So. That should bring us full circle, as far as my bullshit backstory goes.
If you're still awake I'll tell you how Vincent and I crossed paths. Blundered into business together. Became a whole thing.
*
I'd nearly wrecked Majid's Audi, remember? We left me kerbside, demobilised by double vision, riding out the secondary explosions of some robust MDMA and digging at the psychological root of my need to rescue boys who swim too far from shore while playing at being men.
The sun came up. A Big Issue vendor rapped on the car window and I waved him away with one hand that looked exactly like one hand only, mathematical proof I no longer posed a danger to myself or others on the road.
I lowered the foggy glass and drove home like a medium poring over a crystal ball, palms and fingertips brushing the steering wheel feeling for shudders or other signs I'd ruined the front-end alignment.
Majid was in the shower. Instead of handing off the keys I left them on the table and crept away to bed.
He rang my cell that afternoon. The man never rang. Never.
My stomach lining shrank at the thought of him stranded in a motorway breakdown lane. I put on a cheerful, inculpable tone and picked up.
"Are you at home?" Majid asked. "I'm bringing my cousin Meera round to see you. We're five minutes away."
Across every known industry, in all conceivable professions from newsagent to member of parliament, Majid had a connection in the form of a cousin.
As insiders go, his emo cousin Meera seemed a figure unlikely to change the course of my destiny. She refused offers of coffee or tea and sat sulking on the couch dressed in Pikachu hospital scrubs, plugging a fist-sized vape rig into her pierced face without gusto or panache, a bored cook checking the temperature of a roast.
Majid stirred his coffee and broke it all down for me.
"Meera's trainin' to become a nurse," he said. "She was there when they brought in the bombin' victims from the Five Ways concert. Show'er, Meer."
Meera flipped her cherry-streaked hair out of one eye and leaned in to show me photos of a bloody trauma patient on her phone.
"That's th'lass oo'got blown up," she said. "Margaret somethin'? Th' Merican oo'z shaggin' Brady Miles."
My perineum wrinkled at the sight of the woman's injuries. My gaze moved from her tastefully understated makeup and long natural lashes to red pits, embedded metal and powder burns surrounding the savaged flesh where her other eye had been.
Sickened, I put a hand on Meera's arm.
"Can you get more like this?" I asked.
Meera shook her head.
"Me bein' near tha' ambulance wuzza lucky one-off. Eyes only avin' a fag when they pulled up in fronna me n'opened the doors. But I'm part a'class, we move as a group-like an' your girl's on the wards now, I can't helpya."
I looked at the NHS lanyard and access fob hanging around Meera's neck. Asked her:
"What size are your trousers?"
Money changed hands. I loaned Meera tracksuit bottoms and a Lonsdale sweatshirt in exchange for her security fob, lanyard and scrubs. Majid located the backpack with the camera hole cut in the bottom and he drove us to the hospital.
I took one of Meera's anatomy textbooks up to the fourth floor and staked out the American's room from a bench near the vending machines. Put my earbuds in and nodded to the beat of nothing while chewing on a yellow highlighter, leafing through a chapter about the thorax, snapping up gold with my hidden camera every time the nurses came to visit Margaret and left her door ajar.
On the second day I brought a lunch and got more footage than anyone could want of Five Ways frontman Brady Miles. Fatter than I would have forecasted, time had turned him into a dumpy drake winging provisions to his wounded hen, tall lattes and flowers, gigantic pillows and Pizza Hut. He was no longer sexy by pop-idol standards, but without his silly Dr. Seuss twist of purple hair Brady was unmistakably masculine and magnetic, putting off strong signals that effectively got my attention.
I won the passive paparazzi lottery on Day Three. Two sadistic nurses death-marched poor Margaret the length of the corridor in some torturous feat of physiotherapy. The swelling of her injury was beginning to subside, and as she staggered past me, moaning and clinging to her rolling drip stand for support, I could see she had once been quite pretty, for a woman close to my mum's vintage. At my age she must have been fucking gorgeous.
Diving into her background online didn't reveal anything the tabloids hadn't publicized, after Brady's dick and Kev's drugs video put Margaret and her two-piece band under the global microscope.
Her mother was dead. Her father was a financial criminal who did his time and moved abroad, whereabouts unknown. But there was no dirt on Margaret.
On social media she was pure vanilla filler, another smiling face floating in an echo chamber of thumb-sucking comfort and filtered nostalgia. Posts about wedding celebrations and pet-shelter fundraisers. Signature campaigns to bring back "The Bletchley Circle" or stop the remake of "Footloose". Solstice cocktail recipes, photographs of homemade ketogenic bread.
I checked out Citizen Samurai on YouTube. Their sound wasn't half bad. Kind of a catchy crunchy low-fi synth-pop project, a blend of The Decemberists and Belle and Sebastian, without the latter's moody-Midlands Nick Drake notes of self-harm.
Except for some concert footage from a time when she was a much leaner species and Vincent had more hair, the only video of Citizen Samurai with any professional polish on it was a live version of "Owen" from Prague sung by Margaret and Brady, with Vincent playing guitar off to one side like the Ringo. I had to give it to her. The sound of Margaret's voice was heavenly.
I changed out of Meera's scrubs in the loo and stopped at the vending machines on my way to the lift. Sitting next to them for three days reawakened my addiction to Mars bars and I wanted one for the road.
I didn't realize I was singing "Owen" loudly enough for anyone to hear until some cheeky creep with a beautiful voice joined in behind me, singing harmony.
I fell silent and found my vocal partner's ghost over my shoulder, reflected in the glass. Some unlucky bloke with one arm in a sling.
As I reached to press the buttons for my Mars bar I realized I was standing in a vending machine queue singing "Owen" with Vincent from Citizen Samurai.
My hand shook as I made my selection. Instead of a Mars bar I accidentally purchased Sizzling Steak Wotsits, my least favorite Wotsits flavour.
I played it cool. Turned around, tore open my rattling bag. Looked Vincent square in the eye and said:
"I think you're fucking brilliant. I'd like to represent you."
After that, shit picked up speed, and things started falling into place.
YOU ARE READING
HUMILIATION of a SAMURAI
General Fictioncover: @JELyrica / One week after Margaret pulls the plug on her relationship with Vincent, a decade-old video of their performance as a musical duo called Citizen Samurai goes viral, and they're hired as an opening act for an aging British boy ban...
