up the street and his feet carry him there almost without thinking. Almost like home, except that the thought of home feels like ants under his skin. He orders a gin and tonic, bitter and sour, nothing like he would ever order in Manchester, and the world swirls around him.
A man catches Noel’s eye and he follows him into the alley, smokes a joint or two, waits to see what will happen. He brushes the mans hand. Nothing happens. Zero for two on that move tonight. He leans against the dirty wall, letting time slip by in its hazy state, and suddenly the bartender is calling last orders. Noel signals for another gin, compelled by the strange, medicinal taste. And it is medicine, he remembers, some random fact he picked up in a pub quiz or off the back of a cereal box, he is drinking alcohol mixed with malaria drugs. Well, he shakes his head, at least that’s one less thing to worry about. And suddenly it feels important, vitally so, that he tells mom he is taking care of himself. She worries so much, wrapping a scarf around his neck, sending him a packet of biscuits she is certain aren’t valuable anywhere in London—they are—and he hasn’t even been answering her calls. I’m never going to get sick, he thinks, I have to tell her. He drains his drink and stumbles to the low, red glow of the phone booth down the road.
His fingers feel numb as he puts in the numbers, as he fishes in his pocket for change, dropping coins from his numb fingers and scrambling to pick them up again, touching chewed gum and who knows what else on the floor of the phone booth.
“Hello,” a man’s voice answers. Not his brother’s, not anyone’s. Noel startles.
“Hello,” he says, and then says nothing.
“It’s one in the morning,” the man grumbles after a moment. “And we’re not buying, or converting.”
“No,” Noel tries to catch his thoughts, slippery and quick, hold them between his teeth like the tail of a rat. “I’m calling for Peggy. Or, I guess, Liam.”
“No,“ the man answers, “they don’t live here. No one lives here.”
“What about you?”
“No one but me.”
“Okay,” Noel tries to think it through. Maybe they moved. Maybe they don’t want to talk to him, “do you know where they are.”
“Nowhere,” the man says, and Noel’s stomach drops like that was the thing he was afraid of, even though he has never thought about this before. But somehow, alone in the dark, he knows the man is right. And that something is very very wrong.
“Maybe I-“ Noel starts, trying to remember the number he dialed. If maybe it was their very first house, the one where he lived with his father.
“Maybe they’re dead,” the man says on the other end of the line, “a woman in a boy lived here before. They died.”
“Yeah,” Noel says, “that’s probably them.” The line beeps three times, harsh and insistent , and then goes silent when he neglects to add another coin. He feels numbly in his pocket, and then gives up. What kind of funeral, he wonders, should they have?
The teller lets Noel buy a tickert for Manchester even though the train won’t depart until six am. He tucks it into his pocket, huddles tighter into his jacket, and steps onto the platform. He shakes his head against the fog, both inside and out, and wonders what that man outside the pub had given him. Something strong and sticky, that isn’t clearing out of his head the way weed normally does. If there has to be a funeral, then someone will call him eventually, but what if it’s something else. What if they never existed to begin with, these people, this home that he always thought he could return to. If that’s the case then he needs to know, he cannot go on, he cannot keep living for one more day until he knows.
He registers a movement to his left and he startles and looks up. An old woman, bundled in coats and scarves, stirs on the platform bench. Maybe that will happen to him, he thinks, now that his home doesn’t exist anymore. Sleeping on station benches, making eyes at strangers. She pulls something out of her pocket, and he hears the slosh of liquid, thick and dark, and draws close to her as though compelled by the sound like a spirit.
“What’s a boy like you doing out here?” She asks as he sits on the bench beside her, slouches against the cold metal. She offers him the bottle and he takes it, feels the glass warm from where her fingers have gripped it, tastes the syrup-sweet sting of dark rum. It reminds him of being sick, flat seven-up and cough medicine. And that’s right, isn’t it, because he is sick now. Has been for so long he can barely keep track. Even with the malaria drugs.
“I’m going home to see my family,” he says to her, wiping his sleeve on the bottle mouth and passing it back, “except they might not exist.”
“Home is like that,” she says. “My sister was like that. One day she was there, then she stopped answering the door.”
“How long?” Noel asks. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes and offers her one. He loves the combination of smoking and drinking, loves it for reasons that sound insane to explain, except once he told Liam how close the two items were to creating the most beautiful explosion if you held them just a little wrong. Liam had said, woah, cool.
