Heartstream

by Tom Pollock

  Oh.

  I get it. Some stupid obstinate part of me was expecting to hear Mum’s voice greet me as I came through the door. And all at once, the pain of it is overwhelming, raging up through me like I’ve got a hurricane bottled in my lungs.

  I try to walk it off, but eventually I have to sit down on the bottom stair and watch tears run off the end of my nose to spot the parquet flooring. I fight for breath after hitched breath, forcing myself to study the interlocking wood panels until the air comes easier.

  I guess it makes sense that it hit me here rather than at the graveyard. After all, it’s not really her presence in the little flower bed where they’ll bury her ashes that I’m mourning – it’s her absence from everywhere else.

  “Come on, Ame,” I say aloud through gritted teeth. “The wake’s about to start. There’s like five thousand tonnes of coleslaw you need to peel the cling film off.” Admittedly not the deepest mantra in the world, but repeated seven times it manages to get me on my feet.

  As I head towards the kitchen, a sound finally does split the silence, a familiar hissing. Someone’s boiling the kettle.

  “Dad?” I call again. “Charlie?”

  Have they been here the whole time? Again there’s no answer. It can’t be them anyway. I would’ve seen the car out front. Gooseflesh plucks at my skin, but it’s too late – I’ve already pushed on the door.

  “Would you like a cup?”

  The woman beside the stove is wearing a down jacket despite the heat. She pours boiling water into our Alice in Wonderland teapot. She’s got the buzz cut all streamers have, so close it’s hard to tell what colour her hair is. At first, I think she’s my parents’ age, but then I realize she’s only maybe in her early thirties, it’s just the way the skin hangs dark under her eyes that makes her appear older. She looks like she hasn’t slept in weeks.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the funeral, but I didn’t really think it would be appropriate, and there was so much to do here.”

  She potters fussily around the kitchen pulling out crockery. There’s a Tesco bag on the table and she unpacks a box of iced buns and sets two of them on a plate. The platters and platters of sausage rolls, biscuits, finger sandwiches and home-made coleslaw we put out for the wake this morning are still on the counter, a supply dump awaiting a grieving army. She doesn’t even touch the cling film covering them.

  “I figured everyone likes iced buns.” She ambles over and pushes the plate at me. “Cake, Amy? I got them for you.”

  It takes me a second to force words past the incredulous horror that’s blocking my throat. I don’t know who this woman is, but her buzz cut tells me why she’s here.

  “This is way over the line,” I burst out. “This is my house! You can’t be here!”

  She blinks at me; her eyes turn down at the corners, baffled and a bit hurt. I feel like I just shouted at a puppy.

  “It’s only a cup of tea.” She raises the plate again. “And I brought my own cake; I didn’t want to presume.”

  Outside, a car growls up on the gravel.

  “That’s my dad, and my little brother,” I tell her desperately. “You cannot be here when they come in. Look…” I fight to get my voice under control. “I know today’s been tough if you’ve been streaming off me, but I just can’t help you, not right now. I mean, she was actually my mum, OK? Charlie’s already flipped out once today, and if he sees a random streamer in here he’s going to lose it.”

  She just stares at me with those shadowed eyes.

  I drag in a deep breath. “Look, I’m sorry to do this, but if you don’t leave, right now, I’m going to call the police.”

  “Oh,” she says, deflating like I’ve just told her it’s going to rain on her birthday. “Oh well, I’m sure they’ll be along sooner or later anyway.”

  Car doors slam outside. Feet crunch on the path. I freeze midway through reaching for my phone. “Wait, what?”

  With an apologetic expression on her weird, youthfully wizened face, she unzips her jacket. For an instant, I think, Did you rob a DIY store? Through the zip, wires sprout, and I glimpse tubes of transparent liquid next to glass canisters of nails and ball bearings. At first my brain refuses to recognize it, it’s just so incongruous, but then it clicks into focus. I’ve seen enough obsessive rolling twenty-four-hour news reports to recognize a bomb.

  “I just wanted to see you,” she says. “Before the end.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cat

  “FIVE!”

  Eighty thousand screams coalesce into the countdown.

  “FOUR.”

  “THREE.”

  “TWO.”

  “ONE.”

