Glitterland (Spires #1)

by Alexis Hall

In the past, we are drinking tea in my oak-panelled rooms, where the wisteria creeps beneath the arched windows, filling the air with scent.

I’d executed it flawlessly, explaining to Niall by the coward’s preferred medium of voice message about half an hour after I should have departed for Brighton that I didn’t feel up to going out tonight. It wasn’t even a lie. The only thing I’d misrepresented was the likelihood of me feeling up to doing anything ever again.

A thumping heartbeat of sex and sound, the drug to unite all drugs, the music of my mania.

I felt a faint and faraway echo of something like pleasure, as though some long-lost, once-loved visitor was knocking on a door that no longer opened.2

Conversations were like fires; they tended to sputter out if you deprived them of air.

Drugs were even worse for me than alcohol but, in some ways, so much better. What I held between my fingers was a little piece of happiness. Artificial, yes. Fleeting, yes. But then I wasn’t sure there was any other kind. And beggars can’t be choosers.

I was grieving, not for my friend, not for the past, but, selfishly, for a piece of fake white happiness.

Depression simply is. It has no beginning and no end, no boundaries and no world outside itself. It is the first, the last, the only, the alpha and the omega. Memories of better times die upon its desolate shores. Voices drown in its seas. The mind becomes its own prisoner.3

It was horrifying but the truth was there, undeniable, like some faint sonic echo deep within my skin, the thin batsqueak of sexuality. I wanted him.5

“That’s what people call you?” “Yes?” “Like in bed, or whatever? They call you A.A. Winters?” I met his eyes. “No, in bed they call me God.”

He came to life beneath its harsh, silver-flashing eye, his body twisting to the music of the shutter. He was shameless in his skin. Ridiculous. And beautiful.

My body had too many secrets for me to share them with strangers.

And then it was over. Like lightning from a clear sky. A moment of glorious, shuddering oblivion, a pure glittering hopefulness, and then the grim, inevitable return.

I’d wasted so much of my life. So many of my days, and all of my promise, all of my dreams, lost to hospitals, to depression, to wanting to die. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. This is not who I am. Except, of course, it was. It was the only thing left to be.

Her laugh was nothing like my glitter pirate’s laugh, but the easy joy in it made my memories chime like bells. I felt a sudden, sharp pang of something almost like loss.

Of course, I wasn’t happy-to-be-there. I was tired, drained, and inappropriately ungrateful. Sometimes it’s beyond me to carry on a conversation with one person, and here I had a whole room looking at me expectantly.

I’d somehow lost the cornerstone of humanity: the ability to pretend, to counterfeit the basics of social interaction, to smile when you didn’t feel like smiling, to seem like you cared about other people when you lacked the capacity to care about yourself.

I wanted him. Still. Again. Just as much as I had when I’d seen him in Brighton. It was madness, and I knew madness, in all its many colours.

Why, in all the vastness of the world, did a sparkly idiot from Essex make me feel alive?

found them rather lovely, and it was terrifying.

I still couldn’t break his gaze. I was dying in the sweetness of looking at him. His eyes. The laughing mouth that had kissed mine, and made me burn and shiver and feel.

Fantastic. Pity from a man whose preferred skin tone was orange. I shrugged.

“So,” I said, “I have…um…this antique rolltop writing desk. At my flat. Where I write. I wondered if you’d be, um, interested in…um…” He played with one of the leather bracelets tied round his wrist. “What?” “Fucking me over it.”

“My name’s Darian Taylor.” We shook hands solemnly. Then he grinned. “And I’m gonna make sure you nevva forget it.”

Whatever the internal mechanism that moderated the human capacity for joy, mine had long been broken beyond repair. And I knew this was a poor substitute, a base shadow cast on the cave wall, a reflection in a tarnished mirror of ordinary things like happiness, love, and hope. But there were moments, fleeting moments, lost in the responses of my body to his, when it was almost enough. And, God, I wanted, I wanted. These crumbs of bliss.

“I nevva seen a flat mushroom. That ain’t right.” “They’re dried, you…you…donut.” He kissed me, and it tasted sweet, like his laughing.

I felt like a lake, and his hands were the moon.

“Yeah. Reckon you could read the phone book and make it dirty.”

“Lots of fings ’ave meaning, babes. And, sometimes, when you fink maybe they doesn’t, it’s just cos you aren’t looking for the same sorta meaning.”

“God help me, I’m being wanked off by Yoda.” “Ha-ha, wanking the way to the dark side is.”

It had been (don’t say it, don’t spoil it) a good day. I tried to rationalise it as the result of physical satisfaction but, in other more abstract ways, I had, almost without noticing, been something close to… Happy. My heart stuttered.

There was little I feared more than happiness, that faithless whore who waited always between madness and emptiness. My moods, when they were not sodden with medication, could turn upon a tarnished penny; happiness was merely something else to lose.

I’d known this mirage before. These shimmering moments. But they each had their price that must be paid. Looking back brought little comfort, only pain. The memory of light only made the present seem darker.

I wished I could sleep. I wished I could stop thinking. But my mind has always been its own enemy.

“We can order in. When we’re not fucking.” “Aww, babes, you gottit all planned out. You’re so romantic.” “You’re unbearable in the morning, you know that?”

“We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are enjoying ourselves down there.”

“Can you stop saying vagina over and over again? It’s scaring me.”

Out of nowhere, I wanted to kiss his wrists, like I had in Brighton.

We’d both served each other a metaphor.

It was like being in hospital again. Reduced from the first person to the third. From subject to object. I was disappearing into other people’s sentences. I wanted to speak, but I didn’t dare. I didn’t know how it would sound. Whether my voice would break. If I would be plausible. If I had the right to want anything at all. What use to the sane, after all, were the words of the mad?

I had never wanted death, merely cessation; unfortunately, sometimes, they seemed to be the same thing.

“I just wanted to fix you,” he said. “This is who I am.” I put my key to the lock. “I don’t need fixing.”

“If you’re my Prince Charming, I want a refund.”

“You really shouldn’t mock people when they’re about to stick their cock up your arse.”

“I’ll put it on my CV,” I murmured. “Excellent cocksucker.”

I wasn’t depressed. I was sad. This little piece of hurt was all my own. I lay there, in the dark, rolling the idea across my mind like a pearl.

Once, I’d lived a life full of wanting and, like anyone else, I’d taken it for granted. But, in time, depression had flayed it from me, the wanting, the everyday hopes and dreams, and all the little desires. They became too dangerous to keep, too fragile to survive, and my bitter, barren soul could nurture no new ones. I’d kept only compromises, the shadows of old passions, things I just about learned to preserve.

I wanted Darian. With a pure, deep certainty, the first I had known for a very long time.

But I would fight for Darian. Sacrifice be damned, selfish or not, hopeless or not, I would fight for Darian. I had no expectations of success, but I would try anyway, with all my meagre strength.

There was no safety in being disliked. No solitary pride. Merely isolation, and the acknowledgement of everything selfishness and fear had wrought.