Grand Parade

Losing Ryker was the hardest thing. I could survive my parents’ death. I barely survived by brother's, but losing Ryker was like losing the sun, which is probably why Syd suggested Ireland; surely here we’d never see the sun again. Yet, as she pulled the curtains from my bedroom window, a strong light bathed the room, reminding me the sun was where it always was, but Ryker wasn’t.

Ciara had invited us to stay at some great-uncle’s flat that had been passed down to her and Syd figured it wouldn’t be too different from home. Every morning I let the cuppa Syd brought me get cold before she eventually threw it out. We didn’t say much to each other, I mean, what do you tell a girl who just lost her brother? And what does she tell the boy who just lost the love of his life?

I rolled over, my arm falling off the bed. The warm sunlight landed on the blue eye on my forearm that kept watch over me. An eye was all I had left of him, and the spotlight cast on it felt like a sick joke. Ten years ago, our friend Johnny tattooed Ryker’s eye on me.

“Now don’t go being naughty, I can watch your every move,” Ryker said as a playful threat, gently squeezing my hand.

“Like a malnourished Santa,” Syd teased him.

“Except, unlike Santa, I reward ill-behaved children,”

“And corrupt the good ones,” Johnny said, eyes fixed on my arm.

“You can only corrupt those who let you,” he put a cigarette between my lips and another between his as Syd lit us up. “Anyway, it’s my turn,” he said, swapping seats with me.

I looked over at him, smiling lazily. In a moment of drunken idiocy, of which there had been plenty back then, Johnny had shaved my initials onto Ryker’s head a couple weeks ago.

“B.S., to brand you like the bull-shitter you are,” Johnny said, dusting hair off Ryker’s shoulders.

Syd laughed at him for a week, yet Ryker only cared about what it meant to us.

“What’ll it be?” asked Johnny, sterilizing his equipment; a ludicrous precaution when his workspace doubled as our bathroom.

“An eye for an eye,” Ryker’s voice boomed, and Johnny laughed as he saw Ryker’s rudimentary drawing of one of the eyes I never took off him.

“Our very own Picasso,” Syd teased, leaning against the tub.

“Now we’ll always watch over each other,”

He looked untouchable then as held mine and Syd’s hands, making a promise to always look out for each other. The warmth of his hands and the gentle strokes of his fingers moved something inside me I thought was long dead. I knew we’d never have a wedding or a flat to ourselves or a bunch of kids running around the gaff, but this moment meant more to me than any of that. Plus, Ryker wasn’t one for traditions, so we’d made our own.

That all started during the Winter of Discontent, but it had been the happiest winter I’d had since before my brother Simon died. That night I couldn’t sleep. I could still feel the ghost of the tattoo needle etching that eye onto my skin, the warmth of Ryker’s hands, and yet, feeling the happiest I’d ever been, I sat up and cried.

I looked over to the other side of my mattress to check I hadn’t woken Syd, yet Ryker was the one to sit up next to me in the dark. He didn’t say anything, but just let me drain out the sorrow and joy that had been building in me that year. I’d never been more certain of being loved.

A knock on the front door took me away from my memories, placing me back in this empty room. It wasn’t the winter of ‘79, but the fall of '89, and Ryker wasn’t holding me. Try as I may, I could only momentarily remember the touch of his lips or the sound of his laugh. I was alone with the distant echoes of my life. Then, I heard whispers down the hall. The routine carried on as it had for the past month. I crawled to the end of my bed and pushed my bedroom door closed, wishing the closed door would keep the memories from slipping away.

A few minutes later, the whispering subsided and there was a gentle knock on my door. I knew it was Ciara because she came to see me every day. Or at least she tried to. I refused to open the unlocked door and she never even tried to enter. But still, she talked to me through it, and even though I never responded, I knew she knew I heard every word. I curled my body around my pillow as her voice slipped through the slot at the bottom of the door, drowning out my memories.

“I saw my parents this weekend. They’ve kept my room just as it was when I left. ‘In case you want to come back,’ they said.” She always paused after every bit of news, waiting for a response she knew wasn’t coming, but hoping for it, nonetheless. “You know, they want me to spend Christmas with them. I was thinking, you and Syd should come too,”

I remembered the Christmas I spent with her family. Back then I really thought I could love her, and I suspect she already knew I could not. Under a stiff white shirt, I’d tried my best to hide the fact that I was a punk in love with his best friend; and as her parents said their prayers, she tried her best to pretend I hadn’t already spent a night in her room or that she knew I was in love with him. It was the life I knew I’d never have with Ryker, and yet I didn’t fit anywhere in it, and I didn’t want to either.

