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Mayo County looks beautiful as ever. Clear deep blue sky. Endless green fields, rolling like an impossibly gentle sea. Sunshine beams off the trees. It’s summertime, of course. They only ever came in the summers.
Noel inhales deeply, tasting the sweet country air. Beside him, he hears Liam do the same. Two brothers alone in a field – there’s a lot of stories that start and end this way.
He looks over at his brother. Liam’s lost that infernal parka he’s always got on, stripped down to a threadbare Beatles t-shirt and decently fit jeans. His hair’s long enough to ruffle with the breeze. Noel thinks he should look out of place in the unchanging landscape of their childhood, with his filled-out arms and soft middle and the lines carved into his face, but that’s not the case. Liam’s older, but himself. Sun and open air look good on him.
Noel feels fresher too. The sun invites him to tip his face up towards it like a sunflower. He realises sort of absently that he’s not wearing any sunglasses. Neither is Liam. Everything’s a bit closer that way. Warmth seeps into him, collecting in the dark fabric of his shirt. The grasses rustle, then the leaves, and a bird sings sweetly somewhere in the distance. It’s all so fucking lovely. Alright, our kid? Yeah, alright.
Noel’s still kind of basking in the loveliness of it all when Liam suddenly takes off marching towards the old family farm house. Noel watches him go, content to wait patiently to find out whatever it is he’s doing. Liam disappears ‘round the side of the house, then comes back a few moments later with a spade in hand.
He approaches with a determined swagger in his loping walk that’s vaguely amusing at first, and then Noel thinks hang on, didn’t Cain murder Abel in a field? But Liam stops before he reaches him and instead shoves the head of the spade right down into the dirt. He pulls it back up in a huge sweeping arc, sending a chunk of grassy topsoil over his shoulder. Then he does it again.
Noel decides to take a step back in case the next swing goes wide. “What are you doing?”
“Digging.”
“Fucking clearly. Why?”
Liam glances up with a half-shrug. “Y’know.” The spade slips sideways as it pulls back and sprinkles his shoulders with dirt.
“No I don’t.” Noel barks an incredulous laugh while Liam wrestles with the next clump of earth. “Come on, you weird little cunt, what are you doing?”
Liam doesn’t answer. By now he’s gotten dirt on his shoes as well, and the bit on his shoulders has trailed down his back. No chance Noel’s getting near enough to brush it off.
Noel watches as the spade displaces more and more earth. “Come on, you’re not serious? Really? Are you really gonna dig a massive ugly fucking hole in the middle of the field?”
No response. Impossible bastard. Fucking ridiculous.
“You’re not very good at this,” Noel observes, because he is. He’s got no strength or technique. It’s the exact kind of physical labour they’ve both been rather successfully avoiding their whole lives. It was only Paul who was ever any good at this sort of thing. He did what he was supposed to, Paul. And look where that got him.
Finally, Liam stops and plants the spade in the ground so he can turn the full force of his petulant stare on Noel. “Are you gonna help, or what?”
“No,” Noel says. Liam stares at him a moment longer, then pulls the spade out of the ground and gets back to it. “No, ‘course not. What’s the fucking point? You still haven’t given us a good reason.”
Liam heaves a spadeful of dirt dangerously near Noel’s nice expensive shoes. His stubborn silence feels accusing.
“And even if I wanted to, right, there’s my back to consider,” Noel tells him. “I’m fucking getting old, you know.” Liam keeps digging. It’s starting to look like a real hole now. “And you are too,” Noel adds.
He stands there until it's clear there are no answers forthcoming, and Liam’s not going to stop, with or without Noel’s help.
“Whatever,” Noel says, and goes back to the house.
Unfortunately there’s not much to do in there, except wander through the empty rooms and run his fingertips along random surfaces, recalling those lawless summer days all those years ago, crashing around with his brothers and cousins. He stands in the old unlit kitchen where the sun falls through the window onto the wooden table like it always did in the mornings. He remembers the times he’d been roped into helping prepare tea; peeling potatoes the way he saw his mam do; heaving buckets of well water up into the basin; proudly dropping the fish they’d caught with their uncle onto the counter for their aunt to gut, watching in disgusted fascination how the slimy organs spilled out from the flat bodies like a pocket just waiting to be unzipped, and how Liam had always squealed like a girl whenever any of it got near him.
