Five Chairs

Dot tuned up on the bus at ten past six on Thursday, in the car park behind the Cardiff arena, and I heard her from the bunks and knew what it meant before I’d got my boots on.

She’d said in Dublin that I’d know when she was ready because I’d hear her tuning first, and I’ve known Dot four years, and she doesn’t tune on a bus. She tunes on the stage, at the mark, with her back foot planted, and she does it in the same order every night, and I lay in the bunk with the blue light on the floor and listened to her do it in the front lounge in the wrong order, the top string first, as if she’d wanted it to be heard.

Fitz put her head through the curtain. “Band on the bus. Crew off. Twenty minutes.” She looked at the four bunks with people in them. “I don’t care what’s said. I care that I know where five of you are for twenty minutes, because at half past I’m walking you to the wings and I’d like to walk five.”

She went. Marek went past her with a case, and Bel, and Jonesy with a coffee, and then the door hissed, and behind the front curtain Keith turned the radio off, which he has never done in four years, and the bus was quiet the way a bus is only ever quiet when it’s parked and there’s a thing about to be said on it.

· · ·Scene break

The front lounge of the bus has a bench down each side that seats two, and a table between them, and a folding chair Fitz keeps for herself, and five of us sat in it.

Dot on the left bench with the fiddle up and the bow going, checking each string against the one below and looking at nobody. Lenny opposite her with his hands flat on the table and no can, which I noted. Femi on Fitz’s folding chair by the curtain with his phone face down on his knee. Ezra on the end of Dot’s bench with his hands on his knees and nothing in them. And me on the end of Lenny’s, across the table from him, with the curtain to the bunks at my back, which I’d chosen, because it’s an exit.

Dot finished the tuning. She put the bow down across her knee and held the fiddle by the neck, and she looked at me over the bridge of it, and she’d been carrying the sentence since Newcastle at least and she put it down on the table between the five of us as if it weighed nothing.

“I’ve watched you two not look at each other for four years,” she said. “I can tell the difference.”

Nobody laughed. It wasn’t a joke. It was Dot, who taught music to fourteen-year-olds in Aberdeen and left it for this and has a wife and a mortgage in the same city, telling me the thing she’d known, and how long, in one sentence with no numbers in it.

“Since when,” I said.

“Since Newcastle I’ve known. Before that I’d a suspicion, and a suspicion’s not knowing. I was a teacher. I know the difference between a kid who’s done the reading and a kid who’s guessing. I’ve been guessing since the first week of this tour, and I’ve known since I walked past you in a corridor in Newcastle and you couldn’t look at me, and I’d like it understood I said nothing. For sixteen days. I said nothing to my wife, who asked. That’s the reading I’ve done.”

“Dot—“

“I’m not finished. I’ll tell you when I am. I’ll put the fiddle down.” She hadn’t. “There’s five chairs on that stage every night, Sylv. Five. Bel lights two. That’s the plot and it’s a good plot and I’ve never once minded it. I’ve minded, this fortnight, sitting on a bus reading about my own band on a phone. That’s what I’ve minded. Not the corridor. I couldn’t care less about the corridor. Fitz is right about corridors.”

She put the fiddle down.

· · ·Scene break

Lenny had his hands flat on the table and he’d waited for the fiddle to go down, because even Lenny knows what it means when Dot’s playing, and then he said it, and it was the sentence I’d seen the shape of in London, and it was worse for having waited two days.

“So the two of you decide,” he said, “and the rest of us find out from a blog.”

“Len.”

“No. I’m going to say it, because I’ve been on this bus since the second record and I’ve told you all twice about October and got nothing, and I’ll take nothing, that’s fine, I’m the drummer, but I found out from Backline that the singer and the guitarist are a thing, and I found out from a woman on a sofa that we’re not saying so, and I’d have liked to hear one of those on a bus.” He wasn’t drunk. It was ten past six and he was sober and it was the worst thing he’d said in four years and he’d said it in a level voice, like Dot. “I’m going in October. I’m going anyway. I’d have liked to go from a band that told me things.”

