A Cup Full of Nothing

If tears were words, Tom would take a pen to his heart and plunge into it, just to feel the salty shower of pain spill down onto the page and cram the lines with emotion. If the cartridge shattered and the ink were to fill his ventricles, to be driven round his bloodstream and blacken his vessels like tracing over the roads on a map, he’d take a breath and feel exhilarated that his job, his life force was supplying his cells with energy and inspiration.

But of course, he thinks, to shatter his breastplate with a biro is impractical, albeit poetic and almost beautifully graphic. As he listens to the chiding tick of the clock above him, he can almost visualise the spray of raven ink engulfing the splatters of thick, crimson anger that would decorate his walls, painting the figures trapped in posters with a sinful melody of dark frustration. He closes his eyes to the dim room, away from hundreds of pairs of his heroes’ judging pupils, and almost smiles. But he can’t seem to.

Instead, he throws the plastic ballpoint down on the wooden table, where it escapes from him with a few monotonal clinks. His eyebrows are magnetised, pulling together as he stands up, fiddling with the string on his wall to let the blind straighten and block the moonlight from his room, but he can’t stop the slithers of lunar radiance leaking round the sides and casting a small illuminating pool on the floor. His pupils dilate in the darkness, letting him see just enough so he can make his usual circuit of the room without colliding with anything. He feels the balls of his feet grind against the polished planks through worn socks and revels in the discomfort, throwing his head back and raising his arms to try and stretch out the tension in his frame. He hopes that untying the knots in his muscles will somehow yank a plug in his mind, allowing communication between his brain and his pen – but he should know by now that the chain always breaks before he pulls it hard enough.

A low whine escapes his throat and he lowers himself onto a beanbag, the cold beads moulding around him, constrained by black imitation velvet. He can feel blood throb through his hands as he dangles them above the floor, haemoglobin and oxygen and carbon dioxide reaching the pits of his fingertips and then climbing all the way back up to his heart. Vibrations travel up through Tom’s feet and the tips of his nails from the floor below, bass lines and boisterous beats and booming laughs triggering every spark point he seems to have. He lolls his bird’s nest hair backwards, blonde spikes that haven’t seen a brush in days resting against the edge of his groaning bookcase, and his temples throb in time with the music. He almost feels like sleeping, but he knows he can’t allow himself to, because he can picture exactly what he’ll dream about. The same old tape plays over and over in front of delicate closed eyelids, taunting him with what he had and what he lost. Every time he sees it he wakes up alone with fits of frustration, only strengthening the will to stay on the top floor on his own, stare at little grey parallel lines on his own and play tunes on his guitar that don’t sound quite right - on his own.

The beat radiating from below slows a little, and the bass softens so he can hear the confident twang of an electric guitar more clearly. Every pluck of the strings tugs at the muscle pounding in his chest, and as he inhales, he can’t stop his breath being sucked through his nose in stuttered, scared jerks. He loathes the feeling of jealousy that poisons his blood, but he also despises the notes of laughter and song that faintly float up to him but pound painfully against his eardrums.

It’s not fair.

He suddenly ignites, dropping his arms and wrenching open his bedroom door. His feet thunder across the landing and he flies down two steps at a time, needing to flee from the incessant bud of creativity that’s blooming from the other three inhabitants of the house. He races past the room that traps all the ideas in a vacuum, his band mates not hearing him over the riffs and fragments of incomplete lyrics, and he lets a profanity slip out under his breath. It’s lost in a contrasting harmony of intoxicated laughs, and he can feel disembodied hands tighten round his trachea, attempting to snap the surrounding cartilage and cut off his oxygen supply.

His baseball shoes crunch on the gravel drive, spraying stones out in his wake. They won’t notice the door slam, or the absence of the pacing from upstairs. They won’t find the empty beer bottles sunken into his feathery duvet like corpses in luxuriously padded caskets, or the violently destroyed pads of lined paper that hold dribbles of meaningless words and repetitive chords that are then cut apart with scribbles. He doesn’t know whether to feel guilty or angry, but it’s the latter that wins over as he flops into the seat of his Mini and stabs at the ignition with the car key. Leaving the house behind him in a flurry of burning tyres, he rips the road apart and heads for somewhere he doesn’t know, somewhere fresh that won’t drag up dregs of stale memories. He needs to feel something that won’t send him back into a coma; he’s been hanging in the balance for far too long now and he knows why, but dealing with it is beyond his control. He either goes into heaven or hell – purgatory is not an option. Not anymore.

Soon, his collar is damp from those tears he wanted to evoke some minutes ago, but as he predicted they do nothing to help tempt words from his brain and weld them to chord structures. All they prod him into doing is inhaling deeply to help him think straight and overpower the shaking of his ribcage – but all he can smell is the old leather of the car interior, hints of freshener fragrance and the now faded stench of perspiration that used to coat every surface, frosting the windows and making the seats slip and squeak under sizzling skin. His hands tighten on the wheel as the car rockets through dark, deserted roads, and the first grunt of pain slips through his tight lips.

