It's Not a Cult
Author: Joey Batey
Date: 2025-10-23 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Fantasy; Adult; Contemporary; Thriller
Description: 'I loved it straight away ... characters so vivid you feel like they might be living in your wardrobe right now' NATASHA PULLEY, author of THE WATCHMAKER OF FILIGREE STREET'Gloriously over-the-top and under-the-skin [with] shades of early Angela Carter' OSKAR JENSEN, author of HELLE AND DEATHCallum, Melusine and Al play in a band with no name, baffling audiences in terrible pubs across the northeast of England with their 'sound'. Their songs tell the stories of the Solkats: fictional northern gods of small things, of mishap and mayhem. Absolutely no one knows what they're on about. But they be
Publisher: Raven Books

For my sisters. Solkats of endless love, support and obscure Simpsons quotes

Contents

Part One

1 Bizen, the witch and Solkat of children’s lies

2 Hadaway, Solkat of rust and texts at three in the morning

3 Fash, Solkat of cold calls and blighted crops

4 Canny, Solkat of betting shops and unheard jokes

5 Marra, the Companion, holder of hands and pints

6 Whisht, Solkat of red wine stains and noise

7 Cowp and Creels, the Tricksters, Solkat of stubbed toes and fateful meetings

Part Two

8 Skinchies, the Luck Monger, Solkat of bus stop fights and fear

9 Neb, Solkat of falling petals and looking at someone else’s phone

10 War Lass, the Last Word You’ll Hear, Solkat of one too many

11 Belter, Wielder of the Thyrsus, Solkat of neon wristbands and punishment

12 Radge, the Cripple, Solkat of masks and mortar

13 Sneck, Solkat of thumb prints and blurted thoughts

Part Three

14 Yem, the Mother, Solkat of empty beds

15 Haporth, Solkat of lost coins in pocket holes, charity shops and memory

16 Scran, Solkat of bar tabs, reckonings and squander

17 Spelk, the Muzzled Hound, Solkat of cramps and forgotten bruises

18 Hackies, Solkat of breath, side-eyes and nightmares

19 Clarty, Solkat of smudged lipstick, mud and change

20 Hockle, the Antecedent, Solkat of spit and nervous moments

21 Monkey’s Blood, Solkat of aftertaste and imagined conversations

22 The Blatherskite, Voluble Purveyor of Nonsense, Solkat of perversion, politics and escape

23 The Bagsies, the wild sisters, Solkat of promises and payment

24 Bonnie, the Wind on Windows, Solkat of fairy lights, flirting and falling

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Author

There is a video on the internet. It has over five hundred million views. It shows the day that I died.

At first it’s a bit fuzzy. Then the focus finds a blashy storm over a crest of cliff in the north-east of England. Ghostly columns of light descend from the sky, piercing the cloud, as though they themselves are protectively holding the storm aloft.

The camera pans to a woman standing at the edge of the cliff, looking out at the storm. She wears a long leather coat, so old the black of it is almost entirely grey. She knows she’s being filmed, always does, and is arching her jaw a little to avoid any chance of double chin, warm whisky gathering in her cheekbones.

I walk over to her, the camera shaking in my hands with the cold and fear. I’ve put the rain guard over the top of the lens to keep away the first few drops that are hurtling from above. It’s not very effective. She turns. As is our way, she looks directly into the camera. She always addresses me through the camera.

‘You scared?’ she asks.

She talks with such an affected tone. I’ve known her for nearly two years and I’m not sure I’ve ever heard her actual accent. I nod.

‘Yeah,’ she whispers, looking down at the waves and the rocks below. ‘Me too.’

The coast throws its ice-cold wind into the cliffs as if in reply and Mel staggers back a touch, then braces herself against it, leaning into it, urging it, like some macabre trust exercise with the universe itself.

She pulls out an old fob watch from within the folds of her grey leather. I know for a fact it doesn’t work; she found it in a charity shop years ago and decided she liked never knowing exactly what time it was anyways. She still inspects it, as though – at this moment, in her last moments – it might miraculously tick for her.

‘He’s late.’ She has absolutely no way of knowing that. ‘I’m not jumping without him. It won’t work unless we jump together. All of us. And they see it with their own eyes.’

The video loses focus for a second. You can see I’ve switched from autofocus to manual, as the cheap little hand camera doesn’t know what to look at, jumping from waves to the nebulous pools of refracted light in her eyes. I try a pan away from her, linger on the wind as it sketches impressionist drafts in the grass, then return to her, in case I want to use it as an establishing shot. Not that I’ll ever get round to editing this. Not after today.

‘Wait, wait …’

She fixes her hair, vain to the end. It’s been dyed so many times, I’ve no idea what colour it started as. Strange palimpsests of break-ups or boredom creep through. From a distance it’s blue, but, like an ocean, the closer you get, the murkier and more iridescent it becomes. Black, mucky browns and greys pepper it, the odd streak of green; one whole clump of orange is at the back and no one’s had the heart to tell her.

‘There. Come back to … Yeah, do that again. Wait—’

She gestures me to do the same panning and resets herself, one leg in front of the other. She’s trying to look like that Friedrich painting she likes, all wistful and histrionic. I wait. The camera lands on her again. She has the most dramatic face on her. She’s trying very hard to make herself cry I think, but it’s coming across like a toddler at the age they learn that crying gets them treats.

‘I never thought it would end like this …’

She’s monologuing. She always does this. Callum hates it.

‘But there’s no way out. No way to escape what we’ve created. It happened so quick. And yet it felt like a lifetime. People have been hurt. Some have died. I will not let this harm continue. We must – hey!’

My arms are tired. I’ve been filming all morning and usually I take a break around now, but the camera’s dipping and Mel immediately notices.

‘Hey! These are my last words, you think you could maybe keep it together, Al?’

I nod and rally, ignoring the lactic acid building in my forearms. She can’t see, but someone else is with us on those cliffs. I feel him some yards away to my right. Breathing.

‘We must put an end to this. We never meant for it to become … what it is. It’s out of control. People believe we’re something we’re not, they think we might be able to help them, save them, bring them salvation. But all we wanted to do was make music. It’s just a band for Christ’s sake. Just another, fucking …’

This is different. Usually she speaks as though she’s cutting strips of wrapping paper – choppy at first, but rather pleasing once the scissor blades glide. But now it’s slow. Careful.

Ripping.

‘I just … I just wanted to be a singer in a band. You know? Drink cheap wine and scream dumb songs. Sleep in shit hotels and, and … It wasn’t really about being famous. It was about just … just creating something. With Callum. And you. But …’

She’s crying. I’ve rarely seen her cry, you can tell, and the camera wobbles as I try for a slow track in. I don’t want to remind her she’s being filmed, but – honestly – it’s fascinating. Melusine doesn’t do crying. She gets angry, she gets drunk, she hurls wine corks at cats, she—

‘Leave it,’ she says. I’ve overstepped. I hold still and she looks down at the waves. It’s far. So far. The blue marble floor of it, its distant flecks of scratched cobalt and cerulean caught in whirling menace. Maybe we’ll hit the water. Survive. Little wafers of silt catch and crash, captured in moment, as the land gives way at the water’s breach, breathing its own new tide, caressing it back into rock.

Callum will have a plan. Callum’s always got a plan.

‘There’s no plan.’

I’m thrown by this. Mel’s got this uncanny ability to see inside people, hear their fears. Callum says they can have entire conversations without saying a word. I believe him.

‘Cal will say there is, but there isn’t. We have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that this is it. No secret backup, no mystery escape. No, Al, I think we should face it now. ’Cause he’ll be here in a second and we’ll have to be quick, probably. But I think it’s time we actually face this properly.’

She looks directly into the camera. Her eyes have grown roots of mascara, canalling down her earthy laughter lines. The grey light of morning has hidden it until now, but you can suddenly see the bruising and swelling around her temple and eye socket, naturally contouring them in deep pitch and purple. She smiles through the tears, hoping desperately to stay in the character she’s been playing all her life. But this is her. For all her screaming and boozing and effortless spinning through life, this is all she is. A terrified young woman. Waiting for her best friend to come. Waiting for their final adventure together.

‘We’re going to die today, Al,’ she says. It hits me too, slowly but agonisingly, like a knife expertly inching under my sternum. I take her hand. It’s warm. Mel always runs warm.

‘We’re going to die and … and my whole life, I wanted to be remembered. To be adored. Cal once asked me what I wanted from life and all I could think of was getting a free glass of wine in a bar because someone recognised me. But really, it was remembrance. Just to be remembered. And … and now that I have it, now that people will, all I want to do is hide. We could hide? Maybe we could just grab some tickets outta here and, I dunno, live in Banff or something?’

Callum talks a lot about Banff. He saw a video online once and now he thinks his dream is to move to west Canada and live on a mountain like a weird, articulate goat.

Her eyes flick away from the camera and peer above it into mine, blinking through the steady flow of rainwater from clumped strands of her hair. I don’t say anything, never do really. But she knows.

‘You’re right. It’s not about us. They’ll hurt everyone we know until they find us again. And … and we can’t let that … let that … happen.’

I look to the figure she can’t see, hoping for noise, but I hear nothing. Her breath is short in the morning air. She fiddles with her coat, one icy hand wrapping herself up as though with a linen sheet, softly at first, then pulling tighter and tighter, the other scrambling around in the dark of her chest for warmth, in search of her heart.

Then she turns.

She’s spotted something. Something in her chest, some buried breath has caught in her ribs and pulled her head up. The camera spins a one-eighty. You can’t see anything on the viewfinder at first, but the human eye clearly can, as Mel’s staring over the grass, away from the cliff, towards the distant, anonymous Northumberland town we somehow ended up by. There must be half a mile of open grassland between us and it’s raining so hard, it’s really hard to see. But they’re there.

At first it looks like something whole. Like a giant writhing larva, undulating and burying itself into the dead flesh of the coastal dunes, dripping past the car park and footpaths, and up and up the grass towards the light. But as it comes into focus, strands of it dissect the far-off town streets and we see the mass for what it truly is.

Thousands. Thousands of people, all of them running, darting eerily and unnaturally, like footage played in reverse, all of them masked in mottled white and cream – a kind of papier-mâché headdress that starts at their brow then covers their face and neck, all the way down to about two or three inches below their clavicle. I don’t know why they chose that kind of mask. Callum thinks it looks like the default avatar on social media sites before you upload a picture of yourself. Which makes all kinds of dark sense.

The incline obscures the depth of the grassland as it melts into the dunes. The crowd seems to burst through a tear in the horizon, suddenly larger, closer than feels natural. I feel Mel’s hand in mine, squeezing, gripping so tight my knuckles crack.

She’s visibly shaking, though she’d say it’s the cold, her eyes wildly searching the masses as they search for us, aching to find Callum.

‘There. There!’ She points.

I don’t see him at first, as though part of me doesn’t want to. But a figure runs before them all. On the best of days, he’s an odd-looking man. Era-less, out of place, but whole. But now he looks like he’s sewn himself back together, or someone’s done it for him, and they’ve done it all wrong. He limps lopsided, one of his arms now inches longer than the other. Streaks of red pierce the grey of the morning light. He’s bleeding and it’s all over his jumper. He’s missing his coat and his clothes are torn. But he runs. Slowly, in pain. But Christ, he runs like nothing I’ve ever seen.

‘They’ve not seen him, perhaps they’ve not seen him!’

Mel releases my hand and dives into her coat. At first I think she’s looking for something to help; a phone, a weapon to fend off the thousands of people giving chase. But a soft clink gives it away and she pulls out three little wine glasses, the ones you find at your local pub that could seemingly withstand nuclear blasts, and a bottle of some truly suspect-looking rosé. Callum hates rosé. So it makes sense she’d choose it as their last drink together.

‘Here, here, hold this, I’ll take the …’

The camera is wrenched from my hands and laid on the ground on its side. You can see my boots. They’re a pair of Mel’s she lent me. They’ve never really fit.

That soft little fffft and a crrrk as she unscrews the top, followed shortly by her favourite sound, that ulug-glug-glug-glug of wine as it’s poured from a fresh bottle. In the distance, through the blades of rippling grass, we see the outline of Callum. He’s slowing down, limping, something’s happened to his leg. I hoik the camera up and Mel is standing there, beaming, her enormous heart-wrenching smile hiding the meniscus of tears resting gently on her lashes. She winces them away, her brow furrowed.

Then she begins to sing, wobbly at first, across the grass towards him. It’s so far, I don’t know how he hears it. It’s from their first Cycle, before I came along. ‘The Sacking of Hadaway Heart’.

‘Yooou. Hold me in your heaaaart, like a dyiiiing thing …’

There is a pause.

Callum has stopped, almost doubled over in pain. He is broken in so many places. Someone has stitched smoke into those pores, his skin is cracked and bruised. I zoom in and see scratches on his hands, as though proof to any passing palm reader he has long controlled his own destiny. The mass of followers beyond has made it to the edge of the town in pursuit and they are slowing too, silent, knowing they have us trapped on the headland, that there’s nowhere to run. Callum heaves for a moment. I think he might collapse.

Quietly, like an echo, he replies.

‘Hadawaaay … my daaarling … heeear me … sing.’

His voice isn’t quite like anyone expects. He’s a podgy, bedraggled, ugly little thing. But that voice. That voice always sounds so old to me, so ancient.

‘They’ll coooome for us by nightfaaall,’ Mel sings back, ‘but til theeeen …’

Callum rights himself. He limps forward, casting an eye over his shoulder. They’ve gathered now, and we can all see just how many of them there are. There’s a few hundred circling him, but behind, more are joining, at least a thousand alone are fanning out along the grass, flanking the coastline. And we’re on stage. No instruments, no mics. Just a lost, mediocre band, in a lost, forgotten corner of the world. They’re walking so slowly now. Some of them look almost hesitant, curious. This is what they’ve wanted. This was part of their plan, of their will. But now it’s ending, I wonder if any of them really wants it. If the joy was in the following, not in where it ends.

‘I’ll keep you safe …’ he sings, ‘with whispered hows … not whens …’

He limps into focus. One of his eyes is bloodshot and one side of his face is swollen. He’s clearly sprained an ankle or something. He doesn’t look into the camera. He rarely does.He’s never been that good with it, hates being caught. He always says he’s too boring to be immortalised in film.

He finally reaches us. There’s no hug. He takes the rosé and wordlessly expresses his utter dismay at it, eyes locked on Mel’s, communicating with that mad telepathy that only comes from a decade of spending every waking hour together. The wind has slowed, patient, in that strange prismatic silence, waiting to be broken by the harmony of their shared breath.

‘Soooo. How’s things?’ Mel says. Callum lets out a stifled bark of a laugh. Her words, like her, are always so playfully at odds with the seriousness of the world. She’s always been out of place. Even to the end.

‘Oh, you know. The usual …’

She breathes, sucking in courage from the air around her, eyes the mass of followers over his shoulder, blinks tears away with the largest smile, and, in as flirty a tone as she can muster, whispers:

‘Fancy jumping off a cliff with me this morning?’

Callum smiles. The followers inch forward behind him.

‘Thought you’d never ask …’

I set the camera on the ground, a few feet from the outcropping. It feels so odd to leave it behind. We walk forward together, all four of us. Me, Callum, Mel and the figure they cannot see. We reach the edge of the cliff, looking down at the rocks and waves below. We sip our rosé.

A silence hangs in the grass; a soft, elegant feeling, interrupted by the wind’s hollow drone circling our wine glasses. Mel and I look to Callum, who always knows what to say, when to say it, how to make us feel what he needs us to feel so we can keep going. His eyes are fixed, the colour of that wild green detritus that circles the underside of every unclean tap.

‘Al?’

I look at him.

‘If you edit this, so this bit is the start of the film or whatever …’

You can almost hear me smiling. He breathes out to the sea.

‘… I’m going to fucking kill y—’

PART ONE

I

Bizen, the witch and Solkat of children’s lies

‘FUCKING LOUDER YOU TOTAL FUCKING CRETIN OR I’LL EAT YOUR FUCKING HEART OUT!!’

Rehearsals are always wild. Euphoric. A yawning rapture of noise and light, half improvised, half meticulously rehearsed, where Mel’s untempered savagery meets the methodical concentration in Callum’s eyes. It has, Mel insists, the sweaty, whirling kismet of the most mind-blowing sex imaginable – when it works. And today it is working. Holy hell, is it working.

‘I saaaaaaid,’ she screams, ‘FUCKING. LOUDEEEER!’

Callum is doubled over. He’s surrounded by all kinds of kit that Mel and I don’t really understand. There’s loop boards, laptops, keyboards and synths, all linked up to weird pedals in a decked-out, bashed-up bureau, with pegs and wooden foot slats that look like they’re nicked from a church organ. He jumps effortlessly from the modded semi-acoustic guitar in his hand to every other instrument, stray button and peg around him, like a time traveller trying desperately to remember how in the blue hell he got here, and how on earth he can get back.

There are strings, violins, cellos, warped backing vocals, samples, occasionally a horn section, all bursting forth from the bureau and its mad intricacies. There are balalaikas, thumb pianos, lap harps.

Melusine stands with a mic in hand, a large PA system and speakers propped up on piles of books behind her, threatening to topple and crush her at any moment. But on she sings. Her voice isn’t perfect, it’s never perfect. But there’s something about them both when they get like this. Like the only thing that’s stopping blood bursting forth from their lungs is the noise coming out of them.

I feel a crescendo coming, I don’t know how. Callum is looking directly at me, avoiding the cameras around the cheap rehearsal room we’ve occupied for nearly a year now. He can feel it too. We both feel something new that we haven’t tried, and I beat the tempo out on my drum kit, lower, quieter, giving us room to grow. Mel is furious, hating that we’re drawing back. But Cal’s got a plan. He can hear what I hear. And he knows you have to welcome quiet to enjoy the noise to come.

‘Wheeeeere the fuck are you GOING, FUCKWITS?’

She removes one of her shoes, the ones she repairs with electric tape when they fall apart, and hurls it with all her might at Callum. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t break eye contact with me, following me, following my tempo, my feel, my eyes. Another shoe whacks him in the side of the head. But he mouths.

‘C’mon …’ Like it’s a prayer. ‘Fucking … c’mon …’

We’ve never needed drugs or anything to get to this place. Mel will sink a few tinnies in rehearsals ‘for inspiration’, but it’s never anything more than that. I can feel the beat build and Cal’s whisper-singing into his mic, something new, some new lyric that’s come to him in the moment. I can’t quite make it out, but I know the relay system will, and we’ll have a recording of the session to dissect after, but it’s inevitably something about one of the Solkats. All the songs whirl around the Solkat Cycles in some way.

Mel finally hears him. She knows he’s somewhere else and it’s all she can do to support the song now. She sirens over the top of his muttered melody, a discordant descant that loops and fuels him.

Occasionally she lets out these howls, these grunts, that are so unbelievably sexual it’s all I can do not to stare; at her legs as they splay across the battered carpet; at the veins in her neck as she pushes every last note she can out of the octave. She’s a tornado of curls and cursing and her eyes catch me, knowing I’m staring at her, knowing I’m lost in her, and she growls, stealing breath for her next, final, crashing, crushing note.

The beat builds. It rises like a hymn to the gods, to the Solkats Cal has so intricately wrought and written, to the space that exists between us, to the dust mites that hang and whirl in the single beam of light that blisters through the skylight. With Mel’s final howl, I slice my hands on my crash cymbal, crushing it with the wood of my sticks, blood staining them like an offering. The note holds, it holds, Christ it holds so long I feel like I’m going to pass out. Then, just as all three of us feel it dying, just as the song reaches its mad miracle of an ending, something flies across the room and hits Callum in the temple with a sickening crunch.

The book slumps to the floor, accompanied by the hollow feedback screech of Cal’s dying orchestration.

He’s quiet. Which means that really hurt. Mel stares at him, unsure.

Slowly, systematically, he shuts the laptops and switches, the pedals and interfaces, all of it down, one by one. Then he looks at Mel, a kind of weird fury in his eyes, rubbing the side of his head.

‘You just hit me … right in my temple …’ he says.

‘Well,’ she gestures around the room, ‘if this is a temple, I’m simply giving you … something to … worship …’

She raises an eyebrow with that flirtatious, disarming magic only she knows how to wield. For a moment, there is nothing.

Then Callum jumps over the bureau and, with a guttural ‘Oh fuuuck yooou’, they wrestle each other to the ground.

I watch for a moment with fondness as they play-fight. It’s wild, but careful. Neither wants to really hurt the other. As the chorus of screams and yelps soothes the room, I idly begin unplugging the wires from the half-dozen cameras around the place. I look at my laptop as the live session I’m streaming out to the internet begins to shut down, one camera at a time. I’ve set it up so the video randomly jumps from wides and two shots, to close-ups and tight low angles throughout the session. I take great care not to show myself in any of the shots as I dismantle the equipment. The final camera shuts down with a little bee-da-bum and the screen goes black.

I look at the comments, still coming in. There aren’t many – maybe only like ten people are watching. A couple of Mel and Cal’s pals are enjoying the play-fight, egging them on. Lots of the comments are pretty baffled by what just happened, some randoms on the internet who think they’ve stumbled on something niche and hipster, only to discover it’s less of a cool, underground music scene and more of a sad, bacchanalian dad band. I end the feed and the notification comes up, ‘This Live Session Has Ended’. I look at the number in the bottom left of the screen. It stares at me, pathetically, like a dog at dinner scraps, and I sigh.

97 subscribers.

The Band started a few years ago, I’m not entirely sure when.

Melusine never likes to talk about where she’s from, but she’s certainly not from the north. Her accent has a distorted musicality to it that’s been so practised to impress, my theory is she watched far too many films from the fifties – the ones where people say ‘dah-leeng’ a lot – then read nothing but James Joyce for a million years, and settled on something in between. She’s hoping, I think, through voice alone, to be whoever anyone else needs her to be. I know she went to, and very possibly dropped out of, art school in London; that’s where she met Callum. Then they both moved up to the North-East, where Cal’s from, because his dad died. I don’t know their ages, they don’t know mine, so in all truth they could have started The Band fifteen years ago and I wouldn’t be able to tell you. They’re both oddly ageless. Like flies trapped in amber. Or chewing gum that stays in your stomach for seven years.

I call it ‘The Band’ because I don’t have any other name for it. Mel, much to Callum’s chagrin, insists they don’t need one. That it would ‘tell their story before people have the chance to read it’.

Callum’s response is always the same:

‘People can’t read our stories, if they don’t know what to internet.’

It’s a bit of a nightmare at gigs. Generally the promoters just put ‘Plus Special Guests’, which a lot of people think is our actual band name. As far as band names go, I actually think that’s pretty clever.

I’ve been playing with them for a year and a half or so, now. They don’t know how old I am. That I dropped out of sixth form last year, that I live alone in my gran’s flat. I have lived in this haunted, forgotten county all my life. And the two most exciting things to ever happen to me, to it, to all those ghosts who wait in ageless silence, are currently arguing about pot noodles.

We stumble out of the rehearsal rooms into the iridescence of a riotously orange summer evening. I know where we’re going. They always go to the ‘little shop’ – a newsagents on the corner. Mel stocks up on tobacco, Cal tries to rustle up some kind of dinner from the money he earns writing sample music for some company in London. It’s heartless, and it kills him to do it. But they pay two hundred pounds if they use it in a commercial, or on some reality cooking show. Mel occasionally takes up a shift at a hair salon in Morpeth, mostly because she takes endless enjoyment from nicking mints from people’s purses, and recently started ‘accidentally’ dyeing old ladies’ hair the wrong garish colour. There’s a whole regiment of elderly grandmas in that town who have recently gone from grey to radioactive green in the space of six months – a trend they’ve affectionately all taken to for some reason. Mel takes great pride in her work, gossiping with them and learning the latest in geriatric sex trends.

Northumberland is, to most, a pallid, furtive thing. It hides itself from the rest of England beneath a shroud of anonymous moorland and brutalist housing estates. Most people here carry themselves quite proudly. But they’ve all substituted typical childhood dreams, such as love or, I dunno, boats, with a kind of stubborn will and a subscription to ‘I coulda been somebody’ Weekly. I always found it, growing up, to be the kind of place the most boring ghosts in the world would haunt. The Cheviot Hills to the west rise limply in weak defiance of the rolling rains, while the coastal strip to the east strikes high at the North Sea, trickling south to the soft alluvial sands and salt marshes that welcome its waves like a dying friend.

I grab one of my cameras from my bag as we walk, the blood from my hand staining the straps. I lag behind, always chasing to keep up, occasionally running ahead to get a shot of them from the front. Cal carries his guitar like a Sisyphean weight, Mel her cigarette like a halberd. I’ve walked into so many lampposts trying to shoot them in profile, but Callum keeps an eye on where I’m walking. Their bickering ricochets along the cobbled streets of Ashington. People here speak Pitmatic; the kind of dialect that treats consonants like they’re a total inconvenience.

‘… twenty-three pounds, which basically means we can buy either one XLR and four Pot Noodles now, or no XLR and, like, a thousand Pot Noodles …’

‘Yes, my darling,’ Melusine bawks, almost always sounding like how I imagine italics sound, ‘but what about wine. I am not playing on Friday, without wine.’

‘You’re not playing at all on Friday without an XLR.’

‘Well, I don’t even know what an XLR is …’

‘It’s a—’

‘Please don’t enlighten me.’

Melusine crouches and checks her make-up in a car mirror. Cal catches my eye, nods to my right, helping me narrowly avoid a bin.

‘Just … Just promise me you won’t get drunk before.’ He’s had this conversation a thousand times. ‘I really want the new songs to work and—’

‘Alcohol,’ says Mel, ‘is like having an enormous moustache. But for your personality. I’m not getting drunk. I’m just becoming more interesting …’

Cal sighs.

‘I know, I know. And I know it’s only the Black and Grey, but it’s got a decent mix desk, and … Our last Cycle—’

‘Album.’

‘They’re Cycles.’

‘They’re albuuums, darling.’

‘Whatever, the new Cycle, I think I’m finished mixing the first few songs, and it basically leaves us one or two to go before the … well, before … you know …’

Mel’s still in ‘performance mode’. She’ll be like this for a few hours at least after rehearsal; madcap and theatrical, playing to the camera, until she crashes and goes really quiet for a while. She can’t get a good angle on her make-up so, rising, and with a sharp whump of her boots, she lifts her leg high in the air, bringing it down on the car mirror, dislodging it. She catches it and continues to walk down the road, continuing her lipsticking.

‘I don’t like your plan,’ she says idly, over the drone of the car alarm.

‘What, why?’

‘Well, I just don’t see why we should stop.’

‘We said we’d stop after eight Cycles.’

‘No, you said you’d stop after eight Cycles. That’s when the stories end. But I think you’re wrong.’

‘You think I’m wrong? About the mythology … that I invented.’

‘That we invented, darling …’

She always calls people ‘darling’, mostly because she can’t remember most people’s names. It’s just easier. Mel knows all this is winding him up. She has a wonderful, twisted way of making anything sound like a joke. Particularly if it was never meant as a joke.

They reach the shop. I don’t go in, never do. They bicker and natter and I flip to my cans, the enormous headphones I keep hanging from my bag. I listen to them from beyond, the clip-mics they wear for me muffled in coats and scarves, and try and get a good angle through the shopfront, catching the two of them skirting the tiny aisles of the off-licence. I manage to catch a really good symmetrical wide, the two of them separated by a stack of beer and crisps. But my new camera is hard to judge, and I’m tired. I jump to auto, hoping it does the work for me, finding them the focus I always think they deserve.

The camera pulls back. It focuses on the reflection in the glass, on the mirror world outside the shop. And I catch something down the viewfinder.

A figure. Not far from me, about thirty yards across the road.

Watching.

I turn and look. Young, huddled, a dark hoodie draped over their face.

At first I’m worried they might be the owner of the car Mel’s just casually demolished, but they’re not shouting or running over. I try to hide the camera. It’s second hand, they all are, but I’d rather not have it out in the open if the guys aren’t here. And it’s already got a bunch of stuff on the data card I’d rather not lose.

The figure pulls out something from their hoodie pouch.

Visions of knives intrusively puncture my thoughts and my hair stands on end. It’s nothing, probably nothing, never is. Nothing like that happens in this town. But the outside world is so scary to me, all of the time, has been for as long as I can remember, and at the slightest strangeness my body seizes, my breath quickens, and it’s all I can do to not—

‘Al?’

Callum has pulled his body mic from its clip from inside the shop and his voice BOOMS in my ears, jolting me so suddenly I almost drop the camera. I turn and see them both at the counter.

‘Do you want an ice lolly?’ he continues softly, seeing he’s startled me. He’s eyeing the figure across the street through the glass, but ushers me in with a little arch of his chin. ‘I never know which one you want …’

I turn back to the hoodie.

‘Quick as you like,’ says Cal.

With a soft ding, I open the off-licence door.

‘I think we should open with that … er … what’s it called, the new one?’

Mel has a basket hanging limply over her arm and is blindly palming everything from bottles of expired mustard to electric toothbrush heads into it. Cal expertly removes them again as they walk down the aisle.

‘Not sure yet,’ he says. ‘It’s definitely a Whisht song. But the name’s escaping me at the moment. Not sure we should open with it, I’m a bit wobbly on the bpm increase.’

‘I like it. I know it’s new, but all of our stuff is new. To. People.’

‘Because no one listens to us.’

‘Because our canon is eclectic, darling.’

I’m shorter than both of them. My head doesn’t even reach the top of the aisle shelves. I try and keep the camera low as they talk.

I’ve been told off before for filming in shops. For some reason, people get really weird about it. Despite the whole world having cameras in their pockets these days, people tend to feel a bit weird when you hold a big, black, clunky one up to their faces. It sort of forces them to face the reality that they’re not all that interesting and they might not actually be the protagonist of their own lives after all.

My legs are still burning from rehearsal, my feet feel like little slats of ceramic in my shoes. But I love filming them. Callum in particular. Mel is electric, of course. She decided a long time ago that most people are generally dead inside and took it on herself to live for them, for everyone around her, and remind them of the futility of it all. Largely by wearing every mad thing she owns at once and eating too many biscuits. But Callum is such a strange person to film.

He’s a little grotesque. Entirely asymmetrical, lopsided. It’s as though God created all the faces in the world, then found a thousand extraneous features hidden under his workbench, whispered ‘Well! You’re damned if y’do, and you’re damned if you don’t!’ – and promptly smushed them all together in a big pile and named it Callum. His skin is so pallid. He nearly always looks dead.

They’ve reached the unoccupied counter. Cal spits clumsily on the floor. A delicate honey-coloured string of spittle hangs for a moment from his mouth, before yo-yoing up and into his scraggle-beard. He doesn’t bother wiping.

‘All I’m saying is,’ Mel declares to no one in particular, ‘no one really cares about the mythology and all your Solkats and things. They want to see me.’

‘You?’

‘Yes. I’m the talent.’

‘You’re the talent …’

‘Yes! I’m what people actually want to see. The amphora. The vessel. You, on the other hand, are the actual talent. The person who does all the …’ – she gestures idly – ‘you know. Music.’

‘I deeply regret teaching you the word “amphora”,’ mutters Cal.

‘And if you did more of that, more mainstream stuff – and I know you can write that stuff, you just choose not to – then people would listen to us more. And they’d see more of me. And. You know. That’s great.’

She’s being ironic. Or maybe she’s not, I never know. I often wonder if she talked like this before I came along, before I started filming them. Or whether, by the very act of being observed, she’s just become this flirty, outrageous thing. She slaps the plastic scratch card prison and barks through the door leading to the back.

‘Oi, Raj!’

I hear Raj in the stockroom beyond let out a cartoonish snort. He crumbles out through the doorway, wiping sleep from his eyes.

‘What?’

I inch behind one of the shelves, but I think he’s spotted me. Mel pulls herself up onto the counter so she’s sitting like some pound shop pre-Raphaelite painting.

‘And good evening to you. Small pack of that green tobacco, please, Raj, and a yellow lighter, please and thank you.’ She always buys yellow lighters for some reason. ‘And two of those teeny bottles of whisky, the ones that taste like cardigans. Cal, do you want anything?’

Cal shakes his head. Raj sleepily manoeuvres around the counter, almost blindly.

‘What’s that?’

He looks at me, eyeing the camera like I’m casually just carting round a human head in my hands. Mel turns, casually.

‘What’s what? Oh, that. That’s Al. Also, have you got any—’

‘What’s it doing?’

I see Callum bristle. He does this thing with his hands, like he’s trying to grip an invisible flame, gripping and releasing, gripping and releasing.

‘It … is holding a camera,’ says Mel. ‘And three packets of cigs s’il vous plait, we’ve got a big gig on Friday and I’ve got a funny feeling I’m going to need all the nicotine known to man to get through it. Have you got any ice lollies—’

‘I don’t want you filming my products.’

‘That … is the weirdest concern I’ve ever heard.’

‘What is it, like,’ Raj throws the cigarettes and tobacco down on the counter, ‘like … a uni film project or something?’

‘What? No, it’s just – thanks – it’s just Al. Al does that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s like a … coping thing.’ Mel winks at the camera. ‘Like, how would you put it, Al? Like therapy or something? Al’s convinced it’s the best way to get new followers online, if we document everything we do, people get to see—’

‘So your friend’s like a retard?’

‘Watch it, fella.’ Callum’s been idly inspecting something deeply fascinating on his shoes but steps forward.

‘And you’re the … like the carers or something?’ says Raj. Mel looks at him, almost lovingly, but with much seriousness, a teacher explaining the application and dangers of industrial warfare with a live grenade in her hand.

‘Nope.’ She slops down from the counter. ‘We’re in a band. And this band is just here for cigarettes and crisps. So why don’t you ring this up for us, Raj, and you can leave the bad words where you found them. Otherwise I’ll have to introduce you to my new best friend. Her name is unending violence, and we have an incredibly sexual relationship …’

There’s that tension. The perilous borderzone Mel likes to occupy when a woman goads a man. She loves it. Because nine times out of ten, the man will walk away from it. Until you reach the one man who doesn’t.

‘Don’t want you filming my products,’ Raj continues warily.

‘Again, such a specific concern …’

‘And I don’t care if you guys are looking after a spaz or whatever, but I don’t want to end up on the interne—’

Wham. In one swift movement they’ve both gone for him, but Mel’s got there first and has swept a bunch of chocolate bars from their little rack and flung them at Raj. One hits him in the jaw. It’s kind of pathetic, as far as confrontations go. But for a moment, he’s stunned. Then, with a quiet intensity, Mel picks up another chocolate bar and throws it at him. Then another, and another. When she speaks she’s quiet, but with every word out her mouth another wad of cheap chocolate ricochets off his face.

‘Stop. Using. Your. Words.’

Raj starts shouting, Mel and Callum join in. I usually leave at moments like this; they’re pretty common. Mel’s volatile but protective. If I said I felt a chill coming on, she’d pick a fight with hell just to warm me up. And I know it’s weird, the filming thing, but the two of them don’t care, they’ve never cared.

My feet carry me away up the aisle towards the door, Mel’s curse words hanging in the air behind me like soft little te deums to the forgotten god of out-of-date off-licence produce. I see Callum gently pulling her away from Raj, while Mel quietly attempts to dismantle his worldview in thirty seconds of whispered rage, but I don’t linger. The ding of the shop door rings and I stumble out into the acrid cold of the evening. My breath sounds like that whu-whu-whu-whu sound the wind makes through a cracked window of a speeding car. I wait for them to come back out.

For a moment, I hesitate. Then I look from beneath my hoodie’s folds, across the street, strapping my camera bag to my front out of habit.

No hooded figure, no threat. But where they were standing, there’s something new. A little white chalk mark on the nearby garden wall.

I hear the familiar ding of the door once more and Mel stumbles out, out of breath, followed by Callum. She’s got a slight tremble in her fingers, and for a moment her performance slips. She shakes it away, the adrenaline, the injustice, the nonsense of the world, fixes her hair, huffs out her chest, then beams at me. Her smile blisters my retinas.

‘Right … now that that’s out of the way. Al …’

She shoves a pile of ice lollies in my face with a wink.

‘Which flavour did you want?’

2

Hadaway, Solkat of rust and texts at three in the morning

When Callum works, it’s like watching a wasp trapped in an open bottle. There’s a ferocity to it, a danger. He paws at the willowy strands of his beard, clogged with scum, a whole universe of detritus so deeply engrained in his biology, it’s almost beautiful. His eyes get this deep olive drab to them, watering with the rolling smoke of his cigarette. I still don’t know if half of what he’s on about is genius or deeply, deeply self-indulgent.

The first time I went to his caravan, I genuinely thought it was the kind of place I might get murdered in. Its interior hosts a maze of art, covered in a manic tapestry of lyrics and drawings, scribbles of poetry, maps of places only he can see and outlines of characters only he has met. The cupboards have had their doors wrenched off and they’re filled with notebooks and odd trinkets, orange polystyrene burger cartons creak beneath my feet. Mel’s artwork – black ink drippings furiously attempting to articulate on canvas the words Cal writes – litters the cigarette-stained sofa. It’s what I imagine old bohemian opium dens looked like. Every breath in that place leaves you reeling, unsure if all this mad creation is a cure or a symptom.

The whole back wall and one of the windows is shrouded in a gigantic bed sheet. On it is a map and timeline of the whole Solkat mythology. It casts shadows on the ground when the sun comes up.

It’s early morning, probably around five, and I’ve been woken by Mel outside singing her soft dawn chorus to the rest of the coastal caravan park, the buzz from her night of wine and writing subsiding into peaceful doodling as she sketches onto her own legs with liquid eyeliner. I switch one of my cameras on out of habit. The cold, late-summer sunrise blinds me.

Cal is scribbling away in a corner, headphones on. He sees me wake, knows that means the camera’s booting up. A single tooth creeps out of his face. A soft contour of sweat creeps down his forehead, circling the little islands of his mismatched eyes, burying deep in the crags that hug his nose, and under the rug of his lip’s dead skin. His singularity is wild in the morning sun. Every breath sounds like a dry heave when he works. Every blink is a wince. Every heartbeat a little battle cry in the war against wonder. The blood-red whites of his eyes, the blotches of iris. This is what the world does to the dead when they don’t have time to die. He’s saying something to me with those eyes, but it’s far off, distant, from within some deep chamber only he can hear.

He began the Cycles years ago when he was studying at college. It started, I think, as pieces of art. Triptychs and collections detailing something he called the ‘Solkats’. But when he left, or was kicked out, he decided it was more; that it was music that could best uncover the stories he was creating. Were it not for Melusine, I’m sure the idea would have died a quick death. I’m not sure he’s the type of person to show his art off to the world. But she fuels him, as he does her, egging each other on, into the mythology of the thing, urgently, desperately, detailing creation stories, love affairs, religious iconographies – each tale intrinsically tied to another, and another, like strands of lightning, reaching out and out, yearning to reach the earth and end their interminable journey.

I’ve never really understood it. I’m sure others might. I read the lyrics and see the notebooks and the weird freaky art they make about it all. But I never ask about it. I think I said to myself at first that I was too dumb to understand it. Then I said that it wasn’t my place to understand it. Now I think that it doesn’t matter if I understand it. My job is different. I drum. I film. I load things up to the internet.

But I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t affected me. The Cycles, the Solkats, the mad art of it all, none of that was the reason I joined the band. I just filmed them one night at a pub in Blyth and Callum asked me if I played anything. But since my gran was wheeled off to her retirement home late last year, I’ve felt untethered, and now I can see wisdom in it. There’s a kind of peace in stories.

There are twenty-four Solkats, apparently. Or, at least, there are twenty-four that Callum’s ‘met’ – which, as far as I can tell, means that there are more, but these are the ones he wants to write about.

He’s only spoken to me about them once, and that was after about two bottles of wine.

‘Solkats … are the gods of the little things,’ he said, clinging to his wine glass as though some force from the cosmos was dragging him to the skies and it was his last and only anchor. ‘They are … forgotten gods, left behind when the gods of old left us. And they are waiting for release. They have no followers. They have no provenance, nor providence. But they can have effect. That’s all they want – is to have effect on the world …’

I asked him what he meant. He waited for minutes before replying.

‘My dad tripped on a kerb. Years ago. Full face plant. He went to the doctor to check how many ribs he’d broken.’

He poured himself more wine.

‘The X-ray or MRI or whatever – it showed marks on his lungs. They caught it so quick and started chemo so fast it gave him another two years before he died.’

The wine was immediately gone. I waited for him again, watched the wine bring to his cheeks a lank and famished light. Then he closed his eyes.

‘Had he not tripped, he would have just died. Probably two months later. So I like to think … I like to think something tripped him.’

Minutes went by. I couldn’t tell if he’d passed out, and was about to pack up, when—

‘When something like that happens. A moment that was so small and random and insignificant but then later turns out gave you all you didn’t know you even wanted. It’s a gift. I guess I wanted to imagine who gives those gifts, who’s having effect on the world without us even seeing. I wanted them to be seen, to … thank them, I guess. If … If we can tell their stories. Help them … have effect. If we can bring them together, unite them, untether them from their happy solipsisms … we might send them on. To … to …’

He promptly passed out after that. To be honest, I don’t drink very often, and when people get wrecked and start using words like ‘happy solipsism’ I’d rather chew my own earlobes off.

I can’t remember all the names of them, the Solkats. But they’re called things like ‘Skinchies’ and ‘Whisht’, ‘Marra’ and ‘Hadaway’. Pretty common northern words imbued with new meaning. The tiny gods of red wine stains. Of unexplained bruises, running mascara or mud. I like that they’re tiny gods. Not sure I could be in a band headbanging to Jesus.

Sometimes I imagine them. With us, among us. Keeps me amused.

We spend the Friday like we spend most Fridays. Callum lives in a run-down holiday park about an hour north of Newcastle. It’s bleak and dishevelled, but close to the coast, which he likes. I love filming the folks whose lives have led them to living in a holiday park. They seem to inch out of the earth, only to retch at the wonder of the world and retreat into their regrets once more. I’m not sure what the situation is, but I think a friend of Callum’s dad runs the place and lets him stay in one of the caravans for free or cheap out of guilt. I know his mum is somewhere in Newcastle, at a hospice, but we’ve never met her. We don’t go to Newcastle that much.

After some sloppy chips and some more mad writing, we drive to the water. There’s this pond on the other side of a nearby burn, I’m not sure we’ve ever known the name of it, but the two of them go down there to fuck about and sing nonsense to the universe. Callum loves it. It’s right by St Cuthbert’s Cave, a gaping maw that smiles out at the inland countryside, chewing stone and grinning, and he loves its stillness, its weight. It’s a gross place, full of graffiti and broken bottles, remnants of makeshift fires and etched carvings from hundreds of years ago. Mel loves getting naked and watching dog walkers quietly pretend not to look disgusted at her pallid, elfin form.

‘Mel?’

Callum has emerged from the lake. Long ago, they threw two lawn chairs into it and they sit on them sometimes, sipping lager. Melusine idly thumbs a paperback of seventies sex stories from hers.

‘Yes dear?’

Callum is writing in his head. The weirdest words come out when you see him like that.

‘Do … do tits float?’

Mel considers this. Slides down into the water from her detritus throne and ponders her breasts, watching them bob about slightly in the reeds. With quiet astonishment, she mutters.

‘Yeah. Yeah, I think they do …’

Callum stares into the distance, quietly mumbles, ‘brilliant …’ then sinks beneath the waters once more.

I always set up a camera on a tripod in the water to watch them while I hop online. The signal’s a bit slow, but I trawl through some of the threads on various forums, looking at indie music makers, folklorists, all the places I post to see if I can expand the fanbase.

There are other people’s perfect band photos, beautifully lit and shot, singles and EPs all downloadable at a click, the world of music now totally open, totally accessible, a forest to lose yourself in and never come out. I click idly on yesterday’s edited live session which I posted this morning. It’s got a few likes, a few people commenting things like ‘wtf?’ and ‘shit she’s so fit’. But one catches my eye.

It’s a link to another thread. I click it.

It’s private. Moderators, or ‘mods’, get high on power, run their little kingdoms and only let ‘real fans’ into their threads when they feel they’re in near or total agreement on their chosen subject. But we’ve never had someone, someone other than me that is, make a private thread about us before. The thread is titled ‘Friday – Black and Grey’. There’s a little thumbnail. I click on it to enlarge it, but the photo is fuzzy – obscured to all but the forum’s members. It kind of looks like a mark. Like a white chalk mark on a stone background.

‘What’s up, nerd?’

Callum traipses up the bank and slops himself down on a towel. He’s not in any way in shape. He sort of looks like someone accidentally inflated a haunted Victorian child. But I study him with great interest, slowly from top to bottom, like a bairn watching racing raindrops on a car windowpane.

I hold up my phone, pointing to the forum. Callum brushes lake water from his brow.

‘Shit. Did you make this?’

I shake my head.

‘It’s got like twenty members. Can you get access?’

I point to the little scrawl underneath it – request pending.

‘Right, right … Well, that’s weird. Gotta say though, I’m a bit …’

He trails off, then calls out across the lake.

‘Mel! Mel, did you tell anyone about the Black and Grey tomorrow?’

Mel belches.

‘Yes, of course, darling!’ She gestures around her. ‘Look at my bustling social circle. I can barely move for all the adoring fans we have …’

Callum turns to me.

‘Did you post it or something?’

I shake my head.

He furrows his brow at my phone, gunking it with stray strands of damp grass. He tosses it back to me, suddenly, as though someone’s just told him the internet is poisonous to the touch. Which it kind of is.

‘Weird …’ he mutters, to no one.

We traipse back to the caravan, the two of them in deep conversation about one of the Solkats – someone called Bizen. We snuggle up in the afternoon sun in a hive of sleeping bags and cigarette butts out on the lawn, Callum idly noodling on a guitar, Mel gently improvising a melody before falling asleep in my lap.

I don’t tell them about the figure yesterday. About the little white mark they drew on the wall. I don’t tell them about the thumbnail, and the little white mark on stone.

And I don’t know why. But coming back from the lake, I don’t tell them about the caravan door. And the little white mark someone’s etched onto it in our absence.

White lines. On a broken circle.

My gran’s care home is a two-minute walk from the crematorium on the West Road in Newcastle. I try to visit her as often as I can. It’s not a bad place, though ironically – for all its commendable service for dementia patients – it is extremely forgettable. Sometimes at night, I try and picture the corridors I must have walked a thousand times. But I can’t. I can’t even tell you the colour of the carpet.

It’s Friday, so Angie’s on duty and greets me at the reception desk. She’s so old she’s often mistaken for a patient herself, and her hair looks like a forgotten impressionist painting of a popping lightbulb. I find her deeply confrontational.

‘You’ve caught her on a good day,’ she says. ‘She asked for her craft stuff.’

She leads me through the labyrinth of corridors, full of hollow faces and ruminating eyes. I turn a corner and there’s a tiny horse just shitting in a bowl. There’s this company that brings tiny horses into old folks’ homes for therapy. The patients look profoundly unbothered by the whole affair. As does the horse, come to think of it.

There is an itchiness in me, a discomfort of the chest, like my heart has pins and needles and I can’t shake it out. I’m not allowed to film in here. I’ve tried, but they’ve caught me every time and threatened to ban me from visiting. The world is too bright, too wild, too peripheral when I’m not seeing it through a viewfinder. I feel the pins and needles become an almost visible hum, the timpani of my breathing rising in a chaotic crescendo I feel in that moment might not end. I stop in the bathroom on the way to Gran’s room and throw up.

Gran’s room is just like all the other rooms. It almost wobbles your vision, as the beiges and greys of the furniture all shift into a pale blur. Gran is in her chair with a small set of craft supplies and a half-made card that says ‘happy birth’ on it.

‘Christine?’ Angie talks to all the patients with that stentorian cadence all nurses use that’s somewhere between kindness and telling people to fuck off on buses. ‘Al’s here to see you?’

Beside Gran is my mum and a woman called Bahvana Borah, our solicitor. She’s a family friend – her mum and Gran used to be friends until her passing – but these days Bahvana has been somewhat reluctantly helping us sort out Gran’s affairs, lasting power of attorney, that sort of thing.

Gran blinks at me, searching.

‘We’re just finishing up,’ says Mum, leaving a forever-stained-orange Tupperware box on the bedside table. ‘She’s been doing crafts today, haven’t you, Mum?’

Gran still looks at me. Then turns back to her crafting. Bahvana sidles over, leaving Mum by the bed.

‘Good to see you,’ she says. She talks very fast and as though I’m not really there. ‘I’m told Christine is settled in well and we’ve wrapped up most of her last will and testament, which I’ll need to talk you through at some point, and I’ll need a few witness signatures from you once the last of the paperwork is drawn up, not to mention …’

Gran’s humming. She’s listening to an old tape recorder Mum brought in a few weeks ago. It’s playing a recording of the two of us from years ago. Gran’s strumming a guitar in our garage and I’m quietly playing along on a floor tom.

My parents moved Gran into the home just after Christmas, but we’re sure she’s had Alzheimer’s for years. When I was fifteen, I found her in the loft space of her two-bedroom flat in Blyth, rifling through old photos.

‘Who are these people?’ she asked.

I told her they were her. When she was younger.

She looked at the photographs like they were ransom notes. ‘I was never young,’ she said. She had a little cry. Then she burned a picture of her in the fifties, when she was about twenty, working at the Tyne Brand herring factory in North Shields.

‘Are you staying long?’

My mum and Bahvana are by the door. Mum’s eyeing my hands to check I’m not secretly filming anything. I shake my head.

‘Alright. Don’t stay too long, she’s tired. See you at the weekend for dinner?’

I nod. Mum pecks me on the cheek, Bahvana nods conspicuously like we’re covert Cold War spies, and they leave.

Gran looks at me now in the harsh morning light, the wash of it devoid of spectrum, her dark eyes still searching.

‘How are you, Gran?’ I ask.

‘I’m making you a birthday card.’ She angles her head away from me, warily, probably unsure as to who I am yet. It sometimes takes time for her to feel safe with someone in the room, but before long she knows – maybe not who I am, my name, who I am to her – but who I am, at my core. Like names and pasts are trivial, and she’s more interested in moment and feeling. She knows she loves me, she just can’t remember why. It’s nowhere near my birthday.

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Mum’s brought you biscuit cakes. She popped some in a tup for you. So you can keep them fresh.’

‘Okay,’ she says, humming.

Mum got diabetes a while back and now regularly bakes a bunch of cakes in frustration, perfectly ices them, then mashes them to absolute death with a rolling pin and throws them in the garden.

As soon as I can no longer hear Angie, Bahvana and Mum’s voices in the corridor beyond, I immediately whip out a tiny camera, the size of a walnut. It’s the kind sportspeople use when skiing or hiking and I place it on her bedside bookshelf, full of half-thumbed books and pictures of her grandkids. Immediately, my breathing slows, and I wipe sweat from my forehead with my hoodie sleeve.

‘You are not well,’ Gran says without looking.

‘Nah, I’m good,’ I say.

‘You should eat more. You are not well. Mind you don’t eat rice though. Rice will make you sick.’

She thinks I’m one of her kids. All my uncles and aunts have stomachs of steel, but will reel at rice.

‘Thanks, Gran. I will. I’ll eat more.’

There is a pulse of silence, an oscillation of unspoken words that permeates the room. I used to think speaking to people who don’t – or won’t – remember you, renders all manner of connection kind of incomplete or pointless. But I found with Gran it’s become, selfishly, a kind of deliverance. I don’t need therapy or medication or a tiny horse shitting in a bowl to process my thoughts, to feel better, to connect. I have Gran. And I can tell her anything. I can cry or laugh or sit in silence and all of it’s alright.

Because the moments never exist to her. They never become realised. They are, were and will be, until she dies, just radio static.

‘How’s the music?’

I look up from my reverie. Some longwave from the universe has crackled from the ether, some sense from the noise. I lean back, so the camera doesn’t get me in shot.

‘It’s … It’s good. We’re playing a gig tonight. And there’s this new Cycle that Callum’s finished. It’s based on … He writes these—’

‘Whisht.’

I pause. Whisht means ‘shut up’ in northern slang. But, in Callum’s world, Whisht is a Solkat. The Solkat of noise and stains.

I hesitate, unsure if she’s telling me to be quiet. But she looks at me with those dark eyes and nods for me to continue.

‘I … yeah. Yeah, he’s writing about Whisht. He’s … he’s one of the gods, the Solkats. This new song, we … we did a live session of it. Callum’s calling it “The Brassic Woes of Bizen and Whisht” – Bizen’s, er, I think the Solkat of—’

‘Whisht.’

I pause again. I think she’s just trying to remember. I talk to her about the band a lot. A lot of the time it’s just to hear it out loud, to make sense of it. But she hardly ever remembers details. Her hands apply invisible lotion to her forearms.

‘Do … do you wanna see the video?’

I look up the song on one of the forums and show her the live session from the other day. It’s come out alright and I’m proud of the edit. She stares at the phone, confused at first as to what she’s watching, not quite able to figure out if these are new faces or ones she has simply forgotten. She can’t see my face in the video, I’ve made sure to put all the focus on Callum and Mel, but I see her searching and she finds my hands in certain moments and grips my arm with a smile. She air-drums in delight. She used to love my drumming.

After a minute or so I notice something. The uploader name.

All the uploads are mine, my screen name – Solkatal. But this isn’t my upload. Someone’s ripped my video and loaded it up themselves – the name SolkataI sneakily substituting the ‘l’ for a capital ‘I’. The shots are the same, but the mix is different. Some of the vocals and synths sound crudely boosted.

It gets to the part where Cal is improvising some lyrics. I hear them properly now – couldn’t really get anything out of the mix I did last night. I hear his voice quite clearly, and the uploader’s even put subtitles on it.

‘Can’t you hear them, trapped inside,

Bizen howls whilst Whisht he writhes,
unleash us from this flesh and form,
and give to us a world reborn …’

It’s weird. It’s literally the exact same footage, same edit, just with the vocals slightly louder. It hasn’t even got that many views. But someone’s taken the time to load it into some sound editing software and isolate the treble of his voice. I look at his face as he repeats the lines while Mel belts behind him. I notice he’s not opening his eyes. Almost looks like he’s crying.

‘Whisht,’ my Gran says, and hands me back the phone. This time she really is telling it to shut up.

I turn it off and sit next to her, watching her glue letters onto the card, lost in my thoughts. I look at the photos of her around the room, her beaming smile at Lindisfarne, a picture of my long-dead granddad running to her across a beach. One catches my eye – it always does – of her, on her wedding day, hanging precariously from its nail. She played her own wedding reception. Her, with this mad twelve-string guitar almost as big as her, flowers in her hair, four months pregnant with Mum. Her eyes reach into the camera lens, happiness in those little teary eyes, as though knowing one day this day might never come back to her. That it might never be remembered. Please remember this, she seems to plead. Please remember everything.

I hear this little bing as the camera on the bookshelf loses battery. I always charge my batteries overnight in the nest of wires and cables by my mattress. Must be dead or faulty. Immediately, that hand that lives in my sternum begins to grip.

‘I’m tired now.’ Gran rises from her chair glacially and makes her way across the room. There’s a cheap armchair in the corner and I watch her hands press the bed and the walls as she walks to it, feeling her way through a pitch-black room that’s only dark to her.

I’m desperate now to get out, back on the street where I can boot up another camera from my bag, but I linger on Gran as she slinks like slate from a cliff, into her chair, her eyes shut.

Curiously, she speaks.

‘Unleash us from this flesh and form …’ she whispers.

I go to her, urging her silently to keep the memory, to cherish it.

‘And give to us …’

She falls asleep.

It makes me feel deeply macabre but, every time she sleeps, I wait until I hear her breath, in case she’s dead. She bleats out this little snore and hums into the depths. I wonder what sleep must be like without memory, what becomes of dreams without the wildness of thought.

Something falls in the room and I jump. The picture – that wedding day, that guitar, that smile – has fallen from its crooked nail onto the desk. I remount it, seeing that it landed on the card she’s been scrawling. There’s a rushed little scribble on it, as if she’s got frustrated or tired, and she’s written nothing inside. But on the front the words wreathe my eyes in wrinkles.

Happy. Birth. To All.

The picture wobbles on its nail.

3

Fash, Solkat of cold calls and blighted crops

Walking into a pub outside of opening hours is odd. It’s like visiting your old primary school long after you’ve left it, though with more, or less, of a vomit smell – depending on how much money your parents had when you were a child. There’s something chimeric about it. The toilets, the chairs, the stools all look different, but the same, distorted. The chalkboard sits smudged now, like an ancient wall painting, showing things unintelligible, but with some deep mystic meaning that’s been lost to time. The past, as always, losing its fight with the present.

The Black and Grey isn’t a hugely popular pub. A lot of rural north-east drinking holes protest the waning of the world with poker evenings or open-mic nights, vaguely hoping to entice the working man through their doors for fellow feeling and fruit machines. Not this one.

Callum and Mel always drop me off at venues first, then circle round the block. This gives me time to set up a shot for their arrival and get a good establishing wide of the car pulling in, as well as handheld footage of their cavalcade out of the car. I choose a position that captures the whole pub side wall and the evening sun in the distance, behind the cheap mirrored windows of some bleak office building beyond. They arrive in Mel’s grey crumpled paper ball of a car, a large trailer nervously chasing it behind, lurching up the kerb by a closed-down nail salon and trundling to a halt. Even from here I can hear them singing at the top of their lungs.

‘Come hum your dirges, thrum your drums! Tell tales of who we were! For while hissss-tory forgets us, know that he was him and I was her!’

It’s a kind of hype song they love to rattle out before soundcheck (I think it’s called Cowp and Creels – the two trickster Solkats of stubbed toes and fateful meetings), halfway between drinking song and karaoke stalwart. They tumble out of the car, a train of beer cans in their wake, and Mel immediately slinks onto the bonnet, flinging her legs into the air like a piano lounge crooner, daring the camera to pan away. Cal immediately starts unloading.

‘Oh, Al. What a fine day it is to sing at this glorious establishment!’ She mimes a microphone in her hand and fixes her hair, spinning to the camera. ‘We stand, dear viewers, beneath the basket-handle arch of the ancient temple Blackus Greyus. Once a thriving, bustling epicentre of insobriety and iniquity, the crumbling polychrome brickwork, decaying fenestration and intense air of mind-warping tedium bely a wayfarer’s refuge, rife with promise and possibility. Here, the corbels themselves prophesy great—’

We both hear a CHUNK and the bureau rounds the corner of the trailer, Callum’s grunts following closely behind.

‘Get the doors, someone?’

‘Great men will sing of this for years to come, for it is here – dear, dear viewers – in this seemingly unremarkable hovel, that true musical transcendence might breathe new life into— ow!’

Callum has ‘accidentally’ shunted the bureau into Mel’s hips.

She drops the imagined microphone and opens the pub doors.

‘I’m just trying to bring a little Solkat ceremony to our process, dear …’

Cal hides a smirk. Mel pretends to help him with the bureau, one bent arm limply pressing against the wood.

Inside, another band is already mid-soundcheck, some indie outfit called something deeply forgettable but instantly recognisable, like ‘The Rivers’ or ‘The Sepiatones’. Callum always complains about bands that have definite articles like ‘the’ in their names, and insists life would be much more interesting if they replaced it with something indefinite, like ‘a’ or ‘some’. A Clash. Some Beatles. Just, like, a bunch of Doors.

‘Evening, Wez,’ he huffs, skirting the bureau’s wheels over the raised threshold and onto the visibly buckling hardwood floor.

Weston, the gig-night promoter, is by the bar. Everyone calls him ‘Wez’. He does, as far as I can tell, everything – promoter, manager, agent, fixer, drug dealer, therapist, priest. Anyone claiming to be a music manager in the forgotten sock of Morpeth is not really a music manager. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him hocking knock-off sports caps at the Big Market at weekends.

‘Yore on thurd,’ he says, engrossed in the band on stage. I can hear the misspellings in his Geordie accent. The band playing is led by this electric blonde young woman, who seems to think deep-throating the mic at regular intervals might act as a serviceable replacement for vocal talent. ‘And I canit get your weeyud box on stedge.’

He gestures to the bureau.

Wez looks like a damp cigarette. He’s pasty, twitchy, as though in constant withdrawal – though I suspect what he’s withdrawing from might be his youth. He wears pointy shoes that make him look like a trendy, dangerous clown and he never says hello.

