Backline

Lenny read it out on the bus at half past ten on Saturday morning, in the car park behind the Liverpool arena, because Lenny reads Backline the way Keith listens to the radio: all of it, every day, in case somebody’s said something about him.

“‘Quiet floor, loud week.’” He had the phone at arm’s length like Hal. “‘Backline hears that Longfield’s Belfast hotel put the band on its quiet floor on Thursday, and that the quiet floor had one door fewer open than it should have. Six-twenty, ten past midnight. Six-twenty, eight minutes to six. The tour manager’s rules are said to be strict about buses and boats and silent on corridors. Longfield play Liverpool tonight and Lanternfield on the twenty-ninth, where the live album is recorded. Ninebark did not reply.’” He looked up. “That’s it. That’s the whole thing. No picture.”

Nobody said anything. The bus was in a car park under a grey sky with the engine off, and the five of us were in the front lounge with the curtain shut on Keith, and Fitz was standing in the aisle with the clipboard, and Marek was somewhere behind her with a string in his hand he’d forgotten he was holding.

“Put it away, Len,” said Dot.

“I’m just reading it.”

“You’ve read it.”

Femi looked at his own phone, which he hadn’t picked up, and I knew what was on it without looking, because it was Saturday and Thursday was five days away and there was a six-year-old in Cardiff who was coming to see what her father did for a living.

Fitz took the phone out of Lenny’s hand, read it once, and gave it back. “It’s a room number,” she said. “I’ve got three hundred of them. Checkout at eleven, bus at one.” And she went to find Marek’s string.

· · ·Scene break

Here’s what I did with it, and I want it in order, because the order is the whole of what I did.

I started to count. That’s what I do instead of the thing I’m not doing, and I did it before I’d decided to: the woman with the laptop in the breakfast room who’d looked up when I left. The night porter, who’d been reading at the desk when we came in and had said good evening to Ezra by name. The lamp on the table halfway down the corridor, and the seventeen doors on the quiet floor, and how many of them had a person behind them at ten past midnight with their ear to the wood. A guest in the lift. A guest in the lobby at eight minutes to six who’d seen a man come out of a door and a woman come out of the same door two minutes later, because we’d left it two minutes and thought that was clever.

I got as far as the lift and I stopped.

I’ve never stopped a count on purpose. I’ve lost them, twice, both in Dublin, and I’ve had them taken off me by a look, but I’ve never once put one down, and I put that one down in a car park in Liverpool with the engine off and I’d like the reason on the record. The minute I found out who, it’d be a crime, and it’d have been done to us, and I’d spend the last fortnight of the tour looking at faces in corridors. It wasn’t a crime. It was a fact. Somebody had seen a fact and sold it, and the fact was true, and I knew that better than they did, because I’d been in the room.

So I didn’t look. I’ve not looked since. Whoever it was, they’d have been counting too, and I know what that’s like.

· · ·Scene break

The morning I’d stopped counting at was Friday, and it went like this.

Fitz knocked once, at six, on one door. He’d already gone, at ten to six, to shower in six-seventeen, which he’d paid for and not slept in; we’d left it two minutes at the door and I’d thought that was clever. In the lobby Fitz stood at the bus with the clipboard and the count, and when she got to me she said, “Sylvie,” and I said, “Here,” and she said, “I know,” and counted Ezra without looking up, and the sea had a boat on it for eight hours and the bus went on the boat and we went on the bus.

He’d sat next to me on the crossing. Not two rows off with a case between his feet: next to me, with the parlour guitar under the seat and nothing between us but an armrest, and Dot at the window across the aisle with her map, who looked at the armrest and then at the sea and said nothing, for a seventh day, with her jaw set the way it sets before a fast reel. I hadn’t counted the crossing. I hadn’t counted the morning. I’d been clear, and it had been mine, and I’d have told you the hour and I hadn’t wanted to know it.

That was Friday. It was on a gossip site by Saturday with the room number right.

