Crash

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Julian's been waiting for the phone call, the one that asks him to come to the hospital in the middle of the night

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Crash, Part II

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Crash, Part II

It’s been three days, the furthest Julian’s been from Noel’s flat is the Spa three streets away and even that’s further than Noel’s been. For someone who previously found it physically impossible to stay at home for more than six hours at a time (and then only if he was asleep for at least four of those)—it’s scaring Julian slightly. Noel’s not stepped foot outside the front door since arriving back from hospital.

Mike and Dave have been round but not Rich, and that’s something he’s ridiculously grateful for—as much as they both love the man, he’s pretty sure Noel wouldn’t cope well with him right now. While Mike and Dave happily kick around the place like they live here, Rich is a much more high maintenance guest.

This afternoon though it’s just the two of them. They’re lying on Noel’s bed, mostly because the living room is filled with canvases covered with various artistic media. It could be said that Noel’s at least been productive, depending on the definition. Some canvases depict vague outlines of nightmarish monsters scribbled in thick black pencil, others have freakishly coloured daubs of paint that almost certainly have meaning in Noel’s mind but it’s meaning he’s not talking about and Julian isn’t able to work it out this time. He can just take guesses, and he’s finding he doesn’t really want to.

He’s propped up against the pillows, legs out in front of him, Noel resting against the crook of his shoulder at an angle to him with his knees pulled up. A cigarette is held loosely in Noel’s fingers—one Julian’s almost certain he isn’t getting back—and as Noel blows smoke rings into the blue walled bedroom, Julian strains to reach the packet he dropped onto the bed. Finally snatching it between two fingers he taps a second ciggy out onto the sheet, picks it up and sticks it between his lips, snagging his lighter from down by his knee.

He takes a first, long drag on it and stretches his arm out to run the tips of his fingers along the edge of Noel’s bare foot. ‘Haven’t seen you smoke in months.’ When Noel plucked the cigarette from his fingers a few minutes ago it was something that knocked him off balance slightly, like him not wanting to go out, like his apparent need to have his best friend, his comedy partner, within sight at all times. Not that it isn’t nice to be wanted, but Noel never fails to make him feel like that, and all this is Noel’s way to dealing, or not dealing, with what happened. Julian has no idea how to help.

Noel’s shrugging, pressing his head back against Julian’s shoulder, possibly a silent request for him to shut it, but Julian—as usual—ignores such a subtle hint. ‘You’re sure it’s okay? The doc said no alcohol, no drugs. Isn’t Nicotine technically…’

He’s cut off by Noel pulling away suddenly, sitting up, wrapping his arms around his knees. ‘Please, Ju, don’t start the mother hen act, I can’t—’

‘I’m sorry, ‘ Julian says before he can finish, ‘sorry.’ He runs his fingers down the line of Noel’s curved spine, over the smooth material of the black velvet shirt, feeling tight, taut muscles on either side. He’s wound too tightly and although Julian’s seen him like this a hundred times before, he’s never felt the need to walk on eggshells in the past—the verbal equivalent of a sharp slap to the face is usually what he needs. He knows instinctively that approach isn’t going to work here. This isn’t a hissy fit because Noel isn’t getting his own way or a random mood swing after a late night or a bad trip; this is Noel’s reaction to something terrifying that’s happened to him, something beyond his control, something that’s knocked him a long way out of his comfort and safety zones.

‘You need to talk this through.’ Nothing. ‘Noel.’

Suddenly he’s all movement, bouncing to his knees, turning to face Julian. ‘Why didn’t he go through with it?’ It’s obviously the most pressing question but it’s still one Julian doesn’t have an answer to.

‘I don’t know. But… maybe you do.’

Noel’s eyes widen, stung. ‘Are you saying I bought this on mys—’

‘No! No. You know I didn’t mean it like that.’

As second passes and Noel deflates. Julian’s almost sorry—the fight’s something he needs right now. ‘Sorry, Ju…. God. All I’ve done is jump down your throat.’

Reaching a hand to Noel’s folded legs he pats one knee. ‘All I’m saying is maybe you did something to spook him—spoke to someone, met someone you know, maybe he thought you were on your own before that. Maybe he didn’t recognise you and when he realised who you were he didn’t think the risk was worth it. No offence.’ A small smile touches Noel’s lips. ‘I don’t have the answers you’re looking for this time. Believe me, I wish I did.’

He nods. ‘I know.’

