Luke Joseph Hoskisson

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A humorous and over the top story centered around the bitterness we feel about ‘getting older’, and how everyone else seems to be doing so well.

Growing Apart

Over the last year on multiple occasions Tom talked about having a big night out, “a mad one”, even. Each night Liam turned up giddy with excitement of what the evening might have in store, and each night he’d been left disappointed and alone by 22:30, as Tom’s three-and-a-half pints of Moretti had inevitably gotten the better of him. Liam never believed it actually felt like one’s heart was burning, but that was the name the pandemic went by.

On the most recent occasion, Liam had gone as far as bringing drugs in an attempt to keep the party going – Double Action Gaviscon – but even those weren’t enough.

“The music’s too loud.” Tom shouted in Liam’s ear, signalling his imminent departure. Liam expected Tom to say this because he always said it. Liam had actually started to suspect that the guaranteed unbearability of Simmons’ soundsystem was precisely why Tom suggested its sticky premises in the first place. Their music was always too loud, probably to drown out all the microaggressions and sexual harassment going on, but that’s besides the point. Its deafening speakers provided the grounds for an acceptable excuse to retire early.

In a catchup, aka a bitching session with all the other members of their friendship group (minus Tom), Liam publicly diagnosed that, “it isn’t that Tom isn’t up for big nights out anymore, but that he isn’t honest about that fact.” The other members express their agreement with “mmm”-s, and “exactly”-s, and, “you know what? I think you’re right”-s. “And the worst part of it is,” Liam suffers, “I told my colleagues I wasn’t feeling great on Monday, you know, planting the seeds of a sick day on the Friday after our night out. But I woke up fresher than I have in years. How annoying is that?!” 

Many of you can probably relate to Liam’s frustration. Others may naturally align with Tom; yourselves individuals who prefer your own company at home, where you’re safe from extortionate drinks prices and…other people; it just makes sense, right?

But neither are wrong, they’re just responding to trauma in different ways. Approaching thirty years of age can have life-changing effects on a person. 

If only we could build love, and empathy, or even the literal structures of our society to the same robustness that we build societal expectations of approaching the big 3.0. 

Does a hard breakup change your lifestyle? It might change you in some ways. You might become a bit more cautious to declare your love. We’re always shocked and appalled by all the killings on the news; and the child abuse, and the religious persecution; the racist attacks, homophobic hate; the constant climate disasters. Yet they don’t really keep us up at night, not as frequently anyway, as the idea of getting older, and feeling like you should have achieved a set, yet arbitrary amount of material success before reaching an arbitrary number of candles on a birthday cake, seems to do. 

People begin to revamp their entire lifestyles. One might go their full existence up until that point incapable of differentiating a Monstera from a Money Tree, then, almost overnight, they’ll begin spending their entire Sunday at the garden centre, comparing composts and topsoils. Which does sound pretty nice, actually.

And on the other end of the spectrum, there’s the Liams of the world, who are desperate to make up for lost time by throwing whatever chemical compound they can get their hands on into their dry, desperate mouths. 

And as we change, naturally so does the kind of people that we want to spend our time with. We may move away from once close friends, not because anything bad really happened, but just because we relate to them less and less. 

Which direction we gravitate towards when we near, reach, or surpass thirty years on this planet depends on a lot, obviously. But we are taught behaviours from an early age, and the leading theory that scientists have is that your path largely depends on whichever philosophy you subscribed to as a child. What I mean by that is: Was it, “first the worst, second the best, third the one with the hairy chest?” Or was it, “first the worst, second the best, third the dirty donkey”, or perhaps even some third, or forth incorrect solution? “Third the dirty donkey” could easily lead to a less optimistic view of the ‘third’ decade, when compared to a ‘hairy chest’ which is simply an inevitability of hormones.

But back to the plot, where, if you recognise yourself in Liam, and find Tom almost offensively boring, then right now it probably makes complete sense to you that thanks to Liam, Tom now hangs from his feet, in a cold, dark warehouse, above a shark tank, a mere metre from certain death.

“Please, Liam, let me go! I’m scared!” Tom pleads, tears and urine trickling down his face.

He wasn’t really dealing with the whole situation very well, which might come as a bit of surprise – he is a heartburn survivor after all. 

“Why am I here?! Why are you doing this?! 

It’s not because Tom wasn’t as lively as he used to be on a night out, that he now hangs here – definitely not! If Liam had fed to sharks every friend he knew that had swapped night club for hike club, well, he would have a very small group of friends. And although various podcasters actually recommended this, Liam believed, rather adamantly, that they should mind their own fucking business. 

“The punishment – fugh thuugh crugghhh”, Liam ‘said’. His mouth was full of Deliveroo’d beef burger. It was a top pick in his neighbourhood, and had a load of five star reviews, but not worth the £14 it had set Liam back. 

“Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that,” Tom admitted. 

Liam cleared his mouth with a large swig of Co-op’s organic prosecco (also Deliveroo). Organic was all they had left online, which Liam thought was by design, but he justified it as a ‘treat’, like he did most things.

“The punishment fits the crime, I said. A dramatic act, for a dramatic act. You betrayed me, Tom”, Liam proclaimed.

“Betrayed you. How?!” asked Tom.

“You know how.” 

“Is this about me joining Shane’s pro-clubs team?! You said you were retiring!”

“No! This isn’t about Fifa! This is about the deposit!”

“The deposit?!”

“Yes! The deposit! The house deposit! A deposit to buy a house with!”

