This Is Yr Life

Chapter Eleven

The hangover was worse this time. Kyle woke up with almost no memory of the night before. He stared up at his ceiling and saw Jessica Barnes’ profile still projected across the alabaster spread. He closed his eyes and opened them again but the image was still there.

Kyle rolled over and saw the time; it was nearly twenty minutes past twelve. He thought he had slept through his alarm but when he looked at his phone, he discovered that he had not set an alarm.

He remained lying down until one o’clock. Outside his room, he heard Finn and Lewis, or who he assumed to be Finn and Lewis, walking around, watching the football, clinking beer bottles and talking, cheering, groaning with every goal and foul and misplaced pass.

He was hungry. Famished. He was thirsty. His throat was dry and his head throbbed and pulsed with every breath. He tried to stand up but his head was weighed down and his lips felt chapped and scarred and tender to the touch.

When he stepped out of his room, the sun shining through the living room window caught him off guard. He stumbled and needed to grasp the door frame. He heard frying from the kitchen. He looked at the TV high on the back wall. It was halftime. Pundits sat around their small desk and discussed what had happened so far. It was too far away for Kyle to see the score, too far for to recognise the names of the teams. On the sofa that ran underneath the window, there were two girls Kyle did not recognise asleep, spooning, with a blanket each. From where Kyle was stood he could tell they were pretty. Their makeup was smudged, though, and their hair looked knotted. One of them was snoring lightly, barely audible over the low sound of the TV.

Finn stepped out from the kitchen.

‘You look like s**t, mate.’

Kyle nodded. He tried to speak but all that happened was a raspy half-sound. Lewis came from around the corner with a glass of water in his hand, he passed it to Kyle and he chugged it all the way down.

‘How are you feeling, Ky?’ Lewis asked. He picked a bowl of something from the counter hidden from sight and took a handful, crunching the food between his teeth.

‘Eh,’ Kyle said. He didn’t look at them but could tell they were still staring at him.

‘Good night?’

He shrugged.

‘Feel as bad as you look, I guess.’ They both laughed. Kyle held onto the empty glass and peered past them towards the sink.

‘Yeah, I guess.’ He nodded sideways towards the two unconscious girls on the sofa, ‘Who are they?’

Finn and Lewis looked at the girls, then at each other and then towards Kyle.

‘Lucy and Maisie,’ said Finn.

‘No,’ Lewis said, hushed, gesturing to keep their voices down. ‘Lacey and Nancy.’ Finn looked at him sideways, c****d his head.

‘You sure?’ he asked and Lewis shrugged. They both looked back at Kyle.

‘You er, you ate our food, pal,’ Lewis said.

‘I did?’

‘Yeah, it’s cool though. You just owe us one.’ He smiled, winked and turned towards the

fridge. He picked two beers out and looked at Kyle.

‘You want one?’ He was joking, Kyle knew, but he shook his head anyway. They walked past him and dropped down onto the sofa.

‘Want to watch?’ Finn asked. ‘We can move these two to our rooms.’ He glanced at the two sleeping girls again who had since shifted positions so they were now both facing away from the rest of the living room. Whoever had been snoring had now stopped. Their shoulders gently rose and fell with their synchronised breathing.

‘No, it’s cool. Thanks. I think I’m going back to sleep,’ Kyle said, forcing a smile and a nod and returned to the darkness of his room.

He sat on the edge of his bed his mouth still dry and his breathing coarse. He stared at the blank dulled wall and wondered if he should open the curtains.

‘Open blinds halfway.’

A wave of light slowly rose up the walls and created a silhouette of Kyle. He watched the shadows of buildings and birds and plane fade by while Finn and Lewis cheered and screamed on the other side of his door. After a while, the noise died down and he heard them talking until a third and fourth voice entered the conversation.

There was movement. Kyle listened. He heard footsteps move past his door and into the kitchen. The fridge opened and the shelves rattled lightly, barely loud enough to hear. The door closed again and footsteps moved back towards the living room.

Grandstand music started playing but was cut off after just a few seconds. The channel, Kyle could tell, had been changed or the TV turned off altogether. He collapsed himself backwards so he was now staring up at the ceiling. Light from outside caught in his eye and he squinted. His eyes saw faces in the shadows above him.

At some point, he had fallen to sleep and he woke up again, later, following a door slamming from the other side. This was followed by two more doors closing. It was dark now and the only light that came through the half-open blinds was the fluorescence of commercialism from the other side of the glass. There was a gentle hum of passing cars, with the occasional honk of a horn, often distant that barely vibrated through the night.

People were coming home from their day of shopping, a day of not thinking about work or school or anything else. Some had gone to the cinema, others the football game. Kyle thought he heard a chanting from way down the street, boisterous and jovial. The songs of victory. But above all, there was a hum.

