(no subject)
IV.
n Berlin, Paul locks himself in a bathroom and refuses to come out. Half an hour before they have to go on, and Daniel can hear the crowd like the roar of the sea. He pounds on the door and feels the sick, sore waves of panic clogging his throat.
“Paul,” he calls, and hammers on the door again. “Paul, please, can you do this some other time? Please. Paul. Paul!” He leans against the door, with its cracked green paint, cold against his temple. Silence.
“Will you at least say something so I know you haven’t died?” he calls. He’s worried enough that it doesn’t occur to him to be angry. That will come later. There’s a muffled thud and the door rattles, jarring Daniel. He jerks back. Paul must have thrown something. “Thanks,” he says sarcastically, before he can stop himself. “Paul, don’t do this now, okay? We have to be out there in like half an hour. Have all the diva moments you want afterwards, okay?”
He’s already been here for ten minutes, and he’s standing nervously in the corridor, hands clutched in his hair, when Carlos hurries past him with a bottle of whiskey in one immaculate hand.
“Carlos!” Daniel says, so relieved that he grabs him by his shirtsleeve. Carlos stops dead, looking faintly scandalised, and smiles politely. “Dan. Nice to know you’re so-”
“Shut up,” Daniel says, cutting him off. “Paul won’t come out.”
“What?”
“Of the bathroom, I mean. He’s locked himself in. We have to be on in like twenty minutes,” he says. Carlos rolls his eyes theatrically and Daniel wants to punch him. Would it kill him to pretend to not be a prick for a minute, at least?
“Well, have you told him that?”
“Of course I’ve fucking told him that,” Daniel snaps. “I’m not fucking - look, he won’t talk to me. Will you try?”
Carlos looks hesitant. He rubs his chin delicately. “Maybe you should get Sam,” he says, after a pause.
“Carlos, come on, we don’t have time. Just -” he stops, because there’s no way that he’s going to beg Carlos to do this. “Look. Just try, okay?” You fucking prick, just try, he adds savagely in his head, shocking himself a little with the force of the thought. Carlos frowns and taps his cheekbone affectedly, and then without a further word he walks to the bathroom. He knocks on the door and there’s too many people walking around now, their footsteps echoing and bouncing off the walls, for him to hear properly. He sees Carlos gesticulate wildly and thinks fuck I should have asked Sam but then the door opens and Carlos steps inside.
Five minutes later the two of them walk out, Carlos patting Paul’s shoulder awkwardly. “Thank Christ,” Daniel says to himself, but he’s thinking, why Carlos? Why not me? Why wouldn’t Paul come out when I asked him to?
What am I, chopped liver? he says to himself, mocking his own thoughts. Standing at the edge of the stage, Paul is shaking slightly and Carlos is whispering something to him rapidly. Sam, standing slightly apart, is eyeballing the two of them. The side of his face is embroidered with white from the stagelights, his mouth stitched in a grim line. As they walk out, Carlos puts a hand on Paul’s arm, squeezes hard, almost savagely.
The show that night is unremittingly awful. Paul stares out at the crowd as though he’s never seen one before, as though he stumbled onto the stage with only a vague idea of what to do. He’s off-key and off-kilter and it fucks Daniel up so much that the riffs fall apart, slipping horribly from his fingers like shards of glass. Sam and Carlos are doing their best to hold the rhythm of the songs together, but there’s only so much they can do, and Carlos gives him a poisonous, panicked look. Daniel makes his way over.
“What the fuck?” he hisses, bent over the bass, throbbing with tension.
“What the fuck yourself, I’m fucking trying,” Daniel shouts, but he feels almost like he’s going to be sick. He wants nothing more than to just walk off the stage. The lights revolve like car headlights careering towards him. “I can’t fucking help it, he’s fucked the timing up, I’m trying, I’m fucking trying, all right?” It feels like he’s stumbled backwards into a nightmare.
Carlos’ jaw is set and he forces out through gritted teeth, “Try fucking harder then.”
“Fuck you!” Daniel spits and walks off. They stumble through the rest of Stella, with Paul’s voice cracking and his fingers twisting on the neck of the guitar as though he’s trying to strangle it.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Daniel says into his ear. He wants to shake Paul. He can feel the aggression of the crowd and if he’s honest, he’s scared, scared of how they’re letting down all these people staring up at him.