‘I’ll make it work,’ Callum grunts, pausing and helping himself to the water jug. ‘Who’s on first?’

‘These guys – ’ Wez gestures, ‘ – The Nicotines. They’re fuckin’. Amezen.’

Callum looks over at the blonde. They are not amazing. I’ve forgotten the song they’re singing and they’re still singing it.

‘Hey.’ Mel nudges Cal, pint of cider and black in tow. ‘Didn’t you date her a while back? She’s got a face like a painter’s radio …’

The blonde looks directly down from the stage and somehow sees us and completely ignores us in the same moment.

‘Yeah,’ Callum sighs. ‘Yeah she, er … She was nice.’

I immediately start setting up my cameras. Wez is used to it, in fact he encourages it. He’s asked me if I’d be willing to film other bands for him for a few quid but I’ve never really had the time. I love this part. Soundchecks have this ethereal, nervous energy about them. It’s calm, considered, but with a frisson of frenetic anticipation – the sort of feeling that might come before smashing a car window with a brick.

I set up three cameras at the back and two at the sides of the room, zip-tying them to bike locks and chaining them to pipes and tables. Some people look at me, but I ignore them. Once they’re all set up, I angle the cameras carefully, taking time to get the framing right, ensuring the drum kit is mostly obscured.

As I’m fiddling, I notice a man in the corner of my eye. He’s blurry but I can see he’s huge and bearded, holding a pool cue. At first it looks like he’s just waiting for his turn to play at the table. But then I feel his eyes on me. He’s watching me and the cameras quite intently, shifting almost imperceptibly in place. Later, when I see the footage online, it’ll take me a moment to work out what he’s doing. He’s figuring out where to stand so he’s not in shot, in any of the shots. He picks a corner that is totally obscured from the camera and sips a pint.

Callum unfolds a ten-foot ramp he nabbed from some failing disability charity and lays it out before the stage, readying to roll the bureau up it and into pride of place. The Nicotines plays on, their perfectly crafted, heartless, indie nonsense about as unique as their haircuts. When suddenly—

‘What. In the ever-loving. FUCK?’

Mel slides from the bar and is now in the centre of the room, amongst the other two bands waiting to play. She’s pointing squarely at The Nicotines’ bassist, a large ginger fella who has, in the last few minutes, tried his darnedest to sink behind the crushed velvet curtains that hug the stage and play from the relative safety of anonymity.

Blonde has dragged him out and, perhaps jokingly, started to make out with him during the guitar solo. He looks incredibly uncomfortable.

‘Harry!’ Mel barks at him, cider slopping onto her dress. ‘Since when do you play for these fucking charlatans?!’

Harry used to play with us. He didn’t say much and spent most of our rehearsals playing some video game on his phone. He was sweet.

The band stops playing. Blonde looks at Harry, then back at Mel, then back at Harry, like they’ve suddenly started playing tennis with an unexploded ordnance.

‘I, er … Well, they asked me to play, Mel,’ says Harry. ‘And you guys, well, you kind of never really—’

‘Stifle your horrisonance, you grave and qualling hag-seed!’ – Mel likes to practise weird insults for moments just as these – ‘You said that you were quitting music! You abandon us, in our hour of need, to play with fucking … Molly Branthom! With her fucking … Creative writing degree and her … fucking … hair!’

‘Mel, come on …’ Callum whispers from the foot of the ramp. ‘He’s just a bassist …’

‘Yeah, Mel,’ Harry mutters. ‘It’s not like you ever actually invited me to rehearsals—’

‘You know what, Harry?’ She lobs a little of her cider at him, breathing his name like a hex on his family. ‘You fuckin’ … eater of broken meats! You … fly-bitten clay-brained goon! You! Are out of the band!’

There is a little pause. Harry looks at Molly Branthom, then back at Mel.

‘Well. I didn’t … I didn’t really know I was in the band, to be honest …’

‘Oh.’

Mel lowers her glass. Her face creases into a smile.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Harry. Well, in that case. Welcome to the band!’

Harry’s face lights up.

‘Really?’

‘NO! Cos you’re … outta the BAND!’

She clomps over the fully assembled ramp and circles back to the bar, yelling more hellish profanities that sound like you might read them off of those ‘famous Shakespearian insult’ mugs your mum thought were ‘fun’. Callum makes his little ‘I’m sorry’ hands he’s so used to making and retreats to his half of stout. I turn my cameras on, one by one.

The bar fills slowly. The usual collection of underage hipsters and loutish skinheads in their stripy tracksuit livery. We didn’t get to soundcheck as it took all of twenty-five minutes and the help of three already tipsy locals to get the bureau onto the stage and fully prepped. Mel is picking a fight with the fruit machine, so I switch to a handheld and potter outside to get some pickups of folks coming in, stray cigarette butts, the nail salon next door.

Callum is sitting on a red-topped bin across the road at the business building, chewing on a roll-up. I know he’s rehearsing lyrics – not that you can really hear lyrics in this dump – but he looks like he’s praying. Occasionally he laughs to himself, and I try and catch some of his little idiosyncrasies down the viewfinder. But, like always, with his almost wolf-like sense of danger, he spots me and nods me over.

‘How was your gran’s earlier?’

I shrug and stand awkwardly next to the bins. He drags on his cigarette.

‘She like the cakes your mum made?’

I nod, feeling my face do that ‘yeah kinda’ expression.

Callum stares at the pub. He’s wearing the exact same clothes as yesterday, doesn’t care about aesthetic or artifice. It freaks people out, sometimes, meeting Callum. He’s distinctly obsessive about the weirdest of things, but with such a disregard for what ‘normal’ folk would call necessity. His towel shirt has grass stains and paint on it. I’m pretty sure he’s not wearing socks.

‘What does the card mean?’ he asks. ‘The card she made for you, you left it at the van.’

I shrug again. I’d meant to put the card in my bag.

‘Happy. Birth. To All. I assume she meant “Al”, right?’

I laugh. His face lights up at the slightest of my vocalisations.

‘It’s weird, the “birth to all”. That’s one of our lyrics. From Skinchies. Before you came along.’

Skinchies is the Solkat of bus stop fights and fear. Their second Cycle, The Betrayal of Skinchies by Marra the Witch, was the reason I started playing with them. It’s really dark and fucked up and frenzied, kind of talks about the end of days and some kind of awakening of the true self. Think Callum was going through some stuff.

‘“Birth to all”,’ he recites, ‘“will only come when scarlet red the rivers run … ” God I hate that Cycle. I mean, who even writes—’

‘Hey, Cal.’

We both turn. Molly Branthom, her blonde hair almost radioactive in the evening light, has an unlit cigarette and a wine glass of ale in hand. Callum automatically searches for his lighter.

‘Hey, Molly … Sound check, er … sounded. Good.’

‘Thanks, yeah. Couple new songs. Wez says he’s got some producers in from Newcastle. Gonna see if they’re keen.’

‘Great,’ says Callum, in such a way as to suggest the word ‘great’ might have etymological roots similar to the word ‘garrote’.

‘You playing new stuff tonight, or … ?’

‘Yeah,’ he finishes his cigarette. ‘Yeah, a new, er, new Cycle. You remember the Cycles? They’re kind of—’

‘I remember.’

‘Yeah, right. So, gonna try some of that.’

‘Which … sol … sol—’

‘Solkat.’

‘Right, which Solkat is it based on?’

‘Whisht.’

‘Cool. Cool.’

Molly looks at me, then at the camera. She’s always been uneasy with it, with me, with Callum. I’ve got loads of footage of her from last year, when she and Callum were hooking up. I liked editing her. If a conversation became too difficult, if she’d run out of thoughts – which was often – she’d always do this croon, a bend of the body, a glimpse of cleavage, a flash of this unbelievably beautiful smile, a whip of hair, a perfect placement of her hand on your chest, your arm, your hand. And suddenly, the embers of dying conversation bloomed with new wind.

‘Well, good luck,’ she sighs. ‘Maybe grab a drink after? Think me and the fellas are gonna stick around for a bit, if you’re—’

‘Aye, sure.’

‘Crackin’. Yeah.’

Her perfume lingers in the air after she’s gone. The acrid alcohol of it makes my head spin. Cal potters inside after a few carefully chosen minutes of distance and I track in after him, framing his silhouette against the doors of the pub like it’s his own personal contrapasso.

Behind me, there’s a figure. Then another. Two of them, in hoodies, watching from the end of the road. One of them chalks a wall. The other starts to walk towards the pub. I don’t look at them, but I can see they’re grabbing something from a bag. I hear the clik-clik-clik of spray paint cans echoing like death rattles on a vacant ward.

‘Laaaaydeez and gen’lemenn! Pleeze wel’cum t’that stedge, the … the, fu’ckin’ …’

Wez trails off. He’s already taller than everyone there, but on the stage he looks like a gigantic spoon-reflection of a man. He looks to his left, to the ‘green room’ which Mel, Callum and I are crushed into, and lowers the mic.

‘What a’yuz called agen?’

‘We don’t have a name,’ Mel whispers.

‘What d’yuz meen, y’don’t have a nem?’

‘We don’t have a name! It’s sort of our thing …’

Wez looks out at the crowd.

‘Well! Wel’cum to the stedge … THIS … fu’ckin’ … band!’

Maybe like three people clap, but Mel walks out like she’s receiving an Oscar. There are gasps and points to the crowd, winks and feigned humility. She does it for fun, each gesture, each gurn drenched in irony. She reaches her mic and wrenches it from the stand, sending it hurling to the floor with a loud crunch, as Callum carefully rounds the bureau and holds his hand up to what looks to be a small, stretched-out coat hanger.

There’s a hush, diamond-like in its brilliance. Then the theremin bursts into life with this piercing, solid screech. His hand is so steady and the note’s clarity resets and rearranges every molecule in the room and invites them all to silence. My diaphragm shoves against my ribs, but I settle in my chair behind the drum kit and wait for his signal. Mel hums into the mic.

The crowd are staring at us, half-derisive, half in morbid fascination. There’s only about fifteen people, but it feels like millions. The note lingers as Mel, eyes closed, sends her hands and arms dancing in the air around her like dandelion wisps. With total control, and a smile so dark and menacing it freezes the folks at the front in statue-like interest, she breathes, half speaks, half sings, like the mad shamanic kraken that she is.

‘Theeey forgot us aaaall … said Whisht …’

I thump the kick drum once.

‘But still our heeeearts will beat.’

I thump the drum again.

‘Our stories will, as time stands still, be lauded, be unleashed …’

Strings. Some bowed double bass, out of nowhere, out of the caverns of the bureau. I wash the ride with mallets and bring sea spray shimmering to the noise.

‘We’ll come, said Whisht, to harken …’

The signal, a slow nod from Cal, as the kick drum begins to follow this throbbing, this grinding metal whirring.

‘As the days are sure to darken …’

Guitar, behind his back, single strums as his hands whip around, pulling at slats, dancing on laptops. A bust-up television from the 1950s plays white noise, transmuted through his devilry into pitched and perfect drones.

‘And in our wake … our fleeesh will break …’

We build, and build, more strumming, and build, more crashing, and build, as breaths become ‘hahs’, become ‘hohs’, become howls. Callum’s hands, like some mad magician, rise so intimately, sending the theremin into angelic, sonic euphoria. At the perfect moment, the tackle of our minds is ripped from its moorings, and we break … A rush of blood in silence only we, together, can choose to fill.

‘And remind you …’ Mel whispers, that snarl of a smile creeping up her cheeks.

She waits. Two figures enter at the back of the room.

‘Of … our bargain …’

We rip into life. Cal is wrenched by ghosts around the long dead wood of the bureau, Mel is puppeteered by things unseen, and I’m lost. I can only watch as my hands and feet follow the blood in the staves of my veins, slashing at the snare, the toms, the crash like enemies. The song cavorts through the words, rising, ebbing, steadying, releasing, ricocheting, Cal’s bureau the ship, Mel’s voice a distant light, and me the hapless skipper surrendering to storm.

I look out. I never usually look out. I stare at the audience, all of whom are looking back in abject shock and strangeness, as though we’ve shown them what really lurks behind their eyes, revealed to them that nothingness resides inside their feckless hearts and minds. The Nicotines are still mid-sip, the other bands equally as fixated.

I hear the words, this time clear, insidious, their fricatives, their voiceless almost glottal howls, as Mel pours paraffin from her mouth into the mic, reaching into her very heart and pulling the artistry from her creaking chest.

‘Can’t you hear them … trapped inside …’

She wobbles, almost passing out, but rights herself with her wine glass. Something’s going on at the back, dancing maybe, moshing, but on we scream.

‘Bizen howls … whilst Whisht … he writhes …’

More shouts, perhaps cheers, hollering, finally, finally, seeing the world like we do, in all its rapture, wreck and ruin.

‘Unleash us from this flessssh and form …’

Someone screams, and I look up, out to the crowd who are turning, turning from us, turning away as though the sound that’s rising is just too much for soul and sweat to bear.

‘And give to us …’

The whole crowd has stepped away from us, running, tumbling, to the back of the room. I see something red.

‘And give to uuus …’

I see blonde. Something blonde, shining, stained, tainted. Around it are two figures. Their faces and the shoulders of their hoodies painted, spray-painted white. Their hands glisten scarlet.

‘And give to uuuuus …’

I stare in horror at the only people facing us, listening, eyes closed in silent revery. With the final crash, and Cal’s terminal words, the screams begin to seep into our reality. People are fleeing, fellas are wielding pool cues, scrambling, as the two, white-marked figures stand, the body of Molly Branthom left idly like an offering at their feet. My hands are numb and I stop playing, staring at the figures and their wild, otherworldly cowls. Cal’s words, the last lyrics unaccompanied by drum or hum, fill the room, bestowing on it, on all of us, some weird and wrenching doom.

‘A world re … reborn …’ he whispers.

Mel hurls me off the stage.

4

Canny, Solkat of betting shops and unheard jokes

After my death, people will look through all the footage I shot. I didn’t load all of it up to the internet, but there’s enough there to fill a museum. I used to start filming the second I woke up. I’d keep the cameras running outside while I went to the bathroom. The first thing I’d hear in the morning was the soft beeping of my camera and it was the last thing I’d hear at night. Loading all of that up online – every moment, every detail of our lives, every boredom, every choice – would have sent me mad.

But with all the online footage, and with the hard drives they nicked from the caravan before the police got hold of them, they had enough. And in the weeks and months that passed, edits of my work would be put together. Crudely, but reverentially. These edits would be loaded up online, people would trade in moments, looks, beats, swapping rare collections of the smallest of glances, of laughter, of tears. They’d become collector’s items – some even paying vast sums of money for the most pivotal moments of our story.

The footage of that night at the Black and Grey, the data cards that is, was sold two years after I died for twenty-three million, eight hundred thousand dollars. It was bought by the UK secretary of a Middle Eastern prince for his art collection. The footage is online, but apparently he holds private viewings of the original videos to the rich and famous once every few months.

For the tens of millions who have watched the upload, they would have witnessed the night it all, at least to us, began.

The footage isn’t great, to be honest. One of the side cameras is obscured by an almost recumbent gentleman who spends most of the gig texting on his phone and talking loudly about the benefits of beard wax for some reason. One of the back cameras slips slowly to the ground, about halfway through The Nicotines’ set, visually representing the deeply eyelid-drooping monotony they assume constitutes music. But there’s one camera that captures everything. And, unlike the human eye that can, if forced or prompted, stray from sights such as these, this camera does not. It stares into the brutality of the night, unblinking, intent on, if not understanding, then at least witnessing what happened. It is this camera that captures most of that night.

It’s very different to my memory. Footage usually is. We arrive on stage, Melusine waves to the crowd. She’s nervous and doesn’t look at all like I thought she did at the time. She pulls the mic, but the new XLR lead catches on the stand and it clatters uncomfortably to the ground. People laugh. She shoots a furtive glance to Callum, who is awkwardly trying to make the theremin work. A ghoulish ‘WHEEEE-EEEOOOOO’ screams out of the PA system, shattering the eardrums of the crowd. Callum frantically strokes a mixing board in his bureau to lower the volume.

The song begins. The drumming is way too loud, you can barely hear anything. You can’t hear any of the strings or synths, maybe some bottom end bass-y stuff, the odd trebly screech, but only because Callum’s back-flung guitar is catching the overhead mics. But we’re definitely in it. We’re into it. As soon as it begins, you see Callum and Mel close their eyes and breathe it. At the time, I saw Mel, with that perfect, imperfect voice, descending into a kind of liminal retreat, dancing in the in-between of sleep and wake. But down the lens, it just looks really awkward and performative and melodramatic. It kind of makes me wince.

They’d been there for a while, the figures. At first you only see the back of them, then they’re obscured for a minute as Molly Branthom, Harry and the rest of The Nicotines gather round the table in front of the camera with some post-performance pints. The camera’s sound isn’t the main feed I rely on to record our gig – that’s on my laptop, carefully engineered close to the stage – so it catches more of their conversation than the music. One guy with straightened hair rips the piss out of us with abandon.

‘Christ, here we go. How do they even get gigs? It’s like a sad child got drunk and wrote the Lord of the Rings soundtrack …’

‘I know, right? And they’re so …’ Their drummer, a hipster woman whose hair I’ve never seen because she’s always wearing a hat, flumps into the booth with their drinks.

‘Weird. Are they, like … you know? Fucking? Is this a sex thing?’

‘They’re not fucking.’ Molly Branthom has sat down next to them. She’s the last to join and behind her the figures are watching the performance.

This is our first close look of them. Their clothes are dark, and you can tell one of them’s a woman. They’ve emptied maybe three or four cans of white spray paint on the top half of their hoodies, a hazy, ghostly, horizontal line traipses across the clavicle, round the back across their shoulder blades, and the white ascends into their hood and faces. In the gloom of the pub they look like distorted chess pieces, aimlessly bobbing in the dark. But one turns as Molly sits. And you see there’s some kind of, I dunno, something on their faces. Sort of looks like papier-mâché. No wonder they look like their eyes are closed. You can’t see their faces at all.

Mel lets out a comically orgasmic noise halfway through a chorus and has already begun visibly glistening with sweat. The Nicotines turn back to one another.

‘You suuure this isn’t a sex thing? Because she looks like she’s having a whale of a time up there.’

‘I can promise you, it’s not.’ Molly’s eyes are down, discovering whole galaxies in the bubbles of her gin and tonic.

‘Yeah, but how can you be sure?’ says Hatster. ‘I mean, look at them. I’m pretty sure they just do this to get all hyped up and horny on their weird music, then do fucked-up sex stuff in the woods and turn into goats or something. They’re definitely—’

‘They’re not fucking,’ says Molly. ‘Callum doesn’t …’

Molly looks up, suddenly aware of something. The figures have turned sharply and are looking at her.

‘Can we … help you?’ asks Harry, nervously, in the way that all large but ultimately timid men do. The figures just stare at them.

The gang turn back, ignoring them, Straight Hair rabbiting on. ‘What’s the deal with their lyrics? Aren’t they a bit … you know. Brillig and slithy toves?’

Molly uncomfortably continues, clearly acutely aware the figures haven’t moved.

‘Callum makes this mythology,’ she says. ‘It’s all to do with these … these gods and creation myths. He believes that these gods are, like, here, I guess? Hiding somewhere. Some of the songs say they’re inside people, like … trapped, sorta. And the only way to let them out is to …’ She sips her drink. ‘Well … die.’

The gang let out a chorus of laughter.

‘So, hang on hang on hang on.’ Hatster’s first two pints are working quickly. ‘Callum doesn’t have sex. And he thinks he’s god.’

‘No, that’s not what I meant—’

‘I mean, WOW. That! That is a dating profile. Swipe right, sign me up, I’m IN. I wanna hang out with a god who is physically repulsed by blowjobs, it’d be the chillest relationship ever! Like having a … Well, basically it would be like having a cat.’

‘Guys, come on, he was nice. He’s just different to other—’

And that’s when it happens.

Out of nowhere, the figure closest to her, the taller one, possibly male, slams her head down on the table. It’s almost balletic in its efficacy, in the ease with which he manipulates the bones in the back of her neck, cradles them in his palm, then forces her face into her own glass. It shatters. Her head comes up and her nose is broken; a tiny shard peeks out of her bottom lip.

For a moment, everyone just looks at her. Then the figure does it again. And again. Three times, just wrenches her head down on to the table. You can hear screams. A couple of the lads stand and go for them, but suddenly relent at the sight of something in the figures’ hands – knives, I think. There’s a sound, like a paper jam, as Molly crumples to the floor in shock. Then the figures move, quickly, efficiently, around the room, out of shot.

There’s a blur and for the briefest of moments the giant, bearded, out-of-focus man dashes forward, trying to get to the figures but is stymied by the crowd. There’s chaos and noise and screaming. The figures return to the camera amidst it all, calmly.

One of them picks it up, looks intensely into it, eyelessly, the mottled white waste of their facemask tilting slightly, almost curiously, at the lens. You hear a female voice, beneath the wads of damp.

‘Release …’ she says, in the same reverential evenness with which my gran would say ‘amen’ in Church. Then the camera turns off.

It was a bit of a blur what happened after. I remember Callum furiously hurling his bureau down the ramp as people ran and gawped at the scene. People flooded to the spot, desperately delivering drunken CPR to a semi-conscious Molly Branthom, who vainly tried to palm them off, blind with blood. Some of the larger patrons rallied and chased the fleeing, white-hooded figures from the pub. I gathered my cameras, snipping the zip-ties and hurling them unceremoniously into a plastic shopping bag. The trailer, the car. Wez’s voice on the mic echoing into the street, calling for people to leave the building calmly, while the world did anything but.

Callum drove, his grip knuckle-white on the wheel. Mel was ecstatic. She howled out the window and laughed her mad hag-cackle into the night.

‘Did you see?’ she asked, arriving into the safety of the caravan, pacing the twenty feet of it like an untethered dog. ‘Did you see them though? Fans! I bet they were fans! Or … or fucked up little junkies into our music! Or maybe it was art! Maybe it was just a weird art piece by some students or something! Iconoclasts! Dissidents! It’s the Byzantine destruction! The Somnath temple, stormed to release stolen idols, stolen gods! Damnatio Memoriae! Fucking Banksy shit!’

With a soft tsssk, a can of lager wheezed into life, a life swiftly snuffed as Mel downed half of it with ease. Callum was quiet. I booted up the cameras to watch the footage.

‘Cal, don’t you see what this means?’

‘It means nothing. It’s a bunch of kids picking a fight with a helpless young woman. It’s not art.’

‘But maybe it is! Maybe it’s not about Molly at all, maybe it was something more. You saw that spray-paint shit! They put that on before the gig. Before anything had happened, before we even started playing! It was premeditated. They chose to split that bitch’s nose during our song—’

‘She’s not a bitch.’

Callum said that so quietly and in pain, as though a magnet had pulled embedded shrapnel from a long-forgotten wound. Mel froze and sipped her lager.

‘Was … she alright? She wasn’t, like, dead or anything?’

‘No. Think she was conscious when we left.’

‘Good. Good.’

Mel sat down on the tiny kitchen sink next to Callum, who was leaning against it, eyes closed.

‘Hey …’ she said, resting her hand close to his. Callum doesn’t like to be touched, she knows not to touch him unless he asks. ‘Whatever it was, it wasn’t our fault. Like you said, just a bunch of kids. Could have happened to anyone in there. It’s not our fault …’

Callum looked at her.

‘But like you said. The paint.’

‘Sure, they’d planned it, planned to hurt someone. But it was just random. They probably picked on the weakest-looking person there. They’re just cowards, Cal. Fucking cowards. And Molly’s fine. You’re totally right, it’s probably got absolutely nothing to do with us …’

They kept talking, soothing one another, trying to make sense of it all. I was watching them so closely I didn’t notice it at first. But then I checked the first camera. I checked another, the same. Then another, and another. I scrambled around in the plastic bag, desperately searching, panicking.

‘Al?’

I held up one of the cameras, a little flap on the side of it with a soft rubber toggle, wobbling in the air. I pointed to the others. Mel hopped down, concerned.

‘What? What is it?’

Callum looked over her shoulder, then into my eyes. He saw the fine viscous lining rising on my eyelids, felt my heart beat in his chest as though it were his. And for the first time since I’ve known him, he hugged me. Actually hugged me. His arms wrapped around me, sturdy brackets of oak bark that wedged me back into the room and held me in place.

‘They took the data cards,’ he said.

‘Fuck …’

A breathless pause, broken only by another tsssk-clack from Mel.

The next morning, a single thump on the door of the caravan wakes me. My fingers automatically start a camera up. Mel is still passed out, curled around the banquette, a half-empty beer can making a desperate attempt to leap from her sleeping hand and join its empty brethren on the floor. The toilet door opens and Callum, still sitting on the floor surrounded by writing books, looks at me, then across to the front door warily. He mouths the words ‘expecting someone?’ I shake my head and turn a second camera on.

‘Hello? Is anyone home?’

The voice outside sounds weary. You can almost hear that it’s spoken from beneath a beard.

‘My name is Detective Inspector Wharton. I’m looking for Callum Jannik. I’d like to ask you a few questions about last night.’

Callum stands up precariously in the narrow booth of the caravan bathroom, wobbling slightly on legs aching with atrophy.

‘Just a second!’

He violently widens his eyes and nods to Mel. I run to her, shake her lightly, then hurl myself around the room, Callum in tow. We’re not druggies. We don’t do meth or crack or anything. But there’s got to be at least a small apothecary’s worth of weed kicking about, and I start scooping and discarding any I can find into cupboards and books. Mel stirs, blinking.

‘The fuck you doing?’

‘Mr Jannik?’ – From beyond.

‘Coming!’

Mel rises and passes through the mayhem, unperturbed.

She starts ringing odd cans of lager like hand bells to hear the sloshing clapper inside, finds one half-full and necks a few mouthfuls.

Callum opens the door carefully, a jet of grey light piercing Mel in the face so suddenly she promptly tumbles over a chair backwards and disappears with an ardent, ‘Fu-UCK-in’ell …’

‘Yeah? Yeah, I’m … I’m Callum Jannik. Ho-how can I help you?’

Wharton is a behemoth of a man. His clear-framed glasses hug his angular, bristly face. He’s the kind of embattled figure you imagine habitually presses his thumb and middle finger against his closed eyes in exasperation at the utter calamity of the world. The black of his officer’s uniform draws in the grey from the dawn morning light, and a fierce, unfriendly nimbus of white adorns his shoulders and grey-blonde hair. I don’t know much about police, but I didn’t think Detective Inspectors wore uniforms.

‘Yes, Callum, good morning. I’d like to ask you a few questions about the events that transpired at the Black and Grey pub in Morpeth yesterday evening between seven and nine o’clock. You were in attendance?’

‘We were playing, we’re in a band.’

Wharton inches his eyes through the door crack, spying the splayed legs of Melusine, dancing in the air behind the chair. He looks directly at me.

‘Is … now a good time?’ he asks, turning back to Callum.

‘Er, yeah. Yeah, now is fine. Do you mind if we …’ He gestures outside.

‘Not at all, I’ll give you a minute.’

We inch into the morning light, the damp grass beneath our tiptoeing feet doing little to settle the precarious equilibrium we woke with. We linger by the door as Wharton returns from a brief inspection of the caravan. We give him our details and statements and he writes them down.

I’ve never met a police officer. Everything I’ve known about them is from episodes of nineties police shows my gran recorded onto VHS tapes years ago. Wharton doesn’t stand like a police officer. Doesn’t really look like a police officer. He moves with errant twitchiness, like a bird looking for openings in crumbling edifices, hoping to find silent respite from coming rain.

‘So you were playing? Are there any other members of the band?’

‘No. Just us,’ says Callum.

Mel bleats. ‘We used to have a bassist, but then the fucker fled to fuck about with feckless hacks who wouldn’t know music if—’

‘And you didn’t see anything while you were performing?’

We all shake our heads.

‘To be honest, we were kind of … into it.’ Callum winces, silently apologising for his own phrasing. ‘We heard some screams after our opening number, stopped playing as soon as we saw what had happened. We got out of there pretty sharpish.’

‘You didn’t want to stay and wait for the police?’

‘Well, the … the people, the people who did it, they were still there. And we didn’t want to stick around.’

‘I see. So you left as quickly as possible.’

‘Yes.’

‘And yet you had time to pack up your equipment?’

I eye his cracked lips. His incisors are a different colour from the rest of his teeth.

‘What do you play?’ he continues.

‘Oh, Callum plays everything. It’s all in there.’ Mel gestures to the trailer, leaning curiously into the conversation on a small upset root of a tree. ‘He packs it into the bureau. There’s instruments you’ve never heard of in that clapped-out thing—’

‘So, to be clear,’ continues Wharton, ‘you left as quickly as you could, with … all of that.’

Callum does his hand-flame thing. When he speaks his voice is strangled, as if the shame of his actions has congealed like wax in his throat.

‘I … I wasn’t really thinking, if I’m honest.’

‘Right. So you packed up.’

Mel takes over. ‘Yeah, grabbed our mics, Cal’s instruments, the cameras, all of it, then came back here. We’ve been here all night, you can ask the residents, we arrived at around—’

‘Cameras?’

The two of them slowly look at me, Wharton’s gaze following and landing on my shaking hands, the tiny hand-cam I’ve been trying to keep hidden blinking back at him curiously. There aren’t laws against filming police, I’ve checked. But I think most of them wish there were, and people online have written diatribes about mistreatment by recalcitrant officers, mostly in America. I think of this and don’t withdraw the camera, warily watching for his reaction. There is none.

‘You frequently film people at seven in the morning?’

‘Al films everything,’ says Mel, mid-roll of a cigarette. ‘It’s within our rights to.’

‘You film everything?’ Wharton has shifted his tone from stern to avuncular with one twitch of a smile beneath the sandy hair of his beard. ‘Must be nice. Helps you remember the good times when times are bad, I imagine?’

I nod without meaning to, disarmed of my defiance with one deft scratch of his moustache.

‘I’m afraid I’m going to need to see the footage.’

‘That’s the thing,’ Callum says. ‘We checked last night and the data cards are gone. Someone must have taken them last night, during the … the attack. If we’d had anything, we’d obviously have surrendered it to the police as soon as we could. But there’s nothing.’

I can feel the camera vibrating in my hands with the cold.

Wharton takes this in.

‘Do you know what obstruction of justice is, Mr Jannik?’

‘Yes, yes sir, we all do—’

‘And if I feel that you are not being fully cooperative with the authorities, I will have no choice but to search your residence myself. Which’ – he sniffs the air, unsubtly – ‘I’m not sure you’d like me to do.’

‘No, honestly, there’s no need to …’ Callum dives back into the caravan, retrieving the bag of cameras, talking all the while, ‘… to do any of that, please, take a look yourself. These are all the cameras we used yesterday, there’s not a single data card in any of them. We’ve no idea who took them. It’s like three hundred, four hundred quid’s worth of cards they nicked.’

He hands the bag to Wharton.

‘We checked all of them, you can see for yourself.’

Wharton digs around in the bag but clearly believes us and doesn’t linger on it.

‘Alright. The contact details you’ve given me, I can reach you on this?’ He holds out his pad. I notice he hasn’t written anything down other than my number. ‘And … and you and Miss, er, Hajna here, you don’t have mobile phones?’

Mel baulks. I hear the internet’s half-remembered mysteries pour out her mouth.

‘Did you know Five Eyes has a backdoor into every major phone company? They have access to—’

‘Five Eyes?’

‘The alliance of the five major Anglophone governments in the world. Through the Echelon surveillance network, which the US government refuses to admit even exists by the way, they can—’

Wharton definitively broadcasts his complete disinterest with a raise of his hand.

‘I’ll call you, then,’ he says, looking at me. ‘I may need to follow up on this. In the meantime, I suggest you avoid any more music concerts for the time being. There’s a chance the attackers may be targeting low-security public venues, and it would be in your best interests to avoid any confrontation and call the police if you notice any suspicious activity. Thank you for your time—’

‘You mean,’ Callum steps forward, ‘you haven’t caught them?’

Wharton pockets his notepad.

‘The investigation is still ongoing at this time.’

‘And is Molly Branthom alright?’

‘I am unable to give details on Ms Branthom’s condition, but suffice to stay, she is stable.’

‘Well, what the fuck?’ Mel throws her cigarette down like a gauntlet. ‘It was only two guys! What the fuck have you been doing? They were fucking daubed in white paint, fucking smashing glasses, attacking folks! There was a whole PUB of witnesses, you mean to say you haven’t even arrested anyone?’

‘The investigation, Ms Hajna,’ he reiterates, ‘is still. Ongoing. Please contact your local police department if you remember any further details. Have a good … A good …’

But Wharton trails off.

Later, as I review this footage, I will pause here. I’ll skip forward five seconds, then back, then forward, confused. If it weren’t for the slight autumn breeze idly knotting the grey sea holly wisps of his hair, I’d have thought the clip was frozen, buffering. But Wharton simply stares, directly over my head at the caravan, unmoving. I didn’t see it at the time, but looking through it all on my laptop, his brow, scored with furrows, cracks a little in thought.

‘Thank you, again,’ he says. I see his fingers inch to his notepad pocket. ‘Take care.’

He turns and wanders through the caravan park. Callum and Melusine watch, then Mel looks directly down the lens, tossing her hair dramatically, flicking her dying yellow lighter at the now distant Wharton.

‘And he didn’t even buy me breakfast! What a cheap fuck he was. What on earth is he even doing with his day, should have the fuckers staying at His Majesty’s pleasure, not threatening us innocent bystanders with search and seizure! I mean …’

She flings the door open like a stage curtain and they both wander back into the holiday home. I wait to watch them go, hearing Mel’s inky profanities puncture the brittle hues of the early autumn morning. The camera lingers on the doorframe, then on the door as it idles shut. I track in slowly, following the invisible route Wharton’s eyes took to the mark etched into the top corner of the frame.

Lines on a broken circle. It might be the morning light, might be my imagination, but the chalk looks fresher than it did yesterday.

5

Marra, the Companion, holder of hands and pints

‘Yuz’ve gone fu’ckin’ VIRAL you toh’ul fuckin’ whack-jobs!’

Wez bangs on the table, sending chunks of monkfish stratospheric along the veranda. We’re in Riley’s Fish Shack, an upscale fish-and-chip place on the beach of King Edward’s Bay. We didn’t hear from him for days after the gig, but he texted this morning offering to take us to lunch. He’s never taken us to lunch. In fact, I’m pretty sure Wez didn’t know all our names before today.

‘Honestlee, have yuz seen this? It’s got like ten thowsand views in three dez! The fu’ckin’ Chronicle’s done a piece on it! Wiv got t’capitalise …’

He’s dressed in his customary suit of solemn neon, his pointy clown shoes and thick silver rings on fingers so bloated I’m sure they’d require a Stanley wrench to remove. He whips out his phone and presses play on a video, abandoning his fork, bedding his hands in his fish and walloping it at his mouth.

Mel and Callum lean in. We’ve already seen the video. It was loaded up on Sunday night, cleanly cut together, by someone called ‘WhishtWhistler1’. The white-faced figures stole the data cards, the footage, but not my laptop, which I keep on stage, so the sound quality is awful. We look really amateurish. Callum turns away when it gets to the violence, looking out over the beach and studying two kids having donkey rides along the damp and littered sands.

‘Ten thousand?’ Mel asks. She knows it’s ten thousand, but is thoroughly enjoying saying it. ‘Is that, like, a lot?’

‘In three dez it is! Peepul are leevin’ comments and links and phortors, half o’thum up in arms, half o’thum there for the craic. I meen, reeally it’s more than ten thowsand, like. The videor’s been teken down like ten times, but the uplorder just bangs up a new link, so it’s prolly more like three or four times that!’

Wez is very much seeing this as his own personal calling, a spiritual revelation from the higher power he has so often betrayed with years of drinking and hurling beer cans at trains. He’s waited for one of ‘his acts’ to make the big time, so he can assuage his desire for vicarious success without any hard work whatsoever. He knows that, in order to not do any work, you have to work very, very hard, very briefly, at very, very specific moments.

‘Av lined up gigs all round the north-east. Everyone’s said yes. They all want a piece of “that band that’s started a CULT”. It’s massive. All the big ones, all the happenin’ plehsis – Durham, Northallerton, fu’ckin’ – Thirsk! We’re gannin’ on tour, lads! We’re gonna ride this bastard ’til he bleeds t’deth!’

Callum turns back.

‘We’re not playing any more gigs.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah, what?’

Mel gawps at him, rending an oyster shell apart with her fingers.

‘What do you mean, no more gigs? Darling, this is it. This is our chance! What we’ve been working for, all those hours and hours writing and creating and painting, and now people want to see us. They want to see your work!’

‘The police officer said don’t gig. So we’re not going to gig.’

‘Hang about!’ It’s midday but Wez’s breath is acetous with morning beer. ‘Of corse Officer Fuckface is gonna seh that, he’s got t’cover his tracks! It’s all, like, inshoreance and that. Doesn’t wanna be seen incitin’ violence before he catches the weirdors, ya kna? Don’t peh him nor mind …’

‘Yeah, Cal. Come on. Cheesy chips …’

Mel and Callum have this thing where, if one of them disagrees on something, like a lyric, a chord progression or that one time they broke into a disused water park in North Shields to get high on the slides, they have to buy the other one cheesy chips. Callum doesn’t even eat cheese, but it’s become a byword for honour. Honour and trust.

‘People will get hurt if we play.’

‘Nor they worn’t!’ Wez is jumping octaves. ‘Think about it. Them fellas who decked yor lass, right? They’re not gonna turn up at your next gig. Or ennie of your gigs! They’ll knor peepul will be, like, expectin’ them, lookin’ forum. They’d be daft to set foot in the plays. Honestly, you’re prolly safer pleyin’ gigs than owt else. I’ll get security, Cal. I’ll hiyah some security at each venue, sling some pals a few bob and you and everyone there will be rite as reign …’

I can hear the misspellings in his speech again. It’s like listening to Chaucer on audiobook. We all know his ‘pals’ will just be this guy Wez knows called Townsend who we’re all pretty sure is simple in the head. Mel swears she saw him accidentally superglue his hand to a dog once.

Callum looks calm, but his leg is bouncing underneath the table. Mel’s voice changes. It’s softer, caring. It might be her real voice, it’s hard to tell.

‘One gig,’ she says. ‘We do one gig. Then if we don’t like it, we can stop. Earn enough money to make the next Cycle, in a proper studio! No one’s going to get hurt, no one’s gonna do anything they don’t want to do. Let’s just … listen to Marra. What is Marra telling you?’

Marra’s the Solkat of backseats on buses. The companion. The holder of hands and pints. As she says this, I sort of imagine her, Marra the Solkat. She’s idly braiding seaweed into her hair in the distance, an enormous cavity in her chest stuffed full with still-pumping hearts.

Callum breathes. I catch him looking at me, not the camera I’ve plonked by the salt and pepper shakers. He sends little signals, his blinks so carefully choreographed I’m convinced he’s sending me messages in Morse. I wish I spoke his language. Perhaps I could tell him to run.

‘When’s this next gig then?’ he asks.

I change the camera battery in ten seconds flat.

We pack our bags pretty quickly. Mel throws her clothes and make-up into plastic shopping bags and totes, packing for every whim and mood that might strike her capricious soul. Callum stuffs bin bags around the bureau to stop the thing rolling around in transit. I return from my gran’s flat with all the cameras I own, fourteen in total, and as many data cards as I can find. I spend twenty minutes experimenting with adhesives and solvents I bought at a hardware shop, seeing if I can glue the memory card slots shut and safely dissolve the glue without damaging the sims.

I saw my gran that afternoon. A text landed from my mum saying she’d been lucid that morning and that I should pop by to say hi. Mum thinks I’m sharing a flat with Callum and Mel in town. She never comes by Gran’s old flat.

‘My band’s latest video got loads of hits,’ I said to her, after sharing a bowl of Angel Delight that might have very well made a serviceable substitute for bathroom sealant, ‘and … and Weston our – well he’s kind of our manager – he’s sorting this little tour out for us. We’re playing tonight in this pub over in Hexham. The Grapes, do you know it? It’s right between the abbey and the Old Gaol?’

Gran nodded, but didn’t look at me. She brought her hands together, fingers in, and wiggled her thumbs, asking for my phone. I got it out.

‘Show me,’ she said, smiling.

‘It’s … it’s maybe not something you want to see, Gran. It’s … There was this fight and this girl got hurt. It’s not—’

‘Show me,’ she said, smiling.

I searched for the video. Even the one Wez showed us that morning had been taken down, but others, hydra-like, had sprouted, all posted by names like ‘marraman’ and ‘skinchbitch’, all the same video. Gran watched, unfazed at the violence, humming along with the song. She breathed it, sang quietly along with it, her puckered fingers plucking at some invisible instrument in the air, a face of odd fondness beaming at the blue phone light.

‘You used to play in the garage,’ she said softly after the video had ended.

‘Aye,’ I said, ‘yeah I did.’

‘I brought you fish finger sandwiches when you were practising. I loved watching you play.’

I smiled, remembering it too.

‘It’s probably why you’re half-deaf now,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘I said it’s probably why you’re half—’

Her face beamed back, that cheeky smile.

‘Good luck tonight,’ she said, pressing play on the phone again. ‘Bring water.’

I left her my phone – I’ve bought a new one, and it keeps her very calm. The wedding picture fell off the wall again.

I stayed in the bathroom of the retirement home for twenty minutes after I left her, looking through the forums and threads. There were loads of them now, maybe thirty or forty, all of them the usual weird internet natter entitled things like ‘random English band starts cult – where do I sign UPPP?’. I looked at the upvotes and comments, trying to tabulate it all, determine really how many new people – new fans – were listening to our stuff and how many were just taking the piss. I checked our data on the streaming services, checked old, posted videos. Everything’s gone up by at least a thousand.

I looked at the closed thread, the one that used to be titled ‘Black and Grey – Friday’. Its numbers had increased ten-fold. Four hundred members. Still my request was pending and I wasn’t allowed in. But the thumbnail had changed. Same blurry white mark on stone, but different. Sort of like a traffic cone, or an odd windmill.

It was now titled ‘The Grapes – tonight’. I looked around, trying to find out how they knew about the gig we’d only just agreed to. Maybe Weston’s got an account on there, maybe the pub’s already publicising it on their website. I don’t know why, but it felt like some ghostly force was tickling the soft parting of my lips. The strangest smile appeared on my face.

There’s no need for it, but Wez has booked us a hotel in Haltwhistle, a town outside Hexham. I think he thinks it’s rock and roll, but when we arrive at the Centre of Britain, it becomes apparent he’s searched ‘cheapest hotels and/or possible places you might get murdered’ and booked the first search result. The elderly locals like to breakfast there apparently, and it stands in the forgotten town aggressively bestrewing its quaintness like cannon fire. A woman tells me clans of Border reivers, centuries ago, neither allied with England nor Scotland, but wild and lawless, would appear from the mists beyond the crumbling Hadrian’s Wall to pillage and plunder this place. Now they sell bowls of muesli for £12.50. The hotel owners, that is. Not the murderous clansmen.

In the harsh afternoon light I film the bricked-up edifice, behind which is an ancient, secret reivers escape tunnel, according to the sign, and wait for Mel and Callum to come back round the block. Mel’s car wheezes to the kerb by the army supply store next door and narrowly avoids a can-chasing old woman in mismatched shoes. Mel falls out of it (‘fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuuuck …’) and hobbles into the hotel, hands between her legs. She’s wearing a patchwork jumpsuit of pinks and greens and has already newly dyed her hair. I think it’s supposed to look punk, but the dye’s so cheap and washy it just looks like someone’s weakly yelled the word ‘purple’ at her from a nearby room.

I look for chalk marks on walls. Nothing. Callum catches me studying the architecture and joins me, two hapless tourists gaping at gallery pieces they’ve been told are seminal.

‘We need to think about set list,’ he says after a while.

I nod, then pull out my phone. I’ve bookmarked a page – a thread entitled ‘ideal set lists’ – some new fans have made. They’re all discussing their favourite songs, order of play, encores. Callum averts his eyes, as though the screen’s too bright. Then looks back. In the links to the right there’s another thread. ‘Need help with timeline of events – Halcyon Cycle’. It has a hundred comments on it.

Once Mel’s relieved herself in the foyer bathroom, we convene in our room. There are two beds, one of which Mel has already claimed, basking in the unbridled euphoria of relief with a little wiggle of her legs. I’ve got time to set up three cameras in this bleak, pastel place and Callum screeches a table to the centre of the room, thumping a small trunk onto it, sending a well-placed hotel pen flipping into the air.

‘I need you to tell me what they’re saying,’ he says, without looking up.

He opens the trunk. I know what’s inside – books and scraps of lyrics, scribbles of art, string and a large, folded bed sheet the size of a wall. This is ‘the map’, the one from the caravan; a condensed, precise visual representation of their overlapping mythology. On it is scribbled and scratched summations of every song, every lyric, timelines, overlapping histories. Words like ‘The Fall of Halcyon’, ‘The Undoing of Skinchies the Luckmonger’, ‘Cowp’s Light and Creel’s Clerestory’. Some of it is written in a language he made up, accompanied by Mel’s little sketches. He casually removes a large esoteric painting of block red from the wall and, with great effort, mounts the map, stapling its edges into the 500-year-old oak beams above him. It takes up the whole wall, and skirts round onto the next. He begins expertly, almost blindly, stapling yarn of different colours, running from one side of it to the other, connecting stories, linking characters, desperate in his efforts to make sense of his sense.

‘Could you … ?’

He gestures and I get my phone out, load up the forums and threads and retrieve a crumpled wodge of printer paper I’ve made notes on from my bag. There are more forum threads than this morning and I start updating my notes, spreading them on the table. Callum stares at the wall, then at my scrawl, like a detective looking for clues in blood.

‘They seem super into Whisht on this one,’ says Mel, whipping the phone out of my hand and scrolling. Inexplicably, she has a glass of rosé in her hand. The bar downstairs isn’t even open.

‘Look, and there’s like twelve threads dedicated to Hadaway,’ she continues. ‘They’ve made the link from ‘Sacking’ to ‘Wayfarer’, worked out it’s two sides of the same event. Don’t think they’ve realised it’s palindromic. And …’

She rises, slapping her hand on a dark black smudge on the map under which is written ‘Bizen’s Release’.

‘Here in the timeline is where the entrapment happened, right? I mean, they’ve worked out the release happens, Marra tries to get out but biffs it … They just don’t know when. They can’t know, we haven’t played those songs yet. Though didn’t you write—’

‘It’s coded. All of ‘Halcyon’. Every second line, every second word. I’d be surprised if they find that.’

Mel sips her wine.

‘Cal. It’s the internet. They’ve got all of time and no friends.’

Callum moves some string around. They talk so fast and in such coded verbiage, I understand about a third of it. They sound like academics. And they are, I suppose. At once archivists and catalysts of shared, imagined history. I’ve been playing with them for so long now and there are moments I can get. I’ve listened to the lyrics a thousand times. It’s the only music I listen to. Everything else is emotionless radio static that assumes sex and love are the sole summations of human endeavour. But even after a thousand listens, it’s in conversations like this I realise I’ve understood about a tenth of the hidden meanings in these songs.

‘Here.’ Callum pulls out a pen, circles a large title, their fourth Cycle, called The Motherless Ones. There are seven Cycles, eight if you include the new stuff. The fourth is the closest they get to ballads and crooning, though with all kinds of weird throbbing synth that feels totally incongruous. ‘If we want to give some clarity on some of the timeline, we should start with Motherless. Do at least the first triptych in that. It’ll introduce Canny and Fash, which they’ll need if they want to understand ‘Halcyon’ properly – realise Marra’s the unreliable narrator in that. Plus we’ve not released live versions of that online, right Al?’

I nod.

‘Yeah, alright. So we do …’

Mel has started scribbling the set list down on her arm. I see the titles of the triptych. ‘Canny Compass’, ‘The Witches of the Wailing Wold’ and ‘Cartographer’.

‘And then, what? Something big, get them on their feet?’

‘L’Orage?’

‘I can’t sing ‘L’Orage’ after ‘Cartographer’, I’ll pass out.’

‘‘Sackless and Sand Shoes’, then. I’ll unpack the lap harp.’

Their secret language soothes me and I sit entranced. I wonder if the men and women of Bletchley Park ever felt this contented in confusion and threat. They natter on. Callum was so hesitant about the gig at lunch. But Mel has expertly wound him up and now he’s excitedly bouncing ideas around the room, fuelled by the idea people might finally want to understand the work after all. After a few minutes my phone pings and I read a text from Wez.

Got Boz to set up livestream. Post links?

Boz is Weston’s mysterious ‘PR’ guy. None of us have met him. Callum has a sneaking suspicion he might be Weston’s sixteen-year-old son who explains technology to him down the phone. He sends me the link, which I click to find a big ‘Livestream Has Not Started Yet’ and a waiting room for the audience. The gig doesn’t start for another two hours but I enlarge the waiting room window. It has 300 people in it.

I leave Callum and Mel to their symphony of secrets and traipse downstairs to find the Wi-Fi password. No one’s at the desk so I potter outside, kite-flying my phone for signal. Some kids walk past quietly and enter the army supply shop.

With the most fleeting of signal bars, I post the live link to our socials. I write ‘The Grapes 19:30 – exclusive live renditions of The Motherless Ones, Halcyon and many more’. Within minutes it has a hundred likes and I shut my phone. The old lady with the mismatched shoes is sitting on a bench in a small square across the street. It’s so quiet I can hear her phone vibrate from here.

The kids come out of the army supply store with those nondescript white plastic bags corner shops use – that seem to be made up of clingfilm and misplaced hope – the weight of them melting their handles like strings of wax. I do not like making eye contact with people in the street. I feel like my eyes send unwanted invitations to the cosmos and, in my humble inexperience, the cosmos is mostly full of lonely, dangerous people who for some reason want to talk about themselves to me. But I involuntarily look up from my thumbs as the kids veer towards me. One of them looks right at me.

He nods. All of them silent, but with recognition. I look down, back at my thumbs, praying the remnant scum so snugly embedded in their nails might reveal to me some ancient protection. I hear a rattle as they pass and look on after them down the street.

Wisps of white spray paint wring the air.

6

Whisht, Solkat of red wine stains and noise

It’s 11 a.m. in Los Angeles. Kaylee stares at herself in the mirror.

She has small cherubic cheeks and thin lips. Her eyes are so far apart they look like duellists who’ve taken the first few steps from one another on the hill of her brow, wandered too far, then promptly forgotten what they were walking for. She threads her hands through her hair, feels river reeds in drought, her split ends robbed of moisture by months of bleaching and dyeing and death.

She cries for a minute. Then moves to her desk, haunted by an enormous green screen behind it. The lighting rig and ring light change her downcast face, the bulbs smoothing the creases by her nose, the yellow in her teeth, the redness in the whites of her eyes. There’s a row of books to her left, their spines unbroken. Her phone won’t stop vibrating with notifications.

Kaylee earns $50,000 a year from streaming through sponsorship alone, and she knows she’s late for a meeting online. One of her partnerships is with a clothing brand who sends children to work in Uzbek cotton fields at the age of four. She hasn’t even put her make-up on yet.

She glances at the feed on her social media pages. She looks at the likes and the reposts, the interminable rambling of her own speech, peppered with laughs she’s lifted, jokes she stole. In one she’s dressed in cosplay, another reviewing a horror movie from the 1980s, at times muckraking the latest celebrity to accidentally reveal a human flaw. The cavity of the woman she was stares back at her from her camera in the darkness as she scrolls through the videos. She doesn’t even remember making some of them. She reaches for some recognition of the untroubled, frenetic young woman that 300,000 people subscribe to, sees how happy she is, how easy everything can be, and cries again.

She glances at her private messages. One is from a friend – though they’ve never met – another nerdy influencer called Willow. The message simply says:

THIS IS WILD.

She clicks it and imbibes a weird, grainy video of a woman getting her head smashed on a table by dudes in weird hoodies.

The fuck? she types.

I know, rite?? Wiiiild.

What is this?

Some band in England. They’re playing right now, livestream. They’re insane. It’s like some performance art shit. People dressed up and everything.

Another link pops up in her window. She clicks it.

After a minute or so of watching, Kaylee throws her juddering phone across the room. It smashes and the vibrations stop.

Two years after these moments, almost to the day, Kaylee will describe the events of this morning in court. She’ll say she was unwell, which is entirely true. That she was suffering from an acute depressive episode. She will mention us. She will detail how she spent an hour and a half watching a live performance of a band that was playing that very moment in a pub in a place called Hexham in the north of England. She will say, at the prompting of her counsel, that her unstable mental state eventually led her to an attachment for the artists in the band, their religious iconographies and mythologies, that, though unhealthy, was a result of previous, untreated trauma. She will deny the charges of incitement to violence filed against her. Her New York-based lawyers, who cost $1,250 an hour, will argue that the prosecutors have no evidence to suggest that her now twenty-one million followers on social media, and indeed any of the followers of any of the defendants, had the ‘mens rea’ to commit the acts they did.

That they – in common parlance – didn’t think their violence would hurt anyone.

My gran subscribes to this young woman. I showed her how to make an account on this video streaming platform on my old phone and, honestly, it’s ideal for her. Constant short form content, never made to last or be remembered, not to stay with us, but to flow insidiously through us like gutter rain. She said that she found K-Li fascinating.

‘Do you know the phrase “fur coat, no knickers?”’ she asked me once.

I nodded.

‘This one. She’s fur coat, no knickers … and a bomb vest.’

The gig passed by me, through me, in bedimmed euphoric stretches of smoke, a half-lit tapestry of feral tribalism and cheap blue alcohol that smelled like tomorrow morning. I must have rewatched the footage of it twenty times. We arrive to soundcheck an hour before doors open, the stencilled window patterns capturing the evening sun in line-locked prisms and piecing them across the cobblestones of St Mary’s Chare. Maybe fifty people linger in the street, a hundred more packed in front of the bar, all of them weirdly reverent as we make our way to the stage. Some have brought signs with replications of album art, others with Callum’s odd Ogham-like scrawl across posters and T-shirts. At least half of them have abandoned all good taste and daubed themselves in that odd, white spray paint. I spot at least three kids who have clearly only recently clambered into the swamp of pubescence, their parents watching on idly with concern.

Mel passes Townsend, who is seemingly trying to remove invisible gum from his beard with his tongue, and beelines to the bathroom, make-up and dresses bundled in her arms. Above the wash of watchful heads and expectant eyes, a mop of ginger spins nervously. Harry, perhaps in my eyes now a little more mercenary than I’d ever pegged him to be, has come to ‘see if we need a hand setting up’. Callum allows him to hold cables whilst he does all the work.

‘How’s Molly doing?’ he asks, awkwardly avoiding the throng of people by the stage.

‘She’s good, she’s good,’ says Harry. ‘She’s on her way, actually. Said she wanted to, er … show her support. And—’

‘She doesn’t want to look like a victim.’

Callum emerges from the underside of the bureau, jack-to-jack cables hanging from his mouth.

‘Yeah! Yeah, I guess … She’s, erm … she’s a bit conscious of her face. She’s all banged up, her nose has one of them … things on it. But her lip just needed some stitches and, I dunno. I know she wants to get back out there, you know? Show the world she’s made of sterner stuff. But Callum, if I’m honest, I think … I think she actually, like genuinely wants to see the band. Think she’s … you know …’

He gestures to the crowd. Some of the younger folks have their phones out, filming the get-in.

‘Into it.’

Harry sounds as surprised as anyone. Callum frowns.

‘She never used to be …’ he says, and he pulls the stop out on the fifties television, the comforting crackle of static tickling my ears. I angle the stage-camera to the crowd. Beyond the windows, the street is packed with people. Three police officers have arrived and are idling by the door. One of them is blurry behind the glass, his frame hidden by its frosting. He has a salt-and-pepper beard.

To any performer of music there’s a mythical state of being. I don’t think, outside of classical academies perhaps, anyone is particularly pursuant of perfection. The very nature of certain instruments, certain surroundings or acoustics, means the actual word ‘perfection’ is often spoken in hollow tones, ironically, playfully and mockingly. No, what musicians tend to chase is something even more indefinable. A seemingly ceaseless, seraphic emanation of the self, a kind of flow, through collective creation. I will later look up the right words online and find ‘egregore’. I will make a note to introduce it to Mel, who loves knowing words Callum doesn’t.

That night we found that angelic place. It wasn’t the last time we’d find it. But, to me, it was really special. Important. Mel would probably use the word ‘holy’.

The pub becomes packed with maybe 300 people, more than we’d ever seen in person. The livestream of the gig started with 800 people watching. Over the course of an hour and a half it goes up to 5,000. Callum and Mel waltz like smoke rising above burning fields, effortlessly finishing and beginning, constantly, like the beat of poetic metre.

The set feels so perfect, even if it isn’t. It runs and rushes, then slows and eddies. It is symphonic and controlled, stupid and chaotic, happy, graceful, tired. I watch the crowd, some ironically waving lighters in the air at our slower songs. Callum smiles, even laughs. Mel jokes and cackles and whips us all into mayhem. We wildly traverse the vertiginous heights of ‘Halcyon’, scour the depths of the ‘Cherry Tree Graves’, thunder the stories of Marra the Witch, of Cowp and Creels, of Whisht and Skinchies and Bizen and Hadaway and Canny and Fash, intertwining their loves and deaths, rebirths and betrayals, summoning them before our eyes like spirits around a fire of fabulist strangeness. It was, I imagine, what love is. A relinquishment to moment. An abdication of reality. A complete and mirthful surrender to an unknowable design.

Halfway through the concert I have a drum solo. Mel refers to it as my ‘Caliban moment’, where I shall ‘cry to dream again’, whatever that means. It is the only moment I leave the rapturous ceremony she and Callum have brought before the crowd. I look out and see a figure.

At first, I don’t recognise the face beneath its bruising. But then I see the stitches and the nose brace and recognise Molly Branthom, sheepishly filming me on her phone. She looks out of place; her face has a desperation on it, a feverish self-awareness, a longing to truly be in the crowd she’s in. I imagine Whisht blowing in my ears. His hot breath, like a dog’s, panting at imagined flames, fanning them into fire.

I remember thinking of my garage. Of playing, with Gran, learning to drum, learning to be, to simply be, with another. I remember her smile, even when I was shit.

Ever chasing subversion, Callum chooses to end the set quietly, solemnly, like a vigil. We sing our last song a cappella. It’s called ‘The Summoning of Hoarfrost’ and it’s the only one I sing properly in. I get distracted halfway through it as my eye spots the chalkboard pub menu that’s offering things called ‘rumbledethumps’ and other old timey names for STDs. Mel has her cheap yellow lighter in hand and is lighting candles and handing them out to the crowd.

‘If ever you are lost,’ we sing,

‘We are here beneath your skin,
just sing our hymn, and from the frost
we’ll rise to bring you truth in spring …’

The room fills with light, as more and more illumination from phones and lighters pierces the darkness.

‘But if our song’s to bring release …

when it is done, come break your lyre,
for if we are to bring you peace …

our songs must burn in blessed … fire.’

We repeat the final lines over and over, growing quieter, almost to a whisper. I hear some of the audience humming beneath our words. Mel has turned the stage lights off and one by one extinguishes the candles she’s lit around the stage. With a final, almost baritone flutter, she snuffs the final one and we are plunged into darkness, enveloped in all the silence the room has begged to hear.

I bask in it. That awkwardness. That awakening in the audience from shared candlelit revery. I wait for clapping, shouting, applause.

But no applause comes.

No rapturous adulation, no hollers or screams. The posters and banners all hang limply by their sides. They all just stare at us. In the dim I see Mel looking at Callum nervously, but he’s already started packing up. Mel unceremoniously turns the stage lights back on – if you can even call it a stage – and turns her back on the crowd, all of whom are still watching on, expectant, unsure. The windows of the pub are thick with faces outside. Even the police officers are watching.

Silence.

‘What are you doing?’ says Mel. ‘Do we … Don’t we bow or something?’

Callum shakes his head, shutting one of the bureau drawers with his hip and expertly wrapping unplugged cables. He has islands in his eyes.

