Here's the story: Orpheus charms his way to Hell to rescue Eurydice. This Orpheus can overpower the siren song. This Orpheus can soothe Cerberus to sleep with a lullaby. This Orpheus can move Hades to tears. He's got a lyre and a song in his throat and this Orpheus was the greatest poet who ever lived. So the King of the Dead makes a deal: they can both escape, as long as Orpheus never looks back.
James Cook revisits this tale, discovering hidden passages at the bottom of his lager, or within the cesspool of colors swirling across the pub's television screen. But for now he cleaves the pages of his unraveling thoughts with a mental bookmark and exhumes J.J.'s voice instead - plucking it from between his ribs if only to relieve the pressure on his lungs - detailing alcohol's nutritional value, interrupted by belches of laughter before their first day of college. Still sixteen and breathing fire, Cook pretends, avoiding his own reflection in the bar top. The past is just one of the many places he can't go back to.
He thinks about Charlie a lot. But he thinks about her in a vacuum, still in the snow, but in a world where he doesn't exist, where he isn't covered in blood (again), where she's only herself and not the closest counterfeit to the only girl he's ever loved. (He's put that love away for a rainy night, when he finds himself outside Fishponds again, drenched and clean-shaven, the boy who refused to look back begging to repeat the past so he won't have to run facing backwards - so he won't have to run at all.)
He raps his knuckles against the bar top, and asks for another pint without the traditional conversational bookends of 'please' and 'thank you'.
"Oi!" the bartender grunts, sliding his drink down the splintered wood panel, foam dribbling over the lip of the glass. But Cook isn't paying attention, and it falls off the edge without a moment's pause and shatters onto the floor already sticky with similar spills.
"You're gonna hafta mop that up, you know," the bartender huffs, running a meaty hand over his graying beard, "and cough up a few extra quid for that fucking glass you broke."
Cook doesn't hear him. His eyes are riveted to the television set and he's gone deaf to even its noise. All of his senses are mute, sight included. The image wavering before him is more of a vision than anything else, and everything around him is an array silhouettes constructed from memory rather than perception. Her face is a different version of young than he has stored in his memory, and this is the only assurance he has that she isn't a hallucination or nightmare. For a moment he fears that she's dead, that this photograph met with eyes that have always said "You don't know me, and you never will" is followed by another of a lifeless stare, or a lacerated throat, or blue lips, or slashed wrists - all places he remembers kissing at one point or another, in her bedroom or under the stars. For another moment he hopes that she is dead, so he can tell the whole world what he's done and get punished for it without wondering what she thinks of him.
By now the bartender is looking up, too, wondering what could be more fucking interesting than the threat to get his shotgun from the back.
Bile rises in Cook's throat and descends just as quickly when the next picture flashes across the screen, a scowling face that might have been Freddie's had he lived to see thirty. His heart bursts into a kaleidoscope of hope and hatred, gratefulness and guilt, all twining together in a mosaic of blood and neon.
The sound of the television comes back to him first - Jake Abassi, owner of a stock company, insider trading, a torrid affair. Cook can't help but crack a grin that splits the corners of his chapped lips. He's glad that she didn't end up married to some suburban fool in rumpled button-ups and soiled ties who'd kiss her chastely on his way to work.
Maybe if they'd fled somewhere else they'd still be there, nomads tiptoeing on train tracks, riding off the rails...
Here's another story: Orpheus navigates his way to Hell to rescue Eurydice. But this Orpheus can't overpower the siren song. This Orpheus can't soothe Cerberus to sleep with a lullaby. This Orpheus can't move Hades to tears. He's got scabs on his elbows and unwashed jeans and this Orpheus' only line of verse is "I love her" scrawled over and over in a red notebook. So the King of the Dead doesn't make a deal: he bashes Orpheus' skull in with a baseball bat and tells Eurydice that he never came for her at all. If he loves me, he'll know where to find me.
No, Cook shakes the dream from his ear, no they wouldn't.
And that is his only detour into fantasy.
