02
June 2012.
Smoke and nicotine fill his lungs. His muscles finally relax after hours.
Andrew knows that the smell follows him like a kind of trail; that the disgusting smell of the burning cigarette permeates him. His hair, mouth and hands. It is a mark that makes him recognizable and that he knows all monsters hate. “I could have chosen worse addictions” he used to think while watching his brother high to the clouds; sometimes the comment was repeated when Kevin scolded him for his health. Kevin frowned with palpable disapproval, as if all the bottles of vodka he had emptied were just a minor detail. Andrew preferred nicotine, the cigarette that for a few seconds left him without oxygen and filled him in a way that few things could, over any other type of drug or alcohol. But well, everyone killed themselves in their own way.
“Excuse me. Could I ask you for one?”
Andrew doesn't even deign to turn around completely, he just moves his eyes to meet the same face he's been staring at for the past hour. It would be impossible not to recognize the voice of the person who had been on that attempted stage, the voice that had sung and spoken words with a devotion that Andrew had drank in like a man in the desert drinking his last drop of water.
He wants to deny this action, but Andrew hates lying to himself. Lying would be acknowledging and giving more value to an action that meant nothing; he did it in order to satisfy his own curiosity. Because Andrew knows that there are talented people everywhere, all over the world there are men and women who sing with their soul, that there were people who leave with their pockets with 5 dollars but with their hearts full for doing what they love; yet the man in front of him surprises him.
If Kevin were here he would say that this man sings as if he had everything to lose, but Andrew is not (and thank God) Kevin Day, so he would say what he saw; A man who is too small and seems to emit an aura that seems destined to enthrall everyone around him. A man who creates music with his voice that seems to come straight from his lungs, as if he desperately needs an escape. Sounds produced by six people mounted on a small stage; who do not shout but make themselves heard throughout the place. It was as if his music demanded, as if it came out forcefully from a chest in which it was locked; the place and its people were too small and his music demanded to be heard in every corner.
“Your bandmates don’t share?” he can’t help but ask.
The singer takes a cigarette from the open box that Andrew, for whatever reason, offers him. “They’re not my bandmates,” he answers naturally.
Silence falls between them; Andrew only allows himself a single, quick glance at his unexpected companion. The moonlight illuminates him. Blue eyes and fiery red hair. He’s a demon.
Andrew wants to ask, but stays silent, taking out his second cigarette. What he wants and what he does have always been very different things.
“What a waste,” he says once, watching the cigarette fall to the ground without the singer taking a drag.
“I like the smell,” he simply answers.
“Is that why you asked for one?”.
“I think it was better to ask for one than to ask if I could come and smell your cigarette smoke,” there is a slight mocking tone in his voice. Andrew rolls his eyes.
“You’re welcome, asshole.” Andrew hates the way that comes out without any poison.
“Then thank you, stranger.”
Andrew wakes up the next morning and the first thing he does is check the news and flight options: no change. He updates Nicky on the situation, with whom he is thankfully only an hour apart. His cousin curses and asks how he is.
When Andrew goes down to breakfast he feels slightly lost, as if the axis of the earth and everything on it has moved two inches in the wrong direction. Gone are the crowded tables and artificial light; now there are only a noticeable amount of tourists and families sitting at tables, eating breakfast too happily at this hour. As he sits at the bar he thinks about what he will do this day. He doesn’t know the place or its people.
The bartender approaches with an easy, practiced smile “What are you having for breakfast?” he asks and when their eyes meet, the man freezes.
Andrew sighs internally “Waffles.”
“Could I ask you a question?” he says, although he is already asking one. Andrew nods slightly; he didn’t want to receive another scolding from Dan about behavior with fans.
Luckily, fans of The Monsters, more specifically Andrew's fans are almost always bad bitches who know how to respect boundaries.
“You're Andrew Minyard?”.
“Why Andrew and not Aaron?”.
“It was 50/50. And Aaron doesn't wear that much black.”
Andrew nodded in mock understanding and said “Waffles.”
He pulled up the blue hoodie he was wearing as he thought about what to do. He was very tempted to just hop on a bus and find some halfway decent places to spend the day. Andrew had gotten used to the constant feeling of boredom years ago; things were boring and Andrew thinks the most interesting person he's ever met is Renee (and the guy from yesterday).