  Four rectangles of light shine on the pitch-black stage: backlit screens. Inside each rectangle, a silhouette of a boy, perfectly still. Every curl of their hair is as familiar to me as my own (Lord knows I’ve spent more time looking at their faces than at mine). Giant LED screens on either side magnify them. My eyes ache and I can feel my corneas drying, but I don’t blink. I don’t want to miss this.

  “ZERO.”

  There’s an instant’s rushing silence: eighty thousand fans all drawing breath.

  Whump. The pyros detonate, the screens drop, the lights dazzle my eyes, and the boys explode forward onto the stage and into the opening bars of “Saturday 3 a.m. Forever”.

  “Three a.m. running out into the street now, feelin’ like I’m dreamin’ but I’m not asleep now. You’re the one…”

  Nick holds his mic out to us and with one voice we all roar back. “YOU’RE THE ONE!”

  “Hearin’ church bells chime as I kiss you forever. We’ll be stoppin’ time cause I know that you’ll never not be the one.”

  “London!” Ryan urges us, as if we need the encouragement. I already feel like my throat’s about to tear, but I strive to scream louder.

  “NOT BE THE ONE!”

  Ryan’s delighted grin rewards us, and his fingers twirl out a short solo, an improvisation I’ve never heard him do before. He’s using the black Stratocaster with the flames from the “Cybersex” video.

  “Have you ever heard him do that before?” Evie screams into my ear, yanking on my shoulder to bring my head down to hers.

  “No!”

  “Me neither! This is the best day!”

  Evie’s got seven years on me, but her grin is so little-girl-thrilled it’s impossible not to grin back. She dances wildly, a five-foot-nothing tornado in black. I just bob and sway, but despite knowing the rhythm as well as my own heartbeat, I can’t quite get my feet moving in time to it.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re the ooooooone!”

  With a thunderous drum solo from Dion, “Saturday” ends and the riff segues straight into the intro to “Teenage Petrol”. Evie shrieks in delight, this being her favourite song of all time. She hauls me back down to her level (for a human being roughly the size of a milk carton, she’s phenomenally strong – must be all the yoga and terrifying green stuff she drinks) and together we belt out the words:

  “Burnin’ in my veins like teenage petrol, You do things to me I just can’t control.”

  The music ebbs and flows and we ebb and flow with it, the crowd flexing and surging like one huge muscle. At every chorus, we all rush forward and my excitement crests to panic as the bodies crush in on me.

  “Grab my hand!” I yell to Evie.

  “What?”

  “Grab my hand, so we don’t get separated!”

  She laughs. “You’re such a mum, Cat.” She ignores my proffered hand and throws her arms up over her head, grooving hard to the drums in the bridge.

  “And, baby, fire up my ignition tonight!”

  The song ends and the lights go up.

  “London!” Nick calls out to us. “It’s good to be home!”

  We roar our love back.

  “Ow!” I feel five needle points of pain in my forearm. I look down. Evie’s perfectly manicured talons are clamped onto me.


  “Did you see that?” she hisses.

  “See what?”

  “They just did a close-up on Ryan’s hands.”

  “So?”

  “He’s wearing purple nail polish.”

  I gape at her.

  “Bullshit.”

  “I swear on Nick’s mum’s life, and you know how much I love Nick’s mum.”

  I do. Judging by her Instagram, Judy’s lovely.

  “I’ll bet you my right kidney Nick’s wearing it too. What with them having Puffy out on stage at the Manchester gig, they’re definitely sending us a message.”

  I’ll be honest, three months ago, when the whole of RickResource was interpreting the presence of Nick Lamb’s childhood stuffed puffin as a symbol of his undying love for his lead guitarist, I was sceptical, and I really, really wanted to believe. But this? Purple nail varnish when the band’s breakout ballad was “Lover in Purple”? It’s hard to believe that isn’t deliberate. I feel my heart stutter.

  “Can you imagine?” Evie goes on. “If they just came out and announced it? Right now? Better, if Nick just walked over and kissed him. I think everyone in this stadium would immediately die. Like, that’s it – I’m out; I’ve peaked. It would be a massacre. Sheer ecstasy as a weapon of mass destruction.” Her voice swells into a shout. “RICK IS REAL!”