The rest of the world snaps back into focus when he feels the barrel of a gun pressed against the hollow of his throat, just below his Adam's apple. He isn't afraid. (I'm not scared!) A baseball bat is the only weapon that can make him tremble, and the only reason he hasn't fled to America is because that's what's on TV most months of the year. (John Foster comes up to the plate. An innocent fastball is hurled down the pipe. The ball howls at first contact with the wood, red seams unfurling like rivulets of blood. It soars into the sky. It's going. It's going. It's gone.)
Refusing to avert his eyes from the television, Cook fumbles through his pockets for his wallet. He throws it carelessly on the bar top, and the leather fold flops open to reveal a few crumpled pounds and a driver's license tucked behind a sheath of plastic, his name printed in dangerous bold - Cook, James - daring passersby to remember that he's a fugitive. The bartender rifles through it, counting and recounting the money, scouring every crevice for loose change. (Would her photograph still be snug in one of the slots had he not burned it all those years ago?)
As the bartender continues to trifle with one of Cook's few worldly possessions, her face materializes on the screen for the last time. The disembodied voice of a male newscaster booms from behind the static frame, like a god or devil or both, but he can't tell which. (Is there any difference, really, between guidance and temptation?)
"Ms. Stonem -" she's gone from a "Miss" to a "Ms.", and Cook wonders when that changed; was Jake Abassi the first to dub her a woman? "Ms. Stonem will be incarcerated for two years at Eastwood Park Prison in Bristol..."
No gun's been fired, but Cook feels a bullet in his belly all the same. He sees his life flash before his eyes, but the montage has discarded the last three years. (He died at eighteen, anyway.) Death throws him back to fishnets and car crashes and waiting (this feels like the start of something), when the blood on his face was only ketchup, was only a practical joke.
("Sweet," she says, and stalks off ahead of them, too-short dress billowing behind her, a hedonistic prophet leading them to the promised land.)
But of course all of Cook's blood is still packaged safely in his veins, and for now it appears he'll go on living the same non-life he's crafted for himself. The gun is at his back now, and the bartender is prodding him out the door.
"Go home, James," he sighs, dragging him by the collar out into the cold. Grubby hands pressed against the window pane, the other customers cheer his departure.
Elizabeth was the last person to call him by his given name. (It happened but it never happened!) When he'd asked to do it all again (the fucks, the fuck-ups, everything) he didn't believe a girl in the Underworld was in any position to answer prayers. But of course as a slew of Orpheus' stumbled into Hell to rescue her, she morphed into Persephone and married darkness.
Here's another story: Orpheus loses a part of herself to Hell and calls it Eurydice. But this Orpheus wrote the siren song. This Orpheus plays fetch with Cerberus every night. This Orpheus sees Hades three times a week and lets him inside her head. She's got scars on her wrists and pills to take and thinks she was born backwards, come out me mum the wrong way. So the King of the Dead makes a different deal: pretend it never happened and I'll put you back together, pretend it never happened and I'll make you better.
Deja vu - as they met again on the park bench; as they danced under fairy lanterns, a stark contrast to their usual strobe lights and popping neon bulbs; as he hit her (hit me again!); as they hurtled out into the street and tumbled onto the roadside (how could I forget?)
Cook hasn't had a dalliance with the past since, and he doesn't know if he can stand another introduction to Effy Stonem's ice blue eyes, under whatever name.
He begins the letter anyway, bent over the hood of his car because he's afraid that if he takes the time to slide inside he'll lose his nerve. (Don't be a pussy.)
Princess, he scrawls in his crabbed handwriting. He bets Jake Abassi has never called her that.
I'm sorry I went to look for Freddie and never came back. But where we went isn't the sort of place you can come back from, and I didn't want to drag you there. I didn't find him, only what was left: his shirt, his shoes, his murderer.
He crumples up the paper and starts anew.
Princess,
Freddie's dead. John Foster killed him. So I killed John Foster. I didn't want you to know. I didn't want you to blame yourself, because it's not your fault.
He flicks his lighter open and touches the flame to the corner of the paper. He sets it on the hood and lets it burn.
Prin-
He adds this draft to the fire as well. He warms his numb hands against the flames, and uses them to light his last spliff. The fire and the ember at the end of his spliff pulsate in tandem, clones of his own battered, burning heart. After a while, he crushes them both underfoot, the remaining ash the only evidence of his being there, as has always been his way.
Things like this, he decides, aren't meant to be written down.
