GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2025/26

ALAN GRAY

‘Extended Play’

THE EARPHONES ARE IN – and they stay in. Once upon a time, it’d be like listening to his own fucking collection in here. Heavy, hard, classic. But metal is dead, and doesn’t he know it.

Well, he might know it, but he doesn’t dress it. Black hoodie, black jeans, black t-shirt; fat gut, long hair, big beard. It’s the get-up he’s had ever since secondary school – only the gut and beard are new, and the hair is longer still. Receding, if you must know, and a little curly at the ends if you want the speciﬁcs, but perfect for headbanging, skanking, windmilling; the sort of things that, these days, would do his back in, and his neck.

Liam stands at the bar, orders a pint of Ruddles Best; takes a booth by the entrance at the side of the stage. Nothing like a good dark corner. And next to the bogs, too – that’ll come in handy, his bladder’s useless.

The walls in the cellar are exposed brick and painted an orangey red. Wherever possible, a poster has been wheat-pasted, a sticker stuck. Posters atop posters, stickers atop stickers – and atop them all, graffiti. Here is a set of signatures from some grotty trio who’d played that stage once, and probably nowhere else. And here is Linkin Park – the late Chester Bennington – with his eyes scratched out and a handlebar tash scribbled on. Oh aye, and a swastika on his forehead.

Bastards, Liam thinks, and he doesn't even like Linkin Park. He sips his pint andtakes out one earphone. Puts it back in.

His ﬁrst beer goes down, and a second quickly follows. The stage remains empty, as does the bar. After taking a piss, he is joined by a couple of older metalheads, and then a few thirty-somethings trickle in; a handful of them women. Some attractive, some not – most apparently disgusted by him, as women often are: as women have been his whole life. As a teenager his acne hadn’t helped, and as an adult his acne scars do him a number. Think: moulding bread, stippled ceiling. Think craters that look like they’ve been dug out with a toothpick, a teaspoon. He’d washed his face enough – practically scoured it in his younger days. But there’s only so much a person can do. At some point, you just have to accept your lot. Besides, the creams are far too expensive, and definitely, definitely not metal.

He watches one of the women order a pint; then stand with the rest of her crusty punk gang. She’s his type – pushing forty with peach-pink hair; bullet belt leopard-print brothel creepers. Each arm dressed in a muddy sleeve of paisley tatts and free-handed peacock feathers. Canny legs, too. Torn-off black shorts, black ﬁshnets. She’s a bit on the chunky side, maybe – but he likes a bit of cushion. Which is just as well because the scene at his age tends to fall into that category. Himself included. Besides, it isn’t like he’s getting any. He hasn’t had any in years, and at some point he’d stopped caring. A miracle of sorts. The constant youthful longing, gone.

There were times when practically anything would’ve gotten him going. A slack stud-belt, a well-placed denim tear. But now – now he’s content with just a look. If they won’t let him near, won’t let him touch: that’s ﬁne by him. He can’t be arsed with the hassle. Can’t be arsed with much.

She stands with her group, staring at the stage and nodding her head. Bopping along, pint held stoically still while her shoulders jut and jerk. And for a moment, it seems like she is nodding to the beat – his beat. A cascade of drums and power chords, bass and distortion. A wall of dark noise, louder than hell.

It’s no slack stud-belt, her bopping – no crotch rip – but it stirs something in him. Quickens his weak heart. Then the track on his earphones switches, and the illusion is killed. Her band tee rushes to his attention, and the illusion’s coffin is nailed shut.

Rancid. What posers.

At school, Liam had been the ﬁrst in his year to truly give metal a try. His dad had got him into it, playing AC/DC’s Back In Black in the car. But these days his taste has developed far from his old man’s, who doesn’t really listen to anything anymore: preferring his garden, his garage, and whatever plays on the radio.

‘You heard this one?’ he’ll say, when they’d both be walking around Homebase, and Liam would listen as if it wasn’t the mainstream earworm of the summer – the money-grabbing claptrap which assaulted his ears at every turn.

