The Heart Rate of a Mouse (Larry)

Chapter 6: Bad Business

When I was fourteen, I decided that I was going to be a musician. I had had my guitar for a bit over a year. I didn't think I was amazing with it, not yet anyway. I wasn't allowed to play when Dad was hungover, which in practice meant that I could only play when he was out. I went over to Liam's house to play sometimes, but not too often. They were a real family. I didn't want to intrude on that.

Liam and I started busking to work on our skills, but we rarely made money. My voice was untrained, my fingers clumsy. He had this red tenor drum that he dragged around. I didn't take our efforts seriously until one night when I realised that I had to get out. I sat next to my bed in the dark, guitar in my lap. My lower lip was busted. Dad had left for the bar since. It wasn't his fault, but my own. I tripped rushing upstairs.

I don't ever remember crying during those years, and I know I haven't cried since my departure - not out of sorrow, not out of happiness. It's all the same to me.

I thought back then that the only chance I had, the only one I was ever going to get, was music. That if I left, which I did, and if I got a band together, which I did, and if we became successful, which we did, I'd be happy.

But 'happy' is such a vague word, meaning something different to different people. I just wanted to play my music and hopefully some people would like it, and then I could make a living out of it. I could stomach the fame if the focus was right, but it's not. The girls come to the shows to stare at me or one of the others. They scream and scream, hands outstretched, and they have posters of me hanging in their bedrooms, and they bat their eyelashes at the paper version of me, use hairbrushes for microphones and sing my words at me, kiss me goodnight, and I could be singing about fucking daffodils or a pile of horse shit and it wouldn't matter. They want me. Music is just the excuse.

The boys who come to the shows aren't any better. Despite Harry's preferences, I still think we live in a heterosexual world, so they're not there to fuck me. They want to be like me. I can't wrap my mind around it, what it is about this circus that they would want to get a piece of. It must be the girls that they want. The fame.

And both parties claim that it's the music. It's the mind-blowing music, the highs and the lows, the world I create, the crazy whirlwind of emotion that the instruments conjure around us. It's the change in time signature at the sixth minute or the explosion of drums when you least expect it.

I know they don't care about that. Critics do, giving me some gratification and some of that acknowledgement of musical integrity that the kids try to take away from me. Two out of every thousand fans come to the show for the right reason. I like those two kids.

I've known that my bandmates are in this for the wrong reasons. I've known that Cal, Ed and Ben have all been chasing immortality, Cal probably wanting it with a side of sex icon status.

Liam's been in it for me.

So what do you do when you realise that the last pieces of string holding you together have dissolved?

I know what we did. Firstly, we went on stage twenty minutes late. It was the biggest fight we have ever had, and Liam got the same amount of shit I did. He's married and a father. Ben didn't know. Goes to show how stealthy Liam has been about it all, how deep that deception goes.

I quit first, then Cal said that no, he was quitting, and then Ed said he had been meaning to quit for weeks now, and Liam said he couldn't be a one man band, so he quit too. Ben only managed to get us on stage by blackmailing and reminding us of our contract, saying that no hasty decisions should be made and that without the band we were nothing. So we went on stage, and we played the show. Why? Because we're professionals. Cal now thinks I'm not, that having fucked another man has cancelled out the little I had going for me.