Sliding Down the Sky (2 page)

The loneliness.

It was eating me up inside. The booze took my mind off it, at least for a while. I’d yet to discover what the answer was, long-term. I wasn’t even sure I wanted one.

With a grunt, I heaved myself to my knees and then to my feet, staggering slightly. I looked up and down the street, but it was empty. Not a soul was out at this time of the night, and those that were, were inside Barney’s.

I was drunk and stupid, but not suicidal, and sure as hell not capable of driving.

My ribs ached and I tried to take shallow breaths as I made my way down the empty street in the dark, towards home.

“I think, in life, everyone needs to be broken in some way.”

– Chris Martin

Callum

As Ally put it when she called, dinner with her and Jack the following night was “non-negotiable”. There was no getting out of it, despite the purpley-blue bruise around my eye. I really wasn’t looking forward to explaining that. The two of them had their own problems. Like the asshole I am, I hoped that would take the heat off me, although lately it seemed the further up Shit Creek I went, the more they wanted to help. I already knew that talking about it wasn’t going to do that, but that didn’t seem to stop them from trying anyway. Then again, maybe I was just the distraction they needed. It made me feel marginally better, thinking about it that way, like I was providing a much-needed service.

“Jesus – what the hell happened to you?” Jack asked when I turned up at their door for dinner.

I waved him off, walking past him into the house.

“Y’know – the usual. A few beers, an asshole with an attitude problem – who, for a change, wasn’t me – and some dude with steel-capped boots. What’s for dinner?”

Ally appeared in her wheelchair in the living room doorway, the smile dying on her lips as soon as she saw me.

“Holy shit,” she breathed. “What happened to you?”

I rolled my eyes and tried to tell myself that even that small movement didn’t hurt.

“Is there an echo in here? I’m fine, just had a little disagreement at Barney’s last night. Nothing major. Still got all my teeth – see?” I flashed them a toothy grimace, on my way to the kitchen. “No, don’t worry about it – I’ll get myself a drink.”

I waited for the backlash to hit – a lecture, reprimand, something. I could feel it building. But by the time I’d grabbed a beer from the fridge, popped the top off it, and headed back to the living room, it was still silent.

I took a healthy swig, preparing myself for the onslaught.

“Callum, you need to stop this.”

It wasn’t what she said, it was the way she said it. And the way she looked at me, like she was disappointed in me, worried about me, even. I’m not sure which was worse. I felt like I’d let her down, which hurt more than the ache in my ribs.

“I’m fine, it’s just a scratch.”

“I know, but –“

“Seriously – I’m good.”

She and Jack exchanged one of those looks, the telepathic ones that couples have that tells you they’ve been discussing this long before you got there. Suddenly, I felt cornered.

“What?” I demanded, my temper flaring.

“Dude, relax,” Jack held up his hands. “We’re just worried, that’s all. A couple of weeks ago it was ‘some guy pushed in front of me at the bar’, a few weeks before that it was ‘he was an asshole with a big mouth’, a few weeks before that it was something else. Now this? It just seems like there’s a pattern here. What’s going on?”

“Maybe I’m just surrounded by assholes?” I snapped. “Ever think of that? Or maybe I’m just bored and need a little excitement in my life?”

The second suggestion was probably closer to the truth, although the first one also fit pretty well.

Of course, there was always door number three: I was too much like my Dad.

I hadn’t seen my father since I’d thrown him out of the house when I was sixteen, but that day was burned into my soul. It can’t help but mess you up when you realise that the person you hate most is also the one you have the most in common with.

I wish I’d had a father like Jack’s. Tom was a true gentleman, the kind that’s hard to come by these days. Hard-working, kind-hearted, straight as an arrow. When he died, I think a part of me died with him. Now, all that was left was the part of me that was too much like my own father. Reckless, stubborn and stupid.

Lately, I could feel the darkness gnawing away at my insides, feeding off the desperation. I didn’t want to be like him. I wanted to be the kind of man Tom saw in me, but now that he was gone, I was drifting, and I drifted back to what I knew. Every time I picked up a glass, I was feeding the prophecy. It was my father’s temper that lay dormant inside me, and with every drink it rose up, scaring the shit out of me.

