the boys i mean are not refined, [a story in three acts,]
Author: westendbound
Artist(s): crackfoxx
Link To Art: you'll find right this ridiculously amazing and beautiful piece of art here.
Word count: 10, 129
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: drug addiction, boy sex, major angst and general Skins badness (swearing, drinking, ect.)
Disclaimer: of course they're not mine, and the title is an e.e. Cummings poem.
Summary: Maxxie's return from London, unsuccessful and angry at the world, and how he rekindles a relationship he thought would never happen. But Maxxie's got some demons, and Tony doesn't know if he's strong enough to fight them. Then, something awful happens, and Maxxie finds himself more alone than before.
Notes: jeeesus, crackfoxx , i can't even lie, i cried a little bit when I saw your gorgous art. and thanks for generally putting up with my bullshit. theangelunknown , who has been so ridiculously understanding of my technological and general life failings; it's on it's way, i promise. and shan_3414 ; you're possibly one of the nicest people I've ever met. <3
Fatal habits, broken dreams
Waking up isn't all it seems
We held on to what we couldn't see
I carried you, you carried me
We were young and excited
We were lost and alone
We were free but misguided
And we had no place to call home
Late nights in Hollywood
Banging guitars and boys
Sweet sex and cigarettes
Were our joys
Jay Brannan, Home.
They speak whatever's on their mind
They do whatever's in their pants
The boys i mean are not refined
They shake the mountains when they dance.
e.e. Cummings, ‘the boys I mean,’
the boys I mean are not refined, by westendbound
1. cavatina
The snow in London was far more beautiful than the snow in Bristol. He knew that snow was snow, no matter where in the country he was, there was a way that it tumbled over and under itself onto the gritty pavement made him smirk, a black comparison to the way when, a month ago, him and James had clasped hands, basking in the glow of West End, and watched the snow dancing down the marquee‘s, almost as poised and precious as the dancers in the shows themselves.
He was right. As much as Maxxie wants to kick things and swear and smash glass wear when he says it, it’s true. His Dad was right.
“I’m good. I’m fucking good,”. Hm. Maxxie leans over the motorway overpass and spits down, taking a drag of his cigarette, making the cherry glow red. ‘But not good enough.’ he adds mentally, his inner voice laced with cynicism. It took a while, he supposes, for it to sink in. Months of living of Pot Noodles and corner-shop own brand coffee to realise that this wasn’t a matter of waiting around for some glossy, shark-esque agent to realise he was exactly what they need, like he told his family back in Bristol, every time his Mum would ring, her voice dry with worry. This wasn’t a waiting game; if it was a game, he’d lost.
He kicked at his fraying, blue, pull a long luggage and carried on along his way, stamping down hard on each and every crack in the pavement he came across, daring the world to get just a little bit worse for him.
There almost weren’t words for his resentment as he leant on the road barrier, the sharp February wind whipping at his cheeks, as he stood in front of the rudimentary tan-and-cream Bristol high-rise Council estate. Built up in the 1920’s just like the rest of this stupid town. He feels sick just staring at it. It burns its way up his chest, creeping its way into his mouth and leaving him with the taste of bile in the back of his throat. 14C Merrymount Court was, in essence, a less good companion of the three-room flat he’d grown up in, kicking and screaming and dying to get out.
The door sticks as he tries to walk in; he slams his shoulder hard against it to force it open, and finally it swings to display the travesty within. Maxxie sighs. It is every little bit as bad as he thought it was going to be. It would appear that the last resident in this place was either an old person or someone with remarkable bad taste; probably both, he thinks. The only things in the room are a folded ip sofa bed, and a little coffee table with a lamp standing on it. The bathroom is as disgusting as he anticipated. The sink was cracking away from the wall, and everything in there; the toilet, the bath, the sink basin, was an altogether quite unsavory shade of grey. The mirror is spattered with something (he doesn’t even want to muse on what it could be,) and he could hardly even see his reflected through it. He just sighs. As he strolls into the kitchen, he sees where the tiles have cracked and fallen away, and he wonders about the story’s they could tell; an angry spouse, an over dramatic teenager, a 1940‘s housewife sprucing the place up, waiting for her husband to get home. Stories that are long gone now. He thinks for a second about the flat back in London. He wonders if anyone will question the cigarette burn on the cushion of the sofa or the bright red stain on the carpet. He wonders if anyone will think of the stories that they left behind there. He wonders if anyone will even care.
*
It started, he supposed, where his dreams and ambitions ended. Spending a year and a half of the same monotonous audition circuit as every other dancer-with-a-fucking-dream in England led him to familiar faces: other dancers, singers, choreographers. Sometimes he’d end up in a corner as the rest of the room sweat to some gaudy warm up tune, the director of whatever low budget production this was grinning slyly at him and running a finger along the rim of his white vest. Of course, the words out of their mouths, ultimately, never changed. Good, but nothing special. Good, maybe when you’ve had a little more experience. Good. Maxxie remembers when he thought, honestly, that good would have been good enough. But even so, the sleazy directors, with their straggled beards and dark-tinted glasses, would run their hand over his shoulder and invite him back to their place, and he’d smile, and more often than not, he find himself on someone’s lap, making sure his face kept smiling and having something (a little white pill, a cigarette, a shot glass that spilled across his palm, a tiny ziplock bag,) pressed into his hand that tell him, ‘Eat Me, Drink Me,’, and he knows that, with a drag, or a sniff, they can burn his sadness away. Tomorrow.
“You make me sick, Max, you really do,”
He’s sat, one leg bowed under himself on the sofa, smoking a cigarette and looking exhaustedly at his boyfriend. The flat- it was a loose title, really…more of big room with a front door- was in a state of disarray. Clothes ( mostly Maxxie’s,) littered the largest proportion of floor space, cigarette butts and emptied Corona bottles (mostly Maxxie’s,) coated the coffee table and the tiny square of cooking space, and James whizzed around, a bundle of angry energy, swiping things up.
“And I don’t think you get it as much as you like to make out you do. It really doesn’t matter.”
“Yeah, you keep saying that yourself Maxxie. You spend so much time creating this…this hard-done-by misunderstood martyr façade that you can’t even see beyond it. You’re a joke. A cliché. Can’t you see yourself?” James sat on the broken arm of the chair, clenching his hands into a ball in his lap and setting his head down on then. He glanced sideway.
“This isn’t going to work is it?”
*
He just can’t spend any more of his time cramped up in the stupid, tiny flat. He’s been there for four days, and still can’t bring himself to pick up his mobile, which for some reason, is still coming out of their bill, and call his parents. In fact, he hasn’t spoke to anyone. Maybe it’s his own pride, he doesn’t really know. He’s spent the last few days sat on the bed, staring at the wall opposite of him and wondering how the fuck he got her. It bubbles up inside him, and and he can’t take it more, so he shoves his feet into the battered old trainers he’s been wearing since he was 15. Slamming the door on his way out, he walks as he realizes he has no clue as to where his feet are taking him. The streets and back paths that they used to run down, they used to know like the back of their hands, don’t feel like his anymore. Maxxie wonders if he’s really been away that long.
As it stands, he finds himself at one of those huge, amazing, yet terrible at the same time traveling fairs that would coast onto the one free patch of grass left in Central Bristol once a year and disappear two weeks later without so much as a passing remark. Maxxie had more than once found himself, even as a young child, gravitating toward these things; maybe it was the bright lights. As a pre-pubescent mess of long arms and short legs and shit heaps of energy his parent’s didn’t know what to do with- he’d never really taken to football- he would often find himself tapping his way up the unsteady metal platform leading up to the giddiness and happiness it promised. This year it was no different. Alone, with his hood pulled out so it pouched over his eyes, he wandered around the rained drenched fields silently, listening to the screaming gaggles of girls and boys pretending to be having the wildest time. He even found himself wishing his mates had never left.
Maxxie was half sure he’d imagined it. But no, even in the murky rain soaked daylight and the harsh, House of Mirror’s neon strobes, he is sure it was him. Sitting on the wall beyond the waltzer. Pumping his iPod through some cheap headphones (and Maxxie bets he can guess what he’s playing, he always been good at working Tony out). Picking at a gaudy pink candy floss. Maxxie fought the urge to go barrelling towards him and paces forwards, unsure. He steps, head ducked, toward him, his feet sinking miserably into the sludge. Much to his distaste, when Tony looks up and spots him, there’s no jump to his feet, and overexcited “Hi!”. He looks up once, his eyes narrowed and peering around the grass, and then double takes, peering hard at him.
“Max?” Maxxie lungs feel like theu’ve forgotten to work, but a “Yeah,” managed to work it’s way up. Tony runs his tongue along the inner edge his lips.
“And what are you doing back in dreary Bristol? I presume it’s not for the nightlife.” Ouch. The killer question. Stretching his arms out, Maxxie grinds his palms together, the scratchy skin showing the frequency of his bad habit.
“Trying to find some money?” he said, clamping his mouth shut. He raises a fair eyebrow at Tony. “And you?” Tony looks down underneath his eye lids and smiles to himself. “Taking a break,” ‘Can you even do that?’ Maxxie thinks. Tony’s eyes shoot up and Maxxie reels inwardly. It was really disconcerting when he did that.
“My head was going funny again.” he says soberly. Maxxie’s teeth drag over his top lip. “Oh.”
They end up back at Maxxie’s, for lack of any better word, flat. He makes cheese and beans and toast.
Despite Tony’s comment about the shit Bristol nightlife, some cocky little Year 13 shit is throwing a rave with their Grandfather’s money in some old bunker in the woods and they go. Tony’s smile excitedly when Maxxie agree’s, and he pelts home on his battered old blue bike. Maxxie tries not to, because he’s home, and Tony’s here, and that should be enough.
But it isn’t.
He dives through a shower, and brushes his teeth, and runs his fingers through his long blonde fringe (“You really need to go and get a bloody hair cut.” he thinks) because he hasn’t got around to buying a hairbrush yet. He busies himself, changing from one outfit to another, pulling out the sofa bed, making mugs of tea and then watching them go cold. When Tony isn’t there two hours after he said he would, Maxxie can’t stop himself any more.
He goes into the bathroom and wrenches the top off of the toilet, pulling out the smoking tin resting just beneath the lid. Replacing the lid, he sits down cross legged on his bathroom floor and lays out his vice on a chipped bit of bathroom mirror that came with the flat.
Tony knocks four minutes later and he regrets it all seconds too late.
“Hey.” He says coming out of the bathroom, rubbing his eyes.
“Hey.” Tony’s all done up in a shirt and nice jeans, and Maxxie feels under dressed, but it doesn’t really matter. He looks quizzically at Maxxie. “Having a cig,” he said in response, and Tony doesn’t press the issue.
It’s one of those pretentious parties that if they had any better plans, they could not have put up with. There were streamers everywhere, and some one had put nibbles out. They catch each others eyes and snigger. But the music is good. And they have nowhere better to be. They dance until to night sky rolls into the morning. Maxxie feels Tony’s hand on his chest and he can’t contain himself. He leans in and their lips crash together. Maxxie can feels himself smile between the kiss. For a second, nothing matters to him. He feels invincible, and then it happens:
“Tony!” it’s Michelle. Maxxie’s heart falls through the bottom of his chest. “When did you get back!?” There’s a beat where nothing but the music pounds in their chests. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Maxxie’s eyes dart to Tony’s face, backlit by the neon disco lights.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were back.” For a split second, Maxxie see’s Tony’s old pride in getting the last word flash across his face, but Michelle cuts him down.
