Suddington's Baptist Church happened to be the largest one in the county, and the most dominant building in town. I hadn't been to a service in a very long time, but whenever Tiffs was back home we made an effort to show our faces there – soak in the residual benediction. There was something about being a pastor's daughter that made it a little difficult to rid yourself of the faith, and Tiffs never seemed to mind.
We headed down to the square by way of the aspens at the edge of the copse, the same route Tiffs had taken yesterday, tracing faded footpaths down to the concrete pavement bordering the overpass and into the urban breach. She was still groggy when we started out over the front stoop and into the November frost, tripping over herself a few times as we navigated the trek to the bottom of the Hill – despite her willingness to accompany me on this tradition of sorts we'd shared since the move, she had never been a fan of early rising. A few of those falls had been into mud slicks. Had my sister been awake enough to care, she might have had more to say about the unfortunate staining it had left on certain regions of her leggings.
Today just so happened to be Communion, which usually took a little longer to set up. I settled for getting her in one of various yoga positions under the hand dryer in the stone bathrooms of the church, trying my best not to laugh too loudly and grab the attention of the congregation that was finishing up their monthly breakfast and preparing the sanctuary for the service.
By the time the organ player had sat down and Tiffs and I had crept in to take our seats, her clothes were nearly dry. Her thighs still stuck to the pew with an audible suction, though, and it took 2 of Tiffs' pinches in my side to get a hold of my silent, shuddering laughter before we reached the opening hymns.
I think it should be okay to admit to yourself that church can be a painful experience. If you were going it alone, yes, definitely, but the effect was much more magnified if it was in the sort of clique-y, fraternitised county where one's neighbours were screened for familiarity before they were deemed valid or viable enough to be bustling members of the community, instead of stragglers sectioned by the door. I wouldn't blame the faith for this, though Tiffs and I disagreed upon it frequently. It seemed obvious to me that if you placed the importance of the gospel upon the heads of secluded, small-minded parishioners, who were as susceptible to a stroke as they were to the general hivemind they had grown up in, then King James was bound to undergo a serious interpretive shredding by elders who wished for their hamlet to remain clean and their tribe more or less contained. Tiffs was of the opinion that the whole thing had been rigged from the start, and that the good words of our Lord and Saviour had only ever been intended as a divide between the classes – some sort of morally-ambiguous quarantine that justified the detriment of the poor and kept them from moving too quickly up the social ranks.
When Dad passed on, I thought I'd never have a reason to attend church again. Battlebricks had been as backwards and bigoted as parishes came, and in comparison, Suddington's churchgoers seemed almost defenceless. Infected by a benign kind of ignorance, rather than the malignant biology that had claimed our father's brain. I'd stayed holed away in borrowed university accommodation for as long as I could, while Tiffs, who had only been 16 at the time, had to make the back-breaking decision of whether to reach out to our estranged mother or enter the public care system. My dorms in East Anglia could barely house myself and a roommate; there was no way she could stay with me.
We'd stayed up 'til 1:00am by his casket, placed in the middle of our living room because we couldn't afford the rates at the funeral home, debating and crying and trying to figure out what to do. I told her to go and do exactly what she wanted, regardless of how she thought I might respond. It was a no-brainer, really; Tiffs had wanted her mother since the day she could talk, and had the roles been reversed and the same choice of evils offered onto me, I think even I would have done the same. I'd gone through Dad's personal things, found his leather-bound log book he used to keep in a locked drawer of the pastor's office, and flipped through the pages with erratic fingers till I found the page labelled 'NAYA,' and the faded, colourful postcards they'd continued to send to each other in the demise of their marriage. Mum had answered on the second ring. After a stifled cry with her, she hadn't hesitated a second to open up her home for Tiffs to complete her GCSEs.
It was only when I realised Dad's love for God and his love for us were the only things that had outlasted his time on this earth that I started to see the value of his entire life's work. My faith grew with me, reedy and thin, as I worked with a few of the neighbours and Mrs. Kennilworth from the church's administrative office to move all our things out in time for the new pastor's arrival and repeated my second year on bursary after I struggled to put my head back together in time for my summer exams. It budded when I stood on the steps of UAE in kitten heels and my mortarboard in the air, scroll clutched between my hands, and flourished every time I got to see Tiffs, in all her radiant, intelligent glory, grapple with that diversity scholarship like she could slap every bald-headed white man who thought her heritage could ever be considered an impediment against the dreams she was going to achieve. It bloomed every time she smiled like she had never witnessed loss.