· · ·Scene break

Liverpool’s living room had a window on the river and a clock on the wall that was an hour wrong and nobody had fixed in the time it took to load in, and Ezra shut the door on it after soundcheck, which is what the room is for, and sat on the arm of the sofa where Dot sits, and waited for me to start.

“Femi’s daughter,” I said.

“Go on.”

“She’s coming Thursday. She’s six. She’s going to stand in the wings with ear defenders on and watch her dad play the keys to ten thousand people, and somebody is going to point a phone at the wings, and I’d like it to be for the song.” My sentences were already short. I’d known they would be. “And Dot’s mortgage. Nineteen years. She left a job with a pension for this, and the band’s a thing that pays it, and the band’s a thing that can last nineteen years if it’s a band. It’s not a thing that lasts if it’s a story about two people, because stories about two people end, Ezra. They end. They end in the same paper that started them. And the day Backline runs a room number is the day it’s a story.”

“It ran a room number. It’s a story. You’ve read it.”

“Yes.”

“So.” He put his hands on his knees, which is what he does when there’s no guitar and he’d like one. “Then let’s say it.”

“That’s your answer to everything.”

“It’s my answer to this. A story’s a thing people tell because nobody’s told it. It’s a gap. Backline runs gaps. You say it, in your words, to whoever you pick, and it’s not a gap any more, it’s a fact, and facts are dull. Nobody films a fact.” He nearly smiled. “Nobody’s ever filmed Femi.”

“He’d say ‘right’ and eat his dinner.”

“He’d say right and eat his dinner and know. Which he doesn’t. Which is the thing I keep saying, and you keep saying not, and in Belfast you said it wouldn’t be the first true thing they’d sold, and then you said not here.” He looked at the wrong clock. “This is a room with a door. I’ve shut it. Here’s here.”

I sat down on the sofa nobody sits on, because my legs had decided, and I looked at the river through the window, and there was a ferry on it, small and orange, going the other way.

“I was twenty-four,” I said.

· · ·Scene break

He waited. I want that understood before any of the rest: he’d asked, and he waited, and what follows took as long as it took, and he didn’t move once, and I’m putting it down here in the order I said it, because the order was hard and I’d like it kept.

The first record. Ninebark had paid for it, and we’d been two people and a van, and in the last week before the booklet went to print Annika had come to the studio. She was head of something smaller then, with the same coat. She said the fans wanted the process. She said people who bought a record wanted to hold the thing it came out of, and did I have a notebook.

I had a notebook. I’d had it since the bookshop. Four years of a back room in Keighley, and it was the songs, in drafts, with the crossings-out, and it was the margins.

“The margins,” I said to him. “That’s the part. The songs were the songs. The margins were where I put the things I’d left out of the songs. The true things. The ones I’d written the long way round, in the song, and then put down straight in the margin so I’d know where they were. A thing about my mother’s hands in the sink. A thing I’d written at twenty about being the sort of girl people forget to ring. That kind of thing. Six pages. She asked for six and I chose them.”

“You chose them.”

“I chose the six with the most in the margins. I was twenty-four and they’d paid for the record and I thought it was generous. I thought it was the true thing, and they’d asked for the true thing, and I gave it them, and they printed it in the booklet under the words ‘diary pages’, which they weren’t, they were a notebook, and it sold.” I heard my voice go small and exact, the way it goes, and I let it. “It sold, Ezra. The record did all right. The booklet sold the record. A magazine ran the margins on their own, without the songs, as a poem. I stood at a signing in Leeds with a queue out of the door and four hundred people in it, and they read me my own margins. A girl of nineteen had my mother’s hands on her arm, in ink. She’d had it done that week. She was so kind about it. They were all so kind. I signed under my own handwriting four hundred times, and I counted them, and I’ve counted everything since, because I’d found out what it was like to not know how many people had a thing of mine and I wasn’t going to not know again.”

That was where it went short and stopped. There was a bit more, and he could hear the bit more, and he let it stand where it was.

