Ninebark

Ninebark keeps my mother’s hands in a frame on the fifth floor, facing the lift doors, between a platinum disc and a fire extinguisher, and I’d forgotten, because I’d spent five years making a point of it.

It’s a spread from the first album’s booklet, two of the six pages, blown up to the size of a window and put under glass. My handwriting. The crossings-out. Down the right-hand margin, in the blue biro I’d had from the bookshop, the line about her hands in the sink, which I’d put down straight at twenty so I’d know where it was. There’s a small brass plate at the bottom that says LONGFIELD, DIARY PAGES, which they weren’t.

The lift opened on it. Hal got out first, with his coat on, and went to the desk. I got out second and looked at the carpet.

Ezra got out last, and stopped.

He’d walked past that frame a dozen times, for launches and for the one meeting a year where the money is, and he’d never stopped, because I’d never told him what it was. Now I had. He stood in front of it with his hands in his jacket and read the margin, the whole of it, top to bottom, the way he reads a chord chart he’s been handed in a hurry. He didn’t touch the glass. Then he looked at me once, and I looked at the fire extinguisher, and the woman on the desk said, “Eleven o’clock? She’s ready for you.”

· · ·Scene break

Annika’s room had a round table with four chairs and three glasses of water poured, which tells you she knew Hal. The window looked down on a canal with a narrowboat on it that didn’t move the whole time we were there. On the wall behind her were the sleeves of every record Ninebark had put out in ten years, framed, in rows, and ours were in the second row, and I didn’t count the rows.

“I know it’s a day off,” she said. “I won’t keep you.”

Hal stood at the window with his coat on. He’d said in Cardiff he wouldn’t sit down, and he didn’t.

Annika sat. She had the running order on one sheet of paper, printed, and she put it in the middle of the table and turned it round so it faced us.

“Fourteen and ‘Lamplight’,” she said. “The order you’ve played since February. I’ve not changed a song. I’ve changed a note: forty-four seconds. Hal told me.” She looked at me. “Monday was perfect. I said so, and I’ll say it here, because a text isn’t the same. You were perfect.”

“Thank you,” I said, which is what you say.

“And ‘Ask the songs’.” She turned to Ezra, and she was smiling, and it was the real one. “Twelve million, as of this morning. Three words. There are people who’ve never heard a note of ours saying it to each other at bus stops. I couldn’t have written it. Nobody here could.”

“I didn’t write it for you,” said Ezra.

“I know. That’s why it worked.” She put her hands flat on the table either side of the running order. “So I’m going to say one thing about Monday, and then we’ll do the order, and you can go and have your day off. Ezra, you didn’t laugh. That’s fine. Don’t laugh. Don’t do anything at all. Sylvie, you did, and that was fine too.” She looked from him to me and back, the way you look at two ends of a sentence. “I’m not asking you to lie. I’m asking you not to answer. You’ve done it for three years; you’re brilliant at it.”

In Manchester we’d been very good at it. I noticed the promotion. I notice everything; it’s still not a compliment.

· · ·Scene break

Ezra had his hands on his knees. He’d had them there since he sat down, and he took one off and put it on the table, next to the running order, not on it.

“I’d like to add a song,” he said.

Hal didn’t turn round from the window. I watched the back of his coat not turn round.

“To Lanternfield,” said Ezra. “Fifteen and ‘Lamplight’. A new one, before it. Four minutes. It goes on the record or it doesn’t, that’s yours, but it goes in the set.”

“Which one?”

“It’s called ‘Daylight’.”

I hadn’t known it had a name.

Four bars on a harbour wall in Anglesey. A fifth he wouldn’t play to me on the wall, or on a roof in Dublin, because it said something. I’d carried the four bars across the Irish Sea and through Belfast and a gossip site and a plaster sofa, and I’d never once asked what they were called, because I thought I’d be told. And he’d told a label. In an office. With a narrowboat outside.

“I’ve not heard it,” said Annika.

“Nobody has.”

“Is it finished?”

“It will be by Birmingham.”

She looked at him for a while. Then she put her hand up, flat, the way the floor manager had on Monday, the signal for off air.