Metal was never some teen-rebellion thing for Liam. Or at least it didn’t start that way. It was more a kind of coming to life, a coming to consciousness. He could suddenly hear thoughts he hadn’t quite understood he was having (a depth he suddenly possessed), and he felt called to be true to the music – to live for it in some way. He couldn’t play an instrument, and after a few attempts on a friend’s bass guitar was forced to acknowledge he lacked anything that could reasonably be called talent. But he did have an ear – a sense of what was good and bad – and he was willing to do whatever it took to reﬁne that ear and construct himself in the process. He entered mosh pits, not to hurt others, but to get closer to the band, the music; he drank till he merged with the sludge of the guitars and smoked till he reverberated with the sonic spirit of the drums. He got fucked up, basically, and it felt right. Here, in the music, was a cause higher than his own wellbeing: one of the deeper drives of existence. Primal, prehistoric, authentic, and real. And it was his for the taking! He wrote a few wide-eyed fanboy blogs, uploaded dozens of ranty album reviews on an emerging Amazon – which a not insubstantial number of metal geeks found helpful – and then he got a job working in IT support (‘Have you tried turning it off and on again?’). But always – always – the music came ﬁrst.

He worked for money that he’d spend on rare-as-hen’s-teeth editions, top-of-the-range ‘may damage your hearing’ sound systems. Money that would supply him with all-accesstickets to the best gigs wherever they were in the country – hell, the world. And if a girlfriend didn’t like it, if a so-called mate couldn’t stand it, then he was happy to be alone. In the end, the isolation, the alienation – it was the stuff great bands were made of. It was at the heart of the fucking genre, for God’s sake. And anyway, you were born, lived a bit, and then you died – why wouldn’t you feel alienated? How much more ‘isolated’ could you possibly get?

The only reason more people don’t do themselves in, he always thinks, is that dying is scary as fuck. Otherwise, many would try it. Give it a go.

He would, anyway. If he didn’t have the music. There were times when he’d even come close, stocking up on paracetamol and Nemiroff vodka, running a slow, temperature-controlled bath. But if life is meaningless – he thinks now, and thought then, turning off the hot tap with the gnarly toes of his right foot– what is death? The question is as empty as the answer. Unknown and unknowable. An unthinkable unthinkable. Very metal indeed.

As if his phone is reading his thoughts, the next track to blast Liam’s lugs is Soundgarden’s ‘Black Hole Sun.’ The sickly swirling dizzying opener; the slide guitar; the muddy drop of the chorus. Plummet after plummet, the feeling in the gut.

He can see himself holding the CD for the very ﬁrst time. Superunknown. Was that what it was about? Suicide? He’d never thought about it – back then, the LP’s title had just seemed cool. But Chris Cornell, the lead singer and lyricist, would later be found with an exercise band around his neck and blood in his mouth. Gone like Kurt Cobain was gone. Gone like Chester, Per Yngve Ohlin, Jon Nödtveidt, Adrian Guerra. LikeJamir Garcia, Jill Janus, Teemu Raimoranta, Evan McCaskey, Sims Ellison, Marcel Jacob, Ingo Schwichtenberg, Scott Columbus, Brian Velasco, Sean Malone, Marc Evans, Jan Paul Beahm, Kristen Pfaff, Layne Staley, Mike Star, Stefanie Sargent, Taylor Hawkins.

All of them, dead.

A young man near the bar gives Liam the horns, and Liam horns him right back. Ironically, obviously. But then the horns of the kid had also been ironic, and the boy is laughing now, surrounded by friends.

The boy is wearing the t-shirt of a thrash metal band Liam can’t stand.

Unlistenable imitators of Pantera, Megadeath, Anthrax. Bands that think metal is nothing more than noise and Satan. Which, don’t get Liam wrong, there’s a time and a place. But metal, he thinks – the very bestmetal – is more like Classical music than an all-out attitude with nothing to back it up.

At least that’s what Ozzy Osbourne had said. And who argues with Ozzy? Bless his dead black soul.

Liam gives the boy and his cronies the middle finger and the kid, laughing, gives him one right back. It’s all part of the fun; he’s passed a sort of test with them, and if he’s honest the boy has earned a little respect from him, too. They’ve been ugly with one another – rude – and unlike out there, in the rest of the world, these things have brought them closer together. If only for a moment. Liam takes back his Ruddles Best, and ‘Black Hole Sun’ explodes into its rage of a finish. The screaming, the crying, and Cornell finally at peace.

Liam downs a third Ruddles. Rolls himself a joint, and heads outside. The air is cold and the lighter won’ttake. At least not at first. He stands in the awning of a shuttered and beaten-down nail shop, smokes and stares at the thick November sky.

With his earphones out, and away from the bar’s racket, everything seems still and slow. It’s apleasure he likes to indulge in – a quiet that simply can’t exist without the roar of his music. And it’s enhanced by each and every drag.

He looks at the skull on his Zippo lighter, inhales and feels the smoke enter his chest, the blood rushto his temples. A slow death, sure, but one that makes him feel ﬁnally alive.