“Right…and what’s your issue with it?!”

Leaving the pub early, working out regularly, even posting motivational quotes on LinkedIn; these were all gross, yet forgivable acts. Tom now hung above the pool of blood thirsty sharks because he had committed the most vindictive, most heinous crime that one friend could do to the other.

“You have one”, Liam mutters, “You have the deposit for a house” 

Tom had saved up enough money to get onto the property ladder – how selfish. Everybody knows that nothing makes you question your life-choices, yourself, more than a friend who has their shit together.

“So you’re going to kill me because I’ve got a deposit on a house?! You have that much insecurity, hate and bitterness inside of you, because of something as insignificant as someone entering the housing market, whilst you’re maxing out your overdraft?!” 

“Yes.” Liam simply stated, the sociopath.

“You can have the money!” Tom shouts.

“What?” Liam checks, offended. “I might be a psycho, but I’m not tacky”.

“So…you’re…jealous? Is that it?” Tom asks – a fair question.

“No, I’m not-, it’s not jealous per se, it’s-. I wouldn’t want a house, even if I could afford one. I wouldn’t want to be tied down. It would make travelling the world so much harder, and I might think about doing that sometime soon.” 

“I thought you’d be happy for me!” shouts Tom.

“I would have been, if I was expecting it, but you always said you were skint! I had it on very good authority that I was saving at least twenty pounds more than you a month, yet I’ve only got eighty quid in my ISA and you’ve got over forty-thousand, so, you know…something’s not adding up, is it?!”

“That was years ago, fresh out of university. We’ve worked for ages!”

Liam pulls a lever on the table, next to his truffle-fries. Tom inches closer to his aqueous coffin. He screams.

“Please! I’ll give you anything! Whatever you want!”

“I want what anybody who finds out their friends, or acquaintances their junior, who seem to be able to afford whatever they want, wants”

Liam ceases with the lever, for the time being.

“Which is?!” Tom says, with a confused look on his face.

“To know that most of it came from your parents, or some rich relative, of course!” Liam says this, as though the most obvious thing in the world

“What?!” 

Liam elaborates, “because then I wouldn’t have to doubt myself so much, and I could take the moral high ground”

Tom resolves: “I saved it all, you idiot!”

Liam tickles the lever. Tom descends, slowly.

Tom continues: “You’ve just always been bad with your money; constant takeaways, expensive rounds, donations to charities! And I mean, this shark tank, how much was it?! Where did you even get it from?!”

Liam snaps back, “on Facebook marketplace, and I got five pounds knocked off the asking price I’ll have you know!”

Liam ceases tickling, and instead yanks the lever. Tom is plunged into the water. His scream is quickly drowned out, and the water turns red.

Liam reflects. It’s a nice time to reflect – silent, bar the occasional splashing of water. People would probably study to this whole ambience if they could. 

After a while Liam speaks: “Mum?”

A human head with a snorkel attached, and a shark fin headband pops out of the water.

“Yes, Darling?”, Liam’s Mum asks, in a way which in no way indicates that she was just murdering her son’s best friend.

“Can you give me the money for a deposit on a house?” Liam asks.

“Oh, I’m sorry, darling, you know me and your father would do anything for you.” 

Liam had actually arranged for real sharks to eat Liam’s face off, but he was out when the Yodel courier came by with delivery. And when Liam finally got off his arse to take the little red slip to the post office, they had closed up for the day – Tom would never have let that happen.

“But I’m not sure we have enough for a deposit on a house” Mum continues, “not with the cuts to your dad’s pension.”

Bob pops his head out. “Were you talking about pensions?”, he interrogates.

Bob actually saw himself as a real-life shark – he subscribed to Shares Magazines in the nineties.

“We just mentioned it, Robert”, Mum interjected .

“Always pay into your pension, Liam! Make sure you do!” Bob proceeds.

“I have been, Dad.”

Liam is too embarrassed to admit that he doesn’t actually know if he’s paying into it, or not. There was a period of a couple of months where he kept maxing out his overdraft, and he thought stopping his forty pound pension contribution – and not his overspending – would fix everything. 

“Can we give Liam money for a deposit?” Mum inquires.

“On a house?! Christ no! Maybe we could stretch to a pair of trainers? Would you like ten percent towards some trainers?”

“Don’t be silly, Robert. We’ll get you one hundred percent of something else you’d like. A little bag of drugs, maybe?” Mum asks, sweetfully.

“Thanks Mum, you’re the best.”

Bob adds his two cents; “Better it comes from us as I always say! Lots of parents don’t let their kids do anything, and, as is always the case, they go off and do it in an unsafe manner.”

“Yes we know, Dear”, Mum says, who has obviously heard a million times before.

But Mum notices something’s up with Liam, her sweet little prince. So she wipes Tom’s blood off her lips, pushes the body away in the water, and breast-strokes closer to the edge of the pool, near to where Liam stands, dry on the outside. 

“Just do what makes you happy, okay, Liam?”, Mum says. “That’s what you always tell me. I love my swimming, and my aquarobics. I don’t give a toss what the rest of the cows in the class think about me anymore. And I learned that from you!”

Liam smiles, and so she puts a little on her pep talk: “Life’s too short to spend it worrying.”

This, of course, is easier said than done, when life’s shortness, and one’s own acceleration through it, is precisely what worries you. Liam’s heart pumps faster, as it always does, when he thinks upon this; a large swig of prosecco slows it down, as it always does. Liam takes in its bubbles, whilst Tom expends his last.