Row K

Marek brought my guitar out of the wings at ten past four and walked it past me, to Ezra, because I’d told him to at breakfast, and he held it the whole way across the deck the way you’d carry a thing that wasn’t yours to drop.

Birmingham holds thirteen thousand. It’s the room the March clip came from, the four million in a week, and at soundcheck it’s a grey plain with the barrier across it and the seats going up into the dark on three sides. The loading door at the back of the floor was up, all the way, because the local crew were bringing in the last of the cases, and the daylight came in through it and lay across the concrete in a long pale strip, nearly to the barrier. I’d never seen daylight on the floor of an arena. I’d been in a hundred of them. You only ever see them at night.

Bel was up in the truss with a work light. Jonesy was at the desk in the middle of the plain. Dot had the fiddle up and was checking the top string, Femi was at the keys, Lenny was on the riser turning a stick over his knuckles, and Fitz was in the wings with the clipboard, and nobody had been told anything except Marek.

Ezra took the plywood-top from him and put the strap over his head. He’s taller than me. It sat high on him, and wrong, and he didn’t adjust it. He put his left hand on the neck and felt the two lied-to strings without looking, the way I do, and I watched him find them, and then he stepped up to his own mic, three and a half feet from mine, on his own mark.

“Jonesy,” he said. “I’m going to play one through. You don’t need to do anything with it.”

“Right you are,” said Jonesy, who’d stopped being surprised in Belfast.

He didn’t look at me. He looked at the strip of daylight on the floor. Then he played the four bars.

· · ·Scene break

I knew them. I’d had them since a harbour wall in Anglesey, with a real lamp on a timer at the end of it. Slow, and plain, in a key I’d never heard him use, and now I knew why I’d never heard him use it: it was mine. It was the key my tuning falls into when you stop fighting it. It was the shape my hands make on that guitar when I’m not thinking, and he’d found it in four bars seven years ago in a room over a pub and kept it, and built a road in it with a house at the end.

The third bar went where it had gone on the wall. The fourth went to the edge.

He played the fifth.

I’m not going to be clever about it. It was one chord, and it was the plain one, the one that sits right under the line and says the thing the line is walking round, and it was the same chord he’d played under my chorus in the Feathers’ kitchen when I was twenty-two. He’d kept that too. He’d put it at the end of a road, and he’d walked me up to it for four bars, and then he opened his mouth and sang, and it was his voice, not the harmony voice, not a third below and a fraction late. It was out in front, on the beat, on its own.

You count the doors in every room you’re in.

It was about me. It didn’t go the long way round; it went straight across. There was a bus in it doing sixty with the lights off, and a harbour wall, and a woman who counts the planes coming down over a bay so she won’t have to look at the man in the next chair, and none of it named anything a stranger could hold up and read out, and all of it named me. There was no bridge. There was no dark in it anywhere, no three seconds, no lamps, no half a foot. There was no chorus either, and I understood halfway through the second verse that that was on purpose. There was no line in it a room could take off him and sing back. He’d written a song nobody else could have.

Then the fifth bar came round again, at the end, and he sang the line that went on it.

It’s always been you, and it’s broad day.

He’d said it to me on a roof in Dublin, the first half, with his hands empty. He’d told me then that the fifth bar was the same thing in a key. It was. I’d heard him say it and I’d let it stand, and now I’d heard him play it, and you can’t let a thing stand when it’s been said twice.

He stopped with his hand flat on the strings, the way he’d stopped on the wall. Only this time there was nothing after it. It was finished.

· · ·Scene break

Nobody was working.

That’s what I saw when I could see again. The local crew man with the last case had stopped it halfway down the ramp from the loading door and was standing with both hands on the handle, in the daylight. Bel had the work light pointed at nothing. Jonesy had his hands off the desk, both of them, flat on his knees, the way Ezra sits when there’s no guitar. A woman from catering had come through the side door with a tray of cups for the riggers and stopped by the barrier, and the tray was level, and she was holding it level, and she wasn’t moving. Lenny’s stick had stopped on his knuckle. Femi had taken his hands off the keys and put them in his lap. Dot had lowered the fiddle, all the way, to her hip, which she doesn’t do at soundcheck, ever, in case she has to come in.