I glanced over at her with a twitch in my lips as she dozed off for the third time during the homily, watching the drool bubble up in the corner of her mouth. She shot up in her seat the moment my elbow connected with her ribcage, and deflated like a balloon when she realised where she was before slumping resignedly in her seat. I cracked up again behind my hand as she griped at me to shut up.
It must have been 1:30 by the time we exited through the massive wooden doors. The church's prominence in the square gave it the perfect vantage point over the urban slopes of the town, people crawling like ants between the shops, bus stops and their homes, and cloistering in corners in an attempt to be swallowed whole by Suddington's permanent mist.
Tiffs poked me in the shoulder, and I turned to see my boyfriend lounging at the bottom of the church steps, seated on the hood of his car. He swung himself to the ground as we locked eyes, shrugging further into his sheepskin denim.
"Hello girls." His smooth, unassuming smile was betrayed by the sparkle in his eyes. "How was church?"
"Jeremy, I may have spent all morning contemplating the sweet mercy of the Lord, but it's been a long week and I am not afraid to punch you."
Jeremy sighed sympathetically and drew Tiffs into his side; she acquiesced by leaning into his chest. "You can ride front today then, Tiffs."
"Yeah?"
"Absolutely."
"Ahem!" I gestured emphatically at the air around me. "Seriously? The girlfriend doesn't get special privileges??"
"Relax, 'dee. You get to ride front seat of the whip all the time. Let us little people have a chance."
Tiffs skipped past the two of us to where the sleek black C-Class was pulled up on the kerb, Jeremy dutifully clicking the fob to give her entry to the inside.
I raised my eyebrows as he looked back at me. "What did I tell you? Sod, indeed."
"C'mon, Adz." He chuckled, moving a few steps closer to me until I had to crane my head to look up at him. "She's our special guest for the weekend. It's only the front seat."
"That's not the point, Jeremy. I'm already paying the price for having spoiled her for all these years. One of us needs to back up and insert some ground rules."
"Who?" He took a minute to fake surprise and point a single index finger at himself. "Me? You think I can take on Tiffs in a battle of wills? I can barely take on you."
"Why are you such a softie?" I asked, narrowing my eyes in only partial mockery and wonder.
"Why are you so into it?"
"HEY!"
He chuckled again, ducking his head until I could count every one of his frozen blond lashes and distracting me enough to sneak his hands into my jacket pockets. "Go easy on me, babe," he said, smirking as he caught the surprise on my face. "Guys don't like to admit when a girl makes 'em soft."
"I make you soft?"
"'Course." He freed one of his hands to flick the tip of my nose. "You make me a lot of things – soft is one of them."
Tiffs rolled down one of the windows to yell back at us from the car. "Guys. Not in front of the Church, please. I'm dead hungry as well."
"Honestly such a fucking –"
"Adz ..."
"It's true!"
He quietened me down by briefly, gently, pecking me on the lips. "Let's go get something to eat. I'm starving, too. Ain't had anything since a coffee at 9:30."
I forced my breath to steady, then shot him a rueful smile. "Okay."
Pulling me behind him with the hand still in my pocket he led the way to his car. We parted to veer round the boot and I paused, noticing something – or someone – in the corner of my eye.
"Hey," I said, turning back to him. "Isn't that Hassan?"
Jeremy laid one hand on the open driver's side door and squinted over at the memorial platform. "Yeah," he said, brow furrowing slightly. "I think that is."
We looked back over at the platform with mounting apprehension.
Hassan Ruparelia was Suddington's least desirable bachelor, the most foreign thing to have sprung out of this dismissible place in years before being usurped by me and my sister. His skin tone was darker than mine, shallower than Tiffs', and he had the personality of the mud slicks Tiffs had spent too much time and energy picking herself up from before. He also happened to be Jeremy's best friend.