He exhales – and all is stillness and wonder. The greyness which coated him is gone, the ﬁlm over his eyes, removed – a boundary between himself and the world dropped. He toes at the cigarette butts litteringthe pavement. A seagull glides through the murk and lands on a bollard plastered with weathered ‘Anarchy’ stickers.

He’ll have one more drink and then go home to a night of cannabis gummies and YouTube. Old concerts, interviews, videos – a sort of free association via clicks. He’d discovered bands that way, or rediscovered them. The pop punk he’d once listened to: all gurns and haircuts. But then again, there’dalways be the odd song that brought him back to himself – an inexplicable moment seemingly lodged in his memory. Eating ﬁsh and chips in a hot Scarborough arcade. Drinking cans in a grim concrete car park. Sitting in the back of his mother’s Ford Mondeo while she bought milk and cigarettes from an off-licence: the weight of the Walkman on his bejeaned lap, the skipping of the CD whenever he scooted or shifted ever so slightly.

His mother was like him, he thinks. She had the same darkness he did – the sense that there was something deeply wrong, even malicious, in the very structure of the world. That even the plants didn’t want you here, that the bricks themselves harboured evil thoughts – empty hate, bitterness without content. She’d left when he was thirteen, and lived in Australia now. Headed Down Under for an affair with a man everybody believed was bad news. She’d never tried to get in touch, and Liam wouldn’t know where to start. He knew of a Facebook account that might be hers – but even if it was, it was unlikely she still monitored it. He thinks about her sometimes – he thinks about her a lot, in fact – and can’t help but feel – no, sense – she’s dead.

From inside the bar, a band announces itself via a storm of guitar shredding. Liam watches as more and more people enter; a mishmash of trenchcoats, bondage trousers, spike bands, and fishnet tights. All of it, shiny and new. In a few years, he thinks, they’ll all have crew cuts and starched shirts, high-heels andglittery purses. A nose ring or two might persist, sure. But what’s in a nose ring? Who fucking cares?

He flicks his roach, follows them in.

Lights flash in Liam’s eyes, ruby and emerald.

The laptop is open on his bed; and in the dark, via the ﬂicker of its screen, he watches himself talking over a clip of Black Sabbath in Paris, 1970.

He is talking about the mindless chugging you so often hear on contemporary albums – or albums that were contemporary back in 2008, when he created this YouTube channel: Extended Play, or EP for short.‘Sabbath – Paris,1970, REVIEW’ had proven to be his highest rated video: twenty likes and three comments, most of which praised him for raving about Black Sabbath; or mocked his appearance. ‘dude needs a makeover lol’; ‘the guy’s just one big acne scar.’

He’d achieved other successes with ‘Best ALBUMS of 2009,’ and ‘Best ALBUMS of 2010,’ but there had only been a handful of videos after that. The Amazon reviews had stopped, too. And after a promotion at work, he’d decided to take down his blog – unable to ﬁnd time for it, and worried about his employers’ thoughts on some of the content. ‘Cannibal Corpse addict’ was hardly on the job spec. And times had changed – in one blog, he’d celebrated Marilyn Manson. The artist, and the man.

Extended Play was different though. It was like a diary he’d left open on the internet, full of loneliness and sour longing. And unlike the blogs and Amazon reviews, it came directly from a face now far from his own. A face that could only hint at what the smoking would do; the drink, the drugs, the years.

Liam marvels at the inability of his eyes to make contact with the camera. On screen, he looks up,down, left, right – but never directly out. Never into the eyes of the viewer. He’s a speaker who likes to use his hands a lot, but because of the set-up and the poor cropping, he frequently goes out of focus: hands becoming so big they seem to contain most of his body fat; nails showcasing their ﬁlth. But despite it all – despite the drawbacks and shortcomings, thewandering eyes, the dirty nails, the hands as big as Godzilla’s – there's still something oddly compelling. The way he speaks with genuine excitement; the things he knows. He really does love what he’s talking about – and isn’t that supposed to be attractive? Isn’t that supposed to give a person meaning? Purpose? Identity? Depth?

That’s what the women would say on the dating apps, anyway. They’d say they were looking for somebody who has passion – who can share their passion: who has passion coming out of their sodding arsehole, basically. But then he’d talk to them, pop them a few messages, and they wouldn’t be interested in the metal they were supposed to ‘love intensely.’ They wouldn’t even know more than a handful of songs from their ‘favourite bands.’ And of course he’d end up rejected. Ghosted. Outright shutdown. Most of the time, he’d be lucky if he even got a match.