‘No bows,’ he says. He nods to me and I stand from the drum kit. I walk tentatively into the crowd to the cameras. We talked before the gig and decided the footage was a priority, that we should make sure to retrieve all the filming equipment as soon as we’d finished. I wade through the pen of bodies, avoiding their eyes and quickly unshackling the cameras from tables and lamps.

‘So, what do we do?’ Mel asks.

In the footage I will later post online, Callum clearly says something here. I will ask him exactly what it is, as it’s a little muffled and off-mic. He will tell me he simply said, ‘we leave’.

But in the comments under the upload, a number of our now 8,000 subscribers will argue to the contrary. One in particular, a post made by ‘99howlingcowp99’, has nearly 4,000 likes and hundreds of comments.

It simply copies the time stamp of the moment. Then reads:

‘Does he say, “we lead”?’

Kaylee watches the live feed go dead and removes her headset, palming her desk mic from her like unwanted scraps. Another email from her agent pops up in the corner of her screen, plastered with the words ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING?’. She ignores it. Her salt-licked cheeks sting a little and she wipes them with the cuffs of her half-open chequered shirt. Her nose is blocked. She tries to inhale but her nostrils squeak in defiance and her mouth whomps open, glue-strings of spittle worming their way across her teeth. Her breath is slow at first, then short. She knows she’s going to cry again, but it doesn’t feel unwelcome. Crying can be applause sometimes.

She changes the window on her screen to her own streaming video, still live, bing-ing silently with a rising ladder of comments and emoticons. She looks at her own video-reflection in the screen, her eyes not meeting her own. The made-up husk of enthusiasm is now a distant memory and the face that stares back is unkempt. No one’s seen this face before now. It’s been covered by her need to hide, to be characterful and present.

There’s a mint tin by her keyboard. She pops it open. Another email lands in her screen corner that simply says ‘KILL THE FEED’. She fishes out a baggie and opens it. Her tongue can taste the urea in the air. She rolls her blunt, lights it, then rests her left eye socket in the butt of her hand. Her followers at home or on their phones frantically write their prayers.

K-Liiiiii girl breaaathe

Girls got the right idea. Get blazed hunny, you deserve it – fucking WOW.

The fuck? Thought this was a gamer chick channel. What was that stream from? Link?

That band was like some cult shit. K-li gon get all wicker man on us like fr

Band name? Link?

K-Li get some rest baby you look like SHIT K-Liiiiiiiiiiiiii

The screen is suddenly vacant. Kaylee has stood up and left the shot. She didn’t load anything onto the background. All anyone can see is green, severed by a thin trail of weed smoke from a hidden ash tray.

K-Li baby come back to us

Girls gon hurl she got the fear

Yo this bands nuts took me like twnety mins to find their socials Link?

Link?

Yo check it Willo streamed it too and CrixCrox

Link?

K-Li honney whered you go we gotta know your safe stay safe

The mic picks up some clanking in the background, a dish maybe, the sound of a kitchen drawer shunting open. Another email, unseen, pings in the corner – ‘DONT SMOKE ON YOUR FEED’. Her followers start posting garbled hieroglyphs, links to the band.

The band girl is hot, she got crazyy witch eyes

They got a ton of videos. Fml british accents Make me nnnnggggh

Dude in them unibomber RIIIGHT??

K-Li you should interview them live sessions or smth

K-LIIII BEBS WERE ARE YOU?

Got like hundreds of clips on this page here gon get into my fancams

Cant see the drummer in them. Name?

Think girl is Mel

Link to threads. K-Li get in on this its pure fantasy shit just uyor cup of tea

The comments trickle on, people from all around the world rabidly typing, spitting lodged tooth-dreck from their minds onto keys. The screen is empty for five minutes. Then Kaylee enters shot, still standing, shirt open, the camera and ring-light eyeing her navel and the skeletal contours of her hips. She removes her shirt for a moment, her head and breasts out of shot. The comments go wild, her fans clambering through their screens with outstretched hands for the warmth, for her flesh. Then she puts a zip-up hoodie on, leaving it open and draped from her shoulders. It used to have the logo of a prominent American football franchise embossed across it but it’s obscured now with three carefully placed strips of silver duct tape.

She sits. The comments rattle on, but she ignores them. She closes a few screens, three or four other muted influencers still barking their reactions to the band’s livestream, then places a large kitchen bowl on the desk in front of her.

Girls gotta eat!

Whats wrong darling? You k

Dayum dem tities tho, that’s the content we need right now

What you doin hun? You
would smash ngl

Do you have any tattoos we aint seen?

You can’t see the contents of the bowl at first, but it’s probably just flour and water, maybe some ripped-up kitchen roll. She takes a drag on her blunt, inhaling it slowly, holding it in her lungs, feeling the coals of it embedding in her throat. Carefully, as if adhering to some form prescribed by dictum only she could know, she places her hands in the bowl, raising them out of it ritualistically, letting chunks of white viscera slop from her fingers. She hangs there. Then, with considerate abandon, she daubs her face. Her eyes, chin, cheeks all welcome the mixture, its uneven scraps hugging the ripples of bone structure, the topographical map of all she’s seen.

Next, her hair, swept back and damp with it, revealing her skull, now a naked haunting edifice. Then finally her shoulders, carefully tracing the collarbone line, slopping whole fistfuls of white into the cavernous bowls of her clavicles and spreading it unevenly around her upper arms. She completes the daubing and her hands lower. She breathes out, finally, her lungs like a thurible, aching with smoke and releasing it to masses unworthy of its scent.

The comments have stopped. She opens her eyes to this new image, this liberation in anonymity, freedom in obscurity, namelessness in the name of revelation. She thinks about the Presbyterian church she went to as a child and snatches her mic into place with a sudden, haptic rage. She waits, her hand hovering over her mouse, ready to end the stream in ceremony. Then, with a voice that would echo round the caverns of the internet like the prayer it was meant to be, she simply whispers:

‘I believe.’

The screen goes black. The comments erupt.

The image becomes a meme in under a minute.

7

Cowp and Creels, the Tricksters, Solkat of stubbed toes and fateful meetings

I try to hand out microphones to people as they enter the Centre of Britain, but few take them. Some of them look at me strangely, and I try to show them where and how to clip them to their chests and hide the battery packs. There’s about fifteen people from the gig, all of them high on the calamity, the cataclysm of song they’ve all experienced. We stayed for drinks with folks after and it sort of developed into a hushed, manic after-party, until two police officers started gently dispersing people around last orders. Wharton wasn’t there when we left.

They’re whooping and shushing, fawning over Mel and Callum like drowning men to driftwood. I have that weird ringing sound I get in my ears after we play. They stumble loud-quiet into the hotel and ricochet off banisters up to our room.

We tumble through the door. Mel loads up my portable speaker, nods to me and I pull out my phone, hitting a playlist Callum likes to listen to in that brief but happy frenzy he gets when he finishes a piece. The room squirms awkwardly into dance as the synth and tribal drumming gets us going, recoiling at the walls, joining in its centre, shifting it from bland and beige to a slow bodily distortion of paint. There are little shouts of celebration, cracks of elbows on bedside drawers, a dissonance of noise that seems to shake the walls of secrets, rob the plaster’s age and unpin the beams of oak above and bring them crashing down.

At its centre whirls Melusine. With a crunch she stands on her bed, pulling the sheet from it with dramatic flair around her. She stands there, somehow virginal, and everyone immediately drops to the floor, giggling and shushing at the forthcoming show.

‘My sweets …’ she croons, her tone mock-messianic. ‘We are witness. Today, all witnessss … to the greatest … wait …’

She sees one of the stragglers, a young woman with pink hair, pouring out wine into stolen glasses. She glares at her until, with further mock-deference, Pink-Hair giggles, bows and offers it up to the bed.

‘Aaa-thank you, yes, all witness! To, let’s face it, the greatest stories ever toooold!’

Cries, cheers. I lower the noise gauge on my camera mic. It’s hard to tell if Mel’s just high on the success of the gig or if she’s genuinely into this. Could be both.

‘We have gifted to you the wisdoms of the Solkats. We bestow upon you their fates. We wreath you. In. Their. Majeeeesty!’

The group bellows out a cacophony of shouts and ululations. We’re all at least a bottle of wine deep, and mired in that intangible drunken world of irony and fractious impulse, animals chasing every flurry of thrill and danger. Some of them have felt-tip pens and are jokingly drawing little ‘tattoos’ on their wrists, lines on broken circles. Mel steps to the other bed, to Callum’s duffel bag, retrieves spare candles and casually underarms them to the crowd. At the back of the room, Callum, arms crossed, watches on fondly. Molly Branthom is next to him. I feel magmatic warmth beneath my cheeks as she gently rests her head on his shoulder. I see him bristle at her touch.

‘But WHO. Is worthy. Of their majesty?’ Mel jumps down and stands in the bed-aisle, little chit-chits of her yellow lighter resounding off the high oak beams as she lights the candles. ‘Who is humble enough to be welcomed into their bosom? Who, my sweets, will …’

She spreads an arm out with the sheet, sending it billowing and rattling the flames around her in the wick-flicking gloom. She raises an eyebrow, downing her wine in one.

‘… make … an offering …

’

The room rumbles into stomps and giggles and rummaging. I pan across them all. At least two or three are underage, and there are one or two older bohemian folks who should clearly have known better than to take whatever mind-altering substance they’ve been saving since the seventies. Mismatched Shoes is there, catatonic in a corner. About half of them were sporting the white paint during the concert but, in the furore of our French exit and running to the taxi rank, sweat has reduced it to little fluvial streams, their shoulders and clothes collecting ceramic mudflats of paste from the wash of white above.

A group of girls in their twenties, the most game for Mel’s antics, let out little ironic barks of laughter and kneel before her.

‘I give you …’ one of them says, in such a way as to hide whether the joke is hers or ours, ‘THIS. Toothbrush! That I … nicked from … THIS bathroom.’

Mel bows solemnly to more laughter.

‘May it symbolise,’ the girl continues, ‘… the … thing. To fight … Aw, which one’s the dirty one?’

‘Clarty,’ says Callum. The room grows a bit quiet as his voice wings over the giggles.

‘Clarty! Yeah, a toothbrush to fight Clarty with! Dirty cow!’

Her girlfriends giggle and Mel mock-solemnly accepts the toothbrush with a bow.

‘To Clarty! She of half-smoked fags and sleepless nights, we give … THIS toothbrush! AND what else?’

I worry for the neighbouring rooms and the racket we’re making. Another girl steps up, prompted by her friend.

‘Dear priestess! I … give you … The gift! Of my touch. Is … is there a thingy of touch?’

Mel leans in, speaking like that dangerous primary school teacher.

‘Aaaah, do you speak of Spelk? The Solkat of forgotten bruises? You wish to remind me of tragedies I have long since BURIED?’

She histrionically turns her back on the girl to a low and murmured ‘oooooOOOOoooo …’ from the group.

‘OR!’ she says, spinning back. ‘Do you speak of Hockle? The wishful Solkat! The antecedent! She of spit and nervous moments …’

The girl inches in to a now-bowed Melusine.

‘Yeah, that one … I give you the gift … of my spit …’

I turn the camera away as, to an enormous uproar of screams and clamour, they kiss. The younger girls pull faces, two guys nervously eyebrow each other. Harry, who has bundled himself by the threshold, immediately inspects the door jamb with his fingers and mutters ‘good … good craftsmanship …’

Finally, the third girl rises. She seems a little more into it than the first two. She’s been kneeling, head bowed, waiting to be summoned, subtly filming the whole thing on her phone.

‘And you,’ says Mel. ‘What do you add to this bounty of tongues and toothbrushes? To whom do you sing tonight, maenad?’

Giggles. I don’t know what maenad means either. The boys mutter something about nads and Mel leaps from the bed and steps around the room, her bare feet still dusty from the stage, concocting crude verses from the distilled fumes of their collected breath.

‘Perhaps you sing to Bizen – who knows what all bairns hide … Or sing you to the Blatherskite? Whose nonsense you abide … Does Marra hold your hand and hear the weeping that you keep? Or do The Hackies steal your dreams … while you do lie … asleep!’

More ‘oooOOOOoooOOOooos’, but this time accompanied by thumps and stomps to the ground. I hear footsteps in the corridor, heavy ones, someone adjacent descending the stairs hurriedly to complain.

The girl raises her glass.

‘I give you, our priestess …’

I notice she’s placed her phone in her shirt pocket, the tiny green eye of light peeking over the top, filming.

‘The gift of noise … To summon Whisht from his cell of flesh.’

She’s clearly actually listened to the songs. There’s something a little off about her canted eyes. I catch Callum leaning in, intrigued – someone who’s studied his lyrics – dislodging Molly Branthom’s head from his shoulder, sending it jolting in the air.

Mel looks at her expectantly.

‘Well, well … A disciple! One with true sight! Come, my sweet. And give to Whisht his worth …’

The girl stares back at her, strained.

Then, something strange happens. Her neck writhes, bulging its muscles as though gripped by hidden hands. She slowly, purposefully, decants her wine, watching it slop to the floor, in spurts at first, then in a stream of scarlet, puttering on the matte cream polyester rug. The girls to her left snort at the chaos, but quickly stop. For from within her, grinds a low rumble. It starts like throat singing, a low-pitched groan like cave-wind, but slowly flows into a harsh alto note, then clambers up through the octave in a stilted glissando. The room is stomping with it, banging on tabletops and walls and floors with it, as the girl rises and rises through her range, getting louder and louder as she grows higher and higher. She reaches the apex of her belt and it starts to crackle, little intervals of silence puncture a howl of such ecstasy and dirt it seems to burn Mel’s cheeks with the warmth of it. Her eyes open as the note becomes a scream, a bay, like an animal in agony or heat, her face contorting, wraith-like, into dark and wilful shapes. But just as she looks like she might black out with the strain, a loud BANG silences the room.

We all look to the door.

Another BANG.

The block red painting by the door tips from the wall with a baf.

‘It’s TWO IN THE MORNING,’ comes a voice – the hotel owner. ‘We will NOT have antisocial behaviour on our property. The police have been called. PACK UP YOUR THINGS.’

Everyone looks around the room, collectively determining the right response, then looks at Melusine for approval.

Mel basks in the silence.

She raises the scream-girl from the floor, up beside her on the bed, now white and dizzy in recovery, and holds her hands aloft.

‘TO WHIIIIIIIIIIIIISHT!’ she cries.

The room erupts into oblivion.

It was four days later we discovered what they’d done. The party continued at someone’s house after that, a local, probably one of the young girls. I didn’t go. Once they’d all fled the hotel, I stayed to pack up all our things: Mel’s diaspora of costumes left littered on the floor, Cal’s trunk, the map, my cameras. I loaded it all into the car and slept in the trailer, lodged between the bureau, my drum kit and the cold metal wall that echoed every landing bird like high-hat hits in my ears. Every car that passed rattled my snare drum in its case. I slept alright, the night and all the adulation still humming in my heart.

Two broken puppets in the shape of Callum and Mel eventually returned around dawn, pulled by the strings of a dying man. They promptly passed out in the back of the car. I drove, stopping off at a garage on the way to grab a new lighter for Mel – she’d lost hers in the night – a multipack of ice lollies and something they told me were eggs, but I’m pretty sure had some kind of painful sentience to them. I dropped Cal and Mel off, got in my car and went back to Gran’s flat. I put on her white silk dressing gown, pulled the floral duvet from her bed to the sofa, ate another ice lolly and watched a show about shipwrecks.

I got a text the next morning from Wez.

Next gig off, back to it next week.

Why? I replied.

Nothing serious. Officer Fuckface being a dick.

I thought about this for a minute.

Where’s the next gig?

No response. I turned my phone ringer up to maximum for the next two days in case I slept through his reply.

This morning my phone rang, unknown number. I watched it, waiting for it to ring out so I could get back to searching the forums and threads. A bunch of them wouldn’t accept my requests to join, so I was making new alternate accounts to see if they’d let me in. The call died and I continued reading all the comments under the uploaded livestream and beyond. I’d spent a day and half editing it and loaded it up last night. People were going mad for it.

Threads grew into threads grew into comments grew into discussions. It was like watching neurons flare in slow motion, theories crackling along synaptic pathways, lighting up at undiscovered stimuli, building a massive neurogenic framework of posts and memes in an attempt to map and chart the massive sensory cell structure of our art. Our following on our social media pages reached 30,000 an hour ago. I look at that number every few minutes, just to feel my chest heave with breath at the sight of it.

A message pops up. It’s from my old phone, the one I gave to Gran to watch her videos. She’s never texted me before. Not even sure she knows how to use it for anything other than clips of things, and even then she needs Angie to walk her through it half the time. I open the messaging app and see a short voice recording, the hilly waveform of it meandering along the screen, peaking in little spikes. A click, and it blares out at me.

‘Hi Al, it’s Angie here from Grove House, hope you’re well. I’ve got an Officer Wharton here with me? He says he’s here to visit Christine, but he’s not on your mum’s contact list. He, erm, kept ringing the phone you gave Christine so we’ve … taken it off her for the time being as it was upsetting her. Says you’re meeting him here this morning? Anyways, let me know, I’ll check to see if Christine’s in a good state for a visit. Alright, all the best.’

I listen to the message twice, not fully understanding it. I must have given Wharton my old number by mistake, the number for the phone I left for Gran, that’s why he was calling her. But there was something in Angie’s voice that made me feel nervous. Why is he visiting her? Why does he want to meet me there?

I emerge from the duvet and get dressed. I look at the closed thread, the one with the blurry mark thumbnail that’s been ‘request pending’ for two weeks now. I decide to send one of the mods a direct message as I’m running out the door.

What are the criteria for joining this forum? Would love to discuss some band theories if poss? No shitposting. Al.

I pull down the car sun visor out of habit, to shade me from the late dawn sunlight. Gran’s ‘birth to all’ card falls limply into my lap.

‘He’s waiting for you in Christine’s room. Find your own way?’

Angie is on the phone with someone, but casually waves me in. I look at the sign-in sheet. A misshapen scrawl above my name reads ‘Chris Wharton’. It feels like someone is scraping ice from my lower back and shunting the powder of it between my shoulder blades. On my way along the corridors, I pull out a camera and turn it on. Then I pause for a moment. I pull out my phone and open the video app. My thumb slips and it flips to the front camera, revealing my face. Something Pavlovian jerks my head away from my own image and I flip it back round, press record and pop it in my shirt pocket. I never wear shirts.

I turn and hang in the doorway. My gran is making another birthday card. Wharton is sitting on the bed not far from her in silence. He turns to see me.

‘Ah, Al. How are you? Christine, Al’s here to see you?’

Gran turns a little and looks at me, that same search for identifying facial characteristics. I usually wear the same shoes every visit, she sometimes remembers shoes. She smiles.

‘I’m making you a card,’ she says, her cadence flat and unfeeling. ‘For your birthday.’

‘Christine’s been telling me about you, Al. She’s very proud. Says you’re quite the talent. Musically, of course, it sounds like you’re a phenomenal drummer. But the artwork too, you’re a painter as well?’

I don’t tell him that’s my mum – I’ve never painted anything in my life.

I ask him why he’s here.

‘Well, forgive me for intruding on your visit, I know how reassuring it is for patients like your gran to have regularity, stability in their daily and weekly routines. Sadly, I was unable to contact you and, rather than bring you down to the station, I thought we could … have a little chat. Somewhere safe. Away from your bandmates.’

Something’s odd about this. Police officers don’t just rock up at retirement homes, impose themselves in people’s personal lives. He’s not in uniform this time. He doesn’t even have his notepad out.

I stay standing and go to set the camera up on a nearby mantle.

‘Ah yes, the documentarian,’ says Wharton. His beard burns brighter against the pale neutrality of the room. ‘Look, I’m sure, as a seasoned filmmaker, you’ll know there aren’t rules against filming police officers …’

I pause. Then defiantly angle the camera to him. He rises, smiling.

‘… unless, of course, according to Section 58A of the 2000 Terrorism Act, the officer believes the footage may be used for the purposes of “coerced unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property”.’ He steps across the room. He’s wearing trainers. ‘And … as you can see …’

He pulls out his phone, flicks through a few things, then holds up a photo, casually turning off my mantle-camera with his other hand.

‘… I’m very much inclined to believe that.’

The first photo he shows is dark, and the phone catches the window light, masking it in pale slashes of reflection. Then, as though it’s developing in phenidone before my eyes, I see the speckled white of two large, curved window frames. The glass is smashed and the fascia is blackened with a murky, textured black. The chequered panelling beneath the windows is stained and chipped and the cobbled street before it is littered with burnt chairs and tables.

He flicks along on his camera roll. The interior is black with char. But I make the stage out, the little raised platform in the corner. A few embers still glisten in the wings of it, the curtain reduced to strings of petrified tar, viscously dripping onto a forgotten kick drum pedal.

A final one, close up on the pub signage. It used to say ‘The Grapes’. Now it’s buried beneath soot and smoke-stained wretchedness.

I grow angry at my involuntary physiological response. At the sight of the burned-out pub, my eyes have watered at imagined heat. We were there. That place was magical, always would have been, but the memory of our mad fantastic witchery is now blighted. He notices the glisten in my eyes.

‘Arson. According to the fire department. We’ve kept it from the local press, don’t want it to be a bigger story than it is, and your friends on the internet haven’t picked up on it. The perpetrators gained entry through the front after hours, doused the place in a petroleum distillate, probably butane. The fire started at the stage. The stage which, I believe, you played on. Not hours before.’

I notice that aquiline quality to him again. Jerkily rending tendons from a dead thing in his speech.

‘Do you know anything about this?’

I shake my head.

‘Where were you in the hours after the concert?’

I tell him about the hotel.

‘And Mr Jannik and Ms Hajna?’

I tell him about the house party.

‘I see.’

He looks like he hasn’t slept. Perhaps he doesn’t sleep very well. I imagine sleep to a man like him is an incurable disease that with stealth pervades an unfortified mind.

‘So you cannot account for their whereabouts. You don’t have any reason to suggest they might have been involved in this crime, do you?’

I shake my head. I’m surprised no one online is talking about this. Callum and Mel haven’t mentioned it. Mel would be having a field day.

‘Right. Right …’

He looks over Gran’s shoulder, watching her apply glue to the birthday message on the card and sprinkle heart-shaped glitter over it.

‘Because I, in fact, do have reason to think that.’

I’m unsure if he’s practised these theatrics or if it stems from years of being the most intelligent person in the room. He pulls out a wodge of paper, print-offs, and lays them on the bed. I can hear Gran humming something as she crafts.

‘A number of your band’s lyrics make reference to fire. I have to say I’ve become quite the fan during my research. In particular, this – this one. The … The Augur of Haporth Rock, your sixth Cycle. It makes a number of quite interesting references. I assume you are familiar?’

Augur’s my favourite Cycle. Haporth is the Solkat of lost coins in pocket holes, of charity shops and memory. In the Cycle he makes his final prophecy before ‘the entrapment’: that two among the Solkats will burn in flame, be released and bring new birth and providence to them all, or something.

‘But if our song’s to bring release,’ he reads,

‘When it is done, come break your lyre,
for if we are to bring you peace,
our songs must burn in blessed fire.’

He exhales with a thin pucker, his cheeks swelling with breath.

‘Heavy stuff. Hea-vy stuff. It seems this song, rather aptly titled “Our Temples All Shall Burn”, implies that, for the, er, the augur to be fulfilled … all the sacred places where this songhas been sung must be, to quote these lyrics, “purified”. Is that a correct interpretation?’

I go to speak, to explain to him it’s metaphorical. It’s supposed to be an allegory for the western consumerist hyperfixation with instant gratification, that Callum’s making a point about our collective attention deficit, rendering the concept of artistic legacy obsolete in favour of the purgative and fleeting nature of contemporary musical distribution. But I don’t, because I can’t remember any of those words.

Gran’s humming again. My ear tunes into it, unable to place it, but it’s one of our songs, I’m sure of it.

‘Tell me, Al, how would you interpret these events? A band that’s been going for seven years, with no success, suddenly becomes a local viral hit. The band, desperate to capitalise on their newfound stardom, plays a concert, gets drunk, then burns the place to the ground in the wee hours following, in the knowledge that this will further stoke the flames of their fandom. If this assumption is correct, as a police officer, when do you think I should intervene? Should I let them play their games until I gather the evidence required to convict them? Or should I stop them now? Before someone, someone else, gets hurt. Or worse …’

I’m hurling through the Solkat library in my mind, ripping catalogues of careful detail from shelves, hunting for the words to that hum. I can almost feel Whisht behind me, his enormous hands cradling my shoulders, twisting me slightly, angling my shirt pocket towards Wharton.

But there’s another Solkat in here too. One Whisht is afraid of.

And it’s hiding behind Wharton’s back.

‘I mean, who’s to say the band didn’t orchestrate the attack at the Black and Grey? Two desperate thirty or forty-somethings, angry at the world for not understanding their weird tunes, slip a couple of smackheads twenty quid, and boom – internet sensations. At the cost of Ms Branthom’s face, that is. I mean, it’s a wonder she wasn’t killed …’

It’s the seventh Cycle. I’m sure of it. Gran’s humming something from Of Monkey’s Blood and Ghosts, it’s all string quartets and reclaimed pianos. I’m ripping pages out of tomes, flicking through the songs in my head. ‘Radge and the Nethermen’. ‘The Pub of Scran and Squander’. ‘Horison’.

‘Al, tell me, do you recognise this?’

He pulls another photo up on his phone. I angle my chest awkwardly, praying my phone has enough memory to catch all this.

It’s a chalk mark on stone. A little triangle with lines. Like a traffic cone. Or a windmill. In my head, the Solkat behind Wharton limps along the bed frame. I can see it gurning, hear its breath heaving.

‘It was found on a wall on St Mary’s Chare. Thirty yards from the Grapes. And here’s another one.’

He shows me a broken circle with lines across it on brick.

‘Found outside the Black and Grey. They sort of look like the script your band uses in your album art, don’t you think? Do you know what they represent?’

I do. I shake my head.

‘You see, this one intrigues me,’ he points to the broken circle, ‘because, for the longest time I couldn’t place it. I knew I’d seen it before. It was somewhere, but for the life of me … But you know where I saw it before. Don’t you?’

It’s ‘Horison’, Gran’s hum, it’s definitely ‘Horison’. It’s a song about War Lass, Solkat of the one too many, and Radge the Cripple, Solkat of masks and mortar. I hear more breath from the bed, more guttural rattling.

‘It was on Callum’s caravan door. Wasn’t it, Al?’

The chorus in my head joins in with Gran’s hum. My eyes flick over to her. She’s stopped crafting. I thought she wasn’t really here, thought she wasn’t lucid, but she is. She’s been pretending. Her vacant smile stops and, out of sight from Wharton, she looks watchful and stern. I see what she’s written on the card, in cheap blue glitter and glue, glinting like the lights of a distant ambulance. It says ‘Many Happy Returns’.

‘Al, look at me.’

I look at his bloodshot eyes, his incisors. The Solkat behind him has crept its hand around his shoulder, its skin bitten from bone.

‘Do you recognise this?’

He shows the last photo. It’s a lighter, in an evidence bag. It’s yellow.

I shake my head, but it was far too slow a reaction, and he steps closer to me, turning his phone off.

‘It’s not your fault, Al. It seems to me that the two of them, they’re obsessed, they’re unwell. I know you weren’t involved in these crimes, it’s clearly just them. But if you help me, help me ensure they don’t hurt anyone else, I promise you I can keep you out of all this and get them professional help. It’s them, Al. Not you. Their silly stories they’ve started to believe. Their little songs that no one listens to. But you don’t believe in gods and Solkats and this, this “release”. You’re smarter than that. Let me take you down to the station and you can talk to me and our friends there … and we can sort this whole … thing … out …’

The book I’ve been searching for in my head drops from a shelf and slops open. Whisht grips my shoulders tighter as my hands shake. Images of Mel flicking her lighter, of smoke and flame. I hear the lyrics Gran’s been humming.

‘Beware War Lass, for fear you must,
for Radge’s words you cannot trust …

Beware War Lass, it must not be,
for Radge’s rage, it comes for thee …’

Silence. Silence in my head and in the room.

Then I see him. Radge. Just behind Wharton. I see him properly, no longer obscured by the bed, by Wharton, by my own mind. His neck is open and his legs end in splintered femur stumps. He’s laughing.

I hear Mel’s words come out of my mouth, her intonation, her feigned frailty, her italics.

I say yes. Yes, I’ll go with him. But before we go, I say I simply must have a minute with Gran.

He considers this. He looks at Gran, sees the innocence of her addled mind, eyes searching the room for kindness and respite.

‘Of course. Of course, take your time. I’ll make a phone call and get us a car. I’ll be outside.’

He leaves.

The hands that have been digging talons into my collarbone jolt me. For a moment all I can hear is the hum.

‘For Radge’s words you cannot trust …’

Then I pull my phone out of my pocket, see the video still running, still recording. I stop it, then find Wez in my contacts, send him the video. It’s taking forever to upload. I write underneath it.

Urgent. Get this to Callum and Mel. NOW.

I pause, all the books in my head now flapping with a wind I have not felt. I add.

Tell them to get out, find somewhere safe. Cheesy Chips. NOW.

I feel wild, untempered, a story not yet written but whirling in the writer’s hands, incorporeal, yes, but alive, alive with fear and choice and moment. The present is just a past I don’t regret yet. Gran looks at me. There is a knowing in her, in her eyes. Those same eyes that claimed her moments, that wrote in youthful script what’s now illegible, those selfsame eyes that pleaded on her wedding day. Those eyes now beg again for action, remembrance, for choice.

She doesn’t smile. She raises a finger to her lips before I can even speak and holds up her card. She hasn’t traced the glue on all the letters, and as she does the glitter falls, cascading to the floor.

Of her ‘Many Happy Returns’, three letters remain. I blink at them, braced and certain.

Run
.

PART TWO

8

Skinchies, the Luck Monger, Solkat of bus stop fights and fear

An energy drink the colour of sunsets is poured into a black novelty coffee mug shaped like a grenade. It fizzes in the ceramic and little firework specks of it sputter out. After a moment, there’s a crrrk-k and some vodka is added to it, some of it slopping onto a mint tin filled with weed.

Kaylee softly back-hands her computer mouse and the screen before her warms into life. She looks at a paused video, her own lily-white, unadorned face caught so perfectly mid-blink that she looks incongruously suspicious of her own hands. She takes a moment to find the cursor and hazily starts the video again. Her tastebuds wince as she sips.

The video lacks her usual intro graphics – a cartoon giraffe smoking dope in a hot air balloon she found hilarious when she was sixteen – and the video has no crossfade or fade-from-black finery. It just starts, her gaunt little head and a deluge of greasy hair suddenly filling the screen. She watches her past self, the beads of 3 a.m. sweat glinting on her brow like aerial photos of far-off waves. Her natural voice, at least three tones lower than her persona’s, creaks with dehydration.

‘So this is day fourteen since the band’s been missing,’ she says. She sips from that same grenade in the video. ‘No posts, no updates. But earlier this evening, a video was posted by one of the mods on Solkat Ceremony. For anyone thinking of joining, they’re crazy tight on numbers and have only let in, like, three thousand, but a member ripped it and posted it over on the Marra threads. I know there’s a lot of fake videos floating around and Willow’s done a lot to debunk most of those, so shout out to her, you can find links to her socials below. But this one I thought I’d post about, cos I think it’s real.’

Kaylee rises as the video plays. Her new phone is ringing somewhere in the magpie’s nest of her bedroom. She returns with it in hand, sees her agent’s name flashing, cancels the call and silences it.

In the video, the giant green screen behind her is suddenly filled with a corridor, Kaylee still visible in the lower right-hand corner. The carpet of the place is entirely forgettable. The footage swoops disorientatingly round a doorframe and she feels a large petrosphere of puke roll in her stomach. She burps and takes another sip.

‘As you can hear in this video, they’re clearly in the north of England where the band was last seen in Haltwhistle two weeks ago, after their performance at the now consecrated pub the Grapes, and it looks like a hospital or care ward. You’ve all seen the video by now so I won’t go through it, but this man’ – she pauses the footage on a brutish, bearded, bespectacled gentleman in trainers, as he turns from an old woman doing crafts – ‘UK police don’t release details of their staff over the phone or on websites, so we can’t be sure, but this man clearly claims to be some kind of officer of the law, probably a local cop.’

The video continues. The footage is poor and at one point for about forty-five seconds the top of a red plaid shirt pocket completely covers the phone’s camera.

‘Thanks to follower CannotCowp2 for transcribing what they say; I for one find the accent a bit hard to grasp. But he’s definitely convinced the band burned the pub down and started, or paid for someone to start, the fight in Morpeth. Now, I don’t think they did, and I think most of us are in agreement – wouldn’t make sense for them to burn a place down, they’d be prime suspects, and their work would stop before they even started. Most of us think it was one of us followers but, rightly so, no one’s coming forward. But I agree with the mods over at WarLads, they seem to think this dude is talking to the band’s drummer, Al – who I guess leaked this to the forums?

‘Anyways, I’ve spoken to some British ex-officers, and some that are still employed as police, so I won’t name the names, but they all agree that this isn’t typical police procedure and that if he is a cop, he’s clearly off duty. This is further corroborated by the fact dude doesn’t want to be filmed, as he switches the other camera off.’

In the video, Wharton turns to face the camera and Kaylee pauses the video, perfectly framing his pallid face, catching the vitreous hazel of his eyes, owl-like, predatory.

‘We sent this screenshot around and one of the spectators at the Black and Grey concert sent us this …’

The photo now plastered on the green screen was taken from somewhere in the centre of the pub audience. The colours blur like a Blake painting and you can see contorted shadow-shapes of the crowd behind, some drinking, most totally ignoring the band on the stage.

‘… and they seem to think that this is him …’

Kaylee waves her cursor in a circle. In the background of the photo, by the bar, is a large, bearded man. It’s got that bleary quality of the first blink of the morning. He’s downing a beer in one hand and holding a pool cue in another. It’s unclear if it’s Wharton, but it fits his build.

‘If this is the case, then maybe he reached out to the band after the incident. There are eye-witness reports of a police presence at the Grapes gig, he might have been there. In either case, we’re sure this video is an upload from Al, who some are calling the Archivist, which means it’s canon. So we should all be talking about who he is in The Story. Now, I know a lot of you are in debate about this, but I’ve been listening to The Motherless Ones again and—’

Her phone lights up on the desk: her agent. Kaylee pauses the video, presses the phone screen with such irritation she hears it slightly dislodge from its casing, then presses the ‘speaker’ button. A voice on the other end.

‘Hi Kaylee, this is Alara from Aspire, I’ve got Shaun for you.’

‘Alright.’

There is a short pause. Then comes a voice that crackles with years of bourbon and coercion.

‘Kaylee, it’s Shaun. How are ya?’

‘Fine.’

‘Good to hear. Good. To. Hear. Look, just an update, I know you’ve said you’re not taking calls, but thought I’d let you know that … seeing as you’re bent on this band thing you’re doing and … uh, departing from your usual content, Velovibe are voiding their contract. Even overlooking that, contractually, you need to plug them every third upload, Alison over at marketing has said your brand ideals, no … no longer align. So they’re pulling their sponsorship.’

Kaylee has removed a wedge of white tack from her wall where a picture once hung. She shakily begins moulding it, rolling bits of it in her hands.

‘Okay.’

Shaun pauses. You can tell someone else is in the room with him, mouthing something.

‘And, seeing as you broke contract, they’re claiming the full split fee for it.’

She kneads the tack with her palm, shaping it into a flat circle on the desk.

‘Okay,’ she says.

More silent chatting on the other end of the phone.

‘So that’s …’ Shaun continues, gently, ‘the twenty-two thousand we’ve got in escrow.’

Kaylee rummages through her desk tray, littered with cigarette butts and bottle caps, and pulls out a hair pin. She digs it into the white circle, watching it wade through the tree rings of her fingerprints, grinding gummed breakers of tack out of it as it moves. She hears someone write something down with little pizzicato squeaks of a whiteboard pen. Shaun continues, hesitant.

‘And, look. We know you’re going through a lot at the moment. And everyone at Aspire is here to support you. Your mental health and physical wellbeing is our, our top priority. We’re always just a phone call away. And … to that end, Alara is sending over some … some literature with some contact details of some very, very trusted professionals, should you wish to talk about—’

Kaylee hangs up the phone.

She idly knuckles the space bar and the video continues, her recorded voice crackling with thought.

‘I think he’s one of them. This beardy dude. If you take the decoded messaging from ‘Halcyon’ and imagine it’s a continuation of ‘The Wreck of Howling Hesperus’ and all that triptych, it would make sense that the two trapped Solkats – whoever you want to say they are, but as I’ve said in previous videos, I think it’s Fash and War Lass – they need the “Marked Man”, the “Mistress” and the “Muzzled Hound”. ‘Hesperus’ talks about them climbing a kind of spire, and Spelk, the Muzzled Hound, the Solkat of cramps and forgotten bruises, is chasing them. So maybe that’s who this man is. I mean, he could be Radge, too. But my current theory? I think he’s hounding them. And he doesn’t know – like we’ve talked about, none of them know there’s a Solkat inside them – but he’s driven by the Solkat, by the Solkat who’s chasing their smell. Kinda. Or something. But I think we should think of him, not like a dissenter, but like a player in The Story. I think they need him, for us to unleash them.’

To any casual viewer, this would be gibberish. Names, Solkats, Cycles. But to these followers there is fluency and meaning in every word. Against every law of content creation, Kaylee pauses here in the video, thinking, careless of the dead air she’s leaving. You can see she’s tired, but more alive than she’s ever felt, her eyes reading poetry in the air. She wonders when an influencer becomes a priest. When do people choose to become a mouthpiece for power, an interpreter of divinity, a bastion for an unthinking congregation?

‘Anyway, hit me up in the comments, I’m doing an AMA later today, five o’clock PT, if anyone’s got any thoughts on this, or any update on their whereabouts—’

The space bar snaps with another knuckle-rap and the video stops. Kaylee looks down at the white-tack circle, now emblazoned with a large looping bulb, like a flame. Two pupilless eyelids astride a line in its centre. Her grenade mug chips her front tooth as she drinks.

‘What up, this is WESTON in the house, just sending out another episode of The WESTON HEMISPHERE, big up big up, grab yaself between the legs and show us what you goooooooot!’

A champagne-coloured Honda Accord nearly upends a family of four carrying newspaper cones of greasy chips, on a narrow, looping coastal road near Tynemouth. With a ‘Whey-OOOH’, the man inside the Honda wrenches the wheel, rolls down the window with great effort and calls out ‘BITE ME BOLLOCKS!’ Followed by ‘Except not – NOT THE KIDS THOUGH!’ and then nearly swallows a boiled sweet. He chokes for a moment, regurgitates it with a mad gurgle, then spits it to the floor. He laughs into his phone, the camera looking up at his chins, catching only snippets of his ‘podcast’ between the protests of his co-host – the wind.

‘Juuuuust giving you an updéeat on where we’re AT my little Solkat wallas, we are BIG. I mean, REALLY big. Our numbers are as high as Bob Marley in a hot-air balloon, big shout out to our new discip’les out in Australia, thee lend dan andar, late to the barbee but you’ve brough seventeen thousand sausages with ya, so keep spreading the word you fu’ckin’ dingo-dildo leg-ends! We’ve got hits in Ukraine, Sudan. Fucking Buk… Bukkna Fasoo, wherever that is. Marra fu’ckin’ welcomes the lotta yas, hoald your hands out to tha WITCH. And The Philippines! God damn, twen’y thousand of yous lot, all goin’ mental for The Story, big fan, big fan of y’work. I went to the Philippines once. Didn’t understand it. A man tried to—’

Wez nearly slams into the car in front, mounts a kerb to go round it, then jumps a red light, bellowing.

‘Aw basstad – FUCK YOU YOU BLIND FU’CKIN’ TWAT I’M FU’CKIN’ DRIVING HEEYA!’

He swerves again, narrowly avoiding a collection of bins that might very well have been accused of looking like a Fiat Punta.

Weston’s a man for whom the nineties was a utopian era of stormless skies and trousers that could have been serviceable replacements for boat sails. He’s more of a haircut than a personality. His vernacular is full of attempted slang and anachronistic lingo that actual young people haven’t said in years. But – as with all strangeness, given time – there is a deeply endearing quality to it. He was barely present for his halcyon days, didn’t notice when they passed, and now the world watches his childlike antics with that selfsame wistfulness.

Nostalgic for beauty they were born long after.

‘Ahm tellin’ you foaks, this is only the beginnin’! We’ve made the news, we’ve rocked your socials, MASSIVE shout out to all our influencer disciples, in particular MethodMan, Klaxxonz, K-Li, Willololo, your tributes are welcome! We are good. Always be good out there gang. And if you can’t be good! Be lucky … aw fuck, hang on I’m gettin’ a call …’

His video recording continues and Wez pulls out a wad of other phones from his jacket, as a big ‘Al – weirddrummer’ pops up on one of them. In a few years, followers will cut all this together quite seamlessly.

The camera lazily waddles across his dashboard as he skids to a halt by a grassy dene, the North Sea, ever-contrary in disposition, pillow-fighting the cliffs in the distance. I saw the car about a quarter of a mile away and have been calling him for two minutes. He splays across the passenger seat, accepting the call with an errant thumb as the phone falls, and he continues the conversation with it lodged in the unknowable netherspace that everyone knows exists beneath car seats. The camera’s frame is filled almost entirely with his butt crack as he rummages.

‘What?’ he barks. ‘Ah was doin’ me podcast!’

A trebly whump. Mel has whipped the phone out of my hand and comically clonks it against a wall between words.

‘Stop. Doing. Your podcast! How many times, Weston? We are trying to keep a low profile, and we cannot DO that if you keep spaffing out garbled nonsense about us to the internet, you clod-footed fucking waste of ovum!’

Weston’s car door lets out an interrogative groan as it opens. He grabs the camera phone from the dashboard, jumps out of the car and then pulls the boot open with his knee, his other phone sandwiched between his shoulder and the patchwork fuzz of his chin.

‘I am keepin’ a lore prorfile!’ he screams at the top of his lungs. ‘I’m not sayin’ owt about where yuz are! I’m just tryin’ to connect with the fandom! You think all those mad Korean bands just fu’ckin’ hide in abandoned water parks and hope peeple will just magically start listenin’ to their fu’ckin’ weeyad sex-jingles on the off chance? It’s PR, fuh FUCK’s sakes …’

‘Are you still filming this?’ Mel asks.

Weston, so used to having one arm out and capturing his day-to-day on his phone, genuinely looks around for a moment, looking for it. He sees it, relieved.

‘I mean, yeah, but I’ll just edit all this out leata …’

He pulls out a large cardboard box. You can see its edges buckling beneath its own girth and there’s a guilty clink of bottle on bottle within. He shunts the boot shut with his elbow. Another whump down the phone as Callum takes it from Mel.

‘Did you check to see if you were followed?’

Weston spins around on the spot. A nearby seagull eyes him suspiciously.

‘Aw aye, regular fu’ckin’ Jeeyems BOND I am. Y’think I spent three month in the army withou learning how to get all stealthy? I’m like the wind, pal. I’m a fuckin’ ninja in the dark! I’m fuckin’— ’

A wine bottle falls out of the box. The seagull loses his shit.

‘Will yuz just open the door, man! I’m freezin’ me nads off out here …’

It’s been three weeks since the burning of the Grapes and the autumn air is colder now. It wasn’t hard to break into Wet ’n Wild, Cal and Mel had done it before and they knew one of the wooden service entrance doors was rotting with fatigue and easily jimmied it open. It’s an old water park, been closed for years. I used to come here with Gran. I barely remember the park itself, but I remember the damp car rides home. Cheeseburgers on the back seat. Rain on the window.

We weren’t planning on staying here, but it turned out to be a pretty ideal hiding spot. The whole building lurches out of North Shields, at first inconspicuous, like a prison, until the huge green and black plastic flumes scurry out of it, hundreds of feet long, meandering around it like artificial wormholes. We can see cheap hotels and the ferry terminal from every angle from within, cagily eying the boats arriving from Amsterdam and unloading the meek few Dutch folk who decided the north-east of England was a good idea for a weekend for some reason. Inside, it is dreamlike. At once familiar and deeply distant.

Huge basins of concrete, gutted and dry, pathetically flanked by fake palm trees and Perspex ‘rock’ formations, empty vending machines and an enormous thirty-foot frog, his mouth open, the slide of his tongue long-since removed, now staring fearfully at the sky in the hope his creator might end the agonising exercise in futility his existence has become. There are few buildings in the world that, once robbed of their purpose, cannot forcibly be twisted into whatever new necessity society demands. Churches can become bars. Warehouses can become bars. Most things can become bars. Or flats or art studios. But a water park with no water is a uniquely redundant thing. Its caverns, its winding static tubes, showers, locker rooms, those little pools you’re supposed to wash your feet in – it all simply stands there, little basilicas of buried avocation, now dissolved at the behest of the tyrant time.

No one in their right mind would look for us here.

The moderator on the blocked ‘request pending’ forum goes by the handle ‘Solkatliberator’. They changed the forum name from ‘The Grapes – tonight’ to ‘Solkat Ceremony’ weeks ago. They replied to me the afternoon I fled Gran’s retirement home. I hid in the bathroom for hours and sneaked out when it got dark, shakily grabbing a bus and the metro straight to the water park, not even stopping at Gran’s flat to grab my stuff. I’ve been awkwardly wearing Callum and Mel’s clothes for days, stumbling around in them like a mannequin on happy pills. They’d got Wez’s message – he’d rung the holiday park owner, a calloused individual called Darren, who had woken them both from their midday slumber – and they’d bolted, throwing whatever they could into the trailer. We unpacked the thing and I got Weston to drive their car and the trailer away and hide it somewhere. He says it’s safe. Which means he’s sold it.

We weren’t really thinking, at least I wasn’t. All I could think about was Gran. I found myself whispering ‘run, run, run, run …’ under my breath the whole way here, which seemed to drown out all panic, thought or reason. Once we arrived, Callum and Mel spent all night trying to make a plan. I slept for fourteen hours.

Callum and I are sleeping in a little back office where they used to keep all the spare swimming costumes and lost property. There’s an incongruous amount of digital watches, and a white board with burn marks on it still in there that someone wrote ‘FUCK GARETH’ across, clearly before the place shut down. Mel sleeps in one of the flume pools, little quiet circles of respite, high in the complex where the slides open out and would once allow people to paddle around in wide discs of water, before continuing on with the ride. How she gets herself up there I’ve no idea.

Solkatliberator messaged me back over the past week. Only a few times. I studied the correspondence every time, each message, each punctuation mark, for signs of fucking about, for mockery or deceit. But they seemed legitimate. If a little weird:

We know who you are, they wrote. You are their companion. We cannot trust you.

I wrote back, then hesitated. Then clicked send.

Just interested in connecting with the fandom. Why can’t you trust me?

We are not your fans. We are your followers. We cannot trust you.

Callum’s deathly allergic to words like ‘forum’, so I showed the messages to Mel.

Her original offering was to reply to Solkatliberator with an exhaustive bibliography of insults. But I didn’t take her up on it.

What’s the difference between a fan and a follower? I asked the next day.

I received a reply within minutes.

A fan appreciates your art. A follower interprets it and obeys.

Mel’s heart painted stained glass windows reading that, the light of this growing influence bathing her in colour.

‘Interprets it … and obeys?’ she said. ‘What does that mean?’

I’d been thinking about this a lot. What with being stuck in a water park for days with bad signal, I’d had little else to do. I pulled out my phone and a stack of papers; lyric sheets I’ve written out by heart. There were so many pre-existing songs when I joined the band, I’d made a little binder of all the lyrics and notes Callum gave me, but that was at Gran’s. I asked him and he let me get the map out. I laid it out on the floor of the office and showed Mel some of the links I’ve made, what I’d written down where I could.

The first Cycle, The Sacking of Hadaway Heart, begins with The Bagsies, a pack of wild sisters, Solkat of promises and payment, vowing to destroy what is beautiful in order to appease the mourning Clarty, the ugly Solkat of smudged lipstick, mud and change. They remove the Solkat Bonnie’s face and gift it to Clarty, who gnaws it into a thousand pieces and plants it in the Hadaway fields, sowing the seeds for the most beautiful prairie flowers ever seen. It’s all very esoteric and complicated.

‘So … you think they listened to our songs and … they did that to Molly because … because they thought we were telling them to do that?’

I pulled out more notes to show her. This time from their second Cycle, The Betrayal of Skinchies by Marra the Witch. In the final triptych, Skinchies discovers that Marra seduced Haporth, who robbed Skinchies of his memories of war to come – that were too hard to bear. Confused and vengeful, Skinchies burns her temple, so that her song cannot be sung ever again.

‘The Grapes …’ Mel said. She pulled the folder from me, began scanning through it, drinking it in, muttering lyrics like incantations under her breath. ‘But that’s not what Cal meant … That’s not what the song means …’

She seemed almost hurt by it. I couldn’t tell if it was performance or not, if she was feigning fear or quietly giddy with the idea of our growing following, but she paced around the map, dancing on her toes and humming. I was reminded of images of fire, of burnt wood and broken glass. Of yellow lighters.

I was certain it wasn’t her, it couldn’t have been. She says she doesn’t care about the world, certainly wants people to see her as wild and wanton. But when the camera’s not on her, or she doesn’t notice it, I see her quietness. It’s a quiet that’s full of insecurity and fear.

I still wanted to ask her about it, though – if she knew anything more about the fire or who might have done it. But just as I was summoning up the courage, there was an almighty crunch in the distance out the office window, followed by some profanities being hurled from a champagne-coloured Honda Accord at a pile of bins. Somewhere out in one of the basins, Callum called through to us.

‘Is that Wez?’

Mel looked up from my notes and the map, her dark, woebegone eyes staring at me, still transfixed on the small revelation burrowing into her head. For a moment, she was lost in it, trying to pull the root from the earth without damaging the petals of its delicate flower. Then, Callum’s words trickled through and she snapped back from the soil, back to the room, back to me.

‘Al …’ she whispers, ‘you will keep this to yourself, dear, yes?’

I nodded, unsure if I was lying. Then, she gestured to my phone to call Weston in the distance, her voice perhaps a little more performative than it usually is.

‘Sounds like it!’ she called back to Cal. ‘I swear to GOD, Al, if someone does not stifle the mewling maw of that sprawling hedge-born addlepate, I will fill it with my fucking BALLS myself!’

I rang Weston again, gathering the third Cycle’s lyrics in my head.

9

Neb, Solkat of falling petals and looking at someone else’s phone

Wez dry-humps the box of supplies through the water park back door, his neon regalia colliding with the grey light of the concrete office. Callum shuts the door behind him, scraping a gaffer-taped super rod of brooms into the broken fire exit bar and lodging it shut. With a guttural crack, Wez slumps the box onto a nearby desk and collapses into a chair.

‘Yore welcome …’ he wheezes.

We’ve not eaten since yesterday. Callum grabs fruit, I grab cornflakes. Mel immediately unscrews a bottle of something with a wild man’s eyes.

‘SO! Updéat!’ Wez immediately puts his boots on the desk. ‘Officer Fuckface is still sniffing around, he’s been questioning attendees, bar owners, morst every place you’ve pleyed in the past year. But he’s not come up with much, I hear, and he’s doin’ it on the down-lore. Think he’s bin spooked since you lorded that videor up online Al, good idea Mel. Called his bluff I wager, think he knows he’s got nowt on yas and is wary nor-wun’s gonna talk to him if he gors in gung-hor. Got yas ya food – Mel, deepest apologies, but I couldn’t get you “crème de ta gueule” because I looked it up online and it turns out you completely made it up.’

Callum and Mel smirk at each other.

‘But ahv got everything else!’ Wez continues. ‘Al, I went by your gran’s place, here’s your cameras and batteries and that, er, dressin’ gown you apparently thought was a necessary item. Nice plaise. Helped meself to a couple of Hobnobs for me trouble and … Christ—’

I’ve torn open the bag and immediately set up three cameras. I’ve been relying on a cheap bashed-up hand-camera and my last data card ran out of memory this morning.

‘But, in PROPA news, as Al might’ve told yas, the internet is fu’ckin’ WILD with activity. Peeple are goin’ NUTS for yas. Yas have hit two hun’red thousand on your socials and all that, streamin’s goin’ through the ROOF, you’ve hit ten million average on your big hitters. Ya know …’ – he lists off our more, as Mel would say, ‘actual’ songs – ‘‘Sand Shoes’, ‘Horison’. Fuckin’ ‘Monkey’s Blood’ is doing great.’

‘How’s Molly doing?’ asks Callum, practically deep-throating a banana.

‘Molly Branthom? Dunno mate. You want to text your girlfriend, get yourselves a fuckin’ phone. Aw, speaking of, Al, I left your phone at your gran’s house, but that new one I got ya it’s not cheap, I’ve got bills comin’ out the wazoo for you lot, so I think it’s time we talk, er … renumeration.’

He means remuneration. Or maybe he doesn’t, I don’t know the difference. Mel insisted I get a new phone – the second in only months – spouting conspiracy theories about backdoor surveillance and something called ‘bluesnarfing’. Callum closes his eyes and inhales like he’s breathing in sulphur.

‘You’re not our manager, Wez,’ he says.

‘Then what am I, Callum?’

There’s a shift in tone. Weston’s gone from clown to crime lord in half an octave.

‘Cos currently ahm the only one who knows where you are. I skidaddle and yas can say goodbye to your sweeties and pop, I’ve been sorting yas out with phones and bringing yas ya news. I’ve been hauling my arse all owa town for this little outfit, I think it’s only fair you giz us a little something for me time.’

He’s hidden his blackmail subtly. But we all heard it. He’s the only person who knows we’re here.

‘We told you,’ says Mel, somehow already onto her second glass of a bottle ominously called ‘Grape Wine’. ‘We don’t want to alert anyone to our whereabouts – not Wharton, not the fans. They are really good at digging stuff up about us, where we are, what our plans are. We stay away until everything calms down, or at least until they’ve stopped doing … what they’ve been doing. We’ve been over this. We need to give everything a berth so wide your dick won’t touch the sides, which means! No cash withdrawals, no online banking, no going home!’

Callum looks at me as I finish setting the balance on the final camera. He gives me a little ‘all alright?’ thumbs up. I try to hide my giddiness. My hand brushes the white silk of Gran’s dressing gown from within its plastic bag.

‘I still think we should just go to the police,’ Callum says. ‘We’ve got nothing to hide, we’ve done nothing wrong. Avoiding them just makes us look guilty.’

‘You saw what Wharton said.’ Mel opens a tub of ice cream and starts fingering it into her face. ‘And Al’s solicitor said we’re well within our rights to do what we want until he has just cause to detain us. He’s out for blood, he’ll want to charge us with incitement, arson, GBH, whatever, whether he’s got evidence or not. And, may I remind you, that – as a weathered, seasoned woman of the world – my record isn’t as boring and clean as yours, darling. Stepping inside a police station is enough to deport me.’

I didn’t know Mel wasn’t British. I’ve no idea where she’s from. She’s been saying all this for weeks and we’re all used to it. But it’s not like her to shy away from challenging authority, and with each diatribe she seems to dig herself deeper into the decision.

‘Look,’ she huffs. ‘We stay put, that’s the plan. Our plan. And if he tries anything again, we can claim he scared us – and feed that shit to the papers!’

‘Yeah, but he’s only one police officer,’ says Callum. ‘If we just go to the station, we can find someone reasonable. Even show them the footage, say Al was being harassed. Which you were.’

He’s stood up and is pacing around a little in the same five square foot of carpet. He does this when he feels trapped.

‘That’s as may be,’ says Weston, ‘but as your manager— ’

A chorus of, ‘You’re not our manager.’

‘— I think it’s important for me to impress upon you … the optics.’

Mel and Callum look at each other with a distinctly, ‘here we go …’ face. Wez recently learned the word ‘optics’ and a day hasn’t gone by where he hasn’t at some point said it. I’ve got footage of him looking at a new fancy hat he’s bought in the mirror and quietly muttering, ‘look at the optics on that,’ so he clearly doesn’t fully know what it means.

‘We know you’re not guilty of anythin’. But your fans. Your fans know this too! They’re behind you! It’s a classic underdog story. The oppressive hand of the law trying to subdue the starving artist, censor your stories! It’s fu’ckin’ Stalin, mate. If anything, you lot hidin’ away for a few weeks has only stawked the fire. You’ve got thowsands of peeple out there, rootin’ for yas, waitin’ for yas to return triumphunt, heroically standin’ up to maltreatment and persecution! I mean, there’s grownds for this being religious persecution, in … in a way?’

Mel stands and walks to Callum, putting her back to his. They’re wordlessly communicating, their syncopated breathing slowly aligning on their own private downbeat that’s always at odds with the world’s natural rhythm. I zoom in on Callum’s face and Mel’s back, and frame them in the dusty white light of the room, like the missing seventy-ninth card in a tarot deck.

‘To that end …’

Wez stands, guilelessly wading into the shot.

‘I’ve got somethin’ that might make … everyone happy …’

Mel turns around. It’s the first time I’ve ever noticed that she’s actually taller than Callum. She pours some of her grape wine into the ice cream tub and swirls it like an aged brandy.

‘Go on …’

The next day, I wake early. My bags are already packed – I don’t have anything but my cameras with me – and there’s a mugginess in the air that welds a soft translucent film of sweat to my body. I wander out into a chancel-like corner of the water park, bereft of iconography but for a large cartoon dolphin on the wall, now staring eyelessly at the soft clerestory light that’s seeping in from above and slowly sapping it of its once cerulean hue. I switch a camera on and pull out my phone. The ‘Solkat Ceremony’ private message page is already open and I write, careful with my wording.

We are playing our next gig tonight. Are you or members of the thread responsible for what happened at the Grapes or the Black and Grey?

I go to put my phone away. It’s early, so I’m not expecting a reply. But then a message immediately pops up. Maybe they don’t sleep. Maybe they’re on a different time zone. Its words itch my fingernails.

No. You are.

It’s accompanied by pictures. Molly’s face, bloodied, up close. Then a few more, of others, all of them bruised and beaten, terrified. I don’t recognise them all, but one of them is of the girls we were with in the hotel, the ones giggling and taking the piss. They’ve got scratches on their foreheads and fear in their eyes.

I look away. I can’t understand it. Solkatliberator doesn’t usually reply more than once a day, and they’ve never sent photos. I have to keep rubbing the phone on Mel’s high-waisted floral trousers – one of the only things that fits around my stomach – as I keep staining the screen with sweat.

We don’t want you to do any more of those things. Innocent people have been hurt.

I hear a crack from above and a ‘fuck’s sake …’ Mel has slid into one of the flume’s openings in her sleep and has clearly woken to a face full of green plastic. A buzz jolts me again, the phone nearly leaping out of my hand.

And in our wake, our flesh will break, and remind you of our bargain.

Reading or hearing someone other than Mel recite Callum’s lyrics loosens the timidity in my head. A heady rage rushes through me, like blood flooding back to veins strapped with splitting tourniquets. Callum has emerged barefoot from the back office, a bowl of cereal in hand, to take what has become his daily walk around the pool. He waves, and smiles his weak little half-smile at me. I turn back to my phone…

Well we’re not telling anyone where the gig is. So good fucking luck finding us.

… and lock the screen. I hear a clambering and the screech of flesh on dry plastic as Mel births herself from the flume above us – jutting ten feet from the concrete below – and gracelessly lowers herself down, hanging from its lip, her dress caught under her own hands and showcasing her pasty bare bottom to a nearby artificial shrub. She drops down, fixes her hair, looks directly into the camera and raises her hands, turning to her left then her right, like she’s just broken an Olympic record.

‘And Hajna,’ she announces, ‘with a perfect stuck landing following a front giant into a one-and-one-half front salto over the bar to regrasp. Truly astonishing to see such an ambitious sequence, great virtuosity from such a young protégé, only twenty-six years of age—’

Callum snorts.

‘Twenty-six years of age. She looks to the judges with quiet anticipation, but I think we all know that will put team GB ahead of the Russians by quite a margin, and …’

I throw my phone into my mouth and the camera awkwardly under my armpit, holding my hands in the air, fingers outstretched.

‘… and yes, YES, that’s a perfect ten from the judges! The crowd goes wild, she thanks her team and I think it’s safe to say, from everyone here at the studio, that this is the beginning of a truly … shining career.’

