The Roof

Femi asked me on the ferry whether I was all right, which Femi does once a tour, and I said yes, and he said, “Right,” and that was Sunday.

The eight-ten was three hours of grey and a lounge with a carpet the colour of a bruise, and Lenny asleep across four seats, and Dot at the window with her map, and Fitz counting us off the gangway at the far end as if the sea might have had one. Hal’s Volvo came out of the car deck behind the bus. Ezra sat two rows from me the whole crossing with the parlour guitar in its case between his feet and didn’t open it, and I didn’t ask him to, and the four bars crossed the Irish Sea unplayed.

Dublin’s hotel was the Castlebrook, ten floors, by the river, with a roof terrace the receptionist mentioned twice, and a bar on it that shut at eleven. Fitz had us in a block on the seventh. I was 714. He was 711. I noticed. I notice everything; it’s not a compliment.

Monday was the first of two. The arena holds twelve thousand and had sold both nights in an hour in March, which Annika had told us as if she’d sold them herself, and at soundcheck Jonesy asked for the bridge and I gave it to him at the ear, and Dot checked her level over the fiddle, and said nothing, for the fourth day.

Hal came to the foot of the stage steps afterwards with his phone held out at arm’s length, which is how Hal reads.

“Annika’s sent the running order for the record. Proposed.” He scrolled with one finger, as if it might bite. “Full set, in order. Then a note. ‘The bridge of “Lamplight” runs forty-one seconds on the March clip. We’d like to make sure the truck has it from both mics and the room.’ Both mics and the room.” He put the phone away. “She’s timed you.”

“Forty-one seconds,” I said. “It’s forty-four. She’s timed the clip, not us.”

“I’ll tell her,” said Hal, and didn’t write it down, and went to find Fitz, and I stood at the foot of the steps and thought about the three seconds she’d missed and where they’d gone, and I knew, because I’d been in them.

· · ·Scene break

The show was the show. I’m not going to describe it; I’d described it sixty times by then and I’d started to hear myself doing it, the way you hear yourself telling a story at a party and know you’ve told it before at a better one. The phones came up at the first chord. The couples marked each other. The last line came back.

I’ll say one thing about it. At the bridge, at the ear, for the first time in three years, I got the count wrong. I gave up at the second block of phones, not the third, because I’d looked at the second block and seen a woman near the barrier with her phone held up and her face turned away from it, toward the man beside her, and she wasn’t filming us. She was filming so she could look at him. I lost the count. I’ve not lost it since I was twenty-four.

In the dark he stood still and I stood still, and this time Fitz’s torch came on at two, not three, and found us, and she said, “Cable,” and nothing else, and that was worse than a sentence.

· · ·Scene break

The hotel bar on the ground floor had Lenny in it, and half of Dublin, and Lenny had introduced himself to the half he didn’t know and was on his third. Femi was upstairs with a photograph. Dot was in the corner of the bar with a whisky she’d let Hal buy her, talking to Hal about the mortgage, which is what Dot and Hal talk about, because Hal is the only person in the building who thinks a mortgage is interesting.

I had a bottle of water from the bar. I’d had water since the encore we don’t do. I’d like that written down in the same ink as the rest, because I’ve thought a lot about the order of things that night, and the order matters: I had a clear head, and I’d had it on purpose since Glasgow, and I was six days into the hardest sober week of my life and could have told you the hour.

Ezra came past the end of the bar with a bottle of his own.

“Roof’s open,” he said. “Nobody’s on it.”

That’s not a question. He’d said on the wall that he wouldn’t ask me anything on a wall, and he’d found the one thing that wasn’t a wall or a question, which was a place. He went to the lift. He didn’t look back to see if I’d follow, which is the only reason I did.

· · ·Scene break

The Castlebrook’s roof was a terrace with a shuttered bar and twenty chairs stacked against the wind, and the river below, and the planes coming down over the bay in a line, one every four minutes, which I timed. The air was warm and moving. He’d taken two chairs off the stack and set them a foot apart at the rail, which was the wall on the harbour, again, and I sat in mine.

“You’re on water,” he said.

“Two shows.”

“It’s not that.”

“No.”

A plane came down over the bay, and I counted it, and he watched me count it, and let me.

“The fifth bar,” I said. “On the wall. You said it said something.”

“It does.”

“Play it.”

“No guitar.” He held up his empty hands, as if I might not have noticed, and I had. “And I’ll tell you why not, since you’ve asked twice and I’ve said not yet twice, and I’m not going to be the man who says not yet three times to you, because I’ve watched what it does from the other side.”

