“If you had to swap bodies with a celebrity who would it be?”

Laura puts on her best ‘thoughtful’ face and thinks deeply about my question.

We’re sat on my back garden, cool glasses of pink lemonade clinking with ice and teeth biting at rims. The sun is hot and thick against my skin and there are cabbage-white butterflies drunkenly fumbling for the sweetest of flowers. My parents had popped their heads out earlier, identical grins twisting up their faces as they shouted their gleeful goodbyes and went on their way. They are heading for a week away in Cornwall and have left me in charge of the house.

Which is why Laura has packed a suitcase and is sitting at our garden table eating the sausages I had thrown on the barbeque earlier.

“Oh man, that’s a hard one,” she muses, brows furrowing. “I’d have to say… Angelina Jolie.”

I snort. “Come on Laura, that’s got to be the most boring answer you could’ve possibly given.”

“What’s wrong with wanting to fuck Brad Pitt?”

“God you’re so predictable.” I sniff, flipping my sunglasses down over my eyes. The sounds of my garden hum around us; the dog snuffling in the bushes, birds chirruping, the barbeque sizzling with hot meat. It’s a beautiful day.

“When is Jimmy coming over, anyway? I’m sure he said noon.” Laura speaks with her mouth full of sausage flesh and I am momentarily disgusted. it’s a truth universally acknowledged that when a girl gets comfortable around you she had to show you every part of her person. I’ve seen more of Laura then I would ever care to remember.

“As if he’d ever be awake for noon. Give it ‘til two and I’ll ring him. Fucking bastard better have got beer like he promised.”

“He will, if there’s anything good about him its that he never lets you down when it comes to alcohol.”

“Except when he’s stealing it from you.” I sneer.

Honestly, I am still unsure as to why we keep such unscrupulous characters around us. We horde the damned and devils to our breasts like we can somehow save them, except I don’t want to save Jimmy, I want to watch him burn a little bit in his own flames. Laura wants to save him, she’s got the infinite kindness that only women seem to have for broken things. I just think the man is funny as fuck and he can get us into some pretty great clubs.

I potter about the garden, weeding the flowers and humming along to the radio Laura dragged outside. She inevitably ends up in the kitchen fixing the mess I made with the food, because she is resident cook and I just slap a bit of salt and pepper on everything and assume the flavour will manifest itself. When I peek through the window I spy her sashaying about the room with her mother’s famous jerk chicken she had started making last night - a recipe she will not divulge even under pain of death. A family thing, she once said, even boys like me can’t know the secret to the great taste.

Whatever. Its not like I could cook it anyway.

I go back to my garden chair, sunglasses cocked and loaded like I’m some Parisian model only without the looks and charisma and charm and fame and money. And Paris. I pick up my book - some sports biography I have no care for, but is quite sexually explicit so I’ll probably keep reading it right to the end anyway.

The day passes in a jolly sort of silence, with only the hum of insects and the radio bubbling pop songs to hum along to. Everything is sweet and soft and I’m almost dropping off when I hear the garden gate bang noisily, the thunk of wood against brick jerking me from my pleasant little daze.

“Hey Irvine, I got you a gift!”

I twist in my seat to see Jimmy standing there with a shit eating grin, wearing a t-shirt I remember losing about six months ago. In his hands he grips a battered acoustic guitar, aging and peeling with old stickers. I stare at him, perplexed.

“Huh?” I say dimly, still trying to shake off the summer-funk clouding my brain.

“I found it in my attic last night and I remember how you like playing so I figured you could have it.”

My gratitude is about to flare, I can feel it, warm and gentle in my chest like a sleeping kitten curled up tight. I let my face relax into a smile but movement catches my eye and I spy a slim figure trotting nervously through my garden gate, hair a complete mess and sleepy eyes peering above Jimmy’s shoulder.

Its Carl.

What is this trickery?

