The Portacabin

“I need the band,” I said to Fitz, at ten to six on Friday, by the portacabins. “Not Ezra. Twenty minutes.”

Fitz didn’t look up from the clipboard. “He’s at the truck with Jonesy till half past, doing a line check on the red guitar. Jonesy’s line-checked the red guitar two hundred times. I’ve told him the truck’s particular.” She turned a page she didn’t need to turn. “I didn’t hear you ask. Living room. I’ll be on the steps.”

· · ·Scene break

We’d come down into the valley at ten that morning, after nine hours out of Aberdeen with Hal’s Volvo behind us again where it belonged. Lanternfield is at the bottom of a long field in Herefordshire that goes down between two hills like a bowl someone’s tipped, with a river at the bottom behind the stage and woods on both tops. The lanterns are on poles, along every path, hundreds of them, paper and wire, unlit in the morning and swinging a bit in the wind, and the field between them rises from the barrier to the trees in one green slope, so that from the stage the whole crowd is in front of you and above you at once, and you can see every face to the back.

I’d counted the poles from the bus window coming down the track. I gave up at two hundred. Twelve thousand tickets, sold in March, the last night, the record.

The backstage compound is a square of fencing behind the stage with plastic sheeting on it, and generators humming, and a row of portacabins on blocks with steps up to their doors. Fitz had been in first and taped the biggest one: LIVING ROOM, in marker, on gaffer. She’d taped a small one at the end of the row too, the size of a garden shed, with a window and a sofa and a kettle and a lock, and on its door, in the same marker, SC.

“Headliners get two,” she’d said, handing me the key. “You’re having the small one. There’s a lock on it. I don’t want to know.”

And parked across the end of the row, nose to the river, was the truck.

It was bigger than the bus. White, no windows, a set of steps up to a door in the side and a thick black snake of cable running from its belly under the fence to the stage. It hummed. Not the generators; the truck itself, all day, a low steady note from the air conditioning and the machines inside, which Femi said, passing it with his coffee, was very nearly a D. There was nobody’s name on the side. I’d been wrong about that in Manchester. It didn’t need a name.

Annika was at the foot of its steps at noon, in wellingtons, with a lanyard round her neck and a man beside her with headphones round his like a scarf. She saw me across the compound and came over, and she didn’t take my hand in both of hers. She’s clever. She’d have seen my face.

“It sounds wonderful,” she said. “The field. You’ve no idea. They tested the room mics this morning with nothing in it but birds.” She looked at the stage, and then at me. “Tomorrow, just do what you do.”

“I will,” I said.

She nodded, and went back to the truck, and it was true, and she’d never know what it was true about, because she’d never once asked.

· · ·Scene break

The living room at Lanternfield had a strip light, a sofa that had been in the rain, a table with the hummus and twelve beers and Hal’s whisky, and a window with a view of the fence. Dot was on the arm of the sofa with the fiddle case between her boots. Femi was on a plastic chair with his one beer, unopened, which I noted. Lenny was standing, because there was nowhere left to sit, with his back to the window, and no can.

Hal was in the doorway with his coat on. I hadn’t asked for Hal. He’d come, and stopped on the top step, and not come in, and not gone, and I left him there.

I didn’t sit. There was a place on the sofa and I didn’t take it, because I’d sat down to say things before and I’d sat down so I could stop.

“I’m going to tell you something first,” I said, “before I tell anybody. That’s the point of it. You’re first. The last time I decided a thing for the five of us, you read it on a phone.”

Nobody said anything. Lenny’s eyes went to the door, to see if Ezra was coming, and came back.

“You know most of it. You know since Newcastle. Here’s the rest.” I had my hands at my sides. I let them stay there. “‘Lamplight’. The first verse is mine, and it’s about him. It always was. It was about him the night I wrote it, over a carpet shop, with him at the other end of the table. And the second verse is his, and it’s about me. We told each other two stories in a van on the A1 about a girl in Falmouth and a man in a bookshop, and every interviewer since has had them, and neither of them was ever true.”