  It’s picked up like a war cry, echoing through the stadium. Not everyone here’s a Ricker, not by a long shot, but there’s at least a pocket in every block, every tier. There must be five thousand of the community here, at least. Soon we’re all chanting it.

  “Rick is real! Rick is real! Rick is real!”

  Ryan looks ready to play, but then he takes his fingers off the fretboard and just bows his head. He looks like he’s soaking it up, enjoying it.

  “RickisrealRickisreal!” Louder and louder, faster and faster, until, breathless, we trip over the words and collapse into more screams and applause and laughter.

  Evie looks a little smug. I wonder what the other Rickers here would do if they knew that the chant was started by Teenage Petrolhead herself, but it looks like they’ll find out, because she’s got her phone out filming it. Later she’ll post it for her sixty-five thousand Twitter followers, taking credit.

  I look around, taking in the armies of Rickdom. The vast majority of the Everlasting’s fans are girls, and I know a lot of them are older than they look. Most of the crowd is in tour merch, but there’s a pretty big overlap between the ones holding up home-made banners declaring Rick is Real and Ryan + Nick = Forever, and those who’ve made a bit more of an effort. I see a stunning black-haired girl wearing the grass skirt from the video for “Honolulu Legend”, and another young woman in a home-made version of the catsuit Ana Alia wears in “Cybersex”. Next to me, Evie is sexy as hell in the short little belted mac from “Rainin’ You”, so it looks like she might not be wearing anything underneath. And I…

  I’m wearing a stifling white mohair coat that I found in a charity shop for a fiver, home-made hooves made out of cardboard, tinfoil and nail polish, a mane made from a tattered mop and even a half a Tipp-Ex-painted coconut over my nose, because my favourite song is “White Horses”.

  “It’s cuuuuuuuuute, dubs,” Evie crooned to me back in her cavernous kitchen, when we were getting ready. (She calls me dubs because my handle, Wild White Horse, compacts down to WWH, and double-you-double-you-h compacts down to dubs. Evie’s mouth is like a flesh and blood zip file sometimes.)

  She even spray-painted my rucksack to look like a saddle. “Details matter,” she told me. Apparently, the fact it’s my only rucksack and now I have to walk around at school taking jokes about “offering rides” matters less. She snapped a pic of us and stuck it on her Insta before we left. Fifteen hundred likes, but the comments mentioned only her.

  Nick spins his mic by the lead a couple of times and catches it. “So, London, guess what? We’re filming the tour DVD tonight. And it’s a good thing too, because you all look incredible out there.”

  Another blitz of gleeful screaming and Nick revs up into the intro to “Cybersex”.

  The tour DVD? Oh shit, now I think of it, there were some signs up over the entrances saying something about how by being here we were consenting to being filmed, but in my excitement I barely registered them. I am suddenly acutely aware of the hemisphere of tropical fruit elastic-banded to my face. Please let the cameras not land on me, I think. I can’t bear being the focus of attention. It makes me squirmier than a caterpillar under a magnifying glass on a cloudless day.

  It’ll be fine, though, right? It’s not like it’s random. Everyone knows the producers find the hot girls in the crowd. Tall and blonde, or tiny, dark and perfect like Evie, not great galumphing gingers built for all the sports girls don’t get paid to play.

  I’m so caught up worrying about Coconutgate that I almost miss the big swell into the chorus.

  “You got me spending all my time, searchin’ high and low online, looking for you-ooo-oooooooo.”

  Nick’s voice surges effortlessly through the octaves and, as though it was an invitation, the crowd surges forward. I feel my feet come off the floor and my hips tilt and no no no no no NO!

  “Put me down!” I yell. “Put me down. Eviiiiiiiiiiie!”

  But no one can hear my panicked cries over Dion’s crash cymbal, least of all Evie who’s getting down in a world of her own. There are hands under my shoulders, hands under my arse, bearing me up. I kick and flail but I can’t dislodge them. I wash forward and back on the crowd, inexorably borne closer to the stage, laid out like the centrepiece of a ceremonial feast. You’ve just tripled your chance of being in the DVD, I think, as the hideous mohair coat rides up to show my appendix scar. I have to get my feet down. I shove my bum backwards, and I begin to tilt towards the right way up, but now a hand grasps my arm, pulling me up up up …

  … onto the stage.

