The Ropewalk

Ezra paid the taxi in cash before I’d got my bag open, and said thank you in Welsh, badly, and the driver laughed at him all the way back up the hill, and we were nobody.

The hotel by the port had let us go at eleven. Fitz’s rules for a day off are short: be reachable, be sober by bus call, and don’t get in a boat. Dot had gone to walk the coast path with a map and no phone, which is Dot’s idea of a rest, and she’d stopped at our table on her way out of breakfast with the map folded under her arm and looked at the two guitar cases against the wall.

“Where are you going?”

“A session,” Ezra said. “Up the coast.”

“Both of you.”

“Both of us.”

Dot is thirty-six and has a wife and a mortgage in Aberdeen and left a job to do this, and what she wants out of the band is for it to last as long as the mortgage, which is nineteen more years, and she has never once said so, because Dot doesn’t say the thing; she tunes up and you find out. She looked at the cases for a bit longer.

“Come back in the same taxi,” she said, and went to find the sea. Femi was in his room on a video call with a six-year-old who wanted to see the sea out of his window and had been shown it eleven times. Lenny was asleep in a coat.

The harbour was an hour up the north coast of the island. A chapel, a lifeboat station, two pubs, a slip with three boats pulled up on it and a fourth that had been pulled up so long it was part of the wall. The tide was out and the mud shone. Ezra had his little parlour guitar on his back, the one he takes on days off because it fits in a taxi. I had mine, the plywood-top, in the soft case, because I’d been told there was a session and I have never once gone to a session without a guitar and sat on my hands. I’m not built for it.

“The Ropewalk,” he said, and pointed at the second pub, which had a sign with a rope on it and a chalkboard that said SESSION SAT 3PM ALL WELCOME in the handwriting of someone who’d meant it.

“You’ve been once.”

“Five years ago. A day off before the Dublin ferry, the first tour. You had a cold and stayed in.”

“I remember the cold.”

“I remember the session,” he said, and held the door.

· · ·Scene break

The back room had a fire lit in August, a window onto the harbour, and seven people round two tables with their instruments out. A man of seventy with a melodeon and a face like a walnut. A couple in their fifties with a fiddle each, who looked like each other in the way people do after thirty years. A big man with a bodhrán and a pint he was resting it on. A girl behind the bar who was also, when needed, a whistle. Nobody looked up for longer than it took to see we had cases.

“Sit down if you’re playing,” said the walnut. “Stand up if you’re not. There’s no third thing.”

We sat. He was Gwil. The couple were Bethan and Huw. The big man was Pete. Nobody asked our surnames, and nobody asked what we did, because in a session what you do is the tune, and the tune had already started.

I don’t know the Welsh tunes. Ezra knows some; he grew up in sessions, in a pub in Falmouth on Thursdays, and a tune in a key is a place he’s been, and he goes back to it. He found the first one in eight bars and was inside it by sixteen, playing under Gwil the way he plays under me, a third below, a fraction late, like a man agreeing. I played rhythm. I can play rhythm in any room on earth; it’s the part of music that’s counting.

“That one’s a lane,” he said to me, under the third tune, without looking. “You go up it and it opens out at the top. Wait for it.”

It opened out at the top. Bethan’s fiddle went up over the melodeon and the room went with it and Pete hit the drum like a door, and it was very good, and nobody filmed it, and I counted the phones in the room and there were none. Seven people and a fire. I’d forgotten it was possible.

We played for an hour. Nobody knew us. That’s not vanity; it’s arithmetic. We’ve had our faces on the front of a music paper and in a hundred thousand phones, and to seven people in a back room on a harbour we were a couple who’d turned up with cases and could keep time, and that was all we were, and I have never in my life been so glad to be nothing.

Then Gwil put the melodeon down on his knee and looked at the two of us with his walnut face.

“You’ve got a song,” he said. “The pair of you. I can hear it in the way he’s sat. Go on.”

· · ·Scene break

We hadn’t discussed it. We didn’t need to; there was only one it could be.

“Long Field” has never been recorded. It’s the song we wrote in the kitchen of the Feathers before three in the morning, seven years ago, a verse each, and we named the band after it, and we’ve never once played it in a room that knew who we were. It’s about a field above Keighley you walk the long way round, because the long way’s got the view, and because if you walk it the long way you never have to cross it. My verse is the walk. His verse is the gate.

