Second Night

Fitz walked us down the corridor at five past nine with the torch off, because the corridor in Dublin is lit, and counted us into the wings by touching each of us once on the shoulder as we passed, so she’d know where we were when the lights went.

Forty steps. Breeze block, a yellow line on the floor we don’t cross until we’re told. Lenny in front, hitting his sticks on his leg. Femi, phone off. Dot with the fiddle under her arm like a parcel she’d been asked to mind. Then me. Then, behind me, where I couldn’t see him and could hear every step, Ezra, with the red guitar, humming one note.

In the wings Marek put the plywood-top into my hands, and I put my hands on the neck of it and checked the tuning the way I do, without a tuner, by feel, the two lied-to strings first. They were where I’d left them. I checked them twice.

The room was a roar you could lean on. Twelve thousand, the second of two, and when the house lights went the sound went up by a third and I felt it in the strap.

Nine steps to the mic. It was nine. Bel’s first look came up, white and blue, and my hands did the first chord without me, because they’d done it sixty-one times, and I sang the first verse of the opener to the back wall, the way I’ve been taught, and the back wall sang it with me.

The room did what it always does. Phones up by the second song and staying up. Hands onto shoulders. A man by the barrier lifted a child onto them and she put her fists in the air and kept them there. I counted the exits: six, green. I didn’t count Ezra. I knew where he was to the inch.

Fourteen songs, and they went by like stations.

Then “Lamplight”. The phones came up before the first chord, because they know it from the tuning, and the room made the sound it makes for that song and no other, low and glad, like a tide coming in over mud.

I sang my verse to the floor. Not the ear. The deck, the taped mark, four feet from his. I gave it everything, and the floor took it.

Then the bridge, and the two amber specials came up and everything else in the building went out, and he stepped in the half-foot.

· · ·Scene break

I looked at him.

I looked at him and I sang the first line, Ask me when the lamps are down, to his face, in the light, and I did not look away, and he did not miss the chord.

He sang the second line to me. Not to the room. He’d said he was done with the room, and he was; he came in under me a third below and a fraction late, and I’ll say it like a vow, and he sang it at me from three and a half feet as if there were nobody else on the island, and I held his eye through the whole line, and my hands did the chords, and I could not have told you what they were.

And the room’s sound changed.

I’ve stood on that mark for three years and I know what the last line sounds like when it comes back, in every room we’ve played, from the back, from the sides, from the floor. It’s a wall. It arrives on the beat. It arrives on the beat in Newcastle and Glasgow and Manchester and Berlin, because twelve thousand people who’ve paid to sing a line know when the line is.

It came late. Half a beat. Twelve thousand people saw a thing and had to take a breath before they could sing, and then they sang it, but I’d never say it in the light, and it came back louder than any room I’ve ever stood in, and under it there was a second sound that wasn’t singing, that I’d never heard a crowd make, that I can only describe as the noise of a very large number of people finding out they’d been right.

I didn’t count. I couldn’t have told you how many phones. All of them.

He held my eye through the last line and I held his. When the last chorus came round I sang it to him, and he sang under me, and the room sang the whole thing back at us at a volume that made Bel’s truss hum, and the last chord was the last chord, and the lights went out.

· · ·Scene break

Three seconds. I took the step. He’d already taken his, so it was less than a step, and in the dark he said, “Sylvie,” and I said, “Here,” and we stood there, my hand on the strap of his guitar and his on my wrist, and that was all, because that was enough, and because I had said on a bus what I would and wouldn’t do in the dark and I keep the sentences I say.

Fitz’s torch came on. It found the floor, and then our feet, and stayed there, and she said nothing. Not cable. Not stage left. Nothing. She’s been counting bands into the dark for twenty years, and she knew where we were, and she let the torch say it.

Then she said, “All of you, please, mind the cable,” a full second late, which was as late as the last line, and we walked.

· · ·Scene break

The roof had ended with him standing up. He’d said, “Goodnight, Sylvie,” and taken his bottle off the rail, and gone down to 711, and I’d sat on the terrace till the bar’s shutter clock said two and the planes had stopped, and then I’d gone down to 714 and not slept. I want that clear. Nothing happened on the roof but the words, and the words were enough to keep me up till the seagulls.

