Extra Time: The District Line #4

by C F White

  Still, the thought tugged a smile from his lips as he slunk under the covers, closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep to the sound of snoring.

  Chapter two

  Somethin’ Else

  July 2013— four years later.

  “You are not meant to be happy about this!” Seb pointed a frustrated finger at the quivering dark-haired lad before him.

  Wide kohl-lined eyes filled up with an amateur fear as the kid opened his mouth to speak. Seb held up a hand to stop him. He wasn’t going to listen to piss and vinegar this time. How many chances did he need, for fuck sake?

  “You’re not meant to be smiling.” Seb’s voice bounced off the acoustics creating a lasting echo that would hopefully drum into the kid’s thoughts and processes. It should. It better. “This is a sombre moment. The point is try not feeling anything. You want to be numb. You want all the conflicting, hurtful, gut wrenching emotions eating you up inside to stop. You want to fucking die!”

  Silence imbued the Art House Theatre. The kid on stage did nothing but stare forwards, a slight nod of confirmation but also, maybe, perhaps, a slither of recognition and—Christ—pity. The seats in the stalls creaked under the awkward shuffling. The others behind him were clearly finding this confrontation a tad overkill.

  “Please,” Seb breathed out, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Try to understand the moment. It’s an important one.”

  And it had been. So was this. Seb was laying his heart and soul on the line. Not to mention a hell of a lot of cash. It had to be perfect. And this straight-out-of-Guildhall quotation marks actor hadn’t learned the first thing about any of it from reading the fucking script. It was as though he’d skimmed read it on the District Line on the way in and filled the blanks in with his ignorance.

  Deep breaths, Sebastian. Deep, fucking, breaths.

  Seb slid his gaze to the blond actor—Max—hovering behind his co-star. Max offered up a nervous smile. It looked like he got it. He understood the severity of the scene. He would. He was the better actor. He’d been whipped out of Les Mis for this—costing Seb a pretty penny—he should know a thing or two about heartache.

  “Go again.” Seb waved a frustrated hand then leapt off the stage and into the first row.

  He slapped down the middle seat, fell into it and snuggled in between Martin Chang and Noah Fitz—his band mates. The two thorns in his side. Or maybe his conscience on each shoulder. Their unease was caught in glances over Seb’s head. That exchange wasn’t unusual. Seb had gotten used to ignoring their silent communication behind his back when he was out centre front and ranting into a microphone. After eight years of gigging together, they’d also learned when and how to rein him in.

  “Seb—”

  “Don’t say it,” Seb cut Martin’s attempt off and folded his arms, his retro leather jacket rasping at the seams.

  “Should have paid out for two professionals.” Noah hadn’t learned to keep shdum as much as Martin had over the years and he slunk down into his seat, folding his arms in smug finality.

  Seb hung his head. “He looked the part, okay? And I was running out of budget.”

  “Looks aren’t everything,” Martin crooned for no other reason than he was hellbent in getting a word in edgeways.

  A loud clang from behind prevented Seb from retaliating. All three whipped around, peering over their back rests in time to witness two children lurch up from the floor and scramble onto their seats in the last row.

  “Sorry, daddy!” the pig-tailed six-year-old in the middle held up an iPad. “It didn’t break this time!”

  “All right, sweetpea. Just be careful, yeah?” Noah widened his eyes in what Seb assumed was his authoritarian father look except, Seb knew, when it came to that little girl, Noah was putty in her hands.

  Seb rolled his eyes. He’d never be like that if he had a daughter.

  But he didn’t have one. Nor did he have a son like Martin did. He was childless. Because after four years since the seed had been planted, it hadn’t yet bloomed. Maybe that’s why he’d thrown himself into producing this musical during the Drops’ downtime. Keeping his mind and creativity occupied had kept him from feeling a sense of loss. And desperate longing.

  “Okay, daddy!” Bethany smiled, all sweetness and light with a knowledge that she had her father wrapped around her pinkie.

  “You’re looking after your sister, aren’t you?” Noah said, obviously trying to work his daddy-day-care role. “Sharing and all that?”