Noel goes up to the room where they’d slept, the three of them, and stares at the little beds. Early on, baby Liam had slept in the room with their mam and it had just been him and Paul, and every night he’d laid in bed with his eyes squeezed shut so the next day could come faster and he could do it all over again. That was when summers had stretched into forever, brimming with possibility. Then all of a sudden he’d gotten old, and he’d spent every night laid awake listening to his brothers snoring in the dark, feeling each day slip through his fingers like sand.
He catches sight of Liam through the window. He’s knee deep in the earth now. He looks at once both a grown man and a little kid. The hole he’s digging seems to be taking on shape and purpose – and it clicks for Noel, what his brother is doing.
He glances down at the little beds again, and then goes back out, because there’s nothing else to do.
Outside it seems to have gotten brighter since earlier. Noel wanders across the field back to Liam, who’s clearly found his rhythm by now, spade steadily scooping and tossing, the soil landing more or less in one place. It’s sort of mesmerising. Noel watches the flex of his back muscles under his darkening shirt and the sheen of sweat over his biceps. His hair sticks at his temples.
“You’re digging a grave,” Noel finally says. Because that’s what it is.
Liam glances up at him, took you long enough clear in his face, then turns his attention back to the dirt and keeps digging.
Noel doesn’t ask any of the obvious questions. Really no point, is there? He stares down into the hole – the grave. The exposed insides of the earth look soft and dark and rich.
Well, that solves that mystery. Something settles in Noel’s chest. He sits down in the grass with his legs folded and watches Liam for a while. His gaze wanders over the endless empty fields, the trees down along the gate, the old house standing behind them. In the distance, a lone bird cartwheels through the air, swoops down into the tall grass and gracefully back up. It seems to be the only other living thing here with them.
Noel flops onto his back. Spreads his arms out wide, ignoring the scratch on his bare skin. Vacant blue sky peers down at him.
He closes his eyes and sounds get louder around him: grass rustling, spade scraping dirt, Liam’s huffs of breath, his occasional laboured grunts. Sun lays down warm on his skin and the ground presses into his back. His lungs fill and empty. He wishes he had his guitar.
Liam’s singing. Noel blinks his eyes open to see the sun’s shifted to the side. Maybe I don't really wanna know how your garden grows, 'cause I just wanna fly…
Live Forever. Of course it is.
Liam’s voice is as strong as it ever was, like he’s singing to a crowd of a hundred thousand and not just an empty field. He’s never been the type to sing to himself absentmindedly – that’s Noel. And he couldn’t, really, not with the way he sings, like a prizefighter going toe to toe with himself. Liam does things deliberately. Always has his reasons, even if they only ever make sense to him.
Noel sits up. Liam’s sitting at the edge of the grave, legs dangling down, leaning back on his hands with his face tipped back to the sky. Singing the chorus now. Noel anticipates the last line out of habit; instinctively fills in the falsetto where Liam leaves the gap, you and I are gonna live forever, maybe a bit too quiet and breathy since he’d just woken up.
Liam’s chin drops and their eyes meet. The whole deep blue sky passes between them.
“What are we doing here, our kid?” Noel eventually has to ask.
“Y’know.”
“Come on.”
“Yeah you do, man, you know.”
“No, I don’t.” Noel thinks they might’ve had this conversation a million times. They could probably keep having it until judgement day. “I fucking mean it. I can’t read your mind. What’s this all about?”
Liam shifts off his hands to spread his hands wide, long arms encompassing the grave and the house and the field and the sky and Noel, enunciating like he thinks he’s speaking to an idiot. “It’s about belonging, man. Like, coming back to where we belong.”
“What, like,” Noel grinds the toe of his expensive shoe into the dirt dubiously, “Returning to our roots or summat?”
“Together,” Liam corrects. The word seems to ring through the air around them, singular and final.
“Together,” Noel echoes.
“Yeah,” Liam says, face placid but jaw firm. “Us. Coming together.”
Noel’s got a sense of vertigo looking at him: young eyes in an aged face. Dirt smudged along one of those sharp cheekbones. Shoulders set back. Well-kempt clothes and soft hands soiled with sweat and earth. His brother. His beautiful, impossible brother.
They’re on the precipice of something here. A dangerous thing, with the rest of the world so far away. Even that one bird seems to have flown away. It’s just the two of them.
