What Goes Up

Sean stood in a clearing looking up at the rollercoaster. It made his blood run cold, but he could recognise that it was a beautiful thing, really. It looped four times and had a forty-five-meter sheer drop, the track bright red and blue, twists and turns painstakingly designed to activate the primal terror and excitement of near death. It was unfortunate, Sean thought, that he only ever experienced the terror. He’d tried to enjoy the thrill of a coaster many times since he and Ali had gotten together but, after each occasion, he’d only found himself more embarrassed, more emasculated. She’d assure him that it didn’t matter, of course, and that they didn’t always have to enjoy the same things, but he’d known her for long enough to recognise the disappointment in her demeanour. The smile of reassurance would drop as soon as she turned her head away. A kiss on the lips had turned into a kiss on the cheek and that had turned into a squeeze of the hand. He figured that they were a year away from her lightly punching him in the upper arm, like a friend’s older brother trying to bond at a sleepover. The thing about a dying relationship is that you start living life in reverse. The intimacy slowly disappears until you reach a point where it would once again be strange for you to touch this woman you barely know, the only difference being that you aren’t passing her in a coffee shop or sitting across from her on the bus: she lives in a house that you own together, and you take it in turns dropping off a child at a nearby school.
               Sean remembered the children, looking down at them on either side of him. He realised he’d been squeezing each of their hands quite tightly, and as he relaxed his grip, they both looked up at him. He smiled, and they all went back to watching as Ali and Connor queued, up towards the embarkation area. Connor was the father of one of the two boys, and a close friend of Sean and Ali’s. The theme park trip had been his idea, a fun opportunity for Ali to enjoy riding rollercoasters with a fellow enthusiast, as well as a good chance for the two young boys to get to know each other better. Sadly, that part hadn’t worked out quite as planned. Sean had spent the better part of the day pulling his son Michael to the side, offering limp words of encouragement that he regretted even as they fell out of his mouth. He’d often worried that parenting wasn’t something that would come naturally to him, and as he found himself uttering trite motivational slogans towards the person he loved most in the world, he couldn’t help but feel that he was letting the boy down. In contrast, Connor’s boy Alfie was charming everyone at the park, starting conversations with ice cream vendors and talking Ali’s ear off about the things he’d learned in school that past week. As much as Sean liked Alfie, and as much as he knew that he was a child, with no reasonable expectation that he should act a certain way out of social consciousness, it was hard for the dad of the quieter boy to not feel that Alfie’s confidence was having a detrimental effect on the willingness of Michael to engage. The more Alfie laughed and shouted and smiled, the more Michael shrank and whispered and hid. Sean had to keep an eye on his own brain, as he didn’t want to feel resentment towards a six-year-old, but he knew it was there regardless.
               They watched as Ali and Connor reached the front of the queue, talking and laughing together in excitement. As well as the inkling of annoyance with Alfie, Sean also felt a pang of jealousy deep in his chest as he watched his girlfriend interact with his best friend. As the relationship between Sean and Ali slowly soured, the friendship between Ali and Connor had stayed much the same, but, with the joy of the couple diminished, the relative closeness of the two friends had begun to feel almost inappropriate. When Ali and Sean had been having sex regularly, Connor hugging Ali at the start of a meal had felt so ordinary as to basically not even register. But now that Sean hadn’t hugged or cuddled with Ali in several months, witnessing each hug had begun to sting more and more. It was completely irrational - Connor had his own love-life and his own girls that he would see, albeit less seriously, but still the jealousy came easy. Ultimately, Sean knew it was indicative of a flaw in his own personality. He was lucky to have a friend who liked his girlfriend so much, and who his girlfriend liked so much in return. He just wished that she would like her boyfriend that much too.
               Chains began to crank loudly as the rollercoaster car slowly ascended the initial vertical rise. The people on board were whooping and screaming, outstretched hands gripping tight to phones taking selfies and videos. As the car reached the apex of the track, the front carriage tipped over the edge, frozen above the drop. Ali and Connor were at the front, and Sean could hear his girlfriend screaming in the distance. Michael squeezed his father’s hand tight, and then the breaks of the car were released, sending the occupants speeding down towards the ground at break-neck speed, hitting a last-minute curve that pulled them back up and around, upside down, around another corner, high into the sky again, then back down into another barrel roll. Sean felt sick just watching. He looked down and saw the grin on Alfie’s face, the grimace on Michael’s. His son had pulled closer to his leg, appearing moments away from burying his face in the fabric of his father’s jeans.
               Shouting from the rollercoaster brought Sean’s attention back to the display in front of him. It wasn’t originating from the car that Ali and Connor were riding in, but from the car in front of them, that had departed a minute before. It had stopped before the end of the track, the passengers dangling fifteen or so feet in the air, an even mix of frightened faces attempting to look back over shoulders, the view obstructed by large restraints, and the flailing feet and hands of guests desperate to catch the attention of the ride operators. As Ali and Connor’s car began a final loop, and as the inevitable reality of the situation dawned on Sean, things slowed down. A man selling balloons noticed the situation and began to run towards the rollercoaster, shrieking warning through a plastic suit of armour that muffled his cries. As he ran, he let go of his stock. Helium horses and swords and shields – drifting away, off out over park, likely landing somewhere miles away, to be chewed on by mice or by cows, impaled on trees or caught in fence wiring, removed of any context under which they might provoke joy.
               Sean closed his eyes and listened as the final remaining seconds of a normal day and a normal week and a normal life ticked by. Children laughing nearby, the bass of disco music rumbling towards them from distant dodgems, the pinging of metal cans on an air rifle range. And then a bang, and a scream – a real scream – and then many more screams. Sean found that he didn’t recognise any of them. It had started to rain, and his shoes had holes in the bottom. He noticed that his feet were wet.