‘You need to accept you might never find them.’ Julian watches Noel tip his head back, twist to stub out the butt of his ciggy in the Rolling Stones ashtray at the far corner of the bed, stretch his legs from under him, bending them to one side, and he pulls his own knees up in anticipation of Noel wanting to use them as support. Rightly as it turns out. Noel crosses his arms on them and rests his chin on his wrists, eyeing Julian with frustration and something like defeat.

‘It’s not like I’ve lost my memory or anything, I can remember everything up until getting home.’

‘Julian thinks about this. Who were you meeting in the pub?’ Partly he thinks he’s trying to get him to go back over that night—like he’s seen people do on terrible American TV shows—but partly it’s because he’s privately curious.

‘Johnny and Ivor. But they stood me up. I was going to come round to your place and gatecrash your night with your Dad’s jazz records but Sue and Chris turned up with some mates so we had a couple of drinks and went off to Azure. Don’t know how long we were there for but I started to feel sick, so I walked home. What if he’d followed me?’

No point in wishing Noel had come over, that Sue and Chris hadn’t showed up when they did. ‘He didn’t follow you.’ It comes out bluntly and Julian immediately regrets it.

‘You don’t have to stay, ‘ Noel murmurs and Julian recognises the tone. But Noel doesn’t move away and they both know he isn’t going to leave, not until they’re back to spending more time out of this flat than in it. Noel falls silent, and Julian lifts a hand, runs his index and middle finger the length of a lock of black hair like human straighteners. For a long time neither says anything and that’s okay; they’ve been together long enough to be able to fall silent in each other’s company.

‘Do you think Howard would be scared of hospitals?’

Julian smiles at the not-so-random question; it works to reassure himself that the Noel of old is still in there somewhere. He considers it and nods. ‘But I think he’d act all heroic for Vince, who’d definitely hate them because he wouldn’t do his hair in the morning.’ He can’t shake the feelings he experienced as he sat at Noel’s bedside, and the lines between he and Vince get blurred sometimes.

‘He’s a shallow bitch, ‘ Noel responds affectionately, closing his eyes, lifting his chin and instead resting his right cheek on the backs of his hands. Julian finds his bare foot again and curls his fingers around it, careful not to tickle.

‘Do you remember when you were gigging on your own, ‘ Noel starts without warning, raising his head, like the memory’s just popped back into his brain right at that moment, ‘before we got together, that guy who used to come to all the same gigs as you and do stand up? The one with the weird hair?’

Julian thinks back. ‘The only person I remember being at all my gigs with weird hair is you.’

Noel grins at that, like sunshine on a stormy day. ‘You know the guy I mean! He was besotted with you, used to try to talk to you after every show.’

Head to one side, reaching to ditch his own cigarette, Julian says, ‘Still you.’

‘Julian! You must remember! Had a weird three barrelled name, all first names cos he couldn’t decide what to call himself on stage.’

Light bulb! ‘You mean Will-Bill-Dick!’

‘That’s him!’

‘Jesus…’ How long must it have been? ‘You saw him?’

‘Yeah, that night. Sounds like he’s done all right. He was wearing a suit anyway. He said he was a producer now, something on telly I think.’

Will-Bill-Dick, atrociously bad stand-up wannabe, a strange little man who could never decide which name to use, who never got a laugh but didn’t let that stop him from trying. A man who would watch Julian’s gigs with a frequency bordering on obsession. He feels something go rotten in his stomach, and suddenly, unexpectedly blinking back tears, he runs his fingers through Noel’s hair as he asks, ‘Did he buy you a drink?’

It didn’t take many calls to get a contact number. Will-Bill-Dick, or William Denham to give him the name he’ll be later charged under for assault, meets Julian in The Arms in Camden Town one afternoon a couple of days later.

Julian gets a round in and chooses a high table just big enough for the two of them and close to the bar, with high stools padded in faded green velvet attached to the wooden frames by bronze studs. William’s still short, still wiry, with shoulder-length blond hair streaked with autumnal highlights. He’s got dark, beady eyes that make Julian feel uncomfortable and remind him of the Welsh character, Barry, who Noel played in the Boosh episode with Kodiak Jack.

He tells William he’d heard he was back in town, and thought it would be good to catch up after so many years. He asks what he’s doing now, remembering Noel saying he was a producer. As it turns out he’s not in telly. He’s working at a back-alley recording studio in Soho, taking bookings from unsigned bands and arranging session musicians for lone artists. Julian wonders why he lied to Noel but isn’t lying to him.

Now they’re face to face he recalls clearly what a creepy bloke he was back in ‘those’ days, why he used to find reasons not to hang around and talk to him, finally deciding that being ‘standoff-ish’, as Noel so often described it, was a better form of defence. It was one of the reasons Noel had such a hard time trying to talk to him during those first weeks and if he wasn’t such a tenacious character they might never have got together, although Julian doubts it. He’s always believed they were supposed to be a double act, and that fate would have thrown them together somehow, found a way for them to trip over one another at some other time in some other place.