Two brothers alone in a field, with a half-dug grave between them.
“It’s too wide,” Noel points out.
Liam pauses digging and straightens up to meet his gaze. Matching sets of blue eyes, like mirrors. The grave stretches open around him like a doorway.
“Oh,” Noel says.
Liam nods decisively, like they’ve agreed on something. “Yeah, man.”
The vertigo gets stronger. Noel knows, but he doesn’t understand. He can’t let himself – never could let himself fall into it completely, there was always a part of him scrambling away from the edge in horror, terrified by the yawning fucking abyss that was him and Liam. He imagines how people, if they ever saw it, would look down into it and recoil in revulsion, and still not understand the fathomless black depths of it. How deep it fucking goes: reaching back to the beginning of the world and swallowing the future whole.
Liam’s still digging. The afternoon sun casts him in gold where his body catches the light. Meanwhile the shadows have thickened around his feet, like he’s wading around in them.
Noel stands up to his full height and looks around. Miles and miles of sky and field around them. Home is inconceivable out here. The old family house behind them seems too far to walk back to, and anyway, what’s there for him? A bunch of empty rooms stuffed full of progressively sadder boyhood versions of himself and the echoes of a family he doesn’t have around anymore?
But they can’t stay here. He has to save them from this grave they’ve dug for themselves. Liam’s so far down already – his head’s level with the grass now.
“Liam,” he calls.
Liam looks up at him. Those big, trusting eyes, in whose reflection Noel looms so tall. The pillar holding up his brother’s world.
“We gotta go,” Noel tells him. Liam looks around himself, like he’s surprised at where he’s ended up.
“Almost ready,” he says.
“Now, Liam.” Noel crouches down at the edge of the grave and sticks out his hand. “C’mon, our kid.”
Liam turns around and starts moving closer, and all at once Noel can see in his eyes what he intends to do.
“No, wait, Liam, don’t –” He straightens up, starts stepping back from the edge, but his brother is too fast, reaching for him with those long, greedy arms. A hand wraps around Noel’s ankle and yanks it out from under him.
Noel feels the air slip past him as the grave yawns wider. Liam’s blue eyes grow the size of the whole sky. Compact dirt slams into Noel’s lower back with a sickening crunch, then the base of his skull, then –
“– Noel, Noel, Noely, fuck, c’mon, Noel, fuck, man, didn’t mean to, fuck please, Noel,” Liam’s voice is saying, somewhere far away.
He’s falling, he thinks. And it’s going to hurt very much when he lands at the bottom of this pitch blackness.
“Fuck, Noely, look at me, please.”
Someone’s driven a spike into the back of his head. A molten spike, straight out of the forge, glowing white hot and liquifying everything inside his skull. He can feel it leaking out and pooling beneath him. The whole world is melting to red.
No, that’s just the sky. Noel immediately wishes he hadn’t opened his eyes. His whole body feels like he’s just touched a hot stove. A paralysing, floating, all-encompassing supernova of pain. Concussion, he recognizes.
Liam’s talking again. “– scared me, man, I thought you – you weren’t moving, d’you know what I mean? Scary shit, man. It was like that time when Da smashed your head into the wall and you just, fucking, like, fell.”
Noel doesn’t remember that. He does remember swinging that cricket bat and the heart-stopping image of Liam crumpling to the floor. “If y’wanted to return the favour, should’ve used a cricket bat,” he slurs. “Or a guitar.”
“Shut up, man, what are you talking about?” Liam says. “Look, you’re alright. Don't move. 'S okay now.” He comes into focus above Noel, wide blue eyes blocking out the red sky. “I had to, alright? I didn’t mean to hurt you. But it’s alright, innit, ‘cause we’re together.”
Together. Noel repeats it to himself. It’s that one phenomenon – where a word gets so familiar that meaning detaches from it, and it becomes just a weird sound.
Liam’s shifting around above him, in and out of his view, touching him in random places, checking to make sure he’s all there. Noel notes with a pang of muted alarm that he can’t lift his arms. Or anything else. He’s not paralyzed, he reasons out to himself, because he can feel the cold, damp earth beneath him, and Liam’s hands on his chest, his arms, his head.
Noel inhales deeply, and mutters, “I can’t move.”