“It’s holidays, you prick.” Tony licks at his lips and looks away, awkwardly. Maxxie reaches out at touches the broad brunette’s arm as the floor tilts a little beneath him and he has to lurch to get his balance back, nearly taking them both down with him, but Tony catches him before he falls.
“Tony, I feel weird.” he shouts into his ear, but between them it feels like a whisper.
Tony flashes him a look of thanks and pulls on his hand.
Maxxie, feeling dizzy from the blare of the lights, has Tony’s hand, huge and guiding, clasped tightly over his own. Closing his eyes and allowing himself to follow, he can see the image of the whole room, backlit by strobe lights, burnt into the back of his eyes like some garish TV show. He feels it coming, and opening his mouth to say something, but all he does is gulp for air and feels himself slump. A sharp crack resonates beneath the music as his knee’s hit the dance floor, and all he can see are the dancers. Tony’s voice drifts through, shouting over the music.
“Maxxie. Fucking hell you prick! Max…wake up, you arse!”. And then another.
“Tony.” The voice is dripping with desperation, and lust, and 7 Smirnoff Ices. “Tony, take me home.”
“’kinda fucking busy here, ‘Chelle.” Maxxie can feel Tony hands on his body, his neck, his chest.
“But Tony!” The voice is sharp now. “I need you. I need you. I‘m your girlfriend”. Maxxie feels the pressure of Tony’s hand on his jugular release. There are a few moment of nothingness, and Maxxie hears the thumping of feet bouncing in time on the floor, the slow steady inhale-exhale of Tony’s breath, but he can’t make his eyes roll forward.
“No.”
Michelle is shrieking now, but it’s an effort to keep listening, when the blanket of obliviousness is creeping right over Maxxie’s brain, and it’s just too enticing.
When he wakes up again, he’s back in the dull living room/bedroom/kitchen of his new homestead and Tony is clattering around in the kitchen. His arms are raised like Braille as he runs his hands up and down, trying to warm himself up because there’s no heat. From behind the kitchen console, Tony appears, his smile cancelling out the roughness of his skin and the dark bags under his eyes. Maxxie absentmindedly traces his fingers over the purple and yellow bruises that have appeared on his knee caps.
“Spaghetti hoops. And toast, always toast. Bacon? Yeah, bacon. Where‘s your bacon Max? Why don‘t you have…”
Maxxie sits up, the white faux-silk sheet slipping down off his chest, leaving him exposed.
“Tony!”. Tony stops, brandishing a frying pan in one hand and a fork in the other.
“Yes Maxxie?”
“You don’t think you should, y’know, let me know what happened?”. The brunette opposite him sets down his utensils with a clatter, his eyes boring downwards. Maxxie fingers the bracelets on his wrists, plays with the covers in his lap, but makes no action to cover his bared chest. There’s a depression in the sofa bed as Tony perched on the end of it.
“I don’t know Max. You just sort of…collapsed.”
There’s a poignant silence.
“Right. I’m sorry for that, Tone. Drank too much.” ‘You fucking Liar’, he thinks. Tony closed his eyes and breathed.
“Max. You know if something’s wrong…you can tell me, right?” His face wile across his cheeks. Maxxie bites down on the inside of his lips, keeping it in. Because however much it hurts, he is way too proud to tell Tony how weak he‘d become. Tony scoots a little further up the half-broken bed and puts his lips gently on Maxxie’s.
As far as first kisses go, it wasn’t really something special. Just...one of those things. But even so, it still made Maxxie’s heart bounce against his chest.
*
The break up was both terrifying and awe-inspiring. Maxxie sat on the sofa, a spectator. Rain pounded on the window. Crockery flew past his cheek. The number of swear words began to out weigh the number of non-swear words. Michelle tried to kiss him twice. Both times Tony turns away, and Michelle scream down the flat.
“fucks sake Tony, we all know exactly what the fuck you’re doing.” Tony’s perched on the kitchen unit, nonchalantly drawing hearts with his index finger on the condensation on the window.
“ And what might that be, lover?” he questioned, smiling politely at his psychotic ex-girlfriend.
“I mean, we all know you just want to....to fuck around....you can’t just use people for your sick little experiments, Tony!” she yelled.
“I’m not. I used to want to be with you, and now I don’t. Now I want to be with Maxxie.” he explains, hopping down off the counter bouncily.
“You can’t just say that thought Tony!” she flicks her brown ringlets over her shoulder and surreptitiously, Maxxie notices, pushes her tits out.
“Too late.”
*
He has an audition later that day. The Bristol Players; the name made him gag a little bit, but money is money and he was fairly sure that, whilst London was above him, he would at least be the best in Bristol. For a long while, he lurks outside, chain smoking Lambert & Butler cigarettes and tracing the wearing on the granite with his free fingers. The dancers moving past him narrow their eyes at him as they pass with their hold alls and superiority complex’s; an outsider. Maxxie smiles them away. Eventually, he makes his way inside. The echoes of his white soled pumps, a noise which used to be extraordinarily familiar, now bounces around him like some kind of ghost of the past he had and the future he didn’t. He is cast from these thoughts by a hack rendition of ‘FAME!’ blaring out of the room he was approaching. The fluorescent tube lighting above him flickers ominously and he rolls his eyes at them. He leans forward onto the frosted glass and stares through. All kick, splits and flips; ‘all style, no substance,’ he thinks, ‘and that’s why you won’t get anywhere,’, and then it hits him- neither did he.
He turns on his heel and steps outside into the stinging sunlight, yanks a spliff from the bottom of his grey jogger’s pocket, and swears at the world.
“You never dance anymore Max,” Tony once observed from the bathroom, his voice echoing around off the old tiles, whilst Maxxie wanders around the kitchen, opening cupboards and drawers and continually wondering why nothing is there.
“That’s not true Tony.” he says, (even though it is, but he’s is no way about to admit that.) staring thoughtlessly into the wasteland of his fridge freezer. “I dance with you all the time at weekends. I still teach at the lads and girls club sometimes.” Tony reenters the room, rolling his eyes with his toothbrush still jammed into his mouth.
“No, you twat, I mean proper dancing. Maxxie dancing. Breaking into churches at midnight dancing.”
A pair of strong arms wrap around his waist and Maxxie places his head in the nook between Tony’s head and neck. A noise of confusion comes out of the back of Maxxie’s throat.
“And what exactly is Maxxie dancing then?” he queried, kissing up and down Tony’s neck.
“You know, dancing down the street to your iPod, sliding around the the bathroom whilst your brushing your teeth, going guerilla warfare on abandoned old buildings...you know?” Maxxie laughs.
“Fine, point taken,”
*
The whole gang take it upon themselves to invite themselves round, of course, god knows how they found out his address. Well, the whole gang is a loose term. Sometimes, when they sit in their blissed out little bubble away from the world, Maxxie forgets that everyone left, just like he did, but unlike him, they never have to come back.
Cassie, whose parent’s were resolute she be home for Christmas, sits cross-legged on the couch. Sid is perched next to her, not close enough to be disturbing but still close enough to be awkward. Michelle sits on the floor, pawing at Tony’s jeans, fussing over how much she misses him and how much she hates being away. Maxxie doesn’t even bother to excuse himself.
He sneaks off away into the bathroom. The water drips slowly out of the black-speckled tap and takes an age, but eventually, he pulls of his jeans and t-shirt and steps into the lukewarm water. They’ve receded into using washing up liquid for bubble bath; Maxxie feels like a king in his Fairy Liquid palace. He waves his hand around in the gray-ish water, watching it bend and flex away from his finger tips and grinning at the control he had here. Eventually, the noise in the outside room get louder as the light outside get dim and the guests get drunker. The semi submerged blonde is inspecting the wrinkles in the paws of his fingers when the door cracks open and he’s about to shout “Oi, someone’s in here!”. But Tony’s trainer, then hand, then whole body slip round the door, and Maxxie budges over as he peels off his clothes and slips in behind him, his knee’s against Maxxie’s sides. Tony traces kisses up and down his neck for minutes, as if to say “None of it fucking matters.”. And it didn’t.
As much as Maxxie felt bad for it, he didn’t really hate himself for not getting in touch with his old friends when he arrived back in Bristol. Why did he have to share the failure that he’d become whilst they were off having successful uni lives and successful careers, when he’s here, doing odd jobs around shops and old women’s flats just to get enough money to pay the water bill. Every so often, a sneaking little voice at the back of his mind creeps up on his to say: “What are you doing Max, they’re supposed to be your best mates.”. Because they had been. The old gang had been amazing. More than the ever changing groups at college; they were a constant. And even thought it felt like treason to the highest degree, he did really care; alone, he and Tony were unstoppable.
He’s bent at the waist, (Good girls bend at the knee, bad girls bend at the waist, Michelle had swore to him one evening to him as she slipped into what would loosely be referred to as a dress but in actually was more like a skirt with sheer black lace sleeves,) over the chipped off-white sink. The sound of Tony’s light snoring resonates around the tiny, tinny flat. Maxxie breathes in, hard, and splashes his face with the not quite clear water that trickled out of the tap. His hands are bracing the side of the sink, the veins rising and the muscles in his shoulders tensing, and he stares himself hard in the mirror on the cabinet. His eyes looks like they’ve been clouded over, he notes, but he is promptly thrown out of his revelry when he hears the pat of a hand on the doorframe behind him.
“So…you’re like a druggie now?” Maxxie’s eyes boggle like they’re about to roll straight across the floor. He opens his mouth, the words of a mix-up apology/explanation getting caught in the back of his throat. Tony speaks over his pants and murmurs anyway.
“That’s pretty fucking hot, Maxxie.” His blonde eyebrows furrow. The weight on his throat and chest make it hard for him to breathe.
*
Tony decides it’s best for him to spend some time back with his parents, but Maxxie’s pretty sure that’s an excuse, though he’s not exactly sure why Tony would even want to leave. He pretends, to Tony as much as himself, that it makes no difference to him. He lasts two and a half hours from the minute he leaves. The next few days, or a week, he doesn’t really know, but Maxxie spends it bouncing from clubs to the flat, dragging back what ever poor sod got enticed by his electric blue eyes and messy blond mop. On the sixth (seventh? eighth?) night since Tony left, Stranger gets the honour, and when Tony walks in, the Stranger was rearing against Maxxie, his silky Topman boxers stretched between his knee’s. A noise escapes Maxxie’s lips, a dirty feral noise that rolls from the back of his throat and falls off his mouth and onto this strangers chest, where Maxxie’s head is tracing kisses. It’s not until they stagger back from the wall towards the coach, a tangled mess, that Maxxie realises Tony stood there, silent. Maxxie’s eyes hit the ground and stick there. Maxxie and Stranger pull away from each other gingerly, Maxxie curling in on himself.
Tony’s sat on the floor with his back to the wall, knee’s up against his chest. He licks nervously at his lips and runs his tongue along his teeth.
“Why Maxxie. I don’t understand. You love me.” His heart swells and he’s sure he’s about to choke. Maxxie looks up under his blonde lashes and wraps his arms around his body.
“I’m sorry Tone. I don’t...really know. You won’t get it. I love you.” But his stingingly blue eyes don’t focus, and Tony does know. When Tony stands up and walks, Maxxie feels a wave of sickness roll up into his mouth, but when he turns left into the bathroom, not right and out the door, he feels happiness crash down on him and force the fear away.
“So show me.” echoes from the bathroom.
“Show you what?” Maxxie hears the porcelain crack against each other and a hundred thoughts flutter fleetingly through his mind. ‘He’s going to chuck something at me. He knocking shit over. He’s having a bubble bath. I should probably duck before he does chuck something at me.; And then, Tony appears in the doorway with Maxxie’s battered smoking tin in his hand; stolen from his Dad’s TV table at age 10. It had a bouncing Border Collie on the front. He named it Lizzie.
