This Is What Happens to Dreamers

I stare at the face in the mirror. I recognise it, though in a strange way. It’s as though someone has come and painted an artistic interpretation of me, but not got it quite right. My thick eyeliner is a little smudged and my hair is dyed coal black again, as it last was nearly eight years ago.

Eight years ago...those were dark times.

I had always been a dreamer. According to mum, I’d had great ambitions for longer than I could even remember. I’d wanted to be a princess when I was three, a fairy when I was five, a gymnast when I was eight and Orlando Bloom’s girlfriend when I was twelve. Don’t ask...

And then I discovered music.

And from that point on, fourteen years old, almost friendless and bordering on having multiple mental disorders, I knew what I wanted to be.

But it wasn’t like me to ever get that fairytale ending they always got in stories.

No. When I dared confide in my few friends that I wanted to sing in a rock band, they laughed. We were nearly sixteen by the time I gathered up enough courage to tell anyone, and we had supposedly moved on from those childish fantasies years ago. By that time, Bella wanted to be a doctor. Lena wanted to be a teacher. Dani wanted to be an accountant.

I was the only one who was still living in my childhood.

Now, Bella is still training to get her PhD, but I can already see that she’s going to come out of it with top marks. Lena is in her first year of teaching. She was always good at foreign languages, so she managed to get a post out in this beautiful beach town in Spain teaching English to the Spanish children. And Dani is already earning more per year than I could ever hope for.

They laughed, and I cried. Not in front of them of course, but alone, in my room, curled up on my bed with heavy guitars and racing drums playing like a remedy for all my problems.

How could sitting alone in my room ever be the medicine that my diseased mind needed?

They told me that I was silly. That I was never going to achieve my dreams. They said that you needed a huge amount of talent to get into that sort of industry. I had talent, but probably not enough of it. I could sing, but I’d never had proper lessons. I could play a few chords on guitar and a couple of pieces on piano, but I could never compete with proper musicians.

I asked mum to pay for me to have singing lessons. I didn’t just ask; I begged. I made all kinds of compromises with her, but money was tight back then. We didn’t have to really go without; we just couldn’t afford luxuries like singing lessons. Or a proper piano, for that matter, which was the other thing that I asked for. I had no idea how much those things cost until mum told me, but I was shocked.

I had always been a dreamer, but it seemed that all those dreams were going to have to be silenced, laid to rest in the dusty graveyard at the back of my mind.

I play with my hair, trying to bring a little more volume into its dark layers. Just outside the shabby little door, I hear two or three sets of heavy footsteps coming past, accompanied by raucous laughter and a lot of swearing.

Things didn’t get any better from then on. In fact, they got worse. I still had hope somewhere deep within me, a tiny little flame that burned inside, but slowly that fire was dying. I could only ever wonder how long it would be before it was doused completely. What would I do once the fire had died once and for all?

I shiver, standing in my little, sleeveless top. Even though it’s hot out there, it always seems cold down here.

When I was in year eleven, a career’s advisor came to talk to us. We were going to be moving on soon—some of us going on to Sixth Form to study more specialist subjects, and some people going off to work in the big, cold world.

What was I supposed to tell her? By this time, even I was beginning to doubt that my dreams were ever going to come true, but what else could I say?

In the end, I made up some lie. It was no use telling her the truth; if she’d have laughed along with everyone else, there was a danger that my confidence would have hit rock bottom and stayed there for good. If she, Mrs Whitlock, the career’s advisor, had chuckled when I said I wanted to be a rock star, my dreams may have never left the ground again.

So I told her very little. She asked what I wanted to do; I said I didn’t know. Of course I knew. I was just afraid of knowing; afraid that knowing as strongly as I did could only bring more disappointment into my already pathetic life. She asked what I wanted to study at A Level; I said music. She asked what else; I said I hadn’t decided. She sighed. She did not laugh, but she hardly supported me either. She just tutted and dismissed me as another one of those naive teenagers who couldn’t get their heads out of fantasy and into the real world. She was a career’s advisor; she must have met many like me before. There were always a few who never moved on from childhood dreams, and she was probably sick and tired of them by now. What made me so special?

I glance one last time at the girl in the mirror and then turn towards the far side of the little room. A distant melody from outside wafts in through the crack where the door is too big to fit into its frame properly. I can hear talking and shouting and even some screams from upstairs. I shudder. My throat knots in fear, though I should be used to all this noise and commotion and chaos now. My frantic heart beats in time with the throbbing, ever-present drum.

After the visit with the career’s advisor, my heart began to hurt. I knew already that it was the feeling of shattered dreams, and I knew also that there was much, much more of it to come. Over the last couple of years, I had become more and more reclusive; more and more of a loner. My friends had grown bored of my frequent moaning and depressive aura. I was still yet to have a boyfriend—I was of the legal age to have sex if I so wished, and yet I had never even kissed someone of the opposite gender. There was no hope of ever being able to progress with my dreams if I had no lessons or practice—no way of ever improving my talent.