I gave him the count. He found my tuning on his own strings in two bars, faster than he’d found it in the Feathers, because he’d never forgotten it. I sang, and he sang under me, and at the chorus he did the thing he’d done seven years ago in a pub kitchen with a new string on: he played the chord that says the thing the line is walking round, and I sang over it, and I didn’t hide it under a joke, because there was nobody in the room to laugh.

We were very good. I want that on the record too. Not good for two people in a pub: good. The fire went and the tide was out and nobody moved, and when it finished Pete didn’t hit the drum, and Huw put his fiddle in his lap, and the girl behind the bar had stopped with a glass in her hand.

“Where’s that from,” said Gwil.

“Leeds,” said Ezra.

“Is it yours?”

“It’s ours.”

Bethan looked at me over her fiddle. She had the look Dot has, the level look, and I’ve since decided it’s something fiddle players are issued with. “You want to do that properly,” she said. “The two of you. You’d get somewhere with that.”

“We might,” Ezra said, and laughed at himself, through the nose, and Bethan laughed too, at something else.

Pete lifted his pint off the drum. He was a big man and he asked it the way big men ask things, as if it weighed nothing.

“Are you two together, then?”

I’ve been asked it two hundred times. On camera, on radio, in a green room in Berlin by a man who said it in French to be polite. I have a way of not answering that Hal could sell as a course, and it starts with a laugh, and I opened my mouth for the laugh and it wasn’t there, because there was no camera, and the laugh is for the camera. There was a fire and a man with a drum.

“We’ve played together seven years,” Ezra said, into the gap.

“That’s not what he asked,” said Bethan.

“No,” said Ezra. “It’s not.”

Gwil picked the melodeon up off his knee and started something in a different key, and the room went into it like water, and the question sat on the table between the pints for the rest of the afternoon, and nobody moved it, and nobody had to.

· · ·Scene break

The taxi wasn’t till six. We walked the harbour wall to the end, where the light is, with the tide coming in over the mud in a long grey sheet, and the wind off the sea taking the top off everything.

He sat on the wall with the parlour guitar across his knees and I sat a foot from him, because a foot is what the wall allowed, and because I’d counted it.

“You didn’t laugh,” he said.

“There was nobody to laugh for.”

“There was me.”

“You’ve heard it.”

He put his fingers on the strings and didn’t play. “I’ve heard it two hundred times. I’ve never once heard you not do it. I thought it was welded on.”

“It’s for cameras.”

“I know what it’s for.”

He played something. I’m going to be exact: four bars, in a key I’d never heard him use, slow, and plain, and going somewhere. Not a lane. A road with a house at the end of it. I heard where it was going in the third bar and I heard him hear it in the fourth, and he stopped, with his hand flat on the strings, before the fifth.

“What’s that?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“That’s four bars.”

“It is.”

“There’s a fifth.”

“There is.” He looked out at the tide. “The fifth one says something. I’m not ready for it to say it on a wall in Wales.”

“Play it anyway.”

“Not yet,” he said, and he gave me my own two words back, mild as milk, and then he laughed at himself before I could, and I understood he’d been waiting three days to do it.

We sat. The light came on at the end of the wall, on a timer, and it was a real lamp, and neither of us said so. My hand was on the stone between us. His was on the strings. I counted the gulls, nine, and didn’t count them again to check, which I have never done, and it’s on the record.

Then my phone went, and it was Fitz, and Fitz doesn’t ring.

“Where are you.”

“A harbour. An hour up the coast. Ezra’s here.”

“I know where Ezra is, he’s with you, that’s why I rang you.” Paper moving. “The afternoon sailing’s off, wind. We’re on the eight-ten. Bus call’s five. Sober, reachable, and if you’re in a boat I don’t want to know.”

“We’re not in a boat.”

“I’m counting you at five,” Fitz said, and rang off.

He’d heard. He put the parlour guitar back in its case, and the fifth bar back wherever he keeps them, and stood up off the wall and held out a hand for my case, not for me, and I gave him the case.

Dublin was a five o’clock bus and an eight o’clock ferry and a day and a night away, and two shows, twelve thousand a night, who’d sing the last line back at us whether we’d walked across the field or not. I’d counted all of it. The only thing on the whole crossing I didn’t have a number for was four bars and the one after, and I walked back up the harbour wall beside him with my hands in my pockets, listening to it not being played.