From what I could make out between the threads of fog obscuring my view of the memorial platform, he was conducting a drug deal in broad daylight. That was Hassan's business; growing and selling weed over smudged and subversive county lines to local demand, dredging channels in the undergrowth through other weird and pathetic nobodies like him. He was sprawled against one of the benches at the far end of the staggered dais with his arms hanging off the back, face upturned to a puddle of grey light with two skulking, shadowy figures waiting nervously on the flagstone before him. Continuing to bathe in his murky lens of heaven, he beckoned them forward with a crook of his fingers, the effect being like the yank of an invisible string; within seconds one of them was knelt before his feet, grasping his hand in the way an ordinary man would bow to a God. A few moments later the guy was hurrying down those steps as fast as his feet would carry him, and Hassan was lazily, indifferently slipping a subtle something inside his pocket.
Jeremy exhaled, letting a soft breath out through a hiss. "Jesus, Hass," he muttered on a plea. "It's 2pm on a Sunday."
There seemed to be a silent impasse stretching out between the two miscreants left behind. Hassan's eyes blinked open, revealing a brown as dark as his skin, as dark as his shaggy, shoulder-length hair, as the figure in front of him twitched in place and refused to look him in the eye. His shrewd appraisal of them seemed amused, but the smirk that appeared on his lips was sharp enough to cut glass.
We watched him step from the bench and strap on his vacuous, sagging rucksack, gliding towards the steps without disturbing a zephyr in the air. And within seconds he was being pulled back, clutched onto, frantic whispers of desperation cajoled into his ear before they were silenced by the upturned hand he placed behind him on his shoulder. It was a statement that spoke for itself.
Swathes of fog that obscured the scene left us witness to the bare bones of a grimace, a shuffle, and an indifferent two-fingered salute that allowed his cohort to make himself scarce.
On his way down the memorial steps Hassan caught sight of Jeremy and me standing beside the car. He paused to lift his hand in a wave and shoot his friend a warm, crooked grin, one which Jeremy returned, albeit weakly.
He turned to my stony glare with something far more putrid – shaving down the grin at the sides 'til it resembled a skeleton of the smirk from earlier, and hardening the glaze of his dour brown eyes 'til they took the chill right out of the air. That same gloved hand moved to his mouth to blow me a mocking, sardonic kiss.
I replied with a one-fingered salute of my own.
~
We found ourselves crowding in Mum's house later that afternoon. Me and Tiffs, and Jeremy, and Anna, and Jeremy's mates from the band. And Hassan. Hassan came too.
Jeremy played in a band called Sad Boys Club – its 'the' being toyed with and eventually dropped between a few swift label changes – based here in his hometown. Anna was right in thinking that Jeremy and I had first met after one of their summertime gigs at a warehouse venue in Adshaw: a loud, stuffy, neon strobe-lit place called The Funhouse, where the tap beer was served lukewarm and the bouncers were moonlighting college students who'd slip you in for a fiver if you didn't match your ID. Super sketchy place. But it was where Tiffs had chosen to take me to celebrate the 2 of us sharing the same house and base again, at least until she packed up for Cambridge in September to start her Natural Sciences degree, and the night I'd shifted all my boxes down and agreed to split a couple lukewarm bottles between us the band had been performing. The Funhouse had been one of their patron spots, especially when they'd first started out – I guess for the sentimental value they continued to trial new material there.
Two beers wasn't enough to get either of us off our faces, but we were happy, deliriously happy that we'd finally found our way into each other's orbit again (for as long as some of us could afford to stay there) and for a group of boys who'd committed to the alternative/ indie feel and sound, their club stuff was pretty good. Tiffs and I had danced the night away behind the groupies and the fanboys, chatting loudly over the slower numbers and completely ignoring the stage presence that was going on, until the crowd disintegrated into the dance floor and pop hits blasting from the tannoys took over from the live music. We'd gone to the bathroom, come back, and on my way to the bar to order Tiffs and I two glasses of water, Jeremy had asked if I'd be interested in a drink on the house. I told him I'd assumed the water was free, and he'd laughed right in my face.
Needless to say I hadn't noticed him playing that night, but after Jeremy and I had started hanging out, and I'd attended more of their performances as a friend, not an unsuspecting audience member, I found it hard to believe I had missed them at all. Axel, the boys' frontman, was incredibly charismatic, and had a killer timbre to his voice that oozed chills whenever he sung. Camz on the keyboard was given a solo moment in every song, and Michael, the drums player from Albas Creek, could manipulate the pulse running through your very veins with the rhythms and speed he mapped out on his kit.
