The Living Room

Annika Strand watched the bridge from the desk with her coat on, and when it was over she clapped four times, which is the number you clap when you’re the only one clapping and you’d like everyone to know you don’t mind.

Manchester is fourteen thousand, the biggest room of the run, and at soundcheck it’s a hangar with the lights on. Hal had brought her in through the loading dock at half three, and stood her by Jonesy where she could see, and then stood behind her with his hands in the pockets of the coat he wears in August, watching her watch us, the way he’s watched every label person watch us since we were two people and a van.

Hal Mortimer is fifty-eight and has managed us since the folk clubs. He is the only adult in any building we play that Ninebark is afraid of, and the reason they’re afraid of him is that he doesn’t want anything from them except that we should be solvent and still speaking to each other in five years, and there’s nothing you can offer a man like that.

“Again?” said Jonesy.

“That’s fine,” Ezra said. “It’s a doorway, Jonesy. You don’t want more of us in a doorway.”

We came off. Annika came to meet us at the foot of the stage steps, and she took my hand in both of hers, which she does, and she said, “That’s it. That’s the moment. That’s the whole record,” and she hadn’t even seen the lights.

· · ·Scene break

Hal taped the words LIVING ROOM to the door of a dressing room in a Bradford arts centre nine years ago, in marker, on gaffer, because he said a band should have somewhere to sit down with the door shut and be rude about the promoter. It’s been on the rider ever since. The band’s room will be labelled LIVING ROOM. Venues think it’s a joke. Fitz checks it before she checks the power.

Manchester’s living room had a sofa nobody had ever sat on, a mirror with bulbs round it, and a table with the hummus, the beers and the whisky, and Annika sat on the sofa and put her phone face down on the table, which is how you know a label person is about to say something they’ve said already to someone more important.

“Lanternfield,” she said. “The last night. Twenty-ninth. We’re recording it. Full set, the truck, the lot. Live album out in the spring, and ‘Lamplight’ is the single, because ‘Lamplight’ is the single whether we like it or not.” She said it to all of us and looked at me. “The bridge has been filmed more than anything Ninebark has put out this decade. Not released. Filmed. By people who paid to be in the room. The Birmingham clip in March did four million in a week and we didn’t lift a finger. We can’t buy that. Nobody can buy that. I’m not going to try. I’m going to record it.”

“Record what,” said Dot, from the arm of the sofa, with the fiddle across her knees.

“The moment.” Annika opened her hands. “Whatever it is you two do at that line. I don’t know what it is. I’ve never asked. I’ve watched it from the desk in nine cities and I couldn’t tell you, and that’s the product. That’s the whole product. The sleeve is going to be two lamps and a dark field, and it’s going to say nothing, and it’s going to sell to every single person who has ever pointed a phone at that bridge and gone home and argued about it.”

Lenny said, “Class,” and opened a beer at four in the afternoon, and Femi looked at the beer and not at Lenny.

Hal hadn’t sat down. Hal doesn’t sit down in a room with a label in it; he says it’s a posture thing, like dogs. He looked at Annika, and then at the two of us, standing where we’d stood since we came in, at opposite ends of the mirror, and he said it to the room, mild as milk.

“Mystery’s a fine thing to sell, Annika. It’s a terrible thing to live in.”

“I don’t sell them a life, Hal. I sell them a record.” She stood up and picked up her phone. “I’m not asking anything. I want that understood. I have never once asked, and I’m not starting in Manchester. Keep doing what you’re doing.” She smiled at me, and it was a real smile, which is the worst kind. “You’re very good at it.”

She left at ten past five. Hal saw her to the car. Femi went to catering, and Dot went with him, and Lenny went wherever Lenny goes with a beer, and then it was the two of us in the living room with the door shut, which is what the room is for.

· · ·Scene break

“So we tell her,” Ezra said.

“Tell her what?”

“That the moment’s not a moment.” He’d sat down on the sofa nobody sits on. “That it’s a Tuesday. In Newcastle. And a Wednesday, in a hotel corridor, where you said the sentence and I went. That it’s got a date on it.”

“It’s not hers.”

“No. It’s ours. That’s the point I’m making.”

“It’s not ours either.” I counted the bulbs round the mirror. Fourteen, one out. “It’s theirs. Twelve thousand a night, and they sing the last line, and they’ve never once got it wrong. It’s the only thing we’ve made that belongs to the people who bought it. The day it’s about two people, it’s a headline. It’s a story about us, and stories about two people end. And it’s not just the song. It’s Femi. He wants to go home and be asked back. Dot’s got a mortgage in Aberdeen with a wife in it. Lenny’s got October, fine, but the bus still needs a drummer till the twenty-ninth. Marek, Bel, Jonesy, Keith, Fitz, whoever’s on monitors this week. Eleven wages, Ezra. Eleven. Off one song that works because nobody knows.”

“That’s a good speech.”

“It’s not a speech.”

“It’s got numbers in it. That’s how I can tell.” He wasn’t being unkind. He never is; it’s worse. “Say Femi’s name again.”

“What?”

“You said Femi wants to go home and be asked back. Say it to Femi. Go and find him in catering and tell him you kissed me in the dark in Newcastle and that you’re keeping it quiet for his sake, and see what he says. I’ll wait here.”

“That’s not fair.”