“Don’t tell me what it’s about,” she said. “I mean that. I’m not being clever. Whatever it’s about, I don’t want to know it in this room, because the day I know it I have to decide what to do with it, and I’d rather not have to.” She put the hand down. “Here’s why no, and it’s not because I haven’t heard it. A live record is the room. That’s all it is. It’s twelve thousand people in a field singing a line they know, and the truck records them doing it, and the people who buy it are buying the night they were there or the night they wish they’d been. A song nobody knows is a song nobody sings. The room goes quiet for four minutes and waits for the one it came for. That’s a studio song. Make it in a studio.”

“It’s not a studio song.”

“Then it’s something else, and I’d say that’s worse.” She said it gently. “The live album is ‘Lamplight’. It was always going to be ‘Lamplight’. The record’s a question, Ezra. It’s two lamps and a dark field and nobody on the sleeve. If the thing you’ve written is what I think it might be, and I’m not asking, then it’s an answer. You can’t put the answer on the same record as the question. Nobody buys a question once it’s been answered.”

He didn’t say anything. He’s the only man I know who can lose an argument by waiting in it.

· · ·Scene break

Annika turned the running order a quarter turn toward Hal, as if he’d been sitting there, and then back.

“There’s one more thing, and I’d like you both to hear it from me, once, in a room, so nobody hears it later from a letter. Hal knows it. He’s known it since you signed.” She kept her voice level, like a woman reading out a train time. “Ninebark owns half the masters of your first two records. That was the deal for paying for the first one, and it was a fair deal, and Hal made it. We hold the option on a third. The board sits in November and decides on a third Longfield record, and the only thing on the table that day will be the live album: the mixes, and the single. If it’s what the bridge is, you make a third record, at this size, with this crew, and I’ll fight for the budget and I’ll get it. If it doesn’t, I can’t. That’s all it is. It isn’t a threat. I’ve never made one. It’s a calendar.”

Nobody moved. The narrowboat didn’t.

I counted. I’d like it on the record that I counted, because it’s what I did, and I’m not going to pretend I did something braver. Eleven wages. Dot’s nineteen years. Femi, asked back. Lenny, till the twenty-ninth and then October. Bel’s two lamps and the truss they hang off. Marek and his strings, Jonesy and his desk, Keith and his radio, Fitz and her count. A bus with twelve bunks and a strip of blue light along the floor. A third record at this size. Twelve thousand a night who’d sing the last line and get it right.

I counted them all, and they came to the same number they always come to, and I said it.

“She’s right.”

Two words, in a label’s office, to the table. Ezra heard them.

I know what Ezra looks like when he hears a thing. I’ve watched him hear a top string go in a pub in Leeds a second before it went, and hear a fizz on Dot’s fiddle from the far side of a stage, and hear the word I’d hidden under a chorus when I was twenty-two. He doesn’t flinch. He goes still, and he looks at the thing, whatever it is, as if he’d like to be sure. He looked at me like that. He had his hand on the table next to the running order, and he didn’t take it away, and he didn’t say anything, and he gave me the whole length of an answer, in case there was one coming after the two words.

There wasn’t.

Hal turned round from the window.

“That’s the first time you’ve told them the calendar, Annika,” he said.

“It’s the first time they’ve needed it.” She looked at me, and I think she meant it kindly, and I think she was right about that as well. “Thank you. I know that cost something. I won’t pretend I know what.”

“Fourteen and ‘Lamplight’,” said Ezra, to the paper, and took his hand off the table.

· · ·Scene break

The canal had a towpath, and the towpath had a bench, and Hal went up to the road to find a taxi, which is what Hal does when two people need a pavement to themselves and he can’t say so.

Ezra didn’t sit on the bench. He stood by the water with his hands in his jacket.

“You said she’s right.”

“She is. About the money.”

“You didn’t say about the money.”

I opened my mouth, and shut it. He’s the only person alive who can hear what I leave out, and I’d left it out, and he’d heard that I had.

“I meant about the money.”

“You meant it the way you mean a chorus. With the word gone.” He wasn’t angry. I’ve still never seen him angry and I’d have known what to do with it. “I’ll tell you what I heard, and then I’ll leave it till Birmingham. I heard you pick. In a room with a label in it and Hal stood up. You counted, and you picked the calendar.”

“I picked eleven wages.”

