Striking the Sun – All Chapters
Liam invited himself over to my house. Emily Post advises against this as a wanton act of rudeness, but if anything my mother was relieved.
I shouted down to her to let him come up to my room, but instead she shoved a football in my hand and chased me out of the house. We walked in near-silence to the park, save for the occasional cycling talk. Except for a few topics, our first conversations were slow and stilted, peppered with misconstructions and mishearings.
I rolled the ball on the grass and we began to play, a comedy of errors that made our attempts at adult conversation seem elegant by comparison. We bonded in laughter at our failures and in the steady release of activity-related dopamine.
On the swings we competed to see who could get the highest, argued about whether it was possible to swing the whole way over the top. And then there I was, swinging high, Liam bouncing the ball in front of me; a teenage logic that we could kick a ball further than anybody had before, using the tools before us.
We raced to the top of the climbing frame and argued about who won. Breathless and triumphant, a discovery left for us in marker pen, scrawled against once-painted steel: ‘poo is your name’. No teenage pretentions too great to laugh on this occasion.
And finally we slouched exhausted at the base of the climbing frame and talked until it began to get dark. My mum fed Liam from the supermarket freezer aisle. The next evening he came back again.
We had more in common than not, and as we discovered new music and television together we developed our own in-jokes and shared passions, dialogues that flowed between us.
The park was our escape from parents, school, and, to some extent, from cycling, pushing our friendship beyond the context that had framed it. We could find a peace from the world there.
And then the peace was profaned by an interjection from two people I’d long since broken free from.
“Dom the hom,” Paul said.
“Who’s your boyfriend?” The other Paul said.
“I’m Liam,” he said, while my brain struggled for a response. “Who are you?”
“Do you like porno, Dom?” He said. He flashed the illicit DVD case my way.
“Nah, this one’s got girls in it, he won’t like it.”
“What are you two doing here?” I said. The words came out with some resistance.
A Paul held a small bottle of vodka in front me.
“You must be the coolest kids in Sedgethorpe,” Liam said.
“No, that’s Dom.”
The two Pauls laughed. I was looking down at the grass in front of me, but could see Liam’s jaw from the corner of my eye, steady and pointing up. He was watching them.
“Do you want a drink, Dom?” Said a Paul.
“No thanks.”
“Have a drink.”
“Are you pussies going to drink that thing or just wave it around?” Liam said.
“Maybe Dom’s mate wants a drink.”
I couldn’t see anybody else in the park. Acres of dark grass that gave way to blackness in the distance.
“Do you want a drink, Dom’s mate?”
“Yeah, I do.” Liam stared back at them.
The bottle finally came his way. The bluff had been called. He raised it to his lips and tilted his head back. Heavy bubbles rose up through the bottle as he poured its contents down his throat.
“Hey,” Paul said. “Hey stop. Not the whole thing.”
Liam offered back the empty bottle.
“You told me to drink it.”
It dropped to the ground near my feet.
“Dickhead.”
“Sedgethorpe’s weird. Your town bullies just bought me a bottle of vodka.”
I couldn’t look up from the ground right now, not even for Liam. I tried for a supportive smile, touching the grass leaves at my feet.
“You better bring the money for that bottle to school, Dickhead Dom.”
When we were alone, after the two boys faded out into the blackness, Liam looked at me, this weird knowing look. He raised his finger to his lips and vomited around it onto the grass in front of us.
“You’ll be alright now you’ve been sick.”
“Yeah. I just need to lie down.”
“Do you want to do it away from the sick? Come on, lie away from the sick.”
Later, my mum watched him in the back seat through her rear view mirror.
“Don’t let him be sick in my car.”
“He’s just not feeling well.”
“I thought he was a nice boy too,” she said.
Susan muted her alarm clock three or four times before waking proper. She couldn’t get out of the bed, a sleep paralysis born of malaise and the actions of the night before. One of the glasses by the bedside, the one with five centimetres of water in it, staved off the furriness in her mouth for long enough to prompt another fifteen minutes in bed, before her bladder forced her to rise.
Toilet whatnots completed and head thoroughly doused beneath tap, she put on yesterday’s clothes and left the house. It was wet outside, the kind of grey drizzle Britain is famous for. Her body wasn’t regulating her heat very well, and the combination of cold rain and warm jacket weren’t helping.
There were other people waiting who could hail the bus when it appeared through the mist, so Susan fixed her gaze down on the kerb in front and tried to keep her head still. Her breath was warm and tasted like everything she’d done last night. Her sweat was vodka seeping from her pores and she was sure the other people could smell the alcohol on her.