I asked to be excused from maths, and half staggered to the medical room, telling the nurse that I had a headache. It wasn’t strictly a lie. I sank, shaking into the squeaky chair in the empty sick room, watching the second hand on the clock tick by...slowly but surely ticking away my life.

I open the door onto the darkened, deserted corridor. The commotion upstairs grows louder. Half staggering, my movements reminiscent of that day, the day when I went to the school medical room, I move towards the stairs. I hold my hair out of my pale face. I have to do it. It’s now or never.

A boy walked in. I glanced up with mild interest, realising that I didn’t know him. I recognised him, but only very vaguely—was he called Alex?

No. I knew who he was. He’d joined our school a couple of months ago. I’d never really spoken to him; I’d never felt the need. He was just another boy in a school of hundreds.

I place my hand on the cold banister and take a step up. It feels as if I’m ascending into delirium. I put in my earplugs to block out the noise, otherwise it would be too insane up there to even concentrate.

It was only as he sat down in one of the other equally squeaky chairs across the room from me, nodding an acknowledgement in my direction, that something fell out of his bag, which he’d evidently forgotten to close properly in his haste to get to the medical room.

Piano sheet music.

I recognised it immediately. It drifted down close to my feet, and I picked it up to hand it back to him; save him from getting up and coming to get it.

The words at the top caught my eyes. I knew that song. In fact, I really, really liked that song.

‘You play piano?’ I asked. I had always been such a shy little mouse. Conversation, especially on a one-to-one basis, terrified me like nothing else. And yet, for some reason, I felt I had to know.

The boy, Alex, looked up.

‘Yeah,’ he said, pulling a face. ‘I’m not that great though.’

I wasn’t interested. He could be absolutely shit at it, but it was still a lifeline to cling onto whilst drowning in this ocean.

‘And you like rock music?’ I persisted. These days, even most boys weren’t that into heavy music, despite it being a typically male-dominated genre.

‘I love it,’ he said. ‘Why?’

We made eye contact.

‘I love it too.’

Even as I was speaking, it sounded unbearably awful. I was hardly going to be the first girl he’d ever met who shared a common interest with him, was I?

And yet, strangely enough, he was smiling.

‘You’re the girl who sung at the winter concert, aren’t you?’ he asked.

I frowned. ‘I thought you only joined the school, like, a month or two ago.’

‘I did,’ he said, ‘but I watched some of the clips of it on the school website—sad, I know right. But you were really good. I mean, really good.’

I could feel my cheeks burning with embarrassment. ‘Thanks,’ I mumbled.

‘And you like heavy music too?’ he prompted.

‘Yeah.’

The shouting grows louder with every step. It sounds insane out there, and a small part of me tries to shrink back into the darkness and pretend this isn’t happening. And yet, gradually, the chaos morphs itself into one word; one word chanted over and over again. And this isn’t a dream, or a nightmare.

This is real.

‘You know,’ Alex said, ‘I’ve got a couple of friends who play guitar, and another who’s insane at drums. And we were going to start a band. But the one problem is that none of us can sing. At all.’

I could scarcely hear him over the hammering of my heart.

‘And I know we’ve just met and stuff, so it’s probably really awkward,’ he continued, playing with his hands as he spoke, ‘but d’you wanna join? As a singer?’

You probably think my life is terrible. I probably did a very good job of making it sound like it is. I earn less than all my friends. I spend way too much time stuck in dark, dingy basements with shabby decor and cramped conditions. There’s certainly never a moment of quiet or privacy—the crowds always there, no matter where you go, shouting and screaming so loud you feel as if your eardrums may burst after a while, and even away from the concerts we’re cramped onto a little tour bus, travelling for hours a day, never getting half as much sleep as we need. But it’s what I want. It’s what I’ve always wanted. And this isn’t a dream anymore. This is reality.

Our second album’s due out soon. We’ve got backing from this really great record label, so once that comes out, things are going to go crazy. We’ll be earning proper money then. We’ll be playing venues twice the size of this one, with proper dressing rooms, and we’ll be travelling between them on far more luxurious tour buses. It’s not a perfect life for most people. But it’s as close to perfect as I could ever ask for my life to be.

The lights onstage go up as I enter. I put the microphone up to my face and begin to sing. The guitars chug and the drums thunder and the piano melody soars over all of it. The crowd is a hurricane, moving and jumping and screaming so fast that it all becomes a blur.

They said it was never going to happen. They said I couldn’t do it.

But now I look at the rest of them, out there in their jobs, which they thankfully enjoy, but I could never bear. And I have just one thing to say to them.

This is what happens to dreamers.