“What does it do?”

“It makes a person very good at singing to an ear.” He looked at the river. “The fifth bar’s the same as a thing I’m about to say. It’s the same thing, in a key. And if I played it you’d hear it, you’d hear it in a second, you hear everything, and you’d nod, and let it stand, the way you let a tune stand. You’ve let my tunes stand for seven years. That’s how we’ve done it. I’ve said it in tunes and you’ve let them stand.” He turned the bottle on the rail, a quarter turn. “You can’t let a sentence stand. You’d have to answer a sentence. So it’s going to be a sentence.”

“That’s not fair.”

“No. I’ve a good few of those tonight. I’ve been saving them.”

He put his bottle on the rail. His hands were empty, then, which I’ve never liked; Ezra with nothing in his hands looks like a man who’s put something down to say something.

“I’m going to tell you a thing,” he said. “I’ve had it since Newcastle. Before that. I’ve had it three years and I’ve never said it and I’m not going to do the joke first. I’d like you to notice I’m not doing the joke.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“There was no girl in Falmouth.”

A plane came down over the bay. I counted it.

“Lamplight” was written in one night, three years ago, in a rehearsal room over a carpet shop in Leeds, after the first record, when the label wanted a second and we had nothing. A verse each, like “Long Field”, at opposite ends of a table, and then the bridge together, standing, because we couldn’t get it sitting down. Mine was the first verse. His was the second. And on the drive home, in the van, at two in the morning, he’d told me his verse was about a girl in Falmouth who left a light on in a window and never came to the door, and I’d said mine was about a man who came into the bookshop on Thursdays and never bought anything, and we’d both said it to the windscreen and let it stand, and every interviewer for three years has been told the same two stories, and there’s a version of them in a magazine.

“There’s a girl in Falmouth,” I said. “You told me. The window.”

“I made her up on the A1. I made her up so you’d have somewhere to look that wasn’t me.” He didn’t laugh. “My verse is about you. It was you at the other end of the table with your hair in the pen. It was the Feathers and your guitar in my hands and a chord you’d been walking round for four years. It’s always been you. I thought you’d hear it. You hear everything. You heard a string about to go in a pub in Leeds before it went, and you didn’t hear that. And I’ve sung it to you every night for three years while you sang yours to a spot past my ear, and I told myself that was fine, and Newcastle’s when I stopped telling myself that.”

Then he stopped. Not for effect. He’d said the whole of it, in order, and there was nothing left, and he sat with his hands empty and looked at the bay.

I counted. I want to be honest about what I counted, because it’s the last time I did it that night: the planes, two; the chairs on the stack, eighteen; the floors down to the river, ten. The number of people who knew what he’d just said: two. The number who’d know if I answered: still two. The number who’d be in the room tomorrow with their phones up while the two of us sang it, knowing: twelve thousand.

What I could lose was in that number. The band, if it became a story about two people, because stories about two people end. The song, which was theirs, the last line, the thing they sang back and got right. And him, in public, in the light, with the phones up, if I said it and it turned out I couldn’t sing it.

I put my hand on the rail next to his bottle. My sentences had already started shortening. I could feel them going.

“There was a bookshop,” I said.

He waited.

“There was no man in it.”

He waited. He asks a thing and then he waits the whole length of the answer, and the answer was three years long, and he was going to sit on a roof in Dublin for the whole of it, and I knew that, and I’d known it in Glasgow with my back to him and the kettle on, and it’s why I’d sent him away.

“Mine’s about you.” My voice had gone small and exact. I let it. “The verse. The chord under it that I never played. The kitchen. I wrote it at the table with you at the other end and I wrote it so nobody would ever know, and then I sang it at your ear for three years so you wouldn’t. It was always. It—“

That was where it stopped. I’d got further than I’d ever got. There was nothing after it, and I didn’t reach for anything, and the wind came over the rail and took the end of the sentence away over the river, and I let it go.

He was quiet for a long time. I don’t have a number for it; I’d stopped. It was the length of a whole answer, which is the only measurement he uses, and I sat inside it with my hand on the rail and my head clear, and I have never in my life been so afraid of a man who wasn’t moving.

Then he turned in the chair, and looked at me, in the light off the shuttered bar, and there was no joke in it anywhere.

“Then I’m done singing it to a room,” he said. “Tomorrow I’m singing it to you. In the light. And you can look wherever you like.”