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THAT WAS THE NIGHT LIAM GALLAGHER PUNCHED VINCENT AND Kate Nash helped me find my prosthetic eye in the men's toilet at The Electric Ballroom in Camden.

Noel's the nicer one, right? Kate said he's a sweetheart so yeah. I'm certain it was Liam.

I should have eaten before Vincent and I appeared on Graham Norton. The Indian restaurant at BBC Television Center had Kerala chicken on special but I was superstitiously certain I'd dribble something curried over my wool trousers, or the great looping bow of my black silk blouse. I handed my menu back to the waiter and ordered another double gin and tonic.

At the studio I downed two glasses of wine in the green room and had a few more during taping. That girl from "Stranger Things" sat between Vincent and David Mitchell plugging her new movie. Once she started knocking them back I felt oddly compelled to keep up.

When did Eleven turn eighteen?

Fuck it. After two weeks in the hospital and a dozen days hiding out at Maxim's flat I deserved a reason to shine up and show off.

The house lights were up and the audience long gone but I was vibrating, volatile. Ravenous and full of stored energy.

I wanted more. And I wanted very much to form the needy nucleus of an excuse for Vincent to ditch the parasitic bitch he hired as his talent agent and come run wild with me for one night on the streets of London.

I closed the green room door and texted to request Vincent's exclusive participation in the pursuit of base behavior.

He declined. I did not hesitate to play the eye card.

I popped my new prosthetic loose and sent Vincent a ghastly selfie of me pouting, tracing an imaginary teardrop with a fresh French-tip fingernail under the raw red pocket in my head. Without the prosthetic in place the black mascara on my slack eyelids resembled the zipper teeth of a smoky blue tote with a crushed rosebud stuffed inside.

In reply Vincent sent an enlarged laughing-crying emoji with a black X slashed over one crinkled eye.

where & when ?

I took an Uber from White City to Granary Square and waited for Vincent in the downstairs bar at Dishoom.

Twelve hours later the tabloid press would confirm that Vincent and I finished dinner, generously tipped our waitstaff and then went after it like a couple of party Cossacks. Drew sabers, spurred our mounts bloody and charged without fear into the breach.

I was doubling up on my painkillers by then and I believe that set the stage for shit to get well out of hand.

The blast left me unconscious. Post-op I awoke beneath an enormous nurse with a paper poppy on her nametag and an upside-down timepiece tacked over one watermelon tit. She corralled my hands beneath the bedcovers to keep me from touching my face, shushed and soothed me as I struggled. Stroked my hair when I submitted and stood to fiddle with my drip.

Her image split and doubled, then spliced into a single fuzzy form as she leaned in close and assured me Vincent was hurt but not hospitalized.

Brady never mentioned casualties or fatalities when he visited me in the ICU. I didn't learn about the second bomb until my condition stabilized and they moved me to a room with a television.

I wore out the remote control, fought through crushing headaches and heavy sedation to focus my only eye on an endless parade of long-winded experts dissecting the short life of Blake Rex Lawrence-Grimes, the Earlham Park Bomber.

Blake fit the typical template. He was a friendless 4chan incel shut-in who collected zombie knives and Airsoft guns, posted praise for ISIS atrocities online and enshrined American school shooters on his Facebook page. In their rush to devour and divine meaning from the misspelled manifesto he left behind on Google Docs, the media simultaneously condemned Blake's actions and rewarded him with an eternal legacy of infamy.

Each in-depth interview with baffled neighbors and tearful teachers added amperage to his celebrity identity. Every lingering close-up of a class photo or stone-faced selfie helped elevate that twenty-year-old bedwetter into a brand-name bogeyman.

In an official statement ISIS reaffirmed their fatwah against Dayglo Dave but denied Blake's claims of affiliation. Blake never formally converted to the group's Manson Family interpretation of Islam, and while ISIS appreciated his freelance efforts, they made it clear he wasn't the kind of cuckoo they wanted popping out of their ideological clock.

In life, Blake's rejection was limited to the people in his community. It was localized, homegrown and artisanal, like a farm-to-table rejection. In death the scope of that scorn scaled up to something commercial-industrial, global-viral.

He was never going to be anyone's first choice for the things that matter, but nobody could say Blake wasn't a self-starter.

