The Feathers

The Feathers has a function room now, and on the Monday of Leeds there was a banner across it that said HAPPY 40TH PAULINE in silver letters, and one of the letters had come unstuck and was hanging by a corner over the place where the stage used to be.

I’d walked from the hotel. It’s two miles from the arena to the Feathers and I know every one of them, because for three years before the band I walked them the other way, to the last bus, with a guitar on my back and fifteen minutes’ worth of songs in my head going round. Sunday had been a day off. Keighley is twenty minutes on the train from Leeds and I hadn’t got on it. I’d sat in the hotel with the curtains open and watched the rain do the car park, and on Monday at one I’d put my coat on and gone out without telling anyone where, which is not a thing I do, and Fitz would have something to say about it at bus call.

The pub had a new sign and the same door. The chalkboard outside said QUIZ TUESDAY and, under it, in a different hand, FUNCTION ROOM AVAILABLE, CHRISTENINGS WAKES BIRTHDAYS, which is a whole life in four words if you read it the right way round.

The lad behind the bar was about twenty and didn’t know me. I’d like that on the record, because in a pub two miles from the arena I was playing that night, on a week when my face had been on a sofa at twenty to eight, it’s arithmetic, and it came out in my favour.

“There used to be an open-mic,” I said. “Upstairs. Tuesdays.”

“Before my time.” He was drying a glass that was dry. “It’s quiz now. Upstairs is functions. It’s not set up, there was a do Saturday. You can have a look if you want. Mind the cable on the stairs, the disco’s still plugged in.”

· · ·Scene break

It was a smaller room than I’d kept. That’s what happens; you carry a room for seven years and it grows in the carrying. Three windows onto the street. One door, the one I’d come in by. A new carpet the colour of gravy, round tables pushed to the walls with white cloths still on them, and sixty chairs stacked in fives by the bar hatch, which I counted before I’d decided to.

The stage had been four beer crates with a rug over them in the corner by the radiator. Now it was a buffet table with a paper cloth, and on the paper cloth a cake stand with nothing on it, and above it Pauline’s banner, and a mirror ball on a hook in the ceiling that turned a quarter turn every time a lorry went past outside.

The radiator was the same. Cream, with the paint gone off the top where people had put their pints. I’d sat next to it for his fifteen minutes because it was the only warm place in the room, with my guitar across my knees in its case, and I’d watched a man from Falmouth play two songs to twelve people and a dog and then heard his top string go.

I didn’t count anything the first time I was in this room. I was twenty-two. I started at twenty-four.

I stood where the rug had been and looked at the door, and I heard his step on the stairs before he reached the top of them, because I’ve been walking down corridors in front of that step for five years and I’d know it on a carpet in the dark.

He stopped in the doorway. He’d no guitar on his back and nothing in his hands.

“I rang on Sunday,” he said. “Asked if the room was still here. The lad said it was a function room. I asked him what the function was.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Mostly fortieths.’” He looked up at the banner. “He was right.”

He came in. He didn’t come as far as me. He stopped by the radiator, where I’d sat, and put his hand on the top of it where the paint had gone, and it must have been cold, because it was August and the pub doesn’t heat a room nobody’s booked.

We stood there. Three and a half feet, give or take, with no marks on the floor and no plot to tell us, and I noticed that, and I noticed him notice it. The mirror ball went a quarter turn.

“I’m not going to ask you anything in here,” he said. “I said the same on a harbour wall, I know. I’m saying it again so you’ll not stand there waiting for it.”

“I wasn’t waiting.”

“No.” He breathed out through his nose. “You’d counted the chairs.”

“Sixty.”

“There were twelve people,” he said. “And a dog. It had a bad leg. It sat on your foot for my second song and you let it.”

I hadn’t remembered the dog. I’d kept the string and the tuning and the kitchen and the chord, and I’d lost the dog, and he’d kept it for seven years, and I stood on a gravy carpet under a banner for a woman called Pauline and found that I couldn’t say anything at all.

