Stardust

“You’re on tour next year.”

Kelly focuses on the bottle of Jack in his hands, sewing pale fingers around the semi opaque bottle like a stiff limbed snake. White snakes, he reflects, are meant to be more aggressive. He wonders if could tie his fingers around someone’s throat, tug and tighten until they were a wonderful blue and a stony dead. It would be a relief, for them, he thinks.

“You’re going to need a new look.”

Now, that’s something Kelly can do.

His hair has long since become standard once more, a dying of it way back in his youth nothing more than a painful memory. Painful because mummy was never really there, and a memory because his peers grew to be hounds of distaste as the years wore on. It became better to blend. To drift away on a bus to the undergrounds where a man may chance upon a dejected teen that hoped to become lost in the city like he’d imagined the pied piper to.

“I want violet hair.” Michael cocks his head to the side, as if he’s imaging such a colour on such a man. His lips purse.

“You can’t go up there in jeans, that’s what every other male artist this side of the galaxy is doing. We’ve got to shock them like Ziggy did. We’re got to get out there and, not do something that’s never been done before, but make something that’s been done before better. We’re in the two thousands now, Kelly; the competition is higher than ever.” Quite literally, Kelly's never seen this many drugs, even in the underground scene where is was thought uncommon to be straight edge.

“How do you feel about thongs?” Kelly smiles, slow and curling, at the relaxed form of Michael.

“Oh, Michael, you devil.” Michael laughs, low and deep, and pushes forward a picture he’d acquired from the leather bag pushing on the side of a table. The bag was the same one Kelly had first seen Michael carrying when he’d first entered his office at Glass Records. Indeed, his office looked much the same as it had almost a year previously. Neat, almost too immaculate with a well stocked wine selection and large pile of official looking books. Michael admitted to never reading them, though he enjoyed the businesslike impression it cast on less savoury clients.

With a slight hum, Kelly pulled the picture towards him. It was a colour photo of a striking man wearing a plain black thong and some kind of netted poncho, accompanied with a heavily spiked wrist band. Raising an eyebrow, Kelly pushed aside the picture to glimpse the one beneath. This was the same man, but wearing some kind of extravagant garment on his shoulder; not unalike to the shoulder decorations of old British army uniforms. A collar like necklace hung from his neck, baring small crosses and small intricate chains.

Kelly pushed the pictures back towards Michael, picking back up his bottle and taking Michael’s former posture as his own.

“So; are you game?”

“Would I really say no, Michael?” He laughed again and Kelly smiled widely at his bottle, fingers no more like snakes than they were pallid dreams.

There was a silence, then, as Michael set the pictures back into his bag and poured some delightfully red wine into his glass, setting the bottle back down in its icy nest.

“Violet isn’t really a Kelly thing, is it?” And it hurts that Kelly has become such a common person in this time, it hurts that he’s not the boy lost in his head with dreams and wishes and thoughts of drugs and things his classmates could never possibly comprehend at such an age. He’s just boring, old Kelly now.

“No, it really isn’t.”

A clink of a glass on a wooden table.

“It might be a Sage thing, though.”