               The ambulance didn’t let Sean in with Ali. He had the two boys with him still, and it was deemed too serious a situation for them to be present. Instead, they waited near the entrance to the park as a panicked teenager tried to organise a taxi for the three of them. Michael and Alfie cried into his trouser legs while the park tried to figure out who would pay for the ride to the hospital. They refused to let Sean pay, presumably fearing a media backlash in the future, but they also couldn’t find anything resembling a company card. In the end the taxi arrived, they climbed in, and a profusely sweating supervisor dropped forty quid’s worth of pound coins into the front passenger seat.
               “Claw machine,” he panted.
               Arriving at the hospital was a relief for Sean. The confusion and anxiety of the children as they took in their new surroundings put a brief stopper in the flow of tears and screaming that had filled the small confines of the car for so many miles. He was able to think now. The problem was that, as they wandered from workstation to workstation, eventually being ushered into a small, comfortable, private waiting room, he wasn’t able to get one, simple, awful thought out of his mind: he’d been right about rollercoasters. A million other fears and concerns bubbled and gave off steam within his mind, but ultimately what Sean couldn’t escape was the relief that he hadn’t been the one sat next to Ali when the accident happened. Despite the slow decline of their relationship, he still loved her, and his chest hurt knowing she was in pain. He felt physically sick knowing she was likely in surgery at that very moment, but he still knew that he wouldn’t ever trade places with her in a thousand lifetimes. As bad as his situation was, he felt a strange wave of gratefulness that he got to be there, with his son, holding him tight against his chest as sobs turned to hiccups which turned to sobbing hiccups.
               After an hour a nurse came to the door, asking Sean if he was Sean. The waiting room had a TV on the wall showing children’s cartoons, and he muted Hey Arthur while he spoke to the lady in the doorway. Connor had given the nurse his phone, and instructed her to give it to Sean, who could use it to call Alfie’s grandma. Sean asked why she couldn’t do it, and she told him that Connor had insisted it be him. She said he thought the grandma would panic less if she heard a familiar voice, and thus be in a better state to pick up the boy.
               Sean took the phone and placed the call. Alfie’s grandma cried, and Sean was forced into giving her reassurances that he couldn’t back up, but he repeated over and over again what the nurse had told him minutes earlier: he’s alive, he’s alert, he’s going to be fine. Details beyond that were few and far between. As he ended the call and stood with the phone in his hand, he realised he’d failed to ask the nurse about Ali’s condition. Was she alive? Was she alert? Was she going to be fine? She still had her phone on her, presumably, so he went to call her from his own. No service. He tapped in the pin-code that the nurse had passed on for Connor’s phone, opened her contact page, and placed a call. His heart thumped so hard he thought it visible through his shirt. Was he anxious to see if she was okay or nervous to speak to his own girlfriend? In any case, it rang and rang and rang, but she never picked up. He ended the call and looked at the phone, which had automatically navigated to Connor and Ali’s shared messages. There was a notification to show his failed call, and above that was a photo, sent earlier in the day. Connor and Ali on the rollercoaster, heads pressed back against the seats as they ascended the first vertical slope of the track, smiling wide. Ali had Connor’s chin between her thumb and forefinger, as if she’d turned his face towards the camera. She must have sent the photo to him at the very last moment before the initial drop. Sean zoomed in on the crowd in the background, far below. He could see himself, and the two boys, identifiable only by shirt colour, their faces fractalized and lost in the post-processing of the phone’s artificial intelligence. He zoomed out again. On their first date, Ali had drunkenly fallen down a curb in the city centre, landing on keys held in her outstretched hands. The keys had etched a half an inch long scar beneath her bottom lip. A scar he’d never really known her without. He’d seen it thousands of times, kissed it hundreds. In the photo it was gone - the camera’s filter had erased it. She appeared as she had before their first kiss.

               Sean sat in the waiting room, too exhausted to sleep. Michael was curled up across his lap. Alfie lay across two chairs opposite them. On top of everything else, a guilt fell across Sean’s stomach now. Watching the little blonde boy’s hair move back and forth against cracked lips as he slept, the resentment of earlier in the day was revealed as absurd. The overzealous mania of a protective parent. Alfie was a good kid, and Sean hoped to see some of his confidence rub off on Michael in the long term. Maybe this experience would bring them closer together. Would it do the same for the adults involved? That was too much to think about. The photo of Ali and Connor hadn’t left his thoughts. Neither had the urgency with which he’d locked the phone again after seeing it. He knew there were messages above the photo, but if he didn’t look, he didn’t know. The cat can still be alive. Nothing had decayed.
               The waiting room door opened and a red-eyed older lady entered the room. Seeing the physical signs of elderly people in emotional distress bothered Sean like nothing else. It felt wrong to him, like fear and sadness should be something you leave behind when you retire. He was immediately able to trace this line of thought back to seeing his dad cry when mum left. He’d been twenty-five.
               “Oh Sean,” whispered Steph.
               Connor’s mother collapsed into his arms as he stood up to embrace her. His sleep disturbed, a confused Michael sat up, looking around. Seeing that his mum still wasn’t there, he put his head back down. Sean ushered Steph into the corridor, where she asked after Alfie’s wellbeing, what he’d eaten, how much he knew. Sean assured her that the boy knew as much as he knew: practically nothing. They’d been waiting for an update for hours. At this, Steph began to cry properly, both hands over her mouth, unconsciously wanting to hold the words in.
               “I didn’t know you didn’t know. I thought they would have told you.”
               “Told us- what should they have told us?” Sean felt like he was going to pass out.
               “They lost- they, both of them, lost both.”
               Sean looked at the sobbing old lady in front of him and tried not to get angry with her. He didn’t understand, and he was frustrated. In his youth he’d suffered recurring dreams of trying to open an envelope with exam results inside, his fingers unable to find an open edge. Steph put one hand on the wall and shaded her eyes with the other, looking down at the ground.
               “Steph, what’s happened? Are they okay?”
               She breathed deep, looking up at him with lips pursed tight.
               “They lost their legs. Both of them. Connor and Ali have both lost their legs.”