“Work’s going well. Actually, I’ve planned this fabulous fancy dress party this weekend. You and Syd should come! You don’t need to dress up if you don’t want to,” her voice as optimistic as ever.

I hated the idea of going to a party, yet I loved that she’d asked me to come. I found myself doing what I always did when she came over; trying not to picture how worried and sad she looked and instead I pictured her the way I saw her back then – a girl far too perfect for the shithole we lived in. A girl who knew my secret before even I did and loved me all the same.

“Beck…” her voice came through clearly, as if she were right below the little slot at the bottom of the door.

I didn’t want her to call me that. Not for the reasons I did back then, but because it was the last thing Ryker had called me and I wanted to savour his words in my mouth until my own end came. And yet, his words never quite fit in my mouth. Even when I tried to think them up and make myself talk like him, his was a gospel I couldn’t quite dare to speak out loud.

“I have to go now, but I’ll be waiting for you where I always am,”

As she walked away, I bit down on the pillow, holding back the sob that was building in my throat. For a month straight, Syd and Ciara had been begging me to come out, not knowing I had gone out every day while Cork was asleep. I’d memorized every crack and turn on the streets I haunted in the darkness, my feet walking me back and forth, the last stop always the same.

When Syd and I first arrived, we’d walked from Patrick’s Quay to our flat on Bandon Road. As we walked down Grand Parade, my eyes fixated on the River Lee, the water violently rushing by. Yet despite its frantic nature, I used to think of how peaceful it would be to let myself fall and drift away until my body shut down and I was gone.

But I’d done my best to convince Syd I hadn’t been out since the day we arrived. To her, I stayed in this dingy room with the curtains drawn. But every night I walked down Sullivan’s Quay toward Grand Parade, hoping I’d finally find the courage to jump. Yet every time I thought about leaving Syd, I thought about what it felt like when I lost Simon. I couldn’t do that to her. Ryker would never forgive me. But what good was I to her now?

Syd knocked, opening my door knowing there’d be no reply. She struggled under the weight of a brown box, half open and with a dented side that disregarded the FRAGILE stamp on it. With my foot, I pulled the chair out from under my desk, giving her a place to set it on other than the floor. She smiled at me with the same tired eyes that had looked over me for the past month.

I often felt guilty. I knew she barely slept because I didn’t either. I’d hear her walking down the halls or see the kitchen light come on in rhythmic intervals throughout the night. Neither of us ate much. That I knew because I could hear Ciara’s confusion when, after buying us groceries the first week we were here, she found rotting veg and full pantries.

And now, seeing her sitting in front of the box, looking at me expectantly with those eyes, I felt like the biggest arsehole in the world. I could almost feel Ryker glaring at me – something he’d rarely done alive, but that I pictured him doing regularly as I sat rotting away in a room, dreaming of death while his sister did everything for me and I gave her nothing, but the loneliness only felt when someone’s left you behind.

“Apparently my idiot brother wrote up a will,” her voice quivered hoarsely.

“I can’t picture his entire life fitting in this box. Will everything be gone when we go back?”

Go back. That was the first time I ever thought about it and the idea made my stomach turn. I couldn’t imagine pushing that rickety door open and walking into that room and not seeing him there. My Ryker, smiling at me, hands outstretched waiting to see what record I brought home from work. My Ryker, holding my hand as we slept or whispering nonsense on the nights the world kept us up. But never seeing that place again felt even worse. Like leaving him behind forever.

“I don’t know. I asked Johnny to keep some of his clothes, but Ryker didn’t have much that wasn’t also for everyone else,”

“I don’t want anyone else…” I choked on a sob, the thought of people circling his belonging like vultures was torture. “You know what’s inside?”

"You should have a look," she said, pulling the flaps open.

My hands trembled as I held on to his red blazer covered in patches and pins. I pulled it close to me, his scent still on it. A part of me wanted to put it on, to feel him hold me again, but that might steal his scent, which I inhaled deeply now, holding back tears – afraid they’d wash him away. I kissed it, desperate to feel his lips touch mine.

Syd looked small as she pulled on his red and white fuzzy sweater; the weight of his absence felt even stronger. What the fuck could I even say to her? Everyone thought because I’d lost my brother, I would know how to help her. That I’d have the magic words to make her feel better. To make her less angry at the world, less enraged, but what do you say after something like that? Every line someone had given me after Simon’s death had made me more angry, more sad, and more bitter.