“So show me why it makes the slightest difference.”
“I can’t do that.” Maxxie says, staring down at his feet. Tony walks towards him, and he doesn’t even have to raise his voice, he never has.
“Why.” he voice is low and steady.
“You know why Tony. I’m not letting you be...me. You’ve got to be careful. Your...head, y’know.” But when Tony kisses up his neck and whispers ‘But I want to be just like you, I love you, we share everything, right?’, he gets his way, as ever.
Tony’s eyes roll back in his skull, the whites flickering like strobe lights. He feels every hair on his body stand on pointe and all at once, it’s like the world has screeched to a halt around their combined form and they are there, at the centre. Maxxie bucks against him. Tony runs his fingers through his hair. Fingers grip sofa bed. Toes curl. Boys pant. They breath hard, and Maxxie rests his cheek softly on Tony’s chest, taking the brunettes hand into his.
“Wow.”
*
2. entr'acte
Weekends with Tony somewhere along the way started melting into one long party. They’d laugh and scream at each other and shag each other’s brains out for hours. Turns out, he wasn’t actually as bad at some things as the trip to Russia all those years ago might have suggested. Sometimes they’d go out, get lost in clubs, dance for days. Sometimes- well, most of the time- they’d stay in Maxxie’s flat, tangled and sweating in his bed sheets.
They were both foggily aware of friends to-ing and fro-ing, a colossal blur of wailed “You’re back!”s and over-zealous hugs.
*
Jal’s voice was crisp and shrill, the way it gets when she was yelling at Anwar for leaving a mess or Michelle for leaving her to fuck off shopping. Good old Jal, always cleaning up everyone else’s messes.
“Is something seriously fucking wrong with your head?” She regrets her choice of words immediately, and Tony’s eyes read hurt. “I’m sorry Tony,”. The boy stood in front of her music stand shakes it off, and rifles through the things in her room. It’s changed since he was last here. Driving forms and teddy bears won from park fun-fairs have been replaces in two short years by claiming for university tuition cheques and a sober black had, at some point, coated the walls.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“How come he never stopped by, caught up with us all?” She asked, setting her clarinet down on the side of the bed. “Have you spoke to Anwar?” she interrogated him. Tony sank down on the double bed next to her, a smirk painted on his cheek.
“No. He hasn’t been around. Suppose he had shit to deal with. Angry Pakistani Mum to appease and such. And anyway, what was I supposed to open with? ‘Hey An, how’ve you been, new job good? By the way, Maxxie’s kind of a soft-core drug addict now, is the pay decent, yeah?’” The heavy lids of Jal’s eye fall down and she inhales, licking at her lips.
“No, I wasn’t saying that. Maybe he’d want to help.”
“And who’d want help? Me and Maxxie are living the dream.” A noise of deep unimpressed emits itself from Jal’s lips.
“And what dream is that, eh Tone? Get yourself six feet under. Have fun with that,” Tony’s cheeks are pulled into the flutter of a skeptical grin, those charming eyes burrowing into Jal’s as if to say: what’s the worst that could happen?
*
She appears, with little to no warning, the next day. When she walks in- she never did bother knocking- the pair of them are stretched out on the sofa bed, in a state somewhere between total bliss and a really bad migraine, and Maxxie can’t deal with the speed the Jal is moving at. He sits up, and Tony’s arm slips from where it had been on Maxxie’s chest a few seconds earlier.
“Jal?” His voice breaks with that early morning crack as he speaks.
She stares deep into him, as if she was staring straight through. Then she moves further into the flat, and starts darting around, picking things off the floor and slinging them into the half broken laundry basket. He tries again.
“Um...Jal?” he says, he voice breaking as he says it. She doesn’t stops as she speaks.
“You’re taking this too far.” she says, pulling a hoover Maxxie wasn’t even aware he owned out from underneath the sink.
“What the fuck are you on about?” he questions, because Jal’s one of his best friend (or at least she was.), but they way she was acting was driving him up the wall.
“Look, Max.” she sits down, and Maxxie is fairly shocked at how empty the flat looks with no-one running around. “...No-one is ever going to say us lot are an advertisement for not partying and wholesome behavior, but they way you two are acting....you’re going to hurt yourselves. Or each other. I don’t even know. I’m just scared for you.”
Maxxie rolls his eyes, as if he hasn’t heart this a million and one times before. Tony snores and flips onto his stoumach, dead to the world.
“Well you shouldn’t be.” He swing his legs over the edge of the bed and walks away from her, and she reverts back to moving through the room like a hurricane. Shutting the door behind himself, Maxxie stares into the mirror in the bathroom; he looks at where his strong abs, his biceps, his defined calves had been before. It wasn’t like he’d gained weight. In fact, he realised, he was thinner than he could remember being since hitting puberty and shooting up six inches in three months. He was thin, stretched out like when you pull Blu-Tac at both ends, and he places his hand on the mirror, touching his reflection and wishing he could get his old one back.
When he finally left the bathroom, Jal is sat with her feet hunched up beneath her next to the window. She peering out at the wind whipping up the tree’s outside. Maxxie runs the tap and splashes his face.
“I’m worried about you two, Maxxie.” she says, her voice tinny, as if she’s holding tears back, but he repeats himself:
“You shouldn’t be.”
She leaves before Tony wakes up.
They both decide to lay off for a while. Maxxie tries to find work, eventually getting hired to teach bratty, ungrateful public school kids to dance to cheesy pop track at the local dance centre. Tony reads a lot. He serves tea in a cafe for two weeks before he gets fired for being impolite to customers.
When Maxxie emerged from the centre that afternoon, the sun is stingingly brightly and he squints against it as he steps out into the busy paving. Tony’s resting, sunglasses perched gently on the tip of his nose, leaning against a railing leafing through some book that for large part is for the benefit of the strangers passing him by. Maxxie grins as Tony grabs him by the waist and slips his hand into the back pocket of Maxxie’s old jogger bottoms.
“Good day?” he questions. Maxxie shrugs his shoulder gently.
“As good as it’s getting, I suppose.”
“I’m glad you’re dancing again” There was a lull for a while as they paced down the high street, screaming of teenagers and mumbling of the elderly masking their quiet.
*
Jal and Anwar meet one drawn out cold afternoon, over steaming plastic cups of coffee, in the window seat of the crowded Bristol centre Starbucks. For a long while, the gentle ease that they had when they were in a large group is foreign to them; the only noise is the sound of them sipping loudly. It’s loud, people running in, iPod’s blaring Jal breaks the awkward silence.
“So, what do we do?” she queries, pulling files and course books out of her bag; she has shit heaps of work to finish and this little excursion isn’t exactly adding to her free time. Anwar shrugs, rubbing his face with his hands.
“Nothing, I guess.” Jal’s eyes dart upwards, staring at Anwar like lightening.
.”What, you think we should just sit back and watch them fuck themselves up?! Don’t you fucking care?”. Anwar looks over the rim of his cup with hurt eyes. Jal swallows hard and pulls her work into her lap. After a minute of sly looks and the scratching of Jal’s pen on paper, Anwar speaks.
“Of course, I care. But are you stupid or something? Do you really think anything we say is going to matter to them?” A heavy breath fills Jal’s chest. It pains her to admit it, but he’s right. Both her and Anwar know perfectly well that nothing they say is going to get through to them.
“You should still go round,” she says, looking deep into her cup and stirring her Vanilla Frappe with the end of her pen, pensively. He shakes his head, but he’s smiling.
“What, and just turn up at his flat like ‘Hey, not killed yourself yet?’.”
“I think he misses you. You did sort of leave him in the middle of London on his own.”
“James was there, wasn’t he?” He stand up, pulling his waterproof coat over his very-sensible-work-jumper. He slings his back onto his back and tilts his head, looking at her sat opposite.
“Yeah fine. Maybe.” They smile at each other, and for a moment it’s just like back when they’d all lie out on the green before History, and then he’s out of the door.
*
Tony is sat, cross-legged on the bed, when Maxxie turns his key and rams his shoulder hard into the door to unstick it. He is staring intently at the floor, his eyebrows are knitted tightly together on his forehead. Maxxie kicks the door shut behind and lean against the ugly orange curtains the old owner must have left behind.
“What’s up with you?” he asks, rolling his iPod back and forth between his hands. The screen is smashed to pieces, it’s been that way for years.
“Nothing,” He’s lying.
“I’m not an idiot, Tone. Tell me whats up.” Tony wipes one of his hand slowly over his face, pressing down hard, before he looks up, but he’s still not looking maxxie in the eye.
“My head’s going funny again,” Maxxie runs his teeth along the inside of his lip, nervously. “And it shouldn’t be. That’s why we stopped, right?” Tony inquires outloud. Maxxie is half stuck between telling Tony that he should probably go home, talk to his family, get out of the flat, go see a fucking doctor. But as shit as it makes him feel, Maxxie knows that if Tony leaves, he’s not going to be able to cope. His conscience gets the better of him, eventually, though he’s alarmed at how long it takes.
“You should go home for a while.”
Tony agree’s without much argument.
The flat is painfully, achingly empty, almost silent when he is away. He doesn’t get in touch; Maxxie mobile broke weeks ago, so it’s not like he could, really. Maxxie spends long nights tossing back and forth on the sofa, convincing himself that Tony is off somewhere shagging other guys, shagging girls, maybe he wasn’t coming back. He’ll get out of bed often, pacing between the window and the opposite wall in his boxers, his bare feet padding across the carpet, wrenching his hands slowly between each other.
He’s not working, bar a less that steady dance job down at the Youthie where he and the old gang had spent last years of Primary School and the first months of Secondary before Tony deemed it ‘for gimps,’ and they stopped going. He goes hungry for three days, until he finds his fingers itching for one of the apples that only actual greengrocers left in England keeps set outside his stall on the market. He keeps his head down and his iPod in as he stalks by hand darting out as he passes. It’s the nicest thing he’s had for weeks; he eats it slowly sitting legs crossed on the banks of the river that that stolen car from all those years ago is probably still sitting in. When he gets back, and he puts it off for ages, mind, Tony is still not back and the flat in practically roaring with silence, he wanders around, flicking on the kettle and the hoover and he flicks his iPod up to full volume, just so he doesn’t have to hear it.
Anwar turns up three days later. It knocks Maxxie off guard, actually, when he sees the figure with his hood up, through the cracked glass in the doorway, but he’s thankful to have something to do that isn’t wandering aimlessly back and forth in flat and lying on the bed with his music on, wondering when the fuck Tony is going to get back. The blonde scurry’s around the flat, pulling things off the floor in a state of mad frenzy and kicking things under the bed before he opens the door, to see his old bed friend there, drenched head to toe in rain. There’s a painful, awkward silence before he steps over the threshold. Maxxie stays glued to the door.
“Hey Max.” Anwar says, pulling his hood down off and Maxxie gets his first full stare at his friend since he left them in London to come back and start some shitty job. It sounded cliche even as he said it to himself, but now, Maxxie though, Anwar looked older. He had heavy bags under his eyes, and a few days worth of stubble under his chin. Maxxie runs a hand beneath his own; he really should shave, he thinks.
“An.” The nicknames don’t feel normal in his mouth anymore.
Anwar sits down heavily on the bed and pulls his ear phones out of his ears, letting them swing down onto his chest.
“What the fuck is going oh, eh Max?” he queries. Maxxie crossed his arms over his chest and hugs himself.
“Not much, what’s going on with you?” he smiles, but Anwar stares at him hard, looking him up and down as if he doesn’t recognise him.
