by Alice Oseman
I was feeling extremely on edge. Aled had not texted me back. Chances are Aled would just be in his uni room or at a lecture or something, but I still couldn’t stop thinking about him doing something … more serious.
Things like that happened, didn’t they?
And Aled didn’t have anyone any more.
“You okay, Frances?” asked Daniel. We were sitting next to each other in the back seat now. The question appeared to be sincere and he was gazing at me with dark eyes.
“He just … hasn’t got anyone. Aled hasn’t got anyone any more.”
“Oh, that’s bullshit,” Daniel sat back with a sneer. “There are four of us in this car. I skipped a chemistry lesson for this.”
There was something calming about the motorway. I’d always thought that. I put my earphones in and listened to an episode of Universe City and watched the blur of grey and green outside. Daniel was next to me, leaning his head on the window, both hands gripping his phone. Carys was sipping a bottle of water. Raine was moving her mouth along to the words of whatever song was playing on the radio, but I had my earphones in, so I couldn’t quite make out what the song was. In my ears, Aled said, or Radio said, “I wished I had as many stories as her,” and although we were all panicking about the same thing, I momentarily felt like we were at peace. I felt the least stressed I had been in a long time. I closed my eyes, the hum of the car and the buzz of the radio and the murmur of Aled’s voice all mixing into one glorious sound.
When we were half an hour away, I said, “I feel like we’re in Universe City.”
Raine laughed. “In what way?”
“Radio’s trapped in Universe City. And someone’s finally heard him. Someone is going to rescue him.”
“Art reflects life,” said Carys. “Or … maybe it’s the other way round.”
A COMPUTER WITH A SAD FACE
Before we knew it, much quicker than I’d expected, we reached Aled’s university town.
In many ways, it was extremely similar to our own hometown. Tall Dickensian buildings and cobbled streets, a small market square with an array of high-street shops, a river running through the whole thing. It was gone 9pm now – everywhere was busy and there were students all over the place, walking around town or hanging around pubs.
It took a good twenty minutes of driving to find St John’s College. Raine parked outside on double yellow lines. It looked tiny, just like a terraced house, and I didn’t really understand how a building so small could be an entire university college. Once we were inside, however, we found that the college stretched into many of the surrounding buildings.
We stood awkwardly in the college foyer. There was a large staircase to our right, and also two corridors up ahead.
“Now what?” I said.
“Does Aled know we’re coming?” asked Daniel.
“Yeah, I texted him.”
“Did he reply?”
“No.”
Daniel turned to me. “So … we’ve just turned up uninvited.”
Everyone was silent.
“To be fair, mate, we were in a bit of a panic,” said Raine. “It sounded like Aled was about to kill himself or some shit.”
She’d said the words that nobody had dared to say yet, and it sent us all back into silence.
“Does anyone even know where his room is?” asked Carys.
“Maybe we should ask at reception,” I said.
“I’ll ask,” said Carys with absolutely no hesitation, and she walked towards the reception desk where an elderly man was sitting. She talked with him for a moment, and then walked back. “He’s not allowed to tell us, apparently.”
Daniel groaned.
“We could ask a few students?” Raine suggested. “See if they know him?”
Carys nodded in agreement.
“What if no one even knows Aled though?” I asked.
Raine was about to say something when a completely different voice sounded from the staircase.
“Sorry – did you guys say ‘Aled’?”
We all turned around in unison to find ourselves faced with a guy wearing a university rowing polo shirt.
“Yes?” I said.
“Are you friends from home?”
“Yes, I’m his sister,” said Carys, sounding ten years older than she was.
“Oh, thank god,” said the student.
“Why thank god?” Daniel snapped.
“Er – well, he’s just been acting a bit strangely. I live opposite him and he— Well, he doesn’t leave his room hardly ever, for starters. He doesn’t come to college meals any more. Stuff like that.”
“Whereabouts is his room?” said Carys.
The student gave us directions.
“I’m so glad he’s got friends from home,” said the student, just before he left. “I mean, he seems so isolated.”
It was decided that I would go alone to Aled’s room.
I was kind of glad, in a way.
I seemed to have been walking for ages, down blue-carpeted halls with cream, chipped walls and shiny doors, when I found the room.
I knocked.
“Hello?”
There wasn’t a reply, so I knocked again. “Aled?”
Nothing.
I tried the handle – it was unlocked, so I went inside. The room was dark – the curtains were closed – so I turned the lights on.
It was a demolition site.
The room itself was a typically miniscule uni room. Smaller than my room at home. It had space for a single bed, then a couple of square metres of floor, a dingy-looking wardrobe, an equally dingy desk. The curtains were so thin that you could see the streetlights through them.
But it was the contents of the room that worried me. It was way beyond normal mess, and Aled had never been very messy in the first place. There was a huge pile of clothes on his desk chair and more on the floor, pretty much covering up every bit of carpet. His wardrobe was almost empty and his bed was unmade and it didn’t look like the sheets had been changed in months. There were at least twelve empty bottles of water on his bedside table, along with a laptop, its on light flashing gently. The walls were the only clean part of the room. He hadn’t put up any posters or pictures at all – they were just dull, mint green breezeblocks. It was freezing – he’d left his window open.
