Konemann The Arena of the Unwell

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-912489-49-7
Verlag: 404 Ink
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Noah spends his nights drifting between North London pubs and music venues, and his days sleeping off hangovers in the stock room of the floundering record shop where he works. He tries not to think about what will happen when his NHS-allocated therapy hours run out and he's left alone with his mind again. After years away, his favourite band Smiling Politely announce a last-minute set in a nearby venue and everything starts to shift. When the crowd turns violent, Noah runs into the street and meets Dylan, the charming local barman he's never had the courage to approach. Pulled into a toxic and co-dependent relationship with Dylan and his brooding, enigmatic friend Fraser, Noah bounces distractedly between sweaty gigs and clubs, swapping beds and friends along the way. The upcoming Smiling Politely album is a beacon of hope for Noah who craves the connection he finds in their music yet lacks elsewhere, but he has to ask himself what he's willing to lose - friendships, dignity, even his sense of self - to just feel like he belongs. 'A sweaty, sticky mosh pit of a novel' - i-D

Liam Konemann is a queer Australian writer based in London. He writes music journalism, fiction and poetry with a focus on queerness and masculinity. His work has appeared in Dazed, HUCK, NME and more. He is author of debut novel The Arena of the Unwell, and essay pocket book The Appendix: Transmasculine Joy in a Transphobic Culture, part of 404's Inklings series.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Konemann, Liam

Leseproben

1

Am I paranoid, or are they really after me? I feel like we’re being hunted in here. This song has the staticky hum of violence at its edges.

Mairead and I are held together by the centrifugal force of the crowd. People swirl around us, long-haired boys and short-haired girls, in vintage t-shirts and high-waisted jeans, all bouncing off each other in time to the beat.

Me and Mairead bounce off each other too, only slightly less in time. She is flushed red and my hair is stuck to my face with sweat. I need to quit smoking some time soon because the breath is burning in my lungs, but it hardly matters. Mairead tries to yell something in my ear, but I don’t catch it. I just grin back.

The tang of sweat and beer fills my sinuses. The stage shifts in and out of view as the people in front of me surge forwards and backwards, and I move with them, shut my eyes and open them again and throw my hands in the air. The bassline thrums in the cavern of my body. The guitar riff spikes and spins out and we all get pulled along with it.

Something mutates in the sound. The pressure in the air builds into a tinnitus hiss in my inner ear. Crowds like this – the 10pm surprise set kind, the type who have been drinking all night before they get here – are easily unhinged, and Smiling Politely have been away too long. Nobody’s let the dogs out to have a run while they’ve been gone.

This is just the coke talking. I clench my jaw to stop the buzz in my teeth and focus on the trailing end of the middle eight. Onstage, Ryan sweeps the monitor with his hair as he plays, folded in half at the waist and hammering the headstock of his guitar on the floor. Even after all this time, he’s still the man I most want to be. The blueprint in a beaten-up leather jacket. I’ve missed him so badly.

Over the top of Ryan’s maelstrom, Claire sings her verse right into the microphone, practically swallowing it, and thrums out a frayed and frantic bass riff. Nobody plays the bass like Claire Shelby. If Ryan is a demi-god then Claire is a deity, a scrap of my own religion pinned inside a person.

The crowd churns, carrying Mairead away from me. She hardly even notices, but I reach for her and miss. I can’t shake the feeling that something in the atmosphere is off. The anxiety claws at me, a flailing robot in my head screaming, Danger! I have to jettison it before it ruins my night. Everything’s fine.

Then something is thrown from the crowd. I don’t see what it is, but I hear the impact, the clack of teeth knocking together, and Claire choking around the end of a lyric. She stops playing. There’s a weird mix of noise and hush around me as some people realise what’s happened and others don’t.

It wasn’t paranoia, and it wasn’t just the coke.

It feels like I’ve gone temporarily deaf in one ear. Someone in front of me moves their head and through the gap I see the stage again. Blood drips over Claire’s jaw and down her neck. It coats her teeth, sick and red like a monster in a movie. She’s ripped a hole in her bottom lip, but instead of pressing her hands to the pain she just stands there bleeding, bottle-blonde hair in her eyes and fingers still resting on the fretboard. She looks up.

More people are catching on now. The rows ahead of me have stopped dancing, and those of us who can see stare up at the stage, more disturbed by Claire’s stillness than the blood. Kristen, the drummer, stops playing, but Ryan carries on, backed by no-one. Claire reaches up to touch the damage, testing, then scoops her fringe out of her face with the same bloodied hand. Her eyes sweep across the crowd. Everyone around me has stopped moving now. She leans into the microphone.

‘Who was that?’ she asks.

Her voice is hard against the squalling backdrop of Ryan’s guitar. It snaps him out of his haze and he straightens up, turns to look at his wife and sees the blood. He stops playing. The sudden lack of sound leaves my ears ringing.

‘Who the fuck was that?’ Claire demands again.

Nobody points. People start whispering around me. Did anybody see? What was it? What happened? It sounded fucking bad, man. The pit crackles with unspent energy. Claire shoves her microphone aside and it topples over, a hollow clunk echoing through the speakers as it bounces off her monitor. Ryan takes off his guitar and moves towards her. Before he’s even halfway across Claire jumps into the crowd, bass guitar still slung around her neck. People recoil and the shifting currents push everyone else closer together as she tracks blood through the first few rows. Over the sound of the speaker feedback, I can sense the hum of violence building into one clear note. I need to find Mairead and get out. I turn, looking for her head in the chaos, but there’s nowhere to go.

The tension pulls taut, and snaps.

It happens fast. Claire finds the culprit, or someone that’s close enough. The sound of twisted strings reverberates through the amp towers as the guitar gets trapped between them, and then the cord is yanked out and all that’s left is the absence. Everyone around them gets sucked in within seconds. I can see the fight spreading through the crowd, more people getting pulled into it as their mates become collateral damage. I smell blood, the metallic taste of it heavy in the hot air. Those of us trying to get out of the way trip over one another in our haste. I have to fight to stay upright so that I don’t get trampled. Without the speaker feedback, the meat-packing thud of boots and bodies is stark and brutal. It’s like being in a film without a score. Nobody is on the stage anymore.

The house lights come up. I catch a shoulder in the face, pain radiating outwards from my nose and across my cheekbones. A girl sobs somewhere behind me. My face feels hot, heart pounding as I squeeze my way towards the edge of the room where the crowd begins to thin. In a minute, it will be just as bad over here as it is in the middle.

Venue security pour into the crowd and the mess gets bigger, spilling out everywhere. The fighters are pushing out towards the edges of the room and my blood rushes in my ears and I am hot, too hot, my skin shrinking tight against my muscles. I have to get out. Everyone around me is having the same idea. There’s too many of us moving, and none of us are going anywhere. I push nearer to the wall, press myself up against it and try to be invisible. I have to think. If I can just stay out of the way until the crowd thins out down here at the front, I can run back towards the bar and out the front door. In the crush I see faces I recognise, other fans I’ve hung out with, customers from the record store and people that I drink with in the Cloak and Dagger, but I can’t reach any of them. We’re all together and all alone. 

I can’t breathe here, and I can’t fight, and I’m going to pass out. I feel a gust of wind rush in to my right, and as the air hits me a shrieking alarm rings out. Someone has opened the fire exit. I edge along the wall and through the push of people out into the alley. A few groups are clumped together out here, some looking shell-shocked and panicked but others already rolling cigarettes, shaking their heads and talking about their next move. Another band, a cab into town. I still can’t breathe. The wailing in my head won’t stop. 

I run back towards the main road, the way Mairead and I came charging up less than half an hour ago. I need to get far enough away to find somewhere safe to stand, and then I can find my friends. More people than I expected have made their way out into the street in front of the venue. At the edge of the crowd, when I can’t catch my breath and my vision is starting to narrow, I sit down in the fag-end gutter and put my head between my legs. I focus on my breathing like the doctor said to try. Things slow.

Here are my aching feet in the gutter, here is the pain in my side. 

‘Y’alright?’

The accent is broad, nasal – Australian, or New Zealand maybe – and sort of familiar. I try to lift my head up to see, but it makes everything spin. I squeeze my eyes shut and lean forward again.

‘Oh hey, it’s you,’ the voice says.

He crouches down beside me and braces a hand on each of my shoulders. I open my eyes again, look through the gap between my knees at a pair of legs and the bottom half of a denim-jacket torso. They help me place the voice. For months I’ve been trying to think of something devastatingly clever and charming to say to this guy who sometimes pulls pints in the Cloak and Dagger – Dylan, I think someone told me – and now here he is in the real world and I’m curled up amongst the leaf-litter in the street. 

‘Noah,’ I say.

A memory of introducing myself at the bar while ordering my fifth pint last Saturday bobs to the surface of my mind. It was him who told me his name is Dylan. I look up at him. My head has stopped spinning, but my chest is still tight, and it feels a little bit like my throat might be closing up. I swallow hard.

‘I mean, I’m Noah. Again. Or still,’ I say.

Dylan grins. ‘I know who you are, Noah Again. Are you okay?’

I wish people always said my name the way he does. The second syllable stretches his mouth into a lazy smile that stays there when he’s finished talking. As soon as my lungs stop trying to climb up out of my mouth, I’m going to ask him what his favourite Smiling Politely song is and I’m going to figure out how to get his phone number. Then if I pull that off, I’ll figure out what it...