Noel’s the best thing to have ever happened to him and despite their differences, despite their arguments, Julian knows he can’t exist without him. They’re two halves of the same person now, irrevocably, and it’s most of the reason he’s doing this.

‘Are you still with Noel?’ William slips the question in between slugs of lager and without hesitation Julian shakes his head.

‘Really?’ He sounds surprised. ‘What happened?’ Julian feels slightly sick, but he shrugs and takes a mouthful of his beer, reckoning on how much of his pint he’s going to be able to drink before he’s arrested and how much he’s going to want to.

‘He dumped me a couple of months back for this other comedian, kind of a mirror image of himself. Preferred the look, he said.’

William’s eyebrows rise almost comically. ‘Sorry. Always thought you two were good together.’ It sounds like a lie, a heavy layer of sarcasm underpinning his words that Julian pretends not to hear but makes him want to reach out with his bare hands and strangle the guy.

‘Were, ‘ he somehow manages. ‘He turned into this media whore. I didn’t recognise him by the time we split.’

Picking up his bottle of beer, William chinks it against Julian’s glass even though it’s on the table and not in his hands. ‘In that case, I’m glad I got my petty revenge in for both of us.’

‘Petty little revenge?’ He has to work at sounding vaguely interested, not angry. Despite knowing this is what he’s after, the beer is turning sour in his stomach and he’s glad he’s only had half the pint.

‘I was in this club a couple of nights ago, saw him tarting around with some weirdly dressed women. So I said hi and dropped a little surprise in his drink when he wasn’t watching. Looked a right sight, all in red with black pointy boots, more like a woman than a guy. I thought about you, hoped you’d ditched him. Sorry it was the other way around but… hey, it should at least have made him as sick as a dog. Little prick deserves it, don’t you—’

He apparently doesn’t see Julian’s fist coming until bunched fingers break his nose with an entirely satisfying crack. One hand goes to his face as he drops his bottle and moans, ‘What the fuck..?’ in a strangely high-pitched voice. To his credit, he follows up by shooting to his feet and landing a punch to the left side of Julian’s face that’ll leave a fierce bruise, but by then the bouncers are grabbing them both and the barman—Luka—is staring at Julian with a mix of awe and shock.

‘What the fuck are you doing, Barratt?’

Julian doesn’t struggle against the big bouncer who has his arms pinned behind him. ‘Call the police.’ He’s staring hatred at the man bleeding onto the pub’s newly fitted carpet.

Luka is staring at him, ‘What?’

‘This guy drugged Noel last weekend, put him in hospital. Call the police.’ Luka doesn’t need to be told a third time.

‘Never a good idea to take the law into your own hands.’

Julian leans forward across the narrow table, stretching his arms and shoulders. His head’s pounding and his fist stings, like he ran into a snowplough. ‘I wasn’t. I just wanted to hit the bastard, just once.’

The uniformed officer is the same one who spoke to Noel at the hospital. He already found Julian some painkillers to take the edge off his headache, along with a decent mug of coffee, before they started this rather informal interview.

‘We’re not going to charge you.’

Julian nods, relief mixing with the cooling adrenaline in his blood stream. ‘Cheers. What about him?’

‘We’re definitely charging him. He doesn’t seem to think that dosing someone with Rohypnol is that serious a crime. My colleague’s setting him straight on that point right about now. And there’s the question of why he had it on him in the first place if the assault wasn’t pre-meditated like he told you.’ Julian sighs, closes his eyes. ‘How’s the head?’

‘Aching.’ Something of an understatement but he can’t find words really adequate to describe it.

‘Better get home then. Need a lift?’

‘No, I’ll walk. But thanks.’

The officer shrugs, nods and escorts him out. ‘Don’t leave the country.’

All he offers in response is a polite chuckle not completely devoid of humour.

Noel’s in the hall before Julian’s got the door open. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Then he gets sight of Julian’s face. ‘What the fuck happened?’

‘I got in a fight, ‘

‘What?’

Pushing the door closed, Julian leans back on it, the latch catching, and looks at Noel who’s standing and staring at him; flustered, worried, scared even. Something inside him swells, almost breaks. He loves his man, more than anything, more than anyone. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for him, no sacrifice he wouldn’t make. And suddenly his headache seems so transient. Stepping forward he wraps an arm around Noel’s neck and walks him into the living room, murmuring, as they go, into Noel’s hair, ‘I’m fine. It’s nothing, ‘

He stops them in front of the sofa, uses his arm to pull his best friend into a tight hug before pushing him gently to sit down. He drops too, into the corner of the black and white sofa, leaning into it, letting his head drop back to the cushions and closing his eyes. He can feel Noel kneeling up in the centre, feels bony knees prodding his thighs.