We hadn’t spoken of it in the morning. He’d nodded at me across breakfast the way he’d nodded at me across the Feathers’ kitchen with my guitar in his hands, and at soundcheck Jonesy had asked for the bridge, both mics, and Ezra had said, “Not today, Jonesy. Save it,” and Jonesy had looked at Bel, and Bel had shrugged, and Dot had put her bow down on the strings and looked at him, and then at me, for a long time, and picked it up again and said nothing, for the fifth day.

So nobody had known, going on, except two of us and a fiddle player. Now twelve thousand people knew, and they had it in their phones.

· · ·Scene break

The living room in Dublin had a fridge that hummed in E flat, which Femi had noticed on the first night and told nobody about but me.

Lenny came in last and loud. “The last line. Did you hear the last line? It was late. Twelve thousand people came in late. That doesn’t happen. That has never happened.”

“It happened,” said Femi.

“I’m saying it’s never happened before.”

“Everyone heard you say it.”

Lenny opened a beer and looked at me, and then at Ezra, and then at the beer, and for the first time in two hundred shows Lenny didn’t say the next thing, and the fridge hummed in E flat into the gap.

Dot sat on the arm of the sofa with the fiddle across her knees. She looked at me over the bridge of it, the level look, and I waited for the sentence, because I could see she had one, and she’d been carrying it since Newcastle at least.

“Not tonight,” said Dot. “I’ll say it when I’m ready, and I’m not, and you’ll know when I am because you’ll hear me tuning up first.” She stood. “Good room.”

Ezra put the red guitar on its stand. He looked at the room, and then at me, in front of all of them, for the first time in a living room, and he said, “Good room,” to me, and it was the same sentence, and it wasn’t.

· · ·Scene break

Bus call was one, in the loading bay, for Belfast, two hours up the road and a day off at the end of it. The rain had come in off the bay. Hal’s Volvo was parked behind the bus with its interior light on and Hal in it, on the phone, with the door shut.

He walked out beside me. Not behind, where I could hear him and not see him; beside, with the red guitar in its case in the hand nearest me, so that the case was between us and nothing else was.

“You looked,” he said.

“I did.”

“Where did it go? The count.”

“I didn’t.”

He stopped in the rain to hear that properly. “You didn’t count.”

“Not one thing. Not the phones. Not the exits.” My sentences were going. I let them. “I looked at you and I sang it and I didn’t count, and I don’t know how many there were, and I’ve never in my life not known how many there were.”

“Twelve thousand,” he said. “I counted. Somebody had to.” And he laughed at himself, first, through the nose, and I laughed too, in a loading bay, in Dublin, in the rain, which is on the record as the first time I’d laughed since Manchester and the first time in three years that it wasn’t for a camera.

Fitz stood at the bus door with the clipboard she doesn’t need and a phone she does, and when I got to her she didn’t count me. She held the phone up.

It was the bridge. Somebody by the barrier, twenty rows back, steady hands. Two amber lamps in a black field and two people in them, three and a half feet apart, and a woman singing the first line to a man’s face and not looking away, and the man singing back. Posted at nineteen minutes to eleven. It was one o’clock now, and the number under it had seven figures and the first of them was a two.

“Two million,” Fitz said. “By bus call. I’ve been doing this twenty years and I’ve never held a phone up at a bus. Read the comments.”

I read the first ten. They said the same thing, in ten spellings.

She looked.

I gave her the phone back. Fitz put it in her pocket and looked at me with the face she uses for a headcount, which is the only face she has.

“I don’t care what you do,” she said. “I’ve never cared what any of you do. I care where you sleep, because I have to count you, and tonight I’d like to know in advance.”

“Seven-fourteen,” I said. “Then the bus. Then wherever you put me in Belfast.”

“Good.” She looked past me. “Ezra.”

“Here,” said Ezra, from behind me, and she counted him, and me, and Dot, and Femi, and Lenny with two cans, and Marek and Bel and Jonesy, and Keith was on, and we were eight and a driver and the door hissed.

Through the window, in the loading bay, in the rain, Hal’s interior light was still on. He’d got out of the Volvo to stand by it, the way he does, with his coat on, and the phone was in his hand and it was lit, and I could read the name on it from the bus, because I read everything, and it said Annika.

He looked at it. He turned it face down on the roof of the car, and it rang again.