The Changeover Sheet

Ezra struck it out with Marek’s marker, in the wings at Aberdeen, at twenty past four on Thursday, and it took one line.

I hadn’t known it was there. That’s the first thing I’d like on the record. Marek keeps a changeover sheet for every show on a clipboard on his workbench in the wings, one line a song, which guitar and which tuning and which hands it goes into, in capitals, in pencil, so he can rub out a capo. He’d done the Lanternfield sheet already, because the truck wanted it by Friday. Fourteen lines and “Lamplight”. And under “Lamplight”, where there’s never been anything, because Hal doesn’t do encores and never has, a sixteenth line, in the same capitals:

AFTER DARK. SC PLY TO EP, STAGE LEFT. DAYLIGHT. 4 MIN. EP ONLY.

My guitar. His hands. After the blackout, in the three seconds, with twelve thousand people in a field and the truck running.

“He asked on the Birmingham bus,” said Marek, who was holding the clipboard, and who looked like a man who’d have given a week’s wages to be restringing something in another building. “I write down what I’m asked. That’s all I do.”

“I know, Marek.”

“I’d have told you if you’d asked.”

“I know.”

Ezra had come into the wings behind me. He’d seen me see it. He didn’t say anything about it, and he didn’t say sorry, because he’d told me in row K that he wasn’t promising me Lanternfield, and he’d meant it, and it was there in pencil to prove he’d meant it. He held his hand out to Marek for the marker, and Marek gave it him, and he took the clipboard off the bench and put a line through the sixteenth line, once, from the first letter to the last, hard enough that I heard the nib on the paper.

Then he gave the clipboard back to Marek, and the marker, and he turned to me.

“It’s yours,” he said. “I’m not playing it to a room you’re not in.”

I was going to say I’m in every room he plays. I’m three and a half feet off. And I didn’t say it, because I knew what he meant, and he knew I knew, and it wasn’t the stage. It was the ear. A room where I’m stood four feet away singing to the point past his left ear is not a room I’m in.

· · ·Scene break

I’d not spoken to him on Wednesday. I’ll put that down.

Aberdeen was a day off. I’d walked the beach, two miles of it, flat and grey, with a wind off the sea that had come a long way without meeting anybody. I’d seen him once, across the breakfast room at the hotel, at a table by the window with Hal, both of them with their coats on, not talking. He’d looked up. He’d nodded, the Feathers nod. I’d nodded back. That was Wednesday. Dot was at home with Ailsa and a cow. Femi had found a swimming pool. Lenny had found a bar, and then, according to Fitz, left it at ten, which she reported at breakfast in the voice of a woman announcing a death.

Thursday, at soundcheck, Jonesy had asked for the bridge, both mics, and I’d waited for Ezra to say “Save it,” and he hadn’t. He’d said, “Go on, then,” and stepped in the half-foot, and sung his line to me at four in the afternoon in an empty arena, and I’d looked at him and sung mine. Jonesy had said, “Good,” and then, “That’s fine,” and nothing else.

And then I’d gone into the wings to find Marek about a string, which is Ezra’s line and not mine, and found the sheet.

· · ·Scene break

He’d a folded paper in his jacket. He took it out, now, in the wings, and held it out to me the way he’d held my guitar out in Birmingham, with a nod, and I took it, because my hand did it.

It was a set list. Birmingham. Fitz prints them on the bus, fifteen songs in big type, and tapes them to the deck by each mic. He’d peeled his off after the show, you could see where the tape had been, and on the back of it, in pencil, in his writing, which is small and square and goes uphill, were the words.

All of them. Every verse. The two lines I’d heard, and the ones I hadn’t let myself keep.

“There’s no other copy,” he said. “Jonesy wiped the tape. It’s not in my phone. It’s in my head, and it’s on that, and you can have that.”

“What do I do with it?”

“Whatever you like. Burn it. Sing it. Put it in a drawer.” He breathed out through his nose. “Including nothing. Nothing’s allowed.”

I didn’t unfold it. I’ve never been handed a page of words about me that was mine. I’ve handed six of them over, and signed under them four hundred times, and walked past two of them in a frame by a lift. I held this one shut, in the wings of an arena in Aberdeen, and I understood that nobody would ever blow it up to the size of a window, because the only person who could had just given it away.

· · ·Scene break

The Aberdeen arena is out by the airport, and the loading door at the back opens on a car park and a fence and, past the fence, a runway. We stood outside the door in the wind. A plane came in low over the fence, and I counted it before I’d decided to, and he watched me do it, and let me.

“Your bunk was empty,” I said.

“I know.”

“You don’t know. You weren’t there.” It came out harder than I’d meant, and I let it. “Fitz counted seven. She stopped at Keith. Lenny said one short, and she said it’s the number I was given, and I stood on the step and watched the Volvo go out in front of us, which it never has, and I went and sat on my bunk and looked at yours. With the blanket folded on it. All night.” My sentences were going. I didn’t stop them. “I’ve never read a listing. You told me about it once. I thought I’d heard it. I hadn’t. I heard it on Tuesday night on a bus doing sixty, and it was your name that wasn’t on it.”

He took that. He didn’t look away from it and he didn’t try to make it smaller.

“I know,” he said again. “Not then. By Scotch Corner. Hal didn’t say a word to me till Perth. At Perth he said, ‘She’ll have looked at your bunk.’ And I said, ‘I know.’ And he said, ‘Right,’ and put the radio on, and it was Keith’s station, and that was the whole of Hal from Leeds to here.”