“No. It’s not. He’d say, ‘Right,’ and eat his dinner, and it’d be his to carry, and you’d have given it to him.” He turned the unopened beer round on the table, once. “You’ve not given it to anyone. That’s what I’m saying. Not to Femi. Not to Dot, who’s known for weeks, whatever you think. You’re not carrying eleven wages up a hill, Sylvie. You’re stood at the bottom of it holding them so you don’t have to move.”

“And you’d have me move where? Onto a stage? In front of a truck with Ninebark’s name on the side?”

“I’d have you say it in a room with the door shut, to the people it’s about, and then decide what to do about the truck. In that order.”

“That’s two things.”

“It’s one thing twice.” He nearly smiled. “You’re not protecting them. You’re protecting the exit.”

The bulbs were still fourteen and one out. I didn’t say anything.

“I’ve watched you do it since the Feathers. You write the field the long way round so you’ve always got the gate at your back. It’s a good way to write a song. I’ve made a living off it. It’s no way to live.”

“You sound like Hal.”

“Hal’s right about most things. It’s very annoying.” He looked at his hands. “I’ll tell you something once, and then I won’t tell you again, because it’s not a card I want to keep playing. Before you. Before the Feathers. I was in a band in Falmouth, four of us, eighteen months. Hawser. We were all right. We had a gig at a pub in Truro I’d played nine times, and a fortnight before it I picked up the free paper in the chip shop and there was the listing, and there were three names on it. Three. Nobody rang. Nobody said we’ve had a think. They just didn’t put me on the poster, and that was how I found out I’d left a band.”

He laughed at himself, through the nose, first.

“So I’m not doing quiet. That’s all. I’m not saying tonight, and I’m not saying to her. I’m saying I’ve had the version where nobody says it, and it turns out you can lose a whole thing that way and never have a conversation. I’d rather be wrong out loud.”

I had the sentence. I could feel it, the way you can feel the chord under the line. I’d let Ninebark have a true thing once, when I was twenty-four, and it had sold, and it had sold so well that I’d spent five years making sure there was nothing left in the shop window that was mine. He was right about the exit. He was wrong about which door.

“Not yet,” I said.

“That’s what you said on the bus.”

“It’s still true.”

He looked at me for the length of a whole answer, and I didn’t give him one, and he nodded as if I had.

“Right, then,” he said, and got up, and went to find his guitar, because that’s the practical thing, and he’d meant the other one.

· · ·Scene break

Hal caught me at the living room door at ten to eight, with the room filling behind the wall so you could feel it in the floor. He’d got a coffee from catering in a paper cup and he held it the way he holds everything, as if it might be evidence.

“She’s not wrong, you know,” he said. “About the money.”

“I know.”

“She’s not right either. That’s the trouble with Annika. She’s only ever half of a thing.” He drank. “I’ve been doing this since you were two people who couldn’t afford a van. I’ve watched a lot of bands sell the thing they were, and I’ve watched a few of them keep it, and the ones who kept it all had one thing in common, and it wasn’t talent.”

“What was it?”

“They talked to each other. Even when it was bad. Especially then.” He looked past me down the corridor, at Dot going by with the fiddle, and at Ezra behind her with the red guitar, and back at me, and Hal has never once asked me a question he didn’t want the answer to, so he didn’t ask. “I’m not your dad, Sylvie, and I’m not the label. I want you solvent and still speaking in five years. That’s my whole job. Everything else is Fitz’s.”

“Fitz counts us.”

“Somebody has to,” said Hal, and went to stand at the desk with Jonesy, where he stands every night, with his coat on, listening for the thing that’s wrong.

· · ·Scene break

The show was fourteen thousand people and I sang the bridge to the ear, and the ear was Manchester and it was further away than Glasgow, and the last line came back like a wall falling over. In the three seconds of dark I stood still and so did he, and Fitz’s torch found us a yard apart, and she said nothing about it and I heard her say nothing.

Bus call was one. The bus was going to Holyhead overnight, five hours, to a hotel by the port, a day off Saturday and the Sunday ferry to Dublin. Hal doesn’t do the bus. Hal has a Volvo older than Lenny and he follows us in it like a man who doesn’t trust a coach to arrive, and he stood by it now in the loading bay with the driver’s door open and the interior light on, waiting for Fitz to finish counting so he could go.

“Dot. Femi. Sylvie. Lenny, God help us. Marek, Bel, Jonesy. Keith’s on.” Fitz looked up. “Ezra.”

“Here,” said Ezra, from beside me, and I hadn’t heard him arrive, and Fitz counted him and went inside.

He didn’t get on. He stood in the sodium light with his hands in his jacket and looked at the bus, and then at me.

“There’s a session tomorrow,” he said. “Saturday afternoon. A pub on a harbour, up the coast from the hotel, an hour in a taxi. Melodeons and a man with a bodhrán and nobody who knows who we are. I’ve been once. I want to go and play badly with strangers and not have anyone film it.”

“That’s a lot of information.”

“I’m not done.” He waited until I looked at him. “Come with me. Be nobody with me for a day. I’ll not ask you anything on a harbour wall. I’m asking you now, so I don’t have to then.”

And he waited. Hal’s interior light went off in the Volvo. Keith turned his radio on. Lenny, at the back of the bus, opened a can.

I said yes before I’d counted anything, which should have told me.