Cold Water

Cold Water

An experiment

It's so noisy out there. They're cheering for me. I'm sure they are, they're chanting something and it must be my name, but suddenly I don't want it to be, it can't possibly be mine. Not with everything that happened to Conor.

They expect something of me and I don't know if I have it. Look at them all - a sea of faces, eager eyes. I can see every individual face, every one watching me, following me, and to most that would be enough to scare the hell out of them.

But I'm not focusing on them, I can't connect with them. I walk out at bullet-point, I can't turn my back on this even if I want to.

I keep going toward the piano, because I always start on the piano, howl the words into the microphone, but I don't want to touch it. I swear it'll eat me. I can't touch it because it can't be possible that I'm good at this, because I know where I learned it, I learned it from my mother, God-rest and so on, but I'm not supposed to know that, I'm not supposed to remember her and everything that she was, that happened to me, that made me.

The spotlights are so piercingly hot but there's a cold sweat on my brow, they're blinding and surround the piano, the ridiculous, terrifying thing. I want to run, I can feel my legs pulling me away, I want yell at everyone, warn them all away from myself, but nothing comes out, my voice doesn't work, and besides, I can't spook the audience.

I don't realise my knees are giving way, almost collapse under the dead-weight of myself, until I hear a muffled, collective gasp; they know something's wrong. I'm trying so hard to look perfect, straighten myself as if fame makes someone immune to this plague that catches up with you. But I've never had a good poker-face.

I feel terrible. I took something to zone out before I got on stage, but I shouldn't have taken so much because I could curl up on the stage, right here, and fall asleep.
I have to focus. I have to perform. I have to bring in the money or I'm a dead man.

The piano was never my first love - it feels more like an affair; I abandonded this for a reason years ago because the sound of it was sour in my ears knowing the last place I played this was when my mother was alive and the last place I heard it was the day she died.

She taught me how to play and put the beauty in its music; I couldn't understand the craft when there was nothing tangible about it. A painting held a thousand words, I could express so much by deepening the greys and heightening the colours, I could see them before I created them. There was nothing visual about the piano, I couldn't see the notes or understand how to hear them.

But she taught me well, and I did fall in love with it, and when the sounds connected together like paint-strokes and I could start to see them, I could be even more secretive and say things only I could understand, express how I felt about Rosalina without her knowing she was so important to me.

Now I hate it. It destroys me.

I've always tried to use emotions, experiences, to write songs; usually it empties me of the feeling and I have peace for a short while. But after so many I'm starting to run out of words, of things to play, and it's catching up on me. It keeps me awake and runs like a motor behind my eyes, humming in my chest, so that it becomes duty, slavery.

Rosie says I've lost weight, my cheeks have sunken and my eyes have begun to darken, and they have, I'm melting away. I can feel the words of songs taking over my head, I can't think of anything else. I can't talk to Rosie or say any other words than songs that I don't even want to sing. Because if I do it makes me remember things, if I say anything else I'll start to remember the rest, and it's already too much.

My mother died when I was young. She was murdered, I saw it. I don't know who did it, and I don't want to. Above all else I can't know that, not even the flicker of his eyes or the smirk I know he had. I can't sing about that, can I?

I finally take my place at the piano and hold my fingers over the keys - trembling, there's a blue crawling into my skin, but all I can see is blood on them. I'm convinced if I stare at them long enough I'll start to play and everything will go back to normal, my mind will go quiet, the people I have come to imagine will dissapear from the stage.

But it's not working.

Caleb - still my best friend - has decided he wants a duet and sits next to me, there's laughter and liquor on his breath, but I've created him. The liquor could be on my own breath, and in a minute I know I'll tell no one to leave in front of fifteen thousand people, but if I can just touch the keys it'll go quiet, it always does.

My fingers are so close to the keys I can sense their smoothness, I can hear the song phantom in my ears, I know which one I should be playing. I can even feel the words, electric in my throat.

I take a breath to exhale them into the microphone and wait for my fingers to respond, but Caleb joins in, he presses a few high keys down -  the soft whisper of what my máthair would play before I fell asleep. Her last words before she fell.

No one will know this song. But I have to play it. They won't like it.

Paul is eyeing me stage-left, horrified; it's not in the set-list, he can't re-organise his hours of hard work, and I should tell him I'm sorry, but I don't think I am.

