Any Other Year (fiction)
Birthday parties are always strange. Or perhaps they are not, at least not for everyone. For William they became strange (or stranger) after his band was on television the first time. Suddenly, everyone wanted to celebrate with him. Celebrate in his proximity. Celebrate on the record company dime. The parties became, by necessity, bigger. They had to accommodate the various sycophants and benefactors who made the machine of commoditized music roll along. William accepted his place in this world, and accepted that his birthday was now part of some bigger marketing plan. William’s thirtieth birthday was particularly odd. His band, The Breach, had the Christmas number one single in the UK. The new year had kicked off with a show at the Bataclan in Paris. The band’s manager, a chubby Londoner called Jamie Warren, was pushing William and the boys to tour Asia in support of their most recent release. William’s long-time girlfriend, Kathryn, had just left him for some rakish, l...