“Daniel,” Paul says, and when he turns, Daniel can see a thin viscous line of blood beginning to trail out of his nose. He smiles wildly. The whites of his eyes shine with reflected rainbows. “Daniel.”
“Paul, come on,” Daniel says. “Pull it together, okay? For us. Just try and get through this, okay? Please.”
He feels so awfully, viciously exposed in front of all the thousands of eyes glaring up at him, all the people straining at the barriers like dogs. He grabs Paul’s shoulder, trying to make him focus.
“No rest for the wicked, huh, Daniel?” Paul says wildly. “Huh? No fucking rest.” His hair is greasy and hanging in his face.
“Paul,” Daniel says, because he has nothing else to say. “Please. Not here. Anywhere but here. I’m - don’t do this here. Not in front of everyone.”
And by some miracle Paul does manage to make it through the rest of the show. Walking off, Daniel has never felt so grateful to be walking away from an audience in his life, has never felt so ashamed of something he should have been proud of. He’s let everyone down horribly and now he’s just running away. He wants to go out and apologise to them all. In the fluorescent lights of the dressing room, Paul is slumped in the corner like a puppet with its strings cut, pasty and sulky looking, the dirty stain from his nosebleed smeared all over his lip. Carlos, leaning against the dresser running beneath the mirror, is dragging heavily on a cigarette, his right elbow cupped in his left hand, clutched close to him. His red tie hangs loose on his shoulders and his black shirt flaps loosely at his pale throat. Sam paces back and forth, stopping when Daniel enters the room.
“Would someone,” he says, between gritted teeth, his voice cold with forced sarcasm, “care to enlighten me about what the fuck just happened?”
Carlos blows smoke and looks at Paul, who is staring at the floor. “We’re as much in the dark as you are, Sam,” he says, silkily. If Sam expresses his anger physically, almost vibrating with its force like a badly-tuned engine, then Carlos is the opposite, internalising it all. Endothermic and exothermic. His voice is glassy and slippery, impossible to get a foothold on, thin ice over a raging river. “I assure you, I’d also love to know what the cause of that fiasco was.”
Their combined aggression is almost overwhelming, filling the room as though it were a gas chamber, and for a second Daniel has a flash of pity for Paul, sitting there with his head bowed as though in prayer. But it’s no one’s fault but his own, and Paul is the reason that his hands are still shaking slightly. Paul is jeopardising his band. “He locked himself in the bathroom,” Daniel blurts. “I was trying to-”
“Why don’t you let Paul talk for himself?” Sam interrupts, and Carlos barks with laughter, interrupting him in turn. “This is ridiculous,” he says. “We sound like his fucking parents or something.”
“This is fucking ridiculous,” Paul says, standing up. “Who the fuck do you think you are? I don’t have to sit here and listen to this.” He rights himself against the wall and stalks unsteadily out of the room, pushing past Daniel. Sam follows him quickly, slamming the door behind him, and Daniel and Carlos can hear shouting out in the corridor, made incoherent by its own reverberations in the hallway. Carlos lights another cigarette off the still-smouldering cherry of the last and exhales more smoke.
“Please don’t do that,” Daniel mutters irritably, and Carlos gives him a withering look.
“Right, because I’m the one with the problem here,” he says.
“What did you say to him? In the bathroom, I mean.”
“Nothing much,” Carlos says, and Daniel feels a sting of… jealousy, almost, because doesn’t he have a right to know? Does Carlos think that he can’t be told, or something? He frowns. Carlos exaggeratedly directs the smoke flowing from his mouth away from Daniel. “Honestly, it was the typical talk-down-the-cokehead shit, you know?” he adds.
“Not really,” Daniel says. “I’ve never seen that, I mean. He was really freaking out.”
“Well, I say talk-down-the-cokehead but really someone probably just handed him something dodgy and he took it. Even sober his sense of self-preservation is hardly something to write home about.” You can only see the tremor of Carlos’ hands very faintly. He pinches the bridge of his nose and squeezes his eyes shut. “Fuck,” he adds. “Is it just me, or was that pretty bad out there?”
