Page 25 of Fallen Thorns
“Maybe you could give me some music recommendations? What was your band’s name again?” My hands trembled; I’d never survived this long in a conversation with a stranger before. My script was near its end. Time to improvise.
“Forever Red! We’re not that big. Well, I don’t know really. Maybe we are? But you might like some of our songs, possibly? Do you like post-punk?”
I looked at him blankly, panicked by my lack of education in music genres. I normally listened to random songs I’d picked up over the years, never taking too much care into learning anything about them but simply listened to whatever I felt like. My mum brought me up on the sixties, my auntie on the seventies.
“The Cure? Joy Division? Siouxsie and the Banshees?” He reeled off some names.
“Oh, The Cure! They sang that song about the days of the week, right? The guy with lipstick.”
His eyes widened; lips tightly pressed together. “Oh dear, we’ve got to do something about that. Just wait until you listen to ‘Disintegration’. It will change your life.” The light on his cigarette died.
We talked some more,sharing parts of our lives and interests and it was working, I was no longer worried like I was earlier. I managed to fully switch off and engage with Ben. It turned out he had also never met his biological father, which was refreshing and of a great comfort to me; he understood what it was like… the not knowing. But unlike me, he had someone to call ‘dad’.
We moved to the bench against the wall as he told me about how his parents didn’t know how to handle it when he came out and how they split up not long after — leaving him to decide to move up to Leeds to live with his grandmother for a few years before moving here for university. I tried my best to sound sympathetic and understanding, and though I honestly was, I struggled with sounding sincere.
“I love my parents, and they always proved they loved me regardless, but they had their own issues to deal with at the time. I blamed myself for a long while, but I realised being an adult is a lot more complicated than it seems. I just wish they’d worded their original reactions better,” he told me. “Sometimes, when I’m feeling childish though, I think about rocking up to their doors and flashing my teeth, proving there are far worse things I could be.”
I laughed at that.
“You know, despite the fact that what we are has nothing to do with any religion.”
“It’s not a religious thing?”
“Nah. Think about it, creatures and demons exist in almost every religion or culture — there's always an opposite force, so if you believe in it, then we could fit into that category, however, history and media has made us out to be such twisted and horrible things, bending our origins to fit their cruel ideologies. But we are still souls. We still have a conscience. It’s science, we just know very little about it. It’s a parasite, it’s probably not from earth. So, whether you have a belief or not, it’s how you live your life that determines your relationship with your faith. Look,” he pulled out a small chain from under his jumper: a crucifix. “This doesn’tburn. I never renounced anything. I’m not sure what I believe in really but...” He looked down at the silver chain, twiddling it between his fingers, “I’m not a demon. It’s not like I chose this.”
And then I asked, it justcameout.
“How did you die?”
Ben jolted his head up, his eyes glistening.Was he crying?
“Never mind,” I said, panicked. I’d grown too comfortable and stepped out of line. Too personal. Again, I was winging this. My boundaries were all askew.
“No, no,” he sniffed, then straightened his back against the bench. “It’s kind of a long story,” he wafted his hand, “I don’t need to bore you anymore but basically, we fell into the wrong crowd. Got involved in a few things we shouldn’t have, and well,” he gestured to himself from head to toe, “shit happened.”
“Marianne saved us. The Thorns existed a good few years before because of the disturbances in the city. To this day, I’ll never understand how she managed to save us, but she did, and I’ll be forever in her debt.”
Us?“YouandCasper?”
Ben gave me a sorrowful laugh. “Yeah. Poetic isn’t it.”
I so desperately wanted to ask more, my mind grasping all the pieces together. But we were interrupted.
Two girls around my age and both dressed for a night out, had approached us, or more, had approached Ben. They looked at me for a brief second before realising they had no idea who I was. They were here for the star.
“Hi… Ben? It’s you, right?” the taller one said shyly.
I watched Ben’s face light up and he adjusted his hands in his pockets, shifting in his seat slightly to face them.
This isn’t the first time this has happened to him.I watched the scene play out, like an outside observer detached from my body.
“Sorry to bother you… we’re just big, big fans and we heard you were back up here for a while but we never actually thought we’d justbump into you.Sorry. I… ahh. Sorry.” The girl was visibly trembling, likely from the cold but genuine awe too. Shereallyadmired this band. What a feeling, to meet someone you idolised.
I wanted to be remembered.
Ben let her talk as she muddled up her words about the first time she watched them perform, and how one of their songs meant so much to her. The lyrics made her feel seen and she even started playing guitar because of them. She spoke of how they gave her the confidence to come out to her family and how she listened to them every day, eternally grateful that they exist.
“Wow, that means a lot. Thank you so much. What’s your name?”He’s good at this.