‘Your skin isn’t all that either,’ he’d type, and then he’d be blocked, probably reported.

One time, a couple of months ago, he’d forgotten to change his t-shirt before a date. Well, he’d remembered, but he wasn’t exactly going to score; and at that point he’d already left the house, waited for the bus and paid the fare. Stain or no stain, stink or no stink, he was always playing against the odds: and what was another long shot to add to his growing losing streak? What did it matter if this one blocked him, too.

‘You’ve gotta put your best foot forward,’ his dad had said, recalling dating Liam’s mother. ‘Talk about your interests, but not too much. The key is showing an interest in them.’

His dad rarely said anything about Liam’s mother that wasn’t about him and the sacriﬁces he’d made for her. If he said she was wild, it was only to mention his own calm and control; if she was spontaneous, he was thoughtful and considerate, steady and measured. It was a sales pitch for his father that inadvertently suggested another possible world, one in which, as the years went by – and his father’s ways began to forecast their inevitable lack – Liam began to see as of increasing value.

‘Your mother would never understand gardening,’ his dad had said once, after Liam had helped him repot a Japanese Maple on Father’s Day. ‘She couldn’t appreciate the discipline of a good routine,’ he said,handing Liam a thermo-ﬂask full of tepid coffee. ‘There’s a joy to it: it gives you a reason to get up in the morning. A rhythm to live by. Structure. Coherence.’

But what if you didn’t like orderliness? What if you’d been reading Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible and were starting to think that rules and restraint, and even God himself, was just a load of crap – that it all boiled down to power and its abuse … What was the point in gardening then? Why sow seeds when you might as well scrub your face with soil and wallow in compost? Why plant maples when you could rip them up from the root? If his mother was whoever his father wasn’t, then he, Liam, was his mother, and carried her curse. He couldn’t live within the lines his dad found so comforting. He couldn’t ﬁnd joy outside of danger and thrill. He had learned to love the windowless room in which the doorwas permanently closed and the candle extinguished. He was most at peace in a sort of familiar distress.

Liam reaches over to his bedside drawer, unwraps a candy-green gummy from its wrinkle of cellophane. Takes it to his mouth and swallows.

When he’d returned to the bar, he’d stood with a Ruddles Best, watching the gig – shoving those who vigorously pounded into him; beer sloshing against the hand that held it, already halfway gone. Without his headphones, he was forced to concede that the live music circuit within the scene had changed. And it was worse than he thought (no wonder he usually stayed plugged in).

Here, on stage, was a band screaming singalong harmonies. Guitars that sprinted over power chords, Super Nintendo style. Double-jumping beats, ground-pounding choruses. He watched as the singer held the mic aloft and sang upwards into it, hair flicking red-and-black as he strained with artiﬁcial emotion. These days, bands didn’t just play, they performed, and this guy acted out the lyrics as if he were BSL-approved: on the phone. Stabby-stabby. Trapped in a shrinkingspace. And was that rock, paper, scissors?

The woman in the Rancid top was moshing – clasping at her bullet belt, thrusting out her crotch. Shewas giving it the duckwalk – one leg kicking, the other stiff, and as far as Liam could tell, nobody was cutting her any slack. But no matter how hard they were going, she was going twice as hard back. She tossed her head without regard for where it landed, raised her elbows with similar indifference. A whirlwind of arms and legs: a storm of a woman, inviting disaster.

It was a picture he couldn’t resist.

He thought about approaching her, offering her a drink. ‘Ruddles Best?’ he’d say. ‘Jägermeister?’

‘Doom Bar, you cunt,’ she’d reply: straight out of the mouths of babes.

And maybe she’d give him a little punch at the top of his right shoulder, too, and he’d feign a returning knock-out slugger, stopping it just in time with a half-smile. The sort of half-smile that said: We could have fun, you and me. We could share in everything life’s about, and go all out. The two of us, we could …

But it was all a fantasy, wasn’t it? A fantasy.

He shook his head as if to shake the nonsense from it, like they do in the movies. And maybe it was the beer – or maybe it was his pain-in-the-arse bladder pressing again – but it kind of worked. He was back in the real world. His high had found its familiar low. Talk about alienated. Talk about isolated. He felt like a xenomorph adrift in a cryogenic chamber – the only feasible rescue coming his way: a furious missile tracking his coordinates.