               Under the sterile light of the hospital bathroom, Sean absorbed his own image in the mirror. His rapidly receding hair was greasy, the long day taking its toll. A constellation of fresh acne had sprung up beneath the corner of his lip, the inevitable result of sitting palm to face for so many long hours. A redness around his eyes was relatively new - he’d found himself crying uncontrollably after Steph had given him the update. He’d ran away from her, down the hall, the slapping of his footsteps echoing in a childlike way that made it impossible for him to reconsider, impossible for him to turn back.
               All at once, he imagined the pain of Ali during the accident, the fear of Ali going into surgery, and his own fear of what the future held for them both. Did he just become a carer? He saw himself bringing her dinner in bed. She’d always been the cook. He didn’t know how to fold up a wheelchair. They’d need a seat in the shower. And a lift for the stairs. Maybe they’d move house. Maybe they’d have to live in a bungalow. His grandma was pushing it these days, maybe they could have hers when she went? But that wouldn’t be for a while. What happened until then? How long will she be in hospital? The stumps concerned him. He’d never been around stumps before. He could recall only one stump-interaction in his life: nine years earlier, working in retail, selling an orange sweatshirt to a man with one arm. He’d looked military, and Sean supposed he’d been blown up by a grenade, or an IED. He’d wanted to ask about whether the man would cut off the spare sleeve, but then he couldn’t imagine what other use that bit of orange fabric might have. It had been a very ugly sweatshirt. After paying, the man had thanked Sean very sincerely, and Sean had thanked the man for his service, despite not really believing in that sort of thing. The man had frowned, then left. Losing your legs is better than losing your arms, Sean had thought at the time. You can still do all sorts without legs. Without arms you have spare sleeves.
               The bathroom door swung open and Alfie stood in the entrance, his face quizzical. He looked up at Sean and appeared to see right through him. He almost looked embarrassed to have found him like this.
               “My grannie’s taking me home. She said that she needs to take my daddy’s phone back, and that you’ve got it.”
Sean produced the phone from his pocket and hesitated, typing in the first two digits of the code to unlock it, before cancelling the action and handing it to the child.
               “Thanks. I think Michael needs you.” Alfie left the room, and after a few moments, Sean followed him. He was greeted in the hallway by Steph, who had a reassuring hand on the shoulder of Michael. He ran over to hug his dad, Sean crouching to meet him.
               After their embrace, Michael pulled back an arm’s length, father and son sharing a long look, eye to eye. Sean felt Steph and Alfie’s eyes on him, felt his own hand shaking on the boy’s shoulder, felt the whole world willing him on to do what people do in this situation. He knew he had to find some words of comfort. He knew that this would be remembered, if not forever, then for a very long time. He could hear his heartbeat, mistaking it for the ticking of a clock. A countdown to Michael’s first therapy session.
               “Let’s get some food”.

               The next three days passed by quickly for Sean, and agonizingly slowly for everyone else. On the morning after the accident, he packed a bag and took Michael to his brother’s house, dropping him off under the pretence that he needed the day to sort things out at the hospital. Then he drove to the airport, parking several miles away and walking for an hour to reach the terminal. He passed through security, then sat for two hours, watching planes take off and land outside on the runway. He recorded videos of a few of them as they came down, deleting the files immediately after it became clear that they’d landed safely. He knew that it was very unlikely for any of the planes to crash, but if they did, he would have had a great clip. He boarded a flight to Barcelona and slept most of the way there, his dreams plagued by nightmares wherein one of those incoming planes did crash land, but he wasn’t quick enough to capture it on his camera, instead repeatedly opening the phone’s gallery to videos of Ali and Connor together.
               In Barcelona he wandered along the boardwalk, drinking a bottle of beer he’d bought for a euro, trying desperately to ignore the graffiti he saw at every turn, walls and benches and traffic lights all adorned with the same three words: Tourist Go Home.
               At night, by the beach, he stumbled across a group called BCN Swing! Thirty or so adults danced by streetlight under the mediterranean pine trees. They moved effortlessly amongst each other, switching partners, smiling - always smiling - the experienced distinguished from the beginners only by the way their eyes stayed level, focused on those of their partner, never looking down to check their feet, never hesitating. A small old man of Asian descent took one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen into his arms, spinning her like lovers on their wedding day. She laughed as they moved together, seemingly surprised by his agility, but her eyes betrayed a deeper admiration – something approaching lust. A crowd had formed around the dancers, the music pulling in the early birds, their bodies pulling in more bodies. Sean stood and watched as strangers from the crowd moved into the circle, stumbling as they found their initial rhythm, soon becoming part of one greater whole, a mass of movement and joy, like some great epic fresco adorning the wall of a cathedral, with fine beautiful detail to be found in any given inch.
               Sean wanted to be dancing. He thought of Ali and how jealous she had always professed to being about his skill on the dancefloor, one of his few God-given talents. He knew that if she was here, she’d be dragging him out onto the cobbles, unashamed of her own ability. He thought of her legs.
               “Mister, hello, you want to dance?”
She made him jump, a smiling face so close to his shoulder, a young girl of twenty or so. Pretty. She raised an eyebrow at his response to the question, waiting for him to speak. She repeated the question in Spanish.
               “I, sorry no, I don’t really dance. I just like watching,” Sean smiled back at her, then looked again to the dancers. Small voices in his head screamed at him. They’d been screaming since he’d dropped Michael at Ray’s house, but now they’d found something new to complain about.
               “I knew you were English. Are you sure? It’s quite easy.”
Sean’s body moved without much input from his brain. He turned around and walked away from the girl, away from the crowd, away from the dancers. A few blocks down the path he bought five more beers from a small corner-shop and carried them in a plastic bag, returning towards where he’d come from earlier in the day.

               Back at the hostel, there was something of a party raging on in the common room. Flip-cup and card games and jelly shots, all manner of things that he felt too old to enjoy. As he passed through on the way to his room, a man with a Nike tick shaved into the side of his head waved him over. Join us, was his offer. Looking around, it was clear that most of these people hadn’t known each other before the week had begun, with the majority likely meeting that night. Sean waved the man away, shaking his head, but in the relative quiet of the dorm corridor, he looked down at the bag at his side, still holding two beers. He turned around.