  The song’s finished. All I can hear is the torrent of blood in my ears. I look down at the hand holding my forearm. The perfectly manicured nails are painted purple. In disbelief, I raise my gaze to be confronted by a smile that’s graced seventeen music videos and approximately one point nine billion magazine covers, not to mention all the posters that surround my bed.

  “Nice costume,” says Ryan Richards into the mic. A ripple of laughter echoes through the stadium. I’ve never been more grateful to have my face covered. I start to blush; the blush becomes a burning; the burning becomes a nova. I must be visible from space. Running a stadium tour on a budget? Save money on lighting by publicly humiliating Catherine Canczuk at your next gig!

  “Hey!” Ryan says sharply. “I mean it. It’s a great costume; it’s cool.”

  The laughter stops like he’s thrown a switch. A moment’s chastened silence, and then a chant rises up.

  “‘White Horses!’ ‘White Horses!’ ‘White Horses!’ ‘White Horses!’”

  “What’s your name?” Ryan proffers the mic.

  I start to tremble. Briefly, I consider lying. “C-C-Catherine,” I mumble. “Cathy. Cat.”

  “You like ‘White Horses’, Cat?”

  Concentrating with every fibre of my being, I manage to convert my tremble into a kind of nod. “M’f’v’rite.”

  “Can we do ‘White Horses’, lads?” Ryan calls over his shoulder.

  Dion, twirling his drumsticks, rolls his eyes. Stef ostentatiously looks around, anywhere but at Ryan, whistling and tuning his bass. But they’re both smiling. It’s biologically impossible for a human being with working hormones to refuse Ryan Richards. Nick plonks himself down on an amp and grabs an acoustic. Ryan sings this one himself.

  “I dreamed last night, I rode a white horse, rode a white horse to the ocean.”

  He offers the mic to the crowd and the response is full-throated and strong.

  “And the white-crested waves, they crashed in the caves, but there was never a sound of you.”

  It might be a slightly obscure album track, but it seems like eve
ryone here knows every single word, and I’m embarrassed and grateful and terrified and great, now I’m crying and I’m definitely going to be on the DVD let alone like five thousand YouTube videos and I can’t breathe through the coconut but I’d rather die than take it off and let them see my face and oh Christ, I love my fandom.

  And then I just let myself drift on the ocean of their voices:

  “I rode my white horse to a secret city, the streets were paved with stars, but wherever I ride, I know I’ll decide to stay wherever you are.”

  As the final strains of the song fade, I come back to myself. A single paralysing thought pierces the blissed-out fog around my brain.

  Oh hell.

  Evie’s going to be pissed.

  I cast around frantically, trying to find her, trying to read her expression in the crowd. Out of the corner of my eye, I spy a U-shaped curve of black ink peeking from the cuff of Ryan’s shirt.

  OK, I think. Yes, it’s low, and it’s selfish, but that might just be my way out. With a brief spasm of guilt, I pull out my phone and snap it, just before Ryan turns round and offers me his hand like he’s helping me out of a carriage at a ball. I step down from the stage, fighting the urge to cower from the gazes of the fans around me. I push through the crowd until I find myself back beside Evie. Her smile could slice bone china without breaking it.

  “Holy shit,” she says. “You lucky bitch.” She sounds playful, but there’s a hardness in her eyes. It should have been her, she’s thinking. She looks cute. She looks sexy. She wouldn’t have needed three tries to say her own name. I swallow back the apology that automatically forms in my mouth. Instead, I hold out my phone and the picture of Ryan’s forearm.

  “Evie, look.”

  Irritably, she lowers her gaze. “What am I looking at?”

  “Ry’s got a new tattoo.”

  She stares at the screen and I know she’s thinking what I thought when I first saw it.

  “Is that the top of a padlock?” she breathes.

  I’m not sure when the padlock became the official online symbol of Ryan and Nick’s love for each other. It started out as a dumb three-point turn of a pun: Pad short for Paddy, short for Patrick, long for Rick – as in “Locked in Rick” – but soon #Padlocked and Padlock emojis were everywhere in the fandom.