Chapter Twenty-Two
The venue was called Churchill’s Black Dog, which Cam insisted was a reference to something unseemly, and Ellie had to tell her that it was a depression reference.
Either way, the place was buzzing with the kind of energy that Iona found she’d been missing.
A gig. A real gig. They were clawing their way back, and it felt… good.
"I've been in bigger lifts," Maeve said, eyeing the dressing room they’d been given.
"It's intimate," said Iona.
"It's a fire hazard."
"It's a headline slot." Cam was already claiming the mirror by the window, applying eyeliner with her tongue stuck out. "Our names are on the poster. In big letters. Above the door. I took seventeen photos."
"Only seventeen?" Ellie asked.
"My phone ran out of storage."
Iona squeezed past a stack of amps that someone had wedged into the corner and found a tiny sink.
The kettle next to it was ancient and had a piece of tape over the on switch that said DO NOT USE in aggressive capitals.
Someone had ignored this and boiled it anyway; steam was still curling from the spout.
Ellie reached past her for the tap, water bottle in hand, turning it on and letting it run as she undid the top of her bottle. Then she reached out again.
"Whoa, wait." Iona grabbed her wrist just as Ellie's fingers were about to hit the stream. "That's the hot tap. You'll scald yourself."
Ellie blinked at her. "Oh. Right."
"Add some cold first, else we’ll be out a bass player."
Ellie smiled at her. "Yeah, thanks, I wasn't paying attention."
"Clearly." Iona adjusted the taps, tested the temperature with her own hand, and stepped back. "There. Now you can rinse your bottle without requiring skin grafts."
Ellie gave her a look that was half grateful, half annoyed. "Thank you, mum."
"You're welcome, child."
Cam had paused her eyeliner application to watch this exchange. "Is this a bit? Are we doing bits now? Because I don’t think I like it. You’re both actual mothers. That takes away from the sexiness of the whole ‘serving mother’ thing, I think."
"We're doing basic safety awareness," Iona said. "Some of us didn't pay attention in home economics."
"I paid attention," Ellie said. "I made an excellent Victoria sponge."
"And then Cam nearly burned the school down."
"The oven was faulty," Cam said.
"The oven was fine. You forgot it was on for forty minutes."
Maeve was watching them with amusement. "Are you three going to bicker all night, or are we actually going to play music at some point?"
"Both," Iona said. "We're multitaskers."
THE VENUE FILLED up fast. An opening band played, something rocky and male-led, not bad, not that Iona was in the head-space to really listen.
And by the time the women took the stage, the room was packed, bodies pressed together, faces tilted up toward the lights.
Some of them were singing I Wanna Be a Star before they'd even started playing.
For a millisecond, she was nervous. But it had always been that way.
Nerves were like old friends. Until she looked at her actual old friends.
Ellie grinning, Cam bent over her drums, Maeve holding the microphone stand.
And then the nerves disappeared, and Iona took a deep breath, her fingers finding the opening chord of their first song, and the crowd cheered, and something in her chest expanded until she thought it might crack her ribs.
This. This was what she'd been missing.
They played tight and fierce, the four of them locked into something that felt inevitable, like the music had always been pent up for years and they were just finally letting it out again.
Cam was a menace on the drums, all energy and precision.
Ellie held the bass line steady, the backbone they all leaned on.
And Maeve's voice filled the room like it was the only thing that had ever mattered.
When they finally launched into I Wanna Be a Star, the crowd lost their minds. The new arrangement was sharper, faster, built from arguments and accidents and late nights in the rehearsal space. It didn't sound like nostalgia. It sounded like now.
Iona looked over at Maeve during the second verse. Maeve was grinning. Actually grinning, teeth and everything, her hair wild in the stage lights and her eyes bright with something Iona had almost forgotten existed.
She looked like herself. The self she'd been before everything went wrong.
The song ended. The crowd screamed. Iona's ears were ringing and her fingers ached and she felt, for the first time in years, like she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
BACKSTAGE WAS CHAOS. People kept appearing, wanting photos, wanting autographs, wanting to tell them about the time they'd seen the original tour in 2011 and it had changed their life.