               At two in the morning, it was just Sean, Nike Tick, and Nike Tick’s girlfriend, Scarface, so named for the tattoo across her left bicep. They were still drinking in the common area, the place was a mess, and Sean felt eighteen again. He’d told the couple, who were Brazilian, that he’d come to Barcelona to let loose after a bad breakup. They’d been all too happy to help him do this, and after the beers had run out, they’d all headed down to a shop around the corner, coming back with wine and little bottles of mixed spirits. On the way there, Nike Tick, a large man who Sean felt an immediate affinity for, had offered him a drag on a joint. Sean hadn’t smoked in seven years, but figured that this was as good a time as any to regress. By the time they’d arrived back at the comfort of the cheap, brightly coloured sofas that littered the hostel living room, he could scarcely move. Instead, he sat and listened from what felt like a great distance as Scarface and Nike Tick told him about their travels, their three dogs back home, and the mundanity of the lives that they were escaping. He was a hairdresser, and she was a retail manager. They lived good lives in Rio, which they assured Sean wasn’t as dangerous as the films and documentaries made it out to be, but they felt bored. They were twenty-two, had been together since primary school, and they were worried about losing their spark. At some point, they noticed that Sean was falling asleep, and began speaking to each other in Portuguese, eventually leaving him to return to their room. Sean awoke the next morning sat semi-upright on the sofa. Four Germans dragged heavy suitcases past him, their wheels bouncing against the grout of the kitchen tiles, each bump driving nails into Sean’s brain. He retired to his room and slept.
               In the afternoon, Sean awoke to a couple shouting. He was on the top bunk, facing the wall, and he stayed completely still. He feared that if he moved, he would somehow be inviting himself into the argument. He imagined the girl coming over and ripping the covers off of him after he made eye contact mid-rant. He imagined her berating him, somehow knowing what he was doing there, what he had left behind.
               The couple were English, maybe Welsh, and they were arguing about their phones. From what Sean could tell, they had been playing a Pokemon game together while travelling, and it had stopped working on the girl’s phone. The boy had made the fatal error of continuing to play the game when she no longer could, and now she was very upset. Sean guessed that they were young, eighteen or nineteen. The boy kept insisting that she could still play the game, on his phone, with him, and she continued to remind the boy, in a louder and louder voice, that any Pokemon they caught on his phone, would only be there, on his phone. After ten minutes of argument, a pact of silence was agreed, and he heard one of the two, he assumed the girl, climb back up the ladder of her bunk bed, settling in with a huff, across the aisle from Sean. For a while they lay there, all three simmering in the quiet stillness of the small, hot, crowded room. The dorm window was cracked, and from down in the street below, life could be heard: vans beeping their way backwards up side-streets, the radio of a bakery playing top hits from two decades earlier, the echoes of footsteps, laughter and conversation. A soundscape of modern life, drifting lazily up, up, and through a half-inch gap in a paint-peeled window, falling on the alert ears of the comatose, listening but immobile.
               It was seven in the evening by the time Sean got up. He was hungry, had been hungry for hours, and that hunger had eventually won out over his need to not move, to not be awake. The couple were gone, their feud seemingly resolved. He dressed in the clothes of the previous day and left the hostel, leaving his phone behind, unable to use it for fear of the calls and texts that he was expressly avoiding. He had considered buying a new sim card for a while, but ultimately that felt that too permanent a step.
               The night was warm in a way that made him acutely aware of the fact that he was unclean. Wandering the streets, eating pizza by the slice, things felt much quieter than the night before. The roads were still busy, and tourists still filled the pavements, but the energy was different. Less felt possible. Sean walked down to the beach and found the area where the dancers had been, but no one was there tonight, and it was quiet. If the swing party was a weekly thing, and if he was going to go home when he’d planned to, he would likely never have the opportunity to dance with those people again. He would go home, to England, and two days later they would be here, in Barcelona, still smiling at each other in the heat, their feet still perfectly finding each step. Maybe the girl who asked him to dance would have more luck with the next man.
               Sean sat in the sand and watched the waves. Out by the water it was even quieter, and if he didn’t look to his right, or to his left, he could pretend that, for the first time since arriving at the airport back home, he was truly alone. Ali came into his mind. And Connor. Ali and Connor. The thought was an attack that he’d successfully repelled to this point, even if his actions had said otherwise. He finally decided to open the castle gates, to allow it in. The idea of them together washed over him all at once, before he pulled back and took it one step at a time, first imagining them kissing each other, seeing how he felt about that, finding that his feelings about it were complicated, finding that he felt sick in more ways than one, finding his heart beating fast. Maybe he could live with it. And maybe if he could live with that, then maybe they could live with this. Maybe he’d go back and everything would be okay. Maybe Michael wouldn’t remember being abandoned by his dad.
               “My friend, my friend. You like beer?” The man had snuck up on Sean, footsteps silenced by the sand and covered by the waves. He was carrying a big cooler on a strap around his neck, holding an outstretched beer towards Sean, who could see the condensation from the can dripping down over his fingers.
               “I’m good, man. I drank last night, can’t do it again.” Sean smiled, looking back towards the ocean.
               “For you, good deal my friend. Two for two euro. Great deal. Come on brother, you like beer, I know you do”.
The man was now holding two beers. Lime green labels, not a brand Sean recognised. Two euros was a good deal. He reached into his pocket and produced a five euro note. The man took it, gave the two cans to Sean, then produced a third can and handed that to him as well.
               “Alone on the beach, no woman? You need three beers my friend. Thank you, thank you.”
               Before Sean could argue, the man walked away.