All of a sudden he can hear his cousin's annoying voice singing over some speakers. The bartender is already there with maple syrup on the side of the breakfast. He puts the tray down and when he doesn't leave Andrew immediately looks at him.
“Is there any chance we could take a picture?” And that's the part he hates most about fame.
“As long as you don't touch me and you upload it once I leave the hotel.”
The man seems partly surprised and partly pleased. “Nice to meet you, I'm Roland.”
He decides that London is as interesting as any other city, which isn’t much at all; there are plenty of bookshops and plenty of museums and Andrew figures he’d have a good time if he liked either. He’s never liked bookshops and you don’t need a museum when you’re in a band with Kevin “I was a history teacher in another life” Day. For the record, he admits he was very tempted to book a guided tour of The Globe Theatre; he’ll think about it more on the way to the hotel.
Andrew figures he should be afraid of walking alone at night in a country he doesn’t know, but he isn’t. The weight of the well-made knives in the sheaths on his forearms gives him the most peace of mind he’s ever had in his life; they remind him that he has the power to protect himself and protect others, that he’s no longer that seven-year-old crying in a bloody bed.
He can hear Eden’s Twilight before he sees it. As always, Andrew was right. The feeling last night wasn’t the product of stress or exhaustion. The sweet sound of a saxophone and the intense drums set to a perfect rhythm that makes your heart race; it's interesting the effect that so few people could have with a few lifeless objects in their hands. The music can be heard from the street and before the doors open. The kind of art that can't be contained within four walls, that demands more; more people, more space.
“You know I tried my best to turn your black eyes hazel
And kiss away your cruelty
I gladly got undressed, put all my cards on the table
And by cards, I mean me”
Andrew should run up and order room service; but he knows he won't once, instantly and upon entering, his eyes meet sapphires so sharp that it seems that just breathing next to them will cut you. He doesn't know the name of the face, but it sets off all the alarms in his head, there is something dangerous and interesting beneath all that facade. The same itch he felt on the back of his neck when he met Renee and saw beyond her, saw the traces of blood and a turbulent past carried on her shoulders. The sensation was the same, amplified a thousand times.
The boy sees him and gives him the mínimum smile. Something small and complicit; as if they both know something that others in the place do not. Andrew adjusts his hood and asks Roland for a whiskey. It feels like giving himself over to the devil.
The man has an effect. The way he sings, the way he moves and gestures. His eyes shine and Andrew finds himself wanting to know what he thinks; or maybe what he doesn't think.
“It tends to have that effect on people,” Roland interrupts his train of thought with unnecessary words and a beautiful glass of whiskey. “It’s a shame the little bird doesn’t act often. You came on a good date, he’ll be singing all week.”
“Little bird?”.
“Tired people who listen to him as if a single action of his would warn of a carbon leak. Bird, canary, I’ve even heard a waiter call him hummingbird because of how restless he is. Here most people have nicknames, I’m Rat R.” He shrugged his shoulders with a casual gesture.
He doesn’t want to talk any more, so he concentrates on drinking his drink. “It tends to have that effect on people,” the bartender had stated, as if it were normal and everyday for a musician who plays in packed stadiums to be half enthralled by an artist who sings in bars. The man speaks as if he is fully aware of the effect that the little bird has on people, as if it is normal for all kinds of people to glance at the redhead and not be able to look away.
It was like fire; Andrew knew firsthand that fire is good for nothing but burning. No matter how much it is embellished, no matter how much fire is said to purify and cleanse, fire only burns. It is uncontrolled and disorderly. On his back Andrew Minyard has Icarus tattooed; to remind himself that no matter how warm and beautiful it is, it will all end in ashes and flames (he ignores how Prometheus decided to give fire to humans, for their sake even if it subjected him to eternal punishment).
“Do you want to go smoke?” the bird says.
Andrew looks up and finds himself face to face with the sun.
Late September, 2012.
Andrew Minyard can't find peace even with his eyes closed.
The man has always known that his mind is too messed up to ever have peace or even a meager sense of complete safety; there was always something lurking in his mind to keep him alert. It was what made him wake up at the slightest noise and evaluate every exit in a room.
This was different. Andrew thinks he's been bewitched at best, obsessed at worst.