Once he says it out loud, he realises he’s conceding defeat. He’s stuck here, and Liam’s going to stay with him. The rest of the world is too far away now. They’ll never make it back.
“It’s alright,” Liam says again, but Noel barely hears him over the rush of blood in his own head. The yawning fucking abyss closing above them. Black spots dance in his vision. Eventually Liam starts shuffling around again, and it takes Noel another quietly crashing moment to understand that he’s laid down beside him. Their arms brush, slightly mismatched, from their shoulders down to their pinky knuckles.
Together, Liam’s voice echoes around the grave. Us, coming together.
This was Liam’s plan all along. Noel can’t bring himself to be angry with him. He wanted it too, maybe.
It gets darker with them lying side by side. Nighttime noises rise from the ground above their heads. Who knows what’s up there. It doesn’t matter. None of it will ever find them.
Liam’s somewhere to his right, but Noel can’t look at him. Turning his head makes the world split in two. So Noel keeps his eyes ahead. The mouth of the grave cuts a square of the sunset above them, lopsided with colour. He watches the light slowly bleeding out of view. It’s like a window to the sky, he thinks absently. Fucking ideal, that. Easy to let his eyes unfocus and his mind swim lazily.
Noel drifts. He’s not supposed to sleep, he knows that, but Liam’s not talking anymore, and listening to their breathing in tandem makes him sleepy. They’re sinking into the earth. His body is cold except for the warm meeting with Liam’s body, and the heavy palm resting on his chest, holding him in place.
Liam had trapped a butterfly in an old sauce jar once, long ago when he was just a kid. He’d sat for hours on his bed staring at the pretty white thing fluttering about. But he hadn’t known what to feed it, or maybe he hadn’t understood it needed feeding, and he left the jar on the window sill by Noel’s bed without ever opening it, and after a few days Noel had taken it out the front door and dumped the tiny lifeless body into the gutter where the runoff carried down into the sewer. When Liam noticed the jar was empty, Noel told him he’d let it go in the park. Liam had brought it up years later, pointing at another one just like it, look, remember my butterfly? I bet it lived a long life, a mega life, bein’ beautiful and eating the park flowers and that.
Yeah, Noel had said, hungover and unsure why he wasn’t just stamping out that bright expression on Liam’s face. Yeah, ‘course, it lived a long life. Or maybe he hadn’t said that.
Maybe he’d said something else. Or maybe there was no butterfly. Maybe that was just a dream Liam had shared with him once, one of those eerily familiar ones that made Noel think I swear I remember dreaming that too.
“Noel, Noel, Noel,” comes a frantic murmur in the dark. Noel opens his eyes and for a moment he’s looking at that very kid in the bed across from his, bright eyes peering out of a round pale face.
“Liam?”
“Noel,” Liam says again, and now the sharp lines and wrinkles swim into view, but his voice still sounds so desperately young. He looks smaller than he did earlier; he looks smaller than Noel. They’re falling backwards now. Time going in reverse.
Noel can picture the butterfly so well, beating its tiny delicate wings against the glass walls, trapped between Liam’s pudgy palms. It had seemed to glow in the dull light of their bedroom, under the shadow of Liam’s skinny body.
“Stay with me,” the Liam next to him pleads. “You have to stay awake, brother, c’mon. Stay with me. You can’t leave me – at least until I fall asleep, man. Don’t leave – Noely. Noel. Please. Stay awake.”
“‘S okay, la,” Noel mumbles reflexively. Liam would always climb into his bed after he’d had a nightmare, slotting his gangly body to Noel’s side, face to Noel’s ear, mumbling terrified nonsense.
Liam does it now, curling into him, tucking his face in the crook of Noel’s neck. “You gotta stay with me,” he mumbles. “Thought I was ready, but I’m scared. I’m fucking scared, Noel.”
“Me too,” Noel admits, and feels the last shaky rock crumble beneath them.
He turns his face back to the sky. He stares up at the square of dim light, the last thing visible now. It’s a window to the stars. Noel loves looking out of windows. That was nice of Liam to think of that, he muses.
Liam’s heart beat slows to match Noel’s. They breathe as one. At some point Liam must finally fall asleep.
Noel didn’t think it could get any darker after that, but it does. An endlessly sinking darkness. With Noel and Liam, right at the centre, sinking down together.