Half-life Beach

I am laughing because I finally know that I am dying. I didn’t realise until tonight. The beauty of her solo voice splits my face into a child’s smile, the chorus makes me start laughing with joy and the song’s end is the death of something more beloved than I will ever be. My cheeks are wet with tears and I don’t care. The air in the room holds the last note like a match holds a flame, but then it’s gone. The song is gone and we are floating in the vacuum it has carved in the atmosphere. Our souls have been sucked up into the space that the notes have hewn above us, and we all understand now, if we didn’t already, that our lives are only short songs. The audience explodes into the silence and we cheer and applaud the death of something beautiful.  

I am overcome. I look around and see none of my friends. I have worked my way to the front of the crowd and I am alone with a thousand people. The security barrier is hard against my stomach. Another song (track four from her third album - Positive Blood) has already started, but I am exhausted. I need space to gather myself, which I will not be able to do while pressed against the hot skin of a tangle of entranced strangers. I get elbowed in the ribs for the third time in a minute and decide to escape to the bar. I need a drink.

I bounce on the bass through the shifting bodies and work my way towards the back of the room. I move away from the rainforest in front of the stage where condensed sweat drips back down from the club’s low ceiling on to the hot bodies of the battery-fans. I reach a thinner stratum of crowd and have enough space to notice that my t-shirt, bearing an image of the singer’s first-album-face, is pasted to my sweaty body. Her voice is now clothed in a rattling drum-guitar shift with keyboard accessories. No longer nakedly solo, it has lost a little of its power over me, but it’s still part of the sound that literally moves the floor beneath me, entering through the soles of my feet and vibrating up through every inch of my heat-swollen body. I really need a drink.  

Around the bar a few other refugees from the front gulp plastic cups of water. There are a few older fans, veterans of the front, retired to the civilisation of the support trenches. Some may be reservists who could still be called back into action by the declaration of a favourite song, but for now they are happy to watch and drink in t-shirts older than the front row security barrier fodder.

From the vantage point of the bar at the back of the basement club she is action figure sized. A figurine from a dream at a distance which requires her studded leather and stage moves to do some of the work on the crowd that she can do with her eyes alone if you’re close enough. Up close, earlier tonight, she’d looked at me. I don’t think she recognised me, but she definitely looked at me. She was as untouchable on the stage as she had been when I first met her.

It was my uni. friend Dan who had been going out with her. She had not attended our university, but lived in the overlap between the student union and the local music scene. I was just an occasional accessory to some of their nights out and a couple of summer days. The days were more precious than the nights. Dressed down and unmade-up she was more beautiful and fractionally less unattainable. Dressed, well, the same, and unintoxicated I was even more shy, but less inclined to hide it by shouting and dancing badly. On one of the days, a spontaneous group trip to a beach overlooked by a power station, she’d taken my hand as we walked together towards the sea. I have no idea where Dan was.

I’ve lost touch with Dan, but I’ve stayed in touch with her through four albums and their streamed singles, six live shows which never lost their power over me, an amount of online watching which is hopefully not capable of being creepy in a hyper-transparent social media age, and three worn-to-fading t-shirts. I look down at her upside-down face on the shirt I am in the process of ruining tonight.  My stomach throbs under her mouth and I lift up the shirt to see a purple, security barrier shaped stripe across my stomach.

I couldn’t even resent Dan. He had been every bit as faithful and kind to her as I hoped I would have been, but with more confidence and charisma than I had to share. It was her, not him that had eventually driven them apart and robbed me of the opportunity to be around her. She had begun to get successful and her monetised time was packaged by an agent and sold off to a record company. She appeared less and less in her dressed-down unmade-up mode and began to unironically wear shades indoors and go about with a perpetually carried rat of a dog with a box-cutter yap. I couldn’t resent her, I didn’t resent Dan, but I hated that fucking dog.  

My moment comes at the bar and I buy an overpriced pint in a plastic glass. I stoop to slurp the first foamy inch down as it still sits on the bar, before the soft plastic has a chance to be squashed by my grip into a gaping spout and christen me a mug. Not my first rodeo. Rising with a foam moustache I see a girl watching me, laughing at my technique. I give her a foamy grin and wipe my mouth on the back of a sweaty arm with a shrug. She is still looking at me after I have shrugged. I expected that to be the end of our exchange. I don’t know what else to do so I take a few steps from the bar and turn my attention back to the stage. The band are doing the album version of Gene Machine, the second single from The Right to Be Forgotten. I’ve got the picture disc. It’s a fast track and even at the back by the bar people are dancing as much as their plastic glasses full of lager will allow. An elbow clips my ribs and I turn to see the girl dancing next to me. She is all joy and no rhythm, but there’s a happy aggression in her moves that makes her body as loud as the music. I restrict myself to a head bobbing shuffle as I gulp the cold pint down. As the track ends she sees me watching her and grins, feathers of dark hair plastered to her forehead. Once again, the look lasts a beat longer than it needs to, long enough to demand a response. The band launches into a decent but missable B side before I have a chance to say anything. Voiceless in the volume I point at my almost-finished pint with raised eyebrows. She takes the pint off me, downs what is left and raises two fingers with a smile.

The B side has driven a few more people to the bar and as I queue, I realise that I feel like I am walking towards the sea on a beach in the shadow of a power station. I go back to her with the drinks and she accepts one with a mouthed word which might be her name. It is definitely a reason to bend in closer.

“RACHEL,” she yells into my ear, hot beer breath and a hand on my neck.

“MAX,” I yell into her ear.

“SAW YOU DOWN THE FRONT!” Her eyes are bright with approval.

“YEAH!” I raise my t-shirt and show her the bruise on my stomach. She laughs hard enough to spill a bit of her pint and then covers her mouth to hide her obvious amusement at my injury. She bites her lip and forces a frown of belated sympathy, then reaches out to stroke the sweaty bruise with a warm hand. The music had stopped and I am still vibrating. I take another drink of my beer and her hand is still there. I look at her and she isn’t laughing any more. I look at the stage and the band start playing their biggest hit, Half-life Beach. Happy beyond laughter I take her hand. The singer puts us on the beach, beauty is alive and well, but there is no time to waste.