“It’s not a thing you tell,” I said, and it was the wrong sentence, and I heard it be wrong as it went out.

“Is it true?”

Ezra didn’t move. He was at the end of the bench with his hands on his knees and he let me go first, in front of the three of them, which is his worst quality and I’d have given anything for him not to have it, for once, on a bus, in Cardiff.

“Yes,” I said.

That was the whole of it. One word, to three people, on a bus with the radio off. I’ve said it in the dark and I’ve said it on a roof and I’ve said it at a door on a quiet floor, and I’d never said it to anyone it wasn’t about, and it came out of my mouth in a level voice and sat on the table with Dot’s bow.

“Since Newcastle,” said Ezra, after me, quiet. “The wings. That’s mine to say, and the rest is hers, and she’ll say it or she won’t.”

Lenny looked at the table for a bit. Then he said, “Right,” which is Femi’s word, and took his hands off it.

· · ·Scene break

Femi hadn’t said anything. Femi says things once, and he’d been waiting, on Fitz’s folding chair with his phone face down, for the moment there’d be room for it, and when Lenny took his hands off the table there was.

“Simi’s coming at half six,” he said. “Her mum’s bringing her. She’s six. She’s got ear defenders with cats on and she’s been practising with them on in the kitchen for a week.” He looked at the phone on his knee and didn’t turn it over. “If anybody points a phone at the wings tonight, I’d like it to be for the song.”

It was my sentence.

I’d said it in Liverpool, in a room with the door shut, to Ezra, on Femi’s behalf: I’d like it to be for the song. I’d said it as the reason for everything. And here was Femi, saying it himself, once, on a bus, and it sounded different in his mouth, because it was his, and I’d had it in mine for a week without asking.

“Say it to Femi,” Ezra had said to me in Manchester, in a living room, with the door shut. I hadn’t. I’d carried Femi’s daughter up a hill for a fortnight, and Dot’s mortgage, and Lenny’s October, and I’d never once turned round to see whether any of them wanted carrying, and they’d been stood beside me the whole way, on the same bus, and I’d left them out of it. That’s what a secret does. I’d thought it was a wall round the band. It was a wall round two people, and the band was on the other side of it, with the crowd, finding out from a phone.

“I’m sorry,” I said. To Femi first. Then to Dot. Then to Lenny, who was surprised to be included, and hid it badly.

“Don’t be sorry,” said Dot. “Be on the bus.”

“I’m on the bus.”

“You’ve not been. You’ve been in a corridor in Belfast.” She picked the bow up off her knee and looked at it. “What happens on the twenty-ninth?”

“I don’t know.”

“Find out before you get there. I’ll be four feet to your right with a mortgage, and I’d like to know what I’m standing next to.” She stood up, with the fiddle, because the twenty minutes were nearly gone and Dot is always the first to know when a thing is done. “Good room,” she said, to the five of us, and it was the first time it had been said since London, and she’d had to be the one, and she knew it.

Fitz put her head through the curtain at half past on the nose. “Five,” she said, and counted us out onto the tarmac by touching each shoulder once.

· · ·Scene break

Cardiff is ten thousand and night sixty-six, and I’ve never played a room with a six-year-old in the wings.

She was there when Fitz walked us down. Simi. Small, in a coat too big for August, with a pair of ear defenders on with cats on them, orange, one either side, and her mother’s hand on her shoulder, standing on the yellow line we don’t cross until we’re told, because Fitz had put her there and told her it was the most important line in the building. She looked at the five of us going past her as if we were a train.

Femi stopped. Femi doesn’t stop on a walk-down. He crouched, and put his hand flat on top of the cats, and said something I didn’t hear, once, and stood up, and walked on, and Fitz touched his shoulder as he passed and touched Simi’s afterwards, and I saw her do it, and I’d like it on the record that Fitz counted a six-year-old.