“What?” I sneer, moving to sit up. I feel an anger brew, my skull pounding with sausage-fat words treachery, treachery, treachery. Laura stumbles from the house holding a plate of raw jerk chicken, smiling blithely in the midday sun. She stops before Carl, takes him in before turning to see my furious expression and smirking in that lazy wolfish way that sometimes drives me mad.

“Hey Carl, I didn’t know you were coming today. Its nice to see you.” She skips around him, puts the chicken by the barbeque and shoots me a sly wink. “I’ll go put your beers in the fridge.”

And she disappears again. Like a fox in your bins, that one.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” I snarl, teeth and gums and spit flying. I watch Carl flinch back a little, deer-eyes narrowing like he is preparing himself for an onslaught of violence. I curl my lips back and try to square my shoulders, look like I’m angry and my heart isn’t doing a runaway pounding thing on my ribs.

“Calm down crocodile, I was just wandering around the library this fine morn, happened to find our boy Carl here and decided, hey, we’re having a shindig, why not invite a new person? Get a little bit of new blood into an old gang, huh?” Jimmy’s voice is sugary and false and I can see the quick-sharp gleam to his eyes. If Laura is like the fox in your bins then Jimmy is the fox in your chicken coop, slaughtering all small animals at will, just for the taste of blood.

He went to the library to find him on purpose. He wants me to be uncomfortable, of course he does, it’s the nature of our relationship. Fisticuffs, drugs and twisted mind fucks, that’s what we are all about. Its what the tie between us is made of, the red-thread that binds us inevitably together. God I hate him so much sometimes.

“Well ain’t that something grand?” I hiss softly, sitting back in my chair and folding my arms. I make like I’m reading my book but instead I peer behind my sunglasses at Carl as he makes his way cautiously to the seat opposite to me. I can see the gleam of his skin where sweat slicks over, how his mussed up hair sticks to his forehead slightly. He’s wearing baggy trousers and a t-shirt of some non-descript festival, the headliners listed on the back. Some hippy-group protesting to save the whale through song and dance, no doubt. What a load of bullshit.

I decide to take the tactile route of completely ignoring our new guests and reading my book as if they weren’t sat next to me. Laura comes out balancing four beers, her dress hitched up over thighs. I catch Jimmy taking them in, tongue darting out to wet his lips. Fucker. If I had my way I’d make sure he never got to be with her again, no matter what. He doesn’t deserve a girl like Laura. He doesn’t deserve love at all.

“Alright so Irvine was asking this earlier. If you could swap bodies with any celebrity who would it be?” She grins sweetly, puts her head on her hands.

“Brad Pitt,” Jimmy says instantly, wolf-mouth stretched into an ugly smile. “Angelina Jolie is, just. Damn.”

I snort loudly. How fucking predictable.

“That’s so weird!” Laura giggles, taking a sip of her beer. “I said Angelina Jolie for the exact same reason.”

Jimmy is all eyes and dark twisted heat now.

“Great minds think alike,” he purrs, and I watch Laura blush, completely disgusted.

“What you two are so simple you can’t see beauty in anyone else except the world’s most famous couple? How boring. Moving on.” I snap, scowling behind my sunglasses.

“Carl what about you?”

Jimmy the chicken-killing fox. I want to strangle him. Set the dogs on his stringy carcass.

Carl looks at us, wide eyes and nerve clacking like maracas in a distant land. Like he’s never sat with a group of people and talked inanely about the world. Never asked stupid questions that inevitably lead onto the subject of sex. Never confessed guiltily that he likes a certain celebrity and watched the others recoil in horror and amusement.

Fucker hasn’t lived at all.

“Well…” he muses, circling the rim of his bottle with the pad of his thumb. “I uh, I guess… I’d swap bodies with Ewan McGregor but only when he was doing Long Way Round.”

There’s a pause.

“What the fuck is that?” Jimmy asks.

I remember watching that with my mum a few years ago. She likes travel documentaries and I liked Ewan McGregor and the fact that he got naked in pretty much everything he did. It was a win-win really.