“That ain’t what I meant. You know that’s not what I meant.” Anwar sighs, and he motions Maxxie over to sit with him on the sofa bed. “What’re you doing?” The question chokes in Maxxie’s chest because honestly, he doesn’t fucking know.
“Just...enjoying ourselves, y’know. Fuck knows you used to take more pills than the rest off us. You always used to be up for a laugh.”
“And now I’m working 9-6 just like everyone else, yeah I know.” His voice is sharp. Maxxie scowls and rolls his eyes at him, flying down onto the bed and curling up against a pillow.
“Yeah? Well Max, we’ve all got to grow up eventually, yeah? Don’t suppose you’ve realised that yet?” His voice is dripping with anger, and a little bit of spit is lying on his chin. Maxxie flys off the bed and he and his former best friend are a hair’s width apart, forehead’s almost touching. Their breathing is heavy.
“Y’know, what, Anwar? I was trying too. Then you fucked off.” His voice is low and even, almost a growl, and it’s more frightening than if he were shouting. It breaks on the last word, squeaking with sadness.
“Ah, don’t blame this on me man.” Anwar motions madly with his hands. “You can hack it in the real world because you’re not good enough, alright Max? So stop kidding yourself with all these stupid drugs and accept that you are just. like. the rest of us.”
The air is tense. Flecks of spit lie on Maxxie’s face. For a moment, the only noise in the room is heavy breathing. Anwar steps away, heading out the door in one fluid motion. Maxxie yells after him:
“I wish it was that simple, An.” And he does, but Anwar is already running down the stairs. Maxxie retreats into his home and rests against the back of the shut door, knee’s up to his chest, just breathing. He really does just wish that he could go out and get a normal, shit job and earn a shit pay and go back to his wife and kid and two sodding cats. But whose he kidding; it’s never been that easy, not for him. He pelts down the stairs, leaving the door open (‘Lets face it, there nothing in there worth taking, he thinks) and running down the road to god knows where.
By the time Tony gets back from spending time with his parents, he’s grinding his teeth and tense. ‘Well, he always did have an addictive personality I guess.’ Maxxie thinks, getting up off the bed as Tony paces back and forth around the flat, patting the heels of his hands together. He reaches out, grabs Tony’s shoulders and pulls him back towards the centre of the room, sitting him down on the edge of the bed.
“I’ve been thinking, we should slow down a bit, yeah?” he says, and Tony glares.
“Why?” His voice is sharp and snappy, like a small child.
“Because...we’re worrying everyone. You’re worrying everyone.”. Tony rolls his eyes and pushed his chin out, a look of disgust coating his lips.
“Yeah. Well, I never meant to be everyone’s fucking charity case. I don’t need you anymore, Max.” He sounds like a spoilt kid, which is exactly what he is, and Maxxie just doesn’t care anymore. He turns away from him, shoving his iPod hard into his ears and drowning Tony out. He’s out of the flat in seconds, stopping to snatch Maxxie’s tin from the top of the toilet tank. Maxxie doesn’t even hear the door slam.
*
3. finale
Sometimes he wakes up with tears on his cheeks. Sometimes, he wakes up, and he has a moment of sweet unaware and then he rolls over, and the cold of Tony’s pillow smacks him across the cheek. And then the tears come.
His hands were red. He looks down, and all he can see is just red, red, red everywhere. The blood is dripping down Tony’s chin, over his lips, pooling in the dip of his neck and all Maxxie can think is ‘Oh my God, he’s dying.’. Maxxie’s heart is pounding so hard in his chest that he’s sure it’s about to push it’s way straight out of his ribcage, and everything is blurring and all he can think is ‘Fuck, no, not now, he needs me,’. But who is he kidding? He doesn’t have a choice; he stopped having a choice a long time ago. He makes it 42 seconds before his eyes crash shut and his heavy head meets Tony’s chest.
The clean white light of the hallway burns at his eyes. He is raising his fists to rub at his eyes when he realizes that they’re being restrained by the sterile white sheets and the woman holding him down so she can shine a spotlight into his eyes. He tries to talk, but his throat is so dry that the words catch. He sits up, scattering the hospital staff around him like marbles, and peers around, his head rolling.
“Where’s Tone?” No one answers. They didn’t need too. “Where’s Tone?!” he says, raising his voice to a painful scratch, and the woman in green and the student in blue trade one of those awful, lingering glances. Then Maxxie notices Jal stood, silently gripping the metal bars at the end of the trolley, and she bites at her lip. When, eventually, she looks up, she shakes her head.
Maxxie feels his heart explode. But it wasn’t the frenzied energetic beat he was used to. This time, it just swelled and burst like a child’s balloon.
*
He waited hours for Tony to come back. He rings his phone continually. No answer. Maxxie even rings his parents, but the Stonem’s say they haven’t seen anything of him. Maxxie doesn’t even last until the sun sets before he finds a hoodie, pulls it over his eyes and goes out to find an alley.
He sits cross-legged on the bed, the powder lying half-emptied on a book, as he uses someone’s dropped Nectar card to divide his vice out. He can hear rain pummeling his window, and wonders if Tony remembered a jacket. Maxxie leans over and inhales hard, a rush hitting his head. The door opens, and, once again, Maxxie regrets himself a few seconds too late. Tony stands, his brown hair matter to his face with the rain, and he leans up against the opened door, a smile creeping along his face.
“Told you I didn’t need you.” Tony mutters, the words long and drawn out as if he’s half asleep and Maxxie is unsure as to whether he is being addressed or not.
“You scored drugs in the centre of Bristol, I’m proper impressed.” Maxxie scoffs, smirking, reclining back onto the cushions and trying to let go of his thoughts. He peers through half-closed eyes at Tony as he wanders round the flat, smashing into things and laughing to himself. Eventually, he comes and sits down on the bed next to Maxxie. He bites his lips and giggles as he lies down, and Maxxie sits up and stares at him. A little river of blood is only just beginning to pool against his top lip. Maxxie’s heart start to thump against his ribs.
“Tony, what the fuck did you take?” Tony peers at him through the fog.
“Oh, you know. In fact, it’s your favorite.” His hands reached up towards Maxxie, whose bent at an angle over him, inspecting him. He takes his friends face in the his palms and pulls him down into kiss. And then, he laughs hysterically to himself as his eyes slide shut, but Maxxie can smell vodka on his breath and shit, shit, shit.
“What have you done?” he says, and suddenly, he’s awake. He’s got Tony by the collar, pulling him down off the bed and onto the tiles in the bathroom, splashing water on his face, and yet it’s doing no good. He’s shouting his name, rubbing his hands against his bare skin, and still...nothing.
*
For what feels like years, but in actuality cannot be more than a few days, Maxxie finds it impossible to move himself of the floor. Jal drops him off from the hospital- she’s driving now, of course- and she sticks around, doing chores that have no real need to be done, for hours. Eventually, inevitably, she has to leave. After she buttons up her Topshop coat and picks up her bag, she bends down and wraps her arms tightly Maxxie. He stays frozen, staring at his point on the floor, not even bothering to raise his arms.
When she returns four days later, she’s dressed up in a little black dress, and she’s holding a suit. Maxxie can’t even fucking remember the last time he’d worn a suit.
He could almost read their minds. It was in the way they looked at him, the way their stares burnt into his skin. It was the way Jal’s teary lids and trembling lips said. “Like losing Chris just wasn’t enough?“. . It was the way Sid looked at him with parental disappointment,; “Look at what you’ve done to us. First Chris, now Tony…and it’s All. Your. Fault.”. It was the way Michelle looked so weak she couldn’t sit up straight or hold his look. He and Mr Stonem stood in unison. Mr Stonem walked forward the pulpit, crumpling the piece of notebook paper in his palm. Maxxie cracked the heavy oak door just enough to run.
Staring up at it from the outside, the church, he realises, isn’t as majestic and complete as he’d thought it was as he marched in. The stained glass was smeared. The windows were smashed. Some of the of the rocks were chipped and dulled by the rain and the snow. The churchyard was barren and haunting at this time, nothing but mounds of grass and a long stone pathway. He’d sat on the hill, chewing his fingers, until the last of the mourner’s filtered away. Maxxie runs the palm of his hand over Chris’ grave as he passes, solemn. When he reaches the fresh mound, he sits, cross legged, beside it. His arms are bared in his t-shirt; the night chill making his hairs stand to attention. He doesn’t feel it. All the noise hissing in his ears is the crackling of the night wind rushing through the trees, but it’s so loud it’s making his head swell. An overwhelming sense of confusion coats him; what the hell was he supposed to do? What was he supposed to say? Half of him, the innocent, naïve half of him that his friends had once fought so hard to protect, wanting to cry, to say sorry, to beg his forgiveness. He wanted to repent. But the other half of him, the half brought out in him after months of hopelessness and loneliness and coating his troubles with whatever had been manufactured for the night urged for something different. They made Maxxie want to shout at Tony. Why had he gone and done this? Why had he made all of Maxxie‘s friends look at him like they didn‘t know who he was? He was…angry. Maxxie lights a cigarette, and sits underneath the loom of the church, resenting the person he’d become.
Eventually, he realises as he walks back through Bristol under the sliver of moon hiding in the night sky, he’s going to have to get rid of everything. He walks through the flat in his mind. The book he had left on the cabinet in the bathroom, books Maxxie would walk straight past in the book shop. The boxers he’d leave screwed up on the floor; Maxxie is fairly sure he’d never actually learned to operate a washer. Oh God, his fucking iPod, Maxxie thinks. What’s he supposed to do with it now? He knows he can’t throw it away, it would kill him inside. And yet, what is he supposed to do? Launch it into a dresser drawer and never look at it again? He can feel his breathing quicken and shouts in his own head. ‘Look what you’ve fucking done to me? What do I do with myself now?’
Because at some point, and maxxie isn’t entirely sure when or where it happened, but Tony became the central point of Maxxie’s life. Not dancing, not making a name for himself. Not even the drugs. It was Tony, it was always him. No one made his heart bang like Tony did. No one and nothing.
All of a sudden, Maxxie know exactly what he’s supposed to do.
When he gets back, he starts by slinging his things into his bag. His iPod, his phone, his wallet. He slams the doors and punches the walls. Suddenly he’s raging, throwing his stuff at walls and swearing, the sound of his neighbors complained masked underneath his own furious noise. Glasses shatter, and before he can even contemplate what’s going on, he is sat on the floor, panting, blood running down the sleeve of his rough grey jumper. Maxxie stalks out of the flat without even knowing where he’s going, leaving the door open; as if it matters. Before he even realises it, he’s running, with no idea where or what he’s running towards. The banging of his heart in his chest, the blood rush in his ears and the panting of his breath is familiar to him, and for the first time in a long time, it’s not something he paid some shady middle aged man for. He turns a sharp right into the train station, and stares up at the boards. Manchester Piccadilly. Edinburgh. Euston. He hops the barriers and is on the first train that whirs past. It’s empty at this time, and he stalks up and down the aisle until he’s exhausted. Eventually he sits down and burying his face in the crook between his shoulder and the window. The lights flashing past in the windows don’t give him a clue where his is, or where he’s going. He didn’t mind, much. New start, he thinks. He peers out of the window. It’s snowing now.
You can lose all sorts of things, he muses, grinding his knuckles over his jeans as the moon dips above him. You can lose your keys and your temper. You can lose the plot of that oh so important soap that you were following because you were out and you forgot to set the Sky+. You can lose your friends.
You can lose the love of your life. You can lose your mind.