“Fucking nightmare,” Daniel says. “Every second. I don’t know, Carl, I don’t want to risk another of those. It’s unprofessional and he’s letting the rest of us down. I’m hardly happy about the amount he shoves up his nose every night anyway, but it’s really not on for him to allow it to interfere with the band. He has to distinguish between personal and professional the way that the rest of us manage to. Maybe we should say something.”
“An intervention? Us?”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
Sam comes back alone, later, when Daniel and Carlos have begun to tactfully discuss something else (European country with the hottest girls: Daniel’s voting for France since Paris always seems to work its magic, Carlos, unsurprisingly, is voting Germany because the women are “fucking crazy, in the good kind of way.”)
“I’m going out. Alone,” he snaps, grabbing his jacket. “You can all go fuck yourselves, especially that dickhead.”
“Temper,” Carlos says when the door slams behind him, and Daniel laughs, but really it’s not funny.
“Well, what are we supposed to do now,” Daniel says, but he’s not really asking: he’s just filling space.
“Let’s go for a drink,” Carlos says.
*
Carlos is right: none of them are exactly in the position to begin preaching on high, so when Paul slinks in the next day, with dark blueberry stains beneath his pale blue angeleyes, nobody says anything. He plays well, that night, but Daniel doesn’t trust him anymore. It’s not so much a shift in their relationship as a revolution: no matter what faults Paul has had before, he’s always trusted him. He’s always known that Paul had the interests of the band, and therefore his interests, at heart. He doesn’t know whether Sam or Carlos trust him, either. They don’t discuss it.
*
“I thought I could fly,” Paul says vaguely. Like many of the things he says when he’s high, this could be interpreted either metaphorically or literally. Like many of the things he says when he’s high, it’s totally unclear what he’s referring to. “You know.”
“Yeah,” Daniel says, mostly to humour him. On the balcony, the only lights are the fibre-optic twinkles of the anonymous city below and the slow smoulder of Paul’s cigarette. The doors behind them are thick glass, closed tight, the people pumping slowly through the room like dark blood through the chambers of a diseased heart. Paul is leaning over the balcony, tilting his head down, his greasy, fine hair hanging limp in his face. Daniel wonders if he should maybe put a hand on the back of Paul’s coat, just in case, but he’s lost count of how many drinks he’s had and it doesn’t seem too pressing a concern.
In one of his sudden segues from bullshit philosophy to banality, he murmurs, “I’ve put on so much weight.”
“No you haven’t,” Daniel lies, trying his best to be convincing.
“Yeah,” Paul says. He has this habit of agreeing with someone just before he contradicts them. “No, I have.”
“You’re also drinking a lot more,” Daniel says, and then hastily adds, before Paul can get defensive, “Like the rest of us, I mean. But that’s probably it.”
“That guy gave me some dodgy coke back there.”
“I doubt that was it. Not unless it was cut with, like, peanut butter.”
“Fuck off, Dan,” Paul says, but he’s smiling, lopsided like a beach-house on an abandoned shore. “I mean back there. That’s why I thought I could fly. But it was kind of horrible, too. I didn’t really want to fly. But I was going to float away whether I wanted to or not.”
Conversations with Paul late at night are always circular, twisted affairs. Daniel has always been curious as to whether Paul is deliberately this oblique or if his mind genuinely works this way, winds around ideas haphazardly like a vine around a trellis. Carlos, for his part, thinks it’s bullshit - “Fuck, most of the time he’s too blunt, and then suddenly he has a few drinks and turns into Mr Poet? I don’t think so” - but Daniel, if he’s honest, has always enjoyed this trait of Paul’s, this meandering, looping thought so different to his own. He doesn’t care much if it’s an act.
“Sam got it for me. The shit he normally gets is good, but I don’t know, this time.”
“Maybe you should stop doing that,” Daniel says, referring to the way that Paul is hanging over the balcony, like a coked-up Juliet reaching for her Romeo. His cigarette’s almost burned out.
“I always think that city lights are like that art thing. You know? What’s it called. With the dots. When the picture doesn’t make sense close up.”
“Impressionism?”
“Close. Not really. The other thing. I can’t think of it.”
“Pointillism?” Daniel says, dredging up vague memories of French art galleries from the sludge of his childhood.