Keys stabbed in the ignition, he drives away from this ghost town accidentally inhabited by people, and winds his way to the heart of the city. He cycles through this several times, each metropolis and its surrounding suburbia a permutation of the last, all failed attempts at recreating home. He even thinks he spies his father out at the water's edge, drowning himself with a six-pack. He sees him in every anonymous obituary, too, where every Fucking Cook ends up eventually, unidentified and unmourned. But there are too many manic burn-outs with teardrop tattoos to know which one lords above him on his family tree. This new incarnation knows his own headline will be different, though.
Here's another story: Orpheus punches his way to Hell to rescue Eurydice. But this Orpheus fell in love with the siren song. This Orpheus slays Cerberus with his bare hands. This Orpheus is worth nothing to Hades. He's got split knuckles and a parole officer and this Orpheus would never look back because it's life, you've gotta get in there and never fucking stop. So the King of the Dead doesn't make a deal: Orpheus kills him after the screen turns black and takes his throne; he and Eurydice rule side-by-side yet all alone, seated behind barricades of bone.
He travels along the highway in a blur of traffic and rest stops, superfluously referring to maps to plot his path; no matter where he's been, there's always some dim part of his mind that remembers which turns to take if he ever wants to return, breadcrumbs of memory scattered on all the right roads he can't quite recall the names of.
When he arrives, he takes care to avoid the residential streets and Keith's pub and Brandon Hill - all the places that remember him best. He carves his route around school zones, too, not wanting Paddy to see him hollowed out at twenty-two, not wanting to see Paddy without that first flush of innocence at fourteen. He doesn't want to see his mother at all.
After a lunch bought on car-seat coins (his wallet is hundreds of miles behind him, left at the tavern), Cook finds a library to book a visit to Eastwood on one of its computers, and for a quick respite in a building equipped with a central heating system. The automatic doors hesitate to open, like they can't decide whether or not admit him; or perhaps he's honed his talent for going undetected better than he originally anticipated. He looks over his shoulder out of habit, but, as usual, finds no one there.
The booking form asks for his name, and he decides to call himself James Uphroes, the latter an anagram for Orpheus and the plural of a nautical term he can't remember the specifics of, though quite fitting as he shares his true name with an historic pirate.
No one else is scheduled for days to come, and he has his pick of time slots to choose from.
A few seconds after submitting, a confirmation with too many exclamation points pops onto the screen:
James Uphroes has an appointment for Tomorrow at 14:00! Thank you! John 3:16
He searches for somewhere to park his car so he can roll into the backseat and sleep for a few hours, but the urge to keep moving is too strong for him to settle down. (You didn't answer my question, Cook. What would happen if you stopped?) He never deviates from the speed limit, always uses his blinker (that straight down the line shit) but he finds himself straying to the outskirts of the city, ready to bolt the moment anyone looks at him with recognition. He drives like this all night, cutting figure-eights through the streets to the point where all the memories that might have existed on those roads are overridden by the ones he makes tonight.
Cook skips breakfast, then lunch, too nervous to eat, too poor otherwise. Fuel tank and body both running on fumes, he's grateful for the empty stomach; he can't stain the cloth interior of the car dry heaving, can he?
In the visitor's parking lot of Eastwood, stationary for the first time in days, Cook spreads his hands on the steering wheel, a cigarette pinched between the index and middle fingers of his left hand. He catches his reflection in the rear-view mirror - shadows under his eyes and stubble on his chin, he wears the past week plainly on his face. Regarding his trembling hand with disgust, he brings the cigarette to the grim set of his lips for one last drag.
"Fuck it," he mutters, setting the cigarette on the dashboard to save for later. (Fuck the future.)
Combing out his hair with his fingers, he cracks his back against the open car door and begins his death march. (Never look back.)
Cook waits in the bank of wooden chairs and tables, five minutes early - more rebellious than punctuality (hasn't quite been able to bleach that streak out of him), and he can't afford to be late. Children of other inmates play in a designated corner of the room, watched ruefully by fathers or grandparents or friends, walls painted bright yellow where everywhere else is drab gray. He bounces his leg underneath his desk like an anxious schoolboy, remembers it's a sign of nervousness, and forces himself to stop, tracing the initials carved into the tabletop instead.
