The people we could be

"Summer was over, and so were we. I know it sounds pretentious but that's how it felt back then," Andrew said, aloud, to the interviewer who only existed in his head.

"Oh my god, do you have any idea how dumb you sound" said the girl he shared a face with. Annabelle was halfway down the stairs and looking at her brother with a mixture of pity and disgust.

"What? It's not like I'm the only person who talks to themselves!" he said without looking at her, pretending to adjust his hair.

"Yes but most people tend not to do it out loud, Especially in public! You might not mind people thinking you're weird but they know we are related!" she was now sitting on the stairs biting her nails and showing no sign of going anywhere.

"You won't be saying that when I'm headlining Glastonbury!" he pulled down his t-shirt, making sure the black and white image of Alain Delon was visible. Andrew found out her name in an old issue of Melody Maker, and was looking for an excuse to bring it up in conversation.

"Do you know..." he began.

"No, do you know that music didn't stop in 1990, Oasis, Blur do these names mean anything to you?"

She knew how to push his buttons. Her lips trembled, fighting back a smile. His friends with siblings had told him to just smack her, only he found it impossible to raise a hand to a face that was so similar to his own.

Gritting his teeth he replied "I'm glad you have discovered music beyond the top- forty, but without the Smiths there would be no Oasis. Or any of their beer stained ilk. Shambling around on stage..."

"Ripping off the Beatles and looking like an inbred version of the Rolling Stones" Annabelle finished the sentence for him, mimicking his voice a little too well.

"Look, just let Mum know I'll be back in time for tea." Grabbing his keys, Andrew made a point of not looking back at Annabelle as he slammed the door. He heard her parting shot through the frosted glass "...good luck with your boy band".

Outside, the close air enveloped him. It was suffocating, especially for the end of May. He had timed the bus to avoid running and sweating more than he knew he would. Putting on his headphones he hit play on the free CD from the cover of that month's Q. It was supposed to be a sampler, the bands who were going to break out in 1997. Andrew had decided he would be the judge of that.

Arriving at the bus stop, his deodorant was fighting a losing battle. He looked around for any sign of the usual illiterates from school, preparing to swarm him, demanding he justify not being exactly like them. For safety he slouched against the shelter, taking an interest in the discarded cigarette butts that covered the pavement, like a Tracy Emin work.

He hadn't heard anything, lyrically at least, as good as his own songs. The ones scribbled in various notebooks, jotters and scraps of paper. The singers did have better voices though. As the bus came over the horizon, he couldn't stop that thought dampening his enthusiasm. The ad had been for a singer, songwriting was a plus, but they had to be able to carry a tune. The voice sounded like a combination of his father and his sister. It was accompanied by images of awkward thank yous and a half-hearted 'well be in touch'.

"You getting on?" the driver grunted. The bus had arrived without Andrew noticing it. Clutching the coins in his hands, pressing down hard until the edge of the largest bit into his palm, he forced himself to climb aboard.

"Sorry" he whispered over the sound of clattering change and his ticket printing.

Dropping into the first available space, he draped his leg over the seat next to his. Drum and base bled from someone's headphones, forcing Andrew to raise the volume on his own. He couldn't concentrate on anything after that other than the fear. He tensed, ready for someone to kick the back of his chair, and watched for a cigarette butt thrown onto his lap. Followed by mocking laughter and slurs about his sexuality.

When nothing happened, he relaxed a little and looked out the window. The bus had left his village and was trundling through a patchwork of fields. Either abandoned and overgrown, or being developed into a new housing estate. Andrew found comfort in the strange half land he was so desperate to escape, mainly due to there not being any bus stops, let alone new passengers.

"So when the two of you met that day, both of you joining a band that didn't go anywhere, did you ever imagine that one day people would compare you to Lennon and McCartney or Morrissey and Marr?" the imaginary interviewer asked.

Aware of the potential threat lurking at the back of the bus, Andrew made sure to answer inside his head. "Of course not, even now it's a struggle to think of us as anything more than a bargain basement Stock, Aitken & Waterman." he paused for imaginary laughs, before adding "In truth, my dad had given me till the end of the Summer holidays to get this music thing off the ground. If not I was going to have to either get a job or go to college. I don't know what he thought I was going to do, it's not like I could work in a bank or anything. Truth be told, growing up in a small town with an identity outside the mainstream, usually all you get is a kick-in. So to meet like-minded people would have been more than enough."

Convinced the stranger could read his mind, Andrew prepared for them to lumber over and begin punching him for the insult. Only for his attention to be drawn to the song that had just started playing. Until now it had all been little more than background music.

The track was melancholic acoustic American alt-rock. An overly familiar relic of the grunge era. Yet, there was something about the lyrics. They told a story of a failed romance, an unplanned pregnancy and the resulting abortion.

When the song ended, Andrew played it again, this time focusing on the authenticity of the voice. That was something else he was painfully aware he didn't have, life experience. How can you write songs if you haven't lived a day in your life? What do you know about love? Are there many songs about sticking fumblings behind the old church? The all too familiar voice asked.