That nutty kid saw something he wanted and he went for it. Even though he filled my legs and abdomen with sheet-metal screws and turned my eye into a sightless meatball I had to give him an A for effort. Further investigation revealed Blake jumped repeatedly from a second-story window at his mother's house until he fractured his own fucking leg. The NHS pulled his crooked parts plumb and equipped him with a plaster cast and the tubular aluminum crutches he would load with a homemade explosive compound and junk-drawer shrapnel.

Blake bought a disabled festival ticket that afforded access to the cordoned area in front of the stage, a vantage near enough for an angry indoor kid who couldn't kick or catch a ball to chuck two crutches like javelins and kill a comedian for the Caliphate.

His manifesto named Dayglo Dave as Blake's primary target but the investigators suspected his homemade ignition system was faulty. Dave's act ended before Blake could prime the charges, and Citizen Samurai took the stage just in time to become new targets of opportunity.

The security guard who grabbed one of Blake's crutches most probably saved our lives. She was killed outright and three of her colleagues, two fans in wheelchairs and a care provider died of their wounds on the scene or in transport. Twenty-four were injured, plus me and Vincent. If your math included Blake Rex the death toll was eight but most memorials, official and informal, deducted the perpetrator and honored his victims with floral arrangements, wooden crosses, candles and stuffed animals in groups of seven.

Fearing Blake's leg cast was another lethal device in disguise, the bomb squad chased away the medics working to revive him. They deployed a robot to fire shotgun blasts at his limb and prudently reduced it to a gory, inert pulp. It's amazing what you can do for the greater good with some buckshot and a bunch of ones and zeroes.

The days of my convalescence dissolved into an unsettling montage of bland meals, painful debridement treatments and a ceaseless news cycle. Never completely rested nor fully alert I existed within shuffled slices of time stripped of sequence, cut off from cues like morning light and sunset dusk, afternoon hunger or bedtime fatigue. Sleeping for five hours or fifteen minutes scrubbed my memory coma-clean. I repeatedly phoned Melanie upon waking to turn down media offers I'd already rejected, unaware we had spoken earlier.

I dreamed in black and white. Nightmares came wrapped in shades of red and I woke up screaming with nurses gripping my wrists to stop me from tearing at the dressing on my eye.

Vincent sent me a YouTube clip of Bill Maher mocking Blake's failure to mate or even date. Maher reckoned the boy was fortunate to die a baptized Christian.

Can you imagine anything more awkward than being a recently deceased terrestrial virgin, tasked with satisfying seventy-two virgin brides in the afterlife? It's so ludicrously tragic, like if O. Henry wrote "The Gift of The Magi" as a gang-bang gone wrong. Picture this, you've just sacrificed yourself to kill some infidels, okay? You made the cut and it's your first night using your Rewards Card in martyr's paradise but you squandered the search-and-destroy exploratory years of your puberty sitting in front of a computer screen, turning tube socks into freestanding sculpture so you don't know what the fuck to do with a warm and willing body. The girls certainly aren't gonna make the first move because they're virgins, remember? Together you're a seventy-three-piece flat-pack orgy kit from IKEA but nobody's got a fucking hex wrench.

I gasped. Took a deep breath that left my medicated head light and throbbing, filled my chest with a feathery sensation like hot cotton candy and when I felt something bigger coming I let it all go.

It was the first time I laughed since the bombing. I snorted and hacked up a jelly-thick blood clot from my sinuses. Brady sprang to the doorway to flag down a nurse as I coughed into a handful of tissue. I blotted pinkish tears leaking from my wound, wiped the liver-colored wad off my lips and chin and waved for Brady to stand down.

"Brady," I said. "I'm fine, come on back. We're not done discussing this."

My perpetual headache flared beyond its baseline level of steady torture. I was exhausted, crying blood like a popeyed Catholic miracle, scheming to devise another Jedi mind-trick that might rewire Brady's will and convince him not to leave Five Ways.

Brady stood in the doorway. Sighed and looked up at the ceiling.