I counted phones. There were none. Nobody in that room had lifted one. Twenty-odd people in a building that holds thirteen thousand, in the daylight, and not one of them had thought to film it, because it wasn’t that sort of thing, and they’d all known.

It was the Ropewalk. It was seven people and a fire, again, in the biggest room of the week.

Fitz broke it. Somebody had to, and it’s always her.

“Right,” she said, from the wings, in the cable voice. “Doors at half six. Back to it, please, all of you.”

And everybody moved. The case came down the ramp. The tray went on to the riggers. Bel’s light found the truss. Lenny’s stick went round his knuckles. That’s what a good crew does with a thing like that: it puts it down where it was and gets on with the load-in, so the thing can stay where it happened.

Jonesy’s voice came in the wedges, on talkback, quiet.

“I had the desk running. Multitrack, all of it. Do you want it kept?”

Ezra looked at me then. For the first time since he’d put the strap on.

“Ask Sylvie,” he said. “It’s hers.”

I’ve never said anything into a microphone as fast as that.

“Wipe it.”

“Wiping,” said Jonesy, and did, and I heard the click through the wedges.

Ezra took the strap off over his head and held the guitar out to me, neck first, the way he’d held it out in a room over a pub in Leeds seven years ago, with a nod. I took it. It was warm where he’d had it. That was the second time in his life he’d played it, and the first time anyone had heard him play it who knew what it was.

· · ·Scene break

We went up into the seats. Block eleven, row K, halfway up and facing the stage square on, which is roughly where the March clip was filmed from, and I didn’t say so, and I didn’t have to. From up there you could see Bel’s two marks on the deck, four feet apart, grey tape on black, and our two mic stands on them, and nothing between.

He sat one seat along from me. Not next to me. One seat, with the fold-down seat between us flipped up.

“Don’t play it live,” I said.

He didn’t say anything.

“Not tonight. Not in Leeds. Not at Lanternfield. Don’t ask Hal to put it in. Don’t put it at the end of a Tuesday when they’re shouting for something and there’s no encore and you’ve got a guitar on. Don’t play it to a room.”

“It’s not in the set,” he said. “She’s seen to that.” He didn’t add the rest. He didn’t need to; I’d seen to it too, in her office, in two words.

“I’m asking you anyway.”

He looked down at the two marks for the length of a whole answer. Then he said, “Why?” and waited, and I understood that he was going to sit in row K of an empty arena for as long as it took, and that this time I was going to have to fill all of it.

So I did. All of it. I’d like it kept in the order I said it, because I’ve never said so much to anyone at once and I’m not likely to again.

“Because it’s the best thing anybody’s ever made about me,” I said. “And that’s the reason. That’s the whole reason, and it’s not the one I gave her. If you play it to a room, it’s a page. It’s in a frame by a lift with a brass plate on it. It’s got my name on it and somebody else’s word underneath, and I’ll stand at a signing in Leeds and a girl of nineteen will have the fifth bar on her arm in ink, and she’ll be kind about it.”

He didn’t move.

“And I said she’s right. She is. Eleven wages is true, and the calendar’s true, and I counted them, and I’d count them again. But you were right on the towpath. It’s not why. I’ve been saying it’s for them since Newcastle and it’s not for them. Dot as good as told me on a bus in Cardiff, and I heard it. It’s for me.” My sentences had gone short. I let them, and kept going. “You said in Manchester I was protecting the exit. You were right about the exit. You were wrong about which door. It’s not a door away from you. I’ve never once wanted a door away from you. It’s a door away from them. From the window. From being a thing that’s known. When a thing of mine gets known it stops being mine, and I know that, I’ve got four hundred signatures to prove it, and you’re the only thing I’ve got left that nobody’s read.”

“I’m not a thing.”

“I know. That’s worse.” I looked at the marks. “And there’s the other bit, and it’s the bit I’d leave out, so I’m saying it first. Stories about two people end. I’ve said that like it’s about the band. It’s about us. If it’s said, in the light, in front of twelve thousand, and then one day it ends, I still have to sing ‘Lamplight’ to them. Every night. On a record they can buy. I’ve watched what a room does with a thing that’s over. It sings it anyway. It sings it louder.”