The desk was covered in miscellaneous sheets of paper, tickets, leaflets, food packets and fizzy drink cans. I picked up a piece of paper from the desk. It was mostly blank apart from a few lines.
Poetry 14/1 – George Herbert: Form and Voice lecture
• 1630s
• Paratext – Gerard genette. The textual form on a poem takes – what it looks like on the page
• Dialogue – trochaic
• John wesley’s christ 1744 1844?????
The rest of the page was covered in swirly lines.
I continued searching through the papers on the desk, not entirely sure what I was looking for. I came across a lot of lecture notes with only one or two bullet points on them. There were also several letters from Student Finance reminding him that he had to reapply if he wanted funding next year.
Then I found the first handwritten note.
Honestly how fucking dare you take away a show that’s so precious to so many people? You think that you control everything about it but the show’s gone way beyond that now – you wouldn’t even be in this position if it wasn’t for us. Bring back Universe City or you’ll regret it.
Then I found a second.
FUCK YOU ALED LAST!!! YOU HAVE RUINED THE HAPPINESS OF SO MANY PEOPLE ACROSS THE WORLD. HOPE YOU ARE HAPPY
And then a third.
Lol why bother staying alive if you’re not making Universe City? You have ripped out the hearts of thousands of people. JUST KILL YOURSELF
Then a fourth. Then a fifth.
I found nineteen of them, scattered across his desk.
I was confused and terrified and then I remembered that photo of Aled from months ago showin
g him walking into the college. All these people had to do was write a letter, put his name on the envelope and address it to the college, and the result was Aled getting bombarded with hate mail.
Then I came across a letter that had the YouTube logo on the header, along with a variety of other logos I didn’t recognise. I quickly skimmed it.
Dear Mr Last,
As you have failed to respond to our emails, we hope you do not mind us contacting you via mail – we at Live!Video would like to invite you to take part in our summer convention, Live!Video London. As your YouTube channel Universe City has risen to great popularity within the last year, we wondered whether you would be interested in putting on a live version of the show. We have never staged a live version of a storytelling channel such as yours before and it would be a great honour for us to have you as the first.
There were several other follow-up letters confirming that Aled hadn’t responded to any of them, which made me feel suddenly very sad.
Underneath the pile of papers, I found Aled’s phone. It was turned off, so I turned it on, since I knew his passcode, and immediately he received eight new messages. Most of them were from me, dating back from early January.
He hadn’t turned his phone on since January.
“What the fuck?” said a voice from behind me.
I turned round, and Aled was standing in the doorway.
He was wearing a white T-shirt that had a computer with a sad face on it, with pale blue ripped jeans. His hair was below his shoulders now and it was the sort of green-grey of someone who’d dyed their hair multiple times different colours and then left it for a while. In one hand he was holding a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste.
The most notable thing, however, was that he had lost a rather extreme amount of weight since the last time I’d seen him at Christmas. Aled hadn’t been particularly skinny during the time I’d known him, and now his face had lost its roundness, his eyes looked sunken and his T-shirt hung off him like a tent.
His mouth was open in shock. He tried to say something else. And then he bolted.
LISTEN
I pelted after him, but I quickly lost him and found myself outside in the dark. I was pretty sure he’d run out of the building, but I couldn’t see which way he’d gone and in this weather he was probably freezing his arse off in just his T-shirt and jeans. I fumbled for my phone and found his name in my contacts and called him, but obviously he didn’t answer, but then remembered that his phone was back in his room, and he hadn’t used it for weeks.
I didn’t know what to do. Would he turn up if I just waited for him inside? Or would he do something dangerous?
He clearly wasn’t thinking rationally.
I turned round and looked at the college door.
I couldn’t go in.
I started to run down the street and into the town centre.
I spotted him almost instantly. He stood out in just his white T-shirt among all the students in big coats and jumpers, laughing and chatting and looking like they were having the time of their lives. They probably all were.
I called out for him and he turned and saw me, and started running again.
Why was he running?
Did he not want to see me that badly?
I followed him down some steps in the street and round a corner and on to a bridge. He turned right again and disappeared down some more steps and I followed, realising suddenly where he was going.
He disappeared into the door of a nightclub.
Music was blaring out of the club. There wasn’t a queue, but I could see it was already packed inside.
“All right, lass?” said the bouncer in a strong Geordie accent. “You got any ID for me, love?”
“Er …” I didn’t. I didn’t drive and it wasn’t like I carried my passport with me. “No, it’s just …”
“I can’t let you in without any ID, love.”
I grimaced. Arguing with a six-foot-five bald Geordie man was probably not the best idea. But I didn’t have any choice.
“Please, my friend just ran into here, he’s really upset, I just need to talk to him and I’ll leave as soon as I found him, I swear …”
The bouncer gave me a sympathetic look. He checked his watch and sighed.