And Jeremy, well – Jeremy's bass was the charge that gave all the other parts meaning. He set their highs and paced their lows and gave their songs the lifeblood that they were known for. He was the heartbeat of every piece they played, and the fans absolutely adored him.
Someone told me a while back that Jeremy used to be the frontman when the band first got together. I forget who it was now, maybe Tiffs or Axel or some nameless face at one of their gigs. He'd seen them through their debuting EP, first manager and first official press shoot, when they were younger and sillier and had that reckless cheekiness that teenage girls were guaranteed to flood the venues for. He still sang on a few of the songs – backing vocals mainly, along with Camz – but he was more preoccupied with writing and producing now, putting all he had left over into the bass. Axel took on lead guitar and the centre stage, managing crowd control and fan-hyping with his salty winks and angst monologues, but from what I could tell the crossover had been quite friendly. Nobody else seemed to care, and no one had ever looked back.
We took one of the parlour rooms and hooked up a console to the flatscreen TV, the boys taking it in turn to battle each other and then Tiffs and I at the age-old curse of Mario Kart. Camz groaned and Michael swore at us, angrily mashing his console buttons, as Tiffs clipped him on a corner and I swerved my car through a secret space chute. Anna was curled up on a loveseat by the table, and Axel, impervious to the very idea of fun, was scrolling disinterestedly through his phone.
"Tiffany, ease up man," Michael grunted, baring his teeth disappointedly as he drove the wrong way up a staircase. "Thought you would o' killed your thumbs scribbling notes at that big fancy school o' yours – or are you just so smart, you don't need to write any of it down no more?"
"Eat shit Michael," she muttered, drilling through her speed boosts. She rammed him into the wall as an afterthought before speeding off along the inner lane.
"What the – FUCK, GIRL!"
"Calm down on the road rage, Mike," Axel drawled, nestling further into the sofa cushions. They'd all taken their shoes off at the front door, after feeling suitably overwhelmed by the manor's cavernous depths, and his socked feet just about brushed the armrest on the other side. "You're not doing yourself any favours."
"Shut it, Nygaard."
I snorted, just about holding back my smile as we sailed past the finish line. I allowed myself the glory of a victory cackle as Tiffs fistpumped the air, meeting me on the way back down for a high-five.
Camz forfeited almost instantly. "I hate this," he muttered, glowering sourly at the screen. "This game is bullshit."
"You're just used to smashing every button you come across like the whole world is an extension of your damn keys," Tiffs retorted. She unwound her crossed legs from off the floor and nudged him with her foot, rubbing out a crick in her neck. "Not everything needs to be bloody dominated, dude. Back off a little."
Axel convulsed under a siege of guffaws and rolled his face under a cushion. I gave his contorting body a withering stare and Camz, watching me, rolled his eyes.
"Sorry about him," he said, shooting me a grimace of apology. "His parents think he never got past the mental age of 12."
"You're his cousin; you would know." I relinquished my own controller with a smirk. "Besides, there's one in every family."
"Who's it in yours?" he asked.
"Her." Predictably enough, Tiffs and I had replied at the same time with a thumb in each other's direction.
Jeremy and Hassan walked in together a couple of seconds later. My boyfriend had asked me, explicitly, if I was okay with Hassan coming round and hanging out after he received the text message on his phone, and I hadn't been in much of a position to say no. Camz had already managed to hijack part of the afternoon to go over some chord progressions he'd refined since their rehearsal that morning, and since Tiffs and I had already agreed to host the rest of the band as well as Anna, I wouldn't have been able to fathom a reason to refuse. I also didn't want to. Hassan made me want to scratch my own eyes out – or better yet, his – but he was the closest thing Jeremy had to a brother, and that made him a parasite I would have to learn to endure.
It was hard to tell what they had been talking about; neither of them made a sound, barely made any eye contact upon re-entry, and as Hassan kicked Axel's ankles off the couch before sitting down and Jeremy shot me a smile that turned my bones to mush, I decided it wasn't really important.
"Tiffs," I said, looking back at my sister over the loveseat she was currently stood behind, "do you want to help me grab the drinks?"