“I don’t know,” she says, “forever. My name is Maeve.”
“Liam,” Noel says, for some reason. “My name is Liam. I had a brother.”
“Had?” She echoes.
“You know,” he says, “on account of not existing. Or being dead, I’m not sure. Or maybe because I left.”
“Did you want to leave?” she coughs, the kind that shakes her whole body. Noel shivers in response. If things were normal, he thinks, he could bring her home. Peggy would give her a warm bowl of soup.
“No,” he says, and then says, “yes. It’s complicated. My brother, he’s, he’s growing up. And I didn’t want him to grow up with me around.”
“That bad, are you?” She laughs, and the laugh turns into another wracking cough. Noel thinks about holding Liam the day they brought him home from the hospital, red and wrinkled. Thinks about kissing him every night before bed, how recently Liam had started asking for kisses again, leaning out from the covers in their shared room, the last time he had put his hand to the back of Noel’s head and held him there, swiping his tongue along the seam on Noel’s lips, and had laughed when Noel stumbled back. How badly Noel had wanted not to stumble back.
“I had to leave,” Noel tells Maeve, bringing the bottle to his lips. She can taste her spit on it, bitter and sour. Thinks about how Liam’s face showed up in his mind when he was jerking off, not matter how hard he tried to think about anything, anything else. Thinks about how Liam had said, after the kiss, calm down, I’m just joking. How Liam may be many things but he is not a good liar. “I had to protect him.”
“It doesn’t sound like you protected him,” Maeve says, reaching out her hand, and for a moment Noel things she is trying to touch him, but she just grabs the bottle, “if he’s dead.”
Liam had screamed at him when he announced he was moving to London. You’re just leaving me here? He has been refusing to answer calls recently.
“Maybe you’re right,” Noel says.
The house looks just the same as it always has, when he arrives, legs sore from the walk from the station and the hours of sitting. He had left Maeve on the platform, heading in the opposite direction, south for the winter. His head is finally starting to clear and he realizes it is barely 7am, the world slowly waking up around him, and that he is as about to knock on a stranger’s door and demand his dead family. He should go back to London, to the sort for life he was built for himself, the one where he doesn’t need anyone except a warm shape against him every now and then, except for the tang of liquor and the way music swallows him up. Where he is hardly even lonely, anymore. But, in the end, his key fits smoothly into the lock just as it always has. The bolt clunks open.
The kitchen sits empty, mom probably already off to work. He stands in the empty space, rubs his cold hands on his arms, then slips off his coat. The house is warm, smells like home, burnt toast and bleach and sweat. He pads up the stairs to his old room, the photos on the walls, landscapes and his own family, and they haven’t even cut him out of the pictures. In the door, he pauses, registering the shape lying curled beneath the blankets on his bed. His, Noel’s bed. And that, well that had not even occurred to him, that maybe he is the one who is dead and gone and replaced and they didn’t even notice. He stares at the other Noel,. The one who might be better at it than him. He wants to throw cold water over his face and throw him out. He wants to tell him to do a good job.
Except then the shape stirs, and rolls over, and he catches Liam’s cow-eyed face squashed against the pillow, the rasp of his breath. His eyes blink open slowly in the morning light.
“Woah,” Liam says, voice hoarse from sleep, “there’s a monster in my room.”
In spite of everything, Noel laughs. Liam sits up, running his hand through his hair and leaving it a worse mess then before.
“What’re you doing here?” He asks.
“What are you doing in my bed?” Noel echoes.
“Better then mine,” Liam answers, “smells like you.” He doesn’t even blush.
Noel laughs, harsh and loud. He laughs a lot these days, even though not much is funny.
“What’re are you doing here, though?” Liam is waking up, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, standing up, and he might be taller than Noel these days, the little freak. “Don’t you live in London now?”
He puts an accent on the words that defiantly isn’t how anyone talks in London, or maybe anywhere in the world.
“I thought you were dead,” he says, because he can’t think of anything else to say. Because it is, and always has been, easier to tell Liam the truth.
“I’m not,” Liam says, then shakes his head, “you daft idiot. Why did you think that?”
“I don’t know,” Noel answers. He is still hovering in the door, like someone kind of Jehovah’s Witness, “I don’t remember. Someone told me.”
