Page 110 of All Right No

-27-

7thFebruary, Belarus.

Beneath the stands of that evening’s venue was both dusty and uncomfortable, two things Ash foresaw as guaranteeing him some solitude. Three weeks on from his birthday, he still had a killer hangover, and was heartily fed up of being asked how he was.

At an all-time low, fuckwit!

It was kind of obvious if you bothered to think about it. How the hell else did anybody feel after their girlfriend announced she was hitched to someone else right after they’d proposed to her in front of the world?

And hell no, a pill or two wouldn’t help. He’d been offered more pharmaceuticals over the last month than there were swear words in his vocabulary. Obviously, he’d refused them all. There weren’t any cures, medicinal, magical or otherwise that would stop him from feeling like shit.

Nothing could make this better.

Nothing except perhaps Ginny herself arriving to tell him it was all a nightmare, and it was okay to wake up now, he’d just taken another unscheduled trip to the hospital.

“Is that you down there, Mr. Gore?”

A shadow blotted out the sunlight, streaming between the slats in the seating.

Ash looked up to find Xane peering down at him through one of those slats. He had to be lying flat on his stomach to have got his eye so close to the gap.

“I’m coming down.”

Please don’t.

For a second or two, he actually contemplated making a swift exit to somewhere else, but if Xane was insistent upon them talking, he’d only pursue him to whatever new location he found. So, he waited, and waited…

It took Black Halo’s lead singer several minutes to find his way under the seating, and then to negotiate the obstacles to reach Ash’s perch upon one of the wooden support beams. His friend was sporting a tight black T-shirt, that read: “YES, I’M BI. NO, I DON’T WANT TO FUCK YOU. GET OVER IT.”

“Does that help get the message across?” Ash asked. Xane had been getting no end of crap about his sexuality ever since Elspeth’s kiss and tell reveal with Bang! Magazine back in the summer.

“It saves my voice.”

He secured a perch on the beam running parallel to Ash’s.

“What do you want?” Ash asked.

“You…committed to the band. Moping isn’t going to fix anything.”

Great, he was about to get a lecture on getting over it, when there was no getting over it. “I’m not moping,” he huffed. “I’m grieving. It’s what you do when you lose something…someone.”

He was outright broken.

Xane’s lips curled. “Ash, I know emo bullshit when I see it, and currently you’re it. Seriously, you’re so it you could give the Angst Brothers lessons on how to be miserable twenty-four seven.”

The Angst Bros. were some new outfit who were flavour of the month with the under-eighteen’s crowd. They dressed like new romantics, wore their hair long and their pretty boy hearts on their sleeves, and probably cried into their pillows every night over the injustice of them failing to get laid. Ash hadn’t decided if they were serious or merely taking the piss while milking it in download sales.

“Look, I know what happened, Ash, and I agree it was shit, and not only that, it was shit on top of a year of other shit, but ultimately, this is the ending you chose. So, either live with it or do something to change it.”

“In what way is this what I chose?” he snarled. “I proposed, Xane. If I chose anything it was to commit to a happily ever after with a woman I loved and whom I thought loved me.”

“She does.” Xane threw out as if it were an established fact.

Ash huffed dismissively, ’cause the way he saw it, that wasn’t a given. “She’s married to someone else. A fact she conveniently omitted to mention.”

“But not out of malice,” Xane said reasonably, as if that made everything forgivable. “She was trying to protect you. And it’s not like her and Miles are together. She hadn’t even seen him in years.”

Ash shook his head so much his brain seemed to rattle. Whatever happened to the concept of your friends being willing to take your side? “She lied, Xane. She told me big fat porkies, and lots of ’em.”