Starboy.

His flyaway hair is straggled, knotted by the wind as tightly as if it were a sailor running calloused hands through his fair locks. There’s iron under his hands, thin salt-eroded blades that hold him back from the night in front of him. His face is an oxymoron; by rights it should shine like the juvenile sun it is, dimpled and wide and light personified – but the grin stretched over his face now hosts something dangerous in its corners, a parasite of insanity. And he hears the words.

Do it.

He can feel the lump in his throat rise like congealed bile and his hands almost slice like liver upon the metal. He tries his best to keep the smile super-glued to his face, not knowing how much is his own and how much is forced upon him – because the entire world is under him and it’s never looked so inviting. Trees he remembers climbing as a child beckon with their aged limbs, their leaves singing as beautifully as a bird. Millions of droplets of water hurl themselves round each other, stealing stone and soil from the embankment as they plunge into saturated darkness. Cars rocket by him; faceless drivers with blank lives, they speed off into the night and forget all about him, leaving only a puff of rotting diesel fumes and the sound of burning oil. The whole world around him is moving and breathing and living, and as much as it beckons Tom to join it, that leech in the crook of his lips is holding him back.

Do it.

So he laughs to himself, because this is so much like something out of a movie it’s unreal. He’s still smiling but he’s not quite sure why – he’s never sure why – and as the iron rail that needs another coat of paint or three draws a pink line on his stomach, he shows that smile to the rocks and the fish and the water that swirls by, gallon after gallon after gallon. Teeth bordered by stretched lips, cracked as century-old acrylic and just as faded, they bare themselves to the elements. The iron grates his ribcage like a knife being sharpened on stone and it pushes a hollow sound from his lungs; something that could be anything from a laugh to a whine to a plea for help – and now the voice is getting desperate, because Tom has never disobeyed before.

His hands shake like leaves in a hurricane as he peels himself from the metal, veined and splintered and dry and almost dead. He backs away, sinking to his knees against the barrier between himself and the never-caring never-stopping hunks of aluminium hurtling past. He stares into their beams, feeling like a suspect under questioning. Why did you do it? Whydidn’t you do it? But he can’t say, because his hands are at his collar and his gaze has moved to his twinkling friends up in the sky. He gulps the harsh cocktail of toxic grey clouds and salty air, and he thinks about what he sees and tries to block out everything else.

It’s not fair that he’s ended up like this. He only came to visit the stars. But he should have known the danger that this place presented him with, and what it would lead to. Like holding candy in front of vicious children, someone told him that it’d be the greatest adventure on earth to climb up over the first blockade. And so, like the Columbus of his generation, he did; opal limbs streaked with sapphire veins crashed clumsily against slippery orange rust, and he heaved his body over the top rail and almost fell back down again. And once he got his breath back, the icicles crystallizing in his throat making his accomplished smile even wider, he was suddenly thinking that the rush would be greater still if he were to dive headfirst into that ravaging, screaming river of daggers below. And he almost believed it. Just for a second, he chuckled at the challenge and hooked his trainer onto the first bar – but then he remembered what he was there for, and the wind and the noise and the ice all hit him at once and that’s where he is now, crouched on the ground staring up at the sky and daring to defy his mind. He can’t breathe, because nobody’s ever taught him how to disobey. His lungs squeeze themselves over and over, pulsing and contracting as tight as the pounding heart muscle next to them, and he feels like hurling stomach acid from his lips; it smoulders so badly that he can hardly think straight. The only thing that he can hear is do it do it do it and the only thing that will stop the burning is to vault over that rail, so he scrambles to his feet and hastily measures the jump.

But this time he’s not smiling.

He feels thick tears splash onto his collar and wipes them away with his trembling palm, and he knows this is the furthest he’s ever gone to cross the line of self-destruction. Just a normal night, and now he’s hyperventilating through a drinking-straw throat and wringing his quivering hands. He gulps, whimpers drowning in thick saliva, as the voice pushes him blindly towards the edge – and suddenly, magically, there are unfamiliar fingers round his wrist dragging him back to safety, back to nausea. His mind screams a protest, his body finds the floor and neck becomes rigid; the muscles won’t twist, and so his eyes spin to his beloved heavens like drowning children trying to locate the surface of the sea.

He promptly vomits a desaturated rainbow, and faints.