However she seemed to these people, she knew her external appearance wasn’t as bad as the parts they couldn’t see. Nothing felt right on the inside, not just a headache, but a full feeling of dead weight in the body, dead weight and light, weak, tender tissue. The bus arrived and she didn’t raise her eyes from the kerb, but moved slowly and robotically so as to not suddenly unsettle her stomach or her head, lest one should empty itself through the other.
The windows were misted with warmth and wetness, and passengers filled the aisle. At the back, one unoccupied seat remained, next to a teenage girl in a leather jacket. The girl’s bag was on the seat and she was prodding angrily at a mobile phone with her manicured claws. Susan what she hoped was a friendly smile rather than a grimace, and the girl moved the bag to the floor.
She tried to sit down, but the motion of the bus was too much, and Susan found herself flung beyond the empty space into the teenage girl’s lap. The girl responded not with fury, but horror. Susan mouthed an apology but her throat was sore and phlegmy, so the guttural noise that swelled from inside her when she stared into the face of the mortified girl failed to help her case.
She found her centre of gravity, placed her bottom down on cushion, and raised her head straight up, staring forward at nothing in particular, but straight and protected from the rigours of movement.
Her insides felt worse now. The potential need to vomit had passed, perhaps shaken down from the forefront of her mind by the embarrassment of an unexpected excursion into teenage crotch, but this reduced volatility left her concentrating on the other problems her body was having. The alliance of tender tissue and dead mass was delicate and it seemed to Susan as though her organs were about to switch off one by one. Something in there had a dull ache that she suddenly noticed and the word pancreas made it to her lips without passing through her vocal chords. The stranger in her eyeline who noticed her mouthing pancreas at him gave her a confused look and then, look unanswered, assumed the message was for someone else.
The organ failure was becoming more real now. Her insides felt heavy and old, tired from the abuse last night’s alcohol had put them through. Her breathing became more laboured and she rushed to take off her jacket in panic at the prospect that it was her body heat causing the breathing difficulties, only her motor skills were still confused, her disoriented arms becoming stuck in the sleeves and spilling out into the aisle and on to, again, the lap of the girl next to her.
Susan became convinced she was about to die. There didn’t seem to be any way her organs could recover. She could see the emergency exit valve not far away above the bus’s back doors, and decided if she felt that the moment of death was upon her she would turn the valve and open the door and climb out. Maybe the air outside would help her recover, or maybe she’d die on the street. Even the latter had to be an improvement on dying so desperately here in this hot metal box, in the lap of this girl with her manicured fingernails and metal bracelets and chewing gum. And so the valve became the fixation and every judder of the bus or shooting pain inside became a potential moment to jump up and eject herself.
She didn’t die, which was mostly a relief to her. She got off the bus three stops early needing air, which was mostly a relief to her fellow passengers, for whom her mumbling and groaning and terrifying fascination with the emergency exit valve was becoming nauseous.
The walk did her no good. For once, the stuffy, warm rumbling of a West London bus was the travel option less likely to upset the insides of its passenger. Outside there was traffic and there were sirens and there were humans to avoid, and it was hard to move with the required rigidity her stomach and brain and possibly pancreas demanded.
It was unusual for her to have drunk herself in to this kind of oblivion on her own at home. It’s difficult to do without someone to encourage you, and without the horrendous people you’re forced to share bars with who make you want to down your drinks. She could drink a lot alone. She’d know she was drunk and then carry on, go to bed with the room swaying, spinning in that clockwise circle that resets in the same invisible spot each time, the same one-foot area of the room passing across in front of your vision over and over until you find yourself in the bathroom holding the bowl and trying to figure out whether the piss or puke will come out first and position yourself appropriately for the end you’ve bet the farm on. She could do that and would do that, but it was nearly impossible to drink to this point on her own, the point where the next morning you can genuinely believe all your organs are turning themselves off on a bus to work, the type of night where sleep never happens, where you never even pass out, you just lose yourself somewhere and let your body sway through the house, cling on to the porcelain it brings you to, hope the worst it chooses to do is put the television remote in the refrigerator.
When she arrived at work, she found the front door locked, the office silent and unlit. She had left home without checking the time, and even stuck in traffic and then walking she’d arrived forty-five minutes early.
She couldn’t imagine looking at a computer screen right now, staring at the vast whiteness of a document without the fortitude to fill the lines in with black. Instead she opened a window, a real one, and breathed in the air and thought about what she’d have to do to get through all of this. She pulled her chair up and rested her chin on the window ledge, and that’s where Jonah Mcleod found her 50 minutes later.
He didn’t speak, just walked in softly, loud enough that he could be sure that she’d heard him and wouldn’t be startled by his presence. The kettle boiled, low bubbling and hisses of escaping steam pounding against her skull, and then a mug of coffee appeared in front of her.