Caleb knows every note of this song, the thing I've been slaving to exhume for years; it comes back to me in torrents, his fingers merge into mine, become mine, he lets me finish it myself. I almost want to stop but I'm fused to the piano resonating with memory, again my mind is tearing away but my heart is glued to the rise and fall of shivering notes. Even the words find their way to my tongue again, twenty-two year old words, and with them I remember what they meant to her, how she was so sure they'd protect me.

It was a sirenic song, beautiful when she used to play it but I've begun to loathe it, it sounds bitter now, the words despairing behind their mask of pretty poetry. The song flows round about the same rhythm as my heart beat now is, even as the notes change and it begins to breathe with life, the sharp voice that forces its way deep from a well of years of forgotten terror with painful clarity - I never hated and loved this piano as much as now.

Soon I can't see the stage, I can't feel my fingers, can hardly hear the crescendo that builds - the dying passion begins to give its last twitch, tries to protect me from the memory that makes me grow young, to a child.

I'm not here. I'm vanishing, falling away into the blinding flashes of some locked room I've kept shut for a reason and don't want to visit.

There she is... I see her dancing - she loved to dance - hair flickering about her fair Irish skin. But I know she stops dancing, she stops dancing through the snow in some sugary bliss, on a  frightening high. She stops because she's said goodbye to me and reached the icy stone steps reaching into the mouth of the cathedral. So serious now, trying to be formal, the sobriety she came here to find starting to embrace her. Her grace abandons her eyes and bleeds onto the steps in just a handful of moments.

I was supposed to stay where she told me.

But she promised she'd be back.

She was only taking a moment too long, and I disobeyed her, I snuck around the back, I wandered past the forgotten souls buried centuries earlier. She came out of the back door and I caught her eye, and in that tiny explosion of a moment, I knew I'd wronged her. She looked so dismayed, even as she was floating out the awning. But then there was a crack and she hit the steps and her blood was spilled, she looked up at me and all she could say was those worthless words.

They mean nothing. I hate them.

I saw his face. I can almost see it now, but not quite. I can feel my insides liquefy into my lungs, feel myself shrinking, because I know this face. I know this face!

But then the power goes out.

The memory is gone.

Someone grabs the back of my jacket and yanks me off stage in the pitch dark, my feet fall over each other and every other sensation heightens - the rushing audience; the flustered breathing of my angry manager; Caleb giving me a heavy slap on the back in mock-congratulations.

'I hope you know I saved your arse, Conor ...' Paul mutters.

He's probably more right than he knows.

He pulls me roughly and I already feel ready to pass out, the sedative cocktail makes me dizzy and my name keeps bouncing over voices, shifting faces. I wish I was one of them watching the rock-star have a particularly rock-star moment, I wish I could be a fan watching me walk away and go home after hassling the bouncers for my money back. I don't want to be the centre of attention.

If my mother saw me now she'd been so disappointed. She wanted me to be something and all I am is a pathetic mess.

I couldn't fix it.

I couldn't do anything.

I just ran.

I just left her there.

I've tried and failed every person important to me. I told Rosie I loved her but I haven't seen her for so long, she must've given up on me. Paul is going to break my neck because I've let him down, too, and he doesn't even know I've discovered what he's funding with his paycheck, the loans and blood-money my money is paying off.

All I have is home - a hotel room - and solace in pain-killers and dreamed up friends.

A door clicks behind us, but I don't know where we are. I turn to ask and I get a thorough punch to my stomach, it sends me reeling backwards to the ground and the nauseating spinning shudders and wobbles. The cold sweat crawls up my neck and strangles my curls, dripping from my face, my heavy eyes. I don't have the strength to carry myself so I stay on the cool concrete ground and I get a boot squarely in my back, kicking stars about the room. A wheezing cough barely escapes my me, I'm groping around to find where all the air went, the stench of blood fills my mouth. He thinks he's beaten the memories out of me, but it only comes washing back tenfold worse, how my father used to take my hair by the fistful and drag me down the hall to my room, leave me locked in the dark for hours melting into days.

There's a heavy sigh and his boots squeak and reach the end of the room, and suddenly sharp lights are glowering down in beams. Paul crouches down and flicks out his coat-tails, he stares at me with grey eyes and what on anyone else would look like compassion.