As tears fall off his face and spin madly to the floor, Maxxie realizes he never even entertained what might happen if he lost both at once.
i really hope you enjoy it? :D
Artist(s): crackfoxx
Link To Art: you'll find right this ridiculously amazing and beautiful piece of art here.
Word count: 10, 129
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: drug addiction, boy sex, major angst and general Skins badness (swearing, drinking, ect.)
Disclaimer: of course they're not mine, and the title is an e.e. Cummings poem.
Summary: Maxxie's return from London, unsuccessful and angry at the world, and how he rekindles a relationship he thought would never happen. But Maxxie's got some demons, and Tony doesn't know if he's strong enough to fight them. Then, something awful happens, and Maxxie finds himself more alone than before.
Notes: jeeesus, crackfoxx , i can't even lie, i cried a little bit when I saw your gorgous art. and thanks for generally putting up with my bullshit. theangelunknown , who has been so ridiculously understanding of my technological and general life failings; it's on it's way, i promise. and shan_3414 ; you're possibly one of the nicest people I've ever met. <3
Fatal habits, broken dreams
Waking up isn't all it seems
We held on to what we couldn't see
I carried you, you carried me
We were young and excited
We were lost and alone
We were free but misguided
And we had no place to call home
Late nights in Hollywood
Banging guitars and boys
Sweet sex and cigarettes
Were our joys
Jay Brannan, Home.
They speak whatever's on their mind
They do whatever's in their pants
The boys i mean are not refined
They shake the mountains when they dance.
e.e. Cummings, ‘the boys I mean,’
the boys I mean are not refined, by westendbound
1. cavatina
The snow in London was far more beautiful than the snow in Bristol. He knew that snow was snow, no matter where in the country he was, there was a way that it tumbled over and under itself onto the gritty pavement made him smirk, a black comparison to the way when, a month ago, him and James had clasped hands, basking in the glow of West End, and watched the snow dancing down the marquee‘s, almost as poised and precious as the dancers in the shows themselves.
He was right. As much as Maxxie wants to kick things and swear and smash glass wear when he says it, it’s true. His Dad was right.
“I’m good. I’m fucking good,”. Hm. Maxxie leans over the motorway overpass and spits down, taking a drag of his cigarette, making the cherry glow red. ‘But not good enough.’ he adds mentally, his inner voice laced with cynicism. It took a while, he supposes, for it to sink in. Months of living of Pot Noodles and corner-shop own brand coffee to realise that this wasn’t a matter of waiting around for some glossy, shark-esque agent to realise he was exactly what they need, like he told his family back in Bristol, every time his Mum would ring, her voice dry with worry. This wasn’t a waiting game; if it was a game, he’d lost.
He kicked at his fraying, blue, pull a long luggage and carried on along his way, stamping down hard on each and every crack in the pavement he came across, daring the world to get just a little bit worse for him.
There almost weren’t words for his resentment as he leant on the road barrier, the sharp February wind whipping at his cheeks, as he stood in front of the rudimentary tan-and-cream Bristol high-rise Council estate. Built up in the 1920’s just like the rest of this stupid town. He feels sick just staring at it. It burns its way up his chest, creeping its way into his mouth and leaving him with the taste of bile in the back of his throat. 14C Merrymount Court was, in essence, a less good companion of the three-room flat he’d grown up in, kicking and screaming and dying to get out.
The door sticks as he tries to walk in; he slams his shoulder hard against it to force it open, and finally it swings to display the travesty within. Maxxie sighs. It is every little bit as bad as he thought it was going to be. It would appear that the last resident in this place was either an old person or someone with remarkable bad taste; probably both, he thinks. The only things in the room are a folded ip sofa bed, and a little coffee table with a lamp standing on it. The bathroom is as disgusting as he anticipated. The sink was cracking away from the wall, and everything in there; the toilet, the bath, the sink basin, was an altogether quite unsavory shade of grey. The mirror is spattered with something (he doesn’t even want to muse on what it could be,) and he could hardly even see his reflected through it. He just sighs. As he strolls into the kitchen, he sees where the tiles have cracked and fallen away, and he wonders about the story’s they could tell; an angry spouse, an over dramatic teenager, a 1940‘s housewife sprucing the place up, waiting for her husband to get home. Stories that are long gone now. He thinks for a second about the flat back in London. He wonders if anyone will question the cigarette burn on the cushion of the sofa or the bright red stain on the carpet. He wonders if anyone will think of the stories that they left behind there. He wonders if anyone will even care.
*
It started, he supposed, where his dreams and ambitions ended. Spending a year and a half of the same monotonous audition circuit as every other dancer-with-a-fucking-dream in England led him to familiar faces: other dancers, singers, choreographers. Sometimes he’d end up in a corner as the rest of the room sweat to some gaudy warm up tune, the director of whatever low budget production this was grinning slyly at him and running a finger along the rim of his white vest. Of course, the words out of their mouths, ultimately, never changed. Good, but nothing special. Good, maybe when you’ve had a little more experience. Good. Maxxie remembers when he thought, honestly, that good would have been good enough. But even so, the sleazy directors, with their straggled beards and dark-tinted glasses, would run their hand over his shoulder and invite him back to their place, and he’d smile, and more often than not, he find himself on someone’s lap, making sure his face kept smiling and having something (a little white pill, a cigarette, a shot glass that spilled across his palm, a tiny ziplock bag,) pressed into his hand that tell him, ‘Eat Me, Drink Me,’, and he knows that, with a drag, or a sniff, they can burn his sadness away. Tomorrow.
“You make me sick, Max, you really do,”
He’s sat, one leg bowed under himself on the sofa, smoking a cigarette and looking exhaustedly at his boyfriend. The flat- it was a loose title, really…more of big room with a front door- was in a state of disarray. Clothes ( mostly Maxxie’s,) littered the largest proportion of floor space, cigarette butts and emptied Corona bottles (mostly Maxxie’s,) coated the coffee table and the tiny square of cooking space, and James whizzed around, a bundle of angry energy, swiping things up.
“And I don’t think you get it as much as you like to make out you do. It really doesn’t matter.”
“Yeah, you keep saying that yourself Maxxie. You spend so much time creating this…this hard-done-by misunderstood martyr façade that you can’t even see beyond it. You’re a joke. A cliché. Can’t you see yourself?” James sat on the broken arm of the chair, clenching his hands into a ball in his lap and setting his head down on then. He glanced sideway.
“This isn’t going to work is it?”
*
He just can’t spend any more of his time cramped up in the stupid, tiny flat. He’s been there for four days, and still can’t bring himself to pick up his mobile, which for some reason, is still coming out of their bill, and call his parents. In fact, he hasn’t spoke to anyone. Maybe it’s his own pride, he doesn’t really know. He’s spent the last few days sat on the bed, staring at the wall opposite of him and wondering how the fuck he got her. It bubbles up inside him, and and he can’t take it more, so he shoves his feet into the battered old trainers he’s been wearing since he was 15. Slamming the door on his way out, he walks as he realizes he has no clue as to where his feet are taking him. The streets and back paths that they used to run down, they used to know like the back of their hands, don’t feel like his anymore. Maxxie wonders if he’s really been away that long.
As it stands, he finds himself at one of those huge, amazing, yet terrible at the same time traveling fairs that would coast onto the one free patch of grass left in Central Bristol once a year and disappear two weeks later without so much as a passing remark. Maxxie had more than once found himself, even as a young child, gravitating toward these things; maybe it was the bright lights. As a pre-pubescent mess of long arms and short legs and shit heaps of energy his parent’s didn’t know what to do with- he’d never really taken to football- he would often find himself tapping his way up the unsteady metal platform leading up to the giddiness and happiness it promised. This year it was no different. Alone, with his hood pulled out so it pouched over his eyes, he wandered around the rained drenched fields silently, listening to the screaming gaggles of girls and boys pretending to be having the wildest time. He even found himself wishing his mates had never left.
Maxxie was half sure he’d imagined it. But no, even in the murky rain soaked daylight and the harsh, House of Mirror’s neon strobes, he is sure it was him. Sitting on the wall beyond the waltzer. Pumping his iPod through some cheap headphones (and Maxxie bets he can guess what he’s playing, he always been good at working Tony out). Picking at a gaudy pink candy floss. Maxxie fought the urge to go barrelling towards him and paces forwards, unsure. He steps, head ducked, toward him, his feet sinking miserably into the sludge. Much to his distaste, when Tony looks up and spots him, there’s no jump to his feet, and overexcited “Hi!”. He looks up once, his eyes narrowed and peering around the grass, and then double takes, peering hard at him.
“Max?” Maxxie lungs feel like theu’ve forgotten to work, but a “Yeah,” managed to work it’s way up. Tony runs his tongue along the inner edge his lips.
“And what are you doing back in dreary Bristol? I presume it’s not for the nightlife.” Ouch. The killer question. Stretching his arms out, Maxxie grinds his palms together, the scratchy skin showing the frequency of his bad habit.
“Trying to find some money?” he said, clamping his mouth shut. He raises a fair eyebrow at Tony. “And you?” Tony looks down underneath his eye lids and smiles to himself. “Taking a break,” ‘Can you even do that?’ Maxxie thinks. Tony’s eyes shoot up and Maxxie reels inwardly. It was really disconcerting when he did that.
“My head was going funny again.” he says soberly. Maxxie’s teeth drag over his top lip. “Oh.”
They end up back at Maxxie’s, for lack of any better word, flat. He makes cheese and beans and toast.
Despite Tony’s comment about the shit Bristol nightlife, some cocky little Year 13 shit is throwing a rave with their Grandfather’s money in some old bunker in the woods and they go. Tony’s smile excitedly when Maxxie agree’s, and he pelts home on his battered old blue bike. Maxxie tries not to, because he’s home, and Tony’s here, and that should be enough.
But it isn’t.
He dives through a shower, and brushes his teeth, and runs his fingers through his long blonde fringe (“You really need to go and get a bloody hair cut.” he thinks) because he hasn’t got around to buying a hairbrush yet. He busies himself, changing from one outfit to another, pulling out the sofa bed, making mugs of tea and then watching them go cold. When Tony isn’t there two hours after he said he would, Maxxie can’t stop himself any more.
He goes into the bathroom and wrenches the top off of the toilet, pulling out the smoking tin resting just beneath the lid. Replacing the lid, he sits down cross legged on his bathroom floor and lays out his vice on a chipped bit of bathroom mirror that came with the flat.
Tony knocks four minutes later and he regrets it all seconds too late.
“Hey.” He says coming out of the bathroom, rubbing his eyes.
“Hey.” Tony’s all done up in a shirt and nice jeans, and Maxxie feels under dressed, but it doesn’t really matter. He looks quizzically at Maxxie. “Having a cig,” he said in response, and Tony doesn’t press the issue.
It’s one of those pretentious parties that if they had any better plans, they could not have put up with. There were streamers everywhere, and some one had put nibbles out. They catch each others eyes and snigger. But the music is good. And they have nowhere better to be. They dance until to night sky rolls into the morning. Maxxie feels Tony’s hand on his chest and he can’t contain himself. He leans in and their lips crash together. Maxxie can feels himself smile between the kiss. For a second, nothing matters to him. He feels invincible, and then it happens:
“Tony!” it’s Michelle. Maxxie’s heart falls through the bottom of his chest. “When did you get back!?” There’s a beat where nothing but the music pounds in their chests. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Maxxie’s eyes dart to Tony’s face, backlit by the neon disco lights.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were back.” For a split second, Maxxie see’s Tony’s old pride in getting the last word flash across his face, but Michelle cuts him down.
“It’s holidays, you prick.” Tony licks at his lips and looks away, awkwardly. Maxxie reaches out at touches the broad brunette’s arm as the floor tilts a little beneath him and he has to lurch to get his balance back, nearly taking them both down with him, but Tony catches him before he falls.