She does a little bow to my chuckling, faking a pratfall to the floor. Callum meanders his way back round to the office, mock-applauding his cereal bowl as he goes. Mel mimes a breaststroke over to me and plonks her elbows over the shallow-end edge of the pool, breathless. She pulls out her rolling tobacco and lays it out on the concrete, spotting my phone.

‘All alright?’

I nod. She sprinkles little pubic strands of brown bark onto liquorice-flavoured paper, menthol filter peeking out the side of her mouth.

‘You asked them?’ she whispers, nodding to my phone. ‘About …’

I nod.

‘But you didn’t tell them where we’re …’ I shake my head.

She licks her cigarette, tempers it with her fingers, then lights it. Her lighter is red, a new one Wez bought her.

‘Good. Good.’

I say her name and nearly ask. I want to ask about the lighter, about what exactly happened after the after-party, about just how far, really, she would go to be remembered. But her face drops for a second, odd glimpses of uncertainty, ivy-like, growing out of the cracks of her fortitude. She looks at me and I can’t bear to break that look, can’t bear for her to think I might see in her anything but beauty and love. She wrenches my strength from me with a smile.

‘This is going to be FUN!’ she squeals.

She takes a huge breath in, then ‘dives’ beneath the water line.

We’re all ashamed to say it. But Wez’s plan has a furtive whisper of sense. We’re driving to Durham later today. It’s about twenty-five miles south of Whitley Bay, with a huge student population, all of whom arrive this week, either to begin or return to the small wedges of study that punctuate their drinking. It turns out that Weston had contacted the university student body about a week ago, unbeknownst to us, and said we’d be available for a secret gig sometime in the future – for a fee of course. Student-run entertainment groups consist of a peculiar genre of people with the fastidious, almost blinding need to control other people’s fun, and he received an email response, a text and two missed phone calls within a matter of minutes from a particularly cloying young woman called Clem. She had the southern, clipped, wispy voice of someone to whom the world had been incongruously kind, and she was therefore very dull and annoying.

Wez informed her we’d consider playing, on the condition that – due to our current situation – we were able to inform her of our arrival twenty-four hours in advance. She said that this wasn’t feasible. He then waited for about four minutes without reply before she emailed again, and, ‘having thought about it’, she was suddenly able to make it work. Wez had the air of a Wall Street scoundrel for the rest of the day.

Callum and Melusine discussed Weston’s plan. We’re to drive down late afternoon, park up and settle at some hotel, then play a secret midnight gig at some student pub night as ‘special guests’. Wez earns his money and, thanks to the surprise nature of the gig, Callum can rest assured none of our weirder fans will be in the loop enough to catch up to us. We’d film it, not livestream it, so there’d be less chance of word getting round the internet and our followers finding out where we were.

Callum asked me if I had any concerns about it before we went to sleep on the pile of clothes we’d been using as beds for weeks, as though looking for an excuse to abandon the enterprise. I tried my best not to look at Mel, who was already trying on outfits for the concert, determining her latest hair colour and singing to the giant, terrified water park frog at the top of her lungs. I lied and said no. But I asked to swing through Newcastle on the way. I wanted to check if my gran was alright.

As I turned my cameras off for the night, Callum asked if he could borrow my phone. I, of course, said yes. He sent a text on it, then deleted it, masking to whom it was sent. He didn’t tell me who it was and I knew I’d spend the night obsessing over it, so I fell asleep looking at the big ‘213k’ on our social media page instead, fathoming how many pubs we’d need to play in to match that number in real life.

Mel’s gear stick crunches as her car metallically sings prayers for petrol, but is drowned out by the sounds of the North Sea to our backs and the beating of callused hands on the dashboard.

‘Come hum your dirges, thrum your drums!

Tell tales of who we were!

For while hissss-tory forgets us, know
that he was him and I was heeeeeeer!’

The car is electric with the sharp static of anticipation. Turns out Wez didn’t sell it. Or he did and he bought it back, hard to say. In either case, with the trailer, bureau and drum kit in tow, the three of us rip ourselves from the tomb of Wet ’N Wild, abandoning its ghosts and buzzing with a charged and volatile energy, feeding on wind through windows and terrible songs from the eighties. With a howl, Melusine postures out the window, a beast, tamed yet forever yearning for peril, shucking pistachio shells at cyclists and screaming her own name as though it brings her power. Callum was hesitant yesterday, but even in his perpetual wariness of the world he can’t help but laugh at her release, at that envious characteristic he would never obtain, however hard he tried – of never caring what others thought of them. I film them both, unable to hide myself from my smile. I put my headphones in and listen to our third Cycle as we rollick into Newcastle, watching Callum do what I suppose he considers dancing.

The car muscles onto the kerb outside Grove House, both Mel and Callum clammy with the effort of playing all the imaginary instruments of whichever obscure prog-rock song they’d suddenly remembered. I search for a new data card.

‘Hey,’ says Callum, turning around. ‘You, er … you want us to come in?’

I’m elbow deep in my large leather duffle, the plastic casing containing my sims in the palm of my hand, but I pretend to keep searching for it.

‘Yeah!’ gurgles Mel, having a frank but mercifully short conversation with the rest of her garish energy drink. ‘She’s into the music! Right? Doesn’t she want to meet her own personal heroine …’

I continue my ‘search’, avoiding eye contact.

‘I mean, no bother if you’d rather just have some time alone with her. We know she likes structure, and you’ve not seen her in a while. Just, you know. She’s important to you. And you’re important to us, and. I dunno. Might be nice?’

Callum is unerring in his navigation of human insecurity. He’s able to see the smallest changes in you or your mood, even before you realise them yourself, and counter them with measured calm – at times, hacking into the tension with a joke, at others, relinquishing and letting the sails of what you’re feeling direct the course. ‘There’s always a time to ask a question,’ he sometimes says. Sometimes when those questions come, they break your ribs.

Angie’s at her desk station. I wait for her to unlock the glass automatic doors.

‘Hey, Al. You didn’t say you were coming in.’

That bus-stop fuck-you of a voice cleaves me between the ears. I tell her it’s an impromptu visit and ask if Gran’s fit to see people.

‘Let me check,’ says Angie, cross and a little confused. She picks up the phone and natters quietly down it. I look over my shoulder, at Callum and Mel leaning on the car, in heated discussion about set lists.

‘Yup, she’s awake. Just you? No police officers this time?’

I imagine Whisht’s hands on my diaphragm. I say I’d like to bring some family members to see her.

‘Are they on your mum’s list?’

I say yes and give the names of two of my cousins. She checks and, appeased, opens the skewbald graveyard of teeth she calls her smile and waves me on. I nod to Callum and Mel to come in, tucking a hand-camera under my armpit.

They’ve changed Gran’s room. Angie leads us all through the warren of aggressively unspecific corridors, explaining that Christine requested a better view, that ‘she wasn’t getting light any more’. We arrive at the door of her ‘new’ room – it is exactly the same, about two doors down. Even her wedding picture is still precariously hanging, as though they transplanted the very same unstable brickwork from her last room into this facsimile of beige. She turns as I hover on the threshold, Callum and Mel waiting in the corridor behind.

‘Christine, Al’s here to see you.’

I suddenly feel uneasy, sick. Gran’s in bed, my old phone in her hand, watching clips of that gothy-looking influencer with a grenade mug venerating her latest idol in a low, tragic, American drone. She looks confused at the figures behind me and bringing them suddenly feels duplicitous, cheap, a fracture of the trust that’s already continually tested, corrupted and rebuilt by her disease. She inches herself up her pillow – the crystal of her eyes bright with that mesmeric curiosity I so often mistake for affection.

‘Of course,’ she says, ‘… of course … Come in. Come—’

‘And Sharon and Kev are here too!’ Angie continues, issuing Callum and Mel through the doorframe like she’s kicking some maddening gum from her heels. ‘Isn’t that nice, all the way from Derby to say hello. Anyway, right, if you’re all settled, I’ll be back in—’

Callum stands there, half-smile, half-heartedly waving from afar as though her very age is contagious, but with unmistakable tenderness in his eyes. Mel has stepped forward, perhaps to hug, to sit, perhaps to tacitly intrude, as she so often does, into the delicate ecosystem of people’s personal universes. But she immediately retreats.

Gran’s face has changed. It shatters into wrinkles with an enormous, quaking expression. It’s as though something thirsty beneath her eyes has become ravenous, drawing the moisture from her skin, contorting it into a hideous, riverine lair of lines and cracks. Her mouth shakes, her eyes protrude in terror and wonder, her lips white from weeks of inertia, her skin now reddening with scorch marks of strain.

‘Christine? Christine, everything alright?’

I feel Whisht’s clawed hand tighten on my stomach, jolting me, the camera falling to the floor at a mad angle. I feel more of them, more Solkats. Hackies and Spelk and Bagsies and whatever all their names are, I feel them loom in the room, hidden at first, now unearthing themselves at the sight of us. I grab the camera, just as Gran lets out a kind of silent scream, a gag, as if the ravenous thing inside her has no more want of water and has slyly slipped into her throat and gorged itself on her lungs. Her blue-veined hand slams out to grip the support frame by her bed.

Rags of spit fall from her mouth as her legs start to kick at imagined restraints beneath her sheets.

‘Right, everyone out, NOW.’

Angie pulls Callum and Mel out of the room with a mutant strength only nurses wield. She pulls a cord, calls out to her tribe of care workers, her weird-women responding down the hall, Angie barking commands, rounding the bed, checking Gran’s eyes, pulse, breathing, pulse, breathing, eyes. Two more nurses whistle past me, both effortless in their weight, gently but powerfully restraining Gran by her arms, Angie righting her head. I hear medical words, firm and loud, feel a hand on my shoulder pulling me from her eyes, Gran’s eyes, her deathless, unblinking eyes, as though she’s looking at her killer, at the person who has come smiling to rip her ribcage and remove the last of her.

‘Gran … Gran, it’s me … it’s me, it’s alright …’

Whisht cradles her head, but she bays at me in a voice I will remember for as long as my mind will let me. I’m thrown from the room, her words etched into my chest for all of time, like names on perished headstones.

‘Release me,’ she says, simply. Cadgeful. Howling.

10

War Lass, the Last Word You’ll Hear, Solkat of one too many

I hear a timid rapping on the door. My weight shifts on the lowered toilet lid, sending it slipping from its misplaced hinges and buckling an inch over the lip of the bowl. Then a voice.

‘Al?’

The petrol station disabled bathroom has spotted beige floor tiles, the kind that scrape the dirt from your shoes and keep it for their own little mosaic. The red emergency cord by the toilet dances softly in a breeze I can’t feel. I rewind the footage on my camera and press play again. A weariness blooms in my chest. I turn the camera off. Another rap at the door.

‘Can I come in?’

I flick the oversized lock-handle of the door. Cautiously, it opens. I see Mel over his shoulder, our sentinel, scowling at anyone with the gall to look our way. Callum closes the door behind him, places a can of something fizzy and fluorescent on the toilet roll dispenser by my shoulder, then pulls down the baby-changing station from the wall. He sits on it. There is a foreboding crack.

He’s waiting, before he talks, for me to switch my camera on.

With its familiar bee-da-bum my shoulders lower.

‘Mel rang Angie. Your gran’s fine. They did an ECG, blood tests, blood pressure. No cardiac event, no stroke. She said it was just an episode of confusion and panic, likely brought on by change in routine or being introduced to new people. She’s resting. Your folks are gonna check in on her this evening at their usual time.’

He’s wearing a new T-shirt – he must have bought it from the shop outside. It’s odd on him, trendy, the distant hue of a sudden, dusky heat storm. I nod and smile, grateful my tear ducts haven’t betrayed me. He searches them, and I watch his search down the viewfinder, hopping between them, trying to find differences in my irises.

‘I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have come in. We didn’t know it would affect her like that.’

I say it’s fine, that it’s not his fault. In my head, I know it’s mine.

‘It’s not your fault either.’ I don’t know how, but he always knows what I’m thinking.

‘Look,’ he says. ‘I don’t know much about … about your gran’s disease. I mean, we knew she was … you know. And Mel’s spent hours at the internet cafe researching it. But we don’t know much, not really, not what you’re going through. But I can tell you that she was so, so happy to see you. Her face just lit up at the sight of you. And. And I know it’s hard to believe it. Easier to think she’s just doing that, that face to everyone. But I know she knows you. And appreciates you visiting. And she …’

He trails off before he reaches the word ‘love’. Callum hates the word. It takes a visible force of will, a kind of run-up, a physical propulsion of his body to say it, even in passing. He once said to me ‘love’s the word you use when you run out of things to say’.

‘She’s going to be fine,’ he continues. ‘And Mel and I are … are here. If you, you know.’

I change the exposure setting on my camera.

‘That is if you actually let us get a word in edgeways.’

I laugh, an involuntary hiccup of trapped tension. We sit for a moment, and smile as Mel, outside, loudly berates a cleaner for even deigning to look in the direction of the bathrooms.

‘We’re not doing the gig tonight.’

My eyes snap to his and I shake my head, tell him I’m fine, that I want to play.

‘I was on the fence about it anyway, and it’s been a really weird few weeks, I don’t think it’s a good idea to—’

I tell him I’m fine again, that I would like to hit something with some sticks for a bit. He laughs, weakly, the rattle of the last hour of chain-smoking dislodging barbed chunks from his throat.

‘I’m not sure about this, Al. About the music and the band. It’s … it’s nice, in a way, that people are listening to us. And it’ll be great to have a bit more money for us all. But the violence, the fire …’

He pulls a matching can of pop from a shopping bag, opens it but doesn’t drink. Images pierce my mind, the bruised girls, the scratches.

‘Do … do you think that maybe people just like us because … people like us?’

I frown and tilt my head. Callum sits in silence for about a minute, searching for the words that in this moment could accurately paint the abstract canvas of colour in his head.

‘I was in town once when I was a kid,’ he said. ‘Shopping with my mum. You know when you’re not old enough to go shopping for clothes without your mum? We were on Northumberland Street. I didn’t know the cool shops where people went to buy clothes, so my mum was trying to get me to choose a brand. And I was so lost, I just stood there with a pasty in my hand, staring at all the signs and photos and lights and things.’

It’s so quiet in here you can hear the little mmmmzzzzm of my camera as I zoom into his face.

‘And I looked up the street and … this fella just started running. He just turned around and started pelting it towards me, like a dead-start sprint out of nowhere. And people, like families and kids and mums and dads and that, a bunch of people around him saw him just turn around and sprint and … and it was the weirdest thing. They all started running, too. They saw a man run, not knowing the reason … But they all ran too, ran down the road, looking around for what he might be running from or to. More people joined as they ran, people shouting, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’ This whole crowd of people. And they reached me and my mum. And … and my mum grabbed my arm, started pulling me, “Callum, come on, come on, run” … But I didn’t. I didn’t see why I should. I just … stood there. Eating my pasty. Watching the world flee an imagined fear, or race towards an imagined treasure, no one knowing what in the fuck they were doing, but they knew everyone else was doing it …’

His eyes glaze as the memory plays out behind his eyes.

‘I think maybe that’s what I mean. That’s what it feels like. Fandoms. Faith. People are just running. And I’m … I’m still just … left behind.’

He pauses.

‘Eating my pasty …’ he huffs, smiling.

A knock on the door. Mel, perhaps with all the restraint she has, doesn’t call through it. But it’s enough for the ink of memory to fade from the pages Callum’s exposed to the sun, and he huffs again, back into the room. Maybe it’s a northern thing, but when words are too flimsy, Callum likes to feed people. He rustles around in the grey plastic and pulls out two fistfuls of ice lollies.

‘You eat one of these. We play tonight. Then we run away to a log cabin in Banff for the rest of our lives. Deal?’

I smile, and pick a mint chocolate-flavoured slab. He leaves, but not before lingering in the middle of the bathroom for a moment, a magnetic equilibrium between space and infinity.

The spires of Durham Cathedral look like the result of some geothermal explosion, frozen in time and chiselled reverentially into Romanesque vaulting, perhaps to warn the north of the eruptive phenomena beneath its soil. The town loops around itself, carrying its ancient streets through arcades of chipped pale stone, sutured by old mining terraced houses, coffee shops and colleges, conch-like, defying and at once prescribing one’s sense of direction, leading you through its own body by the very nature of its growth. The city was once a stronghold, its barbican breached by neither Scottish tribes nor foreign faiths, and now its streets are filled with tourists, townies and errant teenagers, hunting for purpose, praying for resolve or wondering if pesto pasta nine days in a row might actually have something to do with the steady erosion of their mental health.

We arrive at our hotel. Perhaps he’s posturing at our fledgling success, or more likely worried we’ll get snatched up by some record company, because Wez has booked us into a fancy manor on the outskirts of town, a lofty sandstone brick of a building, ancient but gutted and filled with lime green curtains and chairs that look like art. We park the car, silently agree to dump our bags and flee the place, though not before Mel steals some poppadoms from the adjacent glam-looking hotel restaurant.

We walk along tree-lined streets into town, the clear evening light embracing us, hiding occasionally behind the hawkish walls of the distant castle.

‘So where exactly are we playing tonight?’ Mel asks, taking care not to step on the cracks of the cobbles beneath her feet. ‘If it’s just a student JCR, I’ll have you know it’s in my rider to have freshly picked lilies in my dressing room at all times, dried apricots and a bottle of chateaupape du … neuf. Chilled.’

Callum raises an eyebrow.

‘It’s a thing …’

Callum looks in the windows of every passing house as he talks.

‘I don’t know where the venue is,’ he says. ‘Wez just said that it was going to be at some student event, so a crowd will already be there. He says there’s this app that this company uses. Secret Gigs or something. You get a text an hour before it starts with the location. I imagine it’s at one of the student pubs, like a live music night or something.’

‘And you’re … you’re cool with that?’ she asks, tentatively.

‘I mean, I guess? I’d rather be playing somewhere official, with security and safety measures and that, rather than some student union in the middle of nowhere. They’ll have bag searches maybe. And the sound quality will hopefully be better, even if it is a glorified open-mic night …’

Mel is lost in thought. It kind of scares me when she gets quiet. She lights a cigarette and offers me one absentmindedly. I don’t smoke, but she forgets.

‘Good. Yeah, it’ll be safe,’ she says after a while. ‘But don’t you think we’re better than an open-mic, Cal? I mean, we’re getting really big. We’ve got over a hundred thousand followers. Can we at least play in that?’

We’ve reached a bridge called Framwellgate. Mel points at the castle walls up the hill before us, hugged by trees, luminescent orange with the setting sun. Cal has walked ahead of us, listening to a busker.

‘I mean surely we can talk our way in there, it can’t be that hard. Just say we’re students. We could pass as students, right?’

I try and arrange my face.

‘Right?’

Callum’s about thirty yards from the busker. He’s a well-groomed gentleman, winsomely wooing tourists as they pass, his voice a refined and soulless amalgam of every artist he’s ever heard. The song sounds familiar. Probably because it’s one of the five or six chord sequences all songs have these days. He’s worming his way through a hollow, motley assortment of vibrato and vowels. His voice is so tempered and lean, it’s like the movie-star six-pack of voices. All for show, no fat or scars. Singing with his lungs and not his heart. I’m so used to hearing the imperfect emotional journeys Mel and Callum reveal in their songs, it’s alien to me – to listen to what amounts to a well-meaning, talented, charismatic man and feel nothing. It’s like comparing Hieronymous Bosch to a fridge magnet.

Mel has started chatting to some tourists who’ve asked her directions to something. She’s giving them a completely fabricated history of the bridge, the castle, the whole town. At one point she mentions ‘Gauls’, which I’m pretty certain have nothing to do with Durham.

I sidle up to Callum to try and get a dirty, over-shoulder shot of the busker. Callum’s studying him. He’s never as disparaging as Mel or me. He searches through music like a kindly elder through the early works of young apprentices, desperate to find the kernel of aptitude or flair that might one day distinguish this from the works of others. The busker winks at a passing student, a brunette young woman whose perfume assaults us as she throws some coins into his open guitar case.

Something in Callum shifts.

‘I need a drink,’ he says.

He never drinks before gigs. He has one half-pint of stout during soundcheck.

I ask him why he wants a drink.

‘Because …’ he says. ‘I don’t want to listen to this song anymore.’

The busker is crooning, climbing a chromatic scale to a perfect, taut belt, little growls before every note, falsetto slips at the end of each line.

‘Is that …’

Mel arrives, somehow with an ice cream cone in hand. She studies the busker.

‘Is that … Our song?’

We both stand there, stunned. It is, it’s one of ours – the Bizen one we released after rehearsal, in the summer before the Black and Grey. It’s been utterly transformed into a poppy, translucent offprint. My fingers, until moments ago pulsing with its rhythm, grip the camera. Mel’s unbothered. She harmonises perfectly with the gentleman under her breath, basking in the replication, in the emulation. She waves flirtatiously. But I feel that rage again. Hearing those words in another man’s mouth.

The busker winks at us and gently kicks his guitar case forward an inch, the sound of coins ringing a carillon beneath his practised tenor.

Callum is already halfway down the road when I get a text from a random number – replying to the message Cal sent and then deleted the night before.

Just arrived. Dinner?

An hour later and Callum and Mel are already down two pints each when Molly Branthom arrives at the restaurant. She’s followed by a nervous Harry, looking like a bouncer for a club whose guest list consists of nothing but extremely thin mean women and snakes.

‘Heeey,’ says Molly, practically mounting the velvet chair next to Callum. ‘Was so glad to hear from you, thanks for texting! Good choice! Love this place. Their dim sum is sum-dim else! Ha! You guys good for drinks?’

Mel raises her empty glass without looking up from the menu. I decline. The bridge of Molly’s nose has a line on it now.

‘Two more then. Harry, would you?’

Harry, almost surprised at being directly addressed, jumps out of his seat to find a server. Molly and Callum catch up on the past few weeks. She is deeply tactile, always reaching and playing with stray threads on other people’s jumpers. So it’s genuinely quite fun to watch her around Callum. She’s been immediately disarmed of one of her most powerful weapons and has to use her words which, she is quickly discovering, are hard.

‘Sooo. This is exciting. You guys are crushing it! Have you seen how many followers you have? My god, I’m gonna get starstruck. Should I get your autograph now, or …’

Callum smiles weakly, but politely. ‘How’s your nose?’

‘Oh, oh fine.’

She automatically arches back, pushing her chest out in distraction.

‘Got the brace thingy off last week. Still a bit tender, but guys are into scars, right?’

Mel snorts into the pint that’s just landed in her hand. Molly, for a frame or two, is like a child before a damaged parent.

‘We spoke to that police officer,’ says Callum. ‘Said he’s still working on finding the guys who did it. I’m sure he will. He seemed on it. If a little … keen.’

Molly waves it away. I notice Harry dropping his eyes to the floor. Wharton’s clearly had an effect on them too.

‘Are you excited for tonight though?’ Molly says.

‘Well, we would be,’ Mel inhales. ‘If we even knew where we were playing. Wez still hasn’t texted Al back and we’re …’ – she checks her broken fob watch – ‘like, two and a half hours away. Cal’s fretting about soundcheck and getting the bureau there and yada-yada-yada …’

‘I left the keys with the hotel,’ Cal says. ‘Weston said he’d drive it over.’

Molly smiles and sips her rosé.

‘And you, Al. You going to film it? God, the fans will go nuts for it …’

I tell her no. Weston’s hired some students to do it, so we can focus on playing.

‘The big leagues. Wow, it’s like you’re a real band! I mean, you are a real band, but you know, this is … You know what I mean. This is different, you know? Your fans, all the … Solkats and stuff. They are into it. In a big way.’

Callum smiles. There’s a fondness in his eyes for her. I guess, after the whirlwind of the last few weeks and the sleepless nights at Wet ’n Wild, he welcomes Molly’s unremarkable inanity. It must be what it’s like to own an exotic bird.

‘Oooh, is that the set list?’

She sees the scrawl on Mel’s arm and reaches for it. Mel pulls it back, eyebrow arched.

‘Buy me a house first. But, yes, this is the set list. We’re … we’re pretty sure this is the set list.’

‘OoooOOooo, last minute changes? What songs are you going for?’

‘Cal wants to do more of the new Cycle. And there’s … there’s a new song. Which we’ve not rehearsed.’

Mel’s voice oozes with mock contempt. Callum said he wrote a new song, to be added to the latest Cycle. Though when he wrote it, I’ve no idea. We’ve been without his bureau or instruments for weeks, so I guess it’s in his head.

‘Oh, they’ll love it, I’m sure,’ says Molly. She catches Harry’s eye, who is looking even more timorous than usual. I notice he’s ordered himself a large bottle of pop and hasn’t touched it. Callum and Mel continue to bicker over the set list and the new song, which Callum is calling ‘Summon’. I angle the camera towards them but pull out wide to get the whole table. Molly sees the camera and leans back, thinking she’s out of shot. With the faintest of raised eyebrows to Harry, she issues him to step up.

‘Hey, er …’

Everyone immediately looks at him. This happens to me sometimes, when I decide to talk. When you’re not a talker, people don’t tend to listen more per se, but they’re definitely weirded out when you say stuff.

‘This … is, this is gonna sound dumb, but … ?’

He pulls out his phone and waves it like the winning hand in a game of cards he doesn’t know the rules to. He’s lost weight in the last month. Perhaps he’s stopped drinking.

‘Oh, we don’t do those,’ says Mel. ‘Do you know how easy it is to access your phone, simply by using the same Wi-Fi? Anyone in here with half a brain could hack into it and see aaaall the dirty things you do, Harry. All the dead-eyed cocaine-dolls you fawn over, all the weird sex fetishes you have, all the really, really simple words you quickly look up on your phone to check if you’ve spelled them right …’

Not sure which of those things Harry’s most embarrassed by, but Mel’s clearly on the money.

‘Oh go on,’ says Molly. ‘It’s just us. Just to remember you by. Before you’re famous.’

People always say that about selfies. It’s ‘to remember you by’. It’s a self-given permit through the doors of someone’s life, always said in that casual, sing-songy way that suggests that whoever turns them down is the one being unreasonable. I hate selfies. I angle my camera to Molly, who’s already adopted her selfie pose, as though in reply to respondent conditioning that’s been psychically engrained on her prefrontal cortex.

Mel manages to hide about a third of her face behind the pub menu before the photo is taken. Callum doesn’t turn away but limply blinks at the phone as Harry shutter-shoots maybe thirty photos in two seconds. Thankfully, as with all photos, something in them doesn’t see me.

‘Aw, you look so great, guys,’ says Molly, leaning in to inspect them. ‘So, what’s the plan?’

Callum looks at Mel, who opens the basket of dim sum that’s just landed in front of her like a magician, sending a huge paff of steam into the booth.

‘Erm. Just. Just gonna wait until the gig starts, I guess …’

‘What? Come ooon … You’ve been stuck in a water park for, like, a decade! Why don’t we find somewhere fun before the gig? You said yourself, Wez is sorting the get-in. We’ll be an hour at the most, we’ll get you back for soundcheck. Let’s go take a walk along the river, grab some tinnies. Or I know a really, really depressing student house party going on? We could steal their wine then peg it? Come on. Could be fun?’

She tilts her head. I see it now. The thrall she has on people. I don’t think she’s a bad person. I just don’t think she’s much of a person. Her movements are choreographed by a kind of natural instinct only pretty people learn; she bends and flicks her body with the tiniest of gestures, each one distinct but combined in a fluid, metachronal rhythm. It’s like watching the antics of a playful baby animal, discovering its own locomotory structures. Her fingers leap, her back arches, her lips part to reveal her delicate tongue, all to the delight of those around her. Her hands move like harvestmen up barren walls.

‘We need to work on the set list,’ says Callum, shaking his head.

Mel’s tone shifts. ‘Well, if you’re going to write songs without me, then what’s the point of even discussing them, Cal? You’re just going to do what you want to do anyway …’

Molly hears this and pounces.

‘Oh. Do you usually have such input on the songwriting?’

‘Yes. I inspire …’

‘But Callum does the actual writing?’

Mel fixes her with a glare and something shifts in her. She’s angry and a plan is clearly forming in her head. She’d say that she’s coming down with a case of the ‘fuck-its’. She downs the last of her pint. Callum’s eyes drop.

‘This party. Really depressing, you say?’ she asks, rounding on Molly and rising, wielding her dim sum basket like a buckler.

‘Oh yeah, really depressing. You’ll looove it.’

Mel looks at Callum. He’s looking deep into his pint for courage.

‘Well then. What are we waiting for!’

Mel marches from the table, grabbing an idle half-empty gin and tonic from the bar. Her voice resounds along the cobbles as the door swings open and she dances into the night.

‘FOR WHILE HIIIISTORY FORGETS US, KNOW

THAT HE WAS HIM! And I was there …’

Callum gets his wallet out to pay. Something tired in his heart.

Five thousand, two hundred and forty-six miles away, an influencer in Los Angeles gets a notification on her phone. It’s a link to a photograph. In it, Callum, Mel and a blonde young woman are eating dinner, Mel’s face obscured by a large menu that reads ‘The Rabbit Hole’.

Beneath the photo is a comment.

We’ve found them.

11

Belter, Wielder of the Thyrsus, Solkat of neon wristbands and punishment

I have stolen a number of theories about parties. This mostly comes from not being very good at them, and looking up ‘how to am good at parties’ on the internet. Usually whilst I’m actually at a party.

There’s the ‘emergent norm’ theory and it goes like this. A bunch of different people drink at a party. Attendees are a bit confused as to why they’re there, they’ve got nothing in common, they’re not entirely sure who invited them. Then this one weird guy in the corner called Gareth has one too many blue-flavoured vodkas and decides setting a football on fire is a good idea. Someone else does it too. So everyone starts setting footballs on fire. Gareth seems to think it’s a good idea. So now, so do we. What a wonderful fella Gareth is.

Next, there’s the ‘contagion’ theory. This is similar to the ‘emergent norm’ theory, but is less about Gareth, sadly. A bunch of people, Gareth included, for one reason or another, start to feel bored, frustrated, elated or angry at their party. All of them experience that emotion, that collective lust or rage, it spreads from one individual to another, eventually leading them to a random collective need to set footballs on fire. There is an abandon of self-preservation and everyone starts kicking flaming balls around and people get synthetic leather melted onto their shins.

There’s the ‘convergence’ theory. This describes a group of people who love regularly getting drunk and recreationally setting footballs on fire. It’s sort of their thing. So, they throw a party, the sole purpose of which is to do that thing. And they do that thing. They have a great time.

And then there’s the ‘value added’ theory. Gareth invites his friends around for a party. They’ve all been working really hard at the water park, their boss Mildred is being a right ninny, they’re stressed and they could all let off some steam. But Mildred, for reasons only known to her, has snuck in before the party and filled the room with hundreds of footballs, tanks of gasoline and a bunch of flaming torches. Gareth and his friends look at these determinants, shrug and mumble ‘you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t’ and decide the proper form of action. That is, to set all the balls on fire. Had Mildred not stressed them all out at work and then subsequently brought her weird hobby collection along, there is almost no chance any games of flame-ball would have ever occurred.

The fifth and final theory scares me. It’s called the ‘collective adaptive systems’ theory. Gareth hears that people are super into setting footballs on fire. So is he – who wouldn’t be? It’s great. He drinks his cup of blue, asks around and he finds out that a bunch of other people, whether sad, angry, elated or bored or not, are also into this idea. It’s just like the other theories. Except that they start to meet weekly, holding ‘footballs on fire’ conventions on the fly, travelling the country, people randomly deciding to give speeches and presentations on the benefits of giant flaming balls to the face. They randomly decide who takes minutes, organises the buffet, insurance, carpool – all of them adapting to new individual jobs and event spaces and publicity – synergistically promoting the sport, but never quite knowing who’s in charge. All they know is that they’re all very excited about the upcoming National Flame-Ball Competition in Nevada, whoever’s idea that was.

It’s this kind of collective, conscious and intelligent organisation of what ostensibly amounts to a really dumb idea, that lends itself to the worst kind of parties. There’s almost reason behind it. Forethought. Sure, it’s efficient. But if Gareth dies at the National Flame-Ball Competition in Nevada, because he unsurprisingly got hit in the head with a giant ball of fire, no one can claim it was just a party. No one can say that it was ‘in the moment’, in response to a collective feeling, stress, leader or a room full of flaming torches. A series of individual decisions and actions, randomly subsumed under the banner of collectivism, led to that person’s death. Gareth is dead. He died in agony. And we are all both guilty and innocent of his murder.

This party was just like that. It was spontaneous, leaderless. But also hideously choreographed and planned. A collective movement consistent of individual action. Gareth was about to get his face melted off and we would all hear his screams. And, it turns out, it is very, very difficult to put a whole party in jail.

The abyssal sub-bass playing into the ether could be heard for half a mile. As we walked closer to the new-build student apartment building, we could see cheap disco lights rebounding off its chrome, little will-o’-the-wisps of vape fumes catching prismatic flares, reforming them with the breeze into technicolour apparitions that screamed with the violence of the music. The pulsations buried themselves in the tissue between my ribs, pressing into me with such solidity, my breath joined them in disjointed arrhythmic beats, adjusting to new pressure with each push and palpitation.

Glass doors reveal the interior. UV lights have been set up, illuminating lambent figures, each of them scorched with body paint – garish greens, yellows, pinks – that, with the splinters of strobe light, look like cave paintings, hunters chasing prey in the dark. A bunch of these creatures are outside smoking. Two guys are drunkenly discovering parkour on a bike rack, another two are discovering each other’s tonsils. One foul hag of a woman screams at her phone, hurling her can of cheap cider at the doors. It hits it with dead tunk. The doors wait a moment, then open.

‘I thought you said this was going to be … depressing …’ says Callum. ‘This looks like a fucking rave.’

‘It is depressing!’ says Molly, fishing around in her purse. ‘This place throws a party like this every term. Everyone knows only the nutjobs attend, first years with no friends, third year drop-outs. I DJ’ed it once in my second year. I saw a guy drink rum out of a shoe. But don’t worry, this is just the downstairs bit. It’s quieter upstairs. There’s a roof terrace, look …’

Above us, about eight floors up, there is the soft welcoming haze of fairy lights. Someone’s put up prayer flags and the unmistakable mist of shisha pipe smoke hangs beneath a crude stretch of fabric that wouldn’t look out of place in a bohemian tearoom. Or the 1980s.

‘Come ooon. One drink,’ says Molly. ‘We’ll find you a guitar and we can just sit in someone’s room?’

Mel has already set off, pulled by one of her invisible strings, one end tied round her heart, the other round every bad decision she’ll ever make.

‘Al doesn’t mind, do you, Al?’ says Molly.

I fiddle with my camera settings, increasing the aperture as much as I can, to capture the dark figures inside. Callum smiles, watches as Mel in the distance has started dancing with the embracing young gentlemen outside, who are as suddenly confused at her gyrations as they are about their sexuality.

‘Sure, I … I suppose that would be nice,’ says Callum. ‘One drink. Al, do you want me to …’

He gestures to my cam bag. Sometimes, at big events, he offers to do some filming for me, so we can get more coverage. The first time he offered, I said no. But he kept asking, and eventually I relented. It felt like leaving your child alone with a friend to babysit for the first time.

I give him one of my cameras and he and Molly set off. My foot hits a kerb as I see their fingers briefly touch, little hanging strands of spider’s web tangling with the movement of a passing breeze.

Inside is an inebriate tapestry of shapes and shade, stitched with threads of every tone and radiance. The strobe lights seize moments in time, catching gesture, gait and movement in trapped little portraits that won’t be remembered in the harsh dawn light. It’s the student common area below their apartments, transformed with a handful of UV lights and a P.A. system. Figures in a kitchenette area gather atop a supine, resplendent figure, who welcomes splashes of vodka with an open mouth. Chairs and couches have been shunted away to reveal a mass of bodies, rippling together and jumping to the DJ – a dreadlocked zombie of a woman with a laptop – as the beat rises to its inevitable crest. The open ‘shared space’ area is flanked by painted figures, shouting their conversations over the tune. One man simply yells ‘BUZZING’, as though by braying his thought out loud, he’s agreeing with his own face. Some of them study Callum’s clothes as we pass through it all, others his unkempt hair and patchy beard. One or two stop their conversations to point at him, mocking.

The music feels like humidity on my skin. Molly has stopped, spotting a friend. I don’t know when she graduated, but it must have been in the last year or two, as there are a number of people who wave to her and call as she passes. She shout-chats to a shirtless and extremely well-built gentleman who seems totally disinterested in our arrival. Callum stands beside them awkwardly. Harry stands behind him awkwardly. Both of them waiting for an introduction that never comes. After a while, we continue down a corridor, more music playing from speakers hurled on their side.

‘God, this brings me back!’ Molly calls. ‘They used to call these parties “dirty bops”. Bet you can see why …’

We pass an open disabled toilet. A woman is sitting in the bowl, crying with laughter at a joke only she can hear.

We reach the lift. Molly whacks the button then turns to Callum, leaning into him and yelling something in his ear I can’t quite catch. They’re so physically close, Harry turns to me for want of looking at anything else. He raises his eyebrows and yells a question about the kind of film I’m using. I tell him it’s digital. He yells a question about the kind of film I’m using. I tell him it’s digital, not film. He says that that’s cool. Molly realises she’s pressed the wrong button and hits another. Callum has a drink in his hand.

Behind us, as the lift opens, I see two young women. I’d seen them moments ago, huddled over a lighter. They’re standing a few yards away now, linked arm in arm, two mugs of wine in their free hands. They’re staring directly at Callum. I try not to ogle them, they’re very beautiful, but from the corner of my eye I see them go to get their phones out. The lift door pings open and a relative silence envelops us as it closes.

‘So who do you know at this party then?’ asks Callum.

‘Oh, only a few people. I’m the elder now, the graduate. No one thinks I’m cool anymore.’

‘I think you’re pretty cool.’

‘That, coming from you, Callum, means very little.’

She laughs. She’s got something in her hand, something translucent, a plastic bag maybe.

‘My friend Jared’s upstairs, says it’s chill. Where’s Mel?’

‘Oh, she’ll be fine,’ says Callum. ‘It’s been five minutes, she’s already being worshipped as some kind of queen, I should imagine.’

‘She’s wild, that one. You two are so cute together. You’re like a little old married couple. Or the tyrant queen and her grand adviser.’

There’s a pause. She’s unsure if she’s overstepped.

‘She just adores you, doesn’t she? She’d be lost without you.’

Callum is studying the controls on his camera, then the lift floor buttons, watching them light up at an agonising pace.

‘And I without her, I guess …’

Harry is on his phone. I hear Molly’s vibrate in her handbag.

The lift doors open.

‘Here we are!’

There’s a bleak little corridor. Along it, the dorm rooms are open and I can hear laughter and some tinny tunes playing from a portable speaker. As we pass them, we see vignettes, tableaus, self-contained short stories that beg to be read to the end. Students on the floor, sock over their fire alarm, hysterical at a joke lost to moment. Another two sets of limbs, wrapped in embrace beneath a pile of coats.

We reach a fire exit lodged open with a sun-bleached textbook, step out into the smell of cold and watermelon-flavoured tobacco weed, and climb the fire exit stairs onto the roof.

It feels like we’ve stepped through time. There’s a table with candles jimmied into wine bottles, outdoor wicker couches and chairs all decked in throws and an array of mismatched cushions. Maybe fifteen or twenty people litter the place, all dressed comparatively formally, yet dishevelled, drunkenly chatting and puffing on tubes linked up to little Mughal towers of metallic plate and glass. Callum and Molly are immediately thrown into conversation with a friend of Molly’s – Jared – who’s flicking his fingers a lot and looks like he’s lodged a toothbrush in his mouth sideways and is frantically chewing it into digestible pieces. Molly hands him the little plastic bag, he hugs her, shakes Callum’s hand violently. I settle further away on a lawn chair. Harry has joined a group of pretty girls who have given him about as much attention as a potted plant.

The minutes wrench themselves through me. I pull my phone out – that ever-reliable party companion – and text Wez.

At a party by the Riverwalk. Where’s the venue?

I wait. The two girls from below have made it to the rooftop.

Three others have joined them and they’re gathered by the steps, cloaked in a hole-and-corner haze, talking to one another without once making eye contact, skipping over the crowd of people, looking for the next rush of dopamine that comes from wandering eyes. One of them points over at Callum. He’s said something and a number of his new friends are laughing. My phone vibrates.

Problem at venue. Sorting it. Update to come.

I reply. What problem?

I see the three little dancing dots as he types. Then, nothing. I put my phone away and am about to start reading and committing to memory everything on the back of a nearby wine bottle, when I see the girls approaching Callum. I pick up my camera and head to the ledge, a wrought-iron bar atop three feet of brick. They wait politely until everyone has noticed them lingering. Callum is the last to turn.

‘Hi, erm,’ says one of them, short-cropped hair. ‘Sorry, sorry to bother you, but we saw you downstairs and. God, I never do this, but we’re all just massive, massive fans and we just wanted to say hi and …’

There’s a little dent in Callum’s plastic cup of wine that catches the diaphanous sheen of the fairy lights above him. It splits slightly and I can see burnished droplets of red drip and run down the underside of his hand and up his sleeve.

‘Er, thanks. Thank you very much, that’s very kind.’

‘Honestly, my friend sent me the links and it’s all I’ve listened to in weeks, it’s crazy. It’s, like, so detailed and, like, different. Honestly, it’s amazing. You’re playing tonight, right? I’ve downloaded the app, we all have, we’re all crazy hyped for it. Morgan’s made T-shirts …’

‘Thank you very much, that’s very kind.’ Callum hates that he’s just said the same thing twice, I can tell. He’s rattled. ‘Do you … Are you students here?’ he asks.

‘No, well, Morgan is, we go to Northumbria, but we’ve come down for the night ’cos Morgan knows the ents committee and there’s like a ton of people who’ve come down, we can’t make the last train so we’re all, like, camping out and stuff and … We’re ready, is what we’re saying. We’re all ready. For … you know.’

Callum frowns a smile. I see him do his hand-flame thing. It’s starting to hit him. How big this is.

‘Yeah, should be fun,’ he says.

The girl glances over his shoulder.

‘Is … she alright?’

Molly’s eyes are closed. She’s got a phone in one hand and Jared’s portable speaker in another. She’s playing one of our songs to the group behind Callum, from our third Cycle, the title song on The Circus at Wych’s Cross. It’s the first album I drummed on. It’s a weird 5/4 time folky beat with intercrossing melodies, then a mad a cappella chorus, accompanied by two upturned kick drums and I think a cor anglais. I can hear how nervous I was to play in that song. I’m lagging on every hit.

‘Erm, yeah. Yeah she’s fine, she’s just—’

‘We’re worshipping!’ says Molly, Jared and his cohort next to her, their hands limply flicking by their sides like they’re damp with water, mouthing along. I don’t know if she’s doing this ironically. Molly holds her fingers up like she’s demanding payment from the candlelight. ‘This bit, wait, just hang on, wait …’

Jared’s face contorts in concentration, his body wanting to dance, his mind trying to focus on what he’s dancing to. The girls talking to Callum let out little squeaks.

‘Oh. My. God. That’s such a banger. And the story! That’s, like, the first one you mention Belter in, right? So fucking cool, Morgan’s got this theory that …’

She rattles on. Callum places his cup down and nervously wipes his hands on his jeans as she whittles conversation out of everything and nothing. He’s looking around now, noticing what I notice, seeing more and more eyes and phones on him. More and more people round him too, mostly to see what all the fuss is about, some listening to the music and laughing as whatever Molly’s taken starts to kick in, others more discerningly musing to themselves, determining whether it’s cool to like this music or not. But something’s not right.

He looks at me. I look in his eyes for so long all I can see is the pink gossamer of his tear ducts, squirming at the corners of his eyes. He’s speaking his Melusine language to me, whole paragraphs of psychic prose in that anchored smile that’s visibly twitching at its peripheries. I wonder if he wants to leave. I pull out my phone and hold it up. He nods and I show him the text from Weston.

‘Aw damn it, so sorry guys, I’ve got to make a call. Venue issues. Back in a tick.’

The group watch him go, as his own song sings out around the rooftop. Everyone up here is gathered around now, some searching him online to work out exactly how big a deal he is, others asking for a selfie. A good few of them know the words. The girls turn on the spot, calling after him, ‘Hurry back,’ ‘Can’t wait for tonight.’ The dancers are looking to the canopy above them, into it, beyond it, singing along to the song, each of them on their tiptoes, reaching, grasping for the notes that are so closely collecting above their heads.

I follow him down the fire exit steps, watching him pretend to type in a number on my phone and hold it up to his ears. We pass through the fire exit and he immediately turns into the first vacant dorm room he can find.

It’s dark, save for a churning lava lamp on the bedside table. He spots some bottles underneath the bed frame and pulls out a large, amber one.

‘Would you mind finding Mel?’ he asks after a minute. ‘Think we should find out what’s going on at this venue. It all seems a bit … dodgy.’

He’s talking like my gran talks, not entirely sure if someone’s there to reply.

I ask him if he’d like to leave.

‘Yeah, yeah in a bit. If you could just find … find Mel. And then we’ll … we’ll work out a plan for …’

His breath catches as he inhales, little huffs, spurts of oxygen wriggling their way down his throat, only to escape in easy cascades as he exhales slowly, purposefully, wrestling his body for control.

I nod, then palm my second camera that he’s left on the bed and prop it up on the desk.

I work my way down the corridor, now populated with tens of bodies, easing into their induced state of elation, falling down the hall. The lift opens and a wave of figures tumble out. I hear them all shouting too loud, their eardrums still aching from the noise downstairs.

‘I dunno, Clem just said the ROOFtop,’ says one.

‘You texted MATT? He’s bringing naughties but he’s asking for twenty QUID, so it’s probably gack …’

‘Did you see that one video where they …’

They pass by me and I get in the lift. It has the vinegary smell of vomit.

The DJ is still playing, shifting into a dark, ethereal EDM beat that sounds like harsh wind and far-off crematorium bells, but no one’s dancing. A few stragglers are coming in through the door. Two of them are carrying a bathtub. I try to catch their faces beneath the sheen of the fluorescent technicolour paint, but it’s haunting and distorted and I turn away.

Mel’s lying on one of the shunted couches that’s facing the wall, staring into space. She’s picked the darkest part of the room, so dark the camera can barely capture her. Her lipstick is smudged. She takes a sip of something green from a martini glass. I tap her shoulder.

‘Oh, hey Al. Having a good party?’

She’s been crying. It’s ugly and so beautiful. Snot trickles down her lip, and her damp, naive eyes glisten with flashes from the party lights. The more dishevelled and broken her make-up is, the more her eyes crackle with perilous sparks of weakness and power. There are specks of paint in her hair.

I ask if she’s alright.

She lights a cigarette with her new red lighter. Her hands are shaking.

‘Mm-hm.’

The party-goers are looking around, looking for her. She’s hiding.

I tell her Callum wants to see her upstairs.

‘I’m busy. I’m preparing.’

She lets out a hum, almost in agony. Then, when I’ve stayed too long, she holds my gaze – not the camera’s. She’s challenging me, goading me, a single eyebrow raised, knowing she has me paralysed. I feel a kind of shrieking in my sternum, a pallid wight of feeling, yearning, yet so utterly fearful. She looks so angry and sad and lost all at the same time and I feel like I’m trapped, immobilised in her eyes.

‘I’ll be fine in a minute,’ she slurs. ‘Please leave me alone.’

The lift doors open with a ding and I step out. The top floor corridor is so full of people now, it takes me minutes to traverse, all of them shambling like wounded beasts towards the fire exit, snapping at one another, barking jokes and laughter at the walls.

I reach the dorm door, it’s shut. I knock, but the noise in the hallway reverberates along the stucco walls and I hear nothing from the other side. Someone is playing our music on their phone.

I see a flash of neon by the fire exit, in between the battalion of bodies and blue-screen light of their phones. I can’t quite hear, but he’s barking something. He’s got a little bum-bag and people are lingering by him, one by one, before stumbling onto the roof.

My ears are warm. The scratching in my sternum, the jostling of the crowd, the noise. The noise calamitously moves me, rearranges my organs, wedging fingers between them, hunting for something. My body starts to follow the tempo of my heartbeat, pinching the back of my neck and moving my head involuntarily, almost imperceptibly, to its rhythm, in a peculiar shake. The metal of the door handle is growing warm in my palm. It feels like the only thing in the whole world that isn’t moving.

I tentatively open the door.

For a moment, my eyes only see the back of Callum’s head.

Then blonde.

Molly pulls away from him.

I step away as I see them part, Callum catching my eye. I walk slowly back into the crowd, the witch-howl in my stomach ripping at me, screeching in delight as it so deftly manipulates my breaths into awful stabs.

There are too many people, too many things happening and my poor head can’t handle it. A thousand lyrics from a thousand songs are tearing through it all at once, and all I want is silence, to forget what’s happening right now, while it’s happening, to fast-forward through the footage and review it later. Safe, away, away and safe.

I hear Callum at the doorframe, wading out in the crowd, who cheer and paw at him, phones held out like flaming torches, capturing him in their existence. He calls out to me.

‘Al!’

I keep walking.

‘Alice, where are you going? Al, come back …’

The lift door closes behind me.

12

Radge, the Cripple, Solkat of masks and mortar

Two cameras were running that night. I had one with me, and my footage is pretty good actually. When I look through it later, I’ll marvel at some of the natural framing, focus pulling from weathered ravers in the foreground, to choice little moments of romance or mannerism in the back. It was a visual festival, a naturally developing performance, full of trapeze wire social gaffs, brutish strong men, caged animals thought tame, released into the audience to gore.

The second camera I’d left with Callum. It’s not as controlled or as naturally beautiful. But I’ll watch most of this particular footage so often after, I’ll know each frame, each lens flare, each misspoken word, each breath, by heart by the end.

The footage begins as mine does. It’s clunkier. Callum follows Molly through the room full of ravers, bopping wildly under the DJ’s influence, screaming her name. But as the camera tracks around them they all become acutely aware of it. The revelry diminishes and is replaced with a wariness, almost a solemnity. What I first saw as mockery is somehow different down this lens. The pointing, the whispering, it’s reverent. Some folks nod at him, like they know him. One does an unusual bow. One guy sees Mel dance over to a table of drinks face-first and blurts out ‘BIZEN!’

What I notice, as Callum ‘looks’ around the room, is that people are looking at him until he looks at them, at which point their eyes drop to the ground. Conversations fizzle or freeze mid-sentence, faces change. They look like actors hearing the word ‘cut’ mid-scene, dropping performance and reverting to the truest version of themselves.

He goes to the drinks table. There’s a crowd around it and he waits patiently, awkwardly lodged between a particularly buxom woman and her particularly buxom friend. Two large young men spot him and tumble over themselves to get out of his way. He thanks them and they avert their eyes, nodding, their conversation now merely voices in vape mist.

He returns to Molly and the large shirtless man. He’s laughing, and probably on something. But, as with the others, it looks totally performative, semiotic, as though each movement has been choreographed, to better showcase his body, his jawline, his hair. With Cal’s arrival, it immediately ceases. The dips of his abdominal muscles flatten and fill with breath, his shoulder blades, which up to now have been applauding with the effort, relinquish their hold on his chest and shoulders and he slumps a little. His eyes widen at the sight of him.

‘We’re so, so, glad you’re here,’ he says. His voice is low and Callum strains to hear it over the thudding bass.

‘Thanks! Er, thanks for having me! Is this … Do you live here?’

‘A house is just a home you haven’t chosen.’

This is a lyric. From our latest Cycle, ‘Whisht Whispers’.

‘Oh,’ says Callum. ‘Well, yeah, not sure that lyric was written about some sick student housing for four hundred quid a month though. If I knew you could get that kind of deal, it might have gone a bit differently!’

The shirtless man smiles softly.

‘We all feel very lucky you chose this town. For your next performance.’

‘Well, yeah, our manag— our frien— this guy we know, sorted it out for us. Should be fun! Though I’m not sure where it is yet though.’

‘A house is just a home you haven’t chosen. Perhaps you’ll choose tonight.’

‘Yeah, yeah … It’s erm … Guess you’re right.’

Molly leans in and issues the shirtless man one of her pills. He nods, gratefully.

‘See you on the roof?’ she says.

‘See you on the roof,’ he replies. ‘And would you like me to—’

He’s reached for his pocket, but Molly stops him, inching a look at Callum out of the corner of her eye.

‘Don’t worry, Harry’s on it.’

The camera spins to Harry, who is transfixed. Behind him, Melusine – rather tentatively, down this lens – has made a grab at some takeaway pizza on a counter, next to a woman choking on vodka getting poured in her mouth. Seeing her distress, Mel bats the vodka away from her and starts admonishing the guys around her.

‘Fuck off, she’s got hands, doesn’t she? She’s not a fucking child, treat her with some fucking respect you currish varlots! You garrulous forms, you story-tourists!’

The guys relent, their voices immediately hollow and murmuring at the sight of her and the mad words she’s using. The young woman rises from the counter and moves towards Mel, who has already got bored and somehow managed to go crust-deep in one mouthful, and the two of them slip into a galaxy only their eyes can see, whirling in a single moment around a star, painful flares of attraction between them. In my footage, Mel looks powerful. But in this, I see her falter. The bravado, the gumption. She always talks like she could get in the pants of anyone in the room but I’m not sure I’ve seen her ever actually do it.

Callum follows Molly down a corridor, stopping only to look at a woman in a bathroom. She’s sitting on a toilet, weeping inconsolably. Molly yells over her shoulder. Callum’s camera is too zoomed in and he pulls out, watching Molly as she jabbers about her uni days. Something catches his eye and he focuses on a daubing on the wall, probably in the same body paint adorning the partygoers. It’s a white circle, flanked by a large looping bulb, like a flame. Two pupilless eyelids astride a line in its centre. He fixates on it, the camera scanning the fingered luminescent paint for further information, but finding none. It’s one of his symbols. One he used a lot on our third Cycle.

He pans. Two more symbols, four or five feet in size, smudged onto the wall by hand. A jagged cross with dots and lines in each of its gaps. And another, a simple two dots and two vertical lines. Our fourth and fifth Cycles.

The camera jerks and the viewfinder’s filled with Molly’s face, gazing at Callum. I’ve never been looked at like that before, never been on the receiving end of such unmitigated focus. She looks a little like how my gran sees the world – with wonder, a search for recognition, tinged with the tremors of fear and uncertainty. A mother looking at a child for the first time, praying it will feel for her what she feels for it.

She pulls him into her.

‘It begins tonight,’ she calls, as though she’s casually naming the song that’s playing.

Callum mumbles something the camera doesn’t catch, its view lodged in Molly’s hip.

‘Everything. Everything begins tonight.’

We enter the lift and the footage skips. Callum will later tell me he actually turned it off to look through what he’d just shot, rewinding it to study the daubings on the wall. When it’s turned back on, the focus finds the fairy lights and candles of the roof terrace.

Callum is mid conversation with Jared and a number of people around him. You can just about make me out in the background, texting and inspecting a wine bottle.

‘The third Cycle is where it ALL kicks off,’ says Jared, playing invisible thumb harps in the air. He occasionally barks random stresses and syllables. His eyes are feral, darting, searching for patterns in agrestal weeds in a garden of colour and beauty.

‘Yeah! The CIRcus is where it all begins,’ says another, just as manic. ‘I know some people think, some people think “The Blatherskite” represents the fool. But the fool in all medieval literature is the subversion, the subVERSION of power, the mirror, the dervé! Unshackled by societal norms, able to, ABLE to embrace both the bestial and the sublime. You know, Adam de la Halle, you’ve read Adam de la Halle, right? He …’

‘The Circus at Wych’s Cross’ is one of the Cycles I’ve never really understood – and I don’t understand many of them. The Blatherskite, the Solkat of perversion and politics, tells the tale. A number of the Solkats, Monkey’s Blood, Spelk and Belter are gathered by Radge, the Cripple, to perform for the others. They hypnotise their audience, set their palms alight with pleasing words and images of dreams, and they’re unable to look away from their own hands. While they’re distracted, Radge tries to steal their stories, gathering their followers to the precipice at Haporth’s rock, and making them swear allegiance to him. Haporth wakes the Solkats in thrall with his first prophecy – The Wallowing – and hurls Yem, the Mother, Solkat of empty beds, from the cliffs into the sea. It sort of begins this war, the first war among the Solkats – Marra leading the Motherless Ones against Radge and his cohort. But there’s a ton of other stuff in it too that I don’t get. It’s impenetrable, and some of it’s not even in English. It’s around the time he wrote this that Callum’s dad died, I think.

‘… and-and that, THAT is the genius of it,’ barks Jared. ‘It’s Kafka’s metamorphosis. You know I’m going to write my dissertation on it? Comparing it, comparing it to, to the elder Edda, Ulster, Fianna, the fucking, the fucking Bi-bible, it’s our modern mythology! It’s the first text in centuries that actually SAYS something, you know? Like it’s a, a continuation of those stories, but a departure from …’

Callum’s camera has dropped to his side, angled up at Jared who has become so animated he’s beginning to resemble a mad, towering inflatable caught in a storm.

‘Wow,’ he says, as Jared’s tirade slows. ‘You’ve … you’ve all really put a lot of thought into it … But you know it’s allegorical, right?’

The whole group stops. Then erupts into laughter.

‘It’s supposed to be a … a comment on …’

But the laughing continues. Callum turns to see some girls who’ve come up to get selfies with him, all of them a perfect display of hip to waist ratio, muses willing him to paint them. He mumbles his way through their compliments. Spilled red wine inches over the lens. He tries to wipe it, tinting the shots from here on out with a pinkish, nightmarish blur, distorting their faces from smiling to fixed, unmoving gurns. The camera is by his waist and it undulates with the increasing rapidity of his breathing. At one point it sounds like he’s going to be sick.

I see Solkats among them. I know it’s weird, but I see them more and more these days, and I see more in this particular footage for some reason. The dancers are looking up as they rave and I imagine the Blatherskite, its face as wide as the canvas above them, watching them, absorbing their little shouts and gifting them golden strands of nonsense from his mouth. The strands hang in the air, tie up their hands in knots, and they fidget to shake them free. They cannot reach him. And he teases them, willing them to leap into the sky and find him, touch his blind eyes, his babbling mouths, his falling teeth. His laughter is drums to them. His breath is sweat.

I’m out of shot, but you see me hand Callum my phone and he tucks the camera under his arm. I see him read the text from Wez. At the time, I thought he was dialling a number but instead he flicks to the browser. A page of forum threads is already open and he quickly refreshes. A hundred new posts pop up, more. Photos of him, of Melusine, all taken quietly, surreptitiously from dark corners, across a gloomy makeshift dance floor, in dirty corridors, from dorm rooms, on a candlelit roof. The pinned post, at the top of the group, has a picture of him, Mel and Molly from behind, walking out of the Rabbit Hole. He clicks on it and sees a number of photos of them, following them along the river to an apartment building in the distance. Posted by username ‘HarryHaporth’.

He makes his way from the crowd. In my footage he looks calm, but here he has pressed the camera to his chest. You can hear his breath and the rapid thumping of his heart. In the dorm room, he plonks the camera onto the bed for a bit, staring at a very loved knock-off sports cap.

You can hear Callum and me talking. He asks me to find Mel. Then I set his camera on the table out of habit, angling it from the desk to the far side of the room, and leave.

The footage from here will become one of the most famous and viewed videos in the following. News outlets will use it to denigrate us, followers will revere it for its truth. It captures the moment that everyone has had, at some point in their lives, but kept secret from themselves. The clip candidly reveals a kind of weakness, an abandon. It projects something hallowed and sacred onto a profoundly base, theriomorphic release. Followers will misinterpret it, reading a religious iconography into it, finding meaning in its meaninglessness. They’ll make a big, spiritual deal out of it, when – really – it’s the most human thing Callum’s ever done.

I don’t think it’s spiritual. But I see the beauty in it that others see. The mortality of it. The wonder.

Callum vomits. He doesn’t make to move, bend or curl his body, reach for a bin or the bathroom. He simply stares. Stares into space, undrunk whisky in his hand, for exactly a minute and twelve seconds. Then, without urgency, but with an almost amusing suddenness, he hurls across the room in a clean, looping ribbon. He pauses. Then another expulsion, bigger this time, that arcs from his being like the rending of his soul. He cries a little, some of its remnants burning his nose. He stares at the draped sheets of vomit on the floor. Then, unblinking, he takes a sip of the whisky and coughs as it burns his already scorching throat.