That was where it stopped. There was nothing after it, and I didn’t reach for anything. It had taken everything I had that wasn’t bolted to row K.

· · ·Scene break

He was quiet for a long time. Down on the floor the local crew had closed the loading door, and the daylight had gone off the concrete, and it was the work lights now, and the arena looked the way it always looks.

“Right,” he said. “Then here’s mine, and it’s all of it, and some of it’s not good.”

He put his hands on his knees.

“I wrote it so you couldn’t let it stand. I’ve said things in tunes for seven years and you’ve let every one of them stand, and nodded, and sung to my ear. I wanted one you’d have to answer. That’s the good bit.” He looked at the marks. “Here’s the bit that’s not. I want you to say it where you can’t take it back. In front of people. That’s what I’ve wanted since Newcastle and I’ve called it the truth, and it is the truth, but it’s not only the truth. I read my name off a poster once. I found out from a listing. And if you say it, out loud, to a room, and then one day you go, I’ll not find out from a listing. It’ll be on the record who said what. It’ll have been you.” He breathed out through his nose, and it wasn’t a laugh. “So I want the risk on you. Because I’ve had it on me once and I didn’t like it. That’s not brave, Sylv. It’s the opposite. I’ve known it for a while. I’ve not said it because it’s the kind of thing you’d hear, and you’d be right.”

I sat with that. I’d known some of it. I hadn’t known he knew.

“That’s a cage,” I said.

“It’s a poster with my name missing off it. I know what it is.” He turned in the seat, all the way, to face me across the flipped-up seat between us. “I’ll not play it tonight, or in Leeds. You’ve asked, and it’s yours; I said so to Jonesy. I’m not promising you Lanternfield, because I’d be lying, and I don’t lie to you. And I’m not going to stop wanting it said. I’d like you to know that, so you’ve not got to wonder.”

“And I’m not going to start.”

“No,” he said. “I know.”

We sat there. We’d said all of it, the good and the not, in an empty building with the work lights on, sober, at five in the afternoon, with nobody filming and nothing to cover. Every song I’d ever written the long way round had told me that if you once said the whole of it out loud, the thing would be fixed.

It wasn’t. Nothing either of us said was wrong. That was the trouble. I wanted it kept, and he wanted it said, and both were true, and you can’t sing a harmony to two tunes at once.

“We both know now,” he said.

“That was meant to help.”

“It was,” said Ezra, and nearly laughed, and didn’t. “That was meant to help.”

· · ·Scene break

Birmingham was thirteen thousand and night sixty-seven, and the room had the March clip in its phones and the Dublin one and the sofa, and when the two amber specials came up and everything else in the building went out, I looked at him, because I’d said I would and I say the sentences I say.

He sang the second line to me, a third below and a fraction late, like a man agreeing. He wasn’t agreeing. I knew that now and so did he, and thirteen thousand people didn’t, and the last line came back on the beat, and kind, and I heard it for the first time as what it was, which was a room singing that I’d never say it, and being happy for me.

In the dark neither of us took the step. Fitz’s torch found us four feet apart, on our marks, and she said, “Cable,” and nothing else.

· · ·Scene break

Bus call was one. Leeds was Monday, after a day off, and the arena there is two miles from the Feathers.

I lay in the bunk with the plywood-top in its case on the floor of the aisle beside me, which Fitz doesn’t allow, and she’d seen it and let it go. Across the aisle, his curtain was shut. It was the first time since Newcastle it had been shut the whole way.

I didn’t count anything. I thought about Leeds.

I’d sing it the way I’d written it. I decided that before we reached the motorway. I’d sing the bridge to the ear, the point past his left ear that had never once looked back, perfectly, the way I’d sung it for three years before Newcastle, and I’d look at nobody. Not to punish him. I’d like that clear. Because it was the song, and the song was theirs, and I’d said all of it out loud and it hadn’t made any of it mine.

I didn’t tell him. I didn’t tell anyone. It was the first thing since Cardiff I’d decided without telling a soul, and I noticed that, lying there in the blue light, and I did it anyway.