A plane. I didn’t count it.

“I’ll tell you why I got in the car, and it’s not good, so I’ll say it first.” He put his hands in his jacket. “Tuesday hurt. Monday hurt and Tuesday hurt worse, because on Tuesday I knew it was on purpose. So I stood on my tape. I sang it to the room. I’ve never done that; I did it to see what it cost, and it cost a lot, and I didn’t want to lie three feet across an aisle from you all night having done it. That’s all. I wanted a night in a car where I’d not have to be good at anything.” He laughed at himself, through the nose, and it was short. “And somewhere past Newcastle I heard what it would look like from the bus. An empty bunk and no word. I’ve had that done to me. I’ve been going on at you about it for a month. And I went and did it, and I didn’t even ring.”

“No.”

“No.” He looked at the fence. “So here’s the plain thing. There’s not a joke. I’m finishing the tour. Tonight, and Saturday, and the bus in between, and the bus after. I’m not going anywhere Fitz can’t count me. I’m not leaving. I’m telling you where I am.”

· · ·Scene break

He waited. Not for an answer, I think. He’d not asked a question. He waited the way he waits after a tune’s finished, to let the room have it.

“And the song,” he said, after a while. “I’ll say this and then it’s done. I wanted it played in that field so you’d have to answer it. I told you in row K it was so the risk was yours. You called it a cage. It is a cage. I’ve been building it in pencil on Marek’s sheet.” He looked at me, then. “I’ll not ask you to say anything. Not on a stage, not on a sofa, not at a table. If you never say it, I’ll still know where I am, because I’ve told you. That’s the bit I had wrong. I thought if you said it I’d know. I can know on my own. I’ve just done it.”

A plane came in over the fence. It was very loud and then it wasn’t.

“That’s the lot,” he said. “I’m going to find Marek about a string.”

“You’ve got strings. There’s a packet on Hal’s dashboard.”

He stopped. He’d been going, and he stopped, and turned, and for a second I thought he’d laugh. He didn’t. He looked at me the way he’d looked at me on a roof in Dublin when he’d said a whole thing in order and there was nothing left.

“I bought them at Wetherby,” he said. “At one in the morning. For something to do with my hands.”

Then he went in, and I stood in the wind with a folded set list in my pocket and a sentence I couldn’t find, and the planes came in over the fence one after another, and I let them.

· · ·Scene break

Aberdeen is ten and a half thousand and night seventy, and Ailsa was in the wings.

Fitz had put her on the yellow line, the way she’d put Simi there, and told her the same thing, and Ailsa had stood on it with her arms folded in the waxed jacket, and Dot had walked past her on the walk-down and touched her elbow and not stopped. I saw Fitz touch Ailsa’s shoulder after, when she’d counted the five of us, and I’d like it on the record that Fitz counts wives.

Fourteen songs. Then the tuning, and the room’s low glad sound, and I sang my verse to him.

Not the floor. Not the ear. I’d done the ear for two nights and it had got me a folded blanket and a packet of strings, and I sang the first verse of “Lamplight” to his face, and the room saw, and made a sound that was ten and a half thousand people being let off something.

The amber specials. Everything else out. He stepped in the half-foot.

Ask me when the lamps are down, I sang, to him, and he came in under me, a third below and a fraction late, and I’ll say it like a vow, and his face was his face again, not the stage one, and I’d never been so glad to see a thing I have no word for.

And the room sang the last line.

But I’d never say it in the light.

On the beat. Kind. Hands on shoulders and phones up and ten and a half thousand voices telling us how glad they were, in the only words they’d been given, and I heard it that night the way you hear a note that’s been out for months and you only notice when the whole band stops.

Two nights. One show. On Saturday, in a field in Herefordshire, the truck would be running. Both mics and the room. Forty-four seconds. And whatever I did at that bridge, the last line would come back in twelve thousand voices, and the truck would take it down, and it would go on a record with our name on the sleeve and nothing else, and it would say, for good, in my voice, over his harmony, that I’d never say it.

That’s the only version of us that would exist. I’d had the other one wiped. “Daylight” was pencil on the back of a set list in my coat pocket, and a thing in his head, and nothing else. The true song had no tape. The one with the lie in it would be in shops by the spring.

In the dark I stood on my mark. So did he. Fitz’s torch found us four feet apart and said, “Cable.”

· · ·Scene break

Bus call was one, for Herefordshire. Nine hours. Fitz stood at the door with the clipboard she doesn’t need.

“Dot. Femi. Sylvie. Lenny, that’s one, well done. Marek, Bel, Jonesy. Keith’s on.” She looked up the car park, past the Volvo with its interior light on and Hal in it. “Ezra.”

“Here,” said Ezra, from beside me. I’d heard him arrive.

“That’s eight and a driver,” said Fitz, as if it had never been anything else, and counted him on.

I lay in my bunk with the blue light on the floor. Across the aisle his curtain was open four inches, and he was in it, and I could hear him breathe. I had the set list in my hand, still folded. I didn’t open it. I didn’t need to; I’ve a memory for words, it’s the job.

I lay there doing the only sum left. Twelve thousand in a field. One truck. One line, not mine, sung back at me by everyone, and kept.

I’d spent five years making sure nothing in the window was mine, and I’d managed it. On Saturday a truck would make it permanent. Twelve thousand people would sing that I’d never say it, and I never had, and it would be the truest line on the record, and I’d have made it true myself.