Iona signed programs and phone cases and one very enthusiastic woman's forearm, using a Sharpie that leaked over her fingers.
"You were amazing," the forearm woman said.
"Thank you," Iona said, and meant it. "That's very kind."
"Can I get a photo with everyone?"
"Let me find the others."
Cam was surrounded by a small crowd of people who all seemed to know her from somewhere. One of them was holding a bottle of champagne. Another was wearing a vintage Stage Girls t-shirt that Iona was fairly certain they'd never actually made.
"Where did you get that?" she asked.
"Made it myself," the person said proudly. "Screen printed. I've got extras if you want one."
"I absolutely want one."
Ellie had retreated to a corner and was having a quiet conversation with someone who turned out to be a music blogger. She looked pale but happy.
A teenager appeared at Iona's elbow, holding a teddy bear. The bear was wearing a tiny guitar.
"This is for you," the teenager said. "I know it's weird. My mum made me bring it. She said you probably wouldn't remember but you signed her CD at a meet-and-greet in Sheffield and she's never forgotten."
Iona took the bear. It was soft and slightly lopsided. "Please tell your mum thank you," she said. "This is possibly the best thing anyone has ever given me."
"Really?"
"I'm going to put it on my amp during every show from now on. It can be our mascot."
The teenager's face lit up. "She's going to freak out. Can I take a picture of you holding it?"
They took eighteen pictures, from various angles, with different poses. By the time the teenager left, Iona's face hurt from smiling, and she was clutching the teddy bear to her chest like a trophy.
She needed to find Maeve. Share this with her.
Show her the ridiculous bear and the ridiculous night and the ridiculous fact that people still cared, after everything, after fifteen years of silence.
She made her way through the thinning crowd, nodding at faces she half-recognized, until she reached the door to the dressing room.
The door was closed.
She pushed it open.
Maeve was sitting at the dressing table she’d claimed, her back to the door. The overhead light was harsh and unflattering, picking out the sweat still damp on her neck, the tangled mess of her hair. She didn't turn around when Iona came in.
For a second, Iona just wanted to kiss her, wanted to say that they had it all back, that it was like nothing had ever changed, that this was what they’d always wanted, always promised to be.
Then Iona saw the bottle.
It was sitting on the dressing table, inches from Maeve's hand. Whiskey. Good whiskey, from the look of it, the kind with a name you couldn't pronounce and a price tag that made you wince. Someone had tied a ribbon around the neck.
A long silence stretched. Iona could hear the muffled sounds of the venue clearing out, voices and laughter and the clatter of glasses being collected.
Normal sounds. Happy sounds. Then Maeve looked up and caught Iona’s reflection in the mirror, her eyes catching in a second what Iona was looking at.
She swallowed, but said nothing.
And suddenly, Iona couldn’t do this. Couldn’t deal with it. Couldn’t parse the sentence that she knew she wanted to say.
She picked up her gear, her guitar case and her bag, slung both over her shoulder and walked out without a word.
THE NIGHT AIR as she walked to her car was cool against the warmth of the stage lights still clinging to her skin.
Her makeup was going to be a disaster by the time she got home, mascara probably already smudging, lipstick worn away to nothing.
She hadn’t bothered to remove it. Hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye to Cam and Ellie.
They’d wonder where she was, what she was doing.
But she'd spent fifteen years thinking about what it would be like to have the old Maeve back. The wild one, the brilliant one, the one who'd kissed her backstage at a club in Camden and tasted like possibility.
And standing in the cool breeze outside Churchill’s Black Dog, teddy bear tucked under her arm, Iona realized she didn't want the old Maeve at all.
She wanted this one. The one who'd rebuilt herself from scratch.
The one who'd spent a decade and a half writing songs in a cottage in Scotland, proving she could be different.
And now she was terrified that she'd dragged Maeve back into a world that would break her again.
If Maeve drank, it would be Iona's fault. Iona had gone to Scotland. Iona had made the pitch. Iona had pulled her back into the lights and the chaos and the bottles of whiskey sitting on dressing room tables, waiting.
Her phone buzzed. Cam, probably wondering where she'd gone.
She turned it off and unlocked the car.