"I'm not Bowie," he said. "I can be replaced. You saw how quickly we lined up new bass players and they weren't lured by money. There's a waiting list to fill Kev's spot, did you know that? Kim Deal. Robert Trujillo, fucking Flea? The bombing turned this tour into some kind of symbol, it's like a popular movement for creative free speech and suddenly we're hot again. Bigger than before, even at our peak. Mike's booked us on Good Morning Britain, Saturday Night Live, Graham Norton, Jools Holland. We'll be playing dates through the new year and the boys are badgering me to pen a Christmas number one. I was only tired before but now I'm truly sick of it Margaret. Sick to fucking death so why can't you understand?"

He sat beside me. Reached over the bedrail and carefully gathered my hand.

"My wife was very nearly murdered in an act of terrorism," Brady said. "If I dropped out to care for you I'm sure the fans would forgive me."

He smoothed the hair on my blind side. I startled under his touch.

Fifteen days had passed since our cursed tour departed France, oozed under the Channel like sewage and bubbled up in Norwich without a bass player. Before our driver could cut the engine Brady dashed from the coach to gather the band and welcome John Hassall, Kev's temporary replacement.

John was a quiet veteran of brutal battles waged onstage between Carl Barât and Pete Doherty. His resumé of traumatic exposure to that genius Gemini-Pisces timebomb at the heart of The Libertines meant John would find the task of filling in for Kev about as challenging as drawing a warm bath.

I got my access pass from Brady's assistant and left Earlham Park in an Uber to anonymously explore Norwich by night. Picked up The Sun, a pack of cigarettes, The Mirror and The Daily Mail. Read the latest coverage of Kev's death and my wedding over a disgusting basket of oily fish and chips and texted a single question mark to Dayglo Dave.

I walked for blocks to shake the road from my bones and when I looked up I was blissfully lost in a curved canyon of identical two-story homes. The repeating pattern of brick chimneys and duplex roofs cut a houndstooth hem from the deep blue fabric of night.

I checked my phone, eager to find some sign that Dave was open for business. He forewarned me operations in Great Britain wouldn't go live until he retrieved his stash and established a secure line of communication with a new burner phone.

I sent a smiley face to Dave and watched the screen. Waited just long enough to go from feeling jonesy and impatient to sad and desperate. Absolutely tumbleweed lonely.

My breaths came short and shallow as a rising dread crowded my lungs and my stomach bucked. I staggered into a low brick wall, pitched forward and vomited chunks of breaded cod and nibbled chips all over some innocent oleander and chrysanthemums. Squinting through watery eyes I crossed the street, sat on the curb and calmed my troubled gut with a smoke until my Uber arrived.

I returned to the coach with a cold six-pack and a take-out taco honeymoon dinner. Brady was bent over at the waist, hyperventilating on the couch in the lounge. I lifted his chest off his knees and rubbed circles between his shoulders until his breathing slowed and his words made sense. He told me he wanted to quit the band.

I opened two beers and sat back with mine while Brady's got warm and he explained in gloomy detail how much his ass was hurting from laying golden eggs. Then I went to work on his beer as he sobbed through a list of all the ways his lucrative music career had soured into a curse that left him creatively dissatisfied, uncomfortably comfortable.

Poor fucking baby.

I fetched a tissue for his tears. Found an empty pizza box and flipped it over in my lap. Picked up a scarlet Sharpie and walked my skinhead newlywed husband through a greasy worksheet of assets, liabilities and equity. I found some cost-of-living forecasts online, converted the American dollar to pounds sterling and projected eighteen years of child support that would commence once the cells Brady left inside his partner were done dividing, started breathing and needing things like new shoes and tuition.

Brady sniffled quietly over the bottom line of my financial intervention.

"That's without adjusting for inflation," I said.

He flinched when I pressed my palm against his cheek with the setting of my wedding ring aimed inward. I wanted to remind him who the fuck I was. Reinforce the fact that we were in this together.

"I know you're hurting without Kev," I said. "But this is business. Can you get your shit together and do business with me?"

Brady blew his nose and nodded. He folded the tissue to a blunt point and swabbed each nostril in turn, a repulsive habit that made me think of that gross kid in grade school, the one who threw up on every field trip and was always sick with something.

I made Brady wash his hands and took him to bed to positively reinforce his stiff-upper-lip British behavior. It was the first time we were intimate as man and wife and it was awkward. Mechanical and frustrating, like moving furniture around tight corners and up steep stairs with a partner who insists on turning to his left instead of your left. We stopped without speaking and separated in the darkness.

