Expiration Day (24 page)

“Hi, nice to see you, Tania.”

I shook his hand and returned his smile.

“Hello, Mike.”

He caught the nervousness in my voice.

“Don't worry, Tania. Just do your best. We've got half an hour to run through what we can, before the punters come in. It may not feel like a long time, but Amanda spoke very highly of you. Still, I promise you we're not expecting miracles.”

“How is Amanda?” I'd not heard from her since she'd asked me to do the gig for her.

“Still in hospital and still rough, I hear. But they're looking after her there. She'll be okay soon enough. Anyway, would you like a drink, or do you want to get set up first?”

I just wanted to get going, and said so. They'd set up Amanda's gear for me, because it was miles better than my rig. Rig! I had the church amp and a cheap chorus pedal. That was my “rig.” Plus my lovely Warwick Corvette, which I had brought with me. Anyway, I plugged it in, and it sounded okay. So I fiddled a bit, and got something that sounded three-quarters decent.

Mike called us to order and gave us the set list. It was all stuff I'd heard them play before, like “Cuts” and “Ace.”

“Nothing new, or fancy, guys. Make it easy for Tania to find the groove. It doesn't have to be great. It just has to be good enough. Remember that, Tania. Good enough. We start with ‘Cuts'—are you okay with that?”

I nodded, though “Cuts” was dead tricky. I ran through it in my head. Two snare beats, then in. Everybody in and full on. I had to knit my melody with the guitarist's, against a fast backbeat that left no room for mistakes.

I knew how tight it was, because I'd practiced against the recording I had, and it was sort-of okay. But when I'd asked John to help me do the thing in real time, over the TeraNet, something had defeated us. Maybe it was just the delays—John calls it the latency problem.

Anyway, Mike called us to tune up, and then said, “Like I said, Tania, the first one's ‘Cuts.' Are you okay with that, or would you rather start on one of the easier ones?”

I wanted to start with one of the easier ones, but pride spoke up without checking with common sense.

“Let's do ‘Cuts' first. If I can't even get close, it's best you find out early.”

And then it was snare, snare, and in, with the most godawful bum note and lurch 'cause my fingers weren't stretched or ready and I was a sixteenth note late and a second fluff and what-was-that and
there
and …

We were rockin'.

It was like riding a bike. You push off, and you wobble a bit, and you crunch through the gears, but suddenly you're riding, and you're part of the machine, and you can feel everything working together.

My hands knew what to do. My brain didn't need to think or worry. It just happened.

I didn't dare look at Mike, or Gary or Gus. I had to keep looking at the fret board, to know where I was, but that was fine. It was no way as effortless as Amanda had made it look, but the song was moving, and it was a living thing.

It was beautiful.

And then, too soon, the moment where you have to pull in to the curb, bring the bike to a halt, and dismount.

What was the cue? Four bars after Mike stops singing, something happens. Argh, it's me, playing a variation of the melody an octave up. Count one bar, two, three, four—go! And hold for the crash … and stop.

Yes!

We'd got there, and it wasn't too “just about.” There was a smattering of applause and I looked up. Gary was giving me the diver's okay sign, and beaming from beneath his dreadlocks. Gus and Mike were nodding and clapping. And over at one of the tables was Siân, together with John and Kieran, who'd come in sometime during the first song, all whooping their congratulations.

“Thanks, guys,” I called to them, “but save it for when I get the intro right.” And to the band, “Sorry for lousing up the intro.”

And Mike called, “Once more through the intro, then, for Tania?”

That was better, and we moved on through the set, or at least enough of the set to feel comfortable.

Then we had to stop. Antonio had given us the sign that he wanted to open the doors for his customers. Antonio was actually Welsh, I discovered, because he came over to me as I was wiping down my bass, and offered me a glass of orange juice.

“You did really well, love”—his Valleys lilt was unmistakable—“but you need to relax a little bit more.”

“Thanks, I'll try. If you don't mind me saying, you don't sound like an Antonio.”