“Tony, I feel weird.” he shouts into his ear, but between them it feels like a whisper.
Tony flashes him a look of thanks and pulls on his hand.
Maxxie, feeling dizzy from the blare of the lights, has Tony’s hand, huge and guiding, clasped tightly over his own. Closing his eyes and allowing himself to follow, he can see the image of the whole room, backlit by strobe lights, burnt into the back of his eyes like some garish TV show. He feels it coming, and opening his mouth to say something, but all he does is gulp for air and feels himself slump. A sharp crack resonates beneath the music as his knee’s hit the dance floor, and all he can see are the dancers. Tony’s voice drifts through, shouting over the music.
“Maxxie. Fucking hell you prick! Max…wake up, you arse!”. And then another.
“Tony.” The voice is dripping with desperation, and lust, and 7 Smirnoff Ices. “Tony, take me home.”
“’kinda fucking busy here, ‘Chelle.” Maxxie can feel Tony hands on his body, his neck, his chest.
“But Tony!” The voice is sharp now. “I need you. I need you. I‘m your girlfriend”. Maxxie feels the pressure of Tony’s hand on his jugular release. There are a few moment of nothingness, and Maxxie hears the thumping of feet bouncing in time on the floor, the slow steady inhale-exhale of Tony’s breath, but he can’t make his eyes roll forward.
“No.”
Michelle is shrieking now, but it’s an effort to keep listening, when the blanket of obliviousness is creeping right over Maxxie’s brain, and it’s just too enticing.
When he wakes up again, he’s back in the dull living room/bedroom/kitchen of his new homestead and Tony is clattering around in the kitchen. His arms are raised like Braille as he runs his hands up and down, trying to warm himself up because there’s no heat. From behind the kitchen console, Tony appears, his smile cancelling out the roughness of his skin and the dark bags under his eyes. Maxxie absentmindedly traces his fingers over the purple and yellow bruises that have appeared on his knee caps.
“Spaghetti hoops. And toast, always toast. Bacon? Yeah, bacon. Where‘s your bacon Max? Why don‘t you have…”
Maxxie sits up, the white faux-silk sheet slipping down off his chest, leaving him exposed.
“Tony!”. Tony stops, brandishing a frying pan in one hand and a fork in the other.
“Yes Maxxie?”
“You don’t think you should, y’know, let me know what happened?”. The brunette opposite him sets down his utensils with a clatter, his eyes boring downwards. Maxxie fingers the bracelets on his wrists, plays with the covers in his lap, but makes no action to cover his bared chest. There’s a depression in the sofa bed as Tony perched on the end of it.
“I don’t know Max. You just sort of…collapsed.”
There’s a poignant silence.
“Right. I’m sorry for that, Tone. Drank too much.” ‘You fucking Liar’, he thinks. Tony closed his eyes and breathed.
“Max. You know if something’s wrong…you can tell me, right?” His face wile across his cheeks. Maxxie bites down on the inside of his lips, keeping it in. Because however much it hurts, he is way too proud to tell Tony how weak he‘d become. Tony scoots a little further up the half-broken bed and puts his lips gently on Maxxie’s.
As far as first kisses go, it wasn’t really something special. Just...one of those things. But even so, it still made Maxxie’s heart bounce against his chest.
*
The break up was both terrifying and awe-inspiring. Maxxie sat on the sofa, a spectator. Rain pounded on the window. Crockery flew past his cheek. The number of swear words began to out weigh the number of non-swear words. Michelle tried to kiss him twice. Both times Tony turns away, and Michelle scream down the flat.
“fucks sake Tony, we all know exactly what the fuck you’re doing.” Tony’s perched on the kitchen unit, nonchalantly drawing hearts with his index finger on the condensation on the window.
“ And what might that be, lover?” he questioned, smiling politely at his psychotic ex-girlfriend.
“I mean, we all know you just want to....to fuck around....you can’t just use people for your sick little experiments, Tony!” she yelled.
“I’m not. I used to want to be with you, and now I don’t. Now I want to be with Maxxie.” he explains, hopping down off the counter bouncily.
“You can’t just say that thought Tony!” she flicks her brown ringlets over her shoulder and surreptitiously, Maxxie notices, pushes her tits out.
“Too late.”
*
He has an audition later that day. The Bristol Players; the name made him gag a little bit, but money is money and he was fairly sure that, whilst London was above him, he would at least be the best in Bristol. For a long while, he lurks outside, chain smoking Lambert & Butler cigarettes and tracing the wearing on the granite with his free fingers. The dancers moving past him narrow their eyes at him as they pass with their hold alls and superiority complex’s; an outsider. Maxxie smiles them away. Eventually, he makes his way inside. The echoes of his white soled pumps, a noise which used to be extraordinarily familiar, now bounces around him like some kind of ghost of the past he had and the future he didn’t. He is cast from these thoughts by a hack rendition of ‘FAME!’ blaring out of the room he was approaching. The fluorescent tube lighting above him flickers ominously and he rolls his eyes at them. He leans forward onto the frosted glass and stares through. All kick, splits and flips; ‘all style, no substance,’ he thinks, ‘and that’s why you won’t get anywhere,’, and then it hits him- neither did he.
He turns on his heel and steps outside into the stinging sunlight, yanks a spliff from the bottom of his grey jogger’s pocket, and swears at the world.
“You never dance anymore Max,” Tony once observed from the bathroom, his voice echoing around off the old tiles, whilst Maxxie wanders around the kitchen, opening cupboards and drawers and continually wondering why nothing is there.
“That’s not true Tony.” he says, (even though it is, but he’s is no way about to admit that.) staring thoughtlessly into the wasteland of his fridge freezer. “I dance with you all the time at weekends. I still teach at the lads and girls club sometimes.” Tony reenters the room, rolling his eyes with his toothbrush still jammed into his mouth.
“No, you twat, I mean proper dancing. Maxxie dancing. Breaking into churches at midnight dancing.”
A pair of strong arms wrap around his waist and Maxxie places his head in the nook between Tony’s head and neck. A noise of confusion comes out of the back of Maxxie’s throat.
“And what exactly is Maxxie dancing then?” he queried, kissing up and down Tony’s neck.
“You know, dancing down the street to your iPod, sliding around the the bathroom whilst your brushing your teeth, going guerilla warfare on abandoned old buildings...you know?” Maxxie laughs.
“Fine, point taken,”
*
The whole gang take it upon themselves to invite themselves round, of course, god knows how they found out his address. Well, the whole gang is a loose term. Sometimes, when they sit in their blissed out little bubble away from the world, Maxxie forgets that everyone left, just like he did, but unlike him, they never have to come back.
Cassie, whose parent’s were resolute she be home for Christmas, sits cross-legged on the couch. Sid is perched next to her, not close enough to be disturbing but still close enough to be awkward. Michelle sits on the floor, pawing at Tony’s jeans, fussing over how much she misses him and how much she hates being away. Maxxie doesn’t even bother to excuse himself.
He sneaks off away into the bathroom. The water drips slowly out of the black-speckled tap and takes an age, but eventually, he pulls of his jeans and t-shirt and steps into the lukewarm water. They’ve receded into using washing up liquid for bubble bath; Maxxie feels like a king in his Fairy Liquid palace. He waves his hand around in the gray-ish water, watching it bend and flex away from his finger tips and grinning at the control he had here. Eventually, the noise in the outside room get louder as the light outside get dim and the guests get drunker. The semi submerged blonde is inspecting the wrinkles in the paws of his fingers when the door cracks open and he’s about to shout “Oi, someone’s in here!”. But Tony’s trainer, then hand, then whole body slip round the door, and Maxxie budges over as he peels off his clothes and slips in behind him, his knee’s against Maxxie’s sides. Tony traces kisses up and down his neck for minutes, as if to say “None of it fucking matters.”. And it didn’t.
As much as Maxxie felt bad for it, he didn’t really hate himself for not getting in touch with his old friends when he arrived back in Bristol. Why did he have to share the failure that he’d become whilst they were off having successful uni lives and successful careers, when he’s here, doing odd jobs around shops and old women’s flats just to get enough money to pay the water bill. Every so often, a sneaking little voice at the back of his mind creeps up on his to say: “What are you doing Max, they’re supposed to be your best mates.”. Because they had been. The old gang had been amazing. More than the ever changing groups at college; they were a constant. And even thought it felt like treason to the highest degree, he did really care; alone, he and Tony were unstoppable.
He’s bent at the waist, (Good girls bend at the knee, bad girls bend at the waist, Michelle had swore to him one evening to him as she slipped into what would loosely be referred to as a dress but in actually was more like a skirt with sheer black lace sleeves,) over the chipped off-white sink. The sound of Tony’s light snoring resonates around the tiny, tinny flat. Maxxie breathes in, hard, and splashes his face with the not quite clear water that trickled out of the tap. His hands are bracing the side of the sink, the veins rising and the muscles in his shoulders tensing, and he stares himself hard in the mirror on the cabinet. His eyes looks like they’ve been clouded over, he notes, but he is promptly thrown out of his revelry when he hears the pat of a hand on the doorframe behind him.
“So…you’re like a druggie now?” Maxxie’s eyes boggle like they’re about to roll straight across the floor. He opens his mouth, the words of a mix-up apology/explanation getting caught in the back of his throat. Tony speaks over his pants and murmurs anyway.
“That’s pretty fucking hot, Maxxie.” His blonde eyebrows furrow. The weight on his throat and chest make it hard for him to breathe.
*
Tony decides it’s best for him to spend some time back with his parents, but Maxxie’s pretty sure that’s an excuse, though he’s not exactly sure why Tony would even want to leave. He pretends, to Tony as much as himself, that it makes no difference to him. He lasts two and a half hours from the minute he leaves. The next few days, or a week, he doesn’t really know, but Maxxie spends it bouncing from clubs to the flat, dragging back what ever poor sod got enticed by his electric blue eyes and messy blond mop. On the sixth (seventh? eighth?) night since Tony left, Stranger gets the honour, and when Tony walks in, the Stranger was rearing against Maxxie, his silky Topman boxers stretched between his knee’s. A noise escapes Maxxie’s lips, a dirty feral noise that rolls from the back of his throat and falls off his mouth and onto this strangers chest, where Maxxie’s head is tracing kisses. It’s not until they stagger back from the wall towards the coach, a tangled mess, that Maxxie realises Tony stood there, silent. Maxxie’s eyes hit the ground and stick there. Maxxie and Stranger pull away from each other gingerly, Maxxie curling in on himself.
Tony’s sat on the floor with his back to the wall, knee’s up against his chest. He licks nervously at his lips and runs his tongue along his teeth.
“Why Maxxie. I don’t understand. You love me.” His heart swells and he’s sure he’s about to choke. Maxxie looks up under his blonde lashes and wraps his arms around his body.
“I’m sorry Tone. I don’t...really know. You won’t get it. I love you.” But his stingingly blue eyes don’t focus, and Tony does know. When Tony stands up and walks, Maxxie feels a wave of sickness roll up into his mouth, but when he turns left into the bathroom, not right and out the door, he feels happiness crash down on him and force the fear away.
“So show me.” echoes from the bathroom.
“Show you what?” Maxxie hears the porcelain crack against each other and a hundred thoughts flutter fleetingly through his mind. ‘He’s going to chuck something at me. He knocking shit over. He’s having a bubble bath. I should probably duck before he does chuck something at me.; And then, Tony appears in the doorway with Maxxie’s battered smoking tin in his hand; stolen from his Dad’s TV table at age 10. It had a bouncing Border Collie on the front. He named it Lizzie.
