“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.”
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…
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