               By the time he got back to the street the hostel was on, it had past midnight. Sean had sung melancholy karaoke to an empty bar, drank a dozen or so more beers, accidentally snapped his sunglasses in half, and made two unsuccessful passes at bartenders who made no effort to hide their disgust at his approach. Outside the doors of the accommodation, he reached for the key-fob that he’d kept in his back pocket. It wasn’t there. He looked around for help but the street was empty, and there was no one at the desk that he could see through the front window of the hostel. Options exhausted, he began to bang on the window, shouting for someone to come and let him in. A window opened across the road within a minute of the banging beginning, and he was given some angry advice in Spanish that he didn’t understand or care to listen to. A minute later, the furious Spaniard reached the ground level of his apartment building. He came out of his front door quietly and approached an unaware Sean, who had his back to the street. The man grabbed Sean by the back of his head and slammed it against the glass of the window, sending him crumpling to the ground immediately. With little ceremony, the man stomped on his ankle, eliciting a long, hoarse, scream from Sean, then turned and headed back to his apartment. Sean cried quietly on the floor, staying there, leaning against the door.
               An hour or so later, strong arms lifted him to his feet. There was swearing in a foreign language, then a beep, and he was carried inside the hostel. Under the bright lights of the elevator, leaning against one of the hand railings, he managed to pry one eye open, blood crusting the other shut. He saw the Brazilians standing across from him, Scarface with her head on Nike Tick’s shoulder, looking at her phone. Nick Tick had his arm around her, and was drinking a small bottle of brown spirit.
               “You don’t look too good, brother.”
               Sean turned to face himself in the mirrored wall as they passed the second floor. A face covered almost entirely in dried blood, a fringe glued to forehead by an adhesive of gore and sweat. It was as good a time as any to accept that his hairline had completely evaporated – had been a lost cause for some time. The comfort of a long-term relationship had helped him in ignoring the significance of the loss up to this point, but now that that comfort was likely over, the anxiety of being an unsightly bachelor washed over him. While the man in the mirror begged for an ambulance, the man in the elevator, the drunker of the two, pondered a makeover.
               “How much to cut my hair?” He felt the slurring as he spoke, felt the gravity of the elevator shake his knees as they arrived at their floor.
               “Sean, man, you need to sleep. You’re fucked up. Wash your face, then sleep.”
               “I will give you one hundred euros. To cut my hair. Right now. After I wash out the blood.”
               “Sean, we’re partying tonight, and you cannot party like this. He doesn’t want to work on vacation. He’s not cutting your fucking hair at fucking three a.m.,” said Scarface.
               Nike Tick’s gaze fixed to the top of Sean’s head, and he winced. He looked down at Scar, who noticed his head tilting, and frowned back up at him.
               “It- it won’t take long. One hundred-euro, baby. You have that number?”

               Sean sat on a stool in the middle of the common area, wearing his complimentary towel as a cape. He only had one, and they’d just finished washing most of the blood from his face in the communal bathroom, so the towel was already brown-red and ruined. Scarface had taken the one hundred euros and gone downstairs to meet a dealer she’d texted. They hadn’t been lying about partying, and as Sean perched there feeling vulnerable and sore, sipping a warm beer slowly, terrible Portuguese-language pop music filled the room.
               Nike Tick returned from the dining area beaming, a new bottle of miscellaneous spirit in one hand, and a pair of kitchen scissors in the other. He set the drink aside, assured Sean that he knew what he was doing, and placed a firm hand on the top of his head. This small act of authority instantly calmed Sean, who closed both eyes automatically, feeling like a cat in the clutches of its mother. Nike manipulated his skull expertly, from side to side, taking him in, whispering to himself in his mother tongue. He let go, and Sean heard a big swallowing gulp, then suddenly a fine-toothed comb ran through his hair, from front to back, and then there was a snip. The sound of the scissors sent a shiver up Sean’s back and across his brain. He was in the hands of someone with skill, and a plan, and that meant that he didn’t need to think about a single thing. As the Brazilian went in for a second snip, and a third, the speed increasing, Sean hoped that the haircut would last forever. He hoped that the nice man from Rio with the big biceps would never stop telling him where to tilt his head, and he hoped that he would never stop whispering. The pain in Sean’s forehead had ebbed and flowed, but now it was swept away. If this haircut was what it had all been leading to: the accident, the photo, the running away, the drinking, the beating - then it had all been worth it.
               As Nike Tick worked, Sean thought of himself as a young boy, being taken to the barber’s by his mother. He’d hated it then, had wished for it to stop as soon as it had started. When Michael’s hair had first grown out as a toddler, Sean had argued at great length with Ali that they shouldn’t put their boy through the same awful experiences that he’d had as a child, and eventually Ali agreed to let Sean cut his son’s hair. He’d done a terrible job, and no one liked it, so they ended up going to the barber’s the next day regardless. Michael enjoyed the novelty of it, and didn’t complain even once through the entire time they were there. Sean remembered feeling a bizarre sort of betrayal at this, a quiet toddler somehow emasculating a version of his father that hadn’t existed for nearly thirty years. Michael would be fast asleep now, probably. Or maybe not, considering the circumstances. He wondered what they would tell the teachers on Monday. Would missing father be the headline? Or are missing legs always going to trump that? He imagined Michael alone in his brother’s spare room back in England, staring at the ceiling. He imagined him asking for his parents as he cried.
               “Mate, do you have anything stronger?”
Sean gestured with the half-empty beer, and Nike Tick took it from his hand, replacing it with the bottle he’d been swigging from. Sean wasn’t in the mood to ask more questions than necessary. He lifted the little brown bottle to swollen lips, and enjoyed the burning in his throat. As he drank, he was sure that he felt a little clump of hair pass into his mouth along with the alcohol, but it was too late to do anything about that.
               Scar burst into the room holding up two plump bags of snow-white powder.
               “Terças-feiras, leve dois, pague um!”
               The tattoo began to make sense.

               The next hour or so was a blur. The coke sped up the intensity of the haircut, and the experience became less pleasurable for Sean. By the time Nike was finished, spinning his customer around on the stool to face his partner for the grand reveal, Sean could barely muster a smile. The bottle in his hand was empty, and the applause from his barber’s girlfriend went on for a hint too long, sarcasm beginning to drip into each clap of the hands. They didn’t linger on the moment for long, and seconds later both Nike Tick and Scarface were draped over each other and the coffee table, snorting alarmingly thick lines through a torn leaflet they’d picked up which advertised the Sagrada Familia.
               Sean went to assess the haircut in the bathroom mirror but found his vision blurring more and more with every step, and as he got into the washroom he was only really able to garner that his hair was, absolutely, undeniably, much shorter. Stumbling back to the communal area, he interrupted the Brazilians’ aggressive making out to ask what he had been drinking. ‘Wray Nephews’ was the response, and it all began to make good sense. He collapsed onto the sofa adjacent to the couple, then leaned forward, trying to hit one of the lines with his bare nostril. Instead of snorting anything at all, he smudged the precious coke all over the table, and Nike Tick cuffed him around the ear like a naughty dog, before pushing him back, deeper into the sofa. Within thirty seconds, his eyes were closed.

