4. The Voice Notes
THE VOICE NOTES
Month one tastes like memes.
Her: a cat sliding off a piano. caption: this is me at soundcheck.
Me: A dog howling along to a bass riff. Caption: my role model.
Her: a toddler destroying a set of pots and pans. caption: your competition.
Me: That kid has better timing than half the session players I've worked with.
Her:
Month two, we argue about music.
Her: flatwounds for warmth, roundwounds for attack. this isn't an opinion, it's physics.
Me: Roundwounds for warmth is a crime and somewhere a luthier just felt a chill.
Her: i will send you a frequency chart.
Me: Please don’t.
She sends a frequency chart. It’s annotated.
Colour-coded. We argue for a few hours. She cites sources.
She concedes a point and then circles back two hours later with a counterexample she’s been researching, and it’s good, and I tell her so, and she sends a gif of someone taking a long, elaborate bow.
On Tuesday a festival offers us the sunset slot on the main stage—the booking we clawed toward for years—but they want an answer by the end of the next day and a whole leg of tour reshuffled to make it fit.
I send Jo the details, the routing problem, and my three least-bad solutions.
Two years ago she’d have called inside twenty minutes with options of her own and a spreadsheet I didn’t ask for.
Jo replies twelve hours later: looks good!
Two words and an exclamation mark. I stare at the reply. Jo is in love. Jo talks about Rebecca backstage with an unguarded brightness. I'm glad for her.
But I'm furious at the hole her happiness is leaving.
The next month brings more voice notes.
The first voice note is an accident. I’m backstage after a show, thumbing out a text about the setlist, and my thumb hits record instead of send—forty-three seconds of me, unedited, going on about a bass run I tried in the bridge of “Golden.” My thumb hovers over the trash.
And then I don’t delete it. I sit there with it a second, this little grey bar with my actual voice inside it, and sending her the real sound of me instead of tidy little words feels like a bigger step than it has any right to—more than a text, less than a call, a door I get to open or leave shut.
I open it. I send it before I can talk myself out of it, and then I stare at the phone like it might bite.
Hers comes back in under an hour. Sixty seconds, her voice low and unhurried, the voice of a woman lying on a couch with the TV off. “Okay, the extra bit—no. You’d kill the momentum and the whole thing would sound like it’s apologising. Maybe leave it. Let it be a little rude.”
She’s right. The voice notes don’t stop after that.
The sound of her voice at night differs from her texts. Texts are sharp. Voice notes are rounder, slower. She pauses mid-thought. She laughs at her own tangents. She says "anyway" when she's about to say the real thing, as though the word is a door she has to open before she can walk through it.
Me: Can I ask you something nosy?
Lena: My favourite kind.
Me: Are you seeing anyone?
Lena: No. The last one ended after eight months. We probably only talked like four times.
Me: Right. Mine was similar, except mine was three months.
Lena: I see.
Neither of us types the obvious thing—that we’re single at the same time, in the same careful, self-protective way.
But something behind my ribs that usually sits still and heavy lifts an inch off the ground, and I catch myself grinning at three grey words in the dark of the van like they’re a love letter.
I'm on the road. Three cities in four days.
The van smells of Sandy's essential oil diffuser and Jeremy's instant noodles and the cumulative exhaustion of people living in a rectangular metal box.
I text Lena from a parking lot at 9 PM, after load-out, standing next to the van with my phone in one hand and a lukewarm coffee in the other.
What did you eat for dinner?
Stir fry. I put an ocean of soy sauce in and now I can't taste anything else.
So you made soy sauce with a side of stir fry.
Ha ha. It’s a bold flavour journey and I stand by every drop.
As you should. Commitment is the whole game.
I check my social media and groan.
The headline: SANDY GAUNTLET SPOTTED WITH NEW FLAME. Different club, different city, same grainy photos. The "new flame" is the studio engineer from Monday's session.
I read it in the hotel bathroom, sitting on the edge of the bath in my underwear, and I call the label before I've brushed my teeth.
The A&R rep and publicist are both concerned. They use the phrase "reputational trajectory," which is code for our investment is at risk. I say the things I always say: the band is focused on the music. Sandy's personal life is hers. The EP is on track. All of it is true.
After the call, I text Lena.
Do you ever get tired of being the person who holds everything together?
She replies with a voice note.
"Yes. All the time. But sometimes I feel like nobody notices. 'Oh, you were doing all that?' Yeah. I was doing all that. But I also find it so hard to ask for help."
She pauses.
"But also—there's a part of it that I love. I like being needed. It's exhausting and I'm not sure who I am without it. So I suppose I'm burned out and I continue doing it since I'm unaware of how to stop.
I listened to the voice note twice. The second time I close my eyes and press my phone against my ear and the sound of her voice fills the hotel room in a way that makes me feel warm.
I listen to it on the tour bus, in the van between cities. Each time, the part about being burned out feels so relatable.
I type out: I want to see you.
I delete it.
What are we?
I delete that as well.
Instead I type:
What did you eat for dinner?
The reply was immediate.
Roasted chicken and potatoes. Nothing fancy but it was exactly what I needed.
That sounds perfect.
It was.
The next month she tells me about a meeting where her boss asked why her billable hours had dropped. She had to choose between honesty and employment. She chose employment. She told him she was chasing up several missing receipts from the client.