He laughed, and his eyes crinkled as he explained.

“My great grand-da' was Italian, love, and he fought at Alamein. He was captured, though, and taken back to Wales as a POW. After the Italians surrendered, he was given work on the land, and he met a local girl and married her, see, and here I am now, a true son of the Valleys running an Italian dive in the middle of London.”

He heard a sound, evidently, because he turned and called, “Sorry, customers at the door.”

I joined my friends at their table.

“Thanks for coming, guys.”

“Well,” said John, “if we can't get a gig here in our own right, at least we can support our very own Tania Deeley, making her debut as a one-night Stand.”

We all groaned at his atrocious pun and our conversation moved on to other things. Around us, Antonio's started to fill up, with the regular fans of Mike Clip and his band. I began to feel butterflies in a way I never had before. I looked across to see if I could catch the eye of Mike. Sure enough he saw my anxious glance, and smiled reassuringly. Gary saw me, too, and came over.

“Hi, Tania, is this your regular band?”

So I introduced the band, and Gary quizzed us about the kind of music we played, and how we'd got started, and stuff like that, which distracted me from my worries a bit. And he said some complimentary things about my bass playing, which made the butterflies come right back.

Butterflies, Mister Zog? It's like butterflies in your tummy. It's not really butterflies, of course, but there's a physical feeling of something odd and unsettled, that's like I imagine real butterflies would feel.

And then there was no avoiding it, a real feeling of dread that filled my whole being. I rushed off, heading for the toilets, sure that disaster would strike. Dizzy, feeling strange, I went into a cubicle, not knowing what was happening or what I would do, and suddenly found myself staring at the toilet bowl, with no idea what would happen next.

Did I throw up now? Could I throw up? Or did I sit down and let my bowels empty? And if so, how was that going to help?

I heard someone come in.

“Are you in there, Tania?”

It was Siân.

“Uh, yes. I'm in the loo.”

“Are you all right? You just ran out so quickly, we wondered if something might be wrong.”

“I'm feeling a bit strange.”

“Strange?”

“Butterflies. Really bad butterflies.”

“Do you want to throw up?”

“Yes. No. I don't know.”

“Do you need the toilet, then?”

“I don't know what I need. I don't think I'm designed for this.”

“Well, if you're not going to use the loo, can you come out?”

“I'm not sure.”

I began to hear voices, calling. One of them was John's.

“John!”

“What is it? Are you all right?”

“Ish. Can you come here?”

“It's the ladies'.”

“It's all right. There's only Siân here.”

Door bangings.

“Okay, Tania, I'm here. Can you come out?”

I did a quick butterfly assessment.

“No.”

“How can I help?”

Good question. I could hear the voices outside. Gary and Mike were there, too, asking if I was all right. But I still felt scared. I needed to feel safe. The cubicle was safe. Outside was not.…

“John, can you hold my hand?”

“Can you open the door?”

“No. Put your hand under the door.”

I've got to give John credit, he didn't argue, but knelt down on the smelly floor of the ladies'. A moment later his hand appeared, and I seized it, eagerly, ignoring the “Ow!” from the other side. The butterflies started to fade, and after a minute, I reached up with my other hand, and fumbled with the latch. The door swung open, and I scrabbled about in the awkward space to ease myself round it.

John pulled me gently into the space under his arm, and the last of the butterflies faded. He must have felt me relax, because he asked, “Can you do it now, Raven?”

“Can do, Ginger Mop.”

 

 

Second song. “Ace.” I'm in the groove. It's their—our—slow song, the one that works deep down in the unconscious, shivery parts of the brain. If it was like that to listen to, it is doubly so as I stand here and coax the first glissando notes from the fret-board, to blend with Mike's ethereal vocal phrasing. I remember thinking the first time I heard it, how it was a mountain journey, draining, yet fulfilling. I find each note outside of time, reach for it, and bring it into being. I hold it, modulate it, let it grow and diminish, catch it on the edge of extinction, and sustain it a final moment. Gone! But the next is already there and I'm transforming it into audible sparks of molten bronze.