Because he closes his eyes and the first thing he sees is wavy red hair with a lazy, private smile. He closes his eyes and his mind replays memories of a first kiss in a cool drizzle, the feel of rough skin under his fingers and made-up songs hummed softly on a dark night. His chest beats so hard he thinks it will burst out; it was as if he felt so much, as if all those emotions were concentrated in that stupid organ too big for the dwarf hole in Andrew's chest. As if he were hanging, exposed to the view of everyone, and with each denied memory he threatened to leave him to form a body of his own. One without cuts on his forearms, and with accepted memories.
Andrew looks at his notebook. Writing, he thinks, would ease his troubles. But he doesn't want to open it and find those yellowed, worn pages holding loose sheets of paper given away, wrinkled and more than two decades old; words from a woman long dead decorate it.
Andrew was a connoisseur of various methods of relief, each on some different scale of self-destruction. The cuts were the beginning but the music was the end. Locked inside a juvenile reformatory with mandatory music classes he had found, ironically, a kind of half-salvation. He didn't believe that notes and words scribbled on paper could save anyone, but Betsy said it helped. She was the only one (or the first, his mind supplies again, with a hoarse whisper of “You are not a monster”) who saw hard, lethal hands and told him that these weapons were capable of producing art.
He allowed himselft to write two songs in these two months. The notebook was open and his head was resting on his lap, dozing. “Sunlight” he called the first one, it was intimate and writing it felt like removing a rib, puncturing a lung and placing all his vulnerability on dirty pages; he had satisfied the itch in his hands for almost a month, perhaps because of how much it cost to write it and because of all the emotions it contained. Still it was not enough, time passed and he needed to get more out, write more about what it felt like to be so… feel so much for someone so stupid for whom you should not feel anything. Voddo doll was a very pop song for being Andrew’s own, but he mentally excused himselft that it was because the record company put out a more indie-pop album this year because it was selling well.
But now he looks at the pages and feels the incredible need to write about beautiful blue eyes that he can remember perfectly. Andrew Minyard has cursed and hated his eidetic memory that allows him to perfectly remember large adult male hands gripping a child's hips; if he were offered the chance to get rid of it, he would. Ironically, that same memory is the only thing that allows him to remember in perfect detail all the parts that make up Neil Hatford.
June, 2012.
It feels like a kind of deja vu, Andrew thinks in the silence of the night.
Both of them leaning outside Eden’s Twilight, cigarettes shared and the moon above both of their heads, lighting up little to nothing; as if that night he had decided to leave them alone, relying only on his hearing.
“Why?” he asks. It comes out of his mouth as easily as the smoke from his lungs. Why give me a cigarette, why come closer.
“You’ll have to be more specific.” Andrew raises an eyebrow and picks up the little cigarette left between his fingers.
The man stares at him; analytical eyes that Minyard knows very well are only found in these children who had to scratch and cry under someone else’s fists. Eyes that he sees in Renee and in himself every time he gets up in the morning. The bird is interesting, that’s what makes him so dangerous.
“Yesterday you shared with me. Just thinking about returning the favor”.
Returning the favor. The words echo in his mind; giving back, caring more strangely. Andrew Minyard is a man made of promises, making deals to try to get up in the morning. Andrew is a man who lives by his obligations and promises, but he is also a man who is used to the core of people never keeping what they promise him in return. No one takes promises as seriously as Andrew and that is a weight he has had to learn to carry.
What he has achieved has never been because a counterparty decided to keep their word and deal. What Andrew has he has achieved by taking and snatching; he was a child in foster care who picked locks to take food, the child who took the best clothes from others and who beat them before others had a chance to even consider him.
This was nothing, just a measly piece of leaves and chemical returned.
But Andrew did not ask for it back and yet it had come into his hand.
“Will this become a habit?” He answers mockingly.
The man just smiles.
“What is your name?” he asks instead.
“What would I get from telling you my name?” Although he knows that the other would only have to go to Google to find out.
“Don’t be a little shit.” Few people speak so boldly to Andrew.
“Let me think about it.” His voice comes out expressionless as he hooks his chin between his thumb and index finger. “No.”
The other’s gaze is penetrating and Andrew’s hands search for another cigarette.
“If you want something in return I could give you my name.”
“Question for question?”.
The little bird’s eyes shine and this time Andrew didn’t give himself to the devil on a silver platter, but rather slept with him for a while. Dangerous, it alarms him in his mind; fortunately Andrew was always an adrenaline addict that allows him to feel.
“Question for question,” he confirms.
Andrew takes another cigarette out of the box.