He watches the clock nailed above the door, distrusting of his own wristwatch purchased for him by Louis before their falling out. The small hand ticks to the two, turning over a new hour, new minute, new second - the point of no return. On cue, the door swings open, a female guard leading a string of women into the sparsely populated visiting area. The children spare them a moment's glance but turn back to their dolls and monster trucks until an adult drags them away to make small talk with their mothers.
She's towards the end of the line and for once he sees her first, blank expression and dark-wash jeans, eyes not even bothering to search for him. Suddenly, his heart is in his throat, hit with the full weight of seeing her in person when a month ago he didn't even have a photograph.
Deja vu - when they sat on opposite sides of the table before he plead guilty to all sorts of offenses like assault and drug-dealing and "I couldn't stand the way he was fucking looking at her".
("So, how is the love?"
"That's what I've always loved about you, Cook. Brave.")
She's not surprised when she sees him, knees almost touching his chest in his too-small chair, elbows propped on the table just to flout the rules of etiquette. Who else could it have been? Who else would need to pretend?
"Where've you been?" she asks in lieu of a proper greeting, out of tender curiosity rather than impatience. It's almost as if his absence was short enough to warrant the question, the beginning of a conversation that might have happened had he returned after leaving John Foster's mutilated body, beaten to death with his own baseball bat. (The reaper has ceased to wield a scythe for quite some time.)
"Hell and back," he replies with nonchalance, the remnants of a cheeky grin ghosting across his lips, subdued laughter spilling from his throat, "but I ain't looking behind me."
The way he regards her now, road-weary and bone-sharp, he's more Odysseus than Orpheus, returning to Penelope after years of wandering. (But in spite of everything, he wasn't written to be the hero. Perhaps he's better cast as Argus, the loyal dog who stood vigil for twenty years just to welcome his master home. Then again, Freddie wasn't written to be dead, either.)
Slender wrists bound in metal handcuffs - the only jewelry she wears now - perch on the edge of the table, left hand clasping its mate - something to hold onto, something to steady her trembling, something to cover her scars. "Did you find Him on your way there?"
She could be inquiring after God or Freddie, but he'll take a gamble on the one whose voice they hear in their heads most often. Besides, they know each other well enough to dispense with the semantics of proper nouns. Perhaps he should have something poetic in store, but he never expected to be His funeral knell. He manages to scrape together two words, the most unadulterated version of the truth, like two shoes dropping one after the other: "He's dead."
She laughs, and the monsters so long at bay peek out at him from the windows of her pupils. "So's Naomi" she says, wanting him to hurt, wanting to show him he doesn't know everything, that she knows death. "Fucking dead." All she does is twist the knife in her own wound. "It was always gonna be you and me, babe, wasn't it? Always gonna be you and me!" The two people who ran the most are the only ones stuck in this ghost town; the two people who tried their hardest to kill themselves are the only survivors. They burn the wings of other birds but like a pair of phoenixes are resistant to the flames. (You just burn, kid. You just burn.)
Here's the truth: Three Orpheuses descend into Hell, searching for each other. There is no siren song. There is no Cerberus. There is no Hades. They've got demented souls and twisted hearts and are they just three losers screwing each other forever, or are they more than that? There is no deal, but they don't look back anyway, afraid of what they'll see: I'm fucking Cook! Let me out! I'm not scared!
Then the eye of the hurricane blinks and unwinds from its terror, an ocean breeze delivering the scent of sea salt as its destruction is undone. (The bards always sing about the calm before the storm, but what of the stillness after it? Do they drown before the rainbow?)
Her eyes aren't so ravenous now, and her manic smile is softened to sadness. After a shaky breath and a pang of regret, she begins to tell him of stand-up comedy and radiation treatments and shouting from the rooftops over a blaring stereo.
"I didn't tell Emily for months."
"I killed John Foster while wearing His T-shirt."
This is their eulogy. For all their promises and all their grief, they'll never sing hymns as they lower their bodies into the ground, nor will they shoot fireworks over their tombs. This story was not written for closure - not for them, anyway.
It's five minutes until visiting hours are over and they still haven't completed their confessions.
"You're not coming back," she says, wobbling on the line between question and command.