Ally looked like she was gonna cry, and I suddenly realised that I’d been standing there, staring at her.

“Just talk to us,” she pleaded, her blue eyes brimming with fear. “Please? What’s going on?”

If only I knew where to begin.

“We all have to face pain, and pain makes us grow.”

– James Taylor

Sass

It had been almost five months since Leo found me. I was curled up in the corner of my bedroom, in the apartment I hadn’t set foot outside of for weeks. Paparazzi had set up camp outside my building and I couldn’t risk going out there again. The curtains remained firmly closed, and I hadn’t eaten in a few days. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even taken a shower. My body was numb, even the pain in my arm had abated.

I was bathing in darkness, both inside and out. I revelled in it, sinking into it like a stone into the ocean. I wanted to die, and he knew it.

My head ached. The throbbing had started when I woke up in the hospital just over seven months before, and it had never stopped. It was like a thousand songs being played by a thousand different instruments, all at the same time. The neverending noise was shredding my soul, a constant torture, a reminder I didn’t need. I remember thinking that this must be what hell feels like.

After ignoring the phone and the door once too often, Leo made the building manager let him in. He hauled me to my feet and threw me in the shower, fully-clothed and practically comatose. He sat beside me, his arm around me, until the water washed enough of the darkness away for me to see the light again.

He saved me because I didn’t have the heart to save myself.

That was the beginning of my journey back to life. It wasn’t the life I wanted, but it was the life I was left with. It was up to me to stand up and move on. Looking back now, that was my rock-bottom, and despite the contstant temptation to curl up into a ball and sink into the depths, I couldn’t allow that to happen.

It wasn’t an easy road. Salvation never is. Salvation hurts like hell, because the road seems neverending and much steeper than you remembered on the slide down.

In the days, weeks and months that followed, Leo never left my side. He moved into my apartment, he made sure I ate and washed, and he shielded me from the media. He ferried me to and from appointments with a therapist and my doctor. He made sure I took my meds. He never gave up on me, even though I was often tempted to give up on myself.

Eventually, the numbness wore off, but pain filled the vacuum. Physical pain, mental torture – sometimes it was unbearable. I lashed out at him, because he was there. I said things, things I regret now, but it didn’t drive him away like I hoped it would. Once, I accused him of being a martyr. I think that hurt him more than anything, although I didn’t know why at the time. I had no idea then, how much he had given up for me. He calmly told me he was my brother, he was staying, and I better get used to it. Then he told me to think about what our parents would do if they could see me now. It was that thought that festered in the dark recesses of my brain for weeks afterwards.

The days blurred into each other. I was like a crackhead going through withdrawal. Lost and hurting, for a long time I didn’t want to be saved. I wanted him to let me wallow, but there was no chance of that. Instead, there was medication to even out my moods, therapy to talk through my fears, and then finally, a turning point.

He wanted me to accompany him, his wife Gemma and three-year-old daughter Aria here, to this white-picket-fence town, and help him renovate and manage a bar he wanted to buy.

I couldn’t even leave the apartment, and he was asking me to move to the other side of the country.

I panicked. I wasn’t equipped to go out into the world, I didn’t have the necessary tools anymore. The last time I had, I was a different person. I had a career I was passionate about, friends who cared about me, a world of opportunity at my feet.

Then there was the other version of me, the out of control one, the one that scared me when I saw her in the mirror. I wanted to make sure she was never going to take over my life again, but I could still feel her, standing behind me, waiting.

The new me was still… new. I needed time to get to know her, to adjust to her life. I was still trying to figure out where she fit into this jigsaw puzzle of a world. Now was not the time to make any momentous decisions.

But Leo wouldn’t let up. The more we talked about it, the more I could see how much the bar meant to him. It was his dream, and he wanted me to share it, with all of them. Who was I to stand in his way? I had taken him away from his wife and child for long enough. Even though he didn’t come right out and say it, I knew he wouldn’t leave me there alone. He didn’t trust me. I understood. I didn’t trust myself.