“It’s a documentary, you idiot, he went on his motorbike around the world.” I snarled, eager to destroy. “Why then?”

Carl is smiling at me.

“Because I’ve always wanted to go to Eastern Russia, I don’t know why. It seems to me almost like the edge of the world.”

Laura snorts. “And you said our answer was boring.”

“You want to go to Eastern Russia?” I ask, ignoring Laura’s obtuse stare. “You know its probably the grimmest place on earth, right?”

“Why, have you been before?” His face is defiantly still and I sort of want to punch him.

“No, but I’m pretty sure all those years of oppressive Soviet power has squashed all joy from that end of the country. You know that’s where they used to ferry free speakers? People died there. There is nothing there a tourist could enjoy.”

“Who said anything about being a tourist? If I were to travel to a country I wouldn’t want to skim its outline, see the bright colours then move on. I would want to get inside it, feel it how its supposed to be felt. I don’t want to go to beaches and get a tan. I want to feel the grimmest place on earth for myself. Is that so wrong?” Jesus Christ, what a cliché. So the hippie likes to travel. I open my mouth to retort but Jimmy beats me to it, hitching out an unhinged laugh as he grips the neck of his bottle, leaning back on his garden chair.

“You two might as well fuck on the table. Who gets all intense over such a stupid question? Fuck, and here I thought we were having a good time.”

“Fuck you Jimmy, its called a debate.” Carl starts blushing and takes a hasty gulp of his beer, bubble frothing from the corners of his mouth. “You invited him in the first place, you know?”

I kick my chair out and stomp over to the barbeque, feeling rather sullen. So the little twat knows how to string a sentence together after all? For some reason rage boils through my skin and I all put launch the barbeque lid off, sending it clanking to the patio floor, the smoke from the coals coiling into the air like thin sea snakes.

I grab one of Laura’s jerk chicken by the bone and throw it on, watching it sizzle and hiss as the flesh burns and shrinks into itself. The smell is heavenly and soothes the tense ache in my muscles, my jaw unclenching as I take a deep breath, smell the distant spices of Jamaica, imagine the heat and colour.

I decide this is a good a time as any to get completely shit-faced. I grab my bottle of beer and down it in one, feel it settle heavily against my stomach, fumes and bubbles tumbling madly through my system. Laura laughs shrilly at a joke Jimmy made and I chug faster, swallow harder and think about the bottle of whiskey my dad left in the cupboard.

I listen in on their conversations as I cook our dinner.

Jimmy is spouting a load of guff about joining the army and I want to get some cheese wire and press it against his throat. He’s such a cunt.

“Its service to our queen and country.” he says.

“Bullshit, its just needless fighting. You’re not joining. There’s no way you could ever survive in the army anyway. They’d either throw you out or you’d get done for desertion.” Good old Laura, she knows how to put old dogs down.

“Well what else will I have? You’re off to Italy soon and that twat is gonna to run off and be some famous film critic of whatever. Might as well throw myself on the sword instead of going back to university and failing at life.”

“You’d have to shoot people, you know.” Laura says darkly. I chuck some mushrooms on the barbeque and watch the moisture pool out of them in steam. “All kinds of people.”

“I can handle that. What says you, Carl? I’ll bet a penny you’re anti-army huh?”

Carl is quiet for a moment and I peak at him from behind my glasses, taking him in. Sure he is, everything about him screams anti-war. If he isn’t anti-war I’ll eat my fucking dog.

“I am, yes,” he says. “Every bullet has its billet, many bullets more than one. God! Perhaps I killed a mother, when I killed a mother’s son.”

There’s a hot, pregnant silence and I find myself oddly softened. So he’s a fucking hippie that can recite poetry at the drop of a hat too. I’ll bet you Jimmy either wants to punch him in the stomach or kiss him squarely on the mouth.