In the morning I feigned sleep as he dressed for a press event. I hurried to the window and watched Brady walk away like a cartoon character shadowed by a raincloud on a sunny day, hands in his pockets, back slack under stooped shoulders.

Manipulating him to finish the tour was the right move. Citizen Samurai recovered some of its online following once Brady put a ring on it and promoted me from homewrecking road-fuck to the real thing. Unsold tickets disappeared overnight thanks to the media storm we kicked up in France, and Melanie was fielding press inquiries around the clock.

I would do anything to delay midnight's arrival. Postpone the inevitable moment when the wheels would wobble off my Cinderella coach to leave me in the street as fortune found me: barefoot, dressed in last year's rags, working nights and straddling a motherfucking pumpkin.

The only part that stung was the sight of Brady looking like someone shot his dog and made him watch. I wasn't conflicted about breaking him in, but I never wanted to see him broken.

Now he sat stiffly at my hospital bedside, biding his time behind a bored smirk as I rambled and stuttered, halting when my clumsy thoughts reached a cliff and the next word wouldn't come.

The bombing somehow hardened his wet-spaghetti spine into a piece of steel pipe and I was the broken one, rendered a miserable wreck with foul body odor, heavy ladyfunk, bad breath and greasy hair.

Pharmaceutically hobbled, my mind was a dull instrument incapable of persuasion. Working a subtle angle against Brady was like trying to pick a lock with a soft stick of butter.

Brady dragged his chair around the foot of the bed to my sighted side. He muted the television, sat with clasped hands and waited until I met his eyes with mine.

A prickly veil of irritation settled over my skin as Brady cleared his throat and issued a stale arrangement of facts he had planned and canned to serve up on that very occasion.

"Five Ways," he said, "is not a warm and fuzzy brotherhood. It's a corporation and I'll have a piece of the pie no matter who stands on that stage. John's spoken to Pete Doherty about taking my place after Glastonbury. Our streaming sales are breaking some of Taylor Swift's records and I've used the advance from my publishing deal to establish a trust for Suzannah and the baby."

He huddled closer in his chair. Sore and swollen in its socket, the remains of my gouged eye turned like a worm in rotten fruit, faithfully tracking the path of my good eye as I watched Brady reach inside his jacket pocket.

"I can retire from performing," he said. "Get you specialized care without humiliating myself on a reality show baking pies. Eating bugs in the fucking jungle, none of that."

He held up his phone.

"And I've found a home for us. Margaret. Look at it."

I strained to focus as he swiped through pictures of a country manor house. Green fields, dry-stone walls. A pond bristling with ragged robin and reedmace. A remodeled stable with skylights set between hand-hewn rafters.

Son of a bitch. I was looking at Brady's rabbit ranch. An elaborate dimwit dream he described one night while we were talking deep and real after a show in Prague. He imagined a rustic rural property with room for free-range chickens, a vegetable garden and a separate structure suitable for use as a recording studio. Brady was eager to embrace his inner Eno, produce new talent on his own label and leave his boy-band days behind.

How the fuck did this happen? The explosion that left me horribly disfigured and unable to walk to the bathroom without assistance somehow boosted Brady's career with booming back-catalog sales and a publishing deal.

The offers Melanie forwarded to me were not star-caliber queries but sideshow scraps. Invitations to melt down under the supervision of a daytime talk-show host and a live studio audience. Pity pieces for Parade or People Magazine where I'd reveal how yoga and journaling helped me find myself and move forward. Uplifting fluff filled with photos of Brady and I preparing a meal in a sitcom-clean kitchen, grinning like idiots and walking hand-in-hand along the water's edge at sunset.

My most profound revelations would appear in breakout quotations on each page. Smug bits of wisdom like tidy haiku about the alchemy of silver linings. Tragedy plus love over time.

This painful journey

has shown me I am stronger

than I ever knew.

Had I been blinded in both eyes they might have knighted Brady. If I'd been killed? Perhaps they would have made him king.

"I'll hire a visiting physio team to help with your balance," he said. "Get you back on your feet, get you playing again. The master bedroom has-"

I snatched Brady's phone and flung it into the hall. Unmuted the television and glowered as the spinning Sky