Minutes go by. Then there’s a knock at the door.

‘Cal? Cal, are you— Oh dear, oh darling …’

A hard-lined wash of light dissects the camera lens. She closes the door behind her and carefully angles herself over the sick, gently sitting on the bed next to him. He’s still staring.

‘Are you alright? Do you want some water?’

He shakes his head.

‘Hey … hey …’

He’s sniffled and she thinks he’s still crying. Molly goes to put an arm around him but then relents, remembering.

‘Do you feel better now? Better out than in, eh? Release …’ she says. There’s comfort in her voice, but not her words. She doesn’t want to tell him he doesn’t have to perform tonight. She’s bending him back into shape, propping him up, trying to get him to do what she wants.

‘Wez is here,’ she says. ‘He’s gathering people on the roof. Some of the boys have lifted your box up there and … well, it’s not the best set-up in the world. But maybe that’s what’s needed, eh? An unplugged performance. Intimate. No pressure.’

Callum sips his whisky.

‘Is Mel here?’

‘She’s on her way up now. Weston’s doing tickets on the door, something to do with the app, it crashed or something, too many people using it. But that’s good, eh? You’re crashing apps, you’re so popular, darling …’

She’s talking like Mel. I wonder if she’s doing it on purpose. Callum looks at the bouncing spittle hanging from his beard. He places his eyes in his hands, his fingers hooking into his brow and scratching his receding hairline.

‘I … I don’t think I want this, Molly … I don’t …’

‘Heeey …’

She’s put her arm around him. Callum’s shoulder seizes at her touch.

‘Look at me, Callum. Look at me …’

He doesn’t for the longest time. Then, his hands drop and he summons the last of his courage to flick his eyes to her. She speaks so softly, comfortingly. It’s like he’s dying. Like she’s beautifully ending his life, but talking him through it, teaching him the experience, to embrace it, like a child. Her face hovers inches from his, trying to find his eyes. She mops the sick from his mouth, then kisses him. His mouth doesn’t respond, his face doesn’t move. Hers presses into his, trying to eke the smallest twitch, the slightest roll of his lips. She holds his head, trapping him for endless seconds of unasked intimacy. Then pulls back, and with the calmest, most terrifying voice I’ve ever heard, says:

‘It’s … it’s not about you anymore, Callum. It’s about everyone now.’

She leans in to kiss him again, but he pulls back. The door opens, and he looks at a silhouetted figure, back-lit by a halogen blaze and a host of writhing bodies. The figure leaves and he shrugs Molly’s arms off him, calling out to me as I run from the room.

I don’t want to talk too much about what happened when Callum found me. I was sitting halfway along a corridor on a floor downstairs, so gauntly lit it filled me with fear. I don’t know how he followed me, but he knew, somehow, where I’d go.

He brought my second camera with him and sat down next to me. He put his arm around me and gently pulled my head into his shoulder.

Minutes went by. Then:

‘There’s a difference between being seen and being perceived …’ he said.

Whisht was making shadow puppets on the wall behind him.

‘To be perceived … is to … It’s losing the person you’ve fought so hard to be. In all its complexity. It’s ignoring the traumas you’ve felt and the wonders you’ve seen. It transforms you into what you are … to them.’

I could hear shouting above us, someone calling through a microphone. But Callum’s voice gently eased my ears back to the room. Back to moment.

‘It’s growing flowers in dog shit,’ he said.

He paused for a minute.

‘People perceive those flowers, their colours. The twists of stem and leaf. And they think, “Oh that’s nice. That’s what flowers are for.” But to be seen. To be seen is for someone to touch those petals. To feel the silk of them, the fibres it took so long to grow. It’s to feel the fur of the stem that protects it from the cold. It’s to run our fingers up the curves of thorns that, if we press them even gently, will make us bleed. It’s smelling, not only the flower, but the ugly, horrible soil that it grew from. And brush, perhaps, our palms on the bumps where roots are growing within.’

He tapped the camera in his hand. I remember seeing tears falling from my hanging head, staining Mel’s trousers with little spheres of morning dew.

‘They all perceive us, Al. We can’t stop them from doing that. But they will never see us. They will never. Ever. See us.’

He said that like a battle cry, held up the second camera and filmed me. He filmed me. My eyes looked away and I covered my face, juddering with tears.

But then his free hand reached out and gently lowered my hands, revealing the fat little face behind them, my weird boring eyes blinking at him, hateful, not of him, but of the whirring lens that’s stealing me, stealing a self that no one should be allowed to see.

He held the camera there, filming me. Whisht lay on my tummy, fawning, his head rising and falling. I looked at Callum and my breathing slowed, aligned with his, his purposeful breaths like a calling to me. Calling me home.

‘I see you, Alice,’ he said.

I never watched that footage back. I deleted it some time later. But I don’t need to. I have what Callum has always wanted for me.

13

Sneck, Solkat of thumb prints and blurted thoughts

The computer on Kaylee’s desk has been on for so long, the heat from it has joined the afternoon sun and warmed the wood beneath it. Bits of tack, hundreds of them, dot the desk, her walls, her monitor. They have a sweaty sheen to them now. Lonely splinters of expensive Argentinian coffee descend from the thin biscuit of grounds around the rim of her cafetière and into the murky depths. A shaky, tired hand plunges the press and they’re gathered, one by one, by the sieve, whirling and diving to escape it before being crushed as one at its base. She pours herself another cup. The fifth in as many hours.

It’s three-thirty in the afternoon, but she’s been awake since yesterday morning. The livestream has been running for just as long. It’s had breaks of silence and study, caffeinated rants at new discoveries, followed by rotten depths of withdrawal and fatigue. She looks at the number of people still watching. It’s about the same. She’s gained a hundred and fifty thousand followers in the last three days alone, double the total she had a month ago, and about a quarter of a million people or so are watching. With her, beside her, on her search.

She’s punctured the time with occasional interviews, the odd hour here and there where she’s chatted with others about theories, updates, plans. There was a three-hour stretch in the night where she got drunk and just re-listened to Cycles. At least twenty other influencers are doing the same, constantly streaming, engaging with this new watchful audience during a momentous night. She’s found a crew in them. No longer bent to their pressures or prejudice, no longer their idol, but part of them. As much a shipmate as shipwright.

She flinches as she rests her hand on her computer mouse, her wrist – freshly tattooed with lines on a broken circle – catching the desk’s edge. She sees a message pop up from Willow.

Got live footage of Durham. NOW. Colab?

She pours some energy drink into her coffee. If she were listening closely, she might have heard her kidneys renounce god.

Ye! Two mins.

She goes to the bathroom and sits, pulling her phone out. She flicks through the ascension of photographs and memes, the captions and comments, hunting for likes and upvotes and approval. Without thinking, she double-taps photos of puppies, lyrics imprinted on sunsets, a friend publicising their new television show. She does this, over and over, for two straight minutes before pausing. Then she looks at the awkwardly-placed pre-installed mirror opposite her.

Why there’s a mirror facing the toilet begs theses on the inherent perversion of Los Angeles. But within that pause, as she looks at the young woman opposite her, now ten pounds heavier, her natural weight, tired but happy, enjoying this prolonged case of the ‘fuck-its’ she’s so acutely diagnosed herself with, there is something. A tousled, exotic beauty. She looks at the phone in her hand, automatically reaching for toilet roll with her other.

There is a certain plasticity to the human mind. She was hungry earlier and suddenly, fugue-like, she found some day-old Mexican food in her hands. She needed to pee so, without thinking, without ever deciding to, she left her computer, crossed her apartment floor and sat down. She just reached for toilet roll proprioceptively, the mapping of her environment and her effect on it configured by a thousand unsung sensors in her mind.

She looks at her phone. At no point had she ever decided to get it out. She’s not wearing trousers, so she took the phone in her hand to the bathroom. But at no point had she decided to. It simply was something her body did now. The soft click as the screen hypnotically drew her eyes into its perfectly designed collection of colours, purposed to be easy, to be user-friendly. To become a gesture so instinctive that, on a subconscious level, her very self was umbilically linked to it. Her bladder was full – she peed. Her stomach was empty – she ate. Her mind was afraid of itself – so she looked at photos of dogs.

She slumps back into her enormous, leather gamer chair. She doesn’t get as many emails any more. Her agents are ‘reviewing their relationship’. Most of her deals are dead, save for one – the energy drink she shotguns every hour or so, who repost her videos every thirty seconds now. She clicks the video link Willow has sent her and screen-shares it to her live feed, automatically plugging in her over-ear headphones and coronating herself.

Willow’s screen appears and reveals an empty chair. Kaylee likes Willow. She’s younger than her. Most influencers, when they’re starting out, are cloying with requests, fabricating a kind of vapid rapport in seconds, with a zeal that borders on delirium. But Willow was careful, slower than most to find fame. She posted religiously for five years before suddenly finding a bump on a video game review that launched her. She was born funny, clever and unhappy. Clever people often have to work much harder to be happy.

‘Just a second, I’m naked,’ comes a voice from beyond the camera. ‘And not, like, sexy naked …’

‘No worries, do you want me to share the Durham feed my end or … ?’

‘No, I’ll do it. Apparently it went down, too many people got hold of the link, but getting a private one. Shouldn’t crash.’

A damp swinging mop of hair whooshes on the left of the screen and Willow slumps into her seat, towel around her. They’ve been doing this for weeks now and they’ve both given up on appearances. No one’s tuning in to see them ‘create content’ any more, no one’s there to see ‘hot gamer girls’. They’re here to hear their thoughts, watch them facilitate discussions, explore ideas, plans, conspiracy theories,footage. ‘It’s like being men!’ said Willow, weeks ago. ‘You don’t see them dyeing their hair and deep-throating joysticks, DO YA?’

‘Hey,’ she says, wringing her hair. ‘You hanging?’

Willow’s hair is usually blonde, but it’s murky after her shower.

She raises an eyebrow and sips coffee – she’s referring to last night’s livestreamed whisky-fuelled listen-along.

‘Yeah, a little,’ says Kaylee. ‘I think I just peed neat bourbon, so it looks like my body’s just letting it shoot straight through at this point.’

‘God, I’d KILL to pee. I haven’t peed in two weeks.’

Kaylee laughs. Her voice is hoarse and it’s mingled with some lagging feed, lending it a robotic tone that makes her sound deranged. Willow is looking at something on her screen, waiting for the updated link, replying to comments. She doesn’t look to Kaylee’s image or the camera, but chats all the same.

‘You saw the footage from the last hour, yeah?’ she asks.

‘Yeah. A bunch of people have changed the whole thing. It’s not just the third Cycle. Think they’re hoping for fourth and fifth, too.’

‘Yeah, saw that. How many people you got?’

‘Two fifty-seven and change. You?’

‘Ooooh, fucking queen of fucking England, are we? One-ninety. But just watch. The apprentice is becoming the master. I’m gonna steal them all from you, just you wait …’

She smiles. Neither of them care anymore how many people are watching.

Videos have come in from the party. Hundreds of thousands of people have been waiting for weeks, and it was this stifled fever that actually drew more intrigued denizens of the internet to its corner. As soon as they emerged in Durham, everyone’s phones began to melt with the traffic, wondering what their plan was, what new revelation they were deigning to gift them. Everyone’s either loaded little videos or photos up to SolkatCeremony, or one of the smaller threads, or one of the eight hundred thousand outriders have ferreted through social media accounts and pillaged videos from people’s feeds. Some have already started splicing moments together and supercuts of their arrival are flooding the forums.

‘There’s a rumour of a new song,’ says Willow. ‘I’ve got SO many thoughts.’

‘Well it sounds like the eighth Cycle is in flux. It’s not released yet, they haven’t recorded it officially, just what we’ve got from the Grapes and a handful of rehearsal videos. Whatever He’s creating, don’t you think it might be, like … in response to us?’

‘Possibly. But you know, I’m a bit more witchy than you. I don’t think it’s in response to us. I just think he’s been waiting.’

They never refer to Callum or Melusine by name. It’s become a weird unspoken rule across all the fandom. Simple, capitalised ‘He’s’ and ‘She’s’. There are a fair few threads on me, they call me the Archivist. Some are fairly convinced I’m a ghost for some reason.

‘If we exact the writings in the third Cycle, and – hell – it sounds like we’re planning on doing Four and Five tonight, SHIT I’m excited, then they might go to ground again. Might give them time to go to a studio or something. Put the Eighth down properly.’

‘God damn, can you imagine … What part of the Cycles are we hoping to replicate?’

‘Beats me. The third is easy. Some kind of hypnosis or something? Radge has the Haporth ritual, could be something like that? But four and five have so many bits to them, I’ve no idea what we’re hoping to do.’

She’s talking about ‘replication’, a word that’s been thrown around for a while now online. Each of them refers to the fandom as ‘we’ and they’re trying to figure out how the songs in the sequence of Cycles are going to manifest in real life – like the attack on Molly and the fire. They think they’re signs, rewards for their faith and following, and that there’ll be more and more as the fandom grows. Some are organising meetings and conferences, others hoping for some kind of festival. Some of the darker forums, like SolkatCeremony, have already started talking about some pretty horrible stuff they hope to do – acts of vandalism, revenge on dissenters, burglary. It’s all bravado of course. It’s easier to type a threat than act on it.

The fourth Cycle, ‘The Motherless Ones’, relays the first major events of the war. Canny is marked by the Bagsies and becomes their leader. There are battles and skirmishes, betrayals. At one point, Whisht defects from the Motherless Ones and betrays them. Canny loses the Battle at Halcyon Gates and is the first to be trapped in mortal form for her failures. It’s all very metal.

The fifth Cycle, simply titled ‘Enmity’, tells the same stories but from Radge’s perspective. We find out he’s in love with one of the Motherless Ones, Hackies, Solkat of side-eyes and nightmares. He tries to abdicate, but Belter and his compatriots threaten to kill the Doubts – dissenters of their creed – and he relents, eventually winning the Battle at Halcyon Gates, only to find Belter killed the Doubts in his absence anyway.

It’s confusing. And I’m in the band.

Willow types some more responses. Kaylee is lost in the wan and wayward lining between thought and sleep, her eyes like pastel beads, wondrous and pale in the afternoon light, the whirling carnage of Halcyon Gates percolating through her thoughts. Her mouth falls open as they wait for the updated link.

‘Willow?’

‘Yeah, babes.’

‘Do you … I know we’ve spoken about this, but. Do you believe in the Solkats?’

Willow stops typing.

‘Like … I dunno, like … really believe?’ Kaylee asks.

Willow smiles. There’s something of an aged clergyman about her, behind a confessional window, smiling at the trivial misgivings of a worried mother, terrified she’s offended god because she slipped up on her vegan diet and accidentally ate halloumi. She adopts a mocking, aged tone.

‘What’s troubling you, my child …’

Kaylee feels the snow of sleep around her, the white, comforting hypotrophy, sheets of it, welcoming her into hypothermic bliss. She takes five sips of coffee.

‘Nothing, no. I was just wondering if it’s the poetry. The idea of it. The Story of it, that you like. Or if … if …’ Kaylee trails off. Her kidneys are seeing demons and hellfire.

Willow looks at Kaylee. Which means she isn’t actually looking at Kaylee. She’s looking directly into the camera above her screen. It’s a standard move people use when doing distanced chats or interviews online. At first, it’s odd. Then you forget they’re doing it. Then you remember and realise they’re staring, not at your face, but at a black, domed nothingness above you. Sort of like real life in some ways.

‘I didn’t,’ she says. ‘At first. I found comfort in the complexity. Nothing has complexity any more. It has colour and the veneer of a plan. TV shows, books, comics, they’re all written week-to-week, or year-to-year, and to someone like me, the cracks show. It’s a story, but every chapter’s by a new author with a new agenda, or by the same author with none, or a committee with several. What drew me to the Solkat Cycle, at first, was an assumption that I wasn’t dumb. You know? That I was able to handle untrustworthy narrators, twisted accounts, form my own ideas. That I could cope with complexity. With a plan. That’s why I got into it …’

She forms a shell of towel around her drying hair.

‘But now. The more I look. The more I watch what people film. What people say about them. The discussions, interpretations. People are saying they’re seeing them. Meeting them, in passing. The Solkats. Little moments that couldn’t possibly be anything but them. Synchronicities that, before now, felt like coincidence, but … But it’s like they’re reaching out to us. The more we look for them, the more we listen, the more they’re able to reach out. Like they’re trying to get out. Take form. Like they’re … I dunno.’

Willow trails off as she replies to another influencer’s drivel. Kaylee thinks for a moment. There are shrouds on old cloth, biblical miracles, crusades, all running through her head. Faith’s inherent need to find patterns, explain coincidence, understand chaos and comfort those fearful of a designless universe.

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she says.

Willow laughs, then something catches her eye – the new link.

‘Do you?’ she asks. ‘Do you believe in Solkats?’

Kaylee can feel coffee granules hugging her cheek lining. It feels like her whole mouth is made of cat tongues.

‘Yes,’ she says, calmly. ‘Yes, I do.’

Willow looks at her/the camera again. ‘You believe His words are true?’

Kaylee plays with some tack on the desk.

‘I know it sounds odd but … But I think not even He believes them. I think He’s been given these stories. That they visit him and help him chronicle their histories. But then, I dunno, the next morning he wakes to the world and … and he chooses not to believe them. Or he forgets. He forgets how real they were the night before, rationalises them, removes himself from them. Because otherwise people might think he’s nuts.’

Willow has dropped her eyes to the screen and is watching Kaylee haphazardly fight her way through exhaustion with every word. They both watch the live feed of comments rattle past them, people weighing in with their own personal dissertations on the subject.

‘Link’s landed. You ready?’

Kaylee leans forward in her seat and scrapes rheum from her eyes.

‘Yes. I’m ready.’

The feed is from the back of the rooftop. Someone has climbed up the fire exit doorway and positioned it precariously on some guttering. It watches as the crowd passes beneath it, through the narthex of the dorm corridor and out into the improvised nave of the glittering, candlelit roof. A hundred people are gathered, maybe more, flanked by the low wall and wrought-iron fencing, guarding them from the drop into the midnight air of Durham.

There’s a low, feverish hum on the roof. A bathtub greets the crowd as they inch forward, placed squarely like a font at the top of the steps. It’s full of white paint.

Some gently dab handfuls of the milky sediment on their cheeks, foreheads and shoulders, taking time not to let a drop of it stain the decking. Others simply dunk their heads in and emerge laughing, their diaphragms kicking with the cold. A buoyancy is in the crowd. Some are still drinking, revelling, following and engaging in whatever unhinged plan the crowd has contrived. Others stand motionless, the paint already hardening on their faces, splintering like mudcracks, forming ancient networks of geometric devotion on their brows and lips.

The feed goes on like this for some time. But then a ripple starts to wash across the crowd, as the cold and adrenaline concoct a febrile intensity in them. Laughter and shouting supersedes the initial quiet and the rooftop quivers with little sparks of energy, as they all somehow feel something coming. Before long, the roof is full. The corridor beyond is full. A neon-tracksuited man with pointy shoes wades through the crowd, zipping up a bum-bag of cash and cradling it like it’s his bastard child.

‘Be good tonight, gang!’ he mumbles, shaking hands as he walks. ‘Marra be with yas! Be good! Be good. And if you can’t be good? Beeeeee lucky …’

A few people around him join him in yelling his catchphrase but are quickly silenced. The fairy lights and corridor bulbs are extinguished, and the crowd is left with nothing but the diffuse luminance of the clouds above them. There is an audible dampening of sound, a downy cover of quiet from the ether. Wez has hung Callum’s map at one of the rooftop edges. It flaps in the wind.

Then, from nowhere, there is a loud, harsh pop of a P.A. system. The crowd jumps and giggles excitedly.

‘Oh the Blatherskite, he saw it all …’

Melusine’s voice is different. It’s adopted a kind of reverberation. To anyone listening, they might assume it to be nerves. But to those who are watching her in the corridor, walking up it, eyes closed, the crowd parting and helping her step through with outstretched hands, they’ll see she’s trance-like. She is stringing together the lyrics of the first triptych, ‘Exordium’, and the words are right. But there’s no intention behind them, as though they’re a foreign language she’s learned phonetically but doesn’t understand. The camera sees a head appear, circumscribed by a cluster of hands and arms, leading her up the steps.

‘But no one speaks his tongue … For who among you gleans the truth … In the nonsense songs he’s sung … ?’

She reaches the bathtub. The teary eyes I saw earlier have gone and she’s pretending again, pretending to be confident. But she’s nervous. Perhaps even scared. She’s alone, singing without Callum for the first time, without me, eyeing the crowd all the while for yellow lighters, for threat. She dips her fingers in the bathtub as she passes, turning over her shoulder to giggling and hushed flutters of drug-induced fidgeting. As she turns, there’s a perfectly judged playfulness in her eyes. With conspiratorial winks and the odd flirty cheek-kiss, she diverts those in the crowd for whom this is a mad, elaborate joke. But to those for whom it’s more, there’s a weight and menace in her tone, accompanied by gentle hands laid heavily on crowns as she saunters through the crowd.

‘They were all of them distracted … By palm-light devilry … For the Cripple Radge would rage and cadge …

And bring them revelry …’

She’s reached the back of the roof. There’s no stage, but with lowered open hands, she ushers the front few rows to sit, revealing her in a black floor-length dress, now stained with the white paint petroglyphs of passing hands. Beside her is Callum’s bureau. She clambers up and sits on top, microphone in hand. At the corners of the frame, in the car park below, little lights hover and dance.

‘This tale might not have wit or sense, it might not entertain, but it will cleanse and make amends… As surely as the rain…’

Melusine bangs on the bureau with a fist between her legs. Some of the crowd jump and a chorus of ‘ooooOOOoo’ vibrates the grizzled wood. The phone lights below are joined by more, bobbing in dark peripheries, neurons firing in the corners of an expansive visual cortex, and they wave and dance to the DUN-dun-dun-DUN-dun-dun of the beat. The crowd is hesitant, watchful, breathless.

‘But though he burbles, listen close …

T’the Blatherskite’s enactment,
for ‘tis the tale that woke the war …

and led …

to our …’

Silence. She feasts on the palpable tension in the air. More phones illuminate before her, her skin alight with phantasmal glow. She breathes so slowly, smiling into the mic. Then, with a grin, her voice croaks.

‘… entrapment …’

With two fists on the bureau, she beats out the waltz, the microphone’s reverb catching the pummelling and giving it chorus. It forges an endless chain of echoes and calls, echoes and calls, whipping the crowd into movement, hesitant at first, then growing and growing with every thud. Those sitting scramble to their feet, start jumping, crowing, laughing, joining the tribalism. Mel lets out a note above it all. It is pitchy and wicked and wild.

Wez is in a corner next to a speaker. He presses play on it and our third Cycle blasts into life. At first it’s too loud, and distorts, piquing with crunchy gain, but then it’s lowered and levelled and Mel bursts into the second song with an improvised siren over the crashing of splash cymbals, electric guitar and chant-lines of howling voices.

On camera it looks like an embarrassment. Mel jumps around the crowd, goading them with waving arms, raising the audience’s hands to clap, holding out the microphone to people to finish lines of lyrics. It’s got a definite air of desperation about it, a wince-inducing vim, like a reality TV star, long after their shine has dimmed, touring university club nights to DJ, accepting ironic adoration, viciously grabbing at success they’ll never have. But to those who are present, who are able to see the marbles of sweat on Melusine’s arms, the clotted hair, the untempered ferocity in the whites of her eyes, it is different. It is euphoric. Prayerful. Release.

The gig erupts, unbridled. Melusine whirls about the stage, singing both her and Callum’s parts, jumping between lyrics tattooed on the fringes of her throat, collapsing into instrumentals with dervish spins and furrowed growls, spewing melody out at the crowd with rhapsodic indignity and fire. She straddles the bureau, turning it into some mad sexual monster, gathering people to raise her high in the crowd, lauding above them with wit and wonder. More phones below light up, the building now surrounded by people watching on through their screens, desperate to capture and keep. The Blatherskite roars above them in the draped masking, growing fat and thin and fat and thin with each billow of the wind, its eyes engorged with the sight, as the crowd tumble over themselves to bear witness.

The fourth song starts and people upturn the bathtub, sending a white deluge of spume across the deck and garnishing the wood with slips and missteps. Mel falters and tries to wrangle the crowd out of the spillage. They ignore her.

The songs blur with the paint, clambering over one another in a discordant medley. Mel reaches the sixth song, ‘The Wallowing’, a dirge that ends with repeated calls and echoes, collecting in a mass of undistinguished voice. As she calls, the large, muscled man we met below approaches and shouts something in her ear. She frowns, unable to hear him. He turns away and she hurls herself from the song’s finale into the next, ‘The House of Home’. You can see she’s failing, flailing to find breath and force, occasionally skipping lyrics and lines just to gulp down oxygen from her shoulders. But the duress of the crowd threatens her, and with little punches to her own chest she frees some trapped vigour, rising to applause and propelling herself through the set like it’s the last she’ll ever sing. Drums beat, synth rages, pizzicato strings release canvasses of noise, as every person there relinquishes control, banishes dignity to the barrows and heaves themselves to recklessness, to righteousness, to ruin.

There was a scream, but Mel didn’t hear it. She was too busy receiving a thumb print mark on her forehead from the anonymous hand of the crowd. But down below, from the street, Callum and I saw it. We heard it.

We watched as a figure fell through Callum’s map, tumbled and hit the concrete. There was a meaty sound of breaking bone, a sick and curdling whelp as air was torn from body.

The music stopped. Silence.

Then cheering.

PART THREE

14

Yem, the Mother, Solkat of empty beds

I can’t work out what camera they’re using. I don’t want to inspect it. It’s old, maybe ten years old, bigger. It’s on a tripod that’s not meant for it, taped into place. I don’t know what to look at. Every time we’ve done this over the past few weeks, I’ve just rubbed and stared at my thumbs, even though I’ve been told not to.

It’s mid-November, six weeks since the fall. My solicitor, Bahvana Borah, sits next to me facing forward, not angling her chair to open the room to me, nor turning to comfort or include. She’s a family friend, insomuch that that’s how Mum introduces her to people, but I know very little about her. I have, over the past few interrogations, however, got the distinct impression that she’s like this at work so she can be someone completely different at home. Maybe she’s really mellow and into acid jazz and owning birds. Or maybe she’s super into bondage. I bet she’s into bondage.

‘If he doesn’t come back in the next two minutes, I suggest we leave and rearrange. We’re under no obligation to be here.’

I nod. She’s got a kind of stress almost constantly in her voice, like she’s perpetually starved of oxygen and her only source of it is in other people’s nervous breath.

The room isn’t like the nineties police shows Gran watches. The first one was, the night it happened. It had one of those mirrors and everything. It felt like I was on a television show, but so deeply unaware of my lines, it’s filled my dreams for weeks. But by the second and third time, when they started questioning us in the Newcastle police station, they’d moved us to just a room with a camera in it. Now we’re in a conference room. It’s way too big for just us.

‘So sorry to keep you waiting,’ comes that familiar, practised boot-to-gravel voice. He sits next to me. The conference table is so big, but all three of us are cramped at one end of it. The obvious place to sit would have been opposite us, but I’m now once again trapped between my solicitor and the man who wants me locked up. I notice he hasn’t followed protocol. He kept the tape running when he left – he’s supposed to stop the recording, seal the tape in a plastic bag, reset it, then state the reason for break upon resuming. He’s not even really supposed to be using a camera, it’s meant to just be audio. But Bahvana said not to argue, weeks ago – ‘Total clarity and complete compliance,’ she said.

‘We have been expeditious, Detective Inspector Wharton, with a number of your requests. I would like to remind you my client found and continues to find your line of questioning distressing. We have been cleared by this department of all wrongdoing and, unless we are presented with new information, we will be unable to tolerate more of your badgering, nor more of these sudden absences. Alice has given her accounts of the events in exorbitant detail. If you are to continue in these Hollywood routines, I am loath to advise her to continue in our, thus far, total cooperation with this department.’

Wharton nods. ‘My apologies, Al. I just have one or two more things I’d like to ask, just to corroborate your bandmates’ recent statements. Is that alright?’

He’s wired, in his own quiet way. The manic idée fixe of a man who thinks he’s solved the equation and is now warped by sleepless hours of scavenging for how he got there. His beard is longer. It looks like a hive now. Sometimes he rubs his chin and his fingers become entirely obscured by it.

I don’t know why he’s so bent on our statements. Hundreds of people outside were filming the whole thing, and their footage corroborated our story. Callum and I called the police. Then we just left. That was the first and arguably only troublesome issue in our statements. We didn’t run to see if she was alright, hurt or even alive. He grabbed me, took my phone and called an ambulance, gave the police the name of our hotel, all the time running from the scene. Then he called Wez, but couldn’t get through, almost dashing my phone on a pavement and sending it splintering into the river. He had this rageful calm about him, a decisiveness. I had nothing in my arteries but the irritant, hidden tickling of adrenaline. I felt like we should be celebrating something.

The thing that shook me wasn’t the running. It was that Callum didn’t try to reach Mel.

We’d watched the performance, most of it. After we talked in the corridor, we’d switched off his camera and decided neither of us wanted to gig. It was too weird, too difficult to figure out, too full of this maddening concoction of depth and whimsy. We wandered, exhausted, into an open dorm room. The layout was almost an exact copy of the floor above, but the room was part of a jutting leg of the complex, at right angles with the rooftop. There was a large window, riveted with a lock that only opened five inches or so. Neither of us could see through it together, so I set up my camera and aimed it at the rooftop, twisting the viewfinder to the room. We sat at a student’s desk and watched.

Callum even helped himself to a beer.

It was a strange thing to witness. We’d never seen one of our own performances before, and neither of us were there. We were just watching Mel fart around with a microphone, singing along to some of our songs, plonking paint on people. After the fourth or fifth song Callum turned to me.

‘This is super weird. Do you wanna just …’

He nodded to the door. I asked him about his bureau, if he wanted to wait and make sure it was safe.

He looked at the viewfinder again. Three people were atop the bureau, covered in white paint, chanting and clapping. At one point, Mel just stopped singing and looked like she was having an aneurysm. Some drizzle from outside had found its way through the window gap and was settling in Callum’s hair and on his left cheek as he watched.

‘I think. That maybe we should just …’

We left and had reached the road outside, just in time to see the accident from below. After the fall, a policeman arrived at our hotel at around two in the morning and took us to Durham police station. He took our statements, then we left. I didn’t sleep much.

The next day, Wharton descended and we were driven north to Newcastle. I sat in silence and watched the city arrive in our eyes. I felt Callum bristle at crossing the river. He’s never liked the city, we’ve never gigged there. I wasn’t allowed to film him, film anything, and it brought a deadening to my ears, a muted thrum as the town, once peculiar and archaic, now awash with packets of glass and chrome, nuzzled its way into the twenty-first century and our heads.

They had nothing, really. I rang my mum and dad and they met me and brought Bahvana. They hadn’t really known the extent of the fandom and had spent all morning on the internet, discovering everything, all the rehearsals, gigs, filming. They were so angry about it. My dad tried to take the camera off me. Bahvana and I submitted the footage to the police. That, with the streamed video Weston had set up and the phones, cleared me, cleared us all, of any kind of illegal activity.

I never got to see the livestream until later. I forced myself to watch it. The gig plays out, Mel completely ignorant of the chaos of the crowd, of the fall, of what’s to come. But however you look at it, it’s an accident. The girl is drunk. Her name is Clementine Avers. She dances, wailing about with all the rest. Then, a topless guy just trips and stumbles into her, knocking her towards Callum’s map, suspended with string above one of the low rooftop walls. She tries to steady herself on it but it tears in two and she tumbles through. There are screams, the music stops. Then the rooftop erupts in elation. Like parents laughing at a child, fallen and bloody-kneed, willing it not to cry but to join them in their laughter, at the silliness of falling.

Clementine broke her spine and half her skull snapped open. She’s in a coma at the hospital. If she wakes up, she’s going to spend the rest of her life paralysed.

I cried when I watched the video. I’m ashamed to say it wasn’t because someone got hurt. I cried because people – for whatever reason, inebriation, disbelief, fear – laughed at it. They just laughed at it. And then – and this makes my fingers itch – they try to keep going. They try to continue the party, like someone’s just set fire to a football and hoofed it off the roof. Mel hurls the mic to Wez, who bungles his way through a speech, totally unsure whether to keep going or call the police, and sprints through the crowd.

She was the first to the scene. It baffles me that in that whole building, filled with people, no one ran to her aid, that all those people below with their phones just stood there, filming. But Mel did. Mel ran. There’s a photo of her on the forums, cradling her. A stencil of it will be graffitied on walls around the world in the coming months. She’s open-mouthed and baring her teeth, something broken in her eyes, awakened, manic, trying to heal the lifeless body in her arms with the force of her very soul. As though the power of her will would sway death’s hand and knit Clementine a fastened spine, an anchored neck and ample blood to fill her emptied veins.

‘Alice,’ says Wharton, tugging me back to him. ‘You mentioned in your last statement that you had absolutely no part, nor did Mr Jannick nor Ms Hajna, in inciting the crowd to violence that night?’

‘There was no violence,’ says Bahvana. ‘We’ve discussed this. It’s involuntary manslaughter at best, Chris, and even then the video clearly shows the gentleman who had last contact with Avers either tripped or was shoved accidentally by a larger group of five people. If you’d like to file charges of involuntary manslaughter by gross negligence, you’ll have a hard time doing so, as the organiser of the event, and the person responsible for the unsafe event space, is tragically the person who fell victim to it. There was no violence preceding or following the event. Alice has stated several times that at no point did the musical group intend to incite or encourage any kind of illegal activity.’

She always refers to us as ‘the musical group’, as though ‘band’ is a dirty word. I think about Callum’s dad. How he broke his ribs and they found cancer on the X-rays. How he was tripped. About the Solkats’ need for effect.

We’ve been asked these questions before, a dozen times now. The first time was hard, I couldn’t stop crying. But as the weeks went on, we were brought in again and again and I became a little numb to it. Bahvana says that this is normal, that the police like to do numerous interviews with bystanders at traumatic events, as initial shock can cause loss or changes in memory. I don’t have that problem. I film everything I see.

The video of the event and the incident hit the papers. It was everywhere on social media. People recognise Callum and Mel now and they can’t go anywhere without folks begging for photos to share with the world. Some of the more rightwing chip-wrappers jumped on the tragedy, calling us a ‘cult’, shaping the narrative into something it isn’t.

Journalists have been taking photos of us outside our houses, or going to the shops. Callum and Mel stayed at his caravan for a few days until it got really bad and have since been staying by the port in Blyth. Callum’s dad’s old boat is there. They’ve holed themselves up in it and plonked themselves a couple of hundred yards out at sea. Mel’s written ‘and to a place I come where nothing shines’ on the side of it in red paint. Whatever that means.

I’ve been back at home with Mum and Dad. They don’t let me film in the house. They’ve said I’m not to play in the band any more, they took my phone off me, its screen was broken anyway. But a strange dissent has been in me since returning home, disguised in quiet placidity. I stole my old phone back from Gran. I’ve visited Callum and Mel on the boat, spent nights there. I’ve drunk wine with them, which I never used to do.

‘Have you ever incited your followers to violence?’ asks Wharton. He’s stood up, purposely obstructing the morning sun through the blinds, the outline of his colossal shoulders sparkling with an unbroken line of spectred light.

I say no.

‘Neither Alice nor any members of the musical group have in any way provoked violent action in their fanbase,’ Bahvana sighs, reciting our position for the hundredth time. ‘No utterances in or outside of performance, or on social media, have been made that could be construed as inimical to public welfare, tending to corrupt public morals, incitement to crime or disturbing the public peace. Any interpretation of their artistic expression as inclusive of language of incitement is spurious and their songs have not led, directly or indirectly, to the indoctrination of a group in preparation for future violent action. Chris, we’ve done this—’

‘When the group is of sufficient size and cohesiveness,’ Wharton repeats, ‘and is sufficiently oriented towards action—’

‘They’re not cohesive, Chris. Any cursory glance on social media will reveal a total lack of organisation. It’s the internet. The events to which you are referring, detective, are the work of a handful of unstable individuals and are in no way associated with my client or her friends—’

‘But the forum user SolkatCeremony has demonstrated extensive knowledge of—’

‘None of the music group have a social media presence and there is no evidence to suggest that they are the user SolkatCeremony, or any other user on any platform.’

My feet rattle around in my shoes like conkers in a shoe box. I don’t know how to fix this.

The first of these ‘events’ started online. An extremely prominent pop singer wrote on social media about us a few days after Durham. She blamed us for Clementine’s condition, raised money for her hospital bills, helped her go private. She called us devil-worshippers, disparaging the music, saying it had subliminal messaging in it – the usual stuff that’s been said about artistry since the 1950s. It makes people dance funny and express themselves, so therefore it must be the work of Satan. I’ve always found this quietly amusing – the idea that the devil, in all his mastery of evil, in all his indefatigable effort to lure humanity to its darkest and most sinful practices, sat on his throne of fire, bored on a Sunday afternoon, and decided the truly most evil thing to do in the world would be to smoke his mum’s dope and write some funky ditties on an acoustic guitar.

Rather than, you know. Crimes.

At first it was just online, the abuse. But our followers, followers like SolkatCeremony, rallied. The pop star was flooded, and I mean flooded, with relentless cascades of insults and threats.

The army of posters started calling her a Doubt – the name the songs have in the later Cycles for ‘non-believers’ – and anyone who disparaged us was branded with it, twisting its typical meaning into a terrible, wounding expletive. This prompted more responses from the singer, more coverage from online news outlets, videos of her crying, her fans rallying around her for support.

A couple of her followers were attacked at a fan-organised tribute night in Massachusetts about a month ago. Two of them were put in hospital. They had the word ‘Doubt’ scratched into them with a needle. Photos were gleefully posted on the forums. And that was just the start.

Since then, anyone who’s said things about us online has been descended upon. People have quit social media, famous people. There are rumours that other closed forums have been created, specifically dedicated to finding the contact information and addresses of these ‘Doubts’. There have been reports of vandalism, theft. A couple of muggings. A bunch of people have been attacked on their front porches in Scotland and New Zealand. One prominent Australian MP had a bucket of white paint poured on him during a visit to a car factory.

My phone feels like a dangerous weed now. It’s remoulded my mind, created a new conditional response whenever I look at it. It used to relieve me of reality’s stress, of the moment, of intrusive tensions in my real life. I could sink from the perilous unpredictability of people around me into an indistinct but wholly manageable digital space. Information came to me at a controlled and tranquil tempo. If I didn’t like something I was reading, I’d simply look away. Now when I look at it, I feel spinescent tendrils creep out of its blue light to me, diasporic heads that pop at the sight of my interest, flinging burrs and spores of uninvited words, embedding them in my flesh and I can’t get them off. I can’t un-see people’s thoughts now. Their actions, their violences. It stays with me, burrowed into me, part of me, growing. I wish I could shed my skin of it.

‘Alice …’

Wharton has abandoned Bahvana and is hoping I’ll engage with him. He’s passed me a cup of tea. The mug has a bunch of fun Shakespearian insults on it.

‘I’ve already put forward my theory. To you. I’ve been following what influencers and forums are saying. They believe that they, as a fandom, are following a correct interpretation of Callum’s lyrics. They believe his mythology is real. And they believe, in order to release the idols of these myths, they must continue in a course of action that aligns with that mythology. These “Doubt” attacks, whether cohesive or not, are a clear replication of your fifth Cycle, “Enmity”. The Solkat Radge falters on his journey and the Solkat Belter threatens his Doubts with violence. Is this an unreasonable understanding of your work?’

‘Would you like me to inform your superiors of your loaded questioning again, Wharton? Alice, as aforementioned, has no songwriting credits in the music group’s discography and is in no way associated with the actions of the fandom—’

Wharton raises his hand, relenting. Then …

‘If – if – someone were to make this assumption, Alice … and draw distinct parallels between the narrative of Mr Jannik’s mythology and global incidents of violence and public harm … Do you think … do you think it would be prudent for Mr Jannik and his associates to publicly decry those incidents? Implore their fandom to—’

‘Wharton.’

Bahvana’s hazel eyes swing like claymores. Wharton parries their brilliance in the sunlight with a comforting, almost cheeky smile.

‘As I’ve said countless times, I am just asking the music group to … help me prevent further incidents …’

‘Without any evidence whatsoever that it will be conducive to the situation. Who’s to say the fandom will listen? Who’s to say it won’t exacerbate or broaden the number of incidents! We are talking about three and a half million followers, of which only a handful have exhibited alleged illegal activity. Not to mention that you are asking my client and the music group to essentially engage with a fandom and adopt a leadership role within it! Opening up doors to … to negligence, incitement to violence, all kinds of charges, charges of which my client is currently entirely innocent. You are manipulating my client into a plethora of potential future legal battles, Detective Inspector Wharton. She’s not here to do your job for you, she’s not here to take blame for the actions of an anonymous fanbase, and she is not here to be a hero!’

Wharton frames his face with his hands, elbows on the table. I know he’s making sense. Or maybe I don’t. I’ve heard him make this argument so many times, my mind has gotten used to its reasoning. He almost always stresses the same syllables, pauses before the same words. It’s sedative. Maybe I’ve been listening to Wharton’s words like a creed, the blind drone of a congregation reciting a dictum that is more pleasing to the ear than to the mind. It’s easier to switch off, let the rhythm and rhyme rid you of your voice and gift to you the peace of choicelessness. Choice is hard. It’s scary and unknown. It requires constant will and leads to perpetual consequence. But in recitation, in prayer and song, there are no choices. Just a collective voice, relinquishing autonomy because autonomy is so deeply terrifying. Someone wrote this prayer long ago, so you don’t need your own words any more. Just listen to these ones and let go. Let go of who you are.

‘Before you go, I’d like to ask you … Alice.’

He uses my name like a plea.

‘If your fans are replicating the events of the Cycles …’

I look to Bahvana. She’s already putting files away in her briefcase.

‘What do you think will happen … when they reach the sixth?’

15

Haporth, Solkat of lost coins in pocket holes, charity shops and memory

Gran has said she’s not accepting visitors. Which isn’t true. My mum has said she’s going to the shops a number of times over the past few weeks, always at her usual visiting time. She’s taken the car. The shops are a two-minute walk away.

Bahvana asks if I want a lift anywhere, but I say no. I want the walk through town to the Haymarket. When I was a child, this place was so broken. An old Odeon on Pilgrim Street, long torn down, had this befouled impurity knitted into its bricks; its archaic red and white signage always made me think of New York in films. The wretched spaces beneath the Tyne Bridge feel like that. There is a bar with no sign by Monument that everyone used to just call Basement, don’t know if they still do. People drank pints of green in there and I once saw a woman on a hen-do piss on a homeless man outside it.

Now, the city aches with ambition. Its facades are white and chrome, the tar-stained clay brickwork incongruously waging war against the office lights and ersatz artistry of recent builds. Some corrupt politician in the 1960s, imaginatively known as Mr Newcastle, started to build walkways above the city roads and shops. He wanted to make the town the ‘Brazil of the North’, whatever in blue fuckery that means, with a kind of pedestrian network that soared high above the city. These streets in the sky were never finished. It turned out he’d been stealing the city’s money and was thrown in prison. These decks now meander through secret corners, some leading to nowhere, abruptly just ending mid-leap across dual-carriageways.

It takes two buses to get to Blyth. The first takes me to the coast, the second north along it, past St Mary’s Lighthouse and into the Port. I see the Battery, domed forgotten wedges of brick with cannons aimlessly staring out at the ocean, challenging it to a battle the sea has long forgotten about, and the perpetually-waterlogged bandstand beyond it, looking around, stranded, wondering what on earth its original purpose was. I get out at the port. Masts perforate the air, hundreds of them, the world turned upside down and they, melting, like dripping watercolours, hoping to join the pigment of grey above them.

There’s one large red ship with the word ‘Tyne’ on it. I’ve never seen it move. It’s got a pub on the lower decks where old men drink bitter and talk to anyone who will listen about that one time they saw a walrus. It’s where I first saw Callum and Mel play.

I wait for twenty minutes until someone comes out the keycode-locked gate of the port, and slip through onto the network of deck promenades which, like the walkways, creep, then suddenly end, flanked by the soft tunks of yachts and buoys. I’m worried I’ve missed them, that they might be already out at sea, but then see Mel’s crimson daubing and the lights from within the cabin. A tarp has been carelessly slumped on the deck over the forward hatch, the jib sheet left unravelled, sending soft tings to the water, with loose lines on mast wood. I reach the edge and clamber up the plastic little set of steps I’m certain are usually used for toddlers mounting toilet bowls, gripping the tiny wire lines that I’m always sure won’t take my weight. A grizzled man emerges from a neighbouring boat and asks me if I’m in ‘that band’. I shake my head and avoid his eyes.

I knock on the locked cockpit door, its pale wood a determinedly archaic feature next to the perspex sheen of the hull. I hear nothing. Another knock.

‘He didn’t get to bed till five. He’ll be asleep another hour.’

I clamber onto one of the seats. Beyond, something bats at the tarpaulin from within. A grey little finger inches over the top of it and the bulbous hood of a sleeping bag wriggles out. Unseen hands scurry within it and undo a toggle. It lowers and a hag-like clod of now blonde and orange hair emerges. A green beer bottle rolls out from within its folds.

Mel’s lost weight in the past two months, ever since the water park really. Cal always refers to her as a ‘Viking Madonna’ – some reference from a book I’ve not read – and I’ve always believed it. Her face as armour, a facade of perfectly cascading plates of dermal stone. But there’s a waywardness to her bones today, a sagginess to her skin. An age. She precariously shifts her legs from the tarp, still clad in her orange sleeping-bag, and bum-shuffles along the deck, slumping into the pit seat, catching fabric on a cleat with a soft little ‘ow’.

‘Hello! And welcome to Folks on Boats,’ she says, staring at nothingness, adopting the weak, hearty spirit of a vacuous breakfast show host. ‘We are delighted to welcome back into the studio … Al! Welcome Al, good to see you again, big fan, big fan.’

I nod and do a little wave to the imagined audience. Mel’s usual performative energy has left her. She’s doing these bits out of habit, hiding behind them, willing the fun to return to her. It’s like she’s broken her leg and is still insistent she’s able to get herself around, determined but unaware she’s hindering her healing.

‘Following the recent success of your band’s latest Cycle, which has sold a bazillion juhmillion copies – a number so big scientists had to invent a new one – and returning from a sold-out worldwide tour, you and your bandmates have received unprecedented acclaim. You’ve played on every continent, you’ve released your own line of swimwear – the cultini – which was the talk of Berlin fashion week. My first question – how do you stay grounded?’

She leans back in her imagined spinning chair. I half-heartedly make a joke about my mansion and entourage of celebrity friends. I can see a dead bird in the water next to me.

‘Except you don’t have any celebrity friends, do you, Al?’ I can’t tell if she’s still doing the bit. ‘You don’t have a mansion, you haven’t gone on a worldwide tour. You’ve been hiding on a boat for weeks and shitting in the fucking sea because the toilet’s broken.’

I stutter. The energy it’s taken to even try and be fun this early in the morning has dissipated. She’s looking at me with fury, like this is my fault.

‘What are we doing?’ she whispers into her own wrists.

I ask if she’s alright. She says nothing. Her eyes are shut, exhausted, a look of pain on her face. She’s not wearing make-up.

I pull out a little paper bag from my rucksack – cheesy chips I was careful to remove from their accompanying newspaper, for fear of the headlines – and hand it to her. She eats without opening her eyes. I ask if she and Callum are still fighting.

A week ago I came round to the boat. It was late evening, clear, the razor edges of wind bringing to my ears a muted warmth. Something had happened. They argue a lot, always have. Usually Mel scratches and claws at the air between them, like she wants their bodies to decompose and allow the splintered half of her soul to finally and completely meet its counterpart. Callum fills that air with pensive sealant, wordlessly filling the space between molecules, so that even they are obstinately braced against the vibrations of sound. But that evening there was terrible noise, the likes of which I’ve never heard between them.

A plate hit something in the lower cabin as I arrived. I didn’t step down, but waited with my cameras, peeking through hatches and down the cockpit alley.

‘—you’ve never done anything! You’ve never built anything in your fucking life, Sarah!’

Callum was shouting. I’ve never heard Callum shout. I’ve never heard him use Mel’s real name. I didn’t even know she had a real name.

‘I’ve never built anything? I built you, you coward!’ She was sat on the little cushions round the collapsible wooden table, kicking it with every sentence, ripping the single leg from its hinges and sending it crunching into a new canted angle. ‘I’ve built you every fucking day! You wake up weeping, screaming that you’re “broken”, that no one fucking understands you, that no one understands the world like you. Well, maybe I don’t, Cal. Maybe nobody does. But you wouldn’t have built anything, made anything, if I hadn’t brought a little, just a little fucking light, and support, and lo—’

‘We don’t use the word “love”— ’

‘I’ll say whatever the fuck I want to say! I will say whatever. I fucking want! These fucking rules you arbitrarily just summon up, that you inflict on everyone around you. You pushed your own fucking mum away with your fucking rules! So keep ’em, keep your fucking rules!’

Callum laughed or coughed, it’s hard to tell, a sound like cracking logs in flame. When they argue, they don’t tend to move. They’re both acutely aware of space and their place within it, how it can be used to hurt or heal, how distance can be agony and proximity a threat.

‘How is your family by the way?’ he asked, simply. ‘When was the last time you saw them? Should I just live like you? Alone? Running? Fucking everyone in sight, catching STDs like they’re collector’s items, drinking and drinking and drinking because you think it makes you fun and different and “cuh-razy”? Because you’re not “cuh-razy”, Sarah. You’re mindless. God, you’re so fucking mindless. Because the terrifying truth of it all is that no matter how many times you change your fucking hair, no matter how many people you fuck, or how much you drink, you’re not fun! You’re not interesting! You’re a collection! A thief! You call people story-tourists – but that’s you! That’s all you are! You steal jokes and voices and stories from everyone, everyone around you because you know, deep down, you’ve never had an original thought in your whole fucking existence! Because you’re afraid of who you really are!’

Another plate. I can’t tell who’s hitting them, but they’re not being thrown. I think they’re on the counter and Callum’s just pressing his hand into them, the pressure splintering them, sending black lines up broken porcelain circles. Cal wields words like a rapier, Mel like a broadsword. But when they talk like this it’s odd – I find it difficult to differentiate their voices. After their years of friendship, they’re tangled in borrowed intonations, in shared mannerism, in tone. Like their harmonies in song.

Mel is wounded. But when she’s wounded, she gets clever.

‘Alright, you want an original thought, darling?’ She does that dramatic, lowered voice that she likes, like she’s in a play. ‘Here’s an original thought. You’ve spent a decade. Ten fucking years, making up esoteric wank disguised as some kind of unapproachable, intellectual, unreachable art. You made it because you didn’t want people to like it. You made it because you wanted people NOT to understand it. Because if people didn’t understand it, then they couldn’t critique it. No one can say it’s shit, or convoluted, or self-indulgent, because you can go to bed at night saying, “Well, they just don’t understand it. They just don’t get me because they’re all so stupid.” Well your worst fucking nightmare has come true, you fucking charlatan. People do get it. And they like it. They fucking love it, Cal. In fact, so many people fucking like it, you’re finally getting paid. Paid! Which is anathema to you, isn’t it? No true artist can truly get paid, because as soon as you get paid, it’s not fucking art any more for some godforsaken fucking reason! And this gig—’

‘People are getting hurt.’

‘And that’s NOT. OUR. FAULT.’

They’re talking about the next concert. It’s a fan event in Newcastle, on the moors. Some followers have raised hundreds of thousands of pounds online to do a festival – a kind of mad gathering, all about the band’s mythos – and they’ve offered us more money than I’ve ever seen in my life to do it. They must have started organising it in the summer. They’re calling it ‘Solkat Ceremony’.

‘It’s not our fault people are nuts. Cal, if you fucking sneeze on the internet these days someone turns it into a goddamn excuse to go and break someone’s legs. It’s a bunch of loonies, who would have hurt people anyway. Now they’re just using your fucked-up little stories as an excuse. If you hadn’t written them, they would have found any number of different reasons to act out. Video games, politics—’

‘But they chose us. You can’t know that they would have hurt people, you can’t fucking know, because they chose us! And they don’t even know if Clementine will pull through, we’ve ruined a life, Sarah. You don’t know—’

‘I do know, Cal. I know. Not a night’s gone by where I haven’t fallen asleep to that sound. To the feeling of blood on my hands. You ran, you coward. You’ve always wanted to run. From your degree, from your parents, hiding in caravan parks, hiding in some imagined future in fucking Banff. I don’t even know what Banff is! So don’t tell me I don’t know, don’t tell me I haven’t thought about it all, because you weren’t. Fucking. THERE!’

Mel takes a step forward, Callum steps to his left like a duellist. Mel tries to calm herself, but can’t help but lunge again.

‘But I also … I also know … that you have worked. We have worked so hard. For years. Not living, surviving. Barely able to pay rent, smashing vending machines with chairs just to fucking eat. And now, after years, years, Cal, of fighting the universe, it’s finally given in. It’s finally giving us a chance! Rewarding us for—’

‘The fucking universe …’

‘—or whatever you want to call it! We’re finally OK. We’re finally, finally … safe! And you … you can’t just … allow yourself to be happy. Because you think you have to be broken. That the world is broken and it’s your fault. But this, this … magnanimous arrogance to assume you can fix it, it’s … It’s … You have to be sad and tired all the time, and haunted, because it’s all you’ve known. And even when something goes right, you see the tiniest shard of hatred in it and it becomes you. Being broken isn’t a state to you, it’s become your whole personality, so inherently part of you, you don’t know who you are without it … and—’

Callum’s eyes are shut. Mel tries to soften her tone, knowing the confrontation has become too much for him, the noise, the light.

‘I’ve spent years, darling. Years of my life trying. Trying to show you that you’re not broken. That the world isn’t broken. That you’re allowed to fail, to run, to go and live in … Banff or wherever. It was an accident. It’s not your fault and … and you’re allowed to be hap—’

‘Did you burn down the Grapes?’ he asks.

Mel stutters.

‘Wh-what?’

‘The yellow lighter that Wharton showed us. It was yours, wasn’t it? Did you burn down the Grapes? Are you part of this?’

Mel is, for a moment, totally silenced. Then:

‘Of course fucking NOT! I’m not the only person in the world to own a yellow lighter, Cal. You were with me, we were at the same party—’

‘Not all night. You could have—’

‘You think I would put anyone’s life in danger for a fucking band?! Who the fuck do you think I am, how can you not know who I am! The very fact that you would say that, think that of me, it breaks my fucking hea—’

Crack.

I slipped on the stubbly white grain of one of the seats, trying to get an angle of Mel through the cockpit. They both looked. Seeing it was me, they both changed. The volume left their voices and now a dark, hideous vitriol scraped plaque from teeth with every fricative. They spat their words with rancour, searching for suffering and cell death in every syllable.

‘If you think …’ said Callum, after a moment, ‘that having millions of followers is worth even … even one of them, one person getting hurt. Then we have nothing to talk about. You’re more broken than I’ve ever been.’

I heard Mel stand up and she came into view in the middle of the room. She sipped a glass of wine like she was pouring a smile into her face.

‘And if you believe,’ she said, ‘… if you’re so far gone into your hellish, blinding narcissism that you truly believe that those millions of followers … all of them, me … love your words so much, think that you are so gifted … that they’d actually be willing to hurt people? To really, really hurt people for them … Then … then I think you’re right.’

She finished her wine.

‘None of my words matter. You won’t hear them anyway. Because the only words that matter to you … are yours.’

We hear a shunt and the top board of the cockpit door opens. Mel has just been pressing her thumbs into the chips I got her, eyes still shut. Callum comes out and she immediately skirts past him, down into the depths of the cabin to find more beer.

They can’t stand to be together. But the idea of the world beyond, without the other, is menacing and foreign. They’re trapped in loneliness, more isolated together than if they were alone.

Mel returns with two beers and hands one to me. I don’t want it, but she isn’t asking. Callum is correctly folding the large tarp on the deck beyond, folding it three times, then rolling it with the full weight of his chest and elbows to press the air from its crevices.

‘What are they saying?’ Mel asks.

I can see Whisht perched atop the mast on a single foot, balancing, out of reach of the shouting but, at the behest of the wind, ready to plummet and ruin it all. He’s singing, but no noise comes out.

I pull out Gran’s old phone. One of the forum pages is already open, but it’s impossible to imbibe its wellspring now. Only months ago there was little to see, burbles of steam from some dormant force beneath the rock. Now it’s a geyser. Every song, every lyric, every line is dismantled, every passing piece of imagery compared and recompiled into a living basin that eddies and erupts with upvotes and popularity, seemingly at random. There are paintings, of us, of the Solkats. There are covers of our songs, hundreds of them. Art, discussion, activism. There are photos of us outside our houses. Videos of us buying Pot Noodles. News articles, petitions. People have started getting tattoos, thousands of people, all the same design. A white incomplete circle on black with lines running through it. My head can’t take it.

It’s a self-sustaining ecosystem. I doubt they even need the band any more.

The pinned thread – the one that’s lodged at the top of the screen for all to see – is the festival one, Solkat Ceremony. A number of the mods – one of which I saw is SolkatLiberator – have been advertising for volunteers, fundraising, brand partnerships. It is, by all accounts, legally dubious. The moors just outside Newcastle city centre require licences and all sorts to hold public events on them. But they all seem to live off the threat of police action or public outcry, emboldened by each other, each voice joining in the hymn and drowning out sense or choice. It’s become so inevitable, Mel has become a little obsessed with it. Since Durham, she’s sat with my gran’s phone for hours into the night, following the updates from afar, like an actor peeking out of the curtain at the interval and listening intently to the unformed thoughts of a faceless, savage audience.

‘They’re still set on those dates,’ she says, studying the threads. ‘People are coming from all around the world. Some celebrities are even endorsing it, pop stars and influencers. The council has already sent out cease and desist letters, but apparently they’re going ignored. They’re not charging for entry. But they’re paying us, Al. People are donating and they’re paying us so much. That money will mean we can …’

She finishes her chips, massaging cheese grease into the crevices of the phone-screen.

‘Gives us a fortnight of rehearsals. Cal’s going to give you the, er, what are they called? The stems. The stems, the files with all the Cycles on them, the studio versions? Do you think you can edit them?’

I ask what she means.

‘You’ll need to edit them. Delete the drum tracks – having the track and you playing live on top of it will sound weird. And the vocal tracks. Both mine and Cal’s vocals. So it’s just the instruments, the bureau.’

I ask why. Why would Callum want the studio recordings of the bureau played through the P.A. system, instead of playing the bureau himself.

‘Cal’s not coming,’ she says.

I look to the bow. Callum has wrestled the tarp into a bag and placed it, secured, next to a large duffel that I know contains the dinghy. He can hear us. His eyes travel slowly along towards me and then nervously settle on the mast above my head instead. He looks back at the bags and pretends to faff with them.

‘We’ll rehearse together, but we’ll need to find somewhere we won’t get noticed. And we need to know what system they’re using, who’s on the soundboard, what mics they’re providing. We’ll reach out to them, give them instructions as to how and when we want to do it, make sure there’s security and …’

Mel is still talking, but I hear Bahvana’s words in my ears. That it’s not our job, that we shouldn’t engage with the fandom, become its leaders, become part of it. I hear Wharton’s blend with them, like Mel and Callum’s counterpointed harmonies, hear his pleas for intervention, hear the feigned concern for public safety. Then all of it, all the hours sitting at tables in those police interrogation rooms, in my mum and dad’s lounge, locked in disabled bathrooms, it all fades. It washes and retreats. Mel’s mouth twists into pouts and I watch her soft, damp tongue tread along the craggy roof of her mouth as she tells me what I’m supposed to do.

‘We’re going to play,’ says Mel, her eyes tying me to the mast, taking my hands in hers. ‘Just us.’

She hands my gran’s phone back to me, the weight of it anchoring me to my choice.