“So show me why it makes the slightest difference.”
“I can’t do that.” Maxxie says, staring down at his feet. Tony walks towards him, and he doesn’t even have to raise his voice, he never has.
“Why.” he voice is low and steady.
“You know why Tony. I’m not letting you be...me. You’ve got to be careful. Your...head, y’know.” But when Tony kisses up his neck and whispers ‘But I want to be just like you, I love you, we share everything, right?’, he gets his way, as ever.
Tony’s eyes roll back in his skull, the whites flickering like strobe lights. He feels every hair on his body stand on pointe and all at once, it’s like the world has screeched to a halt around their combined form and they are there, at the centre. Maxxie bucks against him. Tony runs his fingers through his hair. Fingers grip sofa bed. Toes curl. Boys pant. They breath hard, and Maxxie rests his cheek softly on Tony’s chest, taking the brunettes hand into his.
“Wow.”
*
2. entr'acte
Weekends with Tony somewhere along the way started melting into one long party. They’d laugh and scream at each other and shag each other’s brains out for hours. Turns out, he wasn’t actually as bad at some things as the trip to Russia all those years ago might have suggested. Sometimes they’d go out, get lost in clubs, dance for days. Sometimes- well, most of the time- they’d stay in Maxxie’s flat, tangled and sweating in his bed sheets.
They were both foggily aware of friends to-ing and fro-ing, a colossal blur of wailed “You’re back!”s and over-zealous hugs.
*
Jal’s voice was crisp and shrill, the way it gets when she was yelling at Anwar for leaving a mess or Michelle for leaving her to fuck off shopping. Good old Jal, always cleaning up everyone else’s messes.
“Is something seriously fucking wrong with your head?” She regrets her choice of words immediately, and Tony’s eyes read hurt. “I’m sorry Tony,”. The boy stood in front of her music stand shakes it off, and rifles through the things in her room. It’s changed since he was last here. Driving forms and teddy bears won from park fun-fairs have been replaces in two short years by claiming for university tuition cheques and a sober black had, at some point, coated the walls.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“How come he never stopped by, caught up with us all?” She asked, setting her clarinet down on the side of the bed. “Have you spoke to Anwar?” she interrogated him. Tony sank down on the double bed next to her, a smirk painted on his cheek.
“No. He hasn’t been around. Suppose he had shit to deal with. Angry Pakistani Mum to appease and such. And anyway, what was I supposed to open with? ‘Hey An, how’ve you been, new job good? By the way, Maxxie’s kind of a soft-core drug addict now, is the pay decent, yeah?’” The heavy lids of Jal’s eye fall down and she inhales, licking at her lips.
“No, I wasn’t saying that. Maybe he’d want to help.”
“And who’d want help? Me and Maxxie are living the dream.” A noise of deep unimpressed emits itself from Jal’s lips.
“And what dream is that, eh Tone? Get yourself six feet under. Have fun with that,” Tony’s cheeks are pulled into the flutter of a skeptical grin, those charming eyes burrowing into Jal’s as if to say: what’s the worst that could happen?
*
She appears, with little to no warning, the next day. When she walks in- she never did bother knocking- the pair of them are stretched out on the sofa bed, in a state somewhere between total bliss and a really bad migraine, and Maxxie can’t deal with the speed the Jal is moving at. He sits up, and Tony’s arm slips from where it had been on Maxxie’s chest a few seconds earlier.
“Jal?” His voice breaks with that early morning crack as he speaks.
She stares deep into him, as if she was staring straight through. Then she moves further into the flat, and starts darting around, picking things off the floor and slinging them into the half broken laundry basket. He tries again.
“Um...Jal?” he says, he voice breaking as he says it. She doesn’t stops as she speaks.
“You’re taking this too far.” she says, pulling a hoover Maxxie wasn’t even aware he owned out from underneath the sink.
“What the fuck are you on about?” he questions, because Jal’s one of his best friend (or at least she was.), but they way she was acting was driving him up the wall.
“Look, Max.” she sits down, and Maxxie is fairly shocked at how empty the flat looks with no-one running around. “...No-one is ever going to say us lot are an advertisement for not partying and wholesome behavior, but they way you two are acting....you’re going to hurt yourselves. Or each other. I don’t even know. I’m just scared for you.”
Maxxie rolls his eyes, as if he hasn’t heart this a million and one times before. Tony snores and flips onto his stoumach, dead to the world.
“Well you shouldn’t be.” He swing his legs over the edge of the bed and walks away from her, and she reverts back to moving through the room like a hurricane. Shutting the door behind himself, Maxxie stares into the mirror in the bathroom; he looks at where his strong abs, his biceps, his defined calves had been before. It wasn’t like he’d gained weight. In fact, he realised, he was thinner than he could remember being since hitting puberty and shooting up six inches in three months. He was thin, stretched out like when you pull Blu-Tac at both ends, and he places his hand on the mirror, touching his reflection and wishing he could get his old one back.
When he finally left the bathroom, Jal is sat with her feet hunched up beneath her next to the window. She peering out at the wind whipping up the tree’s outside. Maxxie runs the tap and splashes his face.
“I’m worried about you two, Maxxie.” she says, her voice tinny, as if she’s holding tears back, but he repeats himself:
“You shouldn’t be.”
She leaves before Tony wakes up.
They both decide to lay off for a while. Maxxie tries to find work, eventually getting hired to teach bratty, ungrateful public school kids to dance to cheesy pop track at the local dance centre. Tony reads a lot. He serves tea in a cafe for two weeks before he gets fired for being impolite to customers.
When Maxxie emerged from the centre that afternoon, the sun is stingingly brightly and he squints against it as he steps out into the busy paving. Tony’s resting, sunglasses perched gently on the tip of his nose, leaning against a railing leafing through some book that for large part is for the benefit of the strangers passing him by. Maxxie grins as Tony grabs him by the waist and slips his hand into the back pocket of Maxxie’s old jogger bottoms.
“Good day?” he questions. Maxxie shrugs his shoulder gently.
“As good as it’s getting, I suppose.”
“I’m glad you’re dancing again” There was a lull for a while as they paced down the high street, screaming of teenagers and mumbling of the elderly masking their quiet.
*
Jal and Anwar meet one drawn out cold afternoon, over steaming plastic cups of coffee, in the window seat of the crowded Bristol centre Starbucks. For a long while, the gentle ease that they had when they were in a large group is foreign to them; the only noise is the sound of them sipping loudly. It’s loud, people running in, iPod’s blaring Jal breaks the awkward silence.
“So, what do we do?” she queries, pulling files and course books out of her bag; she has shit heaps of work to finish and this little excursion isn’t exactly adding to her free time. Anwar shrugs, rubbing his face with his hands.
“Nothing, I guess.” Jal’s eyes dart upwards, staring at Anwar like lightening.
.”What, you think we should just sit back and watch them fuck themselves up?! Don’t you fucking care?”. Anwar looks over the rim of his cup with hurt eyes. Jal swallows hard and pulls her work into her lap. After a minute of sly looks and the scratching of Jal’s pen on paper, Anwar speaks.
“Of course, I care. But are you stupid or something? Do you really think anything we say is going to matter to them?” A heavy breath fills Jal’s chest. It pains her to admit it, but he’s right. Both her and Anwar know perfectly well that nothing they say is going to get through to them.
“You should still go round,” she says, looking deep into her cup and stirring her Vanilla Frappe with the end of her pen, pensively. He shakes his head, but he’s smiling.
“What, and just turn up at his flat like ‘Hey, not killed yourself yet?’.”
“I think he misses you. You did sort of leave him in the middle of London on his own.”
“James was there, wasn’t he?” He stand up, pulling his waterproof coat over his very-sensible-work-jumper. He slings his back onto his back and tilts his head, looking at her sat opposite.
“Yeah fine. Maybe.” They smile at each other, and for a moment it’s just like back when they’d all lie out on the green before History, and then he’s out of the door.
*
Tony is sat, cross-legged on the bed, when Maxxie turns his key and rams his shoulder hard into the door to unstick it. He is staring intently at the floor, his eyebrows are knitted tightly together on his forehead. Maxxie kicks the door shut behind and lean against the ugly orange curtains the old owner must have left behind.
“What’s up with you?” he asks, rolling his iPod back and forth between his hands. The screen is smashed to pieces, it’s been that way for years.
“Nothing,” He’s lying.
“I’m not an idiot, Tone. Tell me whats up.” Tony wipes one of his hand slowly over his face, pressing down hard, before he looks up, but he’s still not looking maxxie in the eye.
“My head’s going funny again,” Maxxie runs his teeth along the inside of his lip, nervously. “And it shouldn’t be. That’s why we stopped, right?” Tony inquires outloud. Maxxie is half stuck between telling Tony that he should probably go home, talk to his family, get out of the flat, go see a fucking doctor. But as shit as it makes him feel, Maxxie knows that if Tony leaves, he’s not going to be able to cope. His conscience gets the better of him, eventually, though he’s alarmed at how long it takes.
“You should go home for a while.”
Tony agree’s without much argument.
The flat is painfully, achingly empty, almost silent when he is away. He doesn’t get in touch; Maxxie mobile broke weeks ago, so it’s not like he could, really. Maxxie spends long nights tossing back and forth on the sofa, convincing himself that Tony is off somewhere shagging other guys, shagging girls, maybe he wasn’t coming back. He’ll get out of bed often, pacing between the window and the opposite wall in his boxers, his bare feet padding across the carpet, wrenching his hands slowly between each other.
He’s not working, bar a less that steady dance job down at the Youthie where he and the old gang had spent last years of Primary School and the first months of Secondary before Tony deemed it ‘for gimps,’ and they stopped going. He goes hungry for three days, until he finds his fingers itching for one of the apples that only actual greengrocers left in England keeps set outside his stall on the market. He keeps his head down and his iPod in as he stalks by hand darting out as he passes. It’s the nicest thing he’s had for weeks; he eats it slowly sitting legs crossed on the banks of the river that that stolen car from all those years ago is probably still sitting in. When he gets back, and he puts it off for ages, mind, Tony is still not back and the flat in practically roaring with silence, he wanders around, flicking on the kettle and the hoover and he flicks his iPod up to full volume, just so he doesn’t have to hear it.
Anwar turns up three days later. It knocks Maxxie off guard, actually, when he sees the figure with his hood up, through the cracked glass in the doorway, but he’s thankful to have something to do that isn’t wandering aimlessly back and forth in flat and lying on the bed with his music on, wondering when the fuck Tony is going to get back. The blonde scurry’s around the flat, pulling things off the floor in a state of mad frenzy and kicking things under the bed before he opens the door, to see his old bed friend there, drenched head to toe in rain. There’s a painful, awkward silence before he steps over the threshold. Maxxie stays glued to the door.
“Hey Max.” Anwar says, pulling his hood down off and Maxxie gets his first full stare at his friend since he left them in London to come back and start some shitty job. It sounded cliche even as he said it to himself, but now, Maxxie though, Anwar looked older. He had heavy bags under his eyes, and a few days worth of stubble under his chin. Maxxie runs a hand beneath his own; he really should shave, he thinks.
“An.” The nicknames don’t feel normal in his mouth anymore.
Anwar sits down heavily on the bed and pulls his ear phones out of his ears, letting them swing down onto his chest.
“What the fuck is going oh, eh Max?” he queries. Maxxie crossed his arms over his chest and hugs himself.
“Not much, what’s going on with you?” he smiles, but Anwar stares at him hard, looking him up and down as if he doesn’t recognise him.