               For the next twenty minutes, Sean twisted and turned, in and out of sleep, contorting his body and trying to find the specific position that would turn the sofa into a bed. Each time he awoke, the couple across from him were either kissing each other or doing more lines. Eventually, he was able to find a nice enough spot, and slept for about forty minutes. When he did finally wake up again, it was to the unmistakeable sound of oral sex, performed enthusiastically. Lacking the tact of a sober man, he opened his eyes fully, taking in the scene, confirming what his ears had told him, before closing them again. He counted to ten, then reopened one eye, just a crack. Nike was completely naked, leaning back into the black leather like he was at home, and Scar was between his legs on the floor, working on her man. Despite all the alcohol, and despite the fact that all he could really see was the back of the girl’s head moving up and down, in what must have been exaggerated motions, Sean felt a stirring in his shorts. This was the kind of thing that didn’t happen to people like him. A threesome was very much on the cards, and Scarface was an incredibly pretty girl.
               He opened his eyes fully, and watched unashamedly as the couple enjoyed themselves, Scar going lower at one point, much lower than Sean had ever experienced, her actions eliciting a groan from Nike, who held her hair in one, large, clenched fist. Nike lost focus and looked around the room, glancing at Sean, before making full eye contact with him as he realised he was awake. Sean smiled at him, and the Brazilian smiled back, putting a finger to his lips. Sean nodded his head in agreement, then slowly sat up, peeling himself from the sofa, noticing that his blood had dripped down and dried on the leather. As he was half-way up, Scar heard him and stopped, turning her head. They both froze, looking at each other, her hand still wrapped around Nike, only covering half of him, until she spoke.
               “Go to bed, little boy.”
               Nike laughed, and Scar climbed up into his lap, stifling his laughs with her tongue. Sean stared, eyes glazed over, and decided it was probably best just to do as he was told. As he tried to stand up fully, he noticed a dripping from the sofa, and when he looked down he realised his shorts were completely darkened. Defeated, he laid back down on the sofa, slipping quickly into dreams, his new friends making love only metres away.

               In keeping with his new routine of each new day starting progressively worse, Sean was awoken at eight a.m. by his backpack being thrown directly at the barely healed gash across his forehead. There was lots of shouting, and gesturing too, and as he crowbarred his eyes open, he saw what the fuss was about. As well as being caught yellow-handed, asleep in his own piss, the hostel operator had also walked in on him babysitting a rather significant amount of cocaine, splayed out all across a cracked coffee table. The floor was covered in hair that was very obviously his, as well as the shattered glass of at least one broken bottle. It was a mess.
               Nike Tick and Scarface were nowhere to be seen, and when Sean mentioned them to the owner, she only got more angry, presumably furious at the perceived passing of the buck to people who clearly weren’t present, whose names he couldn’t remember, and who obviously hadn’t done all the pissing on her nice leather sofa.
               Sean stumbled out onto the street. Still wet, hurting more or less everywhere, his ankle swollen in a way that he hadn’t noticed the night before. He found himself walking with a limp, and it became quite clear quite quickly that the holiday was over. Opening his backpack on a streetside bench, he retrieved the phone buried deep inside. He was going to throw up, that much was certain, but he couldn’t tell whether it was the alcohol, the fear of unlocking his notifications, or the concussion. In any case, he threw up. Luckily he hadn’t eaten much the day before, because most of what splashed back across his ankles was liquid, easily wiped off with a pocketed tissue.
               The messages streaming in made his phone vibrate like an Xbox controller in his hands, heating the entire thing up to melting point in seconds. He swiped them all off, opening Uber and arranging for a ride to the airport. It would be fifteen minutes. He tried to salvage one last meaningful moment from the trip and focused on the way people looked at him as they walked past, knowing that this was probably what it felt like to be homeless. Each person looked until he caught them, quickly averting their gaze, pretending they’d never seen him, never noticed him, concerned he would request something of them. He felt  that he wanted to set the record straight, and tell them that he wasn’t actually homeless. But then he realised that he didn’t really know whether or not that was true, and that he was pathetic for thinking it regardless. He found that this was a fitting take-away from his time in Barcelona.
               Three Ubers turned him down before he was finally allowed into the backseat of a banged up Punto with no air conditioning. The man spoke enough English for Sean to lie convincingly about being mugged the night before, but not enough English to provide the sort of awkward reassurances or commiserations that would usually be expected. If anything, he seemed sincerely upset by Sean’s apparent situation, and kept looking at him with kind eyes through the rear-view mirror, shaking his head and muttering in Arabic. He was a young Muslim man, and a photo of him and his wife dangled above the passenger seat. She was in a headscarf, and the man was in a brilliant white tunic of some sort. As the photograph span around and jumped with the bumps of the trip, Sean stared at it. It was a wedding photo, he realised. The man was very normal looking, Sean thought, but his wife was one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. He wondered how they’d met; whether it had been arranged or organic; was the man lucky, or was he exceedingly charming in his own language? The smiles captured in the photograph looked genuine, and it was enough to make Sean’s eyes stream with jealous sadness. How could he even question the legitimacy of someone else’s marriage? What position was he in?
               The driver noticed him crying and pulled over to the side of the road.
               “Hey, hey,” he held up a finger, “one year ago. Here. Two men, get in taxi, I drive, I drive, they tell me ‘stop’. I stop. They fuck me”.
               Sean watches as the man mimics punching and strangling on himself. He wipes the tears from his face.
               “They fuck me and fuck me. But! I fuck them back. Bang, bang, bang. You know?”
               “I know,” Sean mumbled.
               “This time, they fuck you, yes? Next time, you fuck them back!”
               Sean laughed, and nodded his head, which seemed to satisfy the kindest man in the world. They began driving again, and the rest of the trip passed without incident until they pulled up at the airport. After saying goodbye, the driver tapped a few times on his phone, then gestured out the window to Sean.
               “Free!”