I didn’t want to be responsible for ending his dream, just because I had thrown mine away.

I think that’s when I realised how much he was willing to sacrifice for me. Maybe I’d known it all along, but the knowledge had been buried beneath all the shit I carried around inside my head now.

It had been almost five months since he’d found me curled up in the corner, half-dead. Some days, I felt like I was still there. My life was so different it was almost unrecognisable, especially to me. My music had fallen silent. It no longer thrummed in my veins or beat out a steady rhythm inside my chest. The deafening multi-instrument orchestra in my head was gone. Instead, there was a vast emptiness and the knowledge that it was my own fault. My punishment was that I had to live with it.

I gave up the lease on my apartment, and I moved in with them. It was the freedom I had been craving. No paparazzi. No press. Just us.

I slowly got used to living again. I could leave the house without having a panic attack. I ate without being reminded to. I showered every day. I didn’t shy away from looking in the mirror. I closed my heart to the sound of him playing guitar in the living room.

I got rid of the reminders of my old life and tried to think ahead.

“Sometimes bravery is as simple as following your gut.”

– Taylor Swift

Callum

“So, what happened?” I asked, taking another sip of my beer while Jack just stared at his.

Barney’s was getting busy, but at our usual table in the corner we were tucked away from the masses. It had been two weeks since that night at dinner, and so far I’d managed to keep the situation under control by feeding them both a crock about being under pressure at work.

It wasn’t total bullshit, because work was a pain in the ass lately. We’d lost a mechanic six months ago, and Bill hadn’t found a replacement yet, which made things worse. It also didn’t help that Bill was bugging me about coming into work hung-over, but I never mentioned that part. It was enough to get them off my case, at least for the moment, and it wasn’t a lie. It wasn’t the whole truth, but I could live with it. I found I could live with a lot of things lately.

Sitting across from me, Jack didn’t look like a man who was overjoyed to find out he was probably going to be a father soon. In fact, he looked like they’d just been given the worst possible news. Two specialists in two months. Ally was determined, as usual. She only had two speeds – all or nothing.

Patience wasn’t one of my virtues. I kicked him under the table, like I used to when we were kids.

“Hey – you hear me? What happened today?”

That seemed to do it. He frowned over the table at me, then took a sip of beer. Quickly putting all the variables together in my head, I came up with the worst case scenario and tried to prepare myself to offer some sort of moral support.

When he set his beer back on the table between us, his hand was trembling. The odds were stacking up. He sat back against the booth and exhaled like it was his final breath.

“He said pretty much the same thing as the other guy. There’s no reason she can’t get pregnant, carry to full-term and deliver a baby by c-section. Apparently, women with her level of injury do it all the time.”

I stared at him, trying to associate the positive words coming out of his mouth with the look of pure desolation plastered all over his face.

“I’m no expert, but isn’t that good news?”

I was obviously missing something here, something big.

“Oh yeah,” he continued. ”And he also mentioned autonomic dysreflexia, high blood pressure, mobility problems, deep vein thrombosis, urinary tract infections and about a million other things that scare the living shit out of me but don’t seem to bother her at all.”

He sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly, shaking his head.

“She’s dreaming if she thinks any of that is worth it – or that I’m going to just stand by and let her do it.”

Shit.

“Have you told her that?”

“Not yet.”

I saw his dilemma. The risks were obviously real, but so was her desire to have a baby. Rock, meet hard place.

She’d subjected herself to two appointments with two specialists in as many months. She hated being prodded and poked. This wasn’t just a passing whim, and she wasn’t going to roll over and surrender. She was a fighter. Six years ago, I’d sat beside her hospital bed after the accident and told her that the doctors said she’d never walk again. A little over a year ago, I’d helped her walk down the aisle, wearing braces beneath her wedding dress. Giving in wasn’t an option, and Jack had to know that even better than I did. They were as stubborn as each other, but I couldn’t see any middle ground here. Judging by the look on Jack’s face, I was willing to bet he couldn’t either.