"Um ... yeah, sure. What are we having?"
"Let me help her," Jeremy said, moving quickly over the floorboards like running water. "Show me the stock Tiffs. Adz; you chill out."
Tiffs and I shared a look of bafflement. "Okay."
"Awesome." Jeremy held the parlour door open for Tiffs to pass through, and then let it click quietly shut behind them
"'Adz'?" Axel asked. "What the hell is that?"
"It's a nickname," I said, glowering at him. "Short for Ada. That's kind of how nicknames work."
He seemed to ponder this for a moment, staring blankly over at the television screen, where Michael was cycling through the game selection. "Bit of a shit nickname, no? Doesn't even sound like your name."
"Better than when he calls her babe," Hassan snorted.
"That's what most people call their girlfriends," Anna shot back. "What do you call yours?"
Hassan's face clouded over in a steaming rage, and Anna and I shared a juvenile grin.
"A* delivery," I whispered as I flounced down on the furniture next to her. She passed me a handful of the throw curled up at her feet.
"I've been meaning to ask, though," she started, switching her soft voice to a murmur as the boys loaded up some sort of headshot royale game and the menu lighting switched the ambience in the room. "Tiffs' always calls you 'dee, right? Well, what's that about?"
I bit my way through a chuckle and laid my head against the frame of the loveseat. "Ada is not a name that's easy to abbreviate," I explained. "When we were little – so, like, when Tiffs was just learning to talk and stuff – Dad had gotten into the habit of calling me Addie, and I guess that was how I was first introduced to her. It took her years to wrap her head around the double syllable part. 'Dee was how I stuck."
Anna's smile was nothing short of syrup-y as she looked back at me. "That's so sweet," she sighed.
Despite the fact that neither of them had been invited into the conversation, Hassan and Axel took it upon themselves to let out a simultaneous groan. Grumbling some sort of complaint to which Hassan disgruntledly agreed, Axel's wiry head of pitch black curls slipped down to the floor to grab a controller for himself, and Hassan took the opportunity to spread his arms across the couch.
"Hass," he asked, eyes glued to the screen in front of him as Camz and Michael began shouting their heads off again, "you're sorting us out for the tour, right?"
Hassan had the decency to quirk an eyebrow in only semi-understanding. "What?"
"You know." Axel bit into the curl of his lip as he fired off a quick few rounds. I felt Anna resist the urge to scuff the loveseat with her anxiety. "Sustenance. Mind enhancers. The usual."
"Shut up Axel," Camz bit out.
"You shut up," he replied heatedly. "I can't play when I'm not at my best. This tour is the biggest thing this band's been on in the last 5 years."
"We're playing mainland UK, you twerp." Michael's lack of aggression only seemed to punctuate the shots he received to the chest, and the sigh he released as a result. "It's hardly London's O2. Calm your tits, you'll be fine."
"Well let me be the judge of that, mate, alright?" Axel's sneer took on an Alex Turner quality, which seemed to be the general direction Axel was taking these days – a right twozzock. You'd think in a room with Hassan Ruparelia in it you'd find it hard to locate a more dislikeable character. "There's a lot riding on my performance. I can't miss a beat here and there and style it out like it's syncopation." He looked back over his shoulder to lock an indictful eye with Hassan. "We'll pay you, of course."
The bat of Hassan's eyelashes was lazy, at most, but the bunching of his muscles and the twitch beneath his jaw didn't bode well for Axel's impertinence. "We'll discuss this with Jeremy," he said lowly.
"What?" Axel's chuckle was dark, and disbelieving. "Hass, man, no need to make this weird. S'only slightly stronger stuff than what you're used to. We're all adults here, why do we –"
"It's Hassan," he said curtly. "And it's my business, so I'll decide who I discuss it with." Digging his phone out of his back pocket and crossing an ankle up on his knee, he slaughtered what was left of the conversation with a quick shift of his attention. "Go back to your games little boy."
Axel looked murderous, but none of us met his gaze.
Tiffs handed me and Anna a half glass of the pitcher of lemonade she'd brought through as Jeremy chucked a can of beer at each of his bandmates' heads. As the tension wafted away with every crisp crack-open and hiss, Jeremy took up a position next to Hassan on the couch, clutching a tumbler of cold water between his fingers and laughing almost immediately at something Hassan said under his breath.