  Bethany nodded. Although the bite of her pouting bottom lip suggested she wasn’t exactly being truthful. Her four-year-old sister beside her was probably used to being cast aside. Seb hadn’t been brought up with siblings so sharing had never been an issue for him. And he’d always been given everything he’d ever asked for.

  At a cost.

  Which reminded him—

  He glared at Noah to hurry the fuck up. Extra time here was money wasted. Do I sound like my father? Seb shook that thought from his tense shoulders.

  Noah’s sick-inducing gooey smile at his daughters faded as he caught on to Seb’s glower and he hollered a quick, “Beth? Lottie?”

  The two girls peered up from behind the blinking screen. “Yes, daddy?” they called back in a perfect unison fit for the acoustics in the closed off Art House theatre.

  “Uncle Seb’s looking at me like he wants to rip that iPad from your cold dead fingers and smash it over my head.” Noah popped a chewing gum into his mouth. “Dial it down, yeah?”

  “Okay, daddy,” Bethany’s hushed whisper pervaded to the front row and the volume on the game she’d been playing tailed off to hushed gurgles.

  “All right?” Noah barked.

  “On all the days. On all the effing days…”

  “Can’t help it, can I? Ann had an appointment.”

  Seb thought it best to keep quiet about Ann and ripped his gaze from Noah’s pointed one to angle his head at the carry cot wedged between him and Martin.

  “Between those two and that one,” he said. “We might as well change our name to the Daddy Drop Offs.”

  “Leah needed a break,” Martin said, gently rocking the car seat within held a three-month-old baby sleeping soundly and wrapped in fleece blankets. “He doesn’t sleep. Ever.”

  “Except to one of my songs sung by a kid who wouldn’t know emotion if it spat him in the face.” Seb needed to get a handle on his temper. They didn’t have long to rehearse, and he’d needed his band mates to check the ensemble he’d put together to play their music was worth the extra budget. But Martin and Noah’s work-slash-life balance wasn’t as one sided as Seb’s was.

  He didn’t resent that.

  He didn’t.

  “Sebastian, darling!” That all-familiar, grating New York accent infiltrated from the back seats and Seb groaned. At this rate, he’d never get this scene done. He was losing money by the second. Time is money. He did not think that in his father’s voice. He. Did. Not.

  Seb pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yes, Sylvia?” he placated.

  “Can I add a little insight here?” she asked, swishing her dark hair over her shoulder as she sauntered down the left aisle toward the stage.

  “No. Fuck off.”

  Girlie giggling from behind made Seb recoil at his choice of language and more so when Martin gasped, tucking the blanket around his baby son’s ears as if Rocky would be able to hear through his snoring and decipher the curse to use as his first word. Seb usually bit his tongue on the swearing around his Godchildren though, but his mother tended to bring out the foul-mouthed rebellious teenager in him. And this was supposed to be his safe space. He was at work. Not invited round to a kids’ birthday party.

  He winced. He hadn’t exactly been proving he was fit to be around children lately. Especially after his faux pas at Bethany’s recent birthday bash. Ann might never forgive him for putting one of the more curse-happy Drops’ songs on to play pass-the-parcel. Perhaps Fifty Reasons Why I Want to Kill You (You Fuc
king Scumbag) hadn’t been the most appropriate choice for the occasion.

  “Darling.” Sylvia stopped beside the first row of seats, hands on hips and looked down at Seb as though he’d stolen the last cookie and not just told his mother to eff-off. “You invited me to take a look whilst I was here in London. The least you can do is respect my professional opinion on this.”

  Seb’s mother defied aging. Dressed in skinny jeans and a tucked-in floaty black top with her hair stylishly tousled, Sylvia Ricci radiated a youthful star-filled glow that was impressive for a woman nearing her fifties. Unlike Seb, who had noticed the few flecks of silver running through his dark hair that morning and had plucked them out to pretend they’d never existed. It was probably stress. Why had he put all his eggs into this hedonistic basket?