-

Before he knows it, one of those featureless drivers has a face that Tom doesn’t need to sketch into his imagination anymore, because it’s right there in front of him. He stares into it as they both collapse into a booth of a dingy twenty-four-hour café, complete with porridge colour walls and a thick frame of green grot embedded into the window frame. He doesn’t acknowledge the slightly concerned waitress watching him, bemused by the dramatic entrance Tom can’t remember, because he’s still trying to figure out why he isn’t sleeping at the bottom of a riverbed. He blinks behind rectangular glasses as the storm in his stomach subsides, and everything becomes clear in the harsh light from above, including this stranger.

“Two full-Englishes and two coffees,” mumbles the young man to the waitress, in a rumble of a voice that doesn’t sound local. Tom just stares, with the neon smudges of confusion bleeding into his muddy irises; his eyes sketch out an insomniac’s face, bordered with dark curls molested by the gale outside. Two sunken, purple ditches are home to eyeballs streaked with swollen capillaries, and lips a little fuller than his own cushion together as their owner counts the change in his wallet before checking the menu. “Uh. Scratch the coffees, make ‘em water. Cheers.”

He directs the gaze of a man twice his age to Tom, who suddenly realises that he’s gawping like a little lost boy into the face of a caring adult.

“S’three in the mornin’,” he growls in his scuffed northern tones, dropping several coins down onto the speckled table. It’s half a question, but Tom doesn’t know what he’s asking, and his mouth stays zipped shut. His rescuer looks him up and down as if he were deciding how long a cancer patient had to live; it’s not evident to the untrained eye, but Tom’s been looked at this way for years and is used to scrutiny. “Why would you go and do a thing like climb the railings of a bridge in the middle of the night, eh?”

It was as if he was asking something in which he had no interest whatsoever - his voice barely a decibel above the humming of the lights, and his eyes on the shoes of the advancing waitress. Yet there’s a prickle on the surface of Tom’s skin that tells him, perhaps the man holds all the interest in the world, but why does he hide it beneath a thick blanket of embarrassment and lethargy? Water sloshes over the side of the tumbler as it thunks down in front of Tom, and like a beggar he swiftly seizes the glass and gulps down his first shaky mouthful of liquid in twelve hours. The skin under his fingernails turns white as he continues to stare, through the concave glass, at the marbled image of the brunette; Tom isn’t used to having such direct questions thrown at him by anyone other than his doctor.

He sets the empty tumbler down with an ungainly clatter, feeling the contents of his stomach slosh around inside him as if trying to get out. He pulls a sickly face and then quickly remembers he is not alone, but the stranger just pulls his leather jacket higher up round his neck. Hand on his stomach, he wishes he hadn’t finished his water so quickly, and doesn’t dare open his mouth because of it. Instead, Tom takes the opportunity to let his eyes drift back to their newfound source of employment – the tatty-haired northerner with a fidget and a recurring yawn. He notices how freckles follow each other in crowds all over his hands and face, their sickly base a matte, minty shade under the fluorescents. Those moth-eaten lips twitch like a startled mouse, and in that second Tom hooks a similarity between the two of them. He can see a river in those averted eyes, not unlike the one he was stood above at some earlier point in the night, separated from the present by a fragment of time he can’t define. He doesn’t think the stranger would be able to tell how long ago it was, either. There are marks of weariness and pain scratched into his face that Tom recognises all too well from staring into the mirror.

He doesn’t look like a hero.

Tom can’t fathom exactly what he doeslook like, because he’s everything he hasn’t seen before and everything he has. He’s just a bloke sat in a café, waiting for a regular English fry-up in his just-out-of-the-eighties brown leather coat and grubby navy polo neck. But he’s also a bloke sat in a café alongside a slightly chubby, almost-hopeless case: a boy of a similar age he just pulled away from the edge of a bridge and back to existence. Materialising seemingly out of thin air.

“Who - who are you?” Tom asks, the words mere imprints of their true form upon his breath, but the stranger looks up at the whisper. “How did you f-find me?”

The questions press on the inside of his mouth coating it like thick glue; he wants to shout them until his companion answers, but with the words come a metallic pain in his throat, as if he’s just swallowed a cheese-grater. The image of the whining bridge flashes up against his retinas, and he hears a ghostly sound of somebody tearing their lungs out. His lungs.

“Was drivin’ home from me mam’s house, up north,” he sniffs, pressing his fingertips into those cherry eye-sockets and bunching the skin of his lips. “Fell asleep in me car at a truckstop, only woke up at half-one. I’m nearly home and comin’ over th’ bridge, an’ I see you.”