               Sean was detained in security for a couple of hours while he explained his situation, but eventually they determined that he wasn’t dangerous, just disgusting. The time delay didn’t bother him too much because the only flight home that day wasn’t until much later in the afternoon, and he’d actually felt quite relieved to be telling the story out loud to someone else for the first time. He left out the drugs and the urine, of course, but when they asked him about his haircut and started laughing, he’d told them the story, laughing along. It wasn’t until his first visit to the bathroom after they released him that he realised why they’d been laughing. He had a mullet, and not a good one. He’d known that both he and Oscar had been quite fucked up the previous night, of course, but only now did he realise exactly how fucked up they must have been. It looked as though his hair had been cut with the friction of two pebbles rubbing against each other on a riverbed for thousands of years. In the sober light of day, and the blinding light of the airport bathroom, Sean felt all his self-consciousness triple instantly, his face flushing red and his hands getting hot. He limped to a gift shop as quickly as he could and picked out a baseball cap. Black material, red letters: I Love Barcelona. As he slipped it over the ugly evidence of his holiday’s sins, the front rim just about hiding the gash on his forehead, he imagined himself as a spy. This look was just a persona. One of many that he had. He’d return home soon, and there he would be the real Sean once again.

               On the flight home he had a lot of time to think about his humiliation. He figured there was a pretty good chance that some of his other friends had already known about Connor and Ali, and the idea of facing them after all this – the looks they would give him, like he was a dog to be put down – it was a lot for him to handle. If they didn’t know, he wondered whether he would tell them. How would he explain his behaviour if they didn’t know what triggered it? Was there even any way to explain it? In some ways he felt that all of this would be much easier to swallow if he’d have slept with someone else while he was away. He could return, feeling like things were balanced, and take on the role that was expected of him. Minimal resentment on his part, some resentment on Ali’s part, but she’d need him now anyway. There was always the option of lying about this whole thing. No one knew he went abroad. Perhaps there was something to be said for constructing a lie that fit within the borders of the UK. The mugging story was pretty believable, but the police would have to be involved if he went down that route, and he didn’t fancy coming up with a feasible tale of kidnapping in the next three hours. They probably tracked his car to near the airport anyway if they did involve the police. It was a wash. He’d have to tell the truth, or at least part of it. He wasn’t good at acting, otherwise going down the ‘manic episode’ path could probably work.
               Sean’s train of thought faltered for a moment. Did he have a manic episode? Is that what that was? He didn’t feel manic. But he also didn’t know what mania was supposed to feel like. Casting his mind back to both nights in the hostel, his behaviour there could definitely be described as manic. He wasn’t sure Ali would even believe him if he told her about the coke. Did he have a genuine manic episode?
               “Anything to drink?” The air stewardess’ smile faltered when Sean looked up at her. She was professional, but she definitely hadn’t been expecting that face when she asked the question.
               “Just water I think.” It was time to be sensible. As she filled a little plastic cup, he watched her. He decided she would be the last woman he ever felt lust towards. She was incredible, and out of reach, and that was a good place to leave this sort of thing. He had Ali, and he did love her. She was exactly the type of person you’d want to raise kids with: funny, relaxed, great at everything she tried. The kind of person whose presence at a party made others want to attend. And she was pretty. They were equally matched in that department, but she was pretty.
               Sean thanked the stewardess for the water and sipped it as he unlocked his phone, dared onwards by the safety of airplane mode. More than three hundred messages, over four different platforms, from eleven different people. Over one hundred missed calls. An email from the police. The messages from Ali’s family were all very angry. The messages from his own family started out concerned, then waded into anger, and then turned back to concern. There were four messages from Connor, asking if he was alright, if there was something he could do to help, a photo of his bandaged stumps, an insistence that Sean was missing the good stuff. A text from his boss asking if he’d be in today. A follow up text asking if he’d be in tomorrow. He couldn’t bring himself to open the messages from Ali. There were sixty on WhatsApp. He could see that those messages included a photo too. He couldn’t do it.
               He waved the stewardess back over. Vodka.

               Sean had never driven drunk before, but it was so far so good. He thought perhaps that the walk back to his car from the airport had helped a lot. The fresh air sobering him up. He was a few miles from home now and nothing had gone wrong. He hadn’t even been beeped at. The sun was setting very slowly, and it was one of those rare British summer evenings where it felt like you were actually alive. People would be barbequing tonight, and playing football on the park, and drinking pints in crowded beer gardens until late. Under regular circumstances, this was the type of evening where Sean and Ali would walk ten minutes down the road to their local river, watching as the water slowly made its way round the wide bend, under the bridge, and off down, out of sight. They’d have a blanket and two wine glasses and they would play trivia games that neither of them were very good at. She’d ask him to name a tennis grand slam champion from 2004, and he wouldn’t know. He’d ask her to name three European capitals that began with B, and she’d immediately get it wrong, listing Barcelona after Brussels. She’d mention that she’s always wanted to go there. He’d tell her: someday.
               The sun was real low now, and directly ahead of Sean on the road. He lowered the visor and reached for his sunglasses, suddenly remembering taking them with him, suddenly remembering sitting on them outside of a takeaway before being beaten up. He squinted instead, and let himself enjoy the warmth on his face, on his arms, trying to figure out if he was the real Sean yet, or if that change would only happen when he walked through the front door of the house he called home. He was so close to home. So close to Ali, and Michael, and suddenly he felt as though it might all be okay. He figured that could be an effect of the alcohol, or the weather, but he was willing to go along with it for now. It loosened the knots in his stomach.
               Two corners left, and he began to wonder if Ali would even be home. The hospital would probably keep her in after the operation. It had only been a couple of days. In the distance there was a rumble of thunder, and Sean laughed out loud to himself. British summer.
               One corner left, the tightness in his stomach returned. He hadn’t drank enough on the plane. It wasn’t too late to turn around. What if she was home? What if Ali and Connor had set their recovery beds up next to each other in the living room? What if Ali had paid someone to come and change the locks? Should he knock straight away? Avoid the embarrassment of trying his key in the door, avoid the pain of realising it doesn’t work anymore, that some things can’t be taken back.
               Last corner turned, he could see his house at the end of the street. His body was on fire, and the sweat pouring out of his hairline was making the wound on his forehead sting. He pulled up in front of the house and turned off the engine. The rain was hammering down against the windshield of the car, shimmering in the golden light of a day almost ended. It took all of the willpower in the world, but Sean opened the car door and dragged himself to sore and aching feet. He made a mental note not to mention how much his ankle hurt, then walked towards the house, warm rain lashing against his face. Standing on the porch, he looked down at his shoes. They still had holes in them. His feet were wet again. His phone dinged.