“Alright, alright I geddit, whatever.” Jimmy says grumpily. “No army.”

“Though,” Carl pipes up, a nervous wobble to his voice. “My dad was in the army. I grew up on army bases. I guess I’m not so much anti-army as I am just anti-war.”

“Ok Shakespeare, you can all shut up now, grubs up.” I plop the plates of food down in front of them, tantalisingly delicious and all debate is lost suddenly the hunger that pulls our stomachs.

Laura and Jimmy are copping off on the other end of the garden and I’m happily drunk staring at the setting sun. The trees sway gentle in the summer breeze and look like long-haired Marge Simpson types, nodding their head and whispering sweet nothings. The flowers bob their heads like in Alice in Wonderland, their ‘o’ mouths wide and colourful, pollen-tongues peeking out. I’ve spent the afternoon steadily ignoring my guests and trying to lure sparrows and blackbirds from their perch on the fence and onto my hands. It hasn’t worked.

Carl has disappeared in the house. I suspect he’s snooping but I can’t be bothered to go find him and tell him off. Instead I lie on the stone floor, listen to the chirrup of sleepy birds, let my dog snuffle happily at my hair. I pat his head and close my eyes.

“Um, Irvine, um.” I feel someone kneel besides me, open my eyes enough to see Carl leaning over me. “Where’s your loo? I went looking but… I thought it’d be rude to just keep opening doors.”

I watch him lazily, his nervous frown, wiping his hands uneasily on his thighs.

“The beauty of architecture.” I sigh, happily drunk. Even hippy-shit here can’t ruin my buzz tonight. “Its hidden, you see. You don’t want to know how many people have pissed themselves in my house looking for our toilet.”

“Please don’t let me be one of those,” He breathes, quite seriously. “I like your dog.”

I blink.

He leans onto his palms, stretched out like some luxurious cat, twisting his head away from my dog’s as his sticky tongue comes out to lap at his face. Carl catches him behind his neck and tugs him into an odd dog-hug, pressing his face into his neck. There’s a happy whine and they’re best buds, just like that.

“You’re good with animals then.” I murmur, feeling suddenly warm.

“Well, it is my job.” His voice is thick and smooth, strangely unfitting with his awkward, gangly posture. He has no regional accent either, just a generic British one, like he‘s from nowhere in particular. I guess that happens to all army brats though. “You know, I really do have to wee.”

“Do you indeed?” I muse, sitting up. “If you follow the hall to the end there’s a door that matches the panelling on the wall. That’s our bathroom.”

He jumps up and practically skips his way into the house, all long legs and crazy hair. I wonder how his tattoo is healing briefly before Laura and Jimmy stumble down towards the garden table.

“Getting on well, are you?” Jimmy leers. “You’ll be married by spring I’ll bet.”

“Shut the fuck up.” I snap, somewhat half-heartedly.

“Hey Irvine dearest, play us a ditty why don’t you?” Laura nods towards the guitar Jimmy gave me. I stand up and dust myself off, stumbling slightly as the world tilts on its axis.

“What would you like, my love?” I pick the guitar up, strum it softly and listen to for strings that need tuning. All of them, pretty much. I sit myself down and set to work, tuning them quickly, efficiently. If there was one thing my father ever did for me it was teach me guitar. I’m pretty fucking good at it.

“An old song. A folksong.”

I strum out some typical Green Sleeves, sounding off with old stings and cracked wood, but beautiful all the same. There’s an soft lilt to it, like when there’s a crackle of a record player skipping or a good, strong voice breaking. Off-kilter but good nonetheless. I play the beginning and watch Laura’s eyes turn dreamy. I turn it into a jig, one my dad taught me when I was young, a bouncy sort of rhythm that he said was an Icelandic folksong but I suspect he was just humouring me.

Carl joins us, wide-eyed, fluffed up and soft around the edges. I stop long enough to take a drink and think of something else to play.