“Go on then, lass, it’s only ten o’clock.”
I gasped out a thank-you and then ran inside.
It was worse than Johnny R’s. The floor was sticky and dirty, the walls were dripping with condensation, and you could hardly see anything through the dark or hear anything other than the blare of classic pop tunes. I barged through the crowds of students jumping up and down – oddly, most of them seemed to be in jeans and T-shirts, nothing like the dressed-up sixth-form crowd at Johnny R’s back at home. I searched and searched, ignoring the students giving me disapproving looks when I barged past them, then went upstairs and did it again, and then …
There. White T-shirt, leaning against a wall. His hair looked grass-green against the flashing lights.
I grabbed him by the upper arms before he saw me coming and he jumped so hard I could feel his bones move.
“ALED!” I shouted though there wasn’t much point. Even I couldn’t hear any sound come out.
The music was so loud that everything was vibrating: the floor, my skin, my blood.
He was gazing at me like he’d never seen a real human being before. His eyes had deep purple shadows underneath them. He hadn’t washed his hair for at least several days. His skin flashed blue, red, pink, orange …
“What are you doing?” I shouted, but neither of us could hear it. “The music’s too loud!”
He opened his mouth and said something, but I couldn’t hear and I couldn’t lip-read either, even though I was trying to listen harder than I had ever listened before. Then he bit his lip and stayed very still.
“I missed you so much,” I said, the only true thing I could think of saying, and I think he might have been able to lip-read it because his eyes filled with tears and he mouthed “Me too,” and I’d never wanted to hear his voice so badly in all the time that I’d ever spent with him.
I didn’t know what else to do so I just wrapped my arms round his waist and put my head on his shoulder and held him.
At first he didn’t do anything. Then he raised his arms, slowly, and placed them round my shoulders, and then he rested his head against mine. After a minute or so, I could feel him shaking. After another minute, I realised I was crying as well.
It felt so real. It didn’t feel like I was trying to be someone I’m not, like I was putting on an act.
I cared about him. And he cared about me.
That was all it was.
NO ONE
We went to the town square. We didn’t even say anything while we were walking there. We held hands because it felt like the right thing to do.
We sat down on a stone bench. I realised several minutes later that this was the exact spot where Aled had been in that stalker photo posted on Tumblr several months ago.
The thing I hate most when I’m in a bad mood is other people being very pitying and sympathetic with me. And I knew this wasn’t just any old ‘bad mood’, but I decided I’d take a different approach.
“So you’ve been feeling a bit shit, then?” I asked. We were still holding hands.
Aled’s eyes crinkled a little – the hint of a smile. He nodded, but didn’t say anything.
“What’s been doing that, then? If it’s a specific person, I can one hundred per cent beat them up.”
He smiled again. “You couldn’t beat a fly up.”
The sound of his voice in the air – in the real world – nearly made me start crying again.
I thought about it. “That’s probably true, actually. They’re too fast. I’m very slow in most areas of life.”
He laughed. It was magic.
“So what seems to be the trouble?” I said, in what I imagined was a doctor voice.
Aled tapped my hand with his fingers. “J
ust … everything.”
I waited.
“I hate being at university,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” His eyes welled up again. “I hate it. I hate everything about it. I’m going insane.” A tear fell and I squeezed his hand.
“Why don’t you quit?” I whispered.
“I can’t go home. I hate it there too. So … I’ve got nowhere to go,” he said, his voice croaky. “Nowhere to go. No one to help me.”
“I’m here,” I said. “I can help you.”
He laughed again, though it died away almost instantly.
“Why did you stop talking to me?” I said, because even now I still didn’t understand. “And Daniel?”
“I—” His voice caught. “I— I was scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“I— I just run away from all the difficult things in my life,” he said, and then laughed exasperatedly. “If something’s hard, if I have to talk to someone about something difficult, I just avoid it and ignore them, as if that’ll make it go away.”
“What … so … with us, you—”
“I couldn’t face the idea of you two … I don’t know … rejecting me forever. I thought it’d be better if I just ignored you.”
“But— But why would we do that?”
He wiped his eyes with his free hand. “Well … okay, so, me and Dan … we argued about lots of things. Mainly about the fact that he doesn’t believe me when I say I like him. Like, he thinks I’m lying to him, or something ridiculous, he thinks I’m just pretending to be attracted to him because I feel sorry for him and because we’ve been friends for so long.” He glanced at me, seeing the expression on my face. “Oh, you don’t think that as well, do you?”
“Daniel sounded pretty convinced …”
Aled groaned. “This is so stupid. Just because I— I don’t shout about my feelings all the time …”
“Why would ignoring him solve that?”
He shook his head. “It wouldn’t. I know it wouldn’t. I was just scared of talking about it. Facing the possibility that he— He might just end our relationship because I seem like I’m not into it. I’ve been doing it since before the summer because I’m— I’m a fucking idiot. And now we’ve grown apart and … I don’t know if we’ll ever go back to the way we were …”