‘Just me. And you.’

The dead bird knocks softly at the transom from the water. Music, hummed aloft in a nervous voice in my head, high above me, descends the lines around the coiled sails and rests in my hair. The familiar tunes of the sixth Cycle. The one where a Solkat dies.

16

Scran, Solkat of bar tabs, reckonings and squander

There is a curious restiveness in people at airport gates. It’s always captivated Kaylee. Before any announcement over the incomprehensible tannoy system, there’s a sense of anarchical entitlement that engulfs the narrow lines of chairs. It gives people permission to abandon headphones, to lie foetal atop one another, to drink to excess. People become animals. It’s one o’clock in the afternoon and the plane’s not even delayed, but this one small pocket of time has apparently inconvenienced them so ardently they’ve felt the compulsion to discard civility, as well as their shoes and socks, and spend their precious time discovering new, fantastical alchemical matters between their toes. The few charging ports around the place are scrapped and scrambled over, bringing mana to the faithful few who have abandoned comfort for the vigils they hold around them.

And then, with atavistic instinct, they all feel the presence of an airline worker approaching the vacant desk, and rise.

In spite of the boarding pass queuing system, they gather in front of the little black belt that separates them from the plane, dragging all the extraneous, inconvenient extensions of themselves, such as toiletries or children, and fight to the front. Why they want to queue is beyond Kaylee. The plane lands at the same time for all of them. Getting on it quicker will not get them there sooner. Why you’d try and rush into the giant metal tube, the trajectory and schedule of which is beyond your control, defies understanding. But, as with all things, she rises too. She is drawn to the crowd, pulled to it, shaped by that ferine impulse to join a collective, to trust the information gathered by the many, to place her faith in the reward system that was gifted in time by the witchling – evolution – to her ancestors long ago.

Two young hipster types with dreadlocks look over their shoulders at her and talk in hushed tones. They’ve been filming her on their phones for some time. Kaylee steps through the gate.

She hasn’t flown in an economy seat since she was a child, but it was the only seat left on the booking site. She settles and places her headphones in, watching California become small and insignificant as she ascends to the sky, the second Cycle in her ears bringing to the clouds a majesty, a dominion over them. She sleeps. She paws at airplane food. She pulls out the little in-flight screen and watches a show about shipwrecks. Occasionally she checks screenshots she’s taken. An itinerary.

She should be in Newcastle in about thirteen hours. Someone’s booked her a hotel, though she doesn’t know who. Someone else has already reimbursed her for the plane tickets. Willow got a flight two days ago and is already there, she’s been sending her photos and screen grabs from the city, outside art supply shops selling white spray-paint for half price, pubs with cocktails named after the band’s songs. She looks at the day-schedule for the festival: 1 December. First up, she’s got some kind of round-table interview with another influencer, a music critic and an academic, run by someone called Molly Branthom. She ignores the ‘proposed topics of discussion’.

It’s all so organised, yet so anonymous. Each email from a different person, each private message from a different, temporary account. She smiles to herself, feeling the metameric structures of the movement, each one performing their specific function, assembling successive layers of tissue through miniature generations of information, layering it and layering it until it becomes muscle, becomes skin, becomes alive. She spots the hipsters a few rows ahead. They’re watching her.

Her fingers brace against the plastic folding tray, wishing for the comfort of her computer, of the screen through which she’d prefer to engage with the world. All those people are just words and noise there. But out here, there’s threat. There’s discomfort and danger. She hasn’t been outside in months.

After a few hours in the air, in that dim-light phantom world of the cabin, she is woken. Her playlist ended an hour ago and she’s been languorously pre-existing in imagined scenarios in her head. But her eyes flicker open. She removes her headphones and looks at a collage of unearthly, floating faces in the aisle, all of them staring at her, expectantly.

‘Can I help you?’ she asks. Six people are standing, crammed between the rows of seats. The two hipster types have their phones in their hands. They don’t blink.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ says one.

‘Yeah, we didn’t mean to wake you.’

‘We just, we saw you at the gate. And … we were wondering …’

‘You’re not … K-Li, are you?’

Kaylee sits up, sending a plastic cup a few millimetres into the air and a thin breaker of red wine up the seat-back in front of her. She rubs sleep from her eyes.

‘Yeah, that’s me …’

The group smile and quietly celebrate to one another.

‘Oh my god I love you,’ whispers one. ‘I used to follow you for your gaming live streams, but as soon as you streamed Them … and, and your reactions, and the way you’ve just, like, changed. Rejected all the bullshit. Man …’

‘I mean, fuck. “I believe … ”,’ says another. ‘The second you said that, I was like, “Wow. Who is this?” You’ve changed my life. They’re all I listen to now.’

‘And you’ve, like, dropped all the ads and stuff. Done exactly what the Cycles say! Relinquishing that modern hold the world has on us and … And your views on the Doubts! The way you’ve just, like, taken down everyone, anyone who tries to put us in a box, you know?’

‘Yeah, these fucking pop stars, manufactured entitled kids. First time someone takes them down a peg, and they’re all “I’m a victim, I’m a victim!” Oh, we’re so sorry something for once in your life didn’t go as planned, you privileged Doubt …’

‘Are … are you heading there too? For the—’

Kaylee at first adopts the face and mannerisms she’s discovered endears herself to people. It’s apologetic, kind. She looks at them as though they are the most important people in the world to her, gifting her the treasure she’s been waiting for all her life. In reality, the itch in her head returns and she starts to fret about her appearance – her greasy hair, her acne – and tries to flatten her fringe. The group keeps talking, each one’s voice raising a little louder than the last to be heard.

She feels the man in front of her, his back grinding through the thin seat layers against her knees, jostling. One of the group has begun speaking at volume and he turns, his head darting into the aisle. Kaylee bristles, feels a coming confrontation.

‘Excuse me,’ he says. He’s old. Maybe, like, forty.

‘They’re just fans, sir,’ she says, firmly. ‘They’re being respectful, they’re not causing anyone any—’

‘No, no, please,’ he whispers. ‘That’s not what I … I just, couldn’t help but overhear …’

His voice isn’t American. He could be from anywhere. He has lacrimal, wet eyes that catch the plane kitchen-light at his lids. He apologetically looks at the young group in the aisle, waving to them awkwardly with his free arm, his other firmly trapped beneath a sleeping child’s shoulders to his right.

‘I just … I just wanted to say hello,’ he says. ‘I’m heading there too, me and my family …’

He nods to his sleeping wife and son. They are all piled against him, splayed across the seats. He dislodges his arm carefully and turns, his knees jutting into the aisle.

’And … well, I wasn’t expecting others to be on the same flight, that’s all. It’s so nice to meet people who are as excited about it as we are. We’ve been on the road all day, this is the last little stretch and, as you can see, Elijah’s all tuckered out. But boy, is he excited. He’s been, look …’

His kid stirs a little on his shoulder and the man gently takes his hand, covered in little felt-tip drawings – ‘tattoos’ of broken circles with crossing lines. He continues, mouthing his words.

‘We’ve been told they might play? Do you think they might play? It’s his birthday, you see, and it would be just so exciting for him if …’

The group starts murmuring together, purring in a low excited comfort, sliced with little squeaks of excitement at rumours and plans. Kaylee sits silent as they all stand around her, above her, talking over her, about her, about her channel. It’s an in-person comment section. Without the misspellings.

She’s heard they might play too. But some of the followers are saying He’s abandoning the project. Rumours abound that He’s been seen in Northumberland at some cave. Blurry photos suggest He’s alone. Which, if true, only strengthens her faith. He has fled, and this is directly aligned with the stories of the sixth and seventh Cycles. The Solkat Clarty foregoes the war and attempts to flee. But Bizen brings her back, forces her to rejoin the cause, by killing her child and threatening to kill more if she doesn’t relent.

‘Can we get a photo?’ one of them asks.

With rabid timidity, they all start singing, quietly but feverishly, one of Their songs – their voices hushed, their diaphragms juddering with energy. They all try and squeeze into shot and get a few low-light selfies before a flight attendant looms down the aisle, ushering them with a kind firmness.

‘Alright guys, if you’d like to head back to your seats, don’t want to wake any more passengers …’

The group obediently slinks back to corners in the dark, hissing and giggling, talking wildly about the days to come. Kaylee leans back in her chair and, without thinking, drinks her whole wine glass in under a minute. She can hear the man in the front chatter to his kid.

‘… I know. Isn’t that nice? They were very nice. Perhaps we’ll see them there and you can show them the T-shirt you made and we can …’

She closes her eyes. Those pre-imagined existences seep into her mind – the festival, the followers, what she might say, how she might say it. A jolt of nerves.

She holds out her hands, resting them palm up on her knees, just as she’s been doing for weeks in moments such as this. She waits, knowing it will come. It always comes now, when she needs it most. The feeling. The comfort, the strength. Songs whistle through her, heard so many times they play in her head unknowingly now, each moment, each note, as shining and revelatory with every pass, their words like childhood songs, impossible to remember when you learned them, but present in your residue, emerging with the most trivial sequence of chords. She waits, feeling the warmth of the wine in her stomach, the gentle hands of it creeping to her head, wreathing her skull in heat.

Then she feels it. Marra’s hands in hers, resting gently, callused and clawed. They hold her in place. She can almost hear her. She can almost hear Marra whispering to her, leading her to where she needs to be.

‘Excuse me, Ms Gebreyes?’

Her eyes open. The stewardess is next to her, crouching, whispering.

‘If you’d like to come with me, please.’

Kaylee smiles.

‘Of course.’

Sometimes a song starts my day. It’s the first thing I hear. It’s always one of Callum’s and I always lie there, minutes passing, as I try and work out what my subconscious is trying to tell me with it.

My camera whirs as I stumble from my childhood bed to the landing bathroom, feeling blindly but with ancient knowledge, for the light I know I will not need. I brush my teeth and stare at the large velvet box on the counter, its scrawl a script I’ve yet to learn. I open it and look at the palette: shades and skin-tones, brushes. I don’t wear make-up. Mel’s been sent free boxes of the stuff in the hopes we’ll post about it online. She gave one to me and told me to try it.

I start to apply some with one hand, the other idly looking up the etymology of the word ‘camouflage’ on my phone. The Italians have a similar word that means ‘to muffle’. To muffle the head.

I spent hours doing this as a kid when girls were doing it at school, stealing my mum’s collection of blusher and eyeliner. But I was never any good at it. I decided long ago that my face is wreckage, unearthed with care at first with clumsy hands, but later left on ocean beds to time, so as not to further compromise its fragile state. I look up how much the box of make-up costs, as I thumb kohl into my watering eyes and laugh at the result. It wakes me, hearing my own voice in the room I spent my childhood in, its echo receiving replies from bathtub memories.

I hear a creak from the corridor. I know this house so dearly the ghosts themselves take care when treading boards. I know who and where anyone is, their gait, mood, intentions, all through walls. I have a kind of extra-sensory cartographical understanding of every room, as though the stale atoms hanging in the air are causally upset by new movement and decision, rageful at the change and are sending missives through their strings to me in fits of translational motion. Dad’s stood up, he wasn’t asleep, he’s been waiting for me. Mum’s awake, somehow I know, and she’s sitting on the bed on her phone. All through the touch of things I cannot see.

‘Alice. Can you open the door, please.’

I do. I’m naked, my face half-done, and Dad immediately jolts his head away. He’s seen me naked more than anyone ever will and yet, when I was about thirteen, there was a sudden descent of a psychosocial veil precluding him from the very sight of me. He goes to my bedroom and pulls Gran’s white silk dressing gown from the hook and hands it through the doorframe.

‘What are you doing?’

I tell him I’m trying to put make-up on. Ancient Egyptians used to wear it to protect themselves from the brightness of the world. As he talks, I wonder if we still do. He balks slightly at the idea of me wearing it.

‘Your mother’s been reading about the … the festival. That your fans are doing.’

I say nothing.

‘And the papers are saying that … there is going to be a police presence. That they’re going to try and disperse it if it … if there is illegal activity and. And some parental groups are protesting it. And. And some of the papers say that some of your … some of your fans are …’

He holds his breath for a beat until the word burns, and then blurts out.

‘… violent.’

I turn and continue with my make-up. I see him over my shoulder in the mirror. He is a simple man. It’s five in the morning and he’s already fully dressed in a fleece from a team-building weekend he went on for work. It’s got the name of a defunct charity, ‘Fulcrum’, on it. He looks at the camera I’ve left on the sink mantle, pulling his eyes with its own unconscious gravity to the little sphere of black, a dark star, an event horizon so dense it draws not only light, but soul.

‘And … we think you shouldn’t go.’

I’ve put the wrong colour foundation on. It makes me look gaunt. Later, when I look at this footage, I will see fear in the eyes of my dad. Not fear of me. But he looks at the camera and I know why he’s scared. It’s trapped him in accountability. He knows he’s unable to truly be himself, to be my father, because, down a viewfinder or on a video loaded up to the internet, that true self is caked in interpretation. It’s almost robbed him of his male energy. Usually his tone would be firmer, bolder, imperative, perhaps even hostile. But there are uncharacteristic upward inflections in his delivery now, clearly rehearsed. He’s scared of being perceived. Of what people will think of him when I post it later. Which, for most of his generation, has never been a concern. Mum won’t even leave the bedroom for fear of it.

‘We spoke to Bahvana, your solicitor …’ he says.

I know who Bahvana is. He’s not speaking to me at all now. He’s addressing them, the future-viewership, the watchers, with workshopped, wary lines.

‘And you are risking not only your safety, but the safety of others by being in attendance. We’ve … printed off all the reports, the accounts. Attacks. In America, the UK. North Africa. We think this is perhaps getting … getting out of hand, so. So, your mother and I are asking … asking you not to go.’

There is a silence, only interrupted by the totally inaudible sensorial strings of my mum by the bedroom door, disturbing those atoms with the beating of her heart.

I tell my dad that I’m going. I tell him about the money and the security they’ve said they’re providing. I try and reassure him that it’s safe. And then I tell him that I’m going to see Gran beforehand.

‘Gran doesn’t want to see you,’ he says, his artifice slipping a little.

I tell him that I think he’s lying. I say that I think she believes in it, in some way. Believes in the Stories. In the things people can’t see. In Solkats.

‘That’s because she’s fucking sick.’

He catches himself, feeling the wincing from my mum metres away.

‘She’s … unwell, Alice. We think that … what you’ve told her about the, the songs and the albums. It upsets her. It’s made her worse. If we had known, we would never have let you give her a phone. She’s more and more erratic and confused, she’s not eating, and it’s because you’ve been feeding her all this nonsense about made-up things, when she can barely work out what’s real in the first place. We have a responsibility to—’

I tell him it’s not my responsibility to do anything. And then I say that, if he and Mum truly felt responsibility for her, they wouldn’t have put her in a fucking home. Mum’s in the corridor now. She’s moved silently, but she’s there. I fix my eye make-up which has run a little down one of my cheeks, as she stands outside the door, round the corner, beyond the camera’s reach.

‘Alice, can you turn the camera off, please?’ she says, quietly.

I don’t. I bend my body slightly, ready to grab it if Dad makes a lunge for it.

‘Alice. Please. Turn the camera off.’

I ask her why I should. There’s a pause.

‘Because … it makes me feel uncomfortable.’

It burns in me. All the things I wanted to say for so long. I say that turning the camera off makes me feel uncomfortable. That, if it weren’t for the camera, you wouldn’t be asking me not to go to the festival, you’d be telling me. I have to make my decisions. For me. And I can’t spend my life being told what to do by two people who don’t even know I exist half the fucking time. It’s not fair that they—’

‘Alice,’ says Mum. ‘Clementine’s dead.’

I say nothing. I can’t see her, but Mum’s holding onto the wall with an outstretched hand, steadying herself. I try to apply lipstick, but my fingers are suddenly shaking. I feel suddenly ravenous and thin, like I haven’t eaten in days.

‘She died during the night. It’s in the news. She didn’t wake up from her coma.’

My eyes are blurry. My reflection is smudged and I blink tears away to see it better. I keep painting my face. I keep painting.

‘Alice,’ says my dad, sternly. ‘You’re not going. This has gone on for too long and you’re part of something you don’t have the faintest clue about. The band, these – these fans, all the … filming. It’s not natural. You’re not well. Carrying cameras around everywhere, filming everything, it’s not normal. It’s not how anybody is supposed to live. Your actions. Have consequences. And you can’t just—’

My vision’s still bleary but my hand raises. I defiantly angle the camera on the counter to him, spinning the viewfinder around. He stares at it, at the hollow frame he’s filling, at how small his anger looks.

‘You’re upsetting your mother. Turn it off.’

I say no.

‘Turn it. Off.’

I pick it up, holding it out at him, watching it absorb him, consume him, capture all the feelings he’s trying to hide, his rage, his impotence, the shedding of control in every micro-emotion his body betrays.

‘Don’t point that fucking thing at me, Alice. Someone has died and you don’t fucking know the slightest thing about—’

Mum calls his name, telling him to calm down, but in his eyes there is a barren, forceless rectitude, an uprightness, a seething contempt for any deviant from his myopic values. Things were fine before technology, before change. There were rules and structures. Then, like an artful pathogen, it crept through genes, glacially mutating and folding proteins in the brain over generations, over and over, shaping them, teaching other proteins to fold too, in self-sustaining feedback loops. That control, or the hunt for it, breaks him. He sees sponges where brains used to be.

Mum’s crying as he shouts at me. He screams about rights to privacy, all they’ve done for Gran, for me. I strafe to try and get Mum in the shot through the door. Suddenly, blindly, Dad palms the camera from my hand. It flies across the room, off the bathroom tiles and into the bath with a crunch. The screen goes black.

Mel is waiting for me in her car outside the house. It’s early but her music is playing so loud I can hear thumps of it as I throw cameras and clothes into my bag. It sounds like distant war drums, filling the cavities of fear in every soldier’s chest with courage. I shut the front door quietly, a new camera in hand. My parents’ bedroom light is still on.

Mel rolls down the window and leans across the seat, calling out to me. She calms my breath with one smile.

‘Darling! Are … are you wearing make-up?’

I nod and shove my things into the boot. I circle round the car to the open window. Mel studies me.

‘You … you look beautiful.’

I slump into the seat next to her and shrug. She smiles and changes the track on her phone. She has a phone now. I turn away, staring out at the cold of the morning.

The music pauses. I can hear Mel’s breath beside me. She waits. I don’t want to look at her.

‘Al?’

There’s a fox across the street. It slinks under a car, something dead in its mouth.

‘Do you know what the definition of madness is?’ Mel asks. I hear a warm crinkle as she lights a cigarette.

I shake my head. I can smell the foundation on me. I’ve only ever smelled it on her, that slightly artificial smell of grainy, cheap pigment. It’s always filled me with a kind of comfort and a kind of strength.

‘It’s who you are,’ says Mel, turning the ignition. ‘When the world doesn’t matter anymore.’

She hums the hype song, but doesn’t say the words. We screech away from the kerb, down the little Gosforth road, music filling the apertures in our heads where our thoughts and choice should be.

Seven miles away, a plane lands. Kaylee wakes from her business class seat, removes her headphones and loads up a livestream on her phone. She writes on social media.

Ready?

17

Spelk, the Muzzled Hound, Solkat of cramps and forgotten bruises

Getting into the retirement home has occupied my mind for weeks. There’s ‘security’ – a bolus of ice cream in uniform – called Tim, who I’m pretty sure could just look at an eclair and it would induce in him some kind of diabetic event. But there are two sets of glass doors that lock, to prevent patients leaving, and there’s a list of visitors and times that is strictly adhered to. I was taken off the list after Durham. Angie and her coven of care workers guard those doors with a custodial resolve usually found in high-security prisons or basement bars that serve pints of green. But Mel had an idea.

She asked me for names of people who worked there, nurses, support staff, and found the social media pages of a few of them. Two of them had posted videos of us. So she reached out.

Angie arrives at seven in the morning, so we’re there at six. I walk up the gravel path and across the car park, my legs restlessly steadying me on imagined uneven terrain. I reach the door. Behind me, Mel sits in the car, watchful of the road. She didn’t want to come in.

I exhale as the first door opens automatically. This isn’t entirely unexpected – if the plan is working, someone should have unlocked it for us a few hours ago – but I’ve never traversed it in the dark. It reflects back my outline in its glass before parting and splitting me open, revealing in its place the little foyer beyond. I look at the security cameras.

The foyer is empty, Angie’s desk vacant. There are a number of routes around the complex, but before that, there is still a second pair of large glass double doors that require a keycard to open. I look around. In the corridors to my left and right I can hear movement, a door opening in one, a trolley, perhaps, in the other. But in front of me stands a large potted shrub. I’ve always thought it looked too exotic and out of place. I look at its base and for the first time see a tag hanging off its trunk. It’s plastic. Behind it is the keycard, left carefully by the follower who’s unlocked the doors for me. I hold it up to the scanner and watch another bisection of my reflection as the doors open. I pocket the card and walk through.

I’ve navigated the hallways of this place on my own before. But in the inky template of the dark, the corridors become illusory, conjuring visions from its impassive colouring. It’s the selective processing of my brain. Like a camera’s shallow depth of field, when focused tightly on something small, it blurs periphery features at the edge of frame, distilling them into indistinct smudges and shapes. My mind fills the absences left by these waifish forms with memories and inventions, turning them into every faceless threat my mind has ever imagined. Necks elongate, eyes melt and become mouths, fingers creep along walls to touch me and draw me to their dawn-less, senseless place of silence and indefinity.

Gran’s door is shut. I knock but there’s no answer.

I carefully creak it open. The room is lighter than the corridor, a wistful street lamp outside shedding its balm across some distant treetops.

Gran is sitting on the bed, fully clothed, staring out the window.

‘Hi, Gran,’ I say. ‘It’s me. It’s Al.’

She turns, but the darkness of the room carries vestiges of aphantasia, of those viscous dark portraits in her mind. I turn a lamp on and her eyes crease into warmth. She holds her hand out to me.

‘Oh darling. Darling,’ she says.

I smile.

‘You look very pretty today,’ she says.

I sit on the bed, her hand in mine. She seems lucid, present.

She inspects my face, rubs it a little with her thumb.

‘How are you, my dear?’ she asks.

‘Good,’ I say. ‘Good.’

I tell her about the past few weeks. Watch her face break into laughs and little yelps when I tell her about the band’s numbers, how we’re getting close to eight million followers. I tell her about the festival later today, that they’re predicting maybe fifty thousand people there. She doesn’t let go of my hand, squeezing it so tight my knuckles buckle into my palm. She watches me, reflecting my excitement back. The words might not mean much to her, but she can see the blooming in my heart, and she blossoms back, repeating the ends of sentences occasionally as hushed, enlivened questions, tilting her head with mine, patting me occasionally when I falter, gifting me her patience.

‘That is all … so very wonderful …’ she says.

I smile again.

Some children will feign understanding when being taught. When you explain something difficult, and ask them if they get it, they’ll say yes, even if they don’t. I wonder if it’s a collusive need to be liked, respected, seen as intelligent, all wired into our education system at a young age. I like to think it comes from a place of kindness. They don’t want the teacher to feel like they’ve failed in their task. They see effort, their life’s vocation, and would rather lie and continue their existence in ignorance, than offend.

‘And what about your friend?’ Gran asks.

I tell her a little about Melusine. That she’s cut her hair shorter, that she’s been helping me embrace the band’s success. We’ve been rehearsing for a fortnight and liaising with the forums, trying to embrace the strangely coordinated chaos and take us from underground, haphazard survival to the safety of the mainstream. Record companies have been in touch, Wez says. But we won’t sign, or can’t sign, with any of them. Callum owns the rights to all our songs.

‘No, your other friend …’ she says.

I hesitate. Then tell her about Callum. How he left in the boat, sailed it up the coast somewhere. I tell her about he and Mel’s falling out and try to explain how he feels, though I know nothing of it. That there have been a few incidents of violence and Callum feels responsible for—’

‘No,’ she says.

I wait, watching her figure out her thought, without once breaking from my eyes.

‘Your other friend.’

I can’t tell if she’s gone. It’s hard with her illness. She was so clever and, if this is possible, she has a clever face. She looks clever. Her eyes are small and inquisitive, her lips thin, her resting expression one of discernment; it all conveys an acumen. Even in her wedding-day photo on the wall, that selfsame wit and intuition is there. So I forget sometimes that her features don’t match her thoughts. It’s moments like this I’m suddenly hit with that misdirection, that guilt. I forget she’s not my gran anymore. That she hasn’t been for a very long time.

‘Have you seen him recently? Your other friend?’

‘Do you … do you mean Wharton, Gran? The policeman? Because he’s not my friend.’

‘Whisht,’ she says. Her eyes have dropped, pained. I don’t know if she’s telling me to stop talking about him. If she’s distressed.

‘Sorry. He shouldn’t have been allowed in here. I don’t know how he talked his way past Angie. Mum and Dad have already complained about—’

‘Whisht,’ she says again.

Her fingers rise, finding motes of miracle in the air, gathering them, then pressing them into her eyes. She stays like that, hiding in the dark of her fingertips, her mouth just slightly open. Her bottom teeth are longer than other people’s.

‘You will have fun today,’ she says finally. ‘At the festival. You will have fun, won’t you?’

I nod.

‘And you will send my love to your friends. I am very proud of you and your friends.’

I thank her.

‘And darling?’ She always says ‘darling’ to everyone. It’s easier. ‘You will forgive her, won’t you?’

I’ve packed up my camera and grabbed my coat, lingering by the door. I fish out her white, silk dressing gown from my bag and fold it, laying it gently on her armchair.

‘Forgive who, Gran?’ I ask.

She carefully rounds the bed and gently lies on it, her back to me, lost again in her corridors.

‘Alice …’ she says.

I wait until I hear her breathing, then step through the door into darkness.

The drive to Jesmond is bitter. The rain doesn’t fall, it hurtles to the streets in handfuls, mortar shells delivering with each blow little shrapnel shards of sleet that give to the roads a few inches of indistinct haze. Mel has her window down and her right arm is raw with the hail. It’s given her substance, jump-shocked her system into a wired freneticism, and she sings out to it, barely able to see the windscreen. Her voice is muscular, unshaken by the cold. She belts out of ironclad lungs as we pass churches and chicken shops, as though willing the sky to do its worst.

‘I will buh-riiiiiiing you back!

Even if tuh-aaakes my laaaaaa-eeeef!

We do not suffer rene-GADES!

Turncoat, traitors, run-AWAYS

I’ll buh-riiiiiiiiiiiing … you BACK. From the BLACK!’

It’s from our sixth, a song called ‘Turncoat’. It’s a lot of Bizen the Witch, pretty much just rocking out. I think about what Wharton said, about the sixth Cycle, what’s to come, what the following might be expecting. But I shake it from my mind as Mel cackles with her final note. I laugh with her. Mel loves Bizen songs.

Callum always starts drafts of them, he says, listening to someone called Hans Rott – who apparently was great for a bit, then went mad and sort of died – then scribbles out some orchestration, adds a bunch of distortion and lets me go bananas on the drums. It’s a collision of tones all knitted together by Mel’s inhumane ability to straddle genre, forcibly thrust the words into purpose and turn pretty much anything written for her into a wail of bonkers, sexual rage. It’s wild.

‘I will buh-reeeaaak your brittle booooones!

And duh-roooooown your dirty tooooomes!

We do not suffer rene-GADES!

Turncoat, traitors, run-AWAYS

I’ll buh-riiiiiiiiiiiing … you … you …’

Mel has stopped singing. We’ve reached the moors on the outskirts of the centre of town and she’s peering through the deluge on the windscreen, trying to determine what it is we’re seeing. The car slows to a halt, joining hundreds more on the tree-lined road, and she opens the sun roof, letting a cascade of water into the car, soaking me. She stands on her seat and pulls herself up, her legs damply pressing into my shoulder. I rub the steam from the glass and point my camera, but the rain obscures the world beyond. I roll down my window.

‘Holy shit …’ I hear above me. ‘Holy … shit.’

The moors start their southernmost point in a place called Spital Tongues in town, and stretch for a thousand acres. They’ve always felt intransigently archaic to me. The city itself has tried desperately to coalesce with the world’s metal and light over the decades. But the moors just sit there incongruously in the centre of the city, have done since the fourteenth century, a cantankerous uncle, refusing to heed the siren of progress, and stubbornly choosing to entrench himself in his role of husbandry to the handful of cows that call it home. I used to walk around it when I was young, go to the Hoppings – a yearly funfair that comes to town – and watch into the evening as older kids would try and go cow-tipping. There was a rumour they fell asleep standing up and you could push them over and they’d die. I never once saw any of them succeed.

But the moorland now is unlike anything I’ve seen. At first it looks like the grass has been blighted, or perhaps burned. Then my eyes find detail and mass. An enormous, contorted colony has replaced the verdant green of the place, thousands of people, circling one another in stigmergic herds, some under umbrellas, others basking in the rain.

The whole field, two miles in length, is warped with movement as tents are erected, cars idly driven through the soil. I see waves coming from the city along Barrack Road in eusocial harmony, people guiding one another, aiding in some cases with translation, direction, carrying bags and blankets. Thousands of people. Thousands of them. They circle and traverse Hunters Moor, clambering across divots and rounding trees, all heading north to the motorway bridge that carries them to the colossal distant mounds of Cow Hill beyond.

I load up camera after camera as Mel stares in wonder at the disciples, the denizens of the internet who have emerged from their keyboards and screens, discovering their tasks, their callings in the crowd, aiding the young or old, feeding, earning money from cheaply-printed T-shirts, hocking water bottles. An Indian restaurant, the only one for miles, has made a kind of slipshod soup kitchen on its pavement and is selling curry by the bucket. I angle one of my cameras up to Mel’s face. The low angle reveals the racing pulse cavorting through her veins, her carotids cleaving her neck in thick, throbbing trunks and diffusing blotches of earthy blue against the pallor of her skin and sky. Rain collects and runs a beardy trickle off her chin, and she rubs her eyes and cheeks of moisture.

I gaze up at her, I can’t not. This footage is useless. Within seconds, rain collects on the lens. But another video will capture this moment, our arrival, probably far better than I ever could.

About forty yards from us, a news van has settled. There are three that I can see. Outside it, a reporter is improvising lines, a steadfast rock in a leafy wind of people around her. The news outlet is local. But it will, in time, be used in a very successful series of televised lectures concerning parasocial phenomena in the twenty-first century. The reporter will later abandon journalism, return to her online degree in anthropology and become a professor at a prominent American university.

‘… and, against council regulation and advice, have arrived in their thousands,’ she says. ‘Police presence around the town moor has been established, but there are reports that authorities were wrong in their estimations of the sheer number of supporters for the group, and a number of constabularies from around the north-east are being issued into Newcastle to ensure the safety of the attendees and the general public. Some attendees have travelled great lengths to be here and some local analysts are already predicting that this will be the largest gathering on the moors since an 1873 demonstration of an estimated two hundred thousand people in favour of male suffrage …’

She’s really good at her job. She has no script and has clearly been told to just keep talking, barking half-remembered facts every few minutes, which means it’s live. A number of sensible-looking thirty-somethings reach her peripheries and she darts to them. Nearly everyone has the broken circle tattoo now.

‘Excuse me, hello. I …’

They keep walking. Everyone does. They look at her with distaste, some with disgust. A perfect estuary of people fans around her, as though some hex has been cast, and to step within her grasp is to surrender yourself and your loved ones to some mutative plague.

She tries a few times. Then lands on a woman, her young kid walking excitedly, dancing in the briefly abating rain. She physically blocks their way and the mother stops, unable to fight her child’s fascination with the camera, fondly but firmly tapping him on the head, as he raises his hands, single fingers outstretched, doing devil horns down the lens. The reporter introduces the station and asks if they’d answer a few questions. The mother nods in tired acquiescence.

‘Have you travelled far today for the concert?’

With that wonderful peripheral admonishment all mums have, she hooks her finger into her child’s collar, just as he is about to wander off.

‘Yeah, we, er, we came up from Manchester for the weekend,’ she sighs. ‘I’ve got three kids, the older two are already here, they’ve gone on ahead, but this little one likes the music, too. My son’s been reading them to him as bedtime stories and they’ve gotten really into it and – Jacob, keep your wellies on or I swear I will tape them to y’ankles …’

Jacob has just sat down and is hip-deep in a puddle.

‘And do you think it’s safe for young people to be attending a festival with so few security measures?’ asks the reporter.

Mum shrugs. ‘I don’t think there’s owt to really worry about. It’s no worse than if I let them run off to Glastonbury for a weekend, with drugs and drink, this way I can keep an eye on them.’

A car drives slowly and joins the traffic about thirty yards behind her.

‘And do you believe, as some of the press is saying, that the band performing today is indoctrinating these young people? What do you think of the reports of attacks around the country?’

The car trundles to a halt. After a moment you can see the sunroof open and one of the windows rolls down. The mum hoiks her child up off the floor with a tug of the hood.

‘Look, I mean. Sure. But I’ve listened to them, and I think they’re good, you know? Bit weird, but they’re not like them death metal bands or anything. I mean, when I were a kid I queued outside in the rain for hours to see all kinds of bands, bands who sent out much worse messages than these lot. And as for the attacks, I think the press has just jumped on them, made a mountain out of it. I mean, my eldest was showing me some of the stuff he’s been involved with and, honestly, I’ve never been able to get him passionate about anything! But now he’s talking art, he’s talking engagement. So I think— Jacob!— I think it’s good. Getting them off their phones, into the real world, real experiences and— JACOB!’

Jacob has slinked his arms out of his raincoat and escaped it, darting out into the road.

She exits frame and hoiks Jacob back from the tarmac, where he is attempting to lick a puddle, returning with a huff.

‘One last question before I let you go …’ says the reporter. ‘You’ve said your two eldest are here. What do you think of the reports that a number of young people are actually involved in the coordination of this festival?’

‘Aw look, I mean …’ The mum’s had enough. Jacob is now just staring down the camera, occasionally sticking his tongue out to drink the falling rain. ‘I think it’s harmless. A bunch of kids—’

‘Potentially over a hundred thousand kids—’

‘Well – yeah, I mean it’s impressive, isn’t it? There are worse things to be involved in, and by all accounts the community is welcoming, extremely welcoming, in fact. My son’s gay and he’s found a wonderful bunch of people online through the band, people who are accepting of all genders and sexes and races, and that’s … that’s hard to find on the … the …’

‘Holy shit …’ comes a voice through the rain.

The mum’s turned over her shoulder again. Jacob has run forward and is standing about ten feet from the car, staring up at it. From out of the sunroof, a drenched wild-woman has risen and is staring out at the fields, the fog of her breath idling in the air, vespers of steam collecting in the rain, twisting with the arching of her neck. She holds her arms out wide and raised, closing her eyes and feeling the torrents above plaster her skin in communion. Sharp abrasions of pain become numb little snaps on her brow and she lets out an involuntary exhalation – a husky, cathartic huff that grows into a woolly ‘haah’.

‘Christ, that’s her, that’s …’

The mum jumps the few yards to her son and pulls him into her, both of them staring at Mel as she drinks in the rain. The camera follows, the reporter lost for words, scrambling, witnessing Mel’s moment beneath the falling sky.

Jacob wriggles free from his mother’s arms and steps closer. Mel hears his splashing and looks down at him from above, kindly, softly, majesty in her eyes. Jacob opens his arms wide like hers and breathes too, copying her. She breathes back at him. He does the same, a little louder. They exchange this panting, each of them playing, laughing, trying to out-breathe the other, seeing who can make the biggest cloud, gathering the cold air into them, trapping it and smothering it in their warmth, then expelling it like alms to the wintry ether. It culminates in a long, protracted haaaaaaah, as they both bend a little, forcing the last of their lungs to one another in skittish, silent squawks, then buckling with the effort. Mel relents, looks down at him and smiles.

‘You win,’ she says. Jacob jumps with glee. ‘May the Hackies go with you …’

Then she drops back into the car. It reverses, turns backwards onto the edge of the moorland grass, and rumbles away into the distance. In the video, the camera turns back to the reporter.

For anyone watching, it seems such a simple, cute exchange. And it was, for the most part. A strange woman and a curious child playing a little improvised game in the rain. But in time it will be picked over and studied and discussed the world over. Because it’s the reporter’s response that best broadcasts the moment’s magnitude. Its urgency, almost its menace. Her eyes are locked in confusion, an astonishment that seems so utterly unbecoming with the innocence of the moment. It’s as though she’s seen their breath, but seen futures within it. Baleful futures. Full of figures and waste and weirdness and time and fear.

‘Turn the camera off,’ she says.

There is a barely-audible response from her cameraman.

‘I said. Turn it. O—’

18

Hackies, Solkat of breath, side-eyes and nightmares

We sit in traffic on our way to the motorway bridge. This stretch of road makes me feel displaced, the roar of the cars below dissecting the expansive stretches of grass and woodland, the noise of it a constant low-level hum that even the soil cannot fully absorb. Along the road, more people trudge, huddled in groups, hundreds of them. I notice one man selling white plastic busts, halved, with elastic straps – manufactured replications of the spray-painted cowls. Some folks have banners and flags with markings on them. One placard simply reads, ‘We Lead’. On its back it says, ‘Release’. Two people are carrying something rolled up, ten feet long, a projector screen. Another is in an electric wheelchair towing a small cart with musical instruments in it.

Mel’s fingers are drumming on the steering wheel. She drums when she’s nervous and she’s beating out a simple four-four beat, its bpm increasing and increasing, giving the car a kind of hollow, sonorous certitude. She checks her face in the mirror, then checks her phone.

‘They said meet at the main gate. Where the fuck is the main gate, it’s a fucking moor.’

I tell her there are coordinates and show her how to look them up on her maps app.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, that’s ages away. We might as well walk.’

I’m sort of hoping she’s joking. I don’t have my drum kit with me, they’ve provided one, but I’ve got way more stuff to carry than she does.

‘How do I make it better?’ she asks, looking at her phone.

I ask what she means.

‘The phone. It’s red in the corner, the battery. How do I charge things?’

I tell her you can charge it using an adapter that plugs into the auxiliary power outlet. The one she uses to light cigarettes.

‘I don’t have one of those,’ she says, casually dropping the phone to her lap.

I tell her we’ll buy one and get my phone out to order one from the internet. I can hear her breathing next to me, smell her perfume. She’s changed it.

‘Al …’ she says.

She looks out the window, glazed, her eyes blurring, unable to focus on any one detail in the swarm.

‘We’re doing the right thing,’ she says.

She’s saying it to herself, bolstering her waning self-assurance. It’s got almost the exact same cadence as a congregation mindlessly murmuring ‘and also with you’.

‘I know Callum wasn’t … I know he’d be pleased to see all this. He wouldn’t say it, but he’d be pleased. This is the kind of … kind of thing he’d want, he always wanted from art. A gathering. Full of people from all walks of life. Coming together. To … to be. To be seen. Together. You know?’

I nod, but as I look out the window at the passing followers, I wonder what Callum would really think of this. I’ve never really thought about it, but now that I do, I start to wonder what the message of the Solkats is, or if there even is one. Maybe it’s supposed to be vague. Maybe people just see what they want to see.

After a minute of silence in traffic, I ask her something. I never ask her these kinds of things.

I ask if she feels seen. Or perceived.

She turns to me, a strange look on her face. It’s like I just told her some fundamental but deeply surprising fact about myself – ‘I once came second in the shot put at the Commonwealth games’ – something like that. There’s an almost baffled, but proud look in her eyes.

‘I do …’ she says, after a moment, turning back. ‘I feel like I’ve been waiting for my real existence to start.’

She huffs, fogging up the windscreen.

‘It’s the “no time to explain” moment,’ she says. ‘In books or films or whatever, there’s always the moment when the protagonist, living their tedious life, meets someone. They meet them and they say “no time to explain, come with me!”. And they run. They run and never look back. Into adventure. I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone to take my hand and say, “Oh, by the way, you’re special. You’re the only one who can save us.” And then I’d run. And find the world I was truly supposed to be in.’

The man with the plastic busts is wandering along the line of cars up ahead and Mel watches him shoving them through car windows, counting cash.

‘All my life I’ve felt like I’ve been waiting for that. Waiting to run.’

I shift focus from her face to the moors beyond. The throng of people, the laughter, the dancing in the rain. Then back to her face. She hears the little zschurm of the camera’s moving lens and automatically sticks out her chin to accentuate her jawline.

‘Haven’t you?’ she asks.

I pause. I say I started running some time ago.

She raises an eyebrow, quizzically.

The moment you and Callum asked me to play with you, in that pub on the boat in Blyth, I say. The moment you held out your hands and said, ‘come with us’, was the moment my real life began.

She smiles. Then it slips, as her thoughts brush their fingers across old pages of dusty books in her mind.

‘I wish he was here.’

I lower the camera slightly. I say I do, too.

We drift into revery. For the tiniest second, as Mel stares out at the moors, the thousands of people, the wind sending puddle-spray across their tracks, her hair dances. I know it’s the air-con, the heat from the footwell. But it catches little wisps of it and they dance around her eyes like uncertain fingertips around ivory keys. I feel the presence of something behind us in the car seat.

Whisht has reached out his long, unnatural fingers and he twirls those wisps of hair. He brushes his knuckle against Mel’s cheekbone, lifting her mouth into a half-smile. Everything has music within it, he seems to say. Every sadness and every hope.

‘Well, fuck this,’ she says. Her eyes have burst open and with a huff, she rolls down the window. She grabs words from books she’s only half-read and hurls them down the road.

‘Oi!’ she calls. ‘You! Shiller! Purveyor of reliquaries! Visage-vendor! Yeah, you!’

The man selling busts is two cars down. He looks up at her and, discovering he has no idea what those words mean, toddles over, confused. He’s got a binbag full of them, slotted together, maybe fifteen of them. One of them slips and falls to the grass. He retrieves it, the pristine white stained with muddy wounds.

‘Alreet, pet,’ he says. ‘You … looking to buy a bust?’

‘I am nobody’s pet,’ says Mel. ‘But yes, show me your wares, you knight-of-the-road pedlar. We are going to be late.’

‘Aye, these are reet popular,’ he says, pulling out the headpiece.

It’s plastic and has some odd staining at the edges, but it’s blank and white and serviceably resembles the ‘avatar of anonymity’ Callum thinks it is. Holes have been cut out in the eyes and mouth and covered with a slightly mismatched white gauze on its inside. A pathetic-looking elastic band loops round the back of the head, forcing the eyes of it to droop slightly, forever looking down.

‘It’s one size fits all, ahm afraid,’ he says, handing it to Mel. ‘I had kids’ ones but they’re sauld out.’

Mel holds it at arm’s length out the window.

‘And from what knock-off mannequin shop did you steal these?’ she asks.

‘Didn’t steal nowt!’ the seller barks, defensively. ‘These are official merchandise, pet! It’s good … good craftsmanship!’

Mel fixes him with a glower.

‘I am nobody’s … pet. But we will buy them. If you tell us the truth.’

The man flounders. He inches into the window, the cigarette smell of his breath stinging my eyes. He smiles, revealing gum rot in his nooks.

‘Fine, fine …’

He tells us they’re part of a character costume for a popular science fiction franchise. He bleached the cheap paint from it and cut the eyes out himself.

‘Fifty,’ he says. Mel balks.

‘Fifty for two scraps of plastic you’ve mangled?’

‘Nah, fifty each.’

She coughs in exasperation. ‘Not to be overweening my dear, but do you know who we are?’

The man looks at her, shrugs. ‘You one of them influencers?’

She’s about to round on him, but then she looks at me. Her eyes narrow with a half-formed idea.

‘Fancy taking a look around?’ she asks.

I smile.

She turns back to the seller, who is dancing on the spot in the rain.

‘Fine,’ she spits. ‘One hundred pounds. But heed my words, hawker. Charlatan. You merchant of discount dreck …’

She hands him a wad of twenties and wrenches the busts from his hands.

‘The Bagsies … will have your heart for this …’

Mel abandons the car in the middle of traffic, much to the chagrin of those around us, and we walk, busts covering our faces. My breath bleaches my cheeks with residue, and I can hear my warm exhalations tightly in my ears. It’s too big for my head and I pull and roll the top part of my hood to cushion it, so I can see out the eyeholes.

Everything through the white gauze looks hazy and angelic, every face we pass robbed of its rumples and laughter lines, distorting them into washes of indefinite features. We clamber through the slats of a wooden fence and onto the moors. Rain breaks through the leather of Mel’s old boots and seeps into lagoons between my toes.

We pass through huddles of people. To our right, at the western edge of the moors, stands Cow Hill. Atop it, I can make out a stretch of staging maybe twenty- or thirty-foot square, with legs of scaffold plunging into the descending hillside earth. Speakers are at its side, microphones, all leading from a small van at the foot of it. The hill is full of people, inching closer to the stage, but there’s no rush, no jostling or chaos. A number of other speakers are around the moors and people have set up screens and projectors and are lounging in front of them, ‘The livestream has not started yet’ plastered across them. Some are drinking, others have set up circles of tents. Smaller stages pepper the grass, showcasing musicians covering our music, string quartets, storytellers, interviews, comedians. There’s no discernible pattern or layout, just a random dander of groups and subcultures, hundreds of pockets all pitched up and waiting, in their own versions and worlds of anticipation, welcoming the like-minded and the lost with soft-hearted observance.

Above the crowd bob a number of figures. Police officers on horseback, traipsing anachronistically across the landscape.

I’ve already looked up ‘freedom of assembly and association’ online, and police can’t disperse large groups of people unless there’s threat of riot or disorder. But I know there are so many hoops to jump through to get permission to stage a gathering like this – application forms, safety and risk assessment meetings and the like. I don’t know if someone has done all these, and we’ve a right to be here, or people have just turned up and the town council simply doesn’t have enough manpower to remove us. Some followers are claiming ‘right to peaceful congregation’, others invoking religious freedom. The police have no one to arrest because no one is in charge. And the watchful press vans and reporters would castrate them. No one wants to be seen arresting people who, at the moment, have simply committed the heinous crime of wanting to hang out together in weird hats on a moor.

I check my phone. We’re trending.

I can almost hear the expression on Mel’s face beneath her mask. She’s smiling, I’m sure of it. Someone offers her a beer with a straw in it as she passes through the masses and she feeds it through the gauze of her bust. Ahead of us is a tarpaulin, maybe thirty feet in length, draped like a tent over the grass on wooden blocks. I can hear chatting through small speakers. Mel looks at me.

‘Keep your cameras hidden, darling,’ she says, a quiver of excitement in her voice. ‘Don’t want to spook the cattle …’

We step closer to the crowd in and around the tarp. At least half of them are wearing busts or painted in white, all of them are draped in witchery and vestments imbued with personal meaning. It feels like a convention for a television show no one’s actually seen, organised by a lone drunk who’s half-remembered it. At the centre, in the tent, there’s a small, raised stage area. Three mossy sofas are aligned in a semi-circle and people are sitting on them. A flash of blonde is at the centre of it all, her back arched, pressing her chest out. She has a line on the bridge of her nose.

A gentleman in his fifties is sitting to her left, microphone in hand. He looks like the kind of man who cleans his glasses just for want of something to do with his hands.

‘… well, you’re half right …’ he’s saying. ‘There is of course a network of ontological references, at once delineating the particular with the universal. But a nominalist reading of the texts, bringing with it a shared membership to the Solkat class, would, in my view, allow for a richer and much more varied understanding of the creation myth …’

Mel bumps her way through the crowd until we’re standing a few people back from the stage. The academic talks without making eye contact with anyone. I’m not sure if what he’s saying makes sense or is even right. Molly Branthom nods at his words, hoping to appear engrossed. She’s the kind of person who can effortlessly feign interest, but is merely waiting her turn to speak.

‘Disallowing the polytheistic interpretation,’ continues the academic, ‘and discarding the notion of the Solkat class as pantheon, per se, welcomes a distinct and unique perception of the Solkat, not as god, but as ancestral entity. It’s not dissimilar to the Australian Aboriginal worldview of the Dreaming, the depiction of ancestral figures of great power, not worshipped, but venerated. This, coupled with their deconstruction of contemporary fixations, removes the inherent sublimity of the Solkat and renders him, no longer as deity, but rather as divine mouthpiece, able to subvert and reveal the fragility of the human condition, but also to embody it …’

Molly looks around the panel. Everyone is looking at the academic as though he’s just casually suggested they all strip naked and rub Vaseline on their nipples.

‘So, just to be clear …’

Kaylee holds up a microphone. I recognise her from her videos. But she’s unbound now, free from the fetters of pretence. She has on this long, blue silk ball gown with a custom hood, the beaded crest of her breastbone tie-dyed white and creeping up the cowl in a glittering mesh. Her face is painted with pale scrawls of lyrics, so tightly strewn around her eyes and neck they blur into a chalky pallor from afar. She has turquoise nail varnish on. She looks like a Viking shield maiden in army boots.

‘You’re saying … that the Solkats aren’t gods?’

The academic sighs with self-importance. ‘I’m saying,’ he says, ‘that to treat them solely as godheads limits our appreciation of the epistemological complexities of the ethos.’

Kaylee looks at where the academic’s nipples would be beneath his waistcoat with continued bafflement. Then, harnessing the audience:

‘Do you believe?’ she asks.

A hum of complicity ripples across the crowd. People are nodding, some murmuring. The academic scoffs. He fingers silver cufflinks in the shape of Christmas trees.

‘My job is not to debase myself with the reductive notion of belief,’ he says. ‘My job is to dismantle the belief system that has emerged from contemporary texts such as these and examine how they shape congregation. A scientist does not need to suffer the illness of his study in order to determine its cause and symptoms. His is an empirical exploration of illness.’

‘So you’re saying we’re sick,’ says Kaylee. The crowd murmurs louder, one or two shouting in indistinct paroxysms. She looks out to them all. The young woman next to her, another blonde American influencer, claps and whoops in agreement.

‘No, what I’m saying—’

‘I think we all can hear what you’re saying, Professor,’ says Kaylee. She stands and wanders with the mic behind the couches, occasionally resting her free hand on its worn velvet. It feels like one of those desperate morning television talk shows, but with more, you know. Crazy people.

‘You’re saying three things,’ she says. ‘First, that the Solkats aren’t real. Second, that our belief in them isn’t real. And third, our belief in them makes us less than you, in your eyes. Makes us nuts.’

‘That’s a completely incorrect interpretation of my—’

‘No, you’ve had your turn. It’s our turn now.’

She cups the cord of her mic. It feels like she’s cupping more than a cable.

‘I don’t wanna dick on all your … academic stuff. Your scholarly pursuits. You have dedicated your life to it. It has become your god. And you, its high priest. But for many of us here, our modern “godheads” are totems of privilege. Academia, money, they are entrenched in generational grief, influence, powers beyond our grasp. We weren’t born into—’

‘I was not raised privileged,’ says the academic. ‘I was born into a working-class—’

‘And yet you’re using a bunch of words none of us know. Why? So you can look clever? Enlightened? Better than us?’

‘I will not apologise if my words are unfamiliar to my audience. I have learned and know the meaning of these words as they pertain to particular ideological criticisms, the kinds ofcriticisms this – as with any movement – should be subjected to.’

‘So you mean to criticise.’

‘I mean to criticise, by its second and original meaning: to appraise, not to find fault with. I was invited here to offer my—’

‘So you mean to decide for us.’ Kaylee has rounded the central sofa and has shunted Molly Branthom along it, who loses footing and casually turns it into an excuse to bend her chest to the audience. She looks so lost and out of place.

‘What do you wish to decide, Professor?’ Kaylee continues. ‘What is your decision?’

‘I mean to … to determine—’

‘You mean to decide whether we, as followers of this particular ethos, as you put it, are clever enough to understand it. Worthy enough to appreciate its complexities. Able to understand its message without knowing the right words.’

Cheers and hollers from the crowd. The academic cleans his glasses. He smiles to himself in a sickening, condescending way that only fuels the crowd, its voice becoming a steady rumble of radical murmuration.

‘And what of you – K-Li, is it?’ he asks, speaking closer into the mic. ‘Don’t you and your – how many is it? – three and a half million social media followers decide what others should think? I notice your numbers have grown substantially and in direct correlation with the, ahem, artists in question. You call me high priest of my academic pursuits; surely the same could be equated to you? I use my words, and you use someone else’s and paint yourself in them. You spout your thoughts on the texts with abandon, and yet I am chastised for mine? What difference is there between us? We both have our means of discourse. I use words, words that perhaps are unfamiliar, but no less valid. And you use … this.’

He gestures to her. ‘A dress and make-up.’

The crowd bites the air with louder growls, circling.

‘Am I – am I – please – am I to entertain the idea that I was invited to this … whatever you want to call it, festival, “ceremony”, whatever it is, to renounce my own opinion?’ He’s leant forward in his chair, unwilling to physically rise to the provocation. ‘By the texts’ own morality structures, surely I am to be welcomed for embracing my own extrapolation of the Stories. By the third Cycle’s narrative alone, surely I should be lauded for not succumbing to the hypnotic light of my own palms, and forming my own opinion?’

Kaylee falters. Some of the crowd abate, a number of the older watchers nodding, others barking, shouting. There’s a rigidity in the air, a traction, but without direction. The crowd is waiting for blood, but from whose wounds they wish it to flow is unknown, almost irrelevant. I notice a figure to my right, cowled in plastic. They haven’t cheered or booed with the crowd. They haven’t said a word.

‘This isn’t one of your forums on the internet, K-Li,’ the academic says, boring his eyes into hers for the first time. ‘It isn’t the echo chambers you are used to. In the real world, there are people that disagree with you. People who wish to examine, analyse and understand, for a multitude of reasons, why something of such seemingly low literary worth has been welcomed so quickly and so ardently by so many people, particularly considering the violence that has accompanied it. This is reasonable discourse. Dissection. Doubt. It’s not enough to simply say “you’re wrong”, to dress up and make a video. We are in the real world, and in the real world, people are entitled to …’

Kaylee does something here. Her voice changes. It becomes dark and hypnotic.

‘Sing a song,’ she says.

‘Pardon?’

‘Sing a song. One of Their songs. Any of them. Sing one of Their songs.’

The academic nervously chuckles.

‘Er, I – I don’t think I would like to subject people to my singing, K-Li …’

‘Do you know any of the songs?’ she asks.

‘I … I have spent a great deal of time over the past few months studying the nuances—’

‘Do you know. Any. Of Their songs?’ she asks again. ‘Have you actually sat and listened to them? Heard them? Allowed them to change you, to have effect?’

The crowd’s murmuring has weaved itself into a knotted mess now. It’s cacophonous. Mel is watching, sipping her beer through her mask. Someone to our left, a woman I think, is watching her, physically turning their whole body to see through the narrow slits of their mask. Another joins them, keeping their distance, then another. One of them starts to write something on a notepad. The other figure, to my right, has noticed me and has almost completely turned to face me.

‘I understand your criticisms, Professor. We understand that you see your job, your role in all this as outlier. Able to judge from the outside. But we do not accept your judgement. No one asked for it and no one will listen to it. Because. If I ask anyone, anyone here, to sing. They will sing. They will sing Their songs.’

She points to someone in the audience. ‘Sing,’ she says.

The audience member, a woman in her thirties, hesitates a moment. Then quietly starts to sing. It’s a song from our sixth Cycle, the title song, ‘The Augur of Haporth Rock’.

‘The time …’ – she coughs, but continues – ‘the … the time for talk is over … The war has just … beguuun …’

‘You.’ Kaylee points to another. ‘Sing.’

‘The Doubts will burn with … sulphur … And the world will heed our druuums …’

Kaylee continues to point, one by one, as the song grows through the crowd, nervously, solemnly. I’ve never heard it a cappella. Usually it’s quite rhythmic and simple, with looping double-stopped violins weaving their way around Mel’s voice. But without them, it’s dark and grave, almost monotonous. Or perhaps it has its own, iterative collection of notes, inherent in the delivery, like skipping-rope rhymes that somehow have no tune, and yet follow a set, undeviating intonation. I start to hear why children’s rhymes are used in horror movies. The dissonance, the subversion of something innocent in its inception, now distorted to reveal within it the uncanny, the strange, the unwelcome.

I watch the figure to my right, who isn’t singing. He’s not even moving. Except his hands. His hands are subtly opening and closing, opening and closing, as though grasping at flame.

‘You see, Professor?’ says Kaylee, as the crowd’s singing continues, low. ‘This. Is the difference. Between you. And us.’

‘Oh and what’s that?’ he scoffs, trying to hide his visible consternation. ‘I didn’t … get singing lessons as a child?’

The chanting grows. Some have their eyes shut, ignoring the panel now, swaying with the natural current of the freeform verse that seems to circle in the air. I see others side-eye one another, checking to see their reactions, verifying their own place in the crowd. Then I see the Solkats. Among us, hazy, moving. Whispering in ears, covering eyes with soft palms, blowing softly on the napes of necks and holding hands. The figure to my right is stepping back, looking around. He looks at me. His eyes beneath the bust are piercing, bleak – the colour of the underside of unclean taps. I hear whispers of his language, but it’s impossible to understand it beneath the weight of sound. He steps calmly out of the crowd and I turn back to Mel to tell her. But someone to our left has handed her a piece of paper.

‘For you, this is discourse …’ says Kaylee.

Mel reads the note and looks at me, gestures for me to follow her, to follow the figures around her. I do, Kaylee’s words still ringing in my ears.

‘For us. This is prayer.’

19

Clarty, Solkat of smudged lipstick, mud and change

‘Well I think it’s fair to seh that the atmospheyah is ele’tric, laydeez and gen’lemen! Abso-fu’ckin’ le’tric!’

Weston’s face beams from screens. He’s climbing Cow Hill. Two cameramen stumble ahead and alongside him, capturing his ascent. He pants as he walks, dressed in a custom-made purple tracksuit with printed scrawl all across it – scanned no doubt from Mel’s art books. He has an extremely optic hat perched precariously on his liver-marked head, and the microphone he’s holding seems to weigh about thirty kilograms. He has the broken circle tattoo on his wrist.

‘Ah meen, come on! They sed we couldn’t do it! They sed it couldn’t be done! And now, here we are, at the inaugrill Solkat Ceremony Festival! Marra be praised – Marra be fu’ckin’ PRAISED!’

The mic picks up some nearby cheering as he passes pockets of followers. None of them wave at the camera or do the usual crude jokes and gestures. They all simply watch him as he passes. At one point, he passes a large screen with his own face projected on it.

‘Look at that handsome fella, eh? Thank you to everyone who’s brought out screens and that, it’s really appreciated. By our cownt there’s one hundred and eigh’y thousand peeple here, and more on their way! All to rejoice in the spec’tckle, all to meet in real life, in real time and give thanks for the Stories and their tellers! And fu’ckin’ hell have we got treats for you today … We’ve got …’

He lists off names. Two or three prominent bands are doing unplugged sets of covers. A famous German DJ has his own tent and, circumventing the decibel level requirement, is handing out free, expensive headphones for a silent disco. There are art classes, finger-painting. A large, volunteer-run music group for children is playing at the foot of the hill. The whole moor is alive with movement and colour as barrel-chested men help with tent-erection, teens congregate in drum circles, all of them smiling, laughing, reaching out for a mile in a steady, undulating wave. Wez reaches a point on the hill where his feet have involuntarily started wandering from side to side to ease the pain from the incline, and in doing so the cameras catch the sights around him.

‘It really is quite the, er … the …’

He’s spotted something over his shoulder. Ever the professional, he wanders over to it, eager to showcase the wonderland he thinks he’s created. A number of people, all cowled in their own white solution made up of damp plaster bandages, are planting garden chairs into the hill. They’ve taped short wooden stakes to the back legs to level them and are facing them up towards the main stage some fifty yards away.

‘And, and look! Some peeple are already setting up for the concert here, er … Hello! Hello and welcome to the Solkat Ceremony, quite the set-up you’ve got here, er …’

One of the figures rises from their haunches where they are malleting the chairs into the ground and looks at him.

Unlike the cheap busts and spray paint, these people do not have mouth or eyeholes in their masks, but gauze covering their whole faces. Wez falters at the anonymous death mask that leers back at him, like some newly born, predatory thing, tilting its head, learning from him, deciding whether he’s prey.