“That’s it. The lights are like that. If you can only get far away enough they make a picture that makes sense. Like life. Don’t you think?”
“Not really,” Daniel says, necking from his bottle. Then he realises he sounds like Carlos - i.e. like a douche - and tries to explain. “Life makes sense to me like this. I mean, yeah, everyone needs perspective, but for me, I don’t have a problem making sense of life. But you have to do it yourself. You have to make your own sense of life. If you expect the world to do it for you then you’re fucked. You can’t just - read it somewhere.”
“I don’t know,” Paul says softly, after a pause, still watching the lights through the pale fall of his own hair. “I just think maybe if I could get far away enough I could see the picture, but then I think, where could I go? What if there isn’t even a picture? I try get away but I can’t go anywhere. But at the same time I have to go. I always have to go. I don’t even know where I am. Where the fuck are we?”
“Who the fuck knows,” Daniel says wearily, because it seems like they’ve been on tour forever and even he loses track at times. “It’s all the same place, Paul, you should know that by now. And come down from that balcony before you fall and break your fucking neck.”
Paul doesn’t move, and Daniel sinks down, sits on the cold cement of the balcony with his back against the icy glass, next to Paul’s legs, watching the people with faces like angelfish float through the rooms. He only has a limited tolerance for Paul when he’s in a mood like this, self-pitying and melancholic, but he stays through a sense of duty, and pragmatism - he can’t let his singer die, after all.
“It feels like flying. The dizziness, I mean,” Paul says finally. “From leaning over.”
“I thought you didn’t like flying,” Daniel says, bored, finishing his beer.
“Not that kind. The good kind. When you get to see the picture.”
“Assuming there is one.”
Paul doesn’t reply, instead turning around to sit next to Daniel, their backs against the glass wall of the balcony. His bare hands are clasped together, blotched purple and pink from the cold, like the inside of a shell. They seem so pale and fragile next to the heavy black sleeve of his coat, and Daniel has the sudden and fleeting urge to take one of his hands, to cradle it in his warm and functional hands, to snap Paul out of - whatever this is. Paul stares straight ahead, at the people indoors. But at the same time there’s still that wariness there, that reluctance to actually touch failure, or what is rapidly manifesting the potential for failure - that fastidiousness that Daniel has always had, that need to keep himself clean. He stares deliberately ahead, as well, and ignores any signals, any real need Paul might be exhibiting now for help. Whatever invitation may have been issued in the silence is lost. “Come on,” Daniel says, “It’s cold. Let’s go back inside.”
*
In the morning he sort of regrets not saying anything, but is perversely pleased at the same time. He’s got enough problems after all. It’s difficult enough fighting battles with Paul, let alone fighting his battles. And maybe Daniel could have done that once, but not anymore. Much as he hates to admit it, he’s become more selfish: maybe four years ago he would have offered to take on Paul’s issues, but not now, not now. There’s even a little part of him that resents Paul for attempting to offload his troubles onto Daniel, even if it was a very tentative attempt, and a failure at that. But the point is that Daniel is becoming increasingly sick of being the nice guy. He doesn’t recall signing a contract to be the nice guy. He doesn’t remember any sort of agreement. He doesn’t remember agreeing to the set of rules that allows Paul to drink himself into a stupor and Sam to lose his temper over trivial things and Carlos to go and get fucked up and him to have to clean up after them all. And he’s sick of it. He wants to be a nice guy, yeah, but he doesn’t want to be taken advantage of. But it’s happening all the same. Every day Sam is a little less patient and Carlos a little more arrogant and Paul, well, Paul just gets more and more fucked up. And every day he tries to get them to just cooperate, to make his life a little easier. Every day he fails.
Sam hands Paul a postcard: “This is for you,” he says, puzzled. It’s a postcard of Blackpool, and instead of a message, there is only a drawing of two little birds. Paul looks at it for a long moment, an expression of surprise and almost-happiness flickering through the shutters of his face like an imprisoned grandmother waving at the windows. Then his eyebrows knit and he carefully folds the postcard and rips it up, putting the neat, even squares of cardboard in his pocket. Daniel asks him later, who was it?