“That ain’t what I meant. You know that’s not what I meant.” Anwar sighs, and he motions Maxxie over to sit with him on the sofa bed. “What’re you doing?” The question chokes in Maxxie’s chest because honestly, he doesn’t fucking know.
“Just...enjoying ourselves, y’know. Fuck knows you used to take more pills than the rest off us. You always used to be up for a laugh.”
“And now I’m working 9-6 just like everyone else, yeah I know.” His voice is sharp. Maxxie scowls and rolls his eyes at him, flying down onto the bed and curling up against a pillow.
“Yeah? Well Max, we’ve all got to grow up eventually, yeah? Don’t suppose you’ve realised that yet?” His voice is dripping with anger, and a little bit of spit is lying on his chin. Maxxie flys off the bed and he and his former best friend are a hair’s width apart, forehead’s almost touching. Their breathing is heavy.
“Y’know, what, Anwar? I was trying too. Then you fucked off.” His voice is low and even, almost a growl, and it’s more frightening than if he were shouting. It breaks on the last word, squeaking with sadness.
“Ah, don’t blame this on me man.” Anwar motions madly with his hands. “You can hack it in the real world because you’re not good enough, alright Max? So stop kidding yourself with all these stupid drugs and accept that you are just. like. the rest of us.”
The air is tense. Flecks of spit lie on Maxxie’s face. For a moment, the only noise in the room is heavy breathing. Anwar steps away, heading out the door in one fluid motion. Maxxie yells after him:
“I wish it was that simple, An.” And he does, but Anwar is already running down the stairs. Maxxie retreats into his home and rests against the back of the shut door, knee’s up to his chest, just breathing. He really does just wish that he could go out and get a normal, shit job and earn a shit pay and go back to his wife and kid and two sodding cats. But whose he kidding; it’s never been that easy, not for him. He pelts down the stairs, leaving the door open (‘Lets face it, there nothing in there worth taking, he thinks) and running down the road to god knows where.
By the time Tony gets back from spending time with his parents, he’s grinding his teeth and tense. ‘Well, he always did have an addictive personality I guess.’ Maxxie thinks, getting up off the bed as Tony paces back and forth around the flat, patting the heels of his hands together. He reaches out, grabs Tony’s shoulders and pulls him back towards the centre of the room, sitting him down on the edge of the bed.
“I’ve been thinking, we should slow down a bit, yeah?” he says, and Tony glares.
“Why?” His voice is sharp and snappy, like a small child.
“Because...we’re worrying everyone. You’re worrying everyone.”. Tony rolls his eyes and pushed his chin out, a look of disgust coating his lips.
“Yeah. Well, I never meant to be everyone’s fucking charity case. I don’t need you anymore, Max.” He sounds like a spoilt kid, which is exactly what he is, and Maxxie just doesn’t care anymore. He turns away from him, shoving his iPod hard into his ears and drowning Tony out. He’s out of the flat in seconds, stopping to snatch Maxxie’s tin from the top of the toilet tank. Maxxie doesn’t even hear the door slam.
*
3. finale
Sometimes he wakes up with tears on his cheeks. Sometimes, he wakes up, and he has a moment of sweet unaware and then he rolls over, and the cold of Tony’s pillow smacks him across the cheek. And then the tears come.
His hands were red. He looks down, and all he can see is just red, red, red everywhere. The blood is dripping down Tony’s chin, over his lips, pooling in the dip of his neck and all Maxxie can think is ‘Oh my God, he’s dying.’. Maxxie’s heart is pounding so hard in his chest that he’s sure it’s about to push it’s way straight out of his ribcage, and everything is blurring and all he can think is ‘Fuck, no, not now, he needs me,’. But who is he kidding? He doesn’t have a choice; he stopped having a choice a long time ago. He makes it 42 seconds before his eyes crash shut and his heavy head meets Tony’s chest.
The clean white light of the hallway burns at his eyes. He is raising his fists to rub at his eyes when he realizes that they’re being restrained by the sterile white sheets and the woman holding him down so she can shine a spotlight into his eyes. He tries to talk, but his throat is so dry that the words catch. He sits up, scattering the hospital staff around him like marbles, and peers around, his head rolling.
“Where’s Tone?” No one answers. They didn’t need too. “Where’s Tone?!” he says, raising his voice to a painful scratch, and the woman in green and the student in blue trade one of those awful, lingering glances. Then Maxxie notices Jal stood, silently gripping the metal bars at the end of the trolley, and she bites at her lip. When, eventually, she looks up, she shakes her head.
Maxxie feels his heart explode. But it wasn’t the frenzied energetic beat he was used to. This time, it just swelled and burst like a child’s balloon.
*
He waited hours for Tony to come back. He rings his phone continually. No answer. Maxxie even rings his parents, but the Stonem’s say they haven’t seen anything of him. Maxxie doesn’t even last until the sun sets before he finds a hoodie, pulls it over his eyes and goes out to find an alley.
He sits cross-legged on the bed, the powder lying half-emptied on a book, as he uses someone’s dropped Nectar card to divide his vice out. He can hear rain pummeling his window, and wonders if Tony remembered a jacket. Maxxie leans over and inhales hard, a rush hitting his head. The door opens, and, once again, Maxxie regrets himself a few seconds too late. Tony stands, his brown hair matter to his face with the rain, and he leans up against the opened door, a smile creeping along his face.
“Told you I didn’t need you.” Tony mutters, the words long and drawn out as if he’s half asleep and Maxxie is unsure as to whether he is being addressed or not.
“You scored drugs in the centre of Bristol, I’m proper impressed.” Maxxie scoffs, smirking, reclining back onto the cushions and trying to let go of his thoughts. He peers through half-closed eyes at Tony as he wanders round the flat, smashing into things and laughing to himself. Eventually, he comes and sits down on the bed next to Maxxie. He bites his lips and giggles as he lies down, and Maxxie sits up and stares at him. A little river of blood is only just beginning to pool against his top lip. Maxxie’s heart start to thump against his ribs.
“Tony, what the fuck did you take?” Tony peers at him through the fog.
“Oh, you know. In fact, it’s your favorite.” His hands reached up towards Maxxie, whose bent at an angle over him, inspecting him. He takes his friends face in the his palms and pulls him down into kiss. And then, he laughs hysterically to himself as his eyes slide shut, but Maxxie can smell vodka on his breath and shit, shit, shit.
“What have you done?” he says, and suddenly, he’s awake. He’s got Tony by the collar, pulling him down off the bed and onto the tiles in the bathroom, splashing water on his face, and yet it’s doing no good. He’s shouting his name, rubbing his hands against his bare skin, and still...nothing.
*
For what feels like years, but in actuality cannot be more than a few days, Maxxie finds it impossible to move himself of the floor. Jal drops him off from the hospital- she’s driving now, of course- and she sticks around, doing chores that have no real need to be done, for hours. Eventually, inevitably, she has to leave. After she buttons up her Topshop coat and picks up her bag, she bends down and wraps her arms tightly Maxxie. He stays frozen, staring at his point on the floor, not even bothering to raise his arms.
When she returns four days later, she’s dressed up in a little black dress, and she’s holding a suit. Maxxie can’t even fucking remember the last time he’d worn a suit.
He could almost read their minds. It was in the way they looked at him, the way their stares burnt into his skin. It was the way Jal’s teary lids and trembling lips said. “Like losing Chris just wasn’t enough?“. . It was the way Sid looked at him with parental disappointment,; “Look at what you’ve done to us. First Chris, now Tony…and it’s All. Your. Fault.”. It was the way Michelle looked so weak she couldn’t sit up straight or hold his look. He and Mr Stonem stood in unison. Mr Stonem walked forward the pulpit, crumpling the piece of notebook paper in his palm. Maxxie cracked the heavy oak door just enough to run.
Staring up at it from the outside, the church, he realises, isn’t as majestic and complete as he’d thought it was as he marched in. The stained glass was smeared. The windows were smashed. Some of the of the rocks were chipped and dulled by the rain and the snow. The churchyard was barren and haunting at this time, nothing but mounds of grass and a long stone pathway. He’d sat on the hill, chewing his fingers, until the last of the mourner’s filtered away. Maxxie runs the palm of his hand over Chris’ grave as he passes, solemn. When he reaches the fresh mound, he sits, cross legged, beside it. His arms are bared in his t-shirt; the night chill making his hairs stand to attention. He doesn’t feel it. All the noise hissing in his ears is the crackling of the night wind rushing through the trees, but it’s so loud it’s making his head swell. An overwhelming sense of confusion coats him; what the hell was he supposed to do? What was he supposed to say? Half of him, the innocent, naïve half of him that his friends had once fought so hard to protect, wanting to cry, to say sorry, to beg his forgiveness. He wanted to repent. But the other half of him, the half brought out in him after months of hopelessness and loneliness and coating his troubles with whatever had been manufactured for the night urged for something different. They made Maxxie want to shout at Tony. Why had he gone and done this? Why had he made all of Maxxie‘s friends look at him like they didn‘t know who he was? He was…angry. Maxxie lights a cigarette, and sits underneath the loom of the church, resenting the person he’d become.
Eventually, he realises as he walks back through Bristol under the sliver of moon hiding in the night sky, he’s going to have to get rid of everything. He walks through the flat in his mind. The book he had left on the cabinet in the bathroom, books Maxxie would walk straight past in the book shop. The boxers he’d leave screwed up on the floor; Maxxie is fairly sure he’d never actually learned to operate a washer. Oh God, his fucking iPod, Maxxie thinks. What’s he supposed to do with it now? He knows he can’t throw it away, it would kill him inside. And yet, what is he supposed to do? Launch it into a dresser drawer and never look at it again? He can feel his breathing quicken and shouts in his own head. ‘Look what you’ve fucking done to me? What do I do with myself now?’
Because at some point, and maxxie isn’t entirely sure when or where it happened, but Tony became the central point of Maxxie’s life. Not dancing, not making a name for himself. Not even the drugs. It was Tony, it was always him. No one made his heart bang like Tony did. No one and nothing.
All of a sudden, Maxxie know exactly what he’s supposed to do.
When he gets back, he starts by slinging his things into his bag. His iPod, his phone, his wallet. He slams the doors and punches the walls. Suddenly he’s raging, throwing his stuff at walls and swearing, the sound of his neighbors complained masked underneath his own furious noise. Glasses shatter, and before he can even contemplate what’s going on, he is sat on the floor, panting, blood running down the sleeve of his rough grey jumper. Maxxie stalks out of the flat without even knowing where he’s going, leaving the door open; as if it matters. Before he even realises it, he’s running, with no idea where or what he’s running towards. The banging of his heart in his chest, the blood rush in his ears and the panting of his breath is familiar to him, and for the first time in a long time, it’s not something he paid some shady middle aged man for. He turns a sharp right into the train station, and stares up at the boards. Manchester Piccadilly. Edinburgh. Euston. He hops the barriers and is on the first train that whirs past. It’s empty at this time, and he stalks up and down the aisle until he’s exhausted. Eventually he sits down and burying his face in the crook between his shoulder and the window. The lights flashing past in the windows don’t give him a clue where his is, or where he’s going. He didn’t mind, much. New start, he thinks. He peers out of the window. It’s snowing now.
You can lose all sorts of things, he muses, grinding his knuckles over his jeans as the moon dips above him. You can lose your keys and your temper. You can lose the plot of that oh so important soap that you were following because you were out and you forgot to set the Sky+. You can lose your friends.
You can lose the love of your life. You can lose your mind.
As tears fall off his face and spin madly to the floor, Maxxie realizes he never even entertained what might happen if he lost both at once.
i really hope you enjoy it? :D