He opens his eyes again. ‘I met William Denham—Will-Bill-Dick—in The Arms.’ A frown touches Noel’s sharp features. ‘We had a drink and I broke his noise. So he punched me.’

Eyes widen. ‘Jesus, Ju…. I’ve got some Anadin..?’

Julian smiles. ‘It’s okay. The policeman at the station got me some.’

‘Station?!’

‘Luka called the police.’

‘What? Why?’ Something about reducing Noel to single word questions amuses him.

‘Because I asked him to.’ Reaching across the small gap between them he cups the side of Noel’s head in his palm, runs his fingers through silky black hair once before pulling his hand back. ‘Denham was the son-of-a-bitch who drugged you. He called it ‘his petty revenge’. He never had any intention of… of raping you. He just knew it would make you sick.’

Noel’s staring at him, lost in all this news. ‘How do you know?’

‘He told me.’

‘Told you?’ He can hear the upset in the high voice, but it’s just that he’s been thrown by what Julian’s telling him. ‘Just confessed like you’re some kind of priest?’

‘I told him we’d split, said you’d dumped me for Russell Brand.’ In so many words. It was laughable now he came to tell the story, although not to Noel apparently, but it worked, so it didn’t matter.

‘You should have gone to the police, ‘ Noel tells him quietly.

‘That’s what the police said.’ His eyes close again almost of their own volition and he feels the tips of Noel’s fingers ghost over the side of his face, behind the bruising, through his hair.

‘Can’t believe you got into a fight for me. That’s so chivalrous. Romantic.’ Julian frowns at the word and cracks his eyes again to see the meaning of it in Noel’s bright eyes. They’re shining, he’s smiling.

‘You sounded like Vince for a second there.’ This closeness, this intimacy, isn’t anything new. But there’s something different in the quality of it, like the kiss they shared the morning Julian brought him home from the hospital. Their gazes lock and hold, and slowly Noel drops sideways against the back of the sofa, stretching his top leg out, pointing his foot into the air, eyes never leaving Julian’s.

‘What is this?’ he murmurs softly.

‘I don’t know, ‘ Julian responds quietly, not wanting to break it, whatever it is. Noel looks at him for a long time without saying anything more, and it crackles between them like electricity. Julian thinks Noel might kiss him again, like he did in the kitchen, and tries to work out in advance how he’ll feel about it, how he’ll react. Something’s changing between them and it’s out of their control. Over the years they’ve both grown, matured, tried new things, made new mistakes, and it’s never mattered, never altered what always stays constant between them. Their relationship needs to endure, they both understand that, and they give each other the space to ensure it does. But this… this is that relationship undergoing some sort of transition. And something tells him they’ll survive it.

The sun’s setting outside the mucky windows. Noel hasn’t kissed him again and they’re not touching but it doesn’t matter, they don’t have to be for Julian to feel Noel there, close to him, and his presence slowly lets him relax, lets his mind take a break, lets his body drift.

It could be minutes, could be hours later when Noel asks quietly, ‘Are they charging Will-Bill—’

‘Willam Denham, ‘ Julian supplies, dazed but not wanting to ever hear that nickname again. ‘Yes.’

‘For assaulting you.’

Julian frowns, waking up slightly, opening his eyes. ‘For assaulting you.’

‘But he hit you!’

‘I hit him first. I’m lucky they’re not charging me.’

‘Did they say why they weren’t?’

He shrugs lazily, tells Noel it was the same policeman who’d been to the hospital who’d interviewed him. ‘Maybe he thought he deserved it.’

Noel nods slowly, reaches for Julian’s hand where it’s resting on the sofa between them, pushes his fingers through Julian’s like that steeple game the other kids used to play at school, other hand playing with his thumb. Julian’s happy to let him. If he needs the physical contact it’s his. Whatever he needs is his; he doesn’t have to ask, he’s welcome just to take it. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah. I was thinking I might go out tomorrow, just down to Camden Market, maybe lunch at the pub…’

‘…check out the gigs in the evening?’ Julian’s glad—relieved—to hear the old Noel again. ‘Want to go tonight?’

‘No. You look like you need to sleep for a day, and I want you to come with me.’

He nods, curling his fingers around Noel’s, settling back to sleep. ‘Twenty-four hours, and I’m all yours.’