"No, Princess," he replies. This is as close as he gets to using her name. "And where I'm going you can't follow."
"Hell again?" she indulges. Effy Stonem follows no man; she sears her path across the world and salts the earth where she treads.
"No," he shakes his head, shrugging off the weight of the last three years, Atlas dropping the world into the pit of the universe. "Home."
It's true. He won't return and she's doesn't want him to for reasons they both understand but do not ruin by mentioning aloud. Chief among them is the inevitability of falling in love with each other because they're what He forgot to take with Him when He died. (Is this how the Apostles feel when Jesus is crucified?) You can't exorcise a ghost when you let it sneak under your sheets every night. Better leave being together to another life, in a world where they don't know He exists, and they don't mind that their hearts are fractured and don't quite fit.
(Secondary among them is that they don't want to undo their last kiss.)
How far they've come from blazing through one shitty little town after the next, sweat, smoke, and concrete fused into their skin. How far they'd come then from delinquent check-lists and sex in the nurse's station and discovering all manner of birthmarks and tattoos for the first time.
They watch the clock nailed above the door, the way some couples watch a favorite television show. The small hand ticks to the three, turning over a new hour, new minute, new second - the end, the beginning.
One last question: "Is E.T. still your favorite movie?" he asks, because he knows the wine glass on her arse is still there.
(We are Cook and Effy.)
"Yes," she admits, like she regrets not repenting for it.
(We've dated. We've fucked in every sense of the word.)
And he grins, eyes twin tongues of blue fire melting her Medusa stare.
(The fucking world knows us.)
Chairs scrape as the convicts rise from their seats at the call of the chiming clock, souls ushered back into their dungeons. Cook walks away before she disappears, unable to watch her slip back into the shade. But of course, as the tale inevitably goes, he lingers in the doorway, other anonymous visitors bumping past him in a crush of shoulder blades and obscene grumbles. He looks back, watching the last denim-clad calf disappear into the fluorescent shadows, watching the shine of her ponytail flick behind the wall.
Look back at me.
Suddenly she's a foolish girl again, and moves against the current of her deflated housemates like she's treading on water, drawing closer to the door but backing away from it with every step. She manages to grip the door frame and muscle herself to the opening again in time to witness Cook's jacketed arm swing out of sight. She always has the last look, the last enigmatic smile before the credits role.
I'd brave damnation for one more glance.
Here's the final chapter: Orpheus schedules a visit in Hell to meet with Eurydice. The siren song is the ticking clock which beckons her back to her cell at the next hour. Cerberus is the spotted service dog resting on an inmate's lap. Hades is the warden controlling the timetable to rotating guards. This Orpheus has a hundred reasons to run and one reason to stay and yet it really never was much of a choice. So the King of the Dead declares his sentence: give me thirty years to life and your most potent confession - maybe less if you behave - and I'll make sure Eurydice forgets about you and this place.
Here's how it ends: Eurydice peels off her prison garb a little sooner than expected, the only time she's ever been lauded for good behavior. When she crawls out from below, she vows to only date boys who look like themselves, not the two trapped in the Underworld, one bathing in the River Styx, the other sprawled on its banks, watching the tide creep closer, probably flirting with Persephone. She packs her past away in Pandora's box and seals it with a kiss. After a few years, Orpheus is just a myth.
Epilogue: A different penitentiary, but all prisons feel the same; even her bedroom felt like this, once. Eurydice is on the other side of the glass this time, in light-wash jeans, civilizations roosting in her bedhead. A gray-uniformed man unhooks the telephone on his side from it's receiver; she does the same. By magic he moves his lips and Orpheus' voice pours into her ear, an echo of the ocean trapped inside a seashell, accent thick and anything but lyrical:
"It was always gonna be you and me, babe," he repeats, tears spilling down his bruised cheeks.
She collapses onto her wobbly elbows and finishes the prophecy between her sobs. "It's always gonna be you and me."
They rest their foreheads against the window, staring down at the other's hands as though labyrinths of fingerprints will provide a map to some treasure trove of unsullied beginnings. Inches apart and worlds away, they can no longer discern who is in the Underworld and who is on the surface.
Hades forbids them to look back, but they've never been ones for listening.