No one important, Paul says. Mind your own business.
title: no rest for the wicked (iv)
warnings: etc etc
a/n: sorry about the delay!
n Berlin, Paul locks himself in a bathroom and refuses to come out. Half an hour before they have to go on, and Daniel can hear the crowd like the roar of the sea. He pounds on the door and feels the sick, sore waves of panic clogging his throat.
“Paul,” he calls, and hammers on the door again. “Paul, please, can you do this some other time? Please. Paul. Paul!” He leans against the door, with its cracked green paint, cold against his temple. Silence.
“Will you at least say something so I know you haven’t died?” he calls. He’s worried enough that it doesn’t occur to him to be angry. That will come later. There’s a muffled thud and the door rattles, jarring Daniel. He jerks back. Paul must have thrown something. “Thanks,” he says sarcastically, before he can stop himself. “Paul, don’t do this now, okay? We have to be out there in like half an hour. Have all the diva moments you want afterwards, okay?”
He’s already been here for ten minutes, and he’s standing nervously in the corridor, hands clutched in his hair, when Carlos hurries past him with a bottle of whiskey in one immaculate hand.
“Carlos!” Daniel says, so relieved that he grabs him by his shirtsleeve. Carlos stops dead, looking faintly scandalised, and smiles politely. “Dan. Nice to know you’re so-”
“Shut up,” Daniel says, cutting him off. “Paul won’t come out.”
“What?”
“Of the bathroom, I mean. He’s locked himself in. We have to be on in like twenty minutes,” he says. Carlos rolls his eyes theatrically and Daniel wants to punch him. Would it kill him to pretend to not be a prick for a minute, at least?
“Well, have you told him that?”
“Of course I’ve fucking told him that,” Daniel snaps. “I’m not fucking - look, he won’t talk to me. Will you try?”
Carlos looks hesitant. He rubs his chin delicately. “Maybe you should get Sam,” he says, after a pause.
“Carlos, come on, we don’t have time. Just -” he stops, because there’s no way that he’s going to beg Carlos to do this. “Look. Just try, okay?” You fucking prick, just try, he adds savagely in his head, shocking himself a little with the force of the thought. Carlos frowns and taps his cheekbone affectedly, and then without a further word he walks to the bathroom. He knocks on the door and there’s too many people walking around now, their footsteps echoing and bouncing off the walls, for him to hear properly. He sees Carlos gesticulate wildly and thinks fuck I should have asked Sam but then the door opens and Carlos steps inside.
Five minutes later the two of them walk out, Carlos patting Paul’s shoulder awkwardly. “Thank Christ,” Daniel says to himself, but he’s thinking, why Carlos? Why not me? Why wouldn’t Paul come out when I asked him to?
What am I, chopped liver? he says to himself, mocking his own thoughts. Standing at the edge of the stage, Paul is shaking slightly and Carlos is whispering something to him rapidly. Sam, standing slightly apart, is eyeballing the two of them. The side of his face is embroidered with white from the stagelights, his mouth stitched in a grim line. As they walk out, Carlos puts a hand on Paul’s arm, squeezes hard, almost savagely.
The show that night is unremittingly awful. Paul stares out at the crowd as though he’s never seen one before, as though he stumbled onto the stage with only a vague idea of what to do. He’s off-key and off-kilter and it fucks Daniel up so much that the riffs fall apart, slipping horribly from his fingers like shards of glass. Sam and Carlos are doing their best to hold the rhythm of the songs together, but there’s only so much they can do, and Carlos gives him a poisonous, panicked look. Daniel makes his way over.
“What the fuck?” he hisses, bent over the bass, throbbing with tension.
“What the fuck yourself, I’m fucking trying,” Daniel shouts, but he feels almost like he’s going to be sick. He wants nothing more than to just walk off the stage. The lights revolve like car headlights careering towards him. “I can’t fucking help it, he’s fucked the timing up, I’m trying, I’m fucking trying, all right?” It feels like he’s stumbled backwards into a nightmare.
Carlos’ jaw is set and he forces out through gritted teeth, “Try fucking harder then.”
“Fuck you!” Daniel spits and walks off. They stumble through the rest of Stella, with Paul’s voice cracking and his fingers twisting on the neck of the guitar as though he’s trying to strangle it.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Daniel says into his ear. He wants to shake Paul. He can feel the aggression of the crowd and if he’s honest, he’s scared, scared of how they’re letting down all these people staring up at him.
