Page 1 of Electric Boy

Chapter One: Something’s Gone Wrong Again

Hoxton, London, UK

November 1987

The Barber & Pony was a poor excuse for a pub, as far as Rahul was concerned. The ancient booths held grime older than Rahul himself. The watery draught was just this side of unpleasantly warm. The air was so thick with smoke he could have cut it with a blunt butter knife and spread it on the pub’s stale pork scratchings. Even an oblivious bystander could have told you that Rahul Chaand detested The Barber & Pony; yet he had patronised the pub every single week since he had moved back to London three years ago. Sometimes more than once a week. Three, four times even. He came because of him.

He was at the bar tonight, as he was most nights, with his skinny elbows propped on the pockmarked mahogany, and head hanging between the sharp hillocks of his shoulders. Rahul came to The Barber & Pony because it was his boozer. Rahul would have followed him to the ends of the Earth, let alone a crummy pub in Hoxton. He knew it was pitiful. There was hardly anything about their relationship that didn’t paint Rahul in a distinctly desperate shade of pathetic. He’d come to terms with that long ago. It didn’t matter to him anymore. All that mattered to Rahul was that Julian Collier was upset. And he needed to be here for him, just as he always was.

“What’s this I hear about a row?” he said in a light, unthreatening tone as he slid onto the stool beside Julian.

“What’re you on about?” He was already slurring. That wasn’t a good sign.

Julian was, by nature, a sunshiny young man with few troubles to cloud his unburdened mind. He wasn’t a rich man. He wasn’t famous. He didn’t have a particularly successful relationship and his friend group was distressingly small. But he was beautiful, fashionable, and well loved. He was passionate about music, and the fact that he both sold records and played in a band did much to nourish his simple soul. But Rahul suspected the main reason that Julian was a happy person was because he was simply born that way. He came into the world with a sunny disposition that life and circumstance had often endeavoured to strip from him.

On occasion, however, a mood as heavy and dark as a storm cloud would settle upon his narrow shoulders, usually brought on by the emotional vampire he liked to call a girlfriend. Thankfully, these sulks tended to be mercifully short, and Rahul found himself to be adept at pulling his best friend out of them even quicker.

Having gotten word from Leroy about the positively massive row that Julian and his girlfriend had engaged in, Rahul had come as soon as he was able.

“He’ll cost me customers,” Leroy, the bartender, had told him after repeating some of the choice words that had been screamed. By the time Rahul had arrived, Aisling, the “girlfriend,” seemed to be long gone, though Julian remained at the bar, sullen and unmoveable as he sank deeper and deeper into his cups. Time for the ol’ Rahul-man to shine, eh? He fancied himself the Julian Whisperer. And it stood to reason. After all, no two people knew each other as well or as deeply as they.

“C’mon, small fry,” he began with the familiar nickname, one that was his alone to use. Julian, being of average height, was short to Rahul only, who at any given moment was the tallest man in the room. “I know you and Aisling have had it out again. What’s she think you’ve done this time? Ruined the economy? Started the Cold War?”

“Can’t do anything right, as far as she’s concerned,” he pouted self-indulgently.

“Tell me about it. It’s practically every other week she’s picking a fight. I’ll never understand why you put up with her and her nagging.”

“She’s not a nag, all right?” Julian contradicted. “She’s just got a point of view. She’s a modern woman.”

“All right, all right,” Rahul backed off, sensing they had not yet arrived at the well-worn territory of slagging off his girlfriend before they inevitably made up again. “A modern woman, sure. Do you want to talk about it? What happened? Maybe talk about it back at your flat?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he continued to pout, planting himself more firmly at the bar just as Leroy passed both Rahul and Julian fresh glasses of beer. Rahul shot the bartender an incredulous look to which Leroy only shrugged helplessly and retreated.

Rahul sighed and tried again. “Fine. We’ll stay right here. As long as we talk. You’re good at talking, Julesy. That’s what draws people to you. The Talker Extraordinaire, that’s what they call you. Silver-tongued. Couldn’t shut you up if I tried.”

“Wouldn’t let you try. I’d be too busy talking.” A smile threatened to break free, like the sun peeking out behind clouds. “You’d try to get a word in edgewise and bam, there I’d be, gabbing away.”

“Gabby Gabber. Gabriel Gabber to your friends.”

Just as Julian seemed ready to add another rung in the ladder of nonsense, his smile disintegrated like a sandcastle in the surf and the dark mood retook him. “She hates it when I talk like this, you know? Says it’s stupid. Maybe she’s right. I really am quite stupid.” His long, pale fingers fumbled out a cigarette, and, failing to find a lighter, let it hang limply from his lips.

Rahul sipped at his beer to cover his profound disappointment. He’d been so close to lifting his friend out of this funk. His fight with Aisling must have cut him deeper than he’d realised. They fought frequently, breaking up every other week only to make up again, but the fights seemed to Rahul to always be superficial things -- who left the toilet seat up and who used whose hair spray -- and the rows were just as easy to overcome as a result. Rahul blamed Aisling, mainly. Julian was as amiable as a fluttering butterfly unless he was provoked.

“She never did,” Rahul exclaimed, aghast. “Did she really say that?” And, in a softer, more serious tone, “You’re not, you know. Stupid.”

“Must be. Else why would I keep making her mad?”

Rahul took pity on him and finally extricated his own lighter from his jacket pocket, lighting Julian’s cigarette for him.

“Because she’s horrendous,” Rahul answered the rhetorical question. “And nothing could ever make her happy. Even you. Now why don’t you tell me what really happened, eh?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“Sorry?” Rahul’s face scrunched in confusion, pausing with the glass halfway to his lips.

“S’your fault, innit?” Julian grumbled, pulling his own lukewarm pint closer. “Me and Ash falling out. She was right. It’s always your fault.”

Rahul knew he shouldn’t take it personally. These were the aftershocks of his row with Aisling. But he couldn’t help the curiosity that welled within him. “How is it my fault exactly?”