2019
Chapter 1
He made a decision not to look when Wayne pointed her out and tried his hardest to stick to that decision when Baz added his approval too.
‘Go on, this is a great chance! What you got to lose?’ Baz said, watching him keenly.
‘Everything,’ Freddie mumbled back, still determined to avoid looking.
‘Just be yourself,’ Wayne offered. ‘I mean, not yourself right now. But, you know, the self you are when you’re just with us. Imagine you’re just chatting in the pub or something.’
It was easy for them, Freddie wanted to say. Baz was all settled now, and Wayne lived in a world where nothing was above being made fun of. In the three years since Freddie had known him, he hadn’t ever once seen Wayne take anything seriously, unless it was a pint, or Call of Duty.
‘What should I say then?’ he asked, hoping the tone of his voice would put them off pressing him any further. No such luck.
‘She’s in a comic book shop holding an issue of Starboy at a Brian Teller signing. What do you think you should talk to her about?’ Baz replied, baffled.
Freddie finally turned his head and took her in: beautiful, in a cute way. Button features and bobbed hair.
This could be OK, he thought. She doesn’t seem all that scary.
He took a moment for a deep breath, and in that moment came a flood of expectation. What if this was it? What if this was the moment every other moment would spin out from? One day he might be telling his grandkids about this. One year from now he might bring her here to propose, and maybe they would get married here too, surrounded by their favourite books, perhaps even officiated over by the man they had both come to this bookshop signing to see. The whole wedding party in vibrant cosplay. The photos would go viral on the internet. Ellen would end up inviting them to America to be on TV and everything.
I have to get this right. It has to be perfect.
And then, the mirror voice, just as insistent: Why even bother?
One deep breath turned into another, and then another, as the thoughts spiralled through his mind, battling and getting louder and louder on each turn. It was all too much.
‘I think our boy might need a bit of a push.’
Before Freddie could register what Wayne had said, he found himself shoved and stumbling backwards, nearly falling over his own feet, and right into her.
‘Oh no, oh my God, I’m so sorry,’ Freddie said, scrambling upright and trying not to drop the Starboy single issues he was clutching.
‘It’s fine,’ the girl said, staring at him.
‘Yeah, I’m so sorry.’ His palms were sweating now, his comics, packaged individually in pristine cellophane sleeves, sliding out of his hands and down to the floor as he tried to balance by placing a hand on a shelving rack that wobbled precariously.
‘Let me help you with that,’ the girl offered, crouching down to help collect them up.
When he bent down to join her, their faces were level, their eyes meeting briefly. Hers were brown. Wide, chocolate-drop brown.
‘Do you need a tissue?’ the girl asked.
‘What?’
‘For your face?’
God, he really was sweating. His top lip was completely slick, and one embarrassing drop threatened to actually roll off his brow and on to the floor below. It was mortifying. And now that he was mortified, that meant the sweating was only going to get worse.
‘No, I’m all right thanks.’ He couldn’t think of anything else to say, could feel Baz and Wayne listening in behind him, the sense that he’d somehow let them down just another thing contributing to his rapidly increasing heart rate, and the adrenaline tremor in his fingertips.
An imagined lifetime of perfect romantic bliss vanished into stardust.
‘I’m going to turn away now,’ Freddie said when they were standing again, his comics all safely collected up.
He knew she was still watching him as he shuffled back to his friends, mopping his face with the sleeve of his jumper before Baz gave him a consolatory pat on the shoulder.
A few moments later, while Wayne was deep into explaining to a baffled stranger how underrated Brian Teller’s cynical approach to Blairite Britain was in the Starboy Ultimate Saga during the late nineties, Freddie heard the girl behind him on the phone.
‘Could you get here quickly, OK?’ she was telling the person on the other end. ‘I swear one of these creeps just tried to maul me. ‘
When he woke up, the hangover hit him like a punch. His gut moaned at him and his tongue felt dry and barbed in his mouth. Freddie tried to moisten his lips, as brittle as a mountain crag. Christ, how many pints did he end up having?
Still, at least it was Saturday. The clock on Freddie’s bedside table read ten thirty, which felt about right. He may have missed most of his morning, but he didn’t care. The only plans he had were to pop to the shops, then at four thirty he was due at his brother’s house to celebrate his niece’s first birthday.
Congratulations Lacey! He’d written on the card. You made it one whole rotation around the sun!
The card was tucked neatly into its envelope and was sitting right on top of his chest of drawers where he wouldn’t forget it, propped up against the carefully wrapped cuddly dinosaur he had bought because he thought it looked cute, and because he imagined that if he were one year old, he’d find the soft felt teeth hilarious. Lacey had so many pink things anyway, this could be something unique that would always remind her of him.
‘Well that’s lovely,’ he heard his sister-in-law saying. ‘But why did you get her a boy present?’
Stella wouldn’t actually say it, but Freddie imagined it anyway.
What if I’ve made a terrible mistake, he thought. What kind of person buys a dinosaur for a little baby girl?
It had seemed like such a good idea at the time; subversive and ‘woke’, as Stella liked to say. But now he wondered if he actually understood the word properly, or if he had in fact gone too far. Did he have enough time to go to the shops to exchange it? Did he even have the energy?
It’ll be fine. It’ll have to be fine.
He groaned and rubbed his face as he realised that he hadn’t managed to brush his teeth before he got into bed, and then attempted to push past the anxiety that gave him. He hadn’t remembered to take his medication either, the side effects of which he’d no doubt have to battle later.
Freddie rubbed at his eyes. Yuck. He felt disgusting. He was disgusting. No wonder he was alone.
He didn’t remember much from the rest of the night before, not after he had seen that girl from the comic book shop come into the pub with a couple of her girlfriends and had decided that the best way to avoid Baz and Wayne trying to set him up again was to get obnoxiously drunk. Freddie vaguely recalled a couple of the people who worked at Ben Day Comics sitting with them, and at some point showing them what amounted to his most prized possession: the complete single-issue run of the first Starboy Saga, now all signed by the creator himself. Had he dreamt that one of the Ben Day lot had suggested that he could probably get a couple of thousand for them if he ever wanted to sell?
Oh no. The Starboys. Where were the Starboys?
Suddenly very much awake, Freddie stumbled around his bedroom, looking for any reasonable place he could have left them during his drunken stupor. Then he started looking through the unreasonable places. Oh God – where the hell had he put them?