“Daniel,” Paul says, and when he turns, Daniel can see a thin viscous line of blood beginning to trail out of his nose. He smiles wildly. The whites of his eyes shine with reflected rainbows. “Daniel.”
“Paul, come on,” Daniel says. “Pull it together, okay? For us. Just try and get through this, okay? Please.”
He feels so awfully, viciously exposed in front of all the thousands of eyes glaring up at him, all the people straining at the barriers like dogs. He grabs Paul’s shoulder, trying to make him focus.
“No rest for the wicked, huh, Daniel?” Paul says wildly. “Huh? No fucking rest.” His hair is greasy and hanging in his face.
“Paul,” Daniel says, because he has nothing else to say. “Please. Not here. Anywhere but here. I’m - don’t do this here. Not in front of everyone.”
And by some miracle Paul does manage to make it through the rest of the show. Walking off, Daniel has never felt so grateful to be walking away from an audience in his life, has never felt so ashamed of something he should have been proud of. He’s let everyone down horribly and now he’s just running away. He wants to go out and apologise to them all. In the fluorescent lights of the dressing room, Paul is slumped in the corner like a puppet with its strings cut, pasty and sulky looking, the dirty stain from his nosebleed smeared all over his lip. Carlos, leaning against the dresser running beneath the mirror, is dragging heavily on a cigarette, his right elbow cupped in his left hand, clutched close to him. His red tie hangs loose on his shoulders and his black shirt flaps loosely at his pale throat. Sam paces back and forth, stopping when Daniel enters the room.
“Would someone,” he says, between gritted teeth, his voice cold with forced sarcasm, “care to enlighten me about what the fuck just happened?”
Carlos blows smoke and looks at Paul, who is staring at the floor. “We’re as much in the dark as you are, Sam,” he says, silkily. If Sam expresses his anger physically, almost vibrating with its force like a badly-tuned engine, then Carlos is the opposite, internalising it all. Endothermic and exothermic. His voice is glassy and slippery, impossible to get a foothold on, thin ice over a raging river. “I assure you, I’d also love to know what the cause of that fiasco was.”
Their combined aggression is almost overwhelming, filling the room as though it were a gas chamber, and for a second Daniel has a flash of pity for Paul, sitting there with his head bowed as though in prayer. But it’s no one’s fault but his own, and Paul is the reason that his hands are still shaking slightly. Paul is jeopardising his band. “He locked himself in the bathroom,” Daniel blurts. “I was trying to-”
“Why don’t you let Paul talk for himself?” Sam interrupts, and Carlos barks with laughter, interrupting him in turn. “This is ridiculous,” he says. “We sound like his fucking parents or something.”
“This is fucking ridiculous,” Paul says, standing up. “Who the fuck do you think you are? I don’t have to sit here and listen to this.” He rights himself against the wall and stalks unsteadily out of the room, pushing past Daniel. Sam follows him quickly, slamming the door behind him, and Daniel and Carlos can hear shouting out in the corridor, made incoherent by its own reverberations in the hallway. Carlos lights another cigarette off the still-smouldering cherry of the last and exhales more smoke.
“Please don’t do that,” Daniel mutters irritably, and Carlos gives him a withering look.
“Right, because I’m the one with the problem here,” he says.
“What did you say to him? In the bathroom, I mean.”
“Nothing much,” Carlos says, and Daniel feels a sting of… jealousy, almost, because doesn’t he have a right to know? Does Carlos think that he can’t be told, or something? He frowns. Carlos exaggeratedly directs the smoke flowing from his mouth away from Daniel. “Honestly, it was the typical talk-down-the-cokehead shit, you know?” he adds.
“Not really,” Daniel says. “I’ve never seen that, I mean. He was really freaking out.”
“Well, I say talk-down-the-cokehead but really someone probably just handed him something dodgy and he took it. Even sober his sense of self-preservation is hardly something to write home about.” You can only see the tremor of Carlos’ hands very faintly. He pinches the bridge of his nose and squeezes his eyes shut. “Fuck,” he adds. “Is it just me, or was that pretty bad out there?”