“Tough night?”
Liam was there for my first experience with alcohol. Three cans of the cheapest white cider the off-licence had in the fridge.
“That’s what tramps drink,” Liam said when I picked them up.
“It’s the cheapest,” I said.
“That’s why the tramps buy it.”
At the checkout they asked how old I was, probably recognised me from coming in with my mother for the past however many years. The cashier appeared unconvinced by my protestations but took the money, the facade complete.
“Going on nineteen are you, Dom? You think you’d be able to grow a beard at that age.”
“Come on, let’s go to the park.”
“Next time bring a trenchcoat and I’ll stand on your shoulders.”
White cider is fizzy. We sat on top of the climbing frame belching, commenting on how the cans’ contents were poor quality, much poorer than we were used to drinking, individually, as though this was simply the first time we were drinking in each other’s company. Perhaps that’s all it was for Liam. After all, the vodka.
“We should have just got two cans of something better,” Liam said.
“If you don’t want the rest of this one, I’ll have it.”
“It’s shit anyway. They put the wasted bits of booze from nightclubs into cans to make money.”
“Scared you’re going to puke again, lightweight?” I said. I made like I was going to drink it.
“I want some of it, dickhead.”
It was getting darker earlier these days and we’d stay in the park until we couldn’t see what was on the other side beyond the grass, and ride shivering to my house.
“You know what,” I said, “This has been fun, but the RSC’s development team is going to be looking for riders in the summer. Maybe it’s time for me to take my cycling more seriously.”
“I don’t think you could take your cycling more seriously. You’re worse than my mum. I wasn’t planning on leading you astray.”
“Once I’m a pro, I’m never doing interviews. Can you imagine how self-important you’d need to be? My results can speak for themselves.”
“I don’t mind about that. It’s part of the job. I’m not racing for Great Britain though. I’ve fallen in love with a European sport, one with holy grounds exclusively in France and Belgium and Italy, and then I’m supposed to pretend I love England?”
“I think that’s part of the job too.”
“I’m not wearing a flag around my shoulders for anyone. And look at us—we’re supposed to be mortal enemies by birth, but I can’t think of anyone I’ve got more in common with.”
His breath lingered in the air, just as his words did. At this moment, we had complete trust in our superiority over our peers.
I dreamed of touching Liam. Running my hands up between his legs.
“It’s getting pretty cold,” he said. I nodded.
Not fantasized, but actually dreamed. Woke up drenched in sweat and guilt.
“All the townies leave the park when it gets dark, did you notice?” He said.
It confused me, for a while. I didn’t find Liam attractive. I tried to look at him in that way and it didn’t work.
We got on our bikes.
After that dream, I looked at some homosexual pictures on the internet. A bodybuilder with an erection that didn’t look real and didn’t look like mine. It didn’t excite me like photographs of breasts had.
Our skinny tyres slipped and sunk across the grass, the pair of us sprinting for minor park landmarks, the victor calling out the name of the professional cyclist he was pretending to be. I impressed Liam naming riders from the previous generation, Mario Cipollini and Salvatore Commesso, and more sincerely the rider I liked the most: Hudson Ivory.
“Bet I can jump that gap,” Liam said. It was only a small ridge, an old ha-ha. Since the recent rain, a small stream had formed in the bottom of it. The ditch wasn’t intended as a drop-in point for a teenage boy when it was dug however many hundred years ago, but it seemed a natural use. Liam’s pace was fearless, his eyes fixed on the grass at the other side. He arced through the air in slow motion, both wheels off the ground.
This glorious graceful moment ended abruptly. He reached the other side and his front wheel hit the downward slope of the grass and his bike disappeared from beneath him. Liam, by stroke of luck, appeared to step forward casually off the bike onto the flat grass above the ditch. For a half second he looked bemused to find himself standing on his feet having been riding a bicycle a split second before, and then he grinned at me. His bike slid down into the stream, which was deeper than we both thought and swallowed all but the right hand side of his bars.
“Nice trick, right?”
“Did you plan it all along?”
“No, but I’ve learned to dismount like that in case of a crash,” he said. Emergency bullshit.
“For your next trick, you’re riding home with a wet arse.”
“My arse isn’t wet, it didn’t touch the floor,” he turned it towards me and awoke some physical reaction from a carnal dream that I had, okay, maybe more than one time.
“Look at your bike,” I said. The tip of his saddle protruded from the water like a dolphin’s nose.
I wasn’t attracted to Liam Greene, but sometimes my brain liked to put his face in my dreams and make me do things I wouldn’t normally find arousing.
He stayed at my house until 11pm listening to music and playing videogames, and when he left I played some more to practice for the next evening.