Nine Lives (Zarry Fan Fiction)

Chapter 1

The light comes on so suddenly it feels like he’s drowning. ‘I’m awake,’ Zayn gasps, sitting up and covering his eyes with his hand. For a moment he has no idea where he is, whether he’s in another hotel bed or in his bunk on the bus, rolling on to another venue in another city he won’t remember an hour after he leaves. That’s nothing new, but then he feels the duvet being tugged off him and Paul only does that when he’s pissed.

‘What? What?’ Zayn says with a jolt and immediately regrets it, moving his hands to the top of his head as he’s hit by a wave of pain that almost knocks him back onto the bed. He’s about to let it, the promise of the soft, soft pillow impossible to ignore. But as he’s giving into the weight of his head, Paul shakes him and tells him to get up and Zayn sits up so suddenly he doesn’t know how he doesn’t break his neck.

‘Am I late?’ Even opening his eyes hurts, but when they refocus, it isn’t Paul, it’s his mother, and it’s only then that Zayn realises he’s at home.

Home. It still doesn’t feel right calling his house that. Home will forever be the tiny house in Bradford he grew up in with its creaky stairs and white wooden windows that stick in the winter. There’s another family living there now, a couple with two little girls and a cat and he wonders if they fight over the bathroom in the mornings, like they used to, and have barbeques in the small square garden. He checks on it sometimes, when he goes back to visit his grandmother who, despite his best efforts, won’t move. He’s tried bribing her with an array of houses that have everything from chandeliers to under floor heating, but she’s having none of it. Zayn doesn’t blame her; he loves her house. Loves how it sits neatly in the middle of the terrace and always smells of cardamom. He hates having iftar dinner anywhere else because it isn’t the same without all of them huddled around her big dining table, he and his sisters fighting over the last samosa.

‘Come on, sweetheart,’ his mother says, kissing his forehead.

‘Mum?’ That hurts, too, his voice rusty, as though he hasn’t spoken for months, and as he rubs his throat, he gets a flash of the night before, of shouting until his head hurt, and falls back onto the bed.

‘Come on, Zain. You’ve got to get up,’ she tells him when he does, clapping her hands as she hurries across the bedroom and disappears into the dressing room.

‘Why?’

She isn’t listening and when he hears her opening and closing drawers, he shuts his eyes and wishes her luck. He’s been living there for almost a year and he still hasn’t unpacked properly so whatever his mother is looking for, she won’t find it. Living isn’t the right word, staying is more apt. The house feels more like a hotel, everything glossy and vaguely familiar, like the black chest of drawers Doniya insisted he buy because she said the bedroom was too white and the leather bed Liam helped him pick out that Harry hates because he says it makes the room smell like the inside of a car. Zayn can’t smell it, but he agrees that every room has that new house smell – drying paint and freshly laid carpets. His mother tries. Whenever he’s in London, she’ll come and stay, do his washing and try to work out how to use the shiny but needlessly complicated oven. But then she goes home again and the house goes back to feeling too big.

Perhaps if he was there more his aftershave would get into the curtains and the sofa in the kitchen would start to smell of buttered toast and marmalade, but he’s only there a day or two a month, if that, so it smells strange. Untouched. Even hotels don’t smell like that. No matter how vigorously they clean them you still know that you’re not the first person to use them. Sometimes he walks into a hotel room and the first thing he smells is someone’s last cigarette or the perfume they put on before they left. Uncleanable, ghostly smells of all the people who slept there before him.