“Fucking nightmare,” Daniel says. “Every second. I don’t know, Carl, I don’t want to risk another of those. It’s unprofessional and he’s letting the rest of us down. I’m hardly happy about the amount he shoves up his nose every night anyway, but it’s really not on for him to allow it to interfere with the band. He has to distinguish between personal and professional the way that the rest of us manage to. Maybe we should say something.”
“An intervention? Us?”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
Sam comes back alone, later, when Daniel and Carlos have begun to tactfully discuss something else (European country with the hottest girls: Daniel’s voting for France since Paris always seems to work its magic, Carlos, unsurprisingly, is voting Germany because the women are “fucking crazy, in the good kind of way.”)
“I’m going out. Alone,” he snaps, grabbing his jacket. “You can all go fuck yourselves, especially that dickhead.”
“Temper,” Carlos says when the door slams behind him, and Daniel laughs, but really it’s not funny.
“Well, what are we supposed to do now,” Daniel says, but he’s not really asking: he’s just filling space.
“Let’s go for a drink,” Carlos says.
*
Carlos is right: none of them are exactly in the position to begin preaching on high, so when Paul slinks in the next day, with dark blueberry stains beneath his pale blue angeleyes, nobody says anything. He plays well, that night, but Daniel doesn’t trust him anymore. It’s not so much a shift in their relationship as a revolution: no matter what faults Paul has had before, he’s always trusted him. He’s always known that Paul had the interests of the band, and therefore his interests, at heart. He doesn’t know whether Sam or Carlos trust him, either. They don’t discuss it.
*
“I thought I could fly,” Paul says vaguely. Like many of the things he says when he’s high, this could be interpreted either metaphorically or literally. Like many of the things he says when he’s high, it’s totally unclear what he’s referring to. “You know.”
“Yeah,” Daniel says, mostly to humour him. On the balcony, the only lights are the fibre-optic twinkles of the anonymous city below and the slow smoulder of Paul’s cigarette. The doors behind them are thick glass, closed tight, the people pumping slowly through the room like dark blood through the chambers of a diseased heart. Paul is leaning over the balcony, tilting his head down, his greasy, fine hair hanging limp in his face. Daniel wonders if he should maybe put a hand on the back of Paul’s coat, just in case, but he’s lost count of how many drinks he’s had and it doesn’t seem too pressing a concern.
In one of his sudden segues from bullshit philosophy to banality, he murmurs, “I’ve put on so much weight.”
“No you haven’t,” Daniel lies, trying his best to be convincing.
“Yeah,” Paul says. He has this habit of agreeing with someone just before he contradicts them. “No, I have.”
“You’re also drinking a lot more,” Daniel says, and then hastily adds, before Paul can get defensive, “Like the rest of us, I mean. But that’s probably it.”
“That guy gave me some dodgy coke back there.”
“I doubt that was it. Not unless it was cut with, like, peanut butter.”
“Fuck off, Dan,” Paul says, but he’s smiling, lopsided like a beach-house on an abandoned shore. “I mean back there. That’s why I thought I could fly. But it was kind of horrible, too. I didn’t really want to fly. But I was going to float away whether I wanted to or not.”
Conversations with Paul late at night are always circular, twisted affairs. Daniel has always been curious as to whether Paul is deliberately this oblique or if his mind genuinely works this way, winds around ideas haphazardly like a vine around a trellis. Carlos, for his part, thinks it’s bullshit - “Fuck, most of the time he’s too blunt, and then suddenly he has a few drinks and turns into Mr Poet? I don’t think so” - but Daniel, if he’s honest, has always enjoyed this trait of Paul’s, this meandering, looping thought so different to his own. He doesn’t care much if it’s an act.
“Sam got it for me. The shit he normally gets is good, but I don’t know, this time.”
“Maybe you should stop doing that,” Daniel says, referring to the way that Paul is hanging over the balcony, like a coked-up Juliet reaching for her Romeo. His cigarette’s almost burned out.
“I always think that city lights are like that art thing. You know? What’s it called. With the dots. When the picture doesn’t make sense close up.”
“Impressionism?”
“Close. Not really. The other thing. I can’t think of it.”
“Pointillism?” Daniel says, dredging up vague memories of French art galleries from the sludge of his childhood.