Dot’s face didn’t move. Femi looked at the beer. Lenny said, very quietly, “Christ.”

“That’s what’s true. Here’s what I’m going to do.” It came out level. I hadn’t known it would. “Tomorrow, at the bridge, I’m going to change the last line. The room’s line. I’m going to sing it myself. Where it goes I’d never say it, I’m going to sing I’m saying it. That’s all. Four syllables for five. Nothing else in the song. Not a note. Not the verses, not the chorus, not the plot. No speech. I’m not saying a word to the field and I’m not saying one to the truck. I’m going to sing it, once, and then it’s on the record.”

“And the room’ll be singing the old one,” said Femi.

“Yes. Over the top of me. It’s theirs. I’m not taking it off them.”

“Right,” said Femi.

“And here’s what it costs, and I want it said, because I’ve been carrying it on my own and calling it you.” I looked at Dot. “The board sits in November. The live album’s the only thing on the table. Annika said it in her office: you can’t put the answer on the same record as the question. If the single’s got that line on it, it’s an answer. There’s probably no third record. Not at this size. Maybe not with them at all. That’s eleven wages next year, at this size. It’s the arenas and the bus and the truss. It’s whoever asks Femi back, and how much for.” I made myself go on. “It’s your nineteen years, Dot. Or some of them.”

Dot didn’t answer. She was looking at me over the fiddle case the way she’d looked at me on the Cardiff bus, and I understood she was waiting to be sure I’d finished, because she’d taught fourteen-year-olds for nine years and she knew what it looked like when a kid stopped halfway.

“That’s it,” I said. “I’m not asking. I’ve decided. I’m telling you first.”

· · ·Scene break

Lenny went first. Lenny always goes first; it’s how he’s built.

“I’m going in October,” he said. “You know that. I’m going anyway. Six weeks, arenas, it’s booked.” He looked at the floor. “So none of that’s my nineteen years. I’m the one it costs nothing.” He stopped. He’d a sentence ready and I could see the shape of it, and he looked at it, and put it down, and said a different one. “You told me. Before it happened. You told me on a Friday, in a room, before it was on anything.”

“Yes.”

“Right.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s all I wanted. In Cardiff. That’s all it was.” He looked at the window, at the fence. “It’d better be a good line.”

“It’s four syllables.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Lenny.

Femi hadn’t moved. He had his beer between his hands on his knee, unopened, and he turned it a quarter turn, which is a thing I’d only ever seen Ezra do.

“Does he know?” he said.

“No.”

“You’ve not told him.”

“No. He’ll hear it when they do.”

Femi thought about that, the way Simi thinks about things, with his whole face. “He’s never heard it before,” he said. “And he’s got to come in under it. On a line he doesn’t sing. With the truck on.”

“Yes.”

“Will he?”

“He always has,” I said. “He’s played under the word I left out for seven years. He had the tune for it before I’d written it. I don’t think he’ll miss it because it’s there.”

Femi looked at me for a long moment. Then he put the beer down on the floor by the leg of the chair, unopened, and put his hands flat on his knees.

“We’ll play,” he said.

He said it once. Femi says things once. And it wasn’t about the line, or about Ezra, or about November. It was about tomorrow night, at nine, in a field, and the fourteen songs before the fifteenth, and the four of them standing where they always stand, playing what they always play, while I did a thing to a song that belonged to all of us. It was the whole of what Femi had to give and he gave it in two words, and I’d have put them on the sleeve if I could.

· · ·Scene break

Dot bent down and opened the fiddle case between her boots.

She took the fiddle out, and the bow, and put the fiddle under her chin, sitting on the arm of a wet sofa in a portacabin, and she tuned it. Top string first. The wrong order, the way she’d done it on the bus in Cardiff, so it’d be heard. Each string against the one below. Nobody said anything while she did it. Hal, in the doorway, took his hands out of his coat pockets.

She finished. She held the fiddle by the neck across her knee and looked at me over the bridge of it.