‘Looks like you’ve come prepared! Heh. Though I can’t imagine you’ll get a good view! We’ve already got a good number of peeple here, and having a seet on the hill is a gréat idea, but pr’aps you can stand on the thing to, er, better see the …’

The figure is still staring at him. The mallet has not left their hand.

‘Well, good luck to yas! Heh, be … be good, and all that. And if you can’t be good, be …’

There is a pause. It looks like the figure is about to lunge. Weston dances awkwardly, then swings round.

‘The consutt is due to start any minute now,’ he continues, hurriedly. His microphone occasionally slips from his hand and his faithful co-host, the wind, takes over. ‘I knor a number of you have been wonderin’ if They would, er, grace us with, with their presence. But I have it on good authority that they were indeed spotted! Yes, spotted, attending the festival and were kindly invited to their private … hoalding place, where they can best, best prepair! For the consutt ahead. We’re all very excited, very excited to see what songs they’ve choasen and …’

The figure is still staring at him. Wez climbs again and finally the figure in the background resumes their work. As he climbs, the camera catches more of these figures, dozens of them, planting similar chairs, each of them about thirty feet from the other, circling the lower stretches of the incline. Each of them stops their work and stares at the camera as Wez breathlessly passes.

‘It is, of course, heh, the privilidge of us all, here on the town moor, to attend this wonderful festival, but to those watching at horm, we want to thank you, heh, for all the, aw fuck this is high, heh, all the well wishes and comments on our social media pedges! I’ve, heh, been toald that nearly ten million people are tuning in to this alreddy, the livestream, from all around the world and all of us here, heh, hear your voices and your support on this … fuck … special … fuck, hang on Boz I’m gonna be sick …’

Wez is bent double, examining his pointy shoes with closed eyes. A single glob of spittle is sputtered from his lips and refuses to leave, dancing in the air like a single, visualised transverse wave of sound. He rallies and heaves himself upright.

‘And it will be here! Laydeez and gen’lemen that we welcome Them to the stedge. In but a few morments, we expect peeple to come and gatha, to hear the Stories. And for anyone who can’t mek it up to the hill, or for anyone watchin’ at horm, you can tune in to the crystal-clear quality of the music by simply following the links on our pedges and … and, aw nah, for fuck’s sake … What do YOU want?’

The morning rain has dissipated for the moment, but left an almost pyroclastic flow of mud and debris that’s unsettling even the sturdiest of followers. Among them are at least twenty police officers, patrolling around and showboating, making a point of inspecting cigarettes for anything untoward. One of them, a large gentleman with a patchy, silvery beard and glasses, is standing behind the camera. It pans to reveal him but, cat-like, he angles himself away, following the cameraman’s back, carefully positioning himself out of reach of the lens.

‘Mr Weston, can we have a word, please?’

Wez waves the camera back to him.

‘I am doing nothing illegal, officer! I am merely filmin’ for my blog, which is an independent, journalistic endevah with absolutely no monetary benefit, no different from the rest of the press in attendance. As I’ve said to you countless times, I am not in charge here! Meerly an interested bystandah on public land, and you can’t—’

‘We’d just like a word with you, please. Would you mind turning the camera off?’

A number of the surrounding followers have noticed this, largely because many of them are watching and listening to the live feed on their phones. A few of the followers, careful to have masked themselves, have inched closer to Wez in support.

‘I’ve told you before, we know our rights, officers!’ says Weston. ‘We do not have to turn off our cameras if we don’t want to, anything you want to say, you can say, but know that you, all of you, are being filmed in front of this crowd and everyone watching at home! Millions of people. We will not be swayed by Doubts, sir! We have a right to public congregation! And religious expression! As per the human rights laws, laid down by the …’

Wez has rehearsed this, and has clearly said it a number of times today. He’s even saying it in a different accent, a kind of faux royal pronunciation that makes him sound like a faded Hollywood starlet. The camera doesn’t show the officer but, even out of shot, you get the distinct impression he’s rubbing the bridge of his nose with his fingers. He interrupts Wez, who is now surrounded by twenty or thirty people, all careful not to move suddenly, but evenly burgeoning. There are at least two children under the age of twelve.

‘Alright, fine,’ says Wharton. ‘Listen, we’re not here to interrupt anyone’s fun. But we have a legal duty to inform you that a number of laws are being broken here. If the concert – as we’ve been reassured – does not exceed the regulated decibel limit, and if everyone here takes their rubbish home and leaves the public space as they found it, it may go ahead. But—’

The camera spins quickly, too quick for Wharton, and it’s enough. A flash of his beard, his mudflat eyes. The forums will quickly make the connection.

‘But people are to leave immediately following its conclusion. If anyone is found here after the music, arrests will be made. Is that understood?’

The camera, back on Wez, catches a naughtiness in his eyes. A roguishness. It’s the mischievous rascality of a wretched powerless man, suddenly consumed by new influence.

‘Are you threatening us, officer?’ he asks.

‘No,’ Wharton replies, immediately, calmly. ‘I am informing you of the consequences should anyone take any of these festivities too far. We are here to protect—’

‘Laydeez and gen’lemen,’ says Wez, stepping to the camera and, for a brief moment, becoming a giant, purple blur before the focus settles. ‘We knew there would be resistance. We knew Doubts would come in all shapes and forms. But we stand unbowed! Officer, you do your duty. And we shall do ours. For we are here to celebréat the next steps on our journey to Release! And, as per the Stories, we are here to exact these words as we have been toald. And—’

The recording stops here. Or rather, the sound does. Boz, Weston’s bouncer-turned-cameraman – who was in no way qualified for the job – slipped on some mud apparently and clattered into the second cameraman. Some would call it luck, but everything Wez says for the next forty-five seconds is lost. What he said would later be used in court as an example of a number of inchoate offences filed against him but, without footage of these specific words and the intonation with which he said them, he would receive only minor reprimands for his actions.

When I watch the footage I see things others don’t. I see the mud on the floor. I see the trudging cameramen. But I see Clarty too, in all her majesty, trip them and laugh as the two men fall. She cradles Wez in her arms, smearing him with sludge, baptising him, filling his mouth with clay and silt for him to spit out to the world. She laughs as she embraces him. And Wez, as the cameras rise and reset the frame, laughs too.

‘… in perpetuity!’

He’s finished his rant and looks around to the followers for an applause that doesn’t come.

‘So make your arrests, Officer,’ he says. ‘But know that—’

Wharton lunges into frame, wrenches the microphone from Wez’s hand and walks him ten yards from the camera. They discuss something, Wharton towering over him, stooping a little to meet his eyes, one of his hands firmly massaging Wez’s shoulder as he talks at him, burying him beneath its weight. Wez looks suddenly like the naughty schoolboy he is, eyes down at his shoes again, and the crowd grows suddenly restless. Little shouts pepper the air as they watch, some throwing drinks to the floor, others holding the more volatile of them back. It grows. Wez’s eyes meet Wharton’s with sudden dog-like rage, twitching, snarling, acutely aware of his embarrassment, of the wide, emasculating grip Wharton has on him. He throws it off, one accusatory finger jutting up at him, readying to rally the crowd, his troops, the only advantage he has.

But just as Wez becomes animated, and just as Wharton nods to the officers around him, there is clapping. Applause, shouts. Cheers. They both look. On the stage, Mel and I have stepped out.

We’ve been here for some time, cowls on, on the far side of the hill. I watched the livestream from afar on my phone. The second I saw Wharton, I pulled Mel aside. And we decided.

Looking from the little zenith of the hill and the raised decking, the moors have become a seething liquid of white-topped colour, writhing and threatening to spoil the perfect meniscus of itself and spill out over the confines of the grassland. There is smoke in patches, as people light rudimentary fires, and it rises like distant, waltzing figures. My legs feel an agitation in the earth that’s sending tectonic pulses to the surface, through the soil and the scaffolding and into the soft cushions of my kneecaps. I have never been in front of this many people, heard so much noise. They stare at us and at their phones and at screens, at the footage from the cameras only metres away, and all, almost in unison, fill their ears, anointing themselves with the protective obols of their earbuds and headphones.

I look to Mel. She’s frozen. The cacophony doesn’t stop, just noise, all noise. She removes her bust and the roar that hits her from the crowd is like a thousand clammy hands, pulling her face from its neutrality into unintentioned twitches of fear and awe. I sit at the drum kit. Its cymbals shimmer with the sound. Mel creeps forward to the front of the stage, to the microphone, and timidly holds it, silent.

I wait. I wait so long. I expect the first notes of the sixth Cycle, the unaccompanied hum she improvised during recording. But she just stands there, her mind so utterly transfixed by the sight and the noise it’s forgotten all other intent or hope. The wind catches her dress and it starts to rain again. One of the cameras, I will later see, zooms in so tight on her face you can see the fog of her breath, her intent weakly clambering to get out.

I don’t know why, but I think back to that rehearsal in Ashington, with Callum and Mel. The summer feels so long ago. I feel that pull again, hear that noise, that goading in Callum’s eyes, towards something new, the call at the edge of precipice to jump into the unknown, to tumble, to relinquish pattern for total disorder. I want to find it – I want to find that feeling again.

I breathe. I listen to that noise. I listen to that silence. Then I drum.

It isn’t planned, it isn’t thought through. But Mel stands there for so long and the crowd howl at us so loud, it’s all I can do to fill the silence in her. She turns as my sticks burst against the cymbals around me, sending crashes high into the sky. I travel round the kit, finding new beats, newness in the rain that hits it with me, ricocheting off the tightness of skins, my legs shaking with every hammer of the kick drum, my hands already white with cold. But I drum. And Mel, hearing it, seeing it, seeing my eyes closed in concentration, seeing my abandon, my worth, just laughs. She laughs and laughs into the mic, turning it and twisting it into notes and shouts with every beat.

She dances with her voice with me, calling and responding with me, finding me in my choice, finding herself in her following, and we play. It’s not a new song, or an old song. It’s always been there, this beat, this kismet. And we play it. We play it like we’ve only just discovered how perfect the world can truly be.

The crowd erupts. The P.A. system is so weak, to everyone beyond the hillside, the sound is lost to wind. But the microphones around us grab each stitch of spittle, each snap of snare, and the world beyond us moves. It wraps itself into splayed, darting movements, into little stretches of motion, each person finding their own, personal gestures to join us in our song, united in our lack of cohesion or plan. Like a thousand scattered pins atop a valve amp, they jump randomly with the jolts of the bass, each in their own distinct ways, but still consentient and together in response to it.

We burst into the set with a timely, knowing understanding. Mel’s voice sings out, but it’s different – captured in cold and nerves. I drum when I’m not supposed to, pause when I shouldn’t. But we don’t care. We find the songs again, like the first time we rehearsed them, with vigour and curiosity, ravenous with offerings, perfect in moments of failure, laughing at each other’s mistakes. The crowd laugh with us – that reverent air of majesty now so exquisitely coupled with silliness. We rattle through the songs, changing them, shifting with the crowd, through ‘Lees and Scum’, ‘Limus’, ‘Clarty’s Lament’. We reach the moments before the screeches of ‘Turncoat’ and Mel turns, screaming over the crowd, rising with the headland, her eyes adorned with tears.

‘Come on,’ she screams, like a prayer. ‘Come on …’

And I want to. I want nothing but this. I want nothing but this feeling that is beyond love, beyond what my body can take. It holds me, willing me to burst into water and seep untrammelled into time itself, to rest there in perfect harmony with every second, every ecstatic, inhuman moment until I am unbecome. It has changed us. I feel the Solkats among us, within us, as watching and prideful as dead parents, at the people we’ve become, the courage we’ve chosen, the paths that we, unbated, have run to. I want to exist in this nothingness, join the dancing of the crowd, the screams, the moment, and remember it. I want to remember everything. Please, god, let me remember everything.

But I slow. I stop.

Someone has tried to get onto the stage. They’re wearing one of the busts. At first they scramble and the collective pulls them back. They scramble again, reaching for the edge, but those thousand hands grab and jerk them away. There’s commotion. Someone hits someone, then another. The figure is flailing out at the people around them and I see blood on their knuckles. The crowd descends, throwing them to the ground. It’s brutal, animal – painted faces wishing death. The figure holds up weakened hands, one of them hanging limply from their wrist, the other opening and closing, opening and closing around an invisible flame. Another kick to his cowled face dislodges his mask and I see meat and blood, beaten, beneath its plastic. The figure tries to right himself, shouting something, pleading, but another hail of bone above crunches into his clavicle. With one final heave, the figure unclasps his headdress, screaming for them to stop, to stop, please stop.

The plastic bust drops to the floor. Its pristine white stares up eyelessly at the sky. It rolls in the mud, revealing its interior, stained scarlet – a maw, a shroud of the battered face imprinted on its inside in shining blood. The crowd parts.

Whoever is controlling the playback pauses it. Wez is trying to wade through the crowd with his cameramen, but they won’t let him through. I hear the police shouting for the crowd to stop, the cracking of baton on skull, I hear screams.

The figure stands. One of his legs gives way and he steadies himself on the stage. His left arm is limp and marked indentations of the mask have cut into his brow, his eyes, his lips. One of his eyes is covered in blood and there’s a garbled mass of mulch down his chin. He wobbles again, as the crowd knit around him, shielding him. He lifts his dead leg onto the stage with his arms, rolling onto it and curling up at Mel’s feet.

She drops to her knees, the microphone thunking to the decking and sending pitchy pleas to the air for respite. I can see the police officers shunting their way through the crowd to the front, but no one parts. They all stare at the broken, beaten figure as he spits up bloody flesh.

The microphone is close enough to hear as Mel stoops and holds him.

‘Cal … Cal, oh god, Cal … Cal, no … please, no …’

It’s all she can say. He tucks himself around her, foetal, his free hand reaching up to her arm for comfort, bleaching it with blood. I can hear him crying. I run to them, kicking floor toms to the side, skidding to Mel’s shoulder to catch his head as it loses strength.

‘Oh god, god Cal. Cal, I’m sorry. I’m sorry …’

She can’t get the words out. His face looks up at us, his one open eye sending us his pain, begging us to take it from him. I hold him. I hold him like he held me and feel his body contort and twist into my thighs, burying his head with soft little cries into me. He weeps. And we hold him. His one working hand slops down from Mel’s shoulder and I wait to hear his breathing. It doesn’t come. Then, with a soul-crushing rattle, he inhales, letting out a gut-shriek of agony.

Whisht kicks the microphone with the wind and it rolls towards us, gently bumping into Callum’s outstretched hand. Clumsily he fingers it, weakly grasping it into his palm. With a groan and cluttered sighs, he rolls over and looks out at the crowd.

People have run to the hill, crying, screaming. Weston’s cameramen hold their equipment aloft, capturing us all in a whirl of hands and blood and bodies. Police are shoving people, throwing them to the side. One is at the forefront, gaining on the stage, murderously bringing his baton down on anyone before him, mercilessly shunting it into heads and necks.

Callum rises.

‘Stop …’

No one hears. The crowd whirls like a storm, pressing, releasing, trying to escape. Some are scrambling over the stage, others pushing people, trampling on lifeless bodies as they hurl themselves down the hill.

‘Stop!’

Callum shouts louder. Some of the crowd abates, but still people run.

‘They’re … they’re going to burn people. Look. They’re going to burn them …’

He’s weak. His voice has left him, and Mel holds him, fully holds him, hugging him, protecting him, her back to the world. Over her shoulder, he screams into the microphone and tries to point, his eyes wide with fear, the slur of his speech peppered with soft sprays of blood.

‘They’re going. TO BURN!’ he screams.

I look.

Down the hill, fires have been lit. A number of bound figures are sitting on garden chairs staked into the ground. The word DOUBT has been branded into their chests. One of them, police will later find, is wearing Christmas tree cufflinks.

‘No, no don’t … don’t save us, save them. STOP THEM …’

But the mic isn’t working. Whoever’s controlling the sound has pulled the plug and Callum’s noiseless cries are lost. He wheezes, pushes the air from himself, crying out, crying.

‘Please … plea …’

He collapses. Mel lowers him to the ground.

With a roar above us, a bruised and bloody figure crunches onto the stage. He pulls Mel away from Callum, but she screams, refusing to let go. He looks at him, then at me, wearing his beaten face like war paint.

‘Come with me,’ says Wharton.

Mel shakes her head, screaming into Callum’s chest. Wharton grabs her.

‘Now.’

20

Hockle, the Antecedent, Solkat of spit and nervous moments

Thirteen people died that day. Four were burned alive. The others were killed in the crowd.

There’s no footage of what happened next. I left my cameras on the stage and Wharton and two other officers ran us down the hill towards the motorway. One of them carried Callum like a child. Wharton put us in his car and he drove. We drove for two hours.

There are only three clips of video that were taken over the next two days.

The first, a farmhouse. We arrived somewhere in Northumberland, inland, away from the waves. I pulled my phone out as soon as we pulled in, trying to catch the rusted gate sign. It simply said ‘Beechmast’, but there was no street name, no number. I tried to find us on the maps app, but the signal here was abysmal. It showed the little dot of my location, but it was in the middle of the sea. I kept filming.

The place was dishevelled, isolated. Little piles of stone that I suppose were once walls pathetically circled an unkempt garden. A rusted child’s tricycle was upturned at its centre, suffused with weeds and roots. Wharton opened the car door. Mel woke with a start and started yelling something, something about needing to go to a police station, to a hospital. But Wharton paid no heed. He pulled her from the car, then me. He saw my phone in my hand and snatched it from me.

‘It’s for your own safety,’ he said.

The footage ends there.

The second video was taken on Mel’s phone. It’s evening, dark, and we’re in the farmhouse. There’s a fire and Callum is splayed out on the floor next to it. There’s a rudimentary splint on his leg and his hand is in an RSI wrist brace, the kind I use when I’ve been practising too much. Mel holds the phone up to him. I was dozing at the time, exhaustion pulling me into a delirium of half-sleep, full of rattiness and sickness. You can hear me muttering something. Mel creeps closer to Callum’s unconscious body, listening to the rasps of breathing. She travels from his leg, up the bruising of his chest. The skin above his heart is warped and pulsing and the firelight catches the night-sky purple of it, contorting it into a bellowing, laughing face.

She whispers.

‘Wake up. Please wake up …’

The camera is shaking.

‘I don’t know what to do, Cal. This isn’t right. How do I make it better? We shouldn’t be here. He said it’s not safe at the police station and he says the hospitals are overrun … But … But I don’t think … I don’t think he’s …’

There is a creak on some floorboards somewhere and the battery dies.

I will later ask why she didn’t use the last of the charge to call someone, call for help. She’ll tell me that she has priors and that she didn’t want to get deported. And that she didn’t know anyone else to call.

The third is Wharton’s footage.

A camera is set up in the lounge area. It’s early afternoon the following day and Callum and Mel are sitting on a threadbare sofa in front of the extinguished fire, the light from the window washing them in bleakness. Half of Callum’s face is tartan with clotted blood, and he’s wrapped in a grey blanket. Mel is drinking tea and looks exhausted. I’m to their left on an armchair, out of sight of the camera, but you can see one of my hands. I’m unpicking strands of thread from the side of the chair and knotting them around a jutting screw from the broken wooden frame inside it.

The room has uneven floors and its corners trap shadows in webs of dust and piled-up furniture. Whoever used to live here was a hoarder, but stopped some time about ten years ago, at least according to the newspapers piled around us. It smells like cold old stone.

From behind the camera, you hear Wharton’s weight pressing protests from rotten floorboards. He sits by the camera and Mel and Callum look to him, uneasy dread in their eyes. Callum winces as he tries to right himself. Wharton clears his throat.

‘Right,’ he sighs. ‘We’ve discussed why you’re here. Why it’s not prudent for you to go to the station. And why it’s particularly important you don’t put anything online.’

Callum huffs and it turns into a cough, gouging chunks of alveoli from his insides. Mel shakes her head, but doesn’t say anything. Her eyes are pinned open and she looks doggedly alert, protective and scared. The hand around her mug is gripping it tightly, ready to hurl it, smash it at the first startle of aggression.

‘I need you to confirm you’re here of your own volition,’ says Wharton.

The lower half of their eyes project a thick line of white as they glower at him in unison. Mel snarls and is about to bite into him with every barb and slur her soul remembers, but Callum holds his hand up, feeling her twist on the cushion next to him. He places it gently on his knee and she looks at him.

‘That is correct,’ he says.

He knows we have to go along with this, whatever it is. We’ve barely seen Wharton for twenty-four hours, he’s been upstairs, we could hear him, but the doors to the lounge are locked. He brought us some cereal and ready meals, patched Callum up as best he could, then left. Mel thought about breaking the window, but Callum can barely walk and we don’t know where we are. There’s frost on the grass outside.

There’s still no signal. None of the lights work. There’s a faint whiff of Wi-Fi but it’s password protected. I feel weak, malnourished. My eyes don’t know where to look without a viewfinder and I’m sweating a lot. Every few minutes my breathing becomes erratic, and I feel sick.

We know now that Wharton isn’t a normal police officer. Of course, I’ve seen him at the station and been interrogated by him and all that. But I’ve known for some time there’s something strange about him. He sometimes dresses in a police uniform beneath his rank, sometimes in his detective inspector’s charcoal suit. He’s happy to intimidate, break protocol with witness interrogation. He might have killed people in the crowd trying to get to us, I don’t know. He drove us from the hill, but we don’t even know where we are and he hasn’t let us call anyone, like my parents or Bahvana. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t even assigned to the case surrounding us.

He’s got a lightless soul. A dark amber horizon perpetually haunts his eyes. I tried to work out what scared me more, which dagger was sharpest in my throat – that he wants to help us or harm us. But I quickly discovered it was neither. His was a preternatural bent, a calling for something we couldn’t possibly begin to comprehend. Whatever he wants is beyond what wanting could mean to people like us. He’s torn, paralysed, between hunting and devouring. For one undoes the other.

‘Before we begin, I’d like to show you something. And I suggest you watch it to the end. For your own sakes and for the sake of … everyone.’

You can hear him pulling out a laptop. He places it behind the camera. Callum leans forward with a groan, his one useable eye so dry and scratched, he’s barely able to keep it open without it weeping. Mel pulls her knees up to her chest. There’s a snap of a space bar and some footage is played. There’s no sound. But we can hear the screams in our heads.

At first Mel peers at it, at the settling pixels, like she’s studying foreign texts. Then, after a minute, she looks away. Her hands creep to her head and press into her temples, fleeing the visions, fleeing the iron-taste of blood clotting in her throat. She hits herself. She hits herself so hard in the thigh, beating it, thrashing at it. Her voice settles on a cruel, agonising, pitchy hum that judders with every thump.

Callum watches, unmoving. His open eye imbibes it, sternly, resolute and purposeful, forcing himself to witness, summoning within himself the last strength to understand, to confront. He makes no attempt to stop Mel’s beating, makes no move to turn away. He simply watches. One twitch, about thirty seconds in, but that’s all. As though someone has clamped his head in place and forced him to set like cement in the most powerless and horrorful moments of his life.

The space bar snaps again. The footage pauses. You can see my hand is bleeding.

Wharton lets out a controlled little sigh, a rehearsed, regretful reaction to a video of people burning, being trampled, dying in silence.

‘This is what’s known as “a supercut”. A fan-video that has been circulating online for thirty-six hours. It’s been reported and taken down a number of times, but it’s still out there, I’m sorry to say. And …’

He loads up another video on the screen.

‘… I’m afraid that this isn’t the only footage that’s pertinent to our predicament. Would you like to take a moment before we continue?’

Mel’s head is buried in the sofa cushion by Callum’s shoulder, causing him to blench with slow little starts of agony. He looks at me. Then turns back to Wharton, nodding his head.

‘Alright. This footage was taken in Manaus, Brazil. It’s followed by similar incidents in Missouri and others in a town outside Oslo. There’s also been a number of similar reports in Johannesburg.’

He presses play.

You can catch hanging, willowed strands of my greasy hair over my face. I don’t watch it. But these videos have sound and I listen. The first clip has people singing our songs above screams. The second clip, longer than the first, has American accents shouting, berating someone outside their house. Gunshots. I stop listening to the third and fourth. My gran’s humming has filled my head, casting its wan candlelight across my thoughts, sending their projected shadows up stony walls, giving them grandeur and form. I can see Radge, the Cripple, unearthed and limping from the fireplace behind the laptop, his clawed hand outstretched, his open, unnatural gullet gulping in the sounds of the clips, trapping them in exposed, vibrating vocal cords, harnessing them as his own distorted voice. His long talons wheedle into Wharton’s eyes. I watch Radge weep balefully, smiling all the while.

The clips of the festival’s deaths are still online for those inclined to watch them. You can hear their screams and watch them fall if you like. But you can’t smell it like I did. You can’t smell the smoke and the burning meat. You can’t feel it sting your eyes and singe your throat. You didn’t breathe in the dead.

‘That’s enough,’ says Mel.

Another snap, the video ceases and Radge retreats. Mel’s calmer, but in that calm lies spite.

‘Why are you showing us this?’ she continues. ‘We didn’t do it. It’s not our fault, we didn’t ask for any of this, it’s not our fault … They didn’t listen to us, we tried to stop them, but no one listened and – and …’

You can hear Wharton lean back in his chair. He scratches his eyes. He sighs again, then fixes Callum with a stare.

‘Up to now,’ says Wharton, ‘I have tried to impress upon you all the extent of the violence your … fandom … is capable of. I implored you, all three of you, to renounce them. To help me dismantle all this. To stop it before it went too far. You fed me the same lines, written by your solicitors. That this isn’t your fault. That you’re not responsible for other people’s actions. That you never meant for this to happen.’

Wharton lights a cigarette, like in cop shows. I watch Radge catch the falling ash in his lidless eyes.

‘But you didn’t listen to me. I saw it. Before anyone, I saw what this was going to be. Miss Branthom, the Grapes, Durham. But you wanted to be famous—’

‘That’s not true.’

Callum’s voice is scratchy. It doesn’t sound like him at all. ‘They told us no one would get hurt. That there’d be security.’

‘And you believed them?’ croons Wharton. ‘Tell me, Callum. Have you met any of your fandom? In person? Looked in the whites of their eyes?’

He reaches to the laptop.

‘Because I have.’

He clicks on a folder on his desktop. It opens to reveal a number of files. With a tap on the keyboard, he cycles through previews of indistinct documents, too small to see detail. There are hundreds of photos and details and scraps of writing, all flicked through at such pace the faces displayed seem to become one, jumping and circulating through expressions and shape, but all sharing those unblinking eyes. Most are young, under thirty, but there are grey hairs in a few and youthful, pubescent eyes in others.

‘For the past four months now I’ve been trying to track down instigators. The people at the forefront of these acts of violence, the ones organising and recruiting and spreading your work.’

For a split second I see a familiar face. The influencer – K-Li. A few seconds later, Harry’s nervous face flashes across the screen. Then Molly’s.

‘But it’s like shovelling snow while it’s still snowing. For every one I confirm, another thirty turn up on my list to investigate. And I’m only one man.’

‘Why aren’t more people helping you?’ asks Mel. ‘Why isn’t this a police operation?’

Wharton releases his hand on the keyboard and the scrolling previews stop. He purses his lips and a thin plume of smoke elegantly drifts out of him. He doesn’t answer.

‘It is a police operation,’ says Callum, after a moment. He’s been studying Wharton’s face intently, but it’s so difficult to see Callum’s intentions or even his mood, beneath the bruising. ‘But you’re not part of it. Are you, Detective Wharton?’

Wharton continues to smoke.

‘For some reason it’s been taken off you. Maybe it’s been bumped to another department. Or you got too close to it. Or …’

Callum looks around the farmhouse living room. There are piles of old telephone directories that don’t even get delivered any more, empty vases. Whisht nuzzles into the back of my neck, and I look over at Wharton. The dust on the mantle’s been disturbed. Picture frames have been removed.

‘You’ve been put on leave,’ says Callum.

For a moment, Wharton is so motionless it’s as though he’s been petrified, fossilised in contemplation. Then his lips creep in on themselves in his weak excuse for a smile, his eyebrows raising for a sliver of time, crazed with cracks. Another sigh, this one perhaps genuine, and his voice finds a new energy in it, pitched a little higher than before.

‘You’ve seen what your art has done,’ he says. ‘And, whether intentional or not, your continued pursuit of fame and success has led to violence and the deaths of an increasing number of people. More incidents, more murders, perhaps, are happening by the day, by the hour. Fans hunting down vocal opponents of your following on six continents. People are dying. Because of your actions and inaction. And the fact you exhibit no guilt—’

‘Fuck you,’ says Mel.

It is dark. Still.

Callum rests his hand on the sofa next to her, but she shakes it off and bends towards the camera, the light from the window catching the teary half-moons of her eyelids.

‘You know nothing of guilt.’

Wharton leans forward. The camera catches his shoulder and left hand.

‘So you do feel it? You feel shame for what has happened?’

‘I feel—’

‘It’s a tragedy,’ says Callum, interrupting her. He’s felt the trap laid out for them and pulled Mel back from it. As guilty as we all feel, that word has two meanings. The first is human emotion, feeling, hurt. The second is confessional. Responsible, remorseful. Admission. He shouts to Mel in their noiseless language and she relents.

‘A terrible … horrible … tragedy,’ she says.

Wharton’s lips retract again, nodding with them. His hand is on his left knee.

‘That it is,’ he says. ‘An unforgivable one. Which is why I would like you to help me prevent more of it.’

Callum looks directly at the camera. He never looks at the camera.

‘You … you want us to record a message to them. Telling them to stop.’

‘That is correct, Mr Jannik. I believe that this is to be the most prudent way forward. I have discerned’ – he loads up another folder on the laptop – ‘in my research that, whether misplaced or not, major proponents of the following are particularly predisposed to specific imperatives. They “follow”, so to speak, your commands. These have largely come in the form of your lyrics, but occasionally – due to the constant documentation of your lives – there are links between some of your day-to-day conversations and the actions of the fandom, sometimes months later.’

He’s changed the way he talks. He’s talking like them, like Callum and Mel. Copying their weird cadences and flow.

‘What do you mean?’ asks Mel.

‘Well. For example …’

He pulls up one of my videos. We’re outside the newsagents, months ago, in the summer. The first day I saw a chalk marking.

‘Alice, do you remember this evening?’

I nod.

‘Ms Hajna offered you your choice of ice lolly. Do you remember which one you chose?’

I do. I tell him the brand.

He loads up another video. Callum and I are in a disabled bathroom, a few weeks later. He has a grey bag by his side.

‘And this day. Mr Jannik offered you your choice of ice lolly again. Do you remember which one you had that day?’

I do. It’s the same brand, same flavour.

‘Two weeks ago, I spoke with the company that makes these.’ He loads up a transcript. I can’t make it out. There’s another document with some numbers on it, the company’s brand logo in the top right-hand corner.

‘It might be of interest to you to know that sales of this particular ice cream have increased in the past six months by nearly eight hundred per cent. They are out of stock at depots. People have been exporting them to the United States, South America. And …’

A screen shot pulls up on the laptop. A prominent e-commerce website.

‘A box of them today can go for up to five hundred dollars online.’

This shivers my legs in an itchy warmth. I was hungry, I chose an ice lolly. The world was watching, so they chose too.

‘My point is, gang …’ Mel bristles at the word. ‘They listen to you. All of you. Every word.’

Wharton lights another cigarette. His hand is still on his knee, but it’s turned slightly. It rests like an upturned dead insect, his fingers twitching with the last surges of synaptic connection. The cigarette hangs limply from it. I don’t know if it’s calculated, if he means to look honest or vulnerable, or if it’s a genuine plea for our help.

His face resumes its anodyne structure.

‘Make a statement. I can help you write it if you like. I’ll take it and load it up to the right places, make sure it reaches the press. Make a statement that will stop all this. Put an end to it. Stop this tragedy. Because, you’re right, it’s not your fault. But you can make it right. And to all those people who have lost their lives, their families, their partners, their children. Don’t you think you owe it to them to try?’

That creed again, that cadence, the careful plotting of pitch and pause. I wonder if Callum’s transcribing the notes of his mannerisms in his head. He could tell me he was persuading us in A minor, the time signature, the shifting tempos. Mel is fiddling with the lace of her black dress, unravelling it with shaking hands.

‘I’m not asking you for much. Just a small clip. Telling them the truth. That you didn’t mean for any of this to happen. That you are regretful of this terrible tragedy. And you want them to stop. In your own words, in your own way. But …’

His upturned hand twitches. His other scratches at his wrist.

‘Please. Help me end this.’

Callum and Mel look at each other. I try and tune to their radio waves, but I’m always slow to hear them, always running to catch up. I hear snippets of reprisal, regret, respite, revenge. Shouts and whispers, memories and laughter, despair. I realise now that there isn’t a single colour that doesn’t exist in their eyes. They share them, every one of them, allocating every hue the universe could think of between them, and diffusing them in their irises and the unknowable depths and blackness at their centre. You’d think I’d be used to it, but I’m always filled with awe when they move together. They both have turned back to Wharton, unrehearsed and yet with seamless oneness – their shared puppeteer perfectly capturing their symmetry with synchronised movements of cracking wrists.

‘We need time to think about it,’ says Mel. ‘And talk. And work out what we want to say.’

‘That’s completely understandable, I’ll just—’

‘Alone,’ says Callum.

Wharton hesitates. Then decides.

‘Alright. I’ll leave you. Shout if you need anything. But I wouldn’t hang around. Every hour that goes by is an hour where someone could—’

‘We’re aware of the situation, Detective Inspector,’ says Mel. ‘But if this is to work, they have to believe it. They have to know it’s coming from us, of our own free will. And there’s only one way to do that.’

Wharton stands. The camera is picked up from its tripod.

‘And what’s that?’

The camera finds its focus again. Mel and Callum are looking at each other again.

‘Through song,’ says Mel.

Wharton hangs there. Then, after a moment, the camera whirls around and faces the floor. He’s trying to find the off button as he walks towards the large wooden door, keys casually hanging from his little finger, laptop under his arm.

‘Actually,’ says Callum. ‘There is something we need.’

The camera doesn’t raise, but you can hear Wharton turn.

‘I don’t have any musical instruments,’ he says.

‘No, no it’s not that. We’d … like the camera. For Al.’

Wharton considers.

‘I can’t do that, I’m afraid. This is the only one I have and I can’t trust you not to—’

‘We have no way of uploading any footage online. We’re not going to use it for any nefarious purpose. But Al’s not filmed anything in two days. It’s important to her. To us. We can’t do anything unless Al’s … Al’s alright.’

Neither Callum nor Mel are looking at me. They know I don’t like it when they talk about me, or make a big deal out of my filming thing, so they’re trying to look as casual as possible, like they’ve just asked him for pen and paper. But Wharton is looking at me. I can feel it. I feel his eyes, the rusty orange steel wool of their colouring, the coarse scouring of my skin. My breath feels heavy and fast and I feel sick again. There’s pity in those eyes and I hate it. Pity like I’m broken, like I’m wrong. But I catch Callum’s eyes too. And in them plans are forming, twisting. It’s the same look he has when songs come to him.

‘Alright,’ says Wharton.

The camera shunks down onto the floor. ‘I’ll be back in an hour.’

I scoop it up and hold it. Feeling the warmth of it, like mother and child. Home.

When I look through this footage in the minutes after, it will take me some time to see it. I’ll rewind a few times and try and isolate a few frames, finding the clearest viewpoint. I zoom in to the bottom right-hand corner of a frame, on Wharton’s bleached, upturned hand.

He scratches his wrist. And for the blurriest, most fleeting of moments, I see it. Beneath his cuff. Like a smile.

Sort of looks like a tattoo. Fresh, maybe a month or two old.

Black lines on a broken circle.

21

Monkey’s Blood, Solkat of aftertaste and imagined conversations

It was Callum’s idea. But I came up with how to do it. The plan sort of made sense, but relied on a number of variants which he was uncomfortable with. Not least was how we’d get away from Wharton. He was larger than us, trained, and Callum was in no state to run or put up a fight. Even the three of us combined couldn’t really contemplate a confrontation. And we didn’t want to think about what would happen if we messed it up.

The first issue was the soot. The fire’s remnants from the night before matted the floorboards. Mel gathered up as much of it as possible, but we couldn’t leave a mess or a trail. Then it was up to me to find the angle. This was key. It had to be dark, but not so dark I’d need to drop the f-stop – I didn’t want the aperture letting in more light to the camera. It had to be just dark enough that you couldn’t see what we were doing, either in the room or down the viewfinder. I also had to fine-tune the zoom. The more you zoom, the darker the image, so it was a balancing act, but I lowered the shutter speed to 1/30th of a second. It gave us a grainy quality, but nothing too noticeable. Then it came down to timing. This would only work with a certain quality of light from the window. Dusk. And that was in two hours. So we had to buy ourselves time.

Mel and Callum figured out the rest of the plan whilst performatively ‘writing’ a song. It was actually very amusing to watch. Callum limped around the room, inspecting it, trying to find anything he might be able to use as a weapon – nothing – all the while humming and occasionally barking out lyrics. Mel did the same, getting in mock-fights with him, calling him every name under the sun and chastising him for his ‘hacky compositions’, all from the floor. She was bent double, stripped of her black dress and splayed in only her pants – hovering over the fabric and carefully, with spittle and a stray cotton ball from Wharton’s first aid kit, daubing the top half of it in charcoal. The banter between them was comical, natural, incongruously normal – the patter of bickering friends, all the while entirely focused on their respective tasks. They were pastiches of themselves, mindlessly inventing narratives and subtexts without once skipping beats. To anyone listening from beyond the door – which we had to assume he was – it would genuinely sound like they were writing a song.

Wharton came in after an hour and paused in the doorway, looking at Mel.

‘How’s it going with— Wh … Why are you naked?’

Mel posed on the floorboards.

‘Are you telling me how to create my art?’

It was the first and only time I’d ever see Wharton wrong-footed. He jerked his head away like my dad does, hearing the impending sexual harassment claims in his head.

‘No, no … just … you … you write your songs … with no clothes on?’

Mel rose and stood in front of him, forcing his face to the doorframe. It was good craftsmanship.

‘Always …’ she said. ‘We’re going to need another hour. And a glass of wine.’

Wharton looked at the floorboards.

‘I think … er, I think there might be some vodka in one of the cupboar—’

‘URGH, fine,’ said Mel, collapsing on to a pillow. ‘But you will hear my displeasure in the music …’

Wharton returned with a half-bottle of vodka and left us to it.

Callum crumpled with relief.

Before long we’d set it up. I shifted the camera into a grey little corner, backlighting the pair of them slightly – but still wrapping them in darkness. I’ve angled a few chairs and stacks of things to isolate them in dark, giving them an almost anonymous, hazy trim.

We’ve tested it, Mel now fully clothed, and it seems to work. That’s the first part of the plan done, hopefully. The second we’re still quietly discussing in between bouts of shouting and singing.

‘Well, we need him to load the video up,’ mouths Mel. ‘We know he has Wi-Fi, so he could do it here. But if we …’ – she immediately jumps in tone – ‘… OBVIOUSLY that’s not going to WORK! I refuse to do a key change halfway through a verse, I am not, for the THOUSANDTH time, a washed-up fucking Broadway hag!’

She resumes whispering. ‘But if … it works. Then what?’

Callum all the while is humming under her. Then—

‘Well, you could have FOOLED me!’ he boomed. ‘Why don’t you just do what you do best and just let me WORK!’

Mel starts singing some random lyrics as Callum continues in hushed tones, looking at me.

‘He won’t let us go. We know that. He’ll load it up and then wait to see what the reaction is. No matter what it is, the best we can hope for is that he hands us over to the police. The worst-case scenario …’

I nod, but my eyes are outside, on the garden through which we’d tumbled the day before. There are hedges, trees. There’s a road, but no cars have been down it since we’ve been here.

‘It’ll work,’ says Callum. ‘We know them. We know how much detail they look for, it’ll work. We’ll shoot it, he’ll take it upstairs to upload and then we … we wait. And … improvise …’

Mel nods to Callum to take over the ‘song writing’. He hums.

‘Improvise?’ she hisses. ‘You want to lay our survival at the altar of improvisation?’

Callum’s voice raises.

‘Well, I don’t know! But I can tell you there is NO need for a third verse, this is an exercise in CONCISION, Mel!’

‘OooOOOOoooh, an exercise in concision?’ she barks back. ‘When have you EVER exercised concision, Cal? Some of our songs are twelve fucking minutes long! Where was this saintly concision THEN?’

She rounds the sofa and, for a moment, the reality of the moment lands in her lap, like a feral animal snapping at the veins in her forearms, her dress cuffs now tatters in its teeth.

‘What if this doesn’t work?’

We both look at her.

‘I mean. We have to consider that. What does he want? Why is he doing this? If he’s capable of kidnapping us and holding us here, who’s to say he won’t …’

I think of Wharton’s oafish hands, those knuckles that I’m sure have muscled mortar from walls in his lifetime. I think of that baton. How it sank into flesh at the festival with such ease, the petty resistance of bone useless beneath its brutality. I think of him in Gran’s room. I can’t stop thinking of him in Gran’s room.

‘I mean,’ says Mel, quietly. ‘We know he’s … that he might be one … one of them. I mean, why else would he get the tattoo, right? What does that mean? If he’s one of them, believes in the Stories then … Then why is he trying to stop it all? Why is he getting us to say all this to them?’

Callum places his hand on my shoulder. I jump at the contact and flee his hand for a second. He sits.

‘I think … Monkey’s Blood.’

Mel tilts her head.

‘Monkey’s Blood?’ she asks. ‘As in Monkey’s Blood and Ghosts? But … what do you mean? It’s … it’s part of the …’

Monkey’s Blood and Ghosts is our seventh Cycle. The sixth ends in bloodshed, as the Solkats are trapped, one by one, in mortal form by Sneck, the Locksmith. There’s a whole song where he tells them Haporth’s prophecies are right, that their time is ending, that war has ravaged them and that the only way to live on is to exist inside flesh. Some of the Solkats resist the entrapment and are killed. They are tied to thrones in chains of bone and murdered.

The seventh Cycle follows Whisht as he tries to stop Sneck. But Sneck’s followers see this as heresy, dissension. They think he’s no longer a Solkat – that he’s already bound himself in mortal form, abandoned their kind, betrayed them. He pleads with them to stop. And they exile him to the Hollow Place, the torched remains of the Hadaway Fields. By the end, he’s the only one left. Doomed to wander earth in crippling loneliness until the Solkats are reborn.

It’s one of the few bits I sort of understand. The mythos is so rambling and strange, I’m often lost. But the seventh is really clear to me, clear in my head. The music is tuneful, melodic, and whenever I listen I can always imagine Whisht wandering, friendless, banished, trying to find friends who cannot see him, watching them, hoping they’ll be alright.

‘What if he thinks …’ says Callum, ‘… that if we renounce the Stories … It’ll be exactly what’s written in the seventh Cycle. The exile, the banishment. And maybe …’

He flinches involuntarily as some of his hair, trapped in a scabbing cut on his brow, wrenches loose with a brush of his hand.

‘Maybe he thinks … one of us … is … Whisht …’

This stays with us a few moments. Then Mel bursts into melody, the tune soft, her eyes furrowed with concern. They continue ‘writing’ the song. But the cavorting turns of phrase, the insults, the burgeoning energy has left the room. We are all lost, fumbling in fog for a remission or guidance that we know cannot come now. Fate has slowly infiltrated our household and we, too late, have discovered its design. There is little to do now but wait.

‘This will work,’ says Callum. ‘I promise. But first … we summon the masses.’

The video begins with the empty sofa. Callum and Melusine enter frame and sit side by side. A veil of shadow slinks from the peripheries and onto their worn and bloody faces, chiselling bark-lines of shade into their cheeks, revealing their craggy features in the matt cast of black. It is dark, the soft orange light from the adjacent window gifts its last glimpses of sun to the scene before descending into cold nothingness. They look above the camera, to Wharton, then down to its left, to me. Wharton is studying the viewfinder, avoiding eye contact. Callum looks so broken, so unfinished, abandoned by his creator and left to stare imperfectly at the world. If I hadn’t just seen him walk into frame, I’d say he was dead.

I’m shaking. So’s Mel. Callum’s still and watchful. But I’m hoping it looks like we’re just nervous to perform.

Then they sing.

They haven’t written a new song. In fact, it’s a reworked version of Callum’s latest tune, ‘Summon’, one that he once hoped to add to the eighth Cycle, the one we’ll never make. I’ve never heard it before. It is full of assonant breath and sits awkwardly in their range, bringing desperate vocal breaches and notes stolen to whispers.

It’s not Callum’s best work. But it’s not supposed to be. In fact, I think he’s done this intentionally. The lyrics implore the public for calm and order. The rhymes are cheap, the words lack his usual care and overwrought complexity. They sing that they abhor violence, that the songs are misinterpreted, that this all must stop. For a song that’s loaded with so much weight, and for a situation as precarious and murderous as this is, it’s entirely forgettable. It’s purposefully tepid, generic. We need it to fool a casual listener, but give to the devout a feeling of facile incompletion. I keep checking the light levels on the camera and I feel Wharton’s presence, a humid aura above me, pressing into me like a paunch and nudging me from balance.

They finish. Mel is looking very dramatically down the lens, Callum studying his own knees. The whole thing wouldn’t be out of place in a student film project – full of melodrama and little forethought. Wharton is looking at the little camera screen.

I feel Mel tense as he bends to inspect it. We all do.

Callum does his best not to look up, but Mel can’t help but broadcast her sudden flutter of fear. At the last second, just as Wharton’s face bows inches from the viewfinder, I carefully angle it so it’s flat to his eyeline, revealing them both, perfectly outlined in the dark. Mel has purposefully pulled the plunging neckline of her dress a little lower, gathering the flab of excess fabric at her waist and covering it with her arms. It reveals her cleavage and the bruising around her décolletage – a perfect camouflage for what we’re trying to hide. I have dropped my hands and lodged them shakily under my bum. He’s so close, even the slightest twitch might give us away, might ignite in him that animal-like, olfactory cartography of his environment. He’s so close to my head I can hear the gentle crackle of neck stubble on his jacket collar. It sounds like someone tuning a radio.

‘Would you like to go again?’ he asks.

The room is cleaved with his tone and we hang there in broken tissue, terrified he’s seen it, seen what we’ve hidden, discovered our plan.

I’m too nervous in the moment, but seeing the footage later, I will marvel at Melusine here. It’s a masterclass, the performance of a lifetime. Something ignites in her eyes and burns with her words.

‘You … you didn’t like it?’ she breathes, quietly. Her face transforms into one full of uncertainty and soul, and she casually reveals in her eyes the red pigment of approaching tears.

‘It’s not a question of … liking it,’ says Wharton. ‘I’m just conscious that—’

‘He didn’t like it …’ says Mel, turning from him. Callum’s unsure where she’s going with this, but follows instinctively.

‘What? No, no he didn’t say that.’

‘He didn’t have to. You can tell. He hates it. He hates it!’

She stands and the frame is entirely filled with her left thigh, but you can hear the histrionics. She knows how people perceive her. She knows people think she’s eccentric and annoying – hell, she’s fostered that image for years. But now she is harnessing it. All of that preconception, all of those muttered ‘that’s so her’s, all of that underestimation and bias and judgement. She’s always performed and pretended. But now it’s like she knew, all those years, that all of that performance would one day save her life.

Tears are the first to come. Then huffs and hyperventilation.

‘You – you don’t know what it’s like. This isn’t just a song, detective … this is me. Me! Whuh-huh … And … and if you don’t like it, whuh, if you don’t like my art – and I am my art – then who-who-ooo am I? What am I if the one thing – whuh-huh-huh – that defines me, is stripped of me, Det-detective! You have stripped me of my self!’

‘That’s not …’ Wharton’s hands raise in objection, ‘that’s not what I meant. It was … it was a very good song.’

‘Very good! Very. Good? Do you think I have dedicated my life, my artistry, the majesty of my soul for … a very. Good. SONG? I have slaved. I am the Muses’ humble emissary. And my legacy, when all this is over … HOW will we be remembered? How will they remember us? As very. GOOD? Very good very good very good very good …’

She starts maniacally wandering on the spot. Callum rises, and for the most fleeting of moments he catches my eye with a ‘what on earth is she doing?’ look. Then he looks at Wharton and glowers with a deeply disappointed shake of the head, as though Wharton has just unearthed some dark and deadly trauma within Mel’s psyche and it will take Callum months to rebury it.

‘Hey, hey … Don’t listen to him,’ he says. ‘It was … effervescent. It was brave – it was every inch a melody of wonder. You mustn’t let him—’

‘HE has DEVOURED my SOUL!’

‘I didn’t mean to offend,’ says Wharton. He looks so uncomfortable, there is a clear awkwardness in the bulk of his shoulders now. He’s eyeing us, trying to figure out if this is a joke. He tries to step forward with a comforting hand.

‘No! NO! You are no artist!’ screams Mel. ‘You are no musician! You have ruined everything. EVERYTHING! Do you realise how hard it is? To write songs? It is AGONY.’

‘Ms Hajna, I really don’t think you—’

‘AGONY I TELL YOU!’

‘I completely understand, I just meant that – as a perfectionist – I wondered if that was … it. You know?’

Melusine lets this hang in the air for a beat, tears blurring her mascara, making her look like a mad Victorian alleyway harlot. Then – and I genuinely have to stifle a laugh – she lets out the biggest wail and collapses into Callum, whose arms hover around her.

‘IS … whuh-huh-huh … IS THAT IT, he asks … whuh-huh-huh … IS THAT IT? Whuh-huh … AREN’T I ENOUGH? AREN’T I ALLOWED … whuh-huh-huh … TO BE IMPERFECT … whuh-huuuuh … FOR ONCE?’

‘It’s alright. It was perfect,’ says Callum, patting her back. ‘It was a masterpiece, it was a …’

He tilts over Melusine’s buried head at Wharton, who looks like he’s just taken a wrong door and found himself suddenly on stage and expected to join in some deeply melodramatic Bavarian operetta. Callum gestures for him to leave, unsubtly mouthing ‘I’m so sorry’, as though this happens all the live long day. Wharton looks at me and it’s all I can do to nod with a little upside-down smile, as if to say, ‘Yes, indeed, I think that would be best.’ He lifts the camera and tripod, awkwardly trying not to make noise with it, avoiding eye contact all the while.

‘I’ll just … I’ll load this up now, and we can—’

‘LURCHER! MARAUDER OF ART!’

‘And we’ll wait to see what the response is.’

‘YOU HAVE STOLEN. MY SOOOOUL!’

‘I’ll be back in … I’ll just leave you … leave you to your …’

Callum nods, comforting Mel, holding her from falling to the floor. Wharton slinks out of the room and we hear the click of the lock behind him.

Melusine continues crying, weeping, wailing. Then, after a minute of continued stagecraft, she relents, and with the sexiest, most electric of raised eyebrows, she smirks at me from Callum’s chest.

‘And that,’ she whispers, grinning, ‘is how you improvise …’

Kaylee’s phone blooms with light. Her face is pressed into the sticky leather cushioning of the couch, rolling her squished cheek into a sweaty hot stone, obscuring one of her eyes. The phone, lying by her face, vibrates. Then again. And then it doesn’t stop vibrating.

She peels her skin from the leather, wiping sleepy drool from her mouth. There is a knocking at the door. The bedroom is sparse and reminds her of L.A. casting offices – bleached and anonymous, designed for its inhabitant to pop in contrast with its violent neutrality. Another knock.

‘Kehlee?’ comes a voice.

She can’t understand half of what he says. His accent is super weird.

‘Kehlee, are ya deesent?’

The door opens and a long, veiny nose enters, followed after a minute or so by the rest of Weston. Kaylee can hear more people in the corridor. There’s about thirty of them in the apartment, all crammed in with sleeping bags and blankets in his lounge and kitchen. Kaylee insisted on her own bedroom. So Wez gave her his.

‘Hiyah, erm … Sorry to interrupt, didn’t knor if you were streaming or …’

She wipes her eyes and points to an open laptop by the sofa.

There is a little green light around the webcam.

‘Aw yeah, er … Hiya, gang! Marra be, er … Marra be with yas …’

Wez half-heartedly waves at the camera. There are eight million people watching. Eight million people just watched Kaylee nap for two hours.

‘You, er … You got the alert, right? Thought you might want to …’

She’s already on her phone. A video has popped up on some press websites, all with headlines that read like death sentences. She clicks one, her turquoise nails a little cracked.

CULT BAND ON THE LAM, it says.

The byline beneath it jolts her from her sleepy haze.

Band release first video after massacre – whereabouts unknown.

She immediately jumps to her laptop, sending her grenade mug full of orange mucus from the bedside table to the floor. A number of people in the corridor are murmuring, on their phones, trying to get a look in the room. As Kaylee clicks and types, a few tumble in with nervous squeaks of glee. Kaylee sits on her bed, and a few more followers settle on the floor, all filming and streaming and filming and streaming and filming.

‘Quiet,’ she says.

Immediate silence. Wez stands by the bed like some multi-coloured grand vizier, hands crossed in front of him. Kaylee clicks the link.

After the festival, Weston had grabbed her and a handful of the others – the more ardent of the influencer followers – and fled to somewhere called Morpeth. It’s maybe the worst place Kaylee has ever been. And she’s been to Florida. Quite a few people were arrested – estimates say two hundred, maybe more – and they’d spent a few hours setting up VPNs for everyone so they could stream without the police finding them. As far as she can tell, this place isn’t owned or rented by anyone. She’s pretty sure Wez found a nearly-finished new-build and just broke in. But he’s kept them all safe and helped them continue their work. She’s almost certain he’s hoping to get laid while they’re here.

It was the only time she questioned herself. Here, in this forgotten place. Questioned her belief. Her faith in Them.

People died. And she was part of it.

But, being in this dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere, she found herself bolstered by the collective, the entourage, the forums and threads. Every time she thought about their deaths, she looked at her numbers, the massive increase in her online followers in the last few hours. She felt their pursuit of purpose, their waywardness, and she knew she was able to give them what they craved. They watched her like newborns, their blue-grey, washy eyes unaccustomed to the world and seeking feed. She shook that fleeting dearth of selfhood from herself and rose to the person she knew she was, could be, is. Marra was by her side. Marra was plaiting her hair, whispering secrets to her and to her alone. Marra was licking the patch of neck beneath her ears and sending shivers into bones. Marra was with her. She always has been.

Kaylee watches the video.

The song is terrible. It doesn’t make sense. Clearly He’s been forced to write it.

Everyone watches for her reaction. Marra cackles in her ears like hungry crows. It finishes and she idly flicks the laptop screen up, the camera’s eye – and the eyes of her millions of followers online – now unblinkingly inspecting the ceiling.

‘What … what do you think, Kehlee?’ Wez asks, tentatively. He looks round the room, more and more people clambering in to hear her words.

‘Mebbe they’re … they’re right, ya kna? Mebbe it’s time we stop all this. Following them, posting, all that. I meen, they wouldn’t say all that, give us a new … a new song if … if they didn’t want us to stop. Right? They wouldn’t—’

‘Mm-hmm,’ says Kaylee. She’s staring at the screen.

Weston inches closer to her. Clarty’s mud drips from his mouth and Kaylee moves jerkily to avoid it.

‘I mean, I dorn’t want to stop,’ he says. ‘None of us want to stop, of corse! But if They are seyin’ that we should then, maybe—’

‘I said, shut up.’

She actually didn’t. But Kaylee isn’t listening. She pinches the edge of the screen. Something has caught her eye.

As she flicked the computer away from her, Marra’s hands had pushed it just a little further. She’d lifted the screen angle a little more acutely, her hands, as small as a child’s, had cradled it to catch the light of a nearby lamp and sketch prisms and lines across it. Kaylee bends the laptop screen back and forth, back and forth. There’s something off, something in the shadows she can’t quite catch.

‘Who’s got photo editing software?’ she asks the room.

A forty-something beard raises his hand and creeps forward with his laptop. Kaylee wrenches it from his hands and grabs the man to her side.

‘Screen-grab at the two-minute mark,’ she snaps.

‘Kehlee, come on, it’s orver …’ Weston steps to her, trying to gently press reason into her ears. ‘They’ve told us to—’

‘There,’ she says. ‘Screenshot that.’

Beard fiddles on the keyboard.

‘Load that up,’ says Kaylee. She can feel something, some greying ember, the last of a raging fire, gasping for oxygen. She’s flapping on it, blowing it as gently as she can, desperate not to extinguish it, but fan it back to life. Marra breathes with her, hugging her arms around her, pressing her wrists into her rib cage with violent little cracks. Her whole body is clicking and snapping with tension, the whole room watching on, breathless, as she scrambles for light.

‘Bring up the exposure. Massively, make it as bright as you can.’

‘Kehlee. What are you doing? Come on, there’s no need to …’

But Wez trails off.

The image shows Melusine and Callum, mid-song. The whiteness of the adjusted image has ripped the detail of it, creating a halogen glow in the room. We see Callum’s wounds, now spotty pinks and indistinct, we see the stacked old phone books, the frayed sofa, their youthful, now wrinkle-less brows. But it is Melusine’s dress that arrests the eye, traps it in focus.

The black of it is grey now, murky. And within its pitch, there’s something strange. It looked, in the shadows, to be little more than dark cotton folds. But, now edited, like viewing a dark screen from above or below, it reveals a different black within it. A scrawled, fingered black.

She’s written something. In pen or charcoal. With two fingers, Kaylee zooms into her shoulders. On one it’s difficult to make out, but Beard sharpens the image.

Help us, it says.

But the other scrawl is clear. The embers Kaylee breathes catch in her lungs and ignite in white heat. She smiles. Marra releases her grasp on her chest and whispers the word as Kaylee reads it, her frayed black tongue inching out between her tar-lined fangs and reaching, unhindered, around the crest of Kaylee’s ear, deep through the tissue of her mind.

Beechmast.

22

The Blatherskite, Voluble Purveyor of Nonsense, Solkat of perversion, politics and escape

There is a phenomenon called the Tetris Effect. If you play a video game all afternoon, or listen to the same song on repeat, or climb a mountain, sometimes, as you close your eyes and drift into sleep, you might still see those bricks falling beneath your eyelids, hear that music in your ears, feel crags beneath your feet. It is compulsive and maddening, as though the visuomotor processes of your mind, always predisposed to recognising and interpreting patterning in your waking life, cannot quite let go. They’re forced to replay those patterns, over and over, until they are truly understood. It can be frightening. The mind is so pliable, so easily ripped from control.

When I fall asleep, I feel a camera in my hands. All I see is a viewfinder and my dreams feature down it, always turbid, always suspended beyond full view. I try to look up from it, to see the dreams in all their colour, but my eyes cannot lift. I can never fully see or hear what my subconscious is so desperate to impart to me. I can’t even dream my own dreams right.

I don’t remember what I was dreaming when I heard the noise. But I remember it ending. I was somewhere dark and brown and cave-like, with shadow-figures on its walls. Dolphins, graffiti, flames. Glitter. I could hear Whisht breathing. Then, with a crack that felt like fingers crunching the cochleas in my ears, my dream-viewfinder split. Deafened and manic, I try to hold the collapsing shards of the screen in my fingers, but more sudden, reverberant cracks echo in my head. I wake with a little scream and a hand from the dark presses over my mouth.

Callum holds me in place for a moment as my eyes meet his, knowing him but – in that precipitous half-world of waking – not recognising him. I wait for returning conscious thought, but until it does, he looks a bit like my dad. Then he holds his finger up to his lips.

‘Someone’s here …’ he mouths.

I sit up.

The source of the noise becomes apparent. I can just about make out the outline of furniture and the walls of the room. Mel is still asleep, draped across the sofa like a silken ocean, her skin now flecked with little breakers of glass that catch the moonlight from the broken window. It was a small break. There is a large pane but columns of panelled glass support it on either side, and one of the lower ones, only inches in height and width, has popped and splintered. Beyond, in the dark of the garden, a figure is crouched, peering in, trying to see anything in the room.

Their face is mottled, backlit by the sky’s soft swathes of pallid light. He looks thin. Like a cigarette.

Callum doesn’t move. He holds his hand out to me, telling me to stay put, then carefully, hugging the shadows, he creeps round the room towards the window. The figure beyond is moving erratically. Fingers press up against the glass, and his whole head fills the gap he’s just made in it. His eyes look wet and hurtful at first, purposefully widened to let the light in, giving him a crazed, predatory look. Then, he removes his head and dives to the ground, returning a moment later with a thin, cardboard box. He carefully shunts the box through the hole, upsetting some remnant shards around the iron bracketing with creaks and cardboard squeaks. It falls to the floor with a baff.

