Neon Red [Order The eBook] [Zayn]

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(DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. It's important to remember this is all totally fabricated, embellished, and exaggerated for entertainment purposes.)

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October 2014

Bradford, England

Try to realize it's all within yourself

No one else can make you change

And to see you're really only very small

And life flows on within you and without you

The Beatles | Within You Without You

We passed a sign that said: "Welcome To East Bowling" and a weight lifted from my chest. My bones creaked awake, animated by the atmosphere and the distinct sound of the wheels hitting the pavement here. Heart-poundingly familiar. Home. I rolled down the window of the rented Land Rover and stuck my head into the wind, catching hold of the familiar scents. The reek of raw peanuts from the factory nearby, which I'd come to despise. I smiled when the air became uncontaminated again, watching the way the sunlight flickered between the buildings as if in a game of hide and seek with me. Watching the way the birds dove past the car, a split second shy of grazing the windshield. 

What urban majesty. Everything imperfectly perfect, and preserved just as it was 40-50 years ago. Fields of towering, high-voltage pylons, cutting through the sky like steel giants. Walkers. Extraterrestrials that emitted silent magnetic fields...and cancer. As we drove by the old mills and rundown motels and tan brick buildings, my childhood resurrected and played out before me with a stunning vibrancy. Masala incense burning around the neighborhood. Our home alive with laughter and bickering. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan forever playing softly in the background of any setting. My mum's perpetual cooking. Succulent dishes whose mouth-watering aromas stifled the house in summer. My grandad's low baritone speaking in a rear room whenever he visited for dinner. He and my dad playing cards, both sometimes allowing me to sit on their laps and learn. The telly going nonstop until my mum shut it off after 11pm. My old faithful Packard Bell computer, which I used to pirate music I couldn't afford off of momentarily stolen CDs. I'd always return them without fail, fearful that Allah was watching my every move.

I peered through the golden haze of early evening and saw my boyhood self-running along on foot behind my dad, his fingers negligibly reaching back for me. He was trying to catch up to my mum. She was strutting far ahead in a hurry because we were constantly late. The 1D boys often gave me shit about showing up to meetings and rehearsals late, but in my defense, tardiness was the only example set for me growing up. Well, my mum tried her best to be punctual, but my dad typically slowed the whole train down because he didn't like to be social.

I remembered riding along with my cousins in their busted old cars. We had fabricated excuses to drive any and everywhere without our licenses, because it was the most liberating freedom in the world. In a town were most people didn't entertain notions of ever getting out, having free reign of the roads with no one to control how far or fast we went seemed liked a nice compensation.

Haz hummed a familiar tune while a commercial played on the radio. We'd been cruising around downtown for a while, marveling at the extravagant city hall building and all the Victorian architecture. Now he wanted to run by and see my old place, insisting that he missed it. All the tall row houses with bright red doors to add a splash of color to the otherwise depressing uniformity. The screen door that wouldn't properly closed. The plumbing that always flooded the laundry room. Before I'd brought the new place in the suburbs and moved the fam out of Bowling, he'd visited the terraced house a few times and always reminisced about us laying on the floor of my tiny room, exchanging music and tattoo ideas.