I decide to try out on of the songs I wrote on my last family holiday to Devon, when I was bored and it was raining horrifically and I was tired of hearing my parents giggle in their bedroom. I had taken my guitar out on a walk with me, over fields and roads, getting drenched despite my raincoat. I strum eagerly and don’t look up at their faces, watching drunkenly, Laura sitting on Jimmy’s knee as he tries to edge his hands up her dress.

“If I could follow you into next year, where trees not only die but disappear, and we get so drunk the shells on the beach don’t hurt our feet.” I sing, soft as the world turns gloomy and the fairy lights come on automatically. “And that silver curve of your shoulder blade, sharp and tasteless on my tongue, engulfed in black waves as you swim out to sea. If I could follow you into next year perhaps we’ll live forever, you and me.”

It’s a shit song, I think, but I sing it anyway. If you can’t sing your crap songs to your friends then who can you sing them to?

I finish the last of the chords, stop and smile and take another long drink from my whiskey and coke.

“Is that a folk song?” Laura asks, frowning. “I’ve never heard that one before.”

“No, I wrote it in Devon. ‘member I kept ringing you complaining about the rain?”

“Oh yeah,” she snorts, pink in the face as she slaps Jimmy’s hand away. “Who’s it about?”

I shrug my shoulders.

“No one, I just wrote it out of boredom. What say you hobbits to a drinking song?” I grin and hitch the guitar up, eager to move the conversation on.

After a couple more songs everyone gets bored and we play drinking games, the dark folding in around us, the soft-yellow of the fairy lights around the decking sending everything ethereal, spelling magic in the air. I love my garden, its full of exotic plants that have grown wild and strange, the arcs and curves of pre-planned spaces disappearing into undergrowth to make secret coves for my dog to dive into. When I was little this place was a wild paradise for me. I would crawl into this hidden underworld, make-believe I was scrabbling about with monsters and strange creatures from drawings I did at the coffee table.

It gets really late and Laura and Jimmy disappear, no doubt to have sex in my room. Again. I wrinkle my nose in distaste and lean back to look at the stars.

“You play very well,” Carl ventures. His speech is slurred slightly and his eyes are half-mast. Drunk, drunk, drunk. I scratch my chin and look away. “I liked your song. It was nice.”

“Well thank you Mary Boffin, I only endeavour to please.”

I’m such an nasty little prick sometimes.

“What was it called?”

I scrunch my face up, thinking. “It had a really pretentious title, I remember. Something like ‘ships that carry the night during winter when our hearts frost over hastily’ or whatever. Vomit-worthy I reckon. I was a little shit last year.”

I really was. I listened to old Chinese music and learnt a little bit of Spanish. Fancied myself something special, I did. It was all mostly to impress a boy in my film class. I noticed he listed his favourite films as all world cinema, really arty films that made no sense whatsoever. The only world cinema I had watched then were really bloody, violent Asian films where you didn’t really need subtitles because it was just gratuitous murder and sex.

“Well, I liked it.” Carl murmured. “I liked it a lot.”

“And in the end that’s all that matters,” I say sarcastically, watching him wince. “Why did you even come here? You know I don’t like you.”

I want to say come to think about it, why are you bothering me at all? Why do you keep coming to talk to me when all I do is spit in your face and call you names? You’re so annoying.

I don’t though, because I have a feeling it’ll only make the matter worse.

Carl looks uncomfortable, eyes darting back towards the yellow light of the kitchen window, long fingers coming out to scratch at his skull, making his hair wilder than before. I watch him carefully, eyes narrowed, like a coyote watching some wounded rabbit stumble along the dust roads.

“I… Jimmy just said you were having a get-together, said I should come along. And… I had no plans so…” I snort with contempt, twist my drink between my palms. Its getting a bit chilly now and I think about staring a bonfire. We’ve got enough wood to get one going all night.

“Whatever, Mr Obvious, mon capitaine.”