I rummaged through the box looking for a letter. Some note written in a hurry to give us answers – to tell me what to tell Syd and myself so we could sleep again. Nothing. In frustration, I kicked my chair, the box toppling over. Syd held herself, hiding her surprise. Yet her eyes weren’t on me. They locked onto at a little white tape under my desk.

I held it, wishing the plastic carried his weight. The black ink had smudged but I knew exactly what it said: “Achilles Falls” – his ridiculous suggestion for a band name. Syd popped open the docket on my radio and I slid the tape in. It started off with a couple of songs. We listened intently, looking for a hidden message that wasn’t there.

The Cramps. PiL. The Fall. And then came his voice. I thought for a minute I was imagining him again. During so many cold night walks I’d heard him on that bridge with me when there was nothing but water seducing me to float away. But Syd gasped, looking at the radio in shock. That was him. That was us.

“Singing over other people’s songs doesn’t count as a demo,” Syd’s voice came through the speaker.

“Leave my artistic process be!” he shouted back. “I’m trying to get us out of this shithole,”

“Hey! It’s our shithole.”

For a brief moment he’d turned to smile at me because I’d called something ours. Because I’d admitted this was our home. Because I admitted there was an us at all.

“And it’ll be our mansion,” he’d held my hand and I no longer tensed when others could see.

“Ah, yes, because nothing says punk like selling out for a mansion,” Syd mumbled along to her own words as the tape went on.

“I am offended you think I have to sell out to make it,”

“And I’m offended by the fact you secretly listen to Kraftwerk but here we are,” despite the tears, she chuckled. It felt strange to hear laughter in our flat after a month of near silence.

“I get no respect around here!"

He loved his melodrama, feigning greater shock when Syd flipped him off. The tape went quiet for a while, but the memory played on as I pictured him shrinking before me.

“I want something better for her. For all of us,” the fragility in his voice had an intimacy that made it feel like he sat on the bed with us.

“We don’t need anything more. And, also, no offense but you’ve never worked a day in your life; I doubt you’re about to start,” I’d run my fingers through his hair.

“The cheek! I’m trying to be serious here,”

“Since when is Ryker Evans ever serious about anything?”

“Since I realized I’m responsible for you two,”

“I’d like to clarify that we’re the ones keeping you alive,” his laugh cut through me.

“And what does that make me? What do I give to anyone other than myself?” as his voice broke, I wrapped my arm around Syd who shuffled closer to me.

“Hope. I had no idea who I was until I met you. No direction. No future,”

“Don’t you quote the Pistols at me!” Even then he was crusading against the Pistols.

“Ryker, I don’t think you realize Syd and I are only still here because of you,” tears welled in my eyes as I remembered the genuine shock in his face. “We don’t…I don’t want a life where you work 9 to 5 to pay for a fucking mortgage until you drop dead in a mill somewhere in Stockport. That’s not who you are. That’s not who I want you to be,” the tape switched off and I ran to turn it over, praying the B-side wasn’t blank. I had to fast forward for 10 minutes until his voice came back.

“Wanna move to Denmark?”

Syd looked at me expectantly, waiting for some explanation I couldn’t give. I was taken aback by the weird time jump between the A and B side. That first side was maybe early 1980? But the B side was us, three months before his death.

“Denmark?” I was puzzled.

“Yes or no,” he demanded.

“I’d follow you to the ends of the world,”

Then, silence. I pushed the fast-forward button, making sure there was nothing left before pulling the tape out. That’s when I read the B-side labelled “Beck: This Summer.” But Ryker hadn’t made it that far.

“Do you know why he chose Denmark?” Syd placed a hand on my shoulder as I shook my head. She handed me a folded news clipping that read: DENMARK TO VOTE ON REGISTERED PARTNERSHIPS THIS SUMMER. “He wanted to be with you for the rest of his life,”

“I just wish he would’ve been here for the rest of mine...And yours. I am so sorry. I have spent months trying to say something to you, but I don’t know how to make it any better,”

“It’s not your job to make it better,”

“We were going to be a real family,” I held the clipping before her. “I owe you at least that. You took me back to the house. You helped me tell him I loved him. You gave me the happiest days of my life and I haven’t been there through the worst of yours,”

“Well, you didn’t jump last night. I’d like to think it was because of me,”

I stared at her, horrified that she knew.

“Syd…” I crumbled on the floor.

“My brother was the most alive person I ever met and he sure as hell would hate to see you hide for the rest of your life,”

“I don’t know how to face the world without him,”

“You take my hand and try,” she sounded just like him.

She pulled me up, guiding me into the kitchen where I punched in the numbers scrawled on a card.

“Hello?” Ciara answered and the sun never burned so bright.