Callum whispers as quietly as he can.

‘Mel …’

She snores slightly.

‘Mel!’

She jumps and, unsure where she is, or who or how to respond to disembodied voices of the night, reverts to the basics.

‘Speaking.’

Callum goes to her immediately and silently shushes her. Then points to the figure at the window, the box on the floor. The figure sees movement within and immediately slinks round the corner of the window frame, hidden from view. Mel shakes slumber from her shoulders.

‘What is it?’ she mouths.

Callum shrugs. Still half-asleep, she stands up, wobbling.

‘What if it’s a BOMB?’ she mouths again.

Callum looks at her. Even in the dark, I can hear the face. It’s usually accompanied by the word ‘… really?’ He steps closer, within a few feet of it, then peeks out the window. He can’t see the figure, so he picks up the box, sending little spelks of glass tinkling to the floor. He reads it, then looks at me, holding it up.

It’s a camera. In fact, it’s one of my favourite models. The box is dented and has scratches of glass along it, but it isn’t split. On it, indented in biro that clearly ran out halfway through the message, there are large letters. It says ‘FOR THE ARCHIVI …’

We huddle on the far side of the room and inaudibly whisper to each other.

‘What do we do?’ mouths Mel. ‘Maybe it’s dangerous!’

‘If they wanted to hurt us, they could have done. I’m gonna open it.’

‘No, no! What if it’s a trap?’

Callum shushes her and listens. He waits, his head arched to the ceiling, straining to hear creaks or movement, then nods to me. There was a rustling, but it’s stopped. Almost like the noise is listening for us.

The camera’s not new, it’s been used. The polythene wrap is missing and it’s been lodged back into the little packing crate the wrong way round. I switch it on and it has about half battery, the darkness of the room only punctured by a grainy outline of the moonlit window.

‘Is there footage on the data card?’ asks Callum.

I flip the little circular disk on the top of it, knowing the settings without sight, feeling the pleasing, reassuring click of it beneath my thumb. There are three clips of footage. The first two are about three seconds long. I play them and all they show are some kitchen tiles – someone breathlessly trying to figure out how the damn thing works. But they get it right on the third try and the camera is thunked down on a dashboard of a car with a loud, messy crack. I immediately lower the volume on the side of the viewfinder.

It’s dark in the car, but after a minute there’s a roar of the engine and a flash of streetlight as it accelerates down a nondescript road. It illuminates the figure’s face, desperately trying to navigate the route on an old GPS. It looks like the interior of a champagne-coloured Honda Accord.

‘Fuck’s sek …’ says Wez.

He sounds scared. I know I don’t know him that well, but I’ve never seen him scared before. He’s always been the worm to wriggle out from beneath the weight of heavy boot steps. But now he sounds like something has caught him squarely in the chest and is pressing into the gelatinous flesh where his heart should be with every word.

‘Right, er … Hiya gang. Not sure what to do here, heh, but … But think this is the rayt thing to do. And … and I’ve got a bit of a head-start, I think, mebbe ten minutes. Don’t think they saw me leave, but they’ll put two and two together and, heh. Yeah. Yeah, this is the rayt thing to do. Mebbe the last thing I’ll do …’

The camera slips and he grabs it instinctively, throwing it into the little shelf where the speed and fuel gauges are. It slides around a bit and captures him from below, occasionally obscured by the turning of the steering wheel.

‘Y’little stunt worked, as I’m sure you knew it would. Heh, very clever. Ah didn’t work it out meself, like. But the gang caught onto it pretty sharpish, found your hidden message and posted it, which meens the police worn’t be far behind them. It’s teken them a few hours to find out where yas are, a lot of interneting, but they’ve found yas and … And ahm not gonna lie, gang, it’s … this is getting … heh … out of control … and, heh … Not sure … not sure if I wanna stick around to see how it ends, if you knar what I mean. Sure you understand … It’s all gotten out of … out of …’

A street light glides through the passenger window and one of his hands rubs tremors from his stubbled jaw. His eyes are glassy. Clarty is massaging red little blushes into his cheeks, speckling them with tiny flakes of scarlet sand. I can see her spit humours into his ears, but with little fits of his head, he shakes her off.

‘To be honest I thought I’d just scarper, ya kna? Just get out before they … they do something, again. But I thought that … mebbe if I could … heh, aw fuck … mebbe if I could get to yas first, I could warn yas and. And. And I can’t hack it fellas, huh. Honestly, I can’t hack any more … any more violence. I mean, they fucking killed people. I didn’t think they’d fucking KILL people, fuck. FUCK. THEY FUCKING. KILLED. PEOPLE.’

He hits the steering wheel with every word, losing it, losing that brazen, cheeky composure he so effortlessly bends and twists in his life. He hits the steering wheel again and again and lets out a little scream. He’s reached a motorway or dual carriageway and the sheer velocity of the car seems to release a pent-up wedge of breath or trauma that’s been lodged in him for as long as he has known.

He calms and drives for almost two minutes in silence. Then.

‘They’re coming for yas,’ he says.

It is so resigned and dark. My hands are gripping the camera so tightly, I can feel the plastic of it almost buckle.

‘They’re … I don’t knor what they’re gonna do. Some are seyen’ they’re gonna come save yas, like, get yas out of there. Which, if true, ahm still not sure is the rayt thing to do, like. And … and some are seyen … some are seyen that … aw fuck …’

Mel is looking out the window. I can’t see what she sees, but she immediately backs away from it.

‘Some are seyen that yas need to be … released,’ says Weston. ‘That … aw fuck, whatever it was, it was something something, you’re mortal. That it’s the “mortal voice” in you, or whatever, that’s meken you want to stop the Stories. Meken you say those things in that song y’did. And that they need to release … to release the Solkat in yas. Let them out. That you’re … once you’re released, the others will be, too. Or summin. I mean, it’s your fuckin songs, you tell me what they’re on about, I never understood a word you wrote if I’m honest. But if they want to … to “release” yas. Well … Well fuck, you guess what the fuck that fucking means …’

He shakily tries to roll a cigarette, his bony knees buckling under the wheel, dropping tobacco down the seat. He licks it and lights it with a yellow lighter, smoke snarling out his nostrils. One of his hands comes up to his brow and he’s shaking, figuring it all out in his head.

‘I’m … I’m mebbe half an hour from where yas are. And … and I’ll leave my car for yas, keys in the ignition. I wish I could do more. Do more to … But I’m sorry. Fuck I’m sorry. But I can’t … I can’t …’

There’s little more for him to say. He drives for another minute or so, noiseless tears running in a steady stream down his cheeks. It’s funny, I’ve never felt danger in his voice. I mean, I’ve never trusted him. His number plate has changed on that car a hundred times, and I heard he once stole a cat from a dentist’s office. This started for him as a cheap opportunity, the chancer that he is. But now, alone in his car, fleeing the thing he helped create, I see a stitch of goodness. As though, tarred as he always has been, a single strip remains untainted on his flesh, a piece of him that has yet to be marred or scorched, a bit of him that even Clarty cannot touch. He goes to turn the camera off. Just as he does, he looks into it.

He holds it up to his face, the tears abating, and with all the strength he can muster and with every inch of his grin, he bursts back into that jack-the-lad shrug, that wink, that flourish. He does a mock-bow, nods to an imagined crowd, theatrically blowing the last of his cigarette smoke to the car.

‘You have been listening to the Weston Hemisphere!’ he sighs. ‘Thank you for joining us on our final episode of the podcast. Be good out there, kids. Be good. And if you can’t be good …’

He looks directly into the camera, lost and helpless in the tide.

‘Be lucky,’ he says, with a wink.

The clip ends.

Callum sits for a moment on a pile of phone books. Mel is ten feet from the window, looking out. I try to circle round, to get them both in frame.

The cold stone of the room, the smell of burnt wood. I wish in my head for this to be the cave, the water park cave of my half-forgotten dream. There was so much noise in that cave. Give me noise. Deliver me from silence.

‘We need to die,’ says Callum.

Mel spins on the spot.

‘What?’

Callum stares into the dark. He’s composing in his head again, that mad, magical spark in his eyes that, when I see it, feels like hands pressing my chest and pinning me to walls. He’s already made this plan, but this is the first we’re hearing of it. Though, in a way, I’d already guessed at it myself.

‘It’s the only way to end this,’ he says. ‘They need to think we’re dead. It’s what the seventh and eighth Cycles say – it’s the “release” of Whisht, the final part, or at least how it was going to end anyway. And if they believe in it, in them, in all the stories … then … I mean, there’s no more music. There’s no ninth Cycle. No more lyrics they can interpret, no more violence for them to bring. It’s the only way they’re going to stop. If they think that … not only that we’re dead … but that they did it. That they made it happen … Then …’

I had no idea that’s what the final Cycles meant. Mel’s eyes are wide.

‘Cal, what the fuck, I am not fucking dying over this!’

‘That’s not what I mean,’ he says.

He slinks over to the sofa, his back seizing as he does. Mel stands over him, hands on hips, elbows akimbo.

‘If we can make them think we’re dead,’ he says. ‘Then … That’s the end of it. It has to be the end of it. Right?’

‘Cal, who fucking knows. I mean, they won’t listen to us. Who’s to say they’ll ever stop now? We tried. We told them not to do this anymore. But it just keeps going. It just. Keeps. Going. And … well, let’s face it …’

She slumps onto the sofa next to him. Every instinct in me is to tell them to run. They could be here any minute, might even be here already. And fuck knows if the broken glass woke Wharton above us. But they both just sit there. Enjoying the view as the ship sinks around them.

‘Our lives are pretty much over anyway,’ she says.

Callum turns.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, we can’t play music ever again, can we? We can’t go outside, can’t live normal lives. Can’t create. Any one of them could be watching. Anywhere, any time. I could, fucking … buy a roast chicken at the corner shop and they’d turn it into some mad fucking ritual where they have to go and kill all the sacred chickens in the world or burn all the corner shops in the whole fucking country for some godforsaken reason. We make more music, they won’t stop. We stop making music, they won’t stop.’

She blinks at the revelation.

‘I mean. What’s the point of it all anymore. If we can’t make our songs?’

Callum puts an arm around her. Mel flinches at the rarity of his touch.

‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘Maybe it’s over for us. And we’ll go to prison or they’ll fucking ruin us or kill us or … Or whatever. But …’ He takes her hand in his. She shakes. ‘But we might be able to stop them. From hurting other people …’

She blinks at him. For the first time in as long as I’ve known her, there’s no earthy cave she can draw profanity from, no headland she can breathe her poetry to. Her jokes have abandoned her, and she’s left, like Whisht, to wander the world, grey and laughterless, forever unsure and unable.

Bizen is curled in the corner of the room, her intestinal hair, her thousand eyes hidden in the dark. But she weeps. Her quiet, mournful weeping runs riverine along the floorboard grain. It sounds like feet. Hundreds of distant feet, brushing through winter grass, soft and pursuant, cracking frozen dew.

‘What do we do?’ Sarah asks. Melusine’s gone. Her voice is simple, unadorned. It sounds in pain.

Callum looks to me. Bizen’s weeping grows louder and there is movement outside the window, in the distance. Across the moonlit moorland, figures stir. Headlights bleach the sky.

‘We’ll take the car. If Wez has left it, that is. Draw them away. Get them to the coast. And I’ll jump out when it’s safe.’

I nod and start throwing my coat on, tying Mel’s boots tight.

Sarah stands up with a flourish, becoming Mel again.

‘We’re not going without you.’

‘You have to,’ he says. ‘It’s the only way this is going to work. You lead them to the coast, I’ll give you the coordinates. I’ll find you in a few hours. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

‘Why? Where are you going?’

Callum’s hands, after years of opening and closing around an invisible flame, finally grip. He grips and holds his flame, his knuckles undulating with the pain of it, rippling and rising with the agony of choice. Bizen wipes tears from her eyes and looks at him with wonder as the waves of figures join the horizon light.

‘To a place where nothing shines …’

23

The Bagsies, the wild sisters, Solkat of promises and payment

Sixty miles away, in Grove House Care Home, a camera turns on, entirely of its own accord.

It’s one of mine. It’s been there for a few months – it died a while back and I forgot to grab it from my gran’s bookshelf. Only a handful of people will see the footage before it is deleted.

My gran is sitting on her bed, looking out at that same dark. At first, it’s difficult to discern exactly where she ends and the bunched-up duvet around her begins. It looks like she’s rising out of white water. Her fingers traipse around the wrinkles and creases of the cover, daring to dip them in, her unseen legs wading along a lakebed of reeds and fleeing minnows. Her hair is down and it looks damp in the haze of the moon, clinging to her skin and finding thousands of tiny kiss-curls along her neck and chest. She stares longingly at the beyond. At the world beyond her room and her mind.

There’s music. It’s a recording, tinny. Soft little pops and static. Then, were I ever to watch this, I’d notice a lag on one of the beats, a floor tom.

It’s me. I’m playing.

I’m eleven or so. The tape recorder is muffled in the snow of the duvet, but you can still hear it. I’m practising some rock band piece in my garage, whatever was cool when I was that age, but there’s a fill in there that’s really hard, and I can’t get my little hands and my clumsy sticks around the kit quick enough to accent its end. I keep trying and trying but I’m always late, or the fill is interrupted by the click of my sticks as they jam up and snap at each other in frustration. Gran listens and waits, her hands dancing around the duvet in time.

‘Can’t do it …’ comes a voice. It’s mine, from the recording, but it’s loud. It’s higher-pitched and angry.

‘Yes you can,’ says Gran to the empty room.

‘Can’t do it, it’s too hard …’ comes the voice again. The sound of sticks being thrown to the floor.

Gran, cloudily enveloped in her silk dressing gown, gently lowers her hands into the duvet. She rummages for a moment and raises them again, clenched, holding imagined sticks.

‘Try again,’ she says.

The recording continues, but you can’t hear much. I’m tightening one of the skins with my drum key.

‘Try again. I’ll do it with you.’

She opens her hands, as though someone’s taking the invisible sticks from her. In the recording, my voice squeaks. I think maybe I’m crying.

Then, with a crash of cymbals and an uncontrolled mashing of the snare, I drum again. Not the song I was practising, not the fill, just drumming. Just me and the kit, whirling around it hurriedly, lagging, striking, slicing. It sounds like three different drum tracks layered on top of one another, a frustrated, angry-sad panic of limbs and muscle, hitting for the sake of hitting, noise for the sake of noise, all of it just totally and awfully assaulting the ear, but cupping the heart in trembling hands and violently shaking it. I think I’m shouting as I play, but the drums are so loud, my voice is lost.

But the majesty of the moment is not in the recording. It’s in my gran.

It’s the most astounding thing, but she mimes the drumming pattern. Every bit of it, every imperfection, every beat, she air-drums with her invisible drumsticks, her legs jolting with the furious thrumming of the kick pedal, her elbows flapping around, perfectly simulating every snap of snare, every accidental rimshot, even the moments you can hear me clearly clashing with cymbal stands and my own sticks. There’s an uncanny animation in her limbs, an eeriness, an energy that seems to be not of her and her body, but of some other maleficent, otherworldly source. Like twitching limbs of dead things forced to move by some intrusive electricity. She’d look kind of crazed, were it not for the utter concentration and belief and love in her face – as though she really were playing, seeing the kit around her, feeling the burning hatred and fatigue in her wrists and transforming it into performance. She even opens her mouth and silently shouts when I do – the face of an ancient creature with the voice of a fledgling babe.

You can hear me tire, and the drumming slows and stops, Gran perfectly replicating every breathless beat as the energy seeps from my veins. With a final crash, there is silence.

Then, something happens. Something happens that I will never understand. It’s the reason those who discover this camera will delete the footage. It’s the reason why perhaps no one should ever see it.

There is nothing but watchfulness in it, in that moment. There is a bleeding of memory and time. It is filled with kindness and colour and wonder and fear of things unseen.

And there is calm. A calm in the not knowing. We’re not meant to know those things, see those colours, see those oils, those unimaginable hues. And that’s alright. Let the ghosts sing, my gran seems to say. Let their voices hum. For nothing will be remembered in time.

In the recording, after a minute of silence, you can hear me throw my sticks at the wall. Gran does the same, in perfect harmony. But just as she throws her imaginary sticks, the picture falls. The picture of her on her wedding day falls. It crunches to the desk and the glass of it breaks.

There is silence. Her soft little breaths are like fingertips on satin. Then, she looks at the camera. Directly at it. And with a smile that would rob the wind of cold, the seas of storm and give to shipwrecks the warmth of silence they always wished to find, the footage ends.

That is the last clip of my gran. She went to sleep. And her breathing stopped.

With a crash, Mel and Callum hurl a chair through the window. It took us five attempts – it wouldn’t break. But with a final whack, it shatters. We’ve stuffed pages of phone books into the slat at the bottom of the door and shunted the sofa against it. The house shakes as Wharton descends the stairs in seconds and, unlocking it, hurls himself with brutish strength at the wood. The whole thing wedges open by inches, the sofa retreating from his force, but it holds – it just holds. Callum grabs a few more phone books and, aching with the effort, scrapes them along the bottom of the window frame, clearing it of glass and sending shards rabbiting onto the grass beyond.

‘There’s nowhere to go,’ says Wharton. His voice is low, quiet, dissonant against the splintering of wood and iron hinges. ‘There’s no use running. You’ll collapse before you reach anywhere with signal, please, let me help you—’

Another crunch as he barrels into the door and the frame peels from the walls. One of his gigantic hands grasps through the gap and he pushes the couch from it with ease. The phonebooks are lodged and holding and he starts pulling the door back to release them.

‘It’s not safe out there without me. You don’t know what they’ll do. Just … stay in the room. We can sort this out … Talk it all out, make a plan …’

The door is stuck, but he’s bending the wood at the top of it with unearthly strength. Callum straddles the window frame, holds his hand out to Mel.

‘Come on, careful …’

The cold air scratches at the edges of my lips and buries itself in my nostrils. I sneeze. Mel slumps over the frame and onto the lawn beyond, tumbling to the ground. I can’t see much and I haven’t had time to get the settings right on the camera, but there’s more movement now, slow, viscous, like a tide of black tar, beyond. There are flashes of white, faceless spectres, all capturing and harnessing the moonlight in beacons of interminable approach, and something’s burning, mingling with the cold in acrid whiffs of smoke.

‘Callum, you know you’ll die of pneumonia before you can get anywhere, or do anything,’ Wharton continues. He’s ramming the door, but his voice isn’t wavering. ‘Think of your friends. Think of the—’

The door squeaks and opens another inch.

‘Alice,’ says Wharton. He’s almost through – the door’s open enough for someone of my size to slink through, but he’s so gargantuan, moreso in the dark, that his chest is lodged between jamb and door-edge.

I reach Callum.

‘Alice, you don’t want to do this,’ grunts Wharton. His voice is melodic. ‘Remember … remember what Bahvana said. You’re not a hero. You don’t owe these two anything. This isn’t you. If you leave, the police will find you. And I can’t help you then. But if you stay – nrrgh – if you, just …’

His right shoulder is through. Callum holds out his hand.

‘Give me the camera, dear. Careful …’

I do. He called me dear. He takes my hand like I’m a debutante descending to a ballroom and I balance with it, bestriding the frame with inelegant little groans.

‘Alice, think of your gran,’ Wharton breathes.

I’m across the threshold, splayed. I hover for seconds, my groin burning with fresh rips of muscle.

‘If you go with them, you’ll get locked away. Think of what that will do to her. Think of all those days she’ll miss with you. The distress you’ll cause. You don’t have to abandon her. You can come with me, we can make it right. And you’ll never have to—’

Callum’s stood, leaving me hanging between the room and the grass, and crossed to Wharton. With a visible force of will, a run-up, a physical propulsion of his body and with all the fury and gum-blood and pain he’s ever known, he hurls himself at the door. Wharton’s head – peeking round it – slams into the wall, crunching with the force, and he tumbles back with a dark grunt, stumbling from the partition. I hear his weight hit the floor.

Callum returns to me, holding his hand back out to me. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Quick as you like.’

My feet land on the grass.

A mist hugs the garden, obscuring hazy outlines of unseen hedges and brick. Somewhere beyond, a few cars briefly beam their headlights out and they blind me, sending me slipping on the grass, only for my arm to land in the grip of Mel, who rights me with rabid rushes of hot breath. The lights extinguish, but it’s enough. They’re here. I don’t know how many, fifty, a hundred, it’s nothing but spectral glimpses of unmoving figures, but they’re here. Callum grunts off the broken shrapnel of his collarbone and rounds on us.

‘Get the car. Where’s the car?’

His voice is level, but the cold is mangling it. Something’s happened to his shoulder and his left arm is longer than his right. But the adrenaline slows the moment and specks of grey snow seem to gather around him, interested in his eyes, fascinated with the quiet fury in him. I look for Whisht or Bizen or any of them, but it’s dark and they fearfully linger in the corners of my eyes. Callum is telling us which roads to take, where to meet him, but I cannot hear. There’s laughter, somewhere. Laughter and the sound of snapping bone.

Callum drags me and we round the house, hugging the walls as more and more figures appear in the dark. It is massive, bigger in the gloom, and someone’s drilled large slats of corrugated iron across windows and falling walls. Mel picks up a stone no bigger than my palm, and holds it above her head, ready to throw it, but I’m certain it wouldn’t do much damage in her hands. Some of them are singing out there in the dark – something low, menacing, beautiful. It’s from the seventh Cycle, but I can’t place it.

‘There! There’s the …’

Weston’s car is about fifty yards along the country road, its rust out of place in the woodland. I film Callum as he reaches the end of the side wall, pressing himself up against it. He peeks out, the snow catching in his beard and hair. But it doesn’t melt. It doesn’t fizzle with his warmth, doesn’t dissolve. I zoom in on him. He flinches, knowing I’m tight on him.

‘Stay on it, Al,’ he says. ‘I can’t have you …’

But I point to his coat. The snow that’s settling, but staying. He brushes it and rubs it between his hands. Then, breathless, wary, he looks around the wall to the front of the house, his face suddenly orange with the light. I’m frozen, trapped in the sight of what’s before us.

It takes me a moment to work out what’s on fire. It’s large, the size of a piano. Then I see the wires and the theremin poking out of it, the speakers, the lap harp, the guitar rack. Callum’s bureau burns, an effigy, a white-orange rip in the fabric of this dark and dreadful universe, revealing through it a terrible, searing world not meant for us. Slats and drawer doors slop off it to the ground with little confetti embers, winding their way from its glowing heart and fleeing into the cold, their existence bright and fleeting, becoming grey with the harshness of this plane, unable to resist its calling to death and ruin.

‘What are they doing?’ Mel asks.

Callum stares at it, looks at his creation melting in the night.

The light of it obscures the figures in the dark and I hear that laughing again. Something guttural joins it, too. I zoom in to try and catch some of the figures moving but there’s nothing. Just movement, tree branches cracking.

‘We make a run for it,’ he says. ‘You two get in the car. They need something to follow, so go slow and get somewhere public, fast. This will only work if it looks like we’re running, so if we—’

Callum goes to take my hand and points to the end of the lane when something wrenches him back.

With giant, unflinching strength, enormous hands pummel him twice in the back of his head, dropping him to the floor.

Mel screams, I’m screaming too. He looks like a blood stain on rumpled sheets. But Wharton rounds on Mel, a large split of blood across his brow. His face is neutral, objective, calculating moves and movement, gathering his environment and discerning its threat.

‘Let go! Let go of me, you—’

Wharton punches Mel in the face and she’s immediately silent. He lets go of her, but she doesn’t run. She just sort of wobbles. She drops her rock and her hand flails out to find mismatched bricks in the wall of the house, sinking onto it, gliding down the mortar that perforates her back and snatches fabric. She half sits there, a tiny fleck of blood beneath her nose. She has the oddest smile on her face.

‘Now …’ says Wharton.

He looks at the bureau and peers into the darkness.

‘We’re gonna get you all in my car. And we’re going to move to a safe location.’

I nod. I can’t look up from the viewfinder. I can’t face his eyes. I can feel them clamber into the trenches of my pupils. But that laughter comes again, and that gargling, and I see him now. I see Radge licking Wharton’s knuckles, displacing them as little boluses of bone and crunching them between his gums. He’s guiding him, his hands over Wharton’s eyes, towards precipices, towards flame, his laughter like lullabies, drawing him to the edge. I almost blurt it out, tell him, beg him to stop, that Radge is tricking him, he’s tricking you, luring you. But I know he’ll think I’m mad. He can’t see what I see, what so many see now.

‘Don’t try and run,’ he says. ‘I’ve called the station, we’ve got officers on their way. If you run, I can’t protect you. And if they try and—’

But he stops.

There are flashes. Little glows in the air. Then, more and more tiny wisps of light emerge in the dark.

Phone cameras illuminating the world.

The humming is louder. The laughter is louder. Out of the dark, from the corners of our vision, steps a figure. Then, from the other side, another. Four, five, ten, all humming from beneath masks and hoodies. Beyond, more cameras film, blinking like starlight in the trees. They don’t stop walking, but there’s a patience in their stride, a plaintive weariness, each of them carefully navigating their mark, mirroring the collective, responding to one another like a shoal.

One of them has turquoise nail varnish on. She’s the first to step to Wharton.

‘Right,’ he calls out. Some of them slow, their feet crunching the ice beneath them. ‘Everyone stay where you are. I am a police officer. And you are all breaking the law. I have backup on their way, they’re minutes away. So if you’ve got any sense, you’ll get back in your cars and scarper. Otherwise arrests will be made. Do you understand?’

They walk closer. They’re all around us now, perhaps there’s more of them, I can’t see. They are maybe fifteen feet from us in a perfect circle, the flames of the bureau flecking the whites of their masks with golden drafts of half-drawn sketches. Wharton continues to spin carefully on the spot, studying them, looking for chinks in the wall of flesh, for the weakest looking of them, for advantage. He changes his tone, his body language. He’s playing for time.

‘But moreover, I understand,’ he says. ‘I understand. I may not … follow. Follow as you all do. But I know the Stories, the Cycles, as well as anyone here. And I know you think this is right. But for those among you, those with influence, I ask you to take a step back. Take a look. Is this what you want? Is this what … the Stories and the Solkats would want of you? Violence and fire? Is this what your parents and your children would want of you? To murder. To murder in the name of something you once thought beautiful? Think of all those who know you, who love you, who follow you …’

Turquoise Nail Varnish hesitates. But it’s not working. If anything, Wharton’s found a scab and tugged at it, drawing clotting blood. It’s riled a few who sing louder now – low voices, male – and one or two are whispering, talking at him, barking.

‘Alice …’ he says.

I can see Callum at my feet, righting himself, hear his quiet pleas for respite from the torrents of blood whirling in his skull. He holds his hand to Mel, who reaches for him, unable to free herself from the comforting brick of the building.

‘Alice, take two steps to my right,’ says Wharton.

I do, slipping slightly on the frost. The fog of his breath buries into his beard, showing far-off beacons in its amber and snow-topped crags in its grey. I don’t know if he’s talking to me. Perhaps he’s talking to the figures. But as he speaks he looks in front of him, to where I see Radge. To the fearful, laughing Radge before him.

‘I was only trying to help,’ he says. ‘That’s all I ever wanted to do. Was help you. I hope you understand that.’

Radge goads him, facing him, the bureau’s smoke becoming his sickly breath, its flames his open throat. Radge steps back, foot by foot, away from him, abandoning him, joining the ranks of the figures, laughing, slipping, dancing between them and into the fire-lit hovel of the night. His knee caps buckle as he walks on shin bones, their shafts buried deep in frosty earth with every step. Wharton holds up his hand.

‘I tried … to help you. You’ll remember that, won’t you? You’ll say I tried to help you. You’ll tell them …’

My camera catches his darting eyes, swirling around him. His shoulders are back, broad, titanic, his fists are clenched and ready.

There’s resolution in his gait. There’s quietude in his words.

I look at his wrist. There’s no tattoo. Whatever we saw on film was soot or mud. And it suited us to believe it was something else. I decide. I won’t ever tell the others.

Callum and Mel grab me. They’ve pulled themselves up, Callum’s bad leg tries to fail him, but fear and violence propel him to his feet. We see blue flashing lights over the hills, we hear the sound of sirens, and Mel hurls Wharton’s bottle of vodka at the bureau. It doesn’t erupt, but it blooms in Wharton’s eyes, those hazel, hurtful eyes. For the briefest of moments, he stares.

Then he nods. He nods. We run.

We run to the road, not daring to look behind us, running from the hum of the followers in our ears, running from the cracking of wood, running from the white-hot zephyrs of cold stealing feeling from ears and fingers and skin. The hums rise as we reach the car, the singing becoming screams, the laughter becoming the screech of coming cars. I hear cracking and thumping and something crunching against brick.

Wharton didn’t scream. He didn’t call out for help. The car croaked into life and with a slip of wheel on ice, we swerved onto the road, the flames of the burning bureau behind us blooming against the night like blotches of spilled ink on an empty page.

24

Bonnie, the Wind on Windows, Solkat of fairy lights, flirting and falling

Two days after Wharton died, a plane takes off from Heathrow.

Kaylee sits on the cramped toilet seat, now mired in seven hours’ worth of usage from the rest of the business class passengers. She fiddles with her vape, twisting the little chamber of it between her fingers, occasionally taking a drag and exhaling into her chest, smothering her mouth with her sweater. She watches her ankles recline and extend rapidly, bouncing on the floor, adding to the muted air around her a kind of whirring that soothes her restless head. Her hand gently taps her wine glass with her phone, in time with some tinny rhythm playing in her earbuds. The shadow of a flight attendant passes under the door. Kaylee sips her wine. Seven of her knuckles are swollen, two of them probably broken. Her nail varnish is chipped and stained. The turquoise has specks of red beneath it now.

They ran from that place, some of them. More had arrived, more headdresses following directions that had been posted on forums and social media, more police in pursuit. They came in droves, their cars shunting onto grass and along the road, hundreds of them. She watched silently as that police officer was beaten to death. She watched as they set fire to his house. Then something tugged her away from it, pulled her back from it all, and she ran. She ran so fast she could feel angry tears creeping up inside her like unfurling strips of falling wallpaper.

She saw Him. He looked at her, she was sure of it, as he ran, limping away from her to the car down the lane, bloodied and in pain. It was as if his face was covered in drying plaster and the merest movement might have cracked its pattern. The strangest of feelings fell over her. She felt like she’d lived her life speaking a second language and was only hearing her mother tongue for the first time.

His eyes were so boring. They were ordinary. Fearful. Apologetic, panicked. He looked human and broken, almost stupid. And in that look and language came revelations, realisations. Reality.

There is a knock at the door. Kaylee doesn’t respond. Instead, she raises the volume of the song playing in her ears. Her bouncing feet settle to its rhythm and join it.

She and a few of the followers made it to the local airport and booked their flights there and then. The staff looked at them, stained with mud. They’d washed most of the blood off themselves in the airport bathroom, but they had no luggage and some didn’t even have passports, so they were turned away. They fled the place, promising to return and catch the next flight, to meet her there. She didn’t care.

She didn’t want to see any of them again. Those who could, flew to London and booked another flight on their phones, scrambling on travel visa and booking websites for the cheapest one they could find. Apparently, some airline controller’s finger had slipped and the clerical error had freed up nearly a whole plane. Kaylee boarded with the others, smiling.

She averts her face for a moment from the mirror. She’s become so used to ignoring it now, discovering that – in avoiding her own reflection – she’s found a freedom from that grip around her self-esteem. But then, slowly, she faces it, faces her eyes. They grow glassy as the music plays and she stares. She stares unblinking at the woman before her.

It’s a new band, the one she’s listening to. She discovered them a few hours ago, as she and a few of the others waited in the airport.

The others were nervous, worried police would stop them from international travel, detain them, arrest them, convict them. But Kaylee idly clicked on a playlist in the passport queue, one some algorithm had determined suited her. It had taken all her tastes – most recently Their Cycles – and suggested similar bands and artists. She had grown so tired of choice and a machine had somehow circumvented it, determining for her who exactly to listen to and like. It was glorious. She’d pressed play and some twangy, folk-ish drawl had blared out, joined shortly after by a chamber choir and some odd instruments she didn’t know the names for. It was good. It was a bit weird, but it was good.

The door knocks again. Kaylee removes one of her earbuds to check if an attendant is berating her for the minty dry-ice of her vape that’s creeping out of the door grate.

‘K-Li?’ comes a voice. It is lilting.

‘Yeah.’

‘K-Li, I think you should see this …’

Kaylee doesn’t look away. She’s been staring so long at her face now, minutes have gone by. It is unchanged. But the bathroom shifts. Staring at one’s own face is an interpersonal encounter, the ego meeting with itself, as if the subject were an other. The mind cannot fully understand it – how this thing, itself, can exist apart from itself. It doesn’t know how to please this reflection, this other, how to hurt it, be kind or harsh to it, how to affect it, change it, move it, without the self changing and moving and acting first. So, in panic, unable to mimic or synchronise with the perceived emotions of another, it becomes an infinite feedback loop of distortion and apparition. Kaylee sees creatures around her, in her peripheries. Looming faces, grasping hands, a fuzzy, brittle shade that paws at her eyelids and begs her to look away. The creatures, her hallucinations, laugh. They swirl and grasp and laugh and grasp and Kaylee blinks.

She pulls the door, split in two and hinged, bending it to open into the bathroom. The light of it automatically dims and the blonde young woman outside it jumps back at the sight of her, at her pants round her ankles, still astride the toilet.

‘Oh god, sorry! I didn’t … Sorry, I didn’t know you were still …’

‘What is it?’ Kaylee asks. She vapes again and sips her wine. The blonde woman arches her back a little, nods to her left and a large figure approaches, bidden by her. He hands her a phone, the light of it catching his ginger hair in the dark.

‘Sorry – sorry to disturb. It’s just. Well, some of us finally got on the Wi-Fi and … And we just thought you might want to know that …’

Kaylee beckons the phone over to her, then kicks the door shut with a clatter and an accompanying little ‘ow’ from the large ginger guy beyond.

The light in the bathroom illuminates again as she shunts the lock shut. The hallucinations have fled, but their memory remains, and Kaylee feels watched and hunted. One of her earbuds has fallen out and she gently replaces it in her ear, that strumming resuming and pumping steadily. The lyrics are good. It has something of a Gregorian monophony about it, its tuneful hum circling the watery frame of the sink, bringing a little vibration to it. It sounds like a silenced phone receiving messages.

With a breath, she reads, only for a second. It’s a collection of headlines, something about Them and cliffs. But immediately she lowers it. There’s a jolt in her stomach, the adrenal stab she’s learned to listen to, then ignore. She’s learned what causes her pain and, with the slightest indication of it, she knows to look away. Protect herself from her own anxiety.

She opens the door. The blonde is still standing there. Kaylee hands her phone back to her.

There is a silence, interrupted by some more of the gang rustling and joining round the bathroom bay. Molly watches intently, trapped by her own complete lack of opinion or thought.

‘What … what do you think? Should we … should we do something? Tell … someone? I mean, maybe They didn’t—’

‘It’s done,’ says Kaylee. The group stare at her in disbelief. ‘What’s done is done. Go back to your seats. We’ll discuss more when we land.’

They all slightly but visibly lean back, stunned. Molly goes to say something, but doesn’t. A few others look at each other for reassurance or response. Harry might as well have stumbled on a new breed of wasp that’s recently learned how to open windows.

‘Go back to your seats,’ Kaylee says again. ‘We’ll talk more when we reach Nevada.’

With confused looks, the wayward group slinks away, the soft otherworldly sonata of their whispers mingling with the drone of the engine and upwards, lightly patting the plastic parapet frame above them and trickling down its side to the walls and into the crannies of history.

Kaylee shuts the door and takes her phone gently in her hands. She idly takes a photo of herself. She doesn’t look like a woman. She looks like a dark thing trapped in a woman’s body, her face sunk, her eyes bulging. She writes. She loads up her social media page and writes the name of a band, the new band playing in her ears. She writes without thinking, knowing only that she must, feeling the pull to change, to be heard, to have effect. She is alone. And now, as it always has been, being alone is unquestionably the most painful thing for her to be.

Check these guys out, she writes.

The new band’s numbers reach a million within the hour.

I will never edit this footage. Any of it. Everything I’ve filmed. Everything I’ve tried to capture.

I tried to. Please know that I tried. Sometimes I’d hastily snip bits together on sleepless nights, try and slice wides with two-shots to beef up the more close-up coverage I prefer to get. Sometimes I’d set it to music or jumble things up to try and capture them, the two of them, as they were meant to be captured, at once the largest and most intimate souls I’ve known. I spent nights behind my computer while Callum and Mel slept or drank, wading through the interminable hours of our lives, trying to make it fit into something cohesive, trying to make sense of the senselessness of it all. But it all felt too much. It was too big, there was too much to take in. There was beauty in horizons, beauty in their eyes, such utter, paralysing beauty in music and laughter and fighting and shame and hate. I can’t take it. I cannot take it. I feel it in the perfect harmony of the moment, in the silliness they make of life, in the gravity they make of art, I feel it when they buy ice lollies, I feel it when they scream and weep. But later, grainy, strained, poorly framed, they feel like shadows, their faces changed and different. Facsimiles. And I wish, I wish I could show the world. I wish I could show you just how imperfect and meandering and dull and powerful and beautiful they are to me. But I can’t. No camera can.

‘Capture’. To capture someone on film. It sometimes feels to me that we forget its original meaning. We hunt moments like prey. We bind them in film. And then, like colourful oddities on display, we point to them. Look what I did, we say, as the creatures pine and moult. Look who I met, we clap, as they paw gently at the cages of the frame. Look who I am, we declare to the world, as every moment, captured in unbreakable chains, weeps with pleading eyes for release. I remember my gran burning her photos. I remember her smile, her happy-sadness as they melted and stained the attic wood. And I know now why one might want to burn them. They cannot be kept. These moments, they should not be kept, should not be captured and shown and cherished. They are the delicate fabric of our little histories which, once handled, will tear and ruin. Let the fabric fade. For it was in the making of it, that joy once was.

I refuse to be captured. I refused to give up my moments to another, to let them sit in menageries, deathlessly waiting for peace. And yet I am the huntress. The master huntress. The one who has captured more than any, my cameras nets, my data cards cages. I chose rather to hunt than be hunted, capture before I could be captured. And now, at the end of all things, how strange the world is to me. For where I’m going, no matter what happens now, no camera can come with me. No one will be there to film. It will be the memory of me. It will be a remembrance of us. It will be a happy nothing, half-seen and lost to moment. And, if we are lucky, if we are very lucky, and if the Solkats are kind this day, of all days, it will be as fleeting as a quiet smile across a northern cliff.

We reached the coast at around ten in the morning. Callum got out of the car a few hours ago, twenty minutes from Beechmast. As soon as he’d got his bearings, he and Mel argued. She grabbed him, tried to force him to stay in the car, screamed and pleaded. But he opened the door and fell onto the cold tarmac of a nearby petrol station. He said it was important he was on camera, so he went and harangued the cashier to film him. The poor man didn’t know what was going on, but seeing Callum in his state he pulled out his phone. Then after a minute, Callum hobbled off into the dark. He could barely walk, his leg crunching beneath his weight. Mel sat in the cold, waiting for him to come back, calling out to him like a mewling pup. Then distant police sirens and the sound of cars ushered us onwards.

After that, we drove carefully and quickly. We were followed to the petrol station, that much we knew. They drove without their headlights on, but it was clear they were there, a couple of cars at first, down the road, keeping their distance. That was when we needed to lose them, so Mel floored it and took off towards dual carriageways, motorways, taking random turnings and exits, waiting for moments in industrial parks, circling cul-de-sacs for minutes at a time, all the while piercingly glaring at the road before her. We lost them quite quickly and easily, which wasn’t unexpected. In the footage that the police would take from the petrol station attendant the morning after, Callum stands in the forecourt and mutters something. What he said was nonsense, just garbled words, but it was enough, once the followers stormed the place, to pique their interest. They followed him. Which is what he wanted.

We pass monasteries and tidal islands and castles along the coastline, the tide rushing into deep pools, navigating the rocks and low ancient cliffs that stand like podiums, their creaking bodies steadfast in the breeze. A familiar rush whips into me when I see the grandeur of those lofty northern headlands, meeting the skies around the hillside, sputtering off the edge in rainbow brilliance and crashing softly into the waves below. Air hits the waterside reeds of the estuaries, the beautiful, harsh chords of their voices crashing around all that’s hewn into the banks and rock. But we keep moving. We keep moving along the coast, to where Callum told us to go.

I haven’t eaten since yesterday, and I sweat when I haven’t eaten. The car is so cold and Mel doesn’t turn the heating on. There’s a broken circle of bruising that contours her eye socket and cheekbone. It’s swollen and one of her eyebrows protrudes in profile, lending her a permanent frown. Her eye is half-shut, as though I’ve photographed her mid-wink. The car slows and we pull past the causeway. The towers sink into the dawn grey of the sky behind us and I can feel storm in my chest, a foreboding grip, a weighted blanket that’s been placed gently in my sleep to stop me moving. The clouds beyond churn in massive billows of dark colour.

After a while, the car stops and a single droplet of rain bolts onto the windshield.

We walk. She doesn’t lock the car as we set off. We’re on some grassy moorland by the sea and Mel’s glued to Wez’s GPS, trying to find the right spot, to the pin Cal programmed into it. There aren’t many high cliffs in the north-east, but the tide is rising, closer than I’ve ever seen it, and we ascend the headland to its highest point. She occasionally looks out into the sea as she wanders, but the haze of soft rain hides all but the breakers of waves.

Before long, the tide is full and the waves wait and gather, drawing in like breath, only to hurl themselves up into crags and crevices, desperate to be felt, to reach and be. But they cannot stay in those harsh climbs and they relent, falling again to gather at their foot. The waves are forgetful. As soon as they’ve failed, they return, hoping with each forward rush they might succeed, might break the rock, might pass onwards onto whatever majesty their sentries guard beyond. Perhaps one day they will.

Mel finds the spot. It’s so ordinary – so pale and uninteresting when compared to the monasteries and castles we’ve passed. Sort of makes sense Callum would pick somewhere so nondescript. Hours go by. I think about killing the camera, saving the last of the battery. But Mel is so beautiful. She stands before the sea, one storm before another, urging it to break and merge with her, become her, fight her with all it has. She idly gathers stones and drops them down the rocks. The cracks echo in my head like silent, breaking bones and snapping tendons. I think I’m crying.

Callum comes. The followers are behind him. They both drink cheap rosé and Mel tries to make jokes.

We step to the edge.

In the footage that some followers will later edit, they’ll see three people on that cliff edge. But there were four. With the last of the camera’s battery, I’ll catch Callum making a joke about this moment being the beginning of the film and they – ever misinterpreting him – will make it so. They’ll edit all this into something he, we, never wanted it to be.

They will see Mel reach out for his hand and Callum unflinchingly meeting it with his.

I don’t know if the boat is out there. I have to believe it is, that it’s somewhere along the coast, a swim away, or anchored out in the squall, dancing in the chaos, refusing to be pulled to new worlds beyond the horizon. I have to believe in Callum. In his plan. He always has a plan. I have to believe in his care for us, in his choice, and follow it. I have to believe that he’s thought about every option, every string of his map, every carefully plotted route to where we are and where we were always meant to be. I have to believe that this fear in my chest, this hum in my heart, this engrained and abject terror at the world is part of it, somehow part of his design. And I believe that he won’t ever let harm come to us. He’d die before that happened.

‘Fancy jumping off a cliff with me today?’ Mel asks.

Callum says he can’t ask her to do that.

But Mel holds her hand out to me. I place the camera on the ground and it captures the four of us. A single flash of light in the clouds beyond. The followers step closer.

Callum turns, releasing Mel’s hand for a moment, and faces the crowd. At first I think he’s going to do a speech. Some rousing final moments before the fall. Then he turns back. And, speaking so low the storm steals his stutters, his voice breaks.

‘What was your favourite bit?’ he asks.

He speaks so casually, I wobble on the headland. The rocks and waves below rupture and fill the air with heady, heavy matter.

‘What?’ asks Mel.

‘Of this whole thing,’ he says. ‘What was your favourite bit?’

Mel laughs. It is the saddest laugh I’ve ever heard.

‘I mean it,’ he says. She slows and stops.

‘We won’t be remembered,’ he says. ‘They think they will, they think they’ll remember us, but they won’t. No one will. But we can, while we can. And that’s what’s beautiful, in a way. So …’

He finishes his rosé and idly drops the glass into the waves that reach and welcome it up the rocks.

‘What was your favourite bit?’

Mel’s head drops and she shakes it from side to side, burying her chin in her chest. At first, I think she’s crying again. But I feel her hand in mine and it grips. It holds mine so tight, drawing from it force and feeling, courage. I try to squeeze back, but it’s weak. With a rattle of breath, she shakes the feeling from her hair and it dances like spray released with some centrifugal force from the spinning axis of her mind.

‘Shoes,’ she says, weakly.

‘Shoes?’

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Throwing shoes at you. And books. Your temple.’

Callum laughs. He looks at her and nods in agreement, a smug little smile on his face.

‘Shoes,’ he says again to the view. ‘Yeah, the shoes was good.’

We wait a moment. I look over my shoulder. The followers are close now, very close, but they’re waiting. For the first time, I see the hesitation in their mass, the jeopardy of the singular in the power of their collective. No one wants to be the first to step to us, every one of them waiting for someone else to start. Masked and anonymous, I can only see them through their bodies. Some old, others young and spry. In them is a curiosity, a wariness. They look like children, distorted, careful children, each of them eyeing the other, verifying their place in the world, their place in their ranks, parentless, leaderless, yet led by everyone else.

‘Al?’ Callum asks.

I look at him. I so rarely see his eyes without the safety of the camera’s pure and distant partition. But I’ve left the camera so far away now on the grass and his eyes hold me so kindly. He sees me. Even when there’s nothing much left of me to see.

‘Best bit?’ he asks.

I think for a moment. My memories aren’t memories any more.

They’re memories of what I’ve filmed. I can’t even see the whole room in some of them, see my surroundings, the weather, the detail. I simply see what I chose to see down a lens in that moment. The rest, my head has chosen to let go.

Growing flowers in dog shit, I say.

Callum smiles. Mel looks a little confused, but Callum shakes his head, silently saying, ‘I’ll tell you later’ in their hidden-head language.

‘Flowers in dog shit,’ he says quietly. ‘Quite right. Quite right …’

We look out at the storm. It’s breaking now, above us, around us. Mel is loving the drama of it. She feels like every character she’s ever wanted to be. She takes my left hand again.

Then Callum meets my eyes. And for the briefest of moments, I am frozen. He nods to my right.

I look. Across the cliffs there is a cacophony, a rolling mass of sleet and hail that, like circling dogs, is waiting for us to die before they feast. The clouds look like undulating muscles, linked vertebrae and tendons all writhing and rising with breath and movement. There is a thunder so deep I stagger back from it, but Mel’s hand drags me back in. I wonder how cold that water is. How much time we have to reach the boat before we’ll die.

A few feet away stands a figure, the fourth figure, sheepishly. His long arms, his specks of fur or downy hair, his eyes of fire and pitch. I look back at Callum.

He’s smiling at me. He nods again, his eyebrows and chin issuing me to action.

I don’t know how, but he sees it too. Maybe. Perhaps he’s always seen it. I hold my right hand out to the figure. Its big, damp eyes the size of duck eggs look up at me, droplets as big as yolks fall to the ground, bringing flowers up from root. It creeps a little closer, looking at my hand with fear and wonder.

I hold it out further and tuck my fingers in slowly, beckoning him towards me.

Whisht hesitates. Then, gently, he is next to me, his hands, his many fingers curling round mine and cupping it in his.

I look back at Callum, but he’s already staring back out at the sea. Whisht holds my hand. It grows numb with the cold and the wind.

‘What about you?’ asks Mel.

Callum doesn’t turn to her. His eyes are tracing the storm.

‘What was your favourite bit?’ she asks.

Some Solkat I can’t yet see, or one he’s yet to find, has gently pressed its hands into the sockets of his eyes and they close. His face relaxes as his mind travels through it all. Through the fire and violence, through the melodies and mischief. I see water parks behind his eyelids, wailing and singing in bashed-up cars, I hear every song, every lyric, every scrap of melody in his throat, caravans and caves, rooftops and falling. I see stolen, unwanted kisses, ice cream, ghosts. I hear my gran’s hum. I see falling glitter, rain and blue dawn light. I hear laughter. I feel sleepless nights and ratty, intrusive flames of thought and action.

He opens his eyes and I feel his hand squeezing mine, through Mel’s.

‘Don’t let go,’ he says, after a while.

I grip their hands so tightly.

‘Don’t let go.’

The followers are running towards us. They’ve felt it, the moment, the decision, and they chase it, hurling themselves at it, willing to be part of it. But Callum is quicker. He steps forward, his foot finding nothing beneath it but the jolt and space where earth should be.

I step too. I step with Whisht, who hums. I hear him singing, giving me the faith to end.

The last thing I heard before we fell was Mel’s voice. It hung in the air with me like falling stones.

‘Cal, no. No, wait—’

In the weeks, the months, the years to come, no one will know what became of us. No camera captured us, no follower saw, once we stepped from that cliff. We fell. And no one has seen us since.

The following would continue, at least for a while. Conspiracy theories still ripple around the internet. Sightings, songs, stories. But the violence would eventually diminish. And the videos would eventually die.

That’s the thing with the internet. It’s a dark, dark room full of tinder and flint. People breathe on embers, build up pyres, draw the lost and cold to warmth and edifice. But no fire lasts, no matter what it burns, and the cold stay cold and travel, through darkness and noise, to the next burning bureau in the distance, ever hungry, ever seeking a heat that will not nourish and will not stay. It is a place of colour, but no warmth. And anyone who stays too long will grow so cold and fearful of the door, and the brightness of the world beyond that dark room’s walls.

There is no memory of what happened. Perhaps the seas held out their arms to us and brought us to their depths to rest.

Perhaps, in their rolling tide, they revealed the mess of rocks, shining in their wake, reaching up, so eager and impatient to greet us that they dented skull and stole our screams and breath.

Or perhaps we landed painfully in water, the cold stabbing us in our chests and, panicked, we sank, we swam, we wrenched our way through waves. Together, unbroken, we kicked and bucked away from gnashing stone and out, out, out into the wilderness of storm, flailing yet unfailing in our plight to find the boat. Perhaps, after minutes, after hours, of battling the squall, two clenched, gripped hands flew out and thumped against something white and smooth and safe. Perhaps we tumbled up the ladder, onto deck and into warmth where we were met with light and cover, a haven that, though haggard, would take us away from all we’d done and all they thought we’d be. Perhaps we sailed. Sailed far away from that little island and found hearts in ourselves, in our little family. Shaved our heads, built our homes. Maybe we went to Banff. I’ve never been to Banff.

Maybe those things happened. Maybe that’s what people should remember.

Remember everything, my gran’s eyes seemed to say. Please. Remember everything.

If I had a camera, I’d know and show you what I saw. But I left my eyes behind and, falling blindly, fell from record.

Perhaps, just perhaps, I hit the surf. Perhaps there was pain, screams. Perhaps the cold stole my voice and dug deep into my throat. I couldn’t move, held there by freezing arms and battered by their welcome. I tried to call out, but corkscrews of spume came hurling from my mouth. I kicked but found nothing beneath my feet but cold, cold hands, dragging me down, down, down.

Perhaps I sank. Perhaps I felt my left hand ease and release Mel’s grip. I wrestled, but, so quick, so effortless, the ocean stole my force. The cold kissed my cheeks, idly thumbed Mel’s boots, my clothes, my hair, and guided me to the dark. I could see fingers tracing the waves above me, dipping their tips in to feel the bracing froth, the upset silt, the reeds and seaweed that waltzed so gently to music that grew so loud and shook with thunder words I could never hope to sing. Whisht whispered with the current and held my hand. He guided me, taking me away from all that noise above.

Below me, ahead of me, a crack. At first it looked like a slit of sunlight, a beacon emanating wonder and magic and grace. A fissure, burbling with heat and otherness in the detritus of the seabed, releasing glimpses of the world beyond, releasing majesty and warmth that boiled this cold and empty world, hoping to gift to us just a little of its perfect calm. Around it I could see a gathering. Twenty-three little glyphs, figures, waiting, dancing to the music of the depths.

Twenty-three little Solkats, welcoming us with open arms and burning lungs, each of them smiling. Just smiling. Unmoving. Like photographs developing. I tried to kick. To swim up, up towards the dimming light, towards the noise. I had so much to tell them, so much to show, so much to capture and release, capture and release into the world. But Whisht just squeezed my hand, and with his other cupped it, gently, lovingly, leading me to where I needed to go. I could see tables of food, instruments, silk dressing gowns. I could hear music, drumming, quiet. I followed, I swam. I sang.

Beyond me, I could see Mel and Callum. They were swimming, together, perfectly in unison, kicking as one, pulling and pushing one another towards the door of light and warmth. They went with the current, following its eddies, dancing in its twists and turns, laughing, holding one another. They could breathe, it seemed, breathe for the first time beneath the waves. They could dance to the music they’ve always heard, wildly jerk and jangle with it, skip and scrape to it, let go of what others saw and see themselves. Their fingers intertwined like matted tackle, never letting go of one another, never releasing, never letting those waters pry them apart and bring them to the everywhere beyond, without the other. They laughed. They sang. I could hear them sing, so clear, so loud, it felt like choruses of birds and wind through trees. They sang, and I tried to sing with them.

‘For while hiiiistory forgets us, know… That he was him, and I was her…’

But as I opened my mouth, water filled my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe their breath, their air. They looked so happy and I couldn’t keep up. I felt the waters drag me, the seaweed knot my knees, the ropes of a thousand sunken ships pull and press me from them. I tried to call, call out to them to wait, please wait, please wait for me. But they couldn’t hear. Please wait for me, I called. But their song was so loud and my voice was so quiet, they swam on. On and on and down and down towards the door. The door where the Solkats waited for them, tears in their eyes, arms outstretched, embracing them with love I’ll never know.

Please wait for me, I call. But I’m too slow. I’ve always been too slow. They reach that place, that world of wonder beyond that I’m just too slow to swim to. Whisht pushes and pulls me, begs me, drags me to the breach.

Please wait, I whisper. I’ll catch up to you, I promise. Please wait. I promise.

But the light fills their eyes and the music fills their lungs. I can’t keep up. I could never keep up.

The door at the bottom of the ocean opened for them. And they stepped through into a world of wonder, of lust. A place that only they could know. A place I wasn’t allowed to be. A place where music was language and touch was safe. A place where you can be entirely unseen, unremembered. And yet so loved. So utterly loved it breaks your ribs and gives you happy rest. A place that sings. A place that listens. A place only you can know.

A place full of ice lollies.

The door shut behind them. The light went out. And my body rested gently on the ocean floor.

Perhaps that’s what happened. Yes, perhaps that’s where I wait. With the Solkats. Those mad, concocted things. Those mad, fantastical, beautiful things. Waiting to be released. Waiting to be seen. Waiting for a door to open.

For a door that never will.

Acknowledgements

I started writing books when I was twenty-one. I’ve written seven or eight over the years and my drawers are full with dozens of half-finished ones. I’ve been close to book deals, but was often dropped at the marketing stage and told that ‘they’d be impossible to sell’. When they never came to pass, it took tremendous effort to keep writing. I thought that my books were inherently not meant for wide release. That I was too weird. That I simply wasn’t good enough.

To Molly and Robert. One of the most joyful days of my professional life was our first meeting about this book. Your kind words, support (and occasional spontaneous afternoon pub trips) bolstered me in ways you cannot know. Knowing you were there for me has brought me unending calm. Thank you for taking a chance on me.

To Thérèse, my editor. You saw something in this one and helped me every step of the way to take it into the world. Your patience, humour, insight and understanding are immeasurable, as is my gratitude to you. To everyone at Raven Books, thank you too for your patience, particularly when life and other commitments tried to get in our way. This is perhaps a strange book, one that doesn’t fit on a particular bookshop shelf. But you chose to ignore that and not only welcome its strangeness, but celebrate it. For that I am beyond grateful.

When I’ve been beset by rejection, my friends and family continued to quietly but steadfastly support me. Some of them have read some of my early work, or – in some unfortunate cases – had the deep misfortune of having me read it to them. To my family, I am deeply grateful for your interest in it. To my sisters in particular, who read some of my early works and even produced art for them, please know, from the bottom of my heart, that ‘you’re adopted and I don’t like you.’

To my colleagues, friends and to my darlings, your patience and love is beyond words. Some of you watched, at times in person, as I agonised and drafted. You asked about it when we played D&D, you walked with me around the heath and listened to my ramblings, you found corners on set together just to see if I was okay. Variously, you face painted me, you were there to bring me tea, a glass of wine, talk or sit in quiet with me (or get drunk down the phone with me). Sometimes it was enough just to coax me back into bed as I sleep-walked around the house breaking things. You, too, have been my family. And I’m so glad to have found you.

Finally, to my dear friend and dear heart, MH. My greatest gratitude lies with you. You have given me the gift of endless kindness, at the very lowest times of my life, and inspired me to my core with your art, creativity and hope. Thank you for the wild and beautiful Solkat pieces included in this book. I know I’m not the easiest person to be friends with sometimes. But there’s not a day that goes by where I’m not thankful to have met you, had the chance to love you and had the honour of making art and music with you. You have taught me so much. Not least, just to keep going.

Thank you everyone. I love you. With my whole heart. Jx

A Note on the Author

Joey Batey was raised in the North East of England and read Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge. He has worked as an actor and musician and is best known for his role in flagship Netflix show The Witcher. Joey produces music with his alt-folk group The Amazing Devil. It’s Not A Cult is his first novel.

RAVEN BOOKS

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First published in Great Britain 2025

This electronic edition published in 2025 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © Joey Batey, 2025

Joey Batey is identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Solkat illustrations by Madeleine Hyland

This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

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ISBN: HB: 978-1-5266-7681-8; BROKEN BINDING: 978-1-5266-9742-4; EBOOK: 978-1-5266-7687-0

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Table of Contents

- Halftitle Page
- Dedication Page
- Title Page
- Contents

- Part One

- 1 Bizen, the witch and Solkat of children’s lies

- 2 Hadaway, Solkat of rust and texts at three in the morning

- 3 Fash, Solkat of cold calls and blighted crops

- 4 Canny, Solkat of betting shops and unheard jokes

- 5 Marra, the Companion, holder of hands and pints

- 6 Whisht, Solkat of red wine stains and noise

- 7 Cowp and Creels, the Tricksters, Solkat of stubbed toes and fateful meetings

- Part Two

- 8 Skinchies, the Luck Monger, Solkat of bus stop fights and fear

- 9 Neb, Solkat of falling petals and looking at someone else’s phone

- 10 War Lass, the Last Word You’ll Hear, Solkat of one too many

- 11 Belter, Wielder of the Thyrsus, Solkat of neon wristbands and punishment

- 12 Radge, the Cripple, Solkat of masks and mortar

- 13 Sneck, Solkat of thumb prints and blurted thoughts

- Part Three

- 14 Yem, the Mother, Solkat of empty beds

- 15 Haporth, Solkat of lost coins in pocket holes, charity shops and memory

- 16 Scran, Solkat of bar tabs, reckonings and squander

- 17 Spelk, the Muzzled Hound, Solkat of cramps and forgotten bruises

- 18 Hackies, Solkat of breath, side-eyes and nightmares

- 19 Clarty, Solkat of smudged lipstick, mud and change

- 20 Hockle, the Antecedent, Solkat of spit and nervous moments

- 21 Monkey’s Blood, Solkat of aftertaste and imagined conversations

- 22 The Blatherskite, Voluble Purveyor of Nonsense, Solkat of perversion, politics and escape

- 23 The Bagsies, the wild sisters, Solkat of promises and payment

- 24 Bonnie, the Wind on Windows, Solkat of fairy lights, flirting and falling

- Acknowledgements
- A Note on the Author
- Imprint