“Four feet to your right,” she said. “Mortgage and all.”

That was it. That was the whole of Dot’s opinion, and she put the fiddle back in the case and shut the catches, one, two, three, and it was a paragraph.

“Hal,” I said.

He was still in the doorway. He hadn’t come in. He never sits down in a room with a label in it, and there wasn’t a label in this one, and he didn’t sit down anyway.

“I’ll be at the desk,” he said. “With Jonesy. And Annika, because she’ll want to be.” He looked at me for the length of a line on a list. “I’ll not tell her. She’s never asked. I’m not starting in a field.”

“It’ll cost.”

“It will. I made the deal. I know what’s in it.” He put his hands back in his pockets. “Solvent and still speaking, Sylvie. That’s my whole job. You’re speaking. I’ll see about the solvent.”

And he went down the steps, and Fitz, who’d been sitting on the bottom one with the clipboard across her knees, said without turning round, “Twenty minutes. That’s nineteen. Well done.”

· · ·Scene break

Ezra came back from the truck at twenty to seven with the red guitar in its case and the look of a man who’d been made to play the same chord for an hour to a producer who didn’t need it.

He found me outside the small portacabin, on its steps, with a tea. He stood at the bottom and looked at the door, SC in marker, and then at me.

“You had the band in,” he said.

I didn’t ask how he knew. He’d have seen Lenny come out without a can, or Femi’s beer on the floor, or Dot’s case shut. He hears everything from a door; it’s where he lives.

“Yes.”

“And Hal.”

“Hal came.”

He nodded. He put the guitar case down on the grass, which he never does, and put his hands in his jacket, and he looked at me with the same face he’d had outside the loading door in Aberdeen, with the planes coming in.

“Are you going to tell me what for?”

And I thought about it. I want it down that I thought about it, sat on a step in a field with a cup going cold, because it was the only thing all day I’d not been sure of.

He’d said in a corridor in Glasgow that he’d like to hear the first thing on its own some time, when it wasn’t the second one as well. If I told him on a step, it’d be a thing said in private and then sung in public, and he’d stand at the bridge tomorrow knowing what was coming, and it’d be a thing we’d agreed, like a plot, and his face would be ready for it. He’d told Rhian Teague to ask the songs. He’d never once in seven years asked me what a line meant. I wanted him to hear it the way he’d heard the chorus in the Feathers’ kitchen: the first time, with no warning, and the tune already in his hands.

“Tomorrow,” I said.

He waited. The length of a whole answer, and I let him have it, and I didn’t fill it.

“That’s not a not,” he said.

“No.”

He looked at me a while longer. Then he picked the guitar case up off the grass.

“Right, then,” he said, and I heard him let it go. Not the way he’d let things go on the bus in Newcastle, because I’d no answer. The other way. The way you let a tune stand because you trust where it’s going.

He went up the row to the living room, and I heard Lenny say, “All right?” and him say, “Good field,” and Dot laugh.

· · ·Scene break

They lit the lanterns at nine. The Friday bill was three bands we’d never met, and the field was half full and singing somebody else’s songs, and from the steps of the small portacabin I could see the poles going up the slope in lines, all the way to the trees, every one of them lit, and the light moving on the paper in the wind.

The truck hummed. Very nearly a D. It would hum all night, Annika’s man had said, backing up the day’s tests, and tomorrow night it would take down everything, both mics and the room, and keep it.

I sat with the tea until it was cold, and then I went in and locked the door and sat on the sofa under the window, and I said the line once, under my breath, to the kettle, to hear what it sounded like in a room. Four syllables for five. It fitted. There was a gap where never had been, a beat with nothing in it, and I left the gap alone.

I didn’t write it down. I’ve written every line I’ve ever made in a notebook first, since the back of a bookshop in Keighley, with the true thing in the margin so I’d know where it was. I’d no notebook in the field and I didn’t want one.

It was the first line I’d ever written that I didn’t write down, and it was the only one that had never needed a margin.