Just then, though, Lady Rancid lurched toward him, thrown by the mosh pit, and he reached out to stop her from falling; palm pressing against the back of her sweat-drenched top. A full hand, ﬁngers splayed: shoulder blades running beneath his knuckles.

It had been the ﬁrst time he’d touched another in months – not even just sexually – though he’d felt the outline of her bra: smelt her perfume: lemon, vanilla, patchouli; and it was enough to ﬂicker the hopeshe’d left to smolder. A bond, a match, a chance at something. A whole story igniting in his head.

There would be a series of dirty jokes and a taxi back to her place. ‘It’s nearer,’ she’d say, ‘I can’t be arsed with a bus.’ And her ﬂat – wow, it’d be just as ﬁlthy as his own. There’d be stacked plates with last night’s dinner still resting on the bedside table, knickers, socks, and middens of clothes all over the carpet,which itself could’ve used a good hoovering. And the posters; and the CD rack; and the pinboard on which she kept old gig tickets, like rare butterﬂies whose curled paper wings faded in the bare-bulb tungsten light—

—But then she turned, regaining her balance. ‘Sorry,’ she said and looked straight through him, as if he were a ghost. And suddenly he understood that there was nothing between them, nor would they ever be. Hers was a surface as hostile to him as the most distant planet: an air he could never breathe. Skin that was smooth and moist, soft and warm; a body that held itself well, and gave off a pristine, choreographed scent. Her bullet belt was new, shiny, slick; her teeth, white; and the smile she gave had a cruel impenetrability to it – a bright, happy smile he could never know.

Another rejection, and this time he didn’t even have to ask.

‘HOW YOU ALL FUCKING DOING?’ the singer bellowed, and without waiting for an answer another song erupted, drums pounding, guitar reverberating. Everything louder than everything else.

Clicking on ‘Best ALBUMS of 2010,’ Liam watches himself dissect the year. Iron Maiden, Avenged Sevenfold, Deftones, Motorhead.

He is doing that thing with his hands again – wafting them too near the camera, distorting perspective. Fingers reach out to grab him, manky, begrimed. Knuckles ﬁll the screen.

‘It’s been a great year for alternative music,’ he is saying. ‘There’s been rubbish, but there’s also been a lotta decent stuff. Just like twenty-ten itself, really. Good and bad.’

He wants messy, he says, prefacing his annual review with a summary of his assessment criteria. Give him stuff with balls; give him some facemelting. Let the shredding of the axe scorch his eardrums, let thesinger shatter the glass on his phone. ‘Give me arsehole-ugly. Give me something real.’

A tirade follows on ambient intros and outros. Ten-minute-long ‘nothing burgers’ that clog an album with inchoate buzzing and tumbleweed static; creaking wooden doors that wouldn’t frighten a rabbit, the cheesy rumble of synthesised thunder.

Then audience Liam – observer Liam, older Liam – feels a twinge in his neck, a stabbing, a burning.

And now it’s in his back. A pulled muscle – pulled muscles! – headbanger’s remorse.

He’d barely even rocked out, but these days even a solid nod could do it.

Sometimes his back would go, and he’d just be walking, nothing more; sitting down, even. Occasionally, he’d turn over in bed and all hellfire would erupt up his spine. He could be brushing his teeth one minute and immolating the next. There was no escaping it: forty was the new sixty – diarrhoea was his only form of stool.

He takes a blister pack of painkillers from the top shelf of his bedside drawer. Pops two in his mouthand churns up some spit. It’s hard to get enough spit going at first, probably because of the edible, but he succeeds eventually, and then decides that it’s a job for three painkillers rather than two.

Maybe even four, just to be on the safe side.

He thinks of Paul Gray, bassist from Slipknot, who overdosed on morphine and fentanyl in 2010, as it happens. Found dead in a Marriott hotel room in Urbandale, Iowa. Pills scattered everywhere. Hypodermic needle next to the bed.

Suicide?

Probably.

Liam pops another, then another, studies the pack.

Could it be that his mother had taken her own life and his dad had kept it from him? Certainly mademore sense than she’d simply cut off all contact. But was this just self-soothing? His dad had never once told him not to contact her – he’d simply advised against it. There was no cover-up. And yet, the advice alwaysstruck him as an ultimatum – like, sure, search for her if you want, but remember, you might lose me when you get back.

He did go looking for her, once, though, in his own way. He booked tickets to Good Things Music Festival in Melbourne, headed to Perth a year later for Soundwave and another chance to watch Metalica. He didn’t know where his mother would be – and Australia was a big country – but he wandered around, stayed in a few run-down hotels and traipsed the nearby streets. Occasionally, he’d think he recognised her, and yet those moments only reminded him that he probably wouldn’t know the woman if she were standing right in front of him at the bar. Did she even like metal, or was that just his dad’s thing?