               Ali was lay horizontal on the sofa, laptop open. She had spent the entire day doing something she’d sworn to herself that she would never do, and so far she’d only hurt her own feelings. Sean’s Facebook account hadn’t been difficult to log in to, he only had one password and he used variations of it for everything, including their shared Amazon account. She’d now read every message he’d ever sent, going back eight years, to when their relationship had been in its infancy. She was looking for clues as to where he might have gone, or what might have happened. The search so far had proved fruitless, and in a moment of weakness that she was far from proud of, she’d began searching her own name in the many chats and group chats that Sean was a part of. Most of the results were mundane, schedule exchanges and offhand mentions, but she had found one particular thread from many years earlier that’d stalled the more pressing investigation. It was a conversation between Sean and Connor, and she guessed that it was about six months after she’d first met Sean. Connor was asking how things were going between the two of them, and Sean had said they were good, as good as could be. Connor asked whether Sean saw the relationship going the distance, and Sean had said that it was too early to say, and that he had some doubts. When pressed, he admitted that he had always hoped to settle down with someone more attractive than Ali, and that he felt like this was just accepting the safe option if he stuck with it. Connor said that he was surprised Sean felt that way. Sean asked why, then double-messaged, bragging that he still had a girl called Mel messaging him to meet up again soon. Connor asked if he was going to do it. Sean said that he didn’t know.
               Ali had tried to stay calm, re-reading the exchange three or four times, then channelled her nervous energy into trying to find a conversation with the girl named Mel. There wasn’t one, or at least, there wasn’t one anymore, and she couldn’t see that she was ever mentioned again.
               She stood up and headed to the kitchen, pouring herself a glass of water. Drinking it, refilling it, drinking again. She splashed water on herself, but her face wasn’t getting less hot. The stitches on her cheek were burning, and it was impossible to tell how much of the discomfort was physical and how much was mental. She went back into the living room, catching her reflection in the mirror. She stopped and looked at herself, tracing the long scar down the side of her face. Thirty stitches. She knew she was lucky, of course. When she was discharged, the doctor had told her repeatedly how lucky she was. One concussion, two bruised knees, and a superficial facial injury. Michael was a bit scared of her at the moment, but she was lucky. She could hold him, and pick him up, and run around after him. She was lucky. Not like Connor. Connor’s legs were much bigger than Ali’s, and in the impact on the rollercoaster, they’d taken the brunt of the damage. He wouldn’t walk again, not on his own two legs. And his face had been hit by much more shrapnel than Ali’s, on account of being taller. He’d lost most of his teeth, and reconstructive surgery on the tissue surround his eye sockets was ongoing.
               Ali opened her phone, navigating to her conversation with Connor. The last message sent between them, the selfie on the ascent. Their smiles were both so genuine. She scrolled up a few messages, to where he’d been asking her to take photos of him for dating profiles. She’d joked that she could even Photoshop them to make him look handsome if he wanted.
               Connor and Sean had known each other since secondary school, and for the longest time, she’d felt quite jealous of their friendship. When Alfie had been born, and when his mother had decided she couldn’t handle it, leaving soon after, Sean had been round at their house almost every day. Connor and Sean had played videogames together, Alfie in the crook of Connor’s arm, and they’d walked him through parks in his pram like a modern couple, arguing quietly over football so as not to wake the baby. When Connor started dating again, it had been Sean who’d gone over to babysit toddler Alfie, and when Connor had needed the house to himself when a run of dates was going well, it had been Sean who had taken Alfie in, setting him up in their spare room for the night. Ali wouldn’t have minded of course, except for the fact that Michael existed too, and for all that time, on every night where Sean had sat eating pizza and drinking beers in another child’s home, his own child had been at home, with Ali, not alone, but without his dad. Ali had brought it up to Sean, but he’d waved it off: Connor needed him.
               The irony was that, when change had finally arrived, it had been at the behest of Connor, who reached out to Ali, separately, inviting her and Michael along to a dinner with Sean and Alfie one night. He hadn’t told Sean that she was invited, the face he made when Ali put on her coat told her that much, but he didn’t argue when he realised what was happening. From that point on they’d been a trio. Ali and Connor hit it off immediately, revelling in the realisation that they had so many shared interests, and Ali loved watching how Connor and Sean interacted, feeling like she’d unlocked a new dimension of her husband, a personality that only existed when this other entity was present, a new Sean for her to explore, one that wasn’t quite as dour as he had often become in private, when the two of them were alone at home. It wasn’t that she felt their marriage was dying, but it had begun to feel like Sean wasn’t trying to stop that happening. He rarely kissed her, barely hugged her, and she struggled to remember the last time she’d seen him dance, a small part of their initial courtship that had nonetheless immediately shaped her view of what she was signing up for in the relationship. She’d imagined them dancing together at weddings until old age stopped their legs from working, and their bodies refused to move anymore. She’d imagined them creaking onto the dancefloor together one last time, their faces creased by smiles, swaying under the light of a disco ball, watching their son dance with someone who loved him just as much as they loved each other.
               But now he was gone. After all those nights spent comforting Connor, he’d gone and done the exact same thing to his own partner. Sean had only been gone for three days, and she already couldn’t remember what it felt like to hold his hand in hers. She wondered how long that would have been the case if the accident never had never happened, but without her ever thinking about it. Was this what people meant when they said that everything happened for a reason? An image came to her mind, of Sean sat on a barstool somewhere, talking to a girl much prettier than Ali, speaking in a way that she would never recognise as him, acting like a Sean she’d never known, masquerading as someone who had everything figured out.
               She was crying now, and angry. Against her better judgement, she opened her chat with Sean, forcing herself not to read all of the previous messages she’d sent, the begging and the breakdowns. She typed out a new message. A new, honest, truth.
               ‘It should have been you sat next to me.’
She sent the message, and it was received immediately. From outside the front door, she heard a phone ding.