I tell her about Jo's studio time booked without checking with Jeremy and Ana. About Sandy spiralling. About Rebecca calling during soundcheck and Jo taking the call and the musicians waiting because some things matter more than rehearsal.
"Do you ever think about leaving?" she asks in a voice note. "The band, I mean."
"Every day," I reply. "But I think they can’t survive without me."
"That's the trap," she says, and I can hear her on my kitchen step even though she's three hundred kilometres away. "That's the specific trap they build for people like us. We're too good at holding everything, so we're the only ones they'll let try."
"How do we get out of that?"
"I don't know." She said in a gloomy voice.
The Belladonnas break for two weeks—Jo and Rebecca disappear on a holiday nobody begrudges them—and in the gap a booking lands in my inbox that I read three times to be sure. A fill-in gig, one night of bass for a touring act whose regular player broke her wrist, and the venue is in Lena’s city.
I should be thinking about the setlist I’ll have to learn on a flight, or the money, or the fact that I’ve just said yes to a stranger’s songs. Instead I think about a too-short couch and a pressure cooker of soup, and I text her before I can talk myself out of it.
Me: So, hypothetically — if a bassist were in your city for a night next week, would that bassist have somewhere to sleep?
Lena: Sure, the couch is yours. It’s been asking about you.
Me: Really?
Lena: Constantly. It’s needy. Also, there’s a burger place two blocks from me that I know you’ll love, and I’ve been WAITING for a reason to take someone.
Me: I suppose I’d have to come see the couch.
Lena: Mmhm. The couch. Sure. That’s what we’re calling it.
Me: Are you saying you miss me?
Lena: I’m saying the couch misses you. I’m merely its humble spokesperson.
We’re ten minutes into a break—coffee going cold, someone’s box of pastries open on an amp—when I put the phone down and catch the whole band looking at me.
“You’re in a good mood.” Jeremy says.
“Good session with great people.”
“Awww, thanks Rhonda.” Ana says.
The burger place is exactly the kind of place Lena would love—vinyl booths, a specials board in three colours of marker, a grill you can hear from the street.
She’s already in a booth when I walk in, and she stands up too fast when she sees me, smiling ear to ear.
Then she hugs me—quick and fierce, both arms, up on her toes—and I get a full hit of that perfume again, bergamot and amber, warm vanilla and a curl of sandalwood, and she’s soft against me.
Something in my shoulders I didn’t know I’d been holding lets go.
“Okay, I’ve been waiting for this all week,” she says, before I’ve even sat down. “You order the special, you get a milkshake and the fries.”
“Yes mam.” I say.
“Be ready for the time of your life.”
“I feel you’re more eager than I am.”
I ordered the special. I got the milkshake. She watches me take the first bite.
“Well?”
“It’s not bad.” I chew, looking back at her. “It’s alright.”
“What? Tell me the truth.”
“It’s the best thing I’ve eaten in months.”
“I knew it!”
She’s so pleased I have to study the table.
We split a basket of fries and a pitcher of something local, and two hours go somewhere I don’t track.
“So there’s a new guy at work,” she says. “Gerald. He’s a new contractor that’s going to work with us till the end of the year. It’s a bit weird but this guy smiles and looks at me constantly.”
“Oh. Really?”
I feel like the burger doesn’t taste so good anymore.
“He does it all day even when I’m not looking, and with teeth. He taps my monitor when he talks to me.”
I don’t love the feeling that arrives with that information. It’s small and hot and unfamiliar. I take a long drink.
“He taps your monitor. Ew.”
“Are you—” She sets down a fry and stares at me, delighted. “Are you okay?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“You’re doing a face.”
“I’m not. He just sounds weird that’s all.”
“Mhmm.” She smiles.
To change the subject I tell her about Sandy and the onion and the guitar case, again, because she likes the story and I like watching her lose it laughing.
Her apartment is the same small warm shape I remember, except this time I come in like I’ve done it before.
She hands me the blanket—the couch blanket, worn soft at the edges—and it should feel like the night I was sick here, and it doesn’t.
I know her name now. I know the exact laugh she makes when something catches her sideways.
“I’m glad you came,” she says, standing closer than the room requires.
“I’m glad the couch missed me.”
“The couch isn’t the only one,” she says, and the room goes very quiet.
Her eyes drop to my mouth and stay there a beat too long.
I should say something. I don’t. She takes a half step in, then another, close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off her, her gaze flicking down to my lips like she’s arguing with herself and losing.
She closes the last of the distance and kisses me—soft at first, and then not—and it tastes like the local beer. My heart is pounding in my ears.
It doesn’t last long. It doesn’t need to. We come apart and stand there in the low light.
“Oh um—” she starts, face red.
“Its the beer,” I say.
“Oh yes, the beer. Obviously. We had, what, two?”
“It was two and a half. It was a big pitcher.”
“Yeah,” She laughs, looking away. “Um, let me get you some water.”
She runs off and gives me the blanket and a glass of water, and I lie on a couch that’s too short for me and stare at a ceiling I’m already fond of.
In the morning I’m gone before she wakes—the whole band had to meet at seven for a practise session. I fold the blanket into the triangle she folds her napkins into, and I text her from the van.
Me: Thanks for letting me stay, I had a wonderful time and company. And for the record. The beer was fine. Two and a half beers do not do that.
Lena: …I know.
Lena: For the record, the pitcher had nothing to do with it. But we can blame it if that’s easier for you.
Me: Too late for easy.