ARABELLA • Alex Turner

TWENTY SEVEN

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     When Alex's bandmates piled in through the front door of Arabella's house and announced their arrival for the whole street to hear, Alex couldn't help the laugh that escaped him.

Despite their obnoxious ways and their constant need to piss him off, he had missed the blundering idiots over the weeks.

   It was late September, a little chillier now that autumn was starting to creep up on them, and the day had finally arrived for Arabella and Sophie to part ways with their old flatmates and move in together.

   Despite the unfavourable circumstances surrounding her mother, Alex could tell that Arabella was looking forward to this new chapter in her life.

Though he'd been apprehensive about her state of mind at first, being back in Sheffield seemed to have boosted her spirits considerably. Seeing the colour return to her cheeks and the dimpled smile reappear on her face after so long was like opening the window on a warm summer's morning and being bathed in golden sunlight.

His girl was finally feeling more like her old self again, so much so that when Matt, Jamie and Nick arrived to help with some of the heavy lifting, she was too busy bobbing her head to an old ZZ Top song to notice.

   The house looked more like a maze than a house with the amount of crates and boxes stacked up everywhere. It was so crammed, in fact, that there was barely room to move.

If Alex hadn't already called in reinforcements in the form of his bandmates, he would have been a lot more worried about the fact that the landlord was due to be collecting the keys from them in less than an hour. How two girls had managed to accumulate this much stuff in the space of only a few years he had no idea.

"Where's our favourite Londoner?" Matt asked before Alex even had the chance to greet him, kicking the door shut with his foot. Nick and Jamie were dutifully kitted out with cleaning supplies and rolls of duct tape, while the drummer had brought what looked like enough snacks to feed a small army and not much else.

"She's upstairs. I'm gonna go and help her finish packing." Alex informed them. "Kitchen's through there. Could you take all the boxes with her name on them out to the car?"

   The trio nodded. Alex could tell that they were keen to ask after Arabella, and he knew that they deserved a proper explanation as to why their frontman had abandoned them for so long, but he didn't want to broach the subject while his girlfriend was within hearing distance.

   "Don't break anything!" He called after them as they pushed past and entered the kitchen where everything was neatly bubble-wrapped and stowed away in Sharpie-labelled boxes. "And don't touch anything that's not Bella's!"

Pointedly ignoring their snarky replies, Alex fought his way up the stairs through a jungle of hoover cords and bin bags to reach Arabella's room, which was in a similar state of disarray.

   The brunette was balanced precariously on top of the metal bed frame, taking down her string lights and the millions of posters she had amassed over the years. She was humming along to a jazz rock song he'd never heard before, wearing jeans and one of his old sweatshirts.

   A pang of sadness hit him at the sight of the room being stripped down to its bare bones.

   The four walls had become somewhat of a refuge for him over the months; a space moulded by her brilliant mind and her whimsical soul. It was the space in which they had shared their first kiss and where they had spent so much time together, listening to hazy rock and roll songs and talking for hours on end.