Tom knows he can’t go back. Sometimes he longs for it. Sometimes he craves it so badly that he has to fist his hands in his sheets and press his damp face to the pillow to stop the sounds of his sobs penetrating the plaster and brick, through to the beds in which his friends lie. But when he wakes in the morning, he rubs the crust from his eyes and remembers that if Danny were ever to try and pull him out of the quicksand, he’d only sink deeper into this deadly, unproductive desert.

He wonders if they talk about him much. They don’t show it. Tom doesn’t think it right – he’s in pain, he’s on the brink of insanity, but after a month or two of trying to get through his hard shell, they left him alone. He didn’t want sympathy back then, especially not from him.

He recalls whispers of his name in the dark. The grating squeal of the doorknob being turned would always signal the arrival of food, comfort, a kind persuading word. Two out of the three didn’t know why he became a hermit, why he hardly ever contributed to band practise or why he didn’t talk so much in interviews anymore. The other never tried to persuade – he knew Tom too well. He realised he could never coax him out of his stubborn personality with a bribe of burnt bacon sandwiches, a movie marathon or a whisper to his ear that felt far too much like the birth of a gesture of affection planted forever on Tom’s neck. But the things that made him curl up on his bedcovers and refuse to surface were all those words still lingering in the air between them, oozing with truth and harshness and leaving ugly drip stains on his brain. They were never taken back. Would it have made a difference if they were? Tom didn’t know. They’d have still been said, still been shouted and thrown at each other. Daggers in one direction, pleas in another. Or at least, they felt like knives. The blades still stick in Tom’s body, cutting through nerves and rendering him useless at just about everything he tries. He’d pull them out and throw them back, but he doesn’t have the heart.

The intoxicant in Tom’s system is now long forgotten by his conscious mind, but the deadly cocktail of alcohol, tears and the rain starting to pelt the windshield is a dangerous catalyst for something negative to happen. Tom can only try to grasp at oxygen, still tasting memories on his dry tongue. Cold tears shake as they cling to his chin, ready to fall, and as he wipes them away he’s reminded of dabbing the wet splashes from his notebook, smudging the mess of ink on the page as he did so. It wasn’t as if he was saving any gold, though. There were no potential album tracks there – there never are, these days. Career just begun – career soon to end. He suspects that their whole second album will be written by the other three, because deadlines are fast approaching and all he’s managed to choke out onto paper are angst-ridden drabbles, written with a shaky hand in the dead of night that he simply can’t show the others. Everything he offers is better plugged up in his head – it’s not fair to unload his thoughts, dreams and worries about one person to their army of fans. None of them make sense to anyone but him, and he guesses that it’s better this way.

Should he feel ashamed for not contributing to the song writing? Should he feel guilty for leaving them to do all the work? He knows he feels saddened that his career is being eaten away by something he thought he’d have forever, and selfish emotion is all he is touched by. His fingers clench round the wheel, just like they did around scrunched up balls of paper, his crushed canvases upon which he flung black words painted into shapes that cast no light and no shadow. He feels the leather resist beneath his palms and wishes it was a smoother substance, but the only place he can have freckled skin and soft, chestnut curls in his hands is in his dreams - and he’s not sure if he wants to dream about Danny anymore.

He’s sick of the lies. Lies are what got them there. Deceits were written in actions rather than words, the both of them choosing to conceal the truth by non-acknowledgement rather than bare-faced pretences. They never had to deny because they were too involved in their own ways to let any sign slip to the outside world. It was always when it was convenient – Danny’s bedroom with the lock when Harry and Dougie weren’t home, slipping out to Tom’s car when they were. Losing themselves in a leather and glass-bound humid confinement always seemed like the answer, only to end up with one of them falling asleep there and the other having to drive home, prod them awake and peel them from the car interior.

Danny got sick of the lies, and now Tom can’t write them to hide his pain.

The rain is heavier now, the road slippery as it twists and turns under the tyres. Tom slides the car up a gear, pressing the button on the stereo, but then quickly turning the music off as a blast of loud guitar screams nothing but five little letters at him, a name that will always be associated with that band – a band who carry memories of loud bass and powerful vocals from the speaker beside his head, as he was forced down on the seat all those times Dougie and Harry were home. He grinds his teeth and throws himself back into his seat as he hurtles down a shining liquorice strip, weaving through ants of cars that are all just blurs of black crawling along in the dark. His ribcage is squeezing the air from his thorax, and he feels so compelled to just cry out to anyone, to let his emotions rip the world apart like he’s never done before. His throat burns from tears and sound as a sickening sob punches into the silence, followed by a drawn out, pained profanity that is different in almost every way to any other noise this car has heard before. He grinds his teeth and almost closes his eyes, feeling so defeated because it’s come to this, and nobody is here to help him. His pupils dilate as he takes in the rush of lights hurtling in the other direction, marvelling at the way they sting his eyes and look so hypnotising like a Ferris wheel spinning in the dark, drawing him into a thrill of height, speed and release…

The steering wheel jerks round of its own accord. As the poet in the car closes his eyes, he forgets the world and feels as though he could write a million songs about the soul leaving his crushed body on the wrong side of the road.