“That’s why,” I said, when I could. “That’s why the field goes the long way round. There’s nothing in the window that’s mine. Not since. The bridge is theirs. The song’s theirs. The last line’s theirs. That’s on purpose. I made it that way and it’s the best thing I’ve ever made, and she wants to put the true version in a truck, and she’s kind about it, and I’ve done kind. I’ve had four hundred kind people in a queue in Leeds. I know what it costs and I know that nobody who’s charging it thinks they’re charging anything.”

The clock on the wall was an hour wrong. The ferry had gone.

· · ·Scene break

He was quiet for the length of a whole answer. Then he took his hands off his knees, which I’ve never liked; a man with empty hands has put something down.

“I’ve heard it,” he said. “All of it. I’m not going to say it doesn’t matter, because it does, and you’d know I was lying, and I don’t lie to you, I’ve only ever left things in tunes. So here’s what I heard. They took six pages of you and sold them, and you helped, and you were twenty-four, and it worked, and it’s why you count. That’s a page. That’s a thing somebody can hold up and read out. I’m not asking for a page.”

“You’re asking for the same thing.”

“I’m asking for a sentence. Said by you, out loud, to whoever you pick, with the door shut or open, and it’s yours to say and it’s yours to pick. They can’t print a thing you say. They can’t put a sentence on a sleeve; it’d stop being a mystery and they’d have to sell a band. What they can print is the thing you leave out. They’ve been printing it for three years. It’s forty-four seconds long and it’s got a truck booked.” He laughed at himself, through the nose, and it wasn’t much of a laugh. “That’s the joke. I’ll wait now.”

I didn’t say anything. I’d said the most I’d ever said in a room and it had taken everything I had that wasn’t nailed to the floor.

“It doesn’t change what I want,” he said. “I wanted to say that plainly so you’d not spend the bus wondering. I want it said. I’ve heard why you don’t, and it’s a good reason, and it’s the best reason I’ve heard, and it’s still not yet, and I’m still not saying that word to you a third time. You said in a corridor on Thursday that there was no second one. There wasn’t. I’d like a night where there’s no not, either. I’m not asking for it tonight.”

“I know it doesn’t change it.”

“Then we’re where we were.”

“No,” I said. “You know now.”

“I know now,” he said, and got up, and opened the door on the corridor, and stood in it, and looked back. “Good room,” he said, to me, and went to find Marek about a string, because that’s the practical thing.

· · ·Scene break

Liverpool is eleven thousand and night sixty-four, and I’m not going to describe it. I looked at him at the bridge and he sang his line to me and eleven thousand people who’d read a room number that morning sang the last one back, and it came on the beat, and it came kind, and in the dark I stood on my mark and didn’t take the step, because there was nothing at the end of it and he’d told me so, and Fitz’s torch found us four feet apart, on our marks, where the plot puts us, and she said “Cable,” and I heard her hear it.

· · ·Scene break

Hal was at the Volvo at bus call with the interior light on and his phone face down on the roof, and he waited until Fitz had counted seven of us and was waiting on Lenny, and then he said it to the two of us, because it was for the two of us.

“Monday. London. The morning programme, the music slot, twenty to eight, live. Rhian Teague. Annika set it up in March for the tour and she rang this afternoon to say it’s still on, and she said it in a voice that meant she’d read the same thing Lenny had.” He put the phone in his coat. “I’m not going to tell you what she’ll ask. You’ve been asked it two hundred times. I’m telling you it’s live, and I can’t stop her, and I’ve not tried, because it’s her programme and I don’t own it.”

“Good,” said Ezra.

Hal looked at him for a bit, and then at me. “I’ll be in the green room,” he said. “With my coat on.”

Lenny came out of the arena with two cans under his jacket and Fitz counted him as a fact and the door hissed and we were eight and a driver and doing sixty toward London with the lights off, and I lay in the bunk with the blue light on the floor and his curtain four inches open across the aisle and neither of us said a word, because there was a day and a half to Monday, and I’ve been asked it two hundred times, and I’d never once been asked with him sat beside me on the same sofa having said he was done. I didn’t know which of our mouths the laugh was going to come out of, and for the first time in five years I’d have given a lot to count that far.