“You picked the thing that means you don’t have to.” He laughed at himself, through the nose, first. “That’s not fair. I know. I’m keeping count of the ones that aren’t, like you do.”

The narrowboat had a cat on its roof now. It hadn’t had a cat when we went in.

“You told her the name,” I said. “Before me.”

He turned from the water.

“I’ve had four bars,” I said. “On a wall. You wouldn’t give me the fifth, on a wall or on a roof, and you gave her the name, in her office, across a running order. That’s the order you did it in.”

“I gave it a name so it’d be on a list. Things on a list get played.” He looked at me for a bit. “That’s the practical reason. The other one’s that I wanted it said somewhere, out loud, by me, and she was the room I had.” He took one hand out of his jacket and put it back. “You’ll hear it before anyone who matters. Tomorrow. You’ll hear the fifth bar. And then you can tell me she’s right.”

Up on the road, Hal had a taxi with its light on and the door open, and he was standing by it with his coat on, the way he stands by the Volvo, waiting.

· · ·Scene break

Ezra rode back to the hotel in the front, next to the driver, and went straight out again with the parlour guitar on his back, and didn’t say where, and I didn’t ask.

Fitz knew. Fitz always knows. I found her in the lobby at four with the clipboard, and she said, without looking up, “Rehearsal room over a tyre place, two stops north. Paid by the hour till nine. He gave me the address. He’s the only one of you who ever gives me the address.”

At half past eleven, in the hotel car park, with the bus’s engine running and the door open, I did the thing Dot had asked me to do in Cardiff. I found out before we got there, and then I told them.

Front lounge. Four of us. Dot with the fiddle case between her boots. Lenny with no can, again. Femi on Fitz’s folding chair.

“Fourteen and ‘Lamplight’,” I said. “Same order. Nothing new. The live album’s ‘Lamplight’ and it’s out in the spring, and there’s a third record if it sells like the bridge, and there’s not one if it doesn’t. She said it once. She said it’s a calendar.”

“Is that it?” said Lenny.

“Ezra asked to put a new song in. Before ‘Lamplight’. She said no.” I made myself say the rest, because the rest was the part I’d have left out a fortnight ago. “I said she was right. In front of him.”

Dot looked at me over the case. Not the level look. The one she uses when a student has told her the truth and she’s deciding whether to mark it.

“Is she?”

“About the money.”

“Aye,” said Dot. “She usually is. That’s what the money’s for.” She didn’t say anything else, and it was a whole paragraph.

“Did he want it in bad?” said Femi.

“Yes.”

Femi nodded, once. “Right,” he said, and got up to find his bunk, and on his way past he put his hand on my shoulder, once, the way Fitz does in a corridor, and I don’t think he knew he’d done it.

Fitz counted at five to twelve. “Dot. Femi. Sylvie. Lenny, that’s none, you’re frightening me. Marek, Bel, Jonesy. Keith’s on.” She looked up the car park. “Ezra.”

“Here,” said Ezra, coming across the tarmac with the parlour guitar, and she counted him, and the door hissed, and we were eight and a driver, doing sixty toward Birmingham with the lights off.

· · ·Scene break

Bottom left, third from the front. The blue light on the floor. Dot above me not turning a page. Keith behind his curtain agreeing with a man in Stoke about bins.

The curtain across the aisle opened four inches.

“Sylvie.”

“Here.”

“Lend me your guitar,” he said. “Tomorrow. At soundcheck.”

The road came up through the floor. I lay and looked at the underside of Dot’s bunk.

“It’s in your tuning,” he said. “The whole thing. The fifth bar only goes in your tuning. I tried it in six others this afternoon, over a tyre place, and it won’t go. It turns into a different song, and the different song’s a lie. I’ve been playing it on the parlour with two strings lied to, and it’s not the same. It wants your guitar.” A pause with the M40 in it. “I’m asking. I’d rather ask than have it handed me.”

Seven years ago I’d handed it to a man I’d never met without being asked, in a room over a pub in Leeds, and I’ve never known why. This time I was being asked, by the only man I’d ever lent it to, and I knew what I was lending it for, which the first time I hadn’t.

“Yes,” I said.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t do the joke. I heard him lie back, and the curtain stay four inches open, and I lay in the blue light a long time working out whether I’d said yes to the guitar or to the song, and it wouldn’t come out as only one.