Kyle was overcome by a violent fit of coughing. It sat him straight up. At some point during his unconscious, he had dragged the blankets over him so he was almost taco-esque lying width ways across the bed. His ankle ached and his foot had been hanging over the edge while he was asleep.

He looked at the time and saw it was nearly nine o’clock. He was thirsty and unwrapped himself from his blanket and staggered towards the door. He pushed it open and the living room was dark. The blind closed and the only light being that of the house assistant’s flashing orange light in the corner. As he stepped forward, a dim light turned on above his head and he walked into the kitchen with the light following him.

He ignored the fridge and turned the cold tap on, letting it run and leaving his fingers underneath it to check the temperature.

The water in Kyle’s flat was always cold. He dipped his head beneath the running tap and let the water fall into his mouth and overflow a drip down his chin, splashing into the cold metal basin below. The water overflowed so much that he dampened his hair and when he pulled his head from under the tap, it dripped onto his shoulders and wet his shirt.

Kyle wiped his mouth with his arm and then his now damp arm on the side of his trousers. He opened the cupboard above the sink and slowly pulled a glass out, taking care not to collide it with any of the other glasses and make a noise. He looked towards Lewis and Finn’s rooms but saw no light coming from underneath the bottom of the door. He filled up the glass of water all the way to the top and took three and then four mammoth gulps where not all the water ended up in his mouth but spread over his cheeks and down the sides of his neck. He leant against the counter as he refilled the glass.

He had the living room to himself.

After chugging down the second glass of water and filling it for the third time he walked over to the sofa in the middle of the living room and climbed onto it. He took a last look back towards Lewis and Finn’s rooms and when he was certain they were asleep, he opened Chloe’s profile and then went to their message chain. He read and reread what he had already said to her and stared at the bottom hoping, for some reason, to see the Unread change to Read. He wanted to see the small bubble of ellipses bounce and bounce as Chloe typed, replying him, asking how he was feeling today and how his day was going. He wanted her to ask him what he was doing next week and the week after. After a few seconds of nothing, of course, appearing he typed a message of his own.

                                                                                                                                                                  Kyle Edwards just now

Hey, hope you’re doing good. I feel like s**t, haha. Last night was fun. Probably doing it again next week. X

                                                                                                                                              Wish you could have been there. X

                                                                                                                                              They seemed cool. X

After sending the message, Kyle went to Chloe’s pictures and instead of looking at recent photographs, just before she died, he went backwards to her first pictures uploaded to the network. He had seen only glimpses of these pictures before and swiped and swiped through the years, seeing birthdays and parties and changes in her clothes and body and hair. He didn’t know how many years he had swiped through and every time he thought to stop he always looked at one more.

He nearly leapt from his seat when he heard a door open behind him. Kyle turned and saw Finn standing outside his door with only the blueish light of his TV behind him, enveloping him in shadow. Kyle noticed he was shirtless but wearing thick woolly socks and long pyjama bottoms that he wore most of the time around the flat. Kyle nodded at him and turned back to the screen where Chloe was blowing out candles and everyone around her was cheering. He knew the video this picture was taken from. He had seen it many time before and helped her friends and family sing happy birthday along with her. He knew that it took her three attempts to blow out all the candles. Finn stepped towards the sofa, his feet not making a sound.

Kyle had been caught. He knew this. He wondered what Finn would ask him. He knew what to say, but didn’t know if Finn would believe him. He had known Kyle too long already. Finn stood behind the sofa while Kyle continued to stare forward. He knew he should have switched off when he wanted to.

But he hadn’t wanted to, as much as he had tried to convince himself.

‘Is that Chloe Kennedy?’

‘How was your party?’

Finn looked at him. ‘Good, thanks. Still feeling it a bit. Is Lewis asleep?’

‘I think so,’ Kyle tilted his head to inspect the bottom of Lewis’ door. ‘His light isn’t on.’

‘Yeah, not surprised. What did you do last night? Thought you were bringing a girl over.’ He stared back at Chloe’s picture. ‘I went to school with her. She was a couple of years below me.’

Kyle didn’t respond. Instead, he stared straight ahead and now Chloe’s picture was not of her and her friends but instead a blur of colours that washed into each other like Venn diagrams.

‘She was in my sister’s year. They weren’t friends, you know? Different circles, one of them didn’t like the other. No idea why other than silly teenage girl drama s**t. Slights abound.’

As Kyle turned to nod his head but say nothing, he noticed Finn was holding an empty glass that caught the light from the screen and reflected the picture towards him.

‘Such a shame. Couldn’t believe she died,’ Finn said. He stood there for a minute or two as Kyle sat in silence, not wanting to say anything, hoping Finn didn’t ask him how he knew her. Finn yawned, said goodnight and walked to the kitchen to fill his glass before returning to his room.