'Alright, what did you take?' he asks gruffly.

Squinting into the light I consider lying but say it anyway. He'll gladly keep kicking. 'Not a lot, just some pills.'

'I thought you were going clean now?'

'I only took the real stuff a couple of times, ok, I wasn't an addict. And you gave that to me, anyway, what does it matter to you?'

He lights a cigarette, casual but irritated. 'You were freaking out on me, I gave you something to chill out. It wasn't anything strong, alright?'

'They made me sick.'

'And you were being "sick" up on stage? Is that why you pulled that ridiculous stunt?'

I try to stand up, but the floor's moving; I almost lean against it thinking it's a wall. A group of people have discovered us, they're banging on the door, muffled, excited screams.

'It wasn't a stunt, it was just... a new song.'

'I don't think your audience wanted that song, Conor.'

'I thought I was the musician here?' I snap.

'It was the closest I've heard to 'Gloomy Sunday' without causing a mass-suicide, Conor, they are not here to be depressed by a pathetic drug-addict.'

I grate my teeth into a snarl. 'That song is mine, alright, and I will play it whenever the hell I want to!'

'You'll have all the press on your tail - '

''Controversy sells,' I sneer.

' - your drug-use will force us to cancel gigs, which you can't afford. I think you know we can't afford that?' He stabs his eyes at me. He veils his alarm in cigarette smoke. 'Now what did you take, exactly?'

He can't take them away; I need them now, to think, to sleep, to walk repressing the urge to jump off something. 'Just... just -'

He grabs me by the collar and stares me squarely in the eye, his hands are a puzzle network of blue veins, which looks strange on him - he's slight but muscular.
'You look terrible. What did you take?' he spits at me.

'A few different pain-killers, sleeping pills... anti-convulsants...'

'What the hell for?!'

'It's under control, ok, I need them, I can't sleep, I can't...' I start trying to express it with my hands - my mother always called them piano-fingers, Paul says they're freakish.

'I can't focus with everyone staring at me, everyone shouting at me, chasing me down the street, banging on my doors, eyes in the bloody walls... I need them.'
Paul lets me go. 'You need to stop. I need you to be present-' he grabs the back of my neck, points aggressively to my head, 'I mean present, for your gigs, ok, for your tour; they need you to be present. You need to get back out there - they want what they've paid for, and they've paid for you.'

'They want me to give everything and I don't have it, my soul, my spirit, I can't give any more. I don't have enough for myself.'

'Get back out on stage and follow the set list, Barrett. Get your head in the game. You're a hero now. Heroes don't get to fall apart.'

'I want to go home...'

'If you don't go out there and play I'll break your fingers off.'

'You can't scare me into going out there, I'm more scared of the bloody piano than you! What the hell can you do to me?!'

I've never really liked his face before, the flash in his eyes; people always said he was "charming", if maybe a little intense, but the sheer intensity of his glare could set things up in flames; worse so when he begins to grind his jaw.

I consider going back out and facing the irritated thousands just to avoid the rageous threat building in Paul - he's capable of more than violence. He could take everything away in second, or cause whatever I touch to deteriorate, he's done it to greater people than me.

Some days Paul is the best friend you could ask for, he can make things happen, but it's easier for him to destroy things. If I lose what I have now there is nothing holding me back from the depths of the black holes I keep pretending aren't opening up underneath me.

I am trying to respect that, back down and turn away. I lean on the walls still buzzing with the intensity of music in the building, try to balance its sturdiness against my faltering resolve.

But then the fury in him makes him tall and strong, he snatches my shirt again, wraps a stony arm, expensive, designer suit-jacket sleeve around my neck and pulls back. I could attempt to lash out, but he's powered by superhuman strength, and when I, against my better judgement, attempt to argue and shout, I find six tiny pills rattling down my throat through my open mouth.

He releases me, and when I start to choke he pounds into my back, but instead of spitting them out I've swallowed them. The poison works fast; now the noise that was once bearable erupts against the sides of my skull, voices shouting and laughing, rapid nightmares, every last fakery and delusion sharp and clear, closing in on me.

I keep breathing in but I can't exhale, I just keep filling up with thick, smoky mouthfuls; until I'm out on stage before I felt my feet move, faces whirr by; and in a migraine flash I'm breathless and in a cold sweat next to my bed.