“That’s it. The lights are like that. If you can only get far away enough they make a picture that makes sense. Like life. Don’t you think?”
“Not really,” Daniel says, necking from his bottle. Then he realises he sounds like Carlos - i.e. like a douche - and tries to explain. “Life makes sense to me like this. I mean, yeah, everyone needs perspective, but for me, I don’t have a problem making sense of life. But you have to do it yourself. You have to make your own sense of life. If you expect the world to do it for you then you’re fucked. You can’t just - read it somewhere.”
“I don’t know,” Paul says softly, after a pause, still watching the lights through the pale fall of his own hair. “I just think maybe if I could get far away enough I could see the picture, but then I think, where could I go? What if there isn’t even a picture? I try get away but I can’t go anywhere. But at the same time I have to go. I always have to go. I don’t even know where I am. Where the fuck are we?”
“Who the fuck knows,” Daniel says wearily, because it seems like they’ve been on tour forever and even he loses track at times. “It’s all the same place, Paul, you should know that by now. And come down from that balcony before you fall and break your fucking neck.”
Paul doesn’t move, and Daniel sinks down, sits on the cold cement of the balcony with his back against the icy glass, next to Paul’s legs, watching the people with faces like angelfish float through the rooms. He only has a limited tolerance for Paul when he’s in a mood like this, self-pitying and melancholic, but he stays through a sense of duty, and pragmatism - he can’t let his singer die, after all.
“It feels like flying. The dizziness, I mean,” Paul says finally. “From leaning over.”
“I thought you didn’t like flying,” Daniel says, bored, finishing his beer.
“Not that kind. The good kind. When you get to see the picture.”
“Assuming there is one.”
Paul doesn’t reply, instead turning around to sit next to Daniel, their backs against the glass wall of the balcony. His bare hands are clasped together, blotched purple and pink from the cold, like the inside of a shell. They seem so pale and fragile next to the heavy black sleeve of his coat, and Daniel has the sudden and fleeting urge to take one of his hands, to cradle it in his warm and functional hands, to snap Paul out of - whatever this is. Paul stares straight ahead, at the people indoors. But at the same time there’s still that wariness there, that reluctance to actually touch failure, or what is rapidly manifesting the potential for failure - that fastidiousness that Daniel has always had, that need to keep himself clean. He stares deliberately ahead, as well, and ignores any signals, any real need Paul might be exhibiting now for help. Whatever invitation may have been issued in the silence is lost. “Come on,” Daniel says, “It’s cold. Let’s go back inside.”
*
In the morning he sort of regrets not saying anything, but is perversely pleased at the same time. He’s got enough problems after all. It’s difficult enough fighting battles with Paul, let alone fighting his battles. And maybe Daniel could have done that once, but not anymore. Much as he hates to admit it, he’s become more selfish: maybe four years ago he would have offered to take on Paul’s issues, but not now, not now. There’s even a little part of him that resents Paul for attempting to offload his troubles onto Daniel, even if it was a very tentative attempt, and a failure at that. But the point is that Daniel is becoming increasingly sick of being the nice guy. He doesn’t recall signing a contract to be the nice guy. He doesn’t remember any sort of agreement. He doesn’t remember agreeing to the set of rules that allows Paul to drink himself into a stupor and Sam to lose his temper over trivial things and Carlos to go and get fucked up and him to have to clean up after them all. And he’s sick of it. He wants to be a nice guy, yeah, but he doesn’t want to be taken advantage of. But it’s happening all the same. Every day Sam is a little less patient and Carlos a little more arrogant and Paul, well, Paul just gets more and more fucked up. And every day he tries to get them to just cooperate, to make his life a little easier. Every day he fails.
Sam hands Paul a postcard: “This is for you,” he says, puzzled. It’s a postcard of Blackpool, and instead of a message, there is only a drawing of two little birds. Paul looks at it for a long moment, an expression of surprise and almost-happiness flickering through the shutters of his face like an imprisoned grandmother waving at the windows. Then his eyebrows knit and he carefully folds the postcard and rips it up, putting the neat, even squares of cardboard in his pocket. Daniel asks him later, who was it?
No one important, Paul says. Mind your own business.
title: no rest for the wicked (iv)
warnings: etc etc
a/n: sorry about the delay!