“Well they’re a liar, then,” Liam responds, stretching his hands over his head, exposing a sliver of belly. He slides open the little drawer in the bedside table and withdraws a packet of cigarettes. “Do I look fucking dead to you?”
“No,” Noel answers, because it is true. Liam looks vivid, and warm, and very alive.
Liam jerks his head at the window and just like that they have slipped back into their secret languages. Noel crosses the threshold and it doesn’t feel as scary as he had been imagining, it doesn’t feel like anything at all. He shimmies open the window, the one with the broken screen, and steps aside to let Liam crawls through first. He follows.
They find themselves side by side on the little roof, the one that hangs over their pitiful back garden, their secret place to smoke and drink and whisper secrets when mum thinks they are safely in their beds. It hasn’t changed, except maybe that tree that overhangs the garden is a little bit bigger, a little older. Like they all are. Liam slides down to lay on his back and Noel follows.
“Do you have a lighter?” Liam asks, shaking a cigarette into his palm.
“Do you not?” Noel laughs, “what do you do when I’m not here?”
Liam mumbles something.
“What?” Noel asks, fishing around in his jacket picket until he finds the lighter and hands it over, stealing himself a cigarette while he is at it.
“Nothing,” Liam says, “I don’t miss you.”
“Well,” Noel answers. He doesn’t know what to say after that.
“Well.” Liam repeats, taking a deep drag. He holds the smoke in his lungs and lets it out in a long stream. Noel watches it rise and dissipate amid the branches of that old, broken tree that has watched them grow up, tapping long branches on the window at night. He used to tell Liam those were witches fingers, that someone was coming to get him and eat him. “How is London?”
“It’s cold,” Noel answers, before he remembers that he loves it, that he is happier than ever, that all his dreams are happening.
“I joined a band,” Liam says, tapping his fingers against the cold slate.
“Oh yeah?” Noel responds, “bet they’re shit.”
“Yeah.” Liam agreed happily, “they are. But so’s yours.”
“You shut—“ Noel starts, and then sees that Liam is laughing and can’t finish the sentence.
“Ours wouldn’t be though,” Liam says after a minute. Noel laughs.
“You just said—“
“No,” Liam says emphatically, “ours. You and me. Your guitar and me singing. And a couple other guys I guess, for the other stuff. But like you and me, Lennon McCartney shit.”
“Are you still on about John Lennon?” Noel asks, as though he isn’t. As though he doesn’t feel like his heart is stopping and exploding all at once.
“You ever thought,” Liam continues, “there was some kind of queer shit going on there?”
Noel chokes. Manages to ask, “Lennon?”
“Yeah, them,” Liam shrugs like he doesn’t care much one way or the either. Like he hasn’t jumped men for saying far less than that. “you know. At least for a while. Doesn’t matter though.”
Noel watches their smoke curl and vanish into the air. It smells like rain, the way rain always smells a little like dead fish. It sounds like Liam is trying to say something, except he can’t be, because its not Liam who is queer. Who has to be scared. Noel has always known there was something wrong with him, but not Liam. He is sure. He had made fucking sure. He had left.
“Sure,” Noel says, after far too long. Liam blinks like maybe he has forgotten what they were talking about. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Don’t you think about it?” Liam continues, and Noel feels like blood freeze. He has daydreamed about this, and the dreams always end up with him throwing himself in front of a train. And then Liam continues, “being great. The world at our feet.”
“Yeah,” Noel says after a minute. Every damned day. Like it is the only thing that matters, at least since he left. Like it will make everything worth it.
“Together, though,” Liam continues, “you and me. The two best in the world, I mean, obviously we have to do it together.”
Noel laughs. Almost tells Liam he isn’t the best. Almost jumps off the roof.
“I need to be back in London tonight,” he says, instead answering. A gig tonight and another after that, and then another, and he cant keep living his life like this, backstage of the band, so closes to what he desires but unable to touch it.
“Take me with you,” Liam says, as if every opportunity in the world is just waiting for that tiniest crack of light to burst through. For the once in his life, Noel doesn’t say no.
“Okay,” Noel says, because he is so tired of lying, so tired of being cold, “we’ll do it together. We’ll be great together.”
Below them, out on the street, the world wakes up. People rush to work, or home from nighttime jobs, babies scream to wakes their parents, and school kids drop books into the dirt, and bus drivers honk loud and shrill, and no one even looks up to see them. But Noel swears as he looks out over the town that he can see the whole world.
