It may go against everything you’ve been taught. The cautionary tales you have taken and digested and pointed at as mistakes; well, they’re the mistake that you now have to make for yourself.

Because you don’t exist if nobody knows you are there.

65

In Oviedo, Spain, David Mendosa plays his last gig – solo guitar outside a packed wine bar to a captivated crowd. He is paid in cash and has three glasses of Rioja on the house before packing his instrument into the car and driving home.

When he arrives home, he drinks another bottle of something red and picks at those nylon strings with effortless dexterity. Then he goes to bed with a glass of water and bottle full of pills. The wine used to help him sleep, but if he swallows enough of the pills down, he knows the rest will be the best he’s ever had.

When his mother discovers him in the morning, she knows what has happened, she knows he is gone, but she shakes him and screams his name and shouts at a God she is about to stop believing in.

She takes the note next to his bed, the one that says he is a person now with courage, who chooses not to fear, and she screws it up. That wasn’t her boy. No way. This will go down as an accidental overdose. A kid who took too many sleeping pills.

She is his mother. She’d know if he was depressed. He never said anything.

He was not a member of The People of Choice. He just wanted to feel part of something.

Eighty people listened to him playing the guitar the night before he died and all David Mendosa craved was to be heard.

66

Ergo’s scent has bedded itself into the fabric of Old Levant’s place, already. Who’s to say whether it is better or worse than the stale alcohol and tikka masala? It doesn’t matter, there are no visitors.

The news plays. The dog gets stroked. The favourite chair fades a little more under the weight of back sweat being massaged into its cushions. It’s the new routine. Ergo seems to have forgotten about Young Levant even if the public are still hanging on to that image of the Man in the Light. Thinking he was the leader.

A narcissist.

Guiltless.

Whatever spin they’re putting on it this week.

The smell stops at the threshold of the spare bedroom. Ergo is not allowed in there. That’s just for the old man. It’s the one room he looks after. It should be the second bedroom but there has never been any need for that. There’s not that much need for the first bedroom; he spends most nights on that clammy sofa.