It would have been one step. There was no Fitz and no torch and no cable except the disco’s. There was a man with his hand on a cold radiator in the room where he’d first played my guitar, and he’d said he wouldn’t ask, and he’d meant it, and all I had to do was cross three and a half feet of carpet and put my hand on his sleeve, and he’d have known everything I’d decided and everything I hadn’t.

I’d decided about the bridge on a motorway two nights before. I’d told nobody. If I crossed the carpet I’d have to tell him, because I can’t touch him and leave a thing out; my hands aren’t built for it.

I didn’t cross it.

“Show me the kitchen,” he said, after a while, which was the practical thing, and he took his hand off the radiator.

· · ·Scene break

The kitchen is a store.

The lad let us through behind the bar with a look that said he’d decided we were a couple from the council. It was the same room. Same tiles, white with a blue one every so often, the same window high up with the same crack in the corner. But the range was gone and the long table was gone, and where the table had been there were kegs, silver, in two rows, and boxes of crisps up to the ceiling, and a mop in a bucket, and a smell of cleaning fluid and cellar.

He went to the middle of the kegs, where the far end of the table had been, and stood there.

“Here,” he said. “You were here, with your back to the window. I was there.” He pointed at a stack of cheese and onion. “You had a tea you’d not asked for. You played the chorus with your eyes shut, because you thought if you didn’t look at me I’d not hear it properly.”

“You heard it.”

“I heard it,” he said.

He didn’t say the rest. He didn’t need to. “Long Field” had been written in this room before three in the morning, a verse each, at a table that wasn’t there any more, and neither of us could have sat down in it now if we’d wanted to, because of the kegs.

I’d like to be exact about what I did next, since it was nothing. I stood by the mop with my hands in my coat. He stood by the crisps with his in his jacket. It was quiet enough to hear the bar. Every true thing I had was in the room with us and I didn’t let one of them out, and he didn’t reach for one, because he’d said he wouldn’t, and Ezra keeps a sentence like other people keep a key.

“I’ll walk,” I said.

“It’s raining.”

“I know.”

He nodded. He looked at the place where the table had been for a moment longer, as if he’d dropped something there and had just remembered it wasn’t worth going back for.

“Soundcheck’s four,” he said. “I’ll get a taxi. You’ll want the walk to yourself.”

He was right, and I hated that he was right, and I walked the two miles in the rain with my hands in my pockets and didn’t count one of them.

· · ·Scene break

Leeds is thirteen and a half thousand and night sixty-eight, and it’s the nearest the tour comes to home, and I knew before the house lights went that half of Keighley was in block C, because my mother’s neighbour had texted to say so, with a photograph of the tickets on a kitchen table.

At soundcheck Jonesy had asked for the bridge, both mics, and Ezra had said, “Save it,” the way he’d said it since Dublin, and I’d said nothing, and Dot had looked at me over the fiddle and I’d looked at my tuning.

The room did what the room does. Phones up by the second song. The couples. A girl in the fourth row, a different girl, a different city, with a sign in capitals: ASK THE SONGS. The man beside her had painted his own, smaller, and it said SHE LOOKED, and he held it up every time I turned his way, as if I might have forgotten.

Fourteen songs. Then the tuning, and the room made the low glad sound it makes for that song and no other, and I sang the first verse of “Lamplight” to the floor.

The two amber specials came up. Everything else in the building went out.

He stepped in the half-foot.

I sang the bridge to the ear.

I’d like it on the record that I did it perfectly. I’ve had three years’ practice, and I hadn’t lost any of it in three weeks. The point just past his left ear, where it has always been. It didn’t look back. Ask me when the lamps are down, I sang to it, and my voice was exact and my hands were exact, and I looked at nobody.

I could see his face. You can’t not, at three and a half feet; it’s there at the edge of everything, the way the exits are. He’d stepped in and turned to me the way he’d done every night since Dublin, and for the first line he waited for me to turn too, the way you wait at a door for someone you’ve heard on the stairs.

I didn’t turn.