He closes his eyes and imagines her there with him in the dark.

When the singer at the bar announced the band’s last track, Liam was still standing at the boundary of the mosh pit. Rejected, his fantasy unspooled.

He had intended to leave, but something had kept him there. Time had stalled, or skipped ahead. Maybe it was the weed. Or perhaps he was just getting tired. He kept thinking he was in one place and then he was in another. Waking up into a dream where he was waking up into a dream, and on and on.

At the other side of the pit, a thirty-something square-jawed goth chick with a septum piercing gave Liam an awkward Desperate Dan grin, then stared at the ﬂoor. Shoulders rising high and spiky, a shadow of limbs, crunched by embarrassment.

She entered the pit, perhaps as her only way out, and he followed.

Although he was exhausted, he didn’t make a habit of throwing away opportunities. And this was a grin – you didn’t see one of those every day. It had to mean something.

Perhaps her relative youth had allowed her to see within him an aspect of that old passionate drive? The zeal that had kept him going all these years. Kept him clinging to life, even as the thankless grind of his nine-to-ﬁve, and the mundane responsibilities of run-of-the-mill adulthood, pulled him inexorably away. For all he knew, here was an actual IRL fan of EP: one of his twenty likes; a comment-poster in meatspace flesh and bone.

He headed toward her, forging his way through the pit, and thinking he actually liked a heavy jaw, andthat maybe he didn’t have any problems with a ﬂat chest, either, or legs twice as long as his own. Maybe he could cup that jaw with his hand as they kissed. Maybe she’d see his acne scars as manly, ask, sensuously, if she could pick at his zits. Oh, and he’d let her; of course he’d let her – how else was he supposed to get girls! He’d lay on his back and let her examine his face with a dermatologist’s fascination. He’d make her cups of tea and squeezein a few drops of honey for flavour, and they’d share their woes and secrets late into the night. He listening to her as he listened to his favourite albums, combing over every word and intonation, reaching for her meaning with everything he had.

Suddenly a hefty shoulder disrupted his balance, and he was driven forward, staggering – lurching – tohis knee. A blow at the back of his neck. A wallop in his side. A thunderous wall of Doc Martens stomping, stomping, stomping.

His heart tightened, constricting like a ﬁst. He felt light-headed and his vision blurred. This was it, he thought. A heart attack, right here in the pit. Even his own heart had had enough – ﬁnally ready to execute onelast OS shutdown. Your Liam ran into a problem and needs to terminate the programme. 15.27% complete.

He tried to steady his breathing, pressed a hand to his chest in the hope of – what? – restarting his ticker? Soothing it? But death didn’t come: that old skeletal cow didn’t want anything to do with him. She ghosted him, like everybody else. Flakey bitch.

He stood up before others could pull him up; moved before he could be made to move. Around him, a churn of bodies. A hot, frantic mess. A sadness deeper than Porcupine Tree’s ‘In absentia.’ And that was a sad album, a sad, sad album.

The square-jawed goth chick observed what he’d become from the crenelations of the crowd. Oh, how the fatty had fallen. How bleak. How pathetic. Then she disappeared, absorbed by a trellis of arms and legs. And it didn’t take long for Liam to recognise his oppressor: the kid who’d given him the horns, and whom Liam had given the middle finger. The kid’s lip was bust, and he wiped at it with the back of his hand, creating a smear across his muzzle. His eyes caught Liam’s – but for whatever reason didn’t seem to register. He’d meant no harm, it was all just fun. The same sort of fun Lady Rancid was now having with some old punk in a pork pie hat. The sort of fun that had left Liam behind.

At home, Liam is watching himself talk without really listening. ‘It’s a progression that’s bound to polarise’ … ‘Softer, but harder too’ … ‘I don’t wanna say arty, but it’s arty’ …

Soon the tablets will kick in. It’s possible he can already feel them at work. The start of a gentle relief. The end of an all-consuming pain.

Kneading the nape of his neck, he closes his eyes, imagines leaning back into the print of a full-bosomed t-shirt – the crinkle of it, the slight drop in temperature between the logo and the fabric. It is plastic-y like vinyl, raised and sticky; and his beard prickles against it, bristling.

‘If you’re expecting more of the same,’ his younger self is saying, ‘you’re bound to be disappointed. But it grows on you. You’ve just gotta stick with it.’