The show was the show. I’m not going to describe it. I’ll say that the phones came up and the couples marked each other and that at the bridge, when the two amber specials came up and everything else in the building went out, I looked at him, and then, on the second line, while he sang it to me a third under and a fraction late, I looked past him for the first time in three years, past the ear, into the wings, where a small shape stood on a yellow line in the dark with two orange cats on its head and its fists in the air, and I looked back at him for the last line, and it came back on the beat, ten thousand strong, kind, and I didn’t count one phone.

In the dark, Fitz’s torch came on at three and found the wings first. The cats. Then the floor. Then our feet, four feet apart, on the marks. “Cable,” she said, and there was something in it this time, and I think it was the cats.

· · ·Scene break

The living room in Cardiff had a sofa with a six-year-old asleep on one end of it, and then not asleep, because Lenny came in, and Lenny’s not a quiet man.

Simi sat up. She’d taken the ear defenders off and they were round her neck like a collar, and she looked at the room the way she’d looked at the walk-down, as if it were a train, and her eyes went over Lenny, who was loud, and Dot, who had the fiddle, and Ezra, who’d put the red guitar on its stand and sat down with a beer he hadn’t opened, and landed on me.

“You’re the singer,” she said.

“I am.”

“My dad says you’re the singer and Ezra’s the one who agrees.”

Femi, at the end of the sofa, put his one beer down on the floor and looked at the ceiling. Ezra breathed out through his nose, once, and picked up his beer, and didn’t open it.

“That’s about right,” I said.

“You looked at him.”

“I did.”

“For the whole song.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I’ve been asked it two hundred times. On camera, on radio, in French in Berlin, by a man with a bodhrán, by a woman with a voice like a warm hand. And I’ve a way of not answering that starts with a laugh, and I opened my mouth for the laugh, and you cannot laugh at a six-year-old in a coat too big for her who’s asked you a straight question at eleven at night, because she’d know. She’d know before you’d finished. It’s the only audience on earth the laugh doesn’t work on, and I’d never played to it.

“Because I wanted to,” I said.

Simi thought about it, with her whole face.

“That’s a good reason,” she said, and lay back down on the sofa with the cats round her neck, and was asleep before Lenny had got the top off his second can.

“She asks things twice,” said Femi, to nobody, from the end of the sofa. “Her mother’s side.”

· · ·Scene break

Hal was at the Volvo at one with the interior light on, and Simi had gone home in her mother’s car at half eleven, asleep on Femi’s shoulder with the cats in his other hand, and Fitz had counted her out of the building, which is not her job.

“Tomorrow,” Hal said. “Eleven. Annika’s office. The two of you and me. She’s asked for it.” He put his phone in his coat. “I want you to hear what that is. Five years she’s never asked for anything. She’s told, and she’s sent, and she’s arranged, and she’s clapped four times at a soundcheck. She’s never once said, ‘I’d like a meeting.’ She’s said it. I don’t know what it’s for. I’m going to be in the room with my coat on and I’m not going to sit down.”

Fitz counted us on. “Dot. Femi. Sylvie.” A pause. “Lenny, that’s one can, that’s a first.” Marek, Bel, Jonesy, Keith’s on. “Ezra.”

“Here.”

The door hissed. Eight and a driver, doing sixty toward London with the lights off, and Keith’s radio was back on behind the curtain, and Dot above me turned a page, and Femi at the front said goodnight to a photograph that had been taken an hour ago in the wings with two cats in it and a yellow line.

I lay in the bunk with the blue light on the floor. I’d said yes on a bus to three people it wasn’t about, and I’d said why to a child, and neither of them had cost what I’d been told for three years they’d cost, and I lay there and counted the things I’d been holding at the bottom of the hill, and there were fewer than I’d thought, and the ones that were left had a woman’s name on them, and an office, and eleven o’clock.