He came in under me on the second line. A third below and a fraction late. He didn’t miss the chord; I’d have heard, and so would Jonesy, and so would the truck if it had been there. He sang and I’ll say it like a vow to the side of my face, and his face did nothing at all. That’s what I saw at the edge of the light. Not hurt. Nothing. The stage face, the one he’d worn at the ear for three years before Newcastle, and I’d never known until then that he had one, because I’d never been on this side of it.

Thirteen and a half thousand people had come to see me look at him. They’d seen it on their phones in Dublin and Belfast and on a sofa, and they’d come with their hands ready on each other’s shoulders. And they watched me not do it, and the last line came back, on the beat, full, every word right, but I’d never say it in the light.

It was the first time in three weeks it had been true.

I heard it land. A room that had come for one thing had been shown the old thing, and it sang the line anyway, because the line was theirs and they know when it is, and it didn’t come back kind this time. It came back correct. And under it, from somewhere in block C, one voice, older than the girl in London had been, shouted, “Look at him, love!” and nobody laughed.

In the dark I didn’t take the step. Neither did he. Fitz’s torch found us four feet apart, on the marks, where the plot puts us, and she held it there a second longer than she needed to, and said, “Stage left. All of you. Mind the cable.”

· · ·Scene break

The Leeds corridor is fifty-eight steps and I’ve done it on four tours. He was behind me the whole length of it and didn’t hum.

Lenny was ahead, and quiet, which is how I knew it had been bad. Femi walked beside Lenny with the bass still on and didn’t take it off till the living room. Dot went past me at the door without a look, and that was worse than the look.

Ezra stopped at the door of the living room. He put his hand on the frame, where he lives, and waited until the others had gone in, and I thought he was going to let me go first, and he didn’t. He stood in the door with the light of the room behind him and the corridor behind me, and he said it plain, and quiet, and once.

“You’re very good at it.”

Then he went in and put the red guitar on its stand.

I stood in the corridor. It took me the whole of the fifty-eight steps back, in my head, to hear where the sentence had come from, and when I heard it I had to put my hand on the wall. Manchester. The living room with the bulbs. Annika standing up to go, with her phone in her hand and the real smile, the worst kind. Keep doing what you’re doing. You’re very good at it.

He hadn’t said it to hurt me. Ezra doesn’t. He’d said it because it was true, and because it was the only sentence anyone had ever said about that bridge that was the right size, and he’d wanted me to hear what it sounded like in the mouth of the one person it was being done to.

I went in. The living room in Leeds had hummus and twelve beers and Hal’s whisky, and a window that didn’t open, and nobody said good room. Lenny drank a can and didn’t talk. Femi looked at a photograph and didn’t say goodnight to it. Ezra sat with a beer he didn’t open and talked to Marek about the neck of the red guitar, which had not moved.

· · ·Scene break

Fitz had booked the Leeds hotel late, because of a conference that had taken every room in the city centre, and when she counted us into the lift at half past twelve she read the room numbers off a sheet and not off her head, which I’d never seen her do.

“Dot, three-oh-four. Femi, three-eleven. Lenny, three-twelve, God help three-thirteen. Sylvie, three-oh-eight.” A pause the length of a line on a list. “Ezra, five-nineteen.”

“Five,” said Lenny.

“It’s what they had.” Fitz didn’t look up. “Bus call’s one tomorrow. After the show. I’ll be counting.”

The lift stopped at three and four of us got out, and the doors closed on him, and it went on up without us.

Three-oh-eight had a kettle and a window onto a wall. I filled the kettle at the bathroom tap because hotel kettles are always dry, and put it on, and stood with my hand on the counter while it ticked, and I thought about Glasgow, where I’d stood like this with my back to him and the door open. There was no door open tonight. There was a floor between us, and a flight of stairs, and a lift that went up without anyone asking it to.

I could have taken the stairs. It was two floors. I counted them, and it was two, and I didn’t go.

It was the first time in five years Fitz’s arithmetic had put a floor between us, and I lay in three-oh-eight until four with the tea going cold, and I didn’t ask myself whether it was counting or kindness, because I knew it was neither. It was what they had.