His voice is burdened with tiredness, suggested in the chopped words and the unfamiliar pronunciation. Despite having spent childhood as well as adulthood wanting to cast himself among the stars, Tom has never travelled further north than Birmingham.

“Wasn’t just gonna let you jump, was I?” He continues, matter-of-factly, with an odd sort of smile that tweaks in the depth of his eyes.

Tom almost asks, how did you know I was going to jump? – and then realises that even though he himself didn’t envisage hurling into the deadly road of rock and water, any one of those drivers would have seen the way he rocked back and forth, cringing, and preparing to take the leap. His lips tremble to show some unidentifiable emotion, and his lips part as if to ask another question - so many wordless queries are pulsing through his brain, waiting to be answered - but then their food arrives, smelling like it’s been boiled in lard and looking like something Tom wouldn’t feed to a dog. The bile forms higher tidal waves in his stomach at the stench of it, and even though he’s hungry he doesn’t feel much like eating. In front of him, however, the other plate is being doused in ketchup and salt and the contents wolfed down with startling enthusiasm, as if the energy is triggered by the sight of nourishment alone. Tom keeps his eyes on the rapidly moving knife and fork, the constant swelling and hollowing of those pallid cheeks as food disappears into what must be a stomach ready to devour even itself. He finds the corners of his mouth twist upwards again when the stranger makes wordless declarations of pleasure at the food, but this time it’s not forced; the smile’s a free one, dancing about his jaw line and pressing a hollow dimple into his cheek like a child’s inquisitive finger. He’s halfway amusing, this dishevelled prince - a watered down, schizophrenic mix of wilting sunflowers and white steeds, punctured with this odd youthful vigour now visible in front of Tom. Troubled and cloudy one moment, and now oddly satisfied.

You know who he reminds you of?

Tom freezes, looking down at his hands. He can see the contours of his bones as they clamp to the table, making it vibrate. He senses his fellow diner look up at the sudden change in behaviour, and the cutlery clinks down onto the plate. Everything turns into a firework-ridden night as eyes squeeze shut, but this action only confines the space in his skull.

Get out, get away. You can’t owe your life to somebody. Make your own decisions.

Tom spits a bitter laugh, his sour breath rattling in his lungs. If only he were able to do that, he thinks. It must be nice to be able to think for yourself without fear of being interrupted.

“You okay, mate?”

His eyes open a fraction, but it’s enough to see that the clouds are back, and concern is chalked into those features. Concern for a stranger that guy has never met, concern for a stranger that he just saved the life of. It’s hard to believe the liveliness that was coursing through that face a moment ago as he guzzled down his breakfast was even there; now it’s not even a ghost, as the rounded nose and the parted lips and the heavily lidded eyes are painted with that same pained discomfort, that fear of intrusiveness.

He’s interfering. Go home. He’s not good for you.

Tom rips himself from his seat and almost sprawls over his clobbered shoes, his feet mindlessly following those instructions that don’t stop coming and never stop shouting. He hurtles out of the door, into the hurricane winds that sweep his coat up around him and pushes him forward into the unknown streets. He doesn’t even want to think about the possibility that he should have stayed, because when he’s lost in the middle of the night he really doesn’t want to pay the consequences of disobeying again. So he runs and runs, tears that could be blood drawing maps of despair on his face, and tries sightlessly to find a place he knows. The roar in his mind is sedated by obedience now, settling in the back of his head to purr as Tom attempts to locate safety. The concrete mazes cast him into orange under the glare of mini streetlamp suns, and all he can see is the pattern of redbrick and all he can feel is the stretch of his lungs, the burn of his throat. All he can think about is the unfairness and the pain and the longing of wanting to be free, ripped from his mind, and for a wild moment he curses that curly-haired boy from stopping him dissolving into fish food.

A deserted alleyway behind a boarded up nightclub is his refuge. He sobs his way through puddles and cigarette butts to find a crib of stone steps, and curls up in the doorway like a pet left in the rain. Fingers web themselves into soaking straw hair, for he hadn’t even twigged that it was raining, and he lets a desolate whine that nobody will hear break from him. He cries because he’s alone, he cries because he isn’talone, and he shoves his fists into his jacket pockets and hugs himself to try and stop the gash in his side from tearing him apart.

But his fingers touch something crinkled, something new, something that wasn’t there before. He pulls a folded piece of ripped paper from his jacket, grubby and smudged, and curiously shields it from the rain. Scrawled untidily there are eleven digits, and underneath the number seven words that make his heart stutter and slow.

In case you ever need it.
Danny.