“All right, mate?”
I opened my eyes. The cabbie looked at me in the mirror again.
“What?”
“I said, are you all right, mate?”
It was only then that I realized that tears were running down my face. I hastily wiped them away. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m all right.”
“Right,” the cabbie said. “You one of me best customers I ever ‘ad, let me tell you.”
I frowned. “How so?”
“About ’alf an hour ago this funny old bloke calls me to MMC Centre. Walked up to me and tells me to wait for me passenger. I said, if I ‘ave to wait, I said, I ‘ave to turn the metre on. Then the bloke gives me 200 quid, can you believe it? I said, for 200 quid I’ll be ‘appy to wait all night. But ‘e said it’ll only be a few minutes. And ‘ere we are. You must be pretty important, mate.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not important at all. I’m completely useless.”
I looked at my watch and tried to make sense of what the cabbie had said. How had it been possible that Pickle had not only anticipated what I was going to do, but also arranged for my transport before I had even made it to the server room? And how did he know that I’d want to go to Hyde Park afterwards? It was where the concert took place all right, but Puerity were not officially scheduled to appear. None of this made any sense to me.
A few minutes into our ride we found ourselves on a gridlocked Shaftesbury Avenue on our way into Piccadilly Circus. Traffic had come to a complete standstill, and after a while the cabbie said, “Sorry, mate. Must be an accident or something. Looks as if we’re stuck ‘ere.”
“How far to Hyde Park Corner?”
“Not far. Mile and a quarter. But in this traffic …”
“I’ll walk,” I said and jumped out of the cab. “Keep the change!”
I ran down Shaftesbury Avenue, and when I reached Piccadilly Circus, I could finally see what had brought all traffic to a grinding halt. Drivers had stepped out of their vehicles and joined the pedestrians standing in the street, all of them staring at the big new MMC powered JumboTron towering over their heads. It showed the scene live from that stage in Hyde Park where Julian had just risen from the dead, dressed all in white like an angel, his arms spread out as if to embrace the whole world, and he was about to speak. I was staring at the big screen with the same bewildered expression on my face as everybody else, albeit for a different reason. In the top right corner of the screen I could see the T-Vox logo, and a ticker band at the bottom of the screen read:
Due to unforeseen technical circumstances we are currently unable to broadcast our regularly scheduled programme
. I had no idea what had happened, but I wasn’t going to complain.
I decided to stay. I wasn’t going to make it to Hyde Park in time anyway, and I wanted to witness Julian’s speech. Not because I hadn’t heard it before, though. Julian had read various iterations of it to me in the last few weeks, so I knew pretty much exactly where it was going. But I wanted to gauge the reaction of the public. Not the reaction of hyped up fans at a concert venue. I wanted to see the reaction of regular folks in the street.
It was mind blowing. As soon as Julian started speaking everyone was mesmerised. Even the most impatient drivers fifty or a hundred metres out of Piccadilly Circus stopped honking their horns so they could listen to Julian on their car radios. Many people just stood there, their heads leaned against the shoulders of their partners, spellbound, listening. Others kept wiping away their tears. Spontaneous outbursts of cheering and applause accompanied Julian’s speech throughout and culminated in a thunderous crescendo as he finished. Never before had I seen thousands of people standing in the middle of the road at Piccadilly Circus on a Saturday night applauding, cheering, yelling at a giant video screen, and I’m sure I will never see anything like it again.
* * *
The night was hot and humid and loud. Right after the concert we all moved to the Four Seasons on Park Lane where most of the people who had taken part in
Rock
for Reason
were staying. We were partying all night, but it was difficult to get a hold of Julian, and I soon lost track of him. Everyone wanted a piece of him that night. People wanted to shake his hand, pat him on the back, have their picture taken with him or just talk with him, congratulate him on his successful resurrection and ask him questions, questions, and more questions. I was worried that it would all become too much for him, because I knew that despite his reaffirmed status as global superstar, his love of the limelight and his passion for talking to people were still very new things for him. Somewhere deep down inside Julian’s old self was alive and well, and that old self loved loneliness. On a normal day, Julian could be lonely anywhere he wanted. On a crowded bus, at the school cafeteria during lunch break, or at a sold out Premiere League game. All he needed then was a good book to read, and interesting thought to ponder, or just a piece of paper and a pen, and the world around him could have gone up in flames.
But this was not a normal day. Just a few hours earlier, three billion people had seen Julian’s face and listened to his voice. Now everyone knew him, everyone recognized him, and everyone would continue recognizing him for the rest of his life. Julian had become so manifest in the consciousness of the world that whenever I asked around for him that night, everyone swore that they had seen him ‘just now’ and ‘right over there’. But wherever I went, Julian had already gone. It occurred to me that he had probably withdrawn himself to some obscure place where no one would bother him and where he could sit back and relax and quietly, silently contemplate his finished work like the Lord on the seventh day; where he could begin to deal with his post-natal depression and those inevitable, nagging questions.
Have I done everything right? Have I done
anything
right? Will anyone understand what I have intended to do, or will they all just see what I have done?
I finally found Julian on the rooftop terrace of the hotel, all by himself, standing close to the ledge and looking majestically across the sleeping city as if he owned the bloody place.
“Don’t jump,” I said jokingly as I approached him.
Without turning around he replied, “It’s funny you should say that. I’ve just been thinking about how a day like this could ever be topped. ‘Julian Monk Rises From the Dead, Then Jumps off a Roof.’ That would be quite a headline, wouldn’t it?”
“I think tomorrow’s headlines will be dramatic enough. No need to do anything more.”
“I suppose.”
We both took in the view of the sleeping city in silence for a while, and then I said, “I’m sorry.”
Julian looked at me. “Sorry for what?”