Time starts and stops in curious fashion. I seem to have far too much time to find each note, yet now we're on the fourth song, racing through the set. For a moment I can look out into the audience, where I see John, alone in space and time, yellow stage lights casting impossibly deep, coal-black shadows about his face.

Aiee! This is so intense. It is birth, it is death, it is my life squeezed into a point of time, that weaves in and out of the here and now and opens a gate into what might be, in some other universe, some other when.

It is done. Twelve songs. Our tale is told, the journey ended. My precious Warwick Corvette is once more a simple plank of wood. And I am plain Tania Deeley, R, late of Mike Clip and the Stands. Around me is a seedy little club, run by a Welshman of Italian blood, where the food is prepacked and greasy and the drinks are marked up and watered down. And somewhere outside there is a gray English day half done. London buses and fast-food stores. Car horns and hawkers.

My little plank needs wiping down, and so do I for I'm drenched with sweat from the heat of the lights. A bath would feel really good right now, but I'm not going to get one. I've a bass to clean and put away, and I've got to help Mike and Co. break down the kit and load it onto their van, and I've got to find Siân and get back home.

Anyway, thank you, John. I didn't know how much I needed you.

Thursday, January 1, 2054

New Year's Day.

Christmas came and went—not a lot of fun because we have mock exams in a week, and I spent a lot of time revising. I really can't get on with maths, at least, not the stuff they're giving us to do now. I was okay with algebra, and trigonometry, but we're moving off into calculus and stuff that I can't see the point of. I mean, measuring the gradient of a line—why is that so important?

I happened to mention it to John, and he tried to explain, but it didn't help.

“You should talk to Kieran,” he suggested.

I didn't realize, but Kieran's an absolute whiz at maths. A dead cert for Cambridge already, apparently. But I don't think I'll call him. He's nice enough, but I wouldn't want to be calling him, in case Siân got the wrong idea.

It's amazing how little you can know about someone—I mean it was months before I found out that Kieran was Kieran Roberts. I knew his favorite drummers, of course, and he'd introduced me to some great bands from the past. I knew that when he got absorbed in music, his stammer faded. But the maths was a revelation, and I wondered how somebody so academically brilliant had ended up pairing off with someone like Siân.

Don't get me wrong—Siân is my best friend, leaving aside John—but she is not academic. I've got to know Siân really well, and she has some good people skills and fantastic intuition. But nothing that you could capture in an exam.

Anyway, maths is a bit of a problem, and the sciences, too. But my languages are okay—I've stuck with Latin and French—and I love English, history, and ethics. My IT skills aren't bad, either, with the stimulus of needing to tread the TeraNet without leaving a trail, and having John to teach me.

The band's gone into hibernation, a bit, which is a shame, but we've not found anywhere to practice, courtesy of Ted's whispering campaign. There's only so far you can go rehearsing over the TeraNet. That's the latency problem that John talks about. I start to understand it better now. It's to do with the speed of light, which you'd think would be fast enough, but apparently in music and video there's a lot of bits of information that have to go from A to B and back to A again really quickly. And there are all sorts of conversions and bufferings that have to take place along the way, and it's there that the speed of light really hurts you, because the speed of light affects how quickly you can switch the bits onto the right path. You can make the switches smaller, which makes them faster and lower power, but, as you go smaller, quantum effects start to interfere. Anyway, Mister Zog, you probably know all that stuff because you're a star traveler, and your physicists have found some sort of back door around light speed and quantum effects, and you're probably laughing at us poor earthlings. Gently, I hope.

How did I get there?

So no band, and loads of revision. I've not seen a lot of Siân as a result—and it doesn't help that there's a break in the rehearsals for
Merchant,
until after the exams. Somewhere in all the busyness of the autumn term we marked the first anniversary of Mum's death, which was very painful, and Christmas itself, which wasn't too bad, as it was our second Christmas without Mum.