“I’m sorry.” I look down at his knees and realise that my dog is pawing at his thighs, vying for his attention. It bugs me that he’s so good with him, people don’t normally get along with my dog. Normally he either ignores them or tries to bite their toes off.

“Be quiet,” I sigh. “Can’t you hear it? That’s called silence. Its not a problem for people to just let it fill in the gaps, you know? You don’t have to talk to get rid of it. I don’t mind it, so neither should you.”

I’m rambling, but that’s ok. “Just… be quiet.”

He fake-zips his mouth shut and stands up, moving towards the other end of the garden with the dog and leaving me to bask in my silence. The glow of the fairy lights doesn’t warm me anymore so I decide to make a fire, drag logs to the fire pit and stumble over garden chairs to find fuel.

Drunken fires are the only fires, in my opinion.

I wake up at the arse-crack of dawn, covered in dew and with that awful slick-death taste you get in your mouth from drinking too much beer. I hack up lung and ash and roll onto my side, shivering violently from a swift, biting cold. I’m lying on the patio floor, head pillowed on a garden chair cushion, a thick blanket around my shoulders. I don’t remember getting them, don’t remember going into the house.

My throat burns. My head aches. My ribs feel as if I’ve been drop kicked by a giant. Everything fucking hurts.

“Oh lord,” I moan, burying my head into the pillow. “Oh fucking hell, Christ, mother of god, urrrhhhhh.”

“Are you ok?” A disembodied voice asks. I assume its God, or something like him.

“I feel like death,” I croak. “I think some celestial being has taken a shit on my heart.”

“I got you some pills and water. They were hard to find though, the pills. Everything is hard to find in your house.” A free-floating hand comes into range holding a glass of water. I sit up and grab it, taking a huge gulp to ease the nausea rolling waves in my guts. Another hand follows with two white, glorious pills.

“Thanks big man,” I huff, taking them dry before swallowing the rest of the water.

“You’re not going to be sick are you?”

“No, fuck off.” I wheeze, squinting at the man in front of me. Oh, its Carl, of course. Sitting next to me with the dog squeezed tightly by his side, looking pleased with himself. “Oh right.” I wince.

“Laura and Jimmy are in your room, um. I think they…”

I wave him off. “Yeah, yeah, they do it all the time, fucking pricks. I just bleach the sheets and guilt trip Laura into buying me a bottle of wine.”

Carl is looking disturbingly refreshed and awake all things considered. I stumble to my feet, retch a little and sway against invisible waves. Everything feels awful. I wobble my way towards the house, into the kitchen, intent on eating something thick and fat to make me feel less like paper and more like a human being. Meat and bread and grease. Fry up.

I open the fridge to find it pretty much empty.

“Oh mother fuck!” I snarl, slamming it shut again. Things rattle and fall inside but I don’t care. Carl has followed me into the house and leans awkwardly against the counter. “What day is it?”

“Tuesday,” he says automatically.

I sigh irritably, thinking through my opinions. I have about fifty quid that mum and dad left me for food. I was going to buy some pot and rent a bunch of girly films for me and Laura to make fun of but alas, it appears my stomach is doing to decision making today. I glance back at Carl, watch him fumble with his t-shirt.

“You,” I bark, sneering slightly. “Come on. We’re going to get breakfast.” He all but clicks his heels together in excitement, grinning broadly like he’s never gone to the fucking shops before. I watch him skip towards the car and sigh.

God. What have I done?

an:

hello hello gentle creatures. the little poem that carl says is by a world war one poet called Joseph Lee. Its one of those poems that stick with you forever, i always think it when i read about war and stuff. Also, yeah I made Carl and army brat too, holla to all my fellow army-brats out there :) i like this chapter. i like garden parties, they make me happy. i like people who get their guitars out and sing songs. i like writing shitty songs with pretentious titles :)

oh yeah, and don't listen to irvine talking about russia. he isn't a history student, he knows nothing, as do i.

happy summer everyone. x