“I’m sorry I let you down. Back on that plane on our way to New York. I never should have let you do this all by yourself. It was the craziest time of our lives, and I turned my back on you for the pettiest of reasons. You were right, Jules. I was jealous. I hated having to share you with the rest of the world. I still don’t quite like it, to be honest.”
“Yeah, well, who could blame you? I wouldn’t want to share myself with anyone either.”
“And you’re always so modest, too.”
We both laughed.
“Seriously, though,” Julian said. “You were jealous all right, but you had every reason to be. I have been neglecting you, all of you. You know how it works, new Christmas presents always outshine even your most favourite toys, but it’s usually only temporary. Did you really think I’d effectively swap my friends, the only friends I’ve ever had, for a life in the limelight? Come on, you ought to know me better than that.”
“Sorry,” I said sheepishly.
“And stop saying that already. We both did what we had to do. Stop beating yourself up over it.”
“Only if I can beat you up instead.”
“You can try.” He looked at me belligerently, although knowing that with his scrawny body he didn’t stand a chance against me.
We laughed again as the eastern horizon slowly began turning a lighter shade of midnight blue.
“So what’s next?” I asked. “I mean, the media will be all over you in the next couple of days and weeks, won’t they? They will all want to talk to you, they’ll all want you to tell them your story over and over again, and they’ll have a million questions. You ready for that?”
Much to my surprise, Julian shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, I’m not. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I’ve discussed it with Mum and Peter as well. I think I’ve said enough for now. It’s time to give everyone a chance to catch up and try to make sense of it all; everyone, including me, that is. Which is why,” he looked at his watch, “fifteen hours from now I’ll be on a Thorex jet with Mum and Peter on our way to Santa Domenica, Peter’s private island in the Caribbean, where we’ll spend the next three weeks in the sun and cut off from the rest of the world.”
“Wow,” I said. “You’re deliberately taking a step back out of the limelight. Didn’t see that one coming.”
Julian shrugged. “It seems like the right thing to do at the right time. No one can run on full throttle all the time. I need to recharge my batteries and get my feet back down on the ground.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You still seem pretty down-to-earth to me.”
“Yeah, but you know I’m good at pretending. If people continuously treat you like the messiah, you start believing it yourself sooner or later. A lot of people really thought they saw the Second Coming today. That’s pretty scary, if you think about it, because those people also tend to think it’s a sign that the end is nigh and that I will bring on the apocalypse. But I’m still contemplating that one.”
He winked.
“So are you coming back to school after the summer?”
“I really don’t know,” Julian said. “I really want to finish school, and I want to go to uni as well. But I’ll probably not be very popular with the other students if I have camera teams following me around everywhere I go, which is what will inevitably happen. And to be honest, I’ve never really needed school to teach me things I needed to know. Peter says that even without a degree I could make a more than decent living with speaking engagements for years to come, and I have to admit it’s very tempting. That was a nice speech I gave today, if I do say so myself, but once the world is through its hangover from that, there will still be so much work to do, so many people to be educated. I don’t know. I’ll have to think it all through.”
“I see,” I said.
After a few minutes of silence, Julian suddenly turned to me and asked, “You wanna come?”
I frowned. “Come? Where?”
“Santa Domenica. Three weeks in the sun on a remote island, away from everything. Just you and me. Well, and Mum and Peter, obviously, but I don’t think they’ll get out of their bedroom much anyway.”
“Now there’s an image I can never unsee. Those two really hit it off together, huh? So how do you get along with your new stepdad?”
Julian shrugged. “He’s good for Mum. Kind. Gentle. Trust me, you won’t recognize him when you see him around Mum. He makes her smile. I hadn’t seen her smile a genuine smile in years until she met Peter. Now she’s smiling all day every day as if she was on drugs or something. But that’s good. It’s great. She’s happy. I can’t give Peter enough credit for that. Plus, he’s eating out of the palm of my hand, because I’m bringing home the bacon.”
I laughed. “Right.”
“You haven’t answered my question, though.”
“Hm?”
“About Santa Domenica. You want to come on vacation with us? It’ll be like back then when you and your dad would take me along, only the other way around. Unless you don’t want to be around two lovebirds and a Jesus freak for three weeks, and …”
“Oh shut up already! I’m coming. I’m coming, all right?”
“All right, then,” Julian said and smiled. It wasn’t one of those subtle, mysterious smiles he was now famous for. It was bright, open, and genuine; a smile that didn’t conceal anything but told me everything I needed to know.
We looked out towards the horizon again. Cold blue gave way to bright, warm orange as the sun was about to rise.
“I’ve never actually seen a sunrise before,” he said. “Have you?”
I shook my head. “I’ve pulled quite a few all-nighters in my time but I’ve never … no, I’ve never seen a sunrise.”
“Let’s stay and watch it then, shall we?”
A few minutes later, as the sun finally broke through the horizon and poured liquid glitter over London’s skyline, Julian put his hand on my shoulder and said, “A new dawn; a new day.”
“Who knows,” I replied. “Maybe even a new world.”
The Epilogue According to Tummy
Three weeks after
Rock for Reason
, the bloody most brilliant concert we have ever played, Momoko was due in court, charged with abuse of a position of trust to engage in sexual activity with a child.
Mr Saunders did a brilliant job at defending her. The first piece of evidence he introduced was a video clip from the concert. It showed me just after we’d finished our gig, walking up to Momoko in the middle of the stage, holding a microphone in one hand and a ring in the other. I got down on one knee and asked her, “Momoko Suzuki, will you marry me?” Momoko burst into tears, sank down on her knees and sobbed, “Yes” into the microphone, much to the delight of the quarter of a million people who were watching us and cheering us on.