Page 3 of When We Were Young

Liv

What just happened? Through the shattered windscreen, I see a lamppost embedded in the car bonnet.

Mum is saying Are you okay? over and over as pain seeps across my shoulder and chest. ‘Liv, answer me, please! Are you okay?’

‘Yeah… I think so. What happened?’

Blood trickles from her eyebrow in a thick red line. She drops her head into her hands, spreading the blood around, making me feel sick. ‘I don’t know… I got distracted.’

‘You’ve cut your head,’ I tell her, but she ignores me.

‘That music… that song… I knew him.’

‘Who? What are you talking about?’

‘I can’t listen to that…’

Steam hisses from under the bonnet. We should get out.

I stumble around the back of the car and help her out, but as soon as we reach the pavement, she sinks to her knees in tears. She’s freaking me out. Maybe she has concussion.

‘Should I call an ambulance?’ I ask.

She’s crying uncontrollably now. ‘No… I’m okay.’

She’s not okay.

My hands tremble as I take out my phone and call Grandad. He’s calm. He tells me not to worry, they’ll be here in a minute.

I find a pack of tissues in my pocket. ‘Here, put some pressure on.’

I sit down beside her and put my arm around her. It’s weird, me taking care of her for a change. My throat aches and I fight the urge to cry. We sit there, me rubbing her back while her shoulders shake in silence.

‘Mum,’ I say after a while, ‘did you say you knew Will Bailey?’

Her face is a mess of tears, snot, and blood. She nods.

I open my mouth to ask the first of a million questions, but my grandparents pull up and I don’t get the chance.

‘That doesn’t look like public health in the Middle Ages,’ Chloe says, sitting down beside me and shoving me with her hip. I shriek and everyone in the library looks over. ‘Sorry! I forgot about your ribs. How are they?’

I roll my eyes at her. ‘Sore.’

At A&E last night, Mum was treated for whiplash and had her eyebrow glued. They told me my ribs and collarbone were bruised from the seatbelt, but it feels way worse than just ‘bruised’.

‘So, what is that?’ Chloe asks, pointing to my laptop. I scroll to the top of the Wikipedia page. ‘Will Bailey? Who’s he?’

‘I was playing one of his songs in the car when we crashed. Mum was crying afterwards. She said she knew him.’

Chloe scrolls to the picture of Bailey.

‘He’s hot. Wait, do you think she was a groupie?’ She giggles. ‘What does he look like now?’

‘He’s dead.’

She grabs my arm. ‘No!’

‘He was twenty-six. Says here “drowning and undetermined factors”. Whatever that means.’

‘That’s so sad… How well did your mum know him?’

A sixth-form girl at the end of our table glares at us, so I lower my voice. ‘I don’t know. After the crash, she said she knew him and later, she said she didn’t know what I was talking about.’

‘She hit her head, didn’t she? Maybe she was confused?’

‘I asked my grandparents about him. They gave each other this look, then said they’d never heard of him.’

‘What’s the big secret?’

‘I don’t know.’ I tell her. ‘But I want to find out.’

Chloe reads the Wikipedia entry: ‘William Oscar Bailey (25th November 1972–29th July 1999) was an English singer, songwriter, and guitarist. In 1996, Bailey released what would be his only album, Fragments . It reached number one in the UK and number three in the US.’

‘Can you imagine my mum hanging out with someone like Will Bailey? Not likely.’

We tap away at our laptops for half an hour, and I’ve just found out what trepanning is when Chloe nudges me.

‘Look at this,’ she says.

My screen’s filled with historical engravings of people having holes drilled into their heads, but Chloe is on YouTube with her earphones in. We must have slipped into an alternate reality where our roles are reversed. She hands me one of her earphones and plays the video.

‘Is that the Pyramid Stage?’ I ask, recognising its iconic shape. ‘Will Bailey played Glastonbury?’

‘Yeah, in 1997. It’s daytime, though, he’s not headlining or anything.’

The camera pans across the vast undulating ocean of people stretching as far as the horizon. It zooms in on the singer’s face, his eyes gleaming as he looks out at the scene before him. He pauses before strumming his guitar and the crowd roars.

When Bailey sings, his voice is as incredible live as it is on the recorded tracks. The camera angle switches to the side of the stage, showing a group of people watching from the wings.

‘There!’ Chloe points to a girl dancing, her arms raised over her head.

Bailey launches into the chorus, serenading the dancing girl. She beams at him. I feel a goofy smile form on my face, but it’s removed by a sudden slap of recognition.

‘Oh my God!’ I gasp. ‘That’s my mum!’

‘I knew it!’

The girl remains in shot for a full five seconds before the focus switches to Bailey’s fingers on his plectrum.

‘Do they show her again?’ I ask.

‘No, that’s it, but he keeps looking her way. It’s her, right?’ Chloe scrolls backwards, finds the shot and pauses.

‘I think so.’ I’ve never seen her look like that, happy and carefree. She’s beautiful. I’ve never thought of my mum as beautiful before. And I can’t imagine her ever going to a festival, let alone dancing in the wings of the Pyramid Stage. It can’t be her. My mind’s spinning.

‘Will you ask her?’

‘She’d say it’s not her. And the way my grandparents reacted… they were covering something up. Why would she say she knew him one minute and deny it the next?’

Chloe plays the video again.

Bailey closes his eyes and sings:

Here she comes in a cloud of yellow feathers

Can we ever be together?

There’s always something in the way.

Here she comes, all around her yellow feathers

It’s an image that I’ll treasure

And now they’re dragging me away.