  Because he had nothing to stop him.

  “I can handle this, Sylvia,” Seb said through gritted teeth. “It’s my fuc—sodding show. Go be the babysitter or something. Call it research for playing the part of a grandma one day.”

  “Chance would be a fine thing,” she said, rather poignantly, and Seb assumed she wasn’t referring to the lack of TV or theatre roles with her preceding tut.

  Seb forced down the retaliation burning on his tongue.

  “It’s not like I’ll ever have the real thing, is it?” Sylvia sighed, ruffling a hand through her hair.

  “Because your maternal instincts are just second to none.” Seb’s sarcasm could have scraped the black paint off the walls.

  “I could have a second chance at that, couldn’t I? But no—”

  “What did you want to say about the performance?” Seb cut her off before she could be the other mother figure in his life who yearned for something he wasn’t able to give her.

  It wasn’t through lack of trying.

  “Oh, right, yes.” Sylvia bounced on her knee-high boots, an excitable glow tinting her cheeks. “If you want your two boys up there to really perform this scene, then you need to explain the story to them. Let them inside your head, darling. They’re straight out of acting school. They can’t expect to know the depths of true emotional anguish yet. Wait ‘til they’re rejected a few more times for being too fat, too skinny or too beautiful.”

  “Mum,” Seb warned, yet Sylvia smiled at his rare use of that word. Not that it meant much to Seb, usually it was his sure-fire way to get her to shut up. Often it worked.

  “Tell them the scene.”

  Often it didn’t.

  “I just did,” Seb seethed through his teeth and boiling temper.

  “No, you barked orders. Tell them what happened. Tell them why this part in particular means so much to you. And why.”

  Seb inhaled. Then, leaping out of his seat, he clambered up on stage and stood in front of the two kids. He shouldn’t really be referring to them as kids. They were both the right age to be playing their roles—early twenties. Perhaps it was Seb’s milestone thirty that made him feel that anyone still in their twenties was a child. Considering these two were practically cover models, bodies honed to perfection and each one standing there in only a pair of boxers, Seb should refrain from thinking they were children.

  He pointed at each one and rushed out, “He loves you. You love him. You’ve not told each other because you’re fucking stupid.”

  Sylvia cleared her throat.

  Seb huffed, then shook his head and swiped his fingers across his brow in the hope to invigorate memories into words. Better words. He was a lyricist. He could do this.

  “It was a bit too early for declarations,” he said, voice calmer and allowing his recollection of that anguish-riddled time to tip to the surface. Like he had when he’d written the song they were to perform and when he’d had help to adapt his idea into a script. “I mean, what was it?” He glanced to Martin behind him, widening his eyes in encouragement. Martin shrugged. So Seb turned back to the actors. “It had been a week? Two? How can you know if something is right after that short time? How can you call it love?”

  He looked at the two actors for validation. They stared blankly back.

  “You’re leaving.” Seb pointed at the dark-haired one, then back at blond Max. “You don’t know but you sense somethings up, because you’re a footballer.” He glanced from one confused face to the next. “Always on the ball? Never mind…” Seb scrubbed a hand down his face and got himself back on track. “This is a tender moment. It’s not about getting into bed. It’s not about sex. It’s about realising that what you have is special, but you can’t keep it.”

  He glanced down to his mother. Was he asking for approval? He’d never sought it from her in his life. But something about her reassuring smile gave him a warm tingle, so he continued,

  “The song—this scene—is about wanting to pause time. Stop feeling. Live in this moment. Forever. You’re clinging onto each other because, come daylight, it’s the final whistle. The curtain call. The outro. Get it?”

  Silence. Until the dark-haired kid piped up, “You loved him then? At this point?”

  Seb should probably learn the actor’s name if he was going to be sharing this much about his life to him. “What’s your name? Real name?”

  “Ben.”

  “Yes, Ben, I loved him. And it hurt. Like fuck.”

  “So why didn’t you just tell him? Like, when he comes out the house to meet you in the street, why didn’t you just say it then?”

