Sleepwalking // Sam Fender

38

Sam's POV

I dropped Beth off at the station, where her grandmother Isobelle was waiting for her. She greeted me with a simple nod while she eyed me from up to down. I still can't understand how Alice could cope with such an stupid woman as mother-in-law.

I then drove to Liam's, habit which had become frequent since he told me that he was going to start writing songs. A happy Elys opened the door and let me in before offering a cup of tea, which I accepted. My brother was sat in the living room, concentrated in a blank piece of paper.

"Writer's block?" I said. Liam jumped and turned around, unaware that I had already entered the house. When he saw that it was just me, he relaxed.

"Yeah, mate" He sighed. "How do you write such good songs in no time? I can't even formulate a sentence" I grabbed of his acoustics guitar, which were by the side of the TV, and sat down besides him.

"I don't know. Just focus on something that means something to you like. It can be recent or from the past" I started strumming the guitar's strings softly. "I write an awful lot about when mam didn't have money and you had just moved out"

"But your last album was different" Elys came over with my cup of tea and sat down in the couch with us.

"Aye, because life is different. There's no way I'm still going to write about going to a pub every night and getting drunk when my weekends consist of dressing up like Snow White so that Beth can be the bad witch while Elliott is the grumpy dwarf" Both, Elys and Liam laughed. "I mean it, we have played that more than I'd like to admit"

"But the new song that you showed me it's brilliant and like how can you write that?" Liam asked stressed.

"You have a new song?" Elys asked.

"I've been in and out of the studio writing a couple of things and I got this new song written, yeah. Liam came around the other day and got to hear it finished" I turned to Liam. "It's about mam and Alice like both of them have been there to help me when things got complicated"

"Yes but Angel in Lothian? How did you even think of that?" I lifted my shoulders and sighed.

"Mam and Alice are my angels in Lothian, mate. You know how much they both love Scotland, right? And they have both been there being my sort of angels when I needed them" I admitted.

"How is Alice doing?" Elys asked. I knew that Liam didn't like Elys being around in our 'writing songs' appointment because she would often try to gossip and wouldn't let us concentrate. I mean, that's what Liam said, I liked having someone to distract me every now and then.

"She's alright. She's with Elliott now doing some shopping" I hadn't told anyone in my family that we were going to move out of Shields permanently (or that it was our intention) and was shitting myself.

"How is she doing after... you know" Liam said. I knew what he meant, obviously.

After losing our second child, Alice went down in a spiral of depression. There were days when I came home from the studio only to find her naked in the shower, crying her eyes out while the kids were still at my mam's. She was now seeing a psychiatrist every now and then but we all knew that something inside of her was still off.

"I mean, she seems happy" I shrugged again. "Like, she's not herself and it's sort of obvious that she still struggles but... At least she felt okay with speaking about the wedding the other day" I was excited for the wedding. I did want to marry her and as soon as I could. I was not going to say at loud but having a day to celebrate ourselves with our friends and family was something that I was really looking forward to.