I gave up my position on the loveseat as soon as Tiffs came back into view with her own glass, crossing the room around the back of the sofa to reach the armchair on the other side. Jeremy gently grabbed my wrist.
"Hey," he asked, as I went past. "You okay?"
I pinched my eyebrows quizzically as I smiled at his concern. "Yeah," I said. "Why?"
He gave me the tiniest shake of his shake. "No reason," he mouthed, stroking the inside of my wrist with his thumb before silently letting me go.
~
It was dark, an almost blue-black in the sky, before the boys left for their respective homes. Jeremy and Camz had back-and-forthed over the musical problem they'd come up against and finally navigated a breakthrough, if their exclamations of relief and affectionate bro-slaps had been much to go by. Axel had eased off and seemed vaguely impressed by the end result, and Michael had thanked us for our patient hospitality. They cleared out of the foyer by 8 o'clock, and Anna, who'd managed to work up the confidence to ask me which bathroom she was allowed to use, got my heartwrenching instincts to escort her to the nicest one we had on the second floor.
I don't know if I would have ever seen it coming, but by the time we'd both trudged back downstairs and swung through the parlour room door in the throes of conversation, Jeremy was igniting the wicks of several candy-striped birthday candles, and Tiffs was standing behind him, looking very pleased with herself.
"Surprise!" she yelled.
Jeremy looked up from his lighter and grinned. "Gotcha."
Anna let out a squeal and a clap from besides me.
On the couch, Hassan's mainstay grimace looked both too pained and tired to be here. But I received the benevolence of some eye contact and a profound nod to mark the occasion.
"Happy birthday, Ada," he coughed out self-consciously.
"Thanks."
Tiffs quickly diverted the attention back to the matter at hand. "Dee," she whined. "The wax is beginning to drip! Blow out the candles already!"
"Aren't you supposed to sing to me first?"
"Really?" Tiffs' exasperation seemed to match the bemusement on Hassan's face. "You want us to sing to you?"
"I mean you bought me a fucking birthday cake." I examined the slightly creased fondant icing and the lines of hundreds and thousands forming the stripes of a bow across the side and top. "From ASDA."
She glanced upwards to glare at Jeremy. "I told you she'd recognise it."
"It's the only place that sells cakes on a Sunday!" Jeremy looked over at me accusingly. "And I thought you said you liked this one."
"I do." Taking my place behind the candles besides my sister and my boyfriend, I felt the flutter of something warm against my insides. "Now sing to me."
Jeremy rolled his eyes on a treacherous smile and began to conduct everyone in a tuneless song. I clapped my appreciation and ducked my head down to the flames, tucking my hair behind my ears and preparing myself for a moment I'd been waiting on with bated breath.
Please God, please Jesus – please let this year be better than the years that came before it. Please let Tiffs and I find the truest of happinesses and amount to much more than the circumstances we were given. Please let Dad be happy in heaven. And please let Jeremy get the life he so greatly desires.
Thank you. I love you. Amen.
Blowing out the candles with the biggest breath I could muster, I watched the thickset 2 and 3 disappear beneath a coil of smoke.
I looked out on the scene around me 30 minutes later. Tiffs and Anna curled up on the loveseat, Hassan lounging quite comfortably in the armchair, and me and Jeremy on the sofa at the back, my feet spread out on his lap under the blanket and his face the most relaxed I'd seen it all day. The cake was standing half-eaten on the coffee table and The Nightmare Before Christmas was playing on the television, Hassan still shovelling spoonfuls of it into his mouth from a plate as the girls whispered nervously to themselves and Jeremy nodded along and mouthed the words to Oogie Boogie's song.
Maybe it wasn't exactly where I'd seen myself a year on from my degree. But I found myself hoping now, more than ever, that wishes could really come true.
nanowrimo has been a task and a half, in case you hadn't noticed. 10 more days till the end of november and we're only at chapter 3 FMBLOODYL
thank you, thank you, thank you to anybody who's made it this far. more updates coming soon - i promise you, the plot is about to thicken incredibly
cue rajesh, aka one of my deepest melanin loves
enjoy your weekend ;) x