  Seb bared his weight from one foot to the other. Hands on hips, he worried on his bottom lip and stared at the stage lights above. Good, fucking question. Why hadn’t he? What had prevented him, back then, from holding on instead of allowing himself to let go?

  “What if he didn’t feel the same?” he said, drifting his gaze to the men in front of him. “What if he’d told me I meant nothing? Or couldn’t mean anything because of the restraints put on him to achieve his dream of a professional football career? What if me telling him how I felt was what made him walk away? Like my mother did?”

  A startled cough earned its way to Seb but he didn’t acknowledge it. He was back at that moment. All those years ago outside an east London terraced house, filled up with drink and nicotine and wanting the ground to swallow him whole, only for a strong arm to yank him back to the surface.

  “I was scared,” he breathed out in quiet resignation. “Scared shitless. Of him. Of my feelings for him. Of not being good enough or deserving of him.”

  Understanding flickered across the two men as they met each other’s gazes.

  “And what about him?” Max asked, obviously trying to find a motivation for his character.

  “He…” Seb didn’t expect the smile to tug on his lips and he tried to shake it off to be the professional. “He’d fallen hook, line and sinker but had no idea how he was going to deal with that.”

  Max nodded. Then, after a roll of his shoulders and click of his neck from side to side, Seb leapt down from the stage. “Go again!” He waved at the three piece at the tip of the stage, elevated from the main set, and they called into action with a thudding bass drum.

  The actors returned to their first positions as the accompanying guitar filtered in, followed by a gliding violin. Seb held his breath as Ben—as Seb—sang his lyrics. His song. His feelings.

  “Innit weird?” Noah whispered to him out the side of his mouth. “To have your life played out on stage like this?”

  Seb didn’t reply. He was too entranced. Too enthralled. Too enraptured by what was happening on that stage. It was like looking through a mirror. A mirror to the past. To the moment when it had all started. When two people had fallen in love.

  Every hair on his body stood on end. Max’s voice was higher than his, more classically trained, but it worked well alongside Ben’s husky rock-tones. Especially when their duet belted out around the empty theatre, and the two men entangled themselves in a dance that near broke Seb’s heart. They got it. They understood. And as the scene ended with them collapsed onto a makeshift bed in the middle of the stage, Seb had to c
hoke back a cathartic tear so as not to be called out in the succeeding silence.

  Sylvia clapped first, followed by Noah and Martin who stood for the ovation. Seb was frozen. That scene had done what it had meant to. It had paused him. He was back there. That time. That moment. That heart wrenching goodbye.

  God, I’d been an idiot.

  “Well,” he finally croaked out. “If you do that on opening night and there’s a dry eye in this house, then I declare them all robots.” He shrugged. “Or Daily Mail press.”

  Ben clambered off the bed and hauled Max up by his arm. They beamed their pride and gratitude down to the front row. And that, there, caused a painful lump in Seb’s throat. That scene. That moment. That had been the start of something quite…spectacular.

  The start of somethin’ else.

  Stage lights switched off, musical instruments clanged, and crew shuffled out from their hidey holes around the theatre, declaring an end to the day’s final rehearsal. Good job, as Seb’s back pocket rang. He shuffled out from the front row and dug out his mobile.

  “Champ,” he answered with a painful grin.

  “How’d it go?” Jay asked.

  “It was…” Seb glanced up to the two actors, heads together, as they made their way backstage to the dressing rooms. “Doable.”

  “Good. How long you gonna be?”

  “Why?” Seb followed the others up the aisle, through the red velvet curtain and to the steps leading to the main foyer.

  “Mum’s called an emergency meetin’.”

  “About?” Seb waved at a few stagehands and the other various staff as they clambered out of the wings. He mouthed at them that he expected a bright and early one tomorrow. They all ignored him. Bastards.

  “Check your news app. Court Yard. Asap.” Jay clicked off.

  Noah bundled up behind him, two daughters held in each hand, and Martin joined, bashing the carry cot into Seb’s legs, baby within squealing his displeasure.