Andrew knew that he had not lived a great deal, but he was well read and...and I'm sure the world is crying out for songs about people who have actually made great art. The voice this time was his own. It was swiftly followed by a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. The notebook tucked into the knee pocket of his combats began to throb. It felt like a siren alerting everyone to his mediocrity. Begging them to steal it and laugh at the delusional scribblings.

Leaning against the window, the glass felt cool as the vibrations shook his skull. He wanted to cry, to get off the bus and just not show up. He wasn't going to be arrested or anything. The guy he had spoken to, Mark, didn't sound all that serious anyway. Andrew's poor memory of the conversation allowed him to remix it any way he liked. So what if the truth was a little different, he was an artist after all!

"The funny thing is, I almost didn't go that day, I was having a bout of insecurity. I know, I know, but it's true." he said to the imaginary interviewer in his head. "I had just heard Freshman by The Verve Pipe, trust me they were a big deal for five minutes in the late nineties" the imaginary interview now had an imaginary crowd that Andrew was addressing.

Finally he let the CD move on. Each subsequent song was blander than the last. He knew how magazines put these mix tapes together. A&R men paid to road-test future singles amongst a bunch of demos and b-sides. Getting the band early airplay and magazine coverage. It was underhanded but it worked. Regardless of the logic, the mediocrity calmed Andrew. A cloud passed over the sun and he let himself enjoy the temporary drop in temperature.

Eventually Andrew got off outside what looked like an old abandoned garage. In truth it belonged to the family of a boy he went to school with and was very much still in operation. Council houses and a small shop surrounded it. Andrew had been travelling for twenty minutes, but where he stood now looked like a different world. Packs of children roamed the streets with bikes and footballs, wary and fascinated by strangers, especially those close to their age.

What followed was a painful few minutes wandering the streets aimlessly, searching for a sign that matched the name scribbled on a scrap of paper that was clutched in his sweating hand.

Andrew imagined people judging him from their windows. Seeing a criminal, either dealing drugs, planning to burgle them or abduct an unsuspecting child. He imagined their hands poised over the phone. The base of his spine was soaked with sweat and his hair was matted to his scalp. He would have headed for the bus, if he wasn't so completely lost.

Instead he began to sing, the tune was In Between Days by the Cure but the lyrics were all his. He was improvising a song about a stranger in a strange land. He imagined a traveler thrust into a parallel universe, a fractured mirror image of his own. Pulling out his notepad, he stopped in the middle of the street and scrawled down the words.

"Are you Andrew?" a voice yelled from a house a few hundred yards away from him.

Looking up now, squinting in the sun, he saw a blurry figure standing at the end of a drive. He was leaning upon the gate. The man was a few years older than him, and looked as if he was an extra from Trainspotting. He had large fluffy tiger slippers on his feet and wore a faded Clash T-Shirt.

Neither of them said anything, the only sound was the birds in the trees and the traffic somewhere in the distance. The heat burnt down upon Andrew's shoulders and he could feel the paper from the notebook sticking to his fingers. The pen was poised over a half-finished thought.

"Yes" he said.

"Cool, I'm Mark" the man opened the gate and gestured for Andrew to head into the garden.

"Honestly, it was only at that moment that I began to consider that he could be a serial killer or something. Like had I just come all this way to get murdered and dumped in bits into a wheelie bin!" he said to the imaginary interviewer.

Andrew trotted down the rows of unkempt gardens and arrived at what looked like a cross between a jumble sale and tip. Mark had disappeared into the gloom beyond the door with the flaking red paint with the faded number five in the middle. Sitting atop an old washing machine was another boy, this one closer to his own age.

He had blonde hair that was almost long enough to pin back and was wearing jeans and a t-shirt that had once had a picture on it but was now little more than white marks. He was plucking the strings of an old acoustic guitar, Andrew could see the bottom one was missing.

The tune spoke to him, calling him across the lawn and through the piles of scrap. Andrew forgot about Mark, and instead focused on this pale boy and the melody he had conjured from a broken guitar. Without saying a word he pulled up an old milk crate, turned it upside down and listened.

The boy nodded, and then started to play something else, as if he was enjoying having an audience. Andrew found himself tapping his hands against the side of the crate in time with the new tune. Nodding his head as words began to form inside him, telling the tale of his journey to this strange new world.

"My name is Stephen by the way," the boy said without taking his eyes off the guitar.

"Andrew, are you part of the band?"

"Nope, they took one look at my guitar and told me to go wait outside, they would call be back in if they were desperate." For the first time Stephen played the wrong note, not that Andrew had any idea what the song was, but he knew what it could be.

"Is this Mark's house?" a much older man asked from the other side of the garden fence. He was wearing a tracksuit and a bucket hat. "I'm a drummer," he added, from behind his Lennon style sunglasses. Andrew wanted to ask where his